A Man of Forty

by Gerald Bullet

  But it’s not any of these things, it’s nothing specific, that Brome is vaguely aware of having missed. Whatever it is, or isn’t, there is nearly always that faint gleam of expectancy in his eyes, as though at any moment, round the very next corner, he might come upon—what? Now, as I look at him, he is a point on a map, joined by a series of fine lines to numerous other points. He is like a station in one of those elaborate railway-systems which he used to be so fond of designing in the grain of his desk-lid at school. This is his pattern : a complicated and flowing pattern, for his relationships are with beings as real and mobile as himself, and if he is the conscious centre of a universe, so too are they, each man, woman, child among them. The flick of an eyelid, the fall of an acorn, is an event having endless repercussions in time and space : to know Brome fully we should have to know the entire universe, past and present. That inquiry will have to wait a bit. Meanwhile, here is Lydia, his wife; here is Eleanor Rook, his wife’s step-daughter ; here is Paul, his seven-year-old son. And in quite another corner of my fancy I find a small, plump woman, drably clothed, who leans over a scullery sink, and presently, hearing a knock at the door, wipes her hands on her apron and scuttles away. She is Katie Parzloe, who lives at Bell Green : we shall come to her in due time.

  § 3

  At the moment when Adam Swinford, having stepped into his dresstrousers, began wondering who besides the usual mob of pressmen and theatrical people would be at the Buckrams’ party ; at the moment when Miss Lily Elver, in her new gown, lipstick in hand, peered at her distorted reflection in the deal-framed rectangle of looking-glass that stood on her yellow chest of drawers ; at this moment, eight twenty-three of the clock on a Friday evening in late February, David Brome brought his car to a standstill outside Chiselbrook railway station, and switched off his headlamps. He glanced at his watch : not much more than a minute to go. Hardly worth while turning off the engine. Still, might as well. The pulse of the car ceased, and in the ensuing silence, an interval all his own, David Brome sat at ease, motionless, conscious of power wielded, of plans well carried out. A clear winter’s evening, a well-running car, no hurry, no hold-up, no waiting. Presently, at leisure, he would get out of the car and saunter up to the platform barrier. By the time he got there the train would be gliding in, and in another moment Adam Swinford would get out and come bouncing down the platform, looking searchingly towards him, his expressive open face ready to break into that amused impudent smile of his.

  There was not more than a dozen years difference in their ages, but David couldn’t help a little envying the young man his personal drive, his abounding energy, and above all the cool confidence that enabled him to take his pleasure with a good conscience. David himself, now officially idle, had not yet got used to the idea that he need do nothing. He fancied he never would get used to it. With no grindstone to set his nose to he felt he was living in a state of sin : the more so because he didn’t take to gardening quite as Lydia did. Partly it was Lydia’s eagerness that put him off it : Lydia’s busy, anxious, fussy enthusiasm and knowing all about it. She knew so much, or at least talked so fast, that it put him at a disadvantage, nipped his interest in the bud, made him feel like a schoolboy receiving more information than he could keep pace with. He would look at her blindly, with shut mind, waiting for the instructions to cease; and then, having done the thing differently, and perhaps wrongly, would oppose to her patient disappointment an equally patient despair, like that of a dumb suffering animal. I don’t want to criticize, dear, she would say ; but unless this and that and so-and-so they’ll just die, and you know how sorry you’ll be then. Only Lydia had this knack of making him feel stupid. And not only stupid but a brute and inconsiderate, a man who wouldn’t or couldn’t listen when spoken to. Perhaps that’s what wives are for, he thought, drawing his knees up, opening the door, twisting round in his seat to get his right foot on the running-board. They love and cherish us, and they make it clear that without their guidance we are helpless waifs, drifting on the tide of our own absent-minded follies. Too clear, for it hurts our vanity, that prodigious male vanity one hears so much about. Vanity unites us and vanity dissevers. In the beginning, to say I love you means You are marvellous. You are marvellous, he says. You are marvellous, she answers. And, male or female, we like that. We purr with pleasure. We are grateful. Our self-doubt is destroyed. I am marvellous. She says so. He says so. On this rock I will build my church. I mean my life, my future, my expanding self infinite in potentiality. So marriage, in the beginning, is a tacit agreement (the rest is not tacit, but that is) to say or to think You are marvellous. It is a mutual bolstering-up of two egos. But it can’t be kept going like that : for everyday living-together the assumption is too absolute. And what then? With the first doubt the illusion of perfection is doomed : it may carry on a precarious existence, but it is doomed. And then I love you means no longer You are marvellous. It means something less illusioned, more complicated, in a way kindlier, in a way more real. No, not more real ; all emotions are real when they happen. It means something we call friendship which is yet as different from friendship as it is from the first world-forgetting desire. It means, trite but true, that with all your faults I love you still, because to be loveless, unloving, is to be dark, lonely, afraid. It means a different compact : mutual tolerance instead of mutual flattery. And we don’t like that so well.

