The Beautiful Visit (21 page)

‘Well? What of it?’

‘I thought you said it was a bad thing for people to indulge in self-pity.’

‘I never said any such thing. A little straightforward self-pity never did anyone any harm. It’s reasonable and necessary, if you’re to feel anything at all. It’s when
people start eliminating self-pity that they go wrong. They might simply say “this is very bad and I’m unhappy about it,” but in fact they nearly always say “of course
I’m not sorry for myself, but . . .” and then a host of excuses and justifications, if possible vilifying someone else concerned. Does my dogmatic and self-assertive nature strike
you?’ he asked suddenly.

‘I – I don’t know.’ I was caught off my guard.

‘It should. Tonight I am feeling peculiarly defensive. Isn’t it odd? Men will consider deeply before they buy a tie or choose a meal; but when it comes to throwing aside their
purpose in life, possibly life itself, they do not think at all. They consent to being marshalled, controlled, exposed to unimagined shock, mutilation and death, with barely a tremor, and their
reasons for complying, if indeed they have any, would compare most shamefully with their reasons for doing almost anything else. And I am one of them.’

‘But surely you don’t have any choice?’

‘What is that? Ignorance or patriotism? It could easily be both.’

‘I mean, you would feel you had to fight in the end, wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh! Oh, I see. I don’t know. But I like to preserve the fragile illusion of personal freedom. You see how I cheat myself. I haven’t thought beyond that, at all. There
hasn’t been time. So I choose to join the Army before public opinion joins me to it.’

‘And you go tomorrow?’

‘Yes. In the afternoon. Late afternoon,’ he added as though the question and the assurance were painfully familiar.

‘Where do you go?’

‘Can you keep a secret? I go to my family for the night. They live in Norfolk. I have not told Maria. Although a Spaniard she left all her family for that wine importer. She wouldn’t
understand. My father has not recovered from my giving up medicine. I think this decision will go far to reassure him. If I’m killed it would be better for him to think kindly of me. So I
go.’

‘Have you a mother?’

‘No. She died. I have a father, and an aunt who will knit scarves and revel in the potential crisis.’

‘What?’

‘My death,’ he answered impatiently. ‘Oh don’t look so anguished. I may not be killed, and you may all live to be sorry.’

Maria came back. Her basket was stuffed with bread and mushrooms and eggs and she seemed very pleased.

‘Everything has been bought,’ she announced and kicked the door open.

‘Come and see the kitchen,’ said Rupert.

Once there he became very gay. He sat on the small square table and proceeded to admire Maria for all the things she had bought, whilst I sat primly on a chair and watched them. She said she
must peel onions, whereupon he rolled up her sleeves and then changed his mind and peeled them himself. She started to pull her sleeves down again, but he turned round suddenly, the tears from the
onions already on his face, saying in a melodramatic manner, ‘No don’t. I want to remember your arms.’

Immediately Maria burst out crying; he hesitated a second, and then dropping the knife on the draining board, walked over to her, pulled her arm from her face and seated her on the edge of the
table.

‘Maria, I was not serious. You know I was not serious.’

‘I cannot laugh about it. I shall die if you go. It gets worse. I have a terrible pain in my heart about you.’ She looked up at him frightened and imploring. ‘I have never had
that. It won’t go. I think I shall not be able to bear it.’

‘I shall be back soon. They will give me leave in three months.’

‘It is that you go. It is not the time. Don’t go tomorrow. Go the next day. No one will notice one day more.’

‘It is not the time?’ he said, repeating her.

She looked at him speechless and desperate, and for a moment, I, who had sat silent and horrified, could exactly feel her passionate resistance to his reason. It was soon over; he took her hands
and led her out of the room without a word.

He returned alone to finish the onions, and for some time we did not speak. He seemed gloomy and uncommunicative and I was afraid and could think of nothing to say.

‘Can I help you?’ I ventured at last.

‘No. She’ll come back and do the rest. Women do feel like that,’ he added abruptly, as though to reassure himself, ‘only she says it.’

‘Do women feel very differently from men?’

