The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  They had ventured together hand-in-hand into the green jungle. And there he had found, unexpectedly, sweet fruits for the picking. There, he had discovered to his surprise, it was possible to roam without encountering snakes sinuous and forktongued, pits dark and slimy.

  So often and often they had roamed together. The Swiss days had proved—how little he had expected this—days devoted merely to bodily love. And, back in England, they were scarcely less ardent. Though Elizabeth had at once resumed her work and was often at Perkins Rents or the other localities that came into her charge as early as nine o’clock in the morning, on many occasions they did not take the chilly plunge of getting up without having first come together in heart-thudding fast-breathing delight. And at night, though she often spent long hours working at some heavy batch of official Minutes or wrestling with a textbook of hygiene, when they did retire it was very seldom that they did not make love before they fell asleep between the smooth and lavender-scented lawn sheets that had been part of the Bosworth’s wedding-gift.

  They had a house in Red Lion Square, a house with a good large room at the back under a wide skylight looking north for Godfrey to work in. Very soon this home had taken on all the characteristics he had found so endearing at Gower Street. Though there was no landlady in starched white apron to create order and bright cleanliness. Elizabeth showed herself an excellent housekeeper and rapidly taught the cook and the two maids they had found. Each day went to pattern from the bringing in of his shaving-pot, invariably steaming hot, to the banking-down of the kitchen range at night and the bolting of the house doors.

  Even young Billy, imported from Gillingham Place to clean the boots and the knives as well as keep his artist’s brushes in order, lost under Elizabeth’s tuition almost all his clumsiness and the doom-laden slummockiness of his bohemian days and became something of a paragon of punctuality and neatness.

  So within a short time of their arrival from Switzerland they had been able to sit in the evenings in a room very much like that at Gower Street, except that at the back beyond the folding doors Elizabeth now had the library shelves the thought of which had once sent Miss Watkyn into such palpitations. And, as their first winter together went by, he would be ensconced on one side of the bright clear fire, in a chair much like Miss Watkyn’s only somewhat larger, and opposite would be Elizabeth with a book on her reading-stand. And the polish on the fireirons, the brass and the furniture would glint and glitter and the light from the gas-pendant would burn steady and clear and he would feel such a state of contentment that at times he thought he would burst.

  And the order and the spotlessness round them there were reflected in the whole of the rest of the house. Floors were always sweet-smellingly polished, carpets were daily brushed and regularly beaten, furniture gleamed, things had their places and were kept in them, windows stood wide open in the mornings however cold the weather and let the fresh air pour in. And on Mondays, always, there was throughout the house starting from a surprisingly early hour the unmistakable smell of hot suds boiling in the copper and everything that should be washed was washed.

  Those Monday wash-days were of so volcanic a nature that they disturbed the whole establishment from top to bottom, even penetrating in the form of that soapy odour into his holy of holies, the studio. And they came to mark for him, more surely than the calendar and the change in the seasons even, the progress of time. Week after week they arrived. There would be first the very early morning disturbance and the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs. Then would come the soapy smell, slowly at first but soon totally pervasive. And at last there would be in the little garden below the studio the sight of blowing and billowing snowy-white sheets, only absent when fog swirled in the small enclosed space or rain beat solidly down. Week after week this long morning of disturbance marked the passing of seven more days of his married life.

  And it was such a satisfying life. No wonder, he often thought, that the wash-day smell appeared to come round so soon. The weeks and the months flew for him, and it seemed no time at all before he was visiting Asprey’s to buy Elizabeth a small pendant on a neat gold chain to mark their first wedding anniversary.

  And one evening a little later as they entered the drawing-room after dinner Elizabeth turned to him.

  ‘Do you know what day it is today, my darling?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he answered momentarily puzzled.

  ‘It is just a year today since we spent our first evening together in this room.’

  ‘It is. It is.’

