Jerusalem the Golden (17 page)

So that when Gabriel knocked upon her door, she was positively waiting for him. And she knew as soon as she set eyes upon him that he was what she wanted. Her certainty, as she saw him, seemed to be what she had thought to be love: she stood there, looking at him,
and she felt herself move slowly, inch by inch, inevitably, and then with gathering speed, as she fell (and never had the metaphor seemed real to her before), as she fell in love. He was breathtaking: she stood and gaped. He was not tall, not much taller than herself, and his skin was worn, but the shape of his head had the square, solid assurance of extreme symmetry, and although it did not seem possible that anyone so handsome should also be intelligent, it seemed equally impossible that he should not be. He looked like Clelia, there was no denying that he looked like Clelia, and he wore a woollen checked shirt and trousers that were dangerously low on his hips; watching him throughout the evening Clara found it difficult to take her eyes off the shortness of his crotch, and she had to console herself by telling herself that it was clearly intended thus to rivet her attention. She thought that she had never seen anyone so sexy off the cinema screen in her life, and very few on it, and she was amazed that he should be allowed to wander loose around the world; she had always idly assumed that there was some system, some process which selected such people, and removed them safely to some other place, where they were no longer accessible to normal human need, no longer part of the system of chance and meetings, exempt from human imperfections, reserved for their own like only. She had thought that they would live, these heroes and heroines, in some bright celluloid paradise: a paradise from which Gabriel had perhaps fallen, for she might surely never ascend? She had never seen such a person so close, so near; she had seen others, fleetingly, but a mixture of envy and desire had kept her at a distance, she had kept well away from a closer vision of the locked and pearly gates. But Gabriel stood there in front of her, smiling, accessible, full of good will, as mortal as she was mortal, or acknowledging her too as divine. She wondered, as he helped her on with her raincoat, what blessed, superior creature he might have as his wife, and why he had come to fetch her so kindly in the rain.

They did not talk much in the car. He asked her how she had spent the summer, and she said she had done nothing, what had he done, and he said he had been working. She inquired about the nature of his work, feeling that such a question, to a member of such a family,
could not be impertinent, and indeed knowing already, from Clelia, something of the answer; he said that he worked for one of the largest of the independent television companies, and that he had been doing a documentary on the life of Lorca, a subject which would surely interest her, as he knew that she knew Spanish. She did not accept the offered politeness, but asked him, instead, if he enjoyed his work, and he said that he did not like it as much as he had hoped, and that he had to please too many people. She could not see that this would give him much difficulty, though she did not say so, for he had every advantage, every faculty for pleasing, he was Clelia all over again, but lacking even her faint abrasive edge. She could not see that he would arouse in others any oppositions save the oppositions of jealousy.

He aroused in her, sitting by his side in the small estate car, symptoms that she could not mistake. Her flesh stiffened at his nearness; even the skin of her face, the skin of her right cheek fronting him, grew taut from its exposure to his presence. She seemed to feel a sympathetic response, but she told herself that he too, like the rest of his family, must possess an inherited universal sympathy: for what rejections, what repulsions could he ever have received? Surely his every movement, all his life, must have been more than eagerly met: and she sat still and rigid, even a little withdrawn, drawing her legs neatly over to her own side of the car, away from his. In the long pauses in their conversation she stared out of the window at the terraced houses, at the drab shops, at the ornate bridge of the Archway itself, averting her eyes from his too-lovely profile.

When they arrived, Clelia met them in the hall, and stretched out her arms to Clara and embraced her most tenderly, as a long-lost friend, and Clara returned the embrace with equal feeling, amazed and relieved to find that feeling itself could lead quite naturally to such a gesture. She had not been reared upon embraces. She took her place in the rich, diversely lit evening of the drawing room with a sense that if she belonged anywhere it was as much here as to those long and silent evenings in front of the derided, loquacious television, and the Denham parents and Martin greeted her with flattering, particular familiarity, as though they knew her well, as though the
summer had accumulated knowledge between them, instead of estranging them; Candida asked her how she had found her mother, and Martin (no longer, she somehow gathered, resident in the house) asked her whether she had been pleased with her respectably pleasing examination results, and whether or not she thought her sessions in his gallery with Clelia might not have cost her a few marks, to which she said no, that Clelia could have cost her nothing, could have brought her nothing but gain. And Mr Denham himself looked at her with recognition, shook her hand with warmth.

