The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  She said to herself, ‘Lectures are the most natural way to learn: listening and questioning. The philosophers in Greece knew that…How silent he is!’ she now thought. His head was resting on his arm: she suddenly caught the gleam of his eyes watching her between his fingers. She got up.

  ‘When did that man say he’d come? Five o’clock? It’s more than that.’

  ‘Marpurgo will be here at seven.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I was thinking just now, I spent my real honeymoon in Bath. Oh, it was so boring! Paul would walk about and look at all the plaques on the houses telling what famous people had lived there. The place is just plastered with plaques. Paul used to worship the great when he was a younger man. It’s so jejune, isn’t it?’ She looked timidly at him, to see if the word was right. ‘Like children worshipping a movie-actor, or a prize-fighter. I got him to stop. They can’t help it: it’s no wonder to be talented. No thanks to the person himself! Some make the best of their opportunities and some don’t care to. I hate ambitious people. Then I noticed him creeping off one day when I was lying on the bed with my eyes shut. I had awful backaches on my honeymoon. I got up quietly and followed him. What do you think he was doing?’

  ‘Visiting the plaques,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Yes! I believe you’d do it yourself.’

  ‘I like looking at their busts, just as girls to marry like looking at wedding-photographs.’

  They laughed.

  They heard a timid knock at the door. Oliver began to grin secretly. In came a young woman with a cheap Paris overcoat and blonde hair, who looked at them both and went mildly to Elvira:

  ‘Good evening: how arr you?’

  ‘Francesca! What a surprise!’

  ‘I received your télégramme,’ murmured Francesca.

  ‘A surprise,’ explained Oliver. ‘I thought you would feel less lonely, Elvira. I telegraphed your friend Francesca you had arrived in her bailiwick. Now, I’ll leave you two girls alone for a few minutes.’ He went into the bathroom. Elvira sat down on the bed. Francesca, without taking off her coat and gloves, looked at her.

  ‘You are happy? Yes: that is why you are not ashamed. Who would have guessed? And your husband?’

  ‘He knows. Only I came away secretly to get it over with.’

  ‘H’m. And imagine, I used to get irritated with you because I thought you did not know love.’

  ‘How are you now?’

  ‘Still working in the bank. It is very intéressant. Every morning we go together into the general office, and if anyone comes late he must walk in in front of the big crowd. Then the director says, Here comes Monsieur Valetvaux: he is interested in the cross-country, he cannot give his undivided attention to his work. It is amusing. Every Wednesday he gives us a speech, and says, The Bank must be your life: you must take it home with you, talk about it at the family table, think about it after dinner, read the papers to see how it will be affected, dream about it, dress for it in the morning. Most intéressant: I have never been in such a house at all. These Americans do everything with so much energy. But that is the secret of their success.’

  ‘And your brother, Francesca?’

  She stamped her foot: ‘Oh, don’t speak of him: he is embêtant: five years younger than me and thinks he can boss me. I cannot be out after seven at night. He takes my sister to the station when she goes out. He is opposed to my younger brother Étienne joining the sports-club. And to think he has had a married woman for mistress these five years. C’est dégoûtant! You English women are free.’

  ‘You must free yourself, Francesca.’

  Oh, no, no more. You don’t know what I had to go through that time I took three weeks’ holiday in England when I met you. Never again: unless I run away for love.’

  ‘You ought to do that.’

  ‘I would do it, but I must find a man, after all, and then I will. One should do anything for love.’

  Oliver reappeared smiling from the bathroom. Francesca looked towards him dubiously. ‘I had better go now: I will be late home.’

  ‘Have lunch with us next week, Francesca,’ he called.

  ‘No, no: we must eat in the refectory of the bank.’

  ‘Well, at night, after work. We will come for you, rue Lafayette.’

  ‘No, no: you must excuse me.’

  ‘Well, then, meet us for an apéritif, near the Gare Montparnasse!’

