Point Counter Point (42 page)

Their train next morning was nearly twenty minutes late. ‘Scandalous,’ Mr. Quarles kept repeating, as he looked at his watch, ‘disgraceful.’

‘You’re in a great hurry to be at your Indians,’ said Philip, smiling from his corner.

His father frowned and talked about something else. At Liverpool Street they parted, Sidney in one taxi, Philip and Elinor in a second. Sidney reached his flat only just in time. He was still engaged in washing the grime of the journey from his large, flesh-padded hands, when the bell rang. He made haste to rinse and dry himself, then, adjusting his face, he stepped into the hall and opened. It was Gladys. He received her with a kind of condescending regality, his chin tilted, his chest thrown back, his waistcoat projecting, but smiling down at her (Gladys called herself ‘petite’) and graciously twinkling through half-shut eyelids. It was an impudent, vulgar, snubby little face that smiled back at him. But it was not her face that had brought Mr. Quarles to London, it was not the individual Gladys Helmsley; it was the merely generic aspect of the woman, her ‘figah,’ as Sidney would have euphemistically put it.

‘You’re very punctual, my dyah,’ he said, holding out his hand.

Gladys was rather taken aback by the coolness of his greeting. After what had happened last time, she had expected something tenderer.

‘Am I!’ she said, for lack of anything better to say; and since human beings have only a limited number of noises and grimaces with which to express the multiplicity of their emotions, she laughed as though she had been amused by something, when in fact she was only surprised and disquieted. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him, provocative-petulantly, why he didn’t kiss her, whether he was tired of her—_already_. But she decided to wait.

‘Almost too punctual,’ Sidney went on. ‘My train was scandalouslah late. Scandalouslah!’ He radiated indignation.

‘Fancy! ‘ said Gladys. The refinement that hung around her speech, like a too genteel disguise, dropped away from time to time, leaving individual words and phrases nakedly cockney.

‘Ryahly disgraceful!’ said Sidney. ‘Trains have no business to be late. I shall write to the Traffic Superintendent at Liverpool Street. I’m not sure,’ he added, still more importantly, ‘that I shan’t write to the
Times
as well.’

Gladys was impressed. Mr. Quarles had intended that she should be. Apart from all merely sensual satsfactions, the greatest charm of his sexual holidays resided in the fact that they were shared with impressible companions. Sidney liked them, not only young, but of a lower class, and poor. To feel himself unequivocally superior and genuinely admired was for Sidney a luxury almost as great as an embracement. His escapades were holidays not only from chastity, but also from that sense of inferiority which, at home, in parliament, at the office, had always inveterately haunted him. In relation to young women of the lower classes he was a great man, as well as a ‘passionate’ one.

Gladys, on her side, was impressed by his thunderings. But she was also amused. Impressed, because she belonged to the world of poor and patient wage-slaves, who accept the unpleasantnesses of social life as so many natural phenomena, uncontrollable by human agency and recalcitrant to human desires. But Sidney was one of the Olympian rich; the rich refuse to accept unpleasantness; they write letters to the
Times
about it, they pull wires, use influence, lodge formal complaints with an always friendly and obsequious police. To Gladys it was wonderful—wonderful, but also very funny. There was such a lot of loud haw-haw and lahdy-da about the whole performance. It was so like the parody of itself on the music-hall stage. She admired, she realized very accurately the economic and social causes of Sidney’s behaviour (it was that realization which had made her so promptly his mistress). But she also laughed. She lacked reverence.

Mr. Quarles opened the sittingroom door to let her pass.

‘Ta,’ said Gladys and walked in.

He followed. On the nape of her neck, her dark cropped hair ended in a little triangle that pointed downwards along the spine. She was wearing a thin green dress. Through the fine stuff he could see, just below her shoulders, the line where the underclothes gave place to bare skin. A belt of black shiny leather was fastened in a slant very low on her hips. At every stride it rose and fell on her left hip with a rhythmical regularity. Her stockings were the colour of sunburnt flesh. Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on. wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves, found modem fashions a treat and could never quite get over the belief that the young women who adopted them had deliberately made themselves indecent for his benefit and because they wanted him to become their lover. His eyes followed the curves of the lustrous sunburn. But what fascinated him most to-day was the black leather belt flicking up and down over the left haunch, with the regularity of a piece of machinery, every time she moved her leg. In that rise and fall the whole unindividualized species, the entire sex semaphored their appeal.

