‘The sort that makes men look good. Eighteenth century, with a powdered wig. Or Regency buck. Oh, he knows how to make the most of himself.’
Fenville’s cup was empty, but she did not offer to refill it.
‘Do you talk to him?’
‘Yes, of course. He talks wonderfully.’
‘But you said you didn’t know his name?’
‘He’ll only tell me if I agree to marry him.’
‘You can hardly marry a man who lives in a mirror and whose name you don’t know,’ said Fenville primly.
‘Of course I could. It would be the only kind of man I ever could marry. My father would have known that.’ She glared at him in proud disappointment. For a moment it struck Fenville that she had picked up that hard look from the baleful lover. Then her face softened. ‘But there is a difficulty. That’s what I want advice about. Please advise me.’
‘All right.’ She seemed quite to forget that he, Fenville, might have some rights of his own in the matter. Then he recollected that indeed presumably he had none.
She went on raptly. ‘He will insist that I’m an heiress. He’s too silly about it. He keeps on saying the house is lined with money. As if I didn’t know what was in my own house. That,’ she said, entering a side issue, ‘was why I was so careful to make things clear to you from the first.’
‘Yes,’ said Fenville. ‘Thank you. And the point is that you don’t want to marry a fortune-hunter?’
‘Not at all. If I married him, I should naturally give him everything. But I don’t want him to marry me thinking I’ve a lot of money when really I’ve nothing.’
‘But if you keep telling him—’
‘He won’t listen.’ Her small hands were clenched.
Fenville was about to say ‘Then he’d better take his chance,’ but managed to stop himself. There was no point in handing his rival victory on a plate. He said, ‘I don’t think his obstinacy promises well for matrimony.’
She looked at him sharply. Apparently she was impressed.
‘There’s the thing about his name as well,’ said Fenville, pressing on.
‘I don’t want to know his name.’
Suddenly Fenville’s eye lighted upon something. Behind Dorabelle, in a corner of the platform upon which the embroidery frame stood, rested a stout cane with a long tassel. It fixed his attention. He became very frightened. About the tasselled cane there seemed to be a distinctive evil of a nightmare, hopeless to resist. He could not drag his eyes from it.
‘I love him so much,’ said Dorabelle dreamily. ‘But I don’t think I should marry him on false pretences.’
‘No,’ said Fenville in a different tone, and trying to gather himself together. ‘I don’t think you should. In fact I’m quite sure you shouldn’t.’
‘He’s the only one who will ever make me entirely happy,’ she said.
‘You can’t know that.’
‘You know very well you can know.’
There was a pause. ‘Is there anything else you want advice about?’ asked Fenville, striving for normality.
‘What are you looking at?’ She glanced over her shoulder, following the direction of his eyes. ‘Oh, my embroidery. It gives me something to do while waiting for him.’
Fenville spoke very quietly. ‘Does he come in here?’
‘No. The glass is always between us, although often it is very thin. Like a film before the eyes. Sometimes it seems to vanish altogether, but then I know that I am dreaming, and sure enough in the end I wake up . . . No,’ she said more steadily, ‘I don’t want any more advice. I feel it is not disinterested.’
‘I think it is.’
‘I don’t believe it was my father who sent you at all.’
‘I never said it was.’ Fenville immediately regretted the cheap retort.
‘It is getting late. You must go.’ She was looking about her.
‘May I come and see you again?’
‘If you wish.’
‘Can I come tomorrow?’
‘Would that please you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well then come tomorrow. Now look at my embroidery. I have worked at it for so long.’
Repugnance for that part of the room was very strong in Fenville, but he had to follow her. He stepped on to the platform, keeping the tasselled cane in view all the time.
‘At least I’ve made a lovely pattern.’
With much of his attention elsewhere, Fenville looked at the frame. Immediately he was even more frightened than before. There was no pattern at all but only a tangle of loose ends, a melee of different coloured silks.
