It was useless, then, to try to adopt or adapt Norah’s husband; and since Norah herself was forever immersed in domestic matters, she too was dropped—or rather dropped herself: for she seemed to have lost all interest in country pursuits, and never went away without her husband.
Her relations hoped that she was happy. Combining duty with dentist or dressmaker, they paid her infrequent calls, and found her fresh-looking still and energetic. She had kept her slender figure, and still managed somehow to look better dressed than other people. True, her face was worn round the eyes and mouth; but then she was well over thirty. Her hair was quite grey; but it was that kind of hair.
When, after some years, she purchased a dilapidated second-hand Morris Cowley, she occasionally returned their calls; but more often careened past their very doors, going picnicking with her boys, or touring the moors with an odd-looking person from the town.
They left the tram-lines at last and the final straggle of pit cottages, and took the road which ran through flat pastures and great ploughed fields, and villages mingling old stone with new red brick and factory chimneys; climbed gently to sheltered grassy uplands where the sheep grazed; then more steeply over hill-roads to the tableland of the moors. Far away on every side stretched those dark historic contours, rolling to the horizon, line after line, like foamless deep-sea waves. All around were the stone walls, the shepherds’ huts, the brown heath patched with the russet of old bracken, the sombre green of gorse, the coarse grass blowing yellowish and tawny in the wind, as if faint sunlight gilded it; but not a gleam came out of the dun sky.
Norah slowed down and looked about her.
“What would it be like, I wonder,” she said, “not to be always longing for this?”
“You’ll have it in the end,” said Grace.
“No, no,” said Norah, still gazing into the distance. “When Gerry gets a bit older he won’t be able to stand these winters. … He can’t now, really. We shall move on to Liverpool or Nottingham, or some such salubrious seat of learning. And we shall end our days in a pension just outside Bordighera. Gerry will sit like a fire-breathing dragon in a bath-chair, and I shall push him … or else be in my grave.”
But as she said this, she saw the picture too clearly: herself worn to death and lying under the earth; Gerry’s face when he sat alone or lay by himself wakeful in the dark watches; the boys drifting about the house with no one to tell them what to do, their shirts grubby, frayed, outgrown; Gerry giving them too many lessons, hounding them on, enveloped with them in a black cloud of exasperation, misunderstanding, and dumb, tearless longing for her. She felt the reproach buried deep in their hearts against her, because she had abandoned them and ruined them: a core of anguished indignation in the three male hearts. … Gerry, who trusted only her (and her with such difficulty), swearing savagely to trust no one and nothing now, and the boys degenerating as they grew up, floundering in the bog of adolescence, among the urgent lusts of young men, whose bodies, in the first sap and vigour of manhood, drive them and betray them. Gazing across the moors, she told herself that she understood these things: she had been taught her lesson long ago when she had presented a spirit quivering with the malleability of first love, but smooth and light in texture as silk, to be petrified and graven for ever with the knowledge of the appetites of men … of the appetites of Jimmy.
It had been her idea, not his, that they should keep nothing from each other. She had wanted to recreate for herself the picture of his childhood and boyhood in order to possess in some measure the wasted past before she had known him. She had been even more of an idiot then than she was now. For the thousandth time she asked herself anxiously, Could she have kept him?—then checked the unprofitable train of thought; for it did not matter now.
She had given him her trifling confidences, and he in his turn … yes, in the end he had given her his. He had shown her himself drunk, sleeping with harlots. All the mysteries that had been names merely, scarcely rousing her curiosity, the rhymes and stories she had laughed at with the others, but had not understood—all had slowly taken form and flesh: Jimmy’s form, his debauched flesh, the mysterious forms, the bought flesh of those who had tempted him.
For the loss to her of his chastity she had suffered—oh! still suffered—a jealousy that pierced and strangled.
She remembered what had followed on her admission: that she had once before imagined herself in love (with a cousin)—permitted herself to be kissed.
Had he ever? …
Poor Jimmy, so much of his confession had been unnecessary: for of such things as he had hinted at she had had no conception, and therefore no suspicion. He had had to enlighten her first as to the facts, almost from the beginning … poor Jimmy, saddled with the useless horror, the futile anguish of an ignorant fool. She had been very slow, painfully slow, to grasp his explanations. But he had persevered … yes, he had persevered.
After that, she remembered, she had become quite obsessed, quite nasty-minded about sex. She had thought of nothing else. She had passed through parched days, inflamed and sleepless nights. No matter how the conversation opened she had had to work it round in spite of herself to the one subject, torturing herself and him with questions and answers. He had laughed at her, he had been gentle with her—sheepish, bored, evasive, remorseful, angry, all in turn. And at last he had cried out “It’s no use. You’ll never understand—” and she had heard in the words an inexpressible weariness and misery; as if he needed her and knew she was inadequate to help him; longed to rest in her, and she would not give him peace. Then in a moment all was clear and calm. At the last second she had not failed him after all. The mist before her eyes had cleared and she had recognized the man she loved, and loved him with truth and passion; casting away the false and empty form of his ideal image. Jealousy was gone; shrinking and pain, misunderstanding and outraged pride all vanished. She had taken his hand and embraced all knowledge in serene perspective, from the erotic curiosities of schooldays to the habitual indulgences of young manhood. She had accepted the fact of lust in him divorced utterly from love. That had been the hardest; but she had managed it.
