The House in Paris (22 page)

'Then you were — extraordinary.'

'You knew that from the first.'

'Because I said to you that I had no honour, you thought this need have no weight.'

'I am sick of honour. But I thought there was your heart — not for me, for her, I mean. There was no question of your loving anybody but her. Did you not know why I came? Since you were in London in April, then went away, I have been either possessed or else myself for the first time. I found I was in prison — no, locked into a museum full of things I once liked, with nothing to do now but look at them and wonder why I had.
They
keep me away from everything that has power; they would be frightened of art if I painted really well. When it thundered last month I used to wish I could be struck by lightning.'

He said coldly: 'I did not know you had so much reason to come.'

'Reason? You might as well say, what
reason
has one to answer the telephone?'

'You believed in my marriage because it seemed — un-politic. You agree, then, she is not a woman to marry without love?'

They walked some way in sharp silence. Karen said: 'Not to marry without love for
her
sake, you mean?'

'I half mean that: yes.'

'But she has not altered: oh,
she
has not changed. What you wanted, you want: it is still there.'

'I know.'

'What has happened?' said Karen, stopping beside the canal.

'Not so much,' said Max, impatient. 'It is just her that I have been mad to think I could marry for love,
her
love, her love only. I see now that that is what I cannot accept.'

'What made you think you could, then?'

'I looked back at my humiliations, my ridiculousness and self-deceptions, and dreaded others. You do not know what it is to be suspect and know why. What it is to have no wall to put your back against. For years her mother did much to show me my insecureness; Mme Fisher has taught me to be suspicious less extravagantly, but with more reason, by showing me where I stood. — I asked Naomi to marry me one afternoon in the salon, towards the end of March. Her mother had been with us, then gone out. Or rather, Mme Fisher and I had been together, with Naomi there, but sewing beside the window, not looking up. She sat dragging forward her work into the daylight, peering at the small stitches with her eyes wrinkled up, looking as though her sewing mattered too much. Though I saw her, I only felt her there when her mother had gone out and all the energy went out of the room. Seeing how gently Naomi picked up her scissors from the floor, I remembered she was a woman. I said something, and she started and pricked her finger. I saw from the pitying way she sucked the bead of blood from her finger how much she pitied me, and saw at the same time that hers was the only pity I did not resent. I wished the blood were on my own finger. I went across to her chair and asked her to marry me: her looking up stopped any doubt in myself. When I see how the stony lines of her dress and her entirely unsurprised face moved me, I see now that it was the madonna trick — my nerves tricking my senses with the idea of peace, making someone to make for me an unattackable safe place. It seemed to me then that I had not acted on impulse but from some long inclination I had not known of. This was so strong that I found it hard to remember that I, in fact, stood above her, beside her chair and looking down at her face, and was not standing looking up from below at a more than life-sized figure, lit as far as the knees, then rising into the dark. I have never passed a figure like that unmoved; I am not rational: there is too much force in a figure of stone pity. The force of the moment seemed to have no end; its deception lasted, twisting my senses till I found her bountiful because she was thin, beautiful in being ugly — '

' — Must you say that?'

'It is against myself. Do you suppose that I cannot see I victimized her? Stripped of what I saw she is ugly for the first time. Those first weeks of false calm were intoxicating — unenmity with myself, the silence of any doubt. I put my entire nature under her feet, and my unresistance to pity exalted me. A fatigue I had not admitted made her my pillow. Desire of what she gave seemed to be desire of her. The wish for the marriage began to dominate me, not less her aunt's death made what had appeared fantastic suddenly possible. My lack of a home, of any place to return to, had not only deprived me, it chagrined me constantly. In France to have no family can be more humbling than poverty. The ambition for some other, some advantageous marriage that I had had, the ambition with which her mother credited me, fell away. To be unambitiously with her became peace.'

'That was when I met you together. I saw. You were not dreaming.'

'It had the actuality of any other dream.'

