The film was an Italian film about an old man, and Clara caught glimpses of it from time to time, and saw as much of it as she would have wanted to see; such a method of viewing films had always seemed to her desirable, and her attention, when caught by the angle of an Italian street, or by the grief of the old man, seemed to be peculiarly intense. When at University, she had read books, voraciously, on her college-hostel bed, while her men tried to make love to her; she had read the whole of Adolphe while lying on top of a man called Bernard, and when Bernard had protested she had said, untruthfully, you do not understand, unless I read to take my mind off you, you would be too much for me. She found Gabriel infinitely more disturbing and distracting than Bernard, and the film less interesting though almost as depressing as Adolphe. But she was not depressed: happiness filled her, she thought that she had never been so happy in her life.
They sat through the film twice, and by the time it ended it was almost evening, and they had reached a state where it was no longer possible for them to part. She wondered what he would suggest, as they finally disentangled themselves, at the second raising of the lights, and got up to go: she rested comfortably upon his worldliness, she knew that he would suggest something, and that acquiescence would be all her part. And he, who had for years been dreaming in his office about such an act, could think only of his office. He had feared, in the dim past mists of unformulated antici pation, that she might, if things were ever to reach such a point, find such a suggestion sordid: but from what she had given of herself during those smoky cinema hours, he could see that for such a nature as hers the sordid, if it existed, did not repel, that hesitation only could repel. So he said to her, as they stumbled up the stairs and on to Oxford Street,
‘We could go to my office. If you would come.’
‘Of course I will come,’ she said, ‘if you are sure.’
‘Sure of what?’ he said.
‘That there will be no one there,’ she said.
And he explained to her that there would be people in the building, but not on his floor of the building, and that he had the key. And she smiled, and said, Oh yes then, that’s all right. And so they walked together, south to where his office was, past the bright, cheap, tatty, cobbled clothes in the shop windows, and they held hands as they walked, and kissed once at a corner whilst waiting for the traffic lights to change, and he seemed to be avenging himself upon those lost and bitterly regretted moments, those envied visions of couples kissing on stations, kissing in cars, kissing under bridges and in doorways, kissing on films and on television, kissing in his own head. When they reached his office, they went up in the lift without meeting anyone, and he unlocked his door, and then locked it behind him, and then with mutual good will they lay down upon the floor. And he not ceasing to be astonished by her ease, and she not ceasing to be astonished by her own felicity, they lay there together upon the mock parquet tiles, lit by the band of fluorescent light, their heads in the space under his desk, staring upwards together, finally, at the unknown underside of the desk, amidst the smell of polish, and the unswept cigarette ash of the day, and the small round paper punchings from his secretary’s filing activities. Clara’s hair, shortly, was full of paper punchings, as of confetti.
After a while, he said,
‘Just think, just think, if you hadn’t come.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ she said, sitting up and staring down at him, ‘how you could think I might not come. How could I ever have stayed away from you? You must be the most beautiful person that I ever saw in my whole life. I would have been mad to have stayed away.’
‘And you still see it that way?’ he said, still lying flat, his arms crossed comfortably behind his head.
‘Why should I not?’ she said. ‘It was very nice, it’s been very nice. I wouldn’t have missed it, not for anything.’
And they stared at each other, reflective, hopeful, satisfied.
Then she fished her brown jersey out of the wastepaper basket, where she had dropped it, and started to get dressed again.
‘Don’t dress, don’t dress,’ he complained; but she said, ‘I’m cold, I must.’
And when she was dressed, she stood up, and started to wander round the office, picking things up, looking at the papers and notices pinned on the walls, inspecting the contents of his cupboard and of his pencil drawer, gazing at herself, in passing, in the mirror behind the door, and reaching flattening, ineffective hands to smooth her hair. She was happy; she felt at home and familiar there, she felt that she had bought herself a right to look, and even the sight of a broken biro on his windowsill was of interest to her. He lay on the floor and watched her; she liked to be watched. And she tried to piece together, from what she saw, the rest of Gabriel’s life: but she tried idly, luxuriously, because she did not really want to know. She did not want to know everything about him. She liked the unknown, she liked to feel familiar with the unknown.
