Nuns and Soldiers (67 page)

‘I love you.’

‘Gertrude -’

‘I love you, I love you.’

‘Do you think we could have that chicken casserole?’

CHAPTER EIGHT

ANNE WAS FOLLOWING THE COUNT as a hunter follows his prey, as a disciple follows his half-crazed master, as a child follows its parent, as a policeman follows a wanted criminal, as a tracker follows a traveller who is lost in the bush.

She was literally following him now along the Chelsea Embankment, while the brown leaves were falling steadily quietly onto the pavement and into the river. There had been a little rain and then a little sunshine. It was Sunday and London was full of church bells. Anne and the Count walked and walked, usually in silence. Sometimes Anne walked behind him, holding his lean awkward figure in the intense tentacles of her attention. He did not seem to mind this method of companioning. Anne liked to watch him, to see his back and his pale limp hair shifting in the wind. She felt that she had him upon a lead. Sometimes she almost danced round him. He seemed not to see her, but she knew that he fed upon her presence, and this feeding gave her deep joy. Anne was so much in love that she could not believe that Peter did not see the world altering before him. Her love must surely change his world, would change it, in the end, completely. She felt as she walked this silent watchful walking a kind of happiness that was like her best days in the convent. She was fully occupied with what ought to occupy her, and she was in the right place in the cosmos, the place to which every atom pointed and every ray tended.

Anne’s grip upon her beloved had not loosened since she had so promptly and skilfully removed him from Gertrude’s house after Tim’s arrival. As it turned out, they had to walk most of the way of the village pushing their bikes, since the Count, after falling off three times, admitted that he could not ride a bicycle, or at any rate if he had ever known he had forgotten. How Anne had enjoyed that walk indulging a pure sweet egoistic joy which entirely precluded, for the moment, any sympathy with her companion’s pain. Anointed with perspiration, she lifted her face to the blazing presence of the sun and continued inaudibly to laugh. How much she enjoyed her lunch upon the train! The Count let her organize their journey home. She led him along, holding him firmly by the sleeve of his coat. She longed to kiss the sleeve of his coat, which her fingers ever so gently palpated and caressed.

Once home, anxiety returned, terrible fear of loss. What had really happened? Was Tim forgiven, reinstated? Or had that momentous embrace been but a prelude to a quarrel and another parting? Would that couple
never
settle down? Of course Anne immediately removed all her things from Ebury Street back to her flat. She kept on telephoning until Gertrude’s joyful voice filled her with equal joy. She flew round to see her friend. Gertrude was radiant. She at once asked if Anne had seen the Count, hoped he was all right, said she would invite him. She thanked Anne for her prompt tactful departure. She laughed at Anne’s account of the ride to the village. Tim, slinking in and out, smiled with sly satisfaction. Anne still could not like Tim, but she had to admit that it looked like a case of two people in love. They were embarrassingly childish together, and it was plain that Gertrude was physically, totally, enamoured. Tim’s presence, her
possession
of him, made her babble with pleasure. She looked years younger. Anne was content.

And she continued her silent vigil, watching over Peter with an intense silent tenderness. As far as she could see, he had not been to Ebury Street since Gertrude’s return. She assumed that he had been, in some terms, invited. Gertrude had invited Anne with a casual ‘come any time’. But Anne had so far not been to see her friend again. She wanted to feed longer upon that vision of Gertrude’s happiness and she needed all her time and energy to concentrate upon Peter. She had, during this period, no other occupation. She had given up looking for a job. She had had a perfect letter from the Poor Clares in Chicago, the sort of letter which gave her a moment of nostalgia for the dedicated life of religious people. But the moment for Poor Clares had passed now. She politely refused such invitations as she received from Janet, Moses, Manfred, Sylvia Wicks (with whom she had become acquainted), Roman clerics, societies and causes, an Anglican bishop. When she was not with Peter she walked alone, or else sat at home reading novels. She had finished
The Heart of Midlothian
which she had brought back with her from France. She was now reading
War and Peace.

