Sunflower (37 page)

Reconciled to her house, she went downstairs, gathered up her letters from the hall table and went into the little library, where they left her supper for her on a tray. It didn’t look very good tonight. This was the third time they had given her cold chicken that week, and she didn’t think she ever really liked it. It was too much like an ingénue part. Suddenly she felt jealous of her servants, moving about in her kitchen as if they owned it, and giving her what they chose of her own food, and she made up her mind to go downstairs and find something she did like to eat. In the hall she paused and called Sambo, who put his three-cornered head between the two lowest banisters, and narrowed his green eyes at her and plainly said to himself, ‘Well, I think but little of her, but all the same I suppose that if you’re about the other ones will go, and I can get back to my bed.’ He accepted a lift in her arms down the stairs to the basement, but was careful to jump down at the first possible moment, so that she should not use this condescension as a pretext for familiarities. ‘Very well, you silly old thing,’ she said, and went to the ice-box and found a hard-boiled egg and some cold potatoes and some celery, and put them on a plate and took it to the kitchen table. It was nice, eating them in her fingers, and anyway she loved being in her kitchen. It was the only part of her house which made her feel that she was any richer than she had been when she left her home in Chiswick. She would never have been surprised to find out that she enjoyed all the possessions in her other rooms temporarily and conditionally, like the dresses she wore during the run of a play. But when she looked at the plates on the dresser, and the sewing machine on the side table, and above all at the rows of red canisters on the mantelpiece with ‘Flour’ and ‘Tea’ and ‘Rice’ written in gold on them, she felt that these were real things that one really owned, that one could keep always because one had paid real money for them, that would always be useful. Finishing her meal, she put her elbows on the table and rested her head on her hands, looking drowsily round her, pleased with the kitchen that was hers, that was full of nice things, that was clean as a new pin. The scrubbed wood of the table was clear as a slice of cheese … She became full of a sense of joyful departure, she was in a ship that was swinging on the tide and with the turn of the tide they would set sail on the fortunate journey … What was swinging? Her sleepy head, held on her hands. Why was she joyful?

Because Francis Pitt was going to ring her up that night. There was not any harm in being rung up. Oh, but if she went to sleep down here, she would never hear the telephone bell, for the servants would have disconnected the one downstairs and it would be ringing by her bedside. She must go upstairs, she would read her letters to keep her awake, she must not run the risk of losing that …

On the threshold of the library she drew back, and screamed, because there was a strange man sitting there.

He stood up. It was not possible that she should not have known him, for it was Essington.

He said, ‘You seem startled. Who were you expecting to find instead of me?’

She answered, ‘I wasn’t expecting anybody. Only somehow I didn’t recognise you. I suppose it’s because I’m tired.’

He repeated, ‘Who were you expecting to find instead of me?’

Plainly he was in tune for one of his long, slow, persistent, cross-examining scenes. There was no way of quieting him down in one of these except by standing still and letting him do it until one cried, when he melted and was benevolent and appeased. But suddenly she knew she could not do that any more and that some change had taken place in her which would have made it impossible for her to do that even if she had wanted, and she exclaimed in exasperation, ‘Do you mean that I’m expecting some man here to make love to me? Don’t be stupid! You still have your latchkey to this house, haven’t you? That’s how you got in, isn’t it? Then how could I have any man here?’

‘Sunflower. You are getting very clever. Very hard and clever. And I think I know what’s making you so hard and clever. There is a certain instinct so strong that it puts bones into those who are naturally spineless as jelly-fish, intelligence into those who might otherwise be classified with the amoebas. Sunflower, I saw you play tonight.’

‘Well, that was nice for you. We gave a good performance.’

‘Sunflower, I saw you play your love scenes with that new young man. That Jew-boy with the wave in his black greasy hair and the little hands and feet. By God. I have never seen such doings on the stage.’

She stared at him in horror. ‘But you are going mad,’ she said gravely, ‘You are going mad.’

