Eyeless In Gaza (24 page)

‘Why, it's Mary Champernowne,' said Mrs Foxe. ‘Mary Amberley, I should say.' Or perhaps, she reflected, should
not
say, now that the Amberleys were divorced.

The name, the familiar face, evoked in Mr Beavis's mind only a pleasant sensation of surprised recognition. Raising his hat with a self-consciously comic parody of an old-world flourish, ‘Welcome,' he said to the new arrival. ‘Welcome, dear lady.'

Mary Amberley took Mrs Foxe's hand. ‘Such luck,' she exclaimed breathlessly. Mrs Foxe was surprised by so much cordiality. Mary's mother was her friend; but Mary had always held aloof. And anyhow, since her marriage she had moved in a world that Mrs Foxe did not know, and of which, on principle, she disapproved. ‘Such marvellous luck!' the other repeated as she turned to Mr Beavis.

‘The luck is ours,' he said gallantly. ‘You know my wife, don't you? And the young stalwart?' His eyes twinkled; the corners of his mouth, under the moustache, humorously twitched. He laid a hand on Anthony's arm. ‘The young foundation-worthy?'

She smiled at Anthony. A strange smile, he noticed; a crooked smile of unparted lips that seemed as though secretly significant. ‘I haven't seen you for years,' she said. ‘Not since . . .' Not since the first Mrs Beavis's funeral, as a matter of fact. But one could hardly say so. ‘Not since you were
so
high!' And lifting a gloved hand to the level of her eye, she measured, between the thumb and forefinger, a space of about an inch.

Anthony laughed nervously, intimidated, even while he admired, by so much prettiness and ease and smartness.

Mrs Amberley shook hands with Joan and Brian; then, turning back to Mrs Foxe, ‘I was feeling like Robinson Crusoe,' she said, explaining that abnormal cordiality.
‘Marooned.' She lingered with a comical insistence over the long syllable. ‘Absolutely marooooned. Monarch of all I surveyed.' And while they slowly walked on across St Giles's, she launched out into a complicated story about a stay in the Cotswolds; about an appointment to meet some friends on the way home, at Oxford, on the eighteenth; about her journey from Chipping Campden; about her punctual arrival at the meeting-place, her waiting, her growing impatience, her rage, and finally her discovery that she had come a day too early: it was the seventeenth. ‘Too typical of me.'

Everybody laughed a great deal. For the story was full of unexpected fantasies and extravagances; and it was told in a voice that modulated itself with an extraordinary subtlety to fit the words – a voice that knew when to hurry breathlessly and when to drawl, when to fade out into an inaudibility rich with unspoken implications.

Even Mrs Foxe, who didn't particularly want to be amused – because of that divorce – found herself unable to resist the story.

For Mary Amberley, their laughter was like champagne; it warmed her, it sent a tingling exhilaration through her body. They were bores, of course; they were philistines. But the applause even of bores and philistines is still applause and intoxicating. Her eyes shone, her cheeks flushed. ‘Too hopelessly typical of me!' she wailed, when their laughter had subsided; but the gesture of despairing self-disparagement was a caricature; she was really proud of her incompetence, regarded it as part of her feminine charm. ‘Well, anyhow,' she concluded, ‘there I was – shipwrecked. All alone on a desert island.'

They walked for a moment in silence. The thought that she would have to be asked to lunch was in all their minds – a thought tinged in Mrs Foxe's case with vexation, in Anthony's with embarrassed desire. The lunch was being
given in his rooms; as the host, he ought to ask her. And he wanted to ask her – violently wanted it. But what would the others say? Oughtn't he somehow to consult them first? Mr Beavis solved the problem for him by making the suggestion on his own account.

‘I think' – he hesitated; then, twinkling, ‘I think our festal “spread,”' he went on, ‘will run to another guest, won't it, Anthony?'

‘But I can't impose myself,' she protested, turning from the father to the son. He seemed a nice boy, she thought, sensitive and intelligent. Pleasant-looking too.

‘But I assure you . . .' Anthony was earnestly and incoherently repeating, ‘I assure you . . .'

‘Well, if it's really all right . . .' She thanked him with a smile of sudden intimacy, almost of complicity – as though there were some bond between them, as though, of all the party, they two were the only ones who understood what was what.

