Lover's Leap (21 page)

The day came at last, after I had wandered in a wider circle than ever, when I couldn't bring myself to return to her door and, almost without being conscious of the decision, made my way instead to where the bus stopped that took me home.

The sun was shining and, as I sat on the top of the bus, a sweet, cool air blew refreshingly on my face. I took off my hat and gave myself up to watching the houses stream past me. My mind was empty of everything but a dull, gnawing resentment and a growing sense of relief that Meriel's flat was behind me and receding and diminishing at every moment. And there was one thing besides, something that lurked darkly behind those other feelings, the small, disturbing menace of the unknown result of what I had done. For I was afraid of Meriel, afraid of the grown-up child which Etherton had said was such an unaccountable and formidable animal. What would she do? To what mad retaliation would this provoke her? I had no plan when I turned away from her door and came home, no determination never to return, to break with her for good and all. I had turned away simply because I was too sick and tired to face another visit at that particular moment.

I left the bus at Oxford Circus and began to walk home along Oxford Street; then turned north up Tottenham Court Road, then east into Bedford Square. When I reached its north-east corner I crossed the road.

Was it a sudden memory that made me glance back before continuing on my way to Russell Square? I was not conscious of the memory until the moment when it became reality, the moment when I saw Rose coming
towards me with her music-case in her hand as she had done that afternoon over two years ago at the beginning of our friendship. And just as she had done then, so now she raised her head, saw me and smiled.

‘You're coming back from your music lesson,' I said.

‘Quite right, and going home to tea.'

‘Might I … would you mind if I walked with you?'

‘Do, Philip,' she said, and we walked together towards her home.

‘Isn't it extraordinary,' I said to her, ‘that you've gone on living where you live and I've gone on living where I live and we've only met twice in more than two years?'

But as we walked along together it seemed to me that those years had fallen out of time and we were back again at the first stage of our friendship. Only too soon we reached her door. But as I prepared to leave her she said: ‘Won't you come in and have tea, Philip? It's so nice to see you again.'

I followed her up the stairs in a dream and once again stood in the familiar hall, entered the bright, familiar sitting-room. I couldn't believe it, I couldn't grasp its reality; it was too miraculous. The tea-table was waiting in its usual place; the blue cups and saucers, the silver teapot were there, miraculously preserved from the destruction of the world in which I had once known them. There was only one cup on the tray: Jennifer, Rose explained, was nowadays busy till dinner-time. And then the door opened and Martha, risen from the tomb, large, grim and formidable as usual, came in with the tea. I was immensely flattered when the stern mask of clay creased into a smile at the sight of me.

Rose asked me about my work and we sat talking as we used to talk, opposite the picture I had painted for her. I had almost forgotten what it was like, and it seemed to me now, as I examined it, that it had a certain free, lyrical quality which, whatever I had gained since, I had
lost nowadays. Then I let my eyes wander about that room whose charming colours had always seemed to me a reflexion of Rose herself. How comforting and healing it was, after all the worry and exasperation of the last hour and all these last months, to sit there with Rose, to see her again not with the dull, frustrated vision of the mind's eye, but in her living and moving beauty; to hear the living tones of her voice which, except for those brief, thwarted moments in Waterloo station, had been silent for me for over two years. How little I thought, when I set out for Meriel's flat, that I should soon be sitting not with Meriel, but, as if by a miracle, with Rose in Rose's flat.

The thought of Meriel again pricked my mind with a little sting of vague menace, and with that came the desire to tell Rose the whole story. It was not that I wanted her advice or help: it was simply that I wanted her to know, so that I should have kept nothing from her. And so I told her that Meriel Filmer, the woman with whom she and Jennifer had met me at Waterloo station, was my mistress and I described the deadlock to which we had come and what had happened this afternoon.

