A Man of Forty (7 page)

Getting no answer to her suggestion, she repeated it.

“Come along, darling. Our nice walk.”

Without looking up from the floor, Paul said : “ Where's Daddy gone?”

“I
told
you, Paul. You know very well.”

“No, you didn't. You didn't tell me. Where's he gone?”

“Oh, Paul, that's naughty.” Eleanor became a little plaintive. “ You know I told you, again and again.”

“Tell me another again,” said Paul.

“He's taken Mummy to the theatre. You know perfectly well. That's why we had lunch early.”

“Why did we have lunch early?”

“Because Daddy and Mummy were going to town, to the theatre.”

“Why did we?”

“Why did we what?”

“Why did we have lunch early because Mummy and Daddy were going to town?”

What did the child mean? What logical bee was buzzing in his bonnet? Could it be that he saw the fatal disconnection between his lunching early and his parents' going to town?”

“Just because,” said Eleanor, deliberately obstructionist.

“ Because what, Ellie?” said Paul, still scowling at the floor.

“Because they wanted to catch the train.”

“Did they have lunch early too?”

“I don't know,” said Eleanor, hedging.

It was untrue. She had seen David and Lydia drive off to the station within a few minutes of his entering the house : it was therefore impossible that they should have eaten lunch. Eleanor said to herself that she was tired of this quibbling conversation. What did it matter anyhow? Yet she knew in her heart that it did matter. It did somehow matter that Mummy had insisted on Paul's taking his midday meal half an hour before his accustomed time, not waiting for the tardy David. It meant that David had hurt and offended her and was being punished in this way. But how could Paul know that? Perhaps because Paul was in some sense being punished too. It was fun for Paul to have a meal with Eleanor, just the two of them together. It was fun, but it was unusual; and Mother's manner in ordaining it had boded something not good. Paul had caught sight of her look, her sharp-set face, and perhaps for the first time he saw her as something separable from David his father. It flashed upon him, though he did not formulate the idea, that David was in disgrace; and with that vague, infinitely distant intimation of unimaginable things, the foundations of his world, far down in the darkness, began rocking.

Eleanor was a conscientious young woman, especially in her dealings with Paul. She repented her equivocation. How, she asked, could one expect the child to be truthful himself if one told him lies?

“I think,” she said, “ they went off without any lunch. Won't they be hungry, poor things!”

But Paul was no longer attending to her answers. For reasons of his own he had given her up. Suddenly he spread his arms wide and made a clean sweep of the wooden bricks. All his work was undone. He set himself to begin again, this time less ambitiously, with a single house : house, courtyard, garden.

“You can finish that after tea, Paul,” said Eleanor coaxing. “ If we don't go for our walk soon, it'll be getting dark. And then all the cows will be gone home. You won't like not seeing the cows, will you? Where shall we go today, Paul? Shall we go to see Mr. Thorpe
and ask him if he can mend our shoes for us? That'll be fun, won't it? Put your bricks away—no, you can leave them till we get back, and then make a fine house for all of us to live in. With stables for three ponies, eh?”

Paul didn't listen, but he knew that Eleanor was talking, and talking, and wanting him to do what he wouldn't do. A profound irrational instinct made it impossible that he should consent to go out today. Behind his patient smiles and considering looks was an iron resolve masking a faceless terror. For days now, for weeks, there had been a strange invisible presence in the house : a presence invisible at least to Paul, though it was not so certain that Mummy and Dad couldn't see it, since they sat so often with averted eyes, and never quite looked at each other, and talked with careful cheerful voices, and seemed to try by these devices to ignore it, whatever it was. And in the process of ignoring it they had become somehow severed, in Paul's imagination; they had become two slightly strange people, no longer parts of the complex comforting reality in which he lived and had his being. Two slightly strange people, and the stranger for being so familiar, so taken for granted, so unquestionably Mummy and Dad. Something had come into the house and something had gone out of it; yet, for all that, the house, every corner of it, every room, every smoothly turned chair-leg, every picture in its place, every mark and stain on the playroom lino, every shining stair-rod, every square-foot of patterned carpet in dining-room and hall, this solid immovable house was still here, still his, a rock of salvation, something he must not let go of. Dad and Mummy had gone to somewhere called town, to something called the theatre, if Eleanor was to be believed. What then? Many a time before they had gone out together, leaving him, and had always come back. Both of them had come back. They would come back this time, yes : Paul did not get so far as consciously supposing the contrary. And at moments he was almost relieved by their absence, by the absence of these two new frightening people who seemed never to look at each other and who were kind to him still, but separately, and with effort, hiding something. By changing, by being different, they had gone before they went; and if he were to consent to go walking with Eleanor, how could he be sure of finding the way back, to what still remained to him, the house, the two
houses : the house that was his home and this other house that he was on the point of building on his playroom floor?

