The Thinking Reed (43 page)

“And you are perfectly happy?” said Isabelle, looking about her.

“Well, I would be,” said Alan, “if I hadn’t gone to Le Touquet and met you.”

She covered her lips with her fingers and looked piteously at him, but she could not herself tell whether she was imploring him to advance or retreat.

Her hand was resting on the table; he put his over it. “Don’t take that away,” he said. “I want to touch it, if only out of friendship. I knew at any rate that we’d be great friends from that very first night we met in that pond of old trout at Lady Barnaclouth’s. I saw at once that I mightn’t get everything I wanted from you, as you were married and trying to make a go of it. But I did think we’d quite possibly know each other awfully well all the time till we died.”

“I hope we will,” she murmured.

“I was sure you would like the right things,” he went on, “because you so hated the wrong things. God, how you hated that party! You loathed the whole lot of them, the bawdy, skimpy girls, those tailor’s dummies who looked as if they wouldn’t talk although the truth was that they couldn’t talk, those pretentious women gabbling about their spawn. You loathed them and loathed them and loathed them, and I loved you for it. A train of emotion started then that hasn’t stopped.”

His fingers closed on hers and loosened. She smiled blindly at him, dropping her lids, and said faintly, “I must have behaved terribly at that dinner party if you could see how I felt about it. My manners must be very bad.”

“No, they are perfect,” he said. “But you have a little pulse in your throat that beats. I noticed it in the first five minutes after we met. It is beating now.”

She took her hand away from him and covered her throat. She still could not look at him.

“You are the most nervous and fragile human being I’ve ever known,” said Alan. “It frightens me, I wish to God you’d let me look after you.”

She whispered, “But, Alan, you forget …” She paused because she did not know what she was trying to say. She could not be wanting to remind him that she was married, since she was going to leave Marc. Probably she was only satisfying that instinct for flight from all profound relationships which is the sincere basis of insincere maidenly bashfulness.

“If you’re going to tell me that someone else looks after you, you needn’t bother,” said Alan. “I saw how that worked out at Le Touquet.”

She cried out, and he said, “Am I a brute to remind you of that? But, my dearest, it’s very relevant.”

“You are perfectly right,” she told him. Her voice was hoarse, as if she were very ill. “Of course that is relevant. It is more than relevant, it is supremely important. Of course I must think of that. Alan, you are charming, and you are so kind. You are so much better than I deserve.”

“That I am not,” he said, and raised her hand to his lips, but set it down as the servant came into the room. “Ah, Mariette,” he said heartily, “it’s very kind of your mother to send us in some of that special jelly. Madame Sallafranque, this is one of my cook’s greatest triumphs … Oh God,” he said, as she left the room, “I’ll take a whack of this with both our spoons and she’ll think we’ve both solemnly consumed some. It’s revolting stuff, made of mistletoe or parsnips or something else that human opinion has long ago and most wisely decided is totally unfitted for making jelly. If you don’t mind, I think we’d better go upstairs to the studio and have coffee up there, for if we hang about here, the meal is apt to be prolonged and to become distressingly regional. It’s only by God’s mercy we haven’t already been sent in some cheese which, thank Heaven, is only made in the Franche-Comté.”

Up in the studio Alan put his arm round Isabelle’s, shoulders very kindly, while she looked round her, murmuring at the pleasantness of the place. She liked the blue-grey paint on the walls, the sound the rain made running down the sloping skylights. For a little they sat on the floor beside the bookshelves, which were full of the pearly roughness of paper-covered volumes, the smaller ones brownish and dishevelled, the large ones smoother and paler, while he showed her a book he was fond of, about the Summer Palace at Peking. Then they leaned over his work-bench and looked at some drawing boards, on which there were the beginnings of some textile designs, but they were only whorls and cubes as yet, she could learn nothing about him from them. She was about to ask him to uncover the veiled picture on the easel or turn round any of the canvases that were propped against the wall, but with a sudden gentle roar of enjoyment he took her to admire two pages he had torn that morning out of an art magazine and pinned up on a screen. In one a wing fetched an angel’s shoulder right up through the paper, according to the will of an unknown sixteenth-century Italian painter, in the other Dufy evoked the raffish expatriate palm trees on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice.

She thought, “He is full of intelligent interests, there will be no narrow and perverted passions suddenly breaking out and running away with life, everything will be easy and fluid.” When the servant had brought them coffee, and they had drunk it and put down their cups, a silence fell, and she lowered her eyelids and waited, expecting him to touch her. But she heard him draw in his breath and utter an exclamation of distress at her intense pallor. She opened her eyes and covered her mouth with her hands, ashamed because of the concern in his face, which was more than she could ever deserve.