‘It's a wretched business, Rose,' I said. ‘It seems that as soon as love enters into the bond between two people, it begins at once to set them at cross-purposes. Meriel, by dint of trying to make me love her more and more, has brought me to the point of … well, if I were honest I should say, of hating her.'

‘But how do you mean,' said Rose, ‘that she tried to make you love her more? Is there any way of making people love you? Love is a matter of giving, not of claiming.' She spoke as if she were stating an obvious fact.

‘That's perfectly true, Rose,' I said; ‘and I have only recently come to realize it. Meriel has taught me that. In fact the truth is, I believe, that she doesn't really love me any more than I love her. But something makes her hold
on to me, a sort of obsession for which, unfortunately for me, she has selected me as the object. I sometimes think that if I hadn't turned up at the particular moment when we first met, almost anyone else would have answered her purpose as well.'

‘But you loved her at first, Philip?'

‘No, not at first; though afterwards I came to love her in a fashion. At first I was merely flattered by her infatuation, and being in an idle and reckless mood at the time I gave in to it. I don't mean I didn't like her: on the contrary, I found her very attractive and amusing. And so she is, at her best.'

‘I'm sure she is,' said Rose.

‘Of course I'm the one who is to blame,' I went on. ‘I ought never to have given in to her. I thought, you see, that it was possible for two people, with a certain amount of care—by treating the thing, I mean, almost as a work of art; by exercising all sorts of discretion and consideration and co-operation and intelligence; in fact, by being highly conscious and philosophical about it—to have a very happy and successful love affair. Do you think that very cold-blooded, Rose?'

‘Not in the least. On the contrary, I think that is necessary in every kind of love; in marriage too, I mean.'

‘The trouble was, you see, that I never, even after we …'

‘After you began living together?' said Rose.

‘Just so. Even after we began living together, I never loved her as … what shall I say? … as furiously as she loved me. If I had, I suppose I should have been ready to hand myself over, body and soul; and that, no doubt, would have satisfied her. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't sacrifice my independence. I was determined still to call my soul my own. That was where I fell short.'

‘Fell short? Why do you call it falling short, Philip? It was just the opposite. It seems to me a horrible thing
that anyone should try to surrender his individuality, give himself away, body and soul. Besides, it can't be done. All that happens, if one tries, is that one empties oneself and becomes a mere wax doll with nothing, not even sawdust, inside. There's nothing left, after that, for the other to love. After all, what you love in anyone is his individuality, his personality, and if he surrenders that, he actually changes; he ceases to be the person you loved.'

‘That's perfectly true,' I said. ‘Meriel has changed. She's no longer, for me, the same charming, cheerful person she used to be.'

‘It seems to me,' Rose went on, ‘that, so far from surrendering his individuality, what a lover ought to do is to keep it bright and keen and at its best, to make it …'

‘A temple worthy of the Holy Ghost.'

Her face lit up with a sudden smile. ‘Yes, Philip,' she said.

‘All the same, the lover must surely give, in a sense?'

‘O certainly. Love is a continual giving, isn't it; a free gift without thought of return.'

‘Then what about the recipient? Must she not give too?'

‘Surely if she can give, she does give?'

‘And if she can't, she mustn't pretend to.'

‘Yes, Philip, that's the point. It's pretending, even when it's done from the kindest motives, that sets everything at cross-purposes.'

‘And in the end there comes a point, the point I have reached with Meriel, when pretence ceases to be possible any longer. What a wise person you are, Rose. Where did you get all your wisdom?'

She glanced at me with raised eyebrows, as if surprised. Then a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. ‘From books, perhaps,' she said.

When I left her I asked her if she would sometimes come to see me. She agreed willingly, but just as I was
going to add a specific invitation I checked myself. I must not be too importunate. I must send her a note, give her a chance to refuse if she wanted to refuse.

‘I'm going home, to Downchurch, to-morrow for a month,' she said; ‘but when I get back I'll ring you up.'

I was so steeped in my new-found happiness that the news of her going away hardly disturbed it.