After lunch, Joan had to be shown the sights of Oxford; and Mr Beavis had an appointment with a philological colleague in the Woodstock Road; and Pauline thought she would like to take things quietly till tea-time. Anthony was left to entertain Mary Amberley. The responsibility was deliciously alarming.

In the hansom that was taking them to Magdalen Bridge Mrs Amberley turned to him a face that was bright with sudden mischief.

‘Free at last,' she said.

Anthony nodded at her and smiled back, understandingly, conspiratorially. ‘They
were
rather heavy,' he said. ‘Perhaps I ought to apologize.'

‘I've often thought of founding a league for the abolition of families,' she went on. ‘Parents ought never to be allowed to come near their children.'

‘Plato thought so too,' he said, rather pedantically.

‘Yes, but he wanted children to be bullied by the state instead of by their fathers and mothers. I don't want them to be bullied by anyone.'

He ventured a personal question. ‘Were
you
bullied?' he asked.

Mary Amberley nodded. ‘Horribly. Few children have been more loved than I was. They fairly bludgeoned me with affection. Made me a mental cripple. It took me years to get over the deformity.' There was a silence. Then, looking at him with an embarrassingly appraising glance, as though he were for sale, ‘Do you know,' she said, ‘the last time I saw you was at your mother's funeral.'

The subterranean association between this remark and what had gone before made him blush guiltily, as though at an impropriety in mixed company. ‘Yes, I remember,' he mumbled, and was annoyed with himself for feeling so uncomfortably embarrassed, was at the same time rather ashamed that he had allowed even this remotely implied comment upon his mother to pass without some kind of protest, that he had felt so little desire to make a protest.

‘You were a horrible, squalid little boy then,' she went on, still looking at him judicially. ‘How awful little boys always are! It seems incredible that they should ever turn into presentable human beings. And of course,' she added, ‘a great many of them don't. Dismal, don't you find? – the way most people are so hideous and stupid, so utterly and abysmally boring!'

Making a violent effort of will, Anthony emerged from his embarrassment with a creditable dash. ‘I hope I'm not one of the majority?' he said, lifting his eyes to hers.

Mrs Amberley shook her head, and with a serious matter-of-factness, ‘No,' she answered. ‘I was thinking how successfully you'd escaped from the horrors of boyhood.'

He blushed again, this time with pleasure.

‘Let's see, how old are you now?' she asked.

‘Twenty – nearly twenty-one.'

‘And I shall be thirty this winter. Queer,' she added, ‘how these things change their significance. When I saw you last, those nine years were a great gulf between us. Uncrossable, it seemed then. We belonged to different species. And yet here we are, sitting on the same side of the gulf as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Which indeed it is, now.' She turned and smiled at him that secret and significant smile of unparted lips. Her dark eyes were full of dancing brightness. ‘Ah, there's Magdalen,' she went on, leaving him (to his great relief; for in his excited embarrassment he would not have known what to say) no time to comment on her words. ‘How dreary that late Gothic can be! So mean! No wonder Gibbon didn't think much of the Middle Ages!' She was suddenly silent, remembering the occasion when her husband had made that remark about Gibbon. Only a month or two after their marriage. She had been shocked and astonished by his airy criticisms of things she had been brought up to regard as sacredly beyond judgment – shocked, but also thrilled, also delighted. For what fun to see the sacred things knocked about! And in those days Roger was still adorable. She sighed; then, with a touch of irritation, shook off the sentimental mood and went on talking about that odious architecture.

The cab drew up at the bridge; they dismounted and walked down to the boat-house. Lying back on the cushions of the punt, Mary Amberley was silent. Very slowly, Anthony poled his way upstream. The green world slid past her half-shut eyes. Green darkness of trees overarching the olive shadows and tawny-glaucous lights of water; and between the twilight stretches of green vaulting, the wide gold-green meadows, islanded with elms. And always the faint weedy smell of the river; and the air so soft and warm against the
face that one was hardly aware any longer of the frontiers between self and not-self, but lay there, separated by no dividing surfaces, melting, drowsily melting into the circum-ambient summer.

Standing at the stern, Anthony could look down on her, as from a post of vantage. She lay there at his feet, limp and abandoned. Handling his long pole with an easy mastery of which he was proud, he felt, as he watched her, exultantly strong and superior. There was no gulf between them now. She was a woman, he a man. He lifted his trailing punt pole and swung it forward with a movement of easy grace, of unhurried and accomplished power. Thrust it down into the mud, tightened his muscles against its resistance; the punt shot forward, the end of the pole lifted from the river-bed, trailed for a moment, then gracefully, once more, easily, masterfully was swung forward. Suddenly she lifted her eyelids and looked at him, with that detached appraising look that had embarrassed him so much in the cab. His manly confidence evaporated at once.

