Point Counter Point, Page 33

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Philip, who had been wandering round the room examining the literary apparatus. ‘Nothing like this.’ He picked up some newspaper clippings that were lying under a paper weight on the lid of the unopened Corona. ‘Puzzles?’ he asked, holding up the irregularly chequered diagrams. ‘I didn’t know you’d become a crossword fiend.’

  Mr. Quarles took the clippings from his son and put them away in a drawer. He was annoyed that Philip should have seen them. The crosswords spoiled the effect of the dictaphone. ‘Childish things,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘But they’re a distraction when the mind is tired. I like to amuse myself with them occasionalah.’ In reality Mr. Quarles spent almost the whole of his mornings on crosswords. They exactly suited his type of intelligence. He was one of the most expert puzzle-solvers of his epoch.

  In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Mrs. Quarles was talking with her daughter-in-law. She was a small and active woman, grey-haired but preserving unblurred and hardly distorted the pure outlines of regular and well-moulded features. The expression of the face was at once vivacious and sensitive. It was a delicate energy, a strong but quiveringly responsive life, that shone in incessant variations of brilliance and shade of colour from her expressive grey-blue eyes. Her lips responded hardly less closely and constantly to her thoughts and feelings than did her eyes, and were grave or firm, smiled or were melancholy through an almost infinitesimally chromatic scale of emotional expression.

  ‘And little Phil?’ she said, enquiring after her grandchild.

  ‘Radiant.’

  ‘Darling little man!’ The warmth of Mrs. Quarles’s affection enriched her voice and was visible as a light in her eyes. ‘You must have felt miserable, leaving him for such a long time.’

  Elinor gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. ‘Well, I knew that Miss Fulkes and mother between them would look after him much better than I could do.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘I don’t believe nature ever meant me to have children. Either I’m impatient with them, or else I spoil them. Little Phil’s a pet, of course; but I know that a family would have driven me crazy.’

  Mrs. Quarles’s expression changed. ‘But wasn’t it wonderful to see him again after all those months? ‘ The tone of the question was almost anxious. She hoped that Elinor would answer it with the enthusiastic affirmative which would have been natural in the circumstances to herself. But at the same time she was haunted by a fear lest the strange girl might answer (with the frankness which was so admirable a quality in her, but which was also so disquieting, in its revelation of unfamiliar and to Rachel incomprehensible states of soul) that she hadn’t been in the least pleased to see her child again. Elinor’s first words came to her as a relief.

  ‘Yes, it was wonderful,’ she said, but robbed the phrase of its full effect by adding. ‘I didn’t imagine I could be so glad to see him again. But it was really a wild excitement.’

  There was a silence. ‘A queer girl,’ Mrs. Quarles was thinking; and her face reflected something of that bewilderment which she always felt in Elinor’s presence. She did her best to love her daughter-in-law; and up to a point she succeeded. Elinor had many excellent qualities. But something seemed to be lacking in her, something without which no human being could be entirely sympathetic to Rachel Quarles. It was as though she had been born without certain natural instincts. Not to have expected to feel happy when she saw her baby again—that was strange enough. But what Rachel found almost stranger was Elinor’s calm and casual admission of the fact. She herself would have blushed to make such an admission, even if it had been the truth. It would have seemed to her something shameful—a kind of blasphemy, a denial of what was holy. To Rachel the reverence for holy things came naturally. It was Elinor’s lack of this reverence, her inability even to realize that holy things were holy, which made it impossible for Mrs. Quarles to love her daughter-in-law as much as she would have liked.

  On her side Elinor admired, respected and genuinely liked her husband’s mother. For her, the chronic difficulty was to establish effectual contact with a person whose ruling ideas and motives seemed to her so oddly incomprehensible and even so absurd. Mrs. Quarles was unobtrusively but ardently religious and lived to the best of her ability in accordance with her beliefs. Elinor admired, but felt that it was all rather absurd and superfluous. Her education had been orthodox. But she never remembered a time, even in her childhood, when she seriously believed what people told her about the other world and its inhabitants. The other world bored her; she was interested only in this. Confirmation had evoked in her no more enthusiasm than a visit to the theatre, indeed considerably less. Her adolescence had passed without the trace of a religious crisis.

