Point Counter Point (15 page)

‘Why do you love me?’ she asked from her corner.

He opened his eyes. They were passing a street lamp. Through the window of the moving cab the light of it fell on her face. It stood out for a moment palely against the darkness, then dropped back into invisibility—a pale mask that had seen everything before and whose expression was one of amused detachment and a hard, rather weary languor. ‘I was just wondering,’ Walter answered. ‘And wishing I didn’t.’

‘I might say the same, you know. You’re not particularly amusing when you’re like this.’

How tiresome, she reflected, these men who imagined that nobody had ever been in love before! All the same, she liked him. He was attractive. No, ‘attractive’ wasn’t the word. Attractive, as a possible lover, was just what he wasn’t. ‘Appealing’ was more like it. An appealing lover? It wasn’t exactly her style. But she liked him. There was something very nice about him. Besides, he was clever, he could be a pleasant companion. And tiresome as it was, his love-sickness did at least make him very faithful. That, for Lucy, was important. She was afraid of loneliness and needed her cavalier servants in constant attendance. Walter attended with a dog-like fidelity. But why did he look so like a whipped dog sometimes? So abject. What a fool! She felt suddenly annoyed by his abjection.

‘Well, Walter,’ she said mockingly, laying her hand on his, ‘why don’t you talk to me?’

He did not reply.

‘Or is mum the word?’ Her fingers brushed electrically along the back of his hand and closed round his wrist. ‘Where’s your pulse?’ she asked after a moment. ‘I can’t feel it anywhere. ‘She groped over the soft skin for the throbbing of the artery. He felt the touch of her finger tips, light and thrilling and rather cold against his wrist. ‘I don’t believe you’ve got a pulse,’ she said. ‘I believe your blood stagnates. ‘The tone of her voice was contemptuous. What a fool! she was thinking. What an abject fool! ‘Just stagnates,’ she repeated and suddenly, with sudden malice, she drove her sharp file-pointed nails into his flesh. Walter cried out in surprise and pain. ‘You deserved it,’ she said and laughed in his face.

He seized her by the shoulders and began to kiss her, savagely. Anger had quickened his desire; his kisses were a vengeance. Lucy shut her eyes and abandoned herself unresistingly, limply. Little premonitions of pleasure shot with a kind of panic flutter, like fluttering moths, through her skin. And suddenly sharp fingers seemed to pluck, pizzicato, at the fiddle-strings of her nerves; Walter could feel her whole body starting involuntarily within his arms, starting as though it had been suddenly hurt. Kissing her, he found himself wondering if she had expected him to react in this way to her provocation, if she had hoped he would. He took her slender neck in his two hands. His thumbs were on her wind-pipe. He pressed gently. ‘One day,’ he said between his clenched teeth, ‘ I shall strangle you.

‘Lucy only laughed. He bent forward and kissed her laughing mouth. The touch of his lips against her own sent a thin, sharp sensation that was almost pain running unbearably through her. The panic moth-wings fluttered over her body. She hadn’t expected such fierce and savage ardours from Walter. She was agreeably surprised.

The taxi turned into Soho Square, slowed down, came to a halt. They had arrived. Walter let fall his hands and drew away from her.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Well?’ she asked challengingly, for the second time that evening. There was a moment’s silence.

‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘let’s go somewhere else. Not here; not this horrible place. Somewhere where we can be alone. ‘His voice trembled, his eyes were imploring. The fierceness had gone out of his desire; it had become abject again, dog-like. ‘Let’s tell the man to drive on,’ he begged.

She smiled and shook her head. Why did he implore, like that? Why was he so abject? The fool, the whipped dog!

‘Please, please!’ he begged. But he should have commanded. He should simply have ordered the man to drive on, and taken her in his arms again.

‘Impossible,’ said Lucy and stepped out of the cab. If he behaved like a whipped dog, he could be treated like one.

Walter followed her, abject and miserable.

Sbisa himself received them on the threshold. He bowed, he waved his fat white hands, and his expanding smile raised a succession of waves in the flesh of his enormous cheeks. When Lucy arrived, the consumption of champagne tended to rise. She was an honoured guest.

‘Mr. Spandrell here!’ she asked. ‘And Mr. and Mrs. Rampion?’

