Martin had managed to inspire some kind of admiration in Clelia, and had enlisted her sympathy in the cause of his dissolving marriage. ‘It wasn’t that I was in love with him, you know,’ she said, from time to time, as chorus to her main argument, ‘it wasn’t as though I was in love with him, you know.’ However, love or no love, Martin had arrived at the gallery one morning, with his small baby in his arms, and the news that his wife had left him, and the clear expectation of help of some kind from Clelia. Clelia had provided help, instantly, by holding the baby, and looking after it, and changing, with increasing expertise, its nappy, and then at the end of the day she had invited Martin and his child home. She seemed somewhat defensive about this stage in her narrative, and said, ‘Well, after all, what on earth was I to do? He really is so peculiarly helpless, and I couldn’t have let him take it home all by himself, could I? I felt I had to do something, he seemed to expect me to do something.’
So Martin and his abandoned baby had moved into the Denham household, and they had moreover stayed there. They had arrived before Christmas, and it was now May.
‘We simply don’t know what to do about them,’ said Clelia. ‘It isn’t, after all, as though we had any reason for not having them, because now that Amelia and Magnus and Gabriel are all married there’s plenty of room, and my parents are anyway worried, politically speaking if you know what I mean, about having so much empty house (though he’s hardly the kind of tenant that that kind of consideration would provide), and he even pays some rent from time to time. But then, being so rich, he could easily go and live somewhere else. But he doesn’t, and my mother won’t tell him to go, because she’s never in her life told anyone to go, it isn’t in her, but he’s grinding her into the ground, she can’t work, she can’t concentrate, he keeps talking to her all the time, and the baby cries, and it upsets her, for all that she keeps saying it doesn’t, and that it takes her back to the happiest years of her life, when we were all in plastic pants, I suppose she means, except I think we all had to wear wet woolly leggings, she had this thing about plastic pants being unhealthy.’
‘Why doesn’t your father tell him to go?’ asked Clara, for from what she could recollect of Mr Denham, she could not picture him suffering fools gladly.
‘Oh, he just doesn’t. He doesn’t like to interfere. I think, truly, he thinks I must be in love with him, and he doesn’t want to complicate things.’
‘But you’re not, are you?’ said Clara.
‘Well, it isn’t exactly as though I’m not,’ said Clelia. ‘I mean, it isn’t as though I wanted to get rid of him.’
‘I see,’ said Clara, feeling that maybe indeed she did. Her eyes were rapidly adjusting to such tones.
And then Clelia sighed heavily, and looked sadly at Clara’s Japanese wooden egg puzzle, which she had been trying all this while to do, and said, ‘How very dull for you, to hear all about my affairs, but I do so like to tell the story of my life, it makes me feel as though things have really happened to me, whereas otherwise they seem not to happen.’
‘It wasn’t dull,’ said Clara, ‘there is nothing, nothing that I wanted to hear more.’
‘Is that true?’ said Clelia, frowning intently at the egg, not risking the raising of her eyes, as though truly diffident, suddenly diffident. ‘I am glad if you mean it. I think I must be like my mother, she is always letting herself be interviewed, my father says it’s vulgar, but she likes it, she likes people coming to ask her questions about herself and how she makes coffee and who she has to dinner and what kind of paper she writes on, she says it makes her feel as though she really has got somewhere in her life. It consoles her, without it she says she feels she hasn’t moved. And she likes telling people things, she doesn’t mind who she talks to, total strangers, interviewers, so long as it’s professional, so long as it’s not personal. When it’s personal, she gets confused. So perhaps I felt I must tell you all this, now, before I know you better, so that I can tell it you without too much confusion. And now I have told you, you must talk now, tell me about yourself.’
‘There doesn’t seem to be so much to tell,’ said Clara.
‘How can you say that, how can you say that,’ said Clelia, ‘by saying that you are condemning me, you’re criticizing me, you’re implying that I talk too much, God knows I do, but surely you could do better? Do tell me, believe me that in me you have the best audience of your life, you will never find as good an audience as me.’