  ‘It all seems to me just nonsense,’ she would say when the matter was discussed in her presence. And there was no affectation in her words, they were not uttered provocatively. She simply stated a fact of her personal history. Religion and, along with religion, all transcendental morality, all metaphysical speculation seemed to her nonsensical in precisely the same way as the smell of Gorgonzola seemed to her disgusting. There was no getting behind the immediate experience. Often, on occasions like this, she wished there were. She would have liked to cross the abyss which separated her from Mrs. Quarles. As it was, she felt a certain uneasiness when she was with her mother-in-law; she hesitated in her presence to express her feelings or to say what she thought. For she had found, only too often, that the frank utterance of what seemed to her perfectly natural sentiments and reasonable opinions, was apt to distress her mother-in-law, to strike her as strange and shocking. It had happened again now, as she could see from the expression which showed itself for an instant on Mrs. Quarles’s mobile and sensitive face. What had it been this time? Conscious of no offence, Elinor could only wonder. In future, she decided, she would volunteer nothing of her own; she would just agree with what was said.

  As it happened, however, the next topic of conversation to be broached was one in which Elinor was too deeply interested to be able to keep her new-made resolution. Moreover it was one on which, as she knew by experience, she could speak freely without risk of unintentional offence. For where Philip was concerned, Elinor’s feelings and opinions seemed to Mrs. Quarles entirely appropriate.

  ‘And big Philip?’ she now asked.

  ‘You see how well he looks,’ Elinor answered for his health, though she knew that the question had not concerned his bodily wellbeing. It was with a certain dread that she looked forward to the conversation that impended. At the same time, however, she was glad to have an opportunity of discussing that which so constantly and distressingly occupied her thoughts.

  ‘Yes, yes, I can see that,’ said Mrs. Quarles. ‘But what I really meant was: how is he in himself? How is he with you?’

  There was a silence. Elinor frowned slightly and looked at the floor. ‘Remote,’ she said at last.

  Mrs. Quarles sighed. ‘He was always that,’ she said. ‘Always remote.’

  He too, it seemed to her, was lacking in something—in the desire and the capacity to give himself, to go out and meet his fellows, even those who loved him, even those he loved. Geoffrey had been so different. At the memory of her dead son Mrs. Quarles felt her whole being invaded by a poignant sadness. If anyone had suggested that she had loved him more than she loved Philip, she would have protested. Her own feelings, she felt sure, had been initially the same. But Geoffrey had permitted himself to be loved more fully, more intimately than his brother. If only Philip had allowed her to love him more! But there had always been barriers between them, barriers of his erecting. Geoffrey had come out to meet her, had given that he might receive. But Philip had always been reluctant and parsimonious. He had always shut doors when she approached, always locked up his mind lest she should catch a glimpse of his secrets. She had never known what he really felt and thought. ‘Even as a little boy,’ she said aloud.

  ‘And now he has his work,’ said Elinor after a pause. ‘Which makes it w
orse. It’s like a castle on the top of a mountain, his work. He shuts himself up in it and he’s impregnable.’

  Mrs. Quarles smiled sadly. ‘Impregnable.’ It was the right word. Even as a little boy he had been impregnable. ‘Perhaps in the end he’ll surrender of his own accord.’

  ‘To me?’ said Elinor. ‘Or to someone else? It wouldn’t be much satisfaction if it was to somebody else, would it? Though when I’m feeling unselfish,’ she added, ‘I wish he’d surrender to anyone—_anyone_, for his own good.’

  Elinor’s words set Mrs. Quarles thinking of her husband—not resentfully, though he had done wrong, though he had hurt her, but pityingly, rather, and solicitously. For she could never feel that it was entirely his fault. It was his misfortune.

