Psyche (27 page)

For a moment longer she lingered, and then fled silently to her room where, the door locked behind her, she fell to her knees beside the bed and wept for something she had lost without ever really having it, for a dream that had been no more than that. And when at last she dried her eyes, she remembered the fierce pleasure of a man's mouth against her own, the aching delight of a man's arms holding her close, and wept again.

It was after eight o'clock, and a blanket of heat had already banished the dew from the long grass of the valley, when she returned from a walk that had taken her far from the barn, along hedged lanes she had never seen before and would not recognize if she were to see them again.

When she had slipped out through the green door at sunrise, it had been with the confused idea that she would not return to it. The fact that she had taken nothing with her was proof that she had seen the complete impracticality of such an idea even while pretending to entertain it. If she had had any money at all, she would have packed her few possessions and left for good. Because Nick had said he would pay her for posing, she had refused the small savings Butch and Mag had been only too eager to give her. As yet Nick had paid for nothing, and she wondered now whether this was because she had no present opportunity to spend money, or because he had wished to make quite sure that she would not leave until he was ready to let her go. With a new-found cynicism she thought that the latter supposition was in all probability the correct one. There was no longer any need for her to remain in hiding, of that she was certain. Yet, as she followed the winding
path across the field to the barn, she knew that, even now, she did not really want to leave this place that she had grown to love so much, this quiet refuge where until to-day she had been so completely content.

It required courage to mount the narrow staircase, but, since it was something she had to do, she did it with decision and outward assurance. Before she reached the top she could hear Nick whistling quietly. When she emerged into the studio it was to find him busy with brushes and turpentine, another canvas already set up on the easel.

When he saw her, his words were as casual as though this morning were no different from any other. “Morning, Venus. Breakfast be ready soon?”

“Ten minutes,” Psyche told him evenly, while she experienced an overpowering relief. He had not, apparently, guessed her secret. That he should even surmise she had imagined herself in love with, and loved by him, would have been more than she could have endured.

Nick, whistling again, interrupted himself long enough to say, “If you have time while the coffee water is heating, see if you can dig up that extraordinary outfit you were wearing the first time I saw you. I want to finish off one of those early sketches.”

All day Psyche posed, her hair once more an uncombed mop of gold, in the old dungarees and shapeless black sweater in which she had once been so comfortably unselfconscious. Nick, talking as usual while he painted, calmly avoided even a glancing reference to what had passed between them.

It was not until nightfall that he put his hand on her arm as she turned toward her room. “Stay with me, Venus.”

Psyche had thought herself fully prepared for an invitation that she had been morally certain would be forthcoming, if not that night, then the next—or the one after that. To find herself wavering for even an instant was something that she had not expected. Unable to trust her voice, she shook off his hand with an abruptness that in itself betrayed her weakness.

“Do I have to plead a cause in which we are both equally interested, Venus?”

Psyche backed across the room until she stood in the bedroom doorway. “Have you any intention of marrying me, Nick?”

“Good God! What has that got to do with anything?”

“You haven't answered my question.”

“You know the answer well enough, Venus.”

“Then you know mine,” Psyche said levelly, and closed the door between them, the subsequent click of the lock a sharp period to her sentence.

She hoped that her refusal of him would be accepted in the same way her surrender had been, without comment. The following morning, however, she discovered that it was to be a primary topic of conversation.

He waited until she was already posing, the clear north light showing small lines of strain around her eyes, before embarking on a discourse that he obviously expected to be less one-sided than usual. Psyche, recognizing his attempt to provoke her into talking, at first refused to do so.

“The lady known as Mag must have said a good deal to you on the subject of holy matrimony, Venus. Did she, I wonder, amongst other misconceptions, implant in you the conviction that love can be found only in a legalized union? Love is a dream, evanescent, fleeting, to be caught and then released, unpolluted by mundane considerations. You seek, Venus, in your untutored simplicity, to chain down something that cannot be chained. Love has many guises, and——”

“I am not in love with you!” Psyche interrupted violently.

“Nor I with you, in the sense in which you seem to be interpreting the word. Nevertheless, what I offer you is a rare enough gift in itself, call it what you will. In spurning it, you rob yourself to no advantage, for I mean you no harm. More than that, I have done you no harm.”

“No?” The monosyllable, as she employed it, borrowed his own brand of cool irony.

He continued to work without pausing. “Venus, it had to happen to you sometime, as surely as the sun rises each morning. It might have been bad, very bad. With me it was good. We both know that. Take it where you find it, Venus, and thank whatever
Gods there be, for you will not find it often. In marriage, that bourgeois custom that seems to have such an unnatural appeal for you, it can be—and too often is—a complete failure. A ring on your third finger will be no guarantee of happiness, physical or otherwise. What I offer you, on the other hand, is guaranteed. We have proved that once already. Next time you will find it equally true.”

“There isn't going to be a next time, Nick.”

“You don't dislike me, do you?”

It was difficult for Psyche to be anything other than honest. “No, I don't dislike you,” she replied slowly. “I should—but I don't.”

“Then stop talking and behaving like a little fool.”

He was no longer painting, but Psyche, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her faded dungarees, held her pose. This was how she had once stood, and in these same clothes, in a world which, though arid and harsh, was one in which she had never needed to compromise. Unconsciously she reverted to the language which had been hers until so very recently. “There ain't goin' to be no next time.”

