As one might walk carefully in a ruined building, so as not to cause further subsidence, he picked up the untouched tea-tray and took it through to the kitchen. Perhaps because of his recent dream his mother’s intonations echoed in his ears. Her observations, he had to admit, were often acute, though always unfriendly. He was not yet ready for the sort of criticism which would have escaped her had a similar situation arisen in her lifetime, and he shrank from entertaining any, since criticism now was beside the point. In a way the two women were not unalike. It occurred to him to ask himself why he had seemed so young in his dream, absorbed, wondering, and he understood that he had never mastered the intricacies of adult behaviour, which would have enabled him to have dismantled this episode from the outset. His mother had been indifferent; so had Katy. Katy had indeed been vastly indifferent, and had erected her own house of cards on his life and his possessions, without ever taking the trouble to test the ground, to question him about his own likes and dislikes, his own preferences, without walking delicately around him to judge whether he was ready for her to take over, and whether she could do anything appropriate to make him more amenable. That was what had brought about his last-minute reconversion, the realisation that she was profoundly indifferent to his life. If only she had asked him … what? Not even so much as what he wanted, as what he thought, felt, imagined! Yes, that was it: imagined. She had treated him as a prostitute treats a client, with dislike, as perhaps she treated all men who failed to maintain a significant hold over her life, like her father, like Howard Singer. He should, even at this stage, feel pity for her. Instead he felt a generalised distress that one so young could have such rudimentary sensibilities. ‘Tell everyone how great you are’: that ridiculous instruction had been adopted by her as others might embrace a philosophy or discover the resources of religion, and her own evangelism, learned so late in life, and grafted on to a possibly defective natural growth, had merely reinforced her blindness to the reality of otherness, to the qualities which fallible human beings rely upon to guide or support them through this life.
By comparison his own projects were only defensible insofar as they provided for both of them: some possibility of a good life might have emerged had everything gone according to plan. Otherwise he saw himself as a fool rather than a knave, a man deluded by his own folly into forgetting his age and his inclinations, his history and his dignity. He examined his conscience and found no prurient intentions. His very indifference to what her behaviour told him about herself had merely strengthened his resolve to magic her into another life, a life which he himself had somehow mislaid during what he thought of as his years of obedience. He had wanted them both to be innocent, as if they were two travellers who had met by accident, and who saw no need to burden each other with their life histories, so charmed were they to have discovered one another in a lonely and deserted place. That such innocence was too much to expect, certainly too much to demand, was now borne in on him with crushing force. Finally, it was the misapprehension that made him suffer, rather than his own inchoate imaginings. He had projected those imaginings on to someone who did not even suspect their existence, and whom he could not now blame for disappointing him. He could not condemn her for her misuse of him. In a sense his was the greater misdemeanour.
Their lives were incompatible: that was the truth of the matter. His history was a foreign country to her, one which she had no wish, no need, to visit. Compatibility is not the affair of an instant. It is preceded by knowledge, by sympathy, by understanding. It is preceded by history, the history he shared with Louise, with Putnam. He understood now why Louise was always in his thoughts, although he had done his best to ignore them, and had even succeeded. That old intuition which had always been there, that period of their lives when no explanations had been necessary, that long, that even tedious predictability: that was true friendship. He had not even felt friendship for the girl, for his brooding obsession could not be confused with true friendship. Friendship meant reliability, a telephone call which could be made, or answered, in an emergency. Friendship was what served at the end, when one was near one’s last resting place. And by no stretch of the imagination could he see Katy at his bedside, although, should the need have arisen, he would be there at hers. Or would have been. Even his imagination was foundering now. The figure on the balcony, in the lightweight suit, remained merely as an image, but a potent one, as if it were the figure of an exotic stranger, one whose acquaintance he would dearly love to have made.
