Sunflower (2 page)

Essington had taken the photographs, though he did not look at them for more than a second. Nowadays it seemed as if hardly anything concerning personality could hold his attention; he cared only for thick books, for interminable talks about ideas that would go on being true if the human body had no flesh on its bones, if trees were not green in summer, if there were no such thing in the world as sound. It made him terribly difficult to amuse in the times when his brain was tired and he had to rest from work. But he looked down at her, as she sat on the stool at his feet, for quite a long time. When he spoke his china blue eyes were wet. ‘It’s because you’re one of the two or three people in every century, Sunflower, that are more than what they are. You’re supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world—’ ‘Isn’t it funny!’ she had interjected, ‘They never notice that my nose isn’t straight.’ At that he gravely felt her nose all the way from the bridge to the tip, and said he thought that it was straight enough, and told her that, whether she truly was or not, the people liked to think of her as the most beautiful woman in the world; and that they liked too how she had risen to her acclamation out of nothing, for everybody knew that only a month before her famous appearance in ‘Farandole’ she had been serving in a stationer’s shop in Chiswick High Street. Indeed, she contained within herself two of the great legendary figures that man has invented everywhere and in all times: Venus and Cinderella. And they were not—he bade her remember—invented idly. They fed desires that must be fed if man is not to lose heart and die. For Venus promises him that there shall be absolute beauty in this world, that the universe shall bring forth perfection which shall make its imperfection a little thing, lightly to be borne; and Cinderella promises him that this harsh order of things which is life may be only temporary and subject to reversal at any time, so that the mighty may be put down from their seats and those of low degree exalted. These things are not understood by the people, but they are felt by them. The mill-girl in Oldham, the sweet-shop girl in Huddersfield, believing themselves to be like Sybil Fassendyll, obscurely know themselves to be by that resemblance related to some system which proved Oldham and Huddersfield a dream, and the waking a fair one. And their sweethearts, obscurely too but more intensely, because only the most passionate egoist can love himself as one loves others, rejoiced in that conviction. ‘Think of it, Sunflower! There’s a cotton operative in Oldham, a railway clerk in Huddersfield, who feels like a pious Catholic in the Middle Ages who fell in love with a woman who was like some miracle-working Madonna, just because his girl is like you …’

And Essington had been right. This little man, with his shy, flickering, devout smile and the solemn, ritualistic movement of his hands as they turned and turned that spanner, was plainly thinking of the resemblance between his wife and her as proof of some imminent sacredness. It was astonishing that Essington, the brilliant and important Essington, whom only the jealous denied to have the greatest mind in the world, who with an almost vicious fastidiousness desired to know as little as possible of all those minds that were not nearly equal to his, should have known the heart of a stupid, flat-spoken little man who kept a garage in Packbury! It showed the power of love. He understood this lover because he himself loved her. Ecstasy shook her. She wished that they could all four be standing here in this yard within the red-gold walls, a group of kindly, friendly lovers, she, Essington, this little man who had so much in his heart, and his wife whom she conceived as a younger, lovelier sister of her own, with a nose that was quite straight …

