Nuns and Soldiers (52 page)

‘I’m going to stay away for a while with someone somewhere, I don’t know who, but where you can’t find me and please don’t try. Tim, honestly, it’s better to do it quickly like this - we shall both die of pain otherwise. I know you love me, sort of, but it’s no good, it’s no good to me, you’re not good enough, like everybody said.’

‘But my darling, my wife, what am I to do? You mustn’t go away, you mustn’t leave me - tell Manfred you’re not coming - stay and let me -’

‘You can stay here - Well, not, I’d rather you didn’t. I won’t be back for some time and I want you to be gone when I return. I’d rather you went away as soon as you conveniently can, and take your stuff. Go to her. Only please don’t bring her here, that’s all I ask.’

‘Gertrude, you’re killing me, you’re
mad
, there isn’t anything like what you’re saying, I’m yours, I’m not anyone else’s - please, please, please don’t go, don’t leave me, my darling, my darling -’

‘Tim,
don’t
, just
don’t
- be kind to me, and don’t. I know you’re sorry, you’re miserable at being found out, but you’ll soon feel better.’

‘You can’t just go -’

‘We are not as we were - Oh how I wish we could be but we’re not - it’s all changed, all spoilt. Get out of my way, please.’

‘I won’t let you go.’

‘Don’t touch me.
Please.
’

Gertrude’s tears were flowing now. She picked up the suitcase and moved to the bedroom door. Tim tried to hold her arm but she evaded him and walked quickly across the hall.

‘Don’t follow me. I don’t want a scene in the street.’ She slipped out of the door and slammed it.

Tim wrenched the door open. ‘Gertrude!’

The street door slammed below. He ran down a few stairs then came slowly back. He went into the flat, into the drawing-room. He lay down on the floor amidst the scattered packages and howled.

CHAPTER SIX

‘WHAT A BORE YOU ARE, dear,’ said Daisy. ‘Now we see you, now we don’t. I thought I’d got rid of you. I am just starting to celebrate this fact when you turn up again, surprise, surprise! And you aren’t even cheerful about it.’

Tim was sitting on Daisy’s bed staring straight in front of him. He was motionless, his face was blank, only his eyes blinked and rarely.

‘Come on, Blue Eyes, cheer up, show some sign of life. I’ve never seen you like this. Usually you’re frigging around like a water beetle, never still a moment. Now you sit for hours like a bloody statue. What am I supposed to do, perch on your head?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tim. The words came out in a whisper. He remained perfectly still, staring at the window.

‘OK, so it’s over,’ said Daisy. ‘It was hopeless from the start, you said so yourself. Anyone could see it was a mad idea. You’re still suffering from shock. You’ll soon feel wild, joyful relief. Damn it, you’re
free
! Have a drink for Christ’s bloody sake.’

Tim shook his head.

‘Are you bewitched or something? Deep depression, electric shocks?’

Tim said nothing.

‘It’s a lovely evening, let’s go to the Prince of Denmark. We’ll walk there if you like, like you used to want to and I never would. That would please you, wouldn’t it? A walk would do you good.’

‘You go,’ murmured Tim.

‘Oh Christ! What can I do with you? Why don’t you lie down properly and rest if you feel so damned frail - instead of sitting there like a waxwork? You’re giving me the creeps. Take some pills, if you won’t have decent alcohol. I’ve got some sleeping pills somewhere, at least I think they’re sleeping pills. I’m going to take you to the doctor if you’re like this tomorrow.’

‘No, no - no doctor.’

‘Speak up, can’t you. Why do you whisper all the time, what’s happened to your vocal cords? Are you sick or what? Don’t be such a booby. You arrive here and expect me to welcome you back with open arms, then you instantly become a kind of ghost. Where’s your spirit, where’s your pluck? Try to behave like a man, even if it’s only for my sake.’

‘I’m sorry, Daisy.’

‘So you know who I am. I’ve been wondering if you even recognized me. I’m yer old Daisy, remember. Old Daisy’s Hotel, always open, turn up any time, always a welcome at Daisy’s Hotel!’

‘You’ve been very kind to me,’ said Tim.

‘Oh good, at least you can move your eyes, now we’re getting somewhere!’

 

 

Tim had arrived at Daisy’s flat that morning. The previous night he had spent alone at Ebury Street.