She was, however, somewhat taken aback by the sight of Annunciata, who looked ridiculously like Clelia, in style, in feature, and even in manner; the matter was made worse by the fact that they were wearing the same shirt, though over differently coloured trousers. She resented such similarity, and she also resented, though pleasurably, the sisters’ expansive, mutual admiration. They displayed each other, they encouraged each other; they spoke about their impending, transient, trivial separation with real regret. They put their arms around each other; they laughed, in the same key, at each other’s jokes. Clara had never in her life seen such a vision of sisterly affection: in her part of the world, in her background, sisters were expected to resent and despise each other, at least until marriage and the binding production of children. Her acquaintances in Northam, she thought, would have considered such affection unnatural, and probably perverted, if not wholly insincere, and there was something in herself that could not help but suspect it: and yet at the same time it seemed to absolve a whole area of human relationship, to rescue it, wholesale, from the scruffy ragbag of the tag ends of family bitterness and domestic conflict. And such affection had, surely, its precedents, for were not sisters classically intended to love, and not to despise one another? She thought, unaccountably, of Christina Rossetti’s
Goblin Market
, a poem which she had learned without comprehension but with considerable interest at primary school: she had always been strangely compelled by the passionate and erotic relationship described in the poem, so remote from any of the petty hostilities that she had ever witnessed. Descriptions and displays of passion had always compelled her, but she had considered
this particular manifestation to be a fabrication, a convenient lie. She began to think that literature did not lie, after all; nothing was too strange to be true.

Nevertheless, despite the interest of such a discovery, she did not like the fact of Annunciata. She resented her, she took the liberty of resenting her, on Clelia’s behalf. She did not like to think that Clelia was in any way thinned or dispersed or diluted by such a close resemblance; she wanted her to be unique.

Nor did she like the look of Gabriel’s wife. She had hoped against hope that Gabriel’s wife would be somehow, in some way, a non-contender, but Gabriel’s wife looked capable of contending with anything. She was a thin, tall small-boned girl, with a great deal of very long, thin, flat blonde hair; she looked far too thin to have had, as Clara distinctly remembered, three children. She was pretty, in a pale, neurotic way; her skin had no colour, and she wore no make-up, and her fingers were brown with nicotine. She sat, most precisely, on one end of the large settee, her long legs crossed, and her body twisted from the waist, as she leant on one arm; her angle had a brittle, deliberate elegance, a conscious threat. She smoked incessantly, tapping non-existent ash from the end of her cigarette on to the carpet as she listened; she did not say much, and she listened with an impatient, alien, critical reserve. But what alarmed Clara most of all were her clothes. She was used to the artistically bizarre, and she was tolerably used to the sight, at least, of the expensive, but she had never before been in the same room with so much accumulated fashion. Gabriel’s wife looked as though she came off the front page of
Harper’s
. Everything was intentional, and everything was new. Her shoes were so new that Clara had not even seen debased versions of them in the shops or magazines; nothing but sheer contemporary novelty could explain their extraordinary, unfamiliar shape. Her stockings were of a shade that Clara had never seen in stockings, a strange greyish-yellow, which she took to be the newest colour available. Her skirt was three inches shorter than anyone else’s in the room, and it was made of a curious quilted material which would have made any other woman look fat; her shirt had a strange floppy neckline, that Clara dimly remembered having seen
on a poster for a film at King’s Cross underground station earlier that day. The whole ensemble was extraordinarily effective, and not a little intimidating. Clara wilted, revived a little when it occurred to her that Phillipa Denham might be or once have been a model, and therefore professionally informed, and then wilted once more when it became clear from the conversation that she had never been any such thing. She preferred the way that Clelia and Annunciata looked, she preferred the style of their house, but there was an assurance, a wealth of successful calculation in Gabriel’s wife’s appearance that frightened her. She looked au fait, she looked in touch, she looked knowledgeable; she did not look as though she would relinquish anything very easily.

The conversation turned, finally, after detours, to Gabriel’s career. He seemed dissatisfied, and his parents, despite all their efforts to the contrary, seemed merely to reinforce his dissatisfactions. ‘It’s no use,’ he said, ‘I know quite well what you think of it, you think it’s just an easy life, don’t you? Go on, admit it, you do, don’t you?’

‘Absolute nonsense, Gabriel,’ said Candida Denham. ‘I don’t think anything of the sort. I daresay you work very hard.’

