CHAPTER XXXIV

 

March 3^rd 1928

 

'Reorganization …' 'Readjustment …' 'Writing down of capital values in the light of existing trade condition …' Anthony lifted his eyes from the printed page.  Propped up on her pillows, Mary Amberley was staring at him, he found, with an embarrassing intentness.

      'Well?' she asked, leaning forward.  Hennaed to an impossible orange, a lock of tousled hair fell drunkenly across her forehead.  Her bed-jacket opened as she moved; under soiled lace, the breasts swung heavily towards him.  'What does it mean?'

      'It means that they're going bankrupt on you?'

      'Going bankrupt?'

      Paying you six and eightpence in the pound.'

      'But Gerry told me they were doing so well,' she protested in a tone of angry complaint.

      'Gerry doesn't know everything,' he charitably explained.

      But, of course, the ruffian had known only too well; had known, had acted on his knowledge, had been duly paid by the people who wanted to unload their shares before the crash came.  'Why don't you ask him about it?' he said aloud, and in a tone that implied some of the resentment he felt at having been dragged, this very evening of his return from New York, into the entanglements of Mary's squalid tragedy.  Everyone else, he supposed, had fled from her since she started taking that morphia; alone of all her friends, having been out of England for half a year, he had had as yet no opportunity and been given no reason to flee.  Absence had preserved their friendship, as though in cold storage, in the state it was in before he left.  When she had asked him urgently to come and see her, he had no excuse to refuse.  Besides, people exaggerated; she couldn't be as bad as they made out.

      'Why don't you ask him?' he repeated irritably.

      'He's gone to Canada.'

      'Oh, he's gone to Canada.'

      There was a silence.  He laid the paper down on the coverlet.  Mrs Amberley picked it up and re-read it – for the hundredth time, in the absurd and desperate hope that there might, this hundredth time, be something new in it, something different.

      Anthony looked at her.  The lamp on the bed-table lit up the profile she presented to him with a ruthlessly revealing brilliance.  How hollow the cheeks were!  And those lines round the mouth, those discoloured pouches of skin beneath the eyes!  Remembering how she looked when he had seen her last, that time in Berkshire, only the previous summer, Anthony was appalled.  The drug had aged her twenty years in half as many months.  And it was not only her body that had been ravaged; the morphia had also changed her character, transformed her into someone else, someone (there had been no exaggeration at all) much worse.  That engaging absence of mind, for example, that vagueness, of which, as of yet another feminine allurement, she always used to be so irritatingly vain, had now degenerated into almost an idiot's indifference.  She forgot, she wasn't aware; above all, she didn't care, she couldn't any longer be bothered.  Grotesquely dyed (in the hope, he supposed, of regaining some of the attractiveness which she could not help noticing that she had lost), the hair was greasy and uncombed.  A smear of red paint, clumsily laid on, enlarged her lower lip into an asymmetrical shapelessness.  A cigarette-end had burned a round hole in the eiderdown, and the feathers fluttered up like snowflakes each time she moved.  The pillows were smudged with rouge and yolk of egg.  There was a brown stain of coffee on the turned-back sheet.  Between her body and the wall, the tray on which her dinner had been brought up stood precariously tilted.  Still stained with gravy, a knife had slipped on to the counterpane.

      With a sudden movement, Mrs Amberley crumpled up the paper and threw it from her.  'That beast!' she cried, in a voice that trembled with rage.  'That beast!  He absolutely forced me to put my money into this.  And now look what's happened!'  The tears overflowed, carrying the black of her painted eyelashes in long sooty trickles down her cheeks.

      'He did it on purpose,' she went on through her angry sobbing.  'Just in order to harm me.  He's a sadist, really.  He likes hurting people.  He does it for pleasure.'

      'For profit,' Anthony almost said; but checked himself.  She seemed to derive some consolation from the thought that she had been swindled, not from vulgarly commercial motives, but gratuitously, because of a fiendishness allied to and springing from the passion of love.  It would be unkind to deprive her of that illusion.  Let the poor woman think the thoughts she found least painfully humiliating.  Besides, the less she was contradicted and diverted, the sooner, it might be hoped, would she stop.  Prudently as well as considerately, he contented himself with a non-committed nod.

      'When I think of all I did for that man!' Mary Amberley burst out.  But while she recited her incoherent catalogue of generosities and kindnesses, Anthony could not help thinking of what the man had done for her; above all, of the terms in which Gerry was accustomed to describe what he had done.  Gross, extravagantly cynical terms.  Terms of an incredible blackguardism.  One was startled, one was set free into sudden laughter; and one was ashamed that such inadmissible brutalities should contain any element of liberating truth.  And yet they were true.

