Venus Over Lannery (12 page)

He paused and she did not speak. “I don't ask you to forgive me,” he went on, “because . . .”

“Let us not talk about it at all,” she said. “It's over and done with. Let it go.”

Her interruption seemed to have perplexed him. He clasped his forehead with his hand as if trying to concentrate his thoughts. “I have something more . . .” he stammered, “there's something I must ... talk over with you.”

“Sit down,” she said, “and have your breakfast.” He glanced at her, surprised and puzzled. “Breakfast?” He recollected himself with a nervous laugh. “Of course!” he said. “I suppose we ought to.”
He sat down and began to serve the bacon and eggs. She handed him his coffee: he took it, put it down beside him and began to stir it meditatively and mechanically, stirring and stirring till she could have cried out with nervous exasperation. She forced herself to eat and at last she heard him stop stirring and clear his throat. “What I want to ... to talk about, Joan,” he began, “is ... don't you think that we ... well ... made a mistake?”

Ever since last night she had known it was coming, and yet, now that she was faced with it, her heart dropped like a stone. “A mistake?” She echoed the word faintly, though she knew quite well what he meant.

“When we married,” he said.

There was a long silence. What was the good of trying to answer his question? She had nothing to say. To set about discussing it, to begin pouring out words and opinions, seemed to her utterly irrelevant. With a desperate effort she threw off the burden he was imposing on them. “It doesn't matter what I think, Norman. Don't ask me questions. Say what you want to say. You want to say something about Pauline.”

His face flushed suddenly scarlet. He put an elbow on the table and propped his head in his hand. “You know?” he said. “You've heard?”

“What is it you want?” she asked.

For a long time he sat silent, his eyes covered. “I want to marry her,” he said at last. “I want you to divorce me.” There was another long silence and
then he dropped his arm with a sigh and pushed back his chair. “You can't decide that at once, I know. You must have time.”

She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. “You must go,” she said. “You'll be terribly late.”

He stood up, hesitated for a moment, and then came towards her; but she turned away. “No!” she said. “Don't!”

The door closed behind him; then she heard it open again. “Joan,” he said, “I'll go away for a few days. Perhaps ... perhaps I'd better pack my suitcase now; unless ... unless you . . .”

“Yes, I'll do it,” she said. “You can send for it this afternoon.”

He tried to smile at her, seeking, it seemed, some response in her eyes. Then he slowly closed the door. As soon as he had left the flat she went to pack his bag.

When Eric got down to breakfast next morning he found only his aunt and Joan in the dining-room. Mrs. Dryden rose as he entered. “Come along,” she said; “we'll begin. In the matter of breakfast, three is a quorum.”

She took her place at the head of the table and began to pour out coffee. Joan sat on her left and Eric went to the side-table to get her some scrambled eggs. As he bent over her to put the plate before her, he realised with a pang that it had all happened before. Each morning, that summer before her marriage, they three had been the first down to breakfast, and it had delighted him to wait on Joan and then secure the place next her. And now it seemed as if time had rolled back to that vanished summer, that Joan, sitting there, was still free, that Daphne, upstairs, had receded to a mere nothing in his life. Yesterday he had avoided Joan, had carefully refrained from even looking at her, for fear the sight of her should spoil his exciting preoccupation with Daphne. But now there was no avoiding her: he had to speak to her and meet her eyes, and as he
did so he felt, under the physical exaltation with which he had woken an hour before, the stirrings of a deep remorse. What a waste, what a lamentable mischance, that the deep and passionate tenderness that he had felt for her should have been driven to expend itself on Daphne. At that desolating perception of what he had lost, he could have wept aloud. He dared not take the place next her now, but took the chair on the right of his aunt. And then Frank Todd came in and, a moment later, Edna and Cynthia: the sense of Joan's nearness receded and, remembering Daphne and last night, he emerged from his moment of despair. He would not allow those buried emotions to disturb him again: he would close his mind against them and obey the exultation of his body. The door opened again and Daphne came in, and his heart leapt and his senses began to dance and all was well again. Her brief and careless good morning, as he rose to help her to some food, gave a delicious sting to their secret. Yes, all was well again.