‘Don’t you think it’s pretty?’ Dorabelle’s tone was that of a schoolgirl coquettishly soliciting attention.
He was taller than she, and she gazed up at him. ‘I don’t think you do,’ she said; and said no more about it. Fenville could say nothing.
She politely saw him out. There was no further sign of Gunter. Dusk was falling.
She was about to open the front door. Then she changed her mind and stood with her back to it. ‘Come again,’ she said. ‘I like being loved at first sight.’ Swiftly she kissed Fenville on the mouth. It was perhaps the most unexpected thing of all, and certainly the most disastrous. Then he was outside.
He could not sleep. He could not eat. He could in no way systematise what he had seen and heard.
‘Good afternoon, Gunter,’ he said the next day. It was half an hour earlier than his previous visit.
Gunter made no response.
‘You look better.’ The strange thing was that Gunter really did. He moved with more alacrity, and breathed without wheezing. Moreover his hands no longer shook. Only his attitude seemed unchanged.
‘You know the way up,’ he said, cast an odd sidelong look at Fenville, and positively hopped off to his solitary kitchen.
Fenville noticed that the ‘almonry’ had disappeared.
He ascended the dismal stairs and knocked at the door of the Quattrocento Room.
Dorabelle was sitting in the big armchair by the fire. There was no sign of the tasselled cane.
‘Enter Malcolm with Drum and Colours.’
She was wearing the same dress; but she was surrounded by a cocoon of soft, black, gauzy material, upon which she was plying her needle.
Yesterday Fenville had been filled with insane courage. Today he felt exhausted and abashed.
‘So Gunter wouldn’t show you up?’
‘He said I knew the way. I do, of course.’
‘The reason servants open doors is not because their masters can’t open them themselves. No, no, Gunter has been discharged.’
Fenville was sitting opposite her. Even in less than twenty-four sleepless hours he had forgotten the splendid details of her beauty. The rediscovery of them temporarily appeased the raw hunger of his nerves.
‘Surely Gunter didn’t behave as badly as all that?’
‘It wasn’t anything he did.’ She laughed her slightly discordant laugh; the one blemish in her exquisiteness. ‘I’ve become engaged to be married, and my future husband has servants of his own.’
Fenville wanted very much to cry. The struggle not to do so paralysed his tongue and throat muscles.
‘I decided, you see, to disregard your advice.’
She continued sewing for a moment in silence. The black gauze reached up from her lap, beyond her left shoulder, and over the back of the high chair, like a spectre.
‘I can’t expect you to congratulate me.’
‘I don’t think I know you well enough,’ said Fenville bitterly.
‘Surely we are old friends?’
Fenville said nothing.
‘Only an old friend could advise so badly.’ She spoke flippantly, and as if Fenville really were an old friend.
‘I saw him once,’ said Fenville harshly. ‘This man of yours. I hope that surprises you. I didn’t like the look of him.’
Of course he was behaving like a fool. Certainly she did not seem at a
ll surprised or even offended.
‘I like the look of him more than anything in the world.’
‘He’s bad,’ said Fenville, amazed by his pointless uncouthness.
‘And you’re good?’ She stared at him questioningly, as if the idea had struck her for the first time.
‘Better than he is.’
She looked away and laughed her alien laugh. ‘You must have heard that love doesn’t go by deserts.’
Fenville had heard it but until now had never believed it.
‘That’s only friendship,’ she said. ‘Quite different.’
‘Friendship between us is out of the question.’ Having fired the first of his boats, Fenville was not watching the whole fleet burn.
‘How young you are!’
Of course she was substantially the younger of the two. As usual when he was with her, Fenville knew that he was blushing.
She disentangled hersef from her work and came and sat at his feet.
She took his hands. ‘You must come and see me whenever you wish.’
‘Why should I come and see you after you’re married to someone else?’
‘If you really love me, as I know you do, you won’t want to stop seeing me because of that. You would only do that if it was yourself you loved and not me.’
