‘It’s hard to see yourself from that far away,’ said Treece slowly. ‘One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it’s other people one can’t satisfy. One thinks one’s way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you’re animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever there. It’s an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It’s the worst kind of despair.’
‘I know, pet, I know.’ Viola put her hands on his forearms and looked up at him with clear grey eyes. ‘You’re a funny person. You live so tensely, don’t you?’ Even as Treece perceived that this was a different Viola, simply a woman, who could end suffering, he was kissing her. He fumbled ineffectually with the front of her dress. ‘There’s a zip at the back,’ said Viola. ‘You’re supposed to find that out for yourself; but it’s an expensive dress.’ She slipped out of the dress.
‘I say, that’s a nice brassière,’ said Treece, very impressed. ‘It’s broderie anglaise,’ said Viola, flattered. She slipped out of the brassière.
‘I was so dulled, so stupid, I needed this so much,’ said Treece.
‘Yes, Stuart, I know.’
‘You’re so good to me,’ said Treece. ‘Do you like me?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Viola, ‘or I wouldn’t be here now. Why are you so humble? You don’t trust anyone, do you? You’re afraid that secretly they don’t really respect Professor Treece as he ought to be respected.’
‘Stop it,’ said Treece. ‘There are no Professor Treeces here.’
Viola giggled. ‘It was Tanya, you know . . .’ she said.
‘Tanya, I know what?’
‘Tanya who said I ought to do this.’
‘She did? Why?’ said Treece, rolling over.
‘Well, I’m such a mess about this. She said I ought to, and that you . . . She takes a great interest in me.’
‘Are you and she lovers?’ asked Treece.
‘No; she’s never done anything to me,’ said Viola. ‘It’s just one of these stories that people put about, people who gossip like me. She has affairs with men; she’s having one with Herman. I don’t think she enjoys them, but she has them.’
‘Do you enjoy them?’
‘I enjoy this. Do you like me?’
‘Very much,’ said Treece. All the same, somehow, his excitement began to diminish. He felt slightly disturbed by all this; it reminded him that it was she, with him, who was involved. All at once the room began to boom with moral reverberations. Notions of responsibility spilled lazily about his head as he lay there on the bed.
‘That bloody coffee,’ said Viola. ‘I put some on. Fasten me up at the back, my baby.’ My baby, Treece noted in astonishment; there it was again, as always. Treece was the sort of man that people always wanted to mother, or father: indeed, as someone had once said of him in the old bohemian days in London: ‘Some men go around leaving illegitimate children; Stuart leaves illegitimate parents.’ Treece had never exactly wished this, but it was a concomitant of his character. ‘I wish you could stay, but all these people . . . Can you come back?’ Here, Treece saw, was a future, a complex of consequences; and it meant, too, problems of discipline within the faculty; after all, what he had done for her he ought to do for every member of the department. So now, as he repeatedly kissed her on the end of the nose as she put on her dress, he was stomaching a desire to hurry from the room, leap aboard his motorized bicycle, drive madly to somewhere safe – for this, which had once been safety, was now safety no more. He had to make the point to her; it was only fair. She was sweet, she was gentle, she was good. When she had first been appointed, she had looked like a damp, frail figure rescued from a shipwreck, needing a protector. It was an illusion; at the interview Treece had observed that Viola had a strong line in articulation, an assurance of opinion, which had earned her the appointment. But ever since then Treece had really responded to the other side of Viola, the frightened girl; he hardly granted that she was a woman, a modern woman with opinions that ran counter to his own, that she was of a generation that he felt he didn’t even understand, the fifties, the Willoughby lot. When he thought of this he trembled: but he had to make his position plain. ‘This doesn’t mean I agree with your opinions,’ he said. They went into the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Viola rather grimly. ‘Intellectually, you’re in the clear.’
