The Nice and the Good (21 page)

With the touch of her hand upon the wall there came the unexpected image of a piano, their old upright piano long since sold, yet now indelibly associated with the mossy wall in virtue of some lost thought which Mary must have thought once as she paused with her shopping bag at the corner of the road. Alistair had a beautiful baritone voice and they had often sung together, he playing the piano, she standing with her hands on his shoulders, head tossed back in an abandonment of song. This was a purely happy memory and she could recall even now that feeling of her face as it were dissolving into an immediate joy. Alistair could play and sing. He was also a fairly good painter, and a talented poet, and a writer, and he was good at chess, and a fencer, and a formidable tennis player. As she suddenly rehearsed these things in her mind she thought, he had so many
accomplishments
. And it occurred to her as she caressed the wall that she must have rehearsed these things, just as she had done now, when she was deciding to marry him. Only it occurred to her that the word ‘accomplishments’ belonged not to then but to now, and that it was a sad and narrowing word.

That Mary had had the nerve to come back and see the
little house in Gunnersbury was due in some obscure way to Willy. She had not spoken to him about it and indeed had never talked to him about Alistair at all. But with the hardening of her resolution to
make something
of Willy had come a sense of having somehow shirked the past, of having too cravenly put it away. She must be able to talk to Willy about Alistair and about exactly how things were and about what happened. And in order to do this she felt that she had to go back, to revive and refresh those dull old memories and those dull old pains. She had, in a quite new way which was now possible, to confront her husband.

How absolute and absorbing that confrontation would be she had not foreseen. She had not foreseen the clematis and the tiled path and the wall. Willy seemed a poor shadow now compared with the bursting reality of these things. The torpid summer atmosphere of the road whose smell, a dusty faintly tarry smell, she recognised so well, was the atmosphere of her marriage, a gradual sense not so much of being trapped as of a contraction, of things becoming smaller and less bright. Was it just that, in some quite vulgar worldly way, she had been disappointed in finding her husband less distinguished than she had imagined? Perhaps I ought not to have married him, Mary thought, perhaps I didn’t love him quite enough. Yet did it make any sense to make that judgment now? What could the wall and the moss really tell her about the mind and heart of a girl of twenty-three? She recalled now, though more as a physical object than as an intellectual one, Alistair’s enormous novel, which she had so devotedly typed out, and which she had retyped with less enthusiasm after the first two copies had become tattered almost to pieces after being sent to twenty publishers. The novel still existed. She had discovered it only a year ago in a trunk and had felt physically sick at turning its pages.

Mary now began to walk slowly down the far side of the road. She could see already that the yellow privet hedge which she and Alistair had planted had been taken away and the creosoted fence had been taken away and a low brick wall with a crenellated top had been put there instead. The small front garden, which she and Alistair had planted with roses, was entirely paved now except for
two beds out of which large sprawling rosemary bushes leaned to sweep the paving stones with their bluish branches. Now Mary, almost opposite the house, could see with a shock the light of a farther window within the darkness of the front room. They must have knocked down the wall between the two downstairs rooms. She and Alistair had often discussed doing so. She stopped and looked across. The house seemed deserted, the street deserted. She touched the smooth close-grained surface of the now thick and robust trunk of one of the prunus trees. The next tree was still missing, the one which the swerving car had knocked over.

Mary felt sick and faint, holding on to the sturdy tree. The shape of the downstairs windows brought back to her that last evening, a summer evening with a lazy pointless atmosphere like the atmosphere which she was breathing now. She and Alistair had been quarrelling. What about? There was an atmosphere of quarrel, not serious, usual, a tired summer evening quarrel. She could see the letter in his hand which he was going to take to the post. She could not see his face. Perhaps she had not looked at his face. She had come to the window to watch him go down the path and step off the pavement and she had seen everything, heard everything: the sudden swerving car in the quietness of the road, the screech of brakes, Alistair’s hesitation, his leap for safety which took him in fact right under the wheels, his hand thrown upward, his terrible, terrible cry.