  He felt a rush of happiness. The three hundred and sixty-five evenings that he had spent with her, most of them in this room, had been passed in a state of active and rosy contentment. It was an achievement. He could not go out to Asprey’s this minute and buy her something to mark it, but he did take her hand and press the palm of it with the ball of his ring-finger in a way that had become a signal between them.

  ‘Dearest,’ she half-reproved him as the maid came into the room with coffee.

  Visits to Asprey’s were possible at this time because his work, despite a year of non-appearance at the Academy, was showing every sign of success. For the following year’s Academy he had painted another subject from Goethe, his ‘Hermann and Dorothea’, and into it he had found himself able to put with ease all the joy and simplicity of his feeling for Elizabeth. When it had been ready it had been arranged, through the good offices of Lady Augusta, that no less a person that the President of the Royal Academy should call at Red Lion Square one afternoon to see it.

  The wrinkle-lined eyes had peered in the chill spring light. The white-polled head had moved slowly to and fro. Then the back had straightened, not without an arthritic grunt.

  ‘My dear fellow, you will one day surpass us all.’

  And not very long after this there had come a note from Herr Pohlmann, very cautiously worded. There had followed a formal visit from the polished and pomaded art-dealer. No reference whatever had been made to their previous encounter when the Venus Verticordia had been so abruptly withdrawn. Instead in the course of an hour during which the German had explained once more all about ‘the truly magnificent opportunities awaiting an artist in these times, my dear sir’ Godfrey had received a commission to paint a mere kitcat portrait of a Mr Joseph Murland, manufacturer, at a fee of three hundred guineas.

  This was the first of a good many commissions from Herr Pohlmann, and his glossy carriage was frequently to be seen in Red Lion Square in the period that followed the very successful showing of the Hermann and Dorothea at that year’s Academy. The engraving rights of that had been sold while the picture was still hanging and for a very substantial sum. And even more had been given for the rights of the two pictures he showed in the following year, ‘The Woodland Wedding from As You Like It’ and ‘Kiss in the Ring’, a contemporary subject that had come to him like a bolt from the blue one August Sunday when in the restless state he customarily got into between one picture and the next he had taken Elizabeth to the Crystal Palace. Dozens of working men and working girls had been playing that game there, the girls chasing the men in the hot sunshine and exacting their forfeits. The scene had suddenly caught his imagination, though he was never able to work out quite why, and he had at once abandoned several tentative subjects and had started work, painting the whole with quite unaccustomed speed.

  The picture had received an extraordinary amount of critical praise, too, with The Times, the Atheneum and Macmillan’s all uniting to acclaim it. Indeed, his work had been as successful with the critics as it had been financially. Except perhaps, as he confessed to Lady Augusta while visiting Brook Street one day, that he had yet to win the approval of Mr Ruskin. But Lady Augusta, who since their marriage had taken a commanding interest in the art world, had a sharp answer to that.

  ‘My dear Godfrey, you cannot expect, painting your Woodland Weddings and your Hermann and Dorotheas, to be noticed by a person with the attitude to marriage of the former husband of Mrs Effie Mi
llais.’

  Godfrey, who had long before rejected as a possible explanation the eminent critic’s failure to consummate his union with the present wife of his distinguished colleague, merely offered a polite ‘I dare say you are right’.

  ‘Of course I am right,’ Lady Augusta countered. ‘And now I am reminded of something else that I have meant to speak to you about.’

  ‘I am all attention.’

  ‘Well, you do have the courtesy to listen to me, which is more than I can say for most young men nowadays.’

  ‘You frequently have something of great good sense to say, Aunt Augusta.’

  ‘I do. And what I have to say now is: why haven’t you and Elizabeth had a child yet?’

  It took Godfrey a second or two to recover from this plain-spoken assault.

  ‘But such things cannot be brought about at whim,’ he managed to reply at last.

  ‘Nonsense. Or, since this is a matter to be taken seriously, what you say may very well be simply an evasion.’

  They were alone, expecting Elizabeth from Perkins Rents. Lady Augusta did not lower her voice.

