For Love Alone (71 page)

He stayed away. They went on backbiting. Once she saw him striding wearily up St James's Street. He was all about town, wearing the trench-coat that the poor Londoner wears summer and winter, a discoloured drab felt hat which he crushed under his arm, a dirty muffler and brown boots. Five days after Quick left, he turned up at the flat, and found her alone. She was dressed all in black linen. “I was just going out.”

“Well, I won't come in,” he murmured.

“Oh, I want you to come in.”

“I'll sit down for ten minutes, I've been walking all the morning.”

“Do you like port? I have some. It looks black as tar, too, look at it.”

“I like port, all right,” he said humorously, setting down his things neatly, and flinging himself in the same deep chair. She brought the bottle and two glasses. “I didn't have time to read the poems, just one or two,” he said. “I've got five or six books promised to publishers and not one written. That's how I live, on advances.” He laughed sadly. They drank two glasses of port each before he said reluctantly: “Well, I must be getting on. I'm getting off to France tomorrow.”

“Ah?” she said guardedly. “You've got a lot to do then? Well, go then—but have another glass.” He smiled and took it reluctantly. “I never drink in the middle of the day.”

“Well, after this go and have some lunch.” He said nothing, raising the glass and looking at its mantle. She explained that they
got it from across the street. Since they were just inside Temple Bar, the vintners had special regulations, that is, that applied to the City, and also had cheaper and better port and sherry than elsewhere in London. They sold from the barrel, so that the wineries resembled somewhat the wineshops in Spain. In the back room, all the young lawyers and well-known Fleet Street men met at about four or five in the afternoon. Also in the street were famous taverns with a few specialities, pasties, old ale and the like, with benches arranged round the room, or in pews; and each corner, each seat in fact, was ornamented with the names of the dead. Above the pews in the “Cock” were several men in wigs and robes who resembled Harry Girton, they equally, though better developed, having his puffy drooping cheeks and the pear-shaped paunch, which he, poor man, would never be able to mature. He did his best with a little round corporation based on occasional advances from publishers and which slowly disappeared as these were expended. Harry and Manette both worked, their rent was low and neither was charitable; but the cost of living and of going on low binges with Harry's friends ate into their small cash. They had no large debts and got nothing on “easy payments”, but a trip to the dentist, a doctor's bill, set them back for a six-month. They were, simply, very poor. Teresa would have liked to have gone out to eat with Harry at one of the taverns which she and Quick frequented and she knew that Harry would let her pay for him. They sat there, thinking of food. He was hungry. She thought: “If I were a man I would be as seedy and hungry as he, that's honesty.”

He put down the glass, his third, and he saw with surprise that she poured herself a fourth. All the same, there was no sign of its having affected her. The telephone rang, she answered it and said: “Nigel Fippenny is coming over in five minutes to have a cup of tea. This is Fleet Street time, that means an hour and a half.”

“I'm blowing,” said Harry. “I have an idea he doesn't like me.” He grinned slyly. Fippenny loved both Quicks and he suspected, with the penetration of jealousy, that the Quicks thought better of
Girton's brains than of his own; he lost no opening for his brash Irishman's sallies and acid stories against Girton's politics.

“No, he doesn't like you.”

“He looks like one of your irritable Orangemen, I.R.A. or not,” said Girton pacifically.

She poured out another glass of wine for them both. Girton, who had been about to go, watched her in surprise and said nothing. He guessed she had a secret to tell him, perhaps that she was in love with him. He knew, like all charming men, that women have no hesitation in saying when they love, and he smiled tenderly to bring out the mood that was most admirable to him in the sex, the gallant and frank mood, that is a proof of love.

“Some more port?”

“If you like!” He watched her intently and a velvety shadow moved round his sensual mouth. She knew what he expected of her, because he had said it two or three times. “In the Soviet Union, a girl who loved a man would tell him so,” but because he knew already, she would not say it. She did not care to talk about love at all, it was enough that there had been a covert declaration between them.

