Point Counter Point (23 page)

She refused to let herself be laughed out of the habit.

‘Electric, electric,’ she went on, dropping her voice, and speaking in a dramatic whisper. ‘Electrical musketry, metrical biscuitry. Ow! ‘ The comb had caught in a tangle. She leaned forward to see more clearly in the glass what she was doing. The reflected face approached. ‘Ma chere,’ exclaimed Polly in another tone, ‘tu as l’air fatigue. Tu es vieille. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. At your age. Tz, tz!’ She clicked her tongue disapprovingly against her teeth and shook her head. ‘This won’t do, this won’t do. Still, you looked all right to-night. “My dear, how sweet you look in white!”’ She imitated Mrs. Betterton’s emphatic voice. ‘Same to you and many of them. Do you think I shall look like an elephant when I’m sixty? Still, I suppose one ought to be grateful even for an elephant’s compliments. “Count your blessings, count them one by one,”’ she chanted softly, ‘“And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” Oh, heavens, heavens!’ She put down her comb, she violently shuddered and covered her face with her hands. ‘Heavens!’ She felt the blood rushing up into her cheeks. ‘The
gaffe
! The enormous and ghastly floater!’ She had thought suddenly of Lady Edward. Of course she had overheard. ‘How could I have risked saying that about her being a Canadian?’ Polly moaned, overwhelmed with retrospective shame and embarrassment. ‘That’s what comes of wanting to say something clever at any cost. And then think of wasting attempted cleverness on Norah!
Norah
! Oh Lord, oh Lord!’ She jumped up and pulling her dressing-gown round her as she went, hurried down the corridor to her mother’s room. Mrs. Logan was already in bed and had turned out the light. Polly opened the door and stepped into darkness.

‘Mother,’ she called, ‘mother!’ Her tone was urgent and agonized.

‘What is it?’ Mrs. Logan answered anxiously out of the dark. She sat up and fumbled for the, electric switch by the bed. ‘What is it?’ The light went on with a click. ‘What is it, my darling?’

Polly threw herself down on the bed and hid her face against her mother’s knees. ‘Oh, mother, if you knew what a
terrible
floater I made with Lady Edward! If you
knew
! I forgot to tell you.’

Mrs. Logan was almost angry that her anxiety had been for nothing. When one has put forth all one’s strength to raise what seems an enormous weight, it is annoying to find that the dumb-bell is made of cardboard and could have been lifted between two fingers. ‘Was it necessary to come and wake me up out of my first sleep to tell me?’ she asked crossly.

Polly looked up at her mother ‘I’m sorry, mother,’ she said repentantly. ‘But if you knew what an
awful
floater it was!’

Mrs. Logan could not help laughing.

‘I couldn’t have gone to sleep if I hadn’t told you,’ Polly went on.

‘And I mayn’t go to sleep until you have.’ Mrs. Logan tried to be severe and sarcastic. But her eyes, her smile betrayed her.

Polly took her mother’s hand and kissed it. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ she said.

‘I do mind. Very much.’

‘It’s no good trying to bluff
me
,’ said Polly. ‘But now I
must
tell you about the floater.’

Mrs. Logan heaved the parody of a sigh of resignation and, pretending to be overwhelmed with sleepiness, closed her eyes. Polly talked. It was after halfpast two before she went back to her room. They had discussed, not only the floater and Lady Edward, but the whole party, and everyone who was there. Or rather Polly had discussed and Mrs. Logan had listened, had laughed and laughingly protested when her daughter’s comments became too exuberantly highspirited.

‘But Polly, Polly,’ she had said, ‘you really mustn’t say that people look like elephants.’

‘But Mrs. Betterton
does
look like an elephant,’ Polly had replied. ‘It’s the truth.’ And in her dramatic stage whisper she had added, rising from fancy to still more preposterous fancy: ‘Even her nose is like a trunk.’

‘But she’s got a short nose.’

Polly’s whisper had become more gruesome. ‘An amputated trunk. They bit it off when she was a baby. Like puppies’ tails.’

For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant. They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked. An extra waiter came on at midnight to attend to the valued clients who wished to break the law. Old Sbisa saw to it that their value, to him, was very high. Alcohol was cheaper at the Ritz than at Sbisa’s.