      'All the most intelligent people in London,' Mrs Amberley was sobbing.  'He met them all at my house.'

      'These old hags!'  Gerry Watchett's voice sounded clearly in Anthony's memory.  'They'll do anything to get it, absolutely anything.'

      'Not that he ever appreciated them,' she went on.  'He was too stupid for that, too barbarous.'

      'Not a bad old bitch really, if she gets enough of it to keep her quiet.  The problem is to give her enough.  It's uphill work, I can tell you.'

      The tone changed from anger to self-pity.  'But what shall I do?' she wailed.  'What can I do?  Without a penny.  Living on charity.'

      He tried to reassure her.  There was still something.  Quite a decent little sum, really.  She would never starve.  If she lived carefully, if she economized …

      'But I shall have to give up this house,' she interrupted, and, when he agreed that of course she would have to give it up, broke out into new and louder lamentations.  Giving up the house was worse than being penniless and living on charity – worse, because more conceivable, a contingency nearer to the realities of her actual life.  Without her pictures, without her furniture, how could she live?  She was made physically ill by ugliness.  And then small rooms – she developed claustrophobia in small rooms.  And how could she possibly manage without her books?  How did he expect her to work, when she was poor?  For of course she was going to work; had already planned to write a critical study of the modern French novel.  Yes, how did he expect her to do that, if he deprived her of her books?

      Anthony stirred impatiently in his chair.  'I don't expect you to do anything,' he said.  'I'm simply telling you what you'll find you've got to do.'

      There was a long silence.  Then, with a little smile that she tried to make ingratiating and appealing, 'Now you're angry with me,' she said.

      'Not in the least.  I'm merely asking you to face the facts.'  He rose, and feeling himself in danger of being inextricably entangled in Mary's misfortune, symbolically asserted his right to be free by walking restlessly up and down the room.  'I ought to talk to her about the morphia,' he was thinking; 'try to persuade her to go into a home and get cured.  For her own sake.  For the sake of poor Helen.'  But he knew Mary.  She'd start to protest, she'd scream, she'd fly into a rage.  It would be like a public-house brawl.  Or worse, much worse, he thought with a shudder, she'd repent, she'd make promises, she'd melt into tears.  He would find himself her only friend, her moral support for life.  In the end, he said nothing.  'It wouldn't do any good,' he assured himself.  'It never does do any good with these morphia cases.'  'One's got to come to terms with reality,' he said aloud.  Meaningless platitude – but what else was there to say?

      Unexpectedly, with a submissive alacrity that he found positively disquieting, she agreed with him.  Oh, absolutely agreed!  It was no use crying over spilt milk.  No use building castles in the air.  What was needed was a plan – lots of plans – serious, practical, sensible plans for the new life.  She smiled at him with an air of connivance, as though they were a pair of conspirators.

      Reluctantly, and with mistrust, he accepted here invitation to sit on the edge of the bed.  The plans unfolded themselves – serious to a degree.  A little flat in Hampstead.  Or else a tiny house in one of those slummy streets off the King's Road, Chelsea.  She could still give an occasional party, very cheaply.  The real friends would come, in spite of the cheapness – wouldn't they? she insisted with a rather pathetic anxiety to be reassured.

      'Of course,' he had to say; though it wasn't the cheapness that would put them off; it was the dirt, the squalor, the morphia, this sickening smell of ether on the breath.

      'One can have bottle parties,' she was saying.  'It'll be fun!'  Her face brightened.  'What sort of bottle will you bring, Anthony?'  And before he could answer, 'We shall get infinitely tight with all those mixed drinks,' she went on.  'Infinitely …' A moment later she had begun to tell him about the advances that George Wyvern had taken it into his head to make to her these days.  Rather embarrassing, in the circumstances – seeing that Sally Wyvern was also … well!  She smiled that enigmatic smile of hers, close-lipped and between half-shut eyelids.  And what was really too extraordinary, even old Hugh Ledwidge had recently shown signs …

      Anthony listened in astonishment.  Those pathetically few real friends had been transformed, as though by magic, into positively a host of eager lovers.  Did she seriously believe in her own inventions?  But anyhow, he went on to think, it didn't seem to matter whether she believed in them or not.  Even unbelieved, these fictions evidently had power to raise her spirits, to restore her, at least for the moment, to a state of cheerful self-confidence.

      'That time in Paris,' she was saying intimately.  'Do you remember?'

      But this was awful!

