CHAPTER XIV

 

MRS VIVEASH descended the steps into King Street, and standing there on the pavement looked dubiously first to the right and then to the left.  Little and loud, the taxis rolled by on their white wheels, the long-snouted limousines passed with a sigh.  The air smelt of watered dust, tempered in Mrs Viveash’s immediate neighbourhood by those memories of Italian jasmines which were her perfume.  On the opposite pavement, in the shade, two young men, looking very conscious in their grey top-hats, marched gravely along.

       Life, Mrs Viveash thought, looked a little dim this morning, in spite of the fine weather.  She glanced at her watch; it was one o’clock.  Soon one would have to eat some lunch.  But where, and with whom?  Mrs Viveash had no engagements.  All the world was before her, she was absolutely free, all day long.  Yesterday, when she declined all those pressing invitations, the prospects had seemed delightful.  Liberty, no complications, no contacts; a pre-Adamite empty world to do what she liked in.

       But today, when it came to the point, she hated her liberty.  To come out like this at one o’clock into a vacuum – it was absurd, it was appalling.  The prospect of immeasurable boredom opened before her.  Steppes after steppes of ennui, horizon beyond horizon, for ever the same.  She looked again to the right and again to the left.  Finally she decided to go to the left.  Slowly, walking along her private knife-edge between her personal abysses, she walked towards the left.  She remembered suddenly one shining day like this in the summer of 1917, when she had walked along this same street, slowly, like this, on the sunny side, with Tony Lamb.  All that day, that night, it had been one long goodbye.  He was going back the next morning.  Less than a week later he was dead.  Never again, never again: there had been a time when she could make herself cry, simply by saying those two words once or twice, under her breath.  Never again, never again.  She repeated them softly now.  But she felt no tears behind her eyes.  Grief doesn’t kill, love doesn’t kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.  Never again, never again.  Instead of crying, she laughed, laughed aloud.  The pigeon-breasted old gentleman who had just passed her, twirling between his finger and thumb the ends of a white military moustache, turned round startled.  Could she be laughing at him?

       ‘Never again,’ murmured Mrs Viveash.

       ‘I beg your pardon?’ queried the martial gentleman, in a rich, port-winey, cigary voice.

       Mrs Viveash looked at him with such wide-eyed astonishment that the old gentleman was quite taken aback.  ‘A thousand apologies, dear lady.  Thought you were addressing … H’m, ah’m.’  He replaced his hat, squared his shoulders and went off smartly, left, right, bearing preciously before him his pigeon breast.  Poor thing, he thought, poor young thing.  Talking to herself.  Must be cracked, must be off her head.  Or perhaps she took drugs.  That was more likely: that was much more likely.  Most of them did nowadays.  Vicious young women.  Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs, dipsos – thoroughly vicious, nowadays, thoroughly vicious.  He arrived at his club in an excellent temper.

       Never again, never, never again.  Mrs Viveash would have liked to be able to cry.

       St James’s Square opened before her.  Romantically under its trees the statue pranced.  The trees gave her an idea: she might go down into the country for the afternoon, take a cab and drive out, goodness only knew where!  To the top of a hill somewhere.  Box Hill, Leith Hill, Holmbury Hill, Ivinghoe Beacon – any hill where one could sit and look out over plains.  One might do worse than that with one’s liberty.

       But not much worse, she reflected.

       Mrs Viveash had turned up towards the northern side of the square and was almost at its north-western corner when, with a thrill of genuine delight, with a sense of the most profound relief, she saw a familiar figure, running down the steps of the London Library.

       ‘Theodore!’ she hallooed faintly but penetratingly, from her inward deathbed.  ‘Gumbril!’  She waved her parasol.

       Gumbril halted, looked around, came smiling to meet her.  ‘How delightful,’ he said, ‘but how unfortunate.’

       ‘Why unfortunate?’ asked Mrs Viveash.  ‘Am I of evil omen?’

       ‘Unfortunate,’ Gumbril explained, ‘because I’ve got to catch a train and can’t profit by this meeting.’

       ‘Ah, no, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘you’re not going to catch a train.  You’re going to come and lunch with me.  Providence has decreed it.  You can’t say no to Providence.’

