Woman in the Mirror

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘I’ve brought coffee up in a Thermos for later.’

  ‘Simon, I’ve never sat before. I may not – take to it too well.’

  ‘About an hour will do.’

  ‘Maybe – not that . . .’

  He said: ‘My hand’s so cursedly unsteady.’

  ‘Then let’s stop.’

  ‘No . . .’

  She moistened her lips. ‘I believe this may be doing the opposite of what I intended – we intended. Isn’t it? Surely this is – is trying to bring Marion back to life.’

  ‘Far from it. This will lay Marion to rest.’

  The painting went on.

  He said: ‘Your arm isn’t quite right. Can you see what I mean?’ He stepped from behind the easel. ‘If you could move it farther back.’ He came up to her and turned her hand. ‘Like that.’ He looked at her deeply, his eyes searching hers. Then he lowered his head and kissed her on the upper part of her breast, his lips pressing firmly on her skin. She looked at his hair, the side of his face, took a breath.’

  He said against her: ‘Do you know the story that a man once lay with a woman on a mountain top. And when he took her he cried: “At this moment – at this moment there is no other God but me!”’

  He rubbed a hand over his eyes, went back to the easel. ‘Art should never imitate life, for life will always win.’ He picked up his brush. ‘Yet the solution surely lies not so much in outright victory as in the emergence of truth.’

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we should stop.’

  ‘Yes. But now we cannot. So give me twenty minutes more to establish what has been begun. Then it will be the end of it – the complete and utter end.’

  The frock did not fit her at all well. Even round the hips it seemed to be pulling, as if caught up. She shifted a little to sit more easily and he made no comment on the move. She took another slow difficult breath and saw the other arm growing on the canvas. In his peculiar way he was again not so much painting it as creating it out of the background. Now the hand. She watched, for a moment fascination getting the better of unease.

  Then she thought she saw a movement behind the canvas. Through the pier-glass she could see the other end of the room and the door leading to the stairs. And the door had moved. She stared at it, pulse beating. The wind? But there was no wind. Only the waterfall roar of the rain.

  Then while she watched a hand came round the door, holding on to the door. It was a girl’s hand. It was not unlike her own hand, the one he was painting. And it was wet.

  It stayed there quite still, and to her it was as if in recreating Marion’s hand on the canvas he had begun to re-animate some long-drowned hand come back from the sea to claim him.

  She swung round with a jerk of head, arm, spine; cushion falling, almost oversetting the couch.

  ‘What is it!’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

  She pointed at the hand on the door.

  Simon stared, screwed up his eyes, dropped the brush.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called.

  There was no reply.

  He lurched to the door, pulled it wide.

  Gregory stood there, taking in what he saw. His hair was plastered with rain and his suit dank with it.

  ‘What d’you want?’ Simon demanded.

  ‘I came to tell you. But then I heard voices, so I didn’t like to come in.’

  He was staring past Simon at Norah in her frock.

  ‘What is it? What have you come to tell me?’

  ‘I thought I ought to. Timson’s back. He couldn’t get through. There’s floods. The road beyond Llanidloes is flooded. So he couldn’t go to Aberystwyth. He turned back. I’ve just been out to look at the car. There’s yellow mud up to the windows.’

  Norah stood up, straightening her frock, stared at the boy’s hands, then down at her own. Then she shook her head as if trying to disperse the miasma that had gathered about her.

  ‘So,’ said Simon to the boy. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Mother sent me to tell you. Because you won’t be able to get your medicine now, not until tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I

  ‘These pills,’ she said. ‘How long have you been without them?’

  ‘Two days. A bit more.’

  The boy had gone. Refusing adamantly to sit again, she had changed back into her own clothes, glad now to get the others off. She was sitting sharing his Thermos of coffee. The spell, the mood, whatever had built up between them had been shattered – the commonplace had returned. But the memory of the mood remained. And the mood itself was not far away. Normality had to be firmly grasped and persisted with.

