‘Did you manage to get away all right?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes; nobody seemed to object very much.’
‘What did you say to them?’
‘I just explained things to Uncle Julius—he never minds what I do—and then I just told Bertrand I was going.’
‘How did he react to that?’
‘He said, “Oh, don’t do that, I’ll be with you in a minute.” Then he went on talking to Mrs Goldsmith and Uncle. So I came away then.’
‘I see. It all sounds very easy and quick.’
‘Oh, it was.’
‘Well, I’m very glad you decided to come with me after all.’
‘Good. I couldn’t help feeling guilty rather, at first, about walking out on them all, but that’s worn off now.’
‘Good. What finally made you make up your mind?’
After a silence, she said: ‘I wasn’t enjoying it much in there, as you know, and I started feeling awfully tired, and it didn’t look as if Bertrand could leave for some time, so I thought I’d come along with you.’
She said this in her best schoolmistressy way, elocution-mistressy in fact, so Dixon repeated as stiffly: ‘I see.’ In the light of a street-lamp he could see her sitting, as he’d expected, on the very edge of the seat. That was that, then.
She suddenly broke in again in her other manner, the one he associated with their phone conversation: ‘No, I’m not going to try and get away with that. That’s only a part of it. I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you a bit more. I left because I was feeling absolutely fed-up with everything.’
‘That’s a bit sweeping. What had fed you up in particular?’
‘Everything. I was absolutely fed-up. I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you this. I’ve been feeling very depressed recently, and it all seemed to get too much for me tonight.’
‘A girl like you’s got no call to be depressed about anything, Christine,’ Dixon said warmly, then at once fell against the window and banged his elbow smartly on the door as the taxi lurched aside in front of a row of petrol pumps. Behind these was an unlit building with a painted sign, faintly visible, reading Car’s for hire—Batesons–Repair’s. Dixon got out, ran to a large wooden door, and began to pound irregularly upon it, wondering whether, or how soon, to add shouts to his summons. While he waited, he ran over in his mind some handy all-purpose phrases of abusive or menacing tendency against the appearance of a garage-man unwilling to serve him. A minute passed; he went on thumping while the taxi-driver slowly joined him, his very presence a self-righteously pessimistic comment. Dixon laid down for himself the general lines of an appropriate face, involving free and unusual use of the lips and tongue, and endorsed by manual gestures. Just then a light sprang up inside and very quickly the door was opened. A man appeared and declared himself able and willing to serve petrol. During the next couple of minutes Dixon was thinking not about this man but about Christine. He was filled with awe at the thought that she seemed, not only not to dislike him to any significant extent, but to trust him as well. And how wonderful she was, and how lucky he was to have her there. The admissions, the implied confessions about his feelings for her he’d made to Carol, had seemed outlandish at the time; now they seemed perfectly natural and just. The next half-hour or so formed the only chance he’d ever have of doing anything whatever about those feelings. For once in his life Dixon resolved to bet on his luck. What luck had come his way in the past he’d distrusted, stingily held on to until the chance of losing his initial gain was safely past. It was time to stop doing that.
Dixon paid the garage-man and the taxi moved off. ‘You haven’t any reason to be depressed, I was saying,’ he said.
‘I don’t see how you can know that,’ she said, severely again.
‘No, of course I can’t know it, but I shouldn’t think you have
too bad a time on the whole,’ he said with an ease that surprised him. He could see that she needed time and encouragement to work back to her more open manner, and reflected that this sort of perception was as unfamiliar in him as all the other things he was feeling. ‘I’d have put you down as somebody reasonably successful in most things.’
‘I didn’t mean to sound like a martyr. You’re right, of course, I do have a good time and I’ve been very lucky in all sorts of ways. But, you know, I do find some things awfully difficult. I don’t really know my way around, you know.’
Dixon wanted to laugh. He couldn’t imagine any woman of her age less in need of such lore. He said as much.
‘No, it’s perfectly true,’ she insisted. ‘I haven’t had a chance to find out yet.’
‘You mustn’t mind me saying this, but I should have thought there’d be plenty of people only too willing to show you.’
‘I know, I see what you mean exactly, but they don’t try to. They assume I know already, you see.’ She was talking animatedly now.
‘Oh, they do, do they? How’s that, would you say?’
‘I think it must just be because I look as if I’m full of poise and that sort of thing. I look as if I know all about how to behave, and all that. Two or three people have told me that, so it must be right. But it’s only the way I look.’
‘Well, it is true you look fairly sophisticated, if that’s the right word. Even a bit upstage sometimes. But it . . .’
‘How old would you say I am?’
Dixon thought an honest answer would, for once, be appropriate. ‘About twenty-four, I should say.’
‘There you are, then,’ she said triumphantly. ‘Just what I thought. I’m twenty next month. The eighteenth.’
‘I didn’t mean of course you didn’t look very young as far as just your actual face goes, I just . . .’
‘No, I know; but it’s the age I seem, isn’t it? It’s the way I look, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is. But it isn’t just that on its own, is it?’
