Jerusalem the Golden (13 page)

‘She doesn’t say so, but at times I think she expects me to although she knows I can’t. We never talk about it: we never talk about anything though, so the fact that we don’t talk about that doesn’t mean much. But I think, all the same, that she wants me at home, though she doesn’t like me, and she could never admit that she might need me …’

‘I know what you should do,’ said Clelia, ‘you should do a Diploma of Education or whatever it’s called. And then you could go on going home for the vacations. They give you money to do those, don’t they?’

‘I thought of that,’ said Clara, ‘but I don’t know if I would want to teach. And anyway, I don’t want to go home for vacations.’

‘Evidently not,’ said Clelia, ‘but evidently you feel you ought. And I consider it unadvisable to lay too great a strain upon one’s conscience. Far better to compromise in my view.’

‘How extraordinary to hear you say that,’ said Clara, ‘I was expecting you to say what all my other friends say, that I must clear out quick, be ruthless, cut all ties, leave her to it, live my own life. You know the kind of things that people say.’

‘People are always telling other people to do that kind of thing,’ said Clelia, ‘it must give them a vicarious thrill. Because they never do it themselves, haven’t you noticed? I never tell anyone to do anything. I haven’t the nerve, I just encourage people to go on doing what they’re already doing anyway.’

‘But even if I did it,’ said Clara, ‘I would be stealing the state’s money, wouldn’t I? By doing a Dip Ed without meaning to teach?’

‘Who knows?’ said Clelia. ‘You might even want to teach at the end of it. And you can’t consider everyone, you know. You can’t feel for both the State and your mother, can you?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Clara, ‘I did put my name down to do a Dip Ed. I thought that anyway it would always come in useful. And kill time, if you see what I mean.’

‘So you see,’ said Clelia, ‘you had made your mind up anyway. You’re doing it in London, I trust.’

‘Of course,’ said Clara, ‘where else?’

‘Where else indeed?’ said Clelia. ‘I’m glad you’ll be back. And I’m frightfully sorry, but I seem to have completely disorganized this egg. Have I ruined it beyond repair? I used to think I was quite good at that kind of thing …’

‘It’s just a trick, really, it’s easy,’ said Clara, and she took back the egg, and found that she could not put it together again either, so they decided to abandon it, and left it in little pieces in a glass dish on the mantelpiece with some dry and coloured gourds, and then they went downstairs and out into the park, and walked towards the bus stop, and Clara explained, lest the gourds and the egg should be thought to reflect in any way on herself, that they had been given to
her by a friend the week before, to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. It was a dark cloudy day; there had been as yet no spring, and the grass was muddy from constant rain. They waited together at the bus stop for Clelia’s bus, and as the bus approached Clelia said, confirming, ‘Next Sunday, then, you’ll come and see us?’ Clara nodded and agreed.

And as Clara walked back towards her college hostel, she thought about Clelia, and wondered whether she dealt out all her friendships with so lavish a hand, or whether, once more in her life, she could count on some peculiar blessing. She had met people of this genre before – intense, smart, well-connected, impulsive, communicative, insatiably interested in the affairs of others – and she would, she supposed, upon interrogation, have classed herself, at least in aspiration, as one of the genre. But she had never before met such qualities so mildly and tactfully and decoratively combined, so settled and established, so kindly displayed. She looked back over her three years at college, now slowly approaching their close, and she thought of all the people she had known and all the friends she had made, and it seemed to her that most of them had been aiming with varying degrees of accuracy at just such an effect. She had, and she felt slightly uneasy about admitting it, she had sought the smartly intense, at the expense of the more solid and dowdy virtues; she had been attracted by surfaces, by clothes and manners and voices and trivial strange graces, and she had imitated what she had seen of these things in others. She was drawn unquestionably to the appearance of things, though she was aware that she had as yet much ground to cover, and that she had followed many a false trail; she remembered with particular regret the quantities of eyeshadow which she had once thought desirable, and the pendant earrings of the same epoch. She also knew that some of her preferences were base in the extreme, and that her affection for Peter de Salis sprang at the first most ignobly from his delightful name. She liked him, too, for being a poet, and for taking her out to things, but she often wondered whether her interest in his poetry were not as superficial as her interest in his name. She seemed to live by an instinct which drew her strongly and on the whole accurately towards such
manifestations, such hints and echoes of a grander world, and which yet at the same time could not approve them. But Clelia, she could see, was secure beyond approval or disapproval: she was what she was, whatever that might be.