Though it was only just past five-thirty he went back to the bedroom and lay down again on his bed. He knew that a lonely night of reflection awaited him, and he welcomed it. He had still to overcome his enormous sorrow at not having managed to admit to his life all those elements he had somehow been at pains to exclude: licence, passion, adventure, fury, recklessness. Had he once been able to indulge such forces, to achieve a perfect liquidity of the emotions, he thought that he might have been able to face death with equanimity, knowing that nothing had been wasted. He did not in all honesty think that he had used the girl as a mere pretext for such indulgence, that it was an old man’s lust disguised as philanthropy that had misled him. The proof, he thought, was that he had felt for her some of the same sadness that he felt for himself, as if they were not only unprotected but uninstructed, and if not innocent then certainly defenceless. The strange odyssey that he had planned for them had indeed something childlike about it, proof of his own childlike wishes, in which sex and sin played no part.
It seemed that extreme instinctive love of that nature was to be denied him, along with the energies that informed those wilder imaginings sanctioned by desire. He remembered in this context a conversation he had once had with Putnam. It had been shortly after the summer holidays, some two or three years earlier. He had been in Aix-en-Provence, where one of his discreet encounters had taken place. It had been perfectly agreeable, extremely appropriate to the time and the circumstances, and it left him depressed, even more depressed than usual. The utter predictability of the episode, and that included the love-making itself, filled him not with shame—that would have been easy to understand—but with longing. On his return to London he had gone on one of his long walks (Kennington, he seemed to remember: the huge incongruous churches came back to him) and had called in to Putnam’s flat afterwards. It was a Sunday: they were to go back to work the following day. For Bland there was something of the apprehension of returning to school, which always afflicted him at such times.
In the rust-coloured gloom of Putnam’s flat, and in the glow of his superior electric fire (synthetic orange coals, embedded in black Bakelite), they had sat in silence, eating crumpets. Both were in a ruminative mood, it seemed, with little to impart in the way of information.
‘You’re quiet,’ Putnam had finally said. ‘Anything wrong?’
‘Tell me something,’ he had replied, out of the depths of his preoccupation. ‘Why should life seem exciting only if there is the possibility of throwing it away? And not even in a good cause. Fatal passion is what I’m talking about, I suppose, and what a failure you feel if you’ve missed it.’
‘I wouldn’t give you a thank you for a fatal passion. A fatal passion can turn nasty, you know. That’s why it’s called fatal.’
‘I seem to have missed it altogether. I seem to have almost avoided it, as if I doubted my own ability to deal with it. Maybe I was too modest.’
‘Don’t be so bloody vain! Only vain people proclaim their modesty.’
‘Not modest, then. Unprepared.’
‘You are what your destiny made you. We all are.’
‘I keep feeling I’ve done something wrong, as if I’d been locked out of something by my own fault.’
‘That’s probably true. We’ve all done something wrong. I do something wrong every time I have a fling with a married woman. Not that there have been all that many,’ he added.
‘And that doesn’t make you suffer?’
Putnam lit a cigare
tte. ‘Not much,’ he said finally.
‘I suppose that’s the difference between an affair and a love affair. I wouldn’t mind suffering for the real thing. In fact I long to.’
‘You’re a romantic. An adolescent. Grown men don’t want to suffer. It all comes from reading, you know. If we didn’t have the books to go on we shouldn’t put up half such a show. At least you wouldn’t. I don’t anyway.’
Now, lying on his bed in the dark, he thought of that conversation and how even Putnam had not understood him. Yet no doubt Putnam had been right. It made no difference. He had continued to think in terms of the seamless adventure, onto which he had so recently imposed the flight, the foreign exile, the passion transmuted into a watchful benevolence. Something had gone wrong; something was amiss. Maybe he was not up to the mark. Maybe the life he had led had been insufficient preparation. In the timeless dark it seemed to him that the passion he had always sought had become attenuated, until now it was an affair not only of longing, but of infinite regret.
