North Face (34 page)

“He tried so hard, too, I couldn’t bear it. You see, he wasn’t a subtle kind of person, he didn’t go at things by thinking them out. It must have taken a lot out of him, trying to work out this one. He said we’d always got on, and it was only because I was shy, and a—and inexperienced, and it would be all right afterwards; and if I didn’t feel happy about it, would I go away with him somewhere, once, and give it a chance? That was a lot for him to say, because he knew if we were found out it would break up his mother and mine, and he’d have taken the blame for both of us like he always had. It wasn’t that he wanted to get me easily, quite the reverse.

“We dragged on for weeks like that, and the war got worse, and he began to look different. Not warm and glowing, a sort of hard bright shine. Then he started drinking. Only off duty of course, and no more than some of the others who had to relax sometimes somehow. But he’d never needed it before. I kept asking for more time to think, and wondering if I ought to marry him anyway, and pretend. But he’d have known. It seemed intolerable for Jock and me to come to that.

“Then, when I was out one evening, I saw him in the street with a Waaf. She was looking at him when he wasn’t at her; you know how sometimes women forget there are other people. I knew more in that couple of seconds than I did later when he told me about it. He saw I’d seen him, or perhaps he wouldn’t have, I don’t know. Anyway, he said there were times when you had to have somebody, and he’d been straight with her about it and she knew where they stood. He hadn’t needed to tell me that part. At first I couldn’t think of anything but what she must be going through, keeping a light touch all the time. She was one of those girls who put a sort of hard varnish on the surface; I don’t suppose she was often caught out like she was when I looked.

“Then suddenly I stopped thinking about her and looked at Jock. I never saw him look better, as a man, than he did that day. Self-reliant and alert and upstanding. I forgot to tell you, he had a
D.F.C
. And all in a moment, I saw that something had happened. Something had gone, a sort of magic invulnerability. He wasn’t a charmed life any more. He was mortal, like anyone else.

“I stayed awake all night afterwards. I thought I must have been mad, to imagine I was important enough to be worth that. I thought I could make myself be in love with him somehow—I
did
love him—it shouldn’t be so different, I thought. I wrote a letter saying I’d marry him. But in the morning it didn’t look right, and I kept it back to write again. And then I thought I’d write a better one next day, when I wasn’t so tired. I put it off three days, and the fourth day I had it in my pocket, ready for the last post. And then the phone went. It was Jock’s mother. I knew as soon as the bell rang, before I answered it.

“My mother went straight over, of course, so I was alone. This is the worst thing I’ve got to tell you. You won’t understand it; it’s outside your kind of life. That’s why I’m telling you, so that you’ll see what I meant when I said you couldn’t be in love with me.

“It was a beautiful summer evening, all clear and still. And I had a wonderful exalted feeling, like one has after seeing a great tragedy on the stage. It seemed everything was resolved between us, that I’d always loved him, and that now it was perfect and spiritual and he must know it too. And then a sort of shrivelling light burst in on me, and I knew what all this ecstasy really was. It was relief.

“You can’t look at a thing like that for more than a second at a time. I never have. It’s unbelievable I should be telling someone in words. I’ve never faced it for as long as it’s taken me to say it now. But it’s always there. There’s something I read a short time after, and I’ve never opened the book again.”

She looked down at the twist of eiderdown in her fingers; her voice was clear, like grey glass.

“The many men, so beautiful,

And they all dead did lie;

And a thousand thousand slimy things

  
Lived on: and so did I.”

As he looked past her shoulder, Neil saw that her hand had moved upward, and was fingering, unconsciously, the medal at her neck. A sudden illumination jerked his voice back to silence; his heart checked with a taut constricting pain. Not daring to move lest she felt it, he clenched his cut hand till he felt the blood break out against the dressing. This distraction saved him, and he made no sound.

