The Thinking Reed (41 page)

It was pleasant to sit beside this easy-tempered man while he spun the speed out of his automobile like a silk thread. She began to sing softly to herself. A lorry held them up, and they waited a few moments outside an absurd house, built perhaps seventy or eighty years ago, when a Swiss chalet was considered a romantic object. Its garden was precise yet rank, too thickly crowded with trees and bushes and plants, though well tended. The wistaria which covered the balconies had been neatly pruned, but by somebody who liked it to grow in a thick mat, even though it kept the light from the windows it overhung; and the front door and jalousies had been painted a dark malachite green, a colour too portentous for such domestic use. On the steps leading up to the house a woman stood, dressed in a full-skirted grey silk dress, older than her age, and carrying an old-fashioned parasol, and gave orders with a slightly pompous gesture of her ringed hand to a gardener who looked excessively rural, like a servant one might expect to find in some ancient but poverty-stricken château in the Auvergne, who really might have been asked to smarten up considering he was so near Paris. If some chance led one to live in that house as it was, with the same people inhabiting it, one’s whole destiny would be changed, so established was its presiding spirit of stately, voluntary stupidity, of proud self-confinement within minute picturesque limits. She laughed to think what a romantic idiot one would be. But one would have an entirely different destiny if one crossed the road and went to live in the small pink house opposite, which the house agents would have described as
villa coquette.
There a pretty housemaid stood on a balcony crowded with geraniums, the wind blowing through her fair hair, and struck a birdcage with her forefinger to make the canaries sing. That was all that any woman would ever be able to do in that house, to stand on the balcony and let the wind blow through her hair and make the canaries sing. In fact a different destiny waited for one in every house in the world. One had only to seize one’s opportunity to leave the wrong house. One had only to wait for the opportunity that would lead to the right house. Life could not be as simple as that, but the charming quality of the morning made her believe that it was.

But she felt that she was neglecting Alan in her private satisfactions and must make conversation with him. She found herself asking, “What is your house like?”

“You will see in a minute,” he answered, “though it won’t be looking its best as it is going to rain any minute now. That’s a pity because I want you to like it, since I hope to live there all my life.”

“All your life!” she exclaimed. “I had no idea this was such a serious enterprise, I thought it was probably some place you had taken for the summer.”

“No,” he said. “It’s more than that.” His voice grew grave, and that slight sickness came over her which she always felt when a doctor said he must give her a hypodermic injection, or when a friend announced an intention to admit her to some special intimacy. But that passed immediately; she liked him very much. She listened attentively as he told her that he had bought this house three years before, when he had quarrelled with his family in England and decided to live in France, and that he had chosen this particular house for reasons which he would explain when they arrived there.

“But what other reason need you have had for buying this house,” she asked, as she stepped out of the automobile, “than that it is one of the nicest houses in the world?”

“If I were a Spaniard or a Chinee,” he said, “I would just be being polite and would not really mean it when I said that it was yours if you wanted it.”

She took off her hat and walked up and down in front of the house, looking at the good weathered stone, the wide windows, the broad-browed gables. The place had been built in the late seventeenth century, to be a little grander than a farm; but it had still the essential character of a farm, the hardy roughness of sacking, the useful simplicity of a preserving pan, the tested adaptability to human needs of the handles to a plough. The grandeur lay in nothing material, but was an emanation from the minds of the builders, who had worked in a calm that had permitted them to choose out of all possible proportions those which would make a house built on this plot of ground, of these materials, most spacious and most lasting, and would show its qualities to the eye, so that those within it would feel uncongested and unhurried and would begin at leisure plans not to be accomplished under a generation or two. She stood smoothing her hair and smiling through narrowed eyes at the façade, but she was infinitely and unreasonably troubled by the perfection of the place, by its exact correspondence to her ideal. She wished that this had been a house belonging to strangers which they had chanced to see as they drove by on their way to lunch at an inn that would mean nothing to them. For so long as she could, she lingered in the garden, exclaiming at the beauty of the rich and sober stonework, of the solid walnut door, of the old tamarisk trees which half hid the mossed stone tiles of the outhouses with the dry green foam of their foliage, the dry flushed foam of their flowers. But she saw a servant watching her from a kitchen window, a plain woman with a face as hardy and simple and serviceable as the house, whose tired yet clear eyes gave the visitor the benign range of her attention while her hands continued tensely with the more important business of scraping some carrots. Suddenly Isabelle felt ashamed of all her evasions, her curvettings, her runnings to and fro and up and down, her freedom from any determination by necessity.

She said timidly to Alan, “Yes, now I want to go in.” But when they were inside, she felt again troubled and embarrassed, as if there was a threat in the exact correspondence between what she had always wanted her house to be like, and these well-shaped rooms, full of sound and not costly provincial French furniture. When Alan bade her come to the window of the living room and look out at his orchard and its boughs burdened with apples, and feel the thickness of the walls, which kept the house warm in winter and cool in summer, she felt a little sick, as if presently she would be called into a court of law to give testimony before a great audience on some vital matter. She murmured an expression of interest, and turned away as if to look at the room again. On the two walls where there were no windows there hung two Louis Quatorze mirrors giving back the green light of France which filtered through the orchard boughs, and on a table beneath them stood crystal beakers holding tree anemones, pale pink, like sugar almonds; and on a tray there were two wine-glasses and a decanter etched with the bees of Empire. She covered her eyes with her hand, not before it occurred to her how appropriate this gentle brilliance of old glass was to Alan, to his smile, which was without reservations, like a child’s, to his fresh voice, to the unclouded translucence of his pleasantness. Her conviction of his extreme worth affected her most disagreeably. She sat down on a sofa, her head aching a little at the temples, and gooseflesh running over her body.

