Palladian (9 page)

She sat close to him, tapping her fingers on his thigh, a little message which he, for the moment, ignored. His surroundings were beginning to dwindle. He slipped his free hand inside her blouse, knowing he must sooner or later, even discovered a paltry, easy pleasure in doing so, but a pleasure incidental to the whisky, until suddenly he felt a violent desire to obliterate himself, to lose himself, to destroy himself and her. She was his hated one, his own lust made flesh, the bad side of his own nature. He vented his hatred on her, he punished her with lust.

But she was a tawdry thing, not worthy of any tenderness. She thought it was pent-up passion he released upon her … She liked the word ‘passionate’, using it always in its sexual sense … She would not have understood that he wreaked vengeance on her, used her brutally in his mind.

So close, they were worlds apart.

‘Who
do
you love, then?’ Mrs Veal dabbed at her eyes, knowing she must not cry, for Tom had said once that it is never moving, always boring and embarrassing for women to cry once they are out of their early thirties. All he had ever said she remembered.

‘Oh, Lord!’ was all he said now and yawned … one, two, three, stretching his arms over his head. Only had temper
could
have come out of that embrace. ‘What do you want me to say? Thank you?’ he inquired.

If your lover is insulting you must put up with it as best you can, fight your own battle. She could not very well run grizzling to Gilbert to ask him to deal with Tom, complaining of incivility, of coldness.

‘One moment you are so …’ she sobbed, ‘… the next moment so ill-natured and proud.’

‘I am ill-natured all the time,’ he tried to explain. ‘But I am not proud,’ he thought, ‘not proud.’

Now it was time to open the bar again, and they had eaten nothing. When he had suggested food, she had begun to cry. If he may not eat, he must drink.

‘Five to,’ he said, looking at the clock. It was easy to put her in a good mood; he had only to betray himself, and not even in words, only in their interpretation.

‘Come here! Come along!’ he said in a different voice. He ran a finger down her forehead, down her nose. ‘Silly little camel! Stop wittering. Stop being a baby. Smile.’ She smiled. (‘You fool,’ he thought.) ‘That’s better. Now go and unlock the door. I’ll go round to the lavatory and then come marching into the bar the front way, as if I’ve been at home all afternoon.’ He smacked her behind quite hard.

‘You’ve had nothing to eat,’ she said, suddenly apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I should damn well think so,’ he said.

He sauntered out to the lavatory across a little yard with crates of empty bottles and ash-cans. Cinders lay about and pieces of straw. One way and another the stench was awful – ‘mostly one way,’ he thought, kicking open the door. He recrossed the yard, buttoning himself up. ‘Kindly adjust your …’ God, how I hate clichés. How nice to see one day ‘Please do up your trousers before opening the door,’ or ‘…’ He tried out a few phrases, making his way round to the front door.

Two men from the village leant against the bar. He was all right, then, for a drink, his pound note was intact a little longer. They were drinking light ale.

‘Whisky for Tom here,’ said one of them, as Mrs Veal came in from the Public Bar. She and he smiled conventionally at one another, yet there was something reserved, masked about
her. He winked. ‘Good evening,’ she said quietly. ‘What bloody game is this?’ he thought. ‘Like a coupla kids!’ ‘Cheers!’ ‘He sat down on a high stool in the corner and listened to the men talking men’s talk. Clichés again. ‘They are like two dogs barking at one another,’ he thought. ‘Sounds come out of their mouths, certainly, but sounds without any significance. “Look, what big chaps we are!” That’s all they are saying at one another, what dogs say when they bark.’

He indicated their glasses to Mrs Veal and laid the pound note on the bar, unfolded, spread flat, infinitely precious. ‘There it goes!’ he thought. ‘There she goes, my beauty.’ But better this – better a pound here and there from Marion (‘Answer up. Say thank you like a nice boy’), better that than a few more pounds and no time to spend them – rushing round the countryside wrenching babies out of screaming women at all hours, mostly night time, not able to go into a pub in case they say ‘His hand was unsteady and no wonder.’ ‘No, I am quite free,’ he thought, looking at Mrs Veal.

