She choked and stared at him and said nothing. His expression was sour, his face heart-shaped with anger, lines drawn in parenthesis.
‘For God’s sake, why are you trembling? What’s the matter with you?’
‘Let me go,’ she said. Her lips wouldn’t frame the words.
‘What d’you say? What is it?’
‘Let me go.’
‘I’m not stopping you! I didn’t invite you here! I asked you to leave two days ago.’
She tried to take another sip of water. Perhaps her trembling fingers convinced him, for he said more quietly:
‘Is it the thunder? I know it affects some people.’
She shook her head. He put the glass down. ‘For that matter I don’t like it myself. Altogether I suppose it’s been a trying day.’ He moved a little away. ‘I stay up here as much as I can to get away from the others and to be near her. It’s as near to her now as I shall ever get . . .’
On the walls a dozen paintings, most of them of a girl. Marion – herself – like her yet unlike. Resemblances, differences. Did he use her as a model next door in that dark attic, propping her up against the wall, imagining her as she had once been, not seeing the horror in front of him?
Sickness welled up.
‘In a moment I’ll go,’ she whispered, trying to think of the soothing words that would persuade him to let her escape. If he once came to realize what she had seen. ‘It was just the shock. I – didn’t know what to think when I saw you . . .’
‘Nor I when I saw you. But people who break down walls must expect shocks! Did my aunt put you up to this?’
‘No, oh, no!’
‘It’s all been part of a design, hasn’t it? In which you play the innocent! God, I’ve been a fool! Of course at the beginning I thought . . . But you seemed so natural, so fresh, so genuine. I was charmed, taken in. I have to tell you I’ve thought of you a great deal. But this – you were put up to this – weren’t you? Come, tell me the truth!’
She whispered: ‘Please let me go. Oh, Simon, I’m so upset. Please let me go.’
‘I’ve told you, go and be damned!’ He gulped in his throat. ‘When you like. As soon as you can walk – it will suit me!’
‘Not that way.’
‘Why ever not? – That’s the way you came. The other way leads through the empty part of the house.’
‘Not that way.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, please yourself. Only just leave me alone.’
She tried to sit up, staring at him and his matter-of-fact tone, trying to subdue the nausea just long enough to get down the stairs and away.
He struck a match and lit a lamp on the desk beside her. He shook out the match and replaced the glass, slowly turned up the flame. The light glowed about his hands, spread across the room. His back was to her now and she glanced assessingly at the other door.
He said: ‘I hope you broke nothing coming through. I prime and stretch all my canvases in there. It leaves me more room.’ With horror she watched him go to the open door of the attic and hold the lamp aloft to peer in.
She stood up, took a step away from him.
He said: ‘Oh, you’ve knocked over Marion’s doll. I hope you haven’t broken it.’
II
He had gone into the attic. Yet now she could not move to escape. What he had said stiffened her with a new sense of shock.
As he came out of the attic she stared at him.
He said again: ‘What’s the matter with you? What are you staring at?’
She didn’t answer. He put down the lamp.
‘Go this way,’ he said. ‘The other way I’d have to come down and unlock the door. I’ll not follow you. Indeed, I’ll get someone to rebuild the wall, if that’s what’s worrying you.’
She went to the door of the attic, held on to the door, half fearfully peered in.
‘Marion’s doll?’ she said.
‘Yes, didn’t you see it? You must have fallen over it. I keep it here along with a few other of her personal things to remind me of her. It’s all there is left . . .’
‘Her – doll?’
He sighed. ‘What else?’
‘I suppose I did – fall over it. It – added to the shock. It’s so enormous.’
He smiled painfully. ‘When I was twelve and Marion was eight our parents took us to Italy on a holiday. We spent a couple of nights in Milan and Marion saw this doll in a shop in one of the arcades. All through the holiday she talked of nothing else, so on the way home my father bought it for her. When we brought it back to England one of the passport officials asked my father why the other child wasn’t entered on his passport . . .’
‘May I – see it close to?’
He brought it out for her, a doll three feet six inches tall, long flaxen hair still silky and lifelike, blue eyes that closed, legs that stepped forward when you led her along.
Norah put her hands up to her face. ‘Simon, I don’t know what to say!’
The sharpness had now altogether gone from his voice. ‘Haven’t we already said all there is to say?’
‘I think I have more to explain . . .’
‘As to why you didn’t leave when I asked you? But that’s plain enough. Your arrangements with Althea . . .’
‘I have no arrangements with Althea! I’ll leave tomorrow. But – there are other things I have to say. About the wall . . .’
‘I’ll get it built up.’
‘It’s not that. I want to explain why I broke it down . . . ! In my room I was always being disturbed by tapping. Usually at night about eleven o’clock. I couldn’t sleep for it. It – worried me. But then this afternoon. It was like someone tapping to attract my attention . . .’
‘Oh . . . that was me. I’m afraid it never occurred to me the sound would carry. I often work at night. I was simply tapping the stretcher to get the canvas taut – or working on a frame.’
