After Julius (35 page)

They took the Lewises home, were provided with a key in case they utterly failed to discover any other roof, and Felix started driving aimlessly about. Then, without any warning, she had felt
utterly despairing – that she did not want him, did not know him, that everything augured badly – they weren’t meant to be together – that the whole business was stupid and
unnecessary – it was mad of him to drive about the streets in this pointless manner. He had no idea where he was going. ‘I
always
believe people,’ she thought angrily.
‘It’s time I stopped.’ She said she wanted to go to Ann’s who would be able to put her up somehow or other, and he could go back to the Lewises. They would both go back to
the Lewises, he replied. She didn’t want to. Why not? She felt humiliated by the whole situation and not inclined to share it with those who, for her, were nearly strangers. Well,
neither
of them would go back to the Lewises. They had a row and that was awful, too: idiotic and awful. It ended with her crying, and him grinding his teeth, giving her his handkerchief and
then
laughing
! ‘The point is,’ he said, ‘it
is
funny: it’s ridiculous that we can’t find one double bed in the whole of London – the largest city
in the world. It’s absurd that just when everything ought to be smooth and romantic and dreamy we should spend so many of our first hours together trying to find somewhere to be alone.
It’s an incredible coincidence that Emma should have embarked on an affair the same night. It’s idiotic that you should be sitting beside me crying on our first proper evening; that we
should apparently have to conduct our entire emotional life in a
car
! Isn’t it? Now. Cheer up – because at last I’ve had an idea.’

It worked. He found a cab rank, and then consulted the drivers on it. They were directed to some back street in Pimlico which proved to be lined with small, sleazy hotels. The third one produced
a room. They were in to the Hotel Ronald. She followed him through a stained-glass door to a narrow hall where a large tired woman in a flowered overall waited for them. Felix signed some name in a
dog-eared exercise book, handed over two pounds and was given a key. Number three on the third floor, the woman said, eyeing them with a knowledgeable lack of interest, toilet on half-landing, and
breakfast was from eight o’clock.

She followed him upstairs, thinking: ‘This is the
last
time I ever do anything
like this
again. In my life. The last time. Never again.’ The stairs were very steep and
covered with linoleum designed to look like marble chips. The landing lights were as dim as electric lights could possibly be. Felix was carrying their luggage, and had given her the key, but when
they came to the room, she resented being the one to open the door, and handed the key to him. The room was adequate. There was a wash basin and a small double bed covered by a maize-coloured
slippery counterpane. The walls were porridge with a frieze of what looked like tinned fruit. The curtains were not drawn; he drew them, and a curtain hook fell down. There were two chairs and a
dressing-table with face powder spilled on it. There was a gas fire that needed shillings in a meter. There was a picture of two puppies tugging a ball of wool over the mantelpiece. She could no
longer avoid looking at him. He was looking at her, but he said immediately: ‘I’ll light the fire and we’ll have a drink.’ She watched him kneeling by the fire. ‘I
really am back where I started,’ he said. ‘This is just the sort of room I had when I first came to London: only smaller, of course. Are there any tooth glasses?’

There was one – dirty. Only the cold tap worked. She washed the glass and then found there was no towel. She unpacked her paper handkerchiefs while he opened his bottle of whisky.
‘We’ll have to share the glass, darling. Do you mind that?’ She shook her head, thinking irritably, ‘What an idiotic question – considering what else we are to
share.’ The fire made any of the room not near it seem very cold, and standing by it scorched her legs but she stayed there because she was trembling, and if he noticed she could say she was
cold.

He pulled the chairs up to the fire and handed her the glass.

‘I’m sorry it’s here. It’s wildly unsuitable for you. I’d like to have taken you to Paris, at least, or Morocco or a Greek island: Pimlico is far too near a cry.
Have a cigarette? You know you want one.’

She found her cigarettes and he lighted one for her.

‘You have the most beautiful hands of anyone I’ve ever seen.’ (But someone had said that to her before: they might have meant it, but they hadn’t loved her.) ‘At
least we’re alone here: at least there’s that about it.’

