Jerusalem the Golden

by Margaret Drabble

  He often wished he could get rid of her. He thought of divorce, idly, as of a great blessing, but there were the children, and anyway where were the grounds? There was nothing wrong with them, nothing at all. They had people to dinner, they went out to dinner, they slept in the same bed, they even read the same books. Sometimes it seemed impossible that their living could continue, and he thought that he too would sit down as she did, and stare at the wall and weep. He tried to remember when it had started, but he could not remember, for they had never been happy; they had been, at their best, in love. Her beauty had always tended towards the disastrous, and he supposed that he, with his enormous pride, had believed that he could deal with such an ill-fated creature, for he had been brought up to believe in himself, and nothing that he had ever met had shaken his confidence. At school, at University, he had been amongst the most well-equipped, favourably singled out by destiny in almost all his connections, and his earliest attempts upon girls had been unfailingly successful. His school reports had remarked upon the way he managed to combine intelligence with modesty and a sense of team spirit, for he had always known instinctively of the best way to ingratiate himself with authority; he had a passion for keeping on the right side of all the world, and the people that he antagonized were rare indeed. He sometimes wondered whether his love for Phillipa had not in fact been some kind of saving lack of grace; he had taken her on because she had not been his measure, because she had been different and beyond him, beyond the scope and range of his charm. He had failed with her, and he consoled himself by thinking that he had needed failure, and that without it he would have been more surely ruined.

  She said, repeatedly, that she did not like him, that she did not want him, and that he could go if he chose. She said that it made no difference to her whether he stayed or whether he went. He, himself, thought that it would make a difference; he thought that she needed him, just as much as she needed to say to him that she did not need him. He knew this, though he considered, in his heart, that there was no need for him to know it; after the things that she had said to him, it was his own courtesy that kept him, and not the strict exigencies of honour. He had considered, for a year or two at least, that if he gave way under the strain, then he gave way honourably, after satisfactory efforts to bear it: a report upon his conduct could not have said other than that he had tried hard. He acquitted himself, in advance. Since the conception of their third child, she had not allowed him to make love to her; she had hardly allowed him to kiss her, save for thin kisses of comfort, after hours of tears. He could not be expected to live without a woman for ever, he thought; even the law made some concession to such needs. And Clara herself had conceded them most beautifully, and with no faint breath of reproach. He had forgotten the taste of good will.

  He thought of Clara’s face, and of the way her lips lay, full and pale and gentle, undefended and yet in no way defenceless. They were strongly curved, and the furrow in her upper lip was deep. She looked hard, and yet soft to him: well-defined, and yet not hardened.

  Phillipa’s body was covered with scars, the blue-white scars of childbearing. And she had been stitched and sewn. She had been too narrow, and they had remade her badly.

  Phillipa, on the underground once, tears rolling down her face, for no reason. When she got out, a young man followed her, an Indian, a lonely student. He said to her, Do not cry, do not cry, you remind me of my own sorrows, I think to myself, I have a letter from home, maybe it tells me my mother, my brother, my brother’s children, they are ill, and I feel for you, so do not cry, I think I am alone, all alone, and I think no one will come up to me and tell me not to cry.

  Phillipa, smiling calmly, said that it was nothing, that she wept for nothing, that she too often wept.

  And he followed her, up the escalator, up the stairs, and on to Regent Street, and walked along with her, and they stood there on the corner, and Phillipa stood and stared at the clothes in the window behind the man’s head, as he told her of his loneliness, and of his work, and of how he had not gone to work that day, and of the tediousness of his life, and its hardships, and its solitary endurances, and he talked softly on and on and Phillipa stood and listened, not to his words, but to the sound of his words, and to their even grief, and she looked covetously at a grey chenille shirt, and she thought of her incommunicable distress, and his voice continued, and her tears were dried at their source, dried by the cold facts of poverty, by the knowledge that from those who have not, even that which they have shall be taken away, and that these dispossessed shall forever meet at street corners, forever uselessly divulging to useless auditors their need.

