Eyeless In Gaza (39 page)

Joan caught up the subject with passionate eagerness. ‘Yes, why
does
he want to be different from everyone else? After all, there are other good people in the world and they don't feel it necessary to do it. Mind you,' she added, looking up sharply into Anthony's face, as if trying to catch and quell any expression of disapproval there, or worse, of patronizing amusement, ‘mind you, I think it's wonderful of him to do it. Wonderful!' she repeated with a kind of defiance. Then, resuming the critical tone which she would not allow Anthony to use, but to which it seemed to her that her own feelings for Brian gave her a right, ‘All the same,' she went on, ‘I can't see how it would hurt him to take that money. I believe it was mostly his mother's doing.'

Surprised, ‘But he told me that Mrs Foxe had tried to insist on his taking it.'

‘Oh, she made it
seem
as though she wanted him to take it. We were there for a week-end in May to talk it over. She kept telling him that it wasn't wrong to take the money, and that he ought to think about me and getting married. But then, when Brian and I told her that I'd agreed to his not taking it, she . . .'

Anthony interrupted her. ‘But
had
you agreed?'

Joan dropped her eyes. ‘In a way,' she said sullenly. Then looking up again with sudden anger, ‘How could I help agreeing with him? Seeing that that was what he wanted to do, and would have done, what's more, even if I hadn't agreed. And besides, I've told you, there was something rather splendid and wonderful about it. Of course, I had agreed. But agreeing didn't mean that I really
wanted
him to refuse the money. And that's where her falseness came in – pretending to think that I wanted him to refuse it, and congratulating me and him on what we'd done. Saying we were heroic and all that. And so encouraging him to go on with the idea. It
is
her doing, I tell you. Much more than you think.'

She was silent, and Anthony thought it best to allow the subject to drop. Heaven only knew what she'd say if he allowed her to go on talking about Mrs Foxe. ‘Poor Brian,' he said aloud, and added, taking refuge in platitude, ‘The best is the enemy of the good.'

‘Yes, that's just it!' she cried. ‘The enemy of the good. He wants to be perfect – but look at the result! He tortures himself and hurts me. Why should I be made to feel dirty and criminal? Because that's what he's doing. When I've done nothing wrong. Nor has he, for that matter. And yet he wants me to feel the same about him. Dirty and criminal. Why does he make it so difficult for me? As difficult as he possibly can.' Her voice trembled, the tears overflowed. She pulled out her handkerchief and quickly wiped her eyes. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I'm making a fool of myself. But if you knew how hard it's been for me! I've loved him so much, I want to go on loving him. But he doesn't seem to want to allow me to. It ought to be so beautiful; but he does his best to make it all seem ugly and horrible.' Then, after a pause, and in a voice that had sunk almost to a whisper, ‘I sometimes wonder if I can go on much longer.'

Did it mean, he wondered, that she had already decided to break it off – had already met someone else who was prepared to love her and be loved less tragically, more normally than Brian? No; probably not, he decided. But there was every likelihood that she soon would. In her way (it didn't happen to be exactly the way he liked) she was attractive. There would be no shortage of candidates; and if a satisfactory candidate presented himself, would she be able – whatever she might consciously wish – to refuse?

Joan broke the silence. ‘I dream so often of the house we're going to live in,' she said. ‘Going from room to room; and it all looks so nice. Such pretty curtains and chair covers. And vases full of flowers.' She sighed; then, after a pause, ‘Do you understand his not wanting to take his mother's money?'

Anthony hesitated a moment; then replied noncommittally: ‘I understand it; but I don't think I should do it myself.'

She sighed once more. ‘That's how I feel too.' She looked at her watch; then gathered up her gloves. ‘I shall have to go.' With this return from intimacy to the prosaic world of time and people and appointments, she suddenly woke up again to painful self-consciousness. Had it bored him? Did he think her a fool? She looked into his face, trying to divine his thoughts; then dropped her eyes. ‘I'm afraid I've been talking a lot about myself,' she mumbled. ‘I don't know why I should burden you . . .'

He protested. ‘I only wish I could be of some help.'

Joan raised her face again and gave him a quick smile of gratitude. ‘You've done a lot by just listening.'

