The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

“Thank you, Blake. Come for the clothes in about ten minutes. Good night.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  Nicholas crossed the wooden bridge from the stable yard over the garden lake and stepped onto the upper floor of the house. He went along to his own room and had a pleasant feeling that thanks to Blake he had managed to keep the whole thing a secret. He undressed quickly while his bath ran and put the clothes in a bundle around his shoes on the sill of his window and felt that he could leave the rest to Blake. He hastened along and locked himself in the bathroom and felt safe. Then he put his hand in the bath to try the water and leaped into the air.

  “Christ Almighty!”

  My God, how could the water be boiling like that? He thought for a moment and put his other hand under the cold tap and leaped again. Good God, he would not be able to do anything with his hands for a week! How on earth was he going to conceal them? His hands got used to the water and he had a slow, luxurious bath. When he got out he felt clean. He had not felt clean for years. All the poison had been sweated out of his mind, not only out of his body. He swore in good humor as he had to hold the towel between his thumb and forefinger to dry himself. Lord only knows how he was going to dress himself or do anything with these hands. He found some ointment in the bathroom cupboard and dressed them and saw they were in a shocking state. He could hardly bear the telephone in his hand when he rang the servants’ hall.

  “Margaret, call me with a cup of strong tea at twenty to eight. I don’t want any tea now. I’m going to sleep until you call me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is the mistress in?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Very well. I am not to be disturbed until twenty to eight. I’ve had my bath.”

  Nicholas had warmed his silk pajamas in the bathroom hot cupboard and now when he put them on he found that all his skin was conscious of them as if it had come alive again. It was marvelous how even one day’s work had slimmed and tautened his belly. Now he was relaxed, but later on he knew his muscles would discover themselves, as if each were an individual, and brace themselves with involuntary movements and he would have again that peculiar feeling that he used to have as an oarsman, that his body had a personality independent of his mind. But, now, here was the pillow, and until dinner he would have a beautiful sleep, that kind of beautiful sleep which made a cushion of down out of the flesh until at last...

  Margaret had tapped gently four times and not awakened him and then she came into the room and woke him by saying, “Your tea, sir,” over and over again until the message got into his sleep and gently opened his eyes. He knew by her cap that it was not morning.

  “Had a good sleep, sir?”

  “Yes, Margaret.”

  She poured out his tea for him. He liked this girl with her cool-gray eyes and finely cut face and unexpectedly warm mouth.

  “The mistress is changing, sir.”

  “All right.”

  He swore softly to himself when she went out. Good heavens, what dear old middle-class memory had decided Muriel to change for dinner this evening? He thought she had given that up. Well, he’d better shake a leg. Hum, he had woken with his body rejuvenated! He had a feeling that if Margaret’s eyes had been blue, he might have pulled her down and kissed her.

  She had, of course, laid out his dinner jacket in his dressing room. Gosh, he’d better be quick. Lord knows how he was going to make the bow in his tie. Even the tips of his fingers were blistered. His hands did not hurt now so much, but he knew that if they got hot and sweated, as one always sweated after exercise, the salt would sting him. He took up everything as if he were picking up a pea. He funked washing his hands again. Almost anything was bearable but water on the sore patches. He dressed himself quickly and looked at the clock. Five minutes to nine! Good God, had Margaret made a mistake? He picked up his watch. It was seven minutes to nine by that. What the hell had happened? Dinner was at eight. What the devil? Anyway, he had got a good sleep in and now he felt absolutely fine. He’d better get down.

