“You must be studying?” asked Dora.
“No, no, I’m not studying anything now.”
“What is your work then?”
“I mean my writing.”
“Writing?”
More vulnerable than ever, he glanced around the table. He was repeating a familiar experience.
“I mean poetry. Well … yes, poems.”
Into the silence Miss Nicholson said gently: “Well, I hope you will read them to us.”
He raised his eyes toward her with his concentrating, round-eyed look, not doubting her word. “I have them here, upstairs,” he said.
The evening seemed to have lost its balance. They allowed him to fetch his poems, feeling the extent of their indulgence and a sense of imposition. They were already inventing to themselves noncommittal expressions of interest and wondering how soon they might stop him. Their manners preventing an exchange of glances, the three boys smiled down at their plates, comfortably appalled; they were all at once drawn together, dissociated from so flagrant a breach of regulations. It was entirely possible that they also wrote poetry, but only within the bounds of a fastidious reticence. Charles Holmes pushed back his chair a little to stretch his legs and muttered: “Let him read one, then—just one. I’m ready for bed.”
The boy came out of the house again, clutching a bundle of papers. When he placed them on the table, they slid outward—single, scribbled pages of all sizes. Seated, he examined them, rustling through an apprehensive silence. He read to himself for a moment, and his audience suddenly saw that he was no longer intensely aware of them, or, indeed, of himself, and that his face was unrecognizably calm. Even his arm, resting on the table’s edge, was curved toward the papers in a controlled and easy gesture. They were slowly troubled by an idea that formed among them. Without looking about, each knew, too, that it had occurred to the others: an idea almost to be repudiated, requiring, as it did, so much accommodation.
When he had read aloud for a few minutes, the boy looked up, not for commendation but simply to rest his eyes. Charles said quickly: “Go on.” The inclined young face had grown, in the most literal sense, self-possessed. Their approval, so greatly required in another context, had now no importance for him. He spoke as though for himself, distinctly but without emotion, hesitating in order to decipher corrections, scattering his crumpled papers on the table as he discarded them. It seemed that no one moved, although the three boys no longer held identical positions; they had separated into solitary, reflective attitudes that conceded this unlikely triumph.
Assunta came to remove the last dishes, but left, after a moment, without disturbing them. A moth thudded against one of the colored lanterns. The evening was at its best, cool and clear. From time to time, his voice tiring, the boy paused to shuffle his papers, or he made some brief explanatory comment on the subject of a poem before reading it. When someone asked whether this was all recent work—as though it could possibly have been otherwise—he replied that it had all been written in the last year or two. “There are more all the time,” he said, and laid his hand on the shaggy papers as if they had taken him by surprise.
The wall overlooking them suddenly broke open at a square of light, shutters clattering back against stone, and Harold’s mother leaned from the window. Framed in ivy tendrils, she presented, in metal curlers and a dark dressing gown, an altered version of that type of post card in which ringleted maidens used to lean toward one over window sills. The boy stared up at her blankly, his eyes emptied of all impression. Without looking at the others, she reminded him that he had traveled all day and that it was almost one o’clock. The wall was abruptly resealed.
Harold continued to look up for a moment, and it could be seen rather than heard that he muttered: “I’m sorry.” He began to put his papers together, at first slowly, and then quickly and nervously, picking up pages that fluttered to the ground. His authority relinquished without a struggle, he rose from the table holding the bundle insecurely against him. “Good night … thanks awfully … good night,” he said, and disappeared into the house with his ungainly steps.
Presently they heard a sound like a splash, a sound that could only be his papers falling across the tiled floor of the living room. They gave him time to gather them up, convinced that alone there in the half darkness he was saying: “I’m sorry.”
THE PICNIC
IT was like Nettie, Clem thought, to wear a dress like that to a picnic and to spill something on it. His wife, May, was wearing shorts and a plaid shirt, and here was Nettie in a dress that showed her white arms and shoulders—and, as she bent over the wine stain, her bosom; a dress with a green design of grapes and vine leaves. He could tell, too, that she had been to the hairdresser yesterday, or even this morning before setting out to visit them. She hadn’t changed at all. Unrealistic, that was the word for Nettie … . But the word, suggesting laughter and extravagance, unexpectedly gave him pleasure. Feeling as though Nettie herself had cheated him of his judgment, he turned away from her and glanced down the hillside to where May was playing catch with Ivor, their youngest boy.
If May had left them alone deliberately, as he assumed she had—and he honored that generosity in her—she was mistaken in thinking they had anything to say to one another. They had been sitting for some minutes in complete silence, Nettie repacking the remains of the lunch into the picnic basket or, since the accident with the wine, fiddling with her dress. But what could two people talk about after ten years (for it must be getting on to that)? Nettie, though quite chatty throughout lunch, certainly hadn’t said much since. Perhaps she expected him to mention all that business; it would fit in with her sentimental ideas. Naturally, he had no intention of doing anything of the kind—why bring up something that happened at least ten years ago and made all three of them miserable enough, God knows, at the time? Yes, that would be Nettie all over, wanting to be told that he had often thought about her, had never forgotten her, never would—although whole months passed sometimes when Nettie never entered his head, and he was sure it must be the same way for her; at least, he presumed so. Even then, he would remember her only because someone else—May, perhaps—spoke of her.
