The Small Room (15 page)

It fell into the silence and stayed there.

“It is not Jack's fault. It is mine,” Maria said suddenly. “I am a pig.”

“Dear Maria,” Lucy felt it strongly, “you are such a darling!”

“I am not a darling. I am a disgusting pig. I am devoured by jealousy of that impossible woman. I hate it that Jack admires her. I always have and I always will.”

“So the old record is still playing, is it?” Jack stood in the doorway, hostile, fatally assuming that what he had heard was the whole truth.

“No, Jack.” Lucy got up and went to him. “No, no!” She wondered if she were shouting, and she felt that she could not make him hear. “Maria is sorry. That's what she was saying.”

“I'm not sorry!” Maria hurled the words out. And the dangerous spiral, which might have been broken if only Jack had come in a second sooner, twirled itself up again toward misunderstanding and rage.

“Sorry or not, you are coming home now!” They did not offer to drop Lucy off on the way.

“Stay and have some scrambled eggs,” Debby said, when she and Henry came back from the farewells, hand in hand.

“I ought to go. I must pack and do a thousand things.…” But inertia had taken over and Lucy allowed herself to be persuaded. She felt they had all been in the power of a storm, blown hither and thither on currents they could not control. It had been exhausting and, while Debby could be heard breaking eggs in the kitchen and talking to herself, Lucy lay down full-length on the day-bed.

“I feel completely bewildered,” Henry said. “What on earth is going on?”

“The quiet groves of academe,” Lucy murmured, “the safe groves of academe.”

CHAPTER 12

As always when Lucy had had several drinks, she found herself thinking of John, longing for his physical presence, longing to come swinging along a path with his hand in hers as she had seen Henry and Debby do (though John and she had known little enough of such innocent communion), to end the fierce conflict and misery as, no doubt, Jack and Maria would do eventually, in bed. Exhaustion, liquor, the unclosed wound of separation—it was all very well to understand why she was weeping now she was alone in her room, but it did not help. She lay in the dark and felt the cold, comfortless tears slide down her cheeks and into her ears.

It was terribly startling then to hear a sharp rap at the door. In the second that Lucy thought, I can pretend I am not here, she was on her feet, had snapped on the light and opened the door, to be confronted by Jane Seaman, in a trench coat, hatless, and—Lucy suspected—drunk. She looked as if she might fall.

“Take off your coat, Jane, sit down,” Lucy said automatically. “I was lying on my bed, trying to get up the energy to undress.”

“You said if I needed help …” She was still standing on the threshold just inside the door, leaning against it. “I've got to get out of here,” she said, shaking her head back and forth like an animal trying to shake off a halter.

Lucy went right over to her and held her, as she staggered forward, then led her to the daybed and helped her out of the coat.

“Why don't I make us some coffee? It won't be very good, hot water out of the tap, but it might sober us up. I've been to a cocktail party, and could do with a little coffee myself.”

Jane said nothing at all, just sat there, leaning forward, hugging herself, while Lucy busied herself with Nescafe and paper cups. She sensed that, for the moment, it was best to ask nothing.

“Here you are, Jane. Drink this.”

“I feel sick.” The voice was thick and muffled, not like Jane's at all.

“Yes … well, just take it easy.” Lucy poured cold water on a handkerchief and brought it to press against Jane's forehead.

“Thank you. That feels good.”

After a moment Jane shakily sipped at the coffee, then drank the whole cup down in a swallow and crushed the empty cup in her hand. “Miss Winter,” she said, “I've got to get out of here.”

“Yes, I know.” Lucy was afraid of saying the wrong thing; her instinct was to treat Jane as a small sick child, wrap her up in a blanket, console her, but this was not possible. The slight figure sitting there, one lank piece of hair drooping over her face, had not relaxed for a moment. “But there is the holiday. Are you going home?”

“Home? I don't have a home. My mother's in Europe and my father wouldn't want me around. He's just married again.”

An idea flashed through Lucy's mind … ask her home with me. But it was risky, and she decided to wait and see. “Will you stay here then?”