He looked at me and I saw his bewilderment

‘Sometimes. The devil of it is that you never know when. Come and help me wash up the tea, and we’ll discuss your problems again by way of a change.’

So we did. From him I learned that jobs were advertised in newspapers; that the war would probably involve a greater choke of work for women; and that one could live on seven and six a week as
far as food was concerned. Presently Maria returned, to begin cooking pancakes with skill and concentration, as though nothing had happened; only perhaps her eyes looked more beautiful and her
sleeves were rolled down. Rupert explained that I was staying the night. She accepted this quite calmly. They showed me my room, a narrow strip with a bed and pictures stacked against the walls and
space for nothing else. Rupert must be a prolific painter I thought, as I edged my way and started to unpack. The evening cooled. My open window looked out on to another back garden with a studio
at the end of it, and I watched the sun sink behind the chimney pots, which were black against the delicate sky, uneven like ogre’s teeth. I was cold and hungry. It was half past eight.

We finally ate supper in the studio. The pancakes were crisp and thin and filled with mushrooms deliciously spiced.

‘She only cooks pancakes,’ said Rupert fondly.

‘But I make many kinds.’

‘You do indeed. I’m proud of your pancakes.’

‘At home my mother cooked with charcoal. It was much better.

‘With nothing else?’

‘She made a hole – there was a hole,’ she corrected herself, ‘in the ground with flat stones on it and the charcoal underneath. Great care was needed to help the oven
heat. But it was much better.’

‘One day, we’ll go and see,’ said Rupert, and she shot him a brilliant grateful glance.

After dinner, when we had carried our plates back to the kitchen, we drank a thin, sharp, flame-coloured wine. I was very cautious about it, refusing more than one glass. Maria lit candles in
silver branched candlesticks. They were old candles, and had burned unevenly, so that the flames quivered in the air on either side of their silver stems; like someone balancing with outstretched
arms on a rope. Rupert made a drawing of Maria which he threw away before either of us could see it, ‘I don’t really want to draw you,’ he said, and frowned at me, twisting the
charcoal round and round in his fingers.

Draw her,’ ordered Maria. ‘And for a change, I watch.’

‘Oh no you don’t. You sing. You entertain us.’

A deadlock ensued as Maria would not sing. Eventually I was placed primly on a chair, ‘as you were in the kitchen’, with my hands in my lap (a most unromantic position I secretly
considered). Maria spread herself on the floor against the bed with some sewing, saying that she would sing if the spirit moved her, or words to that effect.

Rupert started to draw, then said that the paper was not wide enough, and he must have a board. He ambled about the room, pulling things from shelves and out of drawers; creating further
confusion, alternately swearing and whistling under his breath until he had procured what he needed. I sat all that time tremulously still, my neck beginning to ache with the effort, but not daring
to move lest he should swear at me. Returning to his original position, about four yards away on a low stool, he started again. There was silence except for Maria’s thread pulled through her
material and the occasional squeak of the charcoal,

‘Sing the one about the fishermen,’ he said after a while.

Maria sang in a small pleasant voice. It was obviously a folk song; a gay simple tune, of the type which is sad in spite of its gaiety. The Spanish words made it irresistibly compelling and
attractive.

‘Tell her what it is about,’ said Rupert drawing hard.

‘It is what the women sing when the boats go out on the first day of the season. It is to ask that their nets will be blessed, that they shall safely return, and that good money shall be
made in the season and there shall not be storms.’

‘It asks a good deal,’ said Rupert.

‘It simply asks.’ Maria shrugged her shoulders.

‘Did you like it? You can talk if you want to.’

‘Yes. I should like to hear it again.’

‘
I
am not allowed to talk when I sit,’ said Maria.

‘You’re different. You’re a professional. Besides you move when you talk.’

Maria sulked a little, but most gracefully; and sang again for us, this time a love song about a girl who was renouncing her lover and the world in order to enter a convent as her positon in the
family decreed.

