The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  A few minutes later he realised that they had turned into Gower Street and then they came to a halt outside Elizabeth’s rooms. He got out, paid off the driver and stood for a moment watching the cab clop away past the regularly spaced and orderly lamp posts. Then, without giving himself time for second thoughts, he turned, ascended the steps and rang firmly at the door bell.

  The landlady, all starchy white apron, stiff and crackling, and starched white cap, opened the door. She recognised him and said that she thought Miss Hills was at home and would go and inquire. And then, after two nights and days in another world, two nights and days that seemed aeons, he was once more in the presence of his Elizabeth.

  Absurdly, he had expected her to look different, much older even. And she looked exactly as she always did, wearing indeed the very dress she had had on the last time he had been here when they had decided that they would accept the invitation to the opera, that almost fatal visit. It was an old dress, but one that he had more than once said greatly suited her, a dark-blue silk trimmed a little with black on the tight-fitting bodice that splendidly showed up her figure. It always seemed to put a new light into her radiantly shining grey eyes, the eyes that he had not expected to change. But, ridiculously too, he had expected her voice to be different, that she would have lost something in the years he had been away of her American intonation. And when she had greeted him, with a ‘Good evening, Godfrey’ no more, he had been surprised that that warmth was still there.

  If it had not been that Miss Watkyn was present, sitting on the other side of the bright fire, nervously adjusting ever and again the little round screen on a stand that protected her face from the fire’s glow, clasping a little bottle of attar of roses and at once telling him that there had been a terrible odour from the gas all day, he would have knelt at Elizabeth’s feet there and then. He would have knelt and begged her forgiveness and asked her to marry him.

  But Miss Watkyn was there, and from her anxieties over the dreadful smell of the gas she moved on all in a rush to her no less terrible anxieties occasioned by his not being at Gillingham Place when Elizabeth had called and her report that his young Billy had hardly seen him since the night of the opera.

  ‘Elizabeth could think of no explanation. The very thought of what might have happened to you made me quite ill. I had to retire to bed. My head ached with an intensity I have never before known. Elizabeth could do nothing for me.’

  Godfrey felt a sharp sting of remorse. To have exposed Elizabeth to all this as well as her own proper worries. He wanted passionately to have an explanation to offer her. But what was there?

  He could hardly say that he had run away to live with a prostitute in a pair of rooms near Leicester Square. And even that bald impossible fact was not the whole explanation. Why had he run away? What could he possibly say of that to Miss Watkyn, or even later in private to Elizabeth? He could furnish no explanation even to himself.

  ‘I am afraid I caused a great deal of trouble,’ he said to Miss Watkyn, with some coldness. ‘A matter of some urgent business.’

  It was transparently false. But certainly with Miss Watkyn there he could not offer a syllable more, except that, turning to Elizabeth, he did manage to add that he wished with all his heart that he had not had to leave the opera house so abruptly. And from the look he saw then in Elizabeth’s eyes, fleeting, instantly shaded, he knew she had been well aware what it was he had been going to say to her that evening. And he knew too that she realised that he still intended to say it just as soon as any proper opportunity arose.

  And now she said nothing that indicated she wanted him to leave.

  But, if she did not want to break off all dealings with him, did this not mean that she was prepared to hear that question of his when he could put it? And if she was prepared to hear it, she was prepared to answer ‘Yes’. She was never a marker-up of conquered hearts.

  He felt warmth flooding back into him. All was as it had been. And surely now all would go on being as it had been? Surely he would not slip back now, after this moment, into that other world, lurking, waiting beneath, treacherous and murky and never to be illuminated? Surely he would not. Surely.

  So he remained with Elizabeth for more than an hour and the shadow that the gap in their mutual life had created was successfully banished at least for that time. They avoided, each of them equally, the subject of the opera and what they had thought of Signor Verdi’s work. Instead they talked about the picture, which had now passed the period of drawing on paper the draperies that had been arranged with time-consuming care on the professional model and was now at the stage of transferring these to the canvas in monochrome over the already present form of the muscled body.

  But they talked even more of Elizabeth’s work. To hear her, those wonderful eyes pouring out their sea-light radiance, expatiate at length on the basic requirements of drainage-systems, or of how by establishing a repair fund with any surplus at the tenants’ disposal formerly rag-stuffed windows could be kept re-glazed, was to Godfrey sheer delight. He felt, as she talked of re-plastering and limewashing, of new water-butts and of keeping hens and goats out of homes, the deep-planted idea of his painting positively gaining in nourishment minute by minute.

  At last he felt obliged to say that he must not keep either of them any longer. He had been hoping for half an hour or more that Miss Watkyn would withdraw, but Miss Watkyn had sat with her toes on her embroidered footstool toasting at the fire and had laughed and exclaimed in horror and enthused with unabated nervous energy. So eventually he had decided he must leave the field himself.

  Yet Elizabeth had a word to say in parting.

  ‘Goodnight, dear friend. And I look forward when we next meet to hearing what you have been doing, to hearing about it all.’

