Five Roundabouts to Heaven (6 page)

“Lorna’s her name.”

“Well, Lorna, then.”

“About four months.”

“Sometimes these things pass, you know.”

Bartels turned and looked at me, and said: “This won’t. This is the real thing.”

Having kicked around the world a bit, I suppose I have rather a mixed conception of morality. I am quite prepared, on occasions, to argue that the end justifies the means, and I was fond of Beatrice. I thought she was in for a pretty raw deal.

So I said: “Why not hang on a little longer? Why not have Lorna, if you wish, as—well, as your girlfriend? Just to make sure.”

“You mean, as my mistress?”

“Well, if you like to put it that way. It might be as well to make sure. It’s a big step. You want to be sure. You’re going to hurt Beatrice like hell, so you want to be sure.”

“I am sure.”

“Sometime these things wear off.”

“This is something different; I feel it is something I have been waiting for all my life.”

His remark was so corny that I couldn’t help replying as I did:

“I’m told it is always like that.”

Bartels flushed. He did not reply.

I sat drearily watching the three bald men drinking cocktails across the room. They had dropped the masks now; they had got down to business, talking in low tones, heads thrust forward.

They looked solemn, keen, and avaricious, unaware that by my side a man who was gentle by nature, kindly and unselfish by instinct, was preparing an act of matrimonial treachery which was in contradiction to every fibre of his make-up.

When a man commits, or even seriously contemplates committing, an act which is not in tone with his character, he is in psychological trouble. Women are similarly affected, but to a lesser degree, because their characters are more flexible.

Bartels, that day at the Café Royal, was already in trouble. The beginnings were apparent to me as he sat breaking up the potato chips before him; breaking one up and then prodding the bits around with his forefinger, and then breaking up another one, until in a short while there were no whole chips left in the little dish, but only a pile of very small broken morsels.

As I watched my friend, I hated the three big-paunched men.

At length Bartels spoke. “The trouble is, you know, Beatrice has never been in love with me. Never. Not even at the beginning.”

“As wives go, that doesn’t make her unique. Beatrice has got everything.” I went on, forgetting my resolution not to oppose him, “Dammit, she’s bloody attractive, efficient, witty, clever, and loyal. And fundamentally she’s kind-hearted. She’s a good girl, Barty. I don’t know what more you want.”

Bartels turned, and looked at me for a few moments. His bright, intelligent, brown eyes had lost the enigmatic, sardonic look they often had. They were shining, with a curious, excited look in them.

“Well?” I said.

He took a deep breath. When he spoke, his voice, normally so strong and steady, had an undercurrent of nervousness about it which I had never heard before. It had the kind of tremor you hear when a diffident man gets up to make his first after-dinner speech.

“I always dreamed of a woman being really in love with me, Pete. I suppose it sounds silly to you. I’ve never told anyone before. At least, not till I told Lorna. Maybe it was because I got ragged a good deal at school. You remember how it was. I was a funny-looking youth. I suppose I dreamed about it the more, just because it seemed unlikely that any girl ever would fall in love with me. I suppose that sounds silly to you?”

“I don’t know that it does,” I answered softly. “No, I reckon I can understand that all right, Barty.”

I didn’t look at him. I felt his eyes upon me, and knew that a wrong expression on my face, a wrong intonation in my voice, would shut him up. When a man is speaking to another man of love, of his inmost feelings, you’ve got to watch your step, almost hold your breath and cross your fingers, or he’ll shy off like a startled horse.

“I proposed to her one day by a stream. It was a May day, very warm and sunny. We sat on a log, throwing twigs into the stream, and then I asked her to marry me. She hesitated for a while, then she said she would. So I kissed her.”

Bartels smiled. “It was funny, that engagement kiss. She didn’t kiss me; she let me kiss her. I think that even then I knew I was making a mistake. But I wouldn’t admit it to myself. I thought I could force her to fall in love with me. Well, I couldn’t.”

He had got over his nervousness now, and was talking quite fluently and easily.

“I wouldn’t have thought Beatrice was cold,” I said. “That’s the last thing I would have thought.”

“She isn’t. She’s very passionate. I found that out even before we were married, though we never slept together. Once she had committed herself, she came to life, but physically only. Only physically, Pete. That’s the point.”

“Maybe she was in love with you, and you couldn’t see it.”

Bartels shook his head. “No, she wasn’t.” He hesitated, then added: “It was sex, that’s all. You see, I remember her kiss when we drove away from the church after our wedding. It was like the engagement kiss. It was as though all her doubts had come back to her. That’s because she married me with her head and not with her heart, and she was wondering if she had done the right thing.”

He laughed, as though ashamed of his revelations, and sat back on his seat.

It is strange to see the anatomy of a marriage slowly and unexpectedly displayed before your eyes. Some people may enjoy it, but I didn’t. I did not feel actual embarrassment, but something rather different and difficult to describe. It was as though one were reluctantly watching the disrobing of an old woman’s body, once rounded and beautiful, or so one thought, and now shrunken and withered.