And so Clara told Clelia, in return, some of her own history, and in telling it, she seemed to find, strangely and more securely than ever a tone that absolved her, a tone that redeemed her past from meanness and humiliations, so that she even found herself able to speak of her own mother without evasion. For Clelia was, as she had claimed, a good audience: she listened with an attention that picked up the faintest vibrations of meaning. And Clara, confident that she would meet with no misunderstanding, managed to relate episodes that she had never before related, and when, finally, she came to the subject of the future, she awaited Clelia’s views as though they might even be of use. She even asked her for them; she asked her what she thought she should do.
‘What a problem,’ said Clelia, contemplating it. ‘What about the rest of the family, what about your brothers, don’t they help?’
‘One of them went to Australia,’ said Clara, ‘and the other one is married, and lives right the other side of town. She has nobody, she really has nobody.’
‘And she thinks you should go home?’
‘She doesn’t say so, but at times I think she expects me to although she knows I can’t. We never talk about it: we never talk about anything though, so the fact that we don’t talk about that doesn’t mean much. But I think, all the same, that she wants me at home, though she doesn’t like me, and she could never admit that she might need me …’
‘I know what you should do,’ said Clelia, ‘you should do a Diploma of Education or whatever it’s called. And then you could go on going home for the vacations. They give you money to do those, don’t they?’
‘I thought of that,’ said Clara, ‘but I don’t know if I would want to teach. And anyway, I don’t want to go home for vacations.’
‘Evidently not,’ said Clelia, ‘but evidently you feel you ought. And I consider it unadvisable to lay too great a strain upon one’s conscience. Far better to compromise in my view.’
‘How extraordinary to hear you say that,’ said Clara, ‘I was expecting you to say what all my other friends say, that I must clear out quick, be ruthless, cut all ties, leave her to it, live my own life. You know the kind of things that people say.’
‘People are always telling other people to do that kind of thing,’ said Clelia, ‘it must give them a vicarious thrill. Because they never do it themselves, haven’t you noticed? I never tell anyone to do anything. I haven’t the nerve, I just encourage people to go on doing what they’re already doing anyway.’
‘But even if I did it,’ said Clara, ‘I would be stealing the state’s money, wouldn’t I? By doing a Dip Ed without meaning to teach?’
‘Who knows?’ said Clelia. ‘You might even want to teach at the end of it. And you can’t consider everyone, you know. You can’t feel for both the State and your mother, can you?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Clara, ‘I did put my name down to do a Dip Ed. I thought that anyway it would always come in useful. And kill time, if you see what I mean.’
‘So you see,’ said Clelia, ‘you had made your mind up anyway. You’re doing it in London, I trust.’
‘Of course,’ said Clara, ‘where else?’
‘Where else indeed?’ said Clelia. ‘I’m glad you’ll be back. And I’m frightfully sorry, but I seem to have completely disorganized this egg. Have I ruined it beyond repair? I used to think I was quite good at that kind of thing …’
‘It’s just a trick, really, it’s easy,’ said Clara, and she took back the egg, and found that she could not put it together again eith
er, so they decided to abandon it, and left it in little pieces in a glass dish on the mantelpiece with some dry and coloured gourds, and then they went downstairs and out into the park, and walked towards the bus stop, and Clara explained, lest the gourds and the egg should be thought to reflect in any way on herself, that they had been given to her by a friend the week before, to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. It was a dark cloudy day; there had been as yet no spring, and the grass was muddy from constant rain. They waited together at the bus stop for Clelia’s bus, and as the bus approached Clelia said, confirming, ‘Next Sunday, then, you’ll come and see us?’ Clara nodded and agreed.
