Caro asked, "Is Tertia here?" The bull by the horns.
Paul pushed a painted door delicately with his finger. "Tertia is staying in the country till this is ready for her." Even a house required advance warning of Tertia. "You're my first guest."
The living-room took all the next floor, but was narrow nonetheless. Caro walked to the front, then to the back. They went up again. Paul switched on an unshaded light. " U p here is where I doss down."
It was the top room and the largest, not having stairs above. From the windows you could see the houses opposite, then a block of flats. There were espaliered trees that would be protective in the summer, or so Paul said. Several rugs on the bare floor were rolled and tied. The walls were dry, the windows had been cleaned. There were unattached lighting fixtures in a corner, door handles in a cardboard box; a pair of marble obelisks already decorated the mantel. A telephone had been connected and was placed on the floor. One window was half-way up, because of the fresh paint, and the room was cold.
With another bright key, Paul unlocked a built-in cupboard.
"Let's have a drink." There was a package on an upper shelf of the closet, and a framed painting propped below. Paul showed Caro the picture.
She said, "Segonzac is a middle-class painter."
"Not every artist can be supreme."
"Obviously." She roused herself to meaning, as to a need for manners. "But there is a veracity—a keeping of faith, if you like—
that enhances even some lesser talents. Something Mrs. Thrale said about your father—that he wasn't a great poet, but he was a true poet."
Paul put the picture away, since it had not served its turn.
"Well," he said, "sit down. Drink to my new house." It displeased or somehow hurt him that Caroline Bell should recall his father.
Caro sat on the pile of rugs. She watched Paul handle a silver flask with her same sardonic look, as if she were about to laugh. "There are no glasses—we'll have to use the cap, I'm afraid. What's more, we have to share it." He handed it to her. "A loving-cap."
She drank. She did not hand the cap back to him, but set it beside her on the freshly waxed boards. Paul said, "Hey, my new floors,"
and picked up the little container and drained it off. "Would you like another?"
"No. It tasted of tin."
"Tin my eye, that's sterling silver." He sat beside her on the rugs.
"You must tell me what you think of my house."
"There is so little space."
"Now you're spoiling things."
"What is left to spoil?"
The telephone rang. The bell exploded in the unclad room, ricocheting off walls and ceiling like a burst of bullets.
Paul had to kneel to talk. "It is. But I'd like to know how you got this number. . . . Look, if this is going to press tonight you'd better read it to me. . . . Very well, you may quote me as follows.
I have no response to Mr. Whatsit's remarks. I am not responsive to viciousness, and I find Mr. Whatsit's own writings the quintes-sence of vulgarity. . . . That's what I said. Certainly: Q-U-I-N-T, then essence . . . That's right, exactly like vanilla. Actually, the word means 'substance of heaven.' Would you please read that back?
. . . That's it, then. . . . Well, that would have to be after I return from Spain, where I go tomorrow, say the end of—yes, that's good for me. Call me then."
Paul put the phone down. He rose and stood with palms placed together, looking at Caroline Bell as if she needed solving; recreating the frame of mind in which he had brought her there.
"Are you really going to Spain tomorrow?"
"Of course not." He looked round for the flask. "Let's have another of those tin things." He handed it to her. "How does it taste now?"
She took a little and handed back the cup. "Now it tastes as if it had your initials on it."
"You've turned such a bitch, Caro. You used to be—"
"What?"
"Angelic. But much less beautiful. That, alas, is the way it goes.
Now tell me about my house, my play."
"You don't want opinions, you want approval."
"I do want your approval."
There was another detonation of the phone bell. Paul knelt again to talk. "Yes, this does seem to be Flaxman five— No, I'm afraid she isn't here but I can give her a— I've told you, she is not here but I—" At an interjection Paul raised, or hardened, his voice to proceed with his own speech—a slight restraint of eyelids showing he was too well bred to close them, even momentarily, in exasperation. "I distinctly told you Mrs. Ivory is not here." He said "Mrs.
Ivory," instead of "my wife" or "Tertia," as a Party member might solemnly transform Russia into "the Soviet Union." He looked comical, crouching on the floor while standing on his dignity.
Caro said, "Tell them you're going to Spain tomorrow."
"I am certainly not going to stand here"—Paul crouched lower
—"listening to—" He stared, then banged the receiver down, the force of the action taking him forward on all fours. He stood up, brushing his trousers. "Hung up on me, the bastard. He thought
—pretended to think I was the servant."
"That's because you said Mrs. Ivory like that." Caro watched Paul wonder about the call, the caller, and Mrs. Ivory. Honourable Tertia. "What sort of voice?"
"Oh—educated."
God forbid Mrs. Ivory should take a lover from the lower classes.
Below in the street the man went on singing in a voice high and unsteady as an old recording:
"But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy,
'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart. "
Paul closed the window. "If it's any satisfaction to you, this is pretty much the situation." He was speaking of the phone call.
"More troublesome than you expected, then."
This was scarcely a question, and Caro, looking up in lassitude from the bound rugs, might have been perfectly indifferent. Her venture at spoiling things by honesty had yielded nothing: honesty must be honestly intended, or its facts are worthless. But Paul considered a moment before saying, "It does create a new degree of isolation."
