To the Dark Tower (9 page)

But Andrée had still to be told.

The Da Costas’ house had been built in a swamp on a bend of the river. For this reason the walls always sweated, the verandas buzzed with mosquitoes, and they had been able to buy it for almost nothing. Also, it was too near the bazaar; and it was said to be haunted. But none of these things worried the Da Costas. It was big; and that was sufficient.

In the bathroom there was a mausoleum: hence the stories of ghosts. But as none of them used the bathroom, preferring to wash, if they must wash, in the courtyard, on the verandas or in their bedrooms, the ghosts left them alone. And so did the English community.

That afternoon, when Hugh drove up in a tonga, a little apprehensive, but fortifying himself with thoughts of Lucy, a chuprassi sprawled on the steps, asleep, his mouth open, his tunic undone, his turban over one eye. When he saw Hugh he grunted, shifted, and went to sleep again. The steps were blotchy where he had expectorated.

Hugh went in, smiling as he thought of Mumsie’s orderlies, saluting, standing to attention, opening doors needlessly—four Sikhs who were old and pompous and scrupulously clean. But he was not sure that he did not prefer this, entering unannounced and letting in two dogs which might perhaps be pariahs or might be Mrs. Da Costa’s pets, then colliding with some naked children whose tummies were quaintly distended, and finally walking through a room where Mr. Da Costa reclined on a sofa, the springs broken, and discussed his affairs with a group of relatives. As Hugh passed he raised two fingers in greeting and smiled through discoloured teeth, while the relatives, men and women, lying in chairs or on the floor, nodded, fanned themselves to show how hot it was, and grinned. The air was wreathed in a sour exhalation of unwashed clothes, foot-rot, tainted meat.

Next door was Mrs. Da Costa, immense among cushions, doing nothing. She, too, smiled as she drew her kimono over gourd-like bubs. In a cage in one corner of the room was a canary, half-covered with a tattered yellow shawl: as Hugh passed it winked a rheumy eye. There were lizards on the ceiling, and on the walls the wings of squashed insects. The slats of the blinds gouged horizontal shadows on bangled arms, perspiring face, plump calves. A punkah swayed and then quivered to a standstill as the coolie took pan. But when Mrs. Da Costa screeched in Hindustani it jerked upwards once more, shifting the dull air in eddies.

On the veranda there was Andrée, reclining at full length in the torrid sun, she alone cool and undisfigured by sweat. She was reading a novel, the fingers of one hand resting lightly against her cheek, her breasts rising and falling as she breathed. Under her arms were blue shadows where she had shaved herself. The garden in front shimmered like a bead curtain.

"Hullo!"

She turned round slowly, smiling at him, and the novel lay in her lap. "Hullo."

He drew up a chair, sat down, crossed his legs. "Christ, it’s hot."

"Do you think so? I like it."

For a while they said nothing more, both gazing out at the garden—if garden it could be called—where two dogs walked in circles round each other, sniffing. Then Andrée burst into peals of laughter. "It’s too absurd, those animals! Even they find it too hot."

Silence.

Then: "Andrée."

"Yes."

"I came to tell you I’m going to get married. To Miss Korrance."

She said nothing. Only her eyelids flickered, as though at the dazzle. It was impossible to tell what she felt or thought. But at last: "Yes. I’m glad," she said. "And next winter I, too, shall be married. Vivian is to get his promotion then." She scratched lazily at her scalp.

He had always known that she would take it like this. Impossible to imagine her making a scene. Why had he been so nervous—the cut under his ear, where the razor slipped, that absurdly large tip to the tonga driver? Why had he so mistrusted her? Filled with a vast tenderness he stooped downwards, ostensibly to tie his shoe. Then, in that position, he rested his cheek against her thigh. How smooth it was, how soft through the white dress! His hand stroked her knee, calf, ankle.

"Dearest." She ran grubby fingers through his hair. "Dearest... You will come and see me sometimes—just sometimes?"

"Of course."

Again the unresisting flesh, the ache that seemed to begin in his loins and forced its way upwards to his throat. "Of course."

The promise was kept.

Lucy and Hugh went to Kashmir for their honeymoon. It was Lucy’s choice because she wanted winter sports. But on the day after their arrival she dared Hugh to race her to their house on skis, slipped, and fractured her pelvic girdle. This kept her in her bed—and Hugh out of it.

