The Unpossessed (9 page)

She tasted it and holding the glass in her hand as though she weighed it against the delicacy of the moment, swallowed slowly. She came to decisions and reversed them; sipped again, her eyes gravely meeting his. It was a fine moment; fidelity hung in the balance; she wanted to prolong it. “A little sweet,” she said at last, “a very little too sweet, I think,” she said faintly (for she liked it sweet, it was Miles who would want it dry) and handed him back the glass. Now they almost held their breaths as he with infinite precision added infinitesimal drops of bitters, the final touches to their masterpiece. They tasted again—first Jeffrey, then Margaret; then Margaret again, then Jeffrey to make sure. Their eyes met; they nodded; and she trembled so her hands went cold.

He set a full glass before each of them. She was not sure if her voice would come clear; she tried it; it was a soft and shaky tenor. “Plying me with liquor, are you.” He rose and softly closed the kitchen door. They lifted their glasses with one motion and drank slowly like people mesmerized, their eyes spinning a tenuous vibrant thread. (
Drink deep of the gin without juniper, drown Miles in the gin with glycerine to make him wash down smooth
.)

He set down his glass and holding his eyes on hers as though he were magnetized, as though he feared to snap the tenuous thread stretched taut between their eyes, he advanced as warily as a tight-rope dancer and took her hands in his. “Margaret!” The moment held her like a vise.

His arms went lightly round her. But while she stood and waited, locked with him into a strange paralysis of everything but hope, he did a curious thing: with one oddly disembodied hand (wearing a painful smile upon his face) he hurriedly unfastened the buttons of his coat. The poignant moment passed, releasing her. Something in her shuddered and drew back; but that must be how these things were done; and as she had hardened herself earlier against Miles, so now she closed a door on her own too-sensitive self—and taking a hasty gulp from the glass he had taken from her (it would be accomplished now, she knew, on a considerably lower level) she slipped with a feeling almost of despair into his arms again, against his carefully erogenous shirt. The sides of his coat flapped back reproachfully.

She felt with curiosity—and marvelled at her standing there, so passive—his hands upon her shoulders, moving vague, dispirited, she thought; then leaping, quick with frenzy, through her hair. He drew her closer to that vulnerable shirt; she was surprised that beneath it his heart could beat so fast. Well, this was what she had wanted, what she had made up her mind for once to take; but she felt more distant from him in his arms than she had during the seconds they stood eyeing each other over the rim of a glass.

She had wanted to lose her head; now she found herself too steadily regaining it. She had expected some surge to draw them together, to sweep them all at once to some high, oblivious place. Infidelity—yes; she could face it; she had consented to it in her mind; half expected this might be an understood preliminary. But she had not counted on—mechanics.

His hands moved quickly, desperately, as though they would achieve some tour de force—a fire with no paper perhaps; no matches; rubbing together two dry unfitted spheres of flint; he was laying his fire with damp sticks. It struck her that he was playing some sort of game, that having forgotten her he was engaged in proving something to himself. “I am something of a lone wolf,” he whispered suddenly; and she shook with repressed laughter—yet if they lived in a world where there were no jokes, it might have been the truth, she granted that; she reflected how no man could speak words entirely foreign to his nature, how even a technique partook of truth. She caught a kind of anguish in him; she felt he reached for her not as Jeffrey Blake for Margaret, scarcely even as man for any woman, but as one rather lonely human being for another; that the fire he was passionately fanning was more for friendliness than sex; and that he did not know it, had overshot his mark, must feel this as his only way of speaking to her.

He went through the motions like an old actor relying on a patient memory. There was something strained and something gallant in his efforts, that won her pity—and left her cold with curiosity. From time to time he drew back his head and looked at her full with his fine blind eyes and murmured “Beautiful. Joy. Atoms dancing like happy pagans” and she did not know whether his words were spoken about her or even to her, and had a ridiculous conviction that he was plagiarizing either from his own or someone else's novel; and surely he looked like anything but an atom or a happy pagan himself, he resembled nothing so much at this moment as a tortured saint. It was an incredible thing that she should be leaning back on Norah's kitchen door with Norah's Jeffrey making love to her. The kitchen door itself was ludicrous; that Miles was talking Marxian determinism on its other side was the final crowning idiocy. . . . But with one ear cocked to that room beyond (she would see it through, this once at any rate) she played her end mechanically; stood and maintained her balance while he hurled himself against her; stood calm while he withdrew to murmur his curious verbal aphrodisiac.

