Eyeless in Gaza, Page 20

  ‘Anyhow,’ Mark went on, ‘the fact remains that the available resources weren’t used. That’s what allows one to hope that a revolution might succeed. Provided it were carried out very quickly. For, of course, once they realized they were seriously in danger, they’d forget their scruples. But they might hesitate long enough, I think, to make a revolution possible. Even a few hours of compunction would be sufficient. Yes, in spite of tanks, there’s still a chance of success. But you must be prepared to take a chance. Not like the imbeciles of the T.U.C. Or the rank and file of the Unions, for that matter. As full of scruples as the bourgeoisie. It’s the hang-over of evangelical Christianity. You’ve no idea what a lot of preaching and hymn-singing there was during the General Strike. I was flabbergasted. But it’s good to know the worst. Perhaps the younger generation . . .’ He shook his head. ‘But I don’t feel certain even of them. Methodism may be decaying. But look at those spiritualist chapels that are sprouting up all over the industrial areas! Like toadstools.’

  The next time he passed, Gerry called her name; but Mary Amberley refused to acknowledge his greeting. Turning coldly away she pretended to be interested only in what Anthony was saying.

  ‘Ass of a woman!’ thought Gerry, as he looked at her averted face. Then, aloud, ‘What do you say to putting on this record another time?’ he asked his partner.

  Helen nodded ecstatically.

  The music of the spheres, the beatific vision . . . But why should heaven be a monopoly of ear or eye? The muscles as they move, they too have their paradise. Heaven is not only an illumination and a harmony; it is also a dance.

  ‘Half a tick,’ said Gerry, when they were opposite the gramophone.

  Helen stood there as he wound up the machine, quite still, her arms hanging limp at her sides. Her eyes were closed; she was shutting the world away from her, shutting herself out of existence. In this still vacancy between two heavens of motion, existence was without a point.

  The music stopped for a moment; then began again in the middle of a bar. Behind her closed eyelids, she was aware that Gerry had moved, was standing over her, very near; then his arm encircled her body.

  ‘Onward, Christian soldiers!’ he said; and they stepped out once more into the music, into the heaven of harmoniously moving muscles.

  There had been a silence. Determined not to pay any attention to that beast, Mrs Amberley turned to Staithes. ‘And those scents of yours?’ she asked with an assumption of bright, amused interest.

  ‘Flourishing,’ he answered. ‘I’ve had to order three new stills and take on more labour.’

  Mrs Amberley smiled at him and shook her head. ‘You of all people!’ she said. ‘It seems peculiarly ridiculous that you should be a scent-manufacturer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The most unfrivolous of men,’ she went on, ‘the least gallant, the most implacable misogynist!’ (Either impotent or homosexual – there couldn’t be a doubt; and, after his story about Berlin, almost certainly impotent, she thought.)

  With a smile of excruciated mockery, ‘But hasn’t it occurred to you,’ Staithes asked, ‘that those might be reasons for being a scent-maker?’

  ‘Reasons?’

  ‘A way of expressing one’s lack of gallantry.’ In point of fact, it was entirely by chance that he had gone into the scent business. His eye had been caught by an advertisement in The Times, a small factory for sale very cheap . . . Just luck. But now, after the event, it heightened his self-esteem to say that he had chosen the profession deliberately, in order to express his contempt for the women for whom he catered. The lie, which he had willed and by this time half believed to be the truth, placed him in a position of superiority to all women in general and, at this moment, to Mary Amberley in particular. Leaning forward, he took Mary’s hand, raised it as though he were about to kiss it, but, instead, only sniffed at the skin – then let it fall again. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘there’s civet in the stuff you’ve scented yourself with.’

  ‘Well, why not?’

  ‘Oh, no reason at all,’ said Staithes, ‘no reason at all, if you happen to have a taste for the excrement of polecats.

  Mrs Amberley made a grimace of disgust.