On recovery, she followed Hugh to the station in the plains where he had since been sent. "Such bad luck," said Mrs. Meakins, referring to the accident. It seemed as if all the facetious references to the honeymoon that guests had made during the wedding breakfast had somehow been wasted.

Of the months that followed, in the sweltering heat of the small station, Hugh later remembered very little. In his mind there was only an eternal afternoon, walls sweating, bodies swearing, moist fingers resting on his side. Always there was promise of storms—the boom of thunder, sudden lightning, intimations of celestial pique. But no rain fell. Lucy lay beside him, and again and again, as one scratches an intolerable itch, arms met, lips closed on each other. Impossible to break away from that high bed and the weight of the ceiling. They were bound in a common doom—both anguished, resentful, humid.

This was the memory he bore with him, indefinite for the most part, without incident, a sense of heat and dazzle, the smell of damp flesh, incessant giving and incessant demand. Only a few details remained apart from this. Going on a parade, his lip bleeding where she had bitten him. (That morning he was particularly savage to defaulters.) Or coming from polo, grimed, swearing. "I’ll have a bath." he said. But: "No," she pleaded. "Stay as you are. Stay as you are." And dirty as he was, his nails black, his shirt sticking to him, she drew him downwards.

This seemed to him almost perverse. And the way in which she delighted to run fingers over his muscles, making him harden them. And hair, not of his head, in her mouth...

But of that time there was little else. Only the words of Lady Korrance when she came for a visit. "I can see that you are both madly in love."

The next winter he got leave and together they sailed for England. But first he went to see Andrée to say good-bye, making an excuse that he wished to meet colleagues he had left behind at the old station, with Mumsie and Papa and Mrs. Meakins. By an odd coincidence he arrived at the station on the night before Andrée was to be married: they had never written to each other, probably because she was almost illiterate.

Their meeting was intended to be ‘platonic’. Together they sat on the veranda, while in the house Mrs. Da Costa, Mr. Da Costa, and a host of screeching relatives made arrangements for the next day. Neither of them spoke, because they had never had much to say to each other; and now it seemed too late to begin. Bats scissored down the sky with a dry creaking of wings; for once the garden ceased to look brown and cracked like the ground of a badly preserved oil-painting, and wore a downy bloom; a fresh breeze blew from the river, bringing not unpleasant smells. But Hugh was bored. Somehow he felt it would be dishonourable to caress Andrée now, on the eve of her wedding. But what else was there to do? What else did she expect?

Soda-water sneezed into his tumbler as she pressed the siphon. Then, handing him his drink, she said with a wry smile: "Tomorrow I shall be Mrs. Green. It seems strange." Was it the moonlight that dilated her pupils and made her eyes seem luminous? Why did her lips tremble?

"Let’s drink to that," he said. "To Mrs. Green." Raising his glass he sipped at the bitter concoction she had shaken out of a row of bottles. Again he repeated the words: "To Mrs. Green."

"Don’t!" Suddenly, and for no reason, she threw herself on his shoulder, tears streaming from her eyes. Her breasts shook convulsively as they lay against him. "I can’t bear it! I’m so frightened!"

"Frightened? But, my dear, why? Don’t you want to—? Don’t you love him?"

"Oh, yes, yes! Of course, I love him! I’m really very happy. It’s silly of me to cry like this. It’s just that I feel—afraid."

"But why—why?" he repeated, tender yet amused. It baffled him that after all she had experienced at his hands she should still have room for fear. Was she afraid of Green’s clumsiness? Or did she expect something more, some special miracle? Almost without thinking he began to caress her.

So it ended in this—what he had been determined to avoid.