'But I saw you together. Last night I thought of Naomi coming across the lawn with the kettle, and saw you smile at the window. You and I are the dream: go back to her.'

'She is not there.'

'You'll find her when you go back.'

'I cannot want to find her. I do not want peace, I do not want a pillow. Now
you
are tricking yourself with the idea of the more than life-sized figure. She has thought of our coming marriage for weeks; she is more than stone; she desires to be desired. Since we returned from London she has never stopped watching me: I have never once felt her eyes leave my face. Imagine the statue's face on your own level, spoilt with anxiousness, following where you go. Her eyes snatch at me and she cannot do things calmly. I had felt her refuse to be fully happy till you and I met again: since we have met and she has seen, though God knows how, that I love you, her love of me is love of her own pain. Her mother watches her watching, and misses nothing. I cannot live with them both.'

'Take Naomi away to live with you somewhere else.'

'I will not live with a woman who lives with her own pain.'

'I liked your gentleness to her.'

'Then it was her lover you came to meet?'

'No. The you in the train. The voice on the telephone — remember, she was waiting to be quite happy till you and I
had
met again. Remember how well she knew me that year in Paris without being told anything. And she must have known your nature well enough, too, not to be satisfied till this was tried out.'

'This?'

'You and I.'

'I see. Do you regret coming?'

'No, there is nothing
to
regret. I mean, there is nothing left now, is there, nothing? — Must we walk here? I've always hated canals.'

Max looked round, but there seemed to be nowhere else. So he opened a gate across the path and they walked on, at the edge of a new field but beside the same gloomy, rain-spotted water. Karen suddenly, but with intense calm, took Max's letter to Naomi from her pocket, read the address then tore it across four times. Then she hesitated with the torn scraps in her hand, looking at the unrelated French words. 'You two have another language, too,' she said. She glanced once at the water, but scattered the scraps on the wet grass, where they lay like the broken trail of a paper chase. Max, making no movement, watched her with irony. 'What was the good of that?' he said finally.

'It did me good.'

'Yes, I see. But my letter was in your charge. I see you are sick of honour.'

'I will not have her hurt.'

'Then we are back where we started. Will you understand nothing?'

'Don't be so — unloving.'

'You compel me to be. That is all you want.'

'Oh yes — you said just now that Naomi saw you loved me. But
that's
not true, is it?'

Max said nothing. Turning, she saw in a moment what was in his eyes. It made her look blindly down at the scraps of letter, now blurring with rain, saying: 'I didn't know ...'

'You force me to hide myself.'

'You force me to hide
myself.''

'Karen, you made me feel this was pleasure between enemies.'

'We have been people darting across the sea to each other; there has been no time yet to be anything else. There has been no time to feel anything but compulsion. If I had known you loved me I would not have dared come. That goodbye in the train only happened because those people jammed us face to face. When you touched my hand, I knew one kind of meeting was possible, but I still thought you loved Naomi. When you were asleep last night, I thought you should be beside her. I didn't ask what
I
felt; I wanted not to know.'

'Would you marry me?'

'You said that was not possible: after that I never let myself think.'

'Possible?' he said more calmly. 'In what way do you mean? If your parents would give money. I have not enough for you.'

'Is
that
all that —?'

'It is serious.'

'Yes, I know. But — I want to so much. It is not simply being happy. Should we be happy? That doesn't seem to come in.'

'That would rest with you.'

'Me? — I can't see anything. Should we live in Paris?'

'Not in any Paris you know. You would not like it much.'

'You mean, you want me to marry you?'

'Yes. I ask a great deal.'

'I'm not much. You used to see that. You used hardly to see me. What made you see me at all?'

'How can I know? Your beauty, first. What you are.'

'You make me ashamed,' she said. 'But I didn't understand anything. Did you not really want us to come here, then?'

'Karen, I don't know.'

'Has this not spoilt me?'

