CHAPTER XII

 

For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant.  They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked.  An extra waiter came on at midnight to attend to the valued clients who wished to break the law.  Old Sbisa saw to it that their value, to him, was very high.  Alcohol was cheaper at the Ritz than at Sbisa's.

      It was about half-past one - 'only half-past one,' Lucy complained - when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant.

      'Still young,' was Spandrell's comment on the night.  'Young and rather insipid.  Nights are like human beings - never interesting till they're grown up.  Round about midnight they reach puberty.  At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to half-past.  An hour later they're growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middle-aged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they're not old.  After four their in full decay.  And their death is horrible.  Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire's exhausted itself into disgust.  I have rather a weakness for the deathbed scenes, I must confess,' Spandrell added.

      'I'm sure you have,' said Lucy.

      'And it's only in the light of ends that you can judge beginnings and middles.  The night has just come of age.  It remains to be seen how it will die.  Till then, we can't judge it.'

      Walter knew how it would die for him - in the midst of Marjorie's tears and his own complicated misery and exasperation, in an explosion of self-hatred and hatred for the woman to whom he had been cruel.  He knew, but would not admit his knowledge; nor that it was already half-past one and that Marjorie would be awake and anxiously wondering why he hadn't returned.

      At five to one Walter had looked at his watch and declared that he must go.  What was the good of staying?  Spandrell was immovable.  There was no prospect of his having a moment alone with Lucy.  He lacked even the justification for making Marjorie suffer.  He was torturing her, not that he might be happy, but that he might feel bored, ill, exasperated, impatiently wretched..

      'I must really go,' he had said, standing up.

      But Lucy had protested, cajoled, commanded.  In the end he sat down again.  That had been more than half an hour ago and now they were out in Soho Square, and the evening, according to Lucy and Spandrell, had hardly begun.

      'I think it's time,' Spandrell had said to Lucy, 'that you saw what a revolutionary communist looked like.'

      Lucy demanded nothing better.

      'I belong to a sort of club,' Spandrell explained.  He offered to take them in with him.

      'There'll still be a few enemies of society on view, I expect,' he went on, as they stepped out into the refreshing darkness.  'Good fellows mostly.  But absurdly childish.  Some of them seem genuinely to believe that a revolution would make people happier.  It's charming, it's positively touching.'  He uttered his noiseless laugh.  'But I'm an aesthete in these matters.  Dynamite for dynamite's sake.'

      'But what's the point of dynamite, if you don't believe in Utopia?' asked Lucy.

      'The point?  But haven't you eyes?'

      Lucy looked round her. 'I see nothing particularly frightful.'

      'They have eyes and see not.'  He halted, took her arm with one hand and with the other pointed round the square.  'The deserted pickle factory, transformed into a dance hall; the lying-in hospital; Sbisa's; the publishers of Who's Who.  And once,' he added, 'the Duke of Monmouth's palace.  You can imagine the ghosts.

 

                                              'Whether inspired by some diviner lust,

                                              His father got him with a keener gust ...'

 

And so forth.  You know the portrait of him after the execution, lying on a bed, with the sheet up to his chin, so that you can't see the place where the neck was cut through?  By Kneller.  Or was it Lely?  Monmouth and pickles, lying-in and Who's Who, and dancing and Sbisa's champagne - think of them a little, think of them.'

      'I'm thinking of them,' said Lucy.  'Hard.'

      They walked on.  At the door of a little house in St Giles's Spandrell called a halt.  'Wait a moment,' he said, beckoning the others back into the darkness.  He rang.  The door opened at once.  There was a brief parleying in the shadows; then Spandrell turned and called to his companions.  They followed him into a dark hall, up a flight of stairs and into a brightly-lighted room on the first floor.  Two men were standing near the fireplace, a turbaned Indian and a little man with red hair.  At the sound of footsteps they turned round.  The red-haired man was Illidge.

