“This seems to be one of Russell’s bad days,” remarked Constance, looked troubled.
“I can’t make out what’s wrong with him,” James said.
“He’s just dreadfully depressed, dear. He feels we’re all doomed—which is, after all, no more than the truth, though one can’t afford to give it undivided attention. These things happen to people—they say he will get over it. It’s as though the Life Force has been temporarily cut off.
“You make it sound like part of the utilities. In the meantime, how awful for Miranda.”
Constance’s frown deepened. “Well, my dear, she must take the rough with the smooth, as the marriage service says.” After this somewhat loose quotation, she paused to examine the rest of the buttons on the shirt, and attacked one with her needle. “Marriage is like democracy—it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with … Given the best of circumstances, it’s exceedingly difficult. I suppose, if Dan had lived”—Dan was Constance’s husband—“we would have had our difficulties too.” Constance only said this to make her point: nothing would have made her believe, particularly in retrospect, that she and Daniel might ever have quarreled.
“What will Miranda do with herself while he’s gone?”
“I’ve been wondering about that. Perhaps she might get out her things and do a little painting again. If we were nearer to a town, she might have taken a little job.” All Miranda’s accomplishments seemed to be diminutive ones. “If she had been more conclusively religious—and I must say she is just the type for it—it would have been a splendid opportunity to make a Retreat.” She snipped a thread, and then added: “As though one ever makes anything else.”
Miranda was writing to her mother. She had just put “Russell is very excited about his trip” (since this was another person whose abundant sorrows left no room for Miranda’s), when the door opened. She looked up quickly, expecting her husband’s haggard face to give her words the lie, but it was not Russell who came into the room. “Oh, James,” she murmured, her elbow on the table, her pen in the air. He might have knocked, she thought.
“I thought you might like the paper.” He laid it on the bed and then sat down beside it. He crossed one foot over his knee and leaned forward, grasping his ankle.
She went on writing and, after a pause, said dismissingly: “Thank you.”
He continued to sit there on the edge of her bed. He saw Russell’s two suitcases, half-packed by Miranda, on the floor near the door; Russell’s jacket over a chair; Russell’s black leather slippers near his own feet. He looked about the room, repelled by all these implications of Russell’s presence, all these reminders that Russell was privileged to enter at any moment—without knocking and without incurring Miranda’s frown. It pained him to think that Russell and Miranda were so much together, so much alone; he was appalled by the idea that they made love.
He got up and wandered first to the windows, and then to the dressing table. This at least seemed to be entirely Miranda’s. He picked up a bottle or two, and set them down with an unpracticed hand. “Is this your scent? … How fascinating—all these little jars.” Miranda glanced up briefly but did not speak, and he sat down again on the bed. “Dearest Miranda,” he said. “I would do anything to comfort you.”
This time she did not look up. “Stop that,” she said. She signed her letter, and took out an envelope and addressed it.
“Anything,” he repeated.
“I don’t need comforting,” she told him. Unconsciously giving a more gentle echo to Russell’s savage denunciations, she said: “I have nothing to complain of. It’s Russell who needs to be comforted.”
“What’s the matter with him anyway?” James asked this in a tone of anticipatory disbelief, but Miranda looked up from. a fresh page to give him a serious answer.
“He is in despair,” she said. “Not the sort of despair that you or I might have, for a day or two, to be shifted by circumstances or surmounted by an effort of the will, but something that seems to him, I imagine, almost—like a discovery of the truth.”
“But why, Miranda? What could be wrong with him? He has a good life.” James, indeed, felt that Russell had cause for perpetual rejoicing.
“Young as you are,” Miranda began heartlessly, “you must already know that the ebb of meaning in life is unaccountable. I’m sure Russell is going to get over this. But I saw it approaching for a long time … No, I can’t tell you why. Some of it may be my fault.” Because this was unbearable to her, she had to add: “Though they say not.” She went back to her writing, and James allowed a decent interval before he reverted to what was for him the main topic.
“Do you know—you’re more yourself with me than with anyone else. I mean, in talking, that kind of thing.”
This was so irrefutably the case that after a moment she simply said “Yes.”
“Why is that?”
“It must be,” she said, “because you have nothing I want.”
“That’s cruel.”
She thought that yes, she was being cruel. But it was the truth. She wanted Russell’s love, Constance’s approval, and her relations with each were pervaded with constraint and supplication. James’s reactions were of practically no interest to her—or was it, she wondered, more complicated than that: that she knew he would, for the present at least, go on caring for her no matter what she said to him?
James continued: “I, on the other hand, am better with anyone else than with you.”
“Goodness, why?”
“I suppose I can’t think of anything good enough to say to you. Anything worthy of you. And then—you make me feel that I’m young.”
Heavens, she thought, studying the paper before her. He thinks I am a woman of the world. She gave an inward smile of astonishment. “I’m ten years older than you.” she said. “Ten important years.”
He said suddenly: “Miranda, I love you so … Now what’s the matter? Can’t I even say the word?”