In fact, it was because someone else brought her to his attention that the thing had come about in the first place. He had not, in the beginning, thought her attractive—a young cousin of May’s who came to the house for weekends in the summer. He had scarcely noticed her until a casual visitor, the wife of one of his partners, spoke about her. A beautiful woman, she had called her—the phrase struck him all the more because he or May would have said, at most, a pretty girl. And Nettie, that day, had been dressed in a crumpled yellow cotton, he remembered—not at her best at all. Later, he had reflected that his whole life had been jeopardized because someone thoughtlessly said: “She is beautiful.”
Now Nettie looked up at him, drawing her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. Still they did not speak, and to make the silence more natural by seeming at his ease Clem stretched on his elbow among the ferns. Nettie released the loop of hair and poured a little water from a thermos onto the mark on her dress. Her earrings swung; her dress shifted along one shoulder. Her head lowered intently—he supposed that she had become shortsighted and refused to wear glasses.
He could hardly recall how it had developed, what had first been said between them, whether either of them resisted the idea. His memories of Nettie were like a pile of snapshots never arranged according to date. He could see her quite clearly, though, sitting in a garden chair, and in a car, and, of all things, riding a bicycle; and facing him across a table—in a restaurant, he thought—looking profoundly sad and enjoying herself hugely.
If, he told himself, I were to say now that I’ve thought of her (just because it would please her—and they would probably never meet again), she might simply get emotional. Not having thought of it for years, she might seize the opportunity to have a good cry. Or perhaps she doesn’t really want to discuss the past; p
erhaps she’s as uncomfortable as I … All the same, she looked quite composed. He might almost have said a little satirical, as though she found his life quite dull and could rejoice that, after all, she had not shared it. (He saw himself, for an instant, with what he imagined to be her eyes. What a pity she had come just now—he had worked hard last winter, and he thought it had told on him.)
It was true, of course, that he had responsibilities, couldn’t be rushing about the world pleasing himself, as she could. But no man, he assured himself irritably, could be entirely satisfied with what had happened to him. There must always be the things one had chosen not to do. One couldn’t explore every possibility—one didn’t have a thousand years. In the end, what was important? One’s experience, one’s ideas, what one read; some taste, understanding. He had his three sons, his work, his friends, this house. There was Matt, his eldest boy, who was so promising. (Then he recalled that during lunch today he had spoken sharply to Matt over something or other; and Nettie had laughed. She had made a flippant remark about impatience ; that he hadn’t changed at all, was that it? Some such silly, proprietary thing—which he had answered, briefly, with dignity. He knew himself to be extremely patient.)
Yes, Nettie could be quite tiresome, he remembered—almost with relief, having feared, for a moment, his own sentimentality. She made excessive demands on people; her talk was full of exaggerations. She had no sense of proportion, none whatever—and wasn’t that exactly the thing one looked for in a woman? And she took a positive pride in condoning certain kinds of conduct, because they demonstrated weaknesses similar to her own. She was not fastidious, as May was.
That was it, of course. He had in his marriage the thing they would never have managed together, Nettie and he—a sort of perserverance, a persistent understanding. Where would Nettie have found strength for the unremitting concessions of daily life? She was precipitated from delight to lamentation without logical sequence, as though life were too short; she must cram everything in and perhaps sort it out later. (He rather imagined, from the look of things, that the sorting process had been postponed indefinitely.) For her, all experience was dramatic, every love eternal. Whereas he could only look on a love affair, now, as a displacement, not just of his habits—though that, too —but of his intelligence. Of the mind itself. Being in love was, like pain, an indignity, a reducing thing. So nearly did it seem in retrospect a form of insanity, the odd thing to him was that it should be considered normal.
Not that it wasn’t exciting in its own way, Nettie’s ardor, her very irresponsibility. It was what had fascinated him at the time, no doubt. And she was easily amused—though that was one of her drawbacks; she laughed at men, and naturally they felt it. Even when she had been, so to speak, in love with him, he had sometimes felt she had laughed at him, too.
In all events, his marriage had survived Nettie’s attractions, whatever they were. It was not easy, of course. In contrast to Nettie, May assumed too many burdens. Where Nettie was impetuous and inconsiderate, May was scrupulous and methodical. He was often concerned about May. She worried, almost with passion (he surprised himself with the word), over human untidiness, civic affairs, the international situation. He was willing to bet that the international situation never crossed Nettie’s mind. May had a horror of disorder—“Let’s get organized,” she would say, faced with a picnic, a dinner party; faced with life itself. If his marriage lacked romance, which would scarcely be astonishing after twenty years, it was more securely established on respect and affection. There were times, he knew, when May still needed him intensely, but their relations were so carefully balanced that he was finding it more and more difficult to detect the moment of appeal.
