The Lodger: A Novel (7 page)

“You’re not awkward with me. But you never build me up or flatter me. You only argue with me.”

“You want flattery? Listen to this then—ever since I met you, you’ve blotted out everyone else. Other people are colorless in comparison; no one quite matches up … it’s most annoying and uncomfortable.”

He turned sharply to look at her. “Is that true…?”

Dorothy flushed deeply. “Yes, it is. From the first moment I saw you coming toward me on the station platform. Though I can’t stand your ideas…”

“Forget my ideas, Dorothy, I shan’t have any more of ’em. Take back anything I ever said. Let’s spend as much time together as we can. We’ll talk, voraciously. I don’t want there to be any inhibitions between us.”

For a long moment, his blue eyes held hers. He put his hand on her knee. She could feel the warmth of it tingling through her thin summer dress. When she was with him, her body spoke a language of its own—or rather, it sang.

The feeling rising inside her was the sweetest thing she’d known, yet it made her a terrible person. It was so strong, it swept everything else away: all the anchoring principles, like honesty and loyalty and not hurting other people. The principles underpinning her idea of herself as a fundamentally decent person.

It was nearly impossible to draw back, yet she had to. Gathering her strength, she dropped her eyes and moved her leg away from his hand.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She looked at him steadily. “Amy Catherine … she’s practically my oldest friend.”

Bertie sighed. “I knew this was coming. I have something to tell you about Jane and I, and I’m not sure how to explain it to you.” He hesitated, looking out toward the garden. “My whole adult life, I’ve been searching for something in a relationship with a woman, something rare and beautiful, not fully understood … something that would satisfy all my needs, from the most cerebral and artistic to the purely physical, and give my life meaning. You see, my heart craves a perfection of mental understanding and bodily response. I want tenderness and intellect and passion all wrapped up in one dear mate for life. And I want to return those gifts in abundance.

“When I met Jane, I thought I had found my ideal. Sadly, it became clear early on in our marriage that this was not the case. Jane more than satisfied my need for companionship, but there were certain physical incompatibilities. How shall I put this? She and I have completely different temperaments, and … well, different bodily demands. Jane has never been a particularly sensual person … she doesn’t see our relationship as being preeminently sexual. She regards my, uh … my
appetites
as a sort of sickness. In this respect, we are vastly mismatched.” He paused again, glancing at Dorothy. “I don’t want to shock you.”

Dorothy kept her face carefully expressionless. “I’ve never been shocked in my life. Go on.”

“The realization of our incompatibilities was dreadfully painful. Perhaps I expect too much from one person but—oh God!—I could not reconcile myself to what I had. I was riven by intolerable longing; I couldn’t rid myself of its raw ache. At the same time, I didn’t want to betray Jane. She was so dear and good; she’d never given me any reasonable cause for discontent. I was torn between my desire not to hurt her and my desire for completion. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work. I was divided against myself.” He stopped and raked his hands through his hair, visibly upset.

“What happened?”

“Well, with time, we reached a recognition of our differences. Jane’s the most loyal and understanding wife I could ask for, but it hasn’t been easy for either of us … We’ve come to an agreement, whereby each of us has the freedom to satisfy our physical desires with other people.”

“You mean you have that freedom,” Dorothy pointed out, drily.

“In theory, both of us have it. In practice, yes, I am the one who makes use of it,” Bertie acknowledged. “But without it, our marriage would surely have collapsed, and neither of us wants that … We’re allies now, rather than lovers. Such passion as there was between us expired a long time ago, leaving a great deal of affection and mutual support. Jane’s only conditions are that I don’t keep my friendships secret from her, and I don’t have them with women she dislikes. She and I continue to love and respect each other, and everything goes on as before.”

“Surely it’s not that simple,” Dorothy protested. She was disturbed, despite her efforts not to be, by their arrangement. The thought flashed in her mind that she wasn’t the first, and she probably wouldn’t be the last. She remembered that Bertie had left his first wife for Jane, which caused something of a scandal at the time.

