Lover's Leap (20 page)

‘I always expect all Philip's friends to be painters,' she said.

Jennifer denied the accusation. ‘All the painting I do,' she said, ‘is painting people's throats. I'm a doctor.'

Meriel and I had finished and it was time to go for our train. I forced myself to say good-bye and not even to look back as I paused at the door for Meriel to pass out.

Meriel, it appeared, had liked them. If it had been Rhoda Gaunt that we had met she would have been full of dark suspicions and conjectures: she would probably have believed that we had met there by secret arrangement. But now she was care-free. Perhaps she felt that there was safety in numbers, two women instead of one; perhaps the fact that she was going away with me for the week-end made the others seem mere shadows by comparison. How little she guessed that all she had of me, there in the railway carriage with her, was the mere outward husk. My heart, my thoughts were clinging to Rose, the sense of her was tingling through me like electricity. My mind was seething with agitation and self-reproach. What would she think, seeing me going away with another woman? Would she think I had forgotten her, was free and happy without her, that I was unfaithful to our … to my love for her? What a tragic, agonizing joy it had been to see her again, a joy as painful as despair. All the feeling that I had thought to be long since dead had awoken at the mere sight of her to a ferment of rapture and misery. My eyes, my thoughts were blind to the carriage in which we sat, to the station which was now slowly sliding past the windows, to Meriel herself, lively and contented in her corner, until she recalled me by a volley of questions and statements.

Who were they? Had I known them long? Was the one that was a doctor a good doctor? She seemed very nice. I had known her longer than the other, she supposed, because the other hardly spoke. But she too seemed nice and was very pretty, in fact quite beautiful. Was she a doctor too? A pianist! Had she ever played on my piano?

‘Yes,' I said, ‘once or twice some time ago,' but recently I had rather lost touch with them both, in fact I hadn't seen them for over a year.

What a pity. Couldn't I ask them to tea so that the beautiful one—what was her name? Bentley? What else? Rose? Rose Bentley, what a lovely name!—so that Rose Bentley should play to us?

What a strange creature Meriel is. They say women have strong intuitions, and yet Meriel suspects me of a secret passion for Rhoda and urges me to renew my friendship with Rose,

Four days later. I thought at first that, after that brief, disturbing glimpse of Rose, I should not be able to help making the week-end miserable for Meriel, but the reverse happened. I think the deep, hidden feelings stirred in me by that meeting must have made me kinder, more forbearing, more compassionate to Meriel, for she was as happy as a lark all the time.

But now, two days after our return, a ridiculous accident has spoilt everything. I was to go to her flat this afternoon. I had been very busy all day and was late in starting, and just as I was going to set out Rhoda turned up. She and I had been commissioned to do a series of coloured drawings for a line edition of Byron's
Don Fuan
and she had brought the proofs. The publisher had sent them to her with an urgent note asking us to return them as quickly as possible, and she had brought them along at once to me so that we might go over them together.

Knowing Meriel, I ought perhaps to have rung her up and warned her that I should be late, but I thought it would be enough if I explained my lateness when I arrived, and Rhoda and I got to work at once.

It turned out to be a longer business than I had expected; but we hadn't been at it more than ten minutes when the telephone bell rang. ‘Meriel, confound it!'
I thought to myself as I went out into the hall to answer. And Meriel it was.

‘Is that you, Phil? Aren't you coming?'

‘Yes, but I'm afraid I shall be late. Have tea: don't wait for me. I'm horribly busy but I'll come as soon as I can.'

I hung up the receiver for fear of argument and went back to work.

‘Sorry if I've interrupted an engagement,' said Rhoda.

‘All right. We must get these things done'; and we settled down to work again.

It seemed as if we hadn't been at it more than five minutes, though no doubt it was really much longer, when the bell rang again. ‘O damn!' I said as I hurried into the hall again. ‘Yes, yes, it's me.'

‘Haven't you started yet?'

‘Yes. I've started. I'm nearly half-way there.'

‘Phil,' Rhoda shouted from the sitting-room, ‘if you like to leave the rest to me …'

‘If you keep on interrupting,' I said to Meriel, ‘I shall never get finished at all. Sit tight and don't worry. Good-bye. Starting soon.'

