Stories (79 page)

The news that Mr. Spencer was not expected did not surprise Fred; he had known it, because of his secret brutal confidence born when she had said: “I never touch the stuff, dear.”

He now got up, went behind her, stood a moment steeling himself, because the embarrassed shamefaced grin had come back onto his face, weakening his purpose—then put two hands firmly under her armpits, lifted her and supported her.

She at first struggled to remain sitting, but let herself be lifted. “Time for bye-byes?” she said. But as he began to push her, still supporting her, towards the bedroom, she said, suddenly coherent: “But, Fred, it’s Fred, Fred, it’s Fred….” She twisted out of his grip, fell two steps back, and was stopped by the door to the bedroom. There she spread her two legs under the cherry
gown, to hold her trembling weight, swayed, caught at Fred, held tight, and said: “But it’s Fred.”

“Why should you care?” he said, cold, grinning.

“But I don’t work here dear, you know that—no, let me go.” For he had put two great schoolboy hands on her shoulders.

He felt the shoulders tense, and then grow small and tender in his palms.

“You’re like your father, you’re the spitting image of your father, did you know that?”

He opened the door with his left hand; then spun her around by pushing at her left shoulder as she faced him; then, putting both hands under her armpits from behind, marched her into the bedroom, while she tittered.

The bedroom was mostly pink. Pink silk bedspread. Pink walls. A doll in a pink flounced skirt lolled against the pillow, its chin tucked into a white fichu over which it stared at the opposite wall where an eighteenth-century girl held a white rose to her lips. Fred pushed Mrs. Fortescue over dark red carpet, till her knees met the bed. He lifted her, and dropped her on it, neatly moving the doll aside with one hand before she could crush it.

She lay eyes closed, limp, breathing fast, her mouth slightly open. The black furrows beside the mouth were crooked; the eyelids shone blue in wells of black.

“Turn the lights out,” she implored.

He turned out the pink-shaded lamp fixed to the head-board. She fumbled at her clothes. He stripped off his trousers, his underpants, pushed her hands aside, found silk in the opening of the gown that glowed cherry-red in the light from the next room. He stripped the silk pants off her so that her legs flew up, then flumped down. She was inert. Then her expertise revived in her, or at least in her tired hands, and he achieved the goal of his hot imaginings of these ugly autumn nights in one shattering spasm that filled him with no less hatred. Her old body stirred feebly under him, and he heard her irregular breathing. He sprang off her in a leap, tugged back pants, trousers. Then he switched on the light. She lay, eyes closed, her face blurred with woe, the upper part of her body nestled into the soft glossy cherry stuff, the white legs spread open, bare. She made an attempt to rouse herself, cover herself. He leaned over her, teeth bared in a hating grin, forcing her hands away from her body.
They fell limp on the stained silk spread. Now he stripped off the gown, roughly, as if she were the doll. She whimpered, she tittered, she protested. He watched, with pleasure, tears welling out of the pits of dark and trickling down her mascara-stained face. She lay naked among the folds of cherry colour. He looked at the greyish crinkles around the armpits, the small flat breasts, the loose stomach; then at the triangle of black hair where white hairs sprouted. She was attempting to fold her legs over each other. He forced them apart, muttering: “Look at yourself, look at yourself then!”—while he held in his nausea which was being fed by the miasmic smell that he had known must be the air of this room. “Filthy old whore, disgusting, that’s what you are, disgusting!” He let his grasp slacken on her thighs, saw red marks come up on them as the legs flew together and she wriggled and burrowed to get under the cherry-red gown.

She sat up, holding the gown around her. Pink gown, pink coverlet, pink walls, pink pink pink everywhere. And a dark red carpet. He felt as if the room were built of flesh.

She was looking straight up at him.

“That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

He fell back a step, feeling his own face go hot. That was how his mother corrected him: That isn’t very nice, dear, in a long-suffering, reproachful voice exactly like Mrs. Fortescue’s.