      'The Hôtel des Saints-Pères.'  Her voice deepened and vibrated with a subterranean laughter.

      Anthony nodded without raising his head.  She had obviously wanted him to echo her hint of significant mirth, to take up the scabrous reference to that old joke of theirs about the Holy Fathers and their own amusements under that high ecclesiastical patronage.  In their private language, 'doing a slight Holy Father,' or, yet more idiomatically, 'doing Holiers,' had signified 'making love.'  Her frowned, feeling suddenly very angry.  How did she dare …?

      The seconds passed.  Making a desperate effort to fill the icy gulf of his silence, 'We had a lot of fun,' said Mary in a tone of sentimental reminiscence.

      'A lot,' he repeated, as unemphatically as possible.

      Suddenly she took his hand.  'Dear Anthony!'

      'Oh, God!' he thought, and tried, as politely as might be, to withdraw.  But the clasp of those hot dry fingers never relaxed.

      'We were fools to quarrel,' she went on.  'Or rather, I was a fool.'

      'Not at all,' he said politely.

      'That stupid bet,' she shook her head.  'And Sidney …'

      'You did what you wanted to do.'

      'I did what I didn't want to do,' she answered quickly.  'One's always doing things one doesn't want – stupidly, out of sheer perversity.  One chooses the worse just because it is the worse.  Hyperion to a satyr – and therefore the satyr.'

      'But for certain purposes,' he couldn't resist saying, 'the satyr may be more satisfactory.'

      Ignoring his words, Mary sighed and shut her eyes.

      'Doing what one doesn't want,' she repeated, as though to herself.  'Always doing what one doesn't want.'  She released his hand, and, clasping her own behind her head, leaned back against the pillows in the attitude, the known and familiar attitude, that in the Hôtel des Saints-Pères had been so delicious in its graceful indolence, so wildly exciting because of that white round throat stretched back like a victim's, those proffered breasts, lifted and taut beneath the lace.  But today the lace was soiled and torn, the breasts hung tired under their own weight, the victim throat was no more a smooth column of white flesh, but withered, wrinkled, hollow between starting tendons.

      She opened her eyes, and, with a start, he recognized the look she gave him as the same, identically the same look, at once swooning and cynical, humorous and languidly abandoned, as had invited him, irresistibly then, in Paris, fifteen years ago.  It was the look of 1913 in the face of 1928 – painfully out of its context.  He stared at her for a second or two, appalled; then managed to break the silence.

      'I shall have to go.'

      But before he could rise, Mrs Amberley had quickly leaned forward and laid her hands on his shoulders.

      'No, don't go.  You mustn't go.'  She tried to repeat that laughingly voluptuous invitation, but could not prevent a profound anxiety from showing in her eyes.

      Anthony shook his head and, in spite of that sickening smell of ether, did his best to smile as he lied about the supper-party he had promised to join at eleven.  Gently, but with a firm and decided movement, he lifted her confining hands and stood up by the side of the bed.

      'Goodnight, dear Mary!'  The tone of his voice was warm; he could afford to be affectionate, now.  'Bon courage!'  He squeezed her hands; then, bending down, kissed first one, then the other.  Now that he was on his feet, and with the road to freedom clear before him, he felt at liberty to plunge into almost any emotional extravagance.  But, instead of taking the cue, Mary Amberley returned him a look that had now become fixed and as though stony with unwavering misery.  The mask he had adjusted to be so radiant with whimsical affectionateness seemed all of a sudden horribly out of keeping with the real situation.  He could feel its irrelevance, physically, in the muscles of his face.  Fool, hypocrite, coward!  But it was almost at a run that he made towards the door and hurried down the stairs.

      'If a woman,' Helen was reading in the Encyclopaedia, 'administers to herself any poison or other noxious thing, or unlawfully uses any instrument or other means to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of …' The sound of Anthony's feet on the stairs caught her ear.  She rose, and quickly walked to the door and out on to the landing.

      'Well?'  She smiled no greeting in answer to his, simulated no pleasure at seeing him.  The face she lifted was as tragically naked of all the conventional grimaces as her mother's had been.

      'But what's the matter, Helen?' he was startled into exclaiming.  She looked at him for a few seconds in silence, then shook her head and began to ask him about those shares, the whole financial position.

      Obviously, he was thinking as he answered her questions, one would expect her to find it all very upsetting.  But upsetting to this point – he looked at her again: no – one wouldn't have expected that.  It wasn't as if the girl had ever had a wild devotion for her mother.  In the teeth of Mary's ferocious egotism, how could she?  And after all, it was nearly a year since that wretched woman had started on her morphia.  One would think that by this time the horror would have lost some of its intensity.  And yet he had never seen an unhappier face.  Such youth, such freshness – it wasn't right that they should be associated with an expression of so intense a despair.  The sight of her made him feel somehow guilty – guiltily responsible.  But when he made another gesture of enquiring sympathy, she only shook her head again and turned away.