  THIRTY-THREE

  When he got down, the decanters and glasses mirrored the glow of the log fire. Sherry and cocktails. Pleasant. He was glad now he had changed. The fine clothes after the long hardship and mud had a special luxury. He would like a very dry sherry, to get away the taste of the tea. Yes, this one was exactly right. Better wait until Muriel came down. There was some kind of glow in the room tonight. He looked about. Everything was the same. He felt good, that was it. But some curious instinct told him that was not all of it. The room was waiting for somebody to come back. It waited like a chair made warm by somebody just gone out. The clock struck nine. Hum, nobody was in any hurry tonight. Well, he wasn’t. London papers. Have a look at the Londoner’s Diary in the Evening Standard. Hum, paragraph about the Egyptian to whom he had refused the loan. Always knew somebody who made a paragraph in the Diary. Family feeling of London about it. Ambassador-just-dropped-in-from-across-the-street kind of atmosphere. Slightly surprising always to find he came from Brazil or somewhere. Cosmopolitan page. Evening Standard was London. The Times was England. Hum, he hadn’t felt amused like this for ages. Oh...

  The one clear thing Nicholas realized was that a perfect stranger had come into the room. For the last few months Muriel had been changing over her personality to somebody else, and now, in a click, the whole thing was complete. She came in with a formality, and Nicholas knew at once that she was not going to lose it for the rest of the evening. That meant she was conscious. And she wore a conscious dress. It seemed some kind of Spanish affair and from the waist down was only black lace over a Castilian pink underskirt through which, vaguely, her legs were silhouetted against the glow of the fire. Nicholas realized that this was a very subtle dress. It was formal and chaste enough for an ambassadorial dinner and yet as tantalizing as something one wore in a bedroom. She wore a red comb like a cockerels crest in her hair, which seemed to be almost black tonight. He wondered how she made her hair look so dark. She had come in and stood in front of the fire for six or seven seconds before Nicholas could get enough acclimated to her to speak. She stood on the hearth, and the whole room had come alive and knew that this had never happened before at Barrington. “Ahm, what would you like?”

  “Sherry.”

  When he caught hold of the knob of the decanter it burned like a red-hot coal. God, how was he going to eat his dinner?

  “Ahm, we’re a little late, aren’t we?”

  “Yes. Margaret told me you had gone to sleep, so I thought you might as well have a good rest, and I put back dinner an hour.”

  She raised her glass with a very slight nod of acknowledgment that made the correct half-formal toast that one might exchange over a sherry. He was slightly flustered by her and forgot to answer it.

  Oxinham came in. “Shall I serve dinner now, madame?”

  “In about five minutes, Oxinham.”

  Nicholas was trying to feel his way into what was happening. He said: “I don’t think I heard a gong.”

  “No. I am not going to use the gong any more.” Nicholas had a feeling that he wanted to get to know this woman. When she turned on the rug she gave just a slight swing to her frock, and her legs suggested themselves in the firelight. She knew perfectly well they did, he knew. She was dead sure of herself.

  “New frock?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  How the devil had she got out of herself and gone into this new woman? What did she intend? He had vaguely proposed to himself that he was going to invent work and retire to the fire in the library after dinner and let the long day drift over him in the smoke of a cigar. But if for no other reason than the social compulsion she exercised this evening, he knew that he must share it with her. But that was not the reason. No sane man was going to leave a woman like this. She gave a slight nod, and he got up and opened the door. He knew perfectly well this was going to be a marvelous dinner, with matched wines and dishes. One had the feeling that the smallest error of
taste was impossible with her now. As she spoke to Oxinham he realized something else. Her voice had changed. Now how could the voice change and the accent remain the same? She now had the trick of making the ear pause for each word before it came.

  Nicholas waited for each dish with some alarm. The handle of the knife made his eyes smart, so acute was the contact on his palm. The worst thing would be the meat, but, thank God, the veal was tender. She seemed quite unaware that he was scarcely able to hold his knife. She had chosen Burgundy for the meal, and, Nicholas knew, that above all wines could best restore the body from fatigue. She was not in the least hurry and carried the wine over to the biscuits. Oxinham, like every born servant, obviously liked the feeling of being commanded and, for the first time, exercised that subtle knack of sharing the success of a meal, while yet remaining apart by the sideboard.

