To the Dark Tower (8 page)

"You brute! You utter beast!” She pulled away, tears of rage filling her eyes. The wide-brimmed hat quivered.

"But really—"

"Don’t talk to me! Don’t touch me!"

Over the smooth lawns she darted. The dress fluttered, the bracelets tinkled. She clutched her hat. Then she had disappeared.

Hugh stood on the bridge, gazing ruefully at his own reflection, dapper, dashing almost, buttons gleaming, teeth gleaming, hair gleaming with fixative. "Damn it," he thought. "Damn it. So she was frigid. So that was it. The little fool!" He felt enraged with her. He would like to smack her face. Any opposition annoyed him; with women he was used to having his way.

Then suddenly he decided: he would go and see Andrée. Andrée would understand. Dear Andrée!

But Lucy wept.

Hugh had ‘had’ his first woman when he was seventeen. He, S. N. George, and two other school friends had visited Paris for a week: in Paris he fell. Later, in retrospect, he never romanticised the incident as so many people do. It was a beginning; and that was all. He was too truthful to romanticise his lust. His abnormal sexual energy was expended on women just as his abnormal physical energy was expended on hockey, polo, tennis; and in either case without the expenditure he felt ill. But there was no romance there, no sentimentality.

For his school-friends, on that visit to Paris, it had been sufficient to drink absinthe in a Montmartre café where the sexes danced together—women mooning round in each others’ arms, men swaying together. But to him this had merely seemed trivial: he had outgrown his adolescence. So that when, one evening, the others had set out, believing this to be Life and Sin and all the things that had been rigidly excluded from the tradition of Dr. Arnold, he complained of a headache and stayed at the hotel.

Later, after they had gone, he began to walk the streets with a perseverance which marked all his activities. He walked Les Gobelins quarter, because that was where the hotel was: had he known Paris better he might have seen the absurdity of this locale. It was raining as he explored those endless terraces and squares, to which clung, like a film of moisture, the gentility of a down-at-heel bourgeoisie. No one seemed to be out that night—only a cat that whisked through his legs, then stopped, returned, and pressed voluptuously against him. Far away, in the mist, there was asthmatic coughing. Lights blurred as though he were seeing them through tears.

For two hours he walked, hands deep in his pockets, the moisture gradually seeping through his clothes. Sometimes he thought of the promised satisfaction—the warmth of it, the mastery. But more often he thought only of how best to succeed in his search, without any consideration of what would follow. The most important thing seemed not to release his energy but to find a woman. The means had superseded the end.

Footsteps clattering down an area, the sound of a woman singing, a church clock striking. The clammy touch of a lock of his own hair on his forehead. A desire to yawn. The ache of delayed realisation. This was all.

Then suddenly, as he strode along, head bowed, coat collar turned up, some syllables of French, murmured timidly from under a lamp-post. He shot round, smiling with relief, gesturing with one hand, oblivious that he was standing in a puddle.

Over her head she held a newspaper to keep her hair dry, a bony Jewess, pitiably thin, with a gold-stopped smile and a low forehead covered in a sort of rash. Her fur gleamed with pin-points of rain, her hands were large and clumsy. She smelt of wet clothes.

In her room her teeth chattered: and even when she was naked she grotesquely tried to warm herself after the fashion of cab-drivers—swinging her skeleton arms and slapping her flesh.

In their embrace she suddenly called out in impatience, because she was cold: “
Viens! Viens, petit garcon!
” But he, because he was preoccupied and in any case did not know the idiom, did not hurry.

It was only later that he realised.

After that, few weeks passed without a repetition. But he was now becoming fastidious. Just as when he had first learnt tennis he was content to play with anyone, however bad, so at first he had pumped himself into drabs, syphilitics, inebriates. But later he was less easily satisfied.

It was when his regiment was sent to India that he met Andrée. He had an accident, riding into a heap of gravel on his motor bicycle and taking the skin off his face, when her father, a Eurasian jute merchant, had driven past in his carriage and seen him. He had almost hurried on, being naturally squeamish. But then his benevolence asserted itself. Grey, with the peculiar greyness of dark complexions, he drew up and got his Indian servant to drag Hugh on to the back seat. Once there, Hugh bled on to the dusty cushions, moaned, muttered, “This is very good of you, sir”; quite failed to realise that Mr. Da Costa was ‘not known’ at the Club, and fell asleep.

