Janet stared in front of her. If he had taken a packet of French postcards and displayed them suddenly before her, she could not have felt a ruder sense of outrage and shock. Her balance, too, had been adjusted to something so different. Timmie, wrapped up in his own effort, accepted her silence as that of fruitful meditation.
“Well,” he said, “I just thought I’d put it to you. Matter of fact, it wasn’t too easy to square up to it—selfish reasons, and all that.” His blush was lost on Janet for the first time. “But that made it all the more important I should. That’s what I wanted to say; that if you think it out on the lines I’ve been talking about, and find it—well—brings you and your husband together and all that, and it means you haven’t so much time for outside things, such as seeing me, I’ll quite understand. If I know you’re happy, it’ll be all right with me.”
He let out a deep breath of relief. He had done it at last. He experienced, already, the rewarding glow that follows the cold plunge. Somehow he felt that the glow was a good thing in itself, apart from anything the effort achieved. But that must be selfish too.
“How do you feel about it?” he asked her averted head. Because the glow was still upon him, he added in modest deprecation, “Hope you don’t think it’s cheek.”
Janet turned round.
“Yes, she said clearly. “Since you ask me, I do.”
Timmie’s glow faded, much more suddenly than it had come. She had snubbed him once or twice before, but not just like this, in this cold hard little voice like pieces of china clinked together; the kind of voice which meant that something permanent had happened. Like the foolish angel in the story who wore the rebel favour by mistake, and was hurled over the jasper walls before he had had time to explain, Timmie floundered, chilled, shocked and bewildered, in outer darkness.
“Well,” he stammered, “I’m sorry if—”
“Do you really think yourself qualified to pass judgement on my home life? Don’t you think you’re being just a little ungrateful? Just because I’ve given you my confidence—a little of my confidence; naturally I couldn’t be expected to tell you everything, a boy of your age. Naturally I spared your feelings. And you take it on yourself to criticize me for failing in a relationship of which you know nothing—absolutely nothing.” Timmie heard, terrified, her voice shake with controlled hysteria. “You haven’t so much as met my husband.”
She stopped breathless. Each surveyed, silent, a separate devastation; each scrambled, in characteristic ways, to salve some cherished object of art from the wreck of fantasy. It was Timmie who came to the surface first, since his had been decorated here and there with fragments of truth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I do feel, really, I deserve this. Not only in the way you mean. I said I was being absolutely honest, but really I wasn’t. Not entirely.”
“Well?” A confused hope stirred in her; there was still time for some situation of abasement and forgiveness. The walls of the damaged tower began to rise again before her eyes.
“I ought to have come clean about this before. Of course I see that. But—well, it was a bit of an effort to do the thing at all, let alone talk about it afterwards. Actually, I did look in on your husband one day. I felt, as one man to another, I wasn’t playing straight with him.” He paused, a little fortified by this phrase; it had a round, solid-sounding ring, which made him feel rather mature. Occupied with this, he did not notice Janet’s face. “Not in anything I’ve actually said to you, I suppose, but in what I’ve felt. And, as a matter of fact, he was pretty decent to me. That’s why I felt perhaps the thing just wanted taking from a different angle.” His spirits began to rise, in optimistic reaction. “It would be pretty marvellous, you know, if we could get him into the Group.”
Janet drew in a thin, sharp breath. She was as white as the snowdrops, but this interesting comparison no longer occurred to her. Words burst from her, unconsidered, unedited. Gross interference … incredible impertinence … taking sides against her. … She should have known better, men were all alike, selfish, insensitive egotists. … Timmie’s eyes, fixed on her face, momentarily checked her. They seemed to be listening as well as his ears. The unwanted knowledge that he was overhearing not what the words expressed, but what they revealed, whipped her anger to frenzy.
“Please don’t stand there,” she said, “staring at me in that stupid, insulting way. There’s nothing for you to wait for. I’ve made a very foolish mistake and now, fortunately, I realize it. I think that’s all I have to say to you, now or in future. Good-bye.”
