Eyeless In Gaza (40 page)

He found himself all at once confused and tongue-tied with self-reproach.

‘I felt awfully sorry for Joan,' he stammered, trying to make amends. ‘Promised I'd do all I could to help the poor girl. But what? That's the question. What?' He exaggerated the note of perplexity. Perplexed, he was justified in betraying Joan's confidences; he had told the story (he now began to assure himself) solely for the sake of asking Mary's advice – the advice of an experienced woman of the world.

But the experienced woman of the world was looking at him in the most disquieting way. Mrs Amberley's eyelids had narrowed over a mocking brilliance; the left-hand corner of her mouth was drawn up ironically. ‘The nicest thing about you,' she said judicially, ‘is your innocence.'

Her words were so wounding that he forgot in an instance Joan, Brian, his own discreditable behaviour, and could think only of his punctured vanity.

‘Thank you,' he said, trying to give her a smile of frank amusement. Innocent – she thought him innocent? After their time in Paris. After those jokes about uterine reactions?

‘So deliciously youthful, so touching.'

‘I'm glad you think so.' The smile had gone all awry; he felt the blood mounting to his cheeks.

‘A girl comes to you,' Mrs Amberley went on, ‘and complains because she hasn't been kissed enough. And here you are, solemnly asking what you ought to do to help her! And now you're blushing like a beetroot. Darling, I absolutely adore you!' Laying her hand on his arm, ‘Kneel down on the floor here,' she commanded. Rather sheepishly, he obeyed. Mary Amberley looked at him for a little in silence, with the same bright mocking expression in her eyes. Then, softly, ‘Shall I show you what you can do to help her?' she asked. ‘Shall I show you?'

He nodded without speaking; but still, at arm's length, she smiled enquiringly into his face.

‘Or am I a fool to show you?' she asked. ‘Won't you learn the lesson too well? Perhaps I shall be jealous?' She shook her head and smiled – a gay and ‘civilized' smile. ‘No, I don't believe in being jealous.' She took his face between her two hands and, whispering, ‘This is how you can help her,' drew him towards her.

Anthony had felt humiliated by her almost contemptuous assumption of the dominant rôle; but no shame, no resentment could annul his body's consciousness of the familiar creepings of pleasure and desire. He abandoned himself to her kisses.

A clock struck, and immediately, from an upper floor, came the approaching sound of shrill childish voices. Mrs Amberley drew back and, laying a hand over his mouth, pushed him away from her. ‘You've got to be domestic,' she said, laughing. ‘It's six. I do the fond mother at six.'

Anthony scrambled to his feet and, with the idea of fabricating a little favourable evidence, walked over to the fire and stood there with his elbows on the mantelpiece, looking at a Conder water-colour.

The door burst open, and with a yell like the whistle of an express train a small round child of about five came rushing into the room and fairly hurled herself upon her mother. Another little girl, three or four years older than the first, came hurrying after.

‘Helen!' she kept calling, and her face, with its expression of anxious disapproval, was the absurd parody of a governess's face. ‘Helen! You mustn't. Tell her she mustn't shout like that, Mummy,' she appealed to Mrs Amberley.

But Mrs Amberley only laughed and ran her fingers through the little one's thick yellow hair. ‘Joyce believes in the Ten Commandments,' she said, turning to Anthony. ‘Was born believing in them. Weren't you, darling?' She put an arm round Joyce's shoulder and kissed her. ‘Whereas Helen and
I . . .' She shook her head. ‘Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears.'

‘Nanny says it's the draught that gives her a stiff neck,' Joyce volunteered, and was indignant when her mother and Anthony, and even, by uncomprehending contagion, little Helen, burst out laughing. ‘But it's true!' she cried; and tears of outraged virtue were in her eyes. ‘Nanny says so.'

