Nuns and Soldiers (31 page)

‘Oh Tim, Tim, dear-I love you - but we can’t tell. It may be you’re right that it’s a momentary magic, a delusion we’ve both got. But if we go on together we can only do it if we hope to marry. We can’t play with this thing, it would be horrible to do so, it would be a betrayal, it would be a crime. Are you willing to go on, for a time, and chance it, to stick with the hope?’

‘And the risk,’ said Tim. ‘
Yes.
But, oh Gertrude, the risk - it’s so terrible - if we lose
now.
’

‘The risk - think what I risk - think of the
moral
risk.’ Tears started into Gertrude’s eyes and she slowly wiped them away with one hand, still looking at him, now almost glaring.

Tim did not move. He was not quite sure what she meant. He said, ‘My darling, if we go on - well there isn’t any if, we must and will go on.
As
we go on, what do we do - about
them
?’

‘I’ve thought,’ said Gertrude, and now she sounded almost weary. ‘We won’t say anything yet, perhaps for some time.’

‘You mean, keep it a secret?’

‘Yes. I don’t like secrets, but it’s better so.’

‘While we’re waiting and seeing we won’t want any spectators, will we.’

‘No.’ They looked at each other in silence.

Gertrude was sitting by the roadside. Her bicycle was propped against a steep brambly bank. The sun was hot. In her bicycle basket there was milk, eggs, coffee, tomatoes, cheese, olives, the day’s bread.

She was sitting on a tuffet of grass, with her back against the bank, in the shade of an apricot tree. She was about half a mile from the house, upon the deserted silent road, and she was thinking. At this time of the morning Tim would be out painting, so she could have had solitude to think back at home, but she preferred to sit beside her bicycle in the road.

It was now three days since the day of the conferences and the dance and the love-making. There had been more love-making. It was indeed, as Tim had said, extreme. And as Tim had said, mythological, amazing.

Sometimes she said to herself, ‘What a pickle I’m in,’ as if by using such language she could somehow simplify the situation and make it more ordinary. Was she bewitched? The honey-magic had lasted, had grown even more intense and wonderful. She had looked at herself in the mirror and seen a different woman. She remembered something that Guy used to say, perhaps it was a quotation, about one’s will changing the limits of the world, and how the world ‘waxes and wanes as a whole’. Gertrude had changed her world and everything in it was different, not only shown in a different light, but different in its cells, in its atoms, in its deep core.

There was no doubt about the
fact
of her being in love with Tim, and Tim being in love with her. This was the real, the indubitable and authoritative Eros: that unmistakable seismic shock, that total concentration of everything into one necessary being, mysterious, uncanny, unique, one of the strangest phenomena in the world. This happening itself was something like a vow, and to this reality she was bound as to a new innocence. She was as if shriven. She had a new consciousness, her whole being hummed with a sacred love-awareness. She loved Tim with passion, with tenderness, with laughter and tears, with all the accumulated
intelligent
forces of her being; although there were times when she was rational enough to ask herself, well, and what follows from
that
?

The odd thing was how pure and clear all that joy had remained in the midst of Gertrude’s dark accompanying preoccupying consciousness of herself as bereaved, as widowed, as in mourning. How did these two things connect? Did they connect? Were they simply, accidentally juxtaposed? Or had one somehow
caused
the other? And if so, had it caused it in a good way or in a bad way? Tim had spoken of ‘illusions’ which arose out of ‘shock’ or ‘stress’. Had she gone out of her mind with grief and rushed for solace to a wild fantasy? Had her grief
changed
? She was not sure. Or else, so accustomed to love somebody, had she fallen in love with the first man with whom, after Guy’s death, she had been really alone? How quickly can the past lose its authority, what
is
its authority? What did it mean to count the weeks, the months, how did time enter here? The magic of the place, the heat, the rocks, presented perhaps a lesser enigma. Tim kept saying that it could not have happened in London S W 1, and that no doubt was true. But any love may be prompted by some chance felicity. It was the connection with Guy that troubled Gertrude, and troubled her deeply, and not only because of something dark and awful which was a grief contaminated now by guilt.

She had come to France to mourn for Guy, to confront his shade, to sort out the poor sad remnants of his things, pieces of paper with his writing on which she had burnt in the fireplace one morning when Tim was absent, in what they now spoke of as ‘prehistory’. She had burnt those remnants. Had she come then to mourn, but also in a sense to clear Guy away, not to have to fear these further confrontations with his relics? Had she, because the pain was too great, attempted to blot Guy out, and had she thus made a vacancy in her soul into which Tim had come? There were rat-runs of thought here into which Gertrude did not want to enter. She feared some terrible imprisonment of guilt and obsession which she knew would be bad. Guy was dead. Tim was alive. She must not, out of some sentimental self-destructive madness, make of this a machine to honour the dead simply by hurting the living. There was such a thing as
just
mourning. Guy would have understood these problems very well indeed.

He had said, ‘I so intensely want you to be happy when I’m gone ... You will pass out of these shadows, I see a light beyond ... They say “he would have wished” has no sense, but it has ... Have the will now to please me in the future when I won’t exist any more.’ And Gertrude had said, ‘I shall never be happy again ... I shall be dead too, walking and talking and dead.’ And he had said, ‘I would very much like you to marry again.’ Guy, her husband, rational, strong, good, the man she had loved and worshipped. Tears came into her eyes, quiet deep tears out of deep wells. She had felt it impossible to live without him. Yet she was living. She had fallen in love with another man, a man as different from Guy as it was possible for one man to be from another.