He was at his most sincere acknowledging displeasure, and his voice, when free of affectation, had a mature colour, resonant, almost beautiful. The clarity of his eyes, which threatened to become prismatic as Tertia's, was retinged by natural resentment.
"That is of course because one is keeping up the public pretence at the same time. I daresay there's nothing new in it." Even the last remark had no sneer. Paul set his foot on the pile of rugs, close to Caro's hand, and went on:
"For aught I know, all husbands are like me; And every one I talk with of his wife
Is but a well-dissembler of his woes,
As I am. Would I knew it, for the rareness
Afflicts me now."
He sat with Caro on the rugs again. "Can you wonder that play is never performed these days?"
Beside the chill drama of Paul's marriage, played out in its interesting setting of worldly success, Caro's wound must blanch to a light stroke of experience that it would be tiresome to display. Caro would be instructed, not questioned; would be addressed, with knowing interpolations: "That alas is the way it goes"; "Something we must rectify." Paul, not Caro, would interpret the degree of meaning in their respective lots. That had been decided, as he sat speaking intimately of his life to the person most excluded from it
—in order to readmit her to the intimacy though not the life.
He lifted his hand to take hers. Then appeared to think better of it: a small indecision within a greater. "There is an interesting collusion in it, I suppose. Deceiving one another, she and I agree to deceive, on another level, a larger public."
"And does that appeal to you?"
"I've always had a taste for the play within the play." He smiled.
"I have an idea. Let's go to Spain tomorrow."
"And send that man a postcard."
"Which one?"
"Both."
His laughter pealed up and down, like the phone bell. Twine stitches harshly imprinted themselves in Caro's elbow as she propped herself on the carpets.
"I have kept loving you." Through all the interesting things that have happened to me. "And you love me."
"Yes."
"Honesty's the best policy."
"That's a contemptible expression. Like 'crime doesn't pay.' "
The same vexed tightening of Paul's eyelids. "Now we're to have a discourse on rhetoric, are we?"
Caro got to her feet, unhearing; her remoteness not intended to teach him any lesson. She took her umbrella from a corner, and walked out of the room.
The first flight of stairs, down which she quickly and lightly went, was too narrow for him to pass her. When he caught her up at the landing he did put his hand to hers. "Of course I shan't let you go."
He said this with leniency, coaxing a child out of its caprice; but his hand was hot and uncertain, as he realized only in touching her.
The steep little stairs rose above them, a white cliff-face that might or might not be rescaled.
"Let me leave here."
"Look, you wanted this, didn't you—coming to the theatre, then here?"
"That doesn't mean I don't have better in me."
"You've gone through enough doors for today."
"Let me go. This isn't how I want to be. Let me go on with my life. Or be at least as I was. Instead of what I've been all these months, since I knew you."
Vicious enough in themselves, the last words did not come out scathingly but as they might have been uttered by a person long cut off from speech and human society, who now ineptly articulated blunt realities. In Paul, however, they produced new tension; and the dim electric glow from above, like stage moonlight, showed his face bleached—scarcely male, scarcely young.
He said, "You look on me as a weakness in yourself."
"All my weakness is distilled in you."
Caro had the effect of interrupting the flow of Paul's will, so that his aspect slackened, in the way of all beings, even animals, who have lost conviction. A countering result was that Caro herself felt closest to Paul at such moments, and least surprised she should love him.
The climax of the sequence was that Paul, with an instinct for the fluctuations of resistance, once again embraced her, putting his arms inside her open coat as if entering her protection. Her umbrella fell to the bare boards with a tactless clatter. She did not raise her arms to him.
Paul said, "How cold. How cold you are."
They stood in this way, without change except for movements of Paul's hands on Caro's body—slight undulations on which the light played cloudily. Withdrawing, she said, "Why should you want this?" Her back to the downward stairs. The unfurnished ring to the voice, words bare as floorboards.
"I don't know." A contagion of honesty, the best policy. "It's the proof of everything I disbelieve."
She would have said, "Yet you believe in God," but could not implicate God in so much bungling.
Paul Ivory rested his palm against the wall beside her head, propping himself there to await her surrender. On the pure wall, the shadow of shapely fingers was huge: he had the upper hand.
The light was turning his figure supple yet metallic, the colour of pewter. It is not often that Venus passes before, and occults, so bright a star.
He made a little distance between them so he might watch her yielding.
He had opened her dress, and the exposed streak of flesh within outdoor clothes was oddly shocking. There was the loosed raincoat and red unbuttoned bodice, then the secret slit of white. Unlike many images of Caroline Bell he later sought to preserve, this one did fix itself in Paul Ivory's memory: the stark wall, the stairs up and down, her red dress; and the flare of her breast which she left gravely revealed, like a confession.
Y o u asked me about Paul Ivory's play. I saw it only last month. I was impressed, and perhaps surprised by his ease in handling the working-class milieu. I think you might be suspicious of it—some of the effects spurious, and a pat, clever ending that was nevertheless breathtaking.