“Are you cold?” asked Alan. “You’re shivering. Would you like a fire?”

She answered, “No, no. It is lovely in here. But you are a curious person. You came into the house, and the post had come since you left, so there were several letters lying on the table by the door. And you did not stop to look at one of them. That seems to me an inhuman lack of curiosity.”

She had hoped this would make him go out and look at the letters, so that she would have time to control this disorder of her nerves, which was idiotic since she was no longer sixteen. But he answered, “Why should I look at my letters? The only letter which could interest me would be one from you. And I conclude you haven’t written to me, as you haven’t said so.” Again a shiver ran through her; she realized that, like Marc, he belonged to the class of men who feel an obligation to speak the truth to women. At this moment she would have preferred him to belong to the same class as André de Verviers, who regarded a lie to a woman as having a value quite apart from the purpose it served in persuading her to any particular act, as being in itself a sexual triumph and even a mystically rejuvenating rite. For if he had been like that, it would have been good sense to leave him and go on her way.

Alan said, “Anyway have some sherry. You look pale. Maybe I should not have asked you to come here when you’re not properly well yet.”

Isabelle drank, and felt instantly a little drunk. The light in the room appeared to have become greener, and to gleam like old glass. As a patient going under an anaesthetic feels an urgent impatience that the doctors should get on with the operation, however much it has been feared till then, so she longed for him to fulfil his threat of telling her what he was really like and get it over. She looked up at him and said, “You were going to explain why you bought this house.”

As she listened to him, she kept on raising her glass to her lips, so that he should think there were still a few drops for her to drink. For if he offered her any more sherry, she would not be able to refuse, since all her instinct at this moment was to comply. What she wanted was someone to tell her what to do; if she could have chosen a miracle to clarify her life, it would have taken the form of a series of orders which, when she had obeyed them all implicitly, would have turned out to be a rule imposing rightness on all departments of her being, so that no blunder, like her marriage to Marc, like the loss of her child, could ever shame her again. So much did she want this that she feared to make any gesture of resistance, lest she not be ready to submit when the word of command came. But if she drank any more sherry, she would put down her head on the sofa and weep, because every word Alan Fielding spoke made it plainer that she ought to make a certain decision, for which she was not yet prepared, which made her feel excited and exhausted. For he was telling her that he was the same sort of person as herself, and that he had come to live in this house because he wanted to detach himself from the life of his rich family, which seemed to him vulgar and brutal. She had often heard him utter expressions of disgust regarding certain persons and places, but she had taken them as examples of the trick of denigration characteristic of his class, which made all young men like him complain of whatever party they had attended on the previous night, as if it had been some sort of tedious accident, like being imprisoned in a lift. Now he was making her understand that they proceeded from a hungry fastidiousness like her own. He wanted, he was saying, life to have a moral beginning and middle and end. He wanted to form part of a pattern. The confidence with which he was telling her this, plainly a slow agony to his natural reserve, proved all the assurances he had made her that his feelings for her were of the utmost seriousness. If she indeed wanted a husband with whom she could live in dignity and peace while she brought into the world children who would be heirs to honour, she had no need to travel further. It was true, what she had thought as she drove here, that a different destiny waited for one in every house; and in this house waited the destiny she desired.

She said to herself, “There is no hurry.” But she had to bend her lips again to the empty glass, so that Alan should not see her shiver. That was of course not true. There was every reason for hurry. She could not believe that Marc would let her leave him as quietly as he had promised last night. A tingling of her nerves warned her that the violence and disorder which had killed her child was certain to break out again and that she might at any moment be the victim of some humiliating attempt to constrain her freedom of movement. But, as soon as she thought that, she realized that she did not believe it. She was afraid of something like that, but slightly different. It occurred to her that perhaps what she feared was that any such attack might appeal to something violent and disorderly in herself such as had made her weep that morning, which might make her want to go back to Marc. She put her hand to her head, amazed that she should be vexed by any such wild imagination; nothing was more impossible than that she should ever want to go back to Marc. But in any case, whether she had Marc or herself to fear, she would be immensely safer if she could declare that she intended to marry Alan.

“Nevertheless, this is a little too much,” she thought, “I am not yet twenty-eight, and this man will be my third husband and my fourth lover.” She was aware, however, that in making this objection she was insincerely subscribing to the fiction that sexual relations, while obviously offering certain satisfactions, are so inherently disagreeable that persons of fine taste, especially women, are obliged to treat them with that remote precaution which they apply to garlic, which they will never suffer to appear undisguised on their tables, but which they will rub on a crust of bread, which they will rub round a salad-bowl, out of which they will eventually eat a salad. But Isabelle knew quite well that she did not find sexual relations disagreeable. They might be so, of course, if they took place between persons of poor physique and character, who were not united by affection, but she had no intention of attempting them in those conditions. Alan was splendidly made, he was full of tenderness, she had grown very fond of him during the summer; if there would be no ecstasy at her bridal, there would be ecstasy at the birth of her children. She saw no reason to ward off such an experience. It was absurd that she should be filled with such a strong desire to run out of the house; but she was feeling better. She put down her glass and smiled at Alan.

“That silly little bell meant that lunch is ready,” he told her. In the dining room too, the light came green through the apple boughs and shone back from good glass. “I don’t know that the food’s very good,” he said as they sat down at the table. “I’ve only three servants to run the whole place, a man and his wife and this girl who’s waiting on us, their daughter. I don’t want more servants than I can really get friendly with and feel responsible for. I do hate that rabble of servants we had at home, half of whom you didn’t know, and half of whom you knew too well, so that, as they haven’t the live-and-let-live of equals, they laugh at you behind your back and cringe to your face.”