Jerusalem the Golden (23 page)

When Gabriel finally roused himself from his floor, and got up and buttoned up his shirt and zipped up his trousers, Clara said to him:

‘Do you go in for this kind of thing much?’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it depends on what kind of thing you think it is, doesn’t it?’

‘No, not really,’ said Clara. ‘What I mean is, do you go in much for the kind of thing that might be taken to be this kind of thing? And to that, you see, you can only say yes or no.’

‘No, then,’ said Gabriel. ‘And what about you?’

‘I’m afraid it might be more likely, in my case, to be yes,’ said Clara. ‘Not that it matters, really.’

‘Time alone will show,’ said Gabriel.

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Clara.

‘We could have another look at the problem on Monday,’ said Gabriel. ‘I could take you out to lunch on Monday.’

‘That would be very nice,’ said Clara. ‘I should like that.’

Gabriel was late home, but it did not matter, as Phillipa never had a meal waiting for him even when he was on time, and she would never betray the interest in his activities that would have been implied by an interrogation. She was sitting in the living room when he arrived, just sitting, and listening to the radio. He greeted her, and she inclined her head, faintly, in his direction, so he went off into the kitchen and made himself an omelette, and came and sat down with her to eat it. He was faint with hunger, and he ate with the omelette half a loaf of bread. When he had finished eating, he remembered
the lemon squeezer in his pocket, and he got it out and handed it to her. She smiled, anxiously, as though willing to appear pleased.

‘Why did you buy it?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just saw it, that’s all.’

Then she reverted her attention to the radio, and he, suddenly desperate before the blank waste remaining hour of the evening, asked her, rashly, recklessly, how she had spent her day. And she told him, very limply and hesitantly, in her flat pale voice, that she had been in the afternoon to the chemist’s to buy some Junior Aspirin, and that as it was raining she had not walked as far as her usual chemist, but had stopped at the nearest one, the one on the corner of the next street. It was a shop, she explained, that she always avoided, because of the seedy, flyblown look of the windows, with their ancient outdated advertisements, and because of the slowness of the service. And this time, she said, she was served by an old man, who had received her request in grudging silence, had spent several minutes looking through the nearest drawers, and then had dragged himself painfully up the steps into the back of the shop to look there. He had not found what she wanted, and had redescended into the shop, unwilling to let her go, mumbling continually that he knew they were there somewhere, and after a few more fumblings the front door of the shop had opened, and his slightly less frail and aged wife had entered. And the old man said to her, as though he were alone with her in the shop, as though the shop were not a shop but a room to live in, it was no good, they couldn’t carry on like this, they’d have to close down, and live on their pensions. ‘I just can’t manage when you’re out, Edie,’ he had said, plaintively, ‘I just can’t manage when you leave the shop.’

And Phillipa had stood there, listening, listening to these tragic intimacies, and they had given her the Junior Aspirins, finally, as though she should never have asked for them, as though she should have known better than to ask.

‘And the truth is,’ she concluded, ‘that I had known better. I knew from the look of that shop that I was the last person in the world that ought to go in it. It was written all over their windows, that I ought not to go in.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, though,’ he said. ‘They must have needed to sell you the aspirins. Or they would have shut the shop.’

‘They needed to. But they couldn’t,’ she said.

Clara, when she got home, shook the paper clippings from her hair, and smiled at herself in the mirror. She thought that she looked rather well. On the other hand, she was not much looking forward to the night, as she feared she was too excited to sleep. Also, she felt slightly sick, as she had felt after her first afternoon at the Denhams’ house: it was the sickness and strain of finding too well what she had been looking for. She had presupposed such a man as Gabriel, such a dark and surreptitious lunch, such an episode upon an unfamiliar floor, and it had happened to her. She felt triumphant, but mingled with her triumph there was a certain alarm. She felt that she was being supported and abetted by fate in some colossal folly: that circumstances were conspiring maliciously to persuade her that her own estimate of herself, that high and grandiose self-assessment of adolescence, was right. She had considered herself too good for such as Walter Ash, and she had got Gabriel. There seemed to be no end to the possibilities of mad aspiration. And yet, she could not feel that this was the way the world should go, she felt that she was breasting, rashly, the marching currents of humanity, and that she would in the end be forced to turn about.

She was so excited that she wished she were still living in college, so that she could call on one of her friends to tell them the whole story. She was not much given to using the telephone, having been bred to use the instrument meagrely and with respect, and anyway the only person to whom she ever told such things, now, was Clelia. And this was one piece of news that she did not think Clelia would much like to know.