Anne waited. She felt like a player who has many advantages and is master of his game, but knows that he will need the utmost concentration to win. She played her game from day to day, wondering each morning whether it would be today that she would declare her love. But prudently she delayed. She felt that she could lose nothing by delay, whereas to speak too soon might startle or offend her quarry. Besides, she wanted to see Peter turn to her, seek her of his own accord. He had already come to her in that he took her interest in him for granted. She did not think that he saw, apart from office colleagues, anyone else. She was, however, still careful not to appear too often. They had walked on two evenings, now on a Sunday, they had sat in a pub, she had even been once to pick him up at his flat, he had come to drinks at her place. Gertrude was not mentioned.

One thing which made Anne feel that she must not put any pressure on him or startle him in any way was his intense gloom. This gloom was at times so extreme that Anne wondered whether he were not receding into some sort of clinical ‘depression’. However, just when she was feeling really frightened for him, he would smile at her with so much gratitude that she would feel relief and even gladness that he could be so sad, and yet touched, reached, by her alone. The mourning would pass.

One day he spoke to her more directly.

‘Anne, you are
too
kind. You really must stop acting nurse-maid. ’

‘I do it because I care for you.’

‘No, you are too kind.’

They were in Anne’s flat. October rain was beating on the window. It was dusk. The Count had come from the office, passing by for his evening ‘drink’. Anne did not try to detain him. These visitations had a kind of easy perfection.

‘I am such a fool,’ he said. He was standing at the window with his glass, looking out at a sky already tainted by distant yellow lamplight.

‘Maybe,’ said Anne. She wished that she could knit. She intuited that Peter would be pleased to see her knitting. As a next best she was sewing buttons onto a blouse.

‘To want so much what one cannot have is stupid and immoral.’

‘You should try wanting what you can have,’ said Anne.

‘You know that - well, you don’t know - but when Gertrude got married I felt I must leave London, and I applied for a transfer to the north of England. Then I cancelled it when -’

‘Yes? And now?’ Anne thought, we’ll go to the north of England together. We’ll live in Yorkshire when we’re married, or perhaps in Scotland. And we will become young again.

‘Not now -’ he said.

‘So - what - now?’

‘Anne, will you think me very stupid if I tell you something?’

Oh tell me that, tell me
that
, thought Anne. ‘You know you can tell me anything, Peter.’

‘I do admire and value you so much.’

‘I’m glad -’

‘What I want to say sounds awful-I think I am going to kill myself.’

Anne stopped sewing. She looked at the little pearl button on the blue blouse, at her sharp needle. She felt absolute terror. She said calmly, ‘It’s immoral,’ and went on sewing.

‘I have never been able to see why,’ said Peter. ‘I cannot be a guest or a spectator, you understand. Politeness? Impossible. I thought I would renew my application to leave London.’

‘Isn’t that more sensible than suicide?’ said Anne.

‘Then I saw it just wouldn’t do, it was pointless. You know, all my life I have felt I was moving on towards some time of absolute disaster, a sort of permanent entry into hell, or as it were a black wall and I were in a ship moving towards it, or a black iceberg. And I resolved that when that time came I would end my life. Now, I go to the office but I cannot work, I go to bed but I cannot sleep -’

‘Go to the doctor.’

‘I have pills, pills cannot help me, except to quit this scene for good.’

‘I think you are showing a contemptible lack of courage and a most irrational inability to predict. All right, you can’t have what you want, and you say you can’t go round there and be polite either. So give it up! In six months’ time you will feel quite different. ’

‘Anne, it’s not just that. I’ve lived on illusions for so long. I’ve lived in an
imagined
love.’

Anne, still sewing, wondered what to say to this. ‘But you did love, it wasn’t a fake love.’

‘No - but so full of illusions and dreams. We dream that we are loved because otherwise we would die.’

‘Peter, you
are
loved,’ said Anne. She threw her sewing on the floor.

‘I lived upon that love, my love for her, for so many years, and it gave me dignity and purpose, partly because it was a sort of-a sort of channel - along which an imagined love came back to me. But really I was doing it all.’

