Earthly Powers (15 page)

       Kiss. "Angel, it's seemed like a long time." He put down his bag.

       "But why the diffident knock?"

       "No keys. The whole damned bunch of them disappeared just before I went northwards. No matter. Must have a drink, angel. Parched." And he mixed himself Haig and water. Strange to consider that we had no refrigerators in those days. He drank and poured himself more. Then he sat on the striped couch, his artificial leg grotesquely stiff before him. "One of my bad days, angel. The bloody chafing."

       "Take it off, Rodney. We shan't be going out, shall we? I managed to get hold of a nice piece of mutton. And capers. And a virtually immaculate cauliflower. We'll have a pleasant dinner." I looked on him with love, neat and compact in his stiff grey suit, humorously ugly, tanned as though he'd been to summer Blackpool, not Manchester. "How was it?"

       "Messed up as from Thursday. Dear Mabel, Mrs Hushabye you know, got a telegram, War Office. Poor bitch, I'd met Frank, nice lad. She did the brave little woman, the show must go on, but she forgot her lines and broke down, nerve-racking. What Manchester thinks today London will think tomorrow. Manchester says pshaw to Shaw. And it wasn't really my part, not my part at all. You writing something for me?" He saw the manuscript on the desk.

       "This is singing and dancing. Do take that leg off."

       "You? Singing and dancing? Well, I suppose it had to happen. I can sing, as you know, angel. A peglegged dance might bring the house down. But no, I have to get down to Claudius for Bentinck. God, I'm so thirsty." I mixed him a fresh drink. "Had the shivers on the train. Cold early train in the dark of foredawn. A bit feverish. Feel my head."

       "Hot. Get nearer the fire. Sweat it out."

       He had a bad cold, sure enough. He could eat little dinner. I got him to bed with a hot water bottle and a tumbler of grog. I lay beside him. He threshed, he mumbled his Captain Shotover lines in the night.

       "Nothing but the smash of the drunken skipper's ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a trap."

       "Rodney, Rodney dear—"

       "The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water, and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?"

       He sweated in gushes, soaking the sheets, then woke raging with thirst. I gave him tepid barley water. "Thanks, angel. A bit better, I think. Sweated a lot of it out. God, we'd better do something about this bed." I got him out of his soaked pyjamas and made him sit, shivering now, wrapped in the counterpane while I turned the mattress over and fetched fresh sheets. Then, both naked, we got back in and clasped each other, and I soothed his poor aching stump with stroking fingers. So embraced, we finally slept, lullabyed by the first milk floats.

       In full winter morning rainlight I dreamed that the bedroom door was open and that there were people standing there. Was I sickening too? No, it was no dream. There were people in the room, three, two men and a woman.

       "I see. Filth," said Linda Selkirk in sable coat and sable toque. The two men might have been younger and elder brother, both with glum Old Bill whiskers, in drab herringbone overcoats, one, the elder, with his bowler hat on.

       "Get out," I said to them all, pulling my numbed arm from under sleeping Rodney. "You've no right in here. You broke in, I'll have you for trespass." One never says the right things. Linda Selkirk bitterly jingled a keyring from the end of her gloved right index finger. Rodney began to snore to compete with the voices.

       She said, "Trespass. A wife has a right to be with her husband. Have you gentlemen," she asked her companions, "seen enough?"

       The elder, he with the hat on, said in a Thamesside whine: "There's certain differences, madam. If that gentleman there was a lady—..." pointing at me. "You see the difference, madam. Soldiers sharing a bivouac, that's not adultery."

       "What are you two?" I tried to shout. "Police officers? Where's your warrant?"

       "Ah, expected police officers, did you?" said the other one. "And why would that be, sir?"

       "As for entering without permission," the still-hatted one said, "the lady was frightened of violence. Any citizen has the right to protect. And she has a right to be in here."

       "You two look," said Linda, "and remember. Men in bed, their arms round each other, disgusting. He comes straight here, ignoring his wife and children, wallowing in filth."

