The Complete Stories (31 page)

  One evening, at his house, the talk was all about the kind of house I should buy. It was clear that my friends had very much more elaborate plans for me than I had for myself. After dinner Roger produced a copper-engraving of 1767 of A Composed Hermitage in the Chinese Taste. It was a preposterous design. "He actually built it," Roger said, "and it's still standing a mile or two out of Bath. We went to see it the other day. It only wants putting into repair. Just the house for you."

  Everyone seemed to agree.

  I knew exactly what he meant. It was just the house one would want someone else to have. I was graduating from the exploiting to the exploited class.

  But Lucy said: "I can't think why John should want to have a house like that."

  When she said that I had a sudden sense of keen pleasure. She and I were on the same side.

  Roger and Lucy had become my main interest during the months while I was waiting to settle up in St. John's Wood. They lived in Victoria Square where they had taken three years' lease of a furnished house. "Bourgeois furniture," Roger complained, rather more accurately than usual. They shut away the model ships and fire-bucket wastepaper baskets in a store cupboard and introduced a prodigious radio-gramophone; they hung their own pictures in place of the Bartolozzi prints, but the house retained its character, and Roger and Lucy, each in a different way, looked out of place there. It was here that Roger had written his ideological play.

  They had been married in November. I had spent all the previous autumn abroad on a leisurely, aimless trip before settling at Fez for the winter's work. My mail at Malta, in September, told me that Roger had taken up with a rich girl and was having difficulty with her family; at Tetuan I learned that he was married. Apparently he had been in pursuit of her all the summer, unknown to us. It was not until I reached London that I heard the full story. Basil Seal told me, rather resentfully, because for many years now he had himself been in search of an heiress and had evolved theories on the subject of how and where they might be taken. "You must go to the provinces," he used to say. "The competition in London is far too hot for chaps like us. Americans and Colonials want value for money. The trouble is that the very rich have a natural affinity for one another. You can see it happening all the time—stinking rich people getting fixed up. And what happens? They simply double their super tax and no one is the better off. But they respect brains in the provinces. They like a man to be ambitious there, with his way to make in the world, and there are plenty of solid, mercantile families who can settle a hundred thousand on a daughter without turning a hair, who don't care a hoot about polo, but think a Member of Parliament very fine. That's the way to get in with them. Stand for Parliament."

  In accordance with this plan Basil had stood three times—or rather had three times been adopted as candidate; on two occasions he fell out with his committee before the election. At least, that was his excuse to his friends for standing; in fact he, too, thought it a fine thing to be a Member of Parliament. He never got in and he was still unmarried. A kind of truculent honesty which he could never dissemble for long, always stood in his way. It was bitter for him to be still living at home, dependent on his mother for pocket money, liable to be impelled by her into unwelcome jobs two or three times a year while Roger had established himself almost effortlessly and was sitting back in comfort to await the World Revolution.

  Not that Lucy was really rich, Basil hastened to assure me, but she had been left an orphan at an early age and her originally modest fortune had doubled itself. "Fifty-eight thousand in trustee stock, old boy. I wanted Lucy to take it out and let me handle it for her. I could have fixed her up very nicely. But Roger wasn't playing. He's always groaning about things being bourgeois. I can't think of anything more bourgeois than three and a half per cent."

  "Is she hideous?" I asked.

  "No, that's the worst part about it. She's a grand girl. She's all right for a chap."

  "What like?"

  "Remember Trixie?"

  "Vaguely."

  "Well not at all like her."

  Trixie had been Roger's last girl. Basil had passed her on to him, then taken her back for a week or two, then passed her on to him again. None of us had liked Trixie. She always gave the impression that she was not being treated with the respect she was used to.

  "How did he come by her?"