‘My poor Anthony,' she said at last, and her face came closer, as it were, in a sudden smile. ‘It makes me hot even to look at you.'

When the punt had been secured, he came forward and sat down in the place she made, drawing her skirts away, on the cushion beside her.

‘I don't suppose your father bullies you much,' she said, returning to the theme of their conversation in the cab.

He shook his head.

‘Nor blackmails you with too much affection, I imagine.'

Anthony found himself feeling unexpectedly loyal to his father. ‘I think he was always very fond of me.'

‘Oh, of course,' said Mrs Amberley impatiently. ‘I didn't imagine he knocked you about.'

Anthony could not help laughing. The vision of his father
running after him with a club was irresistibly comic. Then, more seriously, ‘He never got near enough to knock me about,' he said. ‘There was always a great gulf fixed.'

‘Yes, one feels he has a talent for fixing gulfs. And yet your step-mother seems to get on with him all right. So did your mother, I believe.' She shook her head. ‘But, then, marriage is so odd and unaccountable. The most obviously incompatible couples stick together, and the most obviously compatible fly apart. Boring, tiresome people are adored, and charming ones are hated. Why? God knows. But I suppose it's generally a matter of what Milton calls the Genial Bed.' She lingered, ludicrously, over the first syllable of ‘genial'; but Anthony was so anxious not to seem startled by the casual mention of what he had always regarded as, in a lady's presence, the unmentionable, that he did not laugh – for a laugh might have been interpreted as a schoolboy's automatic reaction to smut – did not even smile; but gravely, as though he were admitting the truth of a proposition in geometry, nodded his head and in a very serious and judicial tone said, ‘Yes, I suppose it generally is.'

‘Poor Mrs Foxe,' Mary Amberley went on. ‘I imagine there was a minimum of geniality there.'

‘Did you know her husband?' he asked.

‘Only as a child. One grown-up seems as boring as another then. But my mother's often talked to me about him. Thoroughly beastly. And thoroughly virtuous. God preserve me from a virtuous beast! The vicious ones are bad enough; but at least they're never beastly on principle. They're inconsistent; so they're sometimes nice by mistake. Whereas the virtuous ones – they never forget; they're beastly all the time. Poor woman! She had a dog's life, I'm afraid. But she seems to be getting it back on her son all right.'

‘But she adores Brian,' he protested. ‘And Brian adores her.'

‘That's exactly what I was saying. All the love she never got
from her husband, all the love she never gave him – it's being poured out on that miserable boy.'

‘He isn't miserable.'

‘He may not know it, perhaps. Not yet. But you wait!' Then, after a little pause, ‘You're lucky,' Mrs Amberley went on. ‘A great deal luckier than you know.'

LITERATURE FOR PEACE
– of what kind? One can concentrate on economics: trade barriers, disorganized currency, impediments in the way of migration, private interests bent on making profits at all costs. And so on. One can concentrate on politics: danger of the concept of the sovereign state, as a wholly immortal being having interests irreconcilable with those of other sovereign states. One can propose political and economic remedies – trade agreements, international arbitration, collective security. Sensible prescriptions following sound diagnosis. But has the diagnosis gone far enough, and will the patient follow the treatment prescribed?

This question came up in the course of today's discussion with Miller. Answer in the negative. The patient can't follow the treatment prescribed, for a good reason: there is no patient. States and Nations don't exist as such. There are only people. Sets of people living in certain areas, having certain allegiances. Nations won't change their national policies unless and until people change their private policies. All governments, even Hitler's, even Stalin's, even Mussolini's, are representative. Today's national behaviour – a large-scale
projection of today's individual behaviour. Or rather, to be more accurate, a large-scale projection of the individual's secret wishes and intentions. For we should all like to behave a good deal worse than our conscience and respect for public opinion allow. One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we're profoundly virtuous. Sweet and decorous to murder, lie, torture for the sake of the fatherland. Good international policies are projections of individual good intentions and benevolent wishes, and must be of the same kind as good inter-personal policies. Pacifist propaganda must be aimed at people as well as their governments; must start simultaneously at the periphery and the centre.