‘And then – ’ she looked at him – ‘often when I went into my sitting-room to look, the rocking-horse was rocking backwards and forwards as if . . .’
‘What rocking-horse?’
‘The grey one. Marion’s, I suppose . . .’
‘Is that still there? No, it was mine. Marion didn’t like it. Rocking? How could it be?’
‘I don’t know. Just moving gently, as if someone had just been using it.’
‘Some other trick of Althea’s? No, it couldn’t be. Wait. I wonder. Come and try.’
She followed him slowly into the attic room, looking around it now with new eyes. It was stacked with finished canvases, with a few old dolls, a doll’s house; on hangers were three frocks, a school bag, a pair of high-heeled dance shoes, a tennis racket, a hockey stick.
‘Look,’ Simon said. ‘You see these two rooms – your sitting-room, as you call it, and this attic were one room in the old days sixty years ago. The floorboards run right under the dividing wall. Well, see, this board, and these two, are loose. Probably when I walked round here working on the stretchers I trod on this end and it moved the one under the rocking-horse and set it swaying. Would you like to go and see if I can do it now to set your mind at rest?’
‘No,’ said Norah, wearily. ‘I – think not. But thanks.’
‘You look exhausted. Did you think the house was haunted?’
‘I – didn’t know. I got upset. I suppose it was the weather. Please forgive me.’
He looked at her closely. ‘Then you really aren’t – in this with my aunt?’
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be in – but I swear I came here only as her secretary and without any knowledge of this house or anyone in it.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said gently, ‘if this – this breaking down of a wall – is the means of our coming to understand each other a little better it will have served a useful purpose.’
‘I wish we could understand each other better,’ Norah said, almost in tears.
‘Then will you stay a little while and talk to me? I come up here to be alone –
but all the same sometimes it becomes – isolated, lonely.’
III
They talked for an hour. Mainly he talked and she listened. She sat on the creaking sofa where she had first lain. He straddled a cane-bottomed chair.
It came slowly at first. He said, as he had said in the garden, that he was unused to talking and particularly unused to talking about himself. She believed it. He said confiding in someone else was like having to climb a wall. Or perhaps breaking one down, he amended with a smile. But somehow confiding in her was different.
Everything she had heard about him was true, but it all seemed altered when explained by him. Yes, he had been a difficult child. He had had meningitis when he was seven, and for a while he could not go to school. He had had periods when he seemed unable to communicate his feelings and so would not speak to anyone. He used to fancy himself living on a draughtboard with only the white squares safe and frightful chasms gaping in the black. Sometimes by rubbing his knuckles together he could make all the people in a room dwindle until they looked like toys and disappeared into the black holes. Sometimes he was able to withdraw from himself and look down upon himself sitting there, shivering and alone. He became someone else and yet lived his own life at the same time. Loneliness was the greatest fear of all; other people inhabited their different world and could not understand his.
After a while he began to recover; his improvement was begun and continued by the discovery of what he could do with chalk and paint. As his sister grew up she also could communicate with him, and he with her, in a way no one else could; and there grew up an affinity as deep as between twins.
‘I don’t think I was specially difficult in my teens. Of course I didn’t work at the ordinary school curriculum, but that was because I wanted to spend all my time painting. What I wanted to read I’d read all night – poetry particularly, biographies of artists, any notes or personal letters they had left – things like the Journals of Delacroix and Constable’s letters. I didn’t do well because it was an orthodox school. If it had been somewhere like Dartington Hall I would probably have been a star pupil. Maybe not for achievement – I can’t assess that – but at least for effort. Anyway, that’s the way it was until I was about eighteen and Marion was fifteen. She was away at school as well and we just met during the holidays. And then . . .’ Simon blinked his eyes as if they hurt or as if he were shutting out some hurtful picture. ‘. . . And then one time I came back from school – it must have been the Christmas, because I was due to leave in the following July – and I saw Marion in the dining-room in a new frock. And suddenly she was no longer just a schoolgirl. I saw her with absolutely new eyes, as if I’d never seen her ever before, and I fell in love with her. It was like a – a revelation.’
The lamp had been burning low since he lit it to look in the attic; now he rose and turned up the wick. The diamonds of rain were spreading more thickly on the darkening window lights.
‘Does that shock you?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘It shouldn’t. We’re brought up, of course, to look on it as unnatural, because it’s undesirable biologically. Otherwise it’s the most natural thing. When it happens as it happened to us it’s – it’s a benign thing.’
Feeling a sudden need to move, she got up and stood looking at one of the paintings of the girl they were talking of. A fresh lively young woman in a yellow frock, hair curling loosely. That struck a chord of memory.
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
‘I’m not going.’
She looked at the other paintings. There were two nudes of the girl; another one in a low black frock, unfinished, the arms and hands barely sketched in; one in a tennis frock, one lying on a sofa reading.
‘She looks very young,’ Norah said.
‘She was very young in all those paintings; eighteen or nineteen. In the last years I only painted her twice – there wasn’t the opportunity. And those two I destroyed.’
‘Destroyed?’
