Lewis Percy (34 page)

‘Then you’ll come? I can tell the Dean?’

‘I’ll let you know within a week, certainly. Some more coffee, Jeannine?’

He thought, rather hazily now, that a moment of decision might have been reached, might even have passed, but without his active participation. That would have to come later, or, on the other hand, it might not come at all. These people, charming though they might be, were, after all, strangers. The future was unreal, not to speak of the various social difficulties he might encounter if he were actually to leave. Resignation, moving house, possibly divorcing: how did one manage these matters? How did anyone? He had a vision of Mrs Harper and Goldsborough banding together to
prevent him from leaving the country. Mrs Harper, he saw, was a massive obstacle on his route to freedom, if freedom was what it was. Even Tissy’s future would have to be negotiated through Mrs Harper, who in all matters of importance acted as her daughter’s broker. It seemed to him now as if his entire courtship had been conducted through Mrs Harper. She was better at being a grandmother than she had been as a mother, Lewis thought. She loved the child painfully, although her reticence was so entrenched that she could not say how much she loved her, did not in fact encourage anyone else to do so. She and the doctor had succumbed instead to the kind of untidy attention that Lewis associated with old age: damp kisses, the lowering of a heavy cheek onto the top of the small head, the fussing over collars and socks with spoiled reddish hands. Poor Mrs Harper. She had once been a beauty, no doubt proud, refined, with her Belgian accomplishments as her dowry. And she had squandered it all on a renegade husband and a reluctant lover. He supposed that there had been an awkward adultery at some stage, and the resulting pregnancy concealed until it was no longer possible. Was it then that the husband took off? If so, Mrs Harper had not been rewarded for her indiscretion. Instead she had found herself less loved than she had expected to be, and with a small child who insisted on her distracted attention. Lewis could now see the reason for those entwined figures, for Tissy’s so voluntary incapacity, for the costive petulance with which Mrs Harper’s disintegrating beauty had always been surrounded, like a miasma, so that it was difficult to know what one might have done to upset her.

And now that beauty had gone entirely. Now she was old, overweight, too discouraged to dye her hair. The doctor’s death had hit her hard. Only the little girl retained her fierce loyalty, which might otherwise have been relinquished with gratitude. How difficult it was to be happy, Lewis thought, and yet it should be so easy. Even he knew it was easy, and in his not particularly interesting life (but unique, unique to him) had sensed transcendence at various unimportant
moments of the day, had felt it earlier this evening as he had pulled the yellow rose towards him and inhaled its scent. The future might yet yield happiness; it was poor-spirited to think otherwise. But for Mrs Harper it was no longer a possibility. For that reason he wanted to see her comfortable, dignified, in his house. She aroused a certain reluctant pity in his mind, and he felt she deserved a gesture of solidarity from someone, if only from himself. Without that, who could survive?

Tissy, who had so brilliantly managed to make herself weightless, imperceptible, would be more of a problem. Tissy was eternally unfinished business. He did not see what would or could happen to Tissy, for it was unlikely that her flush of liberation would last once family forces were brought to bear. Those friends of hers, Fran and Kate, still seemed to telephone her occasionally, but not to ask her to join them as they had formerly done. Possibly they viewed her association with Gilbert Bradshaw as a defection. Tissy had indeed assumed a manner of airy inconsequentiality when this man’s name had been mentioned: it was the manner of a girl who wants to show off to her friends, and Lewis supposed that those friends, their roles reduced from participation to audience, had taken offence. In any event, all that was in abeyance. He had no way of knowing what Gilbert Bradshaw’s intentions were, but he saw, with sudden penetrating clarity, that Tissy must marry him. She must marry Gilbert Bradshaw: in so doing she would be free, and so would her mother. And so would he. More and more it seemed to Lewis that all he had to do was to go away and stay out of sight until all these events had taken place.

And the little girl? He would have to trust her to remember him, he thought, and hope that she would eventually trust him to make her happy.

‘I expect you’ll be taking your vacation shortly,’ said Howard Millinship, who now had his arm on the back of his wife’s chair.

‘Well, no,’ said Lewis. ‘My daughter is too little to be
taken from her mother, and I like to see her every day. She lives with her mother, not with me.’

‘How old is she?’ asked Jeannine.

‘Nearly three. My wife and I are separated, you see.’