‘Sorry: what isn’t what on its own?’
‘I mean it’s not just your appearance that makes you seem older and more experienced and all that. It’s the way you behave and
talk, a lot of the time, too. Don’t you think so?’
‘Well, it’s awfully hard for me to tell, isn’t it?’
‘Must be, naturally. It’s . . . you seem to . . . keep getting on to your high horse all the time; hard to describe it exactly. But you have got a habit, every now and then, of talking and behaving like a governess, though I don’t know much about them, I must admit.’
‘Oh, have I?’
Though the tone of this question illustrated just what he was talking about, Dixon, feeling it couldn’t matter what he said, said: ‘There, you’re doing it now. When you don’t know what to do or say, you fall back on being starchy. And that all fits in with your face; that’s probably what gave you the idea of being starchy in the first place, your face, I mean. And that makes a total effect of a prim kind of self-assurance, and you don’t want to be prim but you do want to be self-assured. Yes . . . But that’s quite enough of Uncle Jim’s Corner. We’re getting off the point. How does all this tie up with being depressed? There’s still nothing to be depressed about.’
She hesitated while Dixon sweated slightly, repenting of his burst of old-trouper confidence, then she said with a rush: ‘It’s all to do with men, you see. I hadn’t had much to do with men till I got my job in London last year . . . Look, you don’t mind talking about me all the time, do you? It seems so self-centred. You don’t think .. . ?’
‘You can forget all that. I want to hear about this.’
‘All right, then. Well . . . I hadn’t been working in the bookshop very long, when a man got talking to me and asked me to come to a party. So I went, of course, and there were a lot of artist kind of people there, and one or two ones from the B.B.C. You know the sort of thing?’
‘I can imagine.’
‘So . . . then it all started. I kept being asked out by men, and of course I kept going, it was such marvellous fun. And I still do enjoy i
t a great deal. But they kept . . . trying to seduce me the whole time. And I didn’t want to be seduced, you see, and as soon as I’d convinced them of that, they were off. Well, I didn’t mind that much, because there always seemed to be another one ready to . . .’
‘I’ll bet there did. Go on.’
‘I’m afraid this sounds terribly . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, if you’re quite sure . . . Anyway, after a few months of that I met Bertrand, that was in March. He didn’t seem quite like the others, chiefly because he didn’t start trying to make me be his mistress the entire time. And he can be very nice, you know, though I don’t suppose you . . . After a bit the thing was, I was starting to get rather fond of him, and at the same time—this is the funny part—I was getting a bit fed-up with him in other ways while I was still getting more fond of him. He’s such a queer mixture, you see.’
Naming to himself the two substances of which he personally thought Bertrand a mixture, Dixon said: ‘In what way?’
‘He can be extremely understanding and kind one minute, and completely unreasonable and childish the next. I feel I never know where I am with him, or what he really wants. Sometimes I think it’s all to do with how he’s getting on with his painting. Anyhow, what with one thing and another we started having rows. And I can’t bear rows, especially because he was always putting me in the wrong by them.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know, he’d start one with me when he could put me in the wrong by starting one, and force me to start one when starting one would put whoever started one in the wrong. There’ll be one over tonight, of course, and he’ll put me in the wrong, as usual. But he’s in the wrong, he’s the one who’s wrong. All this business with Mrs Goldsmith—it’s all right, I’m not going to ask you about it—but I know there’s something going on there, but he won’t tell me what it is. I don’t suppose it’s anything much; he just gets a bit excited when . . . But he won’t tell me what’s happening. He’ll pretend there isn’t anything, and he’ll ask me if I really think he’d get up to anything behind my back, and I’ll have to say No, otherwise . . .’
‘This is none of my business, Christine, but in my opinion friend Bertrand’s letting himself in for you giving him the air.’
‘No, I can’t do that, unless . . . I can’t do that. I’m in too deep now to back out like that. It’ll have to go on as it is. You’ve got to take people as you find them.’
Not wanting to speculate what ‘it’ was, and how it was going on, Dixon asked hurriedly: ‘Have you and he got anything planned for the future?’
‘Well, I haven’t, but I think he may. I’ve got an idea he wants us to get married, though he’s never actually mentioned it.’
‘And what do you feel about that?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’
This seemed all for the moment. It crossed Dixon’s mind that apart from her voice he’d no evidence that she was beside him at all. When he turned to his right he saw only the darkest and most anonymous shape; she held herself so still that there was no sound of movement from clothing or upholstery, she seemed to use no scent, or anyway he couldn’t smell any, and he was a long way from being able to think of touching her. The shoulders and hatted head of the taxi-driver, outlined against the glow of the car’s lights, and whose movements controlled their course, were in a way much more real to him. Dixon looked out of the side window, and his spirits rose at once at the sight of the darkened countryside moving past him. This ride, unlike most of the things that happened to him, was something he’d rather have than not have. He’d got something he wanted, and whatever the cost in future embarrassment he was ready to meet it. He reflected that the Arab proverb urging this kind of policy was incomplete: to ‘take what you want and pay for it’ it should add ‘which is better than being forced to take what you don’t want and paying for that’. It was one more argument to support his theory that nice things are nicer than nasty ones. Christine’s unshared presence was a very nice thing, so nice that his feelings seemed overloaded by it like a glutton’s stomach. How splendid her voice was; to hear more of it he asked: ‘What are Bertrand’s pictures like?’
