Venus Over Lannery (14 page)

“But I don't want to hibernate, Emily. I simply feel that at my time of life I have a right to take a rest. I've been on the go for well over half a century and I've collected a lot of material in my portmanteau. Mayn't I settle down and unpack, and set about examining and sorting and enjoying all the stuff I've got together?”

“Certainly not,” said Emily. “You ought to have been examining and sorting and enjoying all this time during the journey, and throwing what you no longer want out of the carriage window so as to make room for new purchases. Whether we like it or not, the train goes on to the end, and if we get out before the end we're simply left behind, which means that we die, mentally if not physically. Don't turn into a Tory, George: you used to be a good Socialist.”

“I'm still a good Socialist, Emily, in the sense that I hold with equality of opportunity and a high standard of living for all, in the sense that I'm ashamed of having eight hundred a year of unearned income when people in Frank's parish haven't, and in the sense that I have always supported the party that, if it gets into power, will very properly take my eight hundred a year away from me. And I'm a good Socialist too in the sense that I approve of pensioning off the old people in good time. Dost thou
think, Emily, that because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

“On the contrary, George, I want cakes and ale for old and young, and I want to be given plenty of work to do, to enable me to enjoy and digest them.”

“O, there I agree,” said the Colonel. “I've got any amount of energy still, if only someone will give me something real to expend it on.”

“The trouble is, Bob,” said Elsdon, “that nobody will give us that something real to do. They don't want us. If I were to take on some job—supposing I could find one—I should be told that I was keeping some other fellow out of it who needed it, and it would be true. We're not wanted.”

“Quite true, George!” said the Colonel. “We're not wanted. We're condemned to sit and rot, or, at least, invent an occupation for ourselves. You surely won't insist, Emily, that because we're denied useful work we must deny ourselves the cakes and ale? If we did, what would there be left to live for? Yes, a regular and healthy alternation of hard work and cakes and ale is the ideal, but observe, Emily, that it is also the humdrum. That's what Ida meant when she said she had always liked the humdrum. You've stayed with us often enough to know what Ida's humdrum is—on the go from morning till night, either in the house or in the village.”

“O, well,” said Emily, “if you mean by the humdrum a useful and well-ordered life, I too am all for the humdrum. We're quarrelling, as usually happens in an argument, not about facts but about a word.

I began by blaming George for retreating from life into senility, for turning his back on these young people and refusing to know them.”

Elsdon glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was half-past seven: it was time to dress. The discussion had depressed and embittered him: he rose from his chair to escape from it. “It's not a question of refusing, Emily,” he said as he went towards the door; “I can't get at them.”

“Nobody can get at anything that he despises, George,” she replied.

The door closed behind Elsdon, and all sat silent for a moment. “Poor George,” said Emily regretfully. “I wish I could learn to think before I speak. It was cruel of me to gird at him. He doesn't despise them: he longs to get at them and doesn't know how to, and he's bitter against them because they won't help him. And they don't help him because they don't know he wants their help.”

Next morning it rained. Cynthia and Frank went for a walk none the less, but the old people remained indoors. Elsdon and the Colonel retired to the smoking-room and the two old ladies were sitting in Mrs. Dryden's study until it was time for Emily to get ready to go to London.

“I'm sorry I've got to go while you're here,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I'm taking Joan to see my solicitor. She has to divorce her husband.”

“Divorce him? But how awfully sad,” said Ida. “She's such a nice little thing, and I thought him a charming youth.”

“I remember you did,” said Emily. “And so do I; but he's no good. Joan will be much better without him. He has found some other woman and is determined to go off with her.”

“But isn't she fond enough of him to put up with that—to let him go for a while?”

Emily looked at her friend in amazement. “This from you, Ida?” she said with a smile. Then the smile vanished. “Unfortunately she's very fond of him, poor little thing, but they're hopelessly unsuited to one another.”

“But, my dear Emily, men and women nearly always are, in one way or another.”

“And how, if I may ask, are you and Bob unsuited to one another?”