       ‘I must,’ Gumbril shook his head.  ‘I’ve said yes to somebody else.’

       ‘To whom?’

       ‘Ah!’ said Gumbril, with a coy and saucy mysteriousness.

       ‘And where are you going in your famous train?’

       ‘Ah again,’ Gumbril answered.

       ‘How intolerably tiresome and silly you are!’ Mrs Viveash declared.  ‘One would think you were a sixteen-year-old schoolboy going out for his first assignation with a shop girl.  At your age, Gumbril!’  She shook her head, smiled agonizingly and with contempt.  ‘Who is she?  What sordid pick-up?’

       ‘Not sordid in the least,’ protested Gumbril.

       ‘But decidedly a pick-up.  Eh?’  A banana-skin was lying, like a bedraggled starfish, in the gutter, just in front of where they were standing.  Mrs Viveash stepped forward and with the point of her parasol lifted it carefully up and offered it to her companion.

‘Merci,’ Gumbril bowed.

       She tossed the skin back again into the gutter.  ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘the young lady can wait while we have luncheon.’

       Gumbril shook his head.  ‘I’ve made the arrangement,’ he said.  Emily’s letter was in his pocket.  She had taken the loveliest cottage just out of Robertsbridge, in Sussex.  Ah, but the loveliest imaginable.  For the whole summer.  He could come and see her there.  He had telegraphed that he would come today, this afternoon, by the two o’clock from Charing Cross.

       Mrs Viveash took him by the elbow.  ‘Come along,’ she said.  ‘There’s a post office in the passage going from Jermyn Street to Piccadilly.  You can wire from there your infinite regrets.  These things always improve with a little keeping.  There will be raptures when you do go tomorrow.’

       Gumbril allowed himself to be led along.  ‘What an insufferable woman you are,’ he said, laughing.

       ‘Instead of being grateful to me for asking you to luncheon!’

       ‘Oh, I am grateful,’ said Gumbril.  ‘And astonished.’

       He looked at her.  Mrs Viveash smiled and fixed him for a moment with her pale, untroubled eyes…. She said nothing.

       ‘Still,’ Gumbril went on, ‘I must be at Charing Cross by two, you know.’

       ‘But we’re lunching at Verrey’s.’

       Gumbril shook his head.

       They were at the corner of Jermyn Street.  Mrs Viveash halted and delivered her ultimatum, the more impressive for being spoken in that expiring voice of one who says in articulo the final and supremely important things.  ‘We lunch at Verrey’s, Theodore, or I shall never, never speak to you again.’

       ‘But be reasonable, Myra,’ he implored.  If only he’d told her that he had a business appointment…. Imbecile, to have dropped those stupid hints – in that tone!

       ‘I prefer not to be,’ said Mrs Viveash.

       Gumbril made a gesture of despair and was silent.  He thought of Emily in her native quiet among the flowers; in a cottage altogether too cottagey, with honeysuckles and red ramblers and hollyhocks – though, on second thoughts, none of them would be blooming yet, would they? – happily, in white muslin, extracting from the cottage piano the easier sections of the Arietta.  A little absurd, perhaps, when you considered her like that; but exquisite, but adorable, but pure of heart and flawless in her bright pellucid integrity, complete as a crystal in its faceted perfection.  She would be waiting for him, expecting him; and they would walk through the twiddly lanes – or perhaps there would be a governess cart for hire, with a fat pony like a tub on legs to pull it – they would look for flowers in the woods and perhaps he would still remember what sort of noise a whitethroat makes; or even if he didn’t remember, he could always magisterially say he did.  ‘That’s a whitethroat, Emily.  Do you hear?  The one that goes “Tweedly, weedly, weedledy dee”.’

       ‘I’m waiting,’ said Mrs Viveash.  ‘Patiently, however.’

       Gumbril looked at her and found her smiling like a tragic mask.  After all, he reflected, Emily would still be there if he went down tomorrow.  It would be stupid to quarrel with Myra about something that was really, when he came to think of it, not of enormous importance.  It was stupid to quarrel with anyone about anything; and with Myra and about this, particularly so.  In this white dress patterned with flowing arabesques of black she looked, he thought, more than ever enchanting.  There had been times in the past…. The past leads on to the present…. No; but in any case she was excellent company.

