For answer, she hit out at his face. But he was too quick for her, caught the flying hand in mid-air and, when she tried to bring the other into play, caught that too. She was helpless in his grasp.
Still smiling down at her, and without a word, he pushed her backwards, step by step, towards the bed.
‘Beast!’ she kept repeating, ‘beast!’ and struggled, vainly, and found obscure pleasure in her helplessness. He pushed her against the end of the low divan, further and further, inexorably, and at last she lost her balance and fell back across the counterpane – (fell back, while, with one knee on the edge of the bed, he bent over her, still smiling the same derisive smile). ‘Beast, beast!’ But in fact, as she secretly admitted to herself – and the consciousness was intoxicating in its shamefulness – in fact, she really wanted to be treated as he was treating her – like a prostitute, like an animal; and in her own house, what was more, with her guests all waiting for her, and the door unlocked, and her daughters wondering where she was, perhaps at this very moment coming up the stairs to look for her. Yes, she really wanted it. Still struggling, she gave herself up to the knowledge, to the direct physical intuition that this intolerable degradation was the accomplishment of an old desire, was a revelation marvellous as well as horrible, was the Apocalypse, the whole Apocalypse at once, angel and beast, plague, lamb and whore in a single divine, revolting, overwhelming experience . . .
‘Civilization and sexuality,’ Anthony was saying: ‘there’s a definite correlation. The higher the one, the intenser the other.’
‘My word,’ said Beppo, fizzling with pleasure, ‘we must be civilized!’
‘Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit. And this in a safe urban world, where there are no risks, no physical fatigues. In a town like this, for example, one can live for years at a time without being made aware that there’s such a thing as nature. Everything’s man-made and punctual and convenient. But people can have too much of convenience; they want excitement, they want risks and surprises. Where are they going to find them under our dispensation? In money-making, in politics, in occasional war, in sport, and finally in sex. But most people can’t be speculators or active politicians; and war’s getting to be too much of a good thing; and the more elaborate and dangerous sports are only for the rich. So that sex is all that’s left. As material civilization rises, the intensity and importance of sexuality also rises. Must rise, inevitably. And since at the same time food and literature have increased the amount of available appetite . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, you see!’
Beppo was charmed. ‘You explain it all,’ he cried. ‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.’ He felt, delightedly, that Anthony’s argument gave, not only absolution, but also a plenary indulgence – to everyone (for Beppo unselfishly wanted everyone to be as happy as he was) and for everything, everything, from the ravishing barmen at Toulon to those top-booted tarts (so definitely not for him) on the Kurfürstendamm.
Staithes said nothing. If social progress, he was thinking, just meant greater piggishness for more people, why then – then, what?
‘Do you remember that remark of Dr Johnson’s?’ Anthony began again with a note of elation in his voice. It had suddenly come to him, an unexpected gift from his memory to his discursive reason – come to enrich the pattern of his thinking, to fill out his argument and extend its scope. His voice reflected the sudden triumphant pleasure that he felt. ‘How does it go? “A man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is making money.” Something like that. Admirable!’ He laughed aloud. ‘The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbours’ wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence – that sort of innocence. With the result that we’re now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.’
There was a silence. Staithes looked at his watch. ‘Time one was getting out of here,’ he said. ‘But the problem,’ he added, turning round in his chair to scan the room, ‘the problem is one’s hostess.’
They got up, and while Beppo hurried off to greet a couple of young acquaintances on the other side of the room, Staithes and Anthony made their way to the door.
‘The problem,’ Staithes kept repeating, ‘the problem . . .’
On the landing, however, they met Mrs Amberley and Gerry coming down the stairs.
‘We were looking for you,’ said Anthony. ‘To say good-night.’
‘So soon?’ cried Mary with a sudden access of anxiety.
But they were firm. A couple of minutes later the three of them, Staithes, Gerry Watchett and Anthony, were walking up the street together.
It was Gerry who broke the silence. ‘These old hags,’ he said in a tone of meditative rancour, and shook his head. Then more cheerfully, ‘What about a game of poker?’ he suggested. But Anthony didn’t know how, and Mark Staithes didn’t desire, to play poker; he had to go off alone in search of more congenial company.
