The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

  The young men who lived in the ivory tower of Chelsea looked out at England through a blind telescope and announced that it was not there, and that it must be something that somebody remembered and that had gone out as soon as Noel Coward had arrived. One of them said roundly that he wanted a map to show where Galsworthy’s England lay. It seemed that in all his travels from Chelsea to Soho he had never come across it. Muriel had read that looking out over the lawn at Barrington, where nearly sixty horses stood down at the corner while their riders watched the foxhounds draw the woodland, and she thought how ridiculous the young men in the ivory tower seemed, until she was disturbed by that curious feeling that she had in the theater when looking at presentations of this England, and she had an odd sensation that all these horsemen were ghosts, and wondered if the young men had not perhaps some kind of premonition of death in this England.

  At lunch today, Therese had in her a sense of disquiet, and it was clear that George Waldenham expected a new European war. Muriel looked hard at Mrs. Henderly’s car, as if she thought it might vanish suddenly, and heard the dog’s ironical bark. She began to wonder if a new war was going to make any change and suddenly remembered that when she had come back from school on holiday, when the whole country seemed to be grumbling about something going wrong at Passchendaele, she had found her mother in bed with a nervous breakdown because she had to sit below the wife of a ranking colonel at a dinner. Mrs. Brampton, if nobody else did, knew what victory was going to mean to England. It was going to mean a demobilization in which, thank God, they were going to get rid of the T. G.’s. And from Mrs. Brampton to Mrs. Henderly, Muriel could not discover one real change.

  Now Muriel wondered if England always belonged to the last generation. Muriel’s own youth had belonged to her mother, and after that to the Bude Bank and Barrington Hall. Even her body had not been her personal property until that day she met MacGregor. She flushed a little in anger. Therese took her for a sophisticated woman, and she felt somehow a liar in this room. She was just entering on the kindergarten stage of sexual education at the age of thirty-one. It was ridiculous. And somehow or the other, new workings in her mind linked up that failure in her life with Mrs. Henderly’s car outside there on the gravel. It was a safe bet that Mrs. Henderly went to more trouble about the sex life of that pedigreed terrier than she had ever gone to about her own.

  She fidgeted in the chair. She had a sense of disturbance in her. It had been somehow communicated to her from Therese, whose whole mind was impregnated by the political and social thought of Europe. Therese lived in a world inside which things happened. Nothing at all ever happened in Mrs. Henderly’s world. Her years began at the first day’s cubbing and ended at the last point-to-point. Her calendar was on the social page of The Times. The only thing she would notice about Therese was that she was called “madame” and not “my lady” by the servants. She would put that down to the unfortunate kink in every foreigner. Somewhere between Mrs. Henderly and Therese, Muriel felt she herself was lost in nowhere.

  When Therese came in, she looked as if her patience with Mrs. Henderly had fatigued her. “You must excuse me,” she said. “I have ordered the tea.” She watched the car go down the avenue. “You must permit me to be a little angry. All the time she talk of dogs, of horses, and people I do not know, and about the bullocks of her husband. Tell me, what is a bullock?”

  “A bull with the pips taken out,” said Muriel, who had acquired that much knowledge at Barrington.

  “Ah, yes, I understand. It is amusing to know these things. It helps me to understand Madame Henderly. And a heifer, what is that?”

  “Oh, a cow which is a jeune fille and not yet a dame.”

  “Ah, thank you. I can understand from you. I think Madame Henderly goes to much trouble to arrange the marriage of her cows, and horses and dogs. And she explain so carefully that her cousin is Lady Somebody,

  I think she nearly take as much interest in arranging the classes of people as she take to arrange the animals.”

  Muriel laughed.

  “Ah, here is the tea! Now, you must stay to dinner!”

  “I can’t. I’d love to, but I must get back. Why don’t you come over next Monday and stay the night with me?”

  “Monday? Ah, yes. George always stay in London from Monday until Thursday. I would like to so much.”