He knew then that she meant what she said, and knew also that it was not, and never had been, in his nature to force compliance on any woman. His face expressionless, he began to paint again. “Have it your own way,” he told her curtly, “though what tortuous and ill-informed logic produces this decision of yours, I cannot guess. Perhaps you will at least satisfy my curiosity, if nothing else, by telling me why there was nobody else before me?”

He has no heart, he has no conscience, Psyche thought bleakly. I was clever enough to know these things about him in the beginning. How could I have forgotten so easily? And now he, who has talked so often of sensitivity, asks me a question like this. I ought not to answer it, but I will, because it is time he learned— as I have—that one can't judge people by how often they wash, by whether they say “isn't” or “ain't”.

“There wasn't anyone clean enough,” she replied slowly.

“What in hell do you mean by that?”

“Just what I say.”

“I presume that I am, for example, clean enough?”

Psyche hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then said distinctly, “I thought you were.”

Nick stepped away from his easel, and his voice was as cutting as a winter wind. “Will you have the goodness to explain that remark?”

This was a side of him that Psyche had never seen, but she stood her ground with a question which was in itself an oblique reply. “You're married, aren't you, Nick?”

“How did you know that?”

“I didn't, really.”

“But now you do?”

“Yes,” Psyche said without emphasis, “now I do.”

His eyes as cold as his icy voice, he said, “My private life is none of your business, Venus, and never will be.” With which, he turned and strode toward the stairs.

Psyche heard the slamming of the door below, and, soon after that, the coughing roar of the car engine. Depression held her to the model's stand. A tired, and temporarily shabby Venus, burdened with doubts she could not resolve, as apathetic as the noonday silence that closed in around her, she asked herself where she was going and why. Travelling a road with few decipherable signposts, her own untried judgement her only rod and staff, she wondered dully how she would ever find her way. She had deliberately angered the one person who had any interest in her, had perhaps forfeited his good-will entirely—and for what?

Sitting down, she covered her face with her hands, and rocking slowly to and fro, whispered, “I don't know—I don't know. Oh, God, I just don't know.”

7

N
ICK
had left the studio without a considered destination, and it was habit rather than anything else that took him to the village post office.

Drawing in to the curb, he heard the dry crackle of fallen leaves beneath the tires, and was aware as he had not been before that summer had given way to autumn.

Inside the small post office, he received his mail with an indifference that evaporated instantly when he saw the conspicuous colour of a telegraph envelope. Putting aside a bundle of newspapers, he ripped it open and took in its contents in a single comprehensive glance. ‘Boat reservation canceled stop flying home stop arrive sixteenth flight 407 stop love Alice.'

His first reaction was one of unqualified pleasure, for he was, within his own limitations, genuinely fond of his wife. Then, computing dates, his dismay more than equalled his pleasure. He had exactly twenty-four hours in which to get rid of a girl who was at the moment his entire responsibility. By the following afternoon no trace of her presence must remain to be discovered by Alice who would, he was sure, insist on seeing his summer's work as soon as she stepped off the plane. Alice was a very sophisticated young woman, but she would not, he knew, accept any such greeting as “I have been faithful in my fashion”. Once he had disposed of the actual Venus, it would not be too difficult to imply that
The American Venus
had been painted in the north country where he had found the model for it—an untruth well
substantiated by the paintings he had done of her against the background of the slag.

His car as good a place as any in which to consider his problem, he went back to it, and getting in, sat absently tapping on the steering-wheel with the long, paint-stained fingers of his left hand.

What he should have done, he saw quite clearly, was to find her another job long before this, and he cursed the procrastination that had allowed him to drift without making any plans for her future. The one kind of work he could have arranged for her on short notice, modelling for another artist, he calmly set aside as impossible. He thought, as it happened quite correctly, that such an idea would not occur to her because she did not think of herself as a professional model, and, as long as he himself had anything to do with it, his Venus was going to remain uniquely his own.

It took him some time to find a solution to his difficulties, and, when he did, he had to rationalize it considerably before even his conscience would tolerate it. He was irritated that his conscience should bother him at all, and to disguise from himself the brutality of his intention he decided to pay her more generously than he might otherwise have done.

It was not until he returned to the converted barn toward nightfall, having amongst other things cashed a cheque and made arrangements with the local taxi, that he recalled the circumstances of his departure from it, so completely had he already severed himself from the dream-like quality of the preceding summer months.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, but he was smiling when he came into the studio.

Psyche, rising quickly from the chair in which she had been sitting, braced for she did not quite know what, saw his smile and had one of her sudden flashes of insight: as a model he would always remember her; as a person he would remember her only very occasionally; as a woman he had already forgotten her.

“Venus, come and sit down here for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.”

When he handed her the telegram she needed to read it once
only to appreciate its exact implications as far as she herself was concerned.

She had realized from the beginning that, in one form or another, this moment was inevitable. Even more precisely, she had known that the first snows of winter were unlikely to find her still at the studio. In spite of this foreknowledge, and in spite of her mixed feelings, the shock was so numbing that she could not find her voice, and the flimsy sheet of paper fluttered between hands which briefly trembled uncontrollably.

Nick, repressing any pity he might have felt, trusting qualities in her that he did not consciously attribute to her, waited for her to speak first, to set the tone of a conversation he wished already over and done with.

He is cruel. Psyche thought passionately, and he is selfish beyond belief. Why should I make this easy for him? Why shouldn't I scream and spit at him? What do I owe him—nothing, nothing, nothing!

And what, asked a voice deep within her, does he owe you? And she knew, growing calmer, that the answer was the same— nothing. She had fled with him because she needed a refuge and had none. He had taken her because she could be of use to him. They were quits, she and Nick.