Over his desk, on the wall, there were a great many notices and pictures and photographs pinned up, and she looked at these closely, seeing that they were there to be looked at; there were reminders and appointments, and a photograph of Clelia and Annunciata, and a photograph of his two elder children, and there was a whole series of photographs of a pop singer whose fame was currently at its dizzy histrionic zenith. Clara was surprised to find such pin-up photographs: she had thought that Gabriel’s world would eschew, somehow, having no need of them, the cheaper glories of the masses, and she turned to him, curiously, and said, ‘Why, why on earth do you have all these pictures of Elvera?’ and he said, ‘Why not? I always thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, why, don’t you find her beautiful?’ And Clara, looking once more at the pictures, of the wide-mouthed, thick-necked singer, throwing her arms up to the heavens wildly, had to concede beauty, had to concede that she had never even troubled to look at such pictures before, so sure had she been that there would have been no point in looking. And she still did not see the point in having them there, those cheaply purchasable photographs: collecting of such things, interest in such things, had always seemed to her from early school days on to be an indication of immaturity, of poverty, of lack of resources, of making do with second best: she had as resolutely and as puritanically scorned the pop world and its manifestations as her mother had done before her. But, from Gabriel’s example, she tried to force herself to see the point, to encompass even this, ready to see in her own disinterest her mother’s own rigidity: because the truth was that everything that Gabriel did seemed to her to be right. The fact that those pictures were here upon his wall redeemed all pictures pinned up on all walls: he had told her that Elvera was beautiful, and so she was, she could see it now, yes, looking at her, in those thick-grained overblown photographs, she could see it, and she wondered what stubborn narrow prejudice had blinded her but an instant before.
And she felt, as she felt with Clelia, when Clelia opened her eyes, as she so often did, to some new and unexpected virtue in the external world: she felt gratitude, and amazement. She took them on trust so completely, the Denhams, for as far as she could see they were never wrong. And yet trust was not the right word for the way that she regarded them, for she did not humbly and ignorantly echo their judgements in her own head; she did not say to herself, repeating what she had heard, I like that advertisement, that house, that film, that book, that painting, that kind of stocking, that man’s face. It was rather that she saw what they saw, once they had told her to see it. They taught her, they instructed her, as once Miss Haines had taught her to admire Corneille: and the lesson about Corneille had been worth while, the object worthy of effort, so why not all these new acquisitions? She despised in herself the old, recalcitrant severity that had condemned Elvera without looking at her: and yet she knew that without the sanction of Gabriel’s casual approval she would never have bothered to look, just as, without Clelia’s doubtful admiration, she would have seen in Martin merely a thin, balding, ascetic neurotic intellectual, a ma
n in no way possibly the object of desire. It was hard work, the acquiring of opinions, and she felt an unresentful envy for those like Gabriel and Clelia, those who had been born with views, those who had known from infancy which pictures to pin up on their walls. Clara’s walls were bare, from indecision.
When Gabriel finally roused himself from his floor, and got up and buttoned up his shirt and zipped up his trousers, Clara said to him:
‘Do you go in for this kind of thing much?’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it depends on what kind of thing you think it is, doesn’t it?’
‘No, not really,’ said Clara. ‘What I mean is, do you go in much for the kind of thing that might be taken to be this kind of thing? And to that, you see, you can only say yes or no.’
‘No, then,’ said Gabriel. ‘And what about you?’
‘I’m afraid it might be more likely, in my case, to be yes,’ said Clara. ‘Not that it matters, really.’
‘Time alone will show,’ said Gabriel.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Clara.
‘We could have another look at the problem on Monday,’ said Gabriel. ‘I could take you out to lunch on Monday.’
‘That would be very nice,’ said Clara. ‘I should like that.’
Gabriel was late home, but it did not matter, as Phillipa never had a meal waiting for him even when he was on time, and she would never betray the interest in his activities that would have been implied by an interrogation. She was sitting in the living room when he arrived, just sitting, and listening to the radio. He greeted her, and she inclined her head, faintly, in his direction, so he went off into the kitchen and made himself an omelette, and came and sat down with her to eat it. He was faint with hunger, and he ate with the omelette half a loaf of bread. When he had finished eating, he remembered the lemon squeezer in his pocket, and he got it out and handed it to her. She smiled, anxiously, as though willing to appear pleased.
‘Why did you buy it?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just saw it, that’s all.’
Then she reverted her attention to the radio, and he, suddenly desperate before the blank waste remaining hour of the evening, asked her, rashly, recklessly, how she had spent her day. And she told him, very limply and hesitantly, in her flat pale voice, that she had been in the afternoon to the chemist’s to buy some Junior Aspirin, and that as it was raining she had not walked as far as her usual chemist, but had stopped at the nearest one, the one on the corner of the next street. It was a shop, she explained, that she always avoided, because of the seedy, flyblown look of the windows, with their ancient outdated advertisements, and because of the slowness of the service. And this time, she said, she was served by an old man, who had received her request in grudging silence, had spent several minutes looking through the nearest drawers, and then had dragged himself painfully up the steps into the back of the shop to look there. He had not found what she wanted, and had redescended into the shop, unwilling to let her go, mumbling continually that he knew they were there somewhere, and after a few more fumblings the front door of the shop had opened, and his slightly less frail and aged wife had entered. And the old man said to her, as though he were alone with her in the shop, as though the shop were not a shop but a room to live in, it was no good, they couldn’t carry on like this, they’d have to close down, and live on their pensions. ‘I just can’t manage when you’re out, Edie,’ he had said, plaintively, ‘I just can’t manage when you leave the shop.’