Nigel Fippenny came earlier than he was expected, he came twenty-five minutes after he had telephoned, and at once flung himself down in the second arm-chair, throwing his black “revolutionary” hat, old-style, on the bed in the alcove. He stretched, got out a cigar, offered one to Harry Girton, who refused it, and made a cynical comment on the aid of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. This was a sore point with Nigel, since he had flourished his guerrilla campaigns against the British since 1916 and now could not give up the comforts of a Fleet Street salary, “thelegraphin' thripe to the Colonies and Dominions”, to fight on the side of liberty. To excuse his sell-out, he invented a whole argument, heartily detested Harry Girton, an Englishman—therefore an “oppressor”—who nevertheless was going out to fight with the International Brigade. He opined that “Yu will never get out there and if yu dhu, yu will sit in a hotel in Madrid with all the other-r Mar-rxists and let me tell yu
I can't thole the arm-chair Mar-rxist, Len'n, that I knu in Moscow in 1921 was no ar-rm-chair-r Mar-rxist”, and so on. To this Harry Girton returned civil answers, or silence.

The two men made up their minds to sit each other out. However, the untrimmed Nigel, who had sold out to the British Empire, became sharp about Mar-rxists who “sell out” to various entities, including the “par-rty”, and gave vent to a pious wish that Britain would fight with Hitler rather than with Stal'n, an ambitious bureaucrat, with whom Len'n would have nothing to do, so that Harry Girton got up, picked up his things and said he had to get on his way. He never argued foolishly.

Teresa left the water on the gas-stove, saying to Nigel: “Your tea is nearly ready,” and accompanied Harry to the door, meanwhile laughing at Nigel's parting shot, some insult to the Marxists. Then, asking Harry what he wanted to take away to Spain with him that she could give him next day, she went with him to the street door and into Crane Court. It was only three-thirty but night had fallen. The light dropped between the half-drawn curtains from the flat above and on to the asphalt, a yard or two beyond them. There were three steps down. She stood on the second step and held out her hand.

“You're going tomorrow,” she said in a muffled voice.

“Yes.” He took her hand. She clasped it in both hers and looked down at him. He smiled faintly and stood still. After a moment, she said wildly: “Harry, I'll go with you.”

“Where?”

“To Spain.”

“Yes?” He waited, looking up at her and holding her hand still. When he withdrew his hand he still looked up, but gravely. She came down the steps, with her hand on his arm, and they turned down the court. At the mouth of the court, under the thick arch, she said: “Good-bye.”

He bent down and kissed her, saying: “Good-bye.”

“This isn't Spain, is it?”

He looked down silently. “I'll come back,” he said at last. She was suffocated.

“Wait for me till I come back,” he said.

She came slowly up the court, scarcely able to walk. She thought: “If he comes back, I'll never see him, there was never anything like this.” But when she got into the flat, she had a shining face, so that Nigel jealously noticed it.

“Yu look all excited! How's that?”

“Excited? Why should I be?”

“Maybe because James is coming back,” he said sarcastically. In the kitchen, as she made his “tay”, she began to sing the “Wedding March”.

“Are yu going to get married?” he shouted.

“Am I?”

“Are yu singing for joy?”

“Good Heavens!” She appeared holding the breakfast cup of tea. “For joy! No, Jimmy is not coming yet.” He took the cup and smiled under his lids as he blew at the steam. “A good cup of tay. I thought yu were singing for joy, maybe”, and he said no more.

W
hen James Quick came back from Antwerp she told him that “the boys” had been at the flat almost every day and that still she had finished the typing job. Quick inquired who they were and what they had said and seemed broken-hearted that Harry Girton had gone to Spain before he could say good-bye to him. “But you said good-bye to him?”

“No. That is, hardly. I never have presence of mind.”

She wanted now to go back to the office to help Quick as his secretary, but Quick had employed a young man secretary already, not to make Teresa anxious, as he said, smiling: “And Axelrode agrees with me, since the secretary is always the office wife, as you know, and cannot help being.” And he told Teresa she could employ herself at home.

