Eyeless In Gaza (27 page)

No, that certainly hadn't been difficult to resist, even though he had never set eyes on Joan at the time. The real temptations were not the worst, but the best. At Grenoble, it had been the best in literature.
Et son ventre, et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne . . . Elle se coula á mon côté, m'appela
des noms les plus tendres et des noms les plus effroyablement grossiers, qui glissaient sur ses lèvres en suaves murmures. Puis elle se tût et commença à me donner ces baisers qu'elle savait
 . . . The creations of the best stylists had proved to be far more dangerously attractive, far less easily resistible than the sordid realities of the Café-Concert. And now that he had said yes to the best possible reality, the appeal of the worst was even less effective, had ceased altogether to be anything remotely resembling a temptation. Such temptation as there was came once more from the best. It had been impossible to desire the low, vulgar, half-animal creature of the Café-Concert. But Joan was beautiful, Joan was refined, Joan shared his interests – and precisely for those reasons was desirable. Just because she was the best (and this for him was the paradox that it was so painful and bewildering to live through), he desired her in the wrong way, physically . . .

‘Do you remember those lines of Meredith's?' said Mrs Foxe, breaking the silence. Meredith was one of her favourite authors. ‘From the
Woods
,' she specified, affectionately abbreviating the title of the poem almost to a nickname. And she quoted:

Love's a kind of philosopher's stone,' she went on. ‘Not only does it deliver us; it also transforms. Dross into gold. Earth into heaven.'

Brian nodded affirmatively. And yet, he was thinking, those voluptuous and faceless bodies created by the stylists had actually come to assume Joan's features. In spite of love, or just because of it, the succubi now had a name, a personality.

The stable clock struck twelve; and at the first stroke there was a noiseless explosion of doves, like snowflakes whirling
up against the clotted darkness of the elms beyond.

‘The beauty of it!' said Mrs Foxe with a kind of muted intensity.

But suppose, it suddenly occurred to Brian, suppose she were suddenly left with no money at all? And if Joan were as poor as that wretched woman at Grenoble, as hopelessly without an alternative resource?

Slowly the last bell note expired, and one by one the whirling doves dropped back on to their turreted cote above the clock.

‘Perhaps,' said Mrs Foxe, ‘you ought to be starting if you're going to get there punctually.'

Brian knew how reluctant his mother was to let him go; and this display of generosity produced in him a sense of guilt and, along with it (since he did not want to feel guilty), a certain resentment. ‘B-but I d-don't need an hour,' he said almost angrily, ‘to c-cycle three m-miles.'

A moment later he was feeling ashamed of himself for the note of irritation in his voice, and for the rest of the time he was with her he showed himself more than ordinarily affectionate.

At half-past twelve he took his bicycle and rode over to the Thursleys'. The maid opened the nineteenth-century Gothic front door and he stepped into a faint smell of steamed pudding flavoured with cabbage. As usual. The vicarage always smelt of steamed pudding and cabbage. It was a symptom, he had discovered, of poverty and, as such, gave him a feeling of moral discomfort, as though he had done something wrong and were suffering from an uneasy conscience.

He was ushered into the drawing-room. Behaving as if he were some very distinguished old lady, Mrs Thursley rose from her writing-table and advanced to meet him. ‘Ah, dear Brian!' she cried. Her professionally Christian smile was
pearly with the flash of false teeth. ‘So
nice
to see you!' She took and held his hand. ‘And your dear mother – how's she? Sad because you're going to Germany, I'm sure. We're all sad, if it comes to that. You've got such a gift for making people miss you,' she continued in the same complimentary strain, while Brian blushed and fidgeted in an agony of discomfort. Saying nice things to people's faces, particularly to the faces of the rich, the influential, the potentially useful, was a habit with Mrs Thursley. A Christian habit she would have called it, if she had been pressed for an explanation. Loving one's neighbour; seeing the good in everybody; creating an atmosphere of sympathy and trust. But below the level of the avowal, almost below the level of consciousness, she knew that most people were greedy for flattery, however outrageous, and were prepared, in one way or another, to pay for it.