‘Cheers!’ the men barked at him, lifting their glasses.

‘Cheers!’ he growled back and swallowed his whisky. That was good, but it was gone, a mere mouthful. He had forgotten the water. All the same, it had been good, was good, and he leaned back and felt the warmth travelling through him. His change lay heaped up, a pile of silver and coppers. He fidgeted with it, afraid to touch his glass again for a bit. He knew he was drinking too quickly, and on an empty stomach. Then he realised she had given him too much money, that the note had been split up, but not much broken into, and he felt distracted with anger.

Gilbert walked in.

Tom saw her eyes flicker in terror. He knew how shaken she was, how her mind turned over quickly the thought that since he had come early, he might so easily have come earlier, how her world rocked and became unsafe.

‘Why, hello, Gil!’ she had said, and now she was saying: ‘Have you lost all your money, then, or spent it?’

He shouted ‘good evening’ at them all, slapped his hands down on the bar, roaring for drinks. ‘Come on, what ’chaving? Don’t be shy, boys.’

He made his wife run back and forth with glasses. Her face looked drawn and desperate and Tom felt compassion for her, was moved by her at last, but not in a way she would have wished, for his pity would not have fitted into her schemes of romance and fascination. Yet her being pitiable had made her become – for this passing moment – real to him and he wished to be kind and show her sympathy.

He was curt with Gilbert, scarcely acknowledged his whisky. Above all men, this was the one he most hated; the one who represented the great bogus male world (of which he, Tom, was an outcast); who threw money about (Tom drew his heap of silver nearer with a loving gesture); who insulted his wife to prove his grandeur (whereas Tom insulted her because she reminded him of his treachery to himself). Moreover, he had aligned himself with this hated man by taking his wife and letting her make a despicable link between them.

‘What sort of day, Gil?’ she was asking. ‘Did Corona run?’

‘Did it run!’ he exclaimed.

‘Yes, that’s what she asked!’ Tom murmured into his whisky. ‘I am having too much drink,’ he thought. ‘Go steady. Why did he come home so early? He hates me. Nothing to do with her, but because I despise what he respects, don’t lift a finger to get what he’d grovel for, never laugh at his funny stories about copulation, never slap him on the back or buy him a drink. If I were Marion, he’d call me a cissy and be done with it, but he knows I’m not, that I could thrash the backside off him or any other man and that puzzles him all the more. But he is just right for her, really. He could not have been
made
to suit her better. He
is the answer to all she needs and asks for, all that her vulgarity calls forth.’ He imagined their love-making; remembered his own; shut his eyes. ‘Why does she hanker after me, then?’ he wondered. ‘Why is she so sick to destroy me? Because she knows I am private and she wants to trespass. She knows I am committed and she wants to annul my commitment. She is worse than he is. She wants to say: “I have received from him the same as
she
– the most beautiful of all women.” But who does she want to say it to? She would never dare say it to me, nor to other people – her husband, for instance – and she could never say it to herself, because she knows it is a damned lie. That is why she cries.’

He wouldn’t soil his money buying Gilbert a drink, so he slipped it into his pocket and then, without saying good night, as if he were just going out to the lavatory, he sauntered casually from the bar. Once outside, he quickened his pace, going up the warm tunnel of the steep lane, the hedges enclosing him.

There was a lighted window at the lodge. That sluttish woman who was sometimes to be seen slapping a grey, gritty cloth across the kitchen floor at the Manor, stood up in the poky little room, above the dusty leaves of geraniums on the sill, a baby clutching at her untidy hair. She was talking to someone unseen and her mouth moved and her body swayed, as women always sway when they hold babies. ‘Do they know unconsciously that they have to keep up the rocking movement of the womb?’ he wondered, pausing for a moment beside the gate-post and the broken gryphon. She slapped the baby’s hand down from her hair. Above her hung a bird-cage covered with a cloth. All the time, only faintly annoying, like gnats, a wireless bleated. She moved the baby higher upon her shoulder and he could see its bare mauve behind, dinted like an unripe plum.