  The words gave him plenty to ponder over as his cab took him home. Plainly Elizabeth, although she wanted to see him still, even wanted to hear him ask her to marry him and was surely prepared to answer ‘Yes’, was not content to accept his almost complete lack of explanation for those two long days in which he had dropped, it must seem to her, out of life altogether. It would not, he thought, be at all in her character to do so.

  But he could not tell her the truth. He could not tell her what it was that he had done.

  Yes, he thought, it might even be possible to say to her, if not to many other women, that he had gone to a prostitute. She would be disgusted. But she must know, with her directness and willingness to face facts, that men had sexual urges, that they could not live without any sexual experience of any sort till they could afford a proper home for a wife and a carriage to go with it. She must, whether she allowed herself to think of it or not, know this. And so she would accept it.

  But that was not the explanation. That was a mere account of the outward events, and even then a somewhat falsified one. To say that he had gone to a prostitute, as if it was an isolated incident releasing a long-held tension, would not be to state what had happened in those days he had spent with Lisa. It would not be to tell Elizabeth of the other world.

  He could never tell her of that.

  If ever he did, she would ask him why such degradation attracted him. And what could he say? He did not know. Then she would tell him, and rightly—if they ever could have such a discussion—that, if he did not know what drew him there, then surely he was not really drawn. And he ought to agree that this was so. But was it? Although at this moment he wanted once more strongly and truly to live in the world of engagements and aspiring, to ask Elizabeth to marry him, to cleave to her, to have children by her, to take his place in the great scheme of things, would it always be so? At the core of him he suspected that it would not be. He had felt the tug of Lisa’s world, and it would tug at him again.

  Back at Gillingham Place that night he had flung himself down on his bed and fallen at once asleep, mortally tired after that day that had begun with his blackly illuminating encounter with the coffee-stall whores and had gone on in a long process of
reversal through his dawn-to-dusk wanderings in mighty working dockland and his meeting with the country-fresh Betsy, to end with his confrontation with Elizabeth. But when he at last awoke next morning it was to find himself, miraculously, full of strength and attack. He hardly waited to breakfast but seized his caster-legged heavy easel and dragged it into the best of the light.

  For nearly two hours he worked with fierce concentration at the task of underpainting the draperies on his canvas, feeling the flowing monochrome paint, later to bear the colours of the finished work, fall sweepingly down with each fold of the heavy tunic-like garment that he had envisaged for his Venus. But then suddenly, and for him quite uncharacteristically, he broke off.

  ‘Billy,’ he called down the stairs. ‘Billy.’

  ‘Yus, Mr Mann, sir,’ Billy said, thrusting his unbrushed mophead in at the door.

  ‘I want you to take a note to Miss Hills.’

  ‘Oh, yus, sir. The lady wot always tells me to get somefink cleaned.’

  Godfrey grinned at the accuracy of the description.

  ‘Well, go to this address in Gower Street, and if they tell you she is not there ask where you can find her. But get the note to her.’

  ‘Right you are, sir, Mr Mann. I’ll find her. Count on me.’

  Quickly Godfrey wrote asking Elizabeth to come to the studio as soon as it was convenient. It was time, he said, to put her hands and her face into the waiting picture.

  Billy took the letter as soon as it was sealed and could be heard tumbling down the stairs as if he was mounted on some enormous iron-shod post-horse. And Godfrey flung himself back in his chair.

  It was not strictly true, he admitted, that the painting was ready for the monochrome work on the proper sitter. There was a good deal to be done on the draperies still. But he had felt suddenly that he must see Elizabeth, that he must bring ideal and reality together.

  He ought, he knew, to go back to work. But he felt that would be impossible. The lines of the tunic would lie heavy as lead if he attempted anything on them now. So he sat on and he stood up and paced vaguely about and he went dozens of times to stare out of the big window at the activities on the river beyond the aged wooden balcony just outside. For a little he tried to recall some of the scenes he had sketched among the docks. But that whole day of tumultuous activity had meant so much to him that his pencil lost all its lightness when he tried to recapture its moments and at last he screwed up the sheet and threw it on the fire.

  And then, after a wait of two hours and more, there was the cheerful rattle of a hansom on the cobbles of the street below and, craning down to look, he saw Elizabeth with a proud and dazzled Billy beside her.

  ‘I was supervising a tremendous wash-tub party,’ she said almost the moment she entered the studio. ‘I ought not to have left. But I thought I detected a note of urgency in what you wrote, something more than was in the words.’

  Godfrey felt his heart beginning to thump. She knew him so well. So well at one level.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m sure that urgent note was there. But, to tell you the truth, though I did feel that I would like to begin putting in your likeness now, there is something that I want to talk to you about before that.’

  Had he all along wanted to confront the great obstacle? No doubt he had, though he had expressed not a whit of it in words to himself.

  ‘You want to tell me where you went after the opera,’ Elizabeth said steadily. ‘But, if you wish to say nothing, I have no right to know.’

  ‘But you have the right. I have led you to expect it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth admitted. ‘Yes, you have done that.’

  ‘You know that I was not taken ill at the opera, that I was not as I told you in my note suffering from a cold, that I was not here when I led you to believe that I would be?’

  ‘Yes. I know all that. So, Godfrey, what was it?’

  It was not a demand. It was the deftest of inquiries.

