Eyeless In Gaza (23 page)

‘But my dear, you
must
,' John Beavis insisted.

Pauline heaved the conscious imitation of a sigh of repletion. ‘I couldn't.'

‘Not even the favourite
chocolatl
?' Mr Beavis always spoke of chocolate in the original Aztec.

Playfully, Pauline eyed the dish askance. ‘I
shouldn't,
' she said, implicitly admitting that the repletion was not complete.

‘Yes, you should,' he wheedled.

‘Now he's trying to make me fat!' she wailed with mock reproach. ‘He's leading me into temptation!'

‘Well, be led.'

This time, Pauline's sigh was a martyr's. ‘All right, then,' she said submissively. The maid, who had been waiting impassively for the outcome of the controversy, presented the dish once again. Pauline helped herself.

‘There's a good child,' said Mr Beavis, in a tone and with a twinkle that expressed a sportive mock-fatherliness. ‘And now, James, I hope you'll follow the good example.'

James's disgust and anger were so intense that he could not trust himself to speak, for fear of saying something out-rageous. He contented himself with curtly shaking his head.

‘No
chocolatl
for you?' Mr Beavis turned to Anthony. ‘But I'm sure
you'll
take pity on the pudding!' And when Anthony did, ‘Ah, that's good!' he said. ‘That's the way . . .' – he hesitated for a fraction of a second – ‘. . . the way to tuck in!'

ANTHONY'S FLUENCY, AS
they walked to the station, was a symptom of his inward sense of guilt. By the profusion of his talk, by the brightness of his attention, he was making up to Brian for what he had done the previous evening. It was not as though Brian had uttered any reproaches; he seemed, on the contrary, to be taking special pains not to hint at yesterday's offence. His silence served Anthony as an excuse for postponing all mention of the disagreeable subject of Mark Staithes. Some time, of course, he would have to talk about the whole wretched affair (what a bore people were, with their complicated squabbles!); but, for the moment, he assured himself, it would be best to wait . . . to wait until Brian himself referred to it. Meanwhile, his uneasy conscience constrained him to display towards Brian a more than ordinary friendliness, to make a special effort to be interesting and to show himself being interested. Interested in the poetry of Edward Thomas as they walked down Beaumont Street, in Bergson opposite Worcester; crossing Hythe Bridge, in the nationalization of coal mines; and finally, under the viaduct and up the long approach to the station, in Joan Thursley.

‘It's ext-traordinary,' said Brian, breaking, with what was manifestly an effort, a rather long preparatory silence, ‘that you sh-shouldn't ever have met her.'

‘
Dis aliter visum
,' Anthony answered in his father's best classical style. Though, of course, if he had accepted Mrs Foxe's invitations to stay at Twyford, the gods, he reflected, would have changed their minds.

‘I w-want you to l-like one another,' Brian was saying.

‘I'm sure we shall.'

‘She's not frightfully c-c-c . . .' Patiently he began again: ‘frightfully c-clever. N-not on the s-surface. You'd th-think she was o-only interested in c-c-c . . .' But ‘country life' wouldn't allow itself to be uttered; Brian was forced in seemingly affected circumlocution: ‘in rural m-matters,' he brought out at last. ‘D-dogs and b-birds and all that.'

Anthony nodded and, suddenly remembering those spew-tits and piddle-warblers of the Bulstrode days, imperceptibly smiled.

‘But w-when you g-get to kn-know her better,' Brian went on laboriously, ‘you f-find there's a lot m-more in her than you th-thought. She's g-got ext-traordinary feeling for p-p-p . . . for v-verse. W-wordsworth and M-meridith, for example. I'm always ast-astonished how g-good her j-judgments are.'

Anthony smiled to himself sarcastically. Yes, it
would
be Meredith!

The other was silent, wondering how he should explain, whether he should even try to explain. Everything was against him – his own physical disability, the difficulty of putting what he had to say into words, the possibility that Anthony wouldn't even want to understand what he said, that he would produce his alibi of cynicism and just pretend not to be there at all.

