Nuns and Soldiers (57 page)

During the day Tim walked, he walked down the Finchley Road, through Maida Vale along the Edgware Road to Hyde Park, or else through St John’s Wood to Regent’s Park. Sometimes he went to Kilburn or to his old haunts in the Harrow Road. More often he made for central London, always on foot, and walked in the parks or as far as Whitehall and the Embankment. Walking now was his task. (It was Anne Cavidge’s task too, and they nearly met head-on once in St James’s Park, only Anne stayed by the lake to watch the pelicans and Tim turned off the path and crossed the grass to the Mall. Thus they passed unknowingly within two hundred yards of each other.) Sometimes Tim went into the picture galleries. The galleries attracted him because of terrible things which he experienced there and which he had to keep morbidly returning to. He no longer dreamed at night that the National Gallery was dim and senseless. The dream had become true, he experienced it walking, in broad daylight. The pictures were all dull and stupid, trivial, incoherent, mean. The colours were filmed over as if he had become colour-blind, or else they were suddenly gaudy, garish like sweet papers, like drifting idle trash. He
hated
the pictures, their pretentiousness, their pompous sentimentality, their pretence of solemn meaning, their essential emptiness.

Tim began to think about death. He felt tired of the stupid suffering which he was beginning to realize was like a virus, the very essence of his invaded being. No one inflicted the suffering, he was it and it would not go. It could not be removed or run from. When he had said to Daisy that hell might cease she had spoken of death. Well, Daisy could please herself, but he at least could go. He watched the big red friendly London buses rolling slowly along upon their great wheels. He imagined how he would move, slowly too, into the road, kneel, and then lie down carefully beneath one of those merciful moving wheels. It would be over in a second. The image consoled him. He knew indeed that he would not do this today or tomorrow, but it was good to know that it was so simple and he might do it some day.

He did not dare to think much about Gertrude, it was too agonizing. Sometimes he tried to exorcize her by doubting his love: he had, after all, married her for money. He was no longer young, he had married her for security and ease. He had married her so that he could at last paint as he pleased. He feigned to persuade himself, while yet he knew that his strong terrible love for her survived like a hidden beast, a rabid dog that would have to be pulled from its cupboard one day and killed, or else would take a long time to starve to death. He wished sometimes, rather abstractly, that he could tell Gertrude that it had not been all lies, that it was not all bad, that the bad bit could be simply cut away and leave the rest. But what now was ‘the rest’? He himself had erased it. He never considered writing to her. He did not dream of her. He dreamed more often of his mother. He felt broken, and words like ‘integrity’ and ‘honour’ occurred to him as names of what he had lost: words which were new to him and which he resented. Where had he picked them up? Had he acquired them somehow from the Count? Had the words got out of the Count’s head and into his without being uttered? Could words do that?

As time went by he thought less about the painful conundrum of his last conversation with Gertrude, and thought more about his last conversation with the Count. The Count had said nightmarish things like ‘I’m sure she would take you back’. Tim was not sure why those words were so repulsive. Perhaps because they reminded him of childhood, of his mother, of grudging untender pardons, of something on a scale which had nothing to do with him and Gertrude. The Count’s persuations, his ‘simple ideas’, had been really insults and proofs of his failure to understand. Of course the Count was doing his duty, and being the Count had done it conscientiously. His rival could hardly expect of him perfect sensibility and inspired eloquence as well. But other things which the Count had said had made sense for Tim, had touched live nerves, and remained with him as somehow uncontaminated thoughts. You ought to be alone, you ought to think and work. Oh yes, thought Tim, one can leave someone forever, it’s possible and I should know.

If I were alone would it be better, he wondered, could I ever get back those things which I have lost, could I get back at least some scraps of some old innocence? If I were alone could I achieve a
clean
despair, a
clean
pain at last? Then I could deal with the beast in the cupboard. Then I could deal with the demons. Yes, when Gertrude and I danced that hay among the blue flowers it was with demons that we danced it.

He thought, I ought to be alone, and not for any purpose except to be alone. He thought, will I leave Daisy in the end? But he knew that, like kneeling down in front of the merciful red bus, this would not happen today or tomorrow.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘THE ROCKS COME CLOSER at this time in the evening,’ said Anne.