And as Clara walked back towards her college hostel, she thought about Clelia, and wondered whether she dealt out all her friendships with so lavish a hand, or whether, once more in her life, she could count on some peculiar blessing. She had met people of this genre before – intense, smart, well-connected, impulsive, communicative, insatiably interested in the affairs of others – and she would, she supposed, upon interrogation, have classed herself, at least in aspiration, as one of the genre. But she had never before met such qualities so mildly and tactfully and decoratively combined, so settled and established, so kindly displayed. She looked back over her three years at college, now slowly approaching their close, and she thought of all the people she had known and all the friends she had made, and it seemed to her that most of them had been aiming with varying degrees of accuracy at just such an effect. She had, and she felt slightly uneasy about admitting it, she had sought the smartly intense, at the expense of the more solid and dowdy virtues; she had been attracted by surfaces, by clothes and manners and voices and trivial strange graces, and she had imitated what she had seen of these things in others. She was drawn unquestionably to the appearance of things, though she was aware that she had as yet much ground to cover, and that she had followed many a false trail; she remembered with particular regret the quantities of eyeshadow which she had once thought desirable, and the pendant earrings of the same epoch. She also knew that some of her preferences were base in the extreme, and that her affection for Peter de Salis sprang at the first most ignobly from his delightful name. She liked him, too, for being a poet, and for taking her out to things, but she often wondered whether her interest in his poetry were not as superficial as her interest in his name. She seemed to live by an instinct which drew her strongly and on the whole accurately towards such manifestations, such hints and echoes of a grander world, and which yet at the same time could not approve them. But Clelia, she could see, was secure beyond approval or disapproval: she was what she was, whatever that might be.
She looked forward to discovering what it might be, and how it might have been created.
When she got back to the college, she went to the library and looked once more at all the reference books pertaining to Sebastian Denham, in the hope of finding the nature of his wife’s professional distinctions, but she was not successful. The biographies were terse and restrained, as far as his private life was concerned, and effusive only about the names and quality of his publications. She thought that she might ring Peter de Salis, and ask him about Mrs Denham, but she did not want to do this, in case Mrs Denham was a lady of such fame that ignorance of her would prove to be positively compromising. So she did nothing. She thought she would wait, and see what happened.
The Denhams’ house, like the Maughams’ house at 23 Hartley Road, Woodgrove, Northam, was semi-detached. But Clara, upon her first visit, could find no other possible point of resemblance, and even this point she missed, so different was the architecture and the attachment from anything she had ever before approached. It was a large, tall, four-storeyed building, on one of the steep hillsides of Highgate; it had been built in 1720, but was deceptively flanked by scrappy houses and miscellaneous buildings of mixed and later dates, so that its lonely eminence had an air of somewhat tragic survival. In front of the building was a large paved double courtyard, which was level, despite the steep gradient of the hill; it was separated from the pavement by a high, elaborate, wrought-iron fence, the gate of which stood fortunately open. Clara would not have liked to wrestle with its huge ornate metallic bolt. The building had two front doors, side by side, one for each house, and the steps up to each door were not divided; an urn full of some kind of greenery stood in the middle of the steps, but there was no attempt at distinction. It was this lack of division that most effectively concealed from Clara the basic, classic structure of the building, for she had been brought up with the notion that walls must be above eye-level, lace curtains impenetrable, bedrooms facing discreetly into the void. Once she had visited a friend who had a room in a house in North London; she had accompanied her friend into the small back garden, and had been deeply shocked to find that the walls dividing the row of small terraced gardens were only two feet high. A child could have seen over them: rows of small children were in fact busy looking over them as she stood there, and looking moreover without disguise at her. She retired quickly after her friend into the kitchen, overcome by a sense of invaded privacy; a garden, to her, was not meant for such intimacies.
The door of the Denhams’ house was painted black, and it was solid, and heavily panelled; in the centre of the middle panel there was a lion’s head with a brass ring in its mouth. There was also a bell, and Clara chose the bell. She had to wait for some time before the door was opened, and she hoped very much that it would be opened by Clelia, but it was not; it was opened by a thin, brown, balding, youngish-looking man. He looked at her, and said nothing.
