To the North (27 page)

Markie, looking at Emmeline while he brought out the plates, wondered what else there was about Daisy that one could tell her. For they were at a point when talk becomes retrospective: right back at each other’s lives they looked with concern or pleasure.

Tonight Emmeline was rather
distraite
. Though she had said she was hungry she did not eat very much; she drank one glass of wine, then sat, cheek on hand, looking sideways into the fire: light blinked on her lashes. Still the room kept for her the ghost of its early strangeness; it would never be quite like other rooms—as though coming in for the first time she had anticipated something upon the threshold. But this touch of strangeness upon her nerves was becoming familiar: an isolation from life she felt here bound her up more closely than life itself. She could not have described the room, told where the clock ticked from, what pictures there were, or whether its colours, shapes, textures, had ever displeased or pleased her. There was the sofa, here—for she puts things down here—must be the table; there was darkness over the corner with no lamp and a rug slipped under one’s foot by the door. But intense experience interposed like a veil between herself and these objects. When he spoke or approached it was for an instant as though the veil parted: something unknown came through— though he was all the time formlessly near her like heat or light. His being was written all over her; if he was not, she was not: then they both dissipated and hung in the air. But still something restlessly ate up the air, like a flame burning.

FOR MARKIE, her silence was like the reflecting surface of water one would not for worlds disturb—so one drops a stone in. “Wake up,” said Markie.

She looked his way.

“What are you thinking?”

“I wasn’t.” Smiling at the question—that she, for one, was never allowed to ask—she watched him fill up her glass and recork the bottle: when he had done she said, “But I didn’t want any more.”

That
, thought Markie, was like her. Had one wished, she would have come with one to the jeweller’s; she would have leaned for hours on the glass counter beside one while one had the shop out to choose her a necklace, then said as one left the shop, case in hand: “But I don’t wear pearls.” She was slow, perhaps, in connecting things with herself, and had been happy just now watching the pretty red stream of claret.

He said: “Well, you’d better drink it.”

Emmeline thought perhaps she was being too silent. Unlike Cecilia, who in the course of just such an evening would have glanced many times at herself in the mirror of one’s opinion, Emmeline seldom asked herself if she pleased or how things were going. Just aware of a differing tenor in all their meetings, she accepted as natural his variations of mood. High or low, drifting over the hours, iridescent or darker passing a shadow, she saw their happiness like an immortal bubble, touching a moment objects it seemed to enclose… . All the same, she did know she was very silent. Cecilia complained that she was inert, Markie said he never knew any woman take less trouble. Could silence bore him?

“
Am
I a bore?” she said.

“Most bores talk too much.”

“I hope I am not,” said Emmeline, sipping her claret. “Though I still don’t see, in a way, how it could be helped.”

“We must face it,” said Markie, solemn.

“I suppose if I did really bore you, you wouldn’t say so. Are most of your friends amusing?”

“No,” he said, definite.

“I expect they are. But as you’re amusing yourself you might not notice.”

“Only one can be funny at a time, if that’s what you mean,” said Markie tartly. To be looked at so dispassionately by Emmeline and told that he was a funny man was a little blighting. Beyond an extraordinary flow of high spirits her nearness and their attraction set up, he did not, in fact, waste much wit on her. Partly because he distinguished acutely between intimacy and society—her presence lay lightly upon one; she was kinder than solitude—partly because his wit, from its very nature, blunted or splintered against a quality that he called her divine humourlessness, and that was in fact a profound irony. He found her—like all naive and humourless people who did not in any way represent themselves by a manner but had to be taken as they were found—funny: she seemed adorably comic. Her seriousness, her angelic politeness, her cat-like unaccounta-bility all, while exposing themselves to his laughter, remained beyond his derision. If the complete moral calm with which she had stepped in Paris over one line in behaviour surprised, in a sense even shocked him, some elusiveness underlying her generosity, something she still withheld unawares renewed the hunter in him, restoring to love what compliance might have destroyed: its mobility. Something escaped the senses, something broke through the hard intellectual frame of his idea of her: her unconsciousness still had him wholly at its command.