  ‘You had plenty left?’

  He was staring at the painting. ‘What?’

  ‘The pills, I mean.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes, more than a dozen.’

  ‘They’re important to you?’

  ‘Not as important as what has happened to me in the last two days.’

  After a moment she said: ‘Were you told to keep on with them?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Essential, they said.’ He looked down and reluctantly replaced a brush in its jar. ‘They’re French, you know. Quite experimental. I think in the first place they did more for me than anything else at all. A tremendous lightening of depression. After only a few weeks I began to belong to the ordinary world . . . And yet – so far so good.’ With a rag he wiped a spot off his hand. ‘It could be a good thing provided it goes on all right. Because the essential thing is that I shall have learned how to live – and love – without them.’

  She stared again at the painting, which he had almost completed in broad design: half Marion, half herself. He could finish it, if he chose to, without her. Gregory’s interruption had come either too soon or too late; she wasn’t sure.

  ‘That boy,’ she said. ‘He has a girl’s hands.’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘Gregory. He makes me shiver.’

  ‘Sometimes one feels sorry for him.’

  ‘Was he always like this?’

  Simon frowned. ‘I wish he hadn’t come in then. He broke . . . In another half hour . . . You won’t sit, even like that?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. No.’

  ‘When I last saw him he was nine. Certainly he was more – understandable then. I’ve tried once or twice these last few days.’

  ‘You’re not alone. Of course I think his eyes . . .’

  ‘Bad eyes are in the family. There were three brothers: my father, the eldest, Gregory’s the youngest. In between was Claude, who died young. He was half blind.’

  ‘You’re – an introvert family,’ Norah said.

  He smiled. ‘That of itself is no drawback. Ultimately the introverts – the balanced introverts – make up most of what is worthwhile in the world.’

  She said: ‘I’ve got to leave tomorrow, Simon, at the latest. This afternoon makes it more necessary than ever. Gregory is sure to go straight to his mother.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Only that she won’t like it – and she may say something, and if she does . . .’

  ‘. . . I realize that. I’ll see her myself tomorrow.’

  ‘D’you mean you’ll leave?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll leave.’

  She looked up at the fanlight. If the floods go down!

  ‘Oh, the road to Morb Lane is always open. And the trains will run.’

  She got up to go, and then something he had just said impinged on her mind.

  ‘Simon . . . your father . . .’

  His eyes flickered back from the painting. ‘I don’t think I can leave that behind,’ he said. ‘All the rest, yes, but not that because it – it’s part of you both.’

  ‘Your father, Simon. You said he was the eldest. Is that – are you sure?’

  He smiled. ‘I ought to know.’

  ‘Well . . . it stands to reason when one thinks of it. But I never have thought of it. I understood Althea’s husband was the eld
est. Thomas Syme.’

  ‘Hubert, Claude, Thomas, that’s how it went. Four years between each.’

  ‘Then how did this house come to belong to Althea?’

  ‘It doesn’t. It never has.’

  II

  ‘Llandathery four one,’ she said into the telephone.

  ‘Llandathery four one. Trying to connect you.’

  She stared down at the heap of typing, some yet unfinished. She felt responsible slightly that she had not completed it that afternoon. ‘But why did you not tell me before?’ she had asked. ‘Tell you what: that the property belonged to me?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘It didn’t occur to me that you didn’t know. Anyway, does it matter?’ ‘It could matter a great deal. Of course it could matter.’

  Burr-burr. Burr-burr. It was earlier than she had said, and probably he was out. But in this weather?

  ‘Sorry, there’s no reply.’

  ‘Oh, keep ringing, will you?’

  Burr-burr. Burr-burr.

  In spite of its frustrate ending, the afternoon had helped, and was still helping, to bring all the strands together, all the tensions to a head. And out of the fear, the nausea, the pleasure, had come some decision. ‘D’you mean you’ll leave?’ she had asked. ‘Yes, I’ll leave,’ he said. But he would have to come back. And surely she must do the same. Unless . . .