Philip has just gone. how delightful and how painful it is to have found him again, delightful to be friends once more and painful to know that we can never be more, because he no longer needs me. At first, as we sat and talked over tea just now, he seemed to me quite unchanged, the same, I mean as he was in the first happy months of our friendship. But he isn't, as I soon discovered. He has matured, gained possession of himself as he would never have done if we hadn't parted. I saw it in a hundred ways. No, he has no need of me now, nor, for the present, of any other woman. In fact he has had an overdose of us, poor boy. But in a year or two he will meet a third, and with her, thanks to Meriel and me, he will be happy.

How astonishing it was to hear him pouring out, in his account of himself and Meriel, an exact account of himself and me. Every phrase he uttered about Meriel I have said to myself about him during the last two years. Write Rose for Philip and Philip for Meriel, and the story could be applied to us, him and me, without altering a single word. And yet, though he has come to know so much, I don't think he yet sees the connection. Ought I to point it out to him, turn over the switch, so to speak, and flood his mind with sudden illumination? Might not that be of enormous help to him? I don't know. It may be that connections such as that, provided from outside, are dangerous, that it is better for each of us to achieve his own illumination.

Two and a half years ago we were both ignorant and hopelessly bewildered. To part was the only thing to do, yet how often have I repented, when the thought of what I inflicted on him has become too painful to face. I did it, in my ignorance, so clumsily, like a bad surgeon making a barbarous muddle of an operation. The memory of his misery during those last days has haunted me all this time,
filling me with remorse. Over and over again his face and his attitude, as he stood beside the door there and offered, poor boy, to set me free, returned to me so vividly that I wept again as bitterly as I did that evening after he had gone. At the moment I hadn't the courage, seeing him standing there so forlorn, to accept the freedom he offered, and so I cruelly raised his hopes by refusing it, and then, realizing the fatal mistake I had made, wrecked them next day by the letter I wrote. How inhumanly I treated him. But I didn't know what to do. One has to be very wise to be able to control such a painful and complicated situation, and I wasn't wise; I was ignorant and bewildered almost as much as he was, and so, unintentionally, I made the ordeal worse for both of us.

In the months after we had parted I gradually forgot the change in him that had so quickly undermined our happiness, and remembered only the real Philip, with his charming, affectionate, schoolboyish earnestness, his bright intelligence, his gaiety; and recalling that, I felt more and more that my behaviour to him was unforgivable.

But now, much more than ever, I realize how fortunate it was for both of us that we parted. If we had married then we should have bound each other inescapably to our immaturity. Each of us would have been hopelessly and permanently maimed. For myself, I feel that in this year or two of retrospection in which I have pondered over and over again every detail of our little disaster, I have gathered a whole lifetime of wisdom. And it has been the same with Philip: he too has gathered wisdom from the lamentable cross-purposes in which he became involved with me and that poor little woman. In our different ways we both made him suffer; we opened his eyes through suffering, and now he has recovered, recovered from both of us. He is free from us both and from his old self, ready for our successor.

Was it offended pride that gave me that sharp pang of
jealousy at our meeting in Waterloo station? I don't know: but I do know that the jealousy was not personal; I felt no hostility against her or against Philip either. Philip and I hardly spoke. It was like ghost facing ghost with an impassable barrier between us.

My heart ached. Afterwards I thought of writing to him, not to suggest another meeting but just to assure him of my goodwill, but I decided in the end that it was better not to. I had no business, I realized, to intrude. A letter from me could do little else but disturb dead passions, unsettle him and perhaps injure her. How glad I am now that I didn't write. If I had done so, I might now be haunted by the belief that I was in part responsible for breaking up their friendship. And yet what a consolation it would have been to me to put to rest the sense of frustration and estrangement which that meeting had served to increase. But all that is ended now. We are friends again, though it is too late, with him, for more than friendship. I realize that.