Jerusalem the Golden (22 page)

‘I can’t imagine why she should have come back,’ said Clara. ‘Having gone, how dreadful it must be to go back.’

‘Perhaps she was worried about the child,’ said Gabriel.

‘Oh yes, the child,’ said Clara. ‘But she’d left it for long enough, why should she come back, having once left it? I could never go back to anything like that.’

And he could see that the thought of a child meant nothing to her, as indeed how should it, and the sight of so much indifference to the most tender points of his life filled him with a sense of liberation, of incipient gaiety. The line was firmly drawn, between one world and another; there were no hands grasping after him, no area of confusion, no grey and trampled, dusty, intermediate terrain. He thought of Clelia’s enormous sympathies, of her arms more ready to receive the child than the man, of her studious, elegant denials, and he thought that he saw in Clara a more voracious simplicity, a need that did not pay too much attention to the sources of its satisfaction. And then the soup arrived, and with it the wine, which he was much in need of, and on the surface of the soup there was a most elaborate little trellis-pattern drawn in cream, and Clara, seeing it, exclaimed with delight, and by some fluke of fate their waiter happened not to be disagreeable, and he stopped and most
charmingly explained the way to make trellises on soup with the back of a fork, and Clara admired and exclaimed, and the waiter, in an unprecedently archaic way, appeared to take pleasure in her exclamations. And when he went away, glowing with the pride of his profession, Clara picked up her spoon, and looked at Gabriel, and smiled, and waving her spoon gently over the surface of her soup, she said, ‘It seems a pity to disturb it, don’t you think? Because whatever he said about it being so simple, I could never make it in a hundred years.’

‘If you don’t disturb it,’ he said, ‘it will probably melt and fade away all by itself. Look, it’s started to spread already. Much better to do it yourself, than to let it go.’

And she put her spoon in, and stirred, and drank.

When they had had their soup, he took her hand under the table. It lay burning in his, dry and quiescent.

Then she looked at him, smiling a little, and said:

‘I like that scar,’ relaxing suddenly as though everything was settled between them.

‘Do you?’ he said. ‘Do you really? I used to think it was rather fetching myself. But it must be years since I looked at it, since I even looked at it.’

‘You did it,’ she said, ‘when you fell over the garden wall.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. And then he said, ‘I’m glad that you like it, I’m glad that you find something to like, because I like all of you.’

And they smiled at each other, tenderly, admissively, securely, their eyes taking on the profound and searching gaze of certainty, their voices mutually sinking and deepening to that tone so much desired, so rarely heard. So rarely ventured.

When they had had their steak, he put one hand on her knee, and she kicked her shoe off and put her foot on his. It felt very soft in its stocking. She had not done at all badly in her effort to drink her half of the bottle of wine, and her cheeks were dimly pink, and her hair fell in her eyes.

‘Clara,’ he said to her, as she curled her toes on his ankle, ‘Clara.’

‘My hair gets in my eyes,’ she said, for answer, pushing it away,
pushing it back with both hands, with both elbows on the table, leaning towards him, her two hands framing a bare white triangle on her high forehead; ‘And it’s too long; when I eat it gets in my food.’

‘Don’t have it cut,’ he said, ‘don’t have it cut.’

‘I can’t afford to have it cut,’ she said, ‘or not how I would like it, and so it grows.’

‘Let it grow,’ he said.

And then they had some coffee, and then he looked at her and said:

‘We could always go to the cinema, for the afternoon.’

‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ she said.

‘I should,’ he said, ‘but I shan’t go. Whatever you say, even if you say no to me, I shan’t go.’

‘What would you do?’ she said. ‘If I said no?’

‘Oh Christ,’ he said, as the underwash of the dreadful tides of his life washed faintly towards him, from a long way off, from some other sea, threatening the safe and steep-walled inlet where they sat. ‘Oh Christ, God knows what I would do, wander around, God knows, I don’t know what I would do.’

And she said, quickly, distressed, moved, not as he feared taking this sudden opening as an expression of his desire for her, but taking it for what it was, for a glimpse into the darkness from which he came towards her:

‘Oh, I’ll come, of course I’ll come.’

