Eyeless In Gaza (20 page)

For Mrs Amberley the laughter was like champagne – warming, stimulating. ‘And I shall have an inscription carved on the base,' she went on, raising her voice against the din: ‘“This kidney was stolen by Helen Amberley, at the risk of her life and . . .”'

‘Oh, do shut up, Mummy!' Helen was blushing with a mixture of pleasure and annoyance. ‘Please!' It was certainly nice to be the heroine of a story that everybody was listening to – but then the heroine was also a bit of an ass. She felt angry with her mother for exploiting the assishness.

‘. . . and in spite of a lifelong and conscientious objection to butchery,' Mrs Amberley went on. Then ‘Poor darling,' she added in another tone. ‘Smells always were her weak point. Butchers, fishmongers, – and shall I ever forget the one and only time I took her to church!'

(‘One and only time,' thought Colin. ‘No wonder she goes and does things like this!')

‘Oh, I do admit,' cried Mrs Amberley, ‘that a village congregation on a wet Sunday morning – well, frankly, it stinks. Deafeningly! But still . . .'

‘It's the odour of sanctity,' put in Anthony Beavis: and turning to Helen, ‘I've suffered from it myself. And did your mother make you spit when there were bad smells about? Mine did. It made things very difficult in church.'

‘She didn't spit,' Mrs Amberley answered for her daughter. ‘She was sick. All over Lady Worplesdon's astrakhan coat. I was never able to show my face in respectable society again. Thank God!' she added.

Beppo sizzled a protest against her implied imputations. Switched off kidneys, the conversation rolled away along another line.

Helen sat unnoticed, in silence. Her face had suddenly lost
all its light; ‘I'll never touch meat again,' she had said. And here she was, with a morsel of that gruesome red lump of cow impaled on her fork. ‘I'm awful,' she thought.
Pas sérieuse
, old Mme Delécluze had pronounced. And though as a professional girl-finisher the old beast could hardly be expected to say anything else, yet it was true; at bottom it was quite true. ‘I'm not serious. I'm not . . .' But suddenly she was aware that the voice which had been sounding, inarticulately and as though from an immense distance, in her right ear was addressing itself to her.

‘Proust,' she heard it saying, and realized that it had pronounced the same syllable at least twice before. She looked round, guiltily, and saw, red with embarrassment, the face of Hugh Ledwidge turned, waveringly and uncertainly, towards her. He smiled foolishly; his spectacles flashed; he turned away. She felt doubly confused and ashamed.

‘I'm afraid I didn't quite catch . . .' she contrived to mumble.

‘Oh, it doesn't matter,' he mumbled back. ‘It's really of no importance.' Of no importance; but it had taken him the best part of five minutes to think of that gambit about Proust. ‘I must say something to her,' he had decided, when he saw Beavis safely involved in intimate talk with Mary Amberley and Beppo. ‘Must say something.' But what? What did one say to young girls of eighteen? He would have liked to say something personal, something even a bit gallant. About her frock, for example. ‘How nice!' No, that was a bit vague and unspecific. ‘How it suits your complexion, your eyes!' (What colour were they, by the way?) Or he might ask her about parties. Did she go to many? With (very archly) boy friends? But that, he knew, was too difficult for him. Besides, he didn't much like to think of her with boy friends – preferred her virginal:
du bist wie eine Blume
 . . . Or else, seriously but with a smile, ‘Tell me,' he might say, ‘tell me, Helen, what are
young people
really
like nowadays? What
do
they think and feel about things?' And Helen would plant her elbows on the table and turn sideways and tell him, exactly, all he wanted to know about that mysterious world, the world where people danced and went to parties and were always having personal relations with one another; would tell him everything, everything – or else, more likely, nothing, and he would just be made to feel an impertinent fool. No, no; this wouldn't do, wouldn't do at all. This was just fancy, this was just wish-fulfilment. It was then that the question about Proust had occurred to him. What did she think of Proust? It was a comfortingly impersonal question – one that he could ask without feeling awkward and unnatural. But its impersonality could easily be made to lead to a long discussion – always in the abstract, always, so to speak, in a test-tube – of the most intimately emotional, even (no, no; but still, one never knew; it was revolting; and yet . . .) even physiological matters. Talking of Proust, it would be possible to say everything – everything, but always in terms of a strictly literary criticism. Perfect! He had turned towards Helen.

