Complete Works, Volume IV (6 page)

ANNA
I can ring him if you like.

KATE
What about McCabe?

ANNA
Do you really want to see anyone?

KATE
I don’t think I like McCabe.

ANNA
Nor do I.

KATE
He’s strange. He says some very strange things to me.

ANNA
What things?

KATE
Oh, all sorts of funny things.

ANNA
I’ve never liked him.

KATE
Duncan’s nice though, isn’t he?

ANNA
Oh yes.

KATE
I like his poetry so much.

Pause

But you know who I like best?

ANNA
Who?

KATE
Christy.

ANNA
He’s lovely.

KATE
He’s so gentle, isn’t he? And his humour. Hasn’t he got a lovely sense of humour? And I think he’s . . . so sensitive. Why don’t you ask him round?

DEELEY
He can’t make it. He’s out of town.

KATE
Oh, what a pity.

Silence

DEELEY
(
To Anna.
) Are you intending to visit anyone else while you’re in England? Relations? Cousins? Brothers?

ANNA
No. I know no one. Except Kate.

Pause

DEELEY
Do you find her changed?

ANNA
Oh, just a little, not very much.
(
To Kate.
) You’re still shy, aren’t you?

Kate stares at her.

(
To Deeley.
) But when I knew her first she was
so
shy, as shy as a fawn, she really was. When people leaned to speak to her she would fold away from them, so that though she was still standing within their reach she was no longer accessible to them. She folded herself from them, they were no longer able to speak or go through with their touch. I put it down to her upbringing, a parson’s daughter, and indeed there was a good deal of Brontë about her.

DEELEY
Was
she a parson’s daughter?

ANNA
But if I thought Brontë I did not think she was Brontë in passion but only in secrecy, in being so stubbornly private.

Slight pause

I remember her first blush.

DEELEY
What? What was it? I mean why was it?

ANNA
I had borrowed some of her underwear, to go to a party. Later that night I confessed. It was naughty of me. She stared at me, nonplussed, perhaps, is the word. But I told her that in fact I had been punished for my sin, for a man at the party had spent the whole evening looking up my skirt.

Pause

DEELEY
She blushed at that?

ANNA
Deeply.

DEELEY
Looking up
your
skirt in
her
underwear. Mmnn.

ANNA
But from that night she insisted, from time to time, that I borrow her underwear—she had more of it than I, and a far greater range—and each time she proposed this she would blush, but propose it she did, nevertheless. And when there was anything to tell her, when I got back, anything of interest to tell her, I told her.

DEELEY
Did she blush then?

ANNA
I could never see then. I would come in late and find her reading under the lamp, and begin to tell her, but she would say no, turn off the light, and I would tell her in the dark. She preferred to be told in the dark. But of course it was never completely dark, what with the light from the gasfire or the light through the curtains, and what she didn’t know was that, knowing her preference, I would choose a position in the room from which I could see her face, although she could not see mine. She could hear my voice only. And so she listened and I watched her listening.

DEELEY
Sounds a perfect marriage.

ANNA
We were great friends.

Pause

DEELEY
You say she was Brontë in secrecy but not in passion. What was she in passion?

ANNA
I feel that is your province.

DEELEY
You feel it’s my province? Well, you’re damn right. It is my province. I’m glad someone’s showing a bit of taste at last. Of course it’s my bloody province. I’m her husband.

Pause

I mean I’d like to ask a question. Am I alone in beginning to find all this distasteful?

ANNA
But what can you possibly find distasteful? I’ve flown from Rome to see my oldest friend, after twenty years, and to meet her husband. What is it that worries you?

DEELEY
What worries me is the thought of your husband rumbling about alone in his enormous villa living hand to mouth on a few hardboiled eggs and unable to speak a damn word of English.

ANNA
I interpret, when necessary.

DEELEY
Yes, but you’re here, with us. He’s there, alone, lurching up and down the terrace, waiting for a speedboat, waiting for a speedboat to spill out beautiful people, at least. Beautiful Mediterranean people. Waiting for all
that,
a kind of elegance we know nothing about, a slim-bellied Cote d’Azur thing we know absolutely nothing about, a lobster and lobster sauce ideology we know fuck all about, the longest legs in the world, the most phenomenally soft voices. I can hear them now. I mean let’s put it on the table, I have my eye on a number of pulses, pulses all round the globe, deprivations and insults, why should I waste valuable space listening to two—

KATE
(
Swiftly.
) If you don’t like it go.

Pause

DEELEY
Go? Where can I go?

KATE
To China. Or Sicily.

DEELEY
I haven’t got a speedboat. I haven’t got a white dinner jacket.

KATE
China then.

DEELEY
You know what they’d do to me in China if they found me in a white dinner jacket. They’d bloody well kill me. You know what they’re like over there.

Slight pause

ANNA
You are welcome to come to Sicily at any time, both of you, and be my guests.

Silence

Kate and Deeley stare at her.

ANNA
(
To Deeley, quietly.
) I would like you to understand that I came here not to disrupt but to celebrate.

Pause

To celebrate a very old and treasured friendship, something that was forged between us long before you knew of our existence.