      'You'd better go,' she said.

      Anthony hesitated a moment, then went.  After all, she wanted him to go.  Still feeling guilty, but with a sense of profound relief, he closed the front door behind him, and, drawing a deep breath, set off towards the Underground station.

      Helen went back to her volume of the Encyclopaedia '… to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of felony.  The punishment for this offence is penal servitude for life, or not less than three years, or imprisonment for not more than two years.  If the child is born alive …'  But they didn't say which the proper poisons were, nor what sort of instruments you had to use, and how.  Only this stupid nonsense about penal servitude.  Yet another loophole of escape had closed against her.  It was as though the whole world had conspired to shut her in with her own impossibly appalling secret.

      Melodiously, the clock in the back drawing-room struck eleven.  Helen rose, put the heavy volume back in its place, and went upstairs to her mother's room.

      With an unwontedly careful precision of movement, Mrs Amberley was engaged, when her daughter entered, in filling a hypodermic syringe from a little glass ampoule.  She started as the door opened, looked up, made a movement as if to hide syringe and ampoule under the bedclothes, then, fearful of spilling any of the precious liquor, checked herself in the midst of her gesture.

      'Go away!' she called angrily.  'Why do you come in without knocking?  I won't have you coming into my room without knocking,' she repeated more shrilly, glad of the excuse she had discovered for her fury.

      Helen stood for a second or two in the doorway, quite still, as if incredulous of the evidence of her own eyes; then hurried across the room.

      'Give those things to me,' she said, holding out her hand.

      Mrs Amberley shrank back towards the wall.  'Go away!' she shouted.

      'But you promised …'

      'I didn't.'

      'You did, Mummy.'

      'I did not.  And, anyhow, I shall do what I like.'

      Without speaking, Helen reached out and caught her mother by the wrist.  Mrs Amberley screamed so loudly that, fearful lest the servants should come down to see what was the matter, Helen relaxed her grip.

      Mrs Amberley stopped screaming; but the look she turned on Helen was terrifying in its malevolence.  'If you make me spill any of this,' she said in a voice that trembled with rage, 'I shall kill you.  Kill you,' she repeated.

      They looked at one another for a moment without speaking.  It was Helen who broke the silence.  'You'd like to kill me,' she said slowly, 'because I don't let you kill yourself.'  She shrugged her shoulders.  'Well, I suppose if you really want to kill yourself …' She left the sentence unfinished.

      Mrs Amberley stared at her in silence.  'If you really want …'  She remembered the words she had spoken to Anthony only a few minutes since, and suddenly the tears ran down her cheeks.  She was overwhelmed with self-pity.  'Do you think I want to do this?' she said brokenly.  'I hate it, I absolutely hate it.  But I can't help it.'

      Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Helen put her arm round her mother's shoulders.  'Mummy darling!' she implored.  'Don't cry.  It'll be all right.'  She was profoundly moved.

      'It's all Gerry's fault,' Mrs Amberley cried; and without noticing the little shuddering start Helen gave, 'everything's his fault,' she went on.  'Everything.  I always knew he was a beast.  Even when I cared for him most.'

      As though her mother had suddenly become a stranger whom it was not right to be touching so intimately, Helen withdrew her encircling arm.  'You cared for him?' she whispered incredulously.  'In that way​?'

      Answering quite a different question, parrying a reproach that had never been made, 'I couldn't help it,' Mrs Amberley replied.  'It was like this.'  She made a little movement with the hand that held the hypodermic syringe.

      'You mean,' said Helen, speaking very slowly, and as though overcoming an almost invincible reluctance, 'you mean he was … he was your lover?'

      The strangeness of the tone aroused Mrs Amberley, for the first time since their conversation had begun, to something like a consciousness of her daughter's real, personal existence.  Turning, she looked at Helen with an expression of astonishment.         'You didn't know?'  Confronted by that extraordinary pallor, those uncontrollably trembling lips, the older woman was seized with a sudden compunction.  'But, darling, I'm sorry.  I didn't imagine … You're still so young; you don't understand.  You can't … But where are you going?  Come back!  Helen!'

      The door slammed.  Mrs Amberley made a move to follow her daughter, then thought better of it, and, instead, resumed the interrupted task of filling her hypodermic syringe.