Towards the end of supper I slipped away, got the bill from the patron and paid it, hoping I would not be looked on as an arrogant Englishman patronising them all insufferably. I then nudged Alexandra and tried to get her away before anyone found out; but this didn’t come off. So I was gravely thanked, and then Deramore had to order champagne to drink our health, and then the rugby international ordered more in his turn, so it was two-thirty before anyone started moving.
By now several of them were tipsy, but I’d been careful to drink as lightly as possible, and noticed Alexandra had done the same. Drink can be wonderful if you need it; we didn’t: you can’t add to the elevation if you’re already on a peak. Deramore knew a night club where there was a good floor show at three but, glancing at Alexandra and getting her assenting nod, I said we’d had enough.
So with ceremony, in which there was plenty of mockery of themselves but none of us, we were escorted to a taxi and bowed and waved away.
It is about five kilometres to Neuilly. We sat in opposite corners of the taxi throughout the drive. We talked briefly, dryly, in short and informative sentences, almost like our first meeting. Jackie and Jules de la Fayarde would be in Cap-Ferrat by now. Alexandra was to follow at the end of the month. She had a holiday due, but there was no point in taking it while her employers could offer her sun and sea and water-skiing. When would my play come on? I thought about September thirtieth. The cast was to assemble on the fifth. She would be back in Paris by then? No, probably about the tenth. But from two weeks hence until the tenth she would be in the south, unreachable.
The lights of the taxi beat down the long avenue of trees.
She said suddenly: ‘Morris.’
‘Yes?’
‘When we get there … would you like to come in?’
‘You’re alone?’
‘Four servants.’
‘Oh …’
‘But they’re in their own part of the house.’
‘If I come in …’
‘Yes.’
The taxi driver slowed to look at the name of the avenue. Alexandra leaned forward to give him directions.
I realised at that moment, perhaps the very first time, that the love I had for her was as deeply returned.
She sat back and put a handkerchief up to her lips, wiped them. ‘I have to tell you, in case you haven’t guessed, that you will be … I have never had anyone else.’
‘I’d—yes, I think I knew.’
A car coming from the other direction lit up her face, made it startlingly pale, much older, as if with strain, the eyes pools of brilliance, a lock of hair falling across her forehead.
‘I still have doubts,’ I said.
‘About me? Then—’
‘No, but listen, in case you don’t know. I love you—it’s not just a light thing; and to take this now, tonight when everything seems slightly fey and unreal …’
‘When you read about this sort of thing,’ she said, ‘it always seems so easy, doesn’t it? One collapses into bed and then it’s all over. Dear Morris, I have to tell you that I have no practical defences either.… I’ve always thought I should have no interest in anyone but a person I loved, and if I loved him I should marry him first. So it didn’t seem necessary to burrow into all the details of how to conduct an affair without running risks. All desperately Victorian! Are you terribly shocked?’
‘Shocked?’
‘Well, that’s the only way one can shock anyone nowadays, isn’t it? Keeping to outdated codes is the only obscenity left.’
‘Alexandra,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. Listen to me. Can you listen to me?’
‘Yes?’
‘When we get to the house, go in alone. I’ll follow you in a few minutes. Is there some way of getting in without rousing the servants?’
‘Yes. I’ll leave the gate and the door open. And I’ll leave a light in the hall. On the first floor turn right. You’ll see a light under the door at the end of the first passage.’
We slowed at the corner, the driver came to a stop before the tall, wrought-iron gates.
I stayed in the taxi until she had unlocked the gate, then told the driver to turn and drive back to Paris. We went back via the Avenue du Roule, but we were almost at the end of the Avenue des Ternes before I told him to stop and wait. I got out and went in an all-night chemist. Then I walked back to the taxi and told the driver to return to the house at Neuilly.
He pushed his cap an inch farther on the back of his head. ‘Why did you not tell me what you required?’ he asked. ‘I know a shop much nearer than that.’