  When Nicholas got back into the drawing room he was surprised to find that it was ten minutes past ten. Time had sat lightly as the wine, and the clock, as it should, had abolished itself. She gave him coffee, had a cigarette, and somehow decided him to have a cigarette instead of a cigar. She was very cool, remained at a distance, then asked him if he would mind some music. She got up and found a program of Spanish music from Paris. Nicholas, every sense acute, had a feeling that she might have looked up the program and tuned herself and her dress to this music. She stood by the fire, and he had a curious perception that she had somehow made herself fluid and was absorbing the music into herself and was being charged by the waves. As she drank a liqueur she compelled the eye to watch every movement. She exercised the mind so much now that she made no physical disturbance in him, and, again, he had the feeling that she wanted that mood, and was able to command it.

  She listened for forty minutes to the end of the program and then got up and turned off the radio. As she turned from the cabinet, there was a slight whisk in her gesture, as if she had been filled by the rhythm like a dancer and wanted to express it. She went and stood on the hearth, paused a moment, and then said: “I think I am going up.”

  Nicholas got a fearful shock of disappointment. The violence of his disappointment astonished him. He realized that he had been completely occupied by her, and now that she was going, he would be left empty. Instinct warned him to let her have her way, and he stood up, and said: “I’m going to bed too, in a moment.” He paused. “I’ve had a long day in the open air.”

  She seemed to be very careless as she said: “Oh, I should have a cigarette and a drink and then go up.”

  Then, somehow, she was gone out of the room. When the door closed, Nicholas stood in front of the fire and tried to sort out his thoughts. What the devil was she playing at? She must know that she had got him into a state of excitement. Yet, whatever mood she had been in, it was not a mood of bitchiness. He recalled every gesture and syllable since she had come into the room. A woman like that demanded a subtle apprehension and somehow she was going beyond him. She had suggested a cigarette and a drink, and still feeling her compulsion, he poured himself a drink and lighted a cigarette. Sleep was going to be impossible. He was not in the least tired. His whole body was alive and tingling as if she had touched him all over with her fingers. Once again he tried to remember if there was anything significant in what she had said about having a cigarette and a drink. She was so different tonight that nothing she did seemed to have happened before. What else was new in her way of leaving the room? What was that sense he had of something unsaid...

  Good God, he realized it now. She had not said good night.

  Nicholas compelled himself to smoke his cigarette slowly. Now that he had begun to suspect the evening might not be over, his body had come alive in desire for her, and he did not try to control his longing. All this evening she had been exercising the total vocabulary of the sophisticated woman and had played on all the keys of his mind and senses, and now he began to feel a slight impatience. He had not the Latin or Gallic finesse that delights in thinking of a woman as an orchestra of emotion in which one by one each instrument must be awakened into music to achieve the crescendo of passion. There was something that exhausted him in that sensual epicurianism, and suddenly he remembered the brutal remark of a young man at Oxford who had said: “These bloody dons! They spend their whole lives nibbling the fat off Falstaff’s rump!” Now suddenly he understood that queer remark. He had something in him that was the Elizabethan sense of flesh and blood. Again that gaunt and powerful young Oxford intellectual spoke in his memory. “You can’t suckle babes on Shelley’s bosom. That ignorant and hairy lout of an oarsman over there has a better sense of Shakespeare in his blood than all of you have in your minds that smell of orchids and Walter Pater.” Nicholas almost flushed now. The hairy lout had been himself, and he had often wondered since why he had not punched Geoheghan on the nose. He was amazed to find himself recalling Geoheghan and now he began to see that he hadn’t punched him because he knew that Geoheghan had understood him. Geoheghan would have known now why he was beginning to resent that complicated and subtle mood Muriel had imposed on him all the evening. He hadn’t that patience in him that could stay at that pitch. He admired her, and she had given a beautiful performance, but it was distant as something on the stage.