      'Spandrell?  Bidlake?' he raised his invisibly sandy eyebrows in astonishment.  And what's that woman doing here? he wondered.

      Lucy came forward with outstretched hand.  'We're old acquaintances,' she said with a smile of friendly recognition.

      Illidge, who was preparing to make his face look coldly hostile, found himself smiling back at her.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      A taxi turned into the street, suddenly and startlingly breaking the silence.  Marjorie sat up in bed, listening.  The hum of the engine grew louder and louder.  It was Walter's taxi; this time she felt sure of it, she knew.  Nearer it came and nearer.  At the bottom of the little hill on the right of the house, the driver changed down to a lower gear; the engine hummed more shrilly, like an angry wasp.  Nearer and nearer.  She was possessed by an anxiety that was of the body as well as of the mind.  She felt breathless, her heart beat strongly and irregularly - beat, beat, beat and then it seemed to fail; the expected beat did not make itself felt; it was as though a trapdoor had been opened beneath her into the void; she knew the terror of emptiness, of falling, falling - and the next retarded beat was the impact of her body against solid earth.  Nearer, nearer.  She almost dreaded, though she had so unhappily longed for, his return.  She dreaded the emotions she would feel at the sight of him; the tears she would shed, the reproaches she would find herself uttering, in spite of herself.  And what would he say and do, what would be his thoughts?  She was afraid of imagining.  Nearer; the sound was just below her windows; it retreated, it diminished.  And she had been so certain that it was Walter's taxi.  She lay down again.  If only she could have slept.  But that physical anxiety of her body would not allow her.  The blood thumped in her ears.  Her skin was hot and dry.  Her eyes ached.  She lay quite still, on her back, her arms crossed on her breast, like a dead woman laid out for burial.  Sleep, sleep, she whispered to herself; she imagined herself relaxed, smoothed out, asleep.  But suddenly, a malicious hand seemed to pluck at her taut nerves.  A violent tic contracted the muscles of her limbs; she started as though with terror.  And the physical reaction of fear evoked an emotion of terror in her mind, quickening and intensifying the anxiety of unhappiness which, all the time, had underlain her conscious efforts to achieve tranquillity.  'Sleep, sleep, relax' - it was useless to go on trying to be calm, to forget, to sleep.  She allowed her misery to come to the surface of her mind.  'Why should he want to make me so unhappy?'  She turned her head.  The luminous hands of the clock on the little table beside her bed marked a quarter to three.  A quarter to three - and he knew she could never go to sleep before he came in.  'He knows I'm ill,' she said aloud.  'Doesn't he care?'

      A new thought suddenly occurred to her.  'Perhaps he wants me to die.'  To die, not to be, not to see his face any more, to leave him with that other woman.  The tears came into her eyes.  Perhaps he was deliberately trying to kill her.  It was not in spite of her being ill that he treated her like this; it was because she suffered so much, it was precisely because she was ill.  He was cruel with a purpose.  He hoped, he intended that she should die; die and leave him in peace with that other woman.  She pressed her face against the pillow and sobbed.  Never see him again, never any more.  Darkness, loneliness, death, for ever.  For ever and ever.  And on top of everything, it was all so unfair.  Was it her fault that she couldn't afford to dress well?

      'If I could afford to buy the clothes she buys.'  Chanel, Lanvin, - the pages of Vogue floated before her eyes - Molyneux, Groult ... At one of those cheap-smart shops where cocottes buy their clothes, off Shaftsbury Avenue, there was a model for sixteen guineas.  'He likes her because she's attractive.  But if I had the money ...'  It wasn't fair.  He was making her pay for not being well off.  She had to suffer because he didn't earn enough to buy her good clothes.

      And then there was the baby.  He was making her pay for that.  His child.  He was bored with her, because she was always tired and ill; he didn't like her any more.  That was the greatest injustice of all.