After breakfast the whole party, tempted by the sunshine, went out into the garden. Mrs. Dryden, Edna and Joan were standing together when Roger joined them. “I say, Edna,” he exclaimed, “what about this walk?”

Edna knit her brows. “I don't want a walk, Roger. You go and have a walk with some of the others.”

“But I want you to come,” he said. “We both need exercise and the country will be marvellous this morning.”

But Edna turned away. “No, thanks,” she said. “I don't feel like it.”

Roger's face was grim: it seemed that much more hung on his insistence than a mere walk. He shrugged his shoulders and turned away sadly. “If I'd particularly wanted you not to come,” he said, “you would have come.”

“Probably!” said Edna shortly as Roger walked slowly away.

Mrs. Dryden and Joan were surprised and pained by Edna's unkindness. “I'm sure,” said Mrs. Dryden, “that one or two of the others will be very glad to go with him.”

“Cynthia and Frank asked me to join them on a walk,” said Joan. “I'll ask him to come with us.”

She hurried after Roger. Edna turned with a nervous smile to Mrs. Dryden. “You must be thinking I treated him very badly,” she said; “but he's such a tyrant. I'd already told him I didn't want to go when he raised the subject before breakfast, and now he thinks he can force me to by tackling me in front of you and Joan. As a matter of fact,” she said, “I wouldn't have minded a bit going for a walk, but I'm tired of being dictated to.”

Mrs. Dryden looked benevolently reproachful. “Always beware of acting on prínciple, Edna, especially when the principles are against your inclinations. But I want to talk to you about Joan. You, of course, know all about her troubles. She has asked my advice and I have advised her to
divorce Norman. I've invited her to come and live here until the proceedings are over, and, I'm glad to say, she has accepted.” She paused and then added reflectively: “It's strange that anyone as charming as Norman should behave with such callousness.”

“Charming?” exclaimed Edna. “I think he's detestable. I've always thought so.”

Mrs. Dryden smiled with amusement. “You mean to tell me, Edna, that the charm doesn't work on you?”

“Not in the least. Charm turned on, like the electric light, for the mere purpose of charming, disgusts me.”

Mrs. Dryden laughed appreciatively. “My dear, you're too human: you haven't my cynical detachment. I agree with you that Norman as a human being—a decent human being—is detestable, but I must say I enjoy him as a work of art.”

Edna snorted impatiently. “Well, I admit he's a work of art in the sense that he deserves to be hung.”

“O,” said Mrs. Dryden, “we all deserve to be hanged for one thing or another, and, that being so, we have to resign ourselves to hanging nobody.”

Edna laughed, and slid her arm affectionately through Mrs. Dryden's. “And what do you deserve to be hanged for?”

“Goodness,” said Mrs. Dryden, “are you asking me to confess all my sins?”

“Well, if it comes to that, what do
I
deserve to be hanged for?”

“For bringing up your nice husband so badly,” said Mrs. Dryden with startling promptness.

Edna dropped Mrs. Dryden's arm and stood facing her on the gravel path. “Me? Bringing up Roger badly? Why, it never entered my head to bring him up at all—that is, until quite recently.”

Mrs. Dryden took her arm and continued the stroll. “And recently?” she asked sedately.

“Recently, I admit, I've begun to find that I have to stand up for myself, as I did just now. Roger, you know, can be awfully stubborn and awfully tyrannical.”

“Of course. So can any child who has been accustomed to have his own way and is suddenly denied it.”

“Do you think Roger used to have his own way?”

Mrs. Dryden laughed. “I've seen him having it, my dear. I can see you still, when you and he came here before you were married, trotting about after him and drinking in everything he said as if it was pure gospel.”