  ‘Well, yes, I will do that: just for a few minutes. I cannot do more. Mrs. Western, I have told my mother about you: perhaps you will come and see me, if Mr. Fenton is busy, one Saturday afternoon? I will take you there. On Saturday afternoon my brother Raoul is out with his maîtresse: elle est dégoûtante, c’est une métisse, mais à un homme tout est permis. You must come then. You will let me know, hein?’

  Elvira saw her to the lift. When she came back, Oliver was nursing his foot gloomily in the arm-chair.

  ‘It doesn’t pay to see old friends in another setting: they lose all their charm. In England she was delightful, an elegant bas-relief of her countrywomen: here she’s just a dumb little office-girl.’

  ‘Did you hear that about her brother? Isn’t it amazing? The family’s such an institution in France that even illegitimate sexual relations have a place.’

  Oliver frowned.

  ‘And I bet Francesca recommended you to go back to your husband: une femme mariée doit être auprès de son mari.’

  She laughed: ‘Jealous! There you’re all wrong: she kept dinning into my ears that I ought to go flat out to it, and love one or other of you desperately: she said I was missing something. She nearly got down on her knees and begged me to sacrifice all for you!’ Elvira went into a peal of laughter: ‘Oh, oh, can you imagine it!’ She put her handkerchief into her mouth. ‘Oh, dear, now that I think of it!’—she became more serious—‘I was really surprised: it shows you don’t know a person as well as you think you do. And in London she had a miscarriage: she’s not a virgin at all: she had a lover. All women are deep. They don’t tell you the truth even if you’re close friends with them. Not that I care twopence: I prefer they shouldn’t be virgins. It clears a lot of nonsense out of their heads.’

  She sat down, crossed her knees and wagged her silken little foot idly, and crossed and uncrossed her soft olive hands. She smiled at Oliver.

  ‘How would you like me to love you madly, to get frantic about you?’

  He went rather pale: ‘I want it!’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t: I couldn’t give up my identity so much, and you wouldn’t like it!’

  ‘So she wants you to love me, like that?’

  ‘I don’t know about you in particular: it’s just a principle. I’m not sure she’s fond of you. A French girl likes a man with a solid status and position. And she doesn’t like the way you criticise bourgeois society while still living on its fat.’ She laughed softly. ‘You know—“do anything for the workers, but get off their backs.” I told her you were thinking of going into business, anyhow, and she thinks you are a business-type.’

  Oliver looked at her, quietly. At last he got up and said: ‘Well, if we are going to look at our lives with the eyes of other people, what should have been a sensual delight will be a spotted rotten orchard pear fallen to the ground before picking.’

  Elvira lit a cigarette, still enlivened with Oliver’s jealousy.

  ‘On the rare occasions that I’ve dreamed dreams, I’ve been fooled. I can’t bear seeing myself a fool. I always look at myself with the eyes of others. And I would rather cut my throat than cut a figure. My pride is against it.’

  ‘You are deeply, passionately proud: you appear mild. Suddenly a blue flash cuts the suffocated night: the less stars are blotted out.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I cannot dream: I am myself a dream. I seem to myself to be a dark, cosy dream.’

  He said eagerly, ‘And that dream will always be my idea of you. You will never know how I worship you, Elvira. You are part of me, just as a proper dye is
part of an absorbent stuff. You are my Tyrian.’

  She mused. ‘How do you see me? I don’t know. I’d like to know. You know, when you are away, I think of you as a certain rather fuzzy shape, thickness in the air: I think of you in a typical attitude and mood, a rather plump, dark, rosy-cheeked, prepotent shape, with a lock of hair falling over your forehead, which has the same white as apples, your hands moving. And I think of you as always eager, easily irritated, spoiled, self-conscious, ambitious in a materialist way.’ She laughed again.

  ‘A little flabby, vain exhibitionist,’ pouted Oliver, ‘in other words.’

  She looked at him calmly. ‘I didn’t say that: no, not quite that. I see clearly: I like you, but I see you objectively. You mustn’t accept compliments from me. I never flatter anyone. I can’t. I’m too honest to myself.’ She let her eyes, universes of self-absorption, roll over him. ‘It is not you: it is a sort of symbol of your sort of man I have when I think about you. I want to know just what sort of symbol like that you have of me.’