‘Ah, but here's Joan,' she cried, interrupting her praise of him, and added, in a tone that was charged with sprightly meaning, ‘You won't want to go on talking with her tiresome old mother – will he, Joanie?'

The two young people looked at one another in a speechless embarrassment.

The door suddenly flew open and Mr Thursley hurried into the room. ‘Look at this!' he cried in a voice that trembled with rage, and held out a glass ink-pot. ‘How do you expect me to do my work with an eighth of an inch of sediment? Dipping, dipping, dipping the whole morning. Never able to write more than two words at a time . . .'

‘Here's Brian, Daddy,' said Joan in the hope, which she knew in advance was vain, that the stranger's presence might shame him into silence.

His pointed nose still white with rage, Mr Thursley glared at Brian, shook hands and, turning away, at once went on with his angry complaint. ‘It's always like that in this house. How can one be expected to do serious work?'

‘Oh, God,' Joan inwardly prayed, ‘make him stop, make him shut up.'

‘As if he couldn't fill the pot himself!' Brian was thinking. ‘Why doesn't she tell him so?'

But it was impossible for Mrs Thursley to say or even think anything of the kind. He had his sermons, his articles in the
Guardian,
his studies in Neo-Platonism. How could he be expected to fill his own ink-pot? For her as well as for him it was obvious, it had become, after these five and twenty years of abjectly given and unreflectingly accepted slavery, completely axiomatic that he couldn't do such a thing. Besides, if she were to suggest in any way that he wasn't perfectly right, his anger would become still more violent. Goodness only knew what he mightn't do or say – in front of Brian! It would be awful. She began to make excuses for the empty ink-pot. Abject excuses on her own behalf, on Joan's, on her servants'. Her tone was at once deprecatory and soothing; she spoke as though she were dealing with a mixture between Jehovah and a very savage dog that might bite at any moment.

The gong – the Thursleys had a gong that would have been audible from end to end of a ducal mansion – rumbled up to a thunderous fortissimo that reduced even the vicar to silence. But as the sound ebbed, he began again.

‘It's not as though I asked for very much,' he said.

‘He'll be quieter when he's had something to eat,' Mrs Thursley thought, and led the way into the dining-room, followed by Joan. Brian wanted the vicar to precede him; but even in his righteous anger Mr Thursley remembered his good manners. Laying his hand on Brian's shoulder, he propelled him towards the door, keeping up all the time a long-range bombardment of his wife.

‘Only a little quiet, only the simplest material conditions for doing my work. The barest minimum. But I don't get it. The
house is as noisy as a railway station, and my ink-pot's neglected till I have nothing but a little black mud to write with.'

Under the bombardment, Mrs Thursley walked as though shrunken and with bowed head. But Joan, Brian noticed, had gone stiff; her body was rigid and ungraceful with excess of tension.

In the dining-room they found the two boys, Joan's younger brothers, already standing behind their chairs. At the sight of them, Mr Thursley reverted from his ink-pot to the noise in the house. ‘Like a railway station,' he repeated, and the righteous indignation flared up in him with renewed intensity. ‘George and Arthur have been rushing up and down the stairs and round the garden the whole morning. Why can't you keep them in order?'

They were all at their places now; Mrs Thursley at one end of the table, her husband at the other; the two boys on her left; Joan and Brian on her right. They stood there, waiting for the vicar to say grace.

‘Like hooligans,' said Mr Thursley; the flames of wrath ran through him; he was filled with a tingling warmth, horribly delicious. ‘Like savages.'

Making an effort, he dropped his long cleft chin on his chest and was silent. His nose was still deathly pale with anger: like marine animals in an aquarium, the nostrils contracted and expanded in a pulse of regular but fluttering movement. In his right hand he still held the ink-pot.

‘
Benedictus benedicat, per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum
,' he said at last in his praying voice, which was deep, with the suspicion of a tremolo, and charged with transcendental significance.

With the noise of pent-up movement suddenly released they all sat down.

‘Screaming and howling,' said Mr Thursley, reverting from the tone of piety to his original harshness. ‘How am I
expected to do my work?' With an indignant bang, he put the ink-pot down on the table in front of him, then unfolded his napkin.

