Trust (56 page)

And went, and dawdled a bit on the square, then dawdled in the train station, then dawdled in the carriage; and, by degrees, departed.

But when the child fell asleep—a thing that occurred abruptly, with an exhausted and queerly narrow snigger of its lungs—he was still on the square, browsing in a newspaper stall. And he had only just gained the station when Allegra, restively blackening her thumb with the carbon copy of
Marianna
(since Enoch had taken the original away to London to find a publisher she read in it every day, marveling and doubting in turn), suddenly seized out of the morning somnolence a new scene, brave, lubricious, carnal, and at once sat down to write it into its logical place, which was Chapter Twelve. That was the chapter, and this the scene, that afterward caused a New York reviewer, the well-known Orphew (nicknamed Off-Hue) Codpress, to call the author, with a prurient sneer, the Wunderkind of Eros (he said this sedately to his wife, however; in print he said "shameless," "shocking," "boring," "tedious"). And in the Soviet edition that was the chapter, and this the scene, that subsequently had to be almost wholly omitted, on the ground—according to
Literaturnaya Gazyeta
—that only the paragraphs celebrating the workers' council were actually relevant to the novel's great and primary theme of Capitalist Plunder Exposed.

But all that was afterward, and commentary; the scene itself she did not imagine in a single moment, as she liked later to pretend, though what she gave out in that hour of her only genuine inspiration was a unity of sensuality not, after all, the sole product of inspiration so much as the grafted fruit of inspired tutelage, the tutor meanwhile paying for his ticket out of her alligator-skin wallet, a long-ago gift from William. If there were ironies in this, the baby's interruptions (the baby itself a sign of the novelist's interrupted Sangerian subtleties) were still more ironic, since the baby (which normally whimpered, even in slumber) interrupted chiefly by not interrupting: lay in its box motionless and ominous. Its cold rubbery little hands were curled up like snails, which Allegra conscientiously felt; then, just as conscientiously, she listened to see if it was still alive. It breathed, so it was. But Allegra, reminded by her own hoary puffs to shiver, and drawing on a pair of socks over a pair of socks to effect an elephantiasis of warmth, slanted her mind from the subjective being-fondled of the fictional breasts of her heroine to the now-dry mammary vessels which Nick had forbidden to suckle; breast-feeding was then in disrepute; it was not, like the appearance of the baby itself, avant-garde. She rehearsed an address to Nick: "Look, a revision, rich, rich," was the whole of it And his reply (which, since by now he was boarding the train, he never gave): "You ought to've revised before, if you were going to revise at all; I told you Twelve was a sermon preached by Enoch and needed a slippery slavering tongue, but you wouldn't touch it, and now we'll have to pay the typist to type over, and how—with a certain New York lawyer stitching up his stingy pockets—how, my dear poet, do you think we'll get the money?" It was perilous when he called her poet; it meant he was hungry. Then she observed to herself that he was long in fetching the food. He never cared that
she
was hungry;
he
would buy himself a bun on the way: so she found her pen (it had dropped into the baby's box and stank slightly) and filled it, and emptied it in long scrawls, and crammed all the chinks of Chapter Twelve with arrowheads and goat-hooves of Venus and Pan, and wished she had a bun with frosting on it. Finally the postman intervened, hastening and truncating (though he did not know he was improving anyone's style) the anticlimax, and bringing a letter from America fat-cheeked with documents. The money was at last assured, but by then, of course, Nick was already halfway to London, and asleep in his compartment with a crumb on his lip.

The divorcee's reply:

