The Beautiful Visit (31 page)

He had leaned forward and was saying: ‘My house, you know. It is shut up, and empty. No one lives there, but I want you to come to it. I thought we might get some food and eat it
there.’ He seemed almost to be pleading with me, as though he half expected me to refuse. But I assented. I did not at all want to join crowds of other people. I wanted to continue to be
alone with him without anything changed.

His house was a tall stucco building facing a park. I remember the trees on the other side of the Terrace, but it was dusk, and we had driven about so much that I had no idea where we were. We
had stopped at three places; where Ian had each time disappeared, to return at length with some packet or basket. ‘There will be drink,’ he had said. ‘We need only concentrate
upon food.’

Now we were arrived, the cab dismissed, at his empty shuttered house. He opened the door and we entered. Inside it was dark and smelled of china tea. ‘I think we will go to the
drawing-room,’ he said. ‘Give me your hand. You are awfully cold. I did not know you were so cold.’ I liked to hear him talk as we climbed the stairs, and I also liked being led
by his deliciously warm hand. On the first floor he stopped and fumbled for the door handle.

The drawing-room was a very large L-shaped room: the tall windows were shuttered, and when Ian had produced some light, I saw that the piano, the sofas and chairs, almost all the contents were
covered with white sheets; the carpets were rolled back and the surface of the mirrors was glazed with dust.

He led me to the fireplace; set down our packets; and stripping the dust sheet from a large sofa, pulled it over to me, inviting me to sit on it. ‘No, lie on it while I light the
fire,’ he said. The fire was already laid, I noticed.

‘Does this seem an impossible venture to you?’ he asked a minute later, as he knelt before the fire.

‘Very nearly.’ He looked at me, then looked as though he were about to speak, but said nothing. ‘What were you going to say?’

‘Would you let down your hair?’ he replied. ‘I should so much like to see you reclining on white velvet with your hair down.’

‘I shall need a comb.’ Instantly he handed me a small yellowed ivory comb.

‘Do not watch me then.’

‘No.’ He turned again to the fire and began building it up with pieces of wood and lumps of coal whilst I unpinned my hair.

‘Would you like another cushion?’ he asked after a time.

‘Yes.’

He rose and delved under the cover of another sofa, returning with a large yellow silk cushion.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, placing it behind my head. ‘I knew you would look beautiful like that. You should be painted. Thank you for letting down your hair. Now I am going to leave
you alone in the firelight while I collect things for our meal.’

‘Shall I not help?’

‘No. I like to think of you lying there in your dark grey skirt. You may watch the fire. I shall come back and find you.’ He walked to the door, then turned back and said: ‘You
will not be bored or frightened by yourself? I am only going downstairs. You will be all right?’

I nodded.

He shut the door. I heard his footsteps descend the bare stairs; and then there was silence. I lay watching the flames, and the shadow of the flames on the gold encrusted ceiling; the richness
of my white velvet sofa in the gentle restless light; the strands of my hair lying on the glowing cushion; and the way the parquet floor looked almost like plaited hair stamped on the ground. I
could still detect the closed scented smell which had seemed to fill the house. I was content just to lie there watching the room. There were pictures, and a mirror hanging above the piano. I began
counting the pieces of furniture, the dim white lumps placed all over the room; even in the furthest corner they could be discerned . . .

I woke to find his hand on my hair.

‘It really
is
an improbable venture,’ he was saying.

‘I didn’t intend . . .’

‘I like you to have slept,’ he said.

There was a little round table beside me with food spread on it, laid upon a knotted lace cloth. There were knives, plates and two glasses; and a black bottle wrapped in a white napkin. There
were also two small steaming pots.

‘I did not even watch the fire. What
is
in the post?’

‘Soup,’ he said proudly. ‘I bought it in a jar and I’ve made it into proper soup. There are biscuits. There was a little sherry. The fire is all right. I was not very
long, you know, but I had to keep unlocking things. My father has a passion for locking everything. He carries an enormous ring with all the keys of all his houses on it; he is unable to unlock
anything in less than half an hour.’ He sat on a stool beside me and gave me some soup and a biscuit.

