Nuns and Soldiers (42 page)

‘Don’t do it again, Tim Reede. I mightn’t forgive you next time. Funny, I did think at first that you were doing it for us, to get her money, you’re crazy enough. I was quite touched. I wonder if she’d have put up with it in the long run, you could always tell some fib about seeing your old friends at the Slade, you’re such an expert liar. Did you tell her about me?’

‘No.’

‘Promise? Not a word?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Good. I bet you told her lies about how lonesome you were. I think you smell of her. You’re a disgusting brute.’

‘Take your shoes off,’ said Tim. ‘They’re like bloody spears.’

‘You take them off. I can’t get at them. You’re in the way. Do you love me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic, where’s all that warm bright Irish talk you used to be so famous for? I’ve never seen a man more like a beaten dog. And your hair’s going grey.’

‘I’m only kidding. Wait, you’re messing my collar, I’ll take the scarf off. Christ, it’s hot.’

‘Oh Daisy, I’ve been so unhappy, it’s been so awful.’

‘Do you want me to console you because Gertie saw what a little rat you were? Poor little Timmie. Put your head there then. Women are for consolation, they’re always the safe house. You come back to the woman you left and ask her to console you because your caper went wrong. God, we’re fools. I wish I could find a better man.’

‘I wish I was a better man.’

‘Poor Tim, poor sinner. There, put your arms around me. Don’t grieve, you’re safe here.’

 

 

Everything began to go wrong, Tim thought afterwards, from the moment of the perfunctory love-making in the studio. His excessive anxiety about being disturbed annoyed Gertrude and made her insecure. She was jumpy and uneasy. She resented his inability to protect her. Then the meeting with Anne (his idea) had not been a success, he had been unable to think of anything intelligent to say, and Anne had stared with her cold eyes as if she were reading his thoughts. He felt sure that she had made Gertrude tell her the truth (though Gertrude denied this) and had told Gertrude to stop it! At the first public test, Gertrude had given way. Looking through the eyes of a third party, she had seen the absurdity of her proceeding. It was just as well he had never breathed a word about Daisy. If he had, and Gertrude had
then
left him, he would have imagined that the cause, and would have had the extra torment of reproaching himself for impudence. He could picture how he would have worked at it, thinking of how, without that fatal revelation, he could have kept his love. As it was, he had at least this consolation: Gertrude had left him, not because of some slip or accident, but because of the deep unworkable structure of the situation. She was ashamed of him, that was what it came to. Tim felt no resentment or surprise. He was ashamed of himself; only under normal conditions this did not matter and he scarcely noticed it.

It had seemed easy enough in France to say, we’ll keep it secret for a while. It had seemed prudent and simple. But the tactics of secrecy had turned out to be intolerable. If Tim had had a secure dwelling it might have been easier, and here indeed the fact of his relation with Daisy was injurious. Anne’s prompt departure (Gertrude
must
have told her) to visit an old school friend in Hereford (Gertrude was becoming as good a liar as Tim was) opened Ebury Street to them; but Ebury Street was not secure either. Polite well-trained cousins and aunts did not ‘drop in’, but their presence pressed upon the horizon. Gertrude was not independent of these people, though she pretended that she was. There remained the vast pleasure-palace of London and fitfully, wandering there together like people on holiday, they had felt happy. Tim had showed her pictures, objects, places. Gertrude really knew remarkably little about London. They frequented the British Museum. (There was a secluded seat in the Etruscan room where they could kiss each other.) Tim took her to pubs, far removed from the Prince of Denmark and from the Ebury Arms, pubs in Chiswick, and some which he remembered in North London (not Hampstead, which was full of aunts and cousins). They went to a shabby cider house in the Harrow Road, she liked that. They were like student lovers, or a caricature of happy children.

They had walked, got drunk, made love. It had all the marks of a secret affair. Indeed it
was
a secret affair. The strange passion which had come to them in France with such sudden urgent wing-beats was still there, that intense inexplicable mutual attraction of carnal beings. The indubitable Eros had not failed or fled. They made love more frenziedly, with closed eyes, groaning against each other. Then leaping apart almost with suspicion and dressing hastily as if to make an escape. Tim was now surprised by Gertrude’s passion, which in France he had somehow, under the sign of that amazing change, taken for granted. In Ebury Street it was something very odd, and he felt that she must feel it so. Besides, the flat at Ebury Street was terrible to Tim, full of accusing memories, and must be far more so to her. Neither of them spoke of this.