Was there any sense in asking, what would Guy think? Gertrude had thought again about Guy and Manfred. She felt less sure now about her theory that Guy had put forward the Count as someone she might marry in order to divert her thoughts from Manfred. It was plausible. Yet would it not be out of character? Gertrude felt giddy for a moment. It was as if she didn’t really know him, enough, any more. All Guy’s wise good words were also compatible with his really not wanting her to marry anybody. There could be little doubt that he had reflected about ‘the suitors’ as he lay dying and reading
The Odyssey.
He must have passed them in review. Had Tim appeared upon that fateful list? No, Guy would never have thought of Tim. Would he, if he knew now, laugh and wish them luck? What would a shade do, and how can one imagine it as other than a mournful spectator?

One thing Guy would certainly have disapproved of was the secrecy, the (for that is what it would come to) lies. What would
they
think? What
will
they think? This was something which Tim almost maddeningly kept repeating and the reiteration distressed Gertrude because she had to admit that she was worried too. Both of them feared the emergence of their love into the public gaze. A sense of secrecy and conspiracy had grown up between them and influenced them both. They wanted to
hide.
That was not good. They had decided to stay on at Les Grands Saules, at any rate they had made no plans for leaving. This seemed, for the present, sensible. They must be together, they must be alone, testing a reality which was already for both of them firmly established. There was no shadow of doubt in the clear looks which they gave each other. But other tests would come, and there would be strains and changes. Viewed in a certain light their situation was obscene - and was not that light the
general
light? Yes, their love would change. Ebury Street would change it. Marriage, if it came, would change it, Gertrude was blessed (and she was thankful for it) with a clear head on the main point. She could not ‘play’ with Tim. If she took him on at all it must be eternally and absolutely. ‘I can’t imagine marriage,’ said Tim. ‘Marriage is unimaginable,’ said Gertrude.
This
marriage was indeed unimaginable.

The strength of the ‘mob’ had been shown by the fact that she and Tim, sitting over their wine (they were drinking a good deal), had discussed the whole lot of them one by one even down to the remoter figures such as Peggy Schultz, Rachel Lebowitz, the Ginzburg twins (one was the well-known actor, the nicer one was a lawyer, they were related to Mrs Mount). Of course Tim was afraid of them. What would Moses say? What would the Stanley Openshaws say? What would Manfred say? Gertrude was interested to learn that Gerald Pavitt had been kind to Tim and that Tim was fond of him in a respectful way. She was not surprised to learn that Tim was frightened of Manfred, and that the two he liked best were Balintoy and the Count. Especially the Count.

The pale thin tall snake-eyed heel-clicking figure of the Count now rose accusingly before Gertrude. His love had touched her, had pleased her, lately had comforted her. She had, before what had now happened, looked forward to seeing him again on her return home. Gertrude had said to Tim, ‘we must keep this a secret,’ and she had added afterwards, ‘till Christmas.’ She did not say, but of course Tim knew, that this was the anniversary. Piety, reason, shame, their private testing of each other seemed to suggest some such delay. To speak out now would be ‘too soon’. And yet - at the end of the year, the Count would propose. Gertrude had already worked this out for herself. He too would be waiting, waiting and watching and hoping. Could she deceive the Count, let him hope vainly, building up dreams, which every smile of hers would add to? If there had been no Tim, would she have loved the Count? Gertrude thrust this useless question from her. Suppose she were to tell the Count about Tim and swear him to secrecy! No, that would be impossible. Or spend the whole of the waiting time with Tim here, or somewhere else, seeing no one? That would be impossible too.

And then there was Anne. Would she dare to lie to Anne? Tim had rather avoided the subject of Anne and Gertrude guessed that he was frightened of her as well. He could not but see her as an alien power in Gertrude’s life. What would Anne think? Would she, Gertrude wondered, be dismayed, be
jealous
? That was possible. Had Gertrude encouraged Anne to envisage a shared life, herself and Gertrude living together, growing old together? Yes; and Gertrude had wanted this too, and ardently. She recalled their talks in Cumbria, their walks beside the sea, the rescue from the waves. Was she not bound to Anne? Surely there could be no question of her
losing
Anne? This idea was suddenly acutely painful and Gertrude put it away. Anne had come to her in a time of dereliction for them both. Anne had lost her convent ‘family’, had lost her God. Perhaps even now, led on by Gertrude, Anne was thinking how she and her old college friend would henceforth be inseparable. These speculations troubled Gertrude very much. But herein too she drew comfort from Anne herself. Anne Cavidge was rational and strong. She would do all things well. She would live her own life. She would stay near Gertrude forever. And she would learn to know Tim and to love him because he was Gertrude’s husband.

‘Husband’: a great word, a dream word. Would she stay the course, would Tim? Was it not foolish to worry so intensely about the motives and results of what might after all never happen?
How
would it be? Gertrude had preached to him enough about how they could both work, he at his painting, she at her teaching. She might even now, she felt, go back to teaching in a school. ‘We’ll work.’ ‘I’ll always be a bad painter.’ ‘I want you to become a good painter.’ ‘If you want that you mustn’t marry me.’ ‘All right, you shall work as a bad painter!’ They had already been practising this regime. Tim went out every day to paint, Gertrude did the housekeeping and looked at her Urdu grammar. She made no progress however, it was too difficult without a teacher. She lived with the event, the fact, the new being. She loved Tim, his childishness, his gaiety, his wry humility, his animal playfulness, his love for her, his talent (for she believed in this), his lack of pretension, or ambition, or affectation, or dignity. It was not (and she had asked herself this question too) just a profane love, the sudden lust of a lonely older woman for a younger man. It was a deep true love which could only envisage permanence as its outcome. Of course she could have a casual affair with Tim. Indeed Tim had expected it. But that was only out of his modesty, out of a feckless future-less aspect of him which she could not help loving too. Somehow life was easy with Tim.