She did not reply. She did not feel that it was at all ‘at least’; being alone with him was looming so large that she didn’t think it would matter much where they were. She
drank some more whisky and handed him the glass. ‘It’s stupid, really,’ she thought. ‘I’ve done this kind of thing dozens of times before: I can always escape
tomorrow. I don’t owe him anything at all.’ And she imagined herself working with Ann: humbly learning how to care about other people so much that she never had time or inclination to
care about herself: an exhausting, pure life, with one’s conscience like milk – no more hangovers like she had about her mother – even, in a way, about Jennifer Hammond. She, too,
might keep an animal as her sole emotional luxury. Anything to get away from these precarious, nerve-racking experiments. People always thought you did these things because you got paid, or loved
sex or being flattered: they never seemed to think that you might just do them because you knew that they were the ropes and you wanted to get into the ring, or go on the voyage or whatever the
ropes were supposed to be about. An added disadvantage to these thoughts was that they didn’t use up any time – he’d barely taken a swig of whisky.

And what the hell do we do when we’ve finished the whisky? That was when she realized how much of her life she’d strung along with people; as they seemed to know what they wanted,
things had generally gone their way. That her natural responses had gradually withered under their collective indifference had not struck her at all until now. But oh God, it did now. She had not
managed to love any of those men – not one; she’d wanted to, just as much as she’d wanted to feel that they loved her, but the moments that she had known that they hadn’t
and wouldn’t, it had all become the lonely game of pleasing people and fitting in with their requirements.

And here was a man whom she liked – very much: even more than that: but the situation wasn’t better because of that – it was much worse: worse than it had ever been with anyone
else. She couldn’t face the dreary, routine embarrassment of taking off her clothes, let alone getting into bed with him. With him, of all people.

‘Can I have some more whisky?’

He said yes, of course she could, and poured it. Then he added: ‘It’s not just this place. You wish you weren’t here with me, don’t you?’

She shook her head, half aware that this was ambiguous.

‘All right. I won’t tease you with questions. Let’s pretend we
have
to be here: we’ve just got no choice. I’m going to get out of my clothes and into bed.
You finish the whisky.’

She sat by the fire with her back to him, hearing him rummage in his suitcase and then the movements of undressing. Her cigarette was burning her fingers and she flung it into the hearth so that
she wouldn’t have to turn round to find an ashtray. She heard him get into bed, and then he said:

‘Cressy!’

Without turning round, she said: ‘Yes?’

‘Come over here. Please. There’s something I want to say to you.’

She got up and walked reluctantly over to him. She was horribly afraid he was going to tell her she was making a fuss about nothing. Then she could cease to make the fuss and it really would be
nothing.

‘Sit on the bed, or you’ll give me a crick in my neck.’

So she sat.

He took one of her hands. ‘Listen. I know you don’t want to take off your clothes with me staring at you: I know you don’t feel like that. So you go and undress by the fire and
I’ll leave you in peace. You do that.’ He gave her hand a friendly pat, and turned on his side towards the window.

‘All right,’ she said gratefully. All the time she was getting her things out of the suitcase, and putting them by the fire, scarlet silk pyjamas (she looked at them doubtfully, but
they were all she had), slippers, dark-blue man’s dressing-gown (better), she thought how kind it was of him to say that. A piece of affection, but she had to watch out not to confuse
affection with love. She took a long time to undress, clean her teeth, brush her hair, go to the lavatory on the half-landing. When she came back she switched off the light at the door. He said:
‘The bedside one doesn’t work,’ but the hot dim light from the gas fire seemed to her enough. She walked over to her side of the bed, and took off her dressing-gown.

