After Julius (9 page)

‘He doesn’t love me: it would be hopeless. In a year’s time I’d be sitting in a dear little Georgian gem in Sussex wondering why he had to work so many evenings in
London. Why do you ask?’

Ann lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke away from Saki’s sulky face.

‘I don’t know – it’s a kind of gauge I suppose. If you love someone enough to marry them, you can stand being made unhappy by them; if you don’t, why put up with
it?’ Unless you partly like being unhappy, she added, but she did not say this.

‘Unless I think that one can’t be in love
without
being unhappy.’

Ann’s faded eyes met hers with a look of shrewd affection.

‘Seriously – what would you do, if you were me?’

‘You don’t want me to take that question seriously, do you?’

Cressy persisted: ‘I
said
seriously.’

Ann put out her cigarette, and cut a piece of Camembert.

‘Have some? Well – what about the rest of your life? You’re a pianist . . .’

Cressy interrupted: ‘I’m no
good
at it: I operate on the level of near-competence – that’s all.’

‘Still, it’s something to do. You enjoyed teaching when you tried it. Don’t interrupt: you asked me.’ She gave her Camembert rind to Saki, who ate it sideways with a
grinding purr. ‘I mean that most people’s lives are divided between what they do by themselves and what they do with other people. I should have said that you have a rather lonely life
where other people are concerned.’ She looked at Cressy, and then too quickly, somewhere else. ‘I mean, people like you and me are always having to arrange their lives on the wrong
scale: you know – how to make a success of living alone,
or
how to be some kind of public administrator – often both . . .’

She went on talking in this vein: with a careful kindness that confused what she meant, until, with a pleasantly self-abusive laugh, she admitted the confusion and went to make coffee. But
Cressy knew what she meant. She hadn’t meant that people did things
by
themselves, or with other people. She had meant
for
in both cases. If you asked Ann how she was, or indeed
for any news about her life, she almost certainly told you something about one of her blind boys – that she had succeeded in getting one sent to an ordinary school, that she had taken another
swimming for the first time in his life: that she had had a most rewarding discussion with the man chiefly responsible for designing new symbols in Braille with the result that another one who
wanted to be a scientist stood a fair chance of getting into a university . . . If you persisted, ‘But how are
you
?’ she probably told you something about the insufferable Saki;
what she really was, or felt about herself, was something she seemed hardly to consider, and certainly never discussed: just as nobody had had the slightest idea that she would try to drown
herself.

When Ann came back with the coffee, they both spoke at once.

‘I
ought
to leave Dick.’

‘You
ought
to get married.’

Ann put down the coffee tray. ‘I didn’t say you ought to leave Dick: I said – ’

‘It can’t be any good: look at the kind of conversation we’ve had about it: the thing is – what am I to
do
? It isn’t that I mind what I’m like: I mind
not enjoying it. I keep living in some kind of immediate future that makes everything dull when it happens; like recognizing every single telegraph pole from a train window. I want an occasion to
rise to – even an awful one, if there aren’t any others available. I’m perfectly aware of how self-absorbed – and –
boring
I sound – well
am
, but I
don’t seem to find anybody, and I’m simply no good at purposes without people. I mean, if I could find a man who even
thought
he was saving the world, I wouldn’t mind
washing his socks, but everybody seems just to be keeping going and making money for that. I never go to sleep feeling even kind or
useful
– just twenty-four hours older, or anxious
about something which doesn’t matter, and knowing what waking up in the morning will be like. Teaching! I’m no good at that because I don’t care enough about people
or
music. I don’t seem to have anything to lose – that’s what’s so frightening. I only get unhappy at the kind of rate I can get used to – a kind of chronic tolerance: if
there was just something to be
for
, I could manage the against side of it?’

It wasn’t a question, but she was trying not to start crying, and this made her voice sound like one.

There was what seemed like an interminable silence. Ann pushed a cup of coffee across the table to her, opened her husband’s cigarette box, lit both their cigarettes. Then Cressy said:

‘Could I come and work with you, do you think?’

‘Of course you could: I don’t think you’d like it though.’

‘That doesn’t matter: it would probably be very good for me.’

Ann said gently: ‘But you see, about that sort of thing, I have to think of
them
.’

