After Julius (7 page)

‘Where do you live now?’

‘I don’t. I had a job at the airport, but I couldn’t find the enjoyment in it so I give it up.’

‘What were you doing?’

He sat down: the thought of it made him tired.

‘Bricks. I was carting bricks in a barrow. It wasn’t a whole job. If they give me something to build I might have found the sense in it. But I just moved bricks from one part of the
site to another part – never saw where they came from or where they went to. It was just a meal ticket – no life to it.’

‘I do
see
,’ she said earnestly. ‘It’s what most people feel about their work.’

‘Oh
no
!’ He felt something like panic at her understanding so easily. ‘
You
don’t know anything about
that
: hundreds – thousands of people have
no idea of it: they have fine lives filled up with change and success and concern – once you’ve discovered the trick of what you are, you just have to live up to it. That’s it,
isn’t it?’ He felt frantic for her agreement: this attentive silence was simply blotting out his horizons. ‘Take – anything! Take trees, for instance. They’re on the
move all their lives – moving up, in air, and down in earth, changing, making growth, they never stop until they get chopped or fall, and I’m not talking about murder and death.
I’m just talking about how one is from day to day. All life must be some kind of movement or other, only we’re meant to see why we’re going, it doesn’t just happen to us
–
we
–
move
– isn’t that the point?’

He had been speaking with his eyes fixed on her face, wanting her to argue, to understand, to be the exception, to show him that he was one; and while these, and many other requirements of her
divided, dissolved, and recurred, she started to speak, checked herself, and got to her feet.

‘Give me my coat.’ She indicated the back of the door. ‘You’ll have to hold it for me – I get stuck with this thick jersey.’

He followed her down the stairs, past the knitter at the switchboard and out into the street in a silence charged with protest. She set off purposefully, walked fast for a few minutes, with her
hands in her pockets and little streams of warm white breath drifting round the edge of the scarf which obscured most of her face. Then, in a voice too quick for the casual words, she said:

‘I usually go home to Sussex for the week-ends. I catch the four twenty from Charing Cross. If you’ve nothing better to do, you might like to come too?’

CHAPTER 4

CRESSIDA

W
HEN
Cressy was alone, she became quite good, and very different company. She had a strong sense of ridicule, and found
herself a continuously rewarding subject. In company, she was a serious romantic, applying her mind to aspects of life which do not depend on thought for their success. She therefore struck
emotional attitudes and then found it difficult, or impossible, to keep still in them: people pushed her and she wobbled, which few attitudes will stand. Although she was usually entertained after
the event, at the time (and her life attracted endless variations upon no more than two themes) whichever it was loomed so large that she had no proportion about it – became a straw in a
whirlpool, the only pebble on the beach: played desperately to the gallery and forgot completely who she was. Nobody had ever really enjoyed the best of her, and it was this that made her sift and
search through even unlikely material in her constant pursuit of someone with whom she could communicate, could share her amusement, could be herself whoever she happened to be at the time. She was
amiable, physically attractive, possessed of small private means and connected with the arts, and although one would have said that these advantages perfectly equipped her for settling down with
some pleasant, overworked, civilized man (somebody whose illusions had been knocked off him, like the celebrated corners at school), this had so far never been the case. Her own nature and one or
two unfortunate early events blocked the way. Leaving these aside, her very advantages were, of course, capable of more than one direction. All men, and very many women, hold the view that women
are designed to please – an idea of elastic luxury: Cressy, with her amiable temperament, was incapable of forgoing the attempt at least, often with insidious success. Pleasing meant
approximating to the man’s idea of the sort of woman his position and intelligence owed him, and as there is nothing more rigorous than anybody’s idea of their rights, the image could
never be sustained. Her physical attractions made this part of it worse: she was sometimes beautiful in that dark, restless, desperate manner which encouraged heroics, the classical dishonesties
arising out of situations which had been provoked by appearances rather than desire or experience. She looked as though she ought to be, had been, might be somebody’s major love, and for many
men who had earlier bitten off exactly what they could chew, this was an irresistible challenge. Her private means simply offered her a wider variety of opportunities, and the fact that she was a
– very minor – professional pianist meant that each man returning to, or embarking upon, the cud of married life could console himself with the fact of her Art – such a comfort,
so constructive. If it was not a solace it damn well ought to be.