In spite of his policy of
lanthano
and his cheerful ability to say what was not the case, Tim had never before concealed his relationship with a woman. He could not cope with the secrecy, which they did not discuss or make a jest of. It filled him with terrible doubts. Yes, one day, sometime, gradually, he would be introduced into the circle of Gertrude’s acquaintance as a friend, then as a special friend, then as a fiancé. They had agreed that they could not love except in the prospect of marriage, only that vista would save their great love from despair and corruption. But he had felt the vista closing. They had begun to live in the present, as doomed lovers do. Unhappiness rose steadily about them like a sea.

In all this, Tim never said to himself that they had made a commonplace mistake, that of taking a trivial lustful fancy for a great love. He still believed in the great love. It was just that not every great love can make itself a place and a way in the world. He often thought, in this connection, of the rocks near Les Grands Saules and of the crystal pool and the Great Face. Somehow it had all started there; and herein he made a distinction. The Great Face had lasted in his mind as a reality, he connected it with his work, with his being as an artist. He recalled its strange configuration, the pale round rock with its wet pitted surface, the mossy ‘pencil lines’ rising up like pillars, the dark cleft above with hanging ferns and creepers blurring the further ascent of the cliff into places unknown. The numinous power of the rock shook him, even now in memory (he could see it with the utmost distinctness in his mind’s eye), with a reverence which was a kind of love. There had been as it were an announcement of truth, and he felt still a magnetic tension as of a persisting bond between himself and the rock. He could believe that the rock existed now, continued to be, quiet and alone, shadowed and gleaming in the sun, darkened in the warm night. About the crystal pool he felt differently. His fear of the Great Face was an awe inseparable from reverence. His fear of the pool, for he feared it, was different, sharper, a fear of what was magical, dangerous. He found it hard to imagine that the pool was there at this moment, and that perhaps a bird was drinking from it, a snake swimming in it.

Trying to make sense of what had happened in the later days of his despair he had sometimes thought: we were simply bewitched, after Gertrude swam in that pool. It was like a drug, a love-elixir. Something that was there bewitched us, perhaps quite casually, we have been temporarily deranged, and now the effects are wearing off. This would have been one way of looking at the matter. But in his deepest heart Tim rejected it. That danger had not touched them. It had not been like magic, it was not magic, although it was in the ordinary sense magical, enchanting. There was absolute truth in the thing, something of wholeness and goodness which called to him from outside the dark tangle of himself. He loved Gertrude with a love that was better than himself. There was a self-authenticating ring about it all, a certainty which he had not felt before. This expressed itself in him as joy; and he felt it even as late as the time when he and Gertrude were getting drunk together in the Harrow Road.

But what is true and good can be bodily destroyed, leaving its truth and its goodness as a pure fine aura in the world of concepts. He and Gertrude could not support their love, could not live it out. She wavered, he despaired. If only, he kept thinking, it were a little longer after Guy’s death, another few months and I might have been saved. Yet, another few months and Gertrude would have been a different woman, her shaken soul not tuned to that precise key wherein it vibrated with Tim’s. That it should have been accidental did not dismay him. He was wise enough to know that mutual love depends on accidents, and this fact alone does not make it fragile. But he felt sad, almost bitter, to think that perhaps the sheer proximity of Guy, that strange commanding absence, had exercised the fatal power.

They had both, in their feverish ‘holiday’, foreseen the end. They had their lines ready. Tim could not have begun that conversation. Gertrude began it. But once she did so he knew what he had to say. Looking back it seemed to Tim that he had displayed courage. Yet what was the alternative? He could have wept and begged. That would have put the end off for a while, but only for a while. He had seen irritation and annoyance in Gertrude’s eyes. He dreaded like the pains of hell the sight of hatred there. He saw how Gertrude was caught. She could take him as a lover but not as a husband. She wanted now to return to her old pattern of life, to her old and dear friends, to what was after all her family. If he overstayed his welcome he would become a hated encumbrance. And he had been told, as clearly as Gertrude could bear to tell him, to go.

He thought, I shall never now be as I once was, simply happy, like a dog. I never really believed she would endure, he thought. And he believed two incompatible things, that Gertrude had loved him wholly and perfectly, and that she had not loved him enough.

 

 

Lying naked in Daisy’s arms in a warmth of sweat upon which the cool airs played from the evening window Tim said to himself, if we could die now we could be conveyed to hell just as we are, packaged and ready. Oh how I wish we could die now.

‘What are you thinking, Blue Eyes?’