  ‘In Abyssinia,’ he went on, ‘they have civet farms. Twice a week, you take a stick and go and poke the cats until they’re thoroughly angry and frightened. That’s when they secrete their stuff. Like children wetting their knickers when they’re afraid. Then you catch them with a pair of tongs, so that they can’t bite, and scrape out the contents of the little pouch attached to their genital organs. You do it with an egg-spoon and the stuff’s a kind of yellow grease, rather like ear-wax. Stinks like hell when it’s undiluted. We get it in London packed in buffalo horns. Huge cornucopias full of dark brown stinking ear-wax. At a hundred and seventeen shillings the ounce, what’s more. That’s one of the reasons why your scent costs you so much. The poor can’t afford to smear themselves with cat’s mess. They have to be content with plain iso-eugenol and phenyl acetic aldehyde.’

  Colin and Joyce had stopped dancing and were sitting on the landing outside the drawing-room door. Alone. It was Colin’s opportunity for releasing some of the righteous indignation that had been accumulating within him, ever since dinner-time.

  ‘I must say, Joyce,’ he began, ‘some of your mother’s guests . . .’

  Joyce looked at him with eyes in which there was anxiety as well as adoration. ‘Yes, I know,’ she apologized. ‘I know,’ and was abjectly in a hurry to agree with him about Beppo’s degeneracy and Anthony Beavis’s cynicism. Then, seeing that he was enjoying his indignation and that she herself rather profited than suffered by it, she even volunteered the information that that man who had come in last and was sitting with her mother was a Bolshevik. Yes, Mark Staithes was a Bolshevik.

  The phrase that Colin had been meditating all the evening found utterance. ‘I may be stupid and all that,’ he said with an assumption of humility that cloaked an overweening self-satisfaction in what he regarded as the quite extraordinary quality of his ordinariness; ‘I may be ignorant and badly educated; but at least’ (his tone changed, he was proudly giving expression to his consciousness of being uniquely average), ‘at least I know – well, I do know what’s done. I mean, if one’s a gentleman.’ He underlined the words to make them sound slightly comic and so prove that he had a sense of humour. To speak seriously of what one took seriously – this, precisely, was one of the things that wasn’t done. That touch of humour proved more cogently than any emphasis could do, any emotional trembling of the voice, that he did take these things seriously – as a uniquely average gentleman must take them. And of course Joyce understood that he did. She glanced at him worshippingly and pressed his hand.

  Dancing, dancing . . . Oh, if only, thought Helen, one could go on dancing for ever! If only one didn’t have to spend all that time doing other things! Wrong things, mostly, stupid things, things one was sorry for after they were done. Dancing, she lost her life in order to save it; lost her identity and became something greater than herself; lost her perplexities and self-hatreds in a bright harmonious certitude; lost her bad character and was made perfect; lost the regretted past, the apprehended future, and gained a timeless present of consummate happiness. She who could not paint, could not write, could not even sing in tune, became while she danced an artist; no, more than an artist; became a god, the creator of a new heaven and a new earth, a creator rejoicing in his creation and finding it good.

  ‘“Yes, sir, she’s my baby. No, sir . . .”’ Gerry broke off his humming. ‘I won sixty pounds at poker last night,’ he said. ‘Pretty good, eh?’

  She smiled up at him and nodded in rapturous silence. Good, good – everything was wonderfully good.

  ‘And I can’t tell you,’ Staithes was saying, ‘how intensely I enjoy writing those advertisements.’ The muscles in his face were working as though for an anatomical demonstration. ‘The ones about bad breath and body odours.’

  ‘
Hideous!’ Mrs Amberley shuddered. ‘Hideous! There’s only one Victorian convention I appreciate, and that’s the convention of not speaking about those things.’

  ‘Which is precisely why it’s such fun to speak about them,’ said Staithes, beaming at her between contracted sphincters. ‘Forcing humans to be fully, verbally conscious of their own and other people’s disgustingness. That’s the beauty of this kind of advertising. It shakes them into awareness.’

  ‘And into buying,’ put in Anthony. ‘You’re forgetting the profits.’

  Staithes shrugged his shoulders. ‘They’re incidental,’ he said; and it was obvious, Anthony reflected, as he watched him, it was obvious that the man was telling the truth. For him, the profits were incidental. ‘Breaking down your protective convention,’ he went on, turning again to Mary, ‘that’s the real fun. Leaving you defenceless against the full consciousness of the fact that you can’t do without your fellow humans, and that, when you’re with them, they make you sick.’

