Eyeless In Gaza (36 page)

Mrs Weeks shook her head. ‘I never found there was much you
could
do,' she said. ‘Not with cats.'

‘But there must be something.'

‘Nothing except leave them alone,' insisted Mrs Weeks, with a pessimism evidently reinforced by her determination not to be bothered. Then, touched by the spectacle of Helen's misery, ‘He'll be all right, dear,' she added consolingly. ‘There's no need to cry. Just let him sleep it off.'

Footsteps sounded on the flagstones of the stable yard, and through the open window came the notes of ‘Yes, sir, she's my baby,' whistled slightly out of tune. Helen straightened herself up from her crouching position and, leaning out, ‘Gerry!' she called; then added, in response to his expression of surprised commiseration, ‘Something awful has happened.'

In his large powerful hands Tompy seemed more miserably tiny than ever. But how gentle he was, and how efficient! Watching him, as he swabbed the little cat's eyes, as he wiped away the slime from the nostrils, Helen was amazed by the delicate precision of his movements. She herself, she reflected with a heightened sense of her own shameful ineptitude, had been incapable of doing anything except stroke Tompy's fur and feel disgusted. Hopeless, quite hopeless! And when he asked for her help in getting Tompy to swallow half an aspirin tablet crushed in milk, she bungled everything and spilt the medicine.

‘Perhaps I can do it better by myself,' he said, and took the spoon from her. The cup of her humiliation was full . . .

Mary Amberley was indignant. Here she was, feverish and in pain, worrying herself, what was more, into higher fever, worse pain, with the thought of Gerry's dangerous driving. And here was Helen, casually strolling into her room after having been in the house for more than two hours – more than two hours without having had the common decency to come and see how she was, more than two hours while her mother – her mother, mind you! – had lain there, in an agony of distress, thinking that they must have had an accident.

‘But Tompy was dying,' Helen explained. ‘He's dead now.' Her face was very pale, her eyes red with tears.

‘Well, if you prefer a wretched cat to your mother . . .'

‘Besides, you were asleep. If you hadn't been asleep, you'd have heard the car coming back.'

‘Now you're grudging me my sleep,' said Mrs Amberley bitterly. ‘Aren't I to be allowed a moment's respite from pain? Besides,' she added, ‘I wasn't asleep. I was delirious. I've been delirious several times today. Of course I didn't hear the car.' Her eyes fell on the bottle of Somnifaine standing on the table by her bed, and the suspicion that Helen might also have noticed it made her still more angry. ‘I always knew you were selfish,' she went on. ‘But I must say I didn't think you'd be quite as bad as this.'

At another time Helen would have flared up in angry self-defence, or else, convicted of guilt, would have burst out crying. But today she was feeling too miserable to be able to shed any more tears, too much subdued by shame and unhappiness to resent even the most flagrant injustice. Her silence exasperated Mrs Amberley still further.

‘I always used to think,' she resumed, ‘that you were only selfish from thoughtlessness. But now I see that it's heartlessness. Plain heartlessness. Here am I – having sacrificed the best years of my life to you; and what do I get in return?' Her voice trembled as she asked the question. She was convinced of the reality of that sacrifice, profoundly moved by the thought of its extent, its martyr-like enormity. ‘The most cynical indifference. I might die in a ditch; but you wouldn't care. You'd be much more upset about your cat. And now go away,' she almost shouted, ‘go away! I
know
my temperature's gone up. Go away.'

After a lonely dinner – for Helen was keeping to her room on the plea of a headache – Gerry was up to sit with Mrs
Amberley. He was particularly charming that evening, and so affectionately solicitous that Mary forgot all her accumulated grounds of complaint and fell in love with him all over again, and for another set of reasons – not because he was so handsome, so easily and insolently dominating, such a ruthless and accomplished lover, but because he was kind, thoughtful and affectionate, was everything, in a word, she had previously known he wasn't.

Half-past ten struck. He rose from his chair. ‘Time for your spot of shut-eye.'

Mary protested; he was firm – for her own good.

Thirty drops were the normal dose of Somnifaine; but he measured out forty-five, so as to make quite sure of her sleeping, made her drink, then tucked her up (‘like an old Nanny,' she cried, laughing with pleasure, as he busied himself round the bed) and, after kissing her good-night with an almost maternal tenderness, turned out the light and left her.