“Afterwards,” she said, accepting his silence with quiet submission, “I tried to prove to myself that it had been inevitable. If I couldn’t do this for Jock, I thought, it must be that I was different, that it wasn’t in me at all. They say some women are queer and don’t want to know about it. I thought perhaps I was, only one day a woman got sentimental about me and that was no good. So I must just be frigid, I thought. Presently I got quite convinced of it, and as I see it now, I suppose it made me feel safe, and I began to get rational about it, and pretend to myself that I must be sensible and take it in hand. That was why I took up with Eric. I know now why it really was. I must have known all the while that he’d be unendurable, and I could convince myself all over again. I hid that from myself, completely, till the morning after he’d gone, and I was having breakfast, and …” She turned her face away. “I was afraid of you. I suppose you knew that.”

“Not now,” he said; and, drawing her back against his shoulder, began to caress her; but he knew he was only playing for time. He felt her trying to relax and yield to it, and knew that the fear of hurting him possessed her to a point where her own sensations were extinguished, she neither knew nor cared what they were. When she began to speak again, one effort cancelled the other; she grew tense again to the touch.

“Not of you, now, but for you. It’s gone too deep; I think it’s become a part of me. I think perhaps …” With a movement that she herself seemed to be resisting, she took his hand between hers and held it away. “Perhaps if you were less kind. If you were going to take what you wanted and give me nothing, or if I could keep myself from …” She averted her face. Over the shadowed mass of her hair, the light picked out an intricate web of threadlike gold. “I think, and tell myself, and it makes no difference. I …” He felt her wrestling, bitterly, with the habit and strength of her own reticence. In a voice almost quenched with shame and struggle, she said, “I can’t feel any pleasure, now, without a sense of sin.”

“Be quiet a moment,” he said. She grew slack against his shoulder; her hands folded themselves passively about his. She was taking this pause into herself, creating a memory for solitude. He let her rest.

“Wars,”, he said at last, groping his way, “are a flaw in time. We’re half evolved beyond them. We’re pitched off our individual points of balance, and our own rhythm of growing, and told they no longer exist except as utilities for the herd. We know it’s a lie, but we’re ashamed to value our souls because cowards are valuing comfort, and the coward in ourselves values it too. So we slither about between two different kinds of being, trying to find a stance. The wonder isn’t that delicate adjustments are destroyed; it’s a miracle that any survive at all. If I wasn’t ready for it at thirty-four, what do you expect me to say about two children who weren’t ready at twenty and eighteen?”

He knew, before she spoke, that this had got nowhere.

“Age doesn’t mean anything. One’s there, one’s responsible, and one takes the results.”

“We all do. I’ve never talked to you as I should. Pure egotism … I worked out an adjustment I thought would do for me. So, good enough. I left a woman who wasn’t yet fit to look after herself, with a child she wasn’t yet fit to take care of. The woman became—what she need never have known she could be. And the child died as I wouldn’t see a murderer die. Like you, I don’t look on myself as a stainless martyr.”

She turned to him, silently. He submitted himself to her compassion, moved by it, and willing in any case to accept with grace what he had asked for. But, as he perceived, its ultimate message was still defeat.

“You did something positive, because you decided it was right. I did nothing, and decided nothing. I was just invertebrate; a total loss.”

He felt as he sometimes did when the route seemed to come to a dead stop, below an overhang. And then, he wiped his mind clear, and tried to see it all as if for the first time. As then, on one of those days when he was in luck and form, something came; he felt suddenly that the impasse could be turned. He had only been silent for a few seconds.

“What do you mean,” he said, “that you decided nothing? Do you believe yourself that you took the line of least resistance? It isn’t indecision that one clings to through punishment like that.”

He had begun, not sure where it was leading him. Now his view cleared; the truth stretched, unbroken, before him to the finish.

She had not answered; but he felt her weight lighten, as it does when the mind ceases to be listless, and draws together.

He asked, “Have you any brothers?”

“No,” she said, separating herself to look at him. “I’m an only child. I should have had one, but he was born dead.”

He said, quietly, “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m—” Her face took on a look of surprise and fear, as if some frail-looking hold, long considered and dismissed, were pointed out to her as a thing to which she might entrust her weight.