  ‘If a healthy young man and a healthy young woman lie in the same bed for a full two years night after night, then if the young woman is still not enceinte questions arise in one’s mind. Are you deliberately avoiding having a child?’

  ‘No, no, we are not.’

  Lady Augusta gave him an unflinching look.

  ‘There are no difficulties?’ she barked. ‘No stupid brutalities on your part that have driven her into panic? No schoolgirl innocence that you have failed to vanquish? No finding your pleasures where you think they’re more easily got?’

  ‘Nothing of any of that, I assure you,’ Godfrey answered, mastering an increasing startledness.

  ‘Then,’ Lady Augusta retorted, ‘if the pair of you have been mating two, three of four times a week, why has there been no child?’

  ‘There has not been,’ Godfrey replied.

  ‘You’ve spoken of it together?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Elizabeth says she would be very happy to have a child. And it would make me happy too if she were to have one.’

  ‘Then what is it, my boy? Should you consult some medical man? They know precious little about such things of course—why, even Elizabeth is probably as knowledgeable as most of them—but if you wish it I could find you someone.’

  ‘You are kind. But I think nevertheless … Really, it is early days yet. Elizabeth is certainly not anxious. She has her work, after all.’

  Lady Augusta straightened her somewhat podgy shoulders.

  ‘And you know my opinion of that.’

  Godfrey had thought that Lady Augusta’s sudden extraordinarily frank outburst would be for him no more than a curious passing episode. It had been only when he called to mind that she was the daughter of a duke and that at that level of society in the time of her youth there had always been a healthy contempt for convention that he could at all account for it all. But what she had said did not fade from his thoughts. Instead he found himself questioning more and more Elizabeth’s continuing childlessness. It was not that he himself passionately wanted a son and heir. He was not Sir Charles with an estate to hand on. Indeed, he felt that if anything his pictures were his children.

  Yet, as each month came and went and Elizabeth said nothing, uneasiness grew within him. He felt with ever increasing acuteness that without this crowning proof their marriage was somehow not complete.

  Eventually, in accordance with the principles he had imbibed from Elizabeth herself, one evening he put the matter frankly to her.

  She looked across at him, the firelight making a play of shadows and dark orangey lights across her full grave face.

  ‘Well, yes, my dearest,’ she said, ‘as you know I have expected to find myself pregnant long before this.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But, tell me, don’t you share this—this notion of mine that without a child our marriage is not quite complete?’

  She considered a little, solemn in the firelight.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘In fairness, I must admit that the idea had not crossed my mind.’

  She leant earnestly forward then, the glow of the fire catching her full bosom.

  ‘And surely it is only a notion,’ she said. ‘Surely it is only fancy. You must try to see that. Our marriage is complete. You know it is.’

  ‘I know that I love you, Elizabeth. I love you now more even than I did in those days in Switzerland, the Switzerland that seems so long ago.’

  She sat still in her chair, leaning intently towards him, as if in the shadowy light she wished to penetrate to his inmost being.

  ‘Yes, you love me, I know,’ she said. ‘And yet there is a “but”. You say nothing, Godfrey dearest, yet I hear that “but”.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘There is a “but”. This notion about a child has become too much embedded in my mind to be chased out at a word.’

  Elizabeth rose from her chair, crossed in front of the fire’s strong and flickering glow and came and sat on the floor beside him, her arms resting on his knee, her face looking up at him.

  ‘Let us go into this together, dearest,’ she said. ‘Let us try to cast a full light on it, to send these shadows scattering.’

  Godfrey sighed.

  ‘To me they are doubts more substantial than shadows.’

  ‘No. They must not be. They need not be. A union does not need such a chance tangible proof of success to be all that it should be. You must know that.’

  Her gaze was steady on him, impassioned.

  ‘My dearest,’ she said, ‘I know that from time to time one sees a couple, childless perhaps but giving every sign that all is well between them, one even catches glimpses of behaviour that would seem to indicate it completely, and then suddenly there is a notorious Divorce Court case. But, my dear, they are not us. We know that we are united.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we know it. Yes, my dear, these must be fancies and I will not give them rein.’

