Sunflower (38 page)

He struck the paper from her hand. ‘Stop making such a fuss!’

‘But Essington, you must read it! It’s so dreadful!’ If only he would read it he must feel sorry for her, he would have to pity and comfort her and she would die if someone did not cover her eyes with kisses and persuade her that everything was well so that she could be relieved for one moment from the anguish of the thought that Francis Pitt might read that paragraph about her, might see her nakedness made a mock of …

Essington nearly screamed. ‘But I’ve read it.’

‘You’ve read it?’

‘Yes! Of course they sent it to me too. I threw the thing in the waste-paper basket. But I knew you’d make a fuss about it. I knew you’d make this hideous fuss!’ He waved his hands as if by her impetuous folly she had ruined a situation delicious in its serenity.

She took a step nearer to him, and bent down across the tray, putting her face close to his. ‘Essington, you’ve read it?’

He blinked. ‘Aren’t I telling you so?’

Appalled by his wickedness, she drew a deep breath.

‘Now what’s the matter?’ he asked tearfully. ‘What did you want me to do about it? What good does it do to get excited as you’re doing?’

Gravely she said, ‘You are mean, you are stingy. I see it all now. When you read that paragraph you saw how awful it was. You’re clever, you couldn’t help doing that. Why, ever since you came in, you’ve been trying to prevent me from reading. Every time I’ve picked it up, you’ve said something that’s put me off. You knew it was awful, you knew I couldn’t help being hurt. But you can’t bear giving any sympathy, because you hate giving anything to anybody. You couldn’t even bear to admit that anything horrid had happened to me on account of you, because that would make me your debtor. So you invented all these things to be angry with me. That silly stuff about the Jew-boy. That endless business about my work, so that it seemed as if it was you whom I ought to be sorry for, and I who was in your debt in every way. Oh, you are mean, you are grudging.’

She stopped suddenly, her finger to her lip, considering a memory as if she were listening to a distant sound. It had crossed her mind that he had been very kind to her one summer night about four years before. They had gone down for a weekend to Southend, because it was the kind of place where nobody would recognise them, and on Saturday evening a tooth that had been giving just the tiniest twinges during the week suddenly began to dig twitching lobster claws of fire down into her jawbone. He couldn’t have been nicer to her. He hadn’t once said that she ought to have had it seen to when she was in town, and had held her in his arms all night, and when she cried a little because the pain was so bad he had made up a funny silly tale to amuse her, a tale like one of the Just So stories, about an Elephant that had an Ache in its Tusk. Her face wrinkled up, she nearly weakened and let him be a little cruel to her, so that they could start all over again. But she remembered what had happened the next day, how on the Sunday morning they had gone out to find a dentist, and when the second one had proved to be out he had suddenly grown tired of being kind. He had waited sulkily in the waiting-room of the third, while she had had the tooth pulled out, having begged her to get through with the business as soon as might be, since it was a pity that anyone who was working so hard as he was should have to spend one of the few decent days of that summer indoors; and at lunch, though she was still feeling sick from the cocaine injection and the wrench, had spoken with humorous pity of her acting, as he had done often before, as he had done often since, as he would do an infinite number of times again, if she did not break up this thing. It was no good. One could not face life with this man who had frayed his nerves by perpetual rage with all that exists, any more than one could cut the pages of a book with a knife that was saw-edged because an ill-tempered user had hacked it down on every sort of substance. She had to put an end to this.

She took her finger from her lip, sighed, shook her head and said, ‘You must go away.’

‘I haven’t finished this chicken.’

‘You mustn’t finish it. I want you to get up and go.’

He paused, his knife and fork in the air.

‘If you don’t go,’ she said, her voice going flat and unmusical with fatigue, ‘I’ll take that tray and throw it on the floor. You’ve got to go.’

‘Sunflower, let’s talk this thing over first.’

‘No. I know everything you have to say. You’re clever, I’m stupid. My acting’s rotten. I’ve minded petty things about my position more than I ought to have. It’s all true. But what matters is that this is my home and if I don’t want you here you’ve got to go.’