Rhoda smiled dryly when I rejoined her. ‘You seem to be very much in request, Phil.'

‘Request?' I said hotly. ‘Demand, you mean.'

In another quarter of an hour we had finished and I took a taxi to Powis Square.

I saw at once from Meriel's face when she let me in that all was for the worst. ‘So you've come?' she said in lofty displeasure.

‘I have indeed,' I said, ‘and in a taxi, Meriel, at enormous expense. Isn't that a sufficient testimony…?'

‘Why do you tell me lies?'

‘If you'll mention what lies I tell I'll do my best to explain why I tell them.'

‘Then you confess,' she said sternly, ‘that you do tell me lies?'

‘Not for a moment, Meriel.'

‘You forget, Philip,' she said, like a detective calmly unveiling a criminal, ‘that one can sometimes hear a good deal through a telephone.'

‘You'd better ring up the Postmaster General and tell him so, Meriel,' I said. ‘I'm sure he'll be grateful for the testimonial.'

In our earlier days a frivolous reply of that sort would usually puncture Meriel's solemnity, but this time it infuriated her. ‘There!' she said. ‘I always know you're lying when you say idiotic things like that.'

‘But honestly, Meriel, I don't understand what you're driving at.'

‘What I'm driving at, as you know perfectly well, is that you told me you were working when you really had someone with you, someone who shouted to you, didn't she, when …'

So that was it. I understood now. ‘Yes,' I said, ‘it was Rhoda Gaunt.'

Her eyes glared at me. ‘You actually admit it.'

‘Certainly I do. Wouldn't it be much worse if I didn't? If you had given me time I would have told you that Rhoda and I were correcting proofs. I've told you already of the
Don Fuan
illustrations.'

‘And you choose this afternoon, when you'd promised to come to me, to correct proofs with Rhoda Gaunt.'

‘No, I didn't choose. We neither of us had any choice.'

‘You must think me a great fool, Philip, if you expect me to believe all your stupid little fibs.'

My patience was at an end. ‘If you believe nothing I say, Meriel, there's not the least use my telling you anything. You'll have to muddle it out for yourself. In fact I'll leave you to it.'

I turned my back on her and, before she could stop me, went to the front door, let myself out, and shut it smartly
behind me. As I ran down the stairs I heard it open again and Meriel's voice: ‘Phil! Phil!'

But I didn't stop. And now as usual, now that my anger has cooled down, I feel ashamed, remorseful, utterly soured. Damnation! How painful and degrading these quarrels are. Yet it seems impossible to avoid them: she never gives me a chance.

Four months later. How strange it is that I should have lived all these months so near to Rose and never once have met her from the time of our separation until that unlikely encounter in Waterloo station. And now seven months have passed since then and I have seen nothing of her until yesterday.

Meanwhile Meriel and I have drifted towards our inevitable destination. Our week-end expeditions did not satisfy her for long. Soon the old complaints and accusations began again. I never knew, when I met her, what mood I was going to find her in: all I could be sure of was that it would not for long be a pleasant one. We were getting along so badly last September that I decided to go to Saltdyke for some weeks and work in peace, and when she was being particularly querulous one evening I told her of my decision.

‘To Saltdyke, where you went last year?' she said, looking at me suspiciously.

‘Yes, to work.'

Her face became sullen. ‘You're going to get away from me.'

‘That too,' I replied.

‘Thank you for being truthful at least.'

‘Why should I try to hide the truth? It's obvious, isn't it, that we get on very badly nowadays? When we meet you spend all the time in explaining to me what an unsatisfactory person I am, so I think the best I can do is to relieve you of the unsatisfactory person's presence for a while.'

She smiled bitterly. ‘That will make you more unsatisfactory still.'

‘Well, anyhow I shan't be here to bear the brunt of it.'

‘No, Phil; but I shall. It's all very well for you: you don't care tuppence whether you see me or not.'

‘If I don't, it's your fault, not mine, Meriel. If you spend all the times we're together in whining and complaining and pointing out my shortcomings, is it any wonder that I don't find our meetings particularly pleasant nowadays? What we want, it seems to me, is to see less, not more of each other.'

‘If we saw more of each other I should have nothing to complain of.'

‘O yes you would. You would complain that we didn't see more still. Nothing short of twenty-four hours per diem would satisfy you.'