“You make it sound so … so clear-cut,” she went on, struggling to find the right words. “What if the other person wants more? Love naturally brings jealousy and possessiveness. You can’t go putting limits on it…”

He picked up a tendril of her hair that had escaped from its heavy bun, and smoothed it lightly between his thumb and fingers, spreading sensations through her body that were like pinpricks of colored light. She half closed her eyes.

“I think you could be the incarnation of all my dreams and desires,” Bertie murmured. “I’m greedy for you … for all of you—flesh and bones, innermost thoughts and secret fantasies…”

Through the open French windows, they could hear Jane approaching with the gardener. “And those evergreens need a good pruning … oh yes, and next summer, I’d like an absolutely enormous bed of azaleas along that wall, a great blaze of color…”

Dorothy pulled away from Bertie. His skin was flushed; his eyes densely blue. Sighing, he got to his feet and walked over to his desk.

Six

The morning stretched blissfully ahead of Dorothy. The room was very warm with sunlight and a blazing fire. Jane was wearing a delicate gauzy little dress; she glanced up affectionately as Dorothy came in.

“How are you, my sweet?” she asked. “I hope you were comfortable in your room. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you. Like a top.”

Jane motioned her toward the wide chintz sofa and Dorothy sank into it gratefully, enjoying the maternal fussing.

“Tell me, really, how you are. You look much rosier this morning. You were utterly washed out when you got here.”

“I was tired to death,” Dorothy said, from the depths of the sofa. “I’m nearly always tired to death nowadays.”

“You shall do absolutely nothing while you’re here; I insist on it. You’ll lounge around in your room, and only come out to eat and play when you feel like it.”

“Yes, please. It sounds utterly blissful.”

A maid entered the room briskly and hovered just inside the door. Dorothy let the quiet murmur of their conversation flow over her “—and open all the windows once you’ve finished washing up the breakfast things, and put flowers in the bedrooms. Oh, and don’t forget to leave the letters in the box when the postman comes…”

“How are your sisters?” Jane asked, when the servant had gone.

“Oh—doing splendidly, I think. I haven’t been to visit them for a while.”

Dorothy glanced down at her hands. Jane had changed since their school days; she’d been swallowed up into the life of household women, losing the intellectual daring that Dorothy used to admire. They were not entirely at ease with one another; it was a struggle to find things to talk about. She was sure Jane felt the strain, too. What if all they had left in common were their feelings for Bertie?

“How is your mother?” she asked.

Jane rolled her eyes. “She was devastated when I went off with Bertie, you know, because he was still married. In fact, she swore she’d kill herself. I ignored all her pleas and threats, so she sent a posse of uncles and cousins round to our lodgings to make us see sense, but that didn’t have the desired effect either.” Jane hesitated and laid her hand on Dorothy’s arm. “Oh Dora, I wish you’d been around to confide in. I loved Bertie and believed in him utterly, but at times I felt so isolated and demoralized. I was defying not only my family, but the whole world.”

“It must have been difficult,” Dorothy murmured, heavy with secret growing shame.

“Yes, it was for a long while, though things improved once Bertie’s divorce came through and he married me. Mother began to accept him grudgingly. She comes to stay fairly regularly, and she and Bertie are almost civil to one another these days…”

The door opened and Bertie came in. “Here you are,” he said impatiently. “The fire in my study has gone out. I can’t get it started again; the wood must be damp. There’s smoke billowing everywhere…”

“I’ll see to it,” Jane said, rising swiftly to her feet. “Back in two ticks, Dora.”

They both went out.

Dorothy stayed on the sofa, listening to the sounds of the maids going about their daily chores in other parts of the house. She was thinking how skillfully Jane managed Bertie’s house and his moods. Jane provided a perfectly stable background for his writing and responded tactfully to his every whim. She was there when wanted by him, never underfoot when not. Bertie admitted to Dorothy, with rueful humor, that every writer should have a Jane.

