Kept

by Alec Waugh

  But then perhaps he had never been in love with Marjorie; not been in love with her, but had loved her. Perhaps that was why he had acted as he had; and acting as he had, perhaps why he had lost her: beeause he had loved her instead of being in love with her. To be in love with someone—was it just this, to be possessed of a wild, greedy hunger, a selfish desire to take and keep, to growl over in one’s lair, to share with no one? You did not feel like that towards someone that you loved. You accepted them on their own terms for what they were, because you loved them. Was that why he had allowed the compromise of their relationship to continue? Or was it laziness simply, laziness and selfishness, and a reluctance to disturb the background of his life? It was a mingling of motives probably, as indeed most things were. It had been so easy to let things drift, to say, “This will have to be settled soon,” and leave it there. And besides, he had for so long come to accept her in that setting, as a woman living under another man’s protection. He had known it within a few days of meeting her, and all through that long six months of platonic friendship he had recognised the presence of that other man in the background of her life. A stationary, unobtrusive presence there, a presence of which one ceased to take account. And when the nature of their relationship had changed there had seemed no reason to regard him, that other man, as any the less negligible than he had been before. It was not either as though from the beginning he had foreseen or indeed desired such a change in their relations. He was of those who can be content with a woman’s friendship. He had had, as far as he would ever have it, the grand passion of his life. And he had outgrown the taste, never particularly acute in him, for promiscuous romances. His chief concern had been the retention of Marjorie’s friendship; and with his fifteen years” experience behind him it had seemed that their intimacy was more likely to be retained if it was not built on a physical basis. And that, he supposed, must have been the exact opposite of what Marjorie had felt. “You can only keep a man,” he could imagine her to have reasoned with herself, “one way. Even that way you may not keep him. But any other way it is impossible. Sooner or later some other woman will come into his life, to bind him to her by that chain of physical attraction, that intimacy that must displace all other intimacies. I only come first in his life now, because there is no other woman in his life who has that particular hold on him. But there will be soon, very soon. In the nature of things, in the nature of man’s nature, that is inevitable. And I cannot afford to lose him.” So she must have reasoned with herself, and who was to say that she had been wrong to reason so. In all human probability sooner or later there would have been that other woman—that other woman who would have insisted on the ending of his platonic comradeship.

  And he had accepted her restatement of their relations, had accepted it as he had accepted her. And because it had been of her restating and not his, he had done nothing. It would have been different, of that he was very certain, if her yielding to him had been in his intentions from the start. If it had been, he would have put before himself at the beginning the various complications of the situation. “I want this woman,” he would have said; “she is the property of another man. Well then, I must take her from him.” But he had never so discussed the matter with himself. Things had happened, and he had let them happen.

  There had been the money question. In the end things usually resolved themselves to that. Of all the restraints that are imposed on us, restraints of age and sex and class, of nature, education and environment, there is none more potent really than the restraint of money. He knew, of course, that he had enough money for them both. People married on seven hundred pounds a year. He had an income varying between twelve and thirteen hundred. He was, however, invariably in debt; in debt to his bank, his tailors, his hosiers, his shoemakers. He had too much spare time in which to spend his money. And thirteen hundred was an awkward sum to have. It was neither a little nor a lot. You knew there were a good many things you could afford with it, and you found yourself affording them too often. For the last three years he had never been really comfortable financially. He had not particularly worried. He did not mind cutting into capital. The stuff was there to be spent. But he had realised that he would have to start sooner or later being careful. Marriage was a contingency that for several years now he had not considered, and he was in no position to embark without considerable embarrassment on the enterprise of a second establishment. He would have had to give up his car and his flat, possibly also Giles. He would have had, that is to say, to reshape entirely the fabric of his life. And he was a bachelor of settled habits; habits that had become a part of him? It had been easy enough to let things drift, to argue with himself, to say, “What should we gain after all; should we be able to give each other more than we are doing now? Is there anything that we should have then that we have not now? What should we gain? There is much for us to lose. The atmosphere of ease and comfort in which our love is set; the long drives through country lanes in summer; the theatres and the dinners, the suppers at Giro’s and the Embassy. And because we have so long had them, we should as likely as not be unable to do without them. We might come to hate each other for the loss of them. Why, after all, should we not continue as we are? One cannot take for oneself and marry every woman by whom one is attracted. Half London’s love affairs take place outside marriage. And in how many of them is there not a husband or protector in the background? Let us wait. Things happen soon enough of their own volition.”

  Well, and things had happened, and he had lost her. He had let the days pass; and he had lost her. And he was missing her now in a way that he had not missed anyone before. “If only I had it all to do again,” he thought. “If only this were the January of ’23,”

  They had been in the second room for some twenty minutes now, and the fine dew of sweat along their legs and chest had expanded into an indistinguishable succession of heavy dropping beads. Meditatively Simon Merivale passed and repassed his hands along that glistening surface. His eyes, fixed on an incredibly gross creature in the farther room, were watching the sweat form bead by bead in the hollow of his throat, watching it swell and gather, watching its slow trickle over the hairy chest towards the belly’s immense protuberance, watching fascinated to see whether its momentum would be sufficient to carry it over the high ridge from which the stomach rose, or whether it would pause weakly, to dribble dejectedly round the outer rim.

