Nuns and Soldiers

  Only now it was not so any more. Gertrude had gone. Tim had been revealed as a liar and a cheat, some sort of traitor. He had wantonly destroyed the innocent happiness of two people and made a desert of horrors round about him. Only, of course, his own happiness had not been innocent. Tim accepted the general force of the charge against him fully and at once, although he still could not work out its details or reconstruct exactly what had happened in that terrible conversation. Gertrude had not understood, he was not as guilty as she thought, but what did it matter now about degrees of guilt? Of course he had never planned to live with Daisy after his marriage; but he had concealed Daisy and her vast importance in his life, he had concealed a bond and a responsibility which, had Gertrude known about it, might have made her, at the crucial moment, hesitate. Gertrude had spoken of her ‘mourning’. Anything, then, might have tilted the balance against him. And in the strange chemistry of his moral confusion, Tim’s crimes against Daisy added to his guilt before Gertrude. Tim now measured how far he really was bound to Daisy, bound as if she were part of him, his sister, his mother. He had to rewrite his history so as to obliterate Daisy from it. But without Daisy it was a false history, and this false history he had tried to live with Gertrude. He realized now, as he sat motionless, paralysed, on Daisy’s bed, how much he was after all Daisy’s property. He felt it with a despair which went beyond any bitterness even against fate.

  After he had got up from the drawing-room floor and tried to think, he had, as his first action, telephoned Manfred’s number. There was no answer. Evening was approaching and Tim had eaten nothing. He drank some whisky, taking the bottle from the familiar tray upon the marquetry table and pouring the whisky into a heavy Waterford glass, a ritual of pleasure now grown hideous and ominous. He looked with horror at the tiger lilies. Then he went back to the telephone. He rang the Count’s office number, but he had already left. He rang his home number but there was no answer. He drank some more whisky. He rang Manfred again, nothing. He rang Gerald Pavitt, but then remembered he was still at Jodrell Bank. He rang Victor Schultz. Victor answered. Tim said thickly, ‘Do you know where Gertrude is?’ Victor replied to this strange request by saying, sorry, he was just off to the hospital. Obviously Victor already knew. Manfred must have swiftly sent the news around and the ranks were already closed against him. He rang Moses Greenberg, but Moses, as soon as he heard Tim’s voice, put the ’phone down. He did not ring the Stanley Openshaws, as he knew that Janet Openshaw detested him. He did not ring Mrs Mount. She had made special efforts to be kind to him and Gertrude at the start, but by now must all the more regard him with abhorrence. He finished the bottle of whisky and went to bed and cried and slept.

  The next morning was a terrible awakening. He woke, his body and his mind sleepily reaching out to Gertrude. She has gone. He remembered. He got up and hurried round the flat looking for he knew not what, Gertrude perhaps returned while he slept. He felt sick, his head ached violently. His body was possessed by misery. He considered eating something but could not. He started to make some tea but could not bear the sight of the kettle. He rang Manfred and the Count but got no answer. He sat in the drawing-room and tried, on Gertrude’s expensive cream-headed paper, to compose a letter. But Tim was not a writer and the attempt to set down his defence only seemed to prove to him that he had none. He tore up his efforts. He would write a letter, but not now. He felt he had to act, to ‘do something about it’, since inaction was torment. Yet what could he do? He thought of running round to Manfred’s flat. But no one would let him in, no one would answer the bell. In any case Gertrude would not be there, had doubtless already gone away to some secret place where he would never find her. Was there, anyway, any point in trying to find her? To see her again, to be rejected again, might add to his pain in ways he could not even imagine. Had he ever really believed that he was married to Gertrude? His crazed mind wondered even this. He could not stay on at Ebury Street. He thought that he remembered that she had asked him not to. And the flat had become terrible to him, a place of torture and punishment, full of happy, unconscious memories of a lost paradise.

  At about ten thirty he ate a piece of bread and butter. He drank some milk from a bottle. He put the butter and milk back in the fridge as Gertrude had taught him to do. He considered shaving and decided not to. What was the point? He packed up his painting gear. He packed his clothes in his old suitcase. Only now he had many more clothes. He thought of leaving them behind, the clothes that Gertrude had bought him, but this seemed improper. She would not want to see those shirts, those ties again. He collected his things from the bathroom. He thrust clothes, paints, sketch books higgledy-piggledy into plastic bags, and stacked up his canvases beside the door. He went out into the awful brightness of Ebury Street and found a taxi. The taxi man helped him to load the stuff, drove him to Chiswick, and helped him to unload it. Tim pushed it all through the door into the desolate damp emptiness of the studio. He closed the door. He had been thinking. The taxi took him back to Victoria, to a bank, where he drew a sum of money out of his and Gertrude’s account. He then continued his ride as far as Shepherd’s Bush Green. From here he walked to Daisy’s flat. During this walk he pulled the golden wedding ring, which Gertrude had given him, off his finger and put it in his pocket.