‘Sunflower, I saw you. I saw you in his arms. I saw you kiss him. Real kisses. I saw you—linked with him …’ His words seemed to bring the sharp point of his tongue out with them through his teeth.

He had to stand quivering while he bit it back. ‘You’ve never acted like that before. You’ve always acted like a decent woman. Not like …’ His intellectual conscience, which was important to control his malice but would never be quite gagged by it, refused to let him say the words because they were not true; but the other passionate part of him had what relief it could by making his mouth shape them silently.

The corresponding point in her seemed to hear what they were, and she made a sweeping gesture which she immediately checked, feeling that sick terror she always felt when an argument between them slipped towards a primitive plane. It had something to do with her fear, which was beyond all reason, which was greater than her fear of death, that he would some day strike her. Their eyes met nervously, and they consented to disregard this moment of dumb show and its significance. She said, as if she believed that an intellectually convincing explanation convinced people, ‘You know you’re talking nonsense. I play that scene like I’ve always played love scenes, the way old Sir Charles Mordant taught me when he was pushing me through my first lead and I couldn’t act at all. “If you want to play a love-scene that gets across the footlights,” he said to me, “get your feet mixed up.” And that’s what I’ve always done. That’s all I do in this play. You’ve seen me do it a hundred times before. What are you being silly about all of a sudden? And as for this man, of all men. Why, you know he’s a nancy-boy.’

He shuddered. ‘Your hideous slang. About things you might have found too hideous to know.’

He had shifted his ground. She had him beaten. But she liked him none the better for that, for it showed that he had made this accusation against her without having a case, without really believing he had one. ‘Well, as to that,’ she said coldly, ‘they’re all round us. They act with us, they write our plays, they make our dresses, they decorate our houses. Sometimes there seem more of them than of the other kind. We can’t help knowing of them.’ There passed through her mind a picture of Cosmo’s birthday party at the Ladrone restaurant a few weeks before. She had not been playing then, so she had gone early, and had sat at the host’s table opposite the door and watched all the guests coming in; the lovely little girls in their teens and early twenties, who had rid themselves of all the traditional signs of womanhood, who had cut off their hair, who were so slim that their frocks rose over their breasts only as they might have over two flower-petals worn that way for a charm, yet who remained utterly women, with soft young faces that glowed in expectation of adventures the cause of which would be submission; and with them these dapper boys, their heads sleek as men’s are, their bodies straight and lithe and dressed in black and white as men’s are, yet who had become utterly not men, whose faces were sparkling with enjoyment of adventures in which women had no part. She had felt very sorry for the girls then. Now, perhaps because she was goose-fleshed with that sense of danger which always came on her when her relationship with Essington took this turn towards unreason, she felt ashamed about herself. At the moment she seemed to hold plenty of cards: but if they were struck out of her hand it would not be so easy to get others. She said aloud, ‘Yes, I don’t know what the world’s coming to!’ She felt perturbed, flimsy, hollow, ephemeral, something that would disappear if people stopped thinking about her. The sight of her letters, which she had left lying on a table, encouraged her. They would be all about her work, they would prove to her that she had a career, that she solidly existed, she would feel much better if she read them.

Essington called out loudly, as if instead of sitting close in the room she had gone out of the door and he had to bring her back at any cost, ‘I am hungry! I want something to eat! Go and make me some coffee!’

This was a habit of his when he had risen to a certain pitch of rage against her. He would wait till there were no servants about and would order her loudly to cook something for him. It was not such a bad thing as it seemed, for it was not a mere explosion of tyranny, it was more like a little mechanical adjustment which made it possible for their relationship to run smoothly for a little while. For after she had obeyed, and gone down to the kitchen and made him coffee and scrambled eggs or a welsh rarebit, and brought it up to him, he would explain that he really had needed the food, that for some reason he had had no dinner, that he was very grateful to her for giving him this; and after that he would be very kind and good for some time. She had often wondered what was in his mind when he did this. It was perhaps the attempt of somebody who was clever in general but not at handling human beings to make a relationship run right by forcing it into the groove along which such relationships traditionally ran; just as a clever person without a mechanical turn of mind who found himself faced with the problem of making a broken-down machine work again would try to make it look as much as possible as it did when it was first delivered by the manufacturer. If they had been mates in a primitive society she would have tended all his bodily needs and he would have been grateful to her for it; that was the way she had been delivered by the manufacturer. The imitation of it was so nearly right, was at any rate so allusive to rightness that it always felt sweet. But it was play-acting, it was pretence, and tonight she couldn’t go through the performance. For it was the extremest fatigue and tedium, like doing exercises when one is dropping with sleep, for her to take any notice of him at all. And it was all preposterous anyway; if he wanted to be kind to her why couldn’t he just be kind to her instead of staging over and over again these pointless dramas of the unjust accusations and repentance?

