The Small Room (23 page)

“I can only speak for myself,” he said. “I've never met a problem like Jane, thank God. All I know is that I don't get all this withholding business. It seems to me you just teach and then go away and hope some of what you said sank in, and then when you see the papers you know almost none of it did. As far as I can see, teaching is as much as anything the ability to handle failure most of the time, one's own failure, I mean …” He stood there, waving the jug back and forth a little as if it were a ball in his hand. Then he set it down on a side table.

One simply could not be ironic about Henry, Lucy thought. He was too innocent and clear.

“Once in a while you do have to, kind of, be a father to somebody, though. Do you remember Saul, Debby? This boy used to hang around all night until I was propping my eyes open.” He laughed. “Saul wasn't even bright.”

“And you were a good father?” Carryl asked gently.

“He had the patience of a saint,” Debby answered from, as usual, the floor. “And Saul did pass!”

“Now he writes me twelve-page letters and says no one understands him but me.” Henry rubbed the back of his head.

“Henry, you are a darling,” Maria enunciated for them all.

“It's only because I listened to him that he thinks that,” he said, his eyes bright behind his glasses.

“Yes …” Jennifer had been silent for a long time, and was still concentrated on the fire, feeding it tenderly with pine cones and little pieces of kindling. Now she lifted her head. “I have a hunch that we are at last, with Henry's help,” and she turned to give him one of her rare smiles, “coming close to the point We are all verbalizers by trade”—Lucy recognized in the pause the beginning of one of Jennifer's slow elucidations, the spider beginning to weave her web—“and so we tend to believe that everything is communicated through words. But do we actually reach our students by heart-to-heart
talks?
” She raised her eyebrows. “I myself have never done such a thing in forty years. No, we teach a subject to half-formed people who are, we must presume, going to grow into wholeness partly through the discipline of exploring a subject. But …” and here she accelerated her pace as she turned to Carryl, as if she had been afraid she would be interrupted and must get to the point, “there is an intangible communion between a teacher and a student which is not, I am prepared to grant, wholly intellectual.”

“Obviously.” Carryl sounded impatient. “What are you after, Jennifer?”

“‘Teach me to heare mermaides singing …'” she went on, imperturbably. “Perhaps quite simply you did not hear the mermaids singing, you and Jane.”

“It is not usual to hear mermaids singing while studying the trade routes of the Middle Ages!” A ripple of smiles acknowledged Carryl's answer, but it was clear that it had been an interruption and the web was by no means woven to the end.

“Don't break the thread,” Lucy murmured.

“It is a very long fine-spun thread,” Jennifer smiled, “but I am coming to the end. Carryl, you did, I think, withhold from Jane Seaman one element in your discourse, and it was crucial.”

“What element?” Carryl asked, on the defensive.

“We are speaking of something withheld which is essential. How could you imagine that you were withholding what you perhaps felt deeply? Yet failed to communicate, though you gave Seaman the run of your library …” “What in hell did I withhold then?” Carryl was close to anger now, a lion caught in a very fine-spun web. “What more am I supposed to give? Time is the most precious thing I have and I gave Jane endless time, time I could not afford, time that should have gone into that long overdue essay for the Seaton Festschrift, for instance.”

Perhaps they all felt as Lucy did that they should not really be present while these two fought it out.

“You withheld love.” Jennifer finished her web.

Carryl did not react at once, either with anger or with recognition. Then she clasped her hands between her knees and smiled her faint ironic smile. “Yes, that was the one thing I was afraid to give. You may be right at that, Jennifer. You usually are.”

It was handsome. It flashed through Lucy's mind that if Carryl had been more detached she would not have been afraid. It was, she considered, not so much a failure of love as a failure of detachment, but enough had been spoken.

“And you wonder why Henry finds Appleton intoxicating.” Jack moved in to break the tension. “After infinite gyrations, we sometimes manage to reach the simple truth.”

“No,” Maria broke in. “No, Jack. No irony, please. We are all afraid, aren't we?” she said, and now everyone was rising to his feet. Maria's arm slipped through Jack's. “Aren't we, my fierce withholding tiger?”