  Elinor sighed. ‘I can’t really expect to receive his surrender,’ she said. ‘When one has become a habit, one can’t very well suddenly turn into an overwhelming revelation.’

  Mrs. Quarles shook her head. In recent years Sidney’s overwhelming revelations had come from such unexpectedly humble sources. The little kitchenmaid, the gamekeeper’s daughter. How could he, she wondered for the thousandth time, how could he? It was incomprehensible.

  ‘If at least,’ she said almost in a whisper, ‘you had God as a companion.’ God had always been her comfort, God and the doing of God’s will. She could never understand how people could get through life without Him. ‘If only you could find God.’

  Elinor’s smile was sarcastic. Remarks of this sort annoyed her by being so ridiculously beside the point. ‘It might be simpler,’ she began, but checked herself after the first words. She had meant to say that it might be simpler perhaps to find a man. But she remembered her resolution and was silent.

  ‘What were you saying?’

  Elinor shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  Fortunately for Mr. Quarles the British Museum had no Essex branch. It was only in London that he could make researches and collect the documents necessary for his book. The house in Portman Square was let (Mr. Quarles blamed the income tax, but his own speculations in sugar were mainly responsible); and it was in a modest little flat in Bloomsbury (‘convenientlah nyah the Museum’) that he now camped whenever the claims of scholarship brought him to town.

  During the last few weeks the claims had been more than usually peremptory. His visits to London had been frequent and prolonged. After the second of these visits Mrs. Quarles had wondered, sadly, whether Sidney had found another woman. And when, on his return from a third journey and, a few days later, on the eve of a fourth, he began to groan ostentatiously over the vast complexity of the history of democracy among the Ancient Indians, Rachel felt convinced that the woman had been found. She knew Sidney well enough to be certain that, if he had really been reading about the Ancient Indians, he would never have troubled to talk about them over the dinner-table—not at such length, in any case, nor so insistently. Sidney talked for the same reason as the hunted sepia squirts ink, to conceal his movements. Behind the inkcloud of the Ancient Indians he hoped to go jaunting up to town unobserved. Poor Sidney! He thought himself so Machiavellian. But his ink was transparent, his cunning like a child’s.

  ‘Couldn’t you get the books sent down from the London Library?’ Mrs. Quarles rather pointedly asked.

  Sidney shook his head. ‘They’re the sort of books,’ he said importantly, ‘that are only in the Museum.’

  Rachel sighed and could only hope that the woman could be trusted to look after herself well enough to keep out of serious trouble and not so well as to want to make mischief.

  ‘I think I shall run up to town with you to-morrow,’ he announced on the morning before Philip and Elinor took their leave.

  ‘Again?’ asked Mrs. Quarles.

  ‘There’s a point about those wretched Indians,’ he explained, ‘that I ryahly must clear up. I think I may find it in Pramathanatha Banerea’s book…Or it may be dealt with by Radakhumud Mookerji.’ He rolled out the names impressively, professionally. ‘It’s about local government in Maurya times. So democratic, you know, in spite of the central despotism. For example…’

  Through the inkcloud Mrs. Quarles caught glimpses of a female figure.

  Breakfast over, Sidney retired to his study and addressed himself to the morning’s crossword. A kind of onion, six letters Anticipations of the morrow distracted him; he could not fix his attention. Her breasts, he was thinking, her smooth white back…What about ‘chive’? No good; only five letters. Walking over to the bookshelf he took out his Bible; its thin pages rustled under his fingers. ‘Thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like young roes that are twins.’ Solomon spoke for him, with what rich thunders! ‘The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.’ He read the words out loud. Gladys had a perfect figure. ‘Like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor.’ These orientals knew what passion was. Miscalling libidinousness ‘passion,’ Mr. Quarles regarded himself as a very passionate man. ‘Thy belly is like an heap of wheat.’ Passion is respectable, is actually respected by the law in some countries. For the poets it is even sacred. He agreed with the poets. But ‘like young roes’ was an odd, inadequate simile. Gladys was plump without being fat, firmly resilient. Roes, on the contrary…As a man of great passions, Sidney could regard himself as positively a noble and heroic figure. ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire with spikenard; spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh…’ But, of course, the word was ‘garlic’! Six letters. A kind of onion. ‘Myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.’