February 2, 1938. Dear William, I wrote my name wherever you marked the blue dots. I also got your note that came separately about your not wanting me to get labeled Adulteress. You don't seem to mind lying any more. Thank you for hoping I will always be very happy. I can't drag the coal in and I am
cold
and nearly
dead
and yesterday it
hailed,
right on top of the old snow. If you hadn't lied the way lawyers know how to do better than anybody I bet you would say I am getting the wages of Adultery, but now all you cay say is that I am getting the wages of Incompatibility, or whatever it is you fixed me up with. I didn't read all those papers—I just signed wherever you put the blue dots. They couldn't put me in jail, could they? I'd rather be an Adulteress than a Prisoner. Enoch's in jail right now, and it's awful, it's not a bit like the time I learned how to play cards. There's a man named Mosley who's got a Fascist gang, and they made some trouble out in the East End against the Movement, and somehow everybody got away but Enoch, and he didn't raise even a stick. They were nice to him in the police station but the jail is as bad as this house, if you want to count dampness. The reason I'm still here is that I have to wait till Enoch gets out. He's coming to help me pack up, but he won't be out for two more days. I'm going to London, I can't stay here alone. There's the rent owed anyway. If not for Enoch I wouldn't have survived everything. He was here a couple of days before the Mosley thing happened with
Marianna Harlow
in a box like a coffin. I hate Chatto and Windus, and will try finding another publisher with more intelligence when I get back to America. Anyhow I wrote some extra parts for
Marianna,
and one whole section is so exciting now and up-to-date that I expect to get famous from it, not that you care. The enclosed (I'm sorry, but it had to be in handwriting) is a copy of Chapter Twelve the way it is now. Your blue dots came when I was in the middle of doing it, and I'm sending it to you so that you can learn something about love-making in case you ever decide to get married to someone else. It's a sort of advance wedding present. I hope you don't find it too literary, though it's not Shelley. Have you got any publishers for clients? I want an American publisher now because Enoch said I should go home right away on account of the baby, also the World Situation. I don't know what else to do. Enoch doesn't like the baby much, but I don't blame him, neither do I. You always wanted a baby and I don't see why. This one isn't very good-looking so far, I suppose they get better as they go along. It's allergic to something, it pukes all the time, nobody knows why. We used to give it wine like they do in France and those countries and it puked and now I always give it milk and it still pukes. That time I wrote you about, a couple of months ago when Enoch was here for that parade and his bad tooth flared up and we made an ice-pack from snow on the window-sill, well, what happened was he had such a terrible pain we had to give him the bed, and it was so cold that night we had to put the baby in with him under the blanket to keep it from freezing, and that's just when it decided to puke all over
Enoch.
So you can see it's a terrible baby. I'm going to use your name for it and I'm going to keep on using your name for myself too, I'm supposed to drop only the Mrs. William part. That's what Abby Lywood did—you remember Abby from Miss Jewett's, who was the second to get engaged in our whole class? After she and Walter were divorced she stopped writing Mrs. Walter Paine and wrote just Abby Paine, and that's what I'm going to do. Not because it's what I'm
supposed
to do, I'm not doing it because it's what you used to call right and proper. If I always did what was right and proper you wouldn't have sent the blue dots. Well, if it were up to me I'd go right back to being Miss, why not? But Enoch says the baby's got to have
some
sort of name, so it might as well be yours, there's no other that's currently available. If I sound resentful it's honestly not on account of the blue dots. It's all right about the blue dots, I don't blame you, except you were stingy about the money to spite me for Nick. He's in Italy now I think, he-kept talking about Sicily, maybe only to mislead.
He's
the one I'm bitter about, not you. I have to go home to America now, not just because Enoch thinks I ought to be where I can get good advice, but I somehow really want to now. Everybody keeps worrying about a war, not that it isn't perfectly plain it's all a bluff. But there's nothing to
do
in Europe any more, and England's ten times worse. I hate Brighton. Brighton's the place I hate, because the happiest summer of my life happened right here, even though the baby was coming in me, it didn't matter, it just made everything hilarious and sentimental. There were lots of things this summer I didn't write you about, I know you don't think I have any decencies but I wouldn't have written at all except that Nick made me, on account of there not being enough money. You should have sent more or else you should have answered. All I can tell you about the summer is flowers—I mean you like gladioli and ugly formal things, things for funerals, but
we
cut twigs of red berries one day—not to eat, they're dangerous to eat (I looked to see in a little book I had that tells about poisonous plants)—but to keep part for a bouquet and part for a sort of garland. You wouldn't have thought of that, in fact you wouldn't like it, you don't understand Sacred Beauty. For instance, there's such a nice tree, not too tall but sort of thin and holy-looking, just outside the window. You wouldn't look twice at that tree, that's what I mean. You wouldn't even see its connection with holiness. Most trees are atheists, but not this one. Once in July all the sheets were off the bed for washing and I noticed that even the
mattress
looked religious. It had a pocket in its middle and you could imagine a guru sitting cross-legged in it. There's a frying pan with a copper bottom that's like one of these Oriental gongs Buddhist monks hit with little hammers when they're calling the rest of the monks to prayer, and even the
frying
pan's connected with the tree. There are connections everywhere that you don't know anything about, and it's not even your fault, it's exactly what the blue dots say, Incompatibility, me with you (according to the blue dots) and you with Sacred Beauty. If you want to know what I mean by Sacred I mean anything that's alive, and Beauty is anything that makes you want to
be
alive and alive forever, with a sort of shining feeling. That's why I brought up the gladioli and the red berries: to show you it couldn't be helped, so you oughtn't to feel bad. It's as though I was destined to feel one way about the tree and the frying pan and the guru in the mattress and you were destined to feel another way about the blue dots. In a certain sense my way is a lie, and your way is a lie too. I mean my way is Pagan, and yours is Presbyterian, and maybe not-lying and Sacred Beauty come somewhere in between, and are where people really belong. Nick's the one who discovered I'm a Pagan, and half the summer he called me an ancient Greek, and made a face whenever I said I was a modern Marxist. He said you couldn't be both, you were a heathen or you weren't a heathen, and I was the clear-cuttest heathen he ever saw. But Enoch was down from London then—he was practically always down from London last summer, because there was all that trouble, the strikes and all, and told Nick he needed a haven, but Nick said what he really needed was a hideout. All he did when he came was sit around and read things like
The Psychological Basis of Social Economics,
and weed. He did a lot of weeding, isn't that funny? It's because weeding is very good for meditating and thinking through your position—you bend the knee and you disembowel, and it's veneration and violation at the same time. (Enoch said that and I copied it down.) Anyway, I was telling you, one particular time when Nick called me a heathen Enoch gave one of those secretive laughs he's capable of.

