“Your favourite film-actors, eh?” All his life he had been a connoisseur of women, and he remembered his humble beginnings as a boy with pictures of actresses pinned above his bed.
“They’re writers. And that’s …” She trailed off, because of course he knew who the third one was.
He picked it up. “I don’t know the names of these great lovers. You’re the age to remember that. Good-looker, eh?”
“Don’t you see who it is?”
He smiled. “Oh, it’s Charles.” It was the curious smile with which he would greet someone who had reason to avoid him. He put the picture back; straightened it. And then it was at once dismissed from his mind; he went out calling to his wife, “I wish you could get the boy to understand that he must not take my pliers to open jam tins or whatever it is that he does to ruin them …”
The picture showed a very young man. His grey eyes were fixed slightly askance on something out of the picture, and although he was not smiling you could make out, under the photographer’s “natural” skin tinting, the faint bracket-sign on either side of his mouth that showed that he had smiled or spoken immediately before the camera clicked. The just-concluded movement made a starting-point for her. She willed him to life, speaking to her mother. He spoke to her adoringly. And then, very smoothly and easily, it was she herself to whom the strange young man was speaking, it was she whom he adored.
On rainy afternoons she stared at the face with strange and stirring emotions. The features, the ears, the eyes; she lingered over them tinglingly. Her own eyes would fill luxuriously with tears. I love you, I love you, she incantated passionately. He had taken the place of Beverley Nichols, or the young Evelyn Waugh as painted by Augustus John. They held long conversations in bed at night, and they kissed and kissed in the darkness, drawing up into these kisses all the wildly tender, terrible yearnings that swept through her body and sent her mind racing. She was in love, haunted and hounded by a fearful burden of the flesh although she did not yet have a woman’s body to fulfil it with, secreting devotion though she had no one for whom to set it working.
Did she ever admit that the fantasy to which she gave all this was her father? Here Jessie came upon the dreadful innocence of inner life, the life dreamt and not lived, that fills but is for ever confined in the globe of the skull. She knew and did not know that the man with whom she rehearsed both the domestic intimacies she had seen in films, and the erotic intimacies mysteriously hinted at in books and strangely understood somewhere in her body—that this man bore the label “father”. The truth was that he was a face, a young face, and she had made the face of love out of him. If there was darkness in the make-believe, it was hidden in the dark nature of make-believe itself. For nothing of all this passion existed in the light of her contact with the “real” world where she shopped and talked with her mother.
There were other things behind the self-composed face of the child who moved among grown-ups as one of themselves, like a little ape who has been taught to blow his nose in a handkerchief and eat with a knife and fork. Confronted with them after so long, Jessie took them up, uncomfortable, puzzled—and then came the stab of identity and recognition. The shape of cold terror that used to impress itself on the back of her neck when she turned her back to the dark passage behind the bathroom door at night, bending to wash her face. Had she ever, in the twenty years or so since then, found out who it was that threatened to come up behind her? Then there was the—even at this stage, an old inhibition came back, and she did not know what name to call it—the business of the electric plugs. She had been afraid to be alone in a room where there were electric plugs because she might be impelled to put her fingers into one and turn on the current. The sight of one, brown, shiny and commonplace, fascinated her horribly, and rising alongside the fascination was an equal fear—the two forces possessed her, but to whom could she cry out? Such things did not exist in the articulate world; “there is nothing there,” they came in and said, of the dark. Bruno and her mother had what she humbly accepted were “real” troubles—the grown-up ones of stocks and shares rising and falling, that they discussed in the deep dreamy concentration induced by money, in which their differences were surpassed; and the other grown-up ones of which nothing was said, but that anyone, even a child, could sense, dividing the stream of the house’s being in two, so that the very cat, coming in the door, paused electrically.
Love and destruction, life and death, were already possessed of the battleground of the mind and body of the child who sat politely, smoothing her new skirt, or hung on her mother’s arm, listening with self-important absorption to talk of dress. The courage that the child must have screwed out of herself to maintain this balance appalled Jessie; how was it possible for a creature to live so secret, so alone? Ignorance, of course, the dreadful certainty, hopelessly accepted, that there is no one, not anywhere in the world, like you.
Was it possible that Morgan was suffering like this?
Yet Jessie was now an adult herself, and she was as inclined as any other to be lulled by the commonplaceness of the child. Morgan with his eternal bat and ball, Morgan jumping up with such prompt eagerness when you sent him off to do some piffling errand. Morgan with a front, of its kind, as bland as her own loved and loving daughterly one had been.
“I should tell Morgan how he comes to have his place with us,” she said to Tom.
He was trying to write a difficult letter, and reluctantly he roused himself at the sound of the slow, dead voice she always used when she had made up her mind to do something reckless. He stopped writing, put his elbows on the table and pressed his two thumbs against the sharp edges of his top teeth for a moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last.
