Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  In the midst of these technical musings a wonder, an exciting wonder, struck her. Whose pram was it anyway? Was that why the little man’s wife could not come down and see her? She imagined the girl who was like her sitting waiting upstairs at one of those windows that overlooked the garage, behind those nice clean Nottingham lace curtains. That must be lovely. One would not have to keep on worrying about trying to make oneself cleverer, because one was doing what was recognised as a whole-time job. Everybody in the house, particularly one’s man, would be thinking of one with kindly concern; there would not be that awful feeling of having to keep up to scratch, of having to win approbation that would be coldly withheld if one’s performance was not good enough. One would be able to sit there resting, waiting, obtaining that peaceful entertainment which animals must know out of the accidents of substances near at hand: pressing the paint blisters on the sun-scorched edges of the shutter, putting one’s eye close to the flaw in the pane and watching how it made the red-gold wall and the surmounting spike of lilac waver as if they were deep under an uncoloured, viscous sea. But the poor young thing had still that awful agony to go through. She shuddered, for like people of almost any age, she hated to think of anyone younger than herself in pain; it perpetually seems to us, whether we are twenty or thirty or forty or fifty, that it is only just in the last two or three months that we have learned how harsh this business of life is and armoured ourselves against it, and we cannot bear to think of mere tender youngsters (as we were before the few months) having to face this dreadful knowledge and assume that armour, which is not light. Oh, poor young thing, poor young thing …

  Perhaps, however, the baby had come already. But the little man would have told her if it had. No, he need not. He might have kept it to the very last, then it would be mentioned casually, lest the Fates should hear and guess how well things were going with him and his wife and do something to spoil it all. She often used to feel like that when she first lived with Essington. But she did wish the little man would say it out now, because if that pram really did belong to him and not to a neighbour it made it all the lovelier that he was so much in love with his wife, since he must have seen her looking ugly and had to look after her. She must know that before she went back to town. It was something to hang on to, knowing that even if you were not happy other people were. She must say something that would lead up to it, though of course he would not tell her if it had not happened. It was only rich smart people who talked about babies before they were born; she had turned scarlet when she first heard them at it. Pondering what she could say that would help him to tell her if he wanted to and not press him to if he didn’t, she looked into the distance; and met the eyes of four people who were standing beside a small yellow car.

  Nice manners they had, staring at a person like that. They might think that though a person was on the stage that wasn’t to say that they liked being treated off the stage as if they were a waxwork. She was always slow of thought, and never slower than when she was forced to suspect that the world was not kind, but the look of them made her apprehensive, for though they were all smiling as they looked at her there was a kind of grease on the surface of their gaze, a kind of scum of squalid feeling …

  And at her elbow the mechanic said, ‘Beg pardon, Mr Pantridge, but that party with the yellow Morris-Cowley was asking if Lord Essington lived in the neighbourhood. I’ve never heard of him being round here, have you?’

  ‘No, not a bit of it,’ said the little man. ‘His place is down Cookham way. Some of us went over from Reading Hospital first time I was wounded. His wife gave us tea. A very nice lady she was. Tell ’em they’re dreaming. What do they want to know for? Got a cousin who does his lordship’s lamps?’ He was annoyed at being interrupted, and immediately went on telling her about his wife’s eldest brother, who had done so well in the war that he got a commission.

  Her jaw dropped. She stared at the four, wondering how they could do such a thing. When startling things happened to her she always became a child again at the impact and felt as if she had no previous experience of the sort. For a moment these people seemed to her as prodigious as gnomes and giants; and then noting the cheap, smart make of the women’s clothes, the excessive something about the men’s skirted overcoats, the common look they had of trying to look not better but worse than they really were, a kind of aspirant unpurity, she wearily placed them as members of a type she had encountered hundreds of times before. ‘What we want to know’ cads, they were. One saw them sometimes at the Embassy Club; they did not belong to it, but men who had to be nice to them because of business took them for a treat and they sat about staring at the people, bobbing forward suddenly to ask who they were, and getting pop-eyed if they had asked about anybody who was divorced or kept. A blush began to sweep over her face, her neck, her breasts, which had begun to smart since she realised that they were thinking of her as a sexual being. These men she thought would have liked to buy all the women in the world, but the money hadn’t run to it. These women would have liked to be bought by all the men in the world, but they hadn’t found their way in to the market. So they dreamed beastly dreams of the world as they would have liked it to be, men and women all sticking together like jujubes in a box, and to make them more solidly satisfying they pretended that they were real things that happened to real people. It was they who said that Connie Maddox had had a black baby; who said that Lettie Aylmer, who was straight, had had an affair with the Duke of Victoria, so that when she got engaged to young Lennie Isaacs his people, who minded, being Jews, were horrid to her for quite a long time. And God knew what they had said about her; what they were saying about her at this very minute. In pain, for she was silly and never got used to this sort of thing, she stared across at them to see what they were saying. It would be something new and lying, for the true thing, about Essington, was too old to amuse. They were sniggering together, with pleased moist smiles under noses wrinkled with disgust, like horrid children talking of a nasty secret. There wasn’t any knowing what they might be saying, she said to herself again and again, lest when she stopped she should maybe know what they were saying.