       ‘Well,’ he said, sighing decisively, ‘let’s go and send my wire.’

       Mrs Viveash made no comment, and traversing Jermyn Street they walked up the narrow passage under the lee of Wren’s bald barn of St James’s, to the post office.

       ‘I shall pretext a catastrophe,’ said Gumbril, as they entered; and going to the telegraph desk he wrote: ‘Slight accident on way to station not serious at all but a little indisposed come same train tomorrow.’  He addressed the form and handed it in.

       ‘A little what?’ asked the young lady behind the bars, as she read it through, prodding each successive word with the tip of her blunt pencil.

       ‘A little indisposed,’ said Gumbril, and he felt suddenly very much ashamed of himself.  ‘A little indisposed,’ – no, really, that was too much.  He’d withdraw the telegram, he’d go after all.

       ‘Ready?’ asked Mrs Viveash, coming up from the other end of the counter where she had been buying stamps.

       Gumbril pushed a florin under the bars.

       ‘A little indisposed,’ he said, hooting with laughter, and he walked towards the door leaning heavily on his stick and limping.  ‘Slight accident,’ he explained.

       ‘What is the meaning of this clownery?’ Mrs Viveash inquired.

       ‘What indeed?’  Gumbril had limped up to the door and stood there, holding it open for her.  He was taking no responsibility for himself.  It was the clown’s doing, and the clown, poor creature, was non compos, not entirely there, and couldn’t be called to account for his actions.  He limped after her towards Piccadilly.

       ‘Giudicato guarabile in cinque giorni,’ Mrs Viveash laughed.  ‘How charming that always is in the Italian papers.  The fickle lady, the jealous lover, the stab, the colpo di rivoltella, the mere Anglo-Saxon black eye – all judged by the house surgeon at the Misericordia curable in five days.  And you, my poor Gumbril, are you curable in five days?’

       ‘That depends,’ said Gumbril.  ‘There may be complications.’

       Mrs Viveash waved her parasol; a taxi came swerving to the pavement’s edge in front of them.  ‘Meanwhile,’ she said, ‘you can’t be expected to walk.’

       At Verrey’s they lunched off the lobsters and white wine.  ‘Fish suppers,’ Gumbril quoted jovially from the Restoration, ‘fish suppers will make a man hop like a flea.’  Through the whole meal he clowned away in the most inimitable style.  The ghost of a governess cart rolled along the twiddly lanes of Robertsbridge.  But one can refuse to accept responsibility; a clown cannot be held accountable.  And besides, when the future and the past are abolished, when it is only the present instant, whether enchanted or unenchanted, that counts, when there are no causes or motives, no future consequences to be considered, how can there be responsibility, even for those who are not clowns?  He drank a great deal of hock, and when the clock struck two and the train had begun to snort out of Charing Cross, he could not refrain from proposing the health of Viscount Lascelles.  After that he began telling Mrs Viveash about his adventures as a Complete Man.

       ‘You should have seen me,’ he said, describing his beard.

       ‘I should have been bowled over.’

       ‘You shall see me, then,’ said Gumbril.  ‘Ah, what a Don Giovanni.  La ci darem la mano, La mi dirai di si, Vieni, non e lontano, Partiam, ben mio, da qui.  And they came, they came.  Without hesitation.  No “vorrei e non vorrei”, no “mi trema un poco il cor.”  Straight away.’

‘Felice, io so, sarei,’  Mrs Viveash sang very faintly under her breath, from a remote bed of agony.

       Ah, happiness, happiness; a little dull, someone had wisely said, when you looked at it from outside.  An affair of duets at the cottage piano, of collecting specimens, hand in hand, for the hortus siccus.  A matter of integrity and quietness.

       ‘Ah, but the history of the young woman who was married four years ago,’ exclaimed Gumbril with clownish rapture, ‘and remains to this day a virgin – what an episode in my memoirs!’  In the enchanted darkness he had learned her young body.  He looked at his fingers; her beauty was a part of their knowledge.  On the tablecloth he drummed out the first bars of the Twelfth Sonata of Mozart.  ‘And even after singing her duet with the Don,’ he continued, ‘she is still virgin.  There are chaste pleasures, sublimated sensualities.  More thrillingly voluptuous,’ with the gesture of a restaurant-keeper who praises the speciality of the house, he blew a treackly kiss, ‘than any of the grosser deliriums.’