Eleanor took him firmly by the hand. “ Didn't you hear me, Paul? Come and let me put your shoes on.”

“No,” said Paul.

“Come along now! We're going to see Mr. Thorpe.”

“No,” said Paul. “ Don't want to go out.”

Eleanor was irritated but curious. She could not remember that Paul had ever before refused to go out for a walk. Just in time, she prevented the fateful words
You must
from passing her lips, words that would have obliged her to carry him if necessary, carry him kicking and screaming out of the house, rather than go back on her word. With Paul she made few promises and fewer threats; but what she promised or threatened she infallibly carried out. If he didn't want to go out, there must be a reason; and where could the reason be but in his tummy?

“Don't you feel well, darling?”

Paul had shaken his hand free and was now building his house at high speed.

“Where've they gone?” he asked, with a slanting glance at her.

“Who?” said Eleanor. Seing his charm, his innocence, his cunning (if that was what it was, but one could never be sure), she suddenly wanted to shake him, to shatter that exasperating composure.

He supplemented his question. “ Have they gone to town?”

“Really, Paul!” Even Eleanor's patience was wearing thin. “ How many
more
times do you want to be told?”

“But have they?” said Paul, with a stubborn crooked smile.

“Now you're being just silly,” said Eleanor firmly. “ I shan't talk to you about it any more.”

“Have they, have they, have they, have they?” cried Paul, rushing at her furiously.

She caught hold of him, pushed him away. “ If you don't stop being silly, Paul, I shall go out of the room.”

For answer, Paul burst into tears. They were angry tears; his daemon was offended. So much was. clear to Eleanor. But what else this weeping portended she was at a loss to know. She did not go out of the room, for she argued that this last was not the kind of
silliness her ultimatum had referred to, if indeed it counted as silliness at all. What a problem Paul was! So were all children, she supposed, but Paul especially : it was part of his peculiar distinction. Sometimes she grew weary of having to concern herself with it, yet feeling how different things would be if only she had someone to share it with. She did in fact share it : with Mother above all, and indirectly (through Mother) with David. But that wasn't by a long way the same as the sharing she sometimes enjoyed in moments of dreaming abstraction, when someone not clearly defined, someone perhaps a little like David but significantly not David, came and put his arms round her and led her to the cot in the night-nursery (its walls would be decorated with nursery-rhyme characters in pastel' colours), and stood with her, embracing her, looking down on their sleeping child. His cough is better today. Beginning to say real words. Notices everything.

When she came to think of her situation Eleanor was tempted for a moment to feel sorry for herself. For here she was, with a stepmother, a stepmother's husband, and a strange little boy : here she was, an alien in the family. Somewhere in the world were blood-relations of hers, an aunt and some cousins ; but these, having seen her once or twice in her babyhood, had shown no further interest in her. Nor did she particularly want them to : it was only that she a little resented (when she thought of it) being different from other girls.

There was no time, fortunately, to think of that now. Paul cried vigorously; and when the wailing threatened to die away he re-started it, with a visble effort. Moreover, his nose wanted wiping. Eleanor found his handkerchief for him, and he submitted to the operation without protest. When it was completed he somehow forgot to begin crying again.

The quarrel was over. He returned to his building. Round the garden of the house he built a high wall.

“Oughtn't you to put a gate in the wall?*' Eleanor said.

Paul smiled at her and shook his head : first slowly, then fast, with lips tight closed. Eleanor perceived that he was now playing the Dumb Game.

“But every garden wall has a gate, Paul,” she said.

Portentous nods, followed by equally portentous head-shakings. She smiled goodhumouredly, if a little wearily, and decided to
postpone further inquiry until it should please Paul to recover the faculty of speech. By maintaining a careful silence during the next five minutes, which didn't at all suit Paul's book, she succeeded in hastening this recovery.

Presently Eleanor said : “ If there's no gate in the wall, how can people get in?”

“They're in already.”

“Then how can they get out?”

Paul's glance fell. “ They don't want to get out,” he said angrily.