  When the little man had paused in his story of how well his wife’s eldest brother had done in the war, she put out her hand and said, ‘I must go. I promised to call back somewhere we passed on the road …’

  He was a very nice little man. Though he would plainly have liked the bright presence of the patron saint of his family imagination to be for ever in his yard, he let her go at once. ‘Well, it’s been very kind of you to let me talk to you like this. Eh, my wife will be vexed she couldn’t see you. I wonder … I wonder …’

  Ah, he was not going to let her go, after all. But there was evidently something he quite dreadfully wanted.

  ‘What is it? You were going to say—’

  ‘I wonder if you’d just wait one second while I get my wife’s photograph. It was taken just after we were married. We thought of sending it to you at the time, it was so like, but we didn’t have the nerve. She would be so pleased if you’d seen it …’

  The poor darling. If the girl was waiting upstairs this might help to pass the time for her. She smiled unsteadily. The tears in her eyes were incommoding her. Those awful people would not go away. ‘Of course. I’d love to see it.’

  It would be all right if he asked her to come into his house. But he did not. He thought of doing so, she could see, for his eyes went to the green side-door and then back to her, but was checked by some thought. Doubtless there was a tyrannous nurse installed there already who was capturing the house for her fuss and litter of preparation and resented visitors. She gave him a little encouraging smile, as if she quite liked waiting in the yard; and he left her.

  Well, the yard was still full of pleasantness. One ought to think of that. There was still the May sunshine, and the red, gold-freckled walls; there was the spike of white lilac, now bobbing springily under some bird-gymnastics executed lower down on its bough: there was t
he iron gate, and the homely orchard garden. But in that direction she did not dare to look, because they were standing there. What was the use of trying to think of pleasant things when they were standing there! People couldn’t have been taught right when they were young if they could do a thing like that. They were just blatantly gaping, with one man fiddling with a suitcase on the carrier as an excuse for delay that would not have taken in a cat. It was Essington’s theory which he had constantly and irritably impressed on her that she ought not to mind this sort of thing, that indeed it was impossible that she could sincerely mind it; but that did not at the moment seem to be true. She tried to imagine what would be thought about it by those people who in her mind were most remote from him, most unlike him in that vein of unfriendliness to her and all her instincts which ran like a dark vein through his love for her; by Rettie Adamson, a girl she was at school with whom she used to walk with on the Monkey’s Parade in Chiswick High Street, and Olga Hammond, who used to dress next to her when she was in ‘Farandole’. She had really loved both of them, but of course she hadn’t been able to keep up with them. Either of them, put in her place, would have gained some satisfaction by reflecting on her superiority in looks over the two women who were tormenting her. She tried to brave it out that way. They certainly were a couple of miseries and no mistake, with their umbrella legs and their palais-de-danse faces. Now she was all right: she was five foot eight and every bit of her measured what it ought to; her hair was real gold, lay it against a sovereign and it didn’t look so bad; lots of people thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world; if she was turned into a statue they could put her into a museum without getting an artist to alter her. But coldly she realised this would not do. She was as far away from Rettie and Olga as Essington was, though not in the same direction: and in that position, which she felt to be very lonely, she knew that her immense physical conspicuousness made her situation far worse. She could not quite see how; but there gleamed deep in her mind a picture of herself as a vast naked torso, but not of stone, of living, flushing flesh, fallen helpless on its side in some public place of ruins like the Forum in Rome, with ant-droves of tourists passing incessantly round her quickly, inquisitively, too close. Sometimes it was hot, and dry winds swung against her weakly like a tired arm, flung dust on her, and dropped again; and tourists crowding along in the shadow of her limbs put up their sweaty hands to experience her texture and stroked the grit into her flesh. Sometimes it was wet, and her groins were runnelled with thick shining ropes of water; and the tourists, going quicker than ever, rushed along her flanks and pricked them with the spokes of their umbrellas.