  Muriel knew the only reason she did not stay the night was that she felt she must get away by herself and think. She knew that she had reached some kind of crisis in her mind today and wanted to get alone with it and understand it. They sat rather quietly after tea, and Muriel felt that she was absorbing the atmosphere of Therese. She did not quite know what it was that made it different from the atmosphere of an Englishwoman. It was somehow as if her mind seemed to inhabit her whole body. There was a kind of continual flux in her. One felt the flowing of the blood, the breeding of the mind. Muriel suddenly knew what it was. She was growing, she had never ceased to grow, and would never stop growing.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The same Monday, on his way to London, Nicholas tried to concentrate on the leaders in The Times. Then he realized that he was not reading the words on the page, but those engraved on his mind—There is a will to death in your hands. Whose death? He tried to fold up the paper, cursed as Blake swerved to avoid a cart, then tore the pages in a violent way. “My God,” he thought, “my nerves are gone to hell. I can’t get these damned letters out of my mind.” The only escape for his mind seemed to be Muriel, and that was like throwing a hot coal from one hand to the other to avoid getting burned. His mind was beginning to wrestle with itself in an alarming way when he dreamed at night. Once he had woken up in a sweat to find his hands about his own neck as if they wanted to strangle him.

  Blake swerved the car again to avoid another cart whose driver was lost in a daydream and threw Nicholas almost into the other corner. He shouted to Blake as he looked back in apology: “Get off this bloody road!” Blake opened the glass shutter and slowed down to ask: “What did you say, sir?”

  “I said get off this bloody road. Take another.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  Blake drove with caution, and that finally snapped the tension in Nicholas. He rapped on the window, made a sign to stop. Blake pulled up. Nicholas got out. “I’ll drive. Get in the back.”

  Blake looked puzzled, then somewhat hurt. This had not happened before. “Yes sir.”

  “It’s bad enough having to go to London on a day like this, without being pushed off the road by those bloody yokels.”

  Blake felt somewhat alarmed as Nicholas pushed down his foot. When they had gone a mile, trimming the corners of grass, Nicholas saw a cart loaded with hay, in the middle of the road. He sighted along the road and felt rather like a hunter who had at last got his gun on a lion. He guessed there was just room. He pushed down his foot and Blake shut his eyes in the back and did not open them again until the whorooosh of hay against the roof showed that Nicholas had got by. From that point, until they reached the traffic controls of outer London, Blake kept his arm up ready to shield his eyes from splintering glass. When they pulled up at the bank, Nicholas felt somewhat better. He gave Blake five shillings and remarked: “Buy yourself a drink. You look as if you wanted one.”

  “I could do with one, sir.”

  “I’ll bet that hayseed doesn’t drive in the middle of the road again.”

  Blake smiled and touched his cap as Nicholas went up the steps. He wondered what on earth was happening to Mr. Bude and hoped profoundly that it would not happen again. He got a chamois and brushed the hayseeds from the car under the amused eye of Lord Cluricawn’s chauffeur waiting at the club across the street.

  “You’re early, Mr. Bude!” Miss Coleman looked up in mild surprise.

  As Nicholas went through into his room, he realized. that all he had done was to arrive ten minutes earlier to get the damned letter. He had seen it on her tray. He kept his eye from it until she had reported the mail to h
im, and then got a shock as he saw the postmark was Edgware. “Good God, the damn thing is getting into London now!” A thought struck him. He opened the shutter.

  “Miss Coleman, is Mr. Elder back?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bude. Do you want him?”

  “No. Just asked.”

  Later on, when they took the letters for reply, Miss Coleman suddenly stopped writing and said: “Mr. Bude, aren’t you well?”

  His hand jumped out and took up the Edgware letter that he had not yet opened.

  “Miss Coleman, do you know anything about this letter?” She looked at him with cold eyes. “No, why should I?”

  He felt that he was making a fool of himself, but he had to go on. “Have you noticed that it comes every Monday, the same envelope?”

  “I have.” She paused. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing, only I just wanted to find out something about it.”

  “Well, why not open it? That’s a good method of finding out.”

  His voice, he knew, was a bark. “Because I know what’s in it!”

  She looked baffled and annoyed.