The next thing that happened was to wake up to an excited circle of woman, Mr. Da Costa’s family, some sending for the doctor, some cautiously attempting to remove his clothes in order to attend to his wounds, all of them talking. Andrée alone stood apart, watching him. He never forgot that gaze.

When the doctor arrived he was horrified to see Hugh sprawling on one of the many unmade beds that littered every room of the house, and hurried him off to the hospital. The Da Costas were not even thanked for their trouble. But the next morning, in spite of the doctor’s warning, “They’re awful people,” and the doctor’s wife’s, “The dirt they put up with!” Hugh called on them. And Andrée was there.

She was fifteen, precocious as many children are who have spent their lives in the plains, plump as few are. She could not even be termed pretty: she bit her nails, her teeth were irregular, her face seemed to be all cheeks. But her body was young and strong, with breasts and buttocks that were far too large for their age, and feet that were far too small.

The first thing Hugh noticed about her was the way her black hair was screwed into two little knots. “Pig-tails”, she called them; and he had corrected, facetiously, “Piglet-tails”. But when they were in the garden together he got her to undo them and ran his fingers through the thick strands. Like a cat she at first rubbed herself against him; then she pulled away, impatiently.

A few days later, a child now, in a white linen frock and sandals, she climbed a tree and dared him to follow her. At the top, scrambling from one branch to another, she ripped her skirt, disclosing a brown thigh. He touched her, and she did not move away. They stayed in the tree.

There was no opposition from her family. It never seemed to occur to them that Hugh might one day marry her. Obviously this was a thing which did not happen—an impossibility, given the society in which they lived. But they were honoured that he should pay her visits, send her flowers, buy her confectionery. Fortunately they were without sexual morality.

And just as they excluded, as a matter of course, all possibility of marriage, so Hugh did also. Apart from all incompatibilities, he was too realistic. He knew that for the moment Andrée was delightful: he loved her animal smell, the way in which she curled up in bed at his feet, her childish tears. But in five years, ten years—he could not bear to think of it. She would be like her mother and her twelve sisters—obese, clumsy, seismic, with a dry wheezing which one took to be laughter.

In any case, Andrée was already engaged to a young man, a Eurasian like herself, who had sung in the choir, been noticed by the padre, and was now a subordinate in the police. He never resented Hugh; rather he was proud of the honour done to him. Hugh had made Andrée what is called a
demi-vierge
.

Then Lucy. But there had been that scene in the garden, and he was no longer asked to tennis, bridge, dinner by Lady Korrance. He had been dropped. True, Mumsie still talked to him in the Club or when they met in other people’s houses, but Lucy ignored him, only staring, as if in reproach, when he entered a room in which she was already seated.

This change irritated him; he was already in love with her—in spite of evenings on the veranda with Andrée, drives with Andrée, meals with Andrée. Thwarted, he took refuge in a ferocious antagonism. When passing her at the Club he looked the other way; he declined to partner her at tennis with an aversion which was obvious to everyone; and he took to staring at her critically, impertinently, on all other occasions when chance threw them together. Among his colleagues he spoke of her with a mixture of contempt and malice; and because they respected him, regarding him as their leader, they soon ceased to laugh
with
her and began, instead, to laugh
at
her. Lucy became the clown, instead of the wit, of the station.

But, suddenly, there was a change—an invitation to a picnic. At first Hugh thought it must be a practical joke: but in the evening Lady Korrance came up to him in the Club. "You got the invitation?" She sounded breathless, a shade too concerned.

"Thank you."

"You can come?"

"I shall be delighted."

Then, all at once, he was aware that Lucy was listening from an embrasure by the window.

Cameras, field-glasses, cold chicken in aspic—it was the usual paraphernalia; with Mrs. Meakins stopping the car at intervals to scurry behind a clump of bushes, the servants forgetting the soda-water, the guests forgetting to be polite. The truth was that it was too sultry. "I love picnics”, exclaimed Lady Korrance. But she might equally well have said, "I love going to the dentist". No one expected her to be truthful. Then she scowled at the bearer because there were already blowflies on the meat.