He walked on up the mossy drive and round the back of the
house. There was a light at Marion’s window, too, but no picture, for the curtains were drawn. He knew he would have to go up and see Marion, because he could not go to bed with his emotions unresolved, and only Marion could help him; Marion, and being in that room which once had been Violet’s and where he could never go and sit alone now without trespassing.

Marion was reading. Marion was polite and never interfered. He asked Tom to have a drink, just as if he didn’t know that he had already had too much, and then, a last suggestion, pointed to the pot of black coffee on the hearth.

‘Wondrous tactful, you are, Marion.’

He was so tactful that now he did not make the mistake of dissembling. He smiled. Tom poured himself some coffee and drank slowly, his two hands round the cup.

‘Why do I do this?’ he said aloud. It was a way of beginning a conversation about himself, which is important to those who are drunk.

Marion held up his book and read out: ‘All round it pipeth chill amidst the orchard boughs; the leaves are quivering and the foliage falls.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Tom crossly, baulked.

‘Sappho.’

Tom always called Greek a dead language. ‘Never thought of it being Autumn there,’ he said, ‘or leaves falling. Or orchards.’

Presently, Marion read: ‘O Hesperus that bringest back all things which the shining dawn dispersed, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the boy back to his mother.’

‘And the drunkard home from the pub. I told you many times it’s a dead language.’

He put an elbow on the mantelpiece and Marion glanced up a bit anxiously at his thousand-flower dishes. When he bent his
head again to read, Tom looked down at the streaky gold hair, the black velvet jacket he despised, the long fingers in a fan over the back of the book, and felt the knot of his emotions draw up tight.

‘Marion, you remember the time you told me to come down off the stables’ roof and I wouldn’t?’

He looked up and smiled.

‘You broke your arm,’ he said. ‘I expect I said “I told you so”.’

‘No. You were very quiet and gentle. As they were lifting me, I kept fainting and coming back and each time as I fell into darkness, I knew you were there, being steady, and waiting to help me.’

Marion fingered his book, a little embarrassed. He knew Tom was going to say: ‘It is the same now.’ He did so. Marion waited, looking at the printed page as if for assistance. He realised that Tom was drunk, but he did realise, too – which is rare in people who drink for pleasure, not obliteration – that Tom wanted to use his drunkenness as a screen behind which he could strip himself of thoughts, emotions, which burdened him.

‘I am drinking myself to death,’ said Tom. It was melodramatic; but, like all melodrama, had the seeds of great tragedy in it. ‘I am wasted. No use. I am done for.’

Marion closed his book. ‘In a different way, I am done for, too,’ he said.

The clock ticked, the fire shuddered and a little brittle noise came from the hot side of the coffee-pot, for the coffee was beginning to boil and Marion moved it back, away from the heat. Tom stared at him, leaning there against the mantelpiece, his elbow among the china bowls.

‘I am
reading
myself to death, that is all the difference is,’ Marion went on, rapping a knuckle against the cover of the book.

‘Why?’

Marion said nothing. Then Tom asked: ‘Money, you mean?’ and he nodded.

‘This money, this house, ruined us both,’ Tom thought, looking round the room, and then at his cousin. ‘It gave you Violet. That was the root of the trouble.’

‘It is useless to blame the money,’ Marion was thinking. ‘If I had to go to that office every day, I should be the same man. I should come back eventually to my books and my painted bowls.’ ‘Margaret makes up for us both,’ he said aloud. ‘Look at her energy and her worthiness and her public spirit – all the Committees and the petitions and the campaigns.’

‘And now a baby,’ said Tom, looking away. (Violet screaming, he thought. She screamed like an animal, not a human sound. She had frozen the world with terror. She had been beautiful in early pregnancy, had moved him so deeply, reminded him of mediaeval sculpture, the drapery falling, the pleats widening over her belly and her bosom so heavy, so utterly different. Later, she had become swollen, her face, her hands puffed out … But he had promised her not to remember…) He covered his eyes with his hand and one of the bowls fell into the hearth. Now it was a thousand pieces.