‘Oo yez, oo yez,’ old Sbisa repeated with Neapolitan, almost oriental emphasis. The implication was that they were not only there, but that if it had been in his power, he would have provided two of each of them for her benefit. ‘And you? Quaite well, quaite well, I hope? Sooch lobster we have to-night, sooch lobster…’ Still talking, he ushered them into the restaurant.

‘What I complain of,’ said Mark Rampion, ‘is the horrible unwholesome tameness of our world.’

Mary Rampion laughed whole-heartedly from the depths of her lungs. It was a laugh one could not hear without wishing to laugh oneself. ‘You wouldn’t say that,’ she said, ‘if you’d been your wife instead of you. Tame? I could tell you something about tameness.’

There was certainly nothing very tame about Mark Rampion’s appearance. His profile was steep, with a hooked fierce nose like a cutting instrument and a pointed chin. The eyes were blue and piercing, and the very fine hair, a little on the reddish side of golden, fluttered up at every movement, every breath of wind, like wisps of blown flame.

‘Well, you’re not exactly a sheep either,’ said Rampion. ‘But two people aren’t the world. I was talking about the world, not us. It’s tame, I say. Like one of those horrible big gelded cats.’

‘Did you find the War so tame?’ asked Spandrell, speaking from the half-darkness outside the little world of pink-tinged lamplight in which their table stood. He sat leaning backwards, his chair tilted on its hind legs against the wall.

‘Even the War,’ said Rampion. ‘It was a domesticated outrage. People didn’t go and fight because their blood was up. They went because they were told to; they went because they were good citizens. ” Man is a fighting animal,” as your stepfather is so fond of saying in his speeches. But what I complain of is that he’s a domestic animal.’

‘And getting more domestic every day,’ said Mary Rampion, who shared her husband’s opinions-or perhaps it would be truer to say, shared most of his feelings and, consciously or unconsciously, borrowed his opinions when she wanted to express them. ‘It’s factories, it’s Christianity, it’s science, it’s respectability, it’s our education,’ she explained. ‘They weigh on the modern soul. They suck the life out of it. They…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up!’ said Rampion.

‘But isn’t that what you say?’

‘What I say is what
I
say. It becomes quite different when you say it.’

The expression of irritation which had appeared on Mary Rampion’s face cleared away. She laughed.

Ah, well,’ she said good-humouredly, ‘ratiocination was never my strongest point. But you might be a little more polite about it in public.’

‘I don’t suffer fools gladly.’

‘You’ll suffer one very painfully, if you’re not careful,’ she menaced laughingly.

‘If you’d like to throw a plate at him,’ said Spandrell, pushing one over to her as he spoke,’ don’t mind me.’

Mary thanked him. ‘It would do him good,’ she said. ‘He gets so bumptious.’

‘And it would do you no harm,’ retorted Rampion, ‘if I gave you a black eye in return.’

‘You just try. I’ll take you on with one hand tied behind my back.’

They all burst out laughing.

‘I put my money on Mary,’ said Spandrell, tilting back his chair. Smiling with a pleasure which he would have found it hard to explain, he looked from one to the other—from the thin, fierce, indomitable little man to the big golden woman. Each separately was good; but together, as a couple, they were better still. Without realizing it, he had quite suddenly begun to feel happy.

‘We’ll have it out one of these days,’ said Rampion and laid his hand for a moment on hers. It was a delicate hand, sensitive and expressive. An aristocrat’s hand if ever there was one, thought Spandrell. And hers, so blunt and strong and honest, was a peasant’s. And yet by birth it was Rampion who was the peasant and she the aristocrat. Which only showed what nonsense the genealogists talked.

‘Ten rounds,’ Rampion went on. ‘No gloves.’ He turned to Spandrell.

‘You ought to get married, you know,’ he said.

Spandrell’s happiness suddenly collapsed. It was as though he had come with a jolt to his senses. He felt almost angry with himself. What business had
he
to go and sentimentalize over a happy couple?’

I can’t box,’ he answered; and Rampion detected a bitterness in his jocularity, an inward hardening.

‘No, seriously,’ he said, trying to make out the expression on the other’s face. But Spandrell’s head was in the shadow, and the light of the interposed lamp on the table between them dazzled him.

‘Yes, seriously,’ echoed Mary. ‘You ought. You’d be a changed man.’