It was about halfpast one—’only halfpast one,’ Lucy complained—when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant.

‘Still young,’ was Spandrell’s comment on the night. ‘Young and rather insipid. Nights are like human beings—never interesting till they’re grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to halfpast. An hour later they’re growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middleaged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they’re not old. After four they’re in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire’s exhausted itself into disgust. I have rather a weakness for the death-bed scenes, I must confess,’ Spandrell added.

‘I’m sure you have,’ said Lucy.

‘And it’s only in the light of ends that you can judge beginnings and middles. The night has just come of age. It remains to be seen how it will die. Till then, we can’t judge it.’

Walter knew how it would die for him—in the midst of Marjorie’s tears and his own complicated misery and exasperation, in an explosion of self-hatred and hatred for the woman to whom he had been cruel. He knew, but would not admit his knowledge; nor that it was already halfpast one and that Marjorie would be awake and anxiously wondering why he hadn’t returned.

At five to one Walter had looked at his watch and declared that he must go. What was the good of staying? Spandrell was immovable. There was no prospect of his having a moment alone with Lucy. He lacked even that justification for making Marjorie suffer. He was torturing her, not that he might be happy, but that he might feel bored, ill, exasperated, impatiently wretched.

‘I must really go,’ he had said, standing up.

But Lucy had protested, cajoled, commanded. In the end he sat down again. That had been more than half an hour ago and now they were out in Soho Square, and the evening, according to Lucy and Spandrell, had hardly begun.

‘I think it’s time,’ Spandrell had said to Lucy, ‘that you saw what a revolutionary communist looked like.’

Lucy demanded nothing better.

‘I belong to a sort of club,’ Spandrell explained. He offered to take them in with him.

‘There’ll still be a few enemies of society on view, I expect,’ he went on, as they stepped out into the refreshing darkness. ‘Good fellows mostly. But absurdly childish. Some of them seem genuinely to believe that a revolution would make people happier. It’s charming, it’s positively touching.’ He uttered his noiseless laugh. ‘But I’m an aesthete in these matters. Dynamite for dynamite’s sake.’

‘But what’s the point of dynamite, if you don’t believe in Utopia?’ asked Lucy.

‘The point? But haven’t you eyes?’

Lucy looked round her. ‘I see nothing particularly frightful.’

‘They have eyes and see not.’ He halted, took her arm with one hand and with the other pointed round the square. ‘The deserted pickle factory, transformed into a dance hall; the lying-in hospital; Sbisa’s; the publishers of
Who’s Who
. And once,’ he added, ‘the Duke of Monmouth’s palace. You can imagine the ghosts:

‘Whether inspired by some diviner lust,

His father got him with a keener gust…’

And so forth. You know the portrait of him after the execution, lying on a bed, with the sheet up to his chin, so that you can’t see the place where the neck was cut through? By Kneller. Or was it Lely? Monmouth and pickles, lying-in and
Who’s Who
, and dancing and Sbisa’s champagne—think of them a little, think of them.’

‘I’m thinking of them,’ said Lucy. ‘Hard.’

‘And do you still ask what the point of dynamite is?’ They walked on. At the door of a little house in St. Giles’s Spandrell called a halt. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, beckoning the others back into the darkness. He rang. The door opened at once. There was a brief parleying in the shadows; then Spandrell turned and called to his companions. They followed him into a dark hall, up a flight of stairs and into a brightly-lighted room on the first floor. Two men were standing near the fire place, a turbaned Indian and a little man with red hair. At the sound of footsteps they turned round. The red-haired man was Illidge.

‘Spandrell? Bidlake?’ he raised his invisibly sandy eyebrows in astonishment. And what’s that woman doing here? he wondered.

Lucy came forward with outstretched hand. ‘We’re old acquaintances,’ she said with a smile of friendly recognition. Illidge, who was preparing to make his face look coldly hostile, found himself smiling back at her.

