Point Counter Point, Page 23

  ‘Well!’ He looked at her and then at the snow and the tree-shadows and the great bare rocks and the blue sky, then back again at his mother. And all at once he was filled with an intense, inexplicable happiness.

  ‘I shall never be so happy as this again,’ he said to himself, when they set off once more. ‘Never again, even though I live to be a hundred.’ He was only fifteen at the time, but that was how he felt and thought.

  And his words had been prophetic. That was the last of his happinesses. Afterwards…No, no. He preferred not to think of afterwards. Not at the moment. He poured himself out another cup of tea.

  A bell rang startlingly. He went to the door of the flat and opened it. It was his mother.

  ‘You?’ Then he suddenly remembered that Lucy had said something.

  ‘Didn’t you get my message?’ Mrs. Knoyle asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes. But I’d clean forgotten.’

  ‘But I thought you needed…’ she began. She was afraid she might have intruded; his face was so unwelcoming.

  The corners of his mouth ironically twitched. ‘I do need,’ he said. He was chronically penniless.

  They passed into the other room. The windows, Mrs. Knoyle observed at a glance, were foggy with grime. On shelf and mantel the dust lay thick. Sooty cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. She had tried to get Maurice’s permission to send a woman to clean up two or three times a week. But, ‘None of your slumming,’ he had said. ‘I prefer to wallow. Filth’s my natural element. Besides, I haven’t a distinguished military position to keep up.’ He laughed, noiselessly, showing his big strong teeth. That was for her. She never dared to repeat her offer. But the room really did need cleaning.

  ‘Would you like some tea? ‘ he asked. ‘It’s ready. I’m just having breakfast,’ he added, purposely drawing attention to the irregularity of his way of life.

  She refused, without venturing any comment on the unusual breakfast hour. Spandrell was rather disappointed that he had not succeeded in drawing her. There was a long silence.

  From time to time Mrs. Knoyle glanced almost surreptitiously at her son. He was staring fixedly into the empty fireplace. He looked old, she thought, and rather ill and dreadfully uncared for. She tried to recognize the child, the big schoolboy he had been in those far-off times when they were happy, just the two of them together. She remembered how distressed he used to be when she didn’t wear what he thought were the right clothes, when she wasn’t smart or failed to look her best. He was as jealously proud of her as she was of him. But the responsibility of his upbringing weighed on her heavily. The future had always frightened her; she had always been afraid of taking decisions; she had no trust in her own powers. Besides, after her husband’s death, there wasn’t much money; and she had no head for affairs, no talent for management. How to afford to send him to the university, how to get him started in life? The questions tormented her. She lay awake at night, wondering what she 6ught to do. Life terrified her. She had a child’s capacity for happiness, but also a child’s fears, a child’s inefficiency. When existence was a holiday, none could be more rapturously happy; but when there was business to be done, plans to be made, decisions taken, she was simply lost and terrified. And to make matters worse, after Maurice went to school she was very lonely. He was with her only in the holidays. For nine months out of the twelve she was alone, with nobody to love but her old dachshund. And at last even he failed her-fell ill, poor old beast, and had to be put out of his misery. It was shortly after poor old Fritz’s death that she first met Major Knoyle, as he then was.

  ‘You say you brought that money?’ Spandrell asked, breaking the long silence.

  Mrs. Knoyle flushed. ‘Yes, it’s here,’ she said and opened her bag. The moment to speak had come. It was her duty to admonish, and the wad of bank notes gave her the right, the power. But the duty was odious and she had no wish to use her power. She raised her eyes and looked at him imploringly. ‘Maurice,’ she begged, ‘why can’t you be reasonable? It’s such a madness, such a folly.’

  Spandrell raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s a madness?’ he asked, pretending not to know what she was talking about.

  Embarrassed at being thus compelled to specify her vague reproaches, Mrs. Knoyle blushed. ‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘This way of living. It’s bad and stupid. And such a waste, such a suicide. Besides, you’re not happy; I can see that.’

