Sunflower (3 page)

Well, the yard was still full of pleasantness. One ought to think of that. There was still the May sunshine, and the red, gold-freckled walls; there was the spike of white lilac, now bobbing springily under some bird-gymnastics executed lower down on its bough: there was the iron gate, and the homely orchard garden. But in that direction she did not dare to look, because they were standing there. What was the use of trying to think of pleasant things when they were standing there! People couldn’t have been taught right when they were young if they could do a thing like that. They were just blatantly gaping, with one man fiddling with a suitcase on the carrier as an excuse for delay that would not have taken in a cat. It was Essington’s theory which he had constantly and irritably impressed on her that she ought not to mind this sort of thing, that indeed it was impossible that she could sincerely mind it; but that did not at the moment seem to be true. She tried to imagine what would be thought about it by those people who in her mind were most remote from him, most unlike him in that vein of unfriendliness to her and all her instincts which ran like a dark vein through his love for her; by Rettie Adamson, a girl she was at school with whom she used to walk with on the Monkey’s Parade in Chiswick High Street, and Olga Hammond, who used to dress next to her when she was in ‘Farandole’. She had really loved both of them, but of course she hadn’t been able to keep up with them. Either of them, put in her place, would have gained some satisfaction by reflecting on her superiority in looks over the two women who were tormenting her. She tried to brave it out that way. They certainly were a couple of miseries and no mistake, with their umbrella legs and their palais-de-danse faces. Now she was all right: she was five foot eight and every bit of her measured what it ought to; her hair was real gold, lay it against a sovereign and it didn’t look so bad; lots of people thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world; if she was turned into a statue they could put her into a museum without getting an artist to alter her. But coldly she realised this would not do. She was as far away from Rettie and Olga as Essington was, though not in the same direction: and in that position, which she felt to be very lonely, she knew that her immense physical conspicuousness made her situation far worse. She could not quite see how; but there gleamed deep in her mind a picture of herself as a vast naked torso, but not of stone, of living, flushing flesh, fallen helpless on its side in some public place of ruins like the Forum in Rome, with ant-droves of tourists passing incessantly round her quickly, inquisitively, too close. Sometimes it was hot, and dry winds swung against her weakly like a tired arm, flung dust on her, and dropped again; and tourists crowding along in the shadow of her limbs put up their sweaty hands to experience her texture and stroked the grit into her flesh. Sometimes it was wet, and her groins were runnelled with thick shining ropes of water; and the tourists, going quicker than ever, rushed along her flanks and pricked them with the spokes of their umbrellas.

The queer things one thinks of! And there sounded in her ears the tones that somehow had something to do with this picture, of Mr Thursby Jingal, who writes the Spy-Glass in the
Daily Show.
It was last week that he had said to her, ‘There are people who are News. Not because of anything they do, not because of anything they are. But just because they’re News.’ She had objected. ‘But so is every leading actress, isn’t she?’ And he had answered, ‘No. Nina Purefoy is a leading actress of far higher standard than yourself. But she isn’t News. You know as well as I do that Lillah Plumptre is almost as beautiful as you are. But she isn’t News. And—er—social things have nothing to do with it. Betty Packhard has had—er—a very interesting life. But she isn’t News. It’s something all of itself. And you’ve got it. You had it when you were a little girl doing your little five minutes in “Farandole” and drawing your five pounds. Even in those days if you went into the Carlton with a young fellow and had a bite and Nina was sitting there after the most colossal first night in history and Lillah was looking as glorious as Helen of Troy, and Betty was there with her diamonds and her Duke, it would be your pink hat and green gloves that the Spy-Glass would notice. I tell you, you’re News …’ His tones had been creamily congratulatory. But being News was like living under a glass bell, a transparent prison, in whose walls the normal light of day was changed to heat that made every incident of one’s life grow to an unnatural size, an unnatural sappiness …