Pause

I found her. She grew to know wonderful people, through my introduction. I took her to cafés, almost private ones, where artists and writers and sometimes actors collected, and others with dancers, and we sat hardly breathing with our coffee, listening to the life around us. All I wanted for her was her happiness. That is all I want for her still.

Pause

DEELEY
(
To Kate.
) We’ve met before, you know. Anna and I.

Kate looks at him.

Yes, we met in the Wayfarers Tavern. In the corner. She took a fancy to me. Of course I was slimhipped in those days. Pretty nifty. A bit squinky, quite honestly. Curly hair. The lot. We had a scene together. She freaked out. She didn’t have any bread, so I bought her a drink. She looked at me with big eyes, shy, all that bit. She was pretending to be you at the time. Did it pretty well. Wearing your underwear she was too, at the time. Amiably allowed me a gander. Trueblue generosity. Admirable in a woman. We went to a party. Given by philosophers. Not a bad bunch. Edgware road gang. Nice lot. Haven’t seen any of them for years. Old friends. Always thinking. Spoke their thoughts. Those are the people I miss. They’re all dead, anyway I’ve never seen them again. The Maida Vale group. Big Eric and little Tony. They lived somewhere near Paddington library. On the way to the party I took her into a café, bought her a cup of coffee, beards with faces. She thought she was you, said little, so little. Maybe she was you. Maybe it was you, having coffee with me, saying little, so little.

Pause

KATE
What do you think attracted her to you?

DEELEY
I don’t know. What?

KATE
She found your face very sensitive, vulnerable.

DEELEY
Did she?

KATE
She wanted to comfort it, in the way only a woman can.

DEELEY
Did she?

KATE
Oh yes.

DEELEY
She wanted to comfort my face, in the way only a woman can?

KATE
She was prepared to extend herself to you.

DEELEY
I beg your pardon?

KATE
She fell in love with you.

DEELEY
With me?

KATE
You were so unlike the others. We knew men who were brutish, crass.

DEELEY
There really are such men, then? Crass men?

KATE
Quite crass.

DEELEY
But I was crass, wasn’t I, looking up her skirt?

KATE
That’s not crass.

DEELEY
If it was her skirt. If it was her.

ANNA
(
Coldly.
) Oh, it was my skirt. It was me. I remember your look . . . very well. I remember you well.

KATE
(
To Anna.
) But I remember you. I remember you dead.

Pause

I remember you lying dead. You didn’t know I was watching you. I leaned over you. Your face was dirty. You lay dead, your face scrawled with dirt, all kinds of earnest inscriptions, but unblotted, so that they had run, all over your face, down to your throat. Your sheets were immaculate. I was glad. I would have been unhappy if your corpse had lain in an unwholesome sheet. It would have been graceless. I mean as far as I was concerned. As far as my room was concerned. After all, you were dead in my room. When you woke my eyes were above you, staring down at you. You tried to do my little trick, one of my tricks you had borrowed, my little slow smile, my little slow shy smile, my bend of the head, my half closing of the eyes, that we knew so well, but it didn’t work, the grin only split the dirt at the sides of your mouth and stuck. You stuck in your grin. I looked for tears but could see none. Your pupils weren’t in your eyes. Your bones were breaking through your face. But all was serene. There was no suffering. It
had all happened elsewhere. Last rites I did not feel necessary. Or any celebration. I felt the time and season appropriate and that by dying alone and dirty you had acted with proper decorum. It was time for my bath. I had quite a lengthy bath, got out, walked about the room, glistening, drew up a chair, sat naked beside you and watched you.

Pause

When I brought him into the room your body of course had gone. What a relief it was to have a different body in my room, a male body behaving quite differently, doing all those things they do and which they think are good, like sitting with one leg over the arm of an armchair. We had a choice of two beds. Your bed or my bed. To lie in, or on. To grind noses together, in or on. He liked your bed, and thought he was different in it because he was a man. But one night I said let me do something, a little thing, a little trick. He lay there in your bed. He looked up at me with great expectation. He was gratified. He thought I had profited from his teaching. He thought I was going to be sexually forthcoming, that I was about to take a long promised initiative. I dug about in the windowbox, where you had planted our pretty pansies, scooped, filled the bowl, and plastered his face with dirt. He was bemused, aghast, resisted, resisted with force. He would not let me dirty his face, or smudge it, he wouldn’t let me. He suggested a wedding instead, and a change of environment

Slight pause

Neither mattered.

Pause

He asked me once, at about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.

Long silence

Anna stands, walks towards the door, stops, her back to them.

Silence

Deeley starts to sob, very quietly.

Anna stands still.

Anna turns, switches off the lamps, sits on her divan, and lies down.

The sobbing stops.

Silence

Deeley stands. He walks a few paces, looks at both divans.

He goes to Anna’s divan, looks down at her. She is still.

Silence

Deeley moves towards the door, stops, his back to them.

Silence

Deeley turns. He goes towards Kate’s divan. He sits on her divan, lies across her lap.

Long silence

Deeley very slowly sits up.

He gets off the divan.