       ‘What is all this about?’ asked Mrs Viveash.

       Gumbril finished off his glass.  ‘I am talking esoterically,’ he said, ‘for my own pleasure, not yours.’

       ‘But tell me more about the beard,’ Mrs Viveash insisted.  ‘I liked the beard so much.’

       ‘All right,’ said Gumbril, ‘let us try to be unworthy with coherence.’

       They sat for a long time over their cigarettes; it was half-past three before Mrs Viveash suggested they should go.

       ‘Almost time,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘to have tea.  One damned meal after another.  And never anything new to eat.  And every year one gets bored with another of the old things.  Lobster, for instance, how I used to adore lobster once!  But today – well, really, it was only your conversation, Theodore, that made it tolerable.’

       Gumbril put his hand to his heart and bowed.  He felt suddenly extremely depressed.

       ‘And wine: I used to think Orvieto so heavenly.  But this spring, when I went to Italy, it was just a bad muddy sort of Vouvray.  And those soft caramels they call Fiats; I used to eat those till I was sick.  I was at the sick stage before I’d finished one of them, this time in Rome.’  Mrs Viveash shook her head.  ‘Disillusion after disillusion.’

       They walked down the dark passage into the street.

       ‘We’ll go home,’ said Mrs Viveash.  ‘I really haven’t the spirit to do anything else this afternoon.’  To the commissionaire who opened the door of the cab she gave the address of her house in St James’s.

       ‘Will one ever recapture the old thrills?’ she asked rather fatiguedly as they drove slowly through the traffic of Regent Street.

       ‘Not by chasing after them,’ said Gumbril, in whom the clown had quite evaporated.  ‘If one sat still enough they might perhaps come back of their own accord….’  There would be the faint sound as it were of feet approaching through the quiet.

       ‘It isn’t only food,’ said Mrs Viveash, who had closed her eyes and was leaning back in her corner.

       ‘So I can well believe.’

       ‘It’s everything.  Nothing’s the same now.  I feel it never will be.’

       ‘Never more,’ croaked Gumbril.

       ‘Never again,’ Mrs Viveash echoed.  ‘Never again.’  There were still no tears behind her eyes.  ‘Did you ever know Tony Lamb?’ she asked.

       ‘No,’ said Gumbril answered from his corner.  ‘What about him?’

       Mrs Viveash did not answer.  What, indeed, about him?  She thought of his very clear blue eyes and the fair, bright hair that had been lighter than his brown face.  Brown face and neck, red-brown hands; and all the rest of his skin was as white as milk.  ‘I was very fond of him,’ she said at last.  ‘That’s all.  He was killed in 1917, just about this time of the year.  It seems a very long time ago, don’t you think?’

       ‘Does it?’  Gumbril shrugged his shoulders.  ‘I don’t know.  The past is abolished.  Vivamus, mea Lesbia.  If I weren’t so horribly depressed, I’d embrace you.  That would be some slight compensation for my’ – he tapped his foot with the end of his walking-stick – ‘my accident.’

       ‘You’re depressed too?’

       ‘One should never drink at luncheon,’ said Gumbril.  ‘It wrecks the afternoon.  One should also never think of the past and never for one moment consider the future.  These are treasures of ancient wisdom.  But perhaps after a little tea …’ He leaned forward to look at the figures on the taximeter, for the cab had come to a standstill – ‘after a nip of the tannin stimulant’ – he threw open the door – ‘we may feel rather better.’

       Mrs Viveash smiled excruciatingly.  ‘For me,’ she said, as she stepped out on to the pavement, ‘even tannin has lost its virtues now.’

       Mrs Viveash’s drawing-room was tastefully in the movement.  The furniture was upholstered in fabrics designed by Dufy – racehorses and roses, little tennis players clustering in the midst of enormous flowers, printed in grey and ochre on a white ground.  There were a couple of lampshades by Balla.  On the pale rose-stippled walls hung three portraits of herself by three different and entirely incongruous painters, a selection of the usual oranges and lemons, and a rather forbidding contemporary nude painted in two tones of green.