      A cell had multiplied itself and become a worm, the worm had become a fish, the fish was turning into the foetus of a mammal.  Marjorie felt sick and tired.  Fifteen years hence a boy would be confirmed.  Enormous in his robes, like a full-rigged  ship, the Bishop would say: 'Do ye here in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism?'  And the ex-fish would answer with passionate conviction: 'I do.'

      For the thousandth time she wished she were not pregnant.  Walter might not succeed in killing her now.  But perhaps it would happen in any case, when the child was born.  The doctor had said it would be difficult for her to have the baby.  The pelvis was narrow.  Death reappeared before her, a great pit at her feet.

      A sound made her start violently.  The outside door of the flat was being furtively opened.  The hinges squeaked.  There were muffled footsteps.  Another squeak, the hardly perceptible click of the spring latch being carefully let back into place, then more footsteps.  Another click and simultaneously the light showed yellow under the door that separated her room from his.  Did he mean to go to bed without coming to bid her goodnight?  She lay quite still, quiveringly awake, her eyes wide open, listening to the noises that came from the other room and to the quick terrified beating of her own heart.

      Walter sat on the bed unlacing his shoes.  He was wondering why he had not come home three hours before, why he had ever gone out at all.  He hated a crowd; alcohol disagreed with him and the twice-breathed air, the smell, the smoke of restaurants acted on him like a depressing poison.  He had suffered to no purpose; except for those painful exasperating moments in the taxi, he had not been alone with Lucy the whole evening.  The hours he had spent with her had been hours of boredom and impatience - endlessly long, minute after minute of torture.  And the torture of desire and jealousy had been reinforced by the torture of self-conscious guilt.  Every minute they lingered at Sbisa's, every minute among the revolutionaries, was a minute that retarded the consummation of his desire and that, increasing Marjorie's unhappiness, increased at the same time his own remorse and shame.  It was after three when finally they left the club.  Would she dismiss Spandrell and let him drive her home?  He looked at her; his eyes were eloquent.  He willed, he commanded.

      'There'll be sandwiches and drinks at my house,' said Lucy, when they were in the street.

      'That's very welcome news,' said Spandrell.

      'Come along,' Walter darling.  'She took his hand, she pressed it affectionately.'

      Walter shook his head.  'I must go home.'  If misery could kill, he would have died there in the street.

      'But you can't desert us now,' she protested.  'Now that you've got thus far, you really must see it through.  Come along.'  She tugged at his hand.

      'No, no.'  But what she said was true.  He could hardly make Marjorie any more wretched than he had certainly done already.  If she weren't there, he thought, if she were to die - a miscarriage, bloodpoisoning ...

      Spandrell looked at his watch.  'Half-past three.  The death rattle has almost started.'  Walter listened in horror; was the man reading his thoughts?  'Munie des conforts de notre sainte religion.  Your place is at the bedside, Walter.  You can't go and leave the night to die like a dog in a ditch.'

      Like a dog in a ditch.  The words were terrible, they condemned him.  'I must go.'  He was firm, three hours too late.  He walked away.  In Oxford Street he found a taxi.  Hoping, he knew vainly, to come home unobserved, he paid off the cab at Chalk Farm station and walked the last furlong to the door of the house in which he and Marjorie occupied the two upper floors.  He had crept upstairs, he had opened the door with the precautions of a murderer.  No sound from Marjorie's room.  He undressed, he washed as though he were performing a dangerous operation.  He turned out the light and got into bed.  The darkness was utterly silent.  He was safe.

      'Walter!'

      It was with the feelings of a condemned criminal when the warders come to wake him on the morning of his execution that he answered, putting an imitation of astonishment into his voice.  'Are you awake, Marjorie?'  He got up and walked, as though from the condemned cell to the scaffold, into her room.

      'Do you want to make me die, Walter?'