‘Now, you are starving and you must eat, or the food may vanish.’

The soup was very hot and good.

‘Any soup tastes good with sherry in it,’ he said, but I think he was secretly very proud of his concoction.

‘Does your father not live here?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘he prefers to live in his club. He works incessantly, and he says he is too tired to combat a large empty house at the end of each day. So it is shut up except
for a caretaker who comes in to clean it, and make sure that nothing has been stolen.’

‘Have you been living here?’

‘No, not really. I come here a good deal, and I spent the first night of my leave here, but it was not the same as it is now. It needs another person.’ He gave me a second biscuit.
‘I shall have to go and see him again.’ He fell silent and I felt all his life that I did not know crowd into his mind.

He gave me a plate on which were half a cold bird, some potato salad, and sprig of watercress. He poured some wine into the glasses. Then he said, ‘I shall drink to our happiness. Your
happiness.’ He drank.

‘May I drink to yours?’

He gave me a glass of the red wine, looked at me, and then said in a bantering facetious manner which ill became him: ‘You may drink to my old age. My happy and prosperous
senility.’

I repeated the toast uncomprehendingly and without much enthusiasm and drank to it.

‘And now let us return to this evening. We are not old, and you are not, I think, unhappy.’

‘I think,’ I said cautiously, ‘that I am very happy.’

‘Do you? Well don’t think any more about it than that. Of course you know you deserve to be. You took an awful risk. You might be utterly ruined by now, in floods of tears, or white
and silent and desperately bored.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ he said solemnly, ‘wicked men and worse still, dull men, frequently collect young women outside London theatres, feed them on grapes and oysters, and carry them off
to some deserted house. I tell you this, because you do not seem to realize how fortunate you are that I am not wicked and hardly at all dull.’

“But how are the men to know about the women? Suppose they are dull?’

‘In these cases that is seldom a primary consideration.’

‘I knew that you were not dull – or wicked.’

‘My upbringing,’ he said sadly. ‘The bad thing about that was that although it presented a fair chance of my being dull, it made no allowance for wickedness
whatsoever.’

‘Tell me about your upbringing.’

‘I should like to hear about yours.’

‘I don’t think I was brought up. I just drifted.’

‘Probably a very good thing.’

‘Yes, but I’m still drifting. I don’t know how to stop. I have no talents, and hardly any friends.’

‘I am your friend.’

‘Yes, I . . .’

‘What would you
like
to do?’ he interrupted to relieve me.

‘What would you suggest?’

He thought for a moment and then said, ‘I should imagine that in a better world you are well equipped simply to live. You would not need a reason for doing this. But at the present time
people have all to be doing something more or less frightful in order to justify their being alive. Everyone labours under a kind of unorganized mass guilt. When they start to organize their guilt
the trouble will really begin.’

‘Will they?’

‘After this war they might. As long as we can think the Germans are even a little worse than ourselves, and the Germans can think that they are a little better than us, we shall rub along
as we are, killing each other. But when the war is over and we are forced back on to comparing ourselves with other members of the family it will not take very long before we see, or think we see,
that we are all equally wicked. Then we shall organize ourselves to compensate for this feeling. Work for work’s sake, and so on. I don’t think you’ve reached that stage.’
He gave me more wine, and then continued: ‘I think you should write. I cannot think of anything else. Have you ever tried?’

I nodded: ‘But it was no good, and I stopped.’

‘Start again. I shall expect to be sent some results.’

We finished our dinner with exquisite pears. Then he asked me to play to him.

‘I cannot play to people.’

He walked to the piano, uncovered and opened it, and came back to the fire.

‘I am not people,’ he said. ‘I cannot play, and it would give me so much pleasure to hear this piano again.’

‘After some minutes’ indecisive silence, I rose from the sofa, went reluctantly to the instrument, and played an Allemande from the English Suites. When I had finished I turned to
him, but he was staring into the fire and did not move or speak. After a moment I suddenly remembered a sonata of Scarlatti and played it.

‘What key is that in?’

‘B minor.’

‘It is most hopelessly sad. The epitome of despair. like the beginning of the end of something. Would you play it again?’

‘The end of love,’ he said when I had finished it.