  Basil told me at length, unable to hide his admiration for Roger's duplicity in the matter. All the previous summer, during the second Trixie period, Roger had been at work, without a word to any of us. I remembered, now, that he had suddenly become rather conspicuous in his clothes, affecting dark shirts and light ties, and a generally artistic appearance which, had he not been so bald, would have gone with long, untidy hair. It had embarrassed Trixie, she said, when at a bar they saw cousins of hers who were in the Air Force. "They'll tell everyone I'm going about with a pansy." So that was the explanation. It was greatly to Roger's credit we agreed.

  Improbable as it sounded, the truth was that they had met at a ball in Pont Street, given by a relative of Roger's. He had gone, under protest, to make up the table at dinner in answer to an S.O.S. half an hour before the time. Someone had fallen out. It was five or six years since he had been in a London ballroom and, he explained afterwards, the spectacle of his pimply and inept juniors had inflated him with a self-esteem which must, he said, have been infectious. He had sat next to Lucy at dinner. She was, for our world, very young but, for her own, of a hoary age; that is to say, she was twenty-four. For six years she had been sent to dances by her aunt, keeping in an unfashionable, middle-strata of life in which her contemporaries had either married or taken to other occupations. This aunt occupied a peculiar position with regard to Lucy; she had brought her up and now did what she described as "making a home" for her, which meant that she subsisted largely upon Lucy's income. She had two other nieces younger than Lucy, and it was greatly to their interest that they should move to London annually for the season. The aunt was a lady of delicate conscience where the issues of Lucy's marriage were involved. Once or twice before she had been apprehensive—without cause as it happened—that Lucy was preparing to "throw herself away." Roger, however, was a case that admitted of no doubt. Everything she learned about him was reprehensible; she fought him in the full confidence of a just cause, but she had no serviceable weapon. In six years of social life Lucy had never met anyone the least like Roger.

  "And he took care she shouldn't meet us," said Basil. "What's more, she thinks him a great writer."

  This was true. I did not believe Basil, but after I had seen her and Roger together I was forced to accept it. It was one of the most disconcerting features of the marriage for all of us. It is hard to explain exactly why I found it so shocking. Roger was a very good novelist—every bit as good in his own way as I in mine; when one came to think of it, it was impossible to name anyone else, alive, who could do what he did; there was no good reason why his books should not be compared with those of prominent writers of the past, nor why we should not speculate about their ultimate fame. But to do so struck us all as the worst of taste. Whatever, secretly, we thought about our own work we professed, in public, to regard it as drudgery and our triumphs as successful impostures on the world at large. To speak otherwise would be to suggest that we were concerned with anyone else's interest but our own; it would be a denial of the sauve qui peut principle which we had all adopted. But Lucy, I soon realized, found this attitude unintelligible. She was a serious girl. When we talked cynically about our own work she simply thought less of it and of us; if we treated Roger in the same way, she resented it as bad manners. It was greatly to Roger's credit that he had spotted this idiosyncrasy of hers at once and played his game accordingly. Hence the undergraduate costume and the talk about the Art of the Transition. Lucy had not abandoned her young cousins without grave thought. She perfectly understood that, for them, happiness of a particular kind depended on her continued support; but she also thought it a great wrong that a man of Roger's genius should waste his talents on film scenarios and advertisements. Roger convinced her that a succession of London seasons and marriage to a well-born chartered accountant were not really the highest possible good. Moreover, she was in love with Roger.

  "So the poor fellow has had to become a highbrow again," said Basil. "Back exactly where he started in the New College Essay Society."

  "She doesn't sound too keen on this play of his."

  "She isn't. She's a critical girl. That's going to be Roger's headache."

  This was Basil's version of the marriage and it was substantially accurate. It omits, however, as any narrative of Basil's was bound to, the consideration that Roger was, in his way, in love with Lucy. Her fortune was a secondary attraction; he lacked the Mediterranean mentality that can regard marriage as an honourable profession, perhaps because he lacked Mediterranean respect for the permanence of the arrangement. At the time when he met Lucy he was earning an ample income without undue exertion; money alone would not have been worth the pains he had taken for her; nor were the pains unique; he habitually went to great inconvenience in pursuit of his girls; even for Trixie he took tepidly to horse-racing for a time; the artistic clothes and the intellectual talk were measures of the respect in which he held Lucy. Her fifty-eight thousand in trustee stock was, no doubt, what made him push his suit to the extreme of marriage, but the prime motive and zest of the campaign came from Lucy herself.