‘I suppose you're as keen on Proust as everybody else.' No answer. From the end of the table came wafts of Mrs Amberley's conversation with Anthony and Beppo: they were discussing the habits of their friends. Colin Egerton was in the middle of a tiger hunt in the Central Provinces. He coughed, then, ‘You're a Proustian, I take it? Like the rest of us,' he repeated. But the lowered and melancholy profile gave no sign of life. Feeling most uncomfortably a fool, Hugh Ledwidge tried once more.

‘I wish you'd tell me,' he said in a louder voice, that sounded, he thought, peculiarly unnatural, ‘what
you
think about Proust.'

Helen continued to stare at some invisible object on the table, just in front of her place.
Pas sérieuse
. She was thinking
of all the unserious things she had ever done in her life, all the silly, the mean, the awful things. A kind of panic embarrassment overwhelmed Hugh Ledwidge. He felt as he might feel as if his trousers were to start coming down in Piccadilly – lost. Anybody else, of course, would just touch her arm and say, ‘A penny for your thoughts, Helen!' How simple this would be, how sensible! The whole incident would at once be turned into a joke – a joke, moreover, at
her
expense. He would establish once and for all a position of teasing superiority. ‘Day-dreaming in the middle of a dinner! About what? About whom?' Very knowing and arch. And she would blush, would giggle – at
his
behest, in response to
his
command. Like a skilled matador, he would wave his little red flag, and she would go plunging here, go charging there, making an absurd and ravishing exhibition of herself, until at last, raising his sword . . . But simple and sensible and strategically advantageous as all this would be, Hugh Ledwidge found it quite impossible to make the first move. There was her bare arm, thin like a little girl's; but somehow he could not bring himself to put out his hand and touch it. And the jocular offer of that penny – it couldn't be made; his vocal cords would not do it. Thirty seconds passed – seconds of increasing embarrassment and uncertainty. Then suddenly, as though waking from sleep, she had looked round at him. What had he said? But it was impossible to repeat that question again.

‘It's of no importance. No importance.' He turned away. But why, oh why was he such a fool, so ridiculously incompetent? At thirty-five.
Nel mezzo del cammin.
Imagine Dante in the circumstances! Dante, with his steel profile, ploughing forward, like a spiritual battleship. And meanwhile, what on earth should he say to her in place of that now impossible remark about Proust? What in the name of heaven . . .?

It was she finally who touched
his
arm. ‘I'm so sorry,' she
said with a real contrition. She was trying to make up for her awfulness, for having so frivolously eaten Mr Baldwin's well-thumbed cow. Besides, she liked old Hugh. He was nice. He had taken the trouble to show her the Mexican things at the Museum. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Ledwidge,' she had said. And the attendants had all been delightfully deferential. She had been led to his private room – the private room of the Assistant Director of the Department – as though she were some distinguished personage. One eminent archaeologist visiting another. It had really been extraordinarily interesting. Only, of course – and this was another symptom of her awful unseriousness – she had forgotten most of the things he had told her. ‘So awfully sorry,' she repeated; and it was genuinely true. She knew what he must be feeling. ‘You see,' she explained, ‘Granny's deaf. I know how awful it is when I have to repeat something. It sounds so idiotic. Like Mr Shandy and the clock, somehow, if you see what I mean. Do forgive me.' She pressed his arm appealingly, then, planting her elbows on the table and turning sideways towards him in just the confidential attitude he had visualized, ‘Listen, Hugh,' she said, ‘you're serious, aren't you? You know,
sérieux
.'

‘Well, I suppose so,' he stammered. He had just seen, rather belatedly, what she meant by that reference to Mr Shandy, and the realization had come as something of a shock.

‘I mean,' she went on, ‘you could hardly be at the Museum if you weren't serious.'

‘No,' he admitted, ‘I probably couldn't.' But after all, he was thinking, still preoccupied by Mr Shandy, there's such a thing as theoretical knowledge. (And didn't he know it? Only too well.) Theoretical knowledge corresponding to no genuine experience, unrealized, not lived through. ‘Oh God!' he inwardly groaned.