All the same, she had asked if she were a bore. And he asked himself—making her come with him to the fire, before which they stood, his arm round her shoulders, his fingers exploring the arm and shoulder so sensitive to his touch—if she ever could be. The possibility glanced his way like a confederate; he was unwilling ever to love her too much. In his nature some final displacement was still impossible. In Paris he had briefly and even brutally told her they could not marry, that he could not, in the day-to-day sense, ever live with her or try out, as they must in marriage, the balance between nights and days. As their relation took form and the shape of their feeling began to appear in its rhythm, his reasons for that quite instinctive refusal became more apparent. The fact was, she kept him uneasy. While her passivity soothed him, an exaltation at all times latent in her regard and, so great a part of her passion, likely to spring out at any time, alarmed, irked and often fatigued him. He had still the sense, as after that first night in Paris, of having been overshot. Her goodness had an unconscious royalty and was overbearing: under her too high idea of life and himself some part of him groaned, involuntary. Her easiness, her un-exactingness, the very absence in her of that prehensile quality he detested in women—that had made at the outset Cecilia’s friendliness too like a pretty, firm hand placed on his arm—all argued in her the deep and innocent preassumption that they were each for the other.

In fact, she was not everyone: there were places she could not occupy. He lacked his Daisy who cried, crooned and pitied and called him her dear bad boy. He missed something that, leaving the gift shop, he had been able to brush from his person like Daisy’s powder; he missed also that tinkle of falling bric-a-brac, those giggles in the dark.

“The fact is,” he said, “one can’t live on the top of the Alps.”

“Alps?” she said, having travelled further than ever from thought in the warm firelight, under the influence of his touch.

“I can’t live at top gear,” he said, rather more lamely, conscious that half his meaning must go astray.

“Oh no,” said Emmeline, “that would be tiresome. Why?”

“It occurred to me. One would give out, you know.”

“Oh yes; one would be bored.”

This was all very well— “All the same,” said Markie, facing her round to him, held by the elbows, so close that staring into each other’s pupils they squinted a little, and had to laugh, “we do disagree, you know.”

“How large your face looks,” she said, drawing away a little to bring it all into focus. Her soft big-pupilled look, indolent and unsearching, passed from feature to feature, caressing the fleshy mask that it loved so well.

Tightening his grip on her elbows, he went on: “We do disagree.”

“About everything, yes—stop, Markie, you’re hurting me rather—I don’t think that matters.”

“You don’t think: that’s just the trouble.”

Surprised, she said: “What is the matter, Markie? Is this your conscience?” Though she had never met Markie’s conscience she had heard it sometimes, creeping about the house.

“No,” he said angrily, “commonsense.”

A shadow of more than incomprehension, of distaste, even of boredom crossed Emmeline’s face which, always transparent to feeling, now seemed, pale and clear in the lamplight, more than half transparent materially. She said: “You are like an insurance company,” and did not explain why.

“You must know this can’t always be this.”

“Nothing goes on,” she said. “We grow old and don’t care, then we die: I don’t think it matters.”

“Look at me!” he said sharply.

“I’m looking—what else can I see?”

“God knows: I never dare think what you do see. Nothing at all like things are.”

“Near enough.”

“For you, I daresay.”

“You’re unkind,” she exclaimed.

“I’m alarmed.”

“If I’m not—and of course I do see in one way I am ruined —I don’t see why you should be.”

“Oh, all right. As you like. But we
are
riding for a fall.”

“I don’t care.” Smiling, she drew her finger across his angry uncertain lips in a little line that should conclude the argument.

“I do,” he said, when the finger had gone. “You know, you’ve been idiotic.”

“How, a fall?”

“Oh, I don’t know… . But it will be the devil.”

It would be the devil. Her unusual touch on the spirit stirred rare solicitude in him; he was afraid for her. He was, however, a good deal more afraid for himself. He had had a frightening glimpse—as she stood serious, eyeing him, anxious to share the untimely burden of this idea of his but with her most radiant air of being outside calamity—of how very high a structure there was to come down. The tall tower, that rocked by some shock at its base or some flaw in its structure totters and snaps in the air, falls wide; the damage is far-flung: you cannot stand back enough, it is upon you. Markie, in whom something cowered, was much afraid for himself. He was afraid, as she stood there so gendy beside him, as much
of
as for Emmeline: it was almost physical.