He said, “You must lie down on the divan, you really must,” and when she had settled herself, he threw over her a coverlet of very soft chestnut-velvet. “I won’t talk to you for a bit,” he told her, “I’ve overtired you terribly, you’ve got to rest.” He tiptoed to the other side of the room and sat down on a couch, while she lay still and held the velvet over her face, delighting in the bloom of its softness against her lips. Over and over again she said to herself that at last she had found peace, until she was no longer conscious of his tense self-effacement, and she fell asleep. But there came a scratching at the door and she cried out and started to her knees, thinking that someone had come for her. But Alan said, “I’m so sorry, it’s the dogs, they usually drift up here about this time,” and he went and let in two collies. They crossed the room making a sound as if knitting needles were rattling out of their paws, and lurched up on the sofa, and were bade to be quiet; and she drew the velvet over her face and tried to sleep again. But the time for that had passed. She rolled over to speak to Alan, meaning to ask him how he had begun to paint, but remained silent because she was disconcerted by his appearance. The dogs were sitting on each side of him, importuning him for sugar, and with their long well-shaped heads, their strong flashing teeth, and their shining eyes, clear brown like peat streams, they looked too like him. She felt as if she were contemplating marrying into the Kennel Club. She rolled back to face the wall, and stared at its blue-grey paint, and listened to the rain pouring down the skylights, telling herself how fortunate she was to have been received into this peace. Seeing her move, he said, “I don’t wonder you can’t rest, with that infernal racket. I do love sunshine and hate the rain.” His words made her remember how Marc loved rain. She saw him as he had been one day in that summer in the garden of her first clinic, as pleased with a cloudburst as if it had been a firework display, crying out with pleasure as the heavy peony-buds, gashed with red, bobbed up and down under the gross drops and the mud bounced up brown and liquid from the flower-beds. The recollection nauseated her.

She sat up and took a comb from her handbag, and began to set her hair in order. Alan whispered across the room, “Isabelle, marry me, marry me.” She smiled and blew him a kiss, and tried to whisper, “Yes.” But no sound at all came from her lips, and suddenly she found herself becoming exasperated at the sight of Alan and the dogs sitting in a row on the sofa, all looking at her with their shining, good-tempered eyes. As an excuse to look away she took out her mirror and powdered her face, and then was able to say, “Alan, show me your pictures.”

“Why now?” he grumbled.

“Please, please,” she said.

He said reluctantly, “I will if you like. But they’re no good really, you know.”

“I want so much to see them,” she said.

“Well, if you must, you must,” he said reluctantly. “There’s one on the easel that I’ve just finished.” He rose, and the dogs dropped off the sofa after him. “It’s nothing really, just a corner of the garden,” he said, twitching off the cloth and looking down on the picture pensively. The dogs stood at his knees, gazing up at it and slowly wagging their tails. From their attitude every one of the three might have painted it. “Perhaps I have got something in that light on the wall beyond the gate,” he decided with modest complacency. “Yes, I think you may see it,” he said, standing back.

She stood up and swayed for a minute. He came over to her and held her up in his kind arms. “You had better lie down again,” he said. “I am going to look after you.”

“No, I want to see your picture,” she said.

He did not let go of her, so she felt his heart beating while she asked herself, “What is wrong with it exactly?” and said aloud, “But it is charming, Alan, it is really charming.” She freed herself and put her hands on each side of the frame, and felt as she had done when she put her hands on her hips after she had lost her child, as if barrenness itself lay between her palms. Her skin was smooth, her bones were delicate, her muscles kept their cunning, but her womb, which should have been full, was empty and a type of ruin. She had only the memory of fertility. This picture recalled many pleasures, it remembered grass and trees and flowers and the quality of light, but it was a memory of life, it did not live. It was a part of death. She tried to put a name to what it lacked, and knew instantly that it was something which would have been present in any picture that Marc had painted.

“Do you really like it?” asked Alan.

She looked up into his delightful face and marvelled how she could ever have thought that his gentleness could fight the violence and disorder that she hated. That could only be worsted by a force greater than itself, such as made Marc so strong a man. She found herself glowing as she said, “Alan, I adore it,” and continued to think of Marc.

“Great guns, how lovely you are looking!” said Alan. “Do you know that you have completely changed in the last ten seconds? You look awfully well now, well to the point of hockey-playing. I don’t believe that I care very much whether you like my picture or not.”

“But I do, I do,” she murmured, moving away from the easel.