He rose and came out from behind the table and stood close to her. He suddenly became immobile. His eyes became fixed, like the painted eyes of a china figure, looking slightly above her left shoulder. Something awful must be happening within him to change his substance from its normal sensitiveness, which responded to each tremor of his nerves as water does to wind. He was probably planning to do something frightful and fantastic to alarm her into being again submissive.

She begged him, not because she was afraid she would weaken, but because it was such an effort to keep her attention that she felt as if she would faint unless he went away. ‘You must go. Can’t you see that there’s nothing else for it but that you should go? Don’t you see that I’m telling you to go although I’m not angry with you, although I’m quite calm, which shows I really mean it?’ Her voice was becoming flatter and flatter with tedium.

His mouth opened slowly. Now that fastidiousness and argumentativeness were not incessantly arranging and rearranging his features she found it difficult to recognise them. They were so curiously marked with a sense of failure, which it was hard to reconcile with the facts of his life. For this was not a new experience caused by his loss of her; he was so passionately refusing to admit he had lost her that he could not let the thought of it affect his face. Almost as much as if he were dead, the moment was not leaving its mark, was letting appear the sum of judgments of each and every day since he was born on whether that birth had been worthwhile. And surely since that sum was what it was it could not be that there had come quite easily to him riches and fame and power. It would have seemed more likely that he had spent his whole life trying to make a small shop pay and failing in the end.

A little dazed with pity, she moved closer to him; and that made it queerer still that again he should raise his voice, not as if he were angry with her, but as if she were going away from him. He shouted quite loudly, ‘Yes, you can go to another paymaster!’

As he spoke his hand went up in the air. The moment she had feared for years had come at last. He was going to strike her.

She could not move out of the way, because her mind was swinging like a pendulum between two aspects of his misery. There was the absurd injustice of what he was saying, which showed how far spent he was; he had now cast truth from him, as a man lost in the desert past hope of rescue strips off his clothing and wanders naked. There was also the absurd way in which he had said it, using words that might have come out of a bad play; even he had cast his own fineness from him, which had been his ultimate pride. Both these losses were so touching that not to become wholly absorbed in each of them seemed callous, so that she was already confused by a sense of conflicting duties and a slow mournfulness that was not compatible with rapid movement, when she saw that what she had long feared more than her own death was happening. There was nothing to do but shut her eyes and wait until his fist came down on her breast.

She had been right in fearing this moment as long as she had. This was the most horrible thing that had ever happened to her, that can ever have happened to anybody since the world began. Not because he had hurt her, but because he had not. He had not even made her sway on her feet. He was not as strong as she was. And that was shame, shame and ruin for them both.

She opened her eyes and saw that he was going to strike her again. He was raising his arm with a curious artificial movement, a trick to achieve strength, like the overarm stroke in swimming. Her heart bled with love for him, for she saw that he was trying to save her world for her; since indeed everything she felt about life depended on men being in some ways stronger than women. She tried to help him in putting it all right by lurching backwards under his blow, but when it came it was so weak that it gave her no help, so that she simply stepped backwards. From a cat-like crinkling of his eyes and a greyness that spread round his mouth, she knew that he had seen what she had been trying to do and seen too why she had failed. She cried into her hands.

When she looked up again he was kneeling beside one of the armchairs at the other end of the room, burying his face in a cushion.

She went and leaned over him, muttering, ‘I’ll make you some coffee …’

He sat back on his heels and turned his face away from her. ‘No, no. I must go now. I can’t stay after this.’ He tried to pull himself on to his feet, and could not manage it. She bent down and helped him. When he was up he cried loudly and disagreeably, ‘Think what you must have done to me to get me to the point of striking you!’