Timmie muttered, “Sorry. Meant it for the best. Good-bye,” and plunged blindly away. She saw him half-trip over the low rail that bordered the grass, recover himself, and wander into the distance. A couple of very small urchins suspended a private argument to shout “Gin-ger!” as he passed.
Janet walked home. She hugged her anger and her sense of wrong around her, desperately; but the chinks of the make-shift structure were draughty with the keen and nipping air of reality outside.
When she came in Kit was taking off his things in the hall. He looked at her, smiled absently, and, as if the sight of her had reminded him, carefully drew the curtain across the alcove where the coatstand was.
Suddenly and hideously she remembered what Timmie had told her. In a kind of panic revulsion she realized that the elimination of Timmie had not been enough. Kit would be there, daily, to project this horrible thing before her mind. She paused in the passage.
“Kit,” she said viciously, “when you pull a curtain-hook off the ring, you might have the consideration to put it back again.”
“Oh, sorry,” said Kit. His absent courtesy had undergone no change at all. He reached up easily to the sagging hook, replaced it, and crossed the hall to the bathroom. Janet went to her room and began to take off her hat and coat.
For the first time, she hated him. Immediately, because she had known that the ring was loose before he touched the curtain at all, but (since this fact could not be transformed into anything else) overwhelmingly for his treachery, his loathsome underhandedness, his coldblooded alienation of her only friend, the one creature who had shown her sympathy and understanding. At the thought of it her vision of Timmie became almost canonized, like the memory of the safely dead. She built up, furiously, an image of the interview, of Kit saying smooth subtly poisoned things. An intuition of the truth, suddenly appearing through this brightly coloured transparency, caught her for a moment undefended. She threw herself on the bed and burst into bitter, hopeless tears.
Presently she stopped, remembering that it would be teatime in ten minutes or so, and that she would not be fit to be seen. (Not that he would care how she suffered, she thought, as she dabbed astringent lotion round her eyes; still, there was one’s self-respect.) She repowdered, applied her delicate pastel lipstick, and did her hair. There was still five minutes before the gong went. She began to wander aimlessly round the room, straightening small things here and there. In this moment of suspended thought, there was a kind of catching and linking in her brain, as of cogwheels that suddenly grip. Small casual impressions, the neglected scrap of months, shook themselves together. The thing they created was there before she had time to shut her eyes. His silences, his absences; his moods of causeless happiness and causeless withdrawal; the mornings when he had gone down, still in his dressing gown, to take a letter from the hall. In the wardrobe mirror she caught a glimpse of her own fixed face, stared at it for a moment without recognition, and turned quickly away.
No, she thought; oh, no no! Nonsense. Of course not. For the conviction had been followed, instantly, by a vision of consequences, unending like Banquo’s line of kings; the decisions, to be taken alone, the choice between private, humiliating acquiescence and public, humiliating revenge. It would end in revenge; her accumulated habits of thought made it a foregone conclusion; but at what a cost! Not only her pretty frame of living would be broken, but what it protected, the picture of herself to which, with the
patience of a Chinese craftsman, she had been adding tiny decorative flourishes before she was old enough to use correctly the pronoun I. All this was intolerable; and from this conclusion followed at once, inevitably, its corollary; it couldn’t be true.
No, it was impossible that Kit should love any one but herself. Her mind flew back two years, returning laden with satisfying proof. Of course he was selfish, physical, unimaginative; it was possible that he … Her mind reached down, in shuddering distaste, for the ultimately preferable alternative. Yes, that was conceivable. She had suspected it all along. It was too much to expect a man to be true in body as well as in heart; one must have courage, forego such illusions. She remembered, now she came to think of it, that she had hinted as much to Peggy one day; so she must really have known it all the time.
Once again the familiar shrine received her, the votive lamp was lit. But at the back of her mind a dread remained that reality would be forced back on her, that some inescapable light would shine through her closed eyes.