Brian thought of their first meeting. The embarrassing discovery of two strangers in the drawing-room when he
came in, flushed and his hair still wet with the rain, to tea. His mother pronounced a name: ‘Mrs Thursley.' The new vicar's wife, he realized, as he shook hands with the thin dowdy woman. Her manners were so ingratiating that she lisped as she spoke; her smile was deliberately bright.

‘And this is Joan.'

The girl held out her hand, and as he took it, her slender body swayed away from his alien presence in a movement of shyness that was yet adorably graceful, like the yielding of a young tree before the wind. That movement was the most beautiful and at the same time the most touching thing he had ever seen.

‘We've been hearing you're keen on birds,' said Mrs Thursley, with an oppressive politeness and intensifying that all too bright, professionally Christian smile of hers. ‘So's Joan. A regular ornithologist.'

Blushing, the girl muttered a protest.

‘She
will
be pleased to have someone to talk to about her precious birds. Won't you, Joanie?'

Joan's embarrassment was so great that she simply couldn't speak.

Looking at her flushed, averted face, Brian was filled with compassionate tenderness. His heart began to beat very hard. With a mixture of fear and exultation he realized that something extraordinary, something irrevocable had happened.

And then, he went on to think, there was that time, some four or five months later, when they were staying together at her uncle's house in East Sussex. Away from her parents, she was as though transformed – not into another person; into her own fundamental self, into the happy, expansive girl that it was impossible for her to be at home. For at home she lived under constraint. Her father's chronic grumblings and occasional outbursts of bad temper oppressed her with fear. And though she loved her, she felt herself the prisoner of her
mother's affection, was dimly conscious of being somehow exploited by means of it. And finally there was the cold numbing atmosphere of the genteel poverty in which they lived, the unremitting tension of the struggle to keep up appearances, to preserve social superiority. At home, it was impossible for Joan to be fully herself; but there, in that spacious house at Iden, among its quiet, easy-going inhabitants, she was liberated into a transfiguring happiness. Dazzled, Brian fell in love with her all over again.

He thought of the day when they had gone walking in Winchelsea marshes. The hawthorn was in bloom; dotted here and there on the wide, flat expanse of grass, the sheep and their lambs were like white constellations; overhead, the sky was alive with white clouds gliding in the wind. Unspeakably beautiful! And suddenly it seemed to him that they were walking through the image of their love. The world was their love, and their love the world; and the world was significant, charged with depth beyond depth of mysterious meaning. The proof of God's goodness floated in those clouds, crept in those grazing sheep, shone from every burning bush of incandescent blossom – and, in himself and Joan, walked hand in hand across the grass and was manifest in their happiness. His love, it seemed to him, in that apocalyptic moment, was more than merely
his;
it was in some mysterious way the equivalent of this wind and sunshine, these white gleams against the green and blue of spring. His feeling for Joan was somehow implicit in the world, had a divine and universal significance. He loved her infinitely, and for that reason was able to love everything in the world as much as he loved her.

The memory of that experience was precious to him, all the more so now, since the quality of his feelings had undergone a change. Transparent and seemingly pure as spring water, that infinite love of his had crystallized out, with the passage of time, into specific desires.

Ever since Anthony had first made him read the poem, those lines had haunted his imagination; impersonally, at first; but later, they had come to associate themselves, definitely, with the image of Joan.
Polis comme de l'huile, onduleux comme un cygne.
There was no forgetting. The words had remained with him, indelibly, like a remorse, like the memory of a crime.

They entered the station and found that there were nearly five minutes to wait. The two young men walked slowly up and down the platform.

In an effort to lay the shameful phantom of those breasts, that oil-smooth belly, ‘My m-mother likes her a l-lot,' Brian went on at last.