Spandrell uttered a brief and snorting laugh, and letting his chair fall back on to its four legs, leaned forward across the table. Pushing aside his coffee cup and his half-emptied liqueur glass, he planted his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. His face came into the light of the rosy lamp. Like a gargoyle, Mary thought, a gargoyle in a pink boudoir. There was one on Notre Dame in just that attitude, leaning forward with his demon’s face between his claws. Only the gargoyle was a comic devil, so extravagantly diabolical that you couldn’t take his devilishness very seriously. Spandrell was a real person, not a caricature; that was why his face was so much more sinister and tragical. It was a gaunt face. Cheekbone and jaw showed in hard outline through the tight skin. The grey eyes were deeply set. In the cadaverous mask only the mouth was fleshy—a wide mouth, with lips that stood out from the skin like two thick weals.

‘When he smiles,’ Lucy Tantamount had once said of him, ‘it’s like an appendicitis operation with ironical corners.’ The red scar was sensual, but firm at the same time and determined, as was the round chin below. There were lines round the eyes and at the corners of his lips. The thick brown hair had begun to retreat from the forehead.

‘He might be fifty, to look at him,’ Mary Rampion was thinking. ‘And yet, what is his age?’ She made calculations and decided that he couldn’t be more than thirty-two or thirty-three. Just the right age for settling down.

‘A changed man,’ she repeated.

‘But I don’t particularly want to be changed.’

Mark Rampion nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with you, Spandrell. You like stewing in your disgusting suppurating juice. You don’t want to be made healthy. You enjoy your unwholesomeness. You’re rather proud of it, even.’

‘Marriage would be the cure,’ persisted Mary, indefatigably enthusiastic in the cause of the sacrament to which she herself owed all her life and happiness.

‘Unless, of course, it merely destroyed the wife,’ said Rampion. ‘He might infect her with his own gangrene.’

Spandrell threw back his head and laughed profoundly, butt, as was his custom, almost inaudibly, a muted explosion. ‘Admirable!’ he said. ‘Admirable! The first really good argument in favour of matrimony I ever heard. Almost thou persuadest me, Rampion. I’ve never actually carried it as far as marriage.’

‘Carried what?’ asked Rampion, frowning a little. He disliked the other’s rather melodramatically cynical way of talking. So damned pleased with his naughtinesses! Like a stupid child, really.

‘The process of infection. I’d always stopped this side of the registry office. But I’ll cross the threshold next time.’ He drank some more brandy. ‘I’m like Socrates,’ he went on. ‘I’m divinely appointed to corrupt the youth, the female youth more particularly. I have a mission to educate them in the way they shouldn’t go.’ He threw back his head to emit that voiceless laugh of his. Rampion looked at him distastefully. So theatrical. It was as though the man were overacting in order to convince himself he was there at all.

‘But if you only knew what marriage could mean,’ Mary earnestly put in. ‘If you only knew…’

‘But, my dear woman, of course he knows,’ Rampion interrupted with impatience.

‘We’ve been married more than fifteen years now,’ she went on, the missionary spirit strong within her. ‘And I assure you…’

‘I wouldn’t waste my breath, if I were you.’

Mary glanced enquiringly at her husband. Wherever human relationships were concerned, she had an absolute trust in Rampion’s judgment. Through those labyrinths he threaded his way with a sure tact which she could only envy, not imitate. ‘He can smell people’s souls,’ she used to say of him. She herself had but an indifferent nose for souls. Wisely then, she allowed herself to be guided by him. She glanced at him. Rampion was staring into his coffee cup. His forehead was puckered into a frown; he had evidently spoken in earnest. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said and lit another cigarette.

Spandrell looked from one to the other almost triumphantly. ‘I have a regular technique with the young ones,’ he went on in the same too cynical manner. Mary shut her eyes and thought of the time when she and Rampion had been young.

‘What a blotch!’ said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley. Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and its smoke. The moors rose up and rolled away beyond it, bare as far as the eye could reach. The sun shone, the clouds trailed enormous shadows. ‘Our poor view! It oughtn’t to be allowed. It really oughtn’t.’

‘Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,’ quoted her brother George.

The other young man was more practically minded. ‘If one could plant a battery here,’ he suggested, ‘and drop a few hundred rounds onto the place…’

‘It would be a good thing,’ said Mary emphatically. ‘A really good thing.’

Her approval filled the military young man with happiness. He was desperately in love. ‘Heavy, howitzers,’ he added, trying to improve on his suggestion. But George interrupted him.