‘Elizabeth, how can you say that? This has never happened before—’
‘Oh, darling, please let’s be open with each other, now! This may be the first time that it’s actually “happened”, as you call it. But it’s certainly been on your mind before. You’ve wanted it. You’ve played all round it. Won’t you even admit that?’
‘Well, yes, perhaps—in a way—only, I promise you—’
‘If we can’t be frank about this, Stephen, we’re lost. Then our whole life together has failed, anyhow—just because this physical thing has ended. And you don’t believe that’s true—do you?’
‘Of course I don’t. And besides—’
‘Then why shouldn’t we face the simplest facts of Nature? Are they really so terrible? That you’re still young and strong and healthy. And that I’m—not.’
‘But, Elizabeth darling—you’re making it all sound so much more important than it is.’
‘No, Stephen! Don’t you see—it’s you who make it important? By being sentimental about it. By refusing to speak of it. After all, this isn’t something new. We’ve both known it for some while, now. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it, many times. But you’ve always made me feel that I couldn’t.’
‘How did I do that?’
‘Oh—by the way you looked and behaved, whenever we came anywhere near the subject.’
‘How did I look?’
‘Defensive. And rather frightened.’
‘I must say, I don’t remember any of those times.’
‘You really don’t?’
‘No. Not a single one.’ The tension between us seemed greatly eased, now, and I found myself on the verge of smiling.
‘Well—if I must refresh your memory’—Elizabeth actually did smile at this point—‘we had a very good reason to discuss this a year ago, that last month in Paris.’
‘A reason? Elizabeth—you can’t mean—?’
‘That charming little Madeleine Jouffroy.’
‘But she—that was nothing at all!’
‘It was a reason.’
‘I suppose so. Just barely.’
‘And then there was the Danish engineer’s wife—what was her name? I never liked her—at the Schwarzsee. And that nice Irish girl—Cathleen somebody—in Tangier—’
‘Stop!’ I exclaimed, laughing. ‘You make me sound like Casanova. Darling, I swear to you—’
‘That nothing ever actually happened? I’m sure it didn’t, if you say so. But, Stephen, that’s exactly where you keep dodging the point. And I don’t mean that I used to sit at home gnawing my nails with suspicion. But those were times when there was enough of a situation to make it worth discussing. And you never would, however much I encouraged you to. We could have done it so easily, then. When Michael came along, that was far more difficult. I mean, it would have been ever so much more embarrassing, if I’d been wrong.’
‘When you found out, weren’t you at all—disgusted?’
‘Because it was a man? What difference does that make? You know, I had a friend, once, whose husband used to have affairs with men. I asked her if she minded that more than if it had been with women. And she said: “Neither more nor less. What I grudge is the time he spends away from me. And that’s the same, in either case.”’
‘Oh, Elizabeth!’ I laughed. ‘Doesn’t anything ever shock you?’
‘Yes, Stephen,’ she had become serious again, at once. ‘Unkindness shocks me. Terribly. And, next time this happens, I want—’
‘There’ll never be a next time.’
‘Next time this happens,’ Elizabeth repeated, laying her hand on mine, ‘I want you to promise that you won’t let the other person believe all kinds of things that are impossible and untrue—’
‘But I told you, there won’t be—’
‘Will you promise?’
‘All right. I promise … But, darling, you do at least realize, don’t you, that I couldn’t ever be serious about anybody else?’
‘That’s the whole point. I do realize it.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘Only, you see, knowing that doesn’t make me altogether happy. Because this being “serious” is only partly love—a great deal of it is nothing but dependence. That’s what I was trying to tell Michael … Darling, have you ever thought what would happen to you if I were ever to leave you?’
‘Leave me? You mean, with somebody else?’
‘No. Alone.’
‘You mean you might go off by yourself? You might get so sick of me that—?’
‘No, silly. I only meant I might die.’
‘Oh … I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.’
‘But, Stephen, I fully intend to die some day. Don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course. But—’
‘Well then, I want you to love me—oh, as much as ever you can—but try to need me less. Let’s stand side by side—not cling to each other.’
‘You don’t really need me, do you? Not in the wrong way, I mean.’
Elizabeth smiled at me, rather sadly. ‘How I wish that were true! But I do—desperately, sometimes. I hope you’ll never know how much.’
‘You just say that, to make me feel better.’
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘How can I? I think you’re about the strongest person in the whole world.’
‘Oh, Stephen darling!’ Elizabeth shook her head with a kind of amused bewilderment. ‘Is that really how I seem to you—after seven long years?’ She passed her hand over her eyes, as if brushing something away. And now I became aware that she was utterly exhausted. This evening must have used up almost the last reserves of her energy. I took her arm, gently helping her to her feet, and we walked together into the bedroom without saying another word.
A few days after this, a parcel arrived for me from Las Palmas. From the feel of it, I thought at first that it must be some piece of laundry we’d left behind at the hotel. But when I’d undone the wrappings and unfolded what appeared to be a large red cotton tablecloth, I found myself looking at a faded Nazi flag. One of its edges was ravelled and tattered, as if it had been flapping for a long time in the wind. There was nothing else in the parcel.