Cressy stared at her a moment, and then, with her eyes full of tears, began to laugh. ‘Oh my God! I
am
far gone, aren’t I!’

And Ann, relieved by this mild hysteria – which was, after all, simply Cressy laughing at herself some time after one would have thought it possible – said mildly:
‘You’re all right: I think you’ve just thought it out too much. Anyway – you have to start by being
for
yourself.’

Cressy took her hands away from her streaming face: ‘Do I?’

‘Not just you: everybody. You have to start by finding out what would
suit you
; otherwise, one’s no use.’

‘You’re a much
better
person than I am.’ She blew her nose. ‘You think about other people all the time; you’re
practical
as well as being
kind.’

‘I’ve got no sense of humour, you see: I simply can’t afford to think about myself; the only times I tried it, it never made me laugh.’

This was tacitly the end of the conversation. Cressy said that she was going to Sussex: might she call Emma at her office to see if she wanted a lift? But Emma was not back from lunch – at
a quarter to three.

‘Perhaps she’s having a nice lunch.’ Ann was always hoping that Emma would get married. Cressy told her what Emma had said that morning about whoever she was supposed to have
married being killed in the war, and Ann, with no conviction at all, said nonsense: the idea struck at her most painful superstition and made her brisk.

As she went, Cressy said: ‘I shall leave Dick. I’ll do it on Sunday night. There now – that’s one thing.’

And this was chiefly why, when the telephone rang on three occasions while she was packing for the week-end, she did not answer it.

CHAPTER 5

FELIX

‘P
ASS
Dr King the marmalade. No – on second thoughts – don’t.’

Felix looked from godson to mother. The godson’s features instantly decomposed to resentment and froze there: he drew an interminable breath at the end of which his face looked as though
it was half-way through an explosion. The howl, like terrible thunder, was still delayed: he had his audience cold, and was taking his time. Mary passed him the marmalade, and said briskly:
‘Finish your cornflakes, Barney.’

That did it. A sound which Felix felt was out of all proportion to his size burst from Barney just as his father came into the room. ‘Christ!’ he said with good-humoured disapproval;
‘Christ!’ He picked up his son. ‘What have you been doing with him? Oh don’t be so awful, Barney.’

The baby, in a high chair, took one look at her father and then dug her hands into her porridge and thrust them lovingly at his neck as he bent to kiss her. Barney – midway between a real
howl and an artificial one – aimed a surprisingly expert kick at his sister. The porridge was deflected; the baby howled; the telephone rang. Mary, six months pregnant, went to answer it.

‘All meals in this house should be taken in a boiler suit and ear plugs.’

‘This is Dr Lewis’s secretary,’ Mary was saying, opening a loose-leaf pad with one hand and uncapping a Biro with her teeth.

Felix went to help her. Jack Lewis had given the baby a lump of sugar, and put Barney back on his chair. With shaking hands he was pouring coffee. They had been up very late the night before.
‘Always get your secretaries pregnant,’ he was saying: ‘then they have to stay with you.’

‘I should think it will be about an hour,’ Mary was saying. ‘He’s visiting now, but I’ll get a message to him. I should keep him in bed until the doctor
comes.’ She put down the receiver, said: ‘Mrs Halloway. I’ll get your eggs,’ and went to get them.

‘Damn and blast Mrs Halloway. She gives us Milk Tray for Christmas,’ he added moodily. ‘Milk Tray!’ He retched absentmindedly. ‘She must know we loathe
it.’

‘Do you hate all your patients?’ Felix felt, as usual, detached, curious, made up of visiting interest: it was a very long time since he had actually lived anywhere.

‘Good Lord, no! Some of them are quite reasonable: they die, or one cures them or something. It’s the ones who go on and
on
, getting ’flu, measles and things – the
kind of people you’re bloody glad you’re not ever seeing at their best.’