“That wasn’t at all nice, Fred, it wasn’t nice at all. I don’t know what can have got into you!”

Without looking at him, she let her feet down over the edge of the bed. He could see them trembling. She was peering over and down to fit them into pink-feathered mules.

He noted that he was feeling a need to help her fit her pathetic feet into the fancy mules. He fled. Down the stairs, into his room, and face down onto his bed. Through the ceilingboard an inch from his ear he could hear his sister move. Up he jumped again, out of his box, and through his parents’ room, which he hated so much he behaved as if it were a vacuum, and simply not there.

His sister was lying coiled on her bed, in her cherry-pink gown, painting her nails coral.

“Very clever, I don’t think,” she said.

He looked for the gun: it was on her dressing-table, in a litter of lipsticks.

He took up the gun and pointed it down at that woman his sister in her terrifying intimacy of warm pink.

“Stupid,” she said.

“That’s right.”

She went on doing her nails.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Then why?—oh do stop it, put that thing down.”

He put it down.

“If you don’t mind, I want to get into bed.”

He said nothing, and she looked up at him. It was a long, hollow, upwards look that she had taken from an advertisement, probably, or a film. But then the look changed, and she was Jane. She had seen something in him.

His face had changed? His voice had changed? He had changed?

Triumph warmed his backbone; he smiled. He had regained his sister, he had made a step forward and come level with her again.

“Please yourself,” he said, and went to the door.

“Ta-ta, goodnight, mind the bugs don’t bite,” said she, in a ritual of their childhood—of last year.

“Oh be your age,” he said. He went through the loathsome dark of his parents’ bedroom without thinking more than: Poor old things, they can’t help it.

Y
es, I saw the look your wife’s face put on when I said, “I have so many husbands, I don’t need a husband.” She did not exchange a look with you, but that was because she did not need to—later when you got home she said, “What an affected thing to say!” and you replied, “Don’t forget she is an actress.” You said this meaning exactly what I would mean if I had said it, I am certain of that. And perhaps she heard it like that, I do hope so, because I know what you are and if your wife does not hear what you say then this is a smallness on your part that I don’t forgive you. If I can live alone, and out of fastidiousness, then you must have a wife as good as you are. My husbands, the men who set light to my soul (yes, I know how your wife would smile if I used that phrase), are worthy of you…. I know that I am giving myself away now, confessing how much that look on your wife’s face hurt. Didn’t she know that even then I was playing my part? Oh no, after all, I don’t forgive you your wife, no, I don’t.

If I said, “I don’t need a husband, I have so many lovers,” then of course everyone at the dinner table would have laughed in just such a way: it would have been the rather banal “out-rageousness” expected of me. An ageing star, the fading beauty … “I have so many lovers”—pathetic, and brave too. Yes, that remark would have been too apt, too smooth, right for just any “beautiful but fading” actress. But not right for me, no, because after all, I am not just any actress, I am Victoria Carrington, and I know exactly what is due to me and from me. I know what is fitting (not for me, that is not important but for what I stand
for). Do you imagine I couldn’t have said it differently—like this, for instance: “I am an artist and therefore androgynous.” Or: “I have created inside myself Man who plays opposite to my Woman.” Or: “I have objectified in myself the male components of my soul and it is from this source that I create.” Oh I’m not stupid, not ignorant, I know the different dialects of our time and even how to use them. But imagine if I had said any of these things last night! It would have been a false note, you would all have been uncomfortable, irritated, and afterwards you would have said: “Actresses shouldn’t try to be intelligent.” (Not you, the others.) Probably they don’t believe it, not really, that an actress must be stupid, but their sense of discrepancy, of discordance, would have expressed itself in such a way. Whereas their silence when I said, “I don’t need a husband, I have so many husbands,” was right, for it was the remark right for me—it was more than “affected,” or “outrageous”—it was making a claim that they had to recognise.

