Lover's Leap (22 page)

The same evening. I walked home from Rose's flat warmed and comforted, recalling, as I walked, the changing beauty of her face and those tones and inflections of her voice which never fail to stir me as a glass bowl is stirred to music at the sound of its key-note. How sane, reliable and human she seemed after the changeful, unpredictable, formidable Meriel. Meriel, the Meriel of nowadays, leaves me dry and barren after every meeting; but after this short hour with Rose I felt as if my heart had broken into blossom. Her face stirred in me that same rapture which I had first felt when I saw her standing for that moment in the doorway of the Ethertons' drawing-room, leaning forward, her hand on the doorpost, with the half-shy, half-eager look in her eyes. Was I then in love with her again?

Ah, I realized now that, except for a brief interval of bitterness after our parting, I had never ceased to be in love with her; and I climbed the stairs to my flat in a dream, opened my door, and confronted Meriel. She stood there as if waiting to catch me the moment I entered.

‘Hallo, Meriel,' I said, trying lamely and guiltily to sound cordial.

She stared at me with a kind of sullen fear, and I thought I saw her body sway slightly. Was she ill or insane? The sight of her alarmed me.

‘Come in here,' I said, turning towards the door of the studio.

She seized my arm. ‘No, not there, Phil!' she said. ‘The sitting-room.'

‘But why?'

‘I hate the studio.'

‘As you like,' I said and stood aside to let her pass.

I followed her into the sitting-room and there she
turned and faced me. ‘Where have you been?' she asked with fierce breathlessness. ‘Why didn't you come?'

‘Sit down, Meriel,' I said. ‘Don't get so excited.'

She ignored my suggestion and remained standing, fixing me with angry, sullen eyes.

‘How long have you been here?' I asked.

‘How long? How do I know? Hours! Ages!'

‘Have you had tea?'

‘Tea? Of course I haven't. The tea's still waiting for you at home.'

‘Then you must have some. I'll make you some at once.'

‘I don't want tea,' she said angrily. ‘What I want is to know why you didn't come.'

‘I didn't come, Meriel, because I couldn't. I found at the last minute that I couldn't.'

‘You mean you wouldn't,' she said with such conviction that I could almost have believed she knew the truth.

‘Well, if I wouldn't, I couldn't, I suppose; and if I couldn't, I wouldn't.'

Her lip trembled and I felt ashamed of my silly quibbling.

‘Where have you been?' she repeated, and a note of tears in her anger alarmed me. The prospect of her breaking down horrified me. If only she kept up her anger it would be less unbearable for both of us.

‘What does it matter where I've been,' I said, determined not to evade the issue any longer. ‘The point is that I didn't come because I felt I couldn't come. I got as far as your door and then my courage failed me and I turned back.'

‘Your courage?'

‘Yes, courage for another of our querulous, acrimonious meetings. Surely you too felt relieved when I didn't turn up, because you can't enjoy them any more than I do.'

‘And whose fault is that?' she asked resentfully.

‘Yours, Meriel, and yours only. Even you, I hope, won't
go to the length of saying that I start these wretched bickerings?'

Her face had grown more and more lowering as I spoke. ‘Yes I will. It's you that make me start, anyhow. You drive me to it in your calm, horribly reasonable way, and then you turn round and pretend it's all my fault.'

‘Well, if I drive you to it—and God knows I don't try to—the best thing I can do is to keep away from you, isn't it? That stands to reason.'

Poor little creature, she made a gesture of hopeless despair that cut me to the heart. I felt as if I had been tormenting a defenceless child.

‘Meriel, try to believe that, in intention at least, I'm innocent. We're both the victims of circumstances, that's what it is. We've got ourselves somehow into such a muddle, to such a pitch of cross-purposes that it's hopeless.'

For a moment or two she looked at me dully. I don't think she had taken in a word of what I had said. Then with a quick movement she turned and, after glancing slowly round the room as if for the last time, went towards the door. A moment later I heard the front door open and shut. She had gone.