Nick: Aha. The whinny of consent. You agree.
Enoch: I'm agreeable, at any rate.
Nick: That's questionable.
Enoch: If you want to call her unredeemed—
Nick: She has no morals. She's a pre-Christian.
Enoch: Ah, but if she has no morals she's a Christian.
Nick: She's what I say she is—heathen.
Enoch: Exactly—Christian. All Christians are heathen, but not all heathen are Christian. Still, if she isn't redeemed, it doesn't mean she's not redeemable.
Me: Oh, I don't want to be redeemed!
Enoch: You will be. Historically the fate of the heathen has always been conversion.
Nick: To convert 'em you need a missionary, and at the moment there aren't any missionaries in Brighton. Unless—
Enoch: Don't look at
me.
I'm not out to convert her to anything.
Nick: You already have.
Enoch: You mean the Movement. But it didn't last—she's a heretic. She's gone over to your sect.
Nick: I have no sect. Sects are exactly what I'm against.
Enoch: People who are against sects form a very large sect.
Me: But don't you see! I'm not
open
to conversion.
There's no missionary representing anything who's clever enough to catch me.
Enoch: The missionary needn't be clever.
Me: Anyone who could change
my
ideas would have to be clever all right!
Enoch: On the contrary. Even illiterate. Even ignorant in toto.
Me:
That
sort of individual wouldn't affect me.
Enoch: That sort of individual will persuade you.
Me: To what?
Enoch: To become what you were always intended to become.
Me: What's that?
Enoch: A member of a class.
Nick: Ho hum, Karl Marx again.
Enoch: No. Anton Chekhov.
Me: What class?
Enoch: The one you were born into. Your husband's.
Me: It would take pretty powerful missionary ways to bring me back to William's ways!
Enoch: The opposite of powerful. Helpless. Illiterate. Ignorant in toto.
There's
your missionary, mewling in its box.

—He meant the baby, which was so funny and absurd that I had to laugh, but Nick didn't. I don't see how a
baby
can influence you in anything—
you
control
it,
not the other way around, after all. The reason I put in about "William's ways" for you to see is that I want you to understand positively that I don't
mind
about the blue dots. I know you think it's a disgrace to be divorced, just because nobody else in our families ever was before; but I don't mind, I wish my mother had sent blue dots to my father, instead of those horrible suspicious half-crazy letters she nearly sent. I'd rather be an Incompatible Adulteress than
dead
in Scarsdale, with gladioli on the window-sills and no guru in the mattress. And in spite of what Enoch says, it's not on account of the baby I'm going home, it's because I'm sick of this place, and it's so cold, and Nick's gone, and the baby's a nuisance without a nurse for it. I'm sure I can find a nurse-girl in London (they call them Nanny like in Peter Pan) when you start sending the money. I hope you start sending it
very soon.
It was awful having the baby, but really it's even worse taking care of it. I thought you would send the money after it was born, that's why I wrote you about it; but in a way there were two births in this cottage, you know?—one the baby, and the other Adam Gruen horn, which is an alias Enoch thought up in the summer once when he was here and reading Adam Smith. (Nick made fun of him for that, but Enoch said Adam Smith was in effect the Karl Marx of the Mercantile Era. I don't know what that means, maybe you do.) The Gruenhorn part is sort of silly-nice, it comes from a little green horn—a cut-off bit of branch all covered over with moss—that sticks out from the tree's belly. Nick used to hang the garland of red poison-berries on the green horn whenever we didn't want Enoch to come in, and sometimes when he was just fresh doWn from London and saw it there he went right off and stayed with an old lady down the road who had a spare room, and never came round till the next afternoon. He was really very good about it, even once when he had to keep away three whole days in a row because the red berries were on the green horn all that time. "Enters the intruder," he said, "because you let your garland down." And everyone laughed, it was so theatrical to hear Enoch trying to do a pun. He has no sense of humor, except in certain unexpected cases. For instance, right now, you see, it's not
Enoch
who's in jail, it's only Adam Gruenhorn. That has all kinds of metaphysical implications concerning Identity. It's what Enoch calls an Ontological Question. I mean if you're not able to pretend you're someone else, then what
are
you? Sometimes I like to pretend I'm married,
really
married, and then I begin to feel splendid, as though I
owned
someone beside just myself. Freedom isn't when you own just yourself, it's when you own somebody else. Enoch and I were discussing that, just before he left here to go to jail—he had an
appointment
with them, they were very nice and gave him two entire days on his honor before he had to go back to get incarcerated. He said anyway he was just as free inside a prison as out of it, because he didn't have any human relationship that counted one way or the other.