She opened her mouth to answer, but stammered because there were two answers she felt inclined to give. She wanted to tell him that he need not reproach himself so greatly for having struck her since he had not hurt her; and she wanted to plead that she had done nothing she had not a right to do, she had only begged him to leave her house because he came there not in love but in hate. But before she had made up her mind which to say it came to her that he had cried out this complaint simply because the strength of her arms when she raised him to his feet had reminded him of the awful thing that had happened. She followed him across the room out into the hall and stood beside him while he put on his coat, biting her lip, looking downwards. Separation was a myth. They were not separate. His shame was hers.

Petulantly he muttered, ‘Gloves gone.’

They had slipped down beside the cabinet. Stooping for them, she saw herself clearly reflected in the polished wood, as if the fine furniture were ironically holding a mirror to her flushed human face. She wished that she was one of the things that have no will but only use. She wished that she were a stream which lets land-beasts drink, and water-beasts live, and men and women bathe, and does not flow uphill. She gave him his gloves and as his coat-collar was turned up put out her hand to arrange it. But with a look of fear in his eyes he waved her away from him, further and further, so that she had to mount the lowest step of the staircase, or seem disrespectful of his physical force.

He did not bother about his coat-collar, though he was the tidiest of men. Instead he pulled out his key-ring and was taking from it the key of her house. He had great difficulty in doing it because all his movements were slow and clumsy as if he were a little drunk. She stood and watched him, understanding the fact that he had always been afraid of her and that all his contempt had only been a disguise for fear, and wondering why he should feel like that for her, who had meant nothing but kindness to him. It was a mystery. And now she did not intend to solve it. He had tired her out. Also, at the back of her mind was a feeling that there was some other thing she had to do.

The telephone bell in her bedroom began to ring. Their eyes met. He stopped fumbling with the keys. They both threw their heads back and looked up the staircase, listening.

He made a queer, coarse, hacking noise in his throat. Their eyes met again. His hand gestured upwards, as if to tell her to go up and answer it.

She shook her head.

He said huskily, ‘Answer it.’

She shook her head, as if it did not matter.

He looked at her steadily. His glance was vacant. She had a feeling that he was rapidly considering whether to fill its blankness with rebuke, with anger, with forgiveness, with repentance, and that his intellect was coldly telling him that he might look in vain for any apposite emotion, for it was the essence of the moment that no emotion could be apposite to it. It was as if he had been one of those chemists who insist on trying to explode the atom in spite of the risk that if they succeed the whole universe may explode at the same time. He had exploded an integral part of their relationship and the whole universe they lived in was destroyed. It was true that they could not be separated, that though they might remove their bodies far apart their spirits would remain mingled. But they hung locked together in the midst of nothingness.

Dropping the empty look, drooping his head, he went back to the business of freeing her latchkey. At last it came clear. He put out his hand to give it to her. She put out her hand to take it. It was enormously heavy, so that the effort of holding it shook the breath out of their bodies.

‘Goodbye, Sunflower.’

‘Goodbye, dear.’

They were whispering like two ghosts. The telephone bell whirred, real, robust.

She let the key fall from her hand on the staircase, as if it would not ever be needed again.

He squared his shoulders, shook them, and let them drop again, muttering to some invisible person who stood beside him in the hall and urged him to assert his rights and stop, ‘No. No. Can’t stay after this. Must go. Dear Sunflower.’ Slowly, stupidly, he began to open the door.

Overhead, the telephone stopped ringing. Because his back was turned she pressed her hands to her breast and dropped them as he turned and looked at her.

He got the door to open, stepped outside and weakly drew it to after him. For a long time he held it just two or three inches ajar. She could see his face, again still as a china figure’s and scarred by lifelong failure as by old cuts, looking at her through the crack. Their pulses beat on the empty house, the silent night, as on a drum.

Overhead, the telephone began to ring again. Instantly he flung the door wide open and stood on the threshold with his arms stretched out, as if he were going to rush in and do violence to the house, to her. She walked backwards up another stair, putting out her hand in front of her to defend herself. But suddenly he banged the door. One moment she was facing his sour and vehement stare, the next she was confronted with blank black wood.