  But he could not, now that it had come to the jumping-point, tackle the towering obstacle.

  ‘Elizabeth, I ran away,’ he blurted out. ‘I was— There was something that I was going to do that night after the opera, a question that I—’

  He came to a full stop, as much because he did not want to refer to the proposal of marriage as because what he was saying to Elizabeth was a travesty of the truth. Or, rather, he questioned himself bemusedly and furiously, was it not at least some part of the truth? He had run away, after all. He had even run away from the marriage. It was just that he had also run to something.

  ‘You were going to ask me whether I would marry you,’ Elizabeth said, steady now as a grenadier.

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes. And I ran away from that. I cannot think why I should have done, but I could not put that question to you. Oh, Elizabeth, I wanted to. I wanted to ask it and passionately I wanted to hear you answer “Yes”. I want it still. But I ran away. Can you forgive me?’

  ‘Godfrey, I must do more than forgive you.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘I must help you to find out why you ran, as you say that you did. There must be some reason, a reason hidden even from you yourself. But we have only to look, to search diligently. I know that. I believe it. I am certain of it. We have only to bring daylight in and you will see what it was that stopped you. We shall do that, you and I, in the days to come, and then I promise you there will be no difficulties.’

  ‘You are ready to do that for me?’

  ‘Yes. Together we shall do it. Together.’

  ‘Then— Then, you mean that …?’

  ‘I mean, Godfrey, that you have asked me to marry you and that I will do so, with all the gladness of my heart.’

  Chapter Twelve

  The days that followed did not, however, bring that shared probing examination that Godfrey feared for all that he knew that he ought to want it. An engagement to marry is a complicated affair. It put Godfrey back into the world of debits and credits with a vengeance. There never seemed to be any time. Gradually it became accepted between Elizabeth and himself that the momentous conversation would take place in all probability after the wedding ceremony. It did not seem to matter that it had been postponed. It was going to happen. They had agreed on that. And it could not alter what there was between them. That too was axiomatic, if unstated.

  But in the immediate aftermath of their decision and in the weeks going on from it there was an enormous amount to be done. There was Lady Augusta and Sir Charles to be told of the engagement, with a tactful lack of reference to the short gap that had occurred between his asking Sir Charles and his asking Elizabeth. There were announcements to be made in the newspapers. There were letters by the score to be written, to his trustees, to old family friends. There were congratulations to be accepted, in letters, at chance meetings with acquaintances of all sorts. And the less the acquaintance, it seemed, the more the congratulations had to be prolonged. When he happened to encounter Arthur Balneal in Regent Street, where he had been visiting jewellers about the ring, they had stood together on the bustling pavement for close on half an hour while the Celebrated Investigator, a most fearful time-waster in committee Elizabeth had told him, delivered a whole sermon on the virtues of family life, incidentally disclosing that he was now the proud father of seven.

  Elizabeth too had her full share of all this, including a mandatory interview with Miss Watkyn, a task in which she had begged his assistance as being likely to calm the inevitable storm. Miss Watkyn had gone one further than even Elizabeth had expected and had fallen at once into a dead faint.

  Even deciding just when the wedding was to take place had proved a matter requiring interminable discussions and adjustments.

  ‘As soon as it is convenient, since we have agreed to it,’ Elizabeth had said dryly to Lady Augusta when the question had first been broached.

  ‘I have no doubt that soon would be convenient to you,’ Lady Augusta had retorted. ‘But there are others to take into consideration. Charles has to
be down in Wiltshire sometimes and people will not attend an affair not held in the Season.’

  An immense amount of juggling with dates had followed. And in the end no exact conclusion had been reached. It was left that if all the preparations Lady Augusta considered necessary could be completed before the end of the Season then the wedding would be in July. If that proved too difficult it would have to be when the Bosworths were back in town in October.

  ‘We shall be seeing a good deal of you, my dear fellow,’ Sir Charles had said to Godfrey at the end of the last long discussion. ‘We’ll hit on the exact day together.’

  ‘That would be excellent,’ Godfrey had replied.

  And he had meant it then. He was swept away by the happy whirl of all that there was to do. Every daylight hour that was not occupied with arrangements was spent at his easel. The Venus Verticordia in spite of his late start was proceeding well. Elizabeth had made time, despite all that Lady Augusta wanted her to do and of her continuing visits to the dirt-encrusted houses of Perkins Rents, to sit for him often enough for him to have completed his work on her hands and on her features in the monochrome under-painting. He was busy now with the colour, a rapid enough process. Nevertheless time was getting short before the final day for submission to the Academy. But surely, he thought, with the happiness that seemed to be tingling in every pore of his skin he ought to be able to progress in a blaze of glorious achievement.

  And, indeed, the putting on of the colour went with a rapidity and sureness that at moments almost scared him. Only in one small passage, small at first though bulking larger and larger as the inflexible date for sending in the picture drew near, did he experience difficulty. It was in catching exactly the extraordinary quality of Elizabeth’s eyes. He tried for them several times, but that generous outpouring of grey sea-light eluded him. Even Elizabeth, when she had asked if she were allowed to see, agreed that he had not succeeded there.