But in comparison with herself, the other two seemed to have arrived at that distant place as well. At least they were not left limp and breathless, she saw few traces in them of the battles she fought for every uphill, forward step. From wherever it was that they were, they viewed life with a distrust that was the first thing in them that had impressed her: they treated life as though it were a bad film, constantly on the watch for sentimental patches, for poor acting and cardboard sets. She had once foolishly remarked on the charm of a certain view: ‘Oh look,’ she had said, and all they had replied was, ‘Look at what?’ Their severity and their scorn appealed to her, for she too wanted above all not to be tricked, not to be taken in, not to admire as sap and foliage what was truly canvas, and that was why she kept on walking, with her dirty shirt sticking to her back and her skirt to her legs. She did not want to be the one to spoil the moment, to accept prematurely, to scare away that other, better thing that waited for them round the corner, shy, poised and ready to run.
She was almost at her last gasp when they reached the brow of the hill: she was turning over in her mind phrases that she knew she could not, simply could not say – innocent phrases: ‘I feel sick’; ‘Couldn’t we stop and have lunch now?’; words that would not pass her lips no matter what the extremity. And then there they were at the top, and below them, miraculously, lay the sea. The steep slope crumbled away in hurried steps down to the rocks and the cool, profound green of the Mediterranean: she had not thought it was so close. With a sigh of reprieve she began the descent: here, at least, was some reason for stopping, for nobody, not even the strongest, could go on walking now unless, like Christ or the Gadarene Swine, they set out across the sea. She was reminded of those family quarrels about choosing picnic sites, and the relief that would descend when a place had been chosen that was acceptable to all.
She turned round to share her memory with Charles, who indulged her, but the sight of his stiff, effete white face changed her mind. He was a London child, he had doubtless never been on a picnic in his life, his parents were probably expensively and stylishly divorced. How had she got herself here, where she could not even open her mouth without feeling herself quite foolishly exposed?
She had protested enough about coming in the first place: she must have known what a shocking experience it would be. When Johnny had first said, ‘Let’s go to Elba,’ she had had no intention of going, she had foreseen those cracks and scars. The others had refused as well, Hannah because she had to see someone the next morning in Florence, and Charles because he had confused the location of Elba with that of Corsica. And they had, of course, gone, after wasting a good four hours quarrelling on dusty streets corners behind Rome station – they had all known that they would go, from the moment that Johnny had opened his mouth. For who could resist such a prospect? Elba, an island not of imprisonment but of embarkation. With the bottom of the hill a few stony yards away her spirits suddenly rose: here they were, after all, and lunch could not now be far away. She began to feel triumphant that she had got there at all. There is no room for complaints amongst purists, and she was glad that she had survived the trial in silence, as pure outwardly as her stricter companions were doubtless pure within.
At the foot of the cliff there was a little bay, and there they stopped, having reached the impassable edge of the water. As if bowing to necessity, not indulging a weakness, they sat down round a small enclosed rock pool, near the open sea. Hannah slipped off her sandals and put her feet in the water with an intent expression on her face. Anne began to feel more and more of a failure for being hungry, and nobody mentioned eating. They talked, desultorily, about a man whose apartment they had borrowed in Florence. After an age Johnny suddenly said, ‘I’m hungry, what the hell are we waiting for?’ and immediately put them all in the wrong for not eating. ‘I’m hungry too,’ she said, but it was too late. ‘Why on earth didn’t you say so then?’ said Charles, and there she was, caught out being complaisant again, caught out waiting for someone else to take the lead. She avoided their eyes, bending down to take off her shoes and she too put her hot feet in the water. It was cool and sharp, and the little scratches began, delicately and pleasurably, to sting. The lunch was at last unpacked: the bread had gone dry, the cheese was sweating in the sun, and the mortadella, which nobody liked anyway, was even coarser and more gristly than usual. Charles had difficulty in opening the sardine tin, and managed to cut himself: she was rather touched when he complained that it hurt, and even Hannah was too exhausted to sneer.
Anne wondered if the sea itself here was full of sardines: she leant against a rock, chewing her final tasteless Italian apple, and staring out across the even water. She felt so much better now that she had eaten, she could see now how beautiful it was, and there was no other word for it: she wanted to exclaim, to cry, to share the beauty of it, the surprise of sitting by the Mediterranean on a hot day in June, the unending surprise of the easy colourful world lying about her. She wanted more than anything to share it, to know by sharing it that it was so, and she remained silent, as the others were. She could not risk it. She was afraid of having missed the point, as though she were to come out of some film and reveal by a careless comment that some final irony and therefore the whole plot itself had eluded her. In the pool at her feet the rock was pink, and the seaweed was of a sun-charged, brilliant green that does not grow above water.