THE FACILITY WITH
which one could become a Stiggins in modern dress! A much subtler, and therefore more detestable, more dangerous Stiggins. For of course Stiggins himself was too stupid to be either intrinsically very bad or capable of doing much harm to other people. Whereas if I set my mind to it, heaven knows what I mightn't achieve in the way of lies in the soul. Even with
not
setting my mind to it, I could go far – as I perceived, to my horror, today, when I found myself talking to Purchas and three or four of his young people. Talking about Miller's ‘anthropological approach'; talking about peace as a way of life as well as an international policy – the way of life being the condition of any policy that had the least hope of being permanently successful. Talking so clearly, so profoundly, so convincingly. (The poor devils were listening with their tongues hanging out.) Much more convincingly than Purchas himself could have done; that muscular-jocular-Christian style starts by being effective, but soon makes hearers feel that they're being talked down to. What they like is that the speaker should be thoroughly serious, but comprehensible. Which is a trick I happen to possess. There I
was, discoursing in a really masterly way about the spiritual life, and taking intense pleasure in that mastery, secretly congratulating myself on being not only so clever, but also so good – when all at once I realized who I was: Stiggins. Talking about the theory of courage, self-sacrifice, patience, without any knowledge of the practice. Talking, moreover, in the presence of people who
had
practised what I was preaching – preaching so effectively that the proper roles were reversed: they were listening to me, not I to them. The discovery of what I was doing came suddenly. I was overcome with shame. And yet – more shameful – went on talking. Not for long, however. A minute or two, and I simply had to stop, apologize, insist that it wasn't my business to talk.

This shows how easy it is to be Stiggins by mistake and unconsciously. But also that unconsciousness is no excuse, and that one's responsible for the mistake, which arises, of course, from the pleasure one takes in being more talented than other people and in dominating them by means of those talents. Why is one unconscious? Because one hasn't ever taken the trouble to examine one's motives; and one doesn't examine one's motives, because one's motives are mostly discreditable. Alternatively, of course, one examines one's motives, but tells oneself lies about them till one comes to believe that they're good. Which is the conviction of the self-conscious Stiggins. I've always condemned showing off and the desire to dominate as vulgar, and imagined myself pretty free of these vulgarities. But in so far as free at all, free, I now perceive, only thanks to the indifference which has kept me away from other people, thanks to the external-economic and internal-intellectual circumstances which made me a sociologist rather than a banker, administrator, engineer, working in direct contact with my fellows. Not to make contacts, I have realized, is wrong; but the moment I make them, I catch myself showing off and trying to dominate. Showing off, to
make it worse, as Stiggins would have done, trying to dominate by a purely verbal display of virtues which I don't put into practice. Humiliating to find that one's supposed good qualities are mainly due to circumstances and the bad habit of indifference, which made me shirk occasions for behaving badly – or well, for that matter, seeing that it's very difficult to behave either well or badly except towards other people. More humiliating still to find that when, with an effort of goodwill, one creates the necessary opportunities, one immediately responds to them by behaving badly. Note: meditate on the virtues that are the contraries of vanity, lust for power, hypocrisy.

THE BLINDS WERE
up; the sunlight lay bright across the dressing-table. Helen, as usual, was still in bed. The days were so long. Lying in the soft, stupefying warmth of her own body under the quilt, she shortened them with sleep, with vague inconsequential thoughts, with drowsy reading. The book, this morning, was Shelley's poems. ‘Warm fragrance,' she read, articulating the words in an audible whisper, ‘seemed to fall from her light dress . . .' (She saw a long-legged figure in white muslin, with sloping shoulders and breasts high set.)

(The figure was running now, in square-toed pumps cross-gartered with black ribbon over the white cotton stockings.)

The half-opened rose gave place to Mark Staithes's strangely twisted face. Those things he had told her the other night about perfumes. Musk, ambergris . . . And Henri Quatre with his bromidrosis of the feet.
Bien vous en prend d'être roi; sans cela on ne vous pourrait souffrir. Vous puez comme charogne.
She made a grimace. Hugh's smell was like sour milk.

