“What about you?”
Pretending not to have heard her answer, he made her repeat it, as they entered the house together.
Pushing open the dining-room door she said, with face averted : “ I didn’t feel hungry.”
His guilt was redoubled. Anger began smouldering in him. It was mean of her, he thought, to punish him by starving herself. But he did not let his thought appear. He set himself to the task of making her feel a little happier. How to do this without hypocrisy was an artificial problem, for this mood in her of disillusioned hope made him remember the more vividly how different things would have been if he had been able to play the part she had expected of him. Whether he liked it or not, he was enough at one with her to suffer her pangs as well as his own. He did not ask himself if he loved her : the question would have been meaningless. The salient fact was that she was Lydia, the living embodiment of a substantial part of his past and therefore of himself. What presently he must tell her, and how, was a problem he could not bring himself to face yet, though faced it must be before the day was out. To sleep unconfessed, now that affairs had reached a decisive point, was more than he was capable of. But at the moment that problem must be put aside : he was concentrated on saving what he could from the wreck of the day’s plans.
“Well, if you’re not hungry, nor am I. How about that?” He tried to achieve a brisk, easy, bantering air. “ And we shan’t enjoy the play on an empty stomach.”
“We shan’t enjoy it at all. We shan’t go to it.”
“What do you mean, Lydia? It’s all arranged. I’ve got the tickets. You… we’ve been looking forward to it. And, besides, we always do go.”
“That’s no reason. Anyhow, we can’t get there in time.”
Guiltily he eyed the clock. “ I know what we’ll do, darling. We’ll have something on the train. Look, we can just do it, if we go now.”
“What does it matter, David? I hate a rush.” But she was weakening.
“Can you be ready in two minutes? Two minutes—not a second more.”
“Do you really want to go?”
“Of course. Of course. Come down to the gate as soon as you’re ready. I’ll be getting the car out.” But he watched her out of the room, thinking : where the devil did I put those tickets? Buy some more if I can’t find them. And if the house is full I’ll buy the damned theatre. This is desperate. For the moment he had almost forgotten Mary. His dominant thought was that Lydia must not be cheated of her day.
But Mary came back. With every small crisis past—finding the tickets, starting the car, catching the train—she advanced a further stage towards repossessing his heart and mind. The tickets were in precisely the right pigeonhole of his desk; as he might have known, being a person of methodical habit. The engine was still warm; they caught the train with five minutes to spare, and took their seats in the restaurant car as the second lunch was about to begin. In an hour and a half they would be occupying two stalls in a snug, old-fashioned theatre. Tea would be served in the second interval, and Lydia would carry the programme home as a memento of the occasion.
Everything, outwardly, was much the same as on previous anniversaries. Inwardly, too, it was the same, with but one difference. And the difference was a great gulf which he could not bridge. He half-wanted to bridge it : for Lydia’s sake, yes, but for his own, too. But to bridge the gulf would have been a double betrayal, since already in his heart he knew that he was ultimately destined to widen it. That knowledge, that bitter knowledge, was the morning’s legacy : it lay as yet in a corner of his mind, not squarely faced, not definitely formulated. And now, with the immediate situation retrieved, Lydia’s little outing being assured to her, he was able to think again of Mary, and could think of nothing else, except to hope, fitfully, that the impossible would happen : that Lydia would somehow enjoy this occasion without much concerning herself with its ostensible meaning.
Sitting opposite her in the dining-car, he leaned across the table to say, hopefully : “ It’s rather fun, don’t you think, going up to town for a matinée?”
She met his glance and smiled, half-eagerly, half-wistfully, afraid to believe in her luck. He felt a cad, and wished he hadn’t spoken, wished they hadn’t come, wished this were any day but the day it was.
Yet he heard himself say : “ Makes it all the more amusing, the scramble, now it’s over.”
“Yes,” said Lydia.
There was still constraint between them. Though each was willing to break it down, neither could quite do so. Presently Lydia spoke again, wishing to build a raft of small talk that would carry them to safety.