‘Good riddance,’ said Mark. ‘And now what about coming to my rooms for an hour?’
It was the most important thing, Hugh Ledwidge felt as he walked home, the most important and also the most extraordinary, most incredible thing that had ever happened to him. So beautiful, so young. ‘Fashioned so slenderly.’ (If only she had thrown herself into the Thames and he had rescued her! ‘Helen! My poor child!’ And, ‘Hugh!’ she would have murmured gratefully. ‘Hugh . . .’) But even without the suicide it had been astonishing enough. Her mouth against his. Oh, why hadn’t he shown more courage, more presence of mind? All the things he might have said to her, the gestures he ought to have made! And yet, in a certain sense, it was better that he should have behaved as he did – stupidly, timidly, ineptly. Better, because it proved more conclusively that she cared for him; because it gave a higher value to her action, so young, so pure – and yet spontaneously, under no compulsion of his, in the teeth, indeed, of what had almost been his resistance, she had stepped down, had laid her hands on his shoulders, had kissed him. Kissed him in spite of everything, he repeated to himself with a kind of astonished triumph that mingled strangely with his sense of shame, his conviction of weakness and futility; in spite of everything. Non più andrai, he hummed to himself as he walked along; then, as though the dank London night were a morning on the downs in spring, broke out into unequivocal singing.
Delle belle turbando il riposo,
Narcissetto, Adoncino d’ amor . . .
At home, he sat down at once to his desk and began to write to her.
‘Helen, Helen . . . If I repeat the syllables too often, they lose their sense, become just a noise in my silent room – terrifying in their meaninglessness. But if I say the name just two or three times, very softly, how rich it becomes, how full! Charged with echoes and reminders. Not so much, for me, of the original Greek Helen. I can’t feel that she was ever anything but a mature woman – never anything but married to Menelaus and eloping with Paris. Never really young, as you are – exquisitely, exquisitely, like a flower. No, it’s more Poe’s Helen I catch sight of through the name. The beauty that carries the traveller back to his own native shore – takes him home. Not to the obvious, worldly home of the passions. No; to that further, rarer, lovelier home, beyond and above them. Beyond and above; and yet implying, yet including, even while transcending, the passions . . .’
It was a long letter; but he was in time, running out, to catch the midnight post. The sense of triumph with which he returned this second time was almost unalloyed. Momentarily, he had forgotten his shyness, his humiliating cowardice; he remembered only that consciousness of soaring power that had filled him while he wrote his letter. Exalted above his ordinary self, he forgot, when undressing, to put his truss away in the chest of drawers, so that Mrs Brinton shouldn’t see it when she came in wi
th his early tea in the morning. In bed, he lay for a long time thinking tenderly, paternally, poetically, thinking at the same time with desire, but a desire so lingeringly gentle that lasciviousness assumed the quality of prayer, thinking of Helen’s exquisite youthfulness, fashioned so slenderly, and her innocence, her slender innocence, and those unexpected, those extraordinary kisses.
CHAPTER XXI
August 31st 1933
HELEN RANG THE bell, then listened. In the silence behind the closed door, nothing stirred. She had come straight from the station after a night in the train; it was not yet ten; her mother would still be asleep. She rang again; then, after a pause, once more. Heavily asleep – unless, of course, she had stayed out all night. Where? And with whom? Remembering that horrible Russian she had met at her mother’s flat the last time she was in Paris, Helen frowned. She rang a fourth time, a fifth. From within the apartment there was suddenly an answering sound of movement. Helen sighed, partly with relief that her mother had only been asleep, partly in apprehension of what the coming minutes or hours held in store. The door opened at last, opened on a twilight that smelt of cats and ether and stale food; and there, in dirty pink pyjamas, her dyed orange hair dishevelled, and still blinking, still strangely swollen with sleep, stood her mother. For a second the face was a mask, bloated and middle-aged, of stupefied incomprehension; then, in a flash, it came back to life, almost back to youth, with a sudden smile of genuine delight.
‘But what fun!’ cried Mrs Amberley. ‘Darling, I’m so glad.’