It was almost twilight, darkening but bright.

They had pulled the table out of the archway onto the terrace and were sitting drinking white wine. The September evenings were very warm.

‘Yes,’ said Gertrude, ‘they become sort of unfocused, I can’t describe it exactly -’

‘I know,’ said Anne, ‘I can’t get them into focus either, they sort of jump at one.’

‘What colour would you say they were now?’ said the Count.

‘Pink? No. Grey? No. They’re certainly not white, yet they’re whitish.’

‘Spotty,’ said Gertrude. ‘Well, spotty isn’t a colour. Now I can scarcely see them at all, they’re dancing.’

‘In Polish,’ said the Count, ‘colour words are verbs too.’

‘How do you mean?’ said Gertrude.

‘One doesn’t just say, “it is red”, one can say “it reds”.’

‘That’s good,’ said Anne. ‘So one feels the colour as sort of radiating actively from the thing, not just sitting passively in it.’

‘Exactly.’

‘The rocks are certainly pinking!’ said Gertrude. ‘You see they’ve changed - now they’ve gone fuzzy again. My God, how still it is.’

They listened for a moment.

‘The cicadas have stopped.’

‘It’s so quiet and so clear, not a leaf stirring.’

‘Nothing stirring but the rocks!’

‘Look at the leaves of the willows and the olives - they’re sort of fixed, outlined in silver.’

‘It’s like a painting,’ said Anne.

‘Have some more wine?’ said the Count.

‘Count is wine steward,’ said Gertrude.

‘I must go shopping tomorrow,’ said Anne.

‘You’re always going shopping,’ said Gertrude.

‘Well, the driver must shop. I must go to the garage about the exhaust and fill up with petrol.’

‘We’ll come too,’ said Gertrude.

‘No, no, you two must do that walk.’

Anne had driven Gertrude and the Count to Les Grands Saules in Guy’s Rover. The car had been laid up after Guy’s death, but it had proved quite easy to put on the road again. Guy, a careful meticulous driver, had kept it in excellent condition. Anne, with her brand new driving licence, had felt nervous at first, but the handsome car had eventually decided to drive itself.

The idea of the three of them going to France had come up in rather a confused way. Gertrude had declared that Anne needed a holiday. After all, Anne had not been out of England for fifteen years, Anne ought to see France, Italy, again. Anne had responded that she thought Gertrude needed a holiday and if Gertrude wanted to go abroad she would go with her. Immediately after this exchange the Count, now a regular visitor at Ebury Street, had arrived for a drink and joined in. Certainly Gertrude needed a holiday. They discussed where Gertrude and Anne should go. Greece was not mentioned. It was Gertrude herself who suggested that they should go to Les Grands Saules, why not. Anne guessed that Gertrude wanted to confront and finish with her embarrassing memories of the episode there with Tim. Guy’s ghost, now Tim’s. By this time it had begun to seem natural, polite, inevitable that Gertrude should ask the Count to come with them. Had he not some leave which he could conveniently take? Why not come and stay at least a little while? After all, he surely needed a holiday too. It was the Count’s idea that Anne should drive them. (The Count
of course
had never learned to drive.) He became quite insistent. Anne was sadly strangely touched and her heart stirred within her. So the Count wanted to be driven by her. Driving and being driven is a significant relationship. Then she realized that the Count’s purpose was to cut out Manfred. The Count was becoming more confident, more positively Machiavellian.

They had been there now for three days. The weather was steadily goldenly bright and hot. Anne could see, as in a glass, how happy she would have been to be here with Gertrude if only her heart were not in the process of being broken. It was as if the natural world, from which she had been exiled for so long, had come back to her, posing like a dancer and holding out its hands. No, that was not the image. It lounged rather before her like a lovely animal, it quietly purred and displayed itself. Anne had never liked the convent garden. It had seemed to her skimpy and formal and mean. She had taken her turn at working in it but it had inspired no interest and given no joy. The convent had been for her an indoor place, a hiding place: her little cell, the chapel, the dark corridors smelling of bread. The valley was, as Gertrude said, amazingly still and brilliant with detail. The little meadow where Tim and Gertrude had danced so long ago among the blue flowers was yellow now, the dry prickly grass smoothed and silkened in the evening light. A scattering of little mauve globe thistles had replaced the wild muscari of the spring. The old hunched-up olive trees stretched out their speary silvery foliage like the arrested hands of metamorphosed beings. Even the restless willows of the brook were still. Only the rocks moved, mysteriously mobile in the uncertain light. This was their hour. At other times of day they were starkly blindingly motionless.