For twenty years she seemed to herself continually to have been starting something, with the idea, the intention, the hope of it lasting, until sheer duration had become an abstract quality that
she applied instinctively, indiscriminately, to any new relationship. In the wake of her desire for an emotional structure, however rocky, she towed her career, feeling sure that it could only
fulfil the promises of her early dreams about it if all else was running smoothly (a man in love with her and with whom she was in love). When love failed her, she nearly always turned to music
(after a period of nightmare vacuum) and met the next man with the appearance of being committed to it. She would have been working steadily for weeks, months, occasionally even a year, and the
impression she gave was unintentionally quite false. An attractive, serious, dark girl with a pleasant talent, trying to make the most of it; unattached and with enough money for her lessons, a
beautiful instrument, and clothes of ravishing simplicity and elegance for recitals at the Wigmore Hall. Had been married; husband killed in the war. No children. Sad, but infinitely intriguing
– and convenient. Surely there must be a lover lurking about? Some cynical, selfish fellow who ruined sensitive intelligent girls by spending two evenings a week with them – preying
upon their finer feelings with anything from money, the right sexual touch to downright lies about the future? But there never was, for Cressy was passionately monogamous. So whoever it was took
possession, spent two evenings a week with her (and sometimes more, but they couldn’t be sure from week to week – they’d telephone anyhow so don’t go out: and, poor fool,
she never would), and preyed upon her feelings with whatever equipment they could bring to bear.

‘The world’s sucker,’ she thought standing by the window of her bedroom. ‘I believe everyone. There is absolutely nothing that any of them say that I don’t
instantly accept as the truth – only varnished a little because I also believe that they don’t want to hurt my feelings.’

She had remained where Emma had left her: her tears had stopped, and the urge to telephone had begun. It always started as a casual thought: ‘Why not ring him up? You’ll tell in an
instant by his voice how things are’ – and was always sharply dismissed: idiotic; lack of pride; taking things too seriously. Back it came: ‘I
am
lacking in pride; I always
take things too seriously – if this equates with being idiotic, that’s what I am.’ What harm could it do? He would be alone in his flat; never got to the office before ten. If she
was married to him, she would be making those delightful, domestic,
little
plans with him that she was certain married people (in love, of course) made with each other. Even when she
had
been married, she had not been able to make them. Occasionally, she and Miles had tried to imagine their life together after the war, but they had been large plans – deliberately
vague and grandiose. They had always been shy of each other – had never parted, she realized, without the distinct and real possibility of it being for the last time, and this fear –
which was almost never, and then only obliquely, mentioned – smothered their marriage into something composed of second thoughts, short-term arrangements, and shallow, crisis acceptances. She
had married at eighteen, in a trance of shock: her father had only just died, and there was no one else to prevent her. She had married at all costs to get away from a place with which all her
associations had become unbearable; where all those nearest her had suddenly, without any warning, stepped out of their familiar roles and revealed themselves as horribly unrecognizable –
stark in their treachery.

She had been seventeen – dreamy, untried, her mind narrowly contented, her preoccupations simple, the older parts of her taste and experience concentrated upon music. There were no finer
shades of feeling then: there was good, some bad, and then mystery; there was love and there was nothing of the kind; people meant what they said and said all that they meant; one moved along
one’s enormous lifeline to some splendid but unknown destination, but the direction was none the less laid, like railway track. To be a pianist, to have parents who were the landscape of
one’s society, a sister so much younger that she accentuated the delightful privileges of being grown up, and
then
– to discover the incalculable joys and agonies of being
secretly in love . . .

Afterwards, she used the abrasive comfort of at least not having made a fool of herself. Nowadays, another part of her wondered whether she had not compensated for this by making a fool of
herself ever since.