Chapter Five
So I left the house as daylight was breaking. So I walked away in the cool air of morning. I turned down the Rue Perronet; someone had broken a milk bottle and a grey cat was licking among the broken glass; a young man and a girl were loading luggage into a Deux Chevaux, water-skis and all; at a window a woman was picking in her stockings.
Corner of the Boulevard Inkermann; a prowling taxi passed; I did not hail it. I walked on, not tired.
First day of the French holiday, breaking fine and hot. The sun began to glint on upper windows like a semaphore lamp. Place Winston Churchill, go straight on, gentle breeze coming off the Seine. In the Avenue de Neuilly an early 73 bus carrying a few workers into the city. Not everything stopped today.
But soon cars would be streaming out of Paris towards the Mediterranean, the Biscay and Channel coasts. Shops and theatres would close, the great houses would be empty, the streets would lose some of their crowded urgency, business would run on skeleton staffs or not at all. Nothing of importance would officially happen until the second week of September. Nothing of importance. Nothing of importance. Nothing of importance.
How long could I decently stay? Did even appearances matter now? Somehow they did. It would be intolerable if any hint of this reached Harriet from outside.
So you made love experimentally and it was right or it was not right; and if it was the one you sighed and parted, and if the other you stayed and supped again. But it wasn’t that actually, was it? God damn it, it wasn’t that at all. Whether last night had been a sexual triumph or a groping failure did not really effect the involvement. One was in deep, deep, deep, with breath and eyes and heart.
Down the Champs Elysées, some traffic already racing; many more cars than usual carried cases on roof or boot. Gardeners hosing the grass verges. Soon these verges would be crowded with spectators for the Grand Parade. A few were already gathering. In the Place de la Concorde the debris of the night was being cleared.
Five kilometres. My room looked cold and clinical in the morning light. It was the room of a stranger. I shut the door and pulled back the white counterpane. This side did not yet get the sun. I needed a shave. I was reluctant to wash, to give anything of the night away. ‘On earth I am a stranger grown; I wander in the ways of men, Alike unknowing and unknown.’ But I am not a stranger to the ways of men; this is a common path; I am a stranger only to myself.
I lie down on the bed, thinking I can never sleep. I can never sleep because all has to be worked out, thought afresh. Life is bursting in me, bursting with the irresistible impulse of an atomic bomb, of a bud turning into a flower. The Rhesus Boy has had his blood changed, revitalised with a new and stronger substance. I’m alive, alive, ALIVE, so that the pulses beat, so that it hurts, so that the sun rises and sets with every other breath. Sleep is not for me. Sleep is for mortals, earth-bound and un-shriven.
And at once, like nature closing a door mistakenly left ajar and swinging gently in unexpected winds, I fall asleep, utterly and dreamlessly, and sleep for six hours without stirring.
I waked and bathed and shaved and breakfasted and walked out on to the balcony. The sun struck obliquely warm across my arms and hands. It was the same sun I had seen earlier, but already contaminated by the day.
Some ectoplasm of the night still clung to me, a sense of magic. I knew I must disperse it. I knew I must ring Harriet.
‘Hullo,
darling, how are you?’
‘All right. Sorry to be out of breath. I just got in this minute and heard the phone ringing. Is anything the matter?’
‘No, nothing. But I shall have to stay on here a couple more days at least. There is a bit of difficulty over the casting and Charisse thinks my presence will be useful.’
‘Oh? Who is it?’
‘Who’s what?’
‘Who’s giving the trouble?’
‘It isn’t exactly that. But there seems to be some slight problem as to whether Marie Paladini will be free, and he thinks—’
‘But it was arranged—’
‘Yes, I know, but no contract is signed. There’s a suggestion of a film offer for her. I think it will all blow over, but he says he’d like me to be on hand.…’ How easy it is for a writer to lie, the inventions spring to his lips.
‘Yes. Yes, of course. When will you be home, then?’
‘Probably Friday. But it might be earlier. How’s your back?’