This unexpectedly shrewd remark disconcerted Fenville and, unused as he was to serious affairs of the heart, might have planted a real doubt.
‘I do love you.’ He was choked and bemused by it, as by poison gas.
‘If you don’t come, I shall hate you.’
Still holding his hands, she gazed at him, unsmiling and mysterious. Looking down at her he could see her white breasts inside her loose brocaded dress. Nothing he could do could prevent him lifting her up and covering her face and neck with kisses.
She neither responded nor resisted. Fenville’s soaring of passion began at length to dip earthwards. But he clasped her in his arms, and at once she began violently to tremble. To Fenville it was as if the life force itself were shaking her: the contrast with her previous passivity was more than he could bear. He sank his lips in her hair and muttered incoherent endearments. He was lost alike to the world and to all cognisance of what she thought or felt.
Then, as by a lightning-stroke, she was severed from him. He saw her standing with her hands behind her clutching the high column of the fireplace, her hair wild, her lips parted, her eyes like green fire.
He realised that the door was opening.
He was at first too abashed to turn and look behind him. But in an instant Dorabelle had relaxed into her customary stature of authority. It was only Gunter, and what he said constituted the vilest anticlimax.
‘I want a hand with my things.’ He sounded as sulky as ever.
Dorabelle’s rejoinder was alarming. She stretched to the wide overmantel and grasped the familiar tasselled cane. It had been lying there out of sight. There was an expression of rage on her face which Fenville had never seen on any face before. It terrified him and also rallied him.
He put a hand on Dorabelle’s arm which held the cane. ‘I’ll come down,’ he said over his shoulder to Gunter.
At once he got the impression that Dorabelle’s rage was transferred to him. It was as if she were silently but effectively destroying him as he stood.
He dropped his hand and took a step back. Then he turned and confronted Gunter. Here too in its way was a surprise. Gunter was dressed almost smartly, and looked a new man. There was something unreasonable about the change in him.
Without looking back Fenville followed Gunter down to the hall. Gunter’s luggage consisted in a battered cabin trunk and three large boxes made of shiny black metal. A taxi driver was regarding the heap disconsolately. Fenville had not altogether expected Gunter to be departing by taxi.
He lifted an end of one of the tin boxes.
‘’Opeless,’ said the taxi driver, his cloth cap on the back of his head.
‘What’s in it?’ said Fenville involuntarily.
‘Papers,’ replied Gunter with some rancour.
‘Come on,’ said Fenville to the taxi driver. ‘We’ll do it between us.’
And they did. Although Fenville did not care for the job at all, he and the taxi driver stowed the three boxes, while Gunter stood by. The cabin trunk was lighter, and the taxi driver was able to manage it on his own. Then Gunter, without a word of thanks, but, to Fenville’s mind, almost horribly spry, hardly limping at all, stepped in, and the taxi drove slowly off. The driver had seemed almost to be looking to Fenville for a gratuity in advance.
Filled with distracting hopes and fears, Fenville returned upstairs. Nothing would have much surprised him, except what he found. The room was empty. That he had not thought of.
He took a few steps inside, then stopped. All around Dorabelle’s empty chair was the black fluffy gauze. Now Fenville perceived its purport. Dorabelle was making of it her wedding veil. He saw a little black wreath, the size of her head.
For a moment he was unable to move, but stood staring at the stuff, bewildered and horrified. Then he walked backwards to the door. He glanced about him.
‘Dorabelle!’
But his voice had left him. He was croaking ridiculously.
The light from the room fell wanly autumnal on the passage where he stood. Out there he had never before really looked about him. Now he saw that the house was even worse kept than he had thought: a horrid orange-coloured fungus had sprouted on one of the carved wooden uprights which supported the landing rail, and the floor, uncarpeted beyond the staircase, was submerged by a stagnant tide of dust. Inside the room the huge fire noisily exalted and devoured; but here in the cold, Fenville could see his footprints, and what he took to be the larger ones of Gunter.