‘Well, I'm
not
serious,' Helen was saying. She felt a great need to unburden herself, to ask for help. There were
moments – and they recurred whenever, for one reason or another, she felt doubtful of herself – moments when everything round her seemed terribly vague and unreliable. Everything – but in practice, of course, it all boiled down to the reliability of her mother. Helen was very fond of her mother, but at the same time she had to admit to herself that she was no use. ‘Mummy's like a very bad practical joke,' she had once said to Joyce. ‘You think you're going to sit on it; but the chair's whisked away and you come down with a horrible bump on your bottom.' But all that Joyce had said was: ‘Helen, you simply mustn't use those words.' Ass of a girl! Though, of course, it had to be admitted, Joyce was a chair that
could
be sat on. But an inadequate chair, a chair only for unimportant occasions – and what was the good of that? Joyce was too young; and even if she'd been much older, she wouldn't really have understood anything properly. And now that she was engaged to Colin, she seemed to understand things less and less. God, what a fool that man was! But all the same, there, if you liked,
was
a chair. A chair like the rock of ages. But so shaped, unfortunately, that it forced you to sit in the most grotesquely uncomfortable position. However, as Joyce didn't seem to mind the discomfort, that was all right. Chairless in an exhausting world, Helen almost envied her. Meanwhile there was old Hugh. She sat down, heavily.

‘What's wrong with me,' she went on, ‘is that I'm so hopelessly frivolous.'

‘I can't really believe that,' he said; though why he said it he couldn't imagine. For, obviously, he ought to be encouraging her to make confession, not assuring her that she had no sins to confess. It was as though he were secretly afraid of the very thing he had wished for.

‘I don't think you're . . .'

But fortunately nothing he said could put her off. She insisted on using him as a chair.

‘No, no, it's quite true,' she said. ‘You can't imagine how frivolous I am. I'll tell you . . .'

Half an hour later, in the back drawing-room, he was writing out for her a list of the books she ought to read. Burnet's
Early Greek Philosophers; Phaedrus, Timaeus, The Apology
, and
The Symposium
in Jowett's translation; the
Nicomachean Ethics;
Cornford's little anthology of the Greek moralists; Marcus Aurelius; Lucretius in any good translation; Inge's
Plotinus
. His manner, as he spoke, was easy, confident, positively masterful. He was like a creature suddenly restored to its proper element.

‘Those will give you some idea of the way the ancients thought about things.'

She nodded. Her face as she looked at the pencilled list was grave and determined. She had decided that she would wear spectacles, and have a table brought up to her bedroom, so that she could sit undisturbed, with her books piled up and her writing materials in front of her. Note-books – or, better, a card index. It would be a new life – a life with some meaning in it, some purpose. In the drawing-room somebody started up the gramophone. As though on its own initiative, her foot began to beat out the rhythm. One two three, one two three – it was a waltz. But what was she thinking of? She frowned and held her foot still.

‘As for modern thought,' Hugh was saying, ‘well, the two indispensable books, from which every modern culture must start, are' – his pencil hurried across the paper – ‘Montaigne's
Essays
and the
Pensées
of Pascal. Indispensable, these.' He underlined the names. ‘Then you'd better glance at the
Discourse on Method
.'

‘Which method?' asked Helen.

But Hugh did not hear the question. ‘And take a look at Hobbes, if you have the time,' he went on with ever-increasing power and confidence. ‘And then Newton. That's absolutely
essential. Because if you don't know the philosophy of Newton, you don't know why science has developed as it has done. You'll find all you need in Burt's
Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
.' There was a little silence while he wrote. Tom had arrived, and Eileen and Sybil. Helen could hear them talking in the other room. ‘Then there's Hume,' he continued. ‘You'd better begin with the
Essays
. They're superb. Such sense, such an immense sagacity!'

‘Sagacity,' Helen repeated, and smiled to herself with pleasure. Yes, that was exactly the word she'd been looking for – exactly what she herself would like to be: sagacious, like an elephant, like an old sheep-dog, like Hume, if you preferred it. But at the same time, of course, herself. Sagacious, but young; sagacious, but lively and attractive; sagacious, but impetuous and . . .