She sat and stared, at the weeds and stones. Hannah had taken off her jersey and was lying curled up with her head on it and her eyes shut. Charles was smoking, staring inland, at nothing. Johnny was folding up bits of wrapping paper from the bread. She felt alone: she let her expression lapse. The sea was swelling into the pond through a cleft, sucking over the encrusted weeds and shells, the whole vast heaving sea pushing an inquisitive finger into the hole before her. There were anemones, and little pink mottled fish lurking near the mottled stone. She thought of the visits she used to make with her family as a child to Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, where too there were rock pools, though dark and cold and grey compared with all this lavish colour. What she had liked then had been the waves breaking in great showers of spray on the rocks when the sea was rough: a wild, rough coast, but beautiful, and she would try to get out near those mountains of water, she would try to get wet. And at the age of twelve, caught for the first time in the effort to share and to assert, she had begun to write appalling Swinburnian poems. She remembered them with horror, wondering what they would think, these silent three, if they could ever have seen those scraps of flowery paper, what they would think now if they could read her mind and see imprinted there her flowery emotion for them and for this scene.
Johnny had finished folding up the wrapping paper. He lifted up a stone and put it underneath. She was surprised: it seemed an odd thing for him to do, as though she were to see him shutting gates on farms or wiping his feet on doormats: an action in an alien tradition. He caught her watching him, and looked up and said, ‘What shall I do with the sardine tin?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Hannah opened her eyes and sat up at the sound of their voices: she could never stay in one position for long. Charles turned round to face them, and they all sat quietly for a moment. Some seabirds flew overhead, screaming. There was a silence, and Anne could have sworn, she could have staked her life, she could have hazarded her future on what they were and what they were watching and what they had got there with them, for it was authenticity itself, but that was not enough, oh no, not enough for her, she was one of those that had to know.
‘Where’s the sardine tin?’ she said, and when Johnny handed it to her she held it for a moment, and then, as they idly watched, unsuspecting, she dropped it into the pool. It sank at once, and a dark oily smear spread over the surface of the water, pouring upwards from that wrenched metal lump. The fish fled, and the anemones shrank and closed in horror: she felt the three of them too withdraw and wince and shrink from what she had done, she felt with satisfaction
the great depth of their shock. Charles even made a sound in protest, and Johnny reached out, too late, an arresting hand. But they said nothing: as she had said nothing, they said nothing. And what she was conscious of, as she sat there calmly smiling, was victory: like Napoleon she had conquered in that action continents, she had conquered Europe, this tideless foreign sea, she had conquered America, all those railroads and all that Bourbon, she had conquered England and that child in a cotton frock.
But of the nature of that victory she was never sure: she had thought to destroy, in one last unnatural effort, her admiration for that gaudy picture postcard set, but even as she sat there amongst the debris, imprisoned, exiled, yet victorious, she wondered whether she had not perhaps left herself, more clearly than ever, but in less painful isolation, with that moment, poised beautifully before the ugliness of its own ruin, poised there before the destruction of sharing and articulation and definition, which was as necessary, as painfully necessary to its existence as water, rocks, and sea, and fish, and faces.
(1968)
5
Crossing the Alps
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book vi, 1.603–7
Cambridge and the Alps
He couldn’t believe it at first. So much planning, so much foresight, such elaborate persuasions, such manoeuvres, all to be so idly undone. It wasn’t possible: he wouldn’t have believed it possible, had he not always, in his heart, expected the worst. But the slow relentless fulfilment of those worst expectations dismayed him unbelievably: as the size of the disaster bore down on him, he protested, he suffered, he moaned inside himself, he knew he could not take it, that he would never cease to resent it.
He knew that it was his own fault. That made it somewhat worse, of course. He should never have washed his hair. Or, at least, he should never have gone to bed with it so wet. It was the price of vanity and idleness. But the price was so high, so wickedly disproportionate to the offence, that he felt he would never trust providence again. Providence had seemed to smile upon them momentarily: but it had been a trick, and how viciously she had withdrawn her favours. If it had happened earlier, he would have taken it better: he would have welcomed disappointment like a familiar friend. But now, after so long, after such trials endured, such unprecedented successes – he moaned and shut his eyes. The irony of it, the irony of it. He almost wished himself dead, and surely would have had he not felt himself to be, anyway, dying.
To begin with, he had deceived himself. He had tried to pretend that it was not happening, that it would not happen. As he stood there waiting for her, waiting for her impossibly awaited arrival, he ignored the symptoms, telling himself that he did not feel so bad, that his throat was merely dry from anxiety, his head ached from the expectation of long-delayed relief, and that with her arrival he would feel quite well again, for she would cure him, miraculously, he would forget such suspicions immediately as soon as she emerged from the station. He watched the exit, nervously, and then looked back at the car. The road shimmered, gently, in the heat. It was so hot: just such a day as they had hoped for. Ridiculous, to feel ill, on such a day. He shivered. Perhaps she would not come: perhaps she had already been overtaken by disaster, perhaps she lay ill in bed or dying, in those places where he could not telephone, perhaps her child was ill, or her sister, perhaps the train had crashed. He looked at his watch. It was due in five minutes. He sneezed. Hay fever, he said to himself: a complaint from which he had never suffered in his life.