‘I went to see Mallory and he’s given me some enormous brown pills that look like space capsules.’
‘They probably are.’
I heard her laugh.
‘What’s the weather like in London?’ I asked.
‘A bit muggy this morning. By the way, who represents Marie Paladini?’
‘I think it’s Roget, I’m not certain.’
‘D’you think any persuasion could be put on them?’
‘No. Good God, no. Look, say nothing to anybody for the moment, I’m pretty sure it will blow over. The thing most calculated to ruin everything would be outside interference.’
‘Meaning mine? I wasn’t thinking of—’
‘Or Ralph’s, or anybody’s. The whole thing will probably be settled by Friday.’ It is easy to lie but not easy to measure the results. I had to stamp here and now on her maddening tendency to take things into her own hands.
‘Try to get home for dinner on Friday, Morris. Tim Dickinson is coming, and one or two other people.’
‘Oh, well, if Tim is coming you’ll be all right.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ She laughed, and we exchanged fond messages, and I lay back on the bed, the comfort and joy gone out of the sunny day.
(‘Darling,’ she had said once, ‘I don’t want you to feel this is my money we’re going to live on, it’s ours. It’s an investment. They say women are the best investors, with the shrewdest heads for making a profit. My father left me twenty thousand pounds. Well, I can live, on my own, on the interest from that—but it’s invested, in insurance, in breweries. Well, now I’m going to take half that out and spend it. We can live for some years on that capital, plus bits of interest, etc. Eventually we’ll make a profit. I know what I’m doing. I’ve faith in you. You’ll write a splendid play, and then you’ll see what a wise and successful investor I’ve been!’)
Get up and look in the mirror, at a tiny nick made in your chin shaving. Two men stare back at me: the triumphant lover and the cheap-jack husband.
(No, it had not been all simple and straightforward last night. Alexandra was a mixture of physical need and emotional shyness, deep feeling and throw-away humour, an immature girl’s approach with an adult’s reactions, a questioning and plumbing of emotion within herself as if the events of the night had to be tested against some inner standard or resolve. Before I left I had bent and parted her hair from her forehead and kissed it and then her lips. She had looked at me with composed eyes, in which there was not a trace of sleep, and said:
‘Beginner’s nerves, darling.’
‘We’re all beginners when we fall in love,’ I said. ‘Make no mistake about it. It happens over again.’
‘I’ll be better tonight,’ she said.
‘I don’t want you better. I want you as you are.’
I turned away from the mirror and rang Charisse. To my relief he was out. I went downstairs, bought a paper, walked with it to the Café de la Paix, sat over a café filtre scanning the news. It made no impression. I would have found as much in a time-table.
In the seven years of our marriage I had written four unsuccessful plays. The first had come on in Croydon but had progressed no farther; the second, Rhesus Boy, had been put into production by Dunnet & Co. As Ralph Diary had remarked over dinner a few weeks ago, this had driven us all to despair by going on a pre-London tour, with constant small amendments being made to try to slip-stream it into shape, and had finally collapsed in Brighton two weeks before a London opening was due. (‘But don’t you see,’ she’d said to me at the time, ‘all this is immensely valuable, immensely formative. It isn’t as if we didn’t know where our next pound of tea was coming from. In some ways it’s much better to have a failure in the provinces before it gets to London: and it’s certainly better to fail again at this stage, and learn from it, than later. You’re not a one-idea man; you’re a professional playwright; it’s only a matter of time.’)
I had breakfasted so late that I cut lunch, walked through the Tuileries to the Seine and sat watching the barges pass. The gardens were nearly empty this afternoon. I had slept through the Grand Parade. Three stout Frenchmen walked past me carrying their fishing tackle and chattering. A small boy shouldering a rough sheep-dog nearly as big as himself came to my seat and took the other end, a boy with close-shaven hair and brief blue shorts and long clear-skinned bony legs.