And Phillipa had stood there, listening, listening to these tragic intimacies, and they had given her the Junior Aspirins, finally, as though she should never have asked for them, as though she should have known better than to ask.
‘And the truth is,’ she concluded, ‘that I had known better. I knew from the look of that shop that I was the last person in the world that ought to go in it. It was written all over their windows, that I ought not to go in.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, though,’ he said. ‘They must have needed to sell you the aspirins. Or they would have shut the shop.’
‘They needed to. But they couldn’t,’ she said.
Clara, when she got home, shook the paper clippings from her hair, and smiled at herself in the mirror. She thought that she looked rather well. On the other hand, she was not much looking forward to the night, as she feared she was too excited to sleep. Also, she felt slightly sick, as she had felt after her first afternoon at the Denhams’ house: it was the sickness and strain of finding too well what she had been looking for. She had presupposed such a man as Gabriel, such a dark and surreptitious lunch, such an episode upon an unfamiliar floor, and it had happened to her. She felt triumphant, but mingled with her triumph there was a certain alarm. She felt that she was being supported and abetted by fate in some colossal folly: that circumstances were conspiring maliciously to persuade her that her own estimate of herself, that high and grandiose self-assessment of adolescence, was right. She had considered herself too good for such as Walter Ash, and she had got Gabriel. There seemed to be no end to the possibilities of mad aspiration. And yet, she could not feel that this was the way the world should go, she felt that she was breasting, rashly, the marching currents of humanity, and that she would in the end be forced to turn about.
She was so excited that she wished she were still living in college, so that she could call on one of her friends to tell them the whole story. She was not much given to using the telephone, having been bred to use the instrument meagrely and with respect, and anyway the only person to whom she ever told such things, now, was Clelia. And this was one piece of news that she did not think Clelia would much like to know.
But in the end she did ring Clelia. Not to tell her, but to talk to her. And as she talked, the consciousness of practising deception did not distress her, for on the contrary she felt that the possession of a secret gave her an extra dimension, an extra asset. They had all for years had their complications, and now she had hers: it even seemed that Gabriel was another bond between them. It did not for a moment occur to her that Clelia might, in a simple sense, object. She imagined herself to be in a world where such considerations did not exist. And yet she knew that it would be better to say nothing, just as Clelia never said anything about Martin, and indeed now said nothing about the return of Martin’s wife. They talked of other things, of Clara’s course on Non-Denominational Religion, of a belt that Clelia had lost off her dress that morning on the bus. But behind their conversation lay other shadows, and Clara felt that the thicker the shadows grew, the more nearly she would be approaching the densely forested gloom that she took to be life itself.
When she had rung off, she walked up and down her room for a few times, thinking that she would not sleep, and then she went to bed and straight away she slept.
8
Clara found that she enjoyed being Gabriel’s mistress. The complications of the liaison, and all its dubious undertones heightened so much her feeling for Gabriel himself that she found herself from time to time on the verge of wondering uneasily whether she did not find more pleasure in the situation than in the man. For she liked the sense of secrecy, the elaborate assignations, the pre-arranged telephone calls in public call boxes, the small, passionate, surreptitious gifts. And yet, at the same time, she was aware, quite distinctly, of Gabriel himself, and could even appreciate, calmly, the impulses that drove him towards her, and the suffering that he had endured. And yet again, on a third level, what she felt for him was need and love, and when he went back to Phillipa, each night, each evening, she felt within herself the dim jealous stirrings of rage. And yet this rage itself she cherished. For to feel jealousy, that classic passion, was in itself a sign of life, and seemed to set a value upon the days through which she was living. She did not see enough of him, did not get enough of him, and felt with the acquired wisdom of her observations that too little was infinitely better than too much, that desire was in every way preferable to possession.
And yet suc
h knowledge did not advise her to refuse him, when he offered her the traditional illicit diversion, a week in Paris. She knew, as she accepted, that perhaps she should have known better, but she also knew herself to be incapable of refusing so dazzling, so delightful a prospect. Paris and Gabriel offered a combination of pleasures that could not be declined. She had visited Paris often enough, since that first school visit, but never with a man, and never with money in her pocket. The money would, in point of fact, be in Gabriel’s pocket, not her own, but that would come to the same thing; she had never managed to find in herself the smallest comprehension of Gabriel’s complaint of poverty, for he seemed to her to spend money like water. She felt sure that travelling in such company, she would see sights that she had never seen before, sights that had been all her life awaiting her; they seemed to call her, and she said that she would go.
Jerusalem the Golden Page 18