A Misalliance (22 page)

‘Arrangements? Oh, the
arrangements
. Well, I rather think the arrangements are Patrick’s affair.’

Watching Bertie eat, as she had done so many times, she was distressed to find that she felt the simple satisfactions of an earlier mode of being. It was as if, in him, she found intimations of her own validity, as if without him that validity disappeared. This was no way, she knew, for a self-respecting modern woman to feel. She also knew that his absence had driven her to strange excesses, all the more strange because they seemed so harmless. Just as some women turn to drink, to food, to shoplifting, Blanche had turned to flirtations with other lives, good works, and uplifting pastimes. She had never doubted that her heart was not fully engaged in these activities, but she had accepted them, haplessly and with a feeling of humility, apologizing all the while to older and more vigorous memories of her former self, for her abject impersonation of worthiness, trying, without prejudice, to learn the art of self-sufficiency. She, who had called Mousie timorous, had become even more timorous herself, able to recognize in others the panic fight for freedom, able to appreciate, to admire, what she now thought of as indifference. For although her place was here, her services must be devoted elsewhere, whatever the misconceptions involved, whatever the misalliances, and despite the clouded conscience that came from an awareness that she was, in all this, without enthusiasm. Bertie, glancing at her over his fork, saw that she looked stern, mysterious.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked politely, knowing that
this was the sort of question to which she always, and voluminously, responded.

‘I was thinking of other lives,’ she said, ‘and how attractive they always look. And how misleading they are when you know a little more about them. It is probably better to leave other lives alone. And I suppose I was thinking about children and how they present you with a version of yourself. Or how you feel yourself to be.’

But this was of no interest to Bertie, who at last came round to what was uppermost in his mind.

‘What will you do about Patrick?’ he said.

‘About Patrick? Why should I do anything about Patrick?’

‘I got the impression that you and he were going away together.’

Blanche laughed. ‘How little you know him. If there were any question of Patrick going away with me he’d be busy discussing it with somebody else. You surely can’t think, Bertie …’

‘Well, yes,’ he said stiffly. ‘I did rather.’

‘And how little you know
me
. If I went away with anyone it would hardly be with Patrick. I should choose someone with a little more, how shall I put it?
Élan? Élan vital?
Patrick is
decorous
. Do you remember how my mother approved of him for just that reason? Patrick might well go overboard for a woman but it would hardly be for someone like me.’

‘Why not? You are still attractive.’

‘But don’t you understand? Patrick sees
me
as decorous. Someone who can be relied upon to do the decent thing.’ She laughed again. ‘And if only you knew how tired I am of doing the decent thing. Or trying to do it.’ She gestured out of the window. ‘There are people out there, Bertie, who never do the decent thing. You know them. I know them. I used to think that I could spot them all over the place. I blame the National Gallery for that, of course. All those deities carrying on their uninhibited lives.
In full view
. It
took me a long time to realize that anyone can do it, if they have a mind to. I still don’t know whether it takes will or just capacity. The character of such lives is to be unfinished, open-ended, escaping control. I suppose that is what gives them their mythic quality. Others abide our question; they are apparently free.’

‘Then who will you go away with?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe I shall go alone and make the best of it. My pleasures are very simple, as you know. It will not be a holiday like the one you have just had. There will be no crowd to make up a party for dinner. I enjoyed it once. I suppose you still do.’

‘I like company, yes.’

‘And I expect,’ she said lightly, looking out of the window, ‘that you and Mousie will get married one of these days.’

‘I dare say we shall get around to it.’

There was a silence, for this, to Blanche, was the end of everything. He watched her carefully. ‘When will you go?’ he said.

‘Oh, as soon as possible. There are one or two things to be sorted out here, one or two involvements, and then I shall go. I might even look for somewhere to live. I think that might be best. Yes, that is what I shall do. You can have this flat, of course. You always liked it more than I did.’

‘You seem to find it very easy to get rid of our past life.’

‘I do, don’t I? Perhaps I should have done it earlier. I have been ridiculous, sitting here, waiting for you to come. And telling you not to. As if that were any way to live. Plato tells us that pleasures mixed with pain are only lesser pleasures. How right he is.’

‘Is that all I am? One of the lesser pleasures?’