Edna took it with perfect good humour, in fact with evident interest. “It's perfectly true,” she said; “but I was a child myself then. How can I be held responsible for his upbringing?”

Mrs. Dryden shrugged her shoulders. “Unfortunately every child brings up every other child with
which it comes into frequent contact. And then, Edna, quite suddenly, you grew up and ceased to accept the gospel without question. If you had done so from the first you would have made it easier for him. He was in love with you, and love, as St. Paul wisely remarked, suffereth long, and is kind. Your sudden change must be very upsetting to him. He probably doesn't in the least understand what has happened. And yet it seems to me that you and Roger, whether by good judgment or mere good luck, made a very good choice. As soon as you have adjusted your balance you will make an admirably suited pair; and you'll adjust it all the sooner if you remember that before you married he was more mature than you, and now, quite suddenly, you've become more mature than he. But don't, for goodness' sake, start trying to rule him by principles. You'll only exasperate him and turn yourself into a prig. He at least never did that. The worst he did was to try to endow you with all that, in his honest but narrow-minded little way, he thought was the best.”

Edna was silent for a moment; then she gave a contemptuous laugh. “A year or two ago I took a course in psychology: much good it seems to have done me.”

“O, psychology!” said Mrs. Dryden with a sniff of scorn. “You and Roger are not an algebraical equation. Besides, don't you remember, at school, how much easier it was to do other people's sums than your own?”

“Don't I just! As a matter of fact, I got on all right in the earlier stages of this particular sum. I did discover, as you apparently discovered years ago, that Roger was trying to turn me into a replica of himself.”

“You asked him to, Edna. You handed yourself over, heart and mind, to be remodelled.”

“Yes, I suppose I did. And how hard he worked at it, poor boy. There was music, for instance: I preferred the Romantics, and I had to be made to prefer the Classics. And, of course, I believed he was right: I did my very best to become a good little Classic. But I did rebel once or twice in a fumbling sort of way. Ah, how well I remember one of the occasions: it was here, when Cynthia played a beautiful song by Richard Strauss. No, it's only fairly recently that I discovered that Romantic and Classic are a matter of taste and not of the Ten Commandments, that I suddenly felt compelled to be myself. Poor Roger! Just when he was on the point of completing the transformation of an Edna into a Roger, I jump up like a jack-in-the-box and wreck the labour of years.”

“And set to work, perhaps, Edna, to turn your Roger into another Edna? Mind you don't do that. It would cause you endless misery and, if you succeeded, which I very much doubt, you wouldn't like the result a bit.”

Edna laughed. “Good Lord, am I as bad as that?”

“It's not a matter of goodness or badness: it's
the simple fact that most of us have enough of ourselves as it is, without having another to cope with. What we want in a husband or wife is not a double but a counterpart, not a slave but a self-respecting companion.” Emily was silent for a moment. “It seems to me a lamentable thing,” she said, “that we humans, who after all have reached a certain stage of civilisation, should not yet have evolved a sane and certain method of choosing our mates.”

“Our chief difficulty in that,” said Edna, “is this glorious and ridiculous business of falling in love. Just when we ought to have all our wits about us we go absolutely blind with infatuation.”

