The Young Desire It (35 page)

She was looking from one to other, smiling. Charles closed his lips in a way new to her knowledge of him; she saw it, and caught the sudden anger in his eye.

‘It won't look right,' he said impatiently. ‘You go back as far as the hedge, and you'll see what I mean.'

‘The weather,' Jimmy repeated with mild, imperturbable certainty. ‘You can't go against that, Mist' Charles.'

‘Well,' he said, ‘I don't agree that it ought to go that way. That's all.'

‘Jimmy is right, son.'

His mother's smiling words, contradicting what she had said a minute earlier, ended the matter. He turned away abruptly, and was going towards the house, to escape from the fire of the sun and from a fresh sense of open conflict which was intolerable to him. As he walked between beds of brilliant, hot flowers, watching his inky shadow cling like a pool to his feet, her hand touched his shoulder and she was there beside him, smiling still, but without triumph.

‘You silly fellow,' she said. ‘Jimmy meant nothing.'

He saw that behind her smile was unease and unhappiness, and made an effort, as they went inside, to show a contrition he did not quite feel.

‘I'm sorry, Mother. I know quite well it doesn't matter which way the bed goes.'

She pressed his arm against her. In the house, blinded securely against the day, there was a deep coolness that smelt faintly of polished wood and flowers and books. They went together to the long front room.

‘Did you have any letters?' she asked suddenly.

‘Yes.'

‘Oh. Nice?'

‘All right—yes, quite nice.'

‘I just wondered. Do you write to Mr. Penworth? You don't speak of him now as you used to.'

He had won back composure and recovered sufficiently from his first shock of surprise to be able to raise his head and smile.

‘I haven't yet,' he said. ‘I will though.'

She knew, before a sudden intensification of reserve in his voice and face, that she had not the courage to ask what she so keenly wished to know.

‘Nothing's wrong, is it, darling?' she said at last. ‘You're just over-tired still, I expect.'

‘No, nothing's wrong.' He was swinging himself from side to side, balanced on his heels.

‘Oh, son, don't do that. It takes off all the polish. What are you going to do with yourself?'

He stopped swinging about, and with a new determination drew near and sat down on the arm of her chair, looking into her upturned face. She was calm; she bent the flimsy hat of straw between her hands idly, returning his look with a look more questioning.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘But on Sunday I—I promised Mrs. McLeod, that is, I promised Margaret last time I'd take her to the big pool this summer. Could I have some lunch? Would Emily mind?'

He had almost said ‘Would you mind?' but caught himself from it in time. She looked away, shaking her head.

‘I'm sure Emily wouldn't. What would you like?'

‘Just something easy,' he said with relief; for he saw how much he had feared her spoken opposition, and now it was past, her consent given, part of the unknown future known and assured to him. She was sighing faintly; her hands ceased moving in her lap, and lay still. He was on his feet again, hearing her sigh, thinking it a sign that all was not yet certain.

‘Well,' she said lightly, ‘I'll see Emily about it now. After that I must write some letters.'

She stood up, and without another word, without smiling, left him there. He saw her expression of sorrow, and went up the stairs slowly, longing for but in despair of present repose and an easing of this mad strain between them, and determined at the same time that no weakening of his own should ease it. When he was in his room again, he lay down on the bed, breathing heavily as though he had been running.

She was watching, he thought; she knew—she has known all the time. That was why she called me down. She wanted to see, to be sure.

He closed his eyes and pressed his clenched hands together, in an effort to think. In itself her knowing mattered nothing to him; but he feared the difficulties between them when she tried, as he knew she would try, to be kind without desiring to be kind. A cold compassion flowed in him. Trying to be kind, when they could not even speak to one another! She never knew what to say. There was nothing to say; no words between them now would ease either him or her. She would lie awake thinking what to say, and never be able to say it so that he could understand; and so they would remain like this, like enemies.