The bird that had been bobbing on the lilac-bough whirred and shot itself up into the sunshine. It must be fun to be able to fire oneself off like a gun and be the gun, to press the trigger and be the bullet; and such fun to bounce and bounce in the thin bright upper air among the pretty dustless treetops. Well, one could swim and dive. Really, this was a good world. It would be all right if one was brave. It was cowardly of her to mind that the people were talking about her and Essington, because it was true. If she had not been willing to stand by what she did she might not have done it. But, oh, why couldn’t Essington have married her, and made it not true any more? Now he was out of politics he could have afforded to let Lady Essington divorce him. But it was wrong of her to think of that, for there was a principle involved; though she was not quite sure what it could be. It could not be disbelief in the institution of marriage, for he always did his formal entertaining at Lady Essington’s house and in lots of ways he seemed to feel that a wife ought to be better treated than someone you live with. There was that time when he had made her cancel her rooms at the hotel she always went to at Cannes because Lady Essington had suddenly made up her mind to go there. She was quite sure, however, that there was some sort of principle involved. It might just be that one had a right to do what one likes. But it could hardly be that, for being stared at by beasts was exactly what she did not like doing. Nevertheless, though the principle continued to elude her, she never doubted but that it existed. Her failure to perceive it she ascribed without question to her own incapacity; for she well knew that always when she tried to make a generalisation out of the abundant and confused facts of life she found herself in the position of the people in a comic advertisement of meat extract that she had once seen: one earnest worker was holding up a bull while another tried to press it with a shoe horn into a small bottle which dangled on one of its hooves like a glass boxing-glove. She never hoped to confine the great bull life in her minute and brittle mind. But Essington was different. His mind was as large as life. He would know this principle. Mildly she marvelled at his greatness, and at his queer kind vagary in loving her, who was so stupid; and reflecting that anyway all this was irrelevant, since the point was that what these people were saying was true, and she must therefore not mind them saying it, she lifted her head and faced them.

That defence went at once. She had to look away and droop her head. For from the grease that floated on these people’s gaze she perceived that what they were saying was not true. It was probably a lie about her and some man that she had never seen; if by chance it stuck to the facts close enough to give her Essington as a lover it lied in making them live a beastly sort of life together. Drinking, and rowdy parties, and all the kind of things that come into some people’s minds when they think of legs, though goodness knows why, for legs are just legs. That was downright funny. She didn’t drink at all; and Essington drank nothing at lunch and only weak whisky-and-soda with his dinner. They didn’t give parties. Essington hardly liked anybody. And she didn’t go out to parties much now; she had so often had to break engagements because he turned up unexpectedly that now she hardly liked to accept invitations. Sometimes, indeed nearly always when she was not rehearsing, he would tell her that he would come to her during the day, but that he could not say at what hour; and then she could go out only for a little while at a time, nervous dashes into the park with one eye on a watch, and come back to sit about alone, for he hated to find people out when he came. There was nothing at all to do then. One could not do any housework, with all the servants about; and being beautiful one must not sew, for that brings on the little fine lines round the eyes which are the beginning of the end. There was the pianola, of course, but music did not interest her very much; and there were books, but she was stupid. Sometimes, sitting in the quiet rooms, she used to think that though she had a nice house and pretty things and all the flowers she wanted, she did not have as amusing a time as her mother had had at 69 Tyndrum Road, Chiswick. She had had a horrid little house and not very much money, but there was always a lot doing, what with cooking and running up clothes on the sewing machine and talking to the milkman and the neighbours and going round to Aunt Bessie and Aunt Polly and doing the shopping. Shopping on Saturday night was particularly exciting, with the naphtha flares burning outside the shops in the High Street, and all one’s friends bumping by with their stuffed string bags, all very jolly and amiable with the joy of buying things. That was a hard life: but this was a dull one. What was she saying? She had forgotten that it was all right when Essington did at last come, so great, so cleverly, so childishly dependent on her, even after ten years. He would drop his face into the curve of her neck and shoulder and rub his face against her warm flesh like a baby or a puppy … ‘Let’s go to bed quite early. I am so tired. I couldn’t sleep at that damned house. Sunflower, let me lie up close to you …’