Sir Basil took photographs, Mrs. Meakins disappeared again ("Look out for snakes", was Lady Korrance’s whispered advice), two subalterns threw a cricket ball at each other. They were all sprawling in the courtyard of a fifteenth-century palace. But they might, for all they cared, have been on Hampstead Heath. When Hugh examined some carving they looked puzzled, even shocked; and Lady Korrance, as though to excuse her guest, exclaimed: "What funny beasts! They have two heads!" and offered him another helping of trifle.

Then, having gorged—on cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs (the salt forgotten), game-pie, trifle, chocolate mousse, liqueur chocolates—the older of them yawned, went to sleep, or chatted in small groups, while the youngsters discussed the feasibility of playing rounders, squabbled over the rules, teased Mrs. Meakins’s dropsical terrier, and finally decided on a walk. In twos and threes they wandered off into the jungle, led by a young man who thought he knew a short-cut to the river.

Hugh was about to saunter after them, alone, when a hand touched his wrist. It was Lucy, smiling, without a trace of embarrassment. "May I come with you?” The words were the first she had spoken to him for four months, apart from conventional greetings.

"If you like."

Again she smiled, magnificent in green silk; then bending her head slightly forward, as if in compliance to his wishes, the plumes on her hat nodding, her eyelashes making delicate shadows on rouged cheeks, she swung ahead. They did not speak. Hers was a high-stepping progression, bird-like, her skirt held high in a white-gloved hand.

"But aren’t we going the wrong way?” Hugh said at last. "I’m sure the others—"

"Oh, no. I saw them. It’s quite all right." Again that smile, again the forward inclination of the head.

He shrugged his shoulders and they moved on through punkahs of fern. The path had been beaten hard by the feet of coolies, the air was shrill with birds. Then suddenly she turned.

"Oh, dear! I do believe we’ve lost the way. I could have sworn ... but this is a dead-end." They had reached a clearing, a few tree-trunks, some creeper, two lemonade bottles, and a copy of the
Pioneer
—relics of some other picnic at some other time. "Now what are we to do?"

"We’d better go back."

She wrinkled up her nose. "I feel rather tired. Let’s sit down for a bit." Raising her skirt she climbed on to a tree-trunk. "Come here. Sit down."

Obeying her he placed himself on the same perch. He wondered what would happen.

Then she was pressing herself against him, hands exploratory, mouth glued to his, body trembling.

"Dearest," she murmured. And her hat fell to the ground.

"Where have you been?” Mrs. Meakins simpered when they returned too late for tea and a game of Consequences.

"We got lost," Hugh explained. "We thought we were following the others, but we came to a dead-end—a rather pleasant clearing."

"Good heavens! Fancy Lucy losing her way! That must be the clearing where we had our picnic last year." This from Sir Basil, who was only tactful with his superiors. "What’s this, Lucy? Lost your way? You
have
got a memory." Then he began to chuckle indulgently.

But Lucy blushed.

"I couldn’t be more delighted," said Lady Korrance when their engagement was announced; and later: "Do call me Mother. After all—well—we’ve never had a son. And now we look upon you ..." So she became Mumsie.

"Of course, I saw it months ago," Mrs. Meakins confided to a group of friends. "Months and months ago—even before they did." Then she sighed, thinking of the Rev. Pat Meakins—‘padre’—who had been so slow that summer at Eastbourne, and was now buried in Gorakhpur under a marble inscription, ‘Remember that the best of friends must part.’

"Congratulations, old boy," were Sir Basil’s words, after a brief interview, during which the baronetcy, Hugh’s grandmother’s probable fortune, and the likelihood of promotion were all discussed. "I haven’t a thing against the match." Nor had he. Of course, there had been talk of a Eurasian girl; the boy moved in a ‘fast’ set; old Phillips had seen a party of them in the bazaar, and one guessed their errand.

But now all this could be dismissed as ‘wild oats’. ‘Wild oats’ meant anything that Sir Basil did not wish to find disagreeable.

So it was all settled. His colleagues gave a party and they all got drunk; the Collector gave a party and they all stayed sober. Mumsie said she didn’t believe in long engagements. Lucy chose an emerald ring.