‘That's
very
satisfactory,' said Anthony; but felt, even as he uttered the words, that he was rather overdoing the approval. If
he
fell in love, he most certainly wouldn't take the girl to be inspected by his father and Pauline. On approval! But it wasn't their business to approve – or disapprove, for that matter. Mrs Foxe was different, of course; one could take her more seriously than Pauline or his father. But, all the same, one wouldn't want even Mrs Foxe to interfere – indeed, he went on to reflect, would probably dislike the interference even more intensely than other people's, just because of that superiority. For the superiority constituted a kind of claim on one, gave her certain rights. One wouldn't be able so easily to ignore her opinion as one could ignore Pauline's, for example. He was very fond of Mrs Foxe, he respected and admired her; but for that very reason he felt her as potentially a menace to
his freedom. For she might – indeed, if she knew it, she certainly would – object to his way of looking at things. And though her criticisms would be based on the principles of that liberal Christianity of hers, and though, of course, such modernism was just as preposterous and, in spite of its pretensions to being ‘scientific,' just as hopelessly beyond the pale of rationality as the most extravagant fetishism – nevertheless, her words, being
hers,
would carry weight, would have to be considered. Which was why he did his best not to place himself in the position of having to listen to them. It was more than a year now since he had accepted one of her invitations to come and stay with them in the country.
Dis aliter visum
. But he looked forward rather nervously to his impending encounter with her.

The train came roaring in; and there, a minute later, they all were, at the other end of the platform – Mr Beavis in a grey suit, and Pauline beside him, very large in mauve, her face apoplectically flushed by the shadow of her mauve parasol, and behind them Mrs Foxe, straight and queenly, and a tall girl in a big flopping hat and a flowered dress.

Mr Beavis adopted for his greetings a humorously mockheroic manner that Anthony found particularly irritating. ‘Six precious souls,' he quoted, as he patted his son's shoulder, ‘or rather only four precious souls, but all agog to dash through thick and thin. And what a hot dash – what a dashed hot dash!' he emended, twinklingly.

‘Well, Anthony.' Mrs Foxe's voice was musically rich with affection. ‘It's an age since I saw you.'

‘Yes, an age.' He laughed rather uncomfortably, trying, as he did so, to remember those elaborate reasons he had given for not accepting her invitations. At all costs he mustn't contradict himself. Was it at Easter or at Christmas that the necessity of working at the British Museum had kept him in London? He felt a touch on his arm, and thankful for any
excuse to break off the embarrassing conversation, turned quickly away.

‘J-joan,' Brian was saying to the girl in the flowered dress, ‘h-here's A-anthony.'

‘Awfully glad,' he mumbled. ‘Heard such a lot about you from . . .' Nice hair, he thought; and the hazel eyes were beautifully bright and eager. But the profile was too emphatic; and though the lips were well cut, the mouth was too wide. A bit dairymaidish, was his conclusion; and her clothes were really too home-made. He himself preferred something rather more urban.

‘Well, lead on, Macduff,' said Mr Beavis.

They left the station, and slowly, on the shady side of the street, walked towards the centre of the town. Still merrily Gilpinesque, as though (and this particularly irritated Anthony) today's expedition were his first holiday jaunt for twenty years, Mr Beavis expatiated in waggish colloquialisms on the Oxford of his own undergraduate days. Mrs Foxe listened, smiled at the appropriate moments, asked pertinent questions. Pauline complained from time to time of the heat. Her face shone; and, walking in gloomy silence beside her, Anthony remarked with distaste the rather rank intensification of her natural odour. From behind him, he cold hear snatches of the conversation between Brian and Joan. ‘. . . a great big hawk,' she was saying. Her speech was eager and rapid. ‘It must have been a harrier.' ‘D-did it have b-bars on its t-t-t . . . on its tail?' ‘That's it. Dark bars on a light grey ground.' ‘Th-then it was a f-female,' said Brian. ‘F-females have b-bars on their t-tails.' Anthony smiled to himself sarcastically.

They were passing the Ashmolean, when a woman who was coming very slowly and as though disconsolately out of the museum suddenly waved her hand at them and, calling out first Mr Beavis's name and then, as they all turned round
to look at her, Mrs Foxe's, came running down the steps towards them.