Kind Are Her Answers (14 page)

“I’m sorry, I—I’ll have to go; we must have been here some time.”

“Hi, just a minute. Not with your hair like that, angel-face. And there’s a smear of dirt right across your chin; goodness knows where you got
that
from. Here, lick your hanky and I’ll clean it off. What you need is some one to look after you.”

J
UST OVER A WEEK
later, walking home after the third Group meeting they had attended together, Janet told Timmie that she had been Changed. A receptive learner, she had acquired by now the full vocabulary as well as a good range of idiom, and could use both without self-consciousness; or with an embarrassment just slight enough to be subtly pleasant.

“I had a quiet time this morning,” she said, “and it suddenly came to me, Timmie, that the guidance you had about me the other day was right.” She paused, to study unobtrusively the effect of her words. It was much as she had expected, but rather better. He had not got to the point, yet, of trying to say anything, so she went on. “You remember what you said about my having done everything that one person alone could?”

“Yes,” said Timmie. He swallowed. “You mustn’t think I … I shouldn’t dream. … I mean, I don’t really know anything about … Only of course, it was obvious that if
you
didn’t get on with somebody, it must be …” He stalled, blushed to the ears, and looked away.

“Never mind about that, Timmie. There are certain things it wouldn’t be right for me to share with you. You’re such a young, spontaneous, happy person, I want you always to keep that.” Her smile of secret courage turned like a knife in Timmie’s heart. “All I wanted to tell you is that I realize, now, the resistance I was putting up was just spiritual pride. I was selfish. It mattered too much to me that I should stand on my own feet, and fight my own battles without any help from any one. I expect that seems foolish to you. It’s just that I’ve always been … rather a lonely creature.”

“I don’t see how you could ever be lonely,” said Timmie gruffly. “I don’t see how you could walk into a room without every one in it wanting to know you. … I did.”

“Perhaps you’re rather a special sort of person, Timmie.

Timmie looked like a dog, who is very seldom fed at meals, when a piece of meat comes over the edge of the table. He was beautifully predictable. She went on. “And perhaps that isn’t exactly what I meant. You can know a host of people, and still be lonely in yourself. You wouldn’t understand that, Timmie. I wouldn’t want you to.”

She had a moment’s clear little glimpse of herself, as she spoke, dressed very simply in soft grey—or perhaps misty blue, or mauve—sitting enthroned and solitary in a noisy admiring crowd. Before Timmie it opened out whole planes of tragic mystery: he attempted no reply at all.

“But one shouldn’t let courage become one’s idol. One mustn’t let it shut one off in oneself, and make one proud. One must put what one has into the common stock. There are a great many things I can learn from
you,
Timmie, for instance. That’s why I’ve decided to join the Group.”

Timmie looked down at his right shoe and said, “You know, I think this is just about the best thing that’s happened to me, ever.”

“Oh, no, Timmie dear. As you go on, you’ll have a message for much more worthwhile people than I am. I feel that about you, very definitely.”

“Not likely. And anyway, I didn’t do anything. You were bound to, sooner or later, being so … the sort of person you are.” He walked for fifty yards or so in silence, then jerked out, very fast, “I expect, now, you’ll be able to change your husband, and then everything will be all right.”

“Change my husband?” Janet stared, startled, for the moment, half out of her wits. She saw Timmie’s eyes fixed on her, anxious and innocent, and her phrase book came back to her. “Oh …
Change
him. Ye-es, Timmie, perhaps some day. …” She looked away, meditatively, trying to recover her poise, which had received the kind of jar a car gives when one changes gear at the wrong speed. This new self of hers had made so lovely a pattern against the background of Timmie, it had not occurred to her, yet, to try the effect against the background of Kit. There was a pause, while she attempted to rearrange the design round this curiously intractable projection.

“If seems a bit hard,” Timmie was remarking with laboured detachment, “that right at the beginning you should have to lead off with a tough job like that. I mean, of course I don’t know, but I should think it would be, fairly.”