She looked forward to discovering what it might be, and how it might have been created.

When she got back to the college, she went to the library and looked once more at all the reference books pertaining to Sebastian Denham, in the hope of finding the nature of his wife’s professional distinctions, but she was not successful. The biographies were terse and restrained, as far as his private life was concerned, and effusive only about the names and quality of his publications. She thought that she might ring Peter de Salis, and ask him about Mrs Denham, but she did not want to do this, in case Mrs Denham was a lady of such fame that ignorance of her would prove to be positively compromising. So she did nothing. She thought she would wait, and see what happened.

The Denhams’ house, like the Maughams’ house at 23 Hartley Road, Woodgrove, Northam, was semi-detached. But Clara, upon her first visit, could find no other possible point of resemblance, and even this point she missed, so different was the architecture and the attachment from anything she had ever before approached. It was a large, tall, four-storeyed building, on one of the steep hillsides of Highgate; it had been built in 1720, but was deceptively flanked by scrappy houses and miscellaneous buildings of mixed and later dates, so that its lonely eminence had an air of somewhat tragic survival. In front of the building was a large paved double courtyard, which was level, despite the steep gradient of the hill; it was separated from the pavement by a high, elaborate, wrought-iron fence, the gate of which stood fortunately open. Clara would not have liked to wrestle with its huge ornate metallic bolt. The building had two front doors, side by side, one for each house, and the steps up to each door were not divided; an urn full of some kind of greenery stood in the middle of the steps, but there was no attempt at distinction. It was this lack of division that most effectively concealed from
Clara the basic, classic structure of the building, for she had been brought up with the notion that walls must be above eye-level, lace curtains impenetrable, bedrooms facing discreetly into the void. Once she had visited a friend who had a room in a house in North London; she had accompanied her friend into the small back garden, and had been deeply shocked to find that the walls dividing the row of small terraced gardens were only two feet high. A child could have seen over them: rows of small children were in fact busy looking over them as she stood there, and looking moreover without disguise at her. She retired quickly after her friend into the kitchen, overcome by a sense of invaded privacy; a garden, to her, was not meant for such intimacies.

The door of the Denhams’ house was painted black, and it was solid, and heavily panelled; in the centre of the middle panel there was a lion’s head with a brass ring in its mouth. There was also a bell, and Clara chose the bell. She had to wait for some time before the door was opened, and she hoped very much that it would be opened by Clelia, but it was not; it was opened by a thin, brown, balding, youngish-looking man. He looked at her, and said nothing.

‘I’ve come to see Clelia,’ said Clara, standing on the doorstep.

The man gulped nervously, and nodded, and said, ‘Clelia, oh yes, Clelia, just a moment, I’ll go and get her.’

And he disappeared. Clara, uninvited, thought she might as well step in, so she did. The hall into which she stepped was not a hall at all, but a large and very high room, with doors leading off it in most directions, and it was so full of unexpected things that she found it hard to know where to look first. The floor was tiled, in diagonal squares of grey and white marble, and the walls were so densely covered with pictures and looking glasses that it was hard to tell whether or how they were papered, but the general tone and impression was of a deep purple and red. At the far end of the hall there was a marble fireplace, and under it was a large pot of dying flowers and a very beautiful rocking horse. The petals of the flowers had dropped, and spilled brown and carelessly over the floor. There was also, she vaguely noted, in one corner a piano, and the windows had shutters of a kind that she had never seen in England.

After a while, Clelia appeared, from one of the doors at the far end of the hall. She was wearing glasses, and trousers, and a pink shirt with embroidered flowers, and she looked rather frightening, and Clara half wished that she had not come. As she approached, Clara thought that she still looked cross, but she could see that whatever annoyance was there was not directed against herself.

‘Well, I came,’ she said.

‘So I see,’ said Clelia. ‘I’m glad you came. It’s been a most shocking day so far, quite shocking. Let’s go up into my room, the garden’s full of Martin and my mother squabbling. Or not squabbling. We can watch them through the window.’

‘Who was that that let me in?’ said Clara, following Clelia meekly up the staircase, and up and up, to the second floor.

‘That was Martin,’ said Clelia. ‘What did you think of him? He’s rather lovely, don’t you think?’