“It seems rather like taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
“In vain? What do you think this is, then, if not love?”
“Oh—something to do with the spring,” she said lightly, “The regenerative process.”
He said sullenly: “I’m not thinking of the regenerative process.”
She smiled. “But it may be thinking of you.”
“But I do love you. You must feel something.”
“Why?” she asked coldly, addressing another envelope. “Why must I? I have been your age and in love—we all have. And had nothing from it.”
“Then—what happens?”
“What happens?” she looked up, again with large serious eyes. “Why … it just hurts and hurts until it wears out.” They stared at each other in dismay for a moment, and then she went on: “James, don’t you feel any loyalty to Russell?”
“You mean, in connection with you? He treats you so badly.”
“That isn’t for you to say. I meant—because he’s fond of you.”
“Well, it is all rather biblical, I must say.”
“It might be, if it were serious.”
“But it is serious. Miranda, it is.”
She leaned back a little in her chair. “James, don’t be absurd. What could you possibly hope for from me?”
“It’s what I wonder myself, of course—I see there isn’t anything … I suppose I hope that you would like me a little, and show it—would say something I could remember and be pleased about … And then—these are my wildest imaginings—I think we might go away together for a while.”
She kept calm. She said, with a faint smile: “Your mother would be displeased.” (And with reason for once, she added to herself.)
“We could go away separately, and meet.”
It would be frightful, she thought, imagining it all in the space of a second. Everyone in the hotels would see the difference in our ages. We would run into someone we know. I would have to pay—I would hate that. “That’s en
ough. Now leave me alone,” she said.
“Let me stay.”
“No.” She went on writing, annoyed at last.
“I shan’t bother you. I promise.”
Glancing at him, she saw that his face had altered and was full of pain. He unclasped his hand from his ankle and extended it a little toward her. “Let me stay,” he said again. “You don’t have to say anything to me. It’s simply to see you. To know what you’re doing. Be in the room with you.” He stared at her, his hand opened in that artless appeal.
She stopped writing and, still holding the pen, rested her brow on her hand and shielded her eyes in what he took to be a gesture of exasperation. It was, instead, that she felt suddenly touched. To make oneself completely vulnerable, to offer one’s love without reserve—even Miranda had long since lost that capacity, before she met and married Russell. You learned—it was all understood—that you must not forfeit any advantage, and that love itself was a subtle game of stoutly maintaining or judiciously yielding your position … She was all at once ashamed of this seedy knowledge, and envied his ability to declare himself. From behind her arduously constructed defenses, she felt she had now no way even to pay tribute to his generosity, his innocence; to love itself. She sat still, with her hand over her eyes.
“James? I think he must be studying,” Constance said.
Russell removed James’s book from the chair, dropped it on the grass, and sat down. He looked sideways at his mother, and then shifted his position so that he could see the garden. Constance went on sewing, apparently unaware of his restlessness. Finally he lay back in the chair and looked at the sky. After a moment, however, he turned his head again, and said abruptly: “Be kind to Miranda this summer.” He felt a little awkward, delegating to his mother the task he had been incapable of performing himself.
“Well of course,” replied Constance, too readily. “It’s why I suggested she come here. You know I’m devoted to her.”
You’re a hard, frivolous woman, Russell thought. “You’re very kind,” he said.
“Not at all. It was the least I could do.”
And therefore you did it, he observed. “Miranda’s unworldly,” he said. “She has no idea of looking after herself.”
If he’s worried about James, Constance thought with justifiable edginess, he should stay here himself; how could I possibly interfere in that? “Don’t you worry,” she told him. “We’ll take care of her.”
How can I leave Miranda to this, Russell wondered. He said: “I’ll write as soon as I get there.”
“Russell.” Constance laid down her sewing and looked at him. “Is there anything I can do for you? If you aren’t going to work for all these months, you may need some money.”
Oh Christ, Russell thought, she’s not going to take it into her head to behave well. His antagonism to his mother was too deeply rooted to allow her any act of disinterested kindness. He said aloofly: “Thank you, Mother. No.”
“If I can give you anything,” she went on, “you would only have to ask.”
But you would have to ask, Russell noted remorselessly. He would not meet Constance’s earnest look Of all her expressions, it was the one with which he was least familiar. He preferred to think of her more usual aspects—arch, superficial, peremptory: those moods of his mother’s which he now found all the more infuriating because he had, as a boy, so greatly admired them.
No less defeated than Miranda, Constance took up her sewing. “I hope you’ll get what you want from this trip.”
Russell, relenting, gave her a wry, intimate smile he could never have given Miranda. “The main thing seems to be to get away … since all the things I should face up to are here. I feel like a fugitive from justice.”
Constance was herself again. She sighed. “We are all that,” she said.
“Do you think you’ll be able to get out of here?” Russell asked, having parked the car, miraculously, in a short space outside the station. He turned off the engine.