They left the restaurant and, when he had seen her to her bus, he set off on foot towards the British Museum, wondering, as he went, what sort of letter he ought to write to Brian. Should he wash his hands of the whole business and merely scribble a note to the effect that Joan seemed well and happy? Or should he let out that she had told him everything,
and then proceed to expostulate, warn, advise? He passed between the huge columns of the portico into the dim coolness within. A regular sermon, he thought with distaste. If only one could approach the problem as it ought to be approached – as a Rabelaisian joke. But then poor Brian could hardly be expected to see it in that light. Even though it would do him a world of good to think for a change in Rabelaisian terms. Anthony showed his card to the attendant and walked down the corridor to the Reading Room. That was always the trouble, he reflected; you could never influence anybody to be anything except himself, nor influence him by any means that he didn't already accept the validity of. He pushed open the door and was under the dome, breathing the faint, acrid smell of books. Millions of books. And all those hundreds of thousands of authors, century after century – each convinced he was right, convinced that he knew the essential secret, convinced that he could convince the rest of the world by putting it down in black and white. When in fact, of course, the only people anyone ever convinced were the ones that nature and circumstances had actually or potentially convinced already. And even those weren't wholly to be relied on. Circumstances changed. What convinced in January wouldn't necessarily convince in August. The attendant handed him the books that had been reserved for him, and he walked off to his seat. Mountains of the spirits in interminable birth-pangs; and the result was – what? Well,
si ridiculum murem requires, circumspice
. Pleased with his invention, he looked about him at his fellow readers – the men like walruses, the dim females, the Indians, emaciated or overblown, the whiskered patriarchs, the youths in spectacles. Heirs to all the ages. Depressing, if you took it seriously; but also irresistibly comic. He sat down and opened his book – De Lancre's
Tableau de l'Inconstance des Mauvais Anges –
at the place where he had stopped reading the day before. ‘
Le
Diable estoit en forme de bouc, ayant une queue et au dessoubs un visage d'homme noir, où elle fut contrainte le baiser
 . . .' He laughed noiselessly to himself. Another one for Mary, he thought.

At five he rose, left his books at the desk and, from Holborn, took the tube to Gloucester Road. A few minutes later he was at Mary Amberley's front door. The maid opened; he smiled at her familiarly and, assuming the privilege of an intimate of the house, ran upstairs to the drawing-room, unannounced.

‘I have a story for you,' he proclaimed, as he crossed the room.

‘A coarse story, I hope,' said Mary Amberley from the sofa.

Anthony kissed her hand in that affected style he had recently adopted, and sat down. ‘To the coarse,' he said, ‘all things are coarse.'

‘Yes, how lucky that is!' And with that crooked little smile of hers, that dark glitter between narrowed lids, ‘A filthy mind,' she added, ‘is a perpetual feast.' The joke was old and not her own; but Anthony's laughter pleased her none the less for that. It was wholehearted laughter, loud and prolonged – louder and longer than the joke itself warranted. But then it wasn't at the joke that he was really laughing. The joke was hardly more than an excuse; that laughter was his response, not to a single stimulus, but to the whole extraordinary and exciting situation. To be able to talk freely about anything (
anything,
mind you) with a woman, a lady, a genuine ‘loaf-kneader', as Mr Beavis, in his moments of etymological waggery, had been known to say, a true-blue English loaf-kneader who was also one's mistress, had also read Mallarmé, was also a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire; and to listen to the loaf-kneader preaching what she practised and casually mentioning beds, water-closets, the physiology of what (for the Saxon words still remained unpronounceable) they were
constrained to call
l'amour
– for Anthony, the experience was still, after two years and in spite of Mary's occasional infidelities, an intoxicating mixture of liberation and forbidden fruit, of relief and titillation. In his father's universe, in the world of Pauline and the Aunts, such things were simply not there – but not there with a painfully, glaringly conspicuous absence. Like the hypnotized patient who has been commanded to see the five of clubs as a piece of virgin pasteboard, they deliberately failed to perceive the undesirable things, they were conspiratorially silent about all they had been blind to. The natural functions even of the lower animals had to be ignored; there were silences even about quadrupeds. That goat incident, for example – it was the theme, now, of one of Anthony's choicest anecdotes. Exquisitely comic – but how much more comic now than at the time, nearly two years before he first met Mary, when it had actually happened! Picnicking on that horrible Scheideck Pass, with the Weisshorn hanging over them like an obsession and a clump of gentians, carefully sought out by Mr Beavis, in the grass at their feet, the family had been visited by a half-grown kid, greedy for the salt of their hard-boiled eggs. Shrinking and a little disgusted under their delight, his two small half-sisters had held out their hands to be licked, while Pauline took a snapshot, and Mr Beavis, whose interest in goats was mainly philological, quoted Theocritus. Pastoral scene! But suddenly the little creature had straddled its legs and, still expressionlessly gazing at the Beavis family through the oblong pupils of its large yellow eyes, had proceeded to make water on the gentians.