  He seemed cast down. ‘I don’t think I have any symbol like that: I think of you in so many ways, in all your moods: everything you do is so dear to me—’

  She went on foolishly: ‘I often think it’s just an attitude I have towards you, towards Paul too, of course. I can’t lose my head: I never fainted, you know. People don’t catch me off my guard very easily. I don’t listen to conversation so much as understand the psychological weaving that is going on underneath. I see everything dissected.’ She was under an impulsion to talk, and went and sat on his knee. He gripped her very tightly, his face still a little pale. With her head on his breast, playing with a button of his waistcoat, she went on, dreaming: ‘When I look back, I realise that I never loved anyone. With Paul, I was a young girl, and he wanted me so much that it gave me a sort of little terror, every time I saw him looking at me and looming over me. He has that great frame, and yet he was so timid with me and so miserable without me: I just wanted to see what he imagined he could get out of me. I wanted to see if it was just living with me or sleeping with me. I wouldn’t sleep with him for quite a long while: he got very depressed, and one day he let me see he thought I was not a virgin and that I was afraid to let him know. I waited a little while longer to punish him for that, and then—I couldn’t give myself up to anyone.

  ‘At last, he said he would have to go away to the country for a while if I couldn’t make up my mind to live with him. Well—I did, I did, of course. The very next morning mother came to see us, quite early: I forget now why. We were having breakfast. Paul got up and ran to the door and took mother in his arms and kissed her, laughing and nearly crying, if you can believe it, saying, “Mother, mother, she was a young girl all the time, and she loves me.” Mother bridled good-humouredly and said, “Well, what did you think, man? Don’t I know my girl?” I looked at the two of them congratulating themselves over me. I always felt a sort of cool amusement. With you, too: I like to tell the truth. I like to keep on analysing what I feel and just telling the truth, it is such a satisfaction. You don’t mind, do you?’

  A strangled voice said: ‘No, darling: just keep on talking.’

  Warm, dreamy, she kept her cheek against his breast, her hair falling over the other cheek and keeping out the light. She went on:

  ‘When Paul first brought you home, I liked you awfully: you weren’t the first. A married woman likes lots of men, because she can like them from a safe distance: they can’t get right after her, and their women, if they have any, can’t say anything because she’s married. But you hadn’t any women, at first, and then you used to dodge after me, in the house. Oh, dear, I actually had to shut you out of the bathroom, you were so anxious to talk to me and explain to me about the girl you picked up, that student, so-called student, Margery something. I used to want to take you in my arms and put your head on my breast, you were such a child, such a boy. I knew it wasn’t the girl at all, but me; you were talking to me through her.’

  He let surprised eyes fall on to her sleek head.

  ‘Did you know that? You were right; but I didn’t know it till now.’ He passed his hand gently over her crouched shoulder. ‘My dear girl.’

  ‘I didn’t mind that at all; I could watch your feelings as if in a play: I was safe, I didn’t have to make up my mind. Then you changed, you sort of stole in, you started to murk about the house—’

  He laughed: ‘Murk?’

  ‘Yes, perk about in a moony way, and I knew you were looking at me. I got cooler to you because I wanted to have a long time to make up my mind…’

  ‘That you loved me.’

  She laughed casually. ‘Oh, no: just whether I would take you or not. You see, I had been thinking for a long time, from the time I first slept with Paul, what other man I would sleep with, just as an experiment: but I had never been able to make up my mind. Of course, don’t think I don’t love you: I do. Because why did I choose you otherwise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you came it used to be as if the air darkened a little, and when I thought of what you had come for, I had moments of excitement, terrified voluptuousness. I could have lived like that for years. I liked that. I always wish it was possible for women to have a sort of house-husband, one who would want them but not live with them.’

  ‘Charming,’ he murmured. ‘A lapdog.’