       I nearly said, We changed the sheets. Infection from my trade. I said, "Here you see a sick man." Unfortunately Rodney was now awake, audible licking a parched mouth, looking with wide-eyed hate on his wife. He did not seem surprised at her presence here; he did not seem to see the two whiskered men. "He came here sick. I've spent the entire night looking after him. Your job," I said stupidly to Linda Selkirk.

       "He can act sick," she said. "He's acted sick before, just as he's acted love. And don't you tell me what my job is, you filthy sodomite."

       "Careful, madam," said the unbowlered.

       Rodney was trying to sit up, well-backed by pillows. There we were, two men in bed, clearly naked from the waist up. I grabbed my dressing gown from the bedside chair and, like any spinster, covered my breasts.

       "Prothero Agency, eleven Wardour Street," the hatted man said, making the gesture of getting ready to produce a card from an inner pocket. "Witnessing an act of infidelity being the purpose of our business."

       "Take that bloody hat off in my house," I cried.

       "Yes, sir." And he took it off. He seemed to have dyed his hair some time past; the dye was working out; there were patches of dirty grey and dead black and a residual henna glow. "Madam," he said, "you can lay an evidence. Perhaps you've been told that already."

       Rodney now seemed to be acting a well though demented man. "Bitch," he said, "you can go to bloody Kemble as he calls himself. He has two legs and he can shove them both between yours. Leave us alone, we're all right as we are."

       "I'll leave you alone," she said, "and I'll make sure you leave the children alone. Have you," she said to the two witnesses, "seen enough?"

       "The act's always hard to prove," said the younger. "That's well-known in law. It's all circumstantial."

       "You heard that," she said, "from his own filthy mouth. About leaving them together."

       "Yes," Rodney said, getting out of bed. "Get out, go on. You can have Kemble, making a bloody fool of me all over London."

       "Discretion of the court," muttered the younger witness. He looked at Rodney getting out of bed naked, lacking a leg. "Ah," he said. The other shook his head sadly, as in pity, as at the hopelessness of our situation, the leglessness being an added perversity. Rodney, hissing "Bitch bitch," hopped two paces, holding on to the bed, ready to spring and hold on to her for support while strangling her. Then he fell and could not get up.

       "Do you admit," said Linda to me, "that you're sodomising my husband, you swine?"

       "Not at the moment," I said. The farce had really entered my blood. Then, putting on my dressing gown, I went over to poor Rodney. The dressing gown lacked its belt. I might as well have been naked. I heard one of the men going tut-tut while I got hold of Rodney's artificial leg. The idea perhaps was to strap it on to him and enable him to get over there, naked and legged, to strangle Linda.

       Linda said, "I want to be sick. I want to vomit. The filth. Trying to be Oscar Wilde. I'll break you, I'll ruin you both. Jail for both of you, filth. I'll have it all over the newspapers, everything."

       "Law of obscenixy," muttered the younger.

       I grasped the artificial leg like a club and raised it to hit, my dressing gown open, showing all I had. Rodney on the floor groaned and tried to get up. His poor arms were too feeble to take the strain of lifting. He collapsed again. The two witnesses sturdily placed themselves in front of their agency's client as I came forward diffidently. I lowered the leg and seemed to be presenting it as a seller of legs, lovely leg here madam admire the action, as one who offered the leg as a legal defence, blame it all on the war. Linda showed her teeth in disgust.

       She said, "You'll hear. You'll be punished. You can keep him." And then: "Can't, can you? You'll be in different cells, they'll send you to different prisons." Then she neatly spat, turned her back, and, went out. She herself, of course, had been a small actress, not successful, abandoning art for marriage. The two men put their hats on, nodded, made tentative hand gestures of goodbye, all in very fair comic synchronisation. Then they too went. I followed, seeing them off the premises. They did not look back. I returned to Rodney and got him into bed. He was both burning and shivering and could say nothing but bitch and bloody bitch. I went to the kitchen and made tea. The sad Monday rainlight would not ray down rain; it was a harsh and costive February sky. I made toast and spread real butter, gift of an Irish admirer. I still refused to think. I took in a tray to Rodney. He could eat nothing but drank thirstily of the milk-cooled tea. Then it was my turn to tremble, though with fear.

       I said, "What's she going to do?"