‘About death and hell.’

‘You’re a merry fellow.’

‘You remember about Papagena and Papageno?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think we’ve had our ordeal.’

‘Sez you. You’ll be off again at the next flicker of skirt. Gertie just got you started.’

‘You’ve been very kind, very sweet.’

‘Ha, ha. I’m just so fed up with men I don’t care.’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Me too.’

‘Let’s go to the Prince of Denmark.’

‘Yes, let’s. The old Prince is lovely on a summer evening like this.’

CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS DONE. Gertrude McCluskie, who had become Gertrude Openshaw, was now Gertrude Reede. Tim and his wife stared at each other in amazement, dismay, joy, embarrassment, terror. The marriage took place at a registry office. The witnesses were Anne, Gerald, the Count, Mrs Mount, Janet and Stanley, and Moses Greenberg. They asked Manfred, but he had to be in Brussels on business.

The marriage was in July. It was now early August. The resolution taken by Tim and Gertrude to make an end of their love had proved a weak one. As they a hundred times said later, they came together again because they could not keep away from each other, could not do without each other. The illness was too extreme, the affinity too deep, the need too violent, the destiny too relentless: they employed many such words smiling at each other and holding hands. Tim had only managed to depart on that night, and Gertrude to tolerate, to survive his departure, because a secret voice in each of them said: this is not the end. The parting was a drama which they ‘had’ to enact. It was a necessary strategy of the Eros who held them in bond and to which they knew in secret from themselves that they had to be true. They had to
prove
how essential each one was to the other, had to try to do without and to find it impossible. It was an ordeal, they said, through which they had passed with flying colours, and the idea of banners held aloft appealed here to both of them. Tim drew for her many pictures of himself and Gertrude meeting each other with flags as upon a battlefield, or dancing together among the blue flowers.

The operation had of course taken some time. Neither of them could resist behaving like a lovelorn swain. Tim walked along Ebury Street late at night and looked up at the lighted windows. He did not intend to call or even to meet Gertrude by accident. He just had to torment his pained heart in this way. He had said heroically that he would ‘do it’, he would perform the act of departure so as to take the moral burden of it away from her. Later he terribly regretted this and saw his rash action as a sort of inexplicable conceited initiative. If only he had waited everything would have been quite different on the next day. Gertrude was only testing him, prompting him to tell her firmly that everything was perfectly all right. He ought to have taken charge of her faith and her hope. Gertrude too thought, why did I say all those things, I didn’t even think them, it was a sort of mechanical tirade. I drove him away and now I’ve lost him and the light and joy of life, an innocent good happiness which I might have achieved, has gone away with him forever. And she said in her heart to Guy, you told me to be happy, but you see I can’t be. And this thought was sometimes a sort of consolation.

Anne did not come back to the flat, though they met there and Gertrude told Anne that Tim had gone and it was over. They did not discuss the matter. Though Gertrude begged her to return, Anne stayed on in her hotel. She was negotiating for a little two-room flat in St John’s Wood. Moses Greenberg dealt with the contract. Gertrude inspected the flat. She saw Anne each day. They discussed furniture, curtains. Their friendship was in a sort of ‘air pocket’ which they knew would soon pass. The Count was another matter. Gertrude had, as she had intended to, seen him on the day after Tim’s flight. She had rung him up at the office and they had lunch together. The Count knew from her voice what had happened. And when they were together it was plain to Gertrude that the Count must have known about Tim. And the Count knew that she knew of this knowledge: of course neither of them mentioned Tim’s name, and the only cloud in the Count’s smiling eyes was (Gertrude guessed) the shadow of a guilt he felt for not having accepted her precious invitation. He blamed himself for having acted less than perfectly, for not having done what a Polish gentleman ought to have done: to have obeyed his lady’s call, even though it be to view his rival. The Count, as it turned out, had ample chances later on to display his qualities as a Polish gentleman, but at this stage neither he nor Gertrude knew what a reversal the future held. Gertrude felt a little glad that she could so easily make him be happy. They went to a small Italian restaurant off Wardour Street, drank a good deal (neither could eat much) and talked about politics, Poland, London, their childhoods, the Count’s work, Gerald’s theories, Anne’s flat. The Count told Gertrude the story of his brother’s death in the war. He had never told this as a story to anybody. It was the first time he had been alone with Gertrude, other than briefly, since Guy died. It was indeed the first time that they had talked to each other for so long, so easily and openly and with so frank a warmth of affection. The Count went back late to the office in a daze of joy.