  ‘Mayn’t I even be unhappy, if I want to?’ he asked ironically.

  ‘But do you want to make me unhappy too? ‘ she asked. ‘Because if you do, you succeed, Maurice; you succeed. You make me terribly unhappy.’ The tears came into her eyes. She felt in her bag for a handkerchief.

  Spandrell got up from his chair and began to walk up and down the room. ‘You didn’t think much of my happiness in the past,’ he said.

  His mother did not answer, but went on noiselessly crying.

  ‘When you married that man,’ he went on, ‘did you think of my happiness?’

  ‘You know I thought it would be for the best,’ she answered brokenly. She had explained it so often; she couldn’t begin again. ‘You know it,’ she repeated.

  ‘I only know what I felt and said at the time,’ he answered. ‘You didn’t listen to me, and now you tell me you wanted to make me happy.’

  ‘But you were so unreasonable,’ she protested. ‘If you had given me any reasons…’

  ‘Reasons,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Did you honestly expect a boy of fifteen to tell his mother the reasons why he didn’t want her to share her bed with a stranger?’

  He was thinking of that book which had circulated surreptitiously among the boys of his house at school. Disgusted and ashamed, but irresistibly fascinated, he had read it at night, by the light of an electric torch, under the bedclothes. A Girls’ School in Paris it was called, innocuously enough; but the contents were pure pornography. The sexual exploits of the military were pindarically exalted. A little later his mother wrote to him that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. ‘It’s no good, mother, he said aloud. ‘Hadn’t we better talk about something else?’

  Mrs. Knoyle drew her breath sharply and with determination, gave her eyes a final wipe and put away the handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was stupid of me. Perhaps I’d better go.’

  Secretly she hoped that he would protest, would beg her to stay. But he said nothing.

  ‘Here’s the money,’ she added.

  He took the folded bank-notes and stuffed them into the pocket of his dressing-gown. ‘I’m sorry I had to ask you for it,’ he said. ‘I was in a hole. I’ll try not to get into it again.’

  He looked at her for a moment, smiling, and suddenly, through the worn mask, she seemed to see him as he was in boyhood. Tenderness like a soft warmth expanded within her, soft but irresistible. It would not be contained. She laid her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘Goodbye, my darling boy,’ she said, and Spandrell recognized in her voice that note which used to come into it when she talked to him of his dead father. She leaned forward to kiss him. Averting his face, he passively suffered her lips to touch his cheek.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Miss Fulkes rotated the terrestrial globe until the crimson triangle of India was opposite their eyes. ‘That’s Bombay,’ she said, pointing with her pencil. ‘That’s where Daddy and Mummy took the ship. Bombay is a big town in India,’ she went on instructively. ‘All this is India.’

  ‘Why is India red?’ asked little Phil.

  ‘I told you before. Try to remember.’

  ‘Because it’s English?’ Phil remembered, of course; but the explanation had seemed inadequate. He had hoped for a better one this time.

  ‘There, you see, you can remember if you try,’ said Miss Fulkes, scoring a small triumph.’

  ‘But why should English things be red?’

  ‘Because red is England’s colour. Look, here’s little England.’ She spun the globe. ‘Red too.’

  ‘We live in England, don�
�t we?’ Phil looked out of the window. The lawn with its Wellingtonia, the clotpolled elms looked back at him.

  ‘Yes, we live just about here,’ and Miss Fulkes poked the red island in the stomach.

  ‘But it’s green, where we live,’ said Phil. ‘Not red.’

  Miss Fulkes tried to explain, as she had done so many times before, just precisely what a map was.

  In the garden Mrs. Bidlake walked among her flowers, weeding and meditating. Her walking-stick had a little pronged spud at the end of it; she could weed without bending. The weeds in the flower-beds were young and fragile; they yielded without a struggle to the spud. But the dandelions and plantains on the lawn were more formidable enemies. The dandelions’ roots were like long tapering white serpents. The plantains, when she tried to pull them up, desperately clawed the earth.