“Precisely. If I had the job of remaking the human race, I would suppress—though with the greatest regret, Edna—but I
would
suppress infatuation. It works admirably for the animals with their temporary mates and numerous families, but it's the worst possible beginning for the relation of a lifetime. Fortunately a good many of us make lucky shots—more by good luck than good management. But that's no excuse for the method. We are making a brave attempt to evolve from the animal to the angel, and yet, in the most vital matter of our lives, we obey the instinct of the animal. No wonder things get into an awful muddle sometimes. How well I remember, not so very long after my marriage, waking up to the fact that I had bound myself body and soul to a comparative stranger, a man with all sorts of ideas and habits and prejudices which I had
never suspected. After that startling discovery I spent a good deal of time and energy in trying to turn my husband into myself, and a hopeless enterprise it was, because two people could hardly have been more different than Arthur and I. Not that we hadn't a good deal in common, but we had even more in which we disagreed violently. For instance, I loved music and he hated it; I liked the French Impressionists and Whistler and he was all for the Pre-Raphaelites, so that when Whistler threw his paintpot in the face of the public and Ruskin threw his inkpot at Whistler we were on opposite sides. Then Arthur was a Tory and I was a Socialist and we could neither of us express the mildest political opinion without exasperating the other.” She laughed tenderly. “As soon as we had settled down from our first infatuation we used to have the most awful rows. Not noisy ones, of course: they were quite quiet, but all the worse for that. It would really have been much better if we had thrown plates. But we agreed about literature, that was one comfort; and there was much, besides, that we liked in one another. After all, we had been very good friends at the start: it was the close contact of marriage that was too much for us, at least at first. He was at home all day, you see, so we were denied the respite of office hours, and soon I discovered all sorts of qualities in him that irritated me. For example, he would never face things: he preferred to glide past them in his gentle fashion. Whereas I, in my bumptious selfconfidence, preferred to tackle them like a lion-tamer.”
She laughed softly to herself. “I'm inclined to believe, now that I'm an old woman, that it comes to the same thing in the end, whichever way you deal with things: it's merely a difference of method. And then—poor Arthur—he had all sorts of fads and mannerisms that used to drive me crazy—perfectly innocent little things as I see them now and, I'm thankful to say, as I came to see them years before he died. Even when the children came they didn't do us much good. We discovered at once that we had all sorts of different views about children. At last, five or six years after our marriage, we reached a point at which I felt I couldn't bear it any longer, and I put a few things into a knapsack and went away by myself for a few days to think things out. I believe I started out with a very strong sense of my own righteousness and Arthur's sins, but the weather, by a lucky chance, was perfect, and with everything so lovely around me I soon began to find my grievances an awful nuisance. I felt as if I were forcing myself to hold up a great weight which it would be much easier to drop. I tried to think, but I couldn't be bothered to think. I decided to enjoy myself for the first day and put off the thinking till the next. But next day the business of thinking seemed even more of a nuisance than before. It was not simply, I found, that I didn't want to think: the fact was that I was actually not interested in my grievances: they seemed, at that range and in those surroundings, to have shrunk considerably in importance. What had happened, I told myself, was that I was enjoying
myself enormously and was therefore not in the proper frame of mind for serious thought. But it never occurred to me to doubt the reality of my grievances. I believed that somewhere or other goodness knows where: in some sort of Platonic heaven or hell, perhaps—they still existed in all their original importance. It wasn't till I had arrived one evening in a charming little village, till I had had my supper and was looking into a little pocket Shakespeare which I had taken with me, that common sense came to me like a revelation.” She broke off and turned her face to the young woman at her side. “I wonder if you have found, as I have, that the most extraordinary coincidences are constantly occurring in life. If one believed in guardian angels, it would be obvious that one's guardian angel had drawn one's attention to some small truth that is of vital importance to our needs. But I don't hold with guardian angels, and so I have never been able to explain how the thing happens. As often as not, in my case, it is something in a book that comes to the rescue, and in this particular instance it was Shakespeare. I was rummaging about in my small Shakespeare, too tired and too contented to read consecutively, when I came upon a phrase—I've forgotten now which play it was in—which at another time might have made no impression on me; but on this particular occasion it was like ... well, like a lighted match to a gas-burner. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' You see how pat it came to my requirements. It
enabled me to take the step I had unconsciously been longing to take, but which pride or principles or some other absurd obstacle had prevented me from so much as seeing. All I had to do, I saw, was to push my precious grievances overboard. Up till then I had been an opinionated, overbearing, inhuman creature... .”