  The colour of these reflections, not themselves, drifted across David’s mind in the three seconds it took him to get himself out of the car. Brown gipsy was his unformulated thought of Lydia whenever the dim dissolving image of her image occurred in the procession ; and scrawny came as an unformulated afterthought. Peaked face, hair still lustrous black, lips tight and thin, greenish-brown eyes peering with a half-alarmed eagerness through rimless lenses : all this and much besides, the staunchness of her, the diligence, the earnestness, the unquietness, all this in her absence could be contained in a single coin of the mind, a visual feeling, complex of various images of which each was a symbol of an abstraction from her living reality.

  But now, as he strolled up to the ticket-collector’s stand, drawn there by the thunder of the incoming train, it was not Lydia who occupied his mind’s eye, and not even his little son Paul, whom an hour or two ago he had re-tucked up in bed and said good night to. Not these but Adam Swinford held the field : young, free, buoyant, sanguine, self-confident. A stimulating week-end was in prospect. Perhaps, too, a rather exhausting one. Adam was capable of talking the greatest nonsense. His mind was lively and unstable. He had an intemperate belief in the rightness of his own opinions ; and because (David thought) he had hardly begun to grow up, he acquired a new set of opinions every six months or so, opinions which he would then proceed to commend to you with the same passion as he had spent in denouncing them on his previous visit. He was a welcome but not a frequent visitor to Chiselbrook. David, who thought him superficial and liked him none the less for it, surmised that he had too many social irons in the fire to be able or willing to cultivate regularity in his relationships. Yes, he liked Adam : yet in some obscure fashion he always felt his coming as a challenge. Am I wiser than he, or merely slower, less vital? In a word, older. Train’s in to time. Good.

  “She’s in to time,” he said, nodding.

  “ Yezzir,“ said the ticket-collector, briefly showing his teeth.

  Slightly craning his neck David contrived to see down the length of the platform. He saw people getting out of the train. Adam was not among the first. It’d be quite like that erratic young devil to have missed the train. Not the first time he’s done it. The ticket-collector, though without directly looking at them, stood nodding at the passengers as they passed him. David knew the man, for though but recently settled as a permanent resident in this neighbourhood, it had been his and Lydia’s week-end resort for ten years.

  “Meeting a visitor, sir?” said the ticket-collector, making conversation.

  “If he’s come,” said David dubiously. “ Quite a cro
wd tonight.”

  “Tickets, please. Ah, it’s a favourite, this one.”

  “Only decent down train of the day.”

  “What about the five fifty-four? That’s a nice train, that is, the five fifty-four,” the man said, in a warm coaxing tone. “One at a time, lady, if you please.”

  For no reason the situation seemed odd to David Brome : himself talking with this uniformed figure while the passengers, all sorts and sizes, filed past them. It was like having a friendly chat with a prison warder, or a menagerie-man, or a shepherd of sheep. What curious questing spirits cower in these bundles of haberdashery? All naked underneath. Putty-coloured bipeds with pale pink faces and sedentary rumps. Crying we come and sighing we go : it’s all done with wires. Adam, where art thou? Missed the train. What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? Pump, bellows, milling machine, and twelve feet of tubing : with minor accessories. All dressed up and nowhere to go. Just like him to miss the train. David scowled, feeling flat and defeated, sociability quenched, prospect of driving back alone, pattern of the evening spoilt, Lydia’s guest-supper waiting and no guest.

  “Looks like rain,” said the ticket-collector.

  “Good for the garden,” said David. Shall I wait for the next? Or go back?

  Clouds massed in the sky. The air was cool and grey with little gusts. David’s view embraced the platform and all it contained. Two late stragglers were getting out of the train. One was a man : oldish, not Adam. The other was a female, with a porter in attendance, carrying luggage. They came towards him, and suddenly, but without sense of shock or change, the colour of his feeling became heavenly blue. She came past him, a young woman, a girl, beautiful. She gave up her ticket and went by, leaving a silence in him. No, he’s not here. Where the bright seraphim in burning row. No good waiting.

  “When’s the next?” he asked moodily.

  “Nine-fifty, sir. Slow.”

  “An hour and a quarter. I shan’t wait,” said David.

  But the expectation of meeting Adam Swinford irrationally lingered for a moment, in face of the plain evidence. David went on the platform, as if to make sure that the fellow had not come. Reluctance to go back to an empty evening—for he hated an enforced change of plan—inspired the pretence that Adam was in the train asleep, or too deeply engrossed in thought to observe where he was, or with the lordly unruffled deliberation he sometimes affected was languidly collecting his belongings from the rack before deigning to alight from his carriage, or had gone to the platform lavatory, or was dawdling at the bookstall (which in fact was shut). All wanton hypotheses, and insincere. He watched the train out, then turned away from the void that was left and went back to his car. It was the only stationary car in sight.

  The night was growing gusty, little coils of wind rose and fell. In the sky, rain-clouds were gathering, a smoky swarm. As he opened the car door and stooped to get in, David saw out of the tail of his eye that the last passenger, with a porter still in charge of her luggage, was standing near the station entrance. It was easy to guess that she was a visitor waiting to be met by her hosts. David stood undecided for a moment : the notion that presented itself to him made him feel diffident, boyishly self-effacing. Yet, beautiful though the girl was, to offer his services seemed no more than ordinary civility.