Poor Jimmy, he had been very wretched—just that once. Yes, perhaps it was he who had been the more wretched in the end. His self-loathing, frenzied and fantastic, had been one more violent initiation for her; but she had triumphed. At long last she had become solid to the core, invulnerable—a hearthstone in an old house, scrubbed clean (but worn a little with ancestral steps) over which a husband might walk securely into his house.
It was such a great love, she whispered to herself: how could it be (for the thousandth time) that it had not availed to save him? That was his fault … so like him … just as everything was coming right at last. In spite of her, he would not, could not care to save himself. To her passionate feminine instinct for life he had opposed his masculine indifference; and somehow, in the general destruction of mankind by man, he had disappeared with a smile and a shrug, and defeated her.
And unfortunately, Jimmy being long since dead and herself having for husband Gerald MacKay, this bitterly-won understanding was rather wasted; for she had married a creature of extreme innocence and chastity, quite uninterested, one would almost think unaware of the difficulties of his sex: absolutely no use to growing boys.
But why worry, she thought, after all? The boys would get through all right, as other boys did. Perhaps, too, things were different in these frank, enlightened days: perhaps girls did not get such shocks. Perhaps it was true (though appalling) what one heard: that they too were beginning to take their experiences casually, promiscuously, before marriage.
She became conscious of Grace sitting silent beside her. There was a woman on whom no one had ever made demands. Quite certainly Tom and she had never tortured each other with feverish intensity, or bound themselves together and plunged headlong into deep waters to sink or swim. The very idea was comic. Grace, now, had n
o important human relationship, occupation or interest—nothing real, in her life; and yet she herself was in some way a perfectly real person—that is, one capable of experience. She had a humorous smile; one could not help wondering what she was thinking about. It was curious that they never talked together about love and marriage, as women generally do. They were topics on which Grace seemed to have no views: as if she had not been married at all: had not, after all, shared a double bed for years with a husband: one, moreover, who trod heavily by day, sniffed firmly, sang in the bath, drank, smoked, wore plus-fours at the week-ends, and was altogether most unmistakably a man. But she never so much as said he snored.
Once some time ago Norah had inquired:
“Were you in love with Tom when you married him?”
She had laughed first, either in mockery or in embarrassment, and replied after a pause:
“Well … I knew I was going to marry Tom,” and said no more, leaving Norah to consider whether the words were to be taken as fatalistic, or referred to some parental arrangement or coercion.
It was a pity, thought Norah, drawing up before a pair of wrought-iron gates that headed a sweep of drive, that Grace had wasted her life.
She took a paper-wrapped object from the back of the car and tucked it under her arm.
“I’ve brought her a hyacinth in a pot,” she said. “Rather a moderate specimen. Why waste a good plant?” She addressed Grace vigorously. “While I’m in here you take a brisk walk. It’s what you need. Come back in a glow or something.”
She glanced at Grace’s colourless cheeks. She herself had lost her complexion after the birth of the children, and now used, with great secrecy, a little rouge.
Grace crossed the road, and wandered up a grassy track that led to the top of the moor’s slope. The light was failing already. In the west a mass of darker clouds marked the defeat of the battered and struggling day. It was sad on the moors, and the wind blew with a chill whistle. The wild birds cried and flew. There was a gull from the sea, flying high up, with the wind, on motionless wings. At the top of the slope she looked far out over shadowy dramatic wastes of land, and saw the sea, laid in a dark line along the horizon. She thought of the coast road that wound beside low, blond sand-dunes; and of the grey-green coarse sea-grasses sprouting over them like tufts of sparse and bristling hair. She remembered the day when she and Tom had taken a train to the coast, one Sunday, soon after their marriage. They had found a lonely bay, and stayed there all day paddling, scrambling over slippery rocks, lying on the beach. When evening came, a flood of blue light, blue as the inside of a wet oyster-shell, gleamed in the damp sands, and all the air was liquid and lucent with the reflection. Far away at the end of the rocks, a lonely child was bowed over her shrimping-net; her small figure, lost almost in an immensity of space, was moving and significant. The North Sea breakers, quieting with evening and the ebb of the tide, collapsed with a soft explosion. And as she lay watching, all had become fixed, crystallized into forms absolute and eternal. Earth and sky mirrored each other in a blue element half air, half water, the lonely child bent for ever above her net, the breaking wave spread itself at the edge of the unmoving fields of the sea like a long bank of flowering marguerite daisies.