But in the end she did ring Clelia. Not to tell her, but to talk to her. And as she talked, the consciousness of practising deception did not distress her, for on the contrary she felt that the possession of a secret gave her an extra dimension, an extra asset. They had all for years had their complications, and now she had hers: it even seemed that Gabriel was another bond between them. It did not for a
moment occur to her that Clelia might, in a simple sense, object. She imagined herself to be in a world where such considerations did not exist. And yet she knew that it would be better to say nothing, just as Clelia never said anything about Martin, and indeed now said nothing about the return of Martin’s wife. They talked of other things, of Clara’s course on Non-Denominational Religion, of a belt that Clelia had lost off her dress that morning on the bus. But behind their conversation lay other shadows, and Clara felt that the thicker the shadows grew, the more nearly she would be approaching the densely forested gloom that she took to be life itself.

When she had rung off, she walked up and down her room for a few times, thinking that she would not sleep, and then she went to bed and straight away she slept.

Clara found that she enjoyed being Gabriel’s mistress. The complications of the liaison, and all its dubious undertones heightened so much her feeling for Gabriel himself that she found herself from time to time on the verge of wondering uneasily whether she did not find more pleasure in the situation than in the man. For she liked the sense of secrecy, the elaborate assignations, the pre-arranged telephone calls in public call boxes, the small, passionate, surreptitious gifts. And yet, at the same time, she was aware, quite distinctly, of Gabriel himself, and could even appreciate, calmly, the impulses that drove him towards her, and the suffering that he had endured. And yet again, on a third level, what she felt for him was need and love, and when he went back to Phillipa, each night, each evening, she felt within herself the dim jealous stirrings of rage. And yet this rage itself she cherished. For to feel jealousy, that classic passion, was in itself a sign of life, and seemed to set a value upon the days through which she was living. She did not see enough of him, did not get enough of him, and felt with the acquired wisdom of her observations that too little was infinitely better than too much, that desire was in every way preferable to possession.

And yet such knowledge did not advise her to refuse him, when he offered her the traditional illicit diversion, a week in Paris. She knew, as she accepted, that perhaps she should have known better, but she also knew herself to be incapable of refusing so dazzling, so delightful a prospect. Paris and Gabriel offered a combination of pleasures that could not be declined. She had visited Paris often enough, since that first school visit, but never with a man, and never with money in her pocket. The money would, in point of fact, be in
Gabriel’s pocket, not her own, but that would come to the same thing; she had never managed to find in herself the smallest comprehension of Gabriel’s complaint of poverty, for he seemed to her to spend money like water. She felt sure that travelling in such company, she would see sights that she had never seen before, sights that had been all her life awaiting her; they seemed to call her, and she said that she would go.

He, for his part, wanted to see her. The charms of deceit did not much charm him, and he lived in London in perpetual fear of surprisal, all the more anxious because he could not tell if his infidelity would be to Phillipa a matter of total indifference, or something more in the nature of a last straw. He did not think she could possibly know, and could not imagine what would happen if she did; and although he managed fine stretches of abandon, in the back of his car, in the cinema, in his locked and viewless office, he could not bring himself to forget. So that when the prospect of a week in Paris was proposed to him, one morning, by his boss, he seized upon it as some kind of answer to his needs, and positively put himself out in order to make it happen. Even his discreet efforts in this direction seemed to him conspicuous, for he had hitherto resisted to the last moment all enticements to foreign travel, and after succumbing to the Spanish trip in search of Lorca had sworn to Phillipa that he would never go again. ‘Go if you want,’ she said. ‘It’s all the same to me.’ But he had felt himself upon his honour. Now, after so short a lapse, his honour seemed to have decayed, and the thought of Clara was to him so compulsive that he found himself angling, seemingly reluctant, seemingly self-effacing, for the job. Reluctant acceptance was an attitude with which he was invariably successful, and the job was given to him. He had known beforehand that Clara would go, for he felt that she would go anywhere, for the sake of going as much as for his sake, and he did not object to her reasons, for his own were far from pure. He wanted to sleep with her, this was all he wanted, the notion of her obsessed him, he felt that on her body he was trying to regain lost time. And it consoled him to think that her need for him was equally indirect. They met, it seemed to him, in some tender, conniving, amorous bargain; each offered, each took,
each acknowledged. Such understanding seemed to him greater, more necessary than love itself. And so he said to her: I have to go to Paris on business, for a week, and come with me, Clara, come with me, you can sleep with me all night long. And she, thinking of hotels, and drinks, and crossed seas, and pale yellow floral stone, and Gabriel as the arms from which she saw these things, said yes, yes, and kissed him most passionately in her gratitude.