Miranda nodded. Reversing the car and driving home belonged to afterwards, when she would be alone. She would not think of that. How disproportionate, she marveled, were the varied limits of human endurance: she, who got sick if she sat in the sun, or fainted if she had to stand too long in a crowd, would survive this devastating morning without any appreciable loss of physical control and would, in fact, conclude it with a twenty-mile drive. She began to gather up Russell’s papers from the floor of the car.
It will be better for her when I’m gone, Russell thought. He really meant, It will be better for me—because he could have no peace in the presence of Miranda’s pain. Once out of sight, her suffering would quickly become bearable to him. He pictured her driving home, putting the car away, going up to their—her—room, and closing the door. His imagination refused the next scene, where she lay down on the bed and wept.
Holding his books and magazines in her lap, she looked up at him and then away. He touched her white cheek with his hand. He said, with what was at that moment total irrelevance: “You’re so beautiful, Miranda.”
Without turning to him, she opened the door of the car and got out. He came round to the curb and unloaded his luggage from the back seat.
“Give me those,” he said. He took two books from her and stuffed them in the pockets of his raincoat, which he laid on top of the suitcases. Then he stood still, between the car and the steel mesh fence of the parking lot, looking at her.
“Better watch the time,” Miranda said. She had not lifted her eyes.
“I have plenty of time.” Now, as he put his arms around her, her anguish communicated itself to him at last. He could feel it pressing onto his breast as she leaned against him, weightless, submissive. For an instant he wondered, with genuine mystification, What have I done to her? Will she ever get over this? He released her a little, and passed his fingers over her eyes and mouth in a curious, sightless gesture. “Don’t come to the train,” he said.
“Let me.” She drew away from him. When he bent to pick up his luggage, she brought a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her eyes. They walked into the station side by side.
A train was coming in, at another platform, slowly obliterating the further wasteland of tracks, shunted locomotives, and spiritless grasses. As soon as it stopped, businessmen jumped off, holding newspapers and brief cases. Hands and handkerchiefs waved from windows and doors. Old people were helped down by the conductor, and young people sprang into each other’s arms. The entire train was emptied in a matter of moments. One or two couples greeted each other silently, with an abrupt kiss, and walked away, scarcely speaking, not holding hands.
How will it be when he returns, Miranda wondered, watching them from the other platform; how will we greet each other? Will we be silent too? And if we speak, what will we have to say?
VILLA ADRIANA
THEY got down from the bus in the middle of a straight, flat stretch of the Via Tiburtina. It was the midday bus from Rome, loaded with visiting relatives and returning farmers, and at the windows heads turned to watch the two foreigners descend to the country road. First, the man got down, his camera strap over his shoulder, his jacket over his arm, a book in his hand. The bus waited, quivering. He extended his free hand to the woman, who, slightly gathering her dress, negotiated the deep steps.
“Vanno alla villa” was exchanged around the bus.
The conductor called to the driver, the door clanged, and they were left behind in a cloud of dust.
Because this was the higher part of the plain across which they had come, they could see it stretching back in the direction of Rome—a dry, untidy shrubbery posted with olive trees and cypresses and a litter of small houses, rammed by the sun. Behind them, where the bus was already climbing the steep slope to Tivoli, the mountains were white, almost featureless in the heat, and scrabbled with vineyards and umbrella pines.
“VILLA ADRIANA,” said the notice under which they turned off into a lane. Where it joined the main road, the lan
e was quite suburban. It was lined with raw, shuttered houses and with groups of oleanders that gave no shade and weighted the air with a sugary smell. But a little farther the countryside closed in, and the two of them wandered on in shadow, scarcely speaking, her hand through the crook of his free arm. In the middle of a wood, the trees gave way to a parking area. Crossing this open space between two empty tourist buses, they entered the gates of the villa.
“So you see,” she said, as though they had been having a long conversation, “there wouldn’t be much point.” They rounded a corner and stopped in the avenue to look at the ruins of a small amphitheater.
“This is called the Greek Theater.” He closed his book, and they walked on between two lines of magnificent cypresses.
“I’m sure you agree,” she continued, with that offhandedness, he thought, so uncharacteristic of her, that she had developed in these last few days—like a parody of what she objected to in his own manner. As if to irritate him even further, she added, “on the whole,” as they paused at the top of the avenue before one extremity of a colossal wall.
There was a restaurant to their right, among the trees. “Shall we have something now, or later?” he asked her.
“It’s so hot,” she said.
He put his book in his pocket, and they went into the café and stood at the bar. They boy took two wet glasses from the draining board and filled them with aranciata. In the garden at the back, a girl was clearing the deserted lunch tables. Her stiff, short skirt spread out around her and exposed the backs of her knees each time she bent over to collect another dish. She took, in her high-heeled sandals, such tiny, tapping steps that it seemed she would never complete the journey from one table to the next. Now and then she glanced at the boy in the bar, and whenever she looked up he was watching her.
Cliffs of Fall Page 8