Nuns and Soldiers (43 page)

However Gertrude’s feeling of return to the natural world of her dear friends did not last her long. Tim had sown within her some special seed of discontent. She could not be as she once was. Tim had opened a vista of a kind of pleasure, a vista of
youth
, which was new to her. He had been a wonderful
foreigner
in her life. And passion tormented her, she could not have expected or imagined such a violent revival of physical passion. She did the sensible things which she had planned, she restored her existence to its old rational patterns. She invited
les cousins et les tantes
and they seemed as usual, throning her in their esteem, loving, merry, unsurprised and blessedly familiar. Yet the things which she had told herself she so much needed were not enough for her and soon seemed empty. She had felt unable to go on without the approval of the Count and Anne. The Count’s approval, now that she had it back, seemed less than totally essential. And about Anne she had, especially after Anne had refused to return to the flat, larger views. She and Anne would always be riding together in that indestructible chariot. Only since it was so indestructible there was perhaps no need to let it run over her dreams. The fact was that she still wanted, and went on wanting, that slim young blue-eyed redhead, and nothing else in the world would do.

The pattern of Tim’s adventures was similar but different. He stayed two days with Daisy, during which time they were continually drunk. Then they began to quarrel as usual. Daisy’s room became intolerable to him. It was desperately hot and stuffy (the hot weather was continuing) and smelt of sweaty clothes and cheap wine. Tim had not the heart to clean or tidy. Finally he left saying he was returning to the studio (which he didn’t have to leave after all) and that he would see Daisy in the Prince of Denmark. He did not go back to the studio. He went to stay in a cheap hotel in Praed Street (not very far in fact from where Anne was staying, only they never met). Staying in the hotel, he had money for once, gave him a crazy detached anonymous feeling which seemed at first to soothe his grief. But soon the idleness and homelessness began to make him feel blackly miserable and mad. He wandered about London and drank in pubs. In the evenings he went to the Prince of Denmark and sat with Daisy and got drunk. Daisy made jokes and cursed the world. She seemed to be talking to herself, uninterested in whether Tim was there or not. Jimmy Roland joined them on two evenings. On the second evening Tim’s old flame Nancy, Jimmy’s sister, turned up and was insulted by Daisy. Then Jimmy disappeared to Paris on art business taking Nancy and Piglet with him.

Both Tim and Gertrude were now looking for each other, only neither could quite acknowledge that this was what was happening. Gertrude was almost ready to say to herself: I have tested the craving and it has survived so why not have what I want? As they both kept returning compulsively to places where they had been together they were likely to meet. Once they visited the same pub in Chiswick on the same day but at different times. Chance could have ordained a prolonged separation however. What they would
then
have done, they often discussed later, always concluding that they would soon have broken down and communicated by the letters or telephone calls or abject knockings on doors which they were always rehearsing in their minds. As it was their search did not last unendurably long. They met finally in the British Museum, when Tim found Gertrude one morning sitting on a seat near the Rosetta Stone.

The joy of that meeting was, for both, a final proof. In a second all the black misery, the anxiety, the fear vanished as at a celestial trumpet call. The sad old world was folded up, a golden heaven unrolled spotty with suns and stars. There was no need of words. They took each other’s hands, unaware of people passing, and were indeed perhaps invisible in the curious and majestic darkness which pervades this part of the museum and perhaps emanates from the Egyptian antiquities. They caressed each other’s hands and wrists, and looked into each other’s eyes.

Gertrude’s final difficulty, as she put it to herself, had now nothing to do with Anne or the Count or with what would be thought by
les cousins et les tantes.
It had to do with Guy. She found that her relation with Guy so far from having ceased or been frozen or consigned to memory was alive and changing. Her feelings now about the trio, Tim, Guy and herself, were quite different from what they had been in France and different from what they had been on her return to Ebury Street and different again from what they had been when she told Tim that it was all ‘impossible’. On the last occasion she had felt quite simply accused by Guy’s bitter shade. Guy himself had said, though he had said it to comfort her, that ‘what he would have wished her to do’ would still make sense after he was dead. He had said he wanted her to be happy, and had spoken of marriage and the Count. Gertrude had worked it out that whether or not Guy had commended the Count so as to protect her from Manfred, and whether or not he had really wanted her to marry the Count or to marry at all, he certainly ‘would not have wished’ her to marry Tim! This thought was not a direct cause of her rejection of Tim, it appeared rather as a strong spontaneous element in the state of mind which pictured Tim as ‘impossible’, and was part of her sense that she was falling in love with Guy all over again.