11
HE DID NOT KNOW WHEN SHE LEFT. AT SOME point in his sleep he heard the chink of the keys dropping through his letter-box. He surfaced briefly, not knowing what time it was, but sleep reclaimed him almost at once. When he finally awoke he saw that it was very late, nearly nine o’clock. He had never before slept past his usual hour, and took this as a sign that something was gravely amiss. Yet he did not seem to be ill. Slowly he reassembled his former self, testing reflexes and movements, not quite daring to think. His instinct was to obliterate everything that had happened, to expunge every sign both of her presence and of his involvement. For the rest he would postpone mature reflection on the significance of these events, and of his own part in them. He would have plenty of time in the days ahead to arrive at a judgment, not on Katy, who now seemed to him almost innocent, an accidental happening in his life, but on himself.
He drank a cup of tea and had his bath. Food was out of the question. When he had dressed, as carefully as usual, he picked up the keys, and, as he knew he had to, unlocked the door of the Dunlops’ flat. The air vibrated with her absence, as though she had only just departed. She had left behind her, through instinct or through carelessness, unmistakable signs of her recent occupancy. In the sitting-room an ironing-board, with the iron up-ended on it, stood facing the television, which flickered with an old black and white film starring Fredric March. He went into the main bedroom, the equivalent of his own, where he supposed the Dunlops slept. Here a coverlet had been hastily pulled over the duvet, while a dent in the pillow showed where a head had recently lain. No attempt had been made to disguise the fact of an alien presence. A wardrobe door, half open because its contents had been disturbed, showed the orange suit pulled halfway off a hanger, one discreetly padded shoulder in the air. He knew that he would find unwashed cups and plates in the kitchen, and wet towels in the bathroom. An almost fearful inspection showed him that his suspicions were correct.
While wondering what to do about all this he had time to marvel, almost to shake his head in admiration, at her incredible insouciance. This is freedom, he thought: freedom is to take what one wants, without bothering to cover one’s tracks. But that is also a definition of criminality, possibly of psychosis. He wondered why he had not seen this before. She had seemed to him phenomenal, certainly; had he not been swept off his feet he would have had time to register certain abnormalities, which she had appeared to regard as stepping-stones on the road to enlightenment. A few further moments’ thought convicted and then exonerated Howard Singer, for whom he now felt a reluctant sympathy. Howard Singer’s upbeat doctrine could not afford to censure the returning prodigal, although her departure, like all her departures, might have left behind some unanswered questions, and a certain amount of minor, or perhaps not so minor, damage. Howard Singer, who was obliged to think that there was no wrongdoing that could not be cured by excessive sympathy, would no doubt be obliged to greet her with enthusiasm. She had once been useful to him, although she would now need to employ all her ingenuity to convince him, all over again, of her value.
But she might even manage this. She was like the phoenix: with each fresh start she regained her strength. In the meantime the wreckage that she had left behind was difficult to ignore. He concentrated on the wreckage in the flat, postponing his own case for later consideration. He washed up the cups and plates, not daring to look in the larder or the freezer, not quite knowing where everything was kept. In the bathroom he picked up the sodden towels from the floor and rather helplessly hung them on the edge of the bath. He dismantled the ironing-board and switched off the television. The rest, he decided, was beyond him. He would have to ask Mrs Cardozo to put the flat to rights, a request which would certainly be unpopular. Then, even if the flat looked odd, it would be clean. Anything that seemed out of place could be laid at Mrs Cardozo’s door. Besides, she was an enterprising woman: she would find clean sheets and towels, and might be persuaded to put the dirty linen into the laundry box, which he could then smuggle downstairs for Hipwood to hand over. Hipwood would need a very generous tip this year, he reflected, as would Mrs Cardozo. But he had no further use for his money, and no future in which to make use of that money: all expenses were therefore irrelevant, and were in any case self-inflicted. He had purposely omitted to fill in the stub of the cheque he had made out to Katy, and by now he had genuinely forgotten how much he had handed over. This seemed to him the only healthy indication of the whole affair, an indication that the pitiful exchange could now be consigned to oblivion, oblivion now being his most imperative requirement.