The evening wore away, almost unbearably sweet to me. Maria seemed less unhappy; Rupert calmer and less defensive. He did not talk to Maria as he had with me, I noticed, but accepted her
presence and was satisfied, did not probe or analyse or work himself into a frenzy over his own words. There was a feeling of private achievement about them; as though they were at least partially
contained in each other, and as though this very dependence were a source of joy and peace to them. I was most acutely aware of it, because I was outside and could watch it undisturbed. It was a
very lovely thing to watch.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I never saw the drawing. I don’t know whether Rupert kept it,

He went the next day. I kept the secret of where he was going from Maria, as he later once more implored me to do. It linked me with them, gave me a responsible share in their crisis. We saw him
off at a station, Maria and I, and when the train had disappeared I touched Maria’s arm to go. There were so many tears in her eyes that she could not see, and she swayed a little when I
touched her. All the way home in the train the tears poured down her face. It was I who bought the tickets, shepherded us through the long tunnels, and into the lifts. She did not speak at all. I
do not think she realized that I was there, or where we were going. When we emerged from under ground, I had to ask someone the way to our street. Maria followed me a pace behind. At first I was
anxious that I should lose her, but she seemed docile. I think she regarded me as a link with Rupert; as such I am sure she would have followed me any distance. When we reached the door, I turned
to her for a key, but she shook her head and then stared at the pavement immobile, so I rapped the knocker as I had done just over twenty-four hours before. After much effort, the people above
admitted us. We went back down the passage, through the garden, and into the studio. Maria flung herself on the bed, and after a moment’s hesitation I left her.

There was really nothing I could do: her despair was so evident, I had never seen anyone so openly unhappy. I picked a book at random and retired to my room feeling unutterably depressed. I
missed Rupert quite enough to start imagining Maria’s feelings. I left both the doors open in case she should call me, but the minutes went by and there was no sound. ‘Look after
her,’ he had said in those last self-conscious minutes. ‘I’ll write when I have an address,’ and he had kissed my forehead. Had he known that she would feel like this, I
wondered? Had he known the desolation which would break on her when he had gone? I remembered her few tears in his presence; perhaps he did not know. And now, quite suddenly, I was faced with the
problem of how to look after a girl from another country, whom I barely knew, who was older than myself (I was young enough for that to weigh heavily in my mind), and whose grief was well beyond
the limits of my experience. She will not kill herself, I thought madly; surely she would not do that; but the temptation to creep to the studio door and look at her became overpowering. She lay
precisely as I had left her, face downwards, making no sound.

I went back to my room and lay on my bed (it was the only comfortable thing to do in that narrow and congested closet). I tried to review the situation. I did not really know how much Rupert had
said to Maria about my staying. Perhaps she knew nothing about it and would dislike the idea very much. It was, of course, Rupert’s studio, but it seemed to belong to her, as much, if not
more. She had no alternative. The villa in Lewisham sounded worse than my home. But it was impossible for me to go back after one day and night away. If I went back now I should never again escape.
Tomorrow I would buy a newspaper and find myself a job. When I had found it, I would go home and explain to them. I would not go home for a week; by which time my brothers should have left, leaving
only my mother and sister to persuade. Rupert’s warnings about jobs seemed absurd and irrelevant. He had no conception of how tedious life had been in my home, and therefore his ideas of what
was stimulating were vastly more ambitious than my own. I would allow three days for finding the job, and then, consulting Maria, I would decide about where to live. These decisions were
lighthearted, and based on profound ignorance, but even so, they took some time to achieve.

It was late when I finally reached my conclusions, and there was still no sign or sound of Maria. I looked in the kitchen for food. I found two eggs, some celery, a melon and a small end of
bread. Nothing else. There was coffee, but I was not very sure how to make it. I put everything else on a tray. Maria would want coffee. With great difficulty I boiled a kettle on the oil stove,
with the eggs in it; taking half an hour over the business. The coffee was in a biscuit tin. I measured three teaspoonsful into a jug, and added one for luck, poured on the water and waited. It was
obviously wrong. I added more and more coffee, until the jug was half full of it, and the water slopped over the top turgid with coffee grounds. It was very difficult to prepare anything in other
people’s kitchens I decided, faint with hunger.