Now with Tim lost and found Gertrude had changed again. She felt that she had reached a position whence she could judge the previous changes and understand them. Her strange love for absent Guy had not diminished, it had even perhaps increased, but it was purged of much of the painful anxiety and bitter speculation which had made it earlier almost like a hostile calculating love, a love relation in which he was angry and she resentfully compliant. There had been, she felt, a kind of madness in that relation, it was almost like a haunting. Now she felt more gently and naturally separated from Guy, more able to look towards him quietly and tenderly; and she rested in the certainty that her connection with him would remain alive and subject to change as all living things are, as long as she herself existed. It was not that she felt that she now carried Guy in her or with her or ‘lived’ him. They were separated. But it was now as if she said to him across that space: I love you, put up with me, it’s just me, I have to go on living and making decisions without you, and I expect I shall do all sorts of things which you think are stupid, but that’s how it is. And Gertrude felt the pain of her loss now as a purer cleaner pain, like a cleaned and disinfected wound.

After a while she was even able to talk about some of this to Tim, and about how her mourning had to go on inside her marriage. She was not worried any more about the ‘time scheme’, or about what in this connection ‘the others’ would think. Guy had died in December, Gertrude was to wed in July, with mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage. Well, so be it. Guy had often said to her that time was unreal. The question of time-lapse now seemed to her superficial and mechanical, something subject to her own judgement upon her own history, her own sense of what was proper and what was real. She no longer anxiously reckoned the weeks and the months of her widowhood. She would decide what to do about Tim in the light of her relation with Guy, and about Guy in the light of her relation with Tim. Love itself would here be her light. These calm thoughts helped Gertrude not to worry too obsessively (though she did worry) about what Guy’s family thought of her or about how madly their tongues were wagging. They were of course, to her, infinitely polite, considerate, intelligent, amiable. She knew that among themselves they would be talking of nothing else, and she imagined vaguely, not in detail, the degrees of shock, amazement, malice and moral disapproval which would spice these conversations which they would all enjoy so much. Positive encouragement had come to her from Gerald (who seemed genuinely fond of Tim), Moses Greenberg (who adopted a fatherly role) and rather surprisingly from Mrs Mount who went out of her way to be pleasant. Manfred of course behaved perfectly, but Gertrude had, as usual, little idea of what he was thinking. (It appeared that his absence on the wedding day was unavoidable. There had been rather short notice of the event.) Gertrude was not, at present at any rate, too worried about them. Perhaps she had been a cause of scandal. But, in this quarter, her sense of duty did not torment and puzzle her.

Anne and the Count, those two ‘noble souls’ as Gertrude thought of them, were another matter. Tim and Gertrude had ‘lain low’ during the fairly brief interval between their reunion and the amazing announcement. They lived at Ebury Street, but without their previous obsession with secrecy. They said nothing, but anyone might have seen them together. Gertrude once more feigned to be ‘probably’ away, at least she said this to the Count and Anne (the others did not matter) without knowing whether they believed her, and a little hoping that they might not. It would perhaps be better, now, if they were to work it out for themselves. Just before she told ‘the family’ Gertrude wrote brief affectionate letters to them both telling them of her intention to marry. Of course they congratulated her, and the Count wrote a warm letter to Tim. Gertrude invited them to drinks with Moses, Manfred, Gerald, Victor and Mrs Mount, and they both came and the little party even achieved a plausible appearance of merriment. Tim seemed happy after the party, he said ‘they’ve accepted us.’ Gertrude was not so sure. She talked a little to Tim about the Count. Tim had been vaguely aware that the Count cared for Gertrude, but he had never known how much, and Gertrude did not now inform him. Anne’s behaviour was impressive. As soon as Gertrude told Anne that she was definitely going to marry Tim, Anne expressed no more opposition and whole-heartedly set about being pleased with the situation. The Count could not be pleased, doubtless could not even try to be. He behaved well, but was, though in general very cordial (it was now a point of honour to accept her invitations), a little remote and aloof. Gertrude measured in detail these movements of detachment and retreat. Now that she was determined to marry Tim she did not feel quite the same anguish about losing the Count’s good opinion which she had felt earlier when her liaison had seemed, even to her, like a messy doomed ‘affair’. But she guessed how much he was suffering. There were rare moments when his eyes could not resist the quick flicker of pain. And she thought to herself, very sadly, well, I have lost the Count, I suppose. He will slowly recede and go away. He cannot do otherwise. I can’t expect to have everything, can I.