  As he was about to ring Daisy’s bell he saw something terrible, obscenely terrible, which renewed his premonition that even greater, more awful unimagined pains awaited him in the future. The screw was turning. He saw standing at the corner of the street, watching Daisy’s door, a familiar figure in a black mackintosh. Cold, cruel Anne Cavidge had come to witness the final act, to collect the final proof, of his absolute faithlessness. Her case was now complete. This, together with his drawing of the money, marked the end, the point from which he could not return. And as he mounted the stairs to Daisy’s flat he knew that he himself had willed the end. Since he was rejected he would prove himself well worthy of it.

  He had indeed come to Daisy not only with this logic in mind. He simply could not think what else to do, where else to go. What could he be now, how employ his continued existence? Should he go and live in a hotel in Paddington on Gertrude’s money trying to compose convincing letters, explaining, asking for forgiveness? The idea of explaining seemed already far away in a lost past. He thought, I have run away from the land of morality. No doubt he would explain sometime. But, as he now dimly and with anguish began to see, he would be doing his explaining to Moses Greenberg during the proceedings for divorce. The scandal and the shame, everything that was happening now, would have to be lived through again in terrible detail. How he took the money, how he was seen on a certain morning, by policewoman Anne . . .

  Daisy behaved exactly as he expected. Daisy’s absolute predictability was still a pillar of the world, a place almost, of absolute virtue which Tim recognized, though it gave him now no pleasure and brought him no consolation. Even in a perverse way he might have been briefly venomously glad if Daisy had turned him away with a curse. She had been making her lunch when he arrived. He refused to eat. After lunch she went out shopping and he lay on her bed in a phantasmagoria of misery. When she came back he sat up, paralysed and staring. The long day was passing.

  ‘Tim, stop looking as if you’ve had a stroke. Move, walk, come to the Prince of Denmark.’

  ‘We can’t go there.’ It was true. Tim was beginning to realize that he too must hide.

  ‘Why not, fuck you?’

  ‘We must leave here,’ said Tim. ‘We must live somewhere else. I’ve got money. We must go somewhere else.’

  ‘Why? I like it here and it’s cheap and your bloody money won’t last forever, and who’s “we” anyway?’

  ‘We must go, we must hide.’

  ‘You can hide, I’m damned if I will. I’m not a criminal!’

  ‘I am,’ said Tim. He continued to sit and stare out of the window. After a while Daisy went out slamming the door. The window began to grow dark at last.

  ?
??He took money out of my bank account,’ said Gertrude.

  Anne was silent.

  Gertrude was back at Ebury Street. So was Anne. Anne had moved back into her old room, though she had not given up her flat.

  It was late evening. Anne, in her blue dressing-gown had just been going to bed when Gertrude came in carrying a glass of whisky. Anne sat on the bed, Gertrude on the chair beside the dressing table. Gertrude had been out to dinner with Stanley and Janet Openshaw. She was wearing an amber-coloured silk dress.

  ‘And he went straight to that woman,’ said Gertrude.

  Anne was not proud of her detective work. She had felt it necessary, some old academic sense of thoroughness, a desire for certainty, had led her to watch Daisy’s flat. She had watched it on the evening of Gertrude’s flight (she had telephoned the Count to discover what had happened) and on the next morning. In the morning she saw with a curious mixture of pain and relief and shame, Tim’s arrival. And she saw Tim turn and see her. It was a hateful role; but Anne wanted to be sure that she had not ruined Tim, and herself, for nothing. She resolved that she would not tell Gertrude. There was enough evidence without this horrible hurtful detail. At any rate she would keep this item in reserve, in case Gertrude weakened later. It might indeed never be necessary. However, she had been unable to restrain herself from making the Count happy by telling him of Tim’s prompt return to his mistress. She also now felt the need to liquidate her own remaining hopes as quickly as possible. She wanted the new phase of the world, whatever it might prove to be, to begin. The Count then, after saying he would not, had been unable to restrain himself from telling Gertrude.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anne. ‘I don’t think you need go on fretting about having been unjust to him.’

  ‘I wish it hadn’t happened so quickly.’

  ‘Better so. If he had anything to say for himself he would have written or rung up.’

  ‘He rang Victor and Moses. I expect he tried to ring Manfred, only Manfred silenced the ’phone.’

  ‘Yes, but that was all on that day. He hasn’t given any sign of life since then.’

  ‘He could have found me, I didn’t even leave London, he could have guessed I was staying with Stanley and Janet.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he write if he isn’t totally guilty? He could ring up now if he wanted to.’

  ‘I know. I - when the ’phone rings-I feel so -’

  ‘Shall we go away, darling? Let’s go to the country, to Stanley’s cottage or - oh, somewhere else, anywhere out of London.’ Anne here expressed her own wish to flee. She almost suggested going to Greece.