  “That man, brother Heritage,” said Merivale, “must weigh very nearly eighteen stone,”

  “Revolting.”

  “And yet it’s, I suppose, what we’ve got all to come to.”

  “God forbid!”

  “You think so, brother, you think so; but will you in ten years’ time, or twenty, or even thirty. Suppose when you are fifty-nine your doctor says to you: ’Heritage, you must make a choice. You must either give up wine, and potatoes and bread and macaroni, and milk and cream and sugar, or you will become monstrously, incredibly obese.’ “

  “I should,” said Ransom firmly,” give up potatoes and the rest.”

  “You would now, my friend,” Merivale persisted; “but will you then? To-day you wish to be slim and graceful a snare about the feet of women. But will you then? Won’t you have got a little tired of it? Won’t you perhaps prefer to enjoy your meals? Will the immense labour of retaining a romantic figure seem worth while to you? For you’d be an awful nuisance, Heritage, you know. We’d have to order special food for you. We might even cease inviting you. I think you’d say after a week or so, ’Oh damn my figure, let’s have a stab at the old spaghetti.’ Yes, I think you would; and so’d most of us, I think.

  “When would Byron, I wonder, have grown tired of dieting,” he continued. “I don’t think he would have stood it much longer. He’d had twenty years nearly of looking like a poet. I think he’d have soon felt it was time to start living as a man. And he’d have been a much better poet. Less of the Childe Harold and more of the Don Juan. You can’t trail ‘a bleeding heart’ round Euro
pe if you’re as fat as Chesterton. It would be ridiculous. And Byron was actor enough to know that you have to dress your part. You’ve got to be thin and haggard if you’re to be the lonely man. If a fat man says he’s miserable, the world’s bound to shriek, ’Oh, are you? Well, at any rate you enjoy your meals.’ Illogical, brother, perfectly illogical. But there it is. There’s a curious corollary to that, you know, that you’ve got to be what you look, that your character is formed by your appearance. Have you considered that? The soul doesn’t make the face, it’s the face that makes the soul.”

  “You’re a quaint fellow,” Ransom laughed. “You’re always trying to prove black’s white.”

  “Well,” answered Merivale. “And isn’t it?”

  As they lay afterwards lazily exhausted and at rest in the curtained recesses of the cooling room, the high treble of a page’s voice was heard mournfully intoning,” Captain Merivale, Captain Merivale, Captain Merivale.”

  “Blast it,” said Simon, “now what can he want.” He was wanted apparently on the telephone. A very urgent message. “Then you can go and find out what it is. If he won’t give you his name and business he’s a moneylender—ring him off. For three-quarters of an hour I refuse to be disturbed.”

  There was an interval of some ten minutes, and then the page-boy returned to say that a Mr Eric Somerset particularly wished to speak to Captain Merivale.

  “Ah, the child,” said Merivale. “Now I wonder into what new mischief the lad has contrived to stumble. You may tell Mr Somerset,” he informed the page, “that I shall be delighted if he will dine with me here to-night at eight o’clock. Tell him he needn’t change, and if he accepts will you bring me the wine list and one of those big score-card things with the food on it.”

  “Now that will be nice,” he added. “I hope, Heritage, you won’t think it rude of me if I do not ask you to join us. The poor lad would prefer, probably, to make his confession without a third.”

  Ransom did not reply. He had started slightly at the name of Somerset, at the name and at the request. Four months ago young Somerset had rung him up in the same way to ask him about Marjorie, to find out in his own phrase, probably, “how the land lay.” Now he had rung up Merivale, to find out perhaps how he should conduct the strategy of seduction. Was it that, or—? Well, whatever it was it did not much matter. Jealousy was a fool’s game. He had had his innings and he had flung away his wicket. He was not the self-pitying sort. He had let the days pass, and he had lost her. Allowed things to happen, and he had lost her.

  Chapter XVIII

  Eric Learns Half the Truth

  At five minutes to eight, in a glow of contented anticipation, Simon Merivale stood waiting in the centre of the circular hall. Rarely had the world seemed to him a more admirably arranged concern. He had lost two pounds in the Turkish bath. He was feeling as active mentally as he was exhausted physically. He was extremely hungry. He had ordered an excellent dinner. He enjoyed confidences, particularly from people that he liked, and he liked young Somerset as much as he liked anyone. It was going to be a singularly pleasant evening. Nor did he allow himself to be disturbed by the strained disquiet on his young guest’s face. He accorded him a misquoted Elizabethan welcome.

  “Good morrow, prince, having such reason to be more prince, you look sad.”

  Eric’s attempt at an answering smile was not successful, and Merivale leant back, his hands in his coat pockets, his head inclined slightly to the left, surveying him with quizzical disapproval.