“I don’t think that’s how I shall have to look at it, do you?” There was a shade of gentle reproach in her voice, which made Timmie crumple and go pink, and Janet herself feel somehow reinforced. “Don’t you think the only way is to forget about one’s own selfish sensitiveness and reserve, and try to get guidance just for—for the other person?” This phrasing allowed her to preserve a half-illusion that she was speaking in general terms. It was, somehow, impossible to use anything even as definite as a personal pronoun.

“Yes, of course, I see you would think of it like that.” Timmie kicked a stray cigarette package across the pavement, and sunk into another silence, from which he emerged to jerk out, “What I was thinking was, how would it be if I had a shot instead. I mean, suppose he wasn’t decent to you. I should feel it was in a way my fault, having more or less put you on to it. So I thought, if I sort of chipped in first and broke the ice … Not that I’d be any good compared with you, in the way of thinking things out and putting them, but sometimes if two men get together over a thing, they … Don’t you think it would be pretty sound?”

There was a pause, filled for Timmie with high anticipations, and for Janet with a kind of turning over of the stomach. Her powers of thought were, for a moment, practically suspended, leaving in possession merely the instinct to remove the responsibility for what she felt to some one else. She drew herself together.

“No,” she said distantly. “I think it would be useless, unwise and most unsuitable. Really, Timmie my dear, you must wait till you’re a little older before you assume responsibilities of that kind. Don’t you think so?”

Like a dog who has demonstrated affection with muddy paws, or like a child who, practising new noises to itself, has hit by chance on a swear-word and been ordered out of the room, Timmie gave her one lost look, and accepted the divine chastisement. “Sorry,” he said indistinctly. He looked on the ground for something to kick, but even this the well-kept pavement denied him. Janet glanced sideways at him, stiff at the joints with constraint and shame, walking a little lopsidedly because his eyes were fixed on his left shoe; his blush deepening till it clashed painfully with his hair. Her resentment left her. She had never achieved, completely, a victory like this before. With Kit there had always been a last shred of doubt. He had an incalculable pride which had made him elusive at moments of final humiliation. In Timmie, as in the sacrifice of some symbolic victim, she completed a dozen achievements that had lacked, at the time, their perfect crown. With no part of this process did her conscious mind have any traffic at all. She merely felt warm to Timmie again, wise and forgiving.

“But you mustn’t be sorry,” she said. “You meant it so kindly. I shouldn’t have been cross with you. It’s only that—one’s unhappiness is such a private thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m going to learn to understand,” said Timmie, speaking with truer guidance than he knew.

A
THUNDERSTORM WAS CREEPING
up, pushing its close air before it. The leaves in the garden dropped still, and the smell from every patch of rotten leaves hung motionless over its source, as if enclosed in glass. The distant thunder seemed to keep a circular track just below the horizon; it was always the same distance away. The air was so charged that the slightness of its muffled sound was irritating; the ear waited continually for it to come nearer.

Christie tossed in the close heat, throwing off the rug, and Kit’s arm, from over her. She reached for his hand again, apologetically, and caressed it.

“It’s so hot.”

“It will be better when the storm breaks,” said Kit.

“When it does I shall have to go in. It might wake her.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

He had forgotten because for once he himself was feeling secure. It was his free evening. He and Fraser, when they relieved each other, had an arrangement which included the night calls as well. He had told Janet he was going to see McKinnon, which, up till just after midnight, had been true. In this relief from guilt and tension, he had overreacted into a blissful sense of immunity. Christie saw his face change.

“Darling, what a shame,” she said. “On your night off. Don’t worry, it will be all right. The storm isn’t coming any nearer.” Her voice, maternal and reassuring, suggested that she would attend to it herself.

The thunder sounded again, like huge casks being trundled round a cellar a long way off. A sheet of lightning threw into theatrical relief a low ceiling of cloud. For an instant as brief as the snap of a camera, the lovers saw one another, their eyes startled and darkly shining, surprised into strangeness as they were flung without warning from a world of touch into one of sight. When the flash had passed, they reached for one another like people reaching for safety.

“It isn’t any louder,” Christie said. “It’s going away.”