She said, ‘There’s plenty of cold chicken on the tray over there.’

He grumbled, ‘I wanted something hot.’

‘I am too tired. There’s whisky there too.’

She did not look at him in case he got her again by some familiar piteousness. When she heard him sit down by the tray and take up his knife and fork she picked up her letters. First of all the folded newspaper she had noticed on the hall table because of its acid violet-pink. The sooner she got the ugly thing into the waste-paper basket…

Essington flung down his knife and fork and cried squeakily, ‘You needn’t have let him … lip you as he did in that third act.’

Rage flooded her. She threw the paper down into her lap. ‘It’s in the part! I can’t play the part as it’s written unless I let him do that! And how dare you suspect me of this! Me who you’ve known all this time! With a silly little thing like that who’s seven or eight years younger than me! How dare you! It’s hateful of you, it’s mean of you, to use something that I have to do as part of my work to goad and hurt me!’

‘Yes, part of your work,’ said Essington; munched for a minute; and then came back to it purringly. ‘Your work. That’s been one of the chief difficulties of our relationship. Your work. The limited farming out of the practice of the least dignified of the arts by one not particularly competent to deal with the difficulties of such a situation.’

If he began to talk about her work he would go on forever. ‘Don’t talk about my work,’ she said. ‘I had to have it. For one thing, I had to have the money. We couldn’t have had as comfortable a house if I hadn’t worked. You couldn’t have spared enough money for all this. And I needed it for itself. You’re away so much that I’d go mad with loneliness if I hadn’t had the theatre. And you had a lot of fun when you’ve been feeling as you are now making fun of my acting. No, there isn’t any use talking about my work.’ She took up the newspaper and tore off the wrapper.

‘Sunflower,’ he said, so imperatively, so weightily, so much as if he were going to lay by her some new and important fact bearing on their relationship that she put down the paper again and waited. But all he had to say when he had got her to look at him was, ‘The misfortunes of us men. Particularly in connection with the necessities of sex. Think, think, if because of our need to eat, to consume from time to time a mutton chop, one had actually to take a sheep about with one. To make constant concessions to its sheeply nature. To train oneself to think—so as not to be rude and give offence—as much like a sheep as possible.’

She bit her lip, took up the newspaper again, and unfolded it. She had never heard of ‘The West End Topical Titbits’ before. Essington’s knife and fork rattled fussily.

When she had read the paragraph on the front page marked with a cross she covered her face with her hands and cried out, ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’

Essington squeaked in irritation, ‘What is it? What is it?’

‘This paper! There’s a paragraph in it about you and me! An awful paragraph!’

‘What paper? Oh—that pink gossip-rag!’

‘Oh, Essington, it’s dreadful, dreadful!’

‘My dear Sunflower,’ he wailed, ‘don’t be absurd. You ought to be used to that sort of thing by this time.’

Surely that was a frightful thing, an incredibly callous thing for him to say to her? She knew in her heart that he was going to fail her for the thousandth time, but because of this new agony this paragraph had brought her, which surpassed any she had ever known before, she had not the courage to accept that. She got up and staggered across the room to where he sat at the tray, holding out the paper and turning her face away from it, and crying out, ‘There’s never been anything as bad as this before! How can people write such things and go on living! You’d think they’d be ashamed! Oh, read it, read it!’