  ‘Sorry, there’s no reply. Shall I give ’em a ring in ten minutes and ring you back?’

  ‘No – er . . .’

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Christopher! I thought you were out.’

  ‘I was. This downpour’s flooded my kitchen. I was trying to unblock the gutter. What is it? Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes . . . I rang early. I thought it might be easier now.’

  ‘Some developments?’

  ‘Yes . . . Everything’s much clearer. But I can’t explain now. Could you come tomorrow about eleven?’

  ‘I was coming anyway.’

  ‘Yes, well . . . I think I shall be having a quarrel with Althea – and Simon is involved and . . .’

  ‘Will you leave then?’

  ‘I think so. But I’ll need your support.’

  ‘You’ll have it, moral and physical.’

  ‘Well, it depends how things turn out.’

  ‘Are you all right tonight?’

  Was she? ‘Perfectly, thanks.’

  ‘You sound a long way away.’

  ‘Is that better?’

  ‘I don’t mean just in distance. In something else.’

  Perceptive. ‘I’m – no different.’

  ‘Well, take care. I don’t trust that lot.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Norah!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Shall I come round now?’

  Should he come round now? ‘Thanks, but there’s simply no point. Everything’s better kept till tomorrow . . .’ She thought she heard a footstep. ‘I must go now. I hope you get your kitchen dry.’

  ‘The rain has even put the fire out.’

  She laughed. ‘I think you have more problems than I have.’

  ‘Don’t joke. All I need is a woman’s tender care.’

  ‘Oh? Well, that’s another matter, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, absolutely one and the same. All our problems can be jointly solved, I assure you.’

  When she hung up she got the same feeling of isolation that she had felt yesterday. Yet she was more secure in herself than she had been then.

  As she came out of the study Mr Croome-Nichols was passing, and he opened his mouth at her in acknowledgement. They exchanged a few words about the flooded roads. She thought that Mr Croome-Nichols for some reason had come to approve of her – perhaps because her father had been to the right university. Yet of all those in the house (apart from Simon) his was the only integrity she felt she could rely on.

  She went upstairs to wait until dinner.

  III

  So at dinner – the last dinner they were likely to eat together – Alice served grapefruit and everyone behaved as if they were acting out a part in which it was necessary to carry on a tradition of conduct already established. Gregory, overheated in a thick suit, his spectacles ludicrously awry, picked and peered at his plate as if suspicious of being cheated. Rupert Croome-Nichols forked food into a corner of his mouth and turned up his eyes in search of revelation. Althea, in brown velvet, her bare plump arms appearing and disappearing through the slit sleeves, bore the burden of the conversation as usual, but more heavily, words sometimes halting on her lips, like swimmers hesitating to dive. Simon had changed his suit and looked smart and well and more composed than Norah had previously seen him.

  If Gregory had carried the story of the afternoon to his mother she gave no sign. Over the pre-dinner sherry she complained of her headache still; but there was something more than sherry on her breath when she did so. Once or twice at dinner Norah caught Gregory peering at his mother, as if anxious for her.

  They talked of the flooded road, of a letter Althea had written to The Times yesterday on the population explosion, of a painter called Kokoschka Simon was interested in, of the frugal food Mr Croome-Nichols had had when a boy and how it had done him no harm at all and how all the young today were overfed.

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Althea, ‘that the young do get too much. It makes them develop much earlier. What we shall not know for another thirty years is whether it will lead to a premature senescence.’

  ‘By then,’ said Gregory, ‘they’ll have life pills. To slow it all down.’

  ‘And maybe death pills too,’ said Mr Croome-Nichols, opening his mouth wide at the joke. ‘Euthanasia is not a Christian ethic but it’s going to become a moral necessity if the population keeps increasing. Or else we shall be standing shoulder to shoulder inhaling air through a pipe.’