‘What you are can no longer be serious, because it is half-hearted. Your life is somewhere else, somewhere inaccessible to me. One is supposed to get over these things, and I shall
get over it, of course I shall. It is just taking rather a long time, that’s all. And I dare say I am to blame. At the moment my life is no longer serious either. I am playing at being something that I do not know properly how to be. And I shall see it through to the end because honour is the highest good. I believe that to be true. But how hard it is, sometimes. How I should like to be different.’

‘Don’t change, Blanche.’

‘I think I must, you know. I will hardly do as I am; my respectability is against me. I have cast myself for the wrong role. Well, it is too late to do anything about that. As I say, I shall see it through. But then I shall try to change. Try to live a little more carelessly. Artlessly. That is to say, without art. Art can be very subversive. I have found that out.’

‘I must go,’ he said, glancing at his watch.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You must.’

‘Your standards were always too high, Blanche.’

‘Were they? Then they will have to go too.’

She got up and started straightening cushions. He caught her arm, but she turned away.

‘I never was, you know,’ he said, turning away himself.

‘Never was what?’

‘Half-hearted,’ he said.

That night Blanche stood at the window, curtain in hand, watching the street. Then she went to bed and lay for a long time, unsleeping.

‘Had quite a party here last night, I see,’ said Miss Elphinstone, turning on both taps and speaking above the noise. ‘Mind you don’t go overdoing it, now. You don’t look at all well to me.’

‘I’m going away,’ said Blanche, feeling like Captain Oates. ‘I might be gone for some time.’

Nothing surprised Miss Elphinstone. Trained in the ways of the Lord, she was proof against all contingencies, although strangely indifferent to life’s more savage demonstrations. Routinely cheerful, she could be thought by the unwary to be complacent, were it not for her smile, which flashed on and off unpredictably; sometimes Blanche would attempt to cut short Miss Elphinstone’s elaborate marginalia only to be rewarded by a smile of great benevolence which revealed, if anything, a consciousness greatly superior to her own. Miss Elphinstone, upright and blameless, unchanging in her demeanour and her attributes, was a tribune of excellence before which Blanche was obliged to lay all her plans. Nothing was really tolerable without Miss Elphinstone’s approval. It was Miss Elphinstone who had cast doubt on Blanche’s attempts to entertain Elinor, saying that Elinor was too young to go out without her mother. Since that remark, Blanche had looked askance at her own efforts and had distanced herself from her earlier eagerness. Part of her reluctance to admit Sally to the flat stemmed from a sense
of Miss Elphinstone’s disapproval, although this was not the entire story. On her only visit Sally’s appraising eye had been quick to compute the difference in income between Blanche and herself and had pitched her expectations accordingly; those expectations had been relentless but not on the whole unreasonable. Now that she was leaving, Blanche desired to put the record straight on as many counts as possible. A great movement of renovation was under way for which she must be worthy. She submitted to Miss Elphinstone her need for a change of air and was oddly relieved to see her nod in agreement. ‘Well, I’ve got my key,’ she said. ‘I’ll look in same as usual. I expect you’ll turn up again when you’ve had enough. Do you want to take that dish next door to Mrs Duff before you forget?’ For to Miss Elphinstone, the immediate task was more interesting than the remote possibility; it could be said that she had little imagination were it not for her sense of priorities, which safeguarded her against eccentricity. Miss Elphinstone was demonstrably sane, without fantasies; great was her interest in other lives, yet by some sort of divine sanction she was immune to any effect they might have had on her own. Blanche envied her her impermeability: having no sense of the relative importance or unimportance of others, Miss Elphinstone lived a life of true enlightenment, always mildly interested but never ill-served by curiosity, and virtuously immune to speculation. Miss Elphinstone would allow Blanche a certain leeway in her affairs though she would be quick to notice anomalies. She appeared to think that a short absence could be sanctioned. Blanche did not tell her by how much the absence might be prolonged, for she was not yet clear about this in her own mind. She thought in terms of reconnaissance, of looking for a house. But really she felt it was her removal from this place that counted, rather than her presence elsewhere, for she saw that presence as nebulous, immaterial. She allowed her mind to rest on the fact that
Miss Elphinstone saw her need to get away; what was to happen next was as yet without definition and could be kept at bay for the time being.