  Gabriel wrote to Clara. She had not known what to expect from him, hardly daring to fear that there might be nothing, and when it was a letter that she received she knew that there could have been nothing more satisfactory. It said:

  My lovely Clara,

  What can I say to you, what can I say, except to ask that I might see you again? So far I have been content to leave our meetings to chance, but it seems to me that now I must take a step in your direction, even if it is only to allow you to step sharply backwards. In view of the facts, or in view of yourself, either way. I write to you, because I should not like to see you step away from me, with my own eyes. And I will wait for you, next week, on Thursday, at one o’clock, in the Oriental bit of Liberty’s (and don’t take that amiss, I have spent half an hour composing that sentence) and if you come, I could take you out to lunch, and if you don’t come, you don’t come. But I hope you will come. And I will be there before you, you will not need to wait.

  Yours, Gabriel.

  Clara read this letter very carefully, and the more she studied it, the more wholly appropriate it seemed, and with a propriety that was to her the very mark of truth. She had received plenty of invitations in her time, and although the standard of punctuation and syntax revealed in them had risen since those first days of Higginbotham and Walter Ash, it had not risen spectacularly high. She liked everything about Gabriel’s letter, from its form of address, sole stroke of colour, to the tender, all-embracing meaningless ‘Yours’ of its conclusion. She liked the paper on which it was written, official headed paper of the company for which he worked, with an address, she noted, which was close enough to Liberty’s, a fact which rendered even more neutral his choice of rendezvous; she liked his writing, small and even, a debased and gentler version of Clelia’s defined and aristocratic hand. And she liked the tone of it; its diffident lack of assumption, its confident clarity. He had offered her an assignation which she felt herself competent to accept, and with a quantity of compromise that she felt herself exactly fitted to bear, and he had even, by some truly impressive insight, divined her secret horror, which was a horror of being kept conspicuously waiting in a public place. She did, at times, uneasily wonder whether such insight might not be born of much experience, but even the thought of much experience did not dismay her. Indeed, she was not sure that it did not, in a sense, encourage her.

  And she thought of Gabriel. She thought of him with the beginnings of a passion: she knew, deliciously, that if she went then it would be too late, for her at least, and that if she did not go, then it would not happen. And yet at the same time, she knew that she would go, so perhaps it was already too late. It was not in her to say no. And perhaps it had been too late since birth, in that she had always been looking for such a man as Gabriel, so endowed, so beautiful, and that if such a man should so much as suggest a possibility of a question to her, then she would answer yes. She knew this, yet did not find her knowledge at all unwelcome, as she had always fancied the idea of involuntary love, and had hitherto found her feelings all too voluntary. She was less happy about the notion that she might be admiring in Gabriel things not personal but generic, but she consoled herself by saying that as she had spent her whole adult life in search of the genre, without success, then the genre must be rare enough: if there were but one Helen, one Alexander, why then hesitate to recognize the
heroic stamp?

  So she went. Like all provincials she knew Liberty’s well enough, and had always known it, as she had not always known the byways of Bond Street, and yet nevertheless when she arrived there, at ten past one, she was forced to face a lurking doubt about the exact nature and location of the Oriental Department. She went in, rashly, from the Regent Street entrance, and immediately found herself waylaid by men’s dressing gowns and silk ties, and confusingly ascending lifts and staircases, so that it took her some time to find the main body of the shop. And when she got there, she did not know which floor to look for, and as she was stubbornly averse to asking for directions she spent even more time wandering around looking for Oriental objects. She thought, at one point, that she had found the department, but it was merely a boutique full of Thai silk dresses; she stared at the dresses and at Gabriel’s absence in mounting panic, before realizing that she must be in the wrong place, for it was surely not possible for him not to be there. So she went up another flight of stairs, and there, his back towards her, inspecting a nest of blue Chinese dishes, was Gabriel. He turned at her approach, as though he had seen her, and when he saw her, he held out his hand to her, and she took it, and he shook it, as though they were acquaintances, but he held it tightly, and then he kissed her cheek, lightly, as though they were friends, and she inclined lightly towards him, to receive, on a bare and exposed cheek, his lips. Not bred to such casual embraces, she had never been able to take them lightly, although she had learned the deft angle at which to bend her head, and her heart was strangely touched by the mixture of formality and implication in their meeting.