“Did you get all your shopping done?”
“No. I didn’t get as far as Chiselbrook. The road was flooded.”
He saw her surprise, and wondered at it. He thought it must have been obvious to her that he had spent the morning with Mary. For so many days, and with such concentration, he had been thinking of Mary, living in her invisible presence, that Lydia must surely have been aware of her too. Yet here she was, pretending ignorance. The next minute he knew he had misjudged her. It was the mention of floods that had puzzled her; for they had just traversed the road from home to Chiselbrook station without encountering anything more than a shallow trickle overflowing from a ditch.
“I went to Radnage,” he explained, “ and called on the Hinkseys.”
“Oh, did you? How are they?”
“He was out riding. Joyce was at home, the same as ever. And Mary, of course. We set off for Chiselbrook, but couldn’t get through the floods. At least we didn’t. I thought it wasn’t worth while.”
“You mean you and…?” She paused, leaving the question indeterminate.
“And Mary, yes.” David glanced out of the window, at the gliding landscape. “ Very low-lying down there. We came to a stream, a couple of feet deep I should think.”
“And you didn’t cross the stream?” asked Lydia in a curiously level tone.
He gave her a quick glance. “ No. Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?” she echoed.
He smiled uncomfortably. He longed to reassure her. He wished it were not so necessary to refrain from reassuring her.
“It depends, I suppose,” he said, “ on what one means by crossing the stream.”
She looked at him intently. There was a self-defensive hardness in her eyes, and in the thin line of her mouth.
“Yes, David,” she said, making an effort to be gentle. “ But we know what we mean. Don’t we?” It was a challenge, not a question.
Her day, he thought despairingly, was ruined. And how much else? But he made one more stubborn attempt, having eaten his cake, to have it still uneaten.
“Look, Lydia. Let’s talk about that after the show, shall we? Pity to spoil our day out.”
“That will be fun, won’t it!”
He winced at her tone. Only suffering could make her so contemptuous. Recognizing the fatuity of his remark, he could still see no other tolerable, way of proceeding. The alternative was to take the next train home again as soon as they reached the terminus. To tear up the theatre tickets and go home. Home : that complex living entity of which he and Lydia, Paul and Eleanor, were component parts, and which now, by an act that nothing could avert, he must destroy. In face of the glory that beckoned him he dared not falter. This pain, Lydia’s and his own, was a price that must be paid, and paid quickly. He wished he could have paid it all, and spared her; but to falter and fumble and live on with her in misery would spare her nothing, except this sharp and untimely beneficent surgery. Previous experiences, false starts, half-hearted writhings towards freedom, had taught him that much. I must make Mary my own for ever, he said. Since we love each other she is already mine. The chance will never come again. He remembered Mary’s mouth on his own, the curve of her breasts, the softness and savour of her skin. The chance will never come again. Never again, said the throbbing engine. Here, now, in this moment of mortal time, I must go up into the high mountain, and the
hard bud in my being, the frozen flower, will break and spend itself. Spend itself, yet never be spent, till death do us part.
If I hesitate now, he said, I am damned for ever. If I lose her, I become in that instant an old man drifting to the grave. But he could not look at Lydia. He could not, with steady eyes, contemplate what Lydia must suffer. She would still have Paul, Paul and Eleanor; and in time she would get used to the new life, settle into it, perhaps even enjoy it. His heart turned to water at the thought of leaving Paul. But it was Lydia’s desolation that hurt him most. Paul, after all, was a child, infinitely adaptable. The whole wretched business would pass over that small head unnoticed.
§ 3
At the top of the house was a large attic-room, a room which young Paul liked to pretend was a boat : that was one of the games he and Eleanor played together up there.