If she hadn’t known – by how bitter an experience! – that this mood of gaiety and affectionateness would inevitably be followed by, at the best, a spiteful despondency, at the worst, by a fit of insanely violent anger, Helen would have been touched by the warmth of her mother’s greeting. As it was, she merely suffered herself to be kissed and, her face still set and stony, stepped across the threshold into the horribly familiar nightmare of her mother’s life.
This time, she found, the nightmare had a comic element.
‘It’s all because of that beastly old femme de ménage,’ Mrs Amberley explained as they stood there in the smelly little lobby. ‘She was stealing my stockings. So I had to lock the bedroom door when I went out. And then somehow I lost the key. You know what I am,’ she added complacently, boasting by force of habit of that absent-mindedness of which she had always been so proud. ‘Hopeless, I’m afraid.’ She shook her head and smiled that crooked little smile of hers, conspiratorially. ‘When I got home, I had to smash that panel.’ She pointed to the oblong aperture in the lower half of the door. ‘You should have seen me, banging away with the flat-iron!’ Her voice was richly vibrant with laughter. ‘Luckily it was like matchwood. Cheap and nasty to a degree. Like everything in this beastly place.’
‘And you crawled through?’ Helen asked.
‘Like this,’ And going down on her hands and knees, Mrs Amberley pushed her head through the hole, turned sideways so as to admit an arm and shoulder, then, with surprising agility, pulled and pushed with a hand beyond and feet on the hither side of the door, till only her legs remained in the lobby. First one, then the other, the legs were withdrawn, and an instant later, as though from a dog-kennel, Mrs Amberley’s face emerged, a little flushed, through the aperture.
‘You see,’ she said. ‘It’s as easy as winking. And the beauty of it is that old Madame Roget’s much too fat. No possible chance of her getting through. I don’t have to worry about my stockings any more.’
‘Do you mean to say she never goes into your bedroom?’
Mrs Amberley shook her head. ‘Not since I lost the key; and that was three weeks ago, at least.’ Her tone was one of triumph.
‘But who makes the bed and does the cleaning?’
‘Well . . .’ There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Why, I do, of course,’ the other replied a little irritably.
‘You?’
‘Why not?’ From her kennel door, Mrs Amberley looked up almost defiantly into her daughter’s face. There was a long silence; then, simultaneously, both of them burst out laughing.
Still smiling, ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Helen, and went down on all fours. The stony face had softened into life; she felt an inward warmth. Her mother had been so absurd, peering up like that out of her kennel, so childishly ridiculous, that suddenly she was able to love her again. To love her while she laughed at her, just because she could laugh at her.
Mrs Amberley withdrew her head. ‘Of course it is a bit untidy,’ she admitted rather anxiously, as Helen wriggled through the hole in the door. Still kneeling, she pushed some dirty linen and the remains of yesterday’s lunch under the bed.
On her feet again, inside the bedroom, Helen looked round. It was filthier even than she had expected – much filthier. She made an effort to go on smiling; but the muscles of her face refused to obey her.
Three days later Helen was on her way back to London. Opening the English newspaper she had bought at the Gare du Nord, she read, with an equal absence of interest, about the depression, the test match, the Nazis, the New Deal. Sighing, she turned the page. Printed very large, the words, ‘An Exquisite First Novel,’ caught her eye. And below, in small letters, ‘The Invisible Lover. By Hugh Ledwidge. Reviewed by Catesby Rudge.’ Helen folded back the page to make it more manageable and read with an intense and fixed attention.
‘Just another book, I thought, like all the rest. And I was on the point of throwing it aside, unread. But luckily something – some mystic intuition, I suppose – made me change my mind. I opened the book. I turned over the pages, glancing at a sentence here and there. And the sentences I found, were gems – jewels of wrought crystal. I decided to read the book. That was at nine in the evening. And at midnight I was still reading, spellbound. It was nearly two before I got to bed – my mind in a whirl of enthusiasm for this masterpiece I had just read.