  Reluctantly, eagerly, he moved towards her. As he came within speaking distance the porter encouraged him with a look of welcome, and said something to the girl, who thereupon turned her eyes towards him.

  Being hatless, he could not salute her ceremonially. “ I don’t know if…” He tried again, failed to achieve a formula, and then said bluntly : “ Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

  The sound of his own voice, a man’s voice, deep and unhurried, betraying nothing of his shyness, restored him to himself.

  She smiled with cool friendliness. “ You don’t remember me. I’m Mary Wilton.”

  He remembered a pale, silent, coldly beautiful child. Now—in how many years? Three was it? four was it?—he could still see, or surmise, that child in this young woman : her face had the same startling perfection. But something new there was ...

  “I remember perfectly,” he said. But added to himself only : I’ve never seen you before. I’ve never seen you smile before.

  She looked unbelieving, amused. “ What a fib!”

  Her ease with him made shyness impossible. He laughed, saying : “ You’re Dr. Hinksey’s niece.”

  “Granddaughter,” she answered.

  “Of course. Well, Dr. Hinksey’s granddaughter,” said David blandly, “ can I give you a lift?” He became aware of the watchful, half-smirking porter, and was constrained to add : “ I’m David Brome.”

  “They must have forgotten me,” she said. “ They’re like that in my family.”

  David made a sign to the porter to put the trunk into his car. “ I suppose they won’t turn up after we’ve gone?” What doubt, what premonition, made him say that? “ But if they do, that’s their lookout, isn’t it?” he said, laughing nervously.

  He opened the car door for her, and took his place at the wheel. The car began moving. She sat at ease, quite unselfconscious, and unconscious, it almost seemed, of him. She broke silence at length only to murmur a hope that she wasn’t taking him out of his way. Fortunately she was, he answered. He stole a half-glance at her profile, and the trumpets sounded, the morning stars sang together. Immortal spirit conjured out of clay. He grinned at himself. Don’t be silly. It’s all done with wires.

  “You’re younger than you used to be,” he remarked.

  “Odd,” she said, with cool humour.

  “Where have you been all this time? Must be four years since I saw you last.”

  “Saw me first, too.”

  “ What?”

  “We’ve only met once before,” she explained. “ You came to see my grandfather, and I was around.”

  “Yes. You’re not the same now, though. You’ve grown younger,” he said, labouring his point. I’m being tedious, he thought; and to mitigate the fault he hurriedly said : “ I haven’t seen much of your grandfather lately, though we’re permanent neighbours now. In a way. Only eight or nine miles between us.” Receiving no answer he added, with an air of finality : “ In short, I live here.”

  She said : “ Do you?” and smiled faintly, acknowledging the information. Her friendliness seemed curiously negative, asking and giving nothing, and taking admiration for granted. If a man were seriously interested in her, he thought, this detachment would be maddening. But as things are it doesn’t matter a damn. I’m not going to think seriously of a girl of—what? Twenty-one or twenty-two she must be. Nor, for that matter, any other girl either. I’ve done with all that. Learnt my lesson. She sees me as a middle-aged man—almost. I must remember that. To David, who felt precisely no age at all, this thought was astonishing : only by an imaginative effort could he achieve it, this seeing of himself through the eyes of a young girl.

  The road to Radnage Hollow, where old Hinksey lived, with his dogs and his horses and his comparatively young wife, became narrow and winding so soon as the outskirts of the little town were left behind. David switched on both headlamps, and with the change this made in the world his momentary agitation subsided. The sensation of being a luminous body tunnelling through darkness, the rush of the road towards him, the dark enamelled green of grass-verge and hurrying hedge, gave a dream quality to the outer world. He felt himself to be enclosed in a timeless travelling moment. Mary Wilton, after a silence he had made no further attempt to break, picked up his disregarded question and answered it, telling him she was just back from America, and had left her mother there.

  “My mother is marrying again,” she said. “ I left her to it.”

  She spoke coolly, lightly, as though of a trifle. He wondered what she really felt about it. Tragic? Jealous? Disappointed? Or just nothing? Impossible to tell. Was it a mask or a face she wore? Inconveniently lovely, whichever it was. But that, said David Brome, is no c
oncern of mine. Nor shall be, world without end.

  § 4

  Miss Camshaw, on her way through the workroom, came slowly to a pause at Lily Elver’s table. She accepted the convention that it was unwise to risk her authority by being too friendly with the girls, and she knew it to be still more unwise, even dangerous, to have favourites among them. But now that the firm had waxed prosperous, so that she was no longer required to be part-time supervisor as well as designer, occasions of official contact with the girls were rare, and she held herself excused from a too rigid regard for discipline. As an artist she could afford to stand a little aloof from such things; for though she was now retained on the staff, at a comfortable salary, the freelance’s bias towards complete independence was still strong in her.