      Like a dog in a ditch, alone.  He made as if to take her in his arms.  Marjorie pushed him away.  Her misery had momentarily turned to anger, her love to a kind of hatred and resentment.  'Don't be a hypocrite on top of everything else,' she said.  'Why can't you tell me frankly that you hate me, that you'd like to get rid of me, that you'd be glad if I died?  Why can't you be honest and tell me?'

      'But why should I tell you what isn't true?' he protested.

      'Are you going to tell me that you love me, then?' she asked sarcastically.

      He almost believed it while he said so; and besides it was true, in a way.

      'But I do, I do.  This other thing's a kind of madness.  I don't want to.  I can't help it.  If you knew how wretched I felt, what an unspeakable brute.'  All that he had ever suffered from thwarted desire, from remorse and shame and self-hatred seemed to be crystallized by his words into a single agony.  He suffered and he pitied his own sufferings.  'If you knew, Marjorie.'  And suddenly something in his body seemed to break.  An invisible hand took him by the throat, his eyes were blinded with tears and a power within him that was not himself shook his whole frame and wrenched from him, against his will, a muffled and hardly human cry.

      At the sound of this dreadful sobbing in the darkness beside her, Marjorie's anger suddenly fell.  She only knew that he was unhappy, that she loved him.  She even felt remorse for her anger, for the bitter words she had spoken.

      'Walter.  My darling.'  She stretched out her hands, she drew him down towards her.  He lay there like a child in the consolation of her embrace.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'Do you enjoy tormenting him?' Spandrell enquired, as they walked towards the Charing Cross Road..

      'Tormenting whom?' said Lucy.  'Walter?  But I don't.'

      'But you don't let him sleep with you?' said Spandrell.  Lucy shook her head.  'And then you say you don't torment him!  Poor wretch!'

      'But why should I have him, if I don't want to?'

      'Why indeed?  Meanwhile, however, keeping him dangling's mere torture.'

      'But I like him,' said Lucy.  'He's such good company.  Too young, of course; but really rather perfect.  And I assure you, I don't torment him.  He torments himself.'

      Spandrell delayed his laughter long enough to whistle for the taxi he had seen at the end of the street.  The cab wheeled round and came to a halt in front of them.  'Still, he only gets what's due to him,' Spandrell went on from his dark corner.  'He's the real type of murderee.'

      'Murderee?'

      'It takes two to make a murder.  There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.  You can see it in their faces.  There's a victim type as well as a criminal type.  Walter's the obvious victim; he fairly invites maltreatment.'

      'Poor Walter!'

      'And it's one's duty,' Spandrell went on, 'to see that he gets it.'

      'Why not to see that he doesn't get it, poor lamb?'

      'One should always be on the side of destiny.  Walter's manifestly born to catch it.  It's one's duty to give his fate a helping hand.  Which I'm glad to see you're already doing.'

      'But I tell you, I'm not.  Have you a light?'  Spandrell struck a match.  The cigarette between her thin lips, she leaned forward to drink the flame.  He had seen her leaning like this, with the same swift, graceful and ravenous movement, leaning towards him to drink his kisses.  And the face that approached him now was focused and intent on the flame, as he had seen it focused and intent upon the inner illumination of approaching pleasure.  There are many thoughts and feelings, but only a few gestures; and the mask has only half-a-dozen grimaces to express a thousand meanings.  She drew back; Spandrell threw the match out of the window.  The red cigarette end brightened and faded in the darkness.

      'Do you remember that curious time of ours in Paris?' he asked, still thinking of her intent and eager face.  Once, three years before, he had been in love for perhaps a month.

      Lucy nodded.  'I remember it as rather perfect, while it lasted.  But you were horribly fickle.'

      'In other words I didn't make as much of an outcry as you hoped I would, when you went off with Tom Trivet.'

      'That's a lie!'  Lucy was indignant.  'You'd begun to fade away long before I even dreamt of Tom.'

