‘Listen to this’ she said. She began to read aloud. Her tone was low, and rather self-conscious; but it quivered with passion - I had never heard such passion in her voice, before.
‘0 mater! 0 fils!’ she read. ‘0 brood continental! 0 flowers of the prairies! 0 space boundless! 0 hum of mighty products! 0 you teeming cities! 0 so invincible, turbulent, proud! 0 race of the future! 0 women! O fathers! O you men of passion and storm! 0 beauty! 0 yourself! 0 you bearded roughs! 0 bards! 0 all those slumberers! 0 arouse! the dawn-bird’s throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?’
She sat still for a moment, gazing down at the page; then she raised her eyes to mine, and I saw with surprise that they were gleaming with unspilled tears. She said, ‘Don’t you think that marvellous, Nancy? Don’t you think that a marvellous, marvellous poem?’
‘Frankly, no,’ I said: the tears had unnerved me. ‘Frankly, I’ve seen better verses on some lavatory walls’ — I really had. ‘If it’s a poem, why doesn’t it rhyme? What it needs is a few good rhymes and a nice, jaunty melody.’ I reached to take the book from her, and studied the passage she had read - it had been underlined, at some earlier date, in pencil — then sang it out, to the approximate tune and rhythm of some music-hall song of the moment. Florence laughed, and, with one hand upon Cyril, tried to snatch the book from me.
‘You’re a beast!’ she cried. ‘You’re a shocking philistine.’
‘I’m a purist,’ I said primly. ‘I know a nice bit of verse when I see it, and this ain’t it.’ I flipped through the book, abandoning my attempt to try to force the staggering lines into some sort of melody, but reading all the ludicrous passages that I could find - there were many of them - and all in the silly American drawl of a stage Yankee. At last I found another underlined section, and started on that. ‘O my comrade!’ I began. ‘O you and me at last — and us two only; 0 power, liberty, eternity at last! 0 to be relieved of distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues! O to level occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to common ground! O adhesiveness! 0 the pensive aching to be together - you know not why, and I know not why...’
My voice trailed away; I had lost my Yankee drawl, and spoken the last few words in a self-conscious murmur. Florence had ceased her laughter, and begun to gaze, apparently quite gravely, into the fire: I saw the orange flames of the coals reflected in each of her hazel eyes. I closed the book, and returned it to the shelf. There was a silence, a rather long one.
At last she took a breath; and when she spoke she sounded quite unlike herself, and rather strange.
‘Nance,’ she began, ‘do you remember that day in Green Street, when we talked? Do you remember how we said that we would meet, and how you didn’t come... ?’
‘Of course,’ I said, a little sheepishly. She smiled - a curiously vague and inward-seeming kind of smile.
‘I never said, did I,’ she went on, ‘what I did that night?’ I shook my head. I remembered very well what I had done that night - I had supped with Diana, and then fucked her in her handsome bedroom, and then been sent from it, chilled and chastened, to my own. But I had never stopped to think what Florence might have done; and she, indeed, had never told me.
‘What did you do?’ I asked now. ‘Did you go to that - that lecture, on your own?’
‘I did,’ she said. She took a breath. ‘I - met a girl there.’
‘A girl?’
‘Yes. Her name was Lilian. I saw her at once, and couldn’t take my eyes from her. She was so very - interesting looking. You know how it is, with a girl, sometimes? - well, no, perhaps you don’t...’ But I did, I did! And now I gazed at her, and felt myself grow warm; and then rather chill. She coughed, and put a hand to her mouth. Then she said, still gazing at the coals: ‘When the lecture was finished Lilian asked a question - it was a very clever question, and the speaker was quite thrown by it. I looked at her then, and knew I must know her. I went over to her, and we began to talk. We talked - we talked, Nance, for an hour, quite without stopping! She had the most unusual views. She’d read, it seemed to me, everything, and had opinions on it all.’
The story went on. They had become friends; Lilian had come calling...
‘You loved her!’ I said.
Florence blushed, and then nodded. ‘You couldn’t have known her, and not loved her a little.’
‘But Flo, you loved her! You loved her — like a tom!’
She blinked, and put a finger to her lip, and blushed harder than ever. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you might have guessed it ...’
‘Guessed it! I - I am not sure. I never thought you might have - well, I cannot say what I thought...’
She turned her head away. ‘She loved me, too,’ she said, after a moment. ‘She loved me, like anything! But, not in the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn’t mind. The fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she wouldn’t do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!’
She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then looked again at the fire.