Gladys halted and turned towards him with a smile, expectantly coquettish. But Mr. Quarles made no responding gesture.

‘I’ve got the Corona hyah,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we had better begin at once.’

For the second time Gladys was surprised, thought of making a comment, and again said nothing, but sat down in silence before the typewriter.

Mr. Quarles put on his tortoiseshell-rimmed pince-nez and opened his despatch case. He had found a mistress, but he did not see why that should entail the loss of a typist, for whose services, after all, he paid.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking up at her over the top of his pince-nez, ‘we’d better begin with those letters to the Traffic Superintendent and the Times.’ Gladys adjusted the paper, typed the date. Mr. Quarles cleared his throat and dictated. There were some good phrases, he flattered himself, in the letters. ‘Inexcusable slackness entailing the waste of time otherwise valuable than that of drowsy railway bureaucrats’—that, for example, was excellent. And so (for the benefit of the
Times
) was ‘the pampered social parasites of a protected industry.’

‘That’ll teach the dogs,’ he said with satisfaction, as he read the letters through. ‘That’ll make them squirm.’ He looked to Gladys for applause, and was not entirely satisfied with the smile on that impertinent face. ‘Pity old Lord Hagworm’s not alive,’ he added, calling up strong allies

‘I’d have written to him. He was a director of the company.’ But the last of the Hagworms had died in 1912. And Gladys continued to be more amused than admiring.

Mr. Quarles dictated a dozen more letters, the answers to a correspondence which he had allowed to accumulate for several days before coming to London, so that the total might seem more important and also that he might get his full money’s worth out of Gladys’s secretaryship

‘Thank goodness,’ he said, when the last of the letters was answered. ‘You’ve no idyah,’ he went on (and the great thinker had come to reinforce the landed gentleman), ‘you’ve no idyah how exasperating these trivial little things can be, when you’ve got something more syahrious and important to think about.’

‘I suppose they must be,’ said Gladys, thinking how funny he was.

‘Take down,’ commanded Mr. Quarles, to whom a
pensee
had suddenly occurred. He leaned back in his chair and, closing his eyes, pursued the elusive phrase.

Gladys waited, her fingers poised above the keyboard. She looked at the watch on her wrist. Ten past twelve. It would be lunch-time soon. A new watch—that would be the first thing she’d make him give her. The one she had was such a cheap, nasty-looking watch; and it kept such bad time.

‘Note for the volume of Reflections,’ said Mr. Quarles, without opening his eyes. The keys briefly rattled. ‘The ivory pinnacles of thought’—he repeated the words inwardly. They made a satisfying reverberation along the corridors of his mind. The phrase was caught. He sat up briskly and opened his eyes—to become aware that the lisle-thread top of one of Gladys’s sunburnt stockings was visible, from where he was sitting, to a considerable distance above the knee.

‘All my life,’ he dictated, his eyes fixed on the lisle thread, ‘I have suffered from the irrelevant—no, say “importunate”—interruptions of the wahld’s trivialitah, full stop. Some thinkers comma I know comma are able to ignore these interruptions comma to give them a fleeting but sufficient attention and return with a serene mind to higher things full stop.’

There was silence. Above the lisle thread, Mr. Quarles was thinking, was the skin,—soft, curving tightly over the firm curved flesh. To caress and, caressing, to feel the finger-tips silkily caressed; to squeeze a handful of elastic flesh. Even to bite. Like a round goblet, like a heap of wheat.

Suddenly conscious of the direction of his glances, Gladys pulled down her skirt.

‘Where was I?’ asked Mr. Quarles.

‘Higher things with a serene mind,’ Gladys g answered, reading from the page in front of her.

‘H’m.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘For me comma alas comma this serenitah has always been impossible semi-colon; my nahvous sensibilitah is too great full stop. Dragged down from the ivorah pinnacles of thought’ (he rolled out the phrase with relish) ‘into the common dust comma, I am exasperated comma, I lose my peace of mind and am unable to climb again into my tower.’

He rose and began to walk restlessly about the room.

‘That’s always been my trouble,’ he said. ‘Too much sensibilitah. A syahrious thinker ought to have no temperament, no nerves. He has no business to be passionate.’

The skin, he was thinking, the firm elastic flesh. He halted behind her chair. The little triangle of cropped hair pointed down along her spine. He put his hands on her shoulders and bent over her.