  The queer things one thinks of! And there sounded in her ears the tones that somehow had something to do with this picture, of Mr Thursby Jingal, who writes the Spy-Glass in the Daily Show. It was last week that he had said to her, ‘There are people who are News. Not because of anything they do, not because of anything they are. But just because they’re News.’ She had objected. ‘But so is every leading actress, isn’t she?’ And he had answered, ‘No. Nina Purefoy is a leading actress of far higher standard than yourself. But she isn’t News. You know as well as I do that Lillah Plumptre is almost as beautiful as you are. But she isn’t News. And—er—social things have nothing to do with it. Betty Packhard has had—er—a very interesting life. But she isn’t News. It’s something all of itself. And you’ve got it. You had it when you were a little girl doing your little five minutes in “Farandole” and drawing your five pounds. Even in those days if you went into the Carlton with a young fellow and had a bite and Nina was sitting there after the most colossal first night in history and Lillah was looking as glorious as Helen of Troy, and Betty was there with her diamonds and her Duke, it would be your pink hat and green gloves that the Spy-Glass would notice. I tell you, you’re News …’ His tones had been creamily congratulatory. But being News was like living under a glass bell, a transparent prison, in whose walls the normal light of day was changed to heat that made every incident of one’s life grow to an unnatural size, an unnatural sappiness …

  The bird that had been bobbing on the lilac-bough whirred and shot itself up into the sunshine. It must be fun to be able to fire oneself off like a gun and be the gun, to press the trigger and be the bullet; and such fun to bounce and bounce in the thin bright upper air among the pretty dustless treetops. Well, one could swim and dive. Really, this was a good world. It would be all right if one was brave. It was cowardly of her to mind that the people were talking about her and Essington, because it was true. If she had not been willing to stand by what she did she might not have done it. But, oh, why couldn’t Essington have married her, and made it not true any more? Now he was out of politics he could have afforded to let Lady Essington divorce him. But it was wrong of her to think of that, for there was a principle involved; though she was not quite sure what it could be. It could not be disbelief in the institution of marriage, for he always did his formal entertaining at Lady Essington’s house and in lots of ways he seemed to feel that a wife ought to be better treated than someone you live with. There was that time when he had made her cancel her rooms at the hotel she always went to at Cannes because Lady Essington had suddenly made up her mind to go there. She was quite sure, however, that there was some sort of principle involved. It might just be that one had a right to do what one likes. But it could hardly be that, for being stared at by beasts was exactly what she did not like doing. Nevertheless, though the principle continued to elude her, she never doubted but that it existed. Her failure to perceive it she ascribed without question to her own incapacity; for she well knew that always when she tried to make a generalisation out of the abundant and confused facts of life she found herself in the position of the people in a comic advertisement of meat extract that she had once seen: one earnest worker was holding up a bull while another tried to press it with a shoe horn into a small bottle which dangled on one of its hooves like a glass boxing-glove. She never hoped to confine the great bull life in her minute and brittle mind. But Essington was different. His mind was as large as life. He would know this principle. Mildly she marvelled at his greatness, and at his queer kind vagary in loving her, who was so stupid; and reflecting that anyway all this was irrelevant, since the point was that what these people were saying was true, and she must therefore not mind them saying it, she lifted her head and faced them.

  That defence went at once. She had to look away and droop her head. For from the grease that floated on these people’s gaze she perceived that what they were saying was not true. It was probably a lie about her and some man that she had never seen; if by chance it stuck to the facts close enough to give her Essington as a lover it lied in making them live a beastly sort of life together. Drinking, and rowdy parties, and all the kind of things that come into some people’s minds when they think of legs, though goodness knows why, for legs are just legs. That was downright funny. She didn’t drink at all; and Essington drank nothing at lunch and only weak whisky-and-soda with his dinner. They didn’t give parties. Essington hardly liked anybody. And she didn’t go out to parties much now; she had so often had to break engagements because he turned up unexpectedly that now she hardly liked to accept invitations. Sometimes, indeed nearly always when she was not rehearsing, he would tell her that he would come to her during the day, but that he could not say at what hour; and then she could go out only for a little while at a time, nervous dashes into the park with one eye on a watch, and come back to sit about alone, for he hated to find people out when he came. There was nothing at all to do then. One could not do any housework, with all the servants about; and being beautiful one must not sew, for that brings on the little fine lines round the eyes which are the beginning of the end. There was the pianola, of course, but music did not interest her very much; and there were books, but she was stupid. Sometimes, sitting in the quiet rooms, she used to think that though she had a nice house and pretty things and all the flowers she wanted, she did not have as
amusing a time as her mother had had at 69 Tyndrum Road, Chiswick. She had had a horrid little house and not very much money, but there was always a lot doing, what with cooking and running up clothes on the sewing machine and talking to the milkman and the neighbours and going round to Aunt Bessie and Aunt Polly and doing the shopping. Shopping on Saturday night was particularly exciting, with the naphtha flares burning outside the shops in the High Street, and all one’s friends bumping by with their stuffed string bags, all very jolly and amiable with the joy of buying things. That was a hard life: but this was a dull one. What was she saying? She had forgotten that it was all right when Essington did at last come, so great, so cleverly, so childishly dependent on her, even after ten years. He would drop his face into the curve of her neck and shoulder and rub his face against her warm flesh like a baby or a puppy … ‘Let’s go to bed quite early. I am so tired. I couldn’t sleep at that damned house. Sunflower, let me lie up close to you …’