'Karen — '

She looked at him and was unable to speak. Last night seemed to be undone, so that they kissed with unfamiliar gentleness, tasting rain on each other's lips. Drawing apart like a pair of very young people, they stared at each other, and at what had happened now. Her heart stood still, as when she first thought of Leopold: she felt the same shock of tenderness and life opening. The face she found was the face she had failed to find on the dark pillow. This beginning of love, wanting new hands, lips and eyes, made them stand apart patiently, looking at the trodden grass between them and hearing cars rush past on the wet Romney road. Later, they turned and began to walk back to Hythe, the canal on their left now, the trees on its far side turning other flanks. Karen, feeling how wet her own feet were, suddenly thought, had he dry shoes to travel in? Once she turned, looking back at the scraps of letter diminishing on the grass. 'Even so — I was right in one way,' she said. 'You cannot simply tell her you do not love her. It would be better to tell her you love me, that we love each other.'

'She knows. But — shall I not write, but go and see her?'

'Write first — write from here. Oughtn't she to know everything? If she wants to see you after that, go. After all, we are her friends.'

The darkness of the sky, the unfriendliness of the landscape — grass, canal, trees, barracks — seemed to them less. Karen saw one lost seagull swing inland.

The bridge coming near, the chimneys behind it, again made a small town picture, like the view from the hill. But as they approached the bridge their figures entered the frame. Lighter even in body with happiness, Karen ran on up the slope to the road beside the parapet. She looked back and saw Max coming more slowly after her, looking back for the last time at the canal.

11

At the terminus of the Hythe bus in Folkestone they said good-bye; he went to the harbour, she to the Central station to wait for her train home. Where they both went, immediately, did not seem to matter much. So their parting had been voluntary and busy: the great thing had been for him to balance her suitcase so that, when her taxi started, it should not fall on her feet. She drove to the station along tree-planted roads of mansion villas, alight early, for this time of year, because of the thick dusk. Tips of shrubs glittered under the big windows. Karen saw quick pictures, upstairs and down: a girl parting her hair in a cool hurry; a family at a Sunday supper gathered round silver dishes; four people at bridge under a lamp. A car pulled up at a kerb and a couple in evening dress went eagerly in at a gate: you could see how occupied you could be without love. Herself, Karen felt like a shut book, glad to sit back with an empty place beside her and let Sunday finish itself. It was true, to think of the chestnut, the churchyard wall, the Ram's Head door with its brass bar made her share the dumb sorrow of objects at being left. Like rain on the taxi windows, soft affections and melancholies blurred her mind; she saw inanimate things as being friendly to love.

Rain
had
been disaster to many people; in the train you saw how hard it had come on them by the way they all sat, knees apart dejectedly, reading the notices or staring up un-blinkingly at the carriage lights. You hope so much of a summer Folkestone week-end: they had been made fools of through no fault of their own. 'It costs money, too,' someone said, as the train quickened on the embankment over the churchyard: now there was nothing ahead but the week's work. To foresee pleasure makes anybody a poet — all sorts of intense fancies must have quickened during the journey down — to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate. Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it. The sea not having been blue had made everyone meaner: for some time they would not think of the sea again. A pall of disappointment hung in the carriage. Karen, seeing that general threat to life that is ever-present but seldom quite fulfils itself, saw why the clouds lying darkly over the harbour when she met Max's boat had filled her with dismay. I was right: we
were
being threatened.

The dark, becoming complete, stood immovable at the windows: only when there were lights did anything fly past. The train made a noise of tunnelling through air. The girl opposite with the splashed stockings crossed her legs and began to smoke; the man she was with spread a newspaper over both of them, glanced primly round then began to feel for her under it: you could see he was certain of one thing. Their intently vacant faces unnerved Karen; shutting her eyes she thought once more of Leopold. When Max spoke of marriage, no child of theirs had been present. What he wants is that I should be tender to him, know him and not go away. Which is what I want. But his life will stay
his
life, as it was before. Leopold belongs to when I thought of Max going, when I thought I must stay alone.