  Their train next morning was nearly twenty minutes late. ‘Scandalous,’ Mr. Quarles kept repeating, as he looked at his watch, ‘disgraceful.’

  ‘You’re in a great hurry to be at your Indians,’ said Philip, smiling from his corner.

  His father frowned and talked about something else. At Liverpool Street they parted, Sidney in one taxi, Philip and Elinor in a second. Sidney reached his flat only just in time. He was still engaged in washing the grime of the journey from his large, flesh-padded hands, when the bell rang. He made haste to rinse and dry himself, then, adjusting his face, he stepped into the hall and opened. It was Gladys. He received her with a kind of condescending regality, his chin tilted, his chest thrown back, his waistcoat projecting, but smiling down at her (Gladys called herself ‘petite’) and graciously twinkling through half-shut eyelids. It was an impudent, vulgar, snubby little face that smiled back at him. But it was not her face that had brought Mr. Quarles to London, it was not the individual Gladys Helmsley; it was the merely generic aspect of the woman, her ‘figah,’ as Sidney would have euphemistically put it.

  ‘You’re very punctual, my dyah,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  Gladys was rather taken aback by the coolness of his greeting. After what had happened last time, she had expected something tenderer.

  ‘Am I!’ she said, for lack of anything better to say; and since human beings have only a limited number of noises and grimaces with which to express the multiplicity of their emotions, she laughed as though she had been amused by something, when in fact she was only surprised and disquieted. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him, provocative-petulantly, why he didn’t kiss her, whether he was tired of her—_already_. But she decided to wait.

  ‘Almost too punctual,’ Sidney went on. ‘My train was scandalouslah late. Scandalouslah!’ He radiated indignation.

  ‘Fancy! ‘ said Gladys. The refinement that hung around her speech, like a too genteel disguise, dropped away from time to time, leaving individual words and phrases nakedly cockney.

  ‘Ryahly disgraceful!’ said Sidney. ‘Trains have no business to be late. I shall write to the Traffic Superintendent at Liverpool Street. I’m not sure,’ he added, still more importantly,
‘that I shan’t write to the Times as well.’

  Gladys was impressed. Mr. Quarles had intended that she should be. Apart from all merely sensual satsfactions, the greatest charm of his sexual holidays resided in the fact that they were shared with impressible companions. Sidney liked them, not only young, but of a lower class, and poor. To feel himself unequivocally superior and genuinely admired was for Sidney a luxury almost as great as an embracement. His escapades were holidays not only from chastity, but also from that sense of inferiority which, at home, in parliament, at the office, had always inveterately haunted him. In relation to young women of the lower classes he was a great man, as well as a ‘passionate’ one.

  Gladys, on her side, was impressed by his thunderings. But she was also amused. Impressed, because she belonged to the world of poor and patient wage-slaves, who accept the unpleasantnesses of social life as so many natural phenomena, uncontrollable by human agency and recalcitrant to human desires. But Sidney was one of the Olympian rich; the rich refuse to accept unpleasantness; they write letters to the Times about it, they pull wires, use influence, lodge formal complaints with an always friendly and obsequious police. To Gladys it was wonderful—wonderful, but also very funny. There was such a lot of loud haw-haw and lahdy-da about the whole performance. It was so like the parody of itself on the music-hall stage. She admired, she realized very accurately the economic and social causes of Sidney’s behaviour (it was that realization which had made her so promptly his mistress). But she also laughed. She lacked reverence.