  To write of someone loved, of oneself loving, above all of oneself being loved—how can these things be done with propriety? How can they be done at all? I have treated of love in my published work; I have used it—with avarice, envy, revenge—as one of the compelling motives of conduct. I have written it up as something prolonged and passionate and tragic; I have written it down as a modest but sufficient annuity with which to reward the just; I have spoken of it continually as a game of profit and loss. How does any of this avail for the simple task of describing, so that others may see her, the woman one loves? How can others see her except through one's own eyes, and how, so seeing her, can they turn the pages and close the book and live on as they have lived before, without becoming themselves the author and themselves the lover? The catalogues of excellencies of the renaissance poets, those competitive advertisements, each man outdoing the next in metaphor, that great blurb—like a Jewish publisher's list in the Sunday newspapers—the Song of Solomon, how do these accord with the voice of love—love that delights in weakness, seeks out and fills the empty places and completes itself in its work of completion? How can one transcribe those accents? Love, which has its own life, its hours of sleep and waking, its health and sickness, growth, death and immortality, its ignorance and knowledge, experiment and mastery—how can one relate this hooded stranger to the men and women with whom he keeps pace? It is a problem beyond the proper scope of letters.

  In the criminal code of Haiti, Basil tells me, there is a provision designed to relieve unemployment, forbidding farmers to raise the dead from their graves and work them in the fields. Some such rule should be observed against the use of live men in books. The algebra of fiction must reduce its problems to symbols if they are to be soluble at all. I am shy of a book commended to me on the grounds that the "characters are alive." There is no place in literature for a live man, solid and active. At best the author may maintain a kind of Dickensian menagerie, where his characters live behind bars, in darkness, to be liberated twice nightly for a brief gambol under the arc lamps; in they come to the whip crack, dazzled, deafened and doped, tumble through their tricks and scamper out again, to the cages behind which the real business of life, eating and mating, is carried on out of sight of the audience. "Are the lions really alive?" "Yes, lovey." "Will they eat us up?" "No, lovey, the man won't let them"—that is all the reviewers mean as a rule when they talk of "life." The alternative, classical expedient is to take the whole man and reduce him to a manageable abstraction. Set up your picture plain, fix your point of vision, make your figure twenty foot high or the size of a thumbnail, he will be life-size on your canvas; hang your picture in the darkest corner, your heaven will still be its one source of light. Beyond these limits lie only the real trouser buttons and the crepe hair with which the futurists used to adorn their paintings. It is, anyway, in the classical way that I have striven to write; how else can I now write of Lucy?

  I met her first after I had been some weeks in London; after my return, in fact, from my week at the seaside. I had seen Roger several times; he always said, "You must come and meet Lucy," but nothing came of these vague proposals until finally, full of curiosity, I went with Basil uninvited.

  I met him in the London library, late one afternoon.

  "Are you going to the young Simmondses'?" he said.

  "Not so far as I know."

  "They've a party today."

  "Roger never said anything to me about it."

  "He told me to tell everyone. I'm just on my way there now. Why don't you come along?"

  So we took a taxi to Victoria Square, for which I paid.

  As it turned out, Roger and Lucy were not expecting anyone. He went to work now, in the afternoons, with a committee who were engaged in some fashion in sending supplies to the Red Army in China; he had only just come in and was in his bath. Lucy was listening to the six o'clock news on the wireless. She said, "D'you mind if I keep it on for a minute? There may be something about the dock strike in Madras. Roger will be down in a minute."

  She did not say anything about a drink so Basil said, "May I go and look for the whisky?"