How silent and empty the house had suddenly become. I stood where she had left me. My hands were trembling: I felt tired out. Then with a deep sigh, as if clearing my chest of a load of depression and bewilderment, I went over to the window and looked out.

Down below, no bigger than a small, agitated doll, she was hurrying blindly across the roadway of the square, looking neither to right nor left. A car shot towards her. It looked, from where I watched, as if by some inevitable mechanism they were bound to crash together. God, couldn't the fellow see her? My arm shot out with a sudden spasmodic movement. The car swerved violently and missed her, but she never even noticed it. As I watched
her she reached the pavement. There she paused for a moment and glanced back at my windows. Then, as if escaping from a burning house, she hurried on and vanished round the corner.

Cars flowed through the square, stream mixing for a moment with stream and then resolving itself into its own channel. People on the pavements, small ant-like shapes, converged slowly into clots, disentangled themselves, thinned into scattered units. All seemed parts of a great meaningless machine endlessly labouring to produce nothing. But for me, after the conflicting emotions of the last few hours it seemed that life had run down to a standstill. Rose had come back and vanished again for a while: Meriel and I had reached a crisis, like a storm that has burst at last after burdening the nights and days with growing menace, and were now becalmed for a moment in a lull of doubtful import. I was left, standing there in my empty flat, as if in a solitary limbo.

With the automatic bias of the worker to his work I drifted from the sitting-room to the studio. I did not expect to be able to work. My idea, I think, was to ponder vaguely, as one does in idle moments, over the half-finished picture on the easel. The studio door was shut. I opened it and then stood paralysed in the doorway. For a moment I could not understand what I saw. Then I realized. Meriel, of course, had done it. The canvas on the easel was ripped across from corner to corner.

It is a terrible thing to have a thing one has created after weeks of ardent thought and labour suddenly destroyed: it is almost as if a part of oneself had been killed. I stood in the doorway staring at the gaping canvas in cold anguish, and then, as I turned away, I saw my palette-knife lying on the floor near the foot of the easel. I went back to the sitting-room and sat down. I remembered how Meriel had stopped me when I tried to go into the studio; I remembered how, as she hurried away across the square,
she had glanced back and then hurried on again as if escaping from something. My wretched picture had stood, in her eyes, for my work, my friends, all that part of my life which was independent of her, the part she had tried in vain to annihilate, and she had taken her revenge on it.

Yet, when I had recovered from the first shock, I began to feel in a way glad at what she had done. Some secret part of me has felt, all this time, that I have wronged Meriel and often I have been seized with remorse for cruelty towards her, even though it was cruelty into which she had goaded me. But now, by this furious act, Meriel had got her own back and I was glad. I was glad, too, I believe, to have a definite, tangible grievance against her. This at least she could never claim was my fault and not hers. And yet might she not? For it was not the normal Meriel, the happy child, who had done this thing. It was a Meriel driven frantic, if not wholly by me, nor wholly by her own nature, at least by our miserable connection, the friction of two hopelessly incompatible creatures. Yes, we are both to blame, yet both powerless to avert our inevitable fate.

Next day. To-day has been an empty day. I went out in the morning and did not return till bedtime, for fear Meriel should ring me up or even call to see me. It was not merely that I dreaded another meeting, whatever its nature. It was, even more, that I felt it would be madness to meet again. We ought to have broken free months ago, when, as old Etherton said in his little lecture on love affairs, we could still retain pleasant memories of our days and nights together; but though I had lacked the courage and determination to do so then, I must do so now at all costs.

When I got home just now there was no sign from Meriel. I hope against hope that she too has realized our
bankruptcy at last and determined to make an end, to abandon me and save me from abandoning her.

Next morning. It was too much to expect. This morning's post has just brought a letter.