“Tell him more. More about us. Tell him the truth. Why not? Why shouldn’t I admit to him that my marriage to his father wasn’t anything like this? Tell him that if his father hadn’t been killed the marriage would have ended anyway. He ought to know he hasn’t missed anything.”
“What are you talking about?” He looked at her as if he were about to apprehend a crime.
“Why do people always protect children by keeping them on the surface? That’s not the way to do it at all. One ought to let them in on everything and make them strong.”
In answer to his silence, she added, “We ought to talk to him more—Boaz said it once.”
He gave a little weary snort, dismissing that as something different.
With an effort at reasonableness, he began: “How do you think you can go about it?”
“Find—a—way—to—get—at—him,” she said. She saw with a thrill of disappointment that she had stung Tom to concealed alarm. “—Well, what have I said?”
He shrugged. “I think the thing for us to do is to stick to practical plans to occupy Morgan. Ease him on to his own feet … that’s all.”
She felt the exchange falling into the pattern of their two personalities and she made an impulsive attempt to break it. “It may be the thing for you, but not for me.” She had never before claimed her relationship as the boy’s mother, as opposed to his as a stranger and a stepfather. Morgan was something they had put up with together, as best they could.
But to Tom the sudden change had little to do with her actual feelings about Morgan; he saw it as a well-known sign of what he thought of as the amateurishness of her nature. She would want to have a go at something; the single achievement itself obsessed her, with the amateur’s disregard for what ought to have gone before in the form of proper preparation, or what might be expected to come after. She was often a brilliant amateur—it was this aspect of her that he had fallen in love with, reaching out in sure instinct beyond the pleasures of their affair to feel the hot flame of her fearful determination, time and again, to achieve a manoeuvre of her own life. How many human beings had this calm and reckless assumption that their life was in their hands? This quality that had deeply excited him and moved him for ever into her orbit turned out to be also, in the
long run of marriage, the one that gave him the most trouble, rather as if he had married for a face and the beauty of it had brought its inevitable pain by attracting other men. What he loved most, he came to like least in her. If she was sometimes brilliant in her disregard for the rules, he had also learnt that she was more often dangerous.
He aimed grimly, “Jessie, don’t try to catch Morgan in a bear-hug now.”
“You think I’m lying.”
“I don’t think you’re lying. I’m sure you’re thinking about Morgan these days in a way you’ve never done before. I’m simply warning you that you can’t foist intimacy on to him now. For Christ’s sake! He won’t know what to do with it.”
She kept feeling tears rise to the brink of her voice, awful, easy tears, and she said dryly, with perfect control, “No, let’s send him on a fishing trip instead. Let’s think like a school-marm, as you’re beginning to do …”
Six
An old man sat in a hotel bedroom in the city that night. The room was charged with an alert irritability that emanated from him and his movements and then came back at him, electrically, with the bright yellow light that sprang from the walls. The room was too small for the light and it was too small for him. Luggage, not unpacked, stood around him, bearing dangling airways labels with a flight number scrawled on them, the name “Bruno Fuecht” and the destination, “Zurich”. He stood in the middle of the room in the concentration of one possessed by what is going on in his own mind, and ceaselessly it went out toward the walls and beat back upon him again. He went to the telephone beside the bed and snapped some enquiry into it, first bringing himself to the state of communication with the world by a sharp cough and a tremor of effort that moved his head unsteadily. He waited, holding the receiver, and the middle finger of his other hand beat jerkily on his knee. He got the information he wanted, and made another request; at last, he heard the telephone ringing in a house he had never seen.
The Stilwells were in the becalmed state that follows a quarrel, when the telephone rang. The quarrel over Morgan had dragged on into a deadly examination of the dissatisfactions and burdens of their daily life, that each took as the unsaid reproach of the other. Each felt the other was known to the bone; there was no possibility that a sudden turn of courage, of frivolity, even, might reveal itself unexpectedly in one of them, and so restore something of the mystery to life itself.
Tom went slowly to the telephone. “Here is Fuecht. Fuecht. Who is speaking?” The voice ended in a crackle.
Tom did not catch the name properly. “This is Tom Stilwell. Who is it you want?”
“This is Fuecht,” the voice came back sternly. “I’m speaking from the Queen’s Hotel. I was on my way to Europe and the plane is delayed. They brought me to town and gave me a room. Listen, my plane doesn’t go till two o’clock.” “Mr. Fuecht! That’s unexpected.” Tom had the embarrassed, disbelieving tone of someone unfairly singled out by a man who had never before paid him any attention. “Can you see me?” the voice insisted. “Couldn’t you come into town? I’m at the Queen’s Hotel and I’ll only be here a few hours, I’m on my way to Europe. You’ve got a car, eh, Stilwell?”
“Well, the trouble is, it’s rather late.”
There was a strangely stirring silence on the other end of the telephone.