“Yes,” Jack said, and yes was clearly a very big word.

“Good heavens, Jackie, it is nearly eight! The children will be starved and burning up the furniture in the fireplace or some such thing!” Then—for all was now a chaos of departure—Maria moved across to Carryl and threw her arms around her. “Darling, you are not a saint, thank God! But you are wonderful and we love you. Don't we, Jack?”

“We honor you, Carryl,” he said with a queer little bow.

Carryl extricated herself from Maria's embrace and was, Lucy was delighted to observe, blushing for once in her life. “Oh, what a funny evening,” she said, crossing the room to say goodbye to Hallie. “Thank you, Hallie.” Then she turned back to the others. “Well, you Atwoods and Lucy, perhaps now your initiation is complete. As usual, it turns out to be an anticlimax: we have certainly taken our hair down in this small room.”

Dear room, Lucy thought, dear room, and dear, tormented,
great
people. Her thoughts were interrupted by Carryl's commanding, “I'll take you home, Lucy!”

CHAPTER 18

They sat in the car, where Carryl had drawn up, at the Faculty Club entrance. It was one of those timeless moments when ease and intimacy are possible; Lucy sensed that it was not inappropriate to take out a cigarette and light it, as if the gesture were an unspoken ‘yes, let's talk.' She had been wondering, as they drove along, what it had cost Carryl Cope to expose herself and to be exposed in the last hour. It had not seemed quite in character, somehow, had seemed rather a deliberate act of the will, a kind of penance. Why?

“Why did you do it?” she uttered when she had drawn a long puff on her cigarette.

“Self-punishment, no doubt. Also, I have discovered lately that I care rather more than I had supposed about what my colleagues think of me. Also pride,” and Lucy saw the pride flash out, as she struck a match to light her cigarette. “I did not want to be judged without being present at the judgment.”

“Jane is going to be all right,” Lucy said.

“Is she? I suppose she is now paying a psychiatrist to give her the love that I withheld.” The tired bitterness of the tone did not escape Lucy.

“She is going to a psychiatrist because of love given or not given long before she met you, Carryl.”

“Yes, no doubt—infantile deprivations or guilt. Why do we feel so guilty, all of us?”

“It's the human condition.”

“For once you sound pious,” Carryl said impatiently. Lucy clasped her hands together miserably. “No. It's only because I feel inadequate … and,” she hesitated before the word, “lonely, I guess. It looked two days ago as if Jack and Maria were through, but they have made it.”

“You wouldn't have been happy with that stiff-necked young man,” Carryl pronounced.

“I expect not. But I miss him.” She changed the subject because she was afraid she would begin to cry, and this she imagined was the one thing Carryl Cope would find intolerable. “Oh dear, people's strengths are so inextricably woven into their weaknesses. What about Olive Hunt?” she asked.

“Olive is punishing herself, God knows for what. She has cut herself off from me, from the college. She too withholds …”

There was a silence while each, Lucy surmised, was thinking of the other's problem.

“Come along!” Carryl roused herself, “Come along home with me. Ill make you scrambled eggs and coffee—it's all I know how to cook, but it's better than going back into that dismal hole.” And she started the engine.

“Much better,” Lucy murmured.

An hour later they were sitting opposite each other by the fire having a second cup of coffee. “I have the strangest sensation,” Lucy said, “as if I were coming back all the time.”

“Back where?”

“Well, at Hallie's for instance, it was coming back to the room where I first met you all, feeling so new and strange. Here I am coming back, too. I've never told you what it meant to be invited up here when you asked me that first time.”

Lucy looked hard at the wall of books, at Carryl's great desk piled high with papers, as usual, at the Constable clouds over the mantel. “Those clouds …” she murmured.

“Ah yes, the clouds.” Carryl glanced up at them coldly. “Olive will no doubt come and recapture them one of these days.” She drank down the end of her coffee with relish. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

“It's a very grand room,” Lucy said. Lucy was acutely aware at the moment of the intensity of the life lived here; of its stature; of its continual self-creation, and of its essential solitude—and by contrast, she saw herself as naked, homeless and vulnerable as a newborn mouse.