Afterwards, he thought, when it's all finished…

The thought came like a cool wind into the hot fervour of his mind. When all was over. There was to be an end, then? He dropped his hands on the blue coverlet, letting his fingers relax and fall open as though all strength had gone out of him. From shoulder to heel he felt his own weight stretched out on the bed, relaxed, heavy, unable to move. If he had been asleep he could not have lain more heavily or more still.

The bed bore him up; he looked at the ceiling, and saw above him the girl's grave face gazing down into his. She was always there now. But an end—he could not picture it. He wondered what it would be like, and what was to pass between them before then. How did one say good-bye? That was a word which somehow they had never said. It was as if they had superstitiously avoided it, in a primitive suspicion and fear of all words. I would not close a door after her, if she went out of a room. Good-bye would be a door closing; blankness drawn across her face, her body, her hair, her arms and hands and all, as though after that she could exist no more. He saw it happening. He said the word aloud to himself. ‘Good-bye.' It had no meaning, he thought angrily; two syllables hinged on clattering consonants, with as much power and as little meaning as has a key with which you lock a door; a formless thing with sorrow and relief for its secret.

He did not want to lose her, yet already she was lost to him.

Who started it? he thought. Neither of us. Or was it I, and is this a punishment? We have had nothing from it all but this. We did no harm to anyone; we have done nothing except be alone together.

His mind returned again to that first long look between them, when from almost nothing had been created something that now, under the compulsion of desire, retrogressed its first appearance to reveal an origin in the heart of time itself. It seemed as though each had held the half of a secret, and as though by the eternal impulse towards unity those halves must come together and they with them, so violently that life had seemed to end there, not begin. Afterwards came the unrecognized clamour of the flesh, and inevitable confusion; life thrusting towards fulfilment when a greater fulfilment had already been encompassed.

Some understanding of this laboured to be born in him, but he could not find words for what he was sure he knew. He entered again and again into the endless brevity of that look between them, until he imagined his own figure and hers, marble, without consciousness and beyond motion, turned each to other under the August sky. Her passionate confessions of knowledge were, it seemed, as nothing when he remembered that. Even their one cold kiss was like a gesture made without thought, lacking consequence, a common admission of perfect sympathy in understanding.

She had said, ‘Wait till I come down…You can have me to take away with you.'

He shivered, and wished he had not left her there laughing behind her gloved fingers. She had more understanding than he had. There was something she knew; the words, now, were tremendous with promise. She must know. She had spoken like that, impetuously, out of some irresistible conviction, as though she had a woman's years. ‘You can have me to take away with you.' The words seemed strange to him, like the feckless words of a fool; but she had said them consciously, deep-sunk in each word, as though they were the brief statement of a matured philosophy.

A fanatical blindness of thought made him fail to see the import of them. I can't get there, he repeated. I remember and remember, and it seems as though everything has already happened. And still I want her.

That afternoon he went down to the river and tired himself with swimming. Relaxation came with weariness. When his body was exhausted by the thin, unresisting fresh water, he dragged out into the sun, and lay face-downwards until the heat stupefied him, and all the images in his mind became slow and vivid, poised between waking and sleeping, like the most vivid of dreams. All that afternoon he remained there, lying in the delicate shade of the leaves of great Chinese bamboos that rose stooping high into the pale sky, curved and motionless. He lay so still that the leaves and stems of grass branded a complex red net of pattern on his arms and legs; the water dried away; ants came out of the grass, crawled over him, and fell back into the grass again. Laboriously the sun shifted over to the west, and the still air was a little easier, cooled here by the water in which every overhanging spray and leaf was mirrored with eternal perfection. After some time, finding the leaf-shadows gone and the sunlight crawling dangerously up his legs and bare back, he staggered to his feet and dropped into the water again. It was cool enough to make him gasp a little. He crossed to the far bank and crawled on to a log that ran down into the water; there he perched, and the tiny dragon-flies, ruby and sapphire, came and perched with him, on the brown rotted trunk and on his bare knees.