It looks as if it will run forever, so you may see it when you get back from France.
Caro stopped writing, and read the passage over. How sincere, judicious. How much easier it is to sound genuine when being derogatory.
Caro sat at her office desk remembering Paul Ivory's play and how, for an instant at the end of the final act, the audience had remained silent after its ordeal. Here and there in the theatre a click or tick, a slight crackle such as one hears at pptteries among baked wares cooling from the furnace. And then the fracturing applause.
Good that you can go to the Rome conference before returning here
—I saw something about it in the papers. In Rome I remember a palace designed on a nobleman's horoscope—that is to say, decorated with representations of planets and pagan gods. Mere astrology, but perhaps you'll manage to see it all the same.
It was thus assured that Ted Tice would pass his happiest hour in Rome in frescoed rooms on the bank of the Tiber.
There will scarcely be time to write again before you get back to England. Thank you for asking me to dinner, that will be lovely. Until one month, then, from today.
Caroline Bell posted this letter on her way home at noon. Saturday was a half-day at her office, and she stopped to buy food to provide lunch for Paul. She was living at that time in a top-floor furnished flat, rented from an office friend who had been posted abroad. It was near the Covent Garden market, in a building otherwise let to printers and publishers.
Noon came like glory into the narrow sooty brick of Maiden Lane, and expanded with architectural intention at the market.
The city rose to the sun's occasion. And Caroline Bell was grateful for a bodily lightness never felt before, which she knew to be her youth. She walked with paper bags in her arms, smiling to think of her lost youth, discovered at the ripe and adult age of twenty-two.
Paul was in her doorway. He waited for her to come up to him, then leaned down from the step to embrace her. With the paper bags and a bunch of red flowers she made quite a bundle. "Why is this woman smiling?"
"I was thinking about adulthood, and adultery."
"Funny, I was thinking about adultery myself. Have you got the key?"
She gave it. They went up linoleum stairs, past doorways sealed with weekend finality. In an old building like this, dust settled quickly, and the unlocking of these small businesses each Monday was a mere deferral, each time surprising, of eventual, ordained oblivion.
Paul said, "Saturday afternoon in England is a rehearsal for the end of the world."
When they paused on a landing to breathe, he said, "These have been the best weeks of my life."
The flat was a large room with windows along one side and a blotched skylight at the far end. One wall was entirely covered by books on warped shelves, and the uneven floor was obscured by a big blue rug, nearly ragged, in which traces of reddish design could still be discerned, like industrial gases in a twilit sky or bloodstains inexpertly removed. A downward sag of ceiling, shelves, and floor was reproduced in a slump of studio couch that stood against the books and was covered by a new blue counterpane. There was a fine old table, scarred, and two chairs. The only picture was Caro's angel from Seville, on a wall near the kitchen door.
Everything was worn, or worn-out, even the smirched sky. The books supplied humanity, as they are supposed to do. Otherwise you might have said dingy^ or dreary.
Paul sat on the fresh counterpane, his hands poised on his knees.
Caro called from the kitchen, "Are you hungry?"
"I shall be."
She switched off the derelict stove and came back and stood beside him. He was turned towards the wall, looking at the books.
"Very much a library, isn't it—Larousse, set of Grove, what's this, Bartlett."
"That's the reference shelf."
"While we provide
the erotica." He drew her down on the sofa, so that she knelt while he lay. "This is our shelf, this sofa. This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere."
"It's the name of a symphony, the Erotica."
"Here's something I want." The book was so heavy he had to sit up again and draw it out with both hands. He flopped it open on their laps, powdering the bedcover with reddish dust. "Unob-tainable now. I can use it in what I'm working on." It was an edition of old plays.
"Well, you could borrow it, I suppose. I suppose you could."
Caro lifted it off her knees and wandered about the room. She pulled curtains across, put the vase of anemones on the table. She took off her clothes.
He said, "To keep, I mean."
"It isn't mine, you see." Caroline Bell laced her hands together on the crown of her head. Her extended torso became both commanding and vulnerable.
Paul thumped the book to the floor at the bedside and lay down, watching. And in the veiled light, with an antique density of books behind him, might have done for a Victorian illustration: young body relapsed on blue and red, white-shirted arm dangling towards a fallen book. Childe Harold, The Death of Chatterton. Caro said as much.
"Thanks. Now come here."
She came to the bed and lay by him. Paul said, "To think this waits for me, day and night." He took locks of her coarse hair and spread them in dark rays round her head. "Hair like a horse."
She said, "My love. My lover."
"Do you remember, the first time, near Avebury, I told you I'd never felt deeply. Or enough. I want to tell you now, this is the most I ever felt for anything or anyone, what I feel for you."
She touched his face. That day at Avebury she had touched his hand to the veneer bedstead; and he had said, "Whatever enough means."
Paul sometimes still thought she looked foreign—by which he meant she never quite belonged to him. He said, "Possession is nine points of the law." But this was much later, when he lay looking at the dusty room and thinking that youth was a help, because these particular moments, of languor, and underclothes on chairs, would otherwise seem a portent of deeper weakness. The flowers, now, were flat, red, garish.
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