“Margaret, are we never—” he whispered in her ear; “are you never going to throw away your bourgeois notions, are we always condemned to sin against ourselves and our desire, oh this is evil, you must read my book and see, it's the only evil. . . .” He continued his impassioned speech; punctuated it with kisses oddly lacking in sensual intelligence. It persisted in her mind that this was
fake
, that desire had started from nothing, that she was taking part, however passively, in a drama much beneath her. “This is terrible,” he whispered, “this making love in kitchens, it can't go on, this is no age for repressions. . . .” His eyes ran from one of her eyes to the other, asking his hundreds of questions—but he waited for no answer; he whipped himself up to have something to beat, just as he fought for possession of her mouth which offered no resistance.

“Your bourgeois notions,” he muttered furiously; “will you never get over them?” She had not answered him directly for something like five years, since the evening when she met him first; he had scarcely expected an answer since. She thought a moment (she was a novice in these matters; the poignant moment had safely passed, leaving her able to coldly calculate) and then spoke blandly: “Yes; I think I
shall
get over them, what you call my bourgeois notions. Now what do you think of that?”

What he thought of it he wouldn't say; but she had an idea, as he drew back in surprise, that his eyes held a moment's dislike of her, as though she had spoken out of turn or in some way broken the unwritten law of his code (which suddenly she recognized, the clearer for his denying it), that he must be seducer. Then he fell to fighting her again, murmuring “Oh this is terrible, this half-love, my God how much I want you” as though she had never spoken at all.

She thought, and wondered if she had not known before, he is trying, at bottom, to seduce himself! Oddly Puritanic, that he should bother then with words; but he needed them, he needed them, for his own inside assurance. “I am highly over-sexed,” he said indignantly as though he challenged a denial; and all at once succeeded in convincing himself.

He seized her as though she were the last human on earth and clung to her ready to die in her arms; then pressed himself against her bitterly (she feared the kitchen door might give) as though she were no human at all but some wall that denied him entrance; and drew back, because he had not found her at all, had found nothing worth his nervous seeking, smiling sheepishly.

She felt completely sold, discovering in a shameful flash that she had been less unfaithful to Miles than to something in herself. She helped Jeffrey locate his sadly floating hands, retrieve them from her flesh which shrank, dishonored, to let the strangers pass. He left one hand a placating hostage on her shoulder while with the other he buttoned himself resentfully into his coat against her (for she had failed him too); and when he had both of his hands back in his own possession again he rubbed them one against the other as though he somehow washed them and forgave them. Their problem was to leave each other now that they so terribly wanted to.

They stood embarrassed like a pair of tired actors wishing the curtain would fall on a play they knew was rotten. She wanted to cut and run—she longed to get back to Miles again, to escape those falsely glowing eyes of Jeffrey's which had failed to take possession of her; she longed to creep back humbly into the circle of Miles' notice. But still they lingered, looking for an exit line.

“I suppose we've been out here pretty long, I suppose we'd better be joining the others,” he said with a loyal showing of reluctance. She saw with mild pain how before returning to Norah he wiped his hands again (or was it Miles he feared) as though he hoped to purge them, guiltily on the sides of his jacket.

“Oh yes, by all means—now that we've mixed the drinks,” she said coldly; and discovered a similar weakness in herself, smoothing her hair (and hoping to God that Jeffrey didn't notice). He lifted the shaker and carried it before them, shining container at once of their apology and both their failures.

“Of course,” he said, as if continuing absently after he had opened the door and waited impersonally for her to pass out first, “of course the critics this year are bit hard by the social consciousness bug, there's a regular blight on them;” the “blight” brought them to where the others sat (and there was Miles again! sitting faithfully where she had left him; but she knew she never
had
left him and prayed that he would know it too); “but in a deep way of course” (what was it, in Norah's mild compassionate eyes? just what
was
Norah anyway, beside a wife and friend? and Miles,
dear Miles
, at whom she could not look directly, gathering his forces perhaps before he dared look up?) “in an important way my characters did symbolize. . . . Oh say, you two, we've mixed a knock-out of a drink!”

“I made him put in bitters, Miles—I knew you liked it dry.” She spoke too quickly; the blood rushed to her temples as though she had called right out before them all
I love you dear, I haven't been unfaithful
. And still she couldn't look at him, fearing to meet what might be in his eyes as she slowly crossed the room toward Norah, renouncing openly (so she felt), denouncing, Norah's husband. And still Miles didn't speak.