The clock of the village church sounded eleven – how sadly, Helen thought as she listened to the strokes of the distant bell, how lonelily! It was as though she were listening to the voice of her own spirit, reverberated in some mysterious way from the walls of the enclosing night. One, two, three, four . . . Each sweet, cracked note seemed more hopelessly mournful, seemed to rise from the depths of a more extreme solitude, than the last. Tompy had died, and she hadn't even been capable of giving him a spoonful of milk and crushed aspirin, hadn't had the strength to overcome her disgust.

Selfish and heartless: her mother was quite right. But lonely as well as selfish, all alone among the senseless malignities that had murdered poor little Tompy; and her heartlessness spoke with the despairing voice of that bell; night was empty and enormous all around.

‘Helen!'

She started and turned her head. The room was impenetrably black.

‘It's me,' Gerry's voice continued. ‘I was so worried about you. Are you feeling better?'

Her first surprise and alarm had given place to a feeling of resentment that he should intrude upon the privacy of her unhappiness. ‘You needn't have bothered,' she said coldly. ‘I'm quite all right.'

Enclosed in his faint aura of Turkish tobacco, of peppermint-flavoured tooth-paste and bay rum, he approached invisibly. Through the blanket, a groping hand touched her shin: then the springs creaked and tilted under his weight as he sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘Felt a bit responsible,' he went on. ‘All that looping the loop!' The tone of his voice implied the unseen smile, suggested a whimsical and affectionate twinkling of hidden eyes.

She made no comment; there was a long silence. A bad start, Gerry thought, and frowned to himself in the darkness; then began again on another tack.

‘I can't help thinking of that miserable little Tompy,' he said in a different voice. ‘Extraordinary how upsetting it is when an animal gets ill like that. It seems so frightfully
unfair
.'

In a few minutes she was crying, and he had an excuse to console her.

Gently, as he had handled Tompy, and with all the tenderness that had so much touched Mrs Amberley, he stroked her hair, and later, when her sobs began to subside, drew the fingers of his other hand along her bare arm. Again and again, with the patient regularity of a nurse lulling her charge to sleep; again and again . . . Three hundred times at least, he was thinking, before he risked any gesture that could possibly be interpreted as amorous. Three hundred times; and even then the caresses would have to deviate by insensible degrees, as though by a series of accidents, till gradually,
unintentionally, the hand that was now on her arm would come at last to be brushing, with the same maternal persistence, against her breasts, while the fingers that came and went methodically among the curls would have strayed to the ear, and from the ear across the cheek to the lips, and would linger there lightly, chastely, but charged with the stuff of kisses, proxies and forerunners of the mouth that would ultimately come down on hers, through the darkness, for the reward of its long patience.

IT WAS ANOTHER
‘knock.' Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, Jack Johnson, Carpentier, Dempsey, Gene Tunney – the champions came and went; but the metaphor in which Mr Beavis described his successive bereavements remained unaltered.

Yes, a hard knock. And yet, it seemed to Anthony, there was a note almost of triumph in his father's reminiscences, over the luncheon table, of Uncle James as a schoolboy.

‘Poor James . . . such curly hair he had then . . .
nos et mutamur
.' The commiseration and regret were mingled with a certain satisfaction – the satisfaction of an old man who finds himself still alive, still able to attend the funerals of his contemporaries, his juniors.

‘Two years,' he insisted. ‘There was the best part of two years between James and me. I was Beavis major at school.'

He shook his head mournfully; but the old, tired eyes had brightened with an irrepressible light. ‘Poor James!' He sighed. ‘We hadn't seen one another much these last years. Not since his conversion. How
did
he do it? It beats me. A Catholic – he of all people . . .'