Emma’s question about whether, if he was free, she would marry Dick, had produced her stock reply (the question was one to which she had for many years now accustomed herself), but later,
inside, it woke her out of a stupor into some confusion. This morning, knowing that with Dick she was on an extreme edge, that the layers of scenes and reconciliations were almost worn through
(although he would, of course, return from Rome, and to her), she tried to see where any change in what had become a painfully familiar situation might be made. But he would return; defensive,
truculently overtired, patronizing, breezy: ‘Well? How have you been amusing yourself?’ and would be met by a coldness which inadequately concealed the violence within her. The breezy
lies would be rejected, the angry justifications denied, she would be stripped of her assumed indifference and stand exposed in her resentment, like a horrible fancy dress. And what lay beneath the
resentment (mutual by now, as it was frighteningly contagious: he would have held out his hand for hers, she would have touched it with icy, unforgiving fingers)? What for years she had called love
– with variations admittedly – but she had always ennobled these situations with that word: now she was beginning to recognize them merely as various translations of a longing to appear
before one person, at least, as she wished both to be seen and to be. It was from
this
position that she had always imagined herself loving: to be pronounced rich before giving; to be given
all the benefits of her own doubts; to be always within the understanding sight and earshot of another person – this would engender love, and meanwhile, surely the imitation of any virtue was
not so much a dishonesty as an encouragement? But the whole thing broke down because neither she nor Dick (nor Edmund, Joe, René, Gilbert, Tom, Sebastian, Nils, Graham nor Harry) had ever
managed to preserve their illusions about one another (had always failed at different points to sustain the beloved image they had been practising to become, and were
ad interim
trying to
present). Only love, she felt, was worth seeking and then keeping: but she seemed to have been hampered by not being quite sure what it was, and had therefore attributed it to everything to be on
the safe, dangerous side. If she had remained married, would none of this have happened? But the difficulty about those months was that, apart from their brevity, none of her memories of them
seemed to be connected in the least with marriage, and Miles dying had set a seal of unreality upon the whole affair.

If she had been asked what was her sharpest memory of those few months of being married to Miles, she would unhesitatingly have answered ‘homesickness’. (She never
was
asked,
as people made a whole set of false assumptions, based on sentiment, lust, and a kind of jingoistic nostalgia for the brave boys and their splendid little wives and widows of the last war, and mere
homesickness would have shocked them.) It had come as a shock to her, and at the time, of course, she suffered it without a word to Miles – or anyone else.

Miles had been commanding an MTB which was building at Cowes, and until the trials were completed, he was able to lie ashore with his wife. This meant that he could at least dine and sleep with
her, leaving her at eight o’clock in the morning, sleepy, warm as a bird, and, he fondly imagined, contented. But Cressy had never stayed in an hotel in her life. The first morning it took
her at least five minutes to understand that he would be out for the whole day – would not see her until late in the evening. ‘But what shall I
do
?’ she had asked in
panic.

He looked nonplussed. ‘I should look at the Island. It’s very pretty, really,’ he added: he had sailed there before the war.

‘But how do I have lunch?’

‘Go down to the dining-room and ask for it. Damn!’ He was shaving fast with a cut-throat razor, and the simplicity of her question had made him cut himself. ‘Really,
darling!’ he had said, as he stuck a piece of cotton wool to the blood.

She had lain in bed watching him cover himself with expert speed: vest and pants – he looked like somebody in the Gaumont British News; black socks and suspenders added a circus air as he
jabbed his cuff links through the starched holes of a clean white shirt: buttoned into it, he became like the charming dope in a glossy American film comedy; a pause while he combed and parted and
smoothed his fine blond hair, and then, after knotting the rather greasy black tie, stared into the shaving-glass with that intimate but curiously unseeing gaze that congeals to intensity in
certain kinds of self-portraits. He seized the black trousers that chinked of money, and dragged them on: the braces hitched added an appearance of outrage or farce. It was not until he was in the
black jacket with its two wavy rings of gold lace that he assumed his usual daytime recognizable anonymity. She had watched him, begging inside that he wouldn’t be so quick, and wondering how
on earth to get through the day on such scant information; then he had bent over her, kissed her ear and a strand of hair – ‘Have a good day’ – and gone, and she was
watching the shut door. ‘Like dogs,’ she thought. ‘It isn’t that they love people so much: they’re just lost indoors without them.’