  Good heavens, he had finished his cigarette, and his body had stopped thinking about her. His mind had not been so acute and untroubled by worries for a long time, and now he had got to the stage when he would almost like to sit down here for an hour or two and enjoy the clear functioning of his own mind. He got up and stood on the hearth and suddenly in the warmer higher air he caught the perfume she had left behind, and the whole room was flooded with her being, and he was conscious of her again. His hand trembled a little as he finished his brandy. His instinct told him that to stay down here was wrong. If she had given him a cue, he would be a coward if he did not take it. He felt rather ashamed of his thought and churlish. After all, she was a really lovely woman now...Oh, damn it, he was probably imagining the whole thing anyway, and when he went up into his dressing room, her door would be shut as usual. Good God, he was nervous about going up!

  When he got into his dressing room, his heart jumped a beat. Her door was ajar. He was conscious of a red glow of light and a throb of music. Then he paused a moment before he closed the door behind him. He wondered why she had turned the radio on. He could only just glimpse the reddish glow in her room. She had changed the lighting. He listened to the music. It seemed to be a Mexican rhumba. One saw dancers in the twilight under the shade of mountain-wide hats. There was a kind of excitement of color and noise inside that door. He closed the door of his room, and his hand was so nervous and smarted so much on the knob that it made a little bang. Silence. The music inside was quiet now as the throbbing of his own blood.

  Suddenly he heard a chuckle. Then she laughed. He moved over nearer to her door. He said, without having the least intention of saying it: “What are you laughing at?”

  She gave another chuckle. “Oh, a joke that occurred to me. I was just wondering what the definition of a husband is in the dictionary and I thought it must be—one who husbands himself!”

  He could not help a laugh. He had now reached her door. Now, curiously enough, it was impossible to go back without being a fool.

  “You won’t find that in the Oxford, I’ll bet!” he said.

  He had to raise his voice slightly over the music.

  “Must you talk through the door?” She was in good humor. “If you must, I’ll turn the wireless off.”

  He knew now that it was all right to go in.

  This was the second surprise he had got in a bedroom within a few weeks. She had changed the positions of the lamps, and now they had apricot shades and one lamp on the dressing table had a green shade, and somehow or other she was glowing like an Indian girl as she sat in front of her table mirror with her back to him. The music, too, belonged to the mood in the room. Nicholas knew that he would be astounded if his mind was able to work, but nothing operated bu
t his sense of instinct, and his instinct told him to take all this just by the feel of it. For a moment he just listened to the music and kept his eyes on her. It was nothing more than a stupid habit of mind which had been astonished by the fact that a woman sat there naked above the waist and took no notice of his being there. In the mirror he saw that she was making up her mouth heavily until it looked a huge, moist scarlet sweetmeat on her golden face.

  “Would you like to turn off the wireless?” she said quietly.

  In silence he went over and turned the knob. Then he moved back to her and stood behind her. Her hair still looked almost black, and he saw that she had moistened it with oil and it somehow clung to her neck and shoulders, and all her skin looked moist as if soaked in honey. He said nothing because he suspected his voice had gone. Now she used the soft lipstick on her nipples, and he had never known a woman did that and he nearly exclaimed in surprise. She touched the leg of the stool that was by her dressing table and said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  Now he was in front of her and confronted with her golden body and her red mouth and the whole enigma of what she was doing as she touched her breasts with scarlet. On her legs she wore, almost to the tops of her thighs, curious trousers of red silk with a green and gold braid like the fringe on a cowboy’s trousers, and they were held up by plain green cords that hung loosely on her waist. He saw the significance of these trousers that were only separate legs of silk and obviously were of no purpose for sleeping or anything. They explained boldly that they were there, like the lipstick on her mouth and lips, for seduction, and they somehow only increased her nakedness. He felt curiously at ease, in spite of his fearful excitement, and he realized that in some way she had managed to tune him into her mood, and that so long as he did not lose the pitch, nothing would go wrong. He saw that she had put an indigo shading on her eyelids, and now the purple tinge in her eyes, that always indicated passion in a woman, had become a solid color.