Anthony said nothing. But after all, he was thinking, it wasn't
so surprising. The poor old thing had grown up as a Bradlaugh atheist. Ought to have been blissfully happy, parading his cosmic defiance, his unyielding despair. But had had the bad luck to be a homosexual at a time when one couldn't avow it even to oneself. Ingrowing pederasty – it had poisoned his whole life. Had turned that metaphysical and delightfully Pickwickian despair into real, common or garden misery. Misery and neurasthenia; the old man had been half mad, really. (Which hadn't prevented him from being a first-rate actuary.) Then, during the war, the clouds had lifted. One could be kind to wounded soldiers – be kind
pro patria
and with a blameless conscience. Anthony remembered Uncle James's visits to him in hospital. He had come almost every day. Loaded with gifts for a dozen adopted nephews as well as for the real one. On his thin, melancholy face there had been, in those days, a perpetual smile. But happiness never lasts. The armistice had come; and, after those four years in paradise, hell had seemed blacker than ever. In 1923 he had turned papist. It was only to be expected.

But Mr Beavis simply couldn't understand. The idea of James surrounded by Jesuits, James bobbing up and down at Mass, James going to Lourdes with his inoperable tumour, James dying with all the consolations of religion – it filled him with horrified amazement.

‘And yet,' said Anthony, ‘I admire the way they usher you out of life. Dying – it's apt to be an animal process. More exclusively animal even than sea-sickness.' He was silent for a moment, thinking of poor Uncle James's last and most physiological hour. The heavy, snoring breath, the mouth cavernously gaping, the scrabbling of the hands.

‘How wise the Church has been to turn it into a ceremonial!'

‘Charades,' said Mr Beavis contemptuously.

‘But good charades,' Anthony insisted. ‘A work of art. In itself, the event's like a rough channel crossing – only rather worse. But they manage to turn it into something rather fine
and significant. Chiefly for the spectator, of course. But perhaps also significant for the actor.'

There was a silence. The maid changed the plates and brought in the sweet. ‘Some apple tart?' Pauline questioned, as she cut the crust.

‘Apple pie, my dear.' Mr Beavis's tone was severe. ‘When will you learn that a tart's uncovered? A thing with a roof is a pie.'

They helped themselves to cream and sugar.

‘By the way,' said Pauline suddenly, ‘had you heard about Mrs Foxe?' Anthony and Mr Beavis shook their heads. ‘Maggie Clark told me yesterday. She's had a stroke.'

‘Dear, dear,' said Mr Beavis. Then, reflectively, ‘Curious the way people pass out of one's life,' he added. ‘After being very much in it. I don't believe I've seen Mrs Foxe half a dozen times in the last twenty years. And yet before that . . .'

‘She had no sense of humour,' said Pauline, by way of explanation.

Mr Beavis turned to Anthony. ‘I don't suppose you've . . . well, “kept up” with her very closely, not since that poor boy of hers died.'

Anthony shook his head, without speaking. It was not agreeable to be reminded of all that he had done to avoid keeping up with Mrs Foxe. Those long affectionate letters she had written to him during the first year of the war – letters which he had answered more and more briefly, perfunctorily, conventionally; and at last hadn't answered at all; hadn't even read. Hadn't even read, and yet – moved by some superstitious compunction – had never thrown away. At least a dozen of the blue envelopes, addressed in the large, clear, flowing writing, were still lying unopened in one of the drawers of his desk. Their presence there was, in some obscure, inexplicable way, a salve to his conscience. Not an entirely effective salve. His father's question had made him feel uncomfortable; he hastened to change the subject.

‘And what have you been delving into recently?' he asked, in the sort of playfully archaic language that his father might have used.

Mr Beavis chuckled and began to describe his researches into modern American slang. Such savoury locutions! Such an Elizabethan wealth of new coinages and original metaphors! Horse feathers, dish the dope, button up your face – delicious! ‘And how would you like to be called a fever frau?' he asked his younger daughter, Diana, who had sat in silence, severely aloof, throughout the meal. ‘Or worse, a cinch pushover, my dear? Or I might say that you had a dame complex, Anthony. Or refer regretfully to your habit of smooching the sex jobs.' He twinkled with pleasure.

‘It's like so much Chinese,' said Pauline from the other end of the table. Across her round placid face mirth radiated out in concentric waves of soft pink flesh; the succession of her chins shook like jelly. ‘He thinks he's the cat's pyjamas, your father does.' She reached out, helped herself to a couple of chocolate creams from the silver bowl on the table in front of her and popped one of them into her mouth. ‘The cat's pyjamas,' she repeated indistinctly and heaved with renewed laughter.