“Grand?” Carryl shrugged. “Olive's grandeur then, not mine.”

“No, yours. It's the life lived here. It's what you are.”

“Oh well,” Carryl shrugged again as if she were shrugging off all the accretions of time and position, “when one is old, as old as I am …” She reached for a cigarette and went on talking without taking it out of her mouth. “I don't really care a hoot about all this. What I care about is doing some work at last. And I might do that better in a cell.” Then she lit up and drew a long puff. “One of my fantasies is to be locked up in jail for a year, with a table, a chair, a bed.”

“And a good many books surely?”

“Yes, I suppose jails have rather poor libraries on mediaeval trade routes, so that's out.”

“But you will be going to Europe this summer?”

“Yes … no … I don't know,” and she puffed furiously at her cigarette again. “Did it ever occur to you, Lucy, that the machinery of feeling can wear out? They call it metal fatigue, I hear, when a plane suddenly blows up in the air. This business of Jane has taken something out of me for good. Olive …” She let the name rest on the air between them. “One comes to the end.”

Lucy felt unable to speak. What could one say?

“I really do have work to do,” Carryl repeated half to herself. “Have some more coffee.”

“Don't move. I'll get it!” Lucy was glad of the chance to escape the unwavering yet impersonal gaze, for Carryl had been staring through rather than at her, and it was unnerving.

“Still,” she went on thinking aloud, “it is strange to unweave the strands of so many years. The silence,” she said. “Olive used to interrupt me a dozen times a day. The phone sometimes rang every five minutes …”

“Yes, the silence,” Lucy said in a small voice. Desolation filled her. It seemed an eternity since she had heard an intimate voice. Carryl's absent gaze suddenly focussed.

“Poor child,” she said quite briskly. “But you know of course that there will be other voices, other people. You will not be lonely forever, whatever you may think now. I, on the other hand, am glad to be rid of it all, to know that there will never be another voice pulling me away from one self into another. I feel lighter … free …” But as she spoke, she looked older than Lucy had ever seen her, old and tired. Her eyelids drooped over the keen eyes. For an instant Lucy wondered if she were falling asleep … wondered too if when the vital energy is gone, and one is free, the imagined work ever gets done.

“Freedom could be frightening.”

“Not to me!” And Carryl sat up, fiercely awake. “I've wasted too much time. I have five books in me still … at least.” Lucy caught the hint of bravado.

“What makes you so sure Olive won't change her mind?”

“She may, but I shan't. I have said, so be it,
ainsi soit-il:
when you have said that, and mean it, you're through. You've gone.”

“I wish I could say it,” Lucy said miserably.

“Cheer up,” Carryl said with a return to her old tone of light mockery. “
Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse
, as the French are fond of reminding us. Even grief … though that may be the hardest thing to accept.” Then she gave Lucy a long friendly look, so intent that Lucy found herself shielding her eyes with one hand. “I suspect that this tragic affair has helped you to grow up. The unswaddling of the ego, if I may put it that way, is exceedingly painful, of course.” Then she got up and took a different tone. “Will you stay on here? I suppose you are aware that you have made an impression. I have an idea that promotion is in the air … just an idea, mind you.”

But instead of relief, Lucy felt only disturbance, fear. “I don't know,” she said, “I never told you that I only got my Doctor's degree so as to be able to stay in Cambridge while John was at Medical School … I don't know,” she said, prickling all over with anxiety at what this confession might provoke, “I guess total commitment to teaching, when I feel so unsettled in every other way, scares me.”

Carryl did not smile. And Lucy sensed the something pitiless, like steel, in the small definite woman standing across the room against a wall of books. “Extraordinary,” she murmured, “a Harvard degree, and for such an odd reason.”

“Love does not seem odd to a woman,” Lucy bristled. “It did not seem odd then,” she corrected herself.

“And now?” The hawk pounced.