Point Counter Point (24 page)

Walter sat on the bed unlacing his shoes. He was wondering why he had not come home three hours before, why he had ever gone out at all. He hated a crowd; alcohol disagreed with him and the twice-breathed air, the smell, the smoke of restaurants acted on him like a depressing poison. He had suffered to no purpose; except for those painful exasperating moments in the taxi, he had not been alone with Lucy the whole evening. The hours he had spent with her had been hours of boredom and impatience—endlessly long, minute after minute of torture. And the torture of desire and jealousy had been reinforced by the torture of selfconscious guilt. Every minute they lingered at Sbisa’s, every minute among the revolutionaries, was a minute that retarded the consummation of his desire and that, increasing Marjorie’s unhappiness, increased at the same time his own remorse and shame. It was after three when finally they left the club. Would she dismiss Spandrell and let him drive her home? He looked at her; his eyes were eloquent. He willed, he commanded.

‘There’ll be sandwiches and drinks at my house,’ said Lucy, when they were in the street.

‘That’s very welcome news,’ said Spandrell.

‘Come along, Walter darling.’ She took his hand, she pressed it affectionately.

Walter shook his head. ‘I must go home.’ If misery could kill, he would have died there in the street.

‘But you can’t desert us now,’ she protested. ‘Now that you’ve got thus far, you really must see it through. Come along.’ She tugged at his hand.

‘No, no.’ But what she said was true. He could hardly make Marjorie any more wretched than he had certainly done already. If she weren’t there, he thought, if she were to die—a miscarriage, bloodpoisoning…

Spandrell looked at his watch. ‘Halfpast three. The death rattle has almost started.’ Walter listened in horror; was the man reading his thoughts? ‘_Munie des conforts de notre sainte religion_. Your place is at the bedside, Walter. You can’t go and leave the night to die like a dog in a ditch.’

Like a dog in a ditch. The words were terrible, they condemned him. ‘I
must
go.’ He was firm, three hours too late. He walked away. In Oxford Street he found a taxi. Hoping, he knew vainly, to come home unobserved, he paid off the cab at Chalk Farm station and walked the last furlong to the door of the house in which he and Marjorie occupied the two upper floors. He had crept upstairs, he had opened the door with the precautions of a murderer. No sound from Marjorie’s room. He undressed, he washed as though he were performing a dangerous operation. He turned out the light and got into bed. The darkness was utterly silent. He was safe.

‘Walter!’

It was with the feelings of a condemned criminal when the warders come to wake him on the morning of his execution that he answered, putting an imitation of astonishment into his voice: ‘Are you awake, Marjorie?’ He got up and walked, as though from the condemned cell to the scaffold, into her room.

‘Do you want to make me die, Walter?’

Like a dog in a ditch, alone. He made as if to take her in his arms. Marjorie pushed him away. Her misery had momentarily turned to anger, her love to a kind of hatred and resentment. ‘Don’t be a hypocrite on top of everything else,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you tell me frankly that you hate me, that you’d like to get rid of me, that you’d be glad if I died? Why can’t you be honest and tell me?’

‘But why should I tell you what isn’t true?’ he protested.

‘Are you going to tell me that you love me, then?’ she asked sarcastically.

He almost believed it while he said so; and besides it was true, in a way.

‘But I do, I do. This other thing’s a kind of madness. I don’t want to. I can’t help it. If you knew how wretched I felt, what an unspeakable brute.’ All that he had ever suffered from thwarted desire, from remorse and shame and self-hatred seemed to be crystallized by his words into a single agony. He suffered and he pitied his own sufferings. ‘If you knew, Marjorie.’ And suddenly something in his body seemed to break. An invisible hand took him by the throat, his eyes were blinded with tears and a power within him that was not himself shook his whole frame and wrenched from him, against his will, a muffled and hardly human cry.

At the sound of this dreadful sobbing in the darkness beside her, Marjorie’s anger suddenly fell. She only knew that he was unhappy, that she loved him. She even felt remorse for her anger, for the bitter words she had spoken.

‘Walter. My darling.’ She stretched out her hands, she drew him down towards her. He lay there like a child in the consolation of her embrace.