  “Well, what were you saying to me?” Then he remembered. “What the devil do you mean by asking if I’m not well?”

  “Would you like me to read you back the letters you have dictated?”

  He realized that his mind must have been slipping. He felt nervous, and said angrily to conceal it: “Miss Coleman, why the hell don’t you answer them yourself? A bloody counter clerk could deal with most of what I waste my time with!”

  “Certainly, I can answer them.”

  She picked up the letters and her pad with a look of contempt on her face.

  “I suppose you think you could run this bloody bank,” he said.

  “Certainly.”

  “I hope you approve of the way I do it.” He knew that he was now being childish.

  “I do not approve of the India loan.”

  He knew that he must either laugh or strike the desk, but his laugh was uneasy. “Oh, don’t you? Why?”

  “Because I’m not sure if you’ll ever get the money back.”

  “By God, so you go in for high finance!”

  “This particular loan is not finance. It is politics.” She picked up the papers and went out. By God, she was shrewd. More than once he had felt uneasy about this loan which had no government security on paper, and was really guaranteed by private enterprise, although it had got itself decked up with a lot of Whitehall blessings. He wondered if old Jock would have said: “My name’s Bude, not Carnegie!” if they had come to him with a similar proposition. My God, he had made a damned fool of himself in asking her about that letter!

  There was a buzz in the cabinet. “Mr. Elder.”

  “Send him in!”

  Mr. Elder, he thought, looked very white and empty of blood. He put the letter away in case he made a fool of himself again. Mr. Elder went into the business in his usual monosyllabic way.

  For a moment, Nicholas wondered if he had dreamed the Chinese room. When they had done, he said: “Perhaps you ought to have taken another week, Mr. Elder.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bude, but I feel much better now.”

  “Well, go off, if you feel shaky.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bude.”

  As Mr. Elder went out, closing the door in a noiseless way, Nicholas had a feeling that he didn’t know a damn thing about any of these people associated with him. And he had lived with two women for years and was just as wise about them. Muriel in her own way was now as much of a mystery as Sidonie. Ah, here was Miss Coleman. She was still somewhat angry he knew, and that somehow made her more desirable. Thank God, anyway, he would get off the physical tension Muriel had set up in him all last week, tonight, in her flat. He had an unpleasant feeling that he was somehow using Sidonie as a proxy for Muriel. Everything in his life was somehow a substitute for something else. Even this enormous bank was only a substitute for the humble pick he wanted to swing in his hands. By God, he’d. like to root up the whole building and see if he could find any real gold underneath it.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When he left the bank, he had a cup of tea in Stewart’s, and then decided to walk in the park. The afternoon was freshening into evening, and he felt somewhat braced as he reached at last the place where he met Sidonie for the first time outside the bank. Only once had he walked by the lake since, as if he wanted to avoid the memory of that April evening when she had stood gazing into the water and then turned in the golden light with the rain on her hair. Now something of that poignant emotion he had felt then returned, and he thought bitterly that the whole thing had been rather like a love song by Herrick that had been turned into a satirical lampoon. Somehow he had lived in the cold green water of her eyes and had been denied the warm golden sunshine of her hair. Suddenly it was all unbearable, and he turned and walked smartly to his club, took a warm bath, then had a cold shower, and ordered Burgundy with an early dinner. He had dined by eight o’clock, and surprised Glynde by saying: “Get me Barrington now.”

  He told Muriel on the telephone that he had to go out to meet somebody in the Treasury and discovered that she had enjoyed herself lunching with Therese Waldenham. Then he ordered his coat and set out to walk to Park Lane. He hoped that Sidonie would not mind his coming early and wondered if she, like him, had missed the lost Monday. This evening, somehow, perhaps because he had gone back to the lake where they had met, he felt he wanted not only sexual relief, but the total sensation of love. He was strangely alone with these two women, and now, since this extraordinary blossoming of Muriel’s personality, he felt lost between them and could not tell which he wanted the more.

  When he gave the usual three rings on Sidonie’s bell, it was a moment before she opened the door. She was clad in a green dressing gown of Turkish toweling and had a yellow towel bound like a turban on her head.