  It was the season of tulips. Duc van Thol and Keizers Kroon, Proserpine and Thomas Moore stood at attention in all the beds, glossy in the light. Atoms in the sun vibrated and their trembling filled all space. Eyes felt the pulses as light; the tulip atoms absorbed or reverberated the accorded movements, creating colours for whose sake the burgesses of seventeenth-century Haarlem were prepared to part with hoarded guilders. Red tulips and yellow, white and parti-coloured, smooth or feathery—Mrs. Bidlake looked at them, happily. They were like those gay and brilliant young men, she reflected, in Pinturicchio’s frescoes at Siena. She halted so as to be able to shut her eyes and think more thoroughly of Pinturicchio. Mrs. Bidlake could only think really well when she had her eyes shut. Her face tilted a little upwards towards the sky, her heavy, wax-white eyelids closed against the light, she stood remembering, confusedly thinking. Pinturicchio, Siena, the solemn huge cathedral—the Tuscan Middle Ages marched past her in a rich and confused pageant….She had been brought up on Ruskin. Watts had painted her portrait as a child. Rebelling against the Pre-Raphaelites, she had thrilled with an admiration that was quickened, at first, by a sense of sacrilege, over the Impressionists. It was because she loved art that she had married John Bidlake. Liking his pictures, she had imagined, when the painter of ‘The Haymakers’ had paid his court to her, that she adored the man. He was twenty years her senior; his reputation as a husband was bad; her family objected strenuously. She did not care. John Bidlake was embodied Art. His was a sacred function and through his function he appealed to all her vague, but ardent, idealism.

  John Bidlake’s reasons for desiring to marry yet again were unromantic. Travelling in Provence he had caught typhoid. (‘That’s what comes of drinking water,’ he used to say afterwards. ‘If only I’d stuck to Burgundy and cognac!’) After a month in hospital at Avignon he returned to England, a thin and tottering convalescent. Three weeks later influenza, followed by pneumonia, brought him again to death’s door. He recovered slowly. The doctor congratulated him on having recovered at all.’do you call this recovering? ‘ grumbled John Bidlake. ‘I feel as though about three-quarters of me were dead and buried.’ Accustomed to being well, he was terrified of illness. He saw himself living miserably, a lonely invalid. Marriage would be an alleviation. He decided to marry. The girl must be good-looking—that went without saying. But serious, not flighty; devoted, a stay-at-home.

  In Janet Paston he found all that he had been looking for. She had a face like a saint’s; she was serious almost to excess; her adoration for himself was flattering.

  They were married, and ifJohn Bidlake had remained the invalid he had imagined himself doomed to be, the marriage might have been a success. Her devotion would have made up for her incompetence as a nurse; his helplessness would have rendered her indispensable to his happiness. But health returned. Six months after his marriage John Bidlake was entirely his old self. The old self began to behave in the old way. Mrs. Bidlake took refuge from unhappiness in an endless imaginative meditation, which even her two children were hardly able to interrupt.

  It had lasted now for a quarter of a century. A tall imposing lady of fifty all in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, she stood among the tulips, her eyes shut, thinking of Pinturicchio and the Middle Ages, and time flowing and flowing, and God immobile on the eternal bank.

  A shrill barking precipitated her out of her high eternity. She opened her eyes, reluctantly, and looked round. The small and silky parody of an extreme-oriental monster, her little Pekingese was barking at the kitchen cat. Frisking this way and that round the circumference of a circle whose radius was proportionate to his terror of the arched and spitting tabby, he yapped hysterically. His tail waved like a plume in the wind, his eyes goggled out of his black face.

  ‘T’ang!’ Mrs. Bidlake called. ‘T’ang!’ All her Pekingese for the last thirty years had had dynastic names. T’ang the First had flourished before her children were born. It was with T’ang the Second that she and Walter had visited the dying Wetherington. The kitchen cat was now spitting at T’ang the Third. In the intervals, little Mings and Sungs had lived, grown decrepit and, in the lethal chamber, gone the way of all pets. ‘T’ang, come here.’ Even in this emergency Mrs. Bidlake was careful to pronounce the apostrophe. Or rather she was not careful to pronounce it; she pronounced it by cultured instinct, because, being what nature and education had made her, she simply could not pronounce the word without the apostrophe even when the fur was threatening to fly.