5
I
PEOPLE WHO think that architecture is a facet of the soul, and are concerned about what sort of house they dwell in (they have to be people with money to believe this) all, nowadays, either live in Georgian houses, or want to, or would want to if it were not so inconvenient. The house in which Emma Fielding lived was, as all her visitors squealed, a collectors’ piece. It was Georgian, civilized, spacious, and dense; corridors gave on to charming rooms and staircases. It was such a good example that people had already formed an organization to protest against its demolition; no one had tried to demolish it yet, but if you are interested in houses, you know what the world is like; and it is not like you. The fact was, however, that Emma had chosen the house not because it was a collectors’ piece, but because the people who owned it, the Bishops, were; Emma collected people. When, a little time ago, a song came out called ‘Eating People is Wrong’, Emma felt a twinge of conscience: she agreed with the proposition, but was not sure that she exactly lived up to it. When she had first gone to the house to see the room, she had been greeted by Mrs Bishop, frail, white-haired, with a deaf-aid. The flat consisted of a bedroom and a living room, and a peculiar stunted sofa.
‘That’s rather nice,’ said Emma, pointing to the sofa.
‘Yes, dear,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘It’s a chaise short.’
‘Do you get the sun in here?’
“No, dear; it’s the wrong side of the house for the sun,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘Still, it’s an ill wind, you know, and there is one compensation: it’s on the right side of the house for the shade. You look thin, don’t you, dear? What have you been worrying about?’
‘Nothing,’ said Emma.
‘Nonsense. I can tell you’re a worrier. You’re worried about not being married.’
‘You’re quite wrong,’ said Emma.
‘Of course you are. All girls do. You aren’t married, are you?’
‘No,’ said Emma.
‘Well, then, that’s what it is.’
‘I don’t want to marry; I’m not equipped to marry,’ protested Emma.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘Everybody’s equipped to marry. It’s very simple equipment.’
‘I mean I’m simply not ready to settle down. I have so much to do first.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Bishop, ‘if you’re going to be like that. We don’t allow animals or children, dear . . .’
‘I must be careful not to have any,’ said Emma.
‘I used to be a big friend of Marie Stopes,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘And you’ll be surprised how useful it’s come in since. And no musical instruments or firearms; and I don’t know what you use, but don’t block the toilet with sanitary napkins, will you?’
‘No,’ said Emma.
‘I know these rules seem terrible, but one has to have them; and don’t get the wrong impression – there are lots of things you can do, if you just think about it,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘Well, I’ll tell my husband we’re having you. He thinks a lot of what I say. In fact, he thinks more of it than I do.’
One got through life, Emma believed, by convincing oneself that each stage was a temporary condition, a momentary expedient, accepted half-heartedly and just for the time being. Compromise was shocking, but she was always doing it; and there were unexpected rewards. This time, in order to have the Bishops, one went without the harmonium. Secret harmonium playing would be quickly detected; and there was nowhere to hide it; the wardrobe, though large for a wardrobe (you could probably have hidden another wardrobe in it), was small for even the most self-effacing harmonium. Whatever her happier qualities, moreover
, Mrs Bishop proved to be a practised investigator. She had a metaphysical sense of evil operating in the world around her, even in her own house, and she was perpetually on a look-out for the world’s corruption (Is it you? Is it you? she seemed to ask as she peered around her, wondering if her tenants were really married, whether her neighbours were pickpockets or prostitutes), not because she condemned it, but because she was interested in it. What worried her was not the actual sin, which she encouraged, but the failure to repent afterwards. She was a true provincial Nonconformist; when you looked at her the word Nonconformity took on shape. She belonged to one of those small vestigial Christian sects that meet in rooms over teashops. ‘We had some lovely sins today, dear,’ she would cry, knocking on Emma’s door on Sunday evening, fresh from church in her fur coat and fox fur, a frail figure, yet (as Emma came to realize) as strong as a horse, in character and physical endurance. The church she attended made a practice of public confession, so that, as Mrs Bishop explained, you not only had the pleasure of doing the sin, but the second, more sophisticated, pleasure of talking about it afterwards. As the weeks went on, the confessions got more lurid; competition grew up as to who could commit adultery the most times in one week. ‘Thirteen times,’ said Mrs Bishop one week. ‘You wouldn’t think anybody had it in them, would you?’ ‘Perhaps he was lying in order to have something to confess next week,’ suggested Emma. It was Emma’s view that it was more Christian not to sin at all than to sin and repent, but Mrs Bishop speedily disabused her on that score. ‘Who did they kill the fatted calf for, the prodigal son or the other?’ she demanded. Emma was reminded of a remark made to her by Herr Schumann, the German student, who had said once, meeting her at coffee, ‘I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.’