Then he began to wonder why he had not gone up to London to collect her. What extraordinarily tortuous process had led them to select such a spot for a rendezvous – as inconvenient for him, almost, as it must be for her? Perhaps she would forget to get off the train and would go hurtling on to Southampton, leaving him standing here forever. She would look for him in Southampton, but he would never find her, they would miss each other, they would never meet again. He felt for the tickets in his pocket. She had forgotten her passport, perhaps. Incompetent, she was, finally, for all her energy and hard work and self-sacrifice. She wasted most of it, through incompetence. In fact, for all the weeks of forethought, she had probably missed the train. She would be standing in London still, weeping a little, giving up, ready to go home and despair, telling herself that she should never have been so wicked as to try, even so briefly, to escape. Without him there to force her, she gave up too quickly. He feared her nature. She lacked pertinacity. She would give up, in the end. She would remain faithful to her dreadful obligations, but herself she would give up, him she would give up, if he were not there to bully and persuade. How could he get at her, as she stood there at Waterloo Station, weeping a little, not knowing where to go?
He heard the whistle of the approaching train. He felt slightly sick, and sneezed again. He had arranged not to go onto the platform – ‘Don’t come into the station,’ she had said, ‘please don’t, I’ll come and look for you, wait for me. I want to worry,’ she said, ‘that you might not be there.’ ‘You know I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know, but I want that moment of anxiety, when I look for you and think you might not be there.’ That moment of anxiety, were she there, she would be enduring now, for the train had stopped, and was emptying its passengers onto the hot quivering asphalt. He looked away, but could not, finally, keep his eyes from the exit: sophistication of torment had its limits, even for him. An elderly woman came out, with some paper parcels from town, and then a child, and then there she was, herself, unmistakable, carrying her suitcase, handing over her ticket, not looking in his direction. Through the barrier, she put down her case, and disembarrassed, looked up. Their eyes met, across the deserted car park. She walked towards him, very slowly it seemed, and he could not move. But when she reached him, he found himself smiling, and said to her, ‘I got you here, after all.’
‘Are you pleased to see me?’ she said, reaching out a hand to touch his arm.
‘I was afraid you might forget to come,’ he said, and they both laughed: they could as soon have forgotten such an assignation as a certain date for death. But her laughter itself alarmed him: her features trembled in the act, and it alarmed him, he wished that the trembling (so necessary in some ways) could be done with for both of them, he had tried to arrange it so that they might both, for a little while at least, not need to suffer. He opened the car door for her, and said, ‘Get in,’ hoping that when he had shut her in there, in that confined space, she would feel safer and let go a little. But she sat there, rigid and intent, and as he drove off he started to brace himself – a little wearily, and how he hated himself for his reluctance – to do the inevitable, to ask the right questions, to comfort, to reassure, to appease. It took so long, sometimes: how could he admit his hope that she might this once, in honour of the occasion, cut it out? She had threatened him so often, saying, ‘A day will come when you simply won’t be able to stand it any more,’ and he had denied it, endlessly, faithfully: but he knew she was right, there are limits to anyone’s endurance, nobody fails to give in in the end. As she herself had decided, two months before, when she had tried to gas herself and the child. Tried ineffectively, of course: she had repented in time, and he had even seized upon the event, and the publicity of doctors and ambulances, to force her to accept that she must get away for a while from her dreadful sentence, but it had taken two months of hard work to persuade her. ‘You’re stupid,’ he had said to her, shaking her, staring appalled at her blotched and swollen face: ‘Stupid. You throw yourself into it so remorselessly, you forget that the only thing you must do – for yourself, for the child himself – is to survive.’ ‘Survive for what?’ she had said, dully, admitting for the first time the pointlessness of her sacrifices: for the child was doomed, he could not anyway survive with
any prospect of a reasonable future. And he had been obliged to voice to her her own stubborn certainties, to reassert for her her own tragic persistence: hearing from her the moribund, flat tones of reason, and from himself the ridiculous, noble, elevated statements of devotion. They had not come well from him, he had thought, but in the end she had succumbed and had leaned against him, as so often before, and had said: ‘You, you know what you are talking about, because what do you do for me but look after me, but look after me without any prospects of future, without any satisfaction or hope? I admire you for it,’ she said. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘It satisfies me, that I love you, I get enough from it, you don’t know what I get, but it’s more than I’d ever hoped for.’
‘That, too, I get,’ she said: speaking of the child. And she had picked up again, from where she had put it down, the usual burden: able, even, with her amazing capacity, to make him feel wanted, to give him happiness, to make him forget, as they talked and lay together and pursued their circumscribed excursions, the sad terms of their contract. They had a good time together, in practice: never failing to enjoy one another’s company. He had thought that all they needed for entire felicity was a few days away together, with light and air, away from that depressing flat and child, away from her depressing work, away from his own depressing wife. He drove carefully along the wide summer road towards Southampton and freedom, and waited for her to start to repent, so that he could embark on consolation.
But she did not repent. She sat there, and slowly, by his side, she started to soften. She liked being there, he could tell it from the way she lit herself a cigarette and began to smile at the passing hedges. She had arrived completely: whatever remorse she had felt about her departure and her elaborate abandoning of the child had already been endured and done with – done with on the train, perhaps, or even before. She had alighted with nothing more than an ordinary nervousness. It was made, he said to himself: a whole week, and the weather, and the journey, and the hotel bedrooms. He reached for her hand, and once more, he sneezed.
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Page 7