“We're not, now; but we certainly were, at one time.”

“I must say you disguised it very well.”

“O, it was easy enough to disguise it; in fact, there was nothing that required disguise. It was while we were in Ireland before the War. You and I didn't meet for a year or two at that time, or perhaps I might have talked to you about it—though I don't believe I would have. Even with you I was always very shy of mentioning matters of sex. My ideas of sex were very simple when I married, and for some time afterwards. They were simply that on the one side there was marriage and children and on the other sensualism. I don't believe I ever thought out the third possibility, a childless marriage. Bob and I, you see, both wanted children, and when it turned out that we couldn't have them I felt that our marriage, as far as sex was concerned, had been a failure. Does that seem to you very strange?”

“Strange, my dear Ida? It seems to me only too natural and healthy. What seems to me strange in human nature is its preoccupation with sex for its own sake. But that's because I'm a woman. I don't think one man in a hundred would agree with us. After all, it's a woman's view—a certain kind of woman's view, perhaps. For a woman it's a view based on physical fact; just as the opposite view in
a man is based on physical fact. For a woman, except by ill luck or deliberate choice, the sexual act is only the beginning of a physical process that ends in a child. For a man it's the beginning and the end. A child may be an emotional or moral result of his act, but it isn't, for him, a physical result. But you didn't feel that your marriage with Bob was a complete failure?”

“Good heavens, no! Far from it! But in the one respect of sex I must have seemed to him to become indifferent. I had no idea he felt otherwise than I did. He never complained. One has such absurd reticences, Emily. The truth was, I think, that for me sex was not nearly such a—how can I put it?—such a specialised thing as for him. For me it was diffused through our whole life together.”

“But did he show no signs of unhappiness?”

“Yes, occasionally he seemed sad and worried. I thought it was because of his new responsibilities: he had just been made second-in-command of his battalion. I wonder if all married couples were as reticent as we were. Up till then we had never discussed matters of sex, and I believe I should have been embarrassed if Bob had attempted to do so. Do you think all the people of our generation were like that?”

“The great majority, I imagine. Arthur and I, of course, set up to be advanced and unconventional, but when we discussed sexual matters it was always other people's, never our own.”

“Did you ever discuss ours?”

“Never, so far as I remember! There seemed nothing to discuss. You appeared perfectly happy, and therefore, as George would point out, perfectly uninteresting. He was quite right yesterday when he remarked, in his dry way, that Cynthia and Frank, the happy, well-suited ones, are the only uninteresting pair among our young visitors. But go on, Ida. You were saying that you had noticed that Bob was unhappy sometimes.”

“One evening he told me that he would have to go on business to Dublin for two or three days. I was a little surprised that he didn't suggest that I should go with him, but I thought no more about it. And then, a day or so later, he asked me, while we were sitting talking after lunch, if it seemed to me possible for a man or woman to love one person and yet be attracted by another. ‘Attracted?' I said. ‘You mean . . .?' ‘Well, physically attracted,' he said. As I said just now, it was the first time we had discussed such a thing. There was nothing very shocking, even to me, about the question and I was rather interested. ‘Well,' I said, ‘in a way, I might say I found Captain Somebody-or-other—I've actually forgotten his name, Emily—and young So-and-so physically attractive.' ‘And what exactly do you mean by that?' he asked. ‘Well,' I said, ‘I like them better than the others; I have a sort of sentimental, half motherly feeling towards them, and you can't deny they're both very nice-looking.' ‘But, for instance,' he said, with a laugh that struck me as a little unnatural, ‘you don't feel like running
away with either of them?' ‘No, thanks! ' I said. ‘I prefer you.' ‘I know you do,' he said; ‘just as I prefer you to any other woman. But I didn't mean run away for good and all; I simply meant—well, why not say it?—go to bed with him.' I was fearfully shocked, of course. ‘You can't imagine such a thing in anyone, even if not yourself? ‘he persisted. I had no answer. ‘I've never thought of it; I've no idea,' I said. ‘But why do you ask such extraordinary questions?' ‘Because, Ida,' he said, and I saw that he was terribly agitated, ‘because when I told you I had to go to Dublin on business, it wasn't true. I was going with ... with another woman, a woman,' he said, turning in his chair and meeting my eyes, ‘that I don't love nearly as much as I love you.' I remember I felt suddenly frozen. I began stammering something—' I don't understand,' or something like that—but Bob stopped me. ‘Listen to me first, Ida,' he said, and he told me that he had felt for some time that I had ceased to ... Well, I won't go on searching for words, Emily: you can guess what he meant. And he said he thought men were more bothered by physical desire than women, that it sometimes became a necessity, and he told me he had meant to go off without telling me, that he had thought it might be better that way, but that he had found he couldn't. He asked me to believe that it had nothing to do with unfaithfulness, that he loved me just as much as I loved him. ‘Can you believe that?' he asked me. I did believe it and I told him so. Poor Bob, that seemed to relieve him enormously.