‘I work a damn sight harder than Clelia,’ said Gabriel. ‘Clelia just sits at her desk reading books all day.’

‘The only trouble with it seems to me,’ said Mr Denham, ‘that it’s neither one thing nor the other. You never appear to know whether it’s entertainment or not. Basically.’

‘Talking of entertainments,’ said Gabriel. ‘Matthews was on at me again today. But I said “no”.’

‘I think you’re mad,’ said Clelia. ‘I’d love to see you on the telly.’ And, turning to Clara, she said in her best explanatory manner, ‘Gabriel is engaged in a perpetual flirtation with his boss, who thinks he’s so lovely he ought to be in front of the cameras instead of behind them, or whatever the phrase is. What is the phrase, Gabriel?’

‘Something like that,’ said Gabriel.

‘And Gabriel keeps on saying no,’ said Clelia, ‘because he’s more than a pretty face. Isn’t that right, Gabriel?’

‘What do they want you to do, in front of the cameras?’ asked Clara.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Gabriel. ‘Interview people about things, I suppose.’

‘You’d be marvellous at it,’ said Clelia. ‘Don’t you think he’d be marvellous at it, Nancy?’

‘Absolutely marvellous,’ said Annunciata. ‘Absolutely made for it. Honestly, Gabriel, you can’t go on hiding your light under a bushel for ever. You must let the world see you. How can you deny them?’

‘Why don’t you want to do it?’ said Clara.

‘It doesn’t seem a sensible idea,’ said Gabriel, ‘because I am quite clever, too. And I’d rather think than talk.’

‘The trouble is,’ said Clelia, ‘that Gabriel’s boss is passionately in love with him, isn’t he, Gabriel, he thinks he’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and he never lets Gabriel go away anywhere to do anything exciting because he wants to keep an eye on him.’

‘Gabriel thinks it’s vulgar,’ said Annunciata, ‘to let people stare at him.’

‘I don’t care who stares at me,’ said Gabriel. ‘I quite like being stared at. But one has to think ahead. One has to think about all those children. And people might get tired of staring at me. Even Matthews might get tired of staring at me. And then where would we be?’

‘Nobody could
ever
get tired of staring at you,’ said Annunciata. ‘One would as soon get tired of staring at Marlon Brando. You’d be made, you’d be a millionaire in a year or two, you could send all your children to Eton. You just daren’t give in, that’s all, you think it’s a wicked seduction, you think you ought to work for your money. It’s the effect of Magnus, probably. You probably think you ought to work as hard as Magnus. Or Papa. But there’s no need, honestly, there’s no need. You couldn’t go wrong. People would stare at you for ever. I bet you never get tired of staring at him, do you, Phillipa?’

And Phillipa, tapping restlessly at her next unlit cigarette, looked up and stared at them all, and smiled slowly, and said, ‘No, never.’ And there the conversation died.

Gabriel and Phillipa drove Clara home, when she said that it was time for her to go; they said that it was on their way, for they lived in Islington, and she thought that Phillipa was glad of an excuse to
leave. Clara sat in the front again, as the car had no back doors. She thought, sitting next to him once more, of how beautifully his name reflected his ambivalent nature: she had always assumed that Gabriel was a girl’s name, until enlightened by Thomas Hardy, just as she had always as a child assumed that angels were ladies. So beautiful, and with such long hair, what other could they be? And Gabriel, she felt, was drawn in more ways than one: she felt his nature, uncircumscribed, rich, perpetually blessed by the possibility of choice. She was sure that he attracted men and women equally, and what she had heard of his flirtation with the television powers merely confirmed her view that life was to him a perpetual invitation. She wondered what parts of it he chose, graciously, to accept. The revelation of the fact of homosexuality had come to her comparatively late in life, for she was sixteen before Walter Ash helpfully though not entirely accurately pieced together for her the hints and suspicions that she had hitherto received: she remembered clearly the initial shock, and the immediate, instantaneous recovery. For the notion, once the shock was over, attracted her; she liked the thought that such strange things could be, she liked any promise of the eternal devious possibilities of the human passions. She liked areas of doubt. Houses were not houses, gardens were not gardens: plants grew along picture rails, stone tables stood in the garden, and Gabriel with his three children was much loved by a man called (and how shortly, with what disrespectful honour) Matthews. How infinitely preferable was such a world to the world where Walter Ash had grabbed her, sternly, singlemindedly, with undeflecting simplicity of purpose, amongst the buttercups.