Venus Over Lannery (15 page)

The Colonel chuckled. “Good! Very good! But what about your sinister travelling-companion?”

“Well, I didn't take my eyes off Pascal till we were some way out of London, and it was only then that I noticed that she was an old woman, a red faced, rather coarse-looking creature. And not only that: she was watching me with a curious smile. ‘I suppose I oughtn't to speak to you,' she said when she caught my eye.”

“There you are!” burst out the Colonel. “What did I say?”

“Yes, there I was. And who do you think she was?”

“Your washerwoman?”

“No, my wife—Naomi.”

“The devil she was!” said the Colonel.

“I didn't know her from Adam,” Elsdon went on, “and I mumbled a reply about having no objection.

‘You've aged a good deal, George,' she said, and as
soon as she spoke my name I recognised her. ‘Good God, Naomi,' I said, ‘and so have you.' It wasn't meant as a
tu quoque
; it was no more than an interjection of amazement. But Naomi took it otherwise. ‘Ah!' she said, ‘you're still angry with me.'”

The Colonel barked a laugh. “Isn't that Naomi all over!”

“‘Well,' she went on, ‘it's only natural that you should be: you must have felt that my leaving you was unforgivable.' I saw she was going to take a high romantic line, as usual, and I determined that we wouldn't have any of that, that we would stick to facts. ‘Unforgivable?' I said. ‘O dear me, no! I did for a month or so, and then I realised that you had been perfectly right. We were shockingly illmatched, weren't we? Whether you were thinking of me or only of yourself, Naomi, you did me a very good turn by leaving me; so set your mind at rest on that score.' But Naomi wasn't going to drop to realism so quickly. ‘I was thinking of neither of us, George,' she said. ‘I was thinking of Jim. He needed me more than you did.' ‘Very likely!' I said.”

The Colonel exploded with laughter. “My dear George, you're magnificent. The depths of humour hidden in those two simple words!”

Elsdon opened his eyes. “Upon my soul,” he said, “I didn't realise it till this moment.” His thin face creased into a broad smile. “By Jove, now that you mention it, it was rather a mouthful. But of course
Naomi wouldn't appreciate the force of it any more than I did.”

“If she did,” said the Colonel, “she would pretend not to. I know Naomi even better than you do, George, which is not to be wondered at, seeing that I knew her long before you did. Well, what next?”

“Where had I got to?”

“You'd got to Jim Marshall.”

“To be sure! Well, naturally, I asked after Jim. ‘And how is Jim? ‘But at that her face grew hard. ‘I don't know,' she said sullenly. ‘What?' I said. ‘You mean to say you didn't . . .?' I was going to say ‘marry him,' but at that moment my eye fell on the label of her suitcase which was on the seat beside her, and I saw ‘Mrs. Parigi, Reading.' I also saw that she had caught me reading it, and as she met my eye she flinched and turned her face away.”

The Colonel knit his brows. “Who the devil has

she got hold of this time? An ice-cream merchant?”

Elsdon sighed. “God knows, poor thing!”

“You didn't find out?”

“No. That Italian name impressed me exactly as it did you. Parigi, plus Reading, seemed to suggest a nasty little Italian restaurant or sweet shop, or perhaps a fiddler in a cinema orchestra, and at the same moment I noticed how old and dowdy her clothes were. She used to dress rather well, you remember.”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, “she did. I'll say that for her.”

“Well, her new name and her dowdy clothes and
her poor red face pulled me up. I didn't enquire into Mr. Parigi. I simply remarked that it was over twenty years since we had parted. She faced me again and I could see the relief in her eyes. ‘Do you ever see Emily and Arthur and Bob and his wife nowadays?' she asked rather wistfully. She hadn't heard of Arthur's death. She seemed really touched at hearing of you and Emily and Ida again, and asked me, poor thing, if any of you ever spoke of her. ‘But of course they don't,' she said, while I was trying to frame a tactful answer. I asked her how she was getting on nowadays. She gave a wry smile. ‘Need you ask, George?' she said. ‘I saw you looking at my clothes just now.' ‘But you've got your own income, Naomi?' I said. ‘I've got two hundred a year, George,' she answered grimly. ‘The rest's gone. As you know, I was always ignorant about money matters. I was ill advised and ... But why should I explain? It's gone, anyhow.' ‘But your husband? He has something?' ‘O, of course!' She tried to sound nonchalant, but neither her voice nor her face could disguise the shame my question caused her, even though she tried at once to change the subject by recalling a visit we paid to Paris in nineteen hundred. ‘I often think of that delightful fortnight,' she said, as if she really meant it. But I wanted to know about her income: I really couldn't let her end her days in poverty, and I asked her flatly what their joint income was. Again she looked painfully embarrassed, but in a moment she pulled herself together. ‘After all,' she said, ‘why