‘They're not very generous with their butter,' and, ‘How jolly the dear old Weisshorn is looking today,' Pauline and Mr Beavis brought out almost simultaneously – the one, as she peered into her sandwich, in a tone of complaint, the other, gazing away far-focused, with a note in his voice of a rapture
none the less genuinely Wordsworthian for being expressed in terms of a gentlemanly and thoroughly English facetiousness.

In haste and guiltily, the two children swallowed their incipient shriek of startled mirth and averted frozen faces from one another and the outrageous goat. Momentarily compromised, the world of Mr Beavis and Pauline and the Aunts had settled down again to respectability.

‘And what about your story?' Mrs Amberley enquired, as his laughter subsided.

‘You shall hear,' said Anthony, and was silent for a little, lighting a cigarette, while he thought of what he was about to say and the way he meant to say it. He was ambitious about his story, wanted to make it a good one, at once amusing and psychologically profound; a smoking-room story that should also be a library story, a laboratory story. Mary must be made to pay a double tribute of laughter and admiration.

‘You know Brian Foxe?' he began.

‘Of course.'

‘Poor old Brian!' By his tone, by the use of the patronizing adjective, Anthony established his position of superiority, asserted his right, the right of the enlightened and scientific vivisector, to anatomize and examine. Yes, poor old Brian! That maniacal preoccupation of his with chastity! Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont. Mary's appreciative smile acted on him like a spur to fresh efforts. Fresh efforts, of course, at Brian's expense. But at the moment, that didn't occur to him.

‘But what can you expect,' Mrs Amberley put in, ‘with a mother like that? One of those spiritual vampires. A regular St Monica.'

‘St Monica by Ary Scheffer,' he found himself overbidding. Not that there was a trace in Mrs Foxe of that sickly insincerity of Scheffer's saint. But the end of his story-telling,
which was to provoke Mary's laughter and admiration, was sufficient justification for any means whatever. Scheffer was an excellent joke, too good a joke to be neglected, even if he were beside the point. And when Mary brought out what was at the moment her favourite phrase and talked of Mrs Foxe's ‘uterine reactions,' he eagerly seized upon the words and began applying them, not merely to Mrs Foxe, but also to Joan and even (making another joke out of the physical absurdity of the thing) to Brian. Brian's uterine reactions towards chastity in conflict with his own and Joan's uterine reactions towards the common desires – it was a drama. A drama, he explained, whose existence hitherto he had only suspected and inferred. Now there was no more need to guess; he knew. Straight from the horse's mouth. Or rather, straight from the mare's. Poor Joan! The vivisector laid out another specimen on the operating table.

‘Like early Christians,' was Mrs Amberley's comment, when he had finished.

The virulent contempt in her voice made him suddenly remember, for the first time since he had begun this story, that Brian was his friend, that Joan had been genuinely unhappy. Too late, he wanted to explain that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was nobody he liked and admired and respected more than Brian. ‘You mustn't misunderstand me,' he said to Mary retrospectively and in imagination. ‘I'm absolutely devoted to him.' Inside his head, he became eloquent on the subject. But no amount of this interior eloquence could alter the fact that he had betrayed confidences and been malicious without apology or qualifying explanation. At the time, of course, this malice had seemed to him the manifestation of his own psychological acuteness; these betrayed confidences, the indispensable facts without which the acuteness could not have exercised. But now . . .