The house itself was a citadel of the old guard – frondy, ornate, bubbling with flowers. Pianola rolls filled a cupboard on the stairs, the faded titles recalling romantic operas. In the lavatory there was a large wooden chest, and when it was opened (it was unlocked) it revealed to Emma a collection of Edwardian hats, with great brims, and ostrich plumes; when she was using the toilet Emma would sit there and try them on. The Edwardian period was their period; if only there hadn’t been that war, what wonders, said Mrs Bishop, would have happened. ‘People like us would have come to our own, you know, if the Hun hadn’t . . . You know, it’s terrible when your generation isn’t the one that’s on top any more. Perhaps it’s wrong to make a virtue out of the age one lived in, just because one did live in it; it’s such an unfashionable age just now, too. But it was a more civilized age than this one; it was so much more peaceable.’
‘But wasn’t it very vulgar?’ asked Emma.
‘I don’t think so. I detest vulgarity; I won’t have it in my house; and people then were very conscious of what vulgarity was. If you were not a gentleman, it was no use being anything.’
‘It seems to me it’s vulgar to call things vulgar in that way.’
‘Oh, well, I liked it, but then I’m naïve,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘I heard a famous writer on the radio say how awful it must be for intelligent young men now that they can’t have servants, because now they have to do all the things they shouldn’t have to waste time doing. I understand that; I don’t suppose anyone much younger than me can, any more.’
‘No, not really,’ said Emma.’
‘Things seem to me rather awful now, and all those foreigners seem to do what they like with us, and people don’t know their places any more. I went into the Post Office this morning and they were so rude to me because I was slow. I told them: I said, “If you don’t want my business, I’ll give it to another firm.” But’, concluded Mrs Bishop forlornly, ‘there isn’t any other firm, is there?’
The simple truth was that Mrs Bishop and her husband – he was ‘Rotary’, a businessman, and no one knew exactly what he did (Emma asked him once, and he said that his business was not her business) – had strayed into Emma’s world out of another one, inconceivably remote, positively unreal, so unreal that Emma could scarcely believe in it. Emma Fielding was, as she phrased it, ‘upstart middle class’, but until she went to the Bishops she did not really know what middle class meant. When Emma went into other people’s rooms, she found herself straightening cushions, wiping dust off ornaments with her sleeve, and if she was not shocked by people who passed the salt from hand to hand without putting it down, she noticed and thought that her mother would have been shocked; this was her vestigial middle-classness, which, like her vestigial Christianity, seemed to her a poor, shady, furtive thing. But to the Bishops, who believed in Keeping Yourself to Yourself, Having Nice Things, Getting On In the World, Keeping Decent, Settling Down, Having a Bit of Property Behind You, Emma was close to communism. Emma had inherited a tradition of snobbery, but had spent the last ten years of her life trying either to eliminate it or to make it intellectually respectable; with the Bishops it was there, plain and overt. Emma did not see why women should want exact equality with men, for, after all, they had their own things in the world, but Mrs Bishop . . . well, Mrs Bishop said: ‘I don’t think women are intelligent enough to have the vote, do you? At least, not until after the change of life.’ If she had not met the Bishops, thought Emma, she would not have known what the old world was; as it was, she knew, and wondered. The Bishops talked of the town they lived in, and it was another town; they talked of the time when the poachers used to go out into the country in the evening, on the tram, and return with their rabbits and pheasants just when the policemen were changing over shifts. They could remember the policemen going round the streets with a handbarrow and piling the drunks that lay in the streets on to it to take them to the station. They had friends who came round in the evenings and sang; and after they had finished their piece, Mrs Bishop would clap her hands and cry, ‘Voix d’ange!’ Donkey carts and flower shows and conservatories and bicycle trips to the sea figured in their conversation. They thought the Conservative Party would have Britain back on the Gold Standard by 1960. Emma looked at them, and gasped; and wondered, if the world is what I think it is, how have you lived, how have you carried on?