  Yet neither what she had said nor what he had sworn had lifted the heaviness he felt. A long silence fell by the light of the fire.

  Elizabeth broke it. She got to her feet with a swishing rustle of her long skirt.

  ‘It’s dark,’ she said. ‘I will ring for Jane to light the gas.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  They waited, in a silence that was somewhat constrained, for the bell to be answered, for Jane, neat in her print dress and white apron, to ignite a taper from the coals, to reach up to the gas-mantle inside its opalescent shade, to adjust the chains of the tap till a white steady light was illuminating the whole room, to bob a curtsey, to depart.

  ‘My dearest,’ Elizabeth said, as the door softly closed, ‘I can see now that you are still not happy. Let us look at it again in a rational way.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Medical science does not know as much as it should about the failure of conception,’ she said. ‘The subject, perhaps because it more concerns women than men, has been neglected. But at least example teaches us that quite often a woman will not conceive for a long while, for years even, and then, for some reason we have no inkling of, she does. There may be some inner event that we have not understood. Or indeed it may well be simply the result of some psychological change.’

  ‘Some psychological change?’ Godfrey said. ‘Yes. Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘And doesn’t this knowledge remove the burden, your irrational burden?’

  ‘Yes. No. My dear, I hardly know.’

  ‘But, dear one,’ Elizabeth said with gentleness, ‘don’t you see? If what I have told you is true, and as far as medical science can go it is true, then you must disabuse yourself of this idea.’

  ‘Yes,’ Godfrey said. ‘I must.’

  Chapter Twenty

  He did make conscientious efforts to expel from his mind this notion that the advent of a child was a necessa
ry seal on his marriage to Elizabeth, especially after medical examination had eliminated any physical reason. But, do what he might, the idea obstinately lodged with him. Their continuing childlessness seemed positively to taunt him. He even found himself once particularly singled out, so it seemed to him, by Arthur Balneal, simply to be told by that round-spectacled individual that he was now the father of no fewer children than nine.

  Was the fellow deliberately mocking him?

  When he went, as he sometimes did, to meet Elizabeth at one of the enclaves cared for by the Society for the Promotion of Sanitary Visiting, he failed entirely to take note of the things that Elizabeth would later ask him to comment on, the knife-edge line of demarcation between a scrubbed passageway and the dirt-encrusted boards of a room beyond where tenants had not yet learnt the lesson, a new clean water-butt or slate cistern, a roof no longer patched with such objects as tea-trays discarded by higher reaches of society. Instead he saw only babies, wretched puling babies in the worst quarters with fingers sometimes gnawed by rats, yet nevertheless babies. Even dead infants frequently enough, laid in a splintery box awaiting the necessary pawning of articles of almost no value before burial could take place. But, for all their pitifulness, tangible signs that procreation had taken place.

  At home, under the plane trees of Red Lion Square, it was babies in the new perambulators being wheeled precariously about by their nursemaids. And through the windows of almost every house he passed, it sometimes seemed, he was bound to observe the tall white peak of the curtains over a well-guarded crib. Even when he paid one of his regular visits to his colourman it was not the shopman himself who greeted him, but his wife explaining that he had ‘just stepped out for a moment’ and nursing the while at an enormous bosom a great sprawling lusty infant of some fifteen or eighteen months.

  He had decided as soon as he had realised that Elizabeth’s firm exposition of the medical facts was not going to drive the idea from his head that he would say no more to her about it. It was the first time he had made up his mind to deceive her in anything since the beginning of their marriage, and the decision burdened him. Until now he had felt free to say to her whatever came into his head. It was one of the wonderful charms of being married to her, to have a confidante to whom he could entrust his most ambitious dreams equally with the most absurd fancies that crossed his mind or even little unrepeatable malicious comments on their acquaintance.