“When I was little,” she said slowly, “very little I mean, I used to pretend he was. To other people, who didn’t know. I used to get told off for being untruthful. I’d forgotten about it for years.”

“Don’t you think,” said Neil, “it’s time you remembered?”

“But, my dear, do you suppose I’ve never thought this kind of thing? It’s the oldest alibi in the world. It’s a line in a farce. It’s what Victorian girls used to say sitting under potted palms.”

“What the hell does it matter who’s said it? You little fool, don’t you realise it’s true?”

She sat up and he let her go. The eiderdown, which had slipped away long since, was tangled under her in a churned-up heap. She wrapped her arms round her breast and shoulders.

“You don’t trust things you’d like to believe too much.”

“You’re sentimental,” said Neil unsympathetically. He gave this a moment, recovering a knock of timing he had had at school. “This isn’t done up in lavender. It’s a taboo that was real when we were savages living in caves. He’d been shaken out of it; for him, what was left of it was just a longing to perpetuate something stable, when everything was rushing over the edge. It wasn’t his fault, or anyone’s fault, that it was love to him and incest to you.”

There was a long silence.

“Do you know now?” he said.

“Yes.” She did not move. He let her be; it was a moment at which he himself would have demanded to be alone.

“How helpless I was,” she said at last, “what a fool, not to have seen it in time. If I could have told him, he’d have understood. He understood all the natural things.”

“At eighteen? Try and remember how it feels.”

“I don’t need to. I wonder, now, if I’ve ever grown beyond it.”

“Oh, yes, for a long time. As Plato says in the
Phaedrus,
growing that’s held in always hurts.”

“And yet … innocent or guilty, one’s still a cause.”

“Yes, one may have to face that, if it’s true. If. I knew a lot of boys, you know, who were twenty when the war began.”

“He was bound to change. I know that. It’s a more concrete thing. Flying a Spitfire, everything’s in split seconds. You can’t afford anything on your mind, when it comes to the pinch.”

“My dear,” he said, “if you’ll forgive me, I’ll take from you one of woman’s pet illusions. When it comes to the pinch, a man doesn’t have anything on his mind.”

“You should know,” she said slowly. “What do you think about?”

“About what to do next, as long as there is anything. After that, it’s everyone’s own business. Perhaps the man who’s most alone, then, is the best off.”

She reached round, and took his hand. It was the bandaged one; he tried to give her the other; but she had known what she was looking for. She turned it over; there was a dark-brown patch, he discovered, staining the dressing across the palm. He knew now, as a hard dry fact about which there was no time to think, that she would have killed herself if he had died. Some part of him, working by itself like the reflex which had gripped the rock, had known it at the time.

“Something nearly happened today,” she said, “didn’t it?”

“It seemed to, for a minute. But it was all done with mirrors.”

Turning round, she looked up at him; but he had seen this coming. He returned the look, straight in the eyes.

“No,” he said. “Sorry, darling, but there it is. There simply isn’t time. Till it was over, I didn’t remember you were alive.”

She looked down at his hand again, and smoothed out a crease in the bandage.

“It’s always like that,” he told her. “Something to do with the glands. Adrenalin, I think.”

This improvement seemed to fail, somehow, of its hoped impression. She simply looked at the bandage, tracing the pattern where it crossed with her finger-ends.

“I love you,” she said, speaking down to it. “I love you. I—”

“S-sh.” He brought her over. “Don’t carry on so.”

Clear and precise in the quiet, the chiming clock downstairs struck one of the little hours. Stroking her hair, he felt beneath it a harder strand entangled. She felt it too; their eyes met in a moment of question and assent.

The clasp had slid from the centre, and took a little while to find; but, found, it was quite easy. The gold disc, smooth and warm like a part of her body, dropped into his hand. Turning it over, he saw on the reverse the white span of wings. He put it down in the ring of light on the bedside table, and said, steadily,

“The albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea.”

She looked at him, without wonder or surprise. “Yes. That’s true, too. After I knew how you felt about it, just for one moment I knew what it really was, and why I wore it. But I couldn’t face it. They say, don’t they, there’s nothing so cruel as a coward.”