“I’m telling you that I don’t care whether you do or don’t,” said Alan. He was fiddling with some paint on the canvas and spoke without looking round at her. “What I want is an assurance that you’re going to be sensible and leave Marc and marry me.”

Isabelle stood silent, wringing her hands and looking at his back.

“Speak up,” he said, with easy lazy confidence.

“No, I’m not,” she said.

He swung round and looked at her incredulously. “Here, what’s all this?” he asked.

“I love Marc,” she said. She added, “I know I have behaved disgracefully,” but she was so happy that she gave the words the wrong intonation and broke off.

“My good girl, you’re lying,” said Alan. “I just don’t believe a word of this. Marc treated you vilely at Le Touquet and you know it, and you’ve been very unhappy ever since.”

“We are neither of us lying,” said Isabelle. “He treated me atrociously at Le Touquet, and I knew it, and I have been very unhappy ever since. Nevertheless I love him.”

“Look here, are you sure I haven’t rushed you and that you aren’t stalling for time?” asked Alan. “I can’t believe a word of what you’re saying. You aren’t a doormat and you aren’t perverse. I refuse to believe that you can love a man who got drunk and gave way to an idiot passion for gambling while you damn well nearly died at his feet.”

“Ah, ah!” said Isabelle. “Now you have hurt me.”

“Hurt you?” said Alan. “I’ve only pointed out to you what Marc did to you. I can assure you I’ve always wished I had the chance to hurt Marc.”

“No, no,” she said, a painful eloquence rushing out of her like tears. “You have pointed out to me what I did to Marc. Listen, listen. I have been feeling guilty all the time at the back of my mind as if I had done something to Marc, but I could not think what offence I could have committed against him, since all the offences in the situation seemed to have been committed by him against me. But now I understand. You have just explained it to me.”

“That’s clever of me,” said Alan, “because it must be a tricky point, from what I’ve seen.”

“I will not be able to tell you exactly what it is,” said Isabelle, “because it is a part of our marriage, it is something private to ourselves. I do not mean that it is anything physically intimate, I mean that it is hard to explain except to people who are married themselves.”

“I believe you are talking about something that is real to you,” said Alan, regretfully.

“I am, I am,” said Isabelle, “and I must tell you about it, partly so that you will understand that nothing is less thinkable than that I should leave Marc, and partly because it will be a help to you when you get married, for you certainly must get married, and partly so that I shall not forget it myself. For one forgets the best things in life, the other things press in on one so. Listen, listen. You said that Marc got drunk at Le Touquet and gave way to an idiot passion for gambling while I damn well nearly died at his feet.”

“Well, that’s the cold truth,” said Alan.

“No, it is not,” said Isabelle. “It is not the truth at all. That is just how much a stranger would make out of the facts when he looked at them from outside. But I am Marc’s wife. I was in a position to look at the facts from the inside, to know the real truth.”

“Do you mind telling me what that was, in your opinion?” asked Alan.

“Ah,” she said, “it is such a long story. He was so tired with the strain of running that great business, you cannot believe how tired he was. Why, the morning after we got there we went and sat on the sands, and he fell asleep with his head on my skirt. I had forgotten that. Oh, God, what has happened to me that I could ever have forgotten it! Then the whole system you hate, of luxury and parasitism, closed in on him. He hated Poots because she was vile and because he was sorry for Luba. He was so nice to Luba, you cannot think how much nicer to her he was than any other man would have been. And then Lady Barnaclouth settled down on his nerves, as she has settled down on everything good and rich she has ever come across in her life, and saw what she could peck out of them. And there were the d’Alperoussas, who threatened his work, his life. Then he got drunk, and once he was drunk he did not know what he was doing, and what he did struck him as it struck me, for it was his child as well as mine that died. My God, my God, how could I have forgotten that?” She was weeping, and had to swallow her tears to say, “It is an extraordinary thing, and I do not approve of it, that I am much more excited than I usually let myself be, and yet I believe I am talking much more sensibly than I usually do. But let me go on. I have been making this hideous fuss because I was hurt by the loss of my baby, and I felt a mean impulse to take it out of life by hurting someone else, and of course I got the maximum sensation out of hurting Marc, because he is nearest to me. I gave way to that impulse without restraint, because I am a rich woman and have never been disciplined. So I committed this horrible offence of treating my husband as if what strangers saw counted, which destroys the whole purpose of marriage, which betrays the trust which is the real point of marriage. It is a cad’s trick, but of course I am a cad because I am a privileged person, and the two things are bound to be the same. In fact I am Agatha.”