In the theatre David's resolution began to waver. He did not doubt that Mary was his destiny, the sum of his desire; nor that she, by some miracle, reciprocated his passion. She had said little enough in words, but in the language of looking and touching she had said everything. Her silences were part of her peculiar essence ; and to feel that still, flowerlike loveliness burst into flame was an intoxication such as he had never known or dreamed of. After those first kisses he had overflowed into words, perhaps impelled by a need to assure himself that she meant what she seemed to mean. She answered not at all, or in monosyllables, except to say once, half-humorously : “ What are you going to do about it?” What he was going to do about it was already plain to him ; but must he do it now, to-day? Sitting in the darkened auditorium, very conscious of Lydia brooding and suffering at his side, and undistracted by what was happening on the lighted stage, he wondered whether it was necessary or sensible to attempt to tell her today. The whole thing being so new, wouldn't it be ridiculously premature, hasty, impolitic? Had he already a precise plan, and if not wasn't it better to wait? On the other hand, wouldn't waiting make the situation more intolerable?

David doesn't, as yet, explicitly debate within himself; but he is conscious of the drift within him, this way and that, of indecision. Yet his utlimate resolution holds : he says to himself, almost in as many words, I must possess her or die. But to possess, what is it? And to die, what is that? In such a man as David Brome, a man in whom spirit and flesh are not visibly at war, the desire for a woman
as yet unachieved is different in kind from all other desires. Let its mechanism be what it may, itself is as far from mere appetite as the end proposed is far from mere pleasure. Only the half-man, the vulgarian, can think of possession in terms of pleasure. The fact and the act are implicit in David's desire, but the desire goes deeper and soars higher than any act can take it. It is a desire for escape, the escape into eternity. Imagination, though moving towards it and hovering round it, stops short of entering the holy of holies, the moment of time-annihilating ecstasy to which—so, dimly, dumbly, he feels or thinks—this mortal shall put on immortality. To possess her, then, will be nothing less than that, that abundant life, that contact with the eternal. And not to possess her, never to have possessed her, will be death, the death of the heart. In the moment that I forgo her, he says, I betray myself, I am old and done for. This is the recurring burden of his thoughts. If I will have it so, he says, life begins for me now, in Mary's love. If I remain tethered I am a dying man, profiting no one. Why can't Lydia see that? he says. Why can't she stand away from the situation and see it clearly? But perhaps she can. Perhaps she does.

So here is David, and here is Lydia, each a world and each alone : They sit side by side in the dark theatre, and something sits with them that can't be dismissed as illusion, though its reality is a matter of faith. In a sense, a sense we need not explore at this moment, all mortal life is illusion ; but this third presence with David and Lydia, this living cumulus of common memories, is at least as real as anything else in human experience. Each tries not to regard it : in which endeavour Lydia, fiercely reviling herself as an unlovable woman (I knew it before and this proves it, she says), and as fiercely extolling herself for her unexampled devotion as a wife (he's shallow and heartless, all my love wasted), is more successful than David, who can't help glancing, now and again, at pictures of the past in which Lydia figures as an attractive, bright-eyed young woman, with warm colour flushing her ivory skin. They read verse together in those days, and in his resolve to romanticize their pleasant but unecstatic friendship he used to call her The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and other foolish things best forgotten. They are best forgotten, because to remember them makes him feel how stubborn he was, how wilful, in his unrealism, his smothering of wholesome doubts. If he were to recall
only the sentimentalities of that carefully sustained situation, he would feel a positive eagerness, to dissolve the resultant marriage. But marriage, as he feels it, is not merely the effect of a cause, is not a static situation : it is a cumulative thing, a daily interchange of being. Seven childless years, years of persevering affection and diminishing romantic illusion, brought him near breaking-point. Though he was fond of his wife's little stepdaughter, Eleanor Rook, he was angry with himself for having taken on a ready-made family. Besides, there was a girl, wasn't there? ... At this moment, so many years after, and with Mary in possession of him, David can hardly remember Lucy's name, though he remembers her charm and her quality vividly enough. Even now, when he recalls her, he feels a breath of the old enchantment. Yes, even now; for that a man can't love more than one woman at a time is the great romantic lie we wilfully impose on ourselves. Love is a variable and maturing relationship ; and though it is impossible for David or any man to be at the same
stage
of love with any two persons, his potential loves, subject to that proviso, are limited only by his heart's capacity. In the eighth year of his marriage David came near to eloping with Lucy. What prevented him was Lydia's announcement that she was at last with child. At almost any other time he would have been delighted beyond measure; but that hope deferred had made his heart sick, and by this time he wanted, not a child, but a new woman. When the child was born, that complicated everything, including of course his emotions ; and he grew reconciled to the loss of Lucy, though not to the fact of his bondage.