‘You’d better divorce before you come to the States, then. You’ll have a far better time if you’re free. You’ll probably marry again.’

‘Well, I suppose my wife will divorce me, when she feels ready to.’

‘Does she work?’

‘I doubt if she earns much. She works for an antique dealer. I thought I might give her the house. I think – I hope – she was happy there.’

‘Chic,’ said Jeannine. ‘And where will you live?’

‘I must look for a flat,’ he said, passing a rather anxious hand over his hair. ‘I have a lot to do. How odd. This morning I had very little to do, or so it seemed. Suddenly everything has changed. I must start looking for a flat tomorrow. You know, I’m not sure that I can come to America this year – there’s going to be so much work to do. I really ought to go back to Paris, for a start.’

‘Why don’t you?’ she said negligently. ‘You could have the flat.’

‘The flat?’

‘Yes, our flat. Nobody uses it except us. My mother might come up for a wedding or something, but that needn’t interfere with you – there’s plenty of room.’

‘I should like that,’ he said slowly. ‘I could get on with some work again.’ But it was with the ache of revived memory that he saw a vista of early mornings, and himself, with his briefcase, walking exultantly down great avenues: not much of an image for a man of thirty-eight, he thought, but for him it looked as if it might have to do.

‘You really are most awfully kind,’ he said. ‘Could I take you up on that?’

‘Of course. It’s better for us to have someone staying there. I’ll leave word with the concierge – she has a set
of keys. Just let Howard know when you’ll be going.’

‘Where is the flat?’ he asked.

She was carefully repairing her mouth, gazing intently into a small mirror. Finally, with a snap, she shut the little case.

‘Place de l’Alma,’ she said.

He remembered the market, and the buying of the cheese, as some men remember their childhood. It will all be changed, he thought. I am no longer twenty years old. This could all be a mistake. Had he not read somewhere, everywhere, in fact, that one should never go back? And now he would have to re-enter the time machine, and who knew how he would fare? He would leave the safety of his ordinary life and risk disillusion, even pain. And loneliness, of course. This would be a difficulty. No Pen, no Jessica. No more Tissy: Emmy gone for ever. But one way or another he had lost them anyway. If nothing awaited him, in this future from which all familiar landmarks had already disappeared, could this be more intolerable than to continue as he was? Recently he had noticed in himself a heaviness, a dullness, which he attributed to his way of life. It had affected him physically, making him weary. The weariness usually attacked him as he set out for Mrs Harper’s house every evening. The unvarying nature of this excursion had turned his day into a series of utterly predictable events. And when he reached the house no attention was paid to him. Jessica, after greeting him – but still with that residual reluctance – would be absorbed in her supper. Mrs Harper would sit with her while she ate. And Tissy would not be at home, or, if she were, she would sit abstractedly to one side, like a visitor, but, unlike a visitor, clearly protective of her own independence, parading her absent-mindedness, her lack of attention, remote in a manner that he was supposed to decode, into which he was meant to read the fact that she no longer had anything to say to him. She would be called frequently to the telephone. Conversations, or what he could hear of them, were monosyllabic, from which he deduced, or
was meant to deduce, that the caller was Gilbert Bradshaw. Of course! He now saw, and felt sure, that she had laid her plans; she was, he thought, remarkably consistent. What hindered her from bringing all this into the open was the kind of embarrassment that can only express itself as defiance. She might be consistent, but she was also consistently childish. She had never grown up, and yet she was capable of grown-up manoeuvres. She had left Mrs Harper no card to play except the happiness of the child.

For Tissy had never been a good mother. He had found this surprising, in view of the careful way in which she had hugged and rocked her baby, and had become anxiously solicitous in her place. No wonder that the child had not known what to make of him. He should have been able to make her laugh, but his love was so hedged about with his own vulnerability that he must have appeared almost tearful with anxiety. Indeed the tears had risen to his eyes on more than one occasion when he was playing with her. He had seen himself as one of those stricken fathers in Hans Andersen, roaming the friendless world with his child on his shoulders, and had been unable to bear it. Perhaps it would be better for Jessica if he disappeared. Gilbert Bradshaw, having no intimate ties with the child, could be jovial, reassuring. He and Tissy would be parents in the purely formal sense, producers of Christmas trees, holidays, bicycles, and that might arguably be better than a father with a broken heart. For when he was with her he truly felt his heart to be broken. Better then to concentrate on what he regarded as the direction of his wife’s ambitions. Let her be happy, if that was what she wanted. Why should she not be? Happiness was not a matter of merit, after all, but of good fortune.