      'Well, have it your own way.  As a matter of fact you weren't enough of a murderee for my taste.'  There was nothing of the victim about Lucy; not much even, he had often reflected, of the ordinary woman.  She could pursue her pleasure as a man pursues his, remorselessly, single-mindedly, without allowing her thoughts and feelings to be in the least involved.  Spandrell didn't like to be used and exploited for someone else's entertainment.  He wanted to be the user.  But with Lucy there was no possibility of slave-holding.  'I'm like you,' he added.  'I need victims.'

      'The implication being that I'm one of the criminals?'

      'I thought we'd agreed to that long ago, my dear Lucy.'

      'I've never agreed to anything in my life,' she protested, 'and never will.  Not for more than half an hour at a time, at any rate.'

      'It was in Paris, do you remember?  At the Chaumière.  There was a young man painting his lips at the next table.'

      'Wearing a platinum and diamond bracelet.'  She nodded, smiling.  'And you called me an angel, or something.'

      'A bad angel,' he qualified, 'a born bad angel.'

      'For an intelligent man, Maurice, you talk a lot of drivel.  Do you genuinely believe that some things are right and some wrong?'

      Spandrell took her hand and kissed it.  'Dear Lucy,' he said, 'you're magnificent.  And you must never bury your talents.  Well done, thou good and faithful succubus!'  He kissed her hand again.  'Go on doing your duty as you've already done it.  That's all heaven asks of you.'

      'I merely try to amuse myself.'  The cab drew up in front of her little house in Bruton Street.  'God knows,' she added, as she stepped out, 'without much success.  Here, I've got money.'  She handed the driver a ten-shilling note.  Lucy insisted, when she was with men, on doing as much of the paying as possible.  Paying, she was independent, she could call her own tune.  'And nobody gives me much help,' she went on, as she fumbled with her latchkey.  'You're all so astonishingly dull.'

      In the dining-room a rich still-life of bottles, fruits and sandwiches was awaiting them.  Round the polished flanks of the vacuum flask their reflections walked fantastically in a non-Euclidian universe.  Professor Dewar had liquefied hydrogen in order that Lucy's soup might be kept hot for her into the small hours.  Over the sideboard hung one of John Bidlake's paintings of the theatre.  A curve of the gallery, a slope of faces, a corner of the bright proscenium.

      'How good that is!' said Spandrell shading his eyes to see it more clearly.

      Lucy made no comment.  She was looking at herself in an old grey-glassed mirror.

      'What shall I do when I'm old?' she suddenly asked.

      'Why not die?' suggested Spandrell with his mouth full of bread and Strasbourg goose liver.

      'I think I'll take to science, like the Old Man.  Isn't there such a thing as human zoology?  I'd get a bit tired of frogs.  Talking of frogs,' she added, 'I rather liked that little carroty man - what's his name? - Illidge.  How he does hate us for being rich!'

      'Don't lump me in with the rich.  If you knew ...' Spandrell shook his head.  'Let's hope she'll bring some cash when she comes tomorrow,' he was thinking, remembering the message Lucy had brought from his mother.  He had written that the case was urgent.

      'I like people who can hate,' Lucy went on.

      'Illidge knows how to.  He's fairly stuffed with theories and bile and envy.  He longs to blow you all up.'

      'Then why doesn't he?  Why won't you?  Isn't that what your club's there for?'

      Spandrell shrugged his shoulders.  'There's a slight difference between theory and practice, you know.  And when one's a militant communist and a scientific materialist and an admirer of the Russian Revolution, the theory's uncommonly queer.  You should hear our young friend talking about murder!  Political murder is what especially interests him, of course; but he doesn't make much distinction between the different branches of the profession.  One kind, according to him, is as harmless and morally indifferent as another.  Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.  And so on and so forth.  Queer,' Spandrell commented parenthetically, 'how old-fashioned and even primitive the latest manifestations of art and politics generally are!  Young Illidge talks like a mixture of Lord Tennyson in In Memoriam and a Mexican Indian, or a Malay trying to make up his mind to run amok.  Justifying the most primitive, savage, animal indifference to life and individuality by means of obsolete scientific arguments.  Very queer indeed.'