This irrational fear of her touched him a moment, ice-cold and feathery like any bodily fear, in the mouth and the palms of his hands. She had, as he saw, stepped in Paris clear of the every-day, of conduct with its guarantees and necessities, into the region of the immoderate, where we are more than ourselves. Here are no guarantees. Tragedy is the precedent: Tragedy confounding life with its masterful disproportion. Here figures cast unknown shadows; passion knows no crime, only its own movement; steel and the cord go with the kiss. Innocence walks with violence; violence is innocent, cold as fate; between the mistress’ kiss and the blade’s is a hair’s breadth only, and no disparity; every door leads to death… . The curtain comes down, the book closes—but who is to say that this is not so?

That Emmeline should have consented to love on his terms was to Markie, now knowing her better, extraordinary. Some idea he had of her reeled every time she appeared in the door of his discreet flat. If such strangeness sweetened possession, it let in an insecurity: he knew less and less where he was with her; reason gave out. As her friend he could only deplore her bad bargain. He had a sound worldly sense of, in her world, impeccability’s market, a keen legal mistrust of the disadvantageous. You cannot research in law, bring up fine points for the telling conclusion, cement an uneasy position, in short, make out a strong case, without gaining respect for the right as an asset if not as an absolute. While not discounting the heart, for which you cannot adjudicate (his idea of the heart was hazy) he could not see why she had not shown a better head. The success, in spite of its notable absence of method, of her outrageous Bloomsbury bureau showed a flair for business— if only (as he still believed quite simply) in knowing so well how to exploit her charm. She might have exploited this further: had she held out till he was crazy he would no doubt have married her: that she had not cared to buy marriage appeared incredible. … In view of all this, her wildness appalled Markie. And to this wildness, this flood, this impetus that he could not arrest, there appeared no limit. He dreaded the fall. He could wish he had never disturbed her, never possessed her but left her as he first saw her, smiling at him like a stranger across the room.

Emmeline, feeling suddenly tired, sat down, leaning back on the sofa. She said: “Are you trying to tell me this ought to be over?”

“Good heavens,” cried Markie, unnerved by her beauty and her directness, “no!”

“Then don’t let us talk,” she said, shutting her eyes as though the bright weight of the room were upon the pupils.

“I was only saying—I’m not dependable.”

“One thing about marriage—one would not have these discussions. Or do married people discuss?”

“You’re right,” he said, “we waste time.”

“They have more time and waste it; but not like
this
. If we were married, you’d have to be with me unless you could think of some reason not to. You’d hate that, wouldn’t you? … But all the reasons against marriage sound so silly: I suppose it can be a good thing. Cecilia and Henry were happy. The good reason for us not to marry is, we don’t want to.”

“It wouldn’t suit us.”

“No, it wouldn’t suit us at all… . Besides, you don’t get on with Cecilia and I don’t think your sister likes me.”

“Family dinners …” said Markie.

“Sometimes they’re nice.”

“Never— This
does
make you happy?”

“I wish I were everyone.”

“Why?”

“Because then everyone would be happy, and also I’d always be such a change for you.”

He said: “But I like monotony” sitting down on the sofa. So the discussion ended, with fatal softness. Shadow drew back, having hesitated on the threshold; draughts died down as though in a heavy curtain… . The fire fell in; falling rain tapped on the parapet; hardly a sound came up from the street.

“Turn out that lamp,” she said, “it is in my eyes.”

AUGUST APPROACHED, but Cecilia could still tell no one her summer plans: these not existing she had to envelop herself in an air of mystery, from which soon sprang a rumour that she was engaged. Only Julian did not enquire. Much was possible, nothing seemed to decide itself; everyone warned her against the heat in America. There were enticing alternatives— a tour in France, a cruise, several possible visits—for any single of which a young woman might have been grateful; but some hazy distaste hung over her mind in considering anything. For her part, Emmeline said rather vaguely, she would be staying in Wiltshire in August with Connie Pleach.