She had promised herself to come often to the sea, but from that day to this she had scarcely seen it. It had needed too much ardour and energy to come alone: and Norah said the coast depressed her. She had wanted to spend a summer holiday there; but every August had seen them departing for a fortnight in Cheshire with Tom’s mother. It was one of the very few things, she thought, that Tom had always been firm about: his holiday must be spent with Mother because she counted on it. It was all right for him: he played golf and she gave him his favourite puddings and fawned upon him. Every year he declared with a shake of the head that poor old Mother was ageing rapidly; but though looking each year more purple, mottled, and puffy, more lewd, more like a decaying plum, she had contrived to remain on the branch and so husband her resources as to be able to greet Tom’s wife each year with unimpaired malevolence: until last winter when she had suddenly dropped off, and Tom had buried her with deep filial feelings and returned from the funeral quite pale and broken.
But the emotion she had had, had been of a different kind: a simple one, in fact, of overpowering relief, such as a prisoner might feel at unexpected acquittal. Next August she would be free. The thought leapt in her mind now, as she started to walk down again over the wet heather. She could go where she liked; and at last she would go alone. Yes, she would suggest to Tom that they should separate for their holiday, and he would be shocked at first, but soon acquiescent. … Where should she go? Far away, right in the south somewhere, but inland, not by the sea. The sea was often ugly, and sad except when the sun shone. The place she wanted must be sheltered and green, with a smell of hay and clover in the air, and thick hedgerows, and cottage gardens packed with flowers. Yes, she would find it.
She quickened her pace: she was almost running, a thing she hated.
“But do I hate it?” she wondered; and now she was definitely running, slowly, springing rather high over the heather, smiling to think how odd she must look—large, clumsy, in a long mackintosh, ambling downhill on matronly limbs, and rather enjoying herself.
“Home, now, home,” said Norah, climbing into the car, and her voice, which was clear and firm, not sad, seemed to ring mournfully, inhumanly, like a voice of the moor, through the wind’s clamour and the grey failing of the day. The half-light made her pallid and insubstantial, and took the warmth of colour from her crimson coat and hat.
“Can we race the rain?” she added, looking round her with a dubious grimace.
After a few miles she took a short-cut down a narrow lane, and as she turned the corner, a patch of red flashed suddenly against the shadows ahead.
“What’s that?” said Norah, peering. “A pink coat. … Oh, the hunt! I wish we’d seen them.”
A young man in a pink coat and muddy breeches was walking down the road in front of them. He paused in his slow, loose stride when he heard the car and stood still in the middle of the lane, as if preparing to ask for a lift. But when he saw that the car held two women he hurried on, staring fixedly in front of him. Grace recognized from afar the old man’s nephew. She had not seen him since the night of the cinema, three weeks ago.
“Oh, it’s that boy, I do believe,” said Norah, slowing down, “Hugh Miller. He came in to play bridge the other night, and Gerry liked him. He actually talked to him. It’s funny—I knew his sister in London years ago. She wrote and asked me to look him up.”
She came up beside him and stopped the car.
“How d’ you do,” she called. “Like a lift?”
Forced to stop and look at her, he recognized her with a smile in which spontaneous friendliness and reluctance were mingled: the smile of one who liked his fellow-creatures but who would just as soon—perhaps rather—be left alone by them. He stood and continued to smile, attractive, polite—wondering, thought Grace, how he could escape from these women.
“I didn’t recognize you for a moment,” he said. His voice too had a mixed quality, diffident and careless; and very quiet. When he spoke he gave her a firm gaze, and then looked away again.
“Would a lift be any good to you?”
“Oh, no, thank you. Don’t bother.” He seemed to draw back. “I was just on my way to the station.”
“To the station? It’s miles away, and you’ll be soaked before you get there. Are you going back to the town?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Well, do get in, then: if you don’t mind the dickey.”
Idiot Norah, thought Grace, and worse than idiot to press him. She saw herself and Norah, two wind-battered, red-nosed married women, accosting a reluctant young man, coaxing him to drive with them. She experienced again the feeling that had assailed her in the cinema, of a humiliating
difference between her and him, deeper than difference of sex, something secretly, perhaps unconsciously aloof in his personality. She felt afraid of him, and wanted to obliterate herself from his sight. She said awkwardly, with a blush:
“Perhaps he’d rather not.”
And at once she felt him stiffen obstinately, sensitively to deny her words, as if she had rudely exposed his secret boredom; and he said with alacrity:
“Thanks awfully then, if you’re sure you don’t mind. I’d love to.”
He climbed in, drawing up his long legs as best he could in the narrow space.
“Splendid!” he said. “Terribly comfortable,” and sat huddled together, heroically smiling.
“Had a good day?” called Norah over her shoulder.
He leaned forward swiftly to reply.
“So-so. A good morning. But then my horse went lame, and I had to take him home. But it was nice to get some exercise after a week of that office.” He added politely: “Do you hunt?”
“Used to,” said Norah.
After a while she looked round again and said:
“You must be frozen. You ought to have a coat.”
“Lord, no!” he shouted back.
She smiled faintly, observing the glow of colour in his fair skin and the clearness of his eyes. He looked so full of fresh air, so well exercised. He was the sort of boy who would throw away the undervests his mother sent him at school, and declare on the coldest day that he was boiling. It was quite extraordinary how pleasant Gerry had been to him.
A Note in Music Page 3