“I suppose so.” The tone was flat, as if Jane had come to the end of feeling. She glanced up through her hair defensively. “I only got drunk because I was with such a jerk.”

Lucy glanced at her watch. “You got rid of him rather early, didn't you?”

“Yes.” The sly smile came and went. “I won't be pawed by a disgusting rich boy who thinks because he has a Thunderbird that he is irresistible.”

“Quite. I do see,” and Lucy laughed. “My poor girl, you have had rather a lot to take lately.”

“I feel like a rat in a cage,” Jane said, hugging herself with both arms and rocking back and forth.

“What would you like to do?”

Again Jane shook her head in that obsessive gesture, back and forth, back and forth. “I don't know. Get away.”

“You wouldn't get away from yourself.” Lucy winced at the smugness of this as soon as she had uttered it.

“I'd get away from
here.
”

Lucy wondered what Carryl Cope was doing about this state of affairs, but didn't dare ask. It must be assumed that she had taken on some responsibility for Jane.

“You can't imagine what it is like,” Jane said, between her teeth. She looked as if she were full of poison. “Whenever I go into a room, everyone shuts up like a clam; I'm treated like a criminal.”

“You would rather have taken the punishment—Oh, I can understand that! But, you see, it would have meant being unable to finish college. That is what Professor Cope wanted to prevent at all costs.”

“Maybe she didn't know the cost. Maybe she was only protecting her own skin, not mine.”

“Have you talked with her yourself, Jane?”

“Yes, of course,” Jane sneered, “she had me in for a little session. She was very kind, blind as a bat, inhuman and cruel without even knowing it.”

“That is not my impression of Carryl Cope,” Lucy said gently.

“She wants to take me to Europe with her this summer,” Jane said, obviously aware that this statement would be startling.

“That is generous.”

“No, just guilt.”

God, what a mess this is, Lucy thought. How would it ever get straightened out? “I'm going to let that pass, Jane. As things are now you could transfer to another college. Would your father understand?”

“He'd pay the bills all right, if that's what you mean.” Lucy felt acutely the desolation of the prospect, the loneliness, the isolation of the girl before her. She took a deep breath and made her decision.

“Jane, would you like to come home with me for the weekend? I can't promise you very much,” she went on quickly to give Jane a moment to think the answer over. “But you would be away from here, in New York, and you'd be free to go and come as you please. My mother is often rather dreary now, since my father's death, but she would find it quite appropriate that I bring a student home, and would ask no questions.”

Lucy had expected anything except a flood of tears. But the girl was bent over, sobbing great tearing sobs.

“I don't know if that means yes or no,” Lucy said gently.

“It m—m—means y—y-yes,” Jane wailed. “It's so awfully k-k-kind of you. You're the only kindness.”

“Nonsense, I just happen to be here.” Lucy waited for the force of the
crise
to spend itself, then she came to the point. “I'm glad you'll come, Jane. Now may I ask just one thing of you?”

Jane nodded.

“If I make an appointment for you with a psychiatrist will you see him? Maybe one way out of the trap is to talk to someone right outside this whole mess, someone who might help you understand what all this is about Carryl Cope.”

“I don't need help about Carryl Cope,” Jane said as bitterly as ever. “If that's a condition, then, no, I'd rather stay here.”

“Of course it's not a condition! But you could do with some help, it seems to me.”

“I'm all right.”

“You'd be pretty inhuman if you were after these last days. And I don't think you are either inhuman or all right. Hating Carryl isn't going to get you out of the trap, Jane. It's what locked you in there.”

Whenever Lucy heard herself laying down the law with such an appearance of authority, she had an immediate reaction of revulsion. It was too easy to stand outside and tell someone off (after all, she herself had just failed in a crucial human relationship); always she had the sense that you kill life by analysing it too rationally. It was a little like taking his shadow away from a person, depriving him of the rich indefinable marsh of feeling from which being springs. The effect on Jane was instantaneous.

“You don't know what you're talking about,” she said, with a return of her earlier insolent tone. “You're just like everyone else who has read a little Freud and thinks he can paste a label on things and solve them with a label.”