Jack Lewis had been through Medical School with Felix: in so far as Felix had one, Jack was undoubtedly his closest friend. He was – had always been – a man of passionate kindness,
which he inadequately concealed by a flow of cynical and defeatist statements. He had married, while Felix was in Korea, a young Jewess: ‘a physicist,’ he had written, ‘doing
research on transistors for General Electric – but don’t despair – picture enclosed – it takes all sorts to understand a transistor.’ The picture had been of a girl in
a sleeveless sweater and jeans sitting on a park bench pushing back long straight hair with one hand. ‘Mary Black’, Jack had written on the back. ‘24 years: 38 23 38.’ The
picture had been bad enough for Felix to take the proportions, with her alleged beauty and intelligence, on trust. ‘Congratulations look forward to being a godfather,’ he had cabled,
and now, six years later, here he was in their pleasant but rather uncomfortable maisonette in Bayswater, with the monster, Barney, aged five, thoroughly mobile but only, as his mother said,
spasmodically reasonable, fiddling about with his cornflakes and staring with frightful, impassive concentration at Felix. Felix was used to babies, or young children, in quantity: faced with the
blown-out bellies and dreadful lethargy of their near-starvation, he had felt, in the beginning at least, not only a shocked desire to relieve their suffering, but a conviction of its being his
right and duty to do so. His fall from this position of righteous ignorance had been a slow, painful trail, blazed by pieces of uncomfortable self-knowledge, the culmination of which had been that
he simply had not loved his fellow men enough: if they were merely wounded or starving, he was able and willing from his personal foxhole of health and strength to help them; if, in their
desperation, they lied, cheated or otherwise employed any available resource to help themselves, he despised them, was irritated by their stupidity, disgusted by their fear and shocked by their
continuing selfish interest in their own existence . . .

Barney, though, was a new experience for Felix. To begin with his health was on a scale which commanded respect. Felix had unwisely tried to fling him over his shoulder practically on meeting:
Barney’s bones seemed to be made of pig-iron and his limbs upholstered in shot; he was utterly solid and of astonishing weight. His hair, his skin, his eyes, shone with well-being, his nature
was both arrogant and resourceful; he really seemed as though, Felix thought, he felt sure that whatever he did would be all right. Just now, as a simple means of gaining his godfather’s
attention, he had laid his cornflakes spoon on Felix’s sleeve and was saying (clearly for the second time), ‘
Did
a poisonous snake sting you?’

Mary said: ‘Bite, Barney, not sting. Snakes don’t sting.’

‘Did a poisonous snake bite you?’

‘No – not actually.’

The telephone rang. Jack groaned and Mary answered it.

‘Put your spoon down, Barney. This is Dr Lewis’s secretary.’

Barney put his spoon down without taking his eyes off Felix. In spite of the fact that Mary was speaking on the telephone, he created his own silence. Then he said: ‘Why not?’

Jack pushed back his chair and got up. ‘He’s crazy about snakes. I’ll be down in a minute. Tell her to get two lots of vaccine out of the fridge, will you, Felix?’

The baby wanted to get down. To this end, she suddenly hurled herself sideways, so that the top half of her body hung over the side of the chair. Mary indicated the need to release her: but when
Felix reached her he found that although she palpably had no waist, her body seemed to have a vast hinge in the middle which now seemed locked. She turned tomato-coloured but remained immovable.
‘. . . just fluids, until the doctor has seen him,’ Mary was saying. ‘Yes – some time this morning: right, Lady Birdneck, goodbye.’ She put down the receiver and sped
to the rescue. ‘Really, Felix – you’re hopeless: she’s caught her foot, can’t you see?’ She could say this kind of thing, Felix had already discovered, and
simply engender general affection – no rancour at all.

‘She should have more feet,’ said Barney, ‘or a lovely scaly tail.’ He turned to Felix. ‘She’s got nowhere for peeing as well. It all comes sloshing out on
nappies’ – he spread his hands dramatically – ‘from
any
where! She should be slain.’

‘That’ll do,’ said Mary. ‘You were awful when you were a baby.’

‘Was I? How was I? How was I awful?’ He was delighted.

‘Silly and dirty’ – she was undoing his back trouser-buttons – ‘and you couldn’t say anything – you couldn’t even sit up. You were a complete
washout. Just a silly old baby. Up you go, and shout when you’ve finished.’

Mary began clearing breakfast. The baby had edged herself off the carpet and was making very good time across the linoleum towards a saucer of tinned cat-food by the sink. The telephone rang
again; Jack appeared; Felix watched while Mary spoke to a patient, extricated the vaccine from the fridge and gave her husband his list of morning calls.