‘How shall I describe the book to you? I might call it a fantasy. And as far as it goes, that description holds good. The Invisible Lover is a fantasy. But a fantasy that is poignant as well as airy; profound as well as intriguing and light; fraught with tears as well as with smiles at once subtly humorous and of a high, Galahad-like spirituality. It is full of broken-hearted fun, and its laughter is dewy with tears. And throughout runs a vein of naïve and child-like purity, infinitely refreshing in a world full of Freudians and sex-novelists and all their wearisome ilk. This fantasy of the invisible but ever present, ever watchful, ever adoring lover and his child-beloved has an almost celestial innocence. If I wanted to describe the book in a single phrase, I should say that it was the story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen . . .’
Falling into her memories of Hugh’s few ignominious attempts to make love to her, the words produced in Helen’s mind a kind of violent chemical reaction. She burst out laughing; and since the ridiculous phrase went echoing on, since the grotesque memories kept renewing themselves with ever heightened intensity and in ever fuller, more painfully squalid detail, the laughter continued, irrepressibly. The story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen! Tears of hysterical merriment ran down her cheeks; she was breathless, and the muscles of her throat were contracted in a kind of agonizing cramp. But still she went on laughing – was utterly unable to stop; it was as though she were possessed by a demon. Luckily, she was alone in the compartment. People would have taken her for a madwoman.
In the cab, on the way to Hugh’s flat – her flat too, in spite of Dante and Beatrice and Hans Andersen – she wondered whether he’d have gone to bed already, and just how upset he’d be to see her. She hadn’t warned him of her arrival; he would be unprepared to receive her, unbraced against the shock of her grossly physical presence. Poor old Hugh! she thought with a derisive pity. Enjoying his private and invisible fun, like Dante with his phantom, and then having to suffer the trampling intrusion of Signora Alighieri! But tonight, she realized, as she stood at last before the door of the flat, looking in her bag for the latch-key, that
invisible solitude of his had already been invaded. Somebody was playing the piano; there was a sound of laughter and voices. Hugh must be having a party. And all at once Helen saw herself making a dramatic entrance, like Banquo’s ghost, and was delighted by the vision. The reading of that article had momentarily transposed her entire being into the key of laughter. Everything was a vast, extravagant, savage joke – or if it wasn’t already, should be made so. It was with a tingling sense of excited anticipation that she opened the door and silently slipped into the hall. An assortment of strange hats hung on the pegs, lay on the chairs – a couple of rich hats, she noticed, very new and shapely, and the rest deformed, and ancient; hats, one could see, of the intellectual poor. There were some letters on the marble-topped table; she bent down by mere force of habit to look at them, and found that one was addressed to her – from Anthony, she recognized; and that too was a joke. Did he seriously imagine that she would read his letters? Enormous ass! She popped the envelope unopened into her bag, then tiptoed along the passage to her room. How tidy it was! How dead! Like a family vault under dust-sheets. She took off her coat and hat, washed, combed her hair, made up her face, then, as silently as she had come, crept back to the hall and stood at the door of the sitting-room, trying to guess by the sound of their voices who were the guests. Beppo Bowles, for one; that giggle, those squeaks and fizzlings were unmistakable. And Mark Staithes. And then a voice she wasn’t sure of, and another, very soft and confidential, that must be old Croyland’s. And who was that ridiculous foreigner who spoke so slowly and ponderously, all on one note? She stood there at the door for a long minute, then very gently turned the handle, drew the door gradually open, and without a sound edged into the room. Nobody had noticed her. Mark Staithes was seated at the piano, with Beppo, a Beppo fatter than ever, she noticed, and balder and more nervously agitated, and – yes, beard and all! – old Croyland, standing one on either side of him, leaning on the instrument and looking down at him while he spoke. Hugh was on the sofa near the fireplace, with the owner of the voice she hadn’t recognized, but who turned out to be Caldwell, the publisher – the publisher, of course, of The Invisible Lover, she reflected, and had a difficulty in checking another uprush of mirth. With them was a young man she had never seen before – a young man with very pale flaxen hair and a ruddy open face that wore at the moment an expression of almost child-like seriousness. His, it was evident, had been the foreign accent – German, she supposed.