That word “affected,” have you ever really thought why it is applied to actresses? (You have of course; I’m no foreign country to you, I felt that, but it gives me pleasure to talk to you like this.) The other afternoon I went to see Irma Painter in her new play, and afterwards I went back to congratulate her (for she had heard, of course, that I was in the auditorium and would have felt insulted if I hadn’t gone—I’m different, I hate it when people feel obliged to come back). We were sitting in her dressingroom and I was looking at her face as she wiped the makeup off. We are about the same age, and we have both been acting since the year … I recognised her face as mine, we have the same face, and I understood that it is the face of every real actress. No, it is not “masklike,” my face, her face. Rather, it is that our basic face is so worn down to its essentials because of its permanent readiness to take other guises, become other people, it is almost like something hung up on the wall of a dressingroom ready to take down and use. Our face is—it has a scrubbed, honest, bare look, like a deal table, or a wooden floor. It has modesty, a humility, our face, as time wears on, wearing out of her, out of me, our “personality,” our “individuality.”

I looked at her face (we are called rivals, we are both called “great” actresses) and I suddenly wanted to pay homage to it, since I knew what that scoured plain look cost her—what it costs me, who have played a thousand beautiful women, to keep
my features sober and decent under the painted shell of my makeup ready for other souls to use.

At a party, all dressed up, when I’m a “person,” then I try to disguise the essential plainness and anonymity of my features by holding together the “beauty” I am known for, creating it out of my own and other people’s memories. Of course it is almost gone now, nearly all gone the sharp, sweet, poignant face that so many men loved (not knowing it was not me, it was only what was given to me to consume slowly for the scrubbed face I must use for work). While I sat last night opposite you and your wife, she so pretty and human, her prettiness no mask, but expressing every shade of what she felt, and you being yourself only, I was conscious of how I looked. I could see my very white flesh that is guttering down away from its “beauty”; I could see my smile that even now has moments of its “piercing sweetness”; I could see my eyes, “dewy and shadowed,” even now … but I also knew that everyone there, even if they were not aware of it, was conscious of that hard, honest workaday face that lies ready for use under this ruin, and it is the discrepancy between that working face and the “personality” of the famous actress that makes everything I do and say affected, that makes it inevitable and right that I should say, “I don’t want a husband, I have so many husbands.” And I tell you, if I had said nothing, not one word, the whole evening, the result would have been the same: “How affected she is, but of course she is an actress.”

Yet it was the exact truth, what I said: I no longer have lovers, I have husbands, and that has been true ever since …

That is why I am writing this letter to you; this letter is a sort of homage, giving you your due in my life. Or perhaps, simply, I cannot tonight stand the loneliness of my role (my role in life).

When I was a girl it seemed that every man I met, or even heard of, or whose picture I saw in the paper, was my lover. I took him as my lover, because it was my right. He may never have heard of me, he might have thought me hideous (and I wasn’t very attractive as a girl—my kind of looks, striking, white-fleshed, red-haired, needed maturity; as a girl I was a milk-faced, scarlet-haired creature whose features were all at odds with each other; I was pretty only when made up for the stage) … he may have found me positively repulsive, but I took him. Yes, at that time I had lovers in imagination, but none in reality.
No man in the flesh could be as good as what I could invent, no real lips, hands, could affect me as those that I created, like God. And this remained true when I married my first husband, and then my second, for I loved neither of them, and I didn’t know what the word meant for years. Until, to be precise, I was thirty-two and got very ill that year. No one knew why, or how, but I knew it was because I did not get a big part I wanted badly. So I got ill from disappointment, but now I see how right it was I didn’t get the part. I was too old—if I had played her, the charming ingenuous girl (which is how I saw myself then, God forgive me), I would have had to play her for three or four years, because the play ran for ever, and I would have been too vain to stop. And then what? I would have been nearly forty, too old for charming girls, and then, like so many actresses who have not burned the charming girl out of themselves, cauterised that wound with pain like styptic, I would have found myself playing smaller and smaller parts, and then I would have become a “character” actress, and then …