There interrupted the happy grazing of her mind one of those sudden, splintering, ripping noises that are apt to break out whenever there are men in overalls. She clapped her hands over her ears and spun round protestingly, because her nerves were so broken that any loud noise made the tears stand in her eyes, and she had so greatly liked the quietness in which she had been standing with the little man. A mechanic was breaking open a large packing-case just inside the garage, with an immense appearance of gusto, and flinging himself upon the crust-coloured boards, tearing off strips of sallow sacking, releasing innumerable shavings to the mercy of the draughts. She marvelled at the way that men did not mind noise, till it struck her that she herself had not minded noise before she was with Essington, and that as a rule single girls could bear what troubles their ears brought them with calmness. ‘They wear one down,’ she muttered, and drooped; for if they wore one down, well, one had to be worn down. But she was diverted from that sad strain of thought by the nature of the object which was being disclosed by the mechanic’s onslaught. It was a perambulator, a new and really prodigious perambulator. Its navy blue body was varnished till it was glossy as water sliding to a weir; its spokes gleamed with the sober but even brightness of the very best japanning, and there were foppishly white rubber tyres; the experienced eye could note that the leather hood was the kind that really washes and does not crack. ‘C-springs, stops, a safety-chain and all!’ she breathed, ‘A really nice one!’ She knew a great deal about prams. It had been part of her duty at the stationer’s shop in Chiswick High Street to take out baby Doris in her pram every afternoon. That one had not had ball-bearings. This one had. Somebody wouldn’t have to break her back pushing the thing when there was bad weather. With that nasty cheap thing the Jenningses had, into which it was a shame to put a pretty little dear like baby Doris, she had often halted in front of baby-carriage shops and gazed enviously at the really nice ones in the windows, and indeed had indulged in dreams of buying the most expensive one on her own account some day, for she had then never doubted but that her future would hold a pram. Oddly enough, as it had turned out, that future was to hold nearly every other kind of manufactured article—telephones, Rolls-Royces, fitted dressing-cases, Paris-to-London aeroplanes, there didn’t seem any limit to what she might buy or use—but never a pram. Yet say what you like, there was something nice about a good pram, about this one, for instance, as the man wheeled it off the floor of its case and on to the concrete, where it stood quivering as Essington’s greyhounds sometimes did, evidently so resilient that it would run nicely over the bumps, so stable that it would not overturn too easily. ‘I don’t say it mightn’t be better finished,’ she pronounced, ‘I don’t suppose it’s one of Hitchings’, but I do say it’s well-built and handy …’

In the midst of these technical musings a wonder, an exciting wonder, struck her. Whose pram was it anyway? Was that why the little man’s wife could not come down and see her? She imagined the girl who was like her sitting waiting upstairs at one of those windows that overlooked the garage, behind those nice clean Nottingham lace curtains. That must be lovely. One would not have to keep on worrying about trying to make oneself cleverer, because one was doing what was recognised as a whole-time job. Everybody in the house, particularly one’s man, would be thinking of one with kindly concern; there would not be that awful feeling of having to keep up to scratch, of having to win approbation that would be coldly withheld if one’s performance was not good enough. One would be able to sit there resting, waiting, obtaining that peaceful entertainment which animals must know out of the accidents of substances near at hand: pressing the paint blisters on the sun-scorched edges of the shutter, putting one’s eye close to the flaw in the pane and watching how it made the red-gold wall and the surmounting spike of lilac waver as if they were deep under an uncoloured, viscous sea. But the poor young thing had still that awful agony to go through. She shuddered, for like people of almost any age, she hated to think of anyone younger than herself in pain; it perpetually seems to us, whether we are twenty or thirty or forty or fifty, that it is only just in the last two or three months that we have learned how harsh this business of life is and armoured ourselves against it, and we cannot bear to think of mere tender youngsters (as we were before the few months) having to face this dreadful knowledge and assume that armour, which is not light. Oh, poor young thing, poor young thing …

Perhaps, however, the baby had come already. But the little man would have told her if it had. No, he need not. He might have kept it to the very last, then it would be mentioned casually, lest the Fates should hear and guess how well things were going with him and his wife and do something to spoil it all. She often used to feel like that when she first lived with Essington. But she did wish the little man would say it out now, because if that pram really did belong to him and not to a neighbour it made it all the lovelier that he was so much in love with his wife, since he must have seen her looking ugly and had to look after her. She must know that before she went back to town. It was something to hang on to, knowing that even if you were not happy other people were. She must say something that would lead up to it, though of course he would not tell her if it had not happened. It was only rich smart people who talked about babies before they were born; she had turned scarlet when she first heard them at it. Pondering what she could say that would help him to tell her if he wanted to and not press him to if he didn’t, she looked into the distance; and met the eyes of four people who were standing beside a small yellow car.