II
One damp, rainy day Emma returned home from feeding some pigeons to find poor Mrs Bishop in a state of considerable upset. ‘There’s been a nasty man here this afternoon,’ said Mrs Bishop, ‘and he’s up in your room and he won’t come out. I don’t know what he’s doing. I’ve been standing on the stairs shouting “Fire!” but even that doesn’t seem to worry him.’
‘Now, don’t worry so much, Mrs Bishop,’ said Emma, not a little worried herself. ‘Did he say who he was?’
‘Well, he said he was a friend of yours, but he didn’t look like it to me, and I’ve never seen him here before,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘He was tall and frightening and very ugly and his coat collar was turned up, and he had a foreign black beret on. There were great big drops of rain dripping off his ears. Then when I opened the door a crack, he pushed it wide open and stepped inside and said if he stood out there in the rain another minute he’d get pneumonia, and he wanted to dry off, and he asked for you then. So I said you were out and he said he’d go up to your room and wait and dry his clothes.’
Emma rushed upstairs. ‘Mind,’ cried Mrs Bishop. ‘He might be naked.’ She threw open the door and there, in front of the gas fire, a plaid rug round his shoulders, sat Louis Bates. ‘What do you think you’ve been doing?’ demanded Emma. Louis, who had come expressly to seduce her, was a little taken aback. Looking at it from his point of view, you could understand his disappointment; it was not a promising beginning.
For weeks now Louis had cavorted with love. Day after day he had searched the University for another glimpse of Emma – peering into lecture rooms, scouting systematically along corridors, hovering outside the women’s lavatories at strategic times. He had written her letters. He had stopped working. It had disorganized his life. He could live with it no longer; he had to act. When he looked into the mirror each morning
, as he shaved around the contours of each cheek, he had been braving himself up to all this: he half expected to find, one morning, a different face there, the face of Louis the lover, Louis the seducer, the fresh, cherubic face of a young man with sparkling eyes and shining teeth. Alas, it was always the same face, long and gaunt, that met his look; and it wasn’t fair, for this was a new Louis, an extravagant, passionate Louis, doing new things, thinking new thoughts. Each morning he gazed at the solemn, hollow face that peered back at him from the mirror, smiled at it, teased and tempted it, said to it, ‘Emma, Emma, Emma.’ But it didn’t seem to get the point at all. And now that she was sitting before him, not a fiction, but a real creature, the more desirable, but the less accessible, his daring faltered. How did one do it? Would she mind if he leapt up and heaved her into the bedroom, stripping off her clothes as they went? Yet he could live with it no longer; he had come to a kind of desperation, and had, somehow, to act.
‘I had to see you,’ he said. ‘I can’t live without you.’
Emma went to the door and shouted downstairs: ‘It’s all right, Mrs Bishop, it’s someone I know.’ Then she returned to Louis. ‘You frightened Mrs Bishop out of her wits: did you know?’
‘Why?’ demanded Louis. ‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘Coming storming into the house like that, and waiting in my room when I’m not here. You simply don’t do things like that.’
‘Why simply don’t you?’ demanded Louis satirically. ‘I was soaking wet. I have a weak chest. And I had to see you. I can’t go on like this. I can’t work. I can’t eat. I think about you all the time.’
‘I can’t think why,’ said Emma. ‘You hardly know me; it’s silly.’ She went over to the window and looked out; the weather that day had become wilder and more blustery; rain bounced in the streets and dripped from the eaves of houses; bedraggled dogs sat in doorways.
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