“No nonsense about you, my girl, is there?” Lucy smiled. “You're absolutely right. So why not go to someone who has done more than read a little Freud? Why not go to the horse's mouth?”

Jane got up and walked about restlessly, took a book out of the bookcase, opened it, and put it back. “Reason is all I've got,” she said with her back to Lucy. “I'm scared to give it up. They'll want to dig down underneath. I've got this far on reason and I'm damned if I'm going to be dragged back to infancy and go through all that again.…” She was crying. “Besides,” the words were torn out of her, Lucy felt, “Carryl Cope would call it c-c-cowardice …”

“You have to remember that Carryl Cope comes from a different generation. When she says things like that, she is simply reflecting her own background and environment.”

“She hasn't failed! What do you suppose would have happened to her if someone had gone around digging in
her
subconscious?”

It occurred to Lucy that if someone had, Jane might not now be caught like a rat in a maze. But it was not the moment to say so. “Maybe she was just lucky, or maybe she has genius that transcends her limitations. Don't you see, Jane, if you run away now from this matrix of pain and conflict, and never come to terms with it, you will just be settling for fossilizing at this stage? Do you really like yourself as you are that much?”

“I'm brilliant. You have said so yourself,” Jane said passionately. “I could get my degree at Columbia and go on to the doctorate and become a professor like Cope.”

Lucy bit back the answer that leaped to her tongue: Is teaching a profession for the humanly crippled to take refuge in? She said quietly, “Yes, you could.”

“But?”

“Jane, may I say a word to you about your long paper?”

“It was good, wasn't it?” In the last few minutes Lucy had watched the artificial bolstered arrogance slip over the suffering human being like a mask. It was not a pleasant thing to see.

“It was a straight A paper. You succeeded admirably in what you had set out to do. But,” Lucy paused and fumbled for words, “I found it disturbing. I am sure it gave you pleasure to tell off so many clever people and prove yourself, to yourself, a match for them. But from some absolute view, God's for instance …”

“Does God have to be brought in?”

“No, He does not have to be. But perhaps it is the moment to suggest to you that Carryl Cope, who does not believe in Freud, does have faith. This makes her humble on one level, where you are not on any that I can see.” The retort was sharp.

“It's faith or Freud then?”

Lucy saw why Carryl Cope had been delighted by this mind. Even drunk, even desperate, the shining intelligence was there.

“There is something a little troubling about brilliance that finds its satisfaction in nay-saying only. You are indulging, Jane, in a corrupting form of power, the power of the critic of critics. I gave your paper an A, as you know, but I liked Pippa's very much better though her grade was a B. Grades are a recognition of accomplishment on one level. Don't be so unintelligent as to overestimate them.”

“Don't take away the only thing I have,” came the answer, an angry bitter answer.

And Lucy responded with something like anger. “If that's all you have, it's not enough. Not enough for you, not enough for me as your teacher. Your intelligence is, if you will, an angel. You are putting it to poor work for an angel. Really, that paper was full of hatred and self-hatred, hatred of the intellect, hatred of all those critics who can prove themselves superior to the artist they analyse because they can analyse him.” Had she gone too far? Jane looked up, met Lucy's eyes and did not waver.

“Yes, I guess that's true,” she said, quietly. “You win.” Then she sat down, hugging herself and rocking as she had when she first came in.

“Winning isn't important.”

“What is?”

“Helping you through this difficult passage is—to me.”

“It's humiliating.”

“People believe in you. That shouldn't be humiliating.”

“I've let them down.”

“Yes, you have. You've let them down badly.”

“Very well.” Jane got up and pulled on her trench coat. “I'll see that god-damned analyst of yours.”

They parted on a firm handshake, and on a straight look.

It was a victory, but now Lucy was alone, and she saw that it was after eleven and too late to call her mother, she felt close to exhaustion, and wondered if she had taken on more than she could handle. She had certainly taken a huge risk in making herself responsible for getting Jane to see a psychiatrist. Carryl Cope would resent it. At this moment she envied Carryl deeply—envied her certainties, her eminence, her genius, her faith, even her blindness. I am nothing, Lucy thought with woe, and I have taken on all this as if I were God.