He signed to the waiter to bring the bill.

‘I don’t see why you should give up your house,’ said Jeannine, who at last appeared to be taking an interest in him. ‘Your wife might marry again. She ought to move out then.’

‘Would that be fair?’ he asked.

‘Quite fair,’ she said firmly.

‘I can’t thank you both enough,’ he said, as they rose to go. ‘You’ve helped me make a lot of decisions I didn’t think I could make.’

‘We can count on you, then?’ said Howard.

‘Yes, I think you can,’ he said. ‘I never thought this sort of thing could happen so quickly.’

‘That’s the way we do it,’ said Howard with a smile. ‘Why waste time?’

‘Why indeed?’ he said, as he shook their hands and got them a taxi. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he shouted, as the door slammed and the taxi moved off. Then he was alone on the pavement. A free man, he supposed.

None of this would be easy, he warned himself, as he strode off in the direction of Parsons Green. But when was leaving home ever easy? And who could make it easier? Certainly not anybody he knew. If anything his family, such as it was, would make it more onerous still. To feel like this at thirty-eight! He should be joyous, determined. But around his heart, which he had believed to be arid, he felt the sad blooming of regret, of longing. For certainty, he imagined. But there was no certainty: he had already found that out, and thus learned the most difficult of all lessons. As he walked along the Fulham Road his pace slackened and his euphoria, largely induced by the unexpected company, gradually ebbed away, leaving sadness and confusion in its wake. Surely none of this could be happening to him, he reasoned. No one had actually asked him if he wanted to go to America: the idea had never occurred to him. The intervening months between now and his departure, whether spent in Paris or in London, seemed irrelevant, and would, he knew, be filled with conflicting feelings; he would be torn between a desire to have everything stay the same and the sad knowledge that it never did. He began to feel appalled at the way his life had shifted into this uncomfortable dilemma. His reason told him that he must seize this opportunity to start again, yet what he felt, overwhelmingly, was distress at having to leave
everything that meant safety to him. He knew that his life was shamefully dull by anybody’s standards. He knew that he was too young to settle down into this dreamy troubled routine with which he had so easily – too easily – come to terms. Yet as he looked up into the whitish sky of a summer night he wondered under what skies he would soon find himself. It was for the furniture of his life rather than its inhabitants that he felt most longing, for he knew that his absence would make little difference to those he would leave behind. Would anyone even notice? Pen, possibly: the others not at all. His own love for his daughter would become a burden to her, while his wife had already indicated her forthcoming absence. She was more competent than he was, had brought her housewifely efficiency to bear on her plans in a way that had once amused him: he was forced to acknowledge in her the same gravity, the same concentration, the same lack of anything to say, now that her object was Gilbert Bradshaw rather than the maintenance of his, Lewis’s, comfort and inheritance. Assiduous was the word he would have used to describe her. And notably unforthcoming. And still he went to her door, and still she eluded him. He wanted her attention, that notoriously scarce commodity, as he had always wanted it. He wanted to tell her of his woe, yet the idea of her wilfully evading this explanation, as she had evaded all the others, was unbearable to him. He knew that if she were to break off to answer the telephone in the middle of this hypothetical explanation he might feel the impulse to murder her.

Yet while longing to stay he knew that he would leave, leave the quiet house, the yellow roses in the garden, the allotted half-hour with his daughter, for a wasteland of unasked-for possibilities. And those intervening months in Paris, that probably misguided reprise of an earlier experience, would, he knew, be an error. For what had his youth yielded, apart from a modest ambition and a mistaken confidence in women? The ambition, which he supposed would now be satisfied, had all but disappeared: he had laid it aside
without regret, leaving it at the back of the cupboard with the unwrapped copies of his book. And fate had seen to it that his naïf confidence had been wrongly invested. Fate would no doubt guarantee that he make the same mistake again, if ever he had the temerity to repeat the experiment. The worst of it was that he still could not see what else he could have done. And now he would leave home to make his mark, but all would be accomplished in desolation. Some essential hope had vanished, and he was about to be sent out to look for it again.