  ‘I was afraid that you might not come,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Oh,’ said Clara. ‘You must have known that I was coming.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. And he had not known; as he had waited, her coming had seemed more and more unlikely, and that solitary kiss more and more of an illusion.

  ‘Perhaps I’m a little late,’ she said, standing there, smiling at him.

  ‘I knew you would be late,’ he said. ‘But even though I knew it, I was early. I wouldn’t for anything have missed you. And as I’ve been here for so long, I had to keep buying things. Look what I’ve bought.’

  And he took out of his pocket a couple of paper bags and in them there was a box of matches in a highly decorated box, and a small sample of flowered silk, and a small horn spoon.

  ‘That proves, you see,’ he said, staring down at his collection, ‘that I really wasn’t sure that you were coming. If I’d been sure, I might have bought you something. But I wasn’t sure, and I was too mean to spend money on the off-chance. These things are the cheapest things in Liberty’s, you know.’

  ‘They’re pretty, though,’ she said.

  ‘You can have them,’ he said.

  ‘I like the silk,’ she said, ‘I’d like to have the silk.’

  ‘The silk was free,’ he said, and he gave her the small scrap, and she put it in her pocket. Then they looked at each other once more, bravely, for the first time since her arrival.

  ‘Shall we go and have lunch?’ he said. ‘I feel hungry, after so much waiting.’

  ‘I am always hungry,’ she said.

  And he took her arm, and they went down the square shallow stairs, and out through the department that sells household novelties, past ranged layers of such objects as lend a little mocking charm to so many thousands of kitchens, of which Gabriel’s own, he sadly felt, was merely an absurd, exaggerated, neurotic case. He had in his other pocket a gadget for squeezing slices of lemon which he had bought, idly, for Phillipa; he rather wished that it was not there. They went east, into Soho, to a little restaurant that Gabriel had first visited, years ago, with his boss; he had never returned and he remembered it chiefly for its furtive gloom, for it was beneath ground level, and inadequately lit. It was still as he had remembered it, dark and warm and not overcrowded. They sat in a corner, he with his back to the room, and she facing it. He looked at her, and she looked past him into the darkness. They did not know what to say to each other, and after a while Gabriel said that had she known that Martin’s wife had returned to him at the weekend.

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ said Clara. She did not want to talk of Martin, for she was afraid that they might end up talking of Clelia, but nevertheless curiosity compelled her to ask where Martin’s wife had been. Gabriel said that it was generally thought that she had been living with a man in Milan.

  ‘I can’t imagine why she should have come back,’ said Clara. ‘Having gone, how dreadful it must be to go back.’

  ‘Perhaps she was worried about the child,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Oh yes, the child,’ said Clara. ‘But she’d left it for long enough, why should she come back, having once left it? I could never go back to anything like that.’

  And he could see that the thought of a child meant nothing to her, as indeed how should it, and the sight of so much indifference to the most tender points of his life filled him with a sense of liberation, of incipient gaiety. The line was firmly drawn, between one world and another; there were no hands grasping after him, no area of confusion, no grey and trampled, dusty, intermediate terrain. He thought of Clelia’s enormous sympathies, of her arms more ready to receive the child than the man, of her studious, elegant denials, and he thought that he saw in Clara a more voracious simplicity, a need that did not pay too much attention to the sources of its satisfaction. And then the soup arrived, and with it the wine, which he was much in need of, and on the surface of the soup there was a most elaborate little trellis-pattern drawn in cream, and Clara, seeing it, exclaimed with delight, and by some fluke of fate their waiter happened not to be disagreeable, and he stopped and most charmingly explained the way to make trellises on soup with the back of a fork, and Clara admired and exclaimed, and the waiter, in an unprecedently archaic way, appeared to take pleasure in her exclamations. And when he went away, glowing with the pride of his profession, Clara picked up her spoon, and looked at Gabriel, and smiled, and waving her spoon gently over the surface of her soup, she said, ‘It seems a pity to disturb it, don’t you think? Because whatever he said about it being so simple, I could never make it in a hundred years.’

