Sunflower (4 page)

She had remembered a man stopping and looking at her on a landing and then running past her down the stairs. That was all. Why should she feel as if some veiled figure had raised a rod and struck what it was her religion to pretend a rock, and drawn a hollow sound? Suddenly she found herself admitting that everything was wrong with this situation in particular, with her situation in general, and that there was no way of thinking it into being right. If Essington really loved her he would not put her into a position which made horrid people giggle at her and make up ugly stories; and she was always suffering things from him which it was not bearable that she should suffer from a man who did not really love her. But all that was nothing beside the central falsity of her life, which she could not put into words, which she could not grasp with her mind, because she was so stupid, but which appalled her. She saw a vast desert. The words bankruptcy, starvation, crashed through her mind. The trapped rat feeling that came to her often in the night came on now in spite of the sunshine, which indeed it dimmed; and she wanted to run and run and run. But she could not do that, any more than she could ever do anything she wanted to do, because the horrid people were still looking at her and would go away and say that they had seen her drunk, if she did anything odd; and the good little man was coming towards her with the photograph.

She took it in her hand, which was now clammy and shaking, and breathed: ‘Oh! … Isn’t she lovely!’

Of course it was far lovelier than if the girl had been lovely. How fondly her husband must love her, to think her beautiful! She reflected wistfully, yet with joy at their happiness, that this ugly girl knew a triumph that she would never know. For if a man says that you are beautiful, and you are, then he is merely making a statement of fact, and you cannot guess from it whether he is in love with you or not. Even if you know he is, the statement still gives you no pleasure, for there is nothing private or even personal about it, since innumerable people have made it before him and no doubt some have subjected it to the last disenchantment of print. But if a man says that you are beautiful and you are not, then it is a proof that he loves you. The alchemy of loyalty is working on him, he is not separate from you. And since no one else says so it is as intimate as if it were a part of the little language that people who love each other always talk. Decidedly there are other fair seasons than the spring, other conditions than beauty for making people live kindly. A wave of intense emotion passed through her. There was a haze before her mind in which there floated her vast flushed torso, dear Marty, Francis Pitt, this hideous and beloved girl. The upshot was a kind of aching happiness.

‘Yes, she’s very lovely!’

‘Well, I think so.’

‘Far lovelier than me …’

‘Oh no, Miss. I wouldn’t say that. But you do see the likeness, don’t you? Funnily enough, there’s a photo of you in this morning’s
Daily Show
that takes you in almost that very pose. I don’t know if you’ve—’ He held the folded page beside the photograph. ‘Isn’t it exact?’

She hadn’t seen it. At Clussingford where she had spent the weekend they did not take in the
Daily Show.
At least they may have, for many newspapers and weeklies and reviews lay about on the tables, arranged according to some system of journalistic affinities, so that they lay on the dark wood in curious shapes such as the foundations of an unerected village form on the sward; and indeed they might be taken as the foundations of an unerected intellectual structure, for nobody ever read them, or anything else. The nice fresh-faced people in sports clothes sat about in the library, with the plump, pompous busts, the globe that showed the countries of the world, really so vexed and dangerous, in sweet pale colours like the silks that lay neatly in the work-boxes of long dead women beside it, and the shelves of bindings that made the eye feel as the palate does when it is drinking old port; and it could not be doubted that they knew what it all meant, for these people loved their homes so much that they almost understood them. But they never read. They seemed to feel that their eighteenth-century forebears had done all the reading that was necessary for their class. It was a persuasion that made them restful to visit, but dull to live with compared with these common people, who bent their noses over the cheap prints and tracked down arguments for the reality of their romantic dreams among the trivial, smudgy words …

‘It’s got a lot about you underneath …’

He was smiling. Evidently there was something intimate that had confirmed the family in its love of her.

‘The latest photograph of Miss Sybil Fassendyll, the famous actress, who is England’s favourite representative of the type of blonde beauty. Tall and slim and golden-haired and sunny in face and disposition, she is known to her friends as “Sunflower”.’

She drew her forefinger across her lips, compelling them to remain set in a foolish little smile. She felt frightened. There would be terrible trouble over this, for no one but Essington called her Sunflower. He would be furious at seeing his private name for her in print. Though he behaved to her much of the time as if she were his most alienated enemy, he could simultaneously behave to her as if he were an ardent lover in the first and most sensitive days of courtship, so far as the ready harbouring of tender grievances was concerned. On the ground that she did not love him as much as he loved her, that she had missed some fine shade of his devotion, he would hate her malevolently for a week. She knew the line he would take over this. Though it was as likely as not that her secret name had leaked into print through his indiscretion, for he was careless in talking to her on the telephone in front of the servants and secretaries, he was sure to say grimly, ‘Sunflower, your little friends talk …’ He loathed her having friends. She had almost none left. There was really only Maxine Tempest now who came about the house. He would certainly say that it was she who had given this to the press. There would be scenes. She would get so tired, and she had to start rehearsing tomorrow. Again she felt as if she were a rat in a trap. There floated before her once more the images of the vast flushed fallen torso, of Marty, of Francis Pitt, of the hideous and beloved girl, but this time they did not make any meaning of happiness. They had of course no meaning, they could not, for they had no connection with each other. Yet somehow life was not bearable unless they were connected, unless they had a meaning. She tried to steady herself by thinking of the ugly girl, for whom at any rate all was well. Yet was even that certain? For Essington had been very good to her when first they were together. It was not till after two or three years that he had made a scourge of his love. She might come back to this yard in some future spring and find nothing fair but the sunshine and the lilac, sourness on the face of the little man and the only thing that mattered gone out of the place. As it had gone …

She did not know what to think. She did not know what to think and be able to go on living. She looked wildly round her and became aware again of the four detestable people who were still standing there lechering with their minds upon her body. There came on her an impulse to throw her arms above her head and shout at them every ugly word she knew, meeting them on their own vile ground and bludgeoning them with her extreme brutality. The world was changing her, spoiling her.