      'But why should the science by obsolete?' asked Lucy.  'Seeing that he's a scientist himself ...'

      'But also a communist.  Which means he's committed to nineteenth-century materialism.  You can't be a true communist without being a mechanist.  You've got to believe that the only fundamental realities are space, time, and mass, and that all the rest is nonsense, mere illusion and mostly bourgeois illusion at that.  Poor Illidge!  He's sadly worried by Einstein and Eddington.  And how he hates Henri Poincaré!  How furious he gets with old Mach!  They're undermining his simple faith.  They're telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention.  The idea's as inexpressibly shocking and painful to him as the idea of the non-existence of Jesus would be to a Christian.  He's a scientist, but his principles make him fight against any scientific theory that's less than fifty years old.  It's exquisitely comic.'

      'I'm sure it is,' said Lucy, yawning.  'That is, if you happen to be interested in theories, which I'm not.'

      'But I am,' retorted Spandrell; 'so I don't apologize.  But if you prefer it, I can give you examples of his practical inconsistencies.  I discovered not long ago, quite accidentally, that Illidge has the most touching sense of family loyalty.  He keeps his mother, he pays for his younger brother's education, he gave his sister fifty pounds when she married.'

      'What's wrong in that?'

      'Wrong?  But it's disgustingly bourgeois!  Theoretically he sees no distinction between his mother and any other female.  He knows that, in a properly organized society, she'd be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis.  In spite of which he sends her I don't know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence.  I twitted him about it the other day.  He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he'd been caught cheating at cards.  So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm, detached, scientific ferocity.  I only laughed at him.  '"One of these days," I threatened, "I'll take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party."  And what's more, I will.'

      'Unless you just go on chattering, like everybody else.'

      'Unless,' Spandrell agreed, 'I just go on chattering.'

      'Let me know if you ever stop chattering and do something.  It might be lively.'

      'Deathly, if anything.'

      'But the deathly sort of liveliness is the most lively, really.'  Lucy frowned.  'I'm so sick of the ordinary conventional kinds of liveliness.  Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm.  You know.  It's silly, it's monotonous.  Energy seems to have so few ways of manifesting itself nowadays.  It was different in the past, I believe.'

      'There was violence as well as love-making.  Is that what you mean?'

      'That's it.'  She nodded.  'The liveliness wasn't so exclusively ... so exclusively bitchy, to put it bluntly.'

      'They broke the sixth commandment too.  There are too many policemen nowadays.'

      'Many too many.  They don't allow you to stir an eyelid.  One ought to have had all the experiences.'

      'But if none of them are either right or wrong - which is what you seem to feel - what's the point?'

      'The point?  But they might be amusing, they might be exciting.'

      'They could never be very exciting if you didn't feel they were wrong.'  Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful.  He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city.  'Some people,' he went on meditatively, trying to formulate the vague obscurities of his own feelings, 'some people can only realize goodness by offending against it.'  But when the old offences have ceased to be felt as offences, what then?  The argument pursued itself internally.  The only solution seemed to be to commit new and progressively more serious offences, to have all the experiences, as Lucy would say in her jargon.  'One way of knowing God,' he concluded slowly, 'is to deny Him.'

      'My good Maurice!' Lucy protested.

      'I'll stop.'  He laughed.  'But really, if it's a case of "my good Maurice"' (he imitated her tone), 'if you're equally unaware of goodness and offence against goodness, what is the point of having the sort of experiences the police interfere with?'

      Lucy shrugged her shoulders.  'Curiosity.  One's bored.'

      'Alas, one is.'  He laughed again.  'All the same, I do think the cobbler should stick to his task.'

      'But what is my task?'

      Spandrell grinned.  'Modesty,' he began, 'forbids ...'