My third play—the one after the near success—had pleased no one. Hypnotised by the memory of weeks of rewriting on tour, I had tried to anticipate all the shortcomings discovered in the previous play under the stress of production and had lost the impetus of the original idea by stopping all the time to be clever about it. No one would touch it.
My fourth was probably the worst play I ever wrote; but it had a star part, and I sent it to Gladys Rentoui. Because it appealed to her she had managed to get it produced; but even her great prestige had failed to bring it to London. So eighteen months ago despair. Utter despair. (What a long time ago that seemed. How established my success already appeared!) Harriet again: ‘Look, if you give up now you’ll never know. You may think you’re getting worse and worse, but in fact you’re ridding yourself of a lot of stuff that’s better out of your system. You’re like a sculptor chipping away a lot of waste from a block of marble. It’s what’s left that matters. As I see it, all your plays are revolving round two or three formal themes. Every failure brings one’s ultimate success nearer.’ Always Harriet.
And then I had written Widow’s Peak and it had come on at Wyndham’s in February. My success had been Harriet’s success. My justification had been hers. The one thing she had not calculated on was my falling in love with another woman just as this success became secure.
Nor had I.
The small boy had unshouldered the dog and was examining his rough coat as if there were something wrong with it, a bruise or a wound.
Well, I was going to bruise and wound Harriet when I told her. How would she take it? I couldn’t begin to imagine. She was not a naturally passionate woman but she had given herself to me willingly and freely whenever she was well enough. And the marital encounters, which were probably no better or worse than in most marriages, had been deepened and given a greater intimacy because of the identity of interest outside. To her an affair with another woman on my part would be a blow to her pride; but she would get over it. It would be my wanting to make a permanency of it that she would look on as a complete and utter betrayal. She had sunk herself in me. She would state categorically that I couldn’t leave her now.
I said to the small boy; ‘Is your dog sick?’
The boy stared at me, confirmed in his suspicion of my foreignness.
‘No, he is not sick, but he has a bad side.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘He has a gathering.’
Supposing that was exactly what she did say—that I couldn’t leave her now? That ours was too close a partnership to be dissolved—that even if I left her she’d never divorce me?
What then?
Knowing Alexandra even so little as I did, I knew that it wouldn’t affect her attitude towards me. Nor, in the world in which I moved, would it be of great concern. Harriet would get much sympathy anyhow: I had never disguised my debt to her. If she refused a divorce, and with Alexandra so obviously charming and sincere, she would gain far less sympathy than by agreeing to it.
I said to the boy: ‘May I look at your dog?’
‘Why?’
‘What is his name?’
‘Popo.’
‘Popo. Where do you come from, Popo? What a lovely big head.’
‘He comes from near Rouen, monsieur. We came up yesterday with my father and my grandfather. My father has a shop in Meuseville near Rouen. My grandfather fought at Verdun, monsieur. He has only one leg. He says always: ‘‘ Ils ne passeront pas, ils ne passeront pas.’’ ’
I moved over and parted Popo’s fur. You could see the slight swelling and then a blob of what looked like yellow pus. I peered closer and saw it was a sheep tick half buried in the dog’s skin.
It would be a terrible thing to tell her, yet there was no other way. Because relationship with her was the peculiar relationship it was, did that mean I must shut my eyes to all other women for the rest of my life? I had not sought out Alexandra. Very far from it. In the middle of a dreary cocktail party it had suddenly happened. I had as much control over that as over a coronary.
(True, I need not have gone across, or telephoned her later, or have followed up each meeting with another; but neither need I have breathed or have been alive.)
I fished around in my pocket and found a bottle of aspirin. (Carried for Harriet’s convenience, God help me.) Inside a piece of cotton wool. Put the cotton wool against the dog’s skin and with finger and thumb move it around until you can feel the protruding end of the tick. Grasp this, give it a rapid twist and pull. The dog yelped and shrank away from me. The complete tick came away between finger and thumb. It might have broken and left half behind. It was suddenly important to me that it had not.
After the Act Page 5