       "Bitch, the bloody bitch. I have to get up, I have to go and see Bentinck." He tried to get out of bed but I pushed him back. "We're reading at two. I want my bag, I want my Hamlet."

       "You're staying here," I said. "I'll ring Bentinck. I'm also ringing the doctor."

       "I don't want a bloody doctor."

       "What's she going to do?" I said again.

       "She can do what she bloody well likes. I'm finished with her. Give me more tea, angel."

       He drained three more breakfast cups and then slept uneasily. His forehead flamed. I dressed and went below to the hall telephone. I could not get Bentinck but left a message with his wife. Dr. Chambers said it sounded like a bad attack of flu and he would be around when he could; flu was on the rampage, I'd better watch myself. I went back to Rodney. He slept and oozed, and there was a bubbling noise in his chest. It seemed natural for me now to set my affairs in order. A phase of my life was coming to an end, perhaps in brutal public scandal, the leers of my enemies, tears of my family, the whips of the vindictive state. They had devoured Wilde like a great meat meal; me they would swallow as a Continental breakfast. I packed Say It, Cecil in a heavy legal envelope and addressed it to J. J. Mannering, stamped it and took it below to the hall table for the porter to post. The morning mail had already been laid out on that table, but there was nothing for me. It was as though a silence premonitory of violence was already setting in. It still would not rain.

       I sat by Rodney and thought. As always with me, thought expressed itself in dramatic images. Two grave men in ulsters and bowlers arrived with a warrant. "If you would come quietly sir and make no fuss it would be better no point in protesting to us sir we are merely indifferent arms of the law." One of the men had a twitch in his left cheek. Or if it were merely a matter of divorce then there would be a long wait before the civil action bred the criminal one. The scandal. How would the newspapers put it? Patients in my father's waiting room reading the papers there, going into the surgery, noting my father's slight tremor, eyes lowered to his instruments in shame. "Needn't say Mr Toomey how much we sympathise my wife asked me to tell you terrible thing who would have thought it yes that's the one hurts when I eat anything sweet." No, the mere act of filing divorce action would entail the laying of an information, if that was the term. I sweated as I saw myself with heavy baggage at Dover or Folkestone, furtively climbing the gangplank in merciful seafog. When the doorbell below rang at noon I sat frozen. My door was knocked impatiently. I sat frozen. No good, they had the right to force an entry. I went to the door on legs of oatmeal. It was, of course, Dr. Chambers, dressed in doctor's old style with top hat in bad need of reblocking.

       "He lives here?" he asked sternly, looking down on bleary rambling Rodney.

       "No," I said blushing. "He came on a visit. He arrived yesterday. From Manchester."

       "The flu's bad up there. A new strain, very tough. Don't at all like the sound of that chest. His face looks familiar."

       "He's Rodney Selkirk. The actor. He was in one of my plays."

       "Not seen any play of yours." The guilt mounted. "Must have been something else I saw him in."

       "Very likely. What can be done for him?"

       "I'll have to get him a bed."

       "This is a bed." Oh God, a laugh in every line, Mr Toomey excels himself, 365th hilarious performance.

       "I mean in the London Clinic. Ambulance too. He obviously can't walk."

       "He has only one leg. On the Marne. A war hero, you know." "War hero, eh?" Nothing sounded too good. "Danger of pneumonia. A killer, that. Needs careful nursing. Even so, even so." He shook his head. My heart fell; I felt the beginnings of the exhilaration of treacherous liberty; dead Rodney, no divorce action, no criminal action. Oh Christ: dead Rodney, Rodney dead. "Can I use your phone?"

       "Downstairs. You don't mean that, do you?"

       "Mean what?"

       "A killer, you said."

       "Mark my words," he said loudly, poking his finger at me. "It's going to be a very sour peace when it comes if it comes. Epidemic proportions, you mark my words. You don't look any too good yourself." And sternly he went down to the telephone.

       When they took Rodney away he was too delirious to know where he was or who I was.

       "Do you think the laws of God will be will be." And then he was King Claudius. "Who, impotent and bedrid, impotent and bedrid, what the hell comes next, prompt, damn it."