  Evidently he had caught her at her toilet. “I’m sorry. I just came early.”

  She seemed slightly off guard. “Oh, I was just washing my hair.”

  There was a slight flush on her face, and he knew that she had told him a lie. It was intolerable that she should lie, because, somehow, there was not a lie in her. Also it hurt him, and he said angrily: “Goddam it, you needn’t lie to me!” She flushed again. “Go on, and do up your hair, if you don’t want me to see it!” Suddenly his hands seemed to jump out by themselves and she backed away from him. “By God, for two pins I’d pull that damn towel away!”

  Now she went pale, and he knew she was ashamed of herself, and all at once, as if she had got tired, she said: “You don’t need to pull off the towel.” She paused. “You can change in there.”

  As he went into the bathroom to take off his clothes and put on the towel dressing gown that he used, he wondered what she had meant by her remark. Was it possible that she was going to let her hair down? He felt nervous and bathed his face in cold water. He wanted her very badly this evening, and yet his physical desire seemed only to be expressing another and stranger need. He dallied in the bathroom, and put his hands in his pockets, in case they jumped out again in anger and wrenched the towel off her head or the rope of hair down. He felt that she could not have meant that she would let her hair down herself. She would be sitting as usual like the dead, beautiful bride of a dead man...

  He stepped in the doorway of her bedroom, and his eyes took in the picture as the lungs might take in a long drink of air. She sat motionless in front of the glass, her hands shut as if to hold a prayer, her hair falling in a golden Niagara to her waist, upon the white garment. At last he went over to her and knew that his heart was beating like the heart of a youth. He saw now that what she wore was not a dressing gown but a nightdress that was made like a cloak and that fastened with a girdle of gold. She wore satin ivory slippers closed like the wings of swans upon her feet. Her breasts, in the opening of the nightdress, seemed to have the soft pink flesh of clouds, and he had a strange sensation that if he picked her up she would not weigh mo
re than air. As she waited there in stillness, one could imagine that if she suddenly shook out all that hair, it might chime like a carillon. He took a step near her, and saw himself in the glass, with the black hairs curling on his chest in the V of his scarlet dressing gown, with the black hair on the backs of his hands, and his dark eyes looking out from under the shaggy hairs of his eyebrows, and he thought suddenly that he was like some animal that had roamed in from the jungle and had no right to her beauty.

  At last she looked up, and her face was flushed with emotion as a rose with color, and he knew that she had made herself a bride for him. He felt that to say anything would disturb the air about her.

  Her voice was only a whisper. “I got tired—of arguing.”

  He knew that she was only trying to say something more than this in a casual way, and he smiled. “Well, I’m very glad I came early.”

  She sat very quietly, and he wondered if by any chance she was as frightened as he was. He had to know whether this meant anything more than a sudden weariness of argument, and he kissed her hand, and then looked up as if to question her eyes, to know if he might touch her mouth. But her lids guarded her eyes. Then he softly kissed her. She did not kiss him back, but he knew now that she did not mind. He put his head into her breasts, inside the golden shawl of hair. It was a long time before their emotion changed itself into desire, and he could hardly remember anything until he laid her gently on the bed. When he wanted to undo her nightdress, his hands suddenly were helpless as a baby’s, and she had to open the girdle herself. They made love in silence, but no longer in a hostile silence, and as he cherished all her body with his mouth, he saw how the blue veins lay inside her skin like watermarks in a translucent paper. It was as delicate as the glow on the book in the stairway niche in Elder’s house. She kept her mouth closed in a virginal way, not because she any longer wanted to withhold it, but because it was in mood with the delicate courtship. Only her fingers, now and again sweetening his body, showed that she was answering his love-making. In the end, emotion had so translated the flesh that he was surprised to find they had come together in the marriage. Afterwards, he did not, as he always had done, release her because she wanted nothing more from him, but stayed in the reminiscence that is like the sunlight cooling to moonlight. He knew that they must have been there some hours before he said: “This is what I’ve always wanted from you.”