He went off to headquarters and I sat where he had left me, trying to think over what he had told me. It was so unexpected, such a shock, that I couldn't think. My mind just ran aimlessly in circles, like a rat in a trap. If only I had known, all that time, what had been happening to him, well ... it simply wouldn't have happened. I've never been any good, you know, Emily, at thinking things out: I don't seem to work that way. I make my decisions ... well, I don't know how I make them; my inside makes them for me; they just arrive, and what arrived quite clearly, that time, was the conviction that the worst thing to do would be to try to hold him back. I didn't know if he had decided anything for himself, whether his confessing to me meant that he had given up the visit to Dublin, but I felt that he mustn't do that, that not only must I not hold him back but that he must not hold himself back; and as soon as he came in again I told him so. I told him that it wouldn't make the smallest difference to my feelings for him. That seemed to amaze him. Apparently he had never expected that. He looked at me with the strangest expression in his eyes, like, I remember thinking”—she gave a sudden little laugh—“like a child that has been given some simply gorgeous present; and then he threw his arms round me. ‘My dear,' he said, ‘how can you possibly know? After it had happened, you might find . . .' ‘No,' I told him, ‘I shall find nothing but what I'm sure of now'; and I made him promise me to follow simply his impulse. ‘Don't talk about it,”

I said; ‘don't say anything more; only remember you're perfectly free.' The same evening he told me he wasn't going. I took him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. ‘Why not?' I asked. ‘Because I don't want to,' he said. ‘Because you don't
like
to, Bob?' ‘Because I should hate to,' he said. And it was really true, Emily. Something had happened and not only to him but to me too.”

For some time Emily said nothing: then she raised her head. “You're astonishingly wise in your quiet way, Ida.”

“Me? Wise?” said Ida with a laugh. “My dear Emily, I've got about as many brains as a . . .”

“As an angel,” said Emily.

“But it was all this that I've told you,” said Ida, “that made me think that if only Joan could have left Norman free . . .”

Emily shook her head. “They've only been married two years, Ida, and, besides that, their case is different. There's nothing left to mend.”

Meanwhile in the smoking-room Elsdon and the Colonel chatted over their pipes. “I had a curious experience last Wednesday, Bob,” said Elsdon, after a pause in their talk, “while I was on my way to Bristol. I had the carriage to myself until a few minutes before we left Paddington, when a woman got in and took the seat opposite me.”

“You ought to have changed carriages, George,” said the Colonel. “It's not safe.”

“O, come,” said Elsdon; “at our time of life?”

“All the more dangerous, my dear fellow. A friend of mine, a solicitor—but you know him, of course; Robert Harlen—says he never travels alone with an unknown woman. You never know what they're up to.”

“Well,” said Elsdon, “I
did,
anyhow. I sat tight. In fact, I don't think I noticed, until we got clear of the station, whether she was a man or a woman. I was engrossed in Pascal's
Pensées.
Do you remember that delicious note where he is discussing reason and instinct: ‘Le bee du perroquet, qu'il essuie, quoiqu'il soit net'?”