  CHAPTER XIX

  July 7th 1912

  MRS FOXE WAS looking through her engagement book. The succession of committee meetings, of district visitings, of afternoons at the cripples’ playroom, darkened the pages. And in between whiles there would be calls, and tea at the vicarage and luncheon-parties in London. And yet (she knew it in advance) the total effect of the coming summer would be one of emptiness. However tightly crammed with activity, time always seemed strangely empty when Brian was away. In other years there had been a wedge of well-filled time each summer. But this July, after only a week or two at home, Brian was going to Germany. To learn the language. It was essential. She knew that he had to go; she earnestly wanted him to go. All the same, when the moment actually came for his departure, it was painful. She wished she could be frankly selfish and keep him at home.

  ‘This time tomorrow,’ she said, when Brian came into the room, ‘you’ll be driving across London to Liverpool Street.’

  He nodded without speaking and, laying a hand on her shoulder, bent down and kissed her.

  Mrs Foxe looked up at him and smiled. Then, forgetting for a moment that she had vowed not to say anything to him about her feelings, ‘It’ll be a sadly empty summer, I’m afraid,’ she said; and immediately reproached herself for having brought that expression of distress to his face; reproached herself even while, with a part of her being, she rejoiced to find him so responsively loving, so sensitively concerned with her feelings. ‘Unless you fill it with your letters,’ she added by way of qualification. ‘You will write, won’t you?’

  ‘Of c-c-c . . . N-naturally, I’ll wr-write.’

  Mrs Foxe proposed a walk; or what about a little drive in the dogcart? Embarrassed, Brian looked at his watch.

  ‘But I’m l-lunching with the Th-Thursleys,’ he answered uncomfortably. ‘There w-wouldn’t be much t-t-t . . . much leisure’ (how he hated these ridiculous circumlocutions!) ‘for a drive.’

  ‘But how silly of me!’ cried Mrs Foxe. ‘I’d quite forgotten your lunch.’ It was true that she had forgotten; and this sudden, fresh realization that for long hours, on this last day, she would have to do without him was like a wound. She made an effort to prevent any sign of the pain she felt from appearing on her face or sounding in her voice. ‘But there’ll be time at least for a stroll in the garden, won’t there?’

  They walked out through the French window and down the long green alley between the herbaceous borders. It was a sunless day, but warm, almost sultry. Under the grey sky the flowers took on a brilliance that seemed somehow almost unnatural. Still silent, they turned at the end of the alley and walked back again.

  ‘I’m glad it’s Joan,’ said Mrs Foxe at last; ‘and I’m glad you care so much. Though in a way it’s a pity you met her when you did. Because, I’m afraid, it’ll be such a weary long time before you’ll be able to get married.’

  Brian nodded without speaking.

  ‘It’ll be a testing time,’ she went on. ‘Difficult; not altogether happy perhaps. All the same’ (and her voice vibrated movingly), ‘I’m glad it happened, I’m glad,’ she repeated. ‘Because I believe in love.’ She believed in it, as the poor believe in a heaven of posthumous comfort and glory, because she had never known it. She had respected her husband, admired him for his achievements, had liked him for what was likeable in him, and, maternally, had pitied him for his weaknesses. But there had been no transfiguring passion, and his carnal approach had always remained for her an outrage, hardly supportable. She had never loved him. That was why her belief in love’s reality was so strong. Love had to exist in order that the unfavourable balance of her own personal experience might be at least vicariously redressed. Besides, there were the attestations of the poets; it did exist and was wonderful, holy, a revelation. ‘It’s a kind of special grace,’ she went on, ‘sent by God to help us, to make us stronger and better, to deliver us from evil. Saying no to the worst is easy when one has said yes to the best.’

  Easy, Brian was thinking in the ensuing silence, even when one hasn’t said yes to the best. The woman who had come and sat at their table in the Café-Concert, when Anthony and he were learning French at Grenoble, two years before – it hadn’t been difficult to resist that temptation.

  ‘Tu as l’air bien vicieux,’ she had said to him in the first entr’acte; and to Anthony, ‘Il droit être terrible avec les femmes, hein?’ Then she had suggested that they should come home with her. ‘Tous les deux, j’ai une petite amie. Nous nous amuserons bien gentiment. On vous fera voir des choses drôles. Toi qui es si vicieux – ça t’amusera.’