Sometimes they called it the boat, sometimes the playroom, sometimes the cross room : according to Paul’s whim. It had begun as a cross room : which is to say, a room for Paul to be cross in. One afternoon a scowl of peculiar fixedness was seen to darken the child’s face, and when asked what he was doing he answered : “ I’m being cross.” He then stamped out of the room and was seen no more for the best part of an hour. Eleanor found him, eventually, in the lumber-filled attic, where with dust-sheet and an old clothes-horse he had rigged up a tent for himself. There he sat enclosed, diligently enjoying his wrath, feeling lonely and solemn and important. He had been alone often enough before, sometimes with a tinge of fear, sometimes only with discontent; but never before had he been alone with himself, never savoured the astonishing fact of his solitary consciousness. For a week or two he made a habit of “ being cross “ at intervals and retiring to his sanctuary. It delighted him that his elders were amused by the performance, which, nevertheless, though passing for a game, was entirely serious on his part. Under the warm sweet flattery of adult attention his sense of ego expanded deliciously. Since that day the lumber in the attic had been sorted out, and much of it removed; so that now there was a room for games more sociable and more constructive than being cross. David and Lydia welcomed the idea of Paul having a room of his own to play in. But in cold weather, when an oil stove was necessary, someone had to be with him; and that someone was most often Eleanor, with whom, as a rule, he kept up an incessant conversation.
This afternon, however, he was being unusually silent.
“Come along, Paul. It’s time we went for our walk.”
Sitting on the floor, and surrounded by a medley of articles recently dragged out of his toy-cupboard, Paul gave no sign of hearing this admonition. At his elbow stood a white wooden horse, upon whose mane he rested his left hand. In front of him, occupying most of the available floor-space, a Village of small houses was in process of construction. He built with plasticine, cigarette cards, and some wooden bricks which, in an unusual variety of shapes and sizes, his father had had made for him by the village carpenter. At present operations were at a standstill. The ground plan, sketched out in a single line of bricks, straggled uncertainly over the lino, reflecting its author’s mood. Paul sat looking at his work from under knitted brows.
Eleanor, endlessly patient, watched him and waited for his answer. She supposed that he hated to be interrupted when planning something, and she did not know whether to interpret his slight frown as puzzlement or as annoyance with herself. Her devotion to him, as much maternal as sisterly, took the form of an irrational assurance that he was destined to be some kind of creative artist : perhaps a sculptor, perhaps an architect, perhaps a painter or a poet. Eleanor had read her Wordsworth, but she had too much humour and common sense to let Paul suspect for one moment that she saw in him a mighty prophet, a seer blest. The salient fact for her was that he was a little boy who had to be coaxed, managed, and controlled. The mighty prophet must be encouraged to evacuate his bowels at proper intervals; the seer blest must not come to the table with dirty hands; and it was important, she believed, that he on whom those truths did rest which we were toiling all our lives to find should be taken out for a walk every fine day of the year.
Getting no answer to her suggestion, she repeated it.
“Come along, darling. Our nice walk.”
Without looking up from the floor, Paul said : “ Where’s Daddy gone?”
“I told you, Paul. You know very well.”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t tell me. Where’s he gone?”
“Oh, Paul, that’s naughty.” Eleanor became a little plaintive. “ You know I told you, again and again.”
“Tell me another again,” said Paul.
“He’s taken Mummy to the theatre. You know perfectly well. That’s why we had lunch early.”
“Why did we have lunch early?”
“Because Daddy and Mummy were going to town, to the theatre.”
“Why did we?”
“Why did we what?”
“Why did we have lunch early because Mummy and Daddy were going to town?”
What did the child mean? What logical bee was buzzing in his bonnet? Could it be that he saw the fatal disconnection between his lunching early and his parents’ going to town?”
“Just because,” said Eleanor, deliberately obstructionist.
“ Because what, Ellie?” said Paul, still scowling at the floor.
“Because they wanted to catch the train.”
“Did they have lunch early too?”
“I don’t know,” said Eleanor, hedging.