Of course there was that for them to think nastily about. Essington did do that to her. But why in the name of goodness did people get so worked up about that? When one came to think of it, which one hardly ever did, there was so little in it, either way. It was no use pretending it was such a marvellous thing, because it wasn’t, at least not for women. Those women over there could have all she’d ever had of it, as far as she cared. But they ought to know better, being women. It wasn’t so very bad either. It was odd rather than really horrid, like giving a man a queer kind of medicine. And, anyway, however you looked at it surely she had been good. There had never been anybody but Essington, though there might have been. There might have been. It seemed to her, as she remembered the chief among those there might have been, that a cold wind had breathed into the yard through the iron gate. Those fools were giggling about her because they thought she was bad; but it was rather her fault that she was too good. Wouldn’t it have been better for her to have been bad and given Marty Lomax what he wanted? Then, though he would have died just the same, he would not have died crying out against her cruelty. She knew people said that you ought not to let a man do that to you unless you were married to him, and that anyway if you had to break that rule you must never, never let two men do it; yet when she remembered his thin voice saying over and over again, ‘I want Sunflower. I love Sunflower,’ she felt a chill of guilt, as if she were a nurse who out of malice had failed to dress a patient’s wound and stop a deathly bleeding, an unnatural mother who had withheld food from her weak child. Surely nothing really mattered except being kind. She wondered achingly how she could have refused anything to anybody who was so lovely to look at as Marty. There never can have been anybody much lovelier. He must have been a most beautiful baby, for when you looked closely at his hair you saw that it looked drab only because it was clipped so short, and it was really bright gold. And he had such nice grey eyes, which were so purely smiling light that they came out white in all his photographs. And he was so tall, yet as pretty in his movements as a polo-pony. Besides, just as the sight of a clergyman always reminds one of a church and religion, so the sight of Marty always reminded one of something, though one could not say exactly of what, except that it was warm and pleasant and yet so unsettling that one wanted to run out into the open air and not come back.

She found herself thinking of Francis Pitt. That always happened when she thought of Marty, now that he was dead, and it was odd. She couldn’t guess why the image of a man she had known very well should invariably recall and be immediately wiped out by the image of a man who was not at all like him and whom she had only seen once, and that quite a long time ago. It must be six or seven years now, for it was during the war. She had gone to the office of a charity to see the secretary about a matinée, and since the lift was out of order she had had to walk upstairs. As she stopped on a landing and looked at the names on the wall directory to see if it was here the office was, a little man with hair the colour of a fox and a very big mouth ran very quickly downstairs from the floor above. He paused and looked at her out of queer grey eyes which were the colour of bad weather, with extreme appreciation and utter lack of interest. It was plain that he cared for women, for he looked at her as a sailor looks at a ship, but everything in him was absorbed in anticipation of something he was going to do. With her mouth a little open, because what he did seemed to be charged with significance, like the movements of a really great actor, she noted the dead halt at which his feeling for beauty made him come to a stop in front of her, and the springy vehemence with which his eagerness for what he was going to do made him pull himself together, strike his gloved hand with the other glove as if that were a spurring signal, and race on down the stairs. She leaned against the wall, listening to his quick footfalls, that were as explicit as laughter. When the sound changed and she knew he had come to the hall she went to the banisters and leaned over, but there was nothing to be seen. In the silence she stood and turned over the thought of him in her mind. No doubt what she had noticed about the dramatic effect of the two contrasting movements—the sudden halt, the sudden racing spurt—would come in useful some day in some part that she had to play. She reminded herself that she must think more of her work. Many people found complete happiness in their work. Then she went on to the office, which was on the next floor, and they told her that she had just missed meeting the chairman of the committee, Francis Pitt, the Australian millionaire. She was glad at that, for if they had met he might have felt bound to stop and talk to her out of politeness, and that would have distracted him from full enjoyment of his happiness. He had been so happy! The recollection of it always gave her a curious fluttering, laughing feeling. Sometimes it came to her when she was sitting learning a part, and she had to get up and walk about the room, rubbing her hands which then felt as if they were charged with electricity. It had come to her hardly at all while she was seeing Marty, but it had come to her often since his death and she was glad. That the man who had been so happy still existed somewhere was proof that the tomb had not taken all youth to itself, that other things survived besides those which did not challenge death by being over-much alive; which was what one thought sometimes, when one was tired.