She left a message for her Director of Studies, saying that she had returned to Northam for the week as her mother was ill, and left instructions with an obliging friend to corroborate, if possible and necessary, this statement. She felt faintly guilty about taking her mother’s name in vain in this way, but she could not think of any other valid excuse for her absence, and felt, in her heart, a faintly pleasurable, guilty revenge, as though she were plucking her pleasures directly from the thorny tree itself. She did not think her absence would cause much disturbance, for there were few people who would even miss her, and the slight element of risk she as ever enjoyed.

She met Gabriel at the Air Terminal: she had had a moment’s dismay when she had thought that discretion might oblige him to travel separately, but he had finally decided that there could be nobody on the plane or in the whole of Paris to whom Clara would mean anything at all, and that she could if asked pretend to be his secretary. She was, to his surprise, a little cool about the idea of being taken as his secretary, so he dropped the notion quickly, and said that they might as well stop worrying, because whoever could they meet? Clara was not herself wholly happy about the idea of not meeting anyone, and indeed sometimes suspected that there was nothing that she more desired than compromise, final, decisive compromise, but she took his point and said nothing.

She had never flown before, and the whole adventure of flying was to her a most delightful treat. She liked everything, from the cup of coffee they had at the Air Terminal, to the glassy glittering expanses of Orly Airport, with all its frivolous extravagant facilities for expense. In fact she liked Orly so much that he could hardly drag her away from it; she insisted upon staying there for a drink, although
he was nervously anxious to leave his things as quickly as possible at the hotel. ‘Why hurry?’ she kept saying. ‘We have all morning; why hurry? Only people like my mother hurry to get to hotels, why bother about the hotel?’ But he, anxious about the devious and complex booking and re-booking that he had been obliged to negotiate, was restless and would not stay, and he bought, to placate her, a bottle of gin in a smart cardboard bag, and a large bottle of perfume, and she clutching these tributes they went and got a taxi and drove into Paris, and to their hotel. Clara, abroad, had never so much as set foot in a taxi; she was absurdly astonished to find that it was possible, so simply, to catch a taxi, for her excursions in Paris had always hitherto been accompanied by exhaustion, aching feet, and the studious recollections of the names of streets. But Gabriel knew a different Paris; he got in a taxi, and told the driver the name of his hotel, and it went.

The hotel reconciled her to the loss of Orly Airport. She had known that it would not be possible to stay in a grand and public, leafy-foyered place, but she had not hoped that Gabriel could so perfectly avoid the shabby. It was a small hotel, on a small and narrow street on the Left Bank, and so discreet was it that they had difficulty in finding anyone to admit their arrival, and yet it made up for the quiet absence of its staff by the glory of its décor. The narrow foyer was lined with mirrors, spotted like the famous hall, so long since visited, at Versailles; Clara now took these spots to be a source of pride and not of shame. On the tiled floor stood suits of armour, heavily reflected, and deeply polished, deeply carved pieces of old wooden furniture; the ceiling was beamed, and the plaster between the beams was painted a deep bright red. Their room, when they finally discovered someone willing to take them to it, was decorated with equally bizarre, consistent verve; the walls were red, the bed was a four-poster of black wood, the bedspread and the curtains were of heavy green velvet. The bath in the bathroom matched the green of the curtains, and the radiators and the frankly exposed pipes of the plumbing and central heating were all painted red. The carpet was thick and green, and from the red walls extended black and gold wooden arms holding lamps. Clara, seeing it, was overcome
with delight; she had never seen anything like it, and it seemed to encompass Gabriel and herself, in their momentary solitude, with a peculiarly appropriate, intimate significance. She turned to Gabriel, standing there in the doorway with their two cases, which for lack of offers he had had to carry up himself, up two flights of stairs, and the sight of him struck her once more in all his peculiar beauty, and he put the cases down, and shut the door behind him, and came and took her in his arms. He undressed her, gently, anxiously, and they pulled down the velvet cover and lay on the bed and made love; it was the first time he had slept with her in a bed more than two feet six inches wide: and it was the first double bed of her life.