Tim had despaired very fast. There seemed to be refuge only in despair. Hope was too agonizing, too searching, too full of awful light. He had to conclude quickly that it was the end.

After Gertrude left he had sat for a while on the floor among his precious packages, crying in an awful way, not exactly with tears but with a wet mouth and a crumpled child’s face. Then he sat still for a longer time trying to think what had happened. What had he said, what had Gertrude said? He tried to remember the conversation, but already a mist had descended over it. He had run straight into some final absolute catastrophe and he knew it was entirely his own fault, but he could not see quite how and why it had come about.

Tim knew at once that something terrible and irrevocable had happened to him. Like someone apprised of a fatal illness, he knew that he had moved into an entirely new state of being and that he would never be as he once was. He had lost Gertrude, his wife whom he loved. That was the centre of it. But the attendant horror was in the shocking manner of the loss, and the being, himself, that was left behind by this cosmic change. Tim sensed himself as sick, sick forever with a kind of moral sickness which he had never known before. He had ruined himself, utterly disappointed Gertrude and utterly lost her, because of some dreadful, unspeakable moral failure. Tim had not been used to thinking in these terms, they were alien to him. He had never had a high opinion of himself, but he had felt that he was harmless, innocent, kind, an ordinary decent weak man. It shocked him utterly, it scarred his soul, to think that he had done something terribly immoral and thereby destroyed his happiness and lost the precious wife whom, beyond his deserts, he had so amazingly achieved. As often happens, Tim measured the magnitude of the crime by the magnitude of the punishment. Before the axe fell he had felt little guilt, a puny guilt easily dismissed. Now, though vaguely, he felt how terribly he must have erred. How could he have had the
moral
folly to aspire to Gertrude? The sense of the loss crept into his heart as he sat there on the floor, tearlessly weeping, unable to stop the tattered remnants of his former being from expecting the continual treats of a happy married life. Gertrude would return, he would show her his new acrylic paints (she loved to see his paints), he would give her a funny necklace he had bought for her (her jewellery was so conventional, they always laughed about that), then there would be lunch with plums and Caerphilly cheese, then he would work, conscious every moment of her presence in his life, then there would be drinks, dinner, talk, laughter, plans. They were going to Greece. Then he would lie with her in bed, mouth to mouth, kissing her asleep, sleeping himself away into a deep sea of absolute safety and bliss.

Only now it was not so any more. Gertrude had gone. Tim had been revealed as a liar and a cheat, some sort of traitor. He had wantonly destroyed the innocent happiness of two people and made a desert of horrors round about him. Only, of course, his own happiness had not been innocent. Tim accepted the general force of the charge against him fully and at once, although he still could not work out its details or reconstruct exactly what had happened in that terrible conversation. Gertrude had not understood, he was not as guilty as she thought, but what did it matter now about degrees of guilt? Of course he had never planned to live with Daisy after his marriage; but he had concealed Daisy and her vast importance in his life, he had concealed a bond and a responsibility which, had Gertrude known about it, might have made her, at the crucial moment, hesitate. Gertrude had spoken of her ‘mourning’. Anything, then, might have tilted the balance against him. And in the strange chemistry of his moral confusion, Tim’s crimes against Daisy added to his guilt before Gertrude. Tim now measured how far he really was bound to Daisy, bound as if she were part of him, his sister, his mother. He had to rewrite his history so as to obliterate Daisy from it. But without Daisy it was a false history, and this false history he had tried to live with Gertrude. He realized now, as he sat motionless, paralysed, on Daisy’s bed, how much he was after all Daisy’s property. He felt it with a despair which went beyond any bitterness even against fate.