A clock struck. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Twelve! She felt guilty; then defiantly decided that she would stay in bed for lunch. A remembered voice – it was Cynthia's – sounded reproachfully in her memory. ‘You ought to go out more, see more people.' But people, Cynthia's people, were such bores. Behind closed eyelids, she saw her mother rapping the top of her skull: ‘Solid ivory, my dear!' Hopelessly stupid, ignorant, tasteless, slow. ‘I was brought up above my mental station,' was what she had said to Anthony the other night. ‘So that now, if ever I have to be with people as silly and uneducated as myself, it's torture, absolute torture!'

Cynthia was sweet, of course; always had been, ever since they were at school together. But Cynthia's husband – that retriever! And her young men, and the young men's young women! ‘My boy friend. My girl friend.' How she loathed the words and, still more, the awful way they spoke them! So coy, such saucy implications of sleeping together! When, in fact, most of them were utterly respectable. In the few cases where they weren't respectable, it seemed even worse – a double hypocrisy. Really sleeping together, and pretending to be only archly pretending to do it. The dreary, upper-class Englishness of it all! And then they were always playing games. ‘Ga-ames,' Mrs Amberley drawled out of a pre-morphia past. ‘A Dear Old School in every home.' See more of those people, do more of the things they did . . . She shook her head.

Was it all nonsense? Or did it mean something – something marvellous she had never experienced? But, yes, she
had
experienced it.

It was humiliating, now, to admit it; but the fact remained that, with Gerry, she had known exactly what those lines signified. A divine presence in a place divine. And it had been the presence in bed of a swindler who was also a virtuoso in the art of love-making. She found a perverse pleasure in insisting, as brutally as she could, upon the grotesque disparity between the facts and what had then been her feelings.

Noiselessly, Helen laughed. The sound of the clock chiming the quarter made her think again of Cynthia's advice. There were also the other people – the people they met when Hugh and she dined with the Museum or the University. ‘Those god-fearing people' (her mother spoke again), ‘who still go on fearing God even though they've pitched him overboard.' Fearing God on committees. Fearing him in W.E.A. lecture-rooms. Fearing him through interminable discussions of the Planned Society. But Gerry's good looks, Gerry's technique as a lover – how could those be planned out of existence? Or the foetus irrepressibly growing and growing in the womb? ‘A co-ordinated housing scheme for the whole country.' She remembered Frank Ditchling's eager, persuasive voice. He
had a turned-up nose, and the large nostrils stared at one like a second pair of eyes, insistently. ‘Redistribution of the population . . . Satellite towns . . . Green belts . . . Lifts even in working-class flats . . .' She had listened, she had succumbed to the spell of his hypnotic nostrils, and at the time it had seemed splendid, worth dying for. But afterwards . . . Well, lifts were very convenient – she wished there were one to her own flat. Parks were nice to walk in. But how would Frank Ditchling's crusade affect any of the serious issues? Co-ordinated housing wouldn't make her mother any less dirty, any less hopelessly at the mercy of an intoxicated body. And Hugh – would Hugh be any different in a satellite town and with a lift from what he was now, when he walked up four flights of stairs in London? Hugh! She thought, derisively, of his letters – all the delicate, beautiful things he had written – and then of the man as he had been in everyday reality, as a husband. ‘Show me how I can help you, Hugh.' Arranging his papers, typing his notes, looking up references for him in the library. But always, his eyes glassy behind glass, he had shaken his head: either he didn't need help, or else she wasn't capable of giving it. ‘I want to be a good wife, Hugh.' With her mother's laughter loud in her imagination, it had been difficult to pronounce those words. But she had meant them; she
did
want to be a good wife. Darning socks, making hot milk for him before he went to bed, reading up his subject, being
sérieuse
, in a word, for the first time and profoundly. But Hugh didn't want her to be a good wife, didn't want her, so far as she could see, to be anything. A divine presence in a place divine. But the place was his letters; she was present, so far as he was concerned, only at the other end of the postal system. He didn't even want her in bed – or at any rate not much, not in any ordinary way. Green belts, indeed!