  “You young men, you young men,” he said, “this night life of yours is undermining you. You’re quite intolerable till you’re outside a cocktail. Still, you can’t sustain life without alcohol. The sooner we dispel this lethargy the better. Dispossess yourself of your equipment, and let us see what the Manhattan king upstairs can do for you.”

  “I have arranged,” he continued, as they leant three minutes later against the bar, “that we will open our gymkhana with a tent-pegging tourney against some oysters; we shall then flash a sword around a partridge, and conclude with a stab at a mushroom savoury, and between the chukkas we might repair our tissues with a little Heidsieck 1911. Have I hit the right note? Admirable. To it then, brother, to it. Hang out our banners on the outward wall.”

  And for some twenty minutes Merivale did what he could to make the occasion jovial. At the end of that time he had realised that not only was Eric not listening to what he was himself saying, but had only sipped at his champagne, and was taking not the least interest in what he was eating. “This,” he thought, “is something rather serious. He’s worried, really worried.” And in the middle of a sentence he stopped speaking, to look curiously and intently at young Somerset as he bent forward over his plate. There was a deep puckered furrow in his forehead and lines that he had never seen before beneath his eyes. It was the genuine thing this, whatever the cause of it.

  “Well, young Somerset,” he said, “and what’s your trouble?”

  Slowly Eric turned in his chair to face him.

  “It’s about Mrs Fairfield,” he said. “I’ve come to ask about her.”

  Merivale nodded. “And what about her, Eric?”

  “Everything.”

  Merivale delayed his answer, delayed it for so long that Eric was himself forced to speak again. “You know, you do know about her, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” said Merivale, “I know. But—” he paused searching for the right words to define his meaning. “I know, Eric,” he said. “But do you think it’s quite cricket for you to come and ask me things about her? Don’t you think it’s to her you ought to go? She’ll tell you what she’d have you know. And do you want to know more than that about your friends?”

  “She told me to come to you,” said Eric.

  “Told you—to me!”

  Eric nodded. “She wouldn’t tell me herself,” he said, “she told me to ask one of my friends. ’Shall I ask Ransom Heritage?’ I said. ‘Oh no, no, no,’ she said, not Ransom; no, not Ransom. That friend of his, Captain Merivale, you can ask him; he’ll tell you.’”

  “And what precisely was it that she wouldn’t tell you? There’s so much after all, and a good deal of it you must know already. How did it happen? How did the thing come up? What was it she wouldn’t tell you?”

  “That’s just,” answered Eric helplessly, “what I don’t know myself. It was like this, you see.” And he proceeded to recount to Merivale the details of that last scene between them. “I can’t understand it,” he concluded. “She said that it would be impossible for us to marry; that there would be no money; that we’d better leave things as they were. But she must have money, otherwise she couldn’t run that flat. I can’t understand it. Why is it, Merivale?”

  For a long while Merivale paused before he answered. If there was anything he hated, it was giving pain. And he would have to hurt Somerset as never before he had been hurt.

  “I don’t understand, Merivale,” Somerset repeated. “Why hasn’t she any money?” There was a distraught look of puzzled expectancy on the fresh-coloured boyish face. Often enough in the past had Merivale thought how unjust it was that things like Somerset should be the victims of mortality, should have to grow old and lose their vitality and freshness, that their hearts must wither with their bodies, that they must become cynical and practical and worldly wise. Things like Somerset should remain young for ever. And yet here was he preparing to deal him now the first of that succession of blows life had in keeping for him—the blows that must weaken and dispirit him, that would drive him to protect himself, with cynicism perhaps, or loneliness, or coldness, or self-pity. Some armour or other he would have to forge; never would life seem quite so good to him again; never again would he see life to the same extent in terms of his own truth and freshness.

  The blow had to be given though.

  “Mrs Fairfield lives,” he said, “under the protection of a married man who intends to marry her when his own wife will agree to a divorce.”

&
nbsp; Very clearly, very slowly, he articulated the words. And his eyes as he spoke never shifted from Eric’s face. He had seen during the War grim things upon men’s faces. He had seen faces twisted and torn with pain; had seen faces go ashen and rigid suddenly in death; had seen on a German’s face as his bayonet stretched at him the horror-stricken foreknowledge of his doom; grim things he had seen there in the War. But never had anything more moved him than the look of blank uncomprehending misery that spread slowly over Eric’s face. It was the soul not the body that was suffering.

  “The protection of a married man,” he repeated. “Then—then—then she’s a kept woman, Merivale?” “Oh no, hardly that, Eric”

  “If to live under the protection of a man that you’re not married to isn’t to be kept, I don’t know what is.”

  He spoke harshly and impatiently. “You’re pretty hard,” thought Merivale, “pretty hard and pitiless, like most people with high standards.”

  “Kept,” repeated Eric, “kept.” And into his voice had crept now a note of horror and disgust. “Marjorie kept, Marjorie a kept woman.”

  He sat back in his chair, his arms folded, his head tilted back, his eyes half closed. What was he thinking, what was he feeling? Through what jungles of suffering were his thoughts travelling? So small a thing the brain that it should contain such torment. One could do nothing at such moments. One must let him be.