The holidaymakers had so far been unambitious. The sheer shock of finding themselves thus alone together had been considerable. The journey, rather unspontaneously hilarious, had been easier. Now suddenly, in this established given space, they had to sort themselves, move about, warily, in relation to each other. Gertrude of course allotted the rooms. She took the large bedroom which had been hers and Guy’s. Anne had the small corner room with the view two ways, over the valley and towards the cleft in the rocks. The Count was given the divan downstairs in Guy’s study, with the cloakroom beside it. In other matters, Anne took charge, and indeed the leadership of the trio seemed naturally to belong to her. The other two were lazy, laughingly compliant. Anne did the shopping and organized their cuisine. They had decided to live simply on bread and cheese and salads with olives and wine and the plentiful fruits of the season, figs and melons and warm golden furry apricots. Oddments from the village deep freeze might be called upon to vary this diet. Anne, with her self-appointed tasks, found it easy to leave Gertrude and the Count together. She also began to plead headaches. This was no fiction. She was being visited by an old enemy, migraine, brought on perhaps by looking so much at those enigmatic spotty unfocusable rocks.

Since their arrival they had sufficiently amused themselves by walking about in the valley and climbing the nearer rocks. They had all had lunch in the village yesterday at the little hotel restaurant, and Anne had invented one or two pretexts to go shopping. There had been a lot of sitting about and drinking. In the evening they played cards, three-handed bridge, at which the Count was so good that he had to make deliberate mistakes to render the game viable. The other two laughed a lot and threw away their advantages. No one concentrated much. Gertrude, taught by Guy, was in fact not a bad player. Anne, who had not played for many years, was at first ambitious, anxious to regain her skill and win, but she soon stopped trying, especially after she realized that Peter was cheating. It became a game of chance.

‘Are you warm enough, darling?’ said Anne to Gertrude. ‘Shall I fetch your shawl?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Shall we eat? I mean, there’s nothing to eat but shall we eat it?’

‘Anne always says there’s nothing, and there’s a feast!’

‘Like the loaves and fishes.’

‘I’ll come and help,’ said the Count.

‘No, no -’ Anne never called him Peter in front of Gertrude.

‘Anne’s Martha and I’m Mary!’

‘Dear me, then who am I?’ said the Count.

They laughed, as they always did at each other’s silly jokes.

In spite of a certain quiet tension there was a holiday atmosphere. Gertrude had bought two new dresses, one of which she was wearing, a light yellow robe with wide sleeves, with a little necklace of blue Venetian beads close around her neck. Anne was wearing the cherry-blossom dress which Gertrude had given her. She had resolutely refused to let Gertrude give her any more clothes. The Count had, Anne suspected, invested in a whole new outfit. He wore light-weight flared trousers with a minute blue and white stripe, and a loose blue short-sleeved tunic shirt, open at the neck. His thin bony feet were on display in smart conspicuously unsmirched sandals. It was the first time Anne had seen him informally dressed. She was not sure if it suited him. She watched him now as he lounged, his long legs extended, his knuckles beating a noiseless rhythm on the tablecloth as he looked tenderly, smilingly, at Gertrude. His pale snake-blue eyes, which looked cold when he was sad, were sparkling now, narrowed between little folds of laughter-wrinkles. The sun had touched his cheek with a pinkness which looked almost like rouge. But his thin arms, emerging rather gawkily from the short shirt-sleeves, were white, covered with long drooping black hairs. Anne looked at the thin hairy arms and longed to stroke them very gently.

‘The only thing I miss in our diet is English cheese.’

‘Why don’t the French import it, they care so much about food?’