A Man of Forty

by Gerald Bullet

  Eleanor was irritated but curious. She could not remember that Paul had ever before refused to go out for a walk. Just in time, she prevented the fateful words You must from passing her lips, words that would have obliged her to carry him if necessary, carry him kicking and screaming out of the house, rather than go back on her word. With Paul she made few promises and fewer threats; but what she promised or threatened she infallibly carried out. If he didn’t want to go out, there must be a reason; and where could the reason be but in his tummy?

  “Don’t you feel well, darling?”

  Paul had shaken his hand free and was now building his house at high speed.

  “Where’ve they gone?” he asked, with a slanting glance at her.

  “Who?” said Eleanor. Seing his charm, his innocence, his cunning (if that was what it was, but one could never be sure), she suddenly wanted to shake him, to shatter that exasperating composure.

  He supplemented his question. “ Have they gone to town?”

  “Really, Paul!” Even Eleanor’s patience was wearing thin. “ How many more times do you want to be told?”

  “But have they?” said Paul, with a stubborn crooked smile.

  “Now you’re being just silly,” said Eleanor firmly. “ I shan’t talk to you about it any more.”

  “Have they, have they, have they, have they?” cried Paul, rushing at her furiously.

  She caught hold of him, pushed him away. “ If you don’t stop being silly, Paul, I shall go out of the room.”

  For answer, Paul burst into tears. They were angry tears; his daemon was offended. So much was. clear to Eleanor. But what else this weeping portended she was at a loss to know. She did not go out of the room, for she argued that this last was not the kind of silliness her ultimatum had referred to, if indeed it counted as silliness at all. What a problem Paul was! So were all children, she supposed, but Paul especially : it was part of his peculiar distinction. Sometimes she grew weary of having to concern herself with it, yet feeling how different things would be if only she had someone to share it with. She did in fact share it : with Mother above all, and indirectly (through Mother) with David. But that wasn’t by a long way the same as the sharing she sometimes enjoyed in moments of dreaming abstraction, when someone not clearly defined, someone perhaps a little like David but significantly not David, came and put his arms round her and led her to the cot in the night-nursery (its walls would be decorated with nursery-rhyme characters in pastel’ colours), and stood with her, embracing her, looking down on their sleeping child. His cough is better today. Beginning to say real words. Notices everything.

  When she came to think of her situation Eleanor was tempted for a moment to feel sorry for herself. For here she was, with a stepmother, a stepmother’s husband, and a strange little boy : here she was, an alien in the family. Somewhere in the world were blood-relations of hers, an aunt and some cousins ; but these, having seen her once or twice in her babyhood, had shown no further interest in her. Nor did she particularly want them to : it was only that she a little resented (when she thought of it) being different from other girls.

  There was no time, fortunately, to think of that now. Paul cried vigorously; and when the wailing threatened to die away he re-started it, with a visble effort. Moreover, his nose wanted wiping. Eleanor found his handkerchief for him, and he submitted to the operation without protest. When it was completed he somehow forgot to begin crying again.

  The quarrel was over. He returned to his building. Round the garden of the house he built a high wall.

  “Oughtn’t you to put a gate in the wall?*’ Eleanor said.

  Paul smiled at her and shook his head : first slowly, then fast, with lips tight closed. Eleanor perceived that he was now playing the Dumb Game.

  “But every garden wall has a gate, Paul,” she said.

  Portentous nods, followed by equally portentous head-shakings. She smiled goodhumouredly, if a little wearily, and decided to postpone further inquiry until it should please Paul to recover the faculty of speech. By maintaining a careful silence during the next five minutes, which didn’t at all suit Paul’s book, she succeeded in hastening this recovery.

  Presently Eleanor said : “ If there’s no gate in the wall, how can people get in?”

  “They’re in already.”

  “Then how can they get out?”

  Paul’s glance fell. “ They don’t want to get out,” he said angrily.