Today was Sunday: Mrs Cardozo was due on the following day, Monday, and the Dunlops would be back on the Tuesday. He thought it sad that his plans should so immediately contain these other characters, to whom he was indifferent, while Katy seemed to have vanished into thin air. Once the trail of her presence had been tidied away there would be little to suggest that she had ever been here, despite the fact that her actual presence had been violently disruptive. Again he admired her for that mixture of idleness and calculation which had almost certainly led her to set her sights on him, simply because he was the nearest thing to hand. And she had so nearly succeeded, let down only at the very end by her own uncertain staying power rather than by any intellectual assessment of his suitability.
Even now he did not entirely regret having known her, even having been willing to suspend judgment on account of her. She was no doubt an amalgam of genuinely damaging characteristics; she was also, and probably by the same token, out of the ordinary. He did not doubt that although he saw her as a failure she was in her perverse way something of a success. He thought it entirely appropriate that her instinct had taken her back to Howard Singer, not on Singer’s account, but in the hope of annexing one of the more confused of Singer’s wealthy clients. He saw her set up in Bel Air, by which time she and Singer would once more be on the best of terms. Perhaps someone less susceptible than himself would occupy the position he had once coveted. At least, he hoped that the next man would be less susceptible. He himself, he thought, had been unequal, and had thus suffered unduly.
Since it was Sunday, and there was now no possibility of change, he put on his tweed hat and set out for the park. The day was fine: the clouds had lifted and disclosed a sky of icy blue, with a low yellowish sun imparting an even radiance to empty streets and frozen pavements. In the park his feet made creaking noises on the frosty grass. It was intensely cold. Because he felt tired, in spite of his long sleep, and because he had not breakfasted, he decided not to take his usual walk to South Kensington, but to sit for half an hour in the steady pitiless light and to try to form some assessment of himself that would help him in the days ahead. For there would be many in which he ran the risk of being destroyed by his own disappointment.
He sat in the small pedimented pavilion which faces the sunken garden on the Bayswater side of the park. There was no one about, although the day was so clear. He could feel the cold of the s
tone, unwarmed by the winter sun, through his coat, and thought that for an elderly man, a man of his age, he was perhaps being imprudent. Common sense dictated food and warmth: he had at some level decided that it was more appropriate to do without either, at least for a significant interval, which must be dedicated entirely to thought of a constructive nature. But no thoughts, let alone constructive ones, occurred to him.
He felt, as he sat undisturbed, in the light of the cruel winter sun, as if he had been shipwrecked, as if he were the only survivor of a disaster so obscure that he could never explain it, even to a friend, even to a friend who loved him. To Louise, who must never know of it. If anyone had been wronged it was Louise, to whom he had denied the offering he had been ready to make to that almost unknown girl, and for whom he now felt pity. She had had the hardness and the dynamism of youth, and he had, through no fault of his own, through the impartial agency of time, lost both. Through that same agency, and no doubt only incidentally through the agency of Katy, he had lost the opportunity to change, had lost the capacity to change. Through envisaging a future so different from his own undoubted and authentic past he had given way to the charm of an idyll, one which could hardly stand up to the light of day. That balcony, that cigar, that red sun sinking …
There was no rule which said that he could not still enjoy those things, but he knew that it would be useless to try. It was only the fantasy that his life might be shared, and shared by someone so alien to himself, that had enabled his imagination to open up these vistas. It had all been totally seductive, and at the same time totally unsuitable. He had been brought up against a phenomenon not previously encountered: the chance acquaintance, not even a friend, who enlivens, enables, introduces the idea of liberty, of a liberty beyond one’s prudent limits. Through the completely randorn circumstance of meeting this girl he had nearly become another man, living an altogether more poetic life.
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