‘I’ve come to see Clelia,’ said Clara, standing on the doorstep.
The man gulped nervously, and nodded, and said, ‘Clelia, oh yes, Clelia, just a moment, I’ll go and get her.’
And he disappeared. Clara, uninvited, thought she might as well step in, so she did. The hall into which she stepped was not a hall at all, but a large and very high room, with doors leading off it in most directions, and it was so full of unexpected things that she found it hard to know where to look first. The floor was tiled, in diagonal squares of grey and white marble, and the walls were so densely covered with pictures and looking glasses that it was hard to tell whether or how they were papered, but the general tone and impression was of a deep purple and red. At the far end of the hall there was a marble fireplace, and under it was a large pot of dying flowers and a very beautiful rocking horse. The petals of the flowers had dropped, and spilled brown and carelessly over the floor. There was also, she vaguely noted, in one corner a piano, and the windows had shutters of a kind that she had never seen in England.
After a while, Clelia appeared, from one of the doors at the far end of the hall. She was wearing glasses, and trousers, and a pink shirt with embroidered flowers, and she looked rather frightening, and Clara half wished that she had not come. As she approached, Clara thought that she still looked cross, but she could see that whatever annoyance was there was not directed against herself.
‘Well, I came,’ she said.
‘So I see,’ said Clelia. ‘I’m glad you came. It’s been a most shocking day so far, quite shocking. Let’s go up into my room, the garden’s full of Martin and my mother squabbling. Or not squabbling. We can watch them through the window.’
‘Who was that that let me in?’ said Clara, following Clelia meekly up the staircase, and up and up, to the second floor.
‘That was Martin,’ said Clelia. ‘What did you think of him? He’s rather lovely, don’t you think?’
Clara could not think of any scheme in which the man she had just seen could have been described as lovely, but she instantly invented one.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And this,’ said Clelia, suddenly throwing open a high white door, ‘is my room.’
And she said it with such pride and such display that Clara did not feel at all obliged to conceal the amazement and delight that she felt, as she might, if confronted with a more worldly modesty, have done: for Clelia’s manner declared, th
is is singular, this is beautiful, this may legitimately amaze, you betray no innocence in admiring this.
And it was, by any standards, amazing. It was a tall, square room, facing towards the back of the house and garden, and it was full and overflowing with a profusion of the most diverse and wonderful objects, so full that the room’s function – for it was, beneath all, a bedroom – was all but concealed. Clara, when she looked hard, could just descry a bed, almost lost beneath a grey and pink flowered cover, a heap of books, and a large half-painted canvas. There were a good many books in the room; one wall was lined with them, and they lay in heaps on chairs and on the floor. There was a plant, which grew and blossomed along the picture rail, and climbed down a picture cord to embrace the frame of a small oil painting of naked nymphs; there was the end of a brass bedstead, upon which other plants clambered and flowered. There were photographs and postcards and letters pinned up and pasted on tables and walls, and amongst these more adult decorations, there was also a great quantity of carefully arranged and ancient toys, of a precise and coloured charm; there was a doll’s house, a glass jar of marbles, a toy iron on a small brass stand, a heap of rag dolls, a row of painted wooden Russian dolls, a nest of coloured eggs, a tower of bricks, a weather house, a huge pendant snowstorm globe containing a small palace and a small forest with small ferny trees. Clara was staggered and bewitched; she had never in her life seen anything like it. Such a vision had never so much as crossed her mind. Some of her friends had fairly eccentric ideas of bed-sitter decoration, and had done far better than the Chianti-bottle, British Railway-poster effort, but none of them had ever conceived of anything like this: and the nicest room she had ever seen had been the drawing room of a friend’s mother in Sevenoaks, which had been distinguished by a bare and gentle colour scheme, and some pretty Georgian furniture.
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