He felt a sudden hatred for Nettie, and for this silence of hers that prejudiced one’s affections and one’s principles. She tried—he could feel it; it was to salve her own pride—to make him consider himself fettered, diminished, a shore from which the wave of life receded. And what had she achieved, after all, that she should question the purpose of his existence? He didn’t know much about her life these past few years—which alone showed there couldn’t be much to learn. A brief, impossible marriage, a lot of trips, and some flighty jobs. What did she have to show for all this time—without children, no longer young, sitting there preoccupied with a stain on her dress? She couldn’t suggest that he was to blame for the turn her life had taken—she wasn’t all that unjust. She had suffered at the time, no doubt, but it was so long ago. They couldn’t begin now to accuse or vindicate one another. That was why it was much better not to open the subject at all, actually. He glanced severely at her, restraining her recriminations. But she had lost her mocking, judicial air. She was still looking down, though less attentively. Her hands were folded over her knee.
Well, she was beautiful; he would have noticed it even if it had never been pointed out to him … All at once he wanted to say “I have often thought of you” (for it was true, he realized now; he thought of her every day). Abruptly, he looked away. At the foot of the hill, May had stopped playing with the children and was sitting on a rock. It is my own decision, he reminded himself, that Nettie isn’t mine, that I haven’t seen her in all these years. And the knowledge, though not completely gratifying, gave him a sense of integrity and self-denial, so that when he looked at her again it was without desire, and he told himself, I have grown.
He has aged, Nettie thought. Just now, looking into his face—which was, curiously, more familiar to her than anyone else‘s—she had found nothing to stir her. One might say that he was faded, as one would say it of a woman. He would soon be fifty. He had a fretful, touchy air about him. During lunch, when she had laughed at his impatience, he had replied primly (here in her mind she pulled a long, solemn, comic face): “I have my faults, I suppose, like everyone else.” And like everyone else, she noted, he was willing to admit the general probability so long as no specific instance was brought to his attention. He made little announcements about himself, too, protesting his tolerance, his sincerity. “I am a sensitive person,” he had declared, absolutely out of the blue (something, anyway, that no truly sensitive person would say). He was so cautious—anyone would think he had a thousand years to live and didn’t need to invite experience. And while, of course, any marriage must involve compromise (and who, indeed, would know that better than she?), that was no reason for Clem and May to behave toward one another like a couple of … civil servants.
She could acknowledge his intelligence. And he had always been a very competent person. Wrecked on a desert island, for instance (one of her favorite criteria), he would have known what to do. But life demanded more, after all, than the ability to build a fire without matches, or recognize the breadfruit tree on sight. And one could hardly choose to be wrecked simply in order to have an opportunity for demonstrating such accomplishments.
Strange that he should have aged like this in so short a time—it would be precisely eight years in June since they parted. It was still a thing she couldn’t bring herself to think of, the sort of thing people had in mind when they said, not quite laughing, that they wouldn’t want their youth over again. Oddly enough, it was the beginning, not the end, that didn’t bear thinking about. One weekend, they had stopped at a bar, in the country, on the way to this house. It was summer, and their drinks came with long plastic sticks in them. Clem had picked up one of the sticks and traced the outline of her fingers, lying flat on the Formica tabletop. They had not said anything at all, then, but she had known simply because he did that. Even now, the thought of his drawing that ridiculous plastic stick around her fingers was inexpressibly touching.
Naturally, she didn’t imagine poor old Clem had planned an affair in advance, but even at the time she had felt he was ready for something of the kind—that she was the first person he happened to notice. For the fact was that they were not really suited to one another, which he would have discovered if he had ever tried to understand her properly. He had no idea of what she was like, none
whatever. To this day, she was sure, he thought her trivial, almost frivolous. (And she was actually an acutely sensitive person.) No wonder they found nothing to say to one another now.
It was a strain, however, their being alone like this. And how like May to have arranged it this way, how ostentatiously forbearing. Magnanimous, Clem would have called it (solemn again), but May had a way, Nettie felt, of being magnanimous, as it were, at one’s expense. Still, what did it matter? Since they had invited her, after she had run into May in a shop one afternoon, she could hardly have refused to come. In an hour or two it would be over; she need never come again.
It did matter. It wouldn’t be over, really. Her life was associated with Clem’s, however little he might mean to her now, and she must always be different because she had known him. She wasn’t saying that he was responsible for the pattern of her life—she wasn’t that unjust. It was, rather, that he cropped up, uninvited, in her thoughts almost every day. She found herself wondering over and over again what he would think of things that happened to her, or wanting to tell him a story that would amuse him. And surely that is the sense, she thought, in which one might say that love is eternal. She was pleased when people spoke well of him in her hearing—and yet resentful, because she had no part, now, in his good qualities. And when she heard small accusations against him, she wondered whether she should contest them. But, for all she knew, they might be justified. That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground —or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.
She sympathized with his attitude. It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn’t cope with love. (In her experience, at any rate, it had always got out of hand. ) But, after all, it was the only state in which one could consider oneself normal; which engaged all one’s capacities, rather than just those developed by necessity—or shipwreck. One never realized how much was lacking until one fell in love again, because love —like pain, actually—couldn’t be properly remembered or conveyed.
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