should I mind telling you? My husband has next to nothing. He manages to make from forty to fifty pounds a year.' I told her I would give her four pounds a week, and she disconcerted me horribly by bursting into tears. ‘I was a fool to leave you, George,' she said, mopping her eyes.”

“Poor Naomi!” said the Colonel. “Yes, poverty would come hard to her. But did you note the word she used to condemn herself, George—that is, if she actually did use it?”

“Fool?” said Elsdon. “Yes, it was fool she said.”

“Ah!” said the Colonel. “Not brute, but fool. Note the difference and how clearly the old Naomi emerges from it. Brute would have criticised her treatment of you: fool merely criticises her treatment of herself.”

“My dear Bob, what does it matter?” said Elsdon impatiently. “The mere thought of four pounds a week was an inestimable blessing to her: that's good enough for me. I don't know what she meant exactly by her exclamation, nor do you, nor, probably, did she. By that time our train was running into Reading. She had just time to pull herself together and give me her address before we stopped in the station. I won't tell you what she said when she left me, for fear you put a cynical interpretation on that too.”

“I'm sorry, George,” said the Colonel, “ but Naomi always had that effect on me, even in the earliest days, long before you knew her. Besides, it's undeniable that to see her truly was, willy-nilly, to see her cynically.”

“Well, yes,” said Elsdon; “that's true enough. That discovery was forced upon me long before she bolted and left me.”

“Then don't allow yourself to become sentimental about her at this time of day.”

“O good Lord! If you'd seen her you would have realised that there was no fear of that. She looked”—he paused and shuddered—“really awful. It was that, precisely, that made me so sorry for her. One's allowed to feel sorry, I hope, for a creature who has come so lamentably to grief, without being senti–mental?”

“Yes, you may pity her, George; in fact, I pity her too, and it won't be for the first time, though I never liked her.”

“Never liked her? But I always understood you were a great friend of hers—in fact, an old admirer.”

“Ah, it was Naomi herself who told you that.”

“It was,” said Elsdon.

“Yes,” said the Colonel, “she cast me for the role of disappointed lover.”

“And you weren't?”