  ‘If you don’t disturb it,’ he said, ‘it will probably melt and fade away all by itself. Look, it’s started to spread already. Much better to do it yourself, than to let it go.’

  And she put her spoon in, and stirred, and drank.

  When they had had their soup, he took her hand under the table. It lay burning in his, dry and quiescent.

  Then she looked at him, smiling a little, and said:

  ‘I like that scar,’ relaxing suddenly as though everything was settled between them.

  ‘Do you?’ he said. ‘Do you really? I used to think it was rather fetching myself. But it must be years since I looked at it, since I even looked at it.’

  ‘You did it,’ she said, ‘when you fell over the garden wall.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. And then he said, ‘I’m glad that you like it, I’m glad that you find something to like, because I like all of you.’

  And they smiled at each other, tenderly, admissively, securely, their eyes taking on the profound and searching gaze of certainty, their voices mutually sinking and deepening to that tone so much desired, so rarely heard. So rarely ventured.

  When they had had their steak, he put one hand on her knee, and she kicked her shoe off and put her foot on his. It felt very soft in its stocking. She had not done at all badly in her effort to drink her half of the bottle of wine, and her cheeks were dimly pink, and her hair fell in her eyes.

  ‘Clara,’ he said to her, as she curled her toes on his ankle, ‘Clara.’

  ‘My hair gets in my eyes,’ she said, for answer, pushing it away, pushing it back with both hands, with both elbows on the table, leaning towards him, her two hands framing a bare white triangle on her high forehead; ‘And it’s too long; when I eat it gets in my food.’

/>   ‘Don’t have it cut,’ he said, ‘don’t have it cut.’

  ‘I can’t afford to have it cut,’ she said, ‘or not how I would like it, and so it grows.’

  ‘Let it grow,’ he said.

  And then they had some coffee, and then he looked at her and said:

  ‘We could always go to the cinema, for the afternoon.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ she said.

  ‘I should,’ he said, ‘but I shan’t go. Whatever you say, even if you say no to me, I shan’t go.’

  ‘What would you do?’ she said. ‘If I said no?’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he said, as the underwash of the dreadful tides of his life washed faintly towards him, from a long way off, from some other sea, threatening the safe and steep-walled inlet where they sat. ‘Oh Christ, God knows what I would do, wander around, God knows, I don’t know what I would do.’

  And she said, quickly, distressed, moved, not as he feared taking this sudden opening as an expression of his desire for her, but taking it for what it was, for a glimpse into the darkness from which he came towards her:

  ‘Oh, I’ll come, of course I’ll come.’

  And so he paid the bill, and they set off together towards the door, towards the stairs up towards the street; the staircase was narrow and dark, and it turned a sharp corner, and on the corner of it he kissed her, and as they stood there another couple, descending, passed them, and he held her in his arms and she buried her face against his. In his arms it was close and private, and he smelled of French cigarettes, and she could feel the hairs of his chest through his shirt. When they had kissed at some length they moved on, up the stairs, and in the street they walked together with their arms entwined, inseparable: they went to the Academy, and sat as each had sat with others in the back row, and as soon as they sat down they turned once more towards each other, turning as they sank into the chairs, mouth on mouth, his arms reaching for her, his hands inside her coat and her jersey, and reaching for so many lost sensations, and finding them there, finding them unfaded as though they had been waiting for him. He had not sat so, in a cinema, for more than seven years, and he felt on her lips the loss of time, and the withering of expectation, and the sudden anxious existence, of himself, so persuasively evoked, and it seemed that in many ways it would have been easier to have kept himself out of the way of such addictive recollections. And yet at the same time it seemed important to be alive, and he remembered, with anguish, that years ago it was such sensations only that he had dignified with the name of life.