Why should a man who hardly knew him put such pressure on him? Tom said, “Just hold on a minute, will you, I’ll speak to Jessie. Do you mind?” There was some sort of sound of assent.
He went back into the living-room where she was lying face-down on the divan. “Have you heard anything from your mother? Anything you haven’t told me? That’s Fuecht.”
Jessie stayed quite still for a moment, and then she turned round and sat up, all in one movement. “It’s Fuecht?” The skin under her eyes seemed to tighten, as it did when she was afraid. “I ought to stop answering the phone altogether,” he said, with a feeble attempt at a joke.
“Fuecht?”
“Yes, at the Queen’s. He’s phoning from there. He says he’s on his way to Europe and the plane’s been delayed.”
She nodded. “Well, that’s that. He’s threatened my mother for weeks that he’d go.” She sat stiffly.
“What shall I tell him? He wants us to go to the hotel. The plane doesn’t leave till two.”
There was a moment’s silence. “I won’t go,” she said. “Does he mean me?”
The coldness of the quarrel stirred again faintly. “I suppose so. Why should he want to see me? I hardly know him. I don’t suppose I’ve seen him more than three times.”
Jessie gave a strange, set, painful blink, like the cringe of an old woman. Tom felt unease, an outsider to the silence between the man on the telephone and the woman bolt upright on the divan. He said, trying to be of use, “D’you want me to go?”
“I won’t go,” she said, and sat running the nail of her forefinger rapidly under the nails of her other hand.
He went back to the telephone. “Hello? Mr. Fuecht, I’ll be there in about half an hour. Jessie’s in bed already. Where will you be?” “In the room,” came the voice, suddenly strong—Tom did not know whether it was the telephone, but the voice seemed to fade and rise to strength, intermittently. “Number a hundred and ninety-six, it’s on the second floor. I won’t go from the room.”
Tom drove to town subdued but not too unwilling. A quarrel is better rounded off than left in the air, a miasma. He was doing something now that he wouldn’t be doing if he were not Jessie’s husband; the relationship was quietly validated by this performance of a piece of family business. It was a token performance, of course, just as Bruno Fuecht was a token relative.
Tom had always thought that Fuecht was a strange, foreign choice to have been made by Jessie’s mother; the explanation that he was the best friend of Jessie’s own father, who had died when she was younger than Elisabeth, certainly seemed the only possible justification. Mrs. Fuecht had the cynical pride of bearing of the woman who has set herself to live out the length of an unhappy marriage. Where Jessie was careless of her appearance, and, in her late thirties, already no longer beautiful, Mrs. Fuecht, at nearly seventy, was dressed in the perfection of cut and matched colour that demands unflagging concentration on one’s own person. Tom had never seen her without a hat. Even in her own house, she looked perpetually like a visitor dressed for some occasion to which nobody else has been invited.
“Why is she so cold,” he had asked Jessie sometime, struck, on meeting the woman again, with this quality in her. “She loathes Fuecht,” said Jessie simply. “She’s frozen into the state of living in the same house with him.”
Mrs. Fuecht had never been happy with the man, but since he had got old he had become demoniacal. From the coast, where they lived in retirement, came reports, year after year, of his moodiness, his contrariness, his downright devilishness. He was ill and quarrelled with his doctors. He made it impossible to keep servants for longer than a few days at a time. He brooded and threatened to sell up his excellent investments. And when, Jessie said, he had stilled her mother to a state of tight-lipped, despairing consternation at his recklessness—he suddenly burst out laughing in her face, as if all of it, everything, from the refusal to take his medicine to the threats to their security, had been directed to this one end: to make a fool of her.
Tom wondered, from time to time—with the impatience one feels toward other people’s troubles—why the old woman hadn’t left Fuecht long ago. He meant to ask her, just as a matter of curiosity; but somehow, once in her presence, he never felt himself taken sufficient account of to be allowed such a question.
He accepted that Jessie’s relationship with her mother was an odd one, to say the least of it. Apparently she had felt herself passionately dependent on her mother as a child and girl; as a woman, she understood that the truth was that her mother had been passionately and ruthlessly dependent on her. It was clear that her mother had clipped her wings and brain-washed her, to keep her near—the story about
the heart trouble was a pretty dreadful one, if you really took a look at it. Before Morgan was born, Jessie had gone to a heart specialist to see if the old ailment had left any weakness that might make a normal birth dangerous for her, and he had told her with emphatic quiet that not only was her heart perfectly normal, but in fact it was not possible that a heart ailment serious enough to keep a child out of school for years could leave no sign of past damage … No, better not look into that at all. Jessie told him that as a child she had believed that her mother loved her more than other mothers loved their children. As she had come to understand, through her feelings for her husband and her own children, the free nature of love, her fascinated resentment toward her mother had grown proportionately; yet she supported the woman, at a distance of five or six hundred miles, against Fuecht.
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