Jerusalem the Golden (24 page)

On the wall at the end of the bed there was a painting, an oil painting of a thin-faced woman, holding in her arms a small dog; the oil of the painting was badly cracked, and the woman stared coldly down upon them, through the stiff wrinkles of age.

On the bed there, Clara said to Gabriel, ‘What will happen to me, what will happen if I should ever lose my nerve?’ And he did not know what she meant, and she said, ‘I am chased, I am pursued, I run and run, but I will never get away, the apple does not fall far from the tree,’ she said.

‘What apple, what tree,’ he said sleepily, and held her as she reared anxiously up from him, sitting up, clutching herself, folding herself in her bare arms; and he said, ‘You are all nerve, you are solid nerve, see, I feel you, I hold you, you are firm and hard, all nerve, there is nothing you would not dare,’ and she said, ‘Yes, I am all nerve, I am hard, there is no love in me, I am too full of will to love.’ And he said, hardly listening, ‘What nonsense,’ and she said, ‘Oh lovely Gabriel, I love you, I love you,’ and lay upon him and kissed him, her fear and her need combined. Because love, desperately, eluded her; she had not been taught to love, she had lacked those expensive, private lessons.

In the afternoon, Gabriel had to see a man at the television place, so at two o’clock they got up and went downstairs and into the next-door café and had some lunch. When Gabriel left her, he gave her some French money and said, when she protested: ‘Spend it, spend it, I brought it for you.’ And she took it, uneasily, promptly, and put
it in her bag. Fifteen pounds, he had given her, to fill in a few hours; without his guidance she did not think she could manage to spend more than ten shillings. And when he had gone, she walked down to the Boulevard Saint Michel, and crossed the river, and looked at the Sainte Chapelle for one franc, and then at Notre-Dame, for nothing, and then she walked on, across the Île Saint Louis, and up to the Place des Vosges, and on and on, up to Montmartre, miles and miles of stony Paris, stopping once for a small black coffee, which she drank standing, for it was expensive to sit down, and then back again, down the steep hill, and when she reached the big shops fatigue overcame her, and she got on a bus and went back to the hotel, where Gabriel was waiting for her, having returned earlier than he had expected, and she said, sitting on the bed and pulling off her dusty shoes: ‘Here, have your money back. I can’t make myself spend it, you will have to spend it on me.’ And he, most secretly relieved, took it back, and they went out to dinner, to a dark smart place where they sat in an alcove and held hands and ate too much. And when they got back to the hotel, she had a bath, and he sat and watched her, and then she said she wanted a drink, and what about the gin, and he said that there was nothing to put in the gin, and she said that that didn’t matter, she would drink it neat. And she did; she got out of the bath, and dried herself, and put on her nightgown, and lay there on the bed reading a book and drinking neat gin. The sight of her, thus recklessly ruining her health, her sleep and her digestion, made him feel ill and old; such lack of foresight was quite beyond him. There had been, he dimly recollected, a day when he might have drunk gin for the sake of alcohol, but now he would as soon have drunk liquid paraffin. He wanted her to pay him attention; it was getting late, and he wanted her to look at him, but she went on reading, and he felt that she was reading to shut him out, to prolong, frivolously, their eventual communications, and he was too tired for such frivolity. And yet at the same time he did not want to disturb her, for her happy, false absorption touched him, and he wanted to see on what terms she would turn to him. Because he knew that, unlike Phillipa, she would turn in his direction, and that her attention to her book was in some way for his benefit.

After some time, she closed the book, and dropped it on the floor, and rolled over on to her back, and shut her eyes. ‘Oh Lord,’ she said, as soon as she had shut her eyes. ‘Oh Lord, I feel dreadful, I feel simply dreadful, why ever did I drink all that gin? Why didn’t you stop me, Gabriel? Gabriel, what a name, Gabriel, did you know that the Italians call their children Paradise and Heaven and such things?’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Why not?’