During this period Tim gave himself over to a sort of orgy of pleasure. He entered a time of festival from which anxiety was to be banished. He did this the more conscientiously as he felt that his enthusiasm must carry Gertrude who had her own burdens of sadness. Not that he doubted, this time round, her whole-hearted assent to their love. But he knew, because she told him, of her thoughts about Guy, and, because he guessed, of her worries about Anne and the Count. As a part of the festivities, Tim attempted during this time to change his persona, to make himself look different, younger, more picturesque. He trimmed his hair carefully and washed it more often. He shaved his barley-field beard down to invisible pin-points, but developed curly side whiskers. He still had his ‘caretaker’s salary’ to spend (he and Gertrude laughed about that) and dressed himself up like an artist in an opera with floppy coloured shirts and subtly contrasting cravats. He did his best at least to amuse Gertrude’s friends. He played the painter heartily for their benefit, and hoped that, after the first shock, they found the act intelligible and reassuring.

Of course Tim could not really banish care. He thought about Daisy, though not obsessively. He thought about her at intervals for certain periods of time and then stopped thinking. He worked out certain things which would have to be done and which would be done, and then, for the moment, ceased to fret. He felt a deep sad tenderness about Daisy but no desire to see her. He felt that she was receding from him. In a certain positive way he was glad to have got away from her, it was something which, in a way, he had long wanted to do, but which without Gertrude’s help he could not have done. He welcomed and cherished this thought. He made certain good resolutions, one of which was that he would tell Gertrude all about Daisy, but not yet. He wondered whether he ought not to tell her at once, but decided on reflection not to. The revelation would hurt her, and she was suffering at present enough pain on his behalf. Moreover to explain Daisy would not be easy, Gertrude might very well misunderstand. Supposing, through some silly impulse of frankness, he were now to lose Gertrude after having so miraculously found her again? To risk this would be a gross ingratitude to the gods. Tim did not exactly put it so to himself, but he really needed time to rethink his relation with Daisy and remove it to a position of comparative unimportance in his autobiography. If only he had not run back to Daisy after Gertrude’s ‘rejection’, if only he had
then
had more faith in their love, this rewriting of his history would now be considerably easier, he would be much nearer to being ‘in the clear’! He must wait. Later, in the midst of a fortified and perfected married love, he could tell this tale less painfully and more safely. And by then it really would be something that belonged to the far past.

With this settled in his mind, Tim planned the sad necessary steps of the severance. He had of course ceased to appear at the Prince of Denmark. He sent Daisy a short letter saying that he was again with Gertrude and would marry her. He had composed a longer letter with penitential paragraphs, but he tore this up. Daisy’s apt gibes occurred to him as his own thoughts. There was no point in ‘saying sorry’. The facts spoke clearly enough. It would be an insult to Daisy to surround them with the vaguely self-justifying emotional rubble of his mind. His mind was indeed full of rubble. He had a very long habit of loving Daisy, and among the shifting mental debris there was an odd idea; suppose he were to tell Gertrude about Daisy and say that he could not altogether give Daisy up but needed to continue to see her as a dear friend? Suppose he were to assume confidently that Gertrude would understand? He entertained this idea as a soothing compromise but of course recognized it as nonsense. It would shock Gertrude, and Daisy would spit upon it. He was, in the midst of his happiness, so complex and versatile is the human mind, thoroughly unhappy at times about Daisy. He did not expect her to reply to his letter, and she did not. Was she waiting for Gertrude to be finished and for Tim to return? Or had she finally consigned Tim to the devil? Should he write again, explain more fully? Every letter was a new bond. Yet he must, he felt, have
some
sign of dismissal from Daisy, some indication that she knew, that she had taken it all in. He could not bear her not to know. Suppose the first letter had gone astray? There were mad lodgers in Daisy’s house who might steal letters. He really did need, for his peace of mind, her forgiveness, but for this he could not formally ask. Daisy’s forgiveness in any case would have its characteristic expression. At last, and after he was married Tim sent a letter containing a stamped envelope addressed to the studio, with a blank card inside it. His letter said,
My dear, I am married, Pardon me and say good-bye.
The envelope came back. Daisy had written
Fuck off
on the card. This was his pardon and he was deeply grateful for it. He recalled Daisy’s saying that without him she would pull herself together and
do
something. He hoped and half believed that this was true, and gradually he began to worry less about her.