  § 4

  In the theatre David’s resolution began to waver. He did not doubt that Mary was his destiny, the sum of his desire; nor that she, by some miracle, reciprocated his passion. She had said little enough in words, but in the language of looking and touching she had said everything. Her silences were part of her peculiar essence ; and to feel that still, flowerlike loveliness burst into flame was an intoxication such as he had never known or dreamed of. After those first kisses he had overflowed into words, perhaps impelled by a need to assure himself that she meant what she seemed to mean. She answered not at all, or in monosyllables, except to say once, half-humorously : “ What are you going to do about it?” What he was going to do about it was already plain to him ; but must he do it now, to-day? Sitting in the darkened auditorium, very conscious of Lydia brooding and suffering at his side, and undistracted by what was happening on the lighted stage, he wondered whether it was necessary or sensible to attempt to tell her today. The whole thing being so new, wouldn’t it be ridiculously premature, hasty, impolitic? Had he already a precise plan, and if not wasn’t it better to wait? On the other hand, wouldn’t waiting make the situation more intolerable?

  David doesn’t, as yet, explicitly debate within himself; but he is conscious of the drift within him, this way and that, of indecision. Yet his utlimate resolution holds : he says to himself, almost in as many words, I must possess her or die. But to possess, what is it? And to die, what is that? In such a man as David Brome, a man in whom spirit and flesh are not visibly at war, the desire for a woman as yet unachieved is different in kind from all other desires. Let its mechanism be what it may, itself is as far from mere appetite as the end proposed is far from mere pleasure. Only the half-man, the vulgarian, can think of possession in terms of pleasure. The fact and the act are implicit in David’s desire, but the desire goes deeper and soars higher than any act can take it. It is a desire for escape, the escape into eternity. Imagination, though moving towards it and hovering round it, stops short of entering the holy of holies, the moment of time-annihilating ecstasy to which—so, dimly, dumbly, he feels or thinks—this mortal shall put on immortality. To possess her, then, will be nothing less than that, that abundant life, that contact with the eternal. And not to possess her, never to have possessed her, will be death, the death of the heart. In the moment that I forgo her, he says, I betray myself, I am old and done for. This is the recurring burden of his thoughts. If I will have it so, he says, life begins for me now, in Mary’s love. If I remain tethered I am a dying man, profiting no one. Why can’t Lydia see that? he says. Why can’t she stand away from the situation and see it clearly? But perhaps she can. Perhaps she does.

  So here is David, and here is Lydia, each a world and each alone : They sit side by side in the dark theatre, and something sits with them that can’t be dismissed as illusion, though its reality is a matter of faith. In a sense, a sense we need not explore at this moment, all mortal life is illusion ; but this third presence with David and Lydia, this living cumulus of common memories, is at least as real as anything else in human experience. Each tries not to regard it : in which endeavour Lydia, fiercely reviling herself as an unlovable woman (I knew it before and this proves it, she says), and as fiercely extolling herself for her unexampled devotion as a wife (he’s shallow and heartless, all my love wasted), is more successful than David, who can’t help glancing, now and again, at pictures of the past in which Lydia figures as an attractive, bright-eyed young woman, with warm colour flushing her ivory skin. They read verse together in thos
e days, and in his resolve to romanticize their pleasant but unecstatic friendship he used to call her The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and other foolish things best forgotten. They are best forgotten, because to remember them makes him feel how stubborn he was, how wilful, in his unrealism, his smothering of wholesome doubts. If he were to recall only the sentimentalities of that carefully sustained situation, he would feel a positive eagerness, to dissolve the resultant marriage. But marriage, as he feels it, is not merely the effect of a cause, is not a static situation : it is a cumulative thing, a daily interchange of being. Seven childless years, years of persevering affection and diminishing romantic illusion, brought him near breaking-point. Though he was fond of his wife’s little stepdaughter, Eleanor Rook, he was angry with himself for having taken on a ready-made family. Besides, there was a girl, wasn’t there? ... At this moment, so many years after, and with Mary in possession of him, David can hardly remember Lucy’s name, though he remembers her charm and her quality vividly enough. Even now, when he recalls her, he feels a breath of the old enchantment. Yes, even now; for that a man can’t love more than one woman at a time is the great romantic lie we wilfully impose on ourselves. Love is a variable and maturing relationship ; and though it is impossible for David or any man to be at the same stage of love with any two persons, his potential loves, subject to that proviso, are limited only by his heart’s capacity. In the eighth year of his marriage David came near to eloping with Lucy. What prevented him was Lydia’s announcement that she was at last with child. At almost any other time he would have been delighted beyond measure; but that hope deferred had made his heart sick, and by this time he wanted, not a child, but a new woman. When the child was born, that complicated everything, including of course his emotions ; and he grew reconciled to the loss of Lucy, though not to the fact of his bondage.