Clara could not think of any scheme in which the man she had just seen could have been described as lovely, but she instantly invented one.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And this,’ said Clelia, suddenly throwing open a high white door, ‘is my room.’

And she said it with such pride and such display that Clara did not feel at all obliged to conceal the amazement and delight that she felt, as she might, if confronted with a more worldly modesty, have done: for Clelia’s manner declared, this is singular, this is beautiful, this may legitimately amaze, you betray no innocence in admiring this.

And it was, by any standards, amazing. It was a tall, square room, facing towards the back of the house and garden, and it was full and overflowing with a profusion of the most diverse and wonderful objects, so full that the room’s function – for it was, beneath all, a bedroom – was all but concealed. Clara, when she looked hard, could just descry a bed, almost lost beneath a grey and pink flowered cover, a heap of books, and a large half-painted canvas. There were a good many books in the room; one wall was lined with them, and they lay in heaps on chairs and on the floor. There was a plant, which grew and blossomed along the picture rail, and climbed down a
picture cord to embrace the frame of a small oil painting of naked nymphs; there was the end of a brass bedstead, upon which other plants clambered and flowered. There were photographs and postcards and letters pinned up and pasted on tables and walls, and amongst these more adult decorations, there was also a great quantity of carefully arranged and ancient toys, of a precise and coloured charm; there was a doll’s house, a glass jar of marbles, a toy iron on a small brass stand, a heap of rag dolls, a row of painted wooden Russian dolls, a nest of coloured eggs, a tower of bricks, a weather house, a huge pendant snowstorm globe containing a small palace and a small forest with small ferny trees. Clara was staggered and bewitched; she had never in her life seen anything like it. Such a vision had never so much as crossed her mind. Some of her friends had fairly eccentric ideas of bed-sitter decoration, and had done far better than the Chianti-bottle, British Railway-poster effort, but none of them had ever conceived of anything like this: and the nicest room she had ever seen had been the drawing room of a friend’s mother in Sevenoaks, which had been distinguished by a bare and gentle colour scheme, and some pretty Georgian furniture.

It was not for some time, and after some acquaintance, that she got round to thinking that one of the most charming features of Clelia’s room was its sense of prolonged nursery associations. The childhood objects were not only lovely in themselves, they were a link with some past and pleasantly remembered time, a time not violently shrugged off and rejected, but a time to be lived with, in happy recollection, a time which could well bear remembering.

Clelia did not pretend not to be delighted by Clara’s delight. ‘I’m so glad you like it,’ she said. ‘I think it’s so lovely. I like it so much. Some people think that it goes too far, but I don’t see that it does, do you?’

‘I don’t see how you can go too far, in the right direction,’ said Clara, not for the sake of saying it, but because, on some level, she profoundly believed it to be true.

They stayed in the bedroom for half an hour or so, talking, looking at the things, talking: and Clara remembered thinking at the time that it was just such a honeysuckle-filtered, sunny conversational
afternoon that would in years to come, whatever those years might bring, cause her the most sad and exquisite nostalgia. She was sad in advance, and yet at the same time all the happier, doubly happy, for knowing that she recognized her happiness, that it was not slipping by her unheeded, for knowing that she was creating for herself a past. She found Clelia’s company extraordinarily entertaining, and bracing only in so far as she liked to be braced: she could hardly follow a word, for instance, of the art references in her conversation, but Clelia managed somehow to combine a great air of erudition and abstruseness with a marked facility for making explanations, so that ignorance was no bar to amusement. She was puzzled only by the unmistakable largesse of the confidence proffered to her, because try as she might, she could not persuade herself that Clelia could talk like this, so wittily and intimately and inquiringly, to everyone; she could not believe that she could talk like this to many. And she even dropped from time to time the odd and flattering hint about the unique nature of her interest. So that Clara, although she found it hard to believe that she herself was thus chosen, had no alternative to believing it. And once she had admitted that it might be possible, she could see that all the evidence pointed clearly in that one direction. So she thought that she might take it on trust. For, after all, it was not humility that restrained her from believing herself to be at first sight infinitely interesting, for she believed herself to be the equal even of Clelia Denham: it was simply a deference to the law of probability. And the law of probability seemed, for once, to have slipped up, and to have permitted her a striking piece of good luck.