“Never for a moment! I didn't even like her. I found her enormously entertaining and very nice to look at, but as for friendship—there are some people with whom friendship, in the real sense of the word, is an impossibility, and for me Naomi was one of them. In fact, when she wrote to me in India and told me you were going to marry her, I was horrified. I felt I ought to write and warn you against her. I very nearly did, but I decided it would do no good
and very likely wreck our friendship. No, I could never regard her as a friend, but our relation was deliciously comical. Naomi, you see, was the perfect impostor. Yes, George, there's no good your looking at me like that: I repeat, the perfect impostor. She deceived everybody; that is, she deceived everybody for a time. The only person she deceived all the time was herself. The joke about self-deceivers is, of course, that they compel everyone else to deceive them. I deceived Naomi magnificently, simply by dint of telling her the truth. I always told her exactly what I thought of her, and she simply loved it. The reason why she loved it was because she didn't believe it. I seem to have heard or read that the human stomach turns acid into sugar and sugar into acids. Well, that was the way Naomi treated my home-truths: her superlative dishonesty enabled her to turn them into a subtle and nutritious flattery. When I assured her that she was greedy, unscrupulous and as cold as a fish, that what she thought was deep and passionate feeling was nothing but a bundle of irritable nerves and appetites, she purred like a cat. My remarks, you see, George, could be interpreted as the bitter reproaches of a disappointed lover, an amorous cruelty which she found delightfully bracing. Well, in a sense she was right about my being an admirer, though not in the sense that she believed it, because I really did find something fascinating in the spectacle of such exquisite selfishness, the same sort of fascination as in watching a perfectly adjusted machine, always so infallibly true to its unique aim.
She didn't at all realise that what enabled me to admire her was the fact that my emotions were not at all involved. But, besides that, I did like her company, even if I didn't like her. She was very nice to look at, wasn't she? And she was lively, intelligent in her own way, and amusing to ... well, to observe and experiment with. One got to foresee her inevitable reactions; one provoked them and they responded pat, for all the world like a penny-in-the-slot machine. And I was just as cold and unscrupulous with her as she was with everyone else, which gave me the rare luxury of blurting out the whole truth to her. To be able to do that, even when you know you're not believed, is extraordinarily refreshing. How could I help being grateful to her? She was such prodigious fun. And of course she found me great fun too, thanks to the ingenious way she had of interpreting me. And so, George, if you call that kind of thing friendship, Naomi and I were great friends. I don't suppose she showed you, did she, the letter she wrote me, telling me of her engagement to you? ‘My dear Bob'—this was the drift of it—' I feel I owe it to you to write and tell you that I'm going to marry George. Will you forgive me? After all, you must have seen that it was bound to happen. And yet I feel a little guilty or, if not guilty, at least responsible for you and Harry and Roderick. But, after all, George was a greater responsibility still. You three will get on without me: you'll just laugh about it and go off and have a drink and feel no worse in the end. But George really needs me, and when it
came to the point I couldn't find it in my conscience to send him away. Now do write and tell me you forgive me . . .' and so on. Now wasn't that Naomi all over, apologising for turning me down when I would no more have thought of asking her to marry me than running away with my grandmother, to say nothing of the fact that by that time I was already engaged to Ida. I replied with my usual candour, and I don't suppose she showed you my letter either. ‘I not only forgive you, my dear Naomi,' I wrote,' ‘I thank you profoundly for not marrying me; but whether I can forgive you for marrying George remains to be seen.' That was the substance of my reply. Its last phrase, which was, of course, open to the merely jocular interpretation which Naomi would undoubtedly give to it, expressed a genuine fear. I was awfully afraid that she would succeed in making you miserable. But, in the years that followed, your letters reassured me. I gathered that everything was going admirably; at least there was nothing to suggest that it wasn't. And then, you remember, soon after my return to England, you asked me down to stay, and, I must say, everything seemed highly connubial. I seem to recall that Naomi was continually stroking your hair or planting herself on your knee. I found it rather embarrassing.”

Elsdon looked sheepish. “So did I,” he said. “Public demonstrations always embarrass me, and those particular ones occurred only when we had visitors.”

“Ah,” said the Colonel. “I might have guessed it.”

“Still,” said Elsdon, “we were jogging along all right. We had effected quite a good working compromise. So long as I avoided arguments and let her have her own way, which I soon learned to do, she made quite a good wife, as wives go. She knew her job as housekeeper: everything ran admirably.”

“It did indeed: one noticed that. Then, of course, Ida and I married, and I noticed that when Ida and I both stayed with you the public endearments ceased.”

“Perhaps they would have produced a bad impression on a woman.”

“No doubt,” said the Colonel. “And then—it seems to me now only a year or two after Ida and I married, but it must have been several years—we met Jim Marshall when we came to you for a weekend. He dined with us, I remember, on our first night and turned up again, I believe, for a good part of the following day. Naomi pretended to me to be fearfully bored by his presence. ‘I can't think,' she said to me, when you others were out of hearing, ‘why he comes so often.' Then she glanced at me with great seriousness. ‘It's difficult to know what to do, Bob.' You see the implication. She was conveying to me that Marshall, tiresome fellow, had begun, like so many others, to pursue her and that she found him a great nuisance. Well, conceivably I might have believed her if she hadn't at the same time, before my very eyes, been working at the poor fellow
for all she was worth. In some ways Naomi was really astonishingly obtuse: she had an unlimited belief in the gullibility of her friends. She never realised that it was perfectly easy for anyone who was immune from her fascination to see what she was up to.”