Nice manners they had, staring at a person like that. They might think that though a person was on the stage that wasn’t to say that they liked being treated off the stage as if they were a waxwork. She was always slow of thought, and never slower than when she was forced to suspect that the world was not kind, but the look of them made her apprehensive, for though they were all smiling as they looked at her there was a kind of grease on the surface of their gaze, a kind of scum of squalid feeling …

And at her elbow the mechanic said, ‘Beg pardon, Mr Pantridge, but that party with the yellow Morris-Cowley was asking if Lord Essington lived in the neighbourhood. I’ve never heard of him being round here, have you?’

‘No, not a bit of it,’ said the little man. ‘His place is down Cookham way. Some of us went over from Reading Hospital first time I was wounded. His wife gave us tea. A very nice lady she was. Tell ’em they’re dreaming. What do they want to know for? Got a cousin who does his lordship’s lamps?’ He was annoyed at being interrupted, and immediately went on telling her about his wife’s eldest brother, who had done so well in the war that he got a commission.

Her jaw dropped. She stared at the four, wondering how they could do such a thing. When startling things happened to her she always became a child again at the impact and felt as if she had no previous experience of the sort. For a moment these people seemed to her as prodigious as gnomes and giants; and then noting the cheap, smart make of the women’s clothes, the excessive something about the men’s skirted overcoats, the common look they had of trying to look not better but worse than they really were, a kind of aspirant unpurity, she wearily placed them as members of a type she had encountered hundreds of times before. ‘What we want to know’ cads, they were. One saw them sometimes at the Embassy Club; they did not belong to it, but men who had to be nice to them because of business took them for a treat and they sat about staring at the people, bobbing forward suddenly to ask who they were, and getting pop-eyed if they had asked about anybody who was divorced or kept. A blush began to sweep over her face, her neck, her breasts, which had begun to smart since she realised that they were thinking of her as a sexual being. These men she thought would have liked to buy all the women in the world, but the money hadn’t run to it. These women would have liked to be bought by all the men in the world, but they hadn’t found their way in to the market. So they dreamed beastly dreams of the world as they would have liked it to be, men and women all sticking together like jujubes in a box, and to make them more solidly satisfying they pretended that they were real things that happened to real people. It was they who said that Connie Maddox had had a black baby; who said that Lettie Aylmer, who was straight, had had an affair with the Duke of Victoria, so that when she got engaged to young Lennie Isaacs his people, who minded, being Jews, were horrid to her for quite a long time. And God knew what they had said about her; what they were saying about her at this very minute. In pain, for she was silly and never got used to this sort of thing, she stared across at them to see what they were saying. It would be something new and lying, for the true thing, about Essington, was too old to amuse. They were sniggering together, with pleased moist smiles under noses wrinkled with disgust, like horrid children talking of a nasty secret. There wasn’t any knowing what they might be saying, she said to herself again and again, lest when she stopped she should maybe know what they were saying.

When the little man had paused in his story of how well his wife’s eldest brother had done in the war, she put out her hand and said, ‘I must go. I promised to call back somewhere we passed on the road …’

He was a very nice little man. Though he would plainly have liked the bright presence of the patron saint of his family imagination to be for ever in his yard, he let her go at once. ‘Well, it’s been very kind of you to let me talk to you like this. Eh, my wife will be vexed she couldn’t see you. I wonder … I wonder …’

Ah, he was not going to let her go, after all. But there was evidently something he quite dreadfully wanted.

‘What is it? You were going to say—’

‘I wonder if you’d just wait one second while I get my wife’s photograph. It was taken just after we were married. We thought of sending it to you at the time, it was so like, but we didn’t have the nerve. She would be so pleased if you’d seen it …’

The poor darling. If the girl was waiting upstairs this might help to pass the time for her. She smiled unsteadily. The tears in her eyes were incommoding her. Those awful people would not go away. ‘Of course. I’d love to see it.’

It would be all right if he asked her to come into his house. But he did not. He thought of doing so, she could see, for his eyes went to the green side-door and then back to her, but was checked by some thought. Doubtless there was a tyrannous nurse installed there already who was capturing the house for her fuss and litter of preparation and resented visitors. She gave him a little encouraging smile, as if she quite liked waiting in the yard; and he left her.