  The little dog obeyed at last. The cat ceased to spit, its fur lay down on its back, it walked away majestically. Mrs. Bidlake went on with her weeding and her vague, unending meditation among the flowers. God, Pinturicchio, dandelions, eternity, the sky, the clouds, the early Venetians, dandelions….

  Upstairs in the schoolroom lessons were over. At least they were over as far as little Phil was concerned; for he was doing what he liked best in the world, drawing. Miss Fulkes, it is true, called the process ‘Art’ and ‘Imagination Training,’ and allotted half an hour to it every morning, from twelve to halfpast. But for little Phil it was just fun. He sat bent over his paper, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his face intent and serious, drawing, drawing with a kind of inspired violence. Wielding a pencil that seemed disproportionately large, his little brown hand indefatigably laboured. At once rigid and wavering, the lines of the childish composition traced themselves out on the paper.

  Miss Fulkes sat by the window, looking out at the sunny garden, but not consciously seeing it. What she saw was behind the eyes, in a fanciful universe. She saw herself—herself in that lovely Lanvin frock that had been illustrated last month in Vogue, with pearls, dancing at Ciro’s, which looked (for she had never been at Ciro’s) curiously like the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where she had been. ‘How lovely she looks!’ all the people were saying. She walked swayingly, like that actress she had seen at the London Pavilion—what was her name? She held out her white hand; it was young Lord Wonersh who kissed it, Lord Wonersh, who looked like Shelley and lived like Byron and owned half Oxford Street and had come to the house last February with old Mr. Bidlake and had perhaps spoken to her twice. And then, all at once, she saw herself riding in the Park. And a couple of seconds later she was on a yacht in the Mediterranean. And then in a motor car. Lord Wonersh had just taken his seat beside her, when the noise of T’ang’s shrill barking startlingly roused her to consciousness of the lawn, the gay tulips, the Wellingtonia and, on the other side, the schoolroom. Miss Fulkes felt guilty, she had been neglecting her charge.

  ‘Well, Phil,’ she asked, turning round briskly to her pupil, ‘what are you drawing?’

  ‘Mr. Stokes and Albert pulling the mow-lawner,’ Phil answered, without looking up from his paper.

  ‘Lawn-mower,’ Miss Fulkes corrected.

  ‘Lawn-mower,’ Phil dutifully repeated.

  ‘You never get your compound words right,’ Miss Fulkes continued. ‘Mow-lawner, hopgrasser, crack-nutter—it’s a sort of mental defect, like mirror-writing, I suppose.’ Miss Fulkes had taken a course in educational psychology. ‘You must’really try to correct it, Phil,’ she added, earnestl
y. After so long and flagrant a dereliction of duty (at Ciro’s, on horseback, in the limousine with Lord Wonersh) Miss Fulkes felt it incumbent upon her to be particularly solicitous, scientifically so: she was a very conscientious young woman. ‘Will you try?’ she insisted.

  ‘Yes, Miss Fulkes,’ the child answered. He had no idea what she wanted him to try to do. But it would keep her quiet if he said yes. He was busy on a particularly difficult bit of his drawing.

  Miss Fulkes sighed and looked out of the window again. This time she consciously perceived what her eyes saw. Mrs. Bidlake wandered among the tulips, dressed flowingly in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, a sort of Pre-Raphaelitic ghost. Every now and then she paused and looked at the sky. Old Mr. Stokes the gardener, passed carrying a rake; the tips of his white beard fluttered gently in the breeze. The village clock struck the half-hour. The garden, the trees, the fields, the wooded hills in the distance were always the same. Miss Fulkes felt all at once so hopelessly sad that she could have cried.