It was untrue. She had seen David and Lydia drive off to the station within a few minutes of his entering the house : it was therefore impossible that they should have eaten lunch. Eleanor said to herself that she was tired of this quibbling conversation. What did it matter anyhow? Yet she knew in her heart that it did matter. It did somehow matter that Mummy had insisted on Paul’s taking his midday meal half an hour before his accustomed time, not waiting for the tardy David. It meant that David had hurt and offended her and was being punished in this way. But how could Paul know that? Perhaps because Paul was in some sense being punished too. It was fun for Paul to have a meal with Eleanor, just the two of them together. It was fun, but it was unusual; and Mother’s manner in ordaining it had boded something not good. Paul had caught sight of her look, her sharp-set face, and perhaps for the first time he saw her as something separable from David his father. It flashed upon him, though he did not formulate the idea, that David was in disgrace; and with that vague, infinitely distant intimation of unimaginable things, the foundations of his world, far down in the darkness, began rocking.
Eleanor was a conscientious young woman, especially in her dealings with Paul. She repented her equivocation. How, she asked, could one expect the child to be truthful himself if one told him lies?
“I think,” she said, “ they went off without any lunch. Won’t they be hungry, poor things!”
But Paul was no longer attending to her answers. For reasons of his own he had given her up. Suddenly he spread his arms wide and made a clean sweep of the wooden bricks. All his work was undone. He set himself to begin again, this time less ambitiously, with a single house : house, courtyard, garden.
“You can finish that after tea, Paul,” said Eleanor coaxing. “ If we don’t go for our walk soon, it’ll be getting dark. And then all the cows will be gone home. You won’t like not seeing the cows, will you? Where shall we go today, Paul? Shall we go to see Mr. Thorpe and ask him if he can mend our shoes for us? That’ll be fun, won’t it? Put your bricks away—no, you can leave them till we get back, and then make a fine house for all of us to live in. With stables for three ponies, eh?”
Paul didn’t listen, but he knew that Eleanor was talking, and talking, and wanting him to do what he wouldn’t do. A profound irrational instinct made it impossible that he should consent to go out today. Behind his patient smiles and considering looks was an iron resolve masking a faceless terror. For days now, for weeks, there had been a strange invisible presence in the house : a p
resence invisible at least to Paul, though it was not so certain that Mummy and Dad couldn’t see it, since they sat so often with averted eyes, and never quite looked at each other, and talked with careful cheerful voices, and seemed to try by these devices to ignore it, whatever it was. And in the process of ignoring it they had become somehow severed, in Paul’s imagination; they had become two slightly strange people, no longer parts of the complex comforting reality in which he lived and had his being. Two slightly strange people, and the stranger for being so familiar, so taken for granted, so unquestionably Mummy and Dad. Something had come into the house and something had gone out of it; yet, for all that, the house, every corner of it, every room, every smoothly turned chair-leg, every picture in its place, every mark and stain on the playroom lino, every shining stair-rod, every square-foot of patterned carpet in dining-room and hall, this solid immovable house was still here, still his, a rock of salvation, something he must not let go of. Dad and Mummy had gone to somewhere called town, to something called the theatre, if Eleanor was to be believed. What then? Many a time before they had gone out together, leaving him, and had always come back. Both of them had come back. They would come back this time, yes : Paul did not get so far as consciously supposing the contrary. And at moments he was almost relieved by their absence, by the absence of these two new frightening people who seemed never to look at each other and who were kind to him still, but separately, and with effort, hiding something. By changing, by being different, they had gone before they went; and if he were to consent to go walking with Eleanor, how could he be sure of finding the way back, to what still remained to him, the house, the two houses : the house that was his home and this other house that he was on the point of building on his playroom floor?
Eleanor took him firmly by the hand. “ Didn’t you hear me, Paul? Come and let me put your shoes on.”
“No,” said Paul.
“Come along now! We’re going to see Mr. Thorpe.”
“No,” said Paul. “ Don’t want to go out.”
A Man of Forty Page 5