“But you forgot the glasses, children,” cried Norah rising gayly.

“This gin,” said Jeffrey bravely (Margaret couldn't bear to look at him) “is something very special, Miles. My man gave me the inside dope. It seems when they put in less juniper—”

“And glycerine to make it smooth,” said Margaret cruelly; (
do you see, Miles, do you see, how he means nothing at all to me?
) “The stuff we have at home is just as good.”

“Flinders chauvinism!” cried Jeffrey in a rasping, boisterous voice. (She felt Miles' head turning ironically; but it was impossible to look.) “To hell with it! Glasses, Norah my girl. Preliminary round!”

Heads tossed up in unison, throats and hopes tentative on the receiving line. “Down the old hatch!” said Jeffrey. Margaret thought her “hatch” (how everything that Jeffrey said repelled her now) would never take it; when there was a sharp repeated ringing of a bell. Four glasses lowered. “It might be Bruno,” Jeffrey said; and Norah ran to press the button. In the interval of waiting (Margaret prayed it might be Bruno) she slowly gathered courage: her eyes began their painful journey up the room toward Miles. She thought her heart stopped beating. For a mad moment she hoped he would leap at Jeffrey's throat—or at her own—to show he loved her; and then her eyes arrived. But Miles was carefully blowing upon his glasses, his cocktail waiting, peacefully, beside him; and the whole of her scene with Jeffrey lost what validity had lingered as she felt it had not entered Miles' consciousness. Steps sounded on the landing. There was a heavy rapping on the door; and Norah flew to open it. “Bruno?” Margaret wasn't sure who said it; it seemed the whole room wanted him.

“Of course it's Bruno,” Bruno said; and stood in the door with bottles under both his arms like a huge and jovial Mephistopheles. “And drunk as hell, thank God.” The room heaved a sigh of relief.

“BUT CHILDREN!” he cried, stopping short as he ran counter to an air of doubt that floated off their little circle—their glasses poised, their faces lifted, as though like Elizabeth they floated rudderless in space, a chorus waiting for the maestro. “Children! you closely resemble a wake! what is the object of the game? sitting out the fall of Rome? acting a charade? or is it, mes amis,” here he crossed his bottles piously, became the French for Sherlock Holmes, “that you plot the revolution?” But he must come in, come in, cried Norah; and he was just in time, said Margaret Flinders wistfully; Bruno's
al
ways
just in time, cried Norah; and Miles ground out a greeting from a hollow granite shell.

The acoustics were bad; their voices stopped short of his fog. Only Norah seemed clear-cut, rich and deep in her mysterious private womanhood, which neither fog nor liquor could obscure. “Ah but wait, wait,” he cried, reeling with his bottles in the doorway, “wait till you're all as drunk as Bruno!” (He was
not
drunk; he was God damn miserably far from drunk; but
shout, you fool, bluster you bastard—drown that damn
cablegram! life goes on!
) “This way ladies and pseudo gents, for—” Come on in, you idiot, have a drink, cried Jeffrey. “Fellow-victims, I salute you,” Bruno concluded, “from a full heart and a full bladder.” He advanced, proffering his bottles for handshakes. “Pardon my stumps,” he added courteously.

And yet at his utter nonsense, their faces brightened—from sheer relief, he supposed, at the spectacle of one more cynical than they, able and willing to present himself as a clown. But his own personal fog lay like ether on his senses; the fog that started from his inability to touch Elizabeth whose outstretched hand (the cable clasped within it) glimmered blurred before his tired eyes. “You're better than a show, Bruno,” Margaret Flinders softly said; and eyed him with peculiar wistful brightness, inviting him to fraternize. “You flatter me, Miss Banner-Flinders,” he replied; and moved off uneasily, evading her, for through his fog he felt obscurely sad for her tonight. “A pretty rotten show,” said Miles, as Norah took the bottles from him—and Bruno was in a hyper-egotistic mood to think she touched his hand deliberately. But he must take his
coat
off, Norah said; and Jeffrey ordered the second round of cocktails served at once. Almost too cordial Jeffrey was, as though he feared the revelation of the Filing Cabinet (which now lay buried deeper than Elizabeth in Bruno's self-obliterating fog); flicking his fingers restlessly as though he longed to get them into something: sex or politics. “Or would you rather take yours straight?” Norah gently asked him. “Oh I'm thoroughly democratic,” he touched her through his fog, wondered if she felt the deadness in his fingers, “I'll take the same as everybody else.”