       ‘And how bored I am with this room and all these beastly pictures!’ exclaimed Mrs Viveash as she entered.  ‘She took off her hat and, standing in front of the mirror above the mantelpiece, smoothed her coppery hair.

       ‘You should take a cottage in the country,’ said Gumbril, ‘but a pony and a governess cart and drive along the twiddly lanes looking for flowers.  After tea you open the cottage piano,’ and suiting his action to the words, Gumbril sat down at the long-tailed Blüthner, ‘and you play, you play.’  Very slowly and with parodied expressiveness he played the opening theme of the Arietta.  ‘You wouldn’t be bored then,’ he said, turning round to her, when he had finished.

       ‘Ah, wouldn’t I!’ said Mrs Viveash.  ‘And with whom do you propose that I should share my cottage?’

       ‘Anyone you like,’ said Gumbril.  His fingers hung, as though meditating over the keys.

       ‘But I don’t like anyone,’ cried Mrs Viveash with a terrible vehemence from her deathbed…. Ah, now it had been said, the truth.  It sounded like a joke.  Tony had been dead five years now.  Those bright blue eyes – ah, never again.  All rotted away to nothing.

       ‘Then you should try,’ said Gumbril, whose hands had begun to creep softly forward into the Twelfth Sonata.  ‘You should try.’

       ‘But I do try,’ said Mrs Viveash.  Her elbows propped on the mantelpiece, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she was looking fixedly at her own image in the glass.  Pale eyes looked unwaveringly into pale eyes.  The red mouth and its reflection exchanged their smiles of pain.  She had tried; it revolted her now to think how often she had tried; she had tried to like someone, anyone, as much as Tony.  She had tried to recapture, to re-evoke, to revivify.  And there had never been anything, really, but a disgust.  ‘I haven’t succeeded,’ she added, after a pause.

       The music had shifted from F major to D minor; it mounted in leaping anapæst to a suspended chord, ran down again, mounted once more, modulating to C minor, then, through a passage of trembling notes to A flat major, to the dominant of D flat, to the dominant of C, to C minor, and at last, to a new clear theme in the major.

       ‘Then I’m sorry for you,’ said Gumbril, allowing his fingers to play on by themselves.  He felt sorry, too, for the subjects of Mrs Viveash’s desperate experiments.  She mightn’t have succeeded in liking them – for their part, poor devils, they in general only too agonizingly liked her…. Only too … He remembered the cold, damp spots on his pillow, in the darkness.  Those hopeless, angry tears.  ‘You nearly killed me once,’ he said.

       ‘Only time kills,’ said Mrs Viveash, still looking into her own pale eyes.  ‘I have never made anyone happy,’ she added, after a pause.  ‘Never anyone,’ she thought, except Tony, and Tony they had killed, shot him through the head.  Even the bright eyes had rotted, like any other carrion.  She too had been happy then.  Never again.

       A maid came in with the tea-things.

       ‘Ah, the tannin!’ exclaimed Gumbril with enthusiasm, and broke off his playing.  ‘The one hope of salvation.’  He poured out two cups, and picking up one of them he came over to the fireplace and stood behind her, sipping slowly at the pale brewage and looking over her shoulder at their two reflections in the mirror.

       ‘La ci darem,’ he hummed.  ‘If only I had my beard!’  He stroked his chin and with the tip of his forefinger brushed up the drooping ends of his moustache.  ‘You’d come trembling like Zerlina, in under its golden shadow.’

       Mrs Viveash smiled.  ‘I don’t ask for anything better,’ she said.  ‘What more delightful part!  Felice, io so, sarei: Batti, batti, o bel Mazetto.  Enviable Zerlina!’

       The servant made another silent entry.

       ‘Tell him I’m not at home,’ said Mrs Viveash, without looking round.

       There was a silence.  With raised eyebrows Gumbril looked over Mrs Viveash’s shoulder at her reflection.  Her eyes were calm and without expression, she did not smile or frown.  Gumbril still questioningly looked.  In the end he began to laugh.