She must get away, she thought, escape from this cruelly sordid, unsympathetic background; go somewhere where she would be free again to be her best self. Unhappy wives went to stay with their mothers. … She shrank back from adolescent memories of her mother’s tinkling laughter, the smell of cocktails on her breath, the jokes of her mother’s friends. Suddenly she remembered the Easter house party which Bill and Shirley had asked her to join; the one, she remembered, to which Timmie could not afford to go. True, it was primarily for the purpose of organizing a return visit to the South Africans, but other people were going. In some recess of her mind she saw herself inclining from her shrine to another Timmie (she made him dark, for contrast) smiling, understanding, forgiving, adored.
She still had the printed folder with the address. After tea—at which both she and Kit were mostly silent—she wrote the letter.
CHAPTER 19
“OH, BY THE WAY,” said Kit, “I’ve been thinking it would be a good idea if I took a fortnight of my holiday when you’re away, if the work lets up. Then we can shut the flat and there won’t be all that nuisance of Elsie sleeping with her mother that we had last time.”
“Of course,” said Janet, “if you like.” Her fingers tightened on the handle of the coffee pot, tilting it. She put it down. Desperately, the sentinel of her tower cried, No Pasaran. “I suppose you haven’t decided yet where you’ll go?”
“Yes, I thought I’d go up to Cumberland. I haven’t been for a couple of years. The Kennards would put me up, I expect.”
All clear! All clear! cried the sentinel; raiders passed! As soon as the danger receded, how easy to be sure it had never been. “Of course,” she said kindly, “that will be lovely for you. I do hope it won’t rain all the time.”
Kit, in the remaining minutes before surgery began, was thinking how little he cared whether it rained or not; whether he walked over the Stye Head Pass in a mackintosh, or sprawled in the sun on Great Gable, sitting, as he liked to sit, on a grassy shelf from which he could watch successions of climbers helping to round away the boot-scraped protuberances of the Napes Needle, or looked from the top of Scawfell at the blue Scottish hills. If these things did not simplify his emotions out of existence, probably he could co-opt some one for an attempt on the Pillar Rock; and he would not, like the man in the play McKinnon had dragged him to, read Dante when he got to the top of it, but lie on his back and slacken his muscles and stare in comfortable vacancy at the clouds.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the heart wears out the breast,
And the soul must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Kit, who did not generalize much, translated this truth into a decision that he needed a bit of a change.
In the early spring—and in the middle, incidentally, of a combined epidemic of influenza and measles—Christie had announced, interleaved with passionate assurances, the reappearance of Maurice. Maurice had been in hospital, after driving a lorry in Spain. The lorry had run backwards down a hill. Maurice was still having massage for his knee, and limped terribly. He had quarrelled with the Anarchists. He was in despair. Kit wouldn’t mind—would he?—if she saw him just once or twice? He had written to ask her, but she would refuse if Kit said no. She promised, truly, faithfully, that everything would be all right.
Kit had written to say that of course he didn’t mind, and had believed it until the moment when the letter slid from his fingers into the unreturning bourne of the pillar-box. The epidemic reached its peak soon afterwards. He did not get an unbroken stretch of free time for three weeks.
In the first week Christie wrote charmingly, protesting fidelity all over again. The protests convinced by their naïve self-congratulation. The second letter contained accounts of two expeditions with Maurice, which were reassuring in their way, but left Kit depressed; also a graphic account of Maurice’s knee, containing three surgical inconsistencies and asking Kit’s opinion of the case. Maurice was so terribly lonely (the letter concluded) that Christie was trying to think whether she shouldn’t introduce him to some nice girl. Did Kit know of any one who would do?
Kit wrote back in the only ten minutes he had to spare next day. He was dog-tired, and his mind ran on measles serum and influenza complications. He never wrote as flexibly as he talked, and was aware of it; to-day’s effort seemed to touch a rock-bottom of flatness, which he tried to enliven by being funny. The result was dismal, but he had no time to write the letter again.