Why ever did I come here, thought Mary. I didn’t know it would be like this. And, as if in substance the very same, the old thoughts came crowding to her. If only I had called him back, or tapped on the window, or said just one more sentence to him, or gone with him, as I might have done if we hadn’t been quarrelling. Anything, anything might have broken that long long chain of causes that brought him and that motor car together in that moment of time. Tears began to stream down Mary’s face. She detached herself from the tree and began to walk on. She found herself saying half aloud what she had said then crazily over and over to the people who crowded round her on the pavement. “You see, so few cars come down our road. So few cars come down our road.”

Paula was coming down the narrow stairs at Foyles. She had already spent several hours on her book-hunt and had eaten her sandwiches in the Pillars of Hercules. She had also made some purchases, which he had asked her to make, for Willy. She had not mentioned this to Mary, as she was aware that Mary was intensely jealous of anyone who performed services for Willy. This sort of discretion came to Paula quite naturally and unreflectively.

Paula was carrying a large basket full of books and also a parcel under her arm. She thought, well that’s the lot, but what shall I do with all this weighty stuff now. There was still some time before the train on which she and Pierce and Mary were to travel back to Dorset. Paula thought, I’ll go to the National Gallery and dump these in the cloak-room and look at some pictures. She emerged into the hot and crowded street and hailed a taxi.
Up and up. Heat Wave to Continue
, said the posters.

Paula knew a good deal about pictures and they brought to her an intense and completely pure and absorbing pleasure which she received from no other art, although in fact her knowledge of literature was much greater. Today, however, as she mounted the familiar steps and turned to the left into the golden company of the Italian primitives all she could think about was Eric, the image of whom, banished by the book-hunt, now returned to her with renewed force. Eric slowly, slowly moving towards her like a big black fly crawling over the surface of the round world. She had just had a postcard from him posted in Colombo.

Paula had an image of Eric’s hands. He had strange square hands with very broad flattened fingers and long silky golden hair which grew not only on the back of the palm but well down to the second finger joint. A signet ring which he wore was quite buried in this tawny grass. Perhaps his hands had somehow decided for him that he must be a potter. Paula could smell his hands smelling with the cool sleek smell of wet clay. Eric had only just managed to make a living with his pottery at Chiswick. Paula had liked his lack of worldliness, she had liked his hands miraculously wooing the rising clay, she had liked the clay. It was all so different from Richard. Perhaps I fell in love with Eric’s hands, she thought, perhaps I fell in love with the clay.
Eric had seemed to her, after Richard’s mixture of intellectualism and sophisticated sensuality, so solid and
natural
. Yet Eric was terribly neurotic, she thought for the first time. He was posing as a natural man, as an artisan, with his curious smock and his great leonine head of unkempt golden hair. Big Eric, big man. So much the greater the appalling horror of his … defeat by Richard. How could Eric ever forgive her for that defeat? The thought came to her, perhaps Eric is coming back to kill me. Perhaps that is the only thing which can give him peace now. To kill me. Or to kill Richard.

Richard. Paula, who had been walking at random through the rooms, stopped dead in front of Bronzino’s picture of
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
. Richard’s special picture. “There’s a real piece of pornography for you,” she could hear Richard’s high-pitched voice saying. “There’s the only real kiss ever represented in a picture. A kiss and not a kiss. Paula, Paula, give me a Bronzino kiss.” Paula went to the middle of the room and sat down. It was long ago, before their marriage even, that Richard had ‘taken over’ that picture of Bronzino. It was he who had first made her really
look
at it, and it had become the symbol of their courtship, a symbol which Paula had endorsed the more since she found it in a way alien to her. It was a transfiguration of Richard’s sensuality, Richard’s lechery, and she took it to her with a quick gasp of surprise even as she took Richard. Chaste Paula, cool Paula, bluestocking Paula, had found in her husband’s deviously lecherous nature a garden of undreamt delights. Paula was incapable of unmarried bliss. Her married bliss had been bliss indeed.