‘Oh Lord,’ said Clara, and got up off the bed, and groped her way to the bathroom, and slammed the door after herself; and he could hear her vomiting violently. He listened, anxiously, to the noise of running water, and after a few moments asked her if she felt all right, and he heard her laugh, and say that she felt fine, much better, and that she’d be out in no time. And she was; she emerged, shortly, her hair tied back with a piece of string, her face shining faintly, smelling of soap.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, as she walked into his arms. ‘How dreadful of me, I always do this when I’m unnerved, when I’m happy. Do I smell frightful, can you bear to be near me?’

‘You smell lovely,’ he said, ‘of soap.’

‘I was terribly sick,’ she said, ‘when I got home, the first time I went to your house, with Clelia, it was so marvellous I couldn’t take it, I just went home and was sick, and it’s the same with you, you’re so marvellous I can’t take you either.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ he said, ‘it was the gin; if you drink like that, what do you expect?’

‘I only drank it because of you,’ she said.

‘If I drank like that,’ he said, ‘I’d feel ill for a week, and you, you seem to be all right again, how do you recover so quickly?’

And he did not like to think of the answer, although he knew it and she did not; it was because she was so young. In five years, he had entered upon a different generation; her childless, tireless, energy belonged to another, earlier world, and one lost to him for ever, however he might try to retrace his steps. She amazed him; she could come to him like that, and Phillipa would turn away to fasten her stockings. And as they embraced, that night, he found himself think
ing, I must be at work at ten in the morning, it’s all right for her, but I must be at work, and I must, I must get some sleep, and he saw, across the slope of her right breast, the gleaming luminous face of his watch and it told him, in its pale green minatory figures, that it was half past two. But despite his fatigue, she was asleep before him; when he relinquished her she slept instantly on her belly, her face creased up on the pillow, breathing heavily, her arms all folded up beneath her, in a total, exhausted sleep, with all her tautness turned into loose dead weight. And he could not sleep; he lay there restless, thinking of his wife, of his children, of his bank balance, and wondering to himself, irritably, sadly, why he had not arranged to have his car serviced while he was away. He had lost the ability to sleep, as she slept; sleeping and waking seemed to him more and more to overlap, so that he dozed in the day, and dreamed restlessly all night, listening for the cries of children in his dreams.

On the third day, he took her to the television centre with him. Clara had hoped to see, with Gabriel, a different Paris from the architectural, linguistic fortress of her University days, and in a sense she was not disappointed. She saw areas she had never visited before; he led her to the Faubourg Saint Honoré, as Clelia had led her to Bond Street, and to the boutiques of the Left Bank, where all the shop windows were filled with clothes that reminded her uneasily of Phillipa. He bought English newspapers, recklessly, and never thought to stand up when he might sit down, nor to buy two drinks in one bar rather than one drink in two bars for the sake of saving on the service. All Clara’s carefully accumulated knowledge of how to live abroad for nothing was to him quite useless, she was glad to note; he took Paris as though it were London, a city to be lived in. She liked the idea that he was here for a specific purpose, on business, though when, once, sitting in a bar outside Notre-Dame, he tried to explain the nature of his mission, she found her ears closing up with unaccustomed uncomprehending boredom; but at the same time she found herself possessed, occasionally, by a faint resenting jealousy. If she had been his wife, she could not help thinking, then she would have met people; she would have been introduced. She set great store by introductions, for they fended off from her the fear of solitude. She
would have liked to have met a French person. She knew that Gabriel knew people in Paris, and was rather annoyed by the fact that her equivocal status, in other ways so agreeable, should thus cut her off from them. Also, she was proud of being with Gabriel, and the passing acquisitive glances of other women did not satisfy her craving for confirmation, for they saw nothing but his outward graces, not in themselves so rare, and could not assess the more complex graces of his heart and of his heritage. Nor was her presence there with him to them at all remarkable. She wished to see in the eyes of others the dim, narrowing, receding vistas, the arches and long corridors through which she had travelled. She wished to set, through him, a value on herself. The image of a honeymoon, with its close and passionate solitude, meant little to her; she could not keep her eyes or her hands off Gabriel, but other desires and other needs lay deeper in her heart. It was not one man that she needed, but through one man a view of other things, a sensation of other ways of being, she wished to feel herself attached to the world. And once, as she sat with a cup of coffee, alone, it crossed her mind, nervously, uneasily, that it was not Gabriel himself after all that she wanted, but marriage to Gabriel: as Gabriel’s wife she would have been irrevocably attached, safe, strapped, labelled, bound and fixed, never to be lost again, and where after all should she find better than Gabriel himself? Nowhere, nowhere, she knew; there was nothing more to look for; he was what she had wanted, and she had him, and he did not belong to her, and she did not want him to belong to her. She did not know what she wanted; she bowed her head, sadly, saddened, staring into her small bitter black cup, seeing there the bitter limits of her own hitherto illimitable designs.