The air grew heavier and more expectant. In the ivy on top of the summerhouse, two starlings fell foul of one another as they sought a deeper shelter, and exploded into a high chittering, half anger and half fear. Kit felt Christie’s fingertips dig into his shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Only the birds.”

She said under her breath, “I used to be a bit frightened of thunderstorms.”

“Would you rather go in?”

“No. I don’t mind things with you that I minded before.”

She slid her head on to his shoulder. She felt slight, and somehow pathetic, yielded up as she was without reserve. Through its cloud of hair her skull seemed soft and light in his hand, like the head of a young child.

Tenderness and security warmed him. Looking up at the blackness of the invisible roof, he said softly, “Tell me about that other chap. What was he like?”

She threw her arm over him. “No. You don’t want to know, you only think you do.”

“I don’t mind to-night. Like you and the thunder. I want to know all about you.”

“You don’t really.”

“Just as you like.”

She stroked his hair, then said, quickly and indulgently like a mother who has been asked for a bedtime story, “All right. I’ll tell you about Maurice if you want me to. But I don’t think you’d get on with him.”

“Well,” said Kit tranquilly, “I didn’t ask with the idea of getting him to put me up for his club.”

She gave a soft little snort of laughter into his neck.

“He couldn’t. He was a devout Communist.”

“I’ve a friend who is.”

“Oh, yes, you told me. Is your friend orthodox?”

“Well, I suppose so. He reads the
Daily Worker,
and he’s an educated man. I should say that was carrying orthodoxy to the point of martyrdom. Why, wasn’t Maurice?”

“No, that was his trouble, poor dear. He was always getting caught up in some sort of heresy. In the end he got expelled from the party. It was terrible. We started, really, because I was so sorry for him. In fact, I learnt it up for a bit, so that I could be in the same heresy as he was. I’ve forgotten most of it now, but I think it was a comfort to him, at the time.”

Kit grunted.

“No, really he did mind terribly. It’s like being excommunicated, you know. He’s a Trotskyist now, and he seems to like that better, but he still has doubts about one or two things and I keep worrying in case they expel him too. If that happens I don’t know
what
he’ll do.”

“What else was he like?” asked Kit. Within him jealousy, like a stalking cat, waited quietly for something solid enough to put its claws in.

“He was about forty and dark and had a heavy sad sort of face. He did rather exclusive sort of woodcuts; he had an exhibition of them once, called “Landscapes of the Mind.” Not very many people came, and he was miserable about that too. He had belonged to the Surrealists at one time, but they said he was irregular and had no place in the Movement. That happened just after I met him. I couldn’t bear him being so lonely. Besides, he said if I wouldn’t have him he’d kill himself.”

Kit uttered a monosyllable under his breath.

“Don’t be mean, darling, he quite easily might have. He’d tried once before, but he hadn’t enough shillings for the gas and it ran out. He did a Landscape, afterwards, of what it felt like when he was almost dead. It was rather marvellous, in a way.”

“Oh. What was he like to live with?”

“Well, I didn’t actually
live
with him, I only used to call in. I was working at the Abbey, and he shared a flat with a man who was on the
Statesman and Nation
or some paper like that. I just used to call in when this other man was away. He used to go away quite a bit, observing what people said to each other in trains and places, about whatever crisis was on.”

“How useful.”

“Yes, it was, except once when he forgot something and came back for it. Of course, Maurice did
ask
me to live with him—instead of this man, I mean, not as well—but I don’t think really he could have afforded it, and though I was awfully fond of him, it was more restful, sort of, at the Abbey for every day.”

“So I should imagine.”

“No, truly, he was terribly sweet sometimes. It was only that he had theories about me.”

“Did he tell you what they were?”

“Yes, all the time. That was it, really. You see, his most famous Landscape—the one that made a lot of people say he was a genius—was called
Woman.
It was tantamount to a revolutionary psychological thesis. He showed me an article in a Left paper, saying so. It was all in symbolism, of course. And everything I did, nearly, he said was symbolical too. It was rather exciting, at first.”

“Must have been.”