From the platform Emily called to him; there was tea made. She peered out from under the droop of a towel flung over her head. In summer she put a towel or an apron over her head even at sunset, as though while ever the sun was above the horizon its light was personally dangerous and malicious to her uncovered. He waved, and watched her climb up the rough stair cut into the bank. Life would go on, with balance and purpose underlying its confusion, as long as there was Emily to call people to drink tea in the late afternoon.

That night, and all the next day, he kept himself so employed that thought was held at arm's length most of the time. In the evening of Saturday, when the sun was dropping down out of the world in a blaze of rusty, hard light, angry and powerless, he set off for that part of their boundary along which the railway line passed towards the south. His mother, who now kept herself quietly aware of his movements, saw him go, without a word; and as he went out the garden gate and down the drive between the old, friendly pear trees whose upper limbs held the red light like velvet, he knew she was looking after him, but did not care. When he had closed the white gate behind him, he turned to look at the sun, as he was used to do. It must be, he thought, after seven, and the evening train came in soon after half past. He would have to make haste.

For a few minutes he ran headlong after his lean sliding shadow. Then all at once, jerking to a halt, he sat down in the warm dry grass of a bank at the edge of a field. It was, after all, useless to go off like this simply to see the train she would come by. His breath rushed fast and dry from running; the warm grass, full of crickets and singing insects mad with sunset fever, smelt as sweet as flowers in that still air. Far away the tops of the blue hills were on fire with the last of the light; the sky was white behind them. Looking at them now, he remembered speaking of those lonely men who came down, in summer evenings when work was done, to watch the evening train go by. Mad, he had said they must be; and now in his way he was akin to that madness. They came down to see and hear a proof that the world still existed beyond their solitary shacks; he would have gone to assure himself that the world he knew had not suddenly contracted to the sharp limits of his own thought. After all, it was a kind of madness, such as is visited upon the lonely ones of the earth.

He sat in the dry grass, and the evensong passion of the insects seethed about him like an invisible ocean stretched from the horizon in the east to the red west. His hair had been on fire, and the flame went out in it quickly; light was going up into the sky, going out. Night must fall.

To-morrow, he thought, to-morrow. Only this night between now and then.

High over him the sky was as pale as moonstone, without a cloud; pale as though a veil of fine gauze had been drawn over it, serene and illimitable. When the sun had set light lingered in the warm air, and soon he could smell the earth's evening exhalation, like a long sigh released, underlying the intolerable nostalgic sweetness of the dry grass stretched for miles under the evening. He got up and walked through the fields towards home.

A murmur on the face of the silence arrested his hand as he was about to open the drive gate, and he stood still, listening, his hand still resting on the white bar. It was the evening train going in.

The low rush of sound swelled faintly, lying on the silence like the stroke of a pencil across a printed page, cancelling but not obliterating. When, after what seemed an unusually long time, it faded out and he could hear nothing but the stillness, he opened the gate and went through. The sound of his feet on the road of the drive was sudden and loud.

That night Charles slept heavily, as though some strong drug had been given him. In the morning, when he woke an hour after sunrise, he remembered no dreams. A leaden heaviness of fear seemed to tear his heart downward on its strings, but the pulse of excitement fluttered moth-like in the cold palms of his hands. He put on his clothes with irrelevant solemnity, as though he had been a condemned man dressing for execution; shoes without socks, a blue shirt, grey trousers, such as he wore on any summer morning—clothes that could be slipped off hurriedly and without thought by a pool's edge, flung over the courteous arm of a tree, forgotten; clothes that clung briefly to a wet body, and dried in the sun, forgotten and kind.

At the breakfast table on the veranda he ate rapidly, with simulated appetite. His hands were beginning to tremble whenever he stiffened his wrists.

I must get out of this, he thought angrily; get away and get it over, whatever it is.