‘A few months after I first met her,’ she went on, ‘I began to see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up here with a suitcase. She was to have a baby, had lost her rooms because of it, and the man - who turned out hopeless, after all - was too ashamed to take her. She had nowhere... Of course, we took her in. Ralph didn’t mind, he loved her almost as much as I did. We planned to live together, and raise the baby as our own. I was glad - I was glad! - that the man had thrown her over, that the landlady had cast her out...’
She gave a grimace, then scraped with a nail at a piece of ash that had come floating from the fire and had fallen on her skirt. ‘Those were, I think, the happiest months of all my life. Having Lilian here, it was like — I cannot say what it was like. It was dazzling; I was dazzled with happiness. She changed the house - really changed it, I mean, not just its spirit. She had us strip the walls, and paint them. She made that rug.’ She nodded to the gaudy rug before the fire - the one I had thought woven, in a blither moment, by some sightless Scottish shepherd - and I quickly took my feet from it. ‘It didn’t matter that we weren’t lovers; we were so close - closer than sisters. We slept upstairs, together. We read together. She taught me things. That picture, of Eleanor Marx’ - she nodded to the little photograph — ‘that was hers. Eleanor Marx was her great heroine, I used to say she favoured her; I don’t have a photograph of Lily. That book, of Whitman‘s, that was hers too. The passage you read out, it always makes me think of me and her. She said that we were comrades - if women may be comrades.’ Her lips had grown dry, and she passed her tongue across them. ‘If women may be comrades,’ she said again, ‘I was hers...’
She grew silent. I looked at her, and at Cyril — at his flushed and sleeping face, with its delicate lashes and its jutting pink lip. I said, with a kind of creeping dread: ‘And then ... ?’
She blinked. ‘And then - well, then she died. She was too slight, the confinement was a hard one; and she died. We couldn’t even find a midwife who would see to her, because she was unmarried - in the end we had to bring a woman in from Islington, someone who didn’t know us, and say that she was Ralph’s wife. The woman called her “Mrs Banner” - imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather strict. She wouldn’t let us in the room with her; we had to sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his hands and weeping all the while. I thought, “Let the baby die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe... !”
‘But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I found that she’d begun to bleed. By then, of course, the midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn’t be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -’
Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, and to
uched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile.
‘I wish I’d known,’ I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of Lilian’s death. There had been Florence’s strange depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother’s gentle forbearance, her friends’ concern. There had been her odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian’s son, yet also, of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished dead, so that the mother might be saved...
I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside her, stroking gently at her sleeve... and at last she roused herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away.
‘How I have talked,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, what made me speak of all this, tonight.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. ‘You must - you must miss her, terribly.’ She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if missing was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and looked away.
‘It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I’ve wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well! And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he’d got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don’t even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn’t know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I’ve never been gladder of anything, in all my life!’
She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door.
But before she could reach it, I called her name.
I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you’d let me stay. I’m - I’ m a tom, like you.’
‘You are!’ She gaped at me. ‘Annie said it all along; but I never thought much about it, after that first night.’ She began to frown. ‘And so, if there never was a man, your story wasn’t like Lilian’s, at all...’ I shook my head. ‘And you were never in trouble...’
‘Not that kind of trouble.’
‘And all this time, you have been here, and I’ve been thinking you one thing, and...’ She looked at me, then, with a strange expression - I didn’t know if she felt angry, or sad, or bewildered, or betrayed, or what.
I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ But she only shook her head, and put a hand across her eyes for a second; and when she took the hand away, her gaze seemed perfectly clear, and almost amused.
‘Annie always said it,’ she said again. ‘Won’t she be pleased, now! Will you mind it, if I tell her?’
‘No, Flo,’ I said. ‘You may tell who you like.’
Then she went, still shaking her head; and I sat, and listened to her climb the stairs and creak about in the room above my head. Then I took some tobacco and a paper, and rolled myself a cigarette from a tin upon the mantel, and lit it; then I ground it upon the hearth, and threw it into the fire, and put my head against my arm, and groaned.
What a fool I’d been! I had blundered into Florence’s life, too full of my own petty bitternesses to notice her great grief. I had thrust myself upon her and her brother, and thought myself so sly and charming; I had thought that I was putting my mark upon their house, and making it mine. I had believed myself playing in one kind of story, when all the time, the plot had been a different one - when all the time, I was only clumsily rehearsing what the fascinating Lilian had done so well and cleverly before me! I gazed about the room - at the washed blue walls, the hideous rug, the portraits: I saw them suddenly for what they were - details in a shrine to Lilian’s memory, that I, all unwittingly, had been tending. I caught hold of the little picture of Eleanor Marx - except it was not Eleanor Marx I saw, of course; it was her, with Eleanor Marx’s features. I turned it in my hands, and read the back of it: F.B., my comrade, it said, in large, looped letters, my comrade for ever. L.V.