Christie kept silence for nearly a week. Then he received four pages, written apparently in a hurry and late at night. They were disjointed, full of spelling mistakes, heavy erasures, and a vague, chaotic urgency. The gist was that Christie wanted him to come and see her as soon as possible. Everything was so difficult, she was so worried, so unhappy, it was so hard to know what one felt or what one ought to do. If he came quickly, everything would be all right.
The letter came on a Monday. There was no sign of any slackening in the work, and every indication that things would get worse. He had a dozen cases of bronchitis, most of them potential pneumonias. Quite a number of the youngest measles children were critically ill. He and Fraser were both waiving their free afternoons as a matter of course. He wrote back, struggling in time he could not afford with a medium of expression in which he was inexpert, promising to come as soon as he could, next week perhaps. The core of the letter somehow got left out; he had no time to invent ways of clothing it decently, and was ashamed to present it naked. He got up every morning to look at the post, but no answer came.
A period began during which his only peaceful moments were those in which he was too busy, or too exhausted, to think. He worked unflaggingly; he would have made work if none had existed. The patients thought him wonderful; always on the go, they said, always cheerful and time for a word or a smile; they wondered, they said, how he kept it up. His smiles, if they had known it, were tokens of gratitude. Better than drink or dissipation, because no reaction followed, they provided refuge from imagining, and he thanked them in the only way he could. In them he could lose himself, decently and realistically. But at night Maurice returned. He knew Maurice intimately and personally, as lovers in romances used to reconstruct their lady from a miniature and a lock of hair.
The next week, by dint of furious work, and still dogged by the thought of work he might have done, he got off for part of his afternoon. On the way to Paxton he took driving risks about which he preferred afterwards not to think, and got to Brimpton just before four. Christie met him on the steps of the Abbey, dressed to go out. She said, “Kit! Have you come?” and stared at him in blank consternation.
“I said I was coming.” His mind paused, as the body pauses after an injury before the pain begins.
“But you only said you might. You didn’t write or anything.”
“I didn’t have time to. Are you fixed up?”
She fiddled with her bag; her face changing, transparently, from
dismay to debate, to hope, to longing calculation.
“Well, yes, at least …” She looked quickly up and down the road. “I really oughtn’t … I mean, I ought to leave a message, or a note, or something.”
She looked up at him. Kit read, correctly, the nature of the appeal in her eyes.
“Note hell,” he said brutally. “Get in the car.” He gripped her by the elbow, bundled her in anyhow, slammed the door and let in the clutch.
She settled herself, with gasps of breathlessness that settled gradually into sighs of content.
“I oughtn’t to do this, really,” she sighed with grateful reproach. “But you didn’t give me a chance. So it’s all right. Darling, I am so glad you came. It keeps coming all over me. Let’s not talk about it, shall we? Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”
Kit asked no questions; partly because he did not want to know, partly because he knew that he would hear about it sooner or later in any case. He was used, by now, to the painful tribute of Christie’s unexpurgated confidence. She told him, not only what women tell their lovers, but also what—he had been accustomed to suppose—they told their most intimate women friends. She seemed to regard both rôles as his natural privilege. He was becoming adaptable. Her trustfulness transformed what, in any one else, would have been wanton cruelty, into a subtle and somehow pathetic compliment. If he ever showed, by accident, that he minded what she told him, she overflowed at once with tender contrition.
“Oh, darling, don’t. You make me feel so mean. I ought not to talk about everything like this. I know it isn’t done. But I didn’t think it would matter to you, because you know I love you best. Besides, it isn’t as if anything had actually happened this time. It never even nearly would, if you were always here.”
“I know,” he said. Distrusting her to the depths of his harassed spirit, he never disbelieved her. Truth flourished in her untended, like a weed, like original sin. The lies which her kindness prompted had the ineffectiveness of half-hearted virtue. It made the taste of everything too keen, bitterness and sweetness alike. After it had most hurt him, he missed it most.