‘While you think twenty-four hours a week too much. And yet it doesn't seem much in return for a whole life devoted to you.'

‘O nonsense, Meriel. You may think you devote your life to me, but you don't. What you do is to try to force me to devote my life and work and friends and body and soul to you and your whims, and I'm not going to. You'd better make up your mind to that once and for all.'

‘Well,' she said, darkly threatening, ‘I won't be responsible for what happens when you've gone.'

I laughed. ‘Won't you? Then who will? Certainly not I. You're responsible for driving me to take refuge from you, so I'm afraid you compel yourself, willy-nilly, to be responsible for the result.'

Perhaps my resolve to go away and my refusal to be impressed by mysterious threats convinced Meriel that by ill temper she had defeated her own ends. Whatever the cause, her mood changed, and by the end of the evening she was at her best. Then, just before I left her, she nestled up to me and laid her head against my arm.

‘Don't go, Phil,' she murmured. ‘Go where?'

‘To Saltdyke. I'll promise to be very good.'

‘But you can't promise to paint my pictures, my child. I
must
go and get through some solid work.'

‘Then you're not running away from me?'

‘Not if you're nice. If you're nice, I'm going away to work; but if you aren't, I'm going to escape from you and taking the opportunity to do some work at the same time.'

She became querulous again. ‘But Phil, I have a foreboding that something terrible will happen if you go away.'

‘And I, my dear, have a foreboding that something even more terrible will happen if I don't.'

She looked at me sharply. ‘And what is that?'

‘That I shan't get my pictures done in time for the show,' I said mendaciously.

Meriel hovered between laughter and querulousness, I maintained an attitude of light banter, but we were each of us really in deadly earnest, determined at all costs to have our own way. When she realized that she couldn't stop me going she assumed a mood of lofty resentment, and when at last I left her flat she clung to me silently and stubbornly, so that I had to unfasten her fingers and tear myself from her. She fell back tragically into a chair, skilfully pretending I had pushed her and, bowing herself over the arm, burst into sobs. But I was angry and determined not to be drawn, and banging to the door behind me I hurried downstairs, sick with remorse and exasperation.

But the picture of Meriel—poor bewildered, frustrated, incorrigible child—sobbing in her chair as though her heart would break, haunted me; and even though I knew that at least half of it was a fake, a put-up job, it finally broke down my resistance, so that next day I rang her up and told her I wasn't going to Saltdyke after all.

‘Why not?' Her voice sounded sharply inquisitive.

‘Because you don't want me to.'

‘Is that the real, true, and only reason, Phil?'

‘Absolutely. Honour bright.'

‘Thank you, my dear, a thousand times. It's very, very sweet of you.'

Well, I had made her happy for a while and salved my conscience, or rather, I had laid the tiresome ghost that roused my remorse; but involuntarily I exacted my price for submission, for in my heart I bore her a grudge for wantonly trading on my feelings and obstructing my work. I realized wearily that it was the worst policy to give in. I hadn't really done anything to help either of us, in fact all I had done was to encourage Meriel to be more exacting and more unscrupulous than before.

Next time we met I seemed to see a secret triumph behind her gratitude. I resented it and very likely I was short-tempered and unkind in consequence and so helped her to spoil our evening once again. Anyhow, before long we were once more on the worst of terms.

Was it simply cowardice that prevented me from insisting that we should part? Was it a secret aversion from dropping back into celibacy? Or was it that I couldn't bring myself to inflict such cruelty on her, even though I felt certain that in the end it would be kind? Probably it was a mixture of all three that held me in check and prolonged our miserable intimacy. My visits to her had by now become a mere drudgery and when I spent the night at her flat I came away feeling ashamed and disgusted, like a drunkard who has relapsed once more into the vicious habit from which he struggles in vain to free himself. Now, when it was time for me to start from my flat to hers I delayed and dawdled in my studio; I hated every yard of the journey, the sickeningly familiar streets and houses, the turnings that brought me nearer and nearer to my destination; and as I approached her door
my steps grew involuntarily slower and slower. More than once I turned away when I reached it and wandered in a wide circle through the hateful streets and squares, unable to bring myself to ring the bell. And when I did at last go in, I found Meriel all on edge with waiting.