‘Doing it all?’

‘I enacted it, I enacted both sides of the relation, and this was easy because she was inaccessible, because of Guy, because of all the people who surrounded her. While really - they all - and she too - regarded me with - saw me as just - as a figure of fun -’

‘Peter, stop it,’ said Anne. ‘I’ve never heard such feeble contemptible rubbish in my life! Human beings are fearfully imperfect and care for each other in fearfully imperfect ways, but they do care. You must be humble enough to accept imperfect love.’

‘Now that the whole thing has collapsed,’ said Peter, ‘I see there’s nothing to live for. I had an escape route, it’s closed, a technique of illusion, it’s gone. I don’t want to be melodramatic about this. I feel quite cold and factual about it. Maybe it’s all to do with being Polish. My country has had nothing but persecution and misery and the destruction of every hope, it’s been kicked to pieces by history. I am an exile. I disliked my father and I could not communicate with my mother. They would both have been glad if I had died instead of my brother. I don’t fit into English society. I played at fitting in with all those people, it was play-acting. I have never made any real friends, I have no talents and my work does not interest me. I am a limited, perhaps fundamentally rather unintelligent man, at whom people laugh. Tell me why suicide is immoral.’

‘Because it’s usually stupid and it’s immoral to do a stupid thing which is so important and so irrevocable. Your state of mind will change and
ought
to change. Why terminate your ability to be good and to do good? Suicide affects other people, for instance it’s infectious. Your act could make another person despair. And it hurts those who depend on you and care for you.’

‘But nobody does.’

‘I do.’

‘You are too kind.’

‘Please, don’t use that form of words, I’m tired of it. And suicide is so often an act of revenge, it certainly would be in this case, and revenge is wrong.’

‘Revenge?’

‘Yes, spite, violence, terrorism, an act of hate, directed against Gertrude, a mean contemptible expression of envy and jealousy.’

‘I don’t think that is so,’ he said, ‘in this case. That would be a foolish calculation. I don’t think anyone would mind much. They would find it rather - invigorating.’

‘It’s a rotten act. Why perform a rotten act?’

‘It’s a unique act. Something irreversible has happened to me, some last lingering necessary conception of myself has gone. I had an illusion of honour, of a sort of soldierly being. Not a gentleman volunteer, as Guy used to say -’

‘What would Guy think now?’

‘He’d understand. We often discussed suicide. You must see, I have lost my mode of being and when that is lost one ceases to be able to exist. There’s a knack, an illusion which I haven’t got any more -’

‘Stop talking about illusions. Try thinking about truth. This talk of suicide is escapist fantasy, it’s just the idea that pain can cease. Think of something
better
, you can. Look at the better thing even if it doesn’t seem to connect with you.’

‘I lived by a sort of dignity which I now see as absurd. I used to think there would be a time of heroism -’

‘Peter, it’s now.’

‘I can’t work or sleep, I see nothing ahead. I cannot see any reason for going on, I don’t believe in God -’

‘Your life doesn’t belong to you,’ said Anne. ‘Who can tell where his life ends? Our being spreads out far beyond us and mingles with the beings of others. We live in other people’s thoughts, in their plans, in their dreams. This is as if there were God. We have an infinite responsibility.’

‘Why God, why not the devil? We walk as evil things in the minds of others, we are devils to them, we torture them by what we are and do.’

‘
You
torture
nobody
,’ said Anne.

‘Because I am nobody and nothing.’

Anne laughed. She got up and came to him at the window. She took hold of the sleeve of his jacket as she had done when they were coming back from France. She said, ‘Peter, this is what Polish heroism is for, to be nobody and nothing and try after all to enjoy it. Let me try to teach you how.’

The telephone rang.

Anne left him and picked it up.

‘Anne -’ it was Gertrude’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s me. Anne, can you come to a party tomorrow? Manfred has just brought the car back from France, and it’s absolutely
full
of champagne -’

Gertrude’s voice was clearly audible in the room. Peter had picked up his coat and was making for the door. He waved to Anne and disappeared.