Paula sat and looked at the picture. A slim elongated naked Venus turns languidly toward a slim elongated naked Cupid. Cupid stoops against her, his long-fingered left hand supporting her head, his long-fingered right hand curled about her left breast. His lips have just come to rest very lightly upon hers, or perhaps just beside hers. It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent. Against a background of smooth masks and desperate faces the curly-headed Folly advances to deluge with rose petals the drugged and amorous pair, while the old lecher Time himself reaches out a long and
powerful arm above the scene to bring all sweet things to an end. “Did you go to see my picture, Paula?” Richard would always say, if Paula had been to the Gallery. The last time he had said it to her was at the end of the first and only quarrel they had had about Eric. He had said it to reconcile them. She had not replied.

Paula told the taxi to stop at the corner of Smith Street and the King’s Road. She paused beside the grocer’s shop on the corner and the grocer, who recognised her, bowed and smiled. She smiled a quick constricted smile and began to walk down the street. This was an idiotic way of torturing herself, as idiotic as the impulse she had suddenly had last year to ring Richard up at the office. She had listened silently for a minute to his familiar voice saying “Biranne”, and then a puzzled “Hello? Hello?” and then she had replaced the receiver. What she was going to do now was to look again at the house in Chelsea where she and Richard had lived. She knew, from something she had overheard Octavian saying, that he lived there still.

She walked more slowly now on the shady side of the street, the opposite side to the house. She could already see the front door, which used to be blue, and which had been newly painted in a fashionable brownish orange. He’s had the door painted, she thought, he’s
cared
enough, he looked through books and chose a colour. And as she came closer still she thought, how very clean the windows are, and there’s a window box with flowers in it that’s new. And she thought, why am I surprised? I must have been assuming that without me there it would be all cobwebs and desolation. I must have been assuming that without me Richard would be demoralised, broken down, done for. Yes, I did think that. How could he have chosen a new colour for the door without me? She stopped in the shade opposite to the house. There was no danger of Richard being there at that time of the afternoon. Paula put her hand over her left breast, curling her fingers round it as Cupid had curled his fingers round the breast of his mother. She was just wondering whether she dared to cross the road and peer in at the front window when something absolutely terrible happened. An extremely attractive and well-dressed woman came
briskly down the street, stopped outside Richard’s house, and
let herself in with a latch key
.

Paula turned abruptly away and began to walk quickly back toward the King’s Road. Hot raging tears filled her eyes. She knew now, knew it with a devouring crippling pain in her body’s centre, that she had not only assumed that without her Richard was demoralised and desolate and unable to have the front door painted. She had, not with her mind but with her flesh and her heart, assumed that without her Richard was alone.

Jessica Bird had hardly ever visited John Ducane at his own house. This had never seemed to her particularly significant. John had always told her how cheerless his own house was and what pleasure he received from visiting her flat. So they normally, and of late always, met at Jessica’s flat and not at the house in Earls Court.

Jessica had not felt deprived or excluded. Now, however, especially since he had spoken of leaving her, Ducane’s house had become in her mind a place both mysterious and magnetic, as if it contained, in the form of some talismanic object, the secret of his change of heart. She had nightmares about the house in which it appeared vastly enlarged into a labyrinth of dark places through which she wandered lost and frightened looking for John. Jessica did not yet believe that he would leave her. She did not see the
sense
of his leaving her, given that she demanded so little. She could not quite bring herself to say to him: take another mistress, I can bear it. But by making him promise to tell her when he did take another mistress she felt that she had in some sense patently condoned his doing so. What then could have driven him into these frantic efforts to escape from her? As there was no proper cause for the frenzy Jessica could not quite believe that the frenzy was real. There must be some misunderstanding, she thought, there must be some mistake.

When one is much in love—and Jessica was still much in love—it is difficult to believe that the beloved’s affection may really have diminished. Any other explanation will be accepted except this one. Besides, Jessica had already suffered her crisis of death and rebirth when John had ceased to be her lover. She had been crucified for him
already and had risen again, and this had persuaded her of her immortality. Since then John had become entissued in the whole substance of her life in a way which seemed at last invulnerable since it was removed from the drama of an ‘affair’. That he should want to take
that
from her seemed in him purely wilful.