‘What can I say? How can I begin, my dear, dear Phil? If only I had arrived a moment later I should have found your door locked and been unable to get in. But Mrs. Batten was coming out as I reached the top of the stairs and she let me in. I did it in a moment of madness. I looked into the sitting-room and then into your studio and found you were not there, and then I saw the picture on the easel and the knife on the table, waiting. O, if only you had been there, Phil! It seems as if Fate had set a trap for me—Mrs. Batten ready to let me in, you away, the knife ready on the table. As soon as I had done it I was horrified, terrified, and ran into the sitting-room to get away from it. O Phil, why weren't you there to save me from myself? No, not from myself, but from the madness that came over me at that dreadful moment. When I got home I flung myself on my bed and lay there weeping and trembling till it was quite dark. It seemed like a horrible, horrible dream from which I couldn't wake. Each time I came to myself I hoped to find it was a nightmare, but there it was still, real and true, staring at me. How can I make you believe that it is only my love for you that makes me so frantic sometimes? If only you will forgive me I promise always, always to be good, to do whatever you want. Only let me be your slave: that will be enough, more than enough for me. I have been trying all day to write to you, but I was so exhausted, my mind was in such a fever, that I didn't know how to begin. The words wouldn't come. Come and see me, Phil dear, or let me come and see you, and all shall be as it was in the early days. I will never be jealous or sulky or reproachful again, I promise.
I will believe everything you tell me. Please, please let us begin again.'

Begin again! The very thought is a nightmare. Poor Meriel, we have nothing left to begin with. If only she had kept her anger, how much easier it would have been. What am I to do? I no longer feel the faintest spark of resentment against her for destroying my wretched picture and I would willingly tell her so. Poor little creature! What I long to do is to write and tell her what I truly feel, that there's nothing for me to forgive either about the picture or anything else. But if I were to do so she would never understand that we can't begin again. How can I convince her that all's finished? If only she weren't such a child, such an impulsive, unreasoning creature, we could talk it over quietly and amicably and then say good-bye. But that, with Meriel, is inconceivable. In five minutes, calm, reason, and self-control would be scattered to the four winds and she would be imploring, reproaching, sulking, flying into a fury, and we would find ourselves plunged again into a thousand antagonisms. No, we mustn't talk; we mustn't meet.

The same evening. I shall not answer her letter. It's the only way. And to-morrow I shall go away, to Saltdyke. Is that cowardly? No, it's the only way that isn't cowardly. If I did what I would like to do I would let her know that the picture is forgiven and forgotten. But that would be a disastrous mistake: it would merely raise hopes of a reconciliation. I hate the idea that she will think me implacable and mean; but, as things are, isn't it better for her that she should? The worse she thinks of me, the better, the easier for her. If only she could bring herself to despise me, it would help her more than anything else, I believe, to free herself from me.

A fortnight later. When I arrived here a fortnight
ago I found Saltdyke as I found it on that day two years ago when I first saw it. The marshland bent was dried to a pale gold, the pale gold of the sands: sea and sky were fathomless blue. My friends at the inn had again transformed the tea-room into a studio for me and my old bedroom was ready.

But for some days I did no work, but spent the time in long walks across the marsh and up and down the coast, renewing my love of the place after all these months of absence. Once again I dived off the wooden groyne into the stinging October sea and swam till breath and muscle failed me. But after a few days, though I did not completely give up my walks, I got to work and have worked steadily ever since.

No word has come from Meriel. What, I wonder, is she doing, poor little thing? What is she thinking? Day by day, in the stillness that wraps this place, I have waited with a vague anxiety lest the silence should be broken, like a man far from rumours and newspapers listening for the faint, dreaded sound of guns on the frontier. But no sound has come, and that is a reassuring sign, for it means that she has bowed to the inevitable, as I myself had done when I came here two years ago. How well I remember what I suffered then: the memory of it makes me feel the more keenly for Meriel who is even now going through the same ordeal. Will the time come, I wonder, when all the bitterness has been forgotten and we can meet again as friends, as Rose and I have met?

In the quiet, busy life I lead here the thought of Rose and of our coming meeting a fortnight hence warms my heart. But I am not impatient. I shall work on soberly here till time brings the day. What do I hope for? What more can I hope for than her friendship, happy meetings week by week perhaps? I dare not look more closely into the future.