Bartels glanced round the room. He said:

“I remember I once said to her, years ago now, and in joking tones: “I think you only married me because I was the best financial bet among your boyfriends. I had a private income, prospect of a good position in a good firm, and you would live in London. Your local boyfriends hadn’t as much to offer as that, had they?” I had been wanting to say it for a long time, because I suppose I wanted to hear her deny it, but I hadn’t dared to risk it. Then one day, apropos of nothing, I just kind of blurted it out.”

He smiled affectionately. “Beatrice can never lie convincingly. She doesn’t try. She’s too honest, you know.”

I nodded. “Too honest, and too strong, too fearless.”

“She replied: ‘Well, I was very fond of you, anyway. And anyway, I love you now.’ I think she does, too, in her own way. She’s never been in love with me, but I think she loves me today more than when she married me.”

He paused. Then he said, in a funny tone of voice: “I always remember the kind of sick feeling I had when I heard her words. But I just laughed, and we didn’t talk about it anymore.”

“Well, we’ve all got to put up with something in life.” My remark was futile and pointless, and I only said it to fill in the silence.

Bartels said slowly:

“She is like a beautiful piece of mosaic, you know. She’s about perfect, except for one thing. The centrepiece of the mosaic, the thing I dreamed about, that’s not there.”

“She’s given you everything she had to give. It’s not her fault if she can’t give you romantic love.” And because he said nothing, I made the same remark I had made before. I said: “We’ve all got to put up with something in life. We can’t have everything, Barty.”

He shook his head and remained silent. So I knew that Lorna Dickson, whoever she was, had won. She might be a cheap little painted doll, she might be a well-groomed woman of the world; whatever she was like, she had won, and Beatrice had lost.

I thought sadly how heavily the dice were loaded against the wife in any triangle of this kind.

The other woman knows that the battle is on. The wife doesn’t. The other woman is on her best behaviour, trying to please, to charm, to flatter, and often, I suppose, to seduce.

The wife, knowing nothing, is behaving like a natural person does: sometimes pleasant and amusing, sometimes dull, critical, or irritable. And silently watching her is her husband, noting her faults, comparing her with the alleged paragon of all the virtues.

I heard Bartels make his point again.

“You see, Beatrice has never been
in love
with me. It’s so different.”

I turned towards him to tell him to be his age, to cease acting like a sentimental youth who has just discovered that love rhymes with dove. But I did not get a chance to tell him that, neither then, nor later, nor ever.

I saw him stiffen slightly, and sit upright, while a look came into his eyes such as I have never seen before on a man’s face, though I’ve seen quite a few fellows who were supposed to be in love.

I will not attempt to describe it, I will merely say that his thin, unimpressive countenance, with its wide mouth and spectacles, was suffused by something nearly akin to beauty.

As he rose to his feet, one forgot his meagre build, or the stupid tuft of hair on the crown of his head, standing up in disarray. One forgot everything except the beauty which sprang from the inner emotion of the man. That emotion, it seemed to me, was devoid of lust, greed, or even self-pity.

It is understandable. Hate can render a beautiful face ugly. The love inside Philip Bartels made his ugly face almost beautiful.

So I knew, without him telling me, that Lorna Dickson had come into the cocktail lounge. I wasn’t expecting her, I was even startled and disconcerted, but I knew she had arrived.

Thus I met Lorna for the first time.

She was dressed, I remember, in a grey costume, but that is all that I do remember about how she was dressed. I was too fascinated by other things to take in much more.

I shall never forget the grace of her movements as she came towards us: the calm but friendly look in her steady, blue-grey eyes as she turned to be introduced to me, the mobility of her face when she smiled, which she did so often, and the laughter-wrinkles at the corner of her eyes.

She was not a pretty little painted doll; she was a mature woman of about thirty-three, gracious and charming, with light brown wavy hair, a slim figure, a small well-shaped head, and a jaw which was rather square, the mouth full but wide.

Above all, the impression I brought away from that lunch was of inner beauty matching that upon Bartels’ face when he saw her come into the cocktail lounge. But whereas the beauty which suffused Bartels was sudden, called to life by the sight of Lorna, the beauty of Lorna, it seemed to me, resided perpetually within her.

Lorna! Dear, sweet, gentle Lorna.

You would willingly have lived out your life in loneliness rather than cause us suffering. That I know. You would gladly have stayed away from us had you known how things would develop.

But you couldn’t know. In your innocence you came and lunched with us. Thereafter, not all your generosity, nor all your unselfishness, could stop the march of events.

It is all finished, the strain and the pain, the struggle and the tears. There is only peace, of a sort, for all of us. Peace, most of the time, but sometimes for me the agony of doubt concerning the crafty manner in which I afterwards acted towards my best friend.

It was over, by several months, when I revisited the château of our youth. It was finished, the climactic point reached and passed. Had I but remembered his words—“Death is of no consequence…it’s not dying that matters, it’s how you die”—then it is possible, just possible, that I might have felt some inner warning, some hidden voice which cried: “Stop! This woman is sacrosanct in the eyes of Philip Bartels.”