I was too ashamed to show the flag to Elizabeth. I kept it hidden for a couple of days, wondering guiltily what on earth I should do with it. Then I burned it secretly in the garden incinerator, after cutting off a small corner, the size of a postage stamp. This I carried around with me in my wallet for a long time; until, finally, I lost it.
After this, I heard nothing more of Michael for the next three years.
It was early in the summer of 1937, and I was back at St Luc. I was sitting alone, one morning, in the little café on the corner of the waterfront, looking at the gulls and the patched sails of the fishing-boats in the harbour and dully wondering, as usual, why I was there and what was going to happen to me next. Whenever I was alone, at that time, I had more or less the same mixture of feelings: a basic wish never to go back to the villa, or see Jane or any of the rest of them again; and a nagging anxiety about what they—and especially Jane—might have been doing while I was gone. There was harbour, and there was I, and there was the situation. It was all as usual.
Until I saw Michael. He appeared—as all authentic ghosts are supposed to—without any dramatic portents; just another figure among the ordinary figures of the waterfront, which only caught my notice because it carried its arm in a sling. He was passing the café with his eyes on the cobble-stones before him, seemingly deep in thought, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have seen me if I hadn’t called his name.
When I did so, he looked up. He seemed to recognize me without much surprise but quite slowly, as people do when they’re drunk. ‘Oh—hello, Stephen,’ he said.
I saw how thin he was. The bones of his body made hard outlines inside his shabby sports-coat and threadbare flannel trousers, and his cheeks were hollow. Underneath his dark sun-tan, he looked tired and ill. His blue eyes were extraordinaril
y bright, so bright that I thought he must be running a fever.
‘Where in the world have you sprung from?’ I asked, when he’d sat down at my table.
‘Spain. Madrid, actually.’ He put his free hand into his pocket, extracted a pack of cigarettes and jerked one out of it, bending to take it between his lips. I lit it for him.
‘So you’re still on the same job—taking pictures?’
‘No. Not the last few months. I was in the International Brigade.’
‘Gosh!’ I nodded toward the sling. ‘Is that how you got this?’
‘It isn’t much.’ Michael glanced down at it indifferently. ‘But they made a mess of it somehow, at the hospital. The bone didn’t set right. Now I’ve got to have a skin graft.’
‘And so you’re out of it, now?’
‘I’m no use to them like this.’
‘Are you going back to England?’
‘I’m on my way there. I’ll be leaving tonight. There was a Frenchman in my company who got killed. His mother lives here. I have to go and see her. That’s why I came.’
‘I see.’ We’d been talking to each other in the dry, bored tones of two upper-class Englishmen discussing cricket. Michael’s terseness was infectious. Now we were silent. I sat watching him. He kept his eyes on the table.
‘I heard about Elizabeth,’ he said at length, with an obvious effort. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks,’ I said mechanically. The mention of her name only seemed to make the gap between us wider. Suddenly I knew that, as I couldn’t get rid of Michael immediately, I wanted to stop being alone with him. If we stayed there any longer, we would either have nothing to say to each other—or far too much.
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘how about coming up to my place and having a drink? I’ve got a villa here, you know. It’s quite nice—right on the beach. And there’s some people I’d like you to meet. That is, if you don’t mind meeting people?’
‘No. I don’t mind,’ Michael told me; and I could see that he didn’t. He simply didn’t care. To him, these weren’t going to be real people, because this wasn’t a real place. I knew, from his whole manner, that that was how he felt.
When we got back to the house, they were all of them there. They were always all of them there. Lee and Dale and Ben and Jo and the girl Lee had brought back from Toulon, and Martin and Joyce and Shirley and Glen, and the two silly Belgian girls and Pierre, the show-off muscle-boy, and the nice tall vague girl with huge feet whom for some reason we called Donald. And, in the midst of them all, as always, Jane. She was lying in a chair on the terrace—this was one of her lazy days—and she didn’t get up. But she looked Michael over appreciatively, as I didn’t fail to notice. I couldn’t help myself: I always watched her, pretending not to, whenever she met a new man.
The gang made a huge fuss over Michael. They were more than ready to welcome any stranger—and this one was handsome, and a wounded hero. Just why he had been fighting at all, and what the Civil War was all about, were matters beyond their understanding. One of them even asked ‘Which side were you on?’ Michael answered, ‘The Government’s,’ politely and without a trace of surprise or annoyance; while two other members of the party, who were a little better informed, were embarrassed and tried to shut the questioner up. The girls wanted to know what kind of a uniform you wore in the Brigade, and whether it was true about the Moors raping women of seventy. And poor old Mr Willoughby, our neighbour from up the hill, fuddled with drink and anxious to impress, rambled on about the Boer War and trotted out his vocabulary of military terms. Michael was quite polite and gentle with him, too. ‘You probably hate talking about all of this,’ said Jane, who was often more sensitive than the others to the way people felt. ‘Don’t let them heckle you.’ Michael smiled at her and answered: ‘No, really, I don’t mind.’ And, watching him as he sat there with the tall gin drink in his hand, I remembered what Elizabeth had said in Las Palmas about the dark little cave.