Yet Dorothy noticed a trace of fear in Jane’s dealings with him, an almost desperate wish to assuage his irritability. Beneath the cheerful surface of life in their house, there was tension. Bertie was frequently away. There was an artificiality about Jane; a careful watchfulness. This was present in everything from the eagerness of her smile to her concern with current affairs; she was utterly devoid of spontaneity.

Dorothy was dimly beginning to realize that Jane protected herself by freezing many of her own emotions and needs. “Jane” was a persona created jointly by her and Bertie, someone who was able to cope with the demands of their joint life. Amy Catherine was more real; real and vulnerable. But she was all but buried beneath the construct that was Jane.

Jane came back and sat down next to Dorothy on the sofa. She took Dorothy’s hand. “I’m glad you’re here, old thing,” she said, giving it a squeeze.

A panicked sense of her own treachery swept through Dorothy. She fought down a sudden overwhelming urge to confess everything. Why couldn’t Jane see the attraction that burned like fire between her and Bertie? She wanted to tell Jane to send her away before it was too late; never to invite her again.

She glanced remorsefully across at Jane and saw, with a sharp pang of pity, that Jane was losing her looks. Her skin seemed drier and less dewy. The fine lines which had begun to appear around her eyes had deepened. To save trouble, she did her hair in a tight bun on the top of her head, which didn’t suit her.

“You know your old hairstyle?” Dorothy asked, suddenly. “You wore most of it down, and it flowed around your shoulders.”

“Yes, what about it?”

“Well, I preferred it. It flattered you better.”

Jane responded with a swift hurt look. There was an unmistakable flash of dislike in her large brown eyes, which vanished almost immediately. It made Dorothy wonder how much Jane guessed.

*   *   *

BERTIE OPENED HIS
study door as Dorothy was walking down the passage. “Come and talk to me.”

“Shouldn’t you be working?”

“I can’t work,” Bertie admitted. “My mind and my thoughts—are just swirling about … I’m distracted by wanting you. It’s like someone murmuring continuously in a room while I try to write.”

He saw the doubt in Dorothy’s eyes, and he answered her gently, without her having to put anything into words. “Jane is the anchor of my existence. You are the zest.”

Dorothy stepped into the room and he shut the door behind her. There was silence.

“Damn you!” he burst out. “Not having you is interfering with my work, my mission…” He flung a hand at the untidy heap of pages on his desk.

“May I look?” she asked cautiously.

He nodded moodily. “It’s in its infancy still. It’s an essay called ‘The Contemporary Novel.’”

Filled with curiosity, Dorothy picked up sheets covered with small, densely written prose. He had never let her see his work in progress before.

We are going to write about it all. We are going to write about business and finance, and politics and precedence, and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretenses and a thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clean air of our elucidations. We are going to write of waste of opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand new ways of living open to man and woman. We are going to appeal to the young and the hopeful and the curious against the established, the dignified and defensive. Before we have done, we will have all life within the novel.

When she’d finished, there was silence.

“Don’t you like it?” Bertie asked, at last.

“I more than like it … it’s brilliant. You are almost the only writer who can cut loose from the old ways of thinking, and you aren’t afraid to tell the truth. You’re going to change lives and make a real difference to the world.”

He smiled broadly; Dorothy could feel his enormous pride in his mental agility. He was like a ringmaster entering the circus tent with a spring in his step, knowing he was going to tame wild animals and bend them to his will.

“I want to describe the contemporary social and political system in England,” he said. “With all its flaws and corruption and its terrible disregard for the poor … through writing about it, I want to raise the status of the novel to the level of political debate … I’m fired by a vision of a world still decades in front of us. I can see its truth and urgency, yet I can’t seem to bring it into being. It’s my work and duty, my set of rules for life and the only religion I have—”

“You know the huge difference between you and me?”

He shook his head, smiling. “Tell me.”

“To me, literature is an end in itself, a thing of beauty and wonder. To you, it’s a vehicle, a tool. It has a purpose.”

“Of course it does. A book without a purpose is simply the writer’s impertinence.”

He got to his feet and moved closer to Dorothy. The exasperation in his voice belied the warmth in his eyes. “But it’s absurd to think that having a purpose rids a work of beauty…”