After a moment, he turned over and put his arms round her, and she thought then, that when he kissed her, everything would be all right. But it wasn’t: her body remained tense and
unfeeling; the gabble of being cold, selfish, and incapable began in her head. He was stroking her shoulder, her breast: he stopped for a moment, and she steeled herself for the first accusation,
but he was simply undoing her jacket so that he could touch her skin. He was gentle: it was all her fault. This was the moment to give in, or give up. She said: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’re too tense for anything to be all right with you yet. Don’t be so anxious.’ He settled her head in the crook of his
shoulder. ‘I love having you like that.’

His kindness brought tears to her eyes. ‘If only it was always like this,’ she thought, ‘I could manage it.’

‘Is that all right for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not secretly madly uncomfortable?’

‘No.’

He stroked her head. ‘That’s good.’

They lay for a while and she had begun to feel soothed and warmed by his kindness and patience with her. But the moment this second word occurred to her, she knew it could not last: people
didn’t ask you to go to bed with them just so that you could bask cosily in their arms. They expected more than that, and, in the circumstances, more than that was the least she could do. In
the end, she made herself say: ‘I think it would be all right now.’

Without a word, he made her sit up, and took off her jacket. Kindness was not unique to him: most people made a few, rationed gestures at the beginning. Once, she had been taken in by them; had
believed that they were not just a part of the full treatment, but she had learned worse than that. Everybody tried at the outset to be nice about getting their own way. He pushed her, still
gently, on to her back and began kissing her breasts – both, and then one, and she felt her whole body start to hold its breath again. He
wasn’t
different from anybody else; it
was just that from some distant, romantic notion she had wanted him to be. She knew that once the worst of her desolation had swept over her, she would be able to pretend – to write him off
and let him have her. He put his hands round her waist and held it hard: this, because he enjoyed it, was supposed to excite her. She
hated
him for doing it – for just being like
everyone else. The nearer people got to you, the more like everyone else they turned out to be. She could get it all over, if she tried, so that he would fall into a complacent stupor, and she
would be able to escape. She shut her eyes, and waited for him to undo the cord round her waist – impatient, fumbling, still pretending to care for her. Why didn’t he get
on
with
it? If she was only allowed a ration of kindness, then he damn well ought only to be allowed a ration of time – of her passive availability. She began to undo her trousers herself but his
hands stopped her. He sat up, gazed at her intently for a second, and said:

‘How many times have you let yourself be raped in return for a little affection?’

She stared at him: his face was in shadow and she could not see his expression. He repeated: ‘How many times?’ and she realized that she had whispered: ‘I don’t
know.’

Silence. She was jolted into it: perhaps he was going to be very angry now, in a different way. It didn’t matter: she was too despairing to care – there might be something, she
thought recklessly, to finding a new way of being unhappy.

He said, very quietly: ‘Has it always been like this for you?’

She assented: there seemed no need to speak.

‘Then why did you come here with me?’

She couldn’t answer that. It seemed too ridiculous, now, to try and explain that. She said nothing.

‘Are you in love with someone else?’

She shook her head.

‘Is it other women you want?’

She knew that one. ‘No,’ she answered wearily: ‘I don’t want women.’

He said: ‘I knew that. I shouldn’t have asked: I’m sorry.’

Then he said again: ‘But why did you come here with
me
?’

So she smashed her final escape route.
Nothing
mattered – absolutely nothing: she’d never known that before. ‘Because you were the first man I was ever in love with.
When I was sixteen: all those years ago, I thought everything had gone wrong
because
of that. I adored you: I would have died for you. And when I found out about my mother I could have
killed her. Then you went away, and there was no point in anything – not even in killing her. I married to get out. It’s not difficult to get out of things. The trouble is getting into
them. But I’ve never got out of the feeling that everything would be all right with you – until tonight.’

There was another silence. Then she said: ‘There’s nothing you could say to me that would make anything worse. You
can’t
be angry with me – or make a scene
– or anything like that.’

Much more silence.

‘No,’ he said, and she had never heard anybody sound like that before. ‘I can’t be angry with you – or anything like that.’

He picked up her scarlet jacket. ‘I want to put this on you. At least, let me begin by seeing that you don’t die of cold.’