After he had got up from the drawing-room floor and tried to
think,
he had, as his first action, telephoned Manfred’s number. There was no answer. Evening was approaching and Tim had eaten nothing. He drank some whisky, taking the bottle from the familiar tray upon the marquetry table and pouring the whisky into a heavy Waterford glass, a ritual of pleasure now grown hideous and ominous. He looked with horror at the tiger lilies. Then he went back to the telephone. He rang the Count’s office number, but he had already left. He rang his home number but there was no answer. He drank some more whisky. He rang Manfred again, nothing. He rang Gerald Pavitt, but then remembered he was still at Jodrell Bank. He rang Victor Schultz. Victor answered. Tim said thickly, ‘Do you know where Gertrude is?’ Victor replied to this strange request by saying, sorry, he was just off to the hospital. Obviously Victor already knew. Manfred must have swiftly sent the news around and the ranks were already closed against him. He rang Moses Greenberg, but Moses, as soon as he heard Tim’s voice, put the ’phone down. He did not ring the Stanley Openshaws, as he knew that Janet Openshaw detested him. He did not ring Mrs Mount. She had made special efforts to be kind to him and Gertrude at the start, but by now must all the more regard him with abhorrence. He finished the bottle of whisky and went to bed and cried and slept.

The next morning was a terrible awakening. He woke, his body and his mind sleepily reaching out to Gertrude. She has gone. He remembered. He got up and hurried round the flat looking for he knew not what, Gertrude perhaps returned while he slept. He felt sick, his head ached violently. His body was possessed by misery. He considered eating something but could not. He started to make some tea but could not bear the sight of the kettle. He rang Manfred and the Count but got no answer. He sat in the drawing-room and tried, on Gertrude’s expensive cream-headed paper, to compose a letter. But Tim was not a writer and the attempt to set down his defence only seemed to prove to him that he had none. He tore up his efforts. He
would
write a letter, but not now. He felt he had to act, to ‘do something about it’, since inaction was torment. Yet what could he do? He thought of running round to Manfred’s flat. But no one would let him in, no one would answer the bell. In any case Gertrude would not be there, had doubtless already gone away to some secret place where he would never find her. Was there, anyway, any point in trying to find her? To see her again, to be rejected again, might add to his pain in ways he could not even imagine. Had he ever
really believed
that he was married to Gertrude? His crazed mind wondered even this. He could not stay on at Ebury Street. He thought that he remembered that she had asked him not to. And the flat had become terrible to him, a place of torture and punishment, full of happy, unconscious memories of a lost paradise.

At about ten thirty he ate a piece of bread and butter. He drank some milk from a bottle. He put the butter and milk back in the fridge as Gertrude had taught him to do. He considered shaving and decided not to. What was the point? He packed up his painting gear. He packed his clothes in his old suitcase. Only now he had many more clothes. He thought of leaving them behind, the clothes that Gertrude had bought him, but this seemed improper. She would not want to see those shirts, those ties again. He collected his things from the bathroom. He thrust clothes, paints, sketch books higgledy-piggledy into plastic bags, and stacked up his canvases beside the door. He went out into the awful brightness of Ebury Street and found a taxi. The taxi man helped him to load the stuff, drove him to Chiswick, and helped him to unload it. Tim pushed it all through the door into the desolate damp emptiness of the studio. He closed the door. He had been thinking. The taxi took him back to Victoria, to a bank, where he drew a sum of money out of his and Gertrude’s account. He then continued his ride as far as Shepherd’s Bush Green. From here he walked to Daisy’s flat. During this walk he pulled the golden wedding ring, which Gertrude had given him, off his finger and put it in his pocket.

As he was about to ring Daisy’s bell he saw something terrible, obscenely terrible, which renewed his premonition that even greater, more awful unimagined pains awaited him in the future. The screw was turning. He saw standing at the corner of the street, watching Daisy’s door, a familiar figure in a black mackintosh. Cold, cruel Anne Cavidge had come to witness the final act, to collect the final proof, of his absolute faithlessness. Her case was now complete. This, together with his drawing of the money, marked the end, the point from which he could not return. And as he mounted the stairs to Daisy’s flat he knew that he himself had willed the end. Since he was rejected he would prove himself well worthy of it.

He had indeed come to Daisy not only with this logic in mind. He simply could not think what else to do, where else to go. What could he
be
now, how employ his continued existence? Should he go and live in a hotel in Paddington on Gertrude’s money trying to compose convincing letters, explaining, asking for forgiveness? The idea of explaining seemed already far away in a lost past. He thought, I have run away from the land of morality. No doubt he would explain sometime. But, as he now dimly and with anguish began to see, he would be doing his explaining to Moses Greenberg during the proceedings for divorce. The scandal and the shame, everything that was happening now, would have to be lived through again in terrible detail. How he took the money, how he was seen on a certain morning, by policewoman Anne . . .