‘Do you enjoy tormenting him?’ Spandrell enquired, as they walked towards the Charing Cross Road.

‘Tormenting whom? ‘ said Lucy. ‘Walter? But I don’t.’

‘But you don’t let him sleep with you?’ said Spandrell. Lucy shook her head. ‘And then you say you don’t torment him! Poor wretch!’

‘But why should I have him, if I don’t want to?’

‘Why indeed? Meanwhile, however, keeping him dangling’s mere torture.’

‘But I like him,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s such good company. Too young, of course; but really rather perfect. And I assure you, I don’t torment him. He torments himself.’

Spandrell delayed his laughter long enough to whistle for the taxi he had seen at the end of the street. The cab wheeled round and came to a halt in front of them. He was still silently laughing when they climbed in. ‘Still, he only gets what’s due to him,’ Spandrell went on from his dark corner. ‘He’s the real type of murderee.’

‘Murderee?’

‘It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cutthroats are born to be hanged. You can see it in their faces. There’s a victim type as well as a criminal type. Walter’s the obvious victim; he fairly invites maltreatment.’

‘Poor Walter!’

‘And it’s one’s duty,’ Spandrell went on, ‘to see that he gets it.’

‘Why not to see that he doesn’t get it, poor lamb?’

‘One should always be on the side of destiny. Walter’s manifestly born to catch it. It’s one’s duty to give his fate a helping hand. Which I’m glad to see you’re already doing.’

‘But I tell you, I’m not. Have you a light?’ Spandrell struck a match. The cigarette between her thin lips, she leaned forward to drink the flame. He had seen her leaning like this, with the same swift, graceful and ravenous movement, leaning towards him to drink his kisses. And the face that approached him now was focussed and intent on the flame, as he had seen it focussed and intent upon the inner illumination of approaching pleasure. There are many thoughts and feelings, but only a few gestures; and the mask has only half a dozen grimaces to express a thousand meanings. She drew back; Spandrell threw the match out of the window. The red cigarette end brightened and faded in the darkness.

‘Do you remember that curious time of ours in Paris?’ he asked, still thinking of her intent and eager face. Once, three years before, he had been her lover for perhaps a month.

Lucy nodded. ‘I remember it as rather perfect, while it lasted. But you were horribly fickle.’

‘In other words I didn’t make as much of an outcry as you hoped I would, when you went off with Tom Trivet.’

‘That’s a lie!’ Lucy was indignant. ‘You’d begun to fade away long before I even dreamt of Tom.’

‘Well, have it your own way. As a matter of fact you weren’t enough of a murderee for my taste.’ There was nothing of the victim about Lucy; not much even, he had often reflected, of the ordinary woman. She could pursue her pleasure as a man pursues his, remorselessly, single-mindedly, without allowing her thoughts and feelings to be in the least involved. Spandrell didn’t like to be used and exploited for someone else’s entertainment. He wanted to be the user. But with Lucy there was no possibility of slave-holding. ‘I’m like you,’ he added. ‘I need victims.’

‘The implication being that I’m one of the criminals?’

‘I thought we’d agreed to that long ago, my dear Lucy.’

‘I’ve never agreed to anything in my life,’ she protested,’ and never will. Not for more than half an hour at a time, at any rate.’

‘It was in Paris, do you remember? At the
Chaumiere
. There was a young man painting his lips at the next table.’

‘Wearing a platinum and diamond bracelet.’ She nodded, smiling. ‘And you called me an angel, or something.’

‘A bad angel,’ he qualified, ‘a born bad angel.’

‘For an intelligent man, Maurice, you talk a lot of drivel. Do you genuinely believe that some things are right and some wrong?’

Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. ‘Dear Lucy,’ he said, ‘you’re magnificent. And you must never bury your talents. Well done, thou good and faithful succubus!’ He kissed her hand again. ‘Go on doing your duty as you’ve already done it. That’s all heaven asks of you.’