Gladys looked up, smiling impertinently, with triumph. ‘Well?’ she asked.

Mr. Quarles bent lower and kissed her neck. She giggled.

‘How you tickle!’

His hands explored her, sliding along her arms, pressing her body—the body of the species, of the entire sex. The individual Gladys continued to giggle.

‘Naughty!’ she said, and made a pretence of pushing his hands away. ‘Naughty!’

‘A month ago,’ said Elinor, as their taxi drove out of Liverpool Street Station, ‘we were in Udaipur.’

‘It certainly seems improbable,’ said Philip, agreeing with the implications of her remark.

‘These ten months of travel have been like an hour in a cinema. There’s the Bank. I begin to doubt whether I’ve ever been away.’ She sighed. ‘It’s rather a dreadful feeling.’

‘Is it?’ said Philip. ‘I suppose I’m used to it. I never do feel that anything has really happened before this morning.’ He craned his neck out of the window. ‘Why people should bother about the Taj Mahal when there’s St. Paul’s to look at, I can’t imagine. What a marvel!’

‘That wonderful black and white of the stone.’

‘As though it were an engraving. Doubly a work of art. Not merely architecture, but an etching of architecture.’ He leaned back. ‘I often doubt whether I ever had a childhood,’ he went on, returning to the previous conversation.

‘That’s because you never think of it. Lots of my childhood is more real to me than Ludgate Hill here. But then I constantly think of it.’

‘That’s true,’ said Philip. ‘I don’t often try to remember. Hardly ever, in fact. I always seem to have too much to do and think about.’

‘You have no natural piety,’ said Elinor. ‘I wish you had.’

They drove along the Strand. The two little churches protested against Australia House, in vain. In the courtyard of King’s College a group of young men and women sat in the sun waiting for the Professor of Pastoral Theology. At the pit door of the Gaiety there was already a queue; the placards advertised the four hundredth performance of’ The Girl from Biarritz.’ Next door to the Savoy, Philip noticed, you could still buy a pair of boots for twelve-and-six. In Trafalgar Square the fountains were playing, Sir Edwin Landseer’s lions mildly glared, the lover of Lady Hamilton stood perched among the clouds, like St. Simeon the Stylite. And behind the grim colonnade of the National Gallery Uccello’s horsemen timelessly fought and Rubens raped his Sabines, Venus looked into her mirror and in the midst of Piero’s choiring angels Jesus was born into a magically lovely world.

The cab turned down Whitehall.

‘I like to think of all the bureaucrats.’

‘I don’t,’ said Elinor.

‘Scribbling away,’ he went on,’scribbling from morning till night in order that we may live in freedom and comfort. Scribble, scribble—the result is the British Empire. What a comfort,’ he added, ‘to live in a world where one can delegate everything tiresome, from governing to making sausages, to somebody else.’

At the Gate of the Horse Guards the mounted sentries looked as though they were stuffed. Near the Cenotaph a middleaged lady was standing with raised eyes, murmuring a prayer over the Kodak with which she proposed to take a snapshot of the souls of the nine hundred thousand dead. A Sikh with a black beard and a pale mauve turban emerged from Grindley’s as they passed. The time, according to Big Ben, was twenty-seven minutes past eleven. In the library of the House of Lords was there a dozing marquess? A charabanc disgorged Americans at the door of Westminster Abbey. Looking back through the little porthole in the hood they were able to see that the hospital was still urgently in need of funds.

John Bidlake’s house was in Grosvenor Road, overlooking the river.

‘Pimlico,’ said Philip meditatively, as they approached the house. He laughed. ‘Do you remember that absurd song your father used always to quote?’

‘“To Pimlico Then let us go,”’ Elinor chanted.

‘“One verse omitted here.” You mustn’t forget that.’ They both laughed, remembering John Bidlake’s comments.

‘“One verse omitted here.” It’s omitted in all the anthologies. I’ve never been able to discover what happened when they’d got to Pimlico. It’s kept me wondering for years, feverishly. Nothing like Bowdlerism for heating the imagination.’

‘Pimlico,’ Philip repeated. Old Bidlake, he was thinking, had made of Pimlico a sort of Rabelaisian Olympus. He liked the phrase. But ‘Gargantuan’ would be better for public use than ‘Rabelaisian.’ For those who had never read him, Rabelais connoted nothing but smut. Gargantuan Olympus, then. They had at least heard rumours that Gargantua was large.