  She laughed naughtily. ‘Really, you don’t think we spend all our time worshipping you! Perhaps old maids do; not a married woman. We make men, we don’t worship them.’ She thought for a moment, and went on in the former tone: ‘You went away, and I thought, Oh, well, this is finishing like the others: Fenton is not the fateful one. Your letters started to come. At first I was repelled, because you weren’t experienced like the others, you just gave yourself away. Then your letters really moved me. I felt a little bit humble—the first time in my life, about a man—and because you were away I could imagine you better. Then I was safe, I didn’t have to make up my mind. When your last letter came begging me to come to you, I thought, What’s the odds? It’s got to be some time, it may as well be now. Because I knew you would never do me any harm. I thought about you all the week-end and about Paul. Paul still broods over me and looms over me as he did in the beginning: but you’re more a companion, a brother, more like a playmate. I thought of your breast all the time. I wanted to see if the same sleep and darkness comes over me on every man’s breast, just the same. I wasn’t so curious about the rest, all men are the same, practically. And I just wanted to see, if in continuing in my own line, you know, just peering, being curious, analysing, being objective, even in love, and I am, I could get any new experiences.’

  She lifted her head and looked at him, satisfied. She was surprised by his estranged expression.

  ‘Oliver, what is the matter?’

  ‘Nothing, my dear.’

  She looked close at his face, shut his eyelids with two fingers and opened them again. She patted the light folds which had become marked in his cheeks, laughed close to his mouth, kissed him.

  ‘Oliver! Silly boy! Oliver, cheer up. Come on, laugh. You aren’t angry at what I told you?’

  ‘I’m not angry,’ said a restrained voice. ‘I’m not angry, Elvira. Don’t worry about me.’

  She put her head on his breast again. ‘Look, I’m talking into your breast that I told you I loved: I’m listening to your heart. What is it saying? Something is wrong, Oliver. I can feel a dreadful coldness in you. What is it?’ She sat up and got off his knee, really startled.

  ‘Oliver, was it my silly gabbling? I didn’t mean a word of it. You know how you start on one track of thinking and you go ahead and it doesn’t really express what you mean at all. It is just a way of thinking. There are lots of ways of thinking. I’m a foolish woman. Look, look at me!’ She tried to turn his eyes to her. He looked at her:

  ‘Elvira, don’t bother about me: it’s nothing. You didn’t say anything wrong: you have a right to say anything you like to me. I am your
lover.’

  A few fretful tears came into her eyes. She cried: ‘Oh, how can you be so foolish as to take what I said seriously? I told you it means nothing. I was reading something in a French magazine while you were out, and it was like that. I just copied the way the man thought. Oh, you annoy me when you’re so sensitive! I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘You mean it, my dear,’ said Oliver, seriously and gently. ‘Don’t worry about me. Let’s go downstairs; perhaps Marpurgo is waiting downstairs for us.’

  He got up and pulled his tie straight. She went petulantly into the bathroom to powder herself: a proud expression came over her face. She thought, ‘Let him come round: it’s just foolishness. I can’t be explaining all night.’ She came out, smiling, sailing, in all the panoply of her languor and robust female beauty. When he looked at her, still with that alien expression—one she had often seen, in fact, on Paul’s face—she knew that he still had a fierce, unalterable passion for her, but that its gaiety had evaporated. She went out insolently before him, swaying her hips, pouting her bosom, wantonly wilful and pretty.

  They walked down, and on the stairs, which were ill-lighted, she was inspired to make a few jokes with double meaning. ‘Now you are going down a gloomy staircase when you would rather go up,’ and ‘I read somewhere that the Greeks said that a man is only tender over a woman on two nights, the first night in the marriage-bed, and the first night in the cemetery, the two nights of the worm. I know why; I was thinking about it to-day when I had my bath. It is because marriage is the beginning of pregnancy and death feeds the seeds in the earth. Men want to dissolve us, crush us, get rid of the vessels of their pleasure. They want to pretend they create alone.’ She turned a disdainful, malicious face over her shoulder, saw that he looked interested, and was warming to her. She smiled.