I played a slow movement from a B Flat sonata of Haydn, and then shut the piano.

‘Who was that?’

‘Haydn.’

‘All people you like?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you. Please come back now.’

When I was again back on the sofa he drew up his stool, and took my hand.

‘I am already so much devoted to you,’ he said. ‘Will you remember how devoted to you I am? Will you tell me one thing? Has anyone made you very unhappy?’

‘No one.’

‘Good.’ He enclosed my hand in both of his for a moment and then said, ‘Now I suppose I must take you home.’

‘I must put up my hair.’

‘Oh yes. Stay here and I will fetch you a mirror.’

He returned with a mirror and ivory brush, which he placed on the table beside me. ‘While you do that I must extinguish the fire.’

‘What about the remains of our dinner?’

‘That will vanish of itself,’ he replied.

I remember that as we opened the front door, we were assaulted by the biting moonlit air, and a thin distant howling.

‘The wolves,’ he said. ‘They often howl at night. I had forgotten them. Do you mind walking until we find a cab?’

‘No. I do not mind anything,’ I replied.

‘Does that mean that were you in the mood for objecting, you would object to walking for a cab?’

‘No.’

We discovered a cab, and began the long quiet drive to Kensington which was the very end of our entire day together.

I think it was then that I first clearly realized that the next day was his last: it was then that I began dreading it, not very sure what precisely it was that I dreaded, not even certain that
I was not simply afraid that
he
dreaded it. I knew, at least, that he was thinking about it, and realized suddenly that he must often have done so since I had met him outside the theatre
– very much more often than the few occasions when he had spoken about his three remaining days. Now it was one remaining day, perhaps not even that. Perhaps he had meant that he was going
away in the evening. It seemed absolutely necessary to know this. I asked him.

‘Very early in the morning the day after tomorrow.’

‘Oh.’ There was one whole day left.

‘I am awfully afraid that I shall not be free until after lunch,’ he said. ‘My father arranged at the beginning of my leave that I lunch with him on my last day, and he is not
free at any other time excepting the evening, which I would like to spend with you. I should like to meet you immediately after lunch, if you would. If you would,’ he repeated, and looked at
me.

‘Where shall I meet you?’

‘Meet me just inside the National Gallery at half past two,’ he said quickly.

He must have considered the matter, I thought, as I agreed to this arrangement.

We were silent again, unable to think of anything which did not render us more silent.

‘Tomorrow night,’ I remember thinking, ‘tomorrow night I shall drive back like this with him for the last time,’ and wondered what would become of me.

‘At any rate, we have decided that you are going to write,’ he said, almost as though he were interrupting me.

‘I shall try.’

We had reached my home. He did not kiss my hand, but helped me out of the cab and then led me to the gate.

‘Will you get in?’

‘Oh yes, I have a key.’

‘I adored your hair. You are a kind and beautiful creature.’

‘I meet you at two-thirty?’

‘Two-thirty. Inside the National Gallery.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good night my dear,’ he said and returned to the cab.

I slipped into the house and up to my room as silently as possible; stripped off my clothes and endeavoured to choose my thoughts, or at least to collect the incidents of the day and savour
them. I knew that it had been a wonderful day. I
knew
this without in the least being able to count the joys, because I was filled with vague but tremendous anxieties which could not be
counted. All I could count were the hours I had left before he went, and I counted them carefully while I unpinned my hair. Eight hours at least; and he had said that he adored my hair. It had
seemed a strange word for him to use. No one had ever adored anything about me. It did not anyway seem a word to which he was accustomed. I adore your hair, I said to myself, hearing his voice; and
experienced a sharp nervous thrill. Tonight I should be able to sleep with my last thought that I should see him tomorrow; but tomorrow night – tomorrow night was like some disastrous
precipice, towards which I was inevitably propelled and on the edge of which I was inevitably forsaken. Now I should not see him until half past two, which seemed so many hours away, that the
ensuing hours with him must seem long also. He does not want to go; and I think he does not want to leave me, I thought, knowing that also. Then I lay down with the false childish little hope that
perhaps something which we both desired so intensely not to happen, would not happen.