Michael went off during the afternoon to see the mother of the dead Frenchman, and then came back to the villa to eat supper with us before his train left. In the meanwhile, we had had one of our typical domestic dramas. Pierre and Shirley and the Belgian girls had been flying a kite on the cliffs near the highway, along which there were power-lines. They had made this kite themselves, and tied a lot of tinsel Christmas stars to its tail. Without any warning, the kite had suddenly dipped in an air-current and fallen on the power-lines, where the tinsel must have caused a short-circuit, for there was a blinding flash, and the lines had burned through and broken and fallen across the road, spitting sparks, and Pierre and the girls had run away. Now they were all working themselves up into a state of panic, lest they should be traced, arrested and thrown into prison. (They probably wouldn’t have been, anyhow; but, to calm their fears, I went down to see the Chief of Police next day and used some money in a discreet manner. That year, I had to take care of several similar situations.)
While this story was being retold for the tenth time, and the gang’s attention thereby diverted from Michael, I kept wondering what he was thinking of us all. I was determined to find out. After the daily overdose of Martinis, I was in a thoroughly nasty mood, half maudlin, half aggressive. Michael’s presence made me more than usually ashamed of the life I was living here, and I wanted to punish him for that. To make some kind of a scene, I didn’t care what. I only knew I had to break through and touch the raw of his feelings, and try to hurt him.
‘Let’s go into the other room,’ I said to him. ‘You must have had about enough of this circus, haven’t you?’
Michael didn’t answer. He merely gave me a faint smile. I took him by the elbow of his good arm and steered him out through the doorway into the dining-room, shutting the door behind us to cut out the noise.
‘It’s like this all the time,’ I continued. ‘I expect you think we’re crazy?’
Again Michael smiled but said nothing. I realized that I wouldn’t get anywhere with this approach.
‘You saw your friend’s mother?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I saw her.’
‘I suppose she was terribly upset?’
‘At first, she was.’
‘What on earth do you say to people in a situation like that?’
‘I forget exactly what I said.’ Obviously, Michael didn’t want to talk about it.
‘I suppose you told her he was killed instantly?’
Michael looked quickly at me, and I saw that I’d startled him. ‘How did you know?’ he asked.
‘That’s what one always tells the relatives, isn’t it? I’ve heard they used to, in the Great War.’
‘No, I mean how did you know it wasn’t true, about Henri?’
‘I didn’t. How could I have?’
‘Of course you couldn’t, actually. It just seemed strange, your saying that—’ Michael appeared to be speaking more to himself than to me. There was a silence.
‘Henri—’ I said, to start him off again. ‘That was his name?’
Michael nodded absently.
‘He was a special friend of yours?’
‘He was my best friend.’ Michael glanced uneasily around the room, and then down at his watch. ‘I say—it’s getting late. I’d better be going.’
‘You’ve got lots of time.’
‘I think I’d better, just the same.’
‘What you mean is,’ I said aggressively, ‘that you refuse to tell me any more about your wonderful Henri. Isn’t that it?’
‘It’s not just Henri. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘What wouldn’t I understand?’
‘Anything I said about the war, or the Brigade, or how Spain is, nowadays. Your friends didn’t understand, either. It’s not your fault. You haven’t been there.’
‘Nobody understands, except you. You’ve been feeling very superior, haven’t you, watching us getting drunk and screaming about a kite? We must seem to you like a bunch of shirkers. Don’t you think we ought to be out in those tr
enches?’
‘No,’ Michael grinned at me, quite at his ease now. ‘Not necessarily. I wish you’d give us some money, though. The ambulance units need it so badly.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you some money, you wounded hero. I’ll give you lots of money, to ease my conscience. Then I won’t feel so guilty about you.’
‘As for my being a wounded hero—if you want to know,’ Michael laughed quietly, ‘I got hit by a stray bullet while I was playing cards. It was my own silly fault … And I don’t know what you mean about feeling guilty. Surely you aren’t still harping on that business in Orotava? I got that out of my system, ages ago.’
‘Because of Henri, you mean?’
‘Yes, partly. He helped a lot.’
‘You want me to be jealous of him, don’t you? You want me to wish I’d been with you, over there, instead of him? Just imagine—I might have been! If I’d gone away with you that night—’
‘I’m glad you didn’t, Stephen. That was a crazy idea of mine. It’d never have worked.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it wouldn’t have.’
‘You think I’m a coward? You think I’d have disgraced you and your wonderful war? I’m not even worthy to be told about Henri.’
Michael didn’t answer. He stood looking straight into my face, and I believe he saw with compassion something of the miserable mess I was in.
‘My God,’ I said, ‘you despise me, don’t you?’
‘You know quite well that’s a lot of rot.’ Michael put his free hand on my arm, as if to steady me. ‘You wouldn’t say it if you weren’t drunk … I don’t know what makes you talk like this, Stephen; but I can see you aren’t happy. I wish there was something I could do about it. But there isn’t. I’ve found that out. You have to work your way out of these things by yourself. I hope you’ll manage to, before long … Look, do you mind if I push off now, without saying Goodbye to your friends? I’ve got this train to catch.’
The World in the Evening Page 23