At the other end of the table Mrs Thursley was cutting up the mock duck with an extraordinary rapidity.

‘Pass that to your father,' she said to the nearest boy. It was essential to get him eating as soon as possible.

A second or two later the parlour-maid was offering Mr Thursley the vegetable. Her apron and cap were stiff with starch and she was as well drilled as a guardsman. The vegetable dishes were hideous, but had been expensive; the spoons were of heavy Victorian silver. With them, the vicar helped himself first to boiled potatoes, then to cabbage, mashed and moulded into damp green bricks.

Still indulging himself in the luxury of anger, ‘Women simply don't understand what serious work is,' Mr Thursley went on; then started eating.

When she had helped the others to their mock duck, Mrs Thursley ventured a remark. ‘Brian's just off to Germany,' she said.

Mr Thursley looked up, chewing his food very rapidly with his front teeth, like a rabbit. ‘What part of Germany?' he asked, darting a sharp inquisitorial look at Brian. His nose had flushed again to its normal colour.

‘M-marburg.'

‘Where there's the university?'

Brian nodded.

Startlingly, with a noise like coke being poured down a chute, Mr Thursley burst out laughing. ‘Don't take to beer-drinking with the students,' he said.

The storm was over. In part out of the thankfulness of her heart, in part to make her husband feel that she had found his joke irresistible, Mrs Thursley also laughed. ‘Oh, no,' she cried, ‘don't take to
that
!'

Brian smiled and shook his head.

‘Water or soda-water?' the parlour-maid asked confidentially, creaking with starch and whalebone as she bent over him.

‘W-water, please.'

After lunch, when the vicar had returned to his study, Mrs Thursley suggested, in her bright, embarrassingly significant way, that the two young people should go for a walk. The ogival front door slammed behind them. Like a prisoner at last restored to liberty, Joan drew a deep breath.

The sky was still overcast, and beneath the low ceiling of grey cloud the air was soft and as though limp with fatigue, as though weary with the burden of too much summer. In the woods, into which they turned from the high-road, the stillness was oppressive, like the intentional silence of sentient beings, pregnant with unavowed thoughts and hidden feelings. An invisible tree-creeper started to sing; but it was as if the clear bright sound were coming from some other time and place. They walked on hand in hand; and between them was the silence of the wood and at the same time the deeper, denser, more secret silence of their own unexpressed emotions. The silence of the complaints she was too loyal to utter and the pity that, unless she complained, it would, he felt, be insulting for him to put into words; her longing for the comfort of his arms and those desires he did not wish to feel.

Their path led them between great coverts of rhododendrons, and suddenly they were in a narrow cleft, hemmed in by high walls of the impenetrable, black-green foliage. It was a solitude within a solitude, the image of their own private silence visibly hollowed out of the greater stillness of the wood.

‘Almost f-frightening,' he whispered, as they stood there listening – listening (for there was nothing else for them to hear) to their own heart-beats and each other's breathing and
all the words that hung unspoken between them.

All at once, she could bear it no longer, ‘When I think of what it'll be like at home . . .' The complaint had uttered itself, against her will. ‘Oh, I wish you weren't going, Brian!'

Brian looked at her and, at the sight of those trembling lips, those eyes bright with tears, he felt himself as it were disintegrated by tenderness and pity. Stammering her name, he put his arm about her. Joan stood for a little while quite still, her head bent, her forehead resting on his shoulder. The touch of her hair was electric against his lips, he breathed its perfume. All at once, as though waking from sleep, she stirred into motion and, drawing a little away from him, looked up into his face. Her regard had a desperate, almost inhuman fixity.

‘Darling,' he whispered.

Joan's only answer was to shake her head.

But why? What was she denying, what implication of his endearment was she saying no to? ‘But J-joan . . .?' There was a note of anxiety in his voice.

Still she did not answer; only looked at him and once more slowly shook her head. How many negations were expressed in that single movement! The refusal to complain; the denial for herself of the possibility of happiness; the sad insistence that all her love and all his availed nothing against the pain of absence; the resolution not to exploit his pity, not to elicit, however much she longed for it, another, a more passionate avowal . . .