She leaned forward to the little man and said, ‘These people keep on staring at me! I can’t stand it!’

Again she was obliged to be artificial with this person who had made her so greatly desire to be honest. But she did not mind so much now that she had begun to doubt if he would always think the ugly girl beautiful. So she gave him a consciously exquisite, benignant, and confidential smile, raised her finger to her lips with a gesture that she knew he would enjoy recognising as one she had used in ‘As You Like It’, and hastened out into the street.

When she had thought of the pond with lilies she could not see it, and no idea was any use to her unless she could see it as a picture. She no longer wanted to go there, and even if she had still wanted to she could not have managed the walk, for she felt spent as she did after a scene with Essington. There was something frightening in the way that though nothing had really happened to her during the last twenty minutes, except that four people had stared at her and another had said things that did not particularly matter, she seemed to have been standing up to an enemy, disputing with him, crying out to friends who did not hear, escaping sometimes to safety, but at the last falling under blows. It was as if the situation Essington had created had been given actual separate life by the power of his genius so that it could torment her even in his absence. But here she was, thinking bitterly about him, and that was wrong, for he was a great man, and often so sweet and kind and dependent on her. Nowadays her thoughts were terribly apt to go sour if she let them settle for a moment. Since everything was really all right, and she was of course quite happy, this was ridiculous. She must find something to do in this little town during the hour or so it was going to take to put the car in order, which would not let her think. Across the road there was a picture theatre, which might or might not be open. She went over to investigate, but stopped before she got to the other kerb because she saw that the posters which had looked so attractive advertised one of her own films.

‘What’s the good of a person going to a film theatre to forget themself if all there is for them to see is themself?’ asked Sunflower almost weeping.

She turned round to go back to the other pavement, but saw that her four tormenters had come out of the garage and were standing about to watch where she was going so that they could follow her. They might as well cross the road as her. She looked up and down the market-place, and decided to go to the more impressive end, where there was a big red-brick building with a clock-tower, because she was always attracted by that kind of architecture, which reminded her of the big buildings around Hammersmith and Chiswick and Turnham Green. Though they were ugly she liked them better than the beautiful places in the West End, which were what they were not because the inhabitants of that detestable part of London really cared for beauty, but they all had nothing to do but talk and criticise each other to bits, so that people who were putting up a building were compelled to make it magnificent out of self-defence. But in Hammersmith and Chiswick and Turnham Green they were busy living, and had no time to chatter about the look of things. Down there it was the little houses that mattered. Not that they were pretty, either, but they sheltered lives that seemed to her, who had to bear the glaring discomfort of publicity, infinitely precious in their privateness. None of the women who lived in the rows of little houses in those ugly parts of London need ever feel as she was being made to feel by the four people who were keeping time with her on the opposite pavement.

It was a shame. Because of them there seemed to lie on her a disagreeable obligation to move on, as if she were a criminal shadowed by the police. When a messenger boy, wheeling his bicycle across the pavement in front of her, stared into her eyes and stopped whistling, she ducked her head in a panic; and then made matters worse by looking back at him imploringly to persuade herself that there was nothing in his face but recognition of her beauty, so that it struck him that she was behaving oddly, and he came to a standstill, gaping. She hurried on with her head down until she bumped into woman who was coming out of a shop. Looking up to apologise she found that the little body’s eyes were set derisively on her coat, which was a very lovely fantasy in checks by Molyneux. She was not hurt by that, for often before she had noticed that good clothes, like any other form of fine art, were always greeted with ridicule when they were brought out into the open among ordinary people; and she knew that there is nothing base about this ridicule, since it springs, like the giggling of children who are taken to see a tragedy, not from a lack of sensibility but from its excess. Children are as far as possible from all knowledge of tragedy, ordinary people have few chances of encountering the rarer sorts of decoration, so these contacts are to them news of an unfamiliar variation in life. They are dismayed that it should exist at all, for it intimates that life covers a range far wider than the octave of their daily routine and that the demands which it may make upon them are endless and incalculable. They are dismayed, too, at its quality: for the beauty of tragedy, and the beauty of good clothes, which is one and the same beauty, asks from those who use it a sympathetic nobility and an unembittered but firm discontent with the emotion that is not right, with the colour, the line that is not right. It sends them off on that search for harmony which is as delicious as love for a woman who is perfect and loving, as agonising as love for a woman about whom one knows nothing, not even that she has been born. This is a hard thing to lay on children, on simple people. They will not have it, they pretend that what they have seen is of no significance, and merely a ludicrous accident of folly which calls for nothing from the sane but laughter. Essington had made her see all that when she had told him how the people in Cricklewood Broadway had giggled at her when her car had broken down on the way to the Fairshams’ at Harrow, and she had had to step out into the street in a Nicole Groult picture gown and cloak.

That had been Essington’s thought; it was now hers. Though she rebelled against him, she was a part of him. How could she leave him? How can one leave oneself? And she had nobody to go to. Marty was dead. She could not go back to the people she had come from, the people who were round her now in this street, because of everything that had happened to her in the last twelve years. She did not mean the sexual things, for she knew, as all women know, that these are of the slightest importance. She meant the things that had made her public and exalted. As she walked along she looked up at the big red building as one who saw the towers of a forbidden city, obscure, mediocre, sacred.