On the voyage home Hugh suddenly made a discovery—with Lucy’s help. It was not a very original discovery, but for these two it was certainly a momentous one: for from that moment began the letter quarrels, the raising of voices in public rooms, the scenes in the halls of hotels. The discovery was this: it is often those people who are most concerned to appear ‘unconventional’ who are truly convention’s slaves. At the station Lucy had appeared such a free spirit, even ‘wild’: Mrs. Meakins, Mumsie, all of them would have agreed that she was independent and went her own way. And yet, and yet ... Why, for example, when Hugh suggested that they should spend their leave in Greece, did she reject the idea, not because she did not like it (he would have understood that) but because "Everyone goes to England when they have leave". Why did she say, "You have failed me", on that evening when he somehow forgot that the Captain had invited them to play bridge and instead gossiped with some third-class passengers in their cabin? Why did she burst into tears when he said that he did not wish to accompany her to Simon Artz, but preferred to take a car into the desert? Why, why? Could it be that Lucy who had always pretended to despise social functions—Lucy who had given herself to him on that picnic, resolutely, defiantly—could it be that she, too, was like the rest of them? It certainly looked like it.

So they didn’t go to Greece. So they bought turkish delight in the company of one governor-general and consumed it in the company of another. So they became ‘good sorts’ and ‘dears’ and ‘nice people’. So they spent their leave at Bournemouth.

"Restful", said one of the passengers who advised this place to them. But Lucy did not find it so. Now that they lived in a small and dank and economical pension, artfully concealed from the sea by three bigger and more expensive hotels (but ‘only three minutes from the front’, said the tinted brochure), now that there were no servants, no dogs, no horses to beat or tame, she became suddenly fretful, ill-at-ease, petulant. She changed. Perhaps, after all, she wished that they had ignored what people said and gone to Greece.

"But I feel so shut-in here. I know no one."

"Oh, come, darling..."

"No—no one! No one that is worth knowing. I hate it."

"There’s nothing to prevent our going away."

"Where on earth could we go?"

"Anywhere."

"But it would only be the same."

Suddenly she began to ask questions about his grandmother, his father, the baronetcy. Once she said: " Of course, as I am the only child..." and then stopped, blushing.

She made him take her each evening to the grandest hotel in the town. How it bored him! For hours she prepared for this, lacing her figure, tinting her face, piling her hair into monumental turrets. And then, after it was all done, they sat together, glum, unspeaking, sipping sherry in the lounge while her sulky eyes roamed among the other guests. Then home—to bed.

She resented the money he spent on books, excursions to the country, the hire of a yacht. All these things she regarded as hostile to her. They drained his time and his energies when she should have them exclusively. They were almost as hateful as those other enemies—his friends.

Once, coming home from a day in the New Forest, he thought she greeted him with undue effusiveness. Yet somehow she seemed constrained, triumphant. "Let’s have some wine," she said at dinner: and later, in their room, she began to whirl round and round in a waltz, her skirt swinging outwards, the colour mounting to her cheeks. Then she collapsed on to the bed, dizzy, laughing, coughing.

Suddenly and for no reason he felt angry with her. He had to repress the desire to strike her face. "I’m going to bed now," he said, and went into the dressing-room.

Then he saw what had happened.

"Where is that book?" he demanded.

"What book, dear?"

"The book that was by my bed."

"I don’t know what you are talking about."

"You know perfectly well. The one that arrived this morning. S. N. George’s new book."

"No, really, dearest—"

"Don’t lie to me!" In a sudden rage he caught one of her wrists and twisted it. "Where is that book? What have you done to it?"

She moaned, struggled; tears ran down her cheeks. "Let go! You’re hurting! Let go!"

"Where is that book?" he repeated, suddenly seeing the whole scene in the mirror above the mantelpiece and feeling ashamed of himself. But he still gripped her wrist, still shook her.

"I burned it."

"Burned it!"

"Oh, darling, it was horrible. I couldn’t bear to have it lying in our rooms. I didn’t want you to read it. I picked it up quite by chance, you see. And then ... You do understand, don’t you? You’re not cross with me?"

He looked at her in incredulity. "Horrible? What do you mean? What’s wrong with the book?"

"That first poem ... It was all that I read. It was—‘On the Statue of a Greek Boy’—or something like that. I—I didn’t know that men thought such things. It frightened me." She rested her head in his lap, where he had sunk on to the bed, the warm tears splashing his hands.

He could not help being tender towards her: "There’s nothing to be frightened of—nothing to upset you. You see, S. N. G. was trying to recapture the spirit of a Greek sculptor—and he must have felt rather like that. The Greeks thought differently from us, that’s all. It’s not a matter of right or wrong... Théocritus, Virgil—" How could he go on? He knew he could never explain to her. Gently, but resolutely, he freed himself from her grasp.