  “Would you like tea?” asked David, in the first interval.

  “No, thank you,” said Lydia coldly.

  Another blunder : he ought to have ordered tea without consulting her. Being unhappy, she was resolved to accentuate her un-happiness by the physical discomfort of going without her accustomed cup of tea.

  “I should like some,” he said. “ In the second interval, I think. Won’t you change your mind, Lydia?”

  “Oh… just as you please,” said Lydia. After a moment’s silence she said : “ Do you want to see the play out?”

  He gave a slight start. “ Don’t you like it?”

  “I don’t care for it much. Do you?”

  “Well, it’s amusing, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Of course,” he said, trying to lure her into neutral conversation, “ It won’t bear looking at closely. It’s flimsy and machine-made. But the acting’s pretty good. And even a poor play is better than any film, don’t you think?”

  Lydia did not answer.

  “Unless that’s merely middle-aged conservatism,” said David, with a smile.

  Retrospectively he listened to his voice speaking, and thought : My God, how polite, how false, how self-conscious! He wished the play were at an end, so that they could decently withdraw and go home, no matter what awaited them there. Lydia could keep up polite appearances when she liked, but to-day, evidently, she was in no mood to play pretty and pretend that everything was as usual. The strain of the past few weeks had wrought havoc in her : she was desperately resolved to make an end of indecision and suspense. Until she could speak to some purpose, therefore, she would be silent.

  This was how David read her, and so far as he went he was right. The fact that she was bitterly unhappy, as he knew too well, made him wince and wish to spare her ; but her silence, which had the effect of a perpetual reproach, made him feel like a felon in the presence of his judge. This he resented, and this modicum of resentment kept his resolution alive.

  So the afternoon dragged on. In the second interval the arrival of the tea-tray created a moment’s diversion. Lydia sipped her tea, but would eat nothing. She was civil and unsmiling. David watched her with guilty solicitude. He knew he was cutting a ridiculous figure, and this knowledge went with him into the street, rode with him in the taxi to the station, and sat by his side in the home-going train. The nervous husband, wanting to be released from his bargain. The nervous, obsequious husband. At moments he came near to hating Lydia for making him feel like that.

  For the first five minutes they had a compartment to themselves. And presently Lydia broke her long silence to say : “ Well, David?”

  She had a sort of smile on her lips, but he did not much like the look of it.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What is it you want to tell me?”

  He glanced out of the window, while he searched for words. The train was moving into a station.

  “We’ll talk this evening,” he said.

  The train stopped. Someone got in.

  § 5

  Evening of the same day. A little after half-past nine. At last they are alone together, these two, alone in the low-ceiled, friendly sitting-room, which they’ve always taken such pleasure in. Supper is over, and Eleanor, for reasons of her own, has just gone to bed. David sits with a book in his lap. Lydia, opposite him, is sewing. With averted head she sits and sews, shutting herself away. For a few moments after the door has closed behind Eleanor, David remains motionless, staring ahead. Then, with sharp emphasis, he shuts his book and lets it fall on the floor beside him. The small noise, in this conscious silence, has the effect of violence. But a glance at Lydia shows him that she will not help him. A wave of despairing anger breaks in his mind, but he gets out of his chair with exaggerated quietness and stands looking down at her bent, dark head.