  No, that certainly hadn’t been difficult to resist, even though he had never set eyes on Joan at the time. The real temptations were not the worst, but the best. At Grenoble, it had been the best in literature. Et son ventre, et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne . . . Elle se coula á mon côté, m’appela des noms les plus tendres et des noms les plus effroyablement grossiers, qui glissaient sur ses lèvres en suaves murmures. Puis elle se tût et commença à me donner ces baisers qu’elle savait . . . The creations of the best stylists had proved to be far more dangerously attractive, far less easily resistible than the sordid realities of the Café-Concert. And now that he had said yes to the best possible reality, the appeal of the worst was even less effective, had ceased altogether to be anything remotely resembling a temptation. Such temptation as there was came once more from the best. It had been impossible to desire the low, vulgar, half-animal creature of the Café-Concert. But Joan was beautiful, Joan was refined, Joan shared his interests – and precisely for those reasons was desirable. Just because she was the best (and this for him was the paradox that it was so painful and bewildering to live through), he desired her in the wrong way, physically . . .

  ‘Do you remember those lines of Meredith’s?’ said Mrs Foxe, breaking the silence. Meredith was one of her favourite authors. ‘From the Woods,’ she specified, affectionately abbreviating the title of the poem almost to a nickname. And she quoted:

  ‘“Love, the great volcano, flings

  Fires of lower earth to sky.”

  Love’s a kind of philosopher’s stone,’ she went on. ‘Not only does it deliver us; it also transforms. Dross into gold. Earth into heaven.’

  Brian nodded affirmatively. And yet, he was thinking, those voluptuous and faceless bodies created by the stylists had actually come to assume Joan’s features. In spite of love, or just because of it, the succubi now had a name, a personality.

  The stable clock struck twelve; and at the first stroke there was a noiseless explosion of doves, like snowflakes whirling up against the clotted darkness of the elms beyond.

  ‘The beauty of it!’ said Mrs Foxe with a kind of muted intensity.

  But suppose, it suddenly occurred to Brian, suppose she were suddenly left with no money at all? And if Joan were as poor as that wretched woman at Grenoble, as hopelessly without an alternative resource?

  Slowly the last bell note expired, and one by one the whir
ling doves dropped back on to their turreted cote above the clock.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mrs Foxe, ‘you ought to be starting if you’re going to get there punctually.’

  Brian knew how reluctant his mother was to let him go; and this display of generosity produced in him a sense of guilt and, along with it (since he did not want to feel guilty), a certain resentment. ‘B-but I d-don’t need an hour,’ he said almost angrily, ‘to c-cycle three m-miles.’

  A moment later he was feeling ashamed of himself for the note of irritation in his voice, and for the rest of the time he was with her he showed himself more than ordinarily affectionate.

  At half-past twelve he took his bicycle and rode over to the Thursleys’. The maid opened the nineteenth-century Gothic front door and he stepped into a faint smell of steamed pudding flavoured with cabbage. As usual. The vicarage always smelt of steamed pudding and cabbage. It was a symptom, he had discovered, of poverty and, as such, gave him a feeling of moral discomfort, as though he had done something wrong and were suffering from an uneasy conscience.

  He was ushered into the drawing-room. Behaving as if he were some very distinguished old lady, Mrs Thursley rose from her writing-table and advanced to meet him. ‘Ah, dear Brian!’ she cried. Her professionally Christian smile was pearly with the flash of false teeth. ‘So nice to see you!’ She took and held his hand. ‘And your dear mother – how’s she? Sad because you’re going to Germany, I’m sure. We’re all sad, if it comes to that. You’ve got such a gift for making people miss you,’ she continued in the same complimentary strain, while Brian blushed and fidgeted in an agony of discomfort. Saying nice things to people’s faces, particularly to the faces of the rich, the influential, the potentially useful, was a habit with Mrs Thursley. A Christian habit she would have called it, if she had been pressed for an explanation. Loving one’s neighbour; seeing the good in everybody; creating an atmosphere of sympathy and trust. But below the level of the avowal, almost below the level of consciousness, she knew that most people were greedy for flattery, however outrageous, and were prepared, in one way or another, to pay for it.