And so he paid the bill, and they set off together towards the door, towards the stairs up towards the street; the staircase was narrow and dark, and it turned a sharp corner, and on the corner of it he kissed her, and as they stood there another couple, descending, passed them, and he held her in his arms and she buried her face against his. In his arms it was close and private, and he smelled of French cigarettes, and she could feel the hairs of his chest through his shirt. When they had kissed at some length they moved on, up the stairs, and in the street they walked together with their arms entwined, inseparable: they went to the Academy, and sat as each had sat with others in the back row, and as soon as they sat down they turned once more towards each other, turning as they sank into
the chairs, mouth on mouth, his arms reaching for her, his hands inside her coat and her jersey, and reaching for so many lost sensations, and finding them there, finding them unfaded as though they had been waiting for him. He had not sat so, in a cinema, for more than seven years, and he felt on her lips the loss of time, and the withering of expectation, and the sudden anxious existence, of himself, so persuasively evoked, and it seemed that in many ways it would have been easier to have kept himself out of the way of such addictive recollections. And yet at the same time it seemed important to be alive, and he remembered, with anguish, that years ago it was such sensations only that he had dignified with the name of life.

The film was an Italian film about an old man, and Clara caught glimpses of it from time to time, and saw as much of it as she would have wanted to see; such a method of viewing films had always seemed to her desirable, and her attention, when caught by the angle of an Italian street, or by the grief of the old man, seemed to be peculiarly intense. When at University, she had read books, voraciously, on her college-hostel bed, while her men tried to make love to her; she had read the whole of
Adolphe
while lying on top of a man called Bernard, and when Bernard had protested she had said, untruthfully, you do not understand, unless I read to take my mind off you, you would be too much for me. She found Gabriel infinitely more disturbing and distracting than Bernard, and the film less interesting though almost as depressing as
Adolphe
. But she was not depressed: happiness filled her, she thought that she had never been so happy in her life.

They sat through the film twice, and by the time it ended it was almost evening, and they had reached a state where it was no longer possible for them to part. She wondered what he would suggest, as they finally disentangled themselves, at the second raising of the lights, and got up to go: she rested comfortably upon his worldliness, she knew that he would suggest something, and that acquiescence would be all her part. And he, who had for years been dreaming in his office about such an act, could think only of his office. He had feared, in the dim past mists of unformulated antici
pation, that she might, if things were ever to reach such a point, find such a suggestion sordid: but from what she had given of herself during those smoky cinema hours, he could see that for such a nature as hers the sordid, if it existed, did not repel, that hesitation only could repel. So he said to her, as they stumbled up the stairs and on to Oxford Street,

‘We could go to my office. If you would come.’

‘Of course I will come,’ she said, ‘if you are sure.’

‘Sure of what?’ he said.

‘That there will be no one there,’ she said.

And he explained to her that there would be people in the building, but not on his floor of the building, and that he had the key. And she smiled, and said, Oh yes then, that’s all right. And so they walked together, south to where his office was, past the bright, cheap, tatty, cobbled clothes in the shop windows, and they held hands as they walked, and kissed once at a corner whilst waiting for the traffic lights to change, and he seemed to be avenging himself upon those lost and bitterly regretted moments, those envied visions of couples kissing on stations, kissing in cars, kissing under bridges and in doorways, kissing on films and on television, kissing in his own head. When they reached his office, they went up in the lift without meeting anyone, and he unlocked his door, and then locked it behind him, and then with mutual good will they lay down upon the floor. And he not ceasing to be astonished by her ease, and she not ceasing to be astonished by her own felicity, they lay there together upon the mock parquet tiles, lit by the band of fluorescent light, their heads in the space under his desk, staring upwards together, finally, at the unknown underside of the desk, amidst the smell of polish, and the unswept cigarette ash of the day, and the small round paper punchings from his secretary’s filing activities. Clara’s hair, shortly, was full of paper punchings, as of confetti.

After a while, he said,

‘Just think, just think, if you hadn’t come.’

‘I can’t imagine,’ she said, sitting up and staring down at him, ‘how you could think I might not come. How could I ever have stayed away from you? You must be the most beautiful person that I
ever saw in my whole life. I would have been mad to have stayed away.’