It was a beautiful soft day, of the kind that announces autumn. An early sun had given way to a whitish grey clarity, against which the dark trees stood immobile in the windless air. Outside the greengrocer’s ragged asters and tight complicated dahlias had taken the place of the unconvincing roses and carnations of a metropolitan summer. Leaves, although still green, were beginning to fall; a man was sweeping them from the gutters. Blanche made her way for the last time to Sally’s basement; some impulse caused her to buy a bunch of flowers, the sort of greeting that Sally might find appropriate, for it was somehow unthinkable to appear before her empty-handed. Sally received presents; she did not give them. Blanche’s cakes, and even her money, she saw now, were disdained as graceless. Sally preferred funds to come winging through the atmosphere, preferably in large quantities, without the embarrassment of a known human intermediary. Thus, while accepting all contributions, she would deplore the style of the giver, and in so doing, remain faithful to her own standards. Blanche began to see that Sally had never cast herself as a deserving or a needy case; she merely thought it reasonable that others should tide her over, until a throw of the dice should have moved her on to a different state of affairs. Theoretically she was always willing to do the same for others, but practically this was somehow never possible. While recounting past generosities and affirming future ones Sally was always in the present without funds. To Sally, accountability was the sign of a pinched and feeble spirit. Yet she implied criticism of those who did not help her, as if she had taken rapid and expert measure of their financial position.

It occurred to Blanche that she had been wildly anachronistic in trying to impose reasonable expectations on Sally.
Sally’s expectations, she now knew, were so different from her own as to seem incomprehensible, just as she, Blanche, had seemed incomprehensible to Sally. ‘You do so little,’ Sally had once said, meaning, ‘You do so little with your money,’ for although she asked no questions she possessed accurate information. Her instincts were so untrammelled that her view of things was in an odd way right. Not for her the hesitations of reflection, the pale cast of thought. What she would have appreciated was some huge treat, since in her view Blanche was in a position to offer her one, a shopping spree, the gift of a car, or a holiday. Anything less met with clouded indifference and a look of disappointment, as if she detected the giver in an attitude of unworthiness. Silence was her only answer to Blanche’s contributions although she never hesitated to solicit them. Indeed, her reaction was to solicit more, as if hoping to stimulate Blanche to some vast final disgorgement of funds, upon receipt of which she would, at last, smile.

It was difficult to fault her, thought Blanche, sniffing the scentless crimson dahlias. There was no blame attaching: it was just that in her dealings with Sally misconceptions ruled. Those misconceptions had been complicated. On a reasonable level she had truly expected only to tide Sally over, as she put it. But superimposed on this had been the fascination of an alien species, one that literally took no heed of the morrow, and passed through life expecting pleasures where others would think in terms of duties. The irregularity of Sally’s life, the contrast between past affluence and present indigence, the promising information, which turned out not be information at all, the complicated situation of the husband, the misreading of the character of the Demuths and of their durability – as if they were not expected to outlast her acquaintance with them – and above all the obduracy of the child, which now seemed less emblematic, less symbolic, and more a symptom of late but normal
development: all this she had cast in the form of a story to which she might contribute. The essence of the story, however, was not that she was expected to help it along but merely to read it, in instalments, supplying appropriate exclamations of wonder, indignation, encouragement, sympathy. If she had been needed at all it was as a chorus, discreetly unfolding money in a suitably bodiless and unembarrassing manner, and contributing an uncritical appreciation of Sally’s current difficulties. That no single human being could maintain this attitude indefinitely did not matter to Sally; after all, there were plenty of others, all of them replaceable. The essential thing was to be Sally, but here Blanche saw that she was overstating the case, for Sally had never once stepped outside her own consciousness. If Mr Demuth refused Paul money, then Mr Demuth was a beast, a vile, crass, ignorant primitive. Of Mrs Demuth she appeared to have no clear picture, probably because she found it hard to credit other women with their own identity. Mrs Demuth was simply someone who was storing her fur coat. Whether she knew of its true ownership Blanche had no idea: probably not, for she had always thought of it as hers. Patrick and Blanche she saw as dreary guardians of the constitution, pedantic in their attempts to sort out her affairs, although Patrick had shown promise in trying to step outside his role. But Sally knew that Patrick could not sustain his flight. Blanche she saw quite clearly as incapable of any flight whatsoever.