A taxi turned into the street, suddenly and startlingly breaking the silence. Marjorie sat up in bed, listening. The hum of the engine grew louder and louder. It was Walter’s taxi; this time she felt sure of it, she knew. Nearer it came and nearer. At the bottom of the little hill on the right of the house, the driver changed down to a lower gear; the engine hummed more shrilly, like an angry wasp. Nearer and nearer. She was possessed by an anxiety that was of the body as well as of the mind. She felt breathless, her heart beat strongly and irregularly—beat, beat, beat and then it seemed to fail; the expected beat did not make itself felt; it was as though a trap-door had been opened beneath her into the void; she knew the terror of emptiness, of falling, falling—and the next retarded beat was the impact of her body against solid earth. Nearer, nearer. She almost dreaded, though she had so unhappily longed for, his return. She dreaded the emotions she would feel at the sight of him; the tears she would shed, the reproaches she would find herself uttering, in spite of herself. And what would he say and do, what would be his thoughts? She was afraid of imagining. Nearer; the sound was just below her windows; it retreated, it diminished. And she had been so certain that it was Walter’s taxi. She lay down again. If only she could have slept. But that physical anxiety of her body would not allow her. The blood thumped in her ears. Her skin was hot and dry. Her eyes ached. She lay quite still, on her back, her arms crossed on her breast, like a dead woman laid out for burial. Sleep, sleep, she whispered to herself; she imagined herself relaxed, smoothed out, asleep. But suddenly, a malicious hand seemed to pluck at her taut nerves. A violent tic contracted the muscles of her limbs; she started as though with terror. And the physical reaction of fear evoked an emotion of terror in her mind, quickening and intensifying the anxiety of unhappiness which, all the time, had underlain her conscious efforts to achieve tranquillity. ‘Sleep, sleep, relax’—it was useless to go on trying to be calm, to forget, to sleep. She allowed her misery to come to the surface of her mind. ‘Why should he want to make me so unhappy?’ She turned her head. The luminous hands of the clock on the little table beside her bed marked a quarter to three. A quarter to three—and he knew she could never go to sleep before he came in. ‘He knows I’m ill,’ she said aloud.’doesn’t he care?’

A new thought suddenly occurred to her. ‘Perhaps he wants me to die.’ To die, not to be, not to see his face any more, to leave him with that other woman. The tears came into her eyes. Perhaps he was deliberately trying to kill her. It was not in spite of her being ill that he treated her like this; it was because she suffered so much, it was precisely because she was ill. He was cruel with a purpose. He hoped, he intended that she should die; die and leave him in peace with that other woman. She pressed her face against the pillow and sobbed. Never see him again, never any more. Darkness, loneliness, death, for ever. For ever and ever. And on top of everything, it was all so unfair. Was it her fault that she couldn’t afford to dress well?

‘If I could afford to buy the clothes she buys.’ Chanel, Lanvin,—the pages of
Vogue
floated before her eyes—Molyneux, Groult….At one of those cheap-smart shops where cocottes buy their clothes, off Shaftesbury Avenue, there was a model for sixteen guineas. ‘He likes her because she’s attractive. But if I had the money…’ It wasn’t fair. He was making her pay for not being well off. She had to suffer because he didn’t earn enough to buy her good clothes.

And then there was the baby. He was making her pay for that. His child. He was bored with her, because she was always tired and ill; he didn’t like her any more. That was the greatest injustice of all.

A cell had multiplied itself and become a worm, the worm had become a fish, the fish was turning into the foetus of a mammal. Marjorie felt sick and tired. Fifteen years hence a boy would be confirmed. Enormous in his robes, like a full-rigged ship, the Bishop would say: ‘Do ye here in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism?’ And the ex-fish would answer with passionate conviction: ‘I do.’

For the thousandth time she wished she were not pregnant. Walter might not succeed in killing her now. But perhaps it would happen in any case, when the child was born. The doctor had said it would be difficult for her to have a baby. The pelvis was narrow. Death reappeared before her, a great pit at her feet.

A sound made her start violently. The outside door of the flat was being furtively opened. The hinges squeaked. There were muffled footsteps. Another squeak, the hardly perceptible click of the spring latch being carefully let back into place, then more footsteps. Another click and simultaneously the light showed yellow under the door that separated her room from his. Did he mean to go to bed without coming to bid her goodnight? She lay quite still, quiveringly awake, her eyes wide open, listening to the noises that came from the other room and to the quick terrified beating of her own heart.