I groaned still louder. I wanted to chuck the damn picture into the grate along with my half-smoked fag - I had to return it quickly to its frame in case I did so. I was jealous, of Lilian! I was more jealous than I had ever been, of anyone! Not because of the house; not because of Cyril, or even Ralph - who had been kind to me, but who had wept for her, and wrung his hands in grief when she lay dying; but because of Florence. Because it was Florence, above all, whom Lilian’s story seemed both to have given me, and to have robbed me of for ever. I thought of my labours of the past few months. I had not made Florence fat and happy, as I had supposed: it had only been time, making her grief less keen, her memories duller. Do you remember how we said that we would meet, she had asked me tonight, and how you didn’t come... ? Her eyes had shone as she had asked it, for I had done her some sort of wonderful favour by not turning up that night, two years before.
I had done her a wonderful favour - and done myself, it seemed to me now, the worst kind of disservice. I thought again of how I had spent that night, and the nights following it; I thought of all the lickerish pleasures of Felicity Place - all the suits, the dinners, the wine, the poses plastiques. I would have traded them all in, at that moment, for the chance to have been in Lilian’s place at that dull lecture, and had Florence’s hazel eyes upon me, fascinated!
Chapter 18
In the days and weeks following Florence’s sad disclosure I became aware that things at Quilter Street were rather changed. Florence herself seemed gayer, lighter - as if, in telling me her history, she had rid herself of some huge burden, and was now flexing limbs that had been cramped and numbed, straightening a back that had been bowed. She was still gloomy, sometimes, and she still went off for walks, alone, and came back wistful. But she did not try to hide her melancholy now, or to disguise its cause - letting me know, for example, that her trips were (as I might have guessed) to Lilian’s grave. In time she even began to speak of her dead friend, quite routinely. ‘How Lilian would have laughed to hear of that!’ she would say; or, ‘Now, if Lily were only here, we might ask her, and she’d be sure to know.’
Her new, sweeter mood had an effect upon us all. The atmosphere of our little house - which I had always thought easy enough, before, but which I now saw to have been quite choked with the memory of Lilian, and with Ralph and Florence’s sorrow - seemed to clear and brighten: it was as if we were passing not into the fogs and frosts of winter, but into springtime, with all its mildnesses and balms. I would see Ralph gazing at his sister as she smiled or hummed or caught at Cyril and tickled him, and his gaze would be soft, and he would sometimes lean to kiss her cheek, in pleasure. Even Cyril himself seemed to feel the change, and to grow bonnier and more content.
And I, in contrast, became ever more pinched and secretive and fretful.
I could not help it. It was as if, in casting off her own old load, Florence had burdened me with a new one; my feelings - which had been stirred, on the night of her confession, into such a curious mixture - only seemed to grow queerer and more contradictory as the weeks went by. I had been sorry for her, and was as glad as her brother to see he
r rather lighter-hearted now; I was also pleased and touched that she had confided in me at last, and told me all. But oh, how I wished her story had been different! I could never learn to like the tragic Lilian, and had to bite back my crossness when she was spoken of so reverently. Perhaps I pictured her as Kitty - it was certainly Walter’s face I saw, whenever I thought of her cowardly man-friend; but it made me hot and giddy to think of her, commanding Florence’s passion, sleeping beside her night after night - and never so much as turning he face to her friend, to kiss her mouth. Why had Florence cared for her so much? I would gaze at the photograph of Eleanor Marx - I could never shake off the confused conviction that it was really Lilian’s features printed there - until the face began to swim before my eyes. She was so different from me - hadn’t Florence herself told me that? She said she had never been gladder of anything, than that I was so different from Lilian! She meant, I suppose, that Lilian was clever, and good; that she knew the meaning of words like cooperative, and so never had to ask. But I - what was I? I was only tidy, and clean.
Well, I think I was never quite so tidy, after that night. I certainly never beat the dirt from Lilian’s gaudy rug again - but smiled when people stepped on it, and took a dreadful pleasure in watching its colours grow dim.
But then I would imagine Lilian in paradise, weaving more carpets so that Florence might one day come and sit on them and rest her head against her knee. I imagined her stocking up the bookshelves with essays and poems, so that she and Florence might walk, side by side, reading together. I saw her preparing a stove in some small back kitchen in heaven, so that I should have somewhere to stew the oysters while she and Flo held hands.
I began to look at Florence’s hands — I had never done such a thing before - and imagine all the occupations I would have set them to, had I been in Lilian’s place...