‘I merely try to amuse myself.’ The cab drew up in front of her little house in Bruton Street. ‘God knows,’ she added as she stepped out, ‘without much success. Here, I’ve got money.’ She handed the driver a ten-shilling note. Lucy insisted, when she was with men, on doing as much of the paying as possible. Paying, she was independent, she could call her own tune. ‘And nobody gives me much help,’ she went on, as she fumbled with her latchkey. ‘You’re all so astonishingly dull.’

In the dining-room a rich still-life of bottles, fruits and sandwiches was awaiting them. Round the polished flanks of the vacuum flask their reflections walked fantastically in a non-Euclidean universe. Professor Dewar had liquefied hydrogen in order that Lucy’s soup might be kept hot for her into the small hours. Over the sideboard hung one of John Bidlake’s paintings of the theatre. A curve of the gallery, a slope of faces, a corner of the bright proscenium.

‘How good that is!’ said Spandrell shading his eyes to see it more clearly.

Lucy made no comment. She was looking at herself in an old grey-glassed mirror.

‘What shall I do when I’m old?’ she suddenly asked.

‘Why not die?’ suggested Spandrell with his mouth full of bread and Strasbourg goose liver.

‘I think I’ll take to science, like the Old Man. Isn’t there such a thing as human zoology? I’d get a bit tired of frogs. Talking of frogs,’ she added, ‘I rather liked that little carroty man—what’s his name?—Illidge. How he does hate us for being rich!’

‘Don’t lump me in with the rich. If you knew…’ Spandrell shook his head. ‘Let’s hope she’ll bring some cash when she comes to-morrow,’ he was thinking, remembering the message Lucy had brought from his mother. He had written that the case was urgent.

‘I like people who can hate,’ Lucy went on.

‘Illidge knows how to. He’s fairly stuffed with theories and bile and envy. He longs to blow you all up.’

‘Then why doesn’t he? Why don’t you? Isn’t that what your club’s there for?’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘There’s a slight difference between theory and practice, you know. And when one’s a militant communist and a scientific materialist and an admirer of the Russian Revolution, the theory’s uncommonly queer. You should hear our young friend talking about murder! Political murder is what especially interests him, of course; but he doesn’t make much distinction between the different branches of the profession. One kind, according to him, is as harmless and morally indifferent as another. Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. And so on and so forth. Queer,’ Spandrell commented parenthetically, ‘how old-fashioned and even primitive the latest manifestations of art and politics generally are! Young Illidge talks like a mixture of Lord Tennyson in
In Memoriam
and a Mexican Indian, or a Malay trying to make up his mind to run amok. Justifying the most primitive, savage, animal indifference to life and individuality by means of obsolete scientific arguments. Very queer indeed.’

‘But why should the science be obsolete?’ asked Lucy

‘Seeing that he’s a scientist himself…’

‘But also a communist. Which means he’s committed to nineteenth-century materialism. You can’t be a true communist without being a mechanist. You’ve got to believe that the only fundamental realities are space, time and mass, and that all the rest is nonsense, mere illusion and mostly bourgeois illusion at that. Poor Illidge! He’s sadly worried by Einstein and Edington. And how he hates Henri Poincare! How furious he gets with old Mach! They’re undermining his simple faith. They’re telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention. The idea’s as inexpressibly shocking and painful to him as the idea of the non-existence of Jesus would be to a Christian. He’s a scientist, but his principles make him fight against any scientific theory that’s less than fifty years old. It’s exquisitely comic.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Lucy, yawning. ‘That is, if you happen to be interested in theories, which I’m not.’

‘But I am,’ retorted Spandrell; ‘so I don’t apologize. But if you prefer it, I can give you examples of his practical inconsistencies. I discovered not long ago, quite accidentally, that Illidge has the most touching sense of family loyalty. He keeps his mother, he pays for his younger brother’s education, he gave his sister fifty pounds when she married.’

‘What’s wrong in that?’

‘Wrong? But it’s disgustingly bourgeois! Theoretically he sees no distinction between his mother and any other aged female. He knows that, in a properly organized society, she’d be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis. In spite of which he sends her I don’t know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence. I twitted him about it the other day. He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he’d been caught cheating at cards. So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm, detached, scientific ferocity. I only laughed at him. “One of these days,” I threatened, “I’ll take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party.” And what’s more, I will.’