One night, in bed, they talked of Clelia. Clara had always avoided the subject of Clelia, not wishing to spill a drop of her affection, but one night Gabriel said to her suddenly,

‘Clara, you remind me of Clelia, at times you even look like Clelia, tell me, why do you look like her, now, at this instant?’

‘I look like her,’ said Clara, sitting up in bed reading and propped on the pillows, ‘because I try to look like her, that’s all. I bought this nightdress because it looks like hers, if you want to know. And I
went into a shop to have my hair cut like hers, but I came out again, I was afraid she might object.’

‘She wouldn’t have objected,’ said Gabriel, ‘she would have liked it. I like you to look like Clelia; do you think I used to be in love with Clelia? I think I probably was.’

‘All your family,’ said Clara, ‘always seem to me to be in love with all the rest of your family. If you see what I mean: it always seems to be rife with incest, don’t you think?’

‘That’s what Phillipa says,’ said Gabriel, who had found it easier to talk of Phillipa than not to talk of her; ‘she doesn’t like it; she thinks we are all self-indulgent, self-erected saints, that we do it all ourselves, that this marvellous world we think we live in is just an image that we impose upon the rest. She hates it, she calls it vanity.’

‘I don’t hate it,’ said Clara, ‘I like it; ought I not to like it? I think you are real saints, it doesn’t occur to me that you might not be real. Aren’t you real? I don’t see why people should object to your all being so wonderful; some people are more wonderful than others, they just are.’

‘Clelia is the only real saint,’ said Gabriel; ‘she truly is a saint. My mother always knew she would be the one. The rest of us, well, the rest of us get by, but Clelia has the real thing. Oh, we’re all marvellous, we’re all polite and delightful and witty and agreeable and all the rest of it, but Clelia is gifted, she’s the only one of us who’s really gifted, you know. She paints really well, one day she will paint really well. But the rest of us will never do anything. Look at Amelia, she went mad through the shock of waking up in the outside world, out of the golden nest, and she only married to get away from us, you know, to escape from our amorous family clutches, and when she got out, when she breathed the cold air of Essex, she went mad. And Magnus works – he’s the cleverest, but they never prized cleverness, they wanted us to be strange and wonderful, so in revenge Magnus works, he kills himself with work; he permits himself to wander so slightly, so discreetly, he lets it be known he’s a man of culture, but he works, to prove he can at least do that. And then he must, with all those children. And then there is me, and what can I do? I can do everything and nothing. No, don’t look at me like that, because it’s
true, it’s quite true that I can do nothing really well, or rather I can do everything well and nothing well enough, I sometimes think I should have been an actor, because that was the only thing I ever wanted to do, but I didn’t do it, and now I couldn’t, I know the life too well to want to do it, and so there is nothing left that I want to do. But Clelia, she wants something, I don’t know how she can be so singled out, but so she was, and they always knew it, our parents, they recognized the marks. They don’t understand what she does, painting since 1865 means nothing to them at all, but people tell them it’s good, and since one of their children had to be good then it had to be Clelia.’

‘I don’t know about painting,’ said Clara, ‘but Clelia I love.’

‘Clelia’s nature is perfection,’ said Gabriel, ‘she is made up of every virtue, and moreover I have never heard her speak a dull word in her life. I could spend the rest of my life with Clelia; I miss her. I’ve never said this to anyone before, not even I think to myself, but it’s true, I miss her, when I married I began to miss her, and Phillipa can tell it, she hated Clelia, she must be the only person in the world who can feel hatred for Clelia. If she
weren’t
my sister, I would miss her, and since she is, why should I not?’

‘If she weren’t your sister, you would probably have married her,’ said Clara.