“I want to know that you are there waiting for me and that when I get home you will rush to the door as you do.”

She was flattered, but she thought instantly: “It's the surest way to lose me.” When Quick came home the same day she told him she
could never live in a back street and wait for him—“What is every waiting wife but a back-street wife? No, I won't be that. I'll go and be someone else's secretary, and then—you know, you said before—a kept woman,
your
kept woman, yours especially, I could not be.”

“Why not mine especially?” he said.

“Because I adore you.”

He was radiant he but did not understand. He said: “Very well, but we must think out something for you to do. What would you like to do?” He was astonished that within three months this woman, whom he had pictured to himself as furiously passionate and to whom marriage would be heaven, should already be dull and discontented. As soon as she mentioned even the vaguest confusion in reasons for her discontent he became unhappy and said that he “had not satisfied her”, and he told her hundreds of queer stories, part of the legend of the male, both obscene and innocent, in which a woman satisfied, slept, became languid, lazy and fat. She remembered in literature, too, a dozen passages where “the satyrs ran off into the wood while the nymphs slept by the banks of the fountain”. For herself, she knew that the satisfaction of this great desire only made her more restless and energetic than before.

Quick loved Teresa deeply; what was clumsy and harsh in her he put down to her hard life, to Jonathan Crow's deceptions, and to her naïveté, when he felt irritated. If, sometimes, he wondered if he had not acted precipitately, in taking her to live with him at once before he had tested the strength of their union, at other times he found a great joy and glory in his absolute abandonment of which he was so capable. It was because of this great self-abandonment that he did not understand her. It was not only her own training but her age, for she was young in experience, which made her different from him. The youthful give themselves up with difficulty. When a husband or wife is a little older a sort of reticence persists. They owe these elders more reverence and at the same time they feel that it is not wrong to conceal their feelings. How can the generations meet in youth, even in the same sex?

Quick thought that her restlessness was something that would pass away when she had accustomed herself to married life, but he was not an obstinate, self-centred, or opinionated man. When he came back and saw by her silence that his wife's friendship with Harry Girton, with all its peculiarities, had developed during his absence, he asked himself: “Have I merely got her on the rebound? Is she about to love truly another man? Am I, with my possessive passion, standing in the way of happiness? I would never do that, whatever the pain—well, we must see it through. If she loves Girton and not me, if her restlessness ceases through him, I must give her up; it is better to do it now than when we are better used to each other.” For restlessness in a woman, to him, by tradition, was wrong. He was very relieved to find that Girton had already gone abroad. This put off the question of their love till he returned and by then—it was far off.

But the Monday after Quick's return, about three in the afternoon, the door-bell rang and Girton appeared, to say good-bye to Quick. His departure had been delayed ten days. In the meantime he intended to go to the Midlands to see his family, from whom he had been separated many times in the past twenty-five years. He came in, sat down, and began to talk in an undertone, desultorily, to Teresa. That afternoon Quick came home early, at three-thirty, and so it was for five days, Girton each day putting off his visit to his home, and Quick each day coming home earlier. On the Friday he was at home again at eleven in the morning—there was nothing to do in the office, he said, and Axelrode off to Antwerp. During this week, when the men so mysteriously met each other, the desire for an hour alone became intense in the two lovers. They were only in love, perhaps, when Quick was there. Girton and Teresa, or so it seemed to them, only asked an hour in which to thrash out the whole matter. Nothing compared with the need to know, to hear the binding words; for the sexual act is also committed between strangers and people who hate each other, and it is the mystic words, “I love you, we love each other” which bind for life, and each waited for these
words to drop. Quick, of course, plainly saw the tension between the two and could imagine only that they had a secret understanding. At last, on Friday, Girton said: “I must leave by tomorrow morning's train to see my people in Birmingham. I keep putting it off—I leave at ten-thirty from Paddington”, and Teresa said: “That's funny, my people, cousins and a great-aunt, live at Leamington, that's on the same line, isn't it? At least from Paddington, that's where they told me to get the train——”