‘And you still see it that way?’ he said, still lying flat, his arms crossed comfortably behind his head.

‘Why should I not?’ she said. ‘It was very nice, it’s been very nice. I wouldn’t have missed it, not for anything.’

And they stared at each other, reflective, hopeful, satisfied.

Then she fished her brown jersey out of the wastepaper basket, where she had dropped it, and started to get dressed again.

‘Don’t dress, don’t dress,’ he complained; but she said, ‘I’m cold, I must.’

And when she was dressed, she stood up, and started to wander round the office, picking things up, looking at the papers and notices pinned on the walls, inspecting the contents of his cupboard and of his pencil drawer, gazing at herself, in passing, in the mirror behind the door, and reaching flattening, ineffective hands to smooth her hair. She was happy; she felt at home and familiar there, she felt that she had bought herself a right to look, and even the sight of a broken biro on his windowsill was of interest to her. He lay on the floor and watched her; she liked to be watched. And she tried to piece together, from what she saw, the rest of Gabriel’s life: but she tried idly, luxuriously, because she did not really want to know. She did not want to know everything about him. She liked the unknown, she liked to feel familiar with the unknown.

Over his desk, on the wall, there were a great many notices and pictures and photographs pinned up, and she looked at these closely, seeing that they were there to be looked at; there were reminders and appointments, and a photograph of Clelia and Annunciata, and a photograph of his two elder children, and there was a whole series of photographs of a pop singer whose fame was currently at its dizzy histrionic zenith. Clara was surprised to find such pin-up photographs: she had thought that Gabriel’s world would eschew, somehow, having no need of them, the cheaper glories of the masses, and she turned to him, curiously, and said, ‘Why, why on earth do you have all these pictures of Elvera?’ and he said, ‘Why
not? I always thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, why, don’t you find her beautiful?’ And Clara, looking once more at the pictures, of the wide-mouthed, thick-necked singer, throwing her arms up to the heavens wildly, had to concede beauty, had to concede that she had never even troubled to look at such pictures before, so sure had she been that there would have been no point in looking. And she still did not see the point in having them there, those cheaply purchasable photographs: collecting of such things, interest in such things, had always seemed to her from early school days on to be an indication of immaturity, of poverty, of lack of resources, of making do with second best: she had as resolutely and as puritanically scorned the pop world and its manifestations as her mother had done before her. But, from Gabriel’s example, she tried to force herself to see the point, to encompass even this, ready to see in her own disinterest her mother’s own rigidity: because the truth was that everything that Gabriel did seemed to her to be right. The fact that those pictures were here upon his wall redeemed all pictures pinned up on all walls: he had told her that Elvera was beautiful, and so she was, she could see it now, yes, looking at her, in those thick-grained overblown photographs, she could see it, and she wondered what stubborn narrow prejudice had blinded her but an instant before.

And she felt, as she felt with Clelia, when Clelia opened her eyes, as she so often did, to some new and unexpected virtue in the external world: she felt gratitude, and amazement. She took them on trust so completely, the Denhams, for as far as she could see they were never wrong. And yet trust was not the right word for the way that she regarded them, for she did not humbly and ignorantly echo their judgements in her own head; she did not say to herself, repeating what she had heard, I like that advertisement, that house, that film, that book, that painting, that kind of stocking, that man’s face. It was rather that she saw what they saw, once they had told her to see it. They taught her, they instructed her, as once Miss Haines had taught her to admire Corneille: and the lesson about Corneille had been worth while, the object worthy of effort, so why not all these new
acquisitions? She despised in herself the old, recalcitrant severity that had condemned Elvera without looking at her: and yet she knew that without the sanction of Gabriel’s casual approval she would never have bothered to look, just as, without Clelia’s doubtful admiration, she would have seen in Martin merely a thin, balding, ascetic neurotic intellectual, a man in no way possibly the object of desire. It was hard work, the acquiring of opinions, and she felt an unresentful envy for those like Gabriel and Clelia, those who had been born with views, those who had known from infancy which pictures to pin up on their walls. Clara’s walls were bare, from indecision.