He stole along the landing to the stair, where again he stood and listened. He thought he heard someone moving quietly about on the floor above him. Swiftly and silently he descended. When he opened the front door, he received another surprise. Again there was a vehicle outside. He certainly had not heard it draw up.
‘Good evening, young shepherd.’
It was a large, ancient Daimler, and the time-worn head of Dr Bermuda addressed him facetiously from the back window.
‘How did you know?’ asked Fenville.
A stunted youth, dressed in black, had come down from the driver’s seat and was opening the rear door. Fenville was so eager to get away from the house that immediately he stepped inside. The youth returned to his place, and they slipped silently into Arcadia Gardens.
‘My son,’ said Dr Bermuda, indicating the driver. ‘And my assistant. In my specialist work only, of course.’
‘How did you know I was here?’ repeated Fenville.
‘Even though professionally you are concerned with the arts and not the sciences,’ replied Dr Bermuda, ‘you must have heard that free will has at last been proved an illusion.’
‘I wasn’t thinking in terms of philosophy.’
‘Why should you?’ enquired the Doctor, in his soft voice, weary with well doing. ‘It is not a matter for philosophy, but for a more exact science. I specialise – what time I have to specialise at all – in the science of the mind. The science of the mind, I point out.’
‘Nor,’ said Fenville, ‘do I want the attentions of a psychologist. If you don’t mind.’
‘Naturally not,’ replied Dr Bermuda, all understanding. ‘Patients who need us seldom want us.’
The lights were coming on in the Bayswater Road.
After a pause, Fenville said, ‘I don’t need you either. I’m cured.’
‘What could be more satisfactory?’ asked Dr Bermuda mildly.
‘The whole thing was nothing but imagination.’
‘Even as a layman you can hardly expect there are exceptions to that rule.’
‘I’ll send you my cheque.’
In the dusky corner of the car the Doctor made a gesture which implied that he had at one time been educated out of England.
Conversation lapsed. Refusing to cast even a glance inside himself, Fenville sat obliquely regarding the weedy back of the Doctor’s son. The boy’s ears were unequal in size, and his hair was tufty and unprofuse.
‘He is the apple of my eye,’ remarked the Doctor, who did indeed seem to have the power of following his patient’s thoughts. ‘He will be a far greater scientist than I am.’
Fenville felt that this called for an indication of scepticism, but he said nothing.
‘I have had to waste too much time in more general practice. Scientific harlotry.’
They had reached Marble Arch. The cinema queues were beginning to flinch and stamp. Unexpectedly the car turned up a side street to the left. It was quite enough to disarrange Fenville’s unreal calm.
‘Where are we going?’ His voice evinced panic and dread.
The Doctor looked at him for a moment. A street light showed his wise, tired eyes.
‘Home,’ said the Doctor. ‘Where else?’
‘This isn’t the usual way.’
‘My son,’ said the Doctor proudly, ‘knows all the short cuts.’
*
Immediately he entered his unlovely room Fenville knew that his brief anaesthesia was ended. He had known that of course it must end before long; but had expected it to last longer than it had, if only in proportion to the shocks which had caused it. Within a minute of the door being shut, frustrated passion and confused terror were once more upon him, mangling his brain. It was almost as if Dr Bermuda had indeed been a steadying influence.
He sat upon his high stool and sank his head upon his small, second-hand drawing desk. The gas fire was unlighted, and he had hardly eaten for three days.
After an uncertain interval there was a knock at his door. Fenville made no response.
The door was gingerly opened.
‘Why ever don’t you put the light on, Mr Fenville?’
Mrs Stark repaired the omission. Fenville found that his very muscles were congealed into despair.
‘Don’t you want any supper?’ Supper was an extra.
‘No thank you, Mrs Stark.’
‘You can’t expect to get better if you don’t do what the Doctor says.’
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