‘Yes. They were quite good but they reflected something – alien in her. Alien in her after she had been away.’
He sat down on his chair again. He had picked up a dry paintbrush and was running his fingers up and down the handle.
‘Affinity between human beings is always hard to achieve. It’s one of the great problems of making a successful marriage, isn’t it? People are drawn together by a sexual attraction and urge. Once the first impulses are spent they have to accustom themselves to living in amity with a strange man or woman who for the first twenty-odd years of their lives have grown up with different backgrounds, different likes and dislikes, different prejudices, different ways of judging things. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. With a sister, everything is shared. All the common memories of childhood, the background, the understanding, the – the affinity of thought. When to these are joined the love of a man and a woman I believe there can hardly be a greater joy.’
She did not speak, waiting for him to finish what he had to tell.
‘Did I say joy? Well, joy and also torture. Because it is, I suppose, doomed from the outset . . . That holiday I’d come home determined to ask my father to relieve me of the undertaking to go in for law and to let me have three years at an art school instead. But this feeling for Marion – which she seemed to return – swamped everything else. It was a – a blinding four weeks. I hardly thought of anything else. When I left I’d only mentioned my career to my father once. Of course there’d been a conditional refusal. One might have expected it. Qualify first, he said. Get your articles. Then, if you want, take a year or so off to paint. Once you’re qualified no one can take it away from you – you’ve a career at your finger-tips . . . Those were bad years, you know. Two million unemployed. He had enough money to live comfortably but all the rest was tied up in property which in those days showed little return. He didn’t know he was going to die so soon. He wanted me to be secure . . .’
She went to the door leading to the attic, then stared down at the great doll which had been left sitting on the threshold. Its blue eyes were staring wide, blank, innocent, mindless.
‘And then?’
‘And then . . . ?’ He seemed to have lost the thread, as if he had been wandering down dark corridors of memory and regret.
‘She – Marion – she loved you in the same way?’
‘I think so. Yes. Yes. In those days. In those days it was total commitment on both sides. You know, Norah, she was so lovely. Not perhaps quite so much so as you . . .’
‘Oh, that’s . . .’
‘The contours of her face, the planes of expression were less right in their proportion. And there was not so much light in the darkness of her hair. But she had the exquisite charm of youth. The untouched, unsullied beauty of a woman discovering herself before my eyes. Nothing can ever replace or repeat the freshness of first love . . .’
After a minute or so Norah came back from the door and sat on the couch again. He put his hand quietly over hers and then withdrew it.
‘If the tragedy of childish love is that there can be no fulfilment, so the tragedy of our love was that it had no future. But we didn’t pay much heed to that. Sufficient for the day, sufficient for the hour . . . I always thought, hoped, when I allowed myself to think, that some day we could come together permanently even if the physical tie had to remain hidden. So it went on, at intervals, for some years. But then things came up that separated us. My father and mother died within a year of each other. Marion had left school and gone to London to study theatre design. That year, it was the year I qualified, the war came. In 1940 I joined the Air Force. Marion went into the Ministry of Defence working on camouflage. We saw each other sometimes, but rarely, so very rarely. Of course it was no worse for us than for millions of others. We wrote, usually twice a week. We met when I was on leave. I became a navigator in Lancasters. By the end of 1943 I had flown more than thirty bombing missions. I was very lucky but in the end the inevitable happened. One night we bought it a
nd had to ditch the plane off the Norfolk coast.’
The hand that had tentatively lain on hers hesitated as it re-grasped the brush. ‘Strange . . . the water was more difficult for me to endure than the flak. Perhaps enmity is always easier to suffer than indifference . . . I watched my friends as the sea impersonally drowned them . . . Against all probability I was picked up . . . So I came to hospital.’
‘And then?’
‘Then the old trouble. After I’d got over the minor injuries and the exposure – I suppose I’d been living on too tight a rein. And no painting, which always served as a catharsis. I was in hospital for months, most of the time trying to reinhabit my body. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think properly, couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep because just at the moment of sleep I’d withdraw and look at myself down there: thin, fair-haired, eyes closed, sheet awry, hands half relaxed; and I’d know that I was not sleeping, only watching. For the same reasons I couldn’t read or write or even paint. This is boring to you: I’ll skip quickly over it.’
‘No. Try to tell me. You talk too quickly, Simon, say too much in a breath. Tell me everything.’
He looked at her. ‘I can’t. It would take too long. A lifetime.’
‘Not that long.’
He said: ‘Well, I recovered; but they said my nerves were too bad for active service. I was discharged, sent home. Do you smoke?’
‘Not often.’
‘I smoked sixty a day at that time. Then I gave it up. No reasons of restraint or determination. The taste just went bad on me. I’ve never smoked since.’ He smiled, suddenly at ease for the first time. ‘So I’m afraid I can’t offer you one.’
‘I’ve said – I don’t often.’
‘Indeed, all I’ve offered you is a glass of water. It’s pretty poor hospitality, but I wasn’t expecting – a guest. Until you came I was alone with my thoughts.’
‘Why should they be so unpleasant?’