  ‘I really have no use for any pills,’ Althea said. ‘Almost everything is controlled by what one eats. Just like a plant. If plants were fed as unsuitably as human beings they’d all turn yellow and die. If . . .’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what we are doing,’ Simon said cheerfully. ‘Turning yellow, at least. Crawling with bacteria. Withering at the roots. And preparing to die.’

  ‘It’s wrong to be morbid, Simon,’ Mrs Syme said. ‘You of all people should think of . . .’

  ‘As for pills, my dear aunt, theoretically I share your distaste for them; practically, there are hundreds and thousands of people who wouldn’t be alive today without them. I think I am one of them.’

  ‘Oh, I have no doubt they have their uses in exceptional cases. The antibiotics, for instance . . .’

  ‘Bomber crews were kept going on Benzedrine. Didn’t you know? Even drugs I suppose you would admit are acceptable in so good a cause. Even the drug that I was taking and which so mysteriously disappeared.’

  ‘My dear Simon, you had it on your dressing-table! No one has touched it.’

  ‘Well, I shall have to do without it for another day shan’t I?’

  ‘The floods will be down by morning: you see. Timson nearly lost the car! He was only just hauled out in time.’

  It’s all a sham, Norah thought. We’re all thinking our own secret elemental thoughts and behaving like the civilized human beings we are not. But it’s only till morning. In the morning we can drop this pretence and tear at each other with tooth and claw. Will it come to that? It hardly seems possible. Yet how else, with what other result, could the whole thing be dragged out into the light of day?

  Towards the end of dinner Simon smiled at Norah and excused himself and left. He hardly seemed to grasp – or even to want to grasp – the significance of what he had told her about his father. He didn’t care. It was not so much that material considerations were not important to him as that other things in life were more so. It was not a view with which in other circumstances Norah would have been inclined to quarrel. But this was not the occasion to be altruistic or unpractical. She had to think for Simon, and indeed for them both.
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  After dinner, Althea poured herself a brandy to go with her coffee, but Norah refused coffee and left them to it. Once out, she doubled back through the larger drawing-room and so into the study. With any luck no one now would stir for twenty minutes. The small risk was worth taking for Simon’s sake. There was just a chance that his pills were here, and to face the unpleasant scene that was inevitable tomorrow he might particularly need them.

  The Aladdin lamp was out, so she lit it, watching the flame go blue and the yellow light blanch as she turned up the wick. The study came into view. She carried the lamp to the desk and began to go quickly and lightly through the drawers, trying to disturb as little as possible. An unnamed portrait watched her censoriously from over the fireplace. Three brothers, he had said, Hubert, Claude, Thomas; four years between them, that’s how it went. Claude had been the blind one. Thomas always the ne’er do well.

  ‘Tell me,’ she had said this afternoon. ‘What made you paint someone drowned in the lake? A woman? That picture you were doing the first morning. It made me think . . .’

  ‘Oh – that. I suppose I am preoccupied with drowning, but at first the woman seemed to add something. You remember what you were saying the other night – about La Belle dame sans merci. Something of that sort. It’s over there, back to the wall, if you want to look. But I never went on with it. It became too Burne-Jonesish and Victorian.’

  ‘So nobody was ever drowned in the lake?’

  ‘Oh, yes. A girl; a maid. She disappeared one day and was found a couple of days later. She was unmarried and pregnant. I saw them bringing her up. I was about seven at the time. It made a great impression.’

  ‘Althea told me but I never know whether to believe what she says.’

  . . . Nothing here. She left the drawers and went to the cupboard in which was kept a miscellany of objects: papers, clippings, photographs, glue, plant labels, rulers, pencils, catalogues.

  Probably this was a useless waste of time.

  ‘Are you looking for something, Norah?’

  Althea in the doorway, voice soft and friendly but sharpness in the eyes.

  So this – this might be the crisis, before she was quite ready for it; tonight instead of tomorrow. Lie, lie. It’s easy still to evade – a smooth excuse – not convincing but delaying. All that was necessary. But the anger burned. Anger and pride. Why should she evade?