  David stands looking down at Lydia. And Lydia is aware of the scrutiny but will not (he thinks) look up, will not alter her posture, will not drop her infernal sewing, in fact will do nothing but oppose to his pleading a stubborn silence. In his face is no hint of the fury that her attitude rouses in him. He has learnt by long practice the habit of control; but what if by some mischance the control is snapped? David seems to be, and normally is, the mildest, the most patient of men; but the very fact that with Lydia he drives himself on so tight a rein holds dangerous possibilities.

  “I expect you know what I have to tell you,” said David, with deliberate quietness.

  “Do you?” said Lydia.

  “It’s about Mary Wilton,” said David.

  “That doesn’t altogether surprise me.”

  Though he thought he heard contempt in her voice, he contrived to answer without change of tone :

  “I suppose not. It must have been pretty obvious.”

  “ You’re very transparent, David. Even Paul can see through you.”

  “Paul? What do you mean? Has he said something?”

  Lydia put down her sewing and met his harassed glance. “ Are you in love with her?”

  He was surprised. “ Why, of course! That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

  “I mean,” said Lydia, coldly patient, “ are you seriously in love with her? Or is she just another Lucy? It’s so difficult to know, with you. You find it so easy to lose your heart. It comes of having such a loving nature, no doubt. I’m not criticizing : I only want to know.”

  “It is serious, yes,” said David.

  He refused to be drawn into a discussion of the Lucy episode, though his mind already bristled at the threat of it. She had dragged Lucy into the conversation merely to put him out of countenance and discredit his passion for Mary Wilton. No love is valid that is not everlasting : that was Lydia’s dogma. The fact that David had thought himself in love more than once was proof positive, she would argue, that he had never “ really “ been in love at all. And David himself was conventional enough, and self-distrustful enough, to feel that every such episode remembered against him did somehow weaken his position and cast some doubt on the genuineness of his emotions. But another and maturer part of him rebelled against that suggestion. If you
looked at the thing coolly, with detachment, it seemed both natural and inevitable that one’s desire for something beyond reach should in time become infected—and at last identified—with the misery of its own non-fulfilment, and so dwindle to vanishing-point. The alternative was an obstinate perseverance in self-torture that could only end in neurosis or actual madness. In Lydia’s eyes it was a reproach to David that he had ever loved Lucy, and equally a reproach that he had ever stopped loving Lucy. There was a nice irony—but he hadn’t the calm of mind to enjoy it—in the fact that his inconstancy to Lucy should be used as a debating-point against him by Lydia.

  “I see,” said Lydia. “ It’s serious. For how long?”

  He saw, with a pang, that the malice had gone out of her inquisition : this question masked a wistful hope.

  “For how long? How do I know?” But he did know, or thought he knew. He was merely trying to soften the blow by appearing cool and reasonable. “ If I were to go by what I feel——”

  “Yes,” said Lydia quickly, “ what you feel. There’s nothing else to go by.”

  David answered : “ It’s painfully simple. I’m possessed by her. To live without her would be unreal, a kind of death.”

  She confronted him with a tortured smile. “ Let’s leave it at that, David. I understand perfectly.”

  “Do you?” said David. “ I’m not so sure.”

  The past rose up before him, the past he had shared with Lydia. The thing he had done, the words he had spoken, seemed monstrous. Yet it was true, what he had said. It was real. Or wasn’t it? Was anything so real as Lydia’s suffering and his own?

  “I’m not sure you do understand,” said David again. “ Because what I’ve told you is only half of it. It isn’t that I feel differently for you. It’s only——”

  She interrupted him. “ No, you don’t feel differently for me. You feel the same as you’ve always felt—a sort of tired friendship. You think I’m going to be unhappy, and so I am, and that’s a nuisance for you. It won’t seriously bother you once you’ve got this new woman, this new lovely young woman with her bedroom eyes. But just at the moment it’s a nuisance. You resent it, and you resent me. What are you going to do about it?”