‘Oh, he hasn’t shown me any of them. He says he doesn’t want me to think of him as a painter until he can think of himself as one. But people have told me they think they’re pretty good. They were all friends of his, though, I suppose.’
Whatever aureole of choking nonsense surrounded this view of Bertrand’s, Dixon thought the view itself worthy of some respect, or at least of some surprise. What a temptation it must be to produce proofs of one’s status as an artist, to flatter people and at the same time show one was rather a good chap by asking for and seeming to act on criticism, above all to let people know how much more there was in one than met the eye. Dixon himself had sometimes wished he wrote poetry or something as a claim to developed character.
Christine had continued: ‘I must say it’s something to meet a man who’s got some sort of ambition. I don’t mean an ambition like wanting to have a date with a film-star or something like that. It sounds a funny thing to say, but I look up to Bertrand because he’s got something to arrange his life around, something that isn’t just material, or self-interested. So it doesn’t really matter from that point of view what his work’s like. It doesn’t matter if what he paints doesn’t give any pleasure to a soul apart from himself.’
‘But if a man spends his life doing work that only appeals to him, isn’t that being self-interested just as much?’
‘Well, in a way everyone’s self-interested, aren’t they? But you must admit there are degrees of it.’
‘I suppose I must. But doesn’t this ambition of his rather leave you out?’
‘What?’
‘I mean, don’t you find he’s painting and so on when you want him to take you out?’
‘Sometimes, but I try not to mind that.’
‘Why?’
‘And of course I wouldn’t dream of letting him see it. It’s not an easy situation. Having a relationship with an artist’s a very different kettle of fish to having a relationship with an ordinary man.’
Dixon, feeling as he now seemed to have begun to feel about Christine, was bound to think this last remark unwelcome, but he found it objectively nasty as well. Had it been a line from a film he’d have reacted much as he did now, namely by making his lemon-sucking face in the darkness. But in a way it was a relief to find a loophole of adolescent vulgarity somewhere in that impressively mature and refined façade. ‘I don’t quite see that,’ he had to say.
‘Well, perhaps I didn’t put it too well, but I should have thought that the work an artist does takes so much out of him, in the way of feeling and emotion and so on, that he hasn’t got much left over for other people, not if he’s any good as an artist, that is. I think he’s sort of got special needs, you know, and it’s up to others to supply them when they can, without too many questions asked.’
Dixon didn’t trust himself to speak. Quite apart from his own convictions in the matter, his experience of Margaret had been more than enough to render repugnant to him any notion of anyone having any special needs for anything at any time, except for such needs as could be readily gratified with a tattoo of kicks on the bottom. Then he realized that Christine must, perhaps unconsciously, be quoting her boy-friend, or some horrible book lent by her boy-friend, whose desire to range himself with children, neurotics, and invalids by thus specializing his needs was not, at the moment, worth attacking. Dixon frowned. Until a minute ago she’d been behaving and talking so reasonably that it was hard to believe she was the same girl as had helped Bertrand to bait him at Welch’s arty week-end. It was queer how much colour women seemed to absorb from their men-friends, or even from the man they were with for the time being. That was only bad when the man in question was bad; it was good when the man was good. It should be possible for the right man to stop, or at least hinder, her from being a refined gracious-li
ver and arty-rubbish-talker. Did he
think he was the right man for that task? Ha, ha, ha, if he did.
‘Jim,’ Christine said.
Dixon’s scalp pricked sharply at this, the first, use of his Christian name. ‘Yes?’ he said warily. He shrugged his bottom along the seat a little way.
‘You’ve been very decent to me tonight, letting me ramble on about myself. And you seem to have your head screwed on the right way. Would you mind if I asked your advice on something?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘You must realize, though, that I’m asking you just because I want to hear your advice, not for any other reason.’ She paused, then added: ‘Have you got that?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, it’s this. From what you’ve seen of us both, do you think it would be a good thing if I got married to Bertrand?’
Dixon felt a slight twinge of distaste he couldn’t quite account for. ‘Isn’t that rather up to you?’
‘Of course it’s up to me; I’m the one who’s going to marry him or not marry him. I want to know what you think. I’m not asking to be told what to do. Now, what do you think?’
This was clearly the moment for a burst of accurate shelling from Dixon in his Bertrand-war, but he found himself reluctant to fire. A reasoned denunciation of the foe, followed up by a short account of his recent conversation with Carol, would stand a good chance of bringing total victory in this phase, or at least inflicting heavy losses. He felt, however, that he didn’t want to do it like that, and only said slowly: ‘I don’t think I know either of you well enough.’