  ‘No. I must stay here. I’ve got to - just in case of anything - and I must see Moses - about the arrangements - and the Count is such a support - and Manfred -’

  Anne was silent. She was trying to read Gertrude’s state of mind. It was not easy.

  Nearly two weeks had passed since the terrible parting, and there had been no communication of any sort from Tim. Anne, as the days passed in silence, lived with her own anguish, watched Gertrude inevitably turning to Peter for comfort, watched the quiet cautious growth of Peter’s sober hope. The Count visited Ebury Street, not too frequently. He had regained, with his hope, his dignity, his reserve. He was punctilious, heel-clicking, restrained; but now Anne could read him like a book. She saw the service of his love and could not but acknowledge it to be perfect. She could not but love him the more in seeing how wonderfully he loved her friend.

  ‘I can’t believe he actually planned to marry me for my money and support her - No, I can’t believe he intended that.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he knew himself what he intended,’ said Anne. ‘He’s a sort of moral imbecile.’

  ‘Yes -’

  Anne did her part, day by day, hour by hour, in helping to complete Gertrude’s disillusion. It was a proper part, though such a painful one. Better that Gertrude should harden her heart quickly. Better for Gertrude, and better in a way for Anne. She did not want the scene at which she would have to assist, the events which she would have to witness, to last too long.

  Gertrude’s state of mind was in fact much more complex than Anne imagined, for Gertrude was now obsessed not only with Tim but with Guy. Her relation with Guy had taken another turn. A strong latent sense of guilt about her hasty marriage was now released and raged within her. It was as if Guy too were saying, ‘I told you so!’ Why did I marry so quickly, so foolishly, she thought to herself; and to Guy’s shade she was constantly saying, I am sorry, I am so sorry. Yet she was not at peace with Guy. Rather, the peace which she had seemed to attain now seemed to her spurious, a tranquillized illusion necessary to the pursuit of her folly. She could not think of Guy gently, tenderly, sadly. She felt once more as if she were haunted by him, as if he came to her positively as a ghost; and with his haunting she felt the revival, with guilt and bitterness added to it, of her first awful grief. She had been formed and toughened by Guy’s hatred of the sentimental, the vulgar, the self-indulgent, the false. How much she had loved that clean sternness. How much she had betrayed it. It seemed to her now that she had weakly withdrawn her total love from Guy as he became cut off, abstracted, unkind, untender, doomed. This withdrawal had been the start of her betrayal, her moral fall. She recalled Guy’s saying once, we have individual virtues but general vices. No one is good all through, in all relations, for all purposes. As virtuous agents we specialize, we have to, because vice is natural and virtue is not. How quickly, without Guy, she had reverted to the natural level. How narrow, how artificial, it now seemed, her own ‘specialization’, which had somehow given her the illusion of being virtuous. And she said to him, why are you a ghost, why are you not with me really as my dear husband, as my support and guide. Your promises made me, and now you are gone. And she reached out into the void towards what she knew was now a figment of her own distressed and tormented mind.

  About Tim she did not know what to think, except that he too was gone. She felt for him, thought of him at this time quite as if she were endowed with two minds and two hearts. She missed his presence with a detailed yearning. Les cousins et les tantes, eager, as Anne was, to obliterate her error, came sometimes near to hinting to her that it was ‘purely physical’, and thus momentary, or else a ‘mental aberration’ resulting from shock, a hysterical symptom, and thus also momentary. Gertrude knew that neither of these explanation was true. She had really loved Tim, and still did, with a love which would have to fade and wither. She comforted herself bitterly with a resentment against him, not only for his unspeakable treachery, but also because his awkward unnecessary existence and her own stupidity in sending him to France, had brought about that hasty and improper marriage, so offensive to the shade of Guy, and about which she now felt so painfully guilty and ashamed. She saw herself with the eyes of others and hung her head.

  About the unspeakable treachery neither her head nor her conscience was entirely clear. She too, like Tim, had tried again and again to remember what exactly had been said in that awful nightmarish conversation. What exactly had she charged him with and what had he admitted and what had he denied? Was he always lying or only sometimes? Did it matter how much of the indictment was true, and what indeed was the indictment? She had at first tried to discuss this with Anne and the Count, even with Manfred, but all three were reluctant to hazard any views except rather general ones, and she herself soon felt such discussion to be improper. This meant that she was locked up alone with important, perhaps crucial problems. In fact Gertrude did not think that, in relation to her own decisions, the details could matter too much. Her sad foolish marriage was over. Tim was sufficiently guilty; and this appeared the more relentlessly clear as the days passed into weeks, without a word of any kind from her vanished husband.

  Gertrude was also suffering from an ailment which had never acutely troubled her before, jealousy. The thought ‘it is over’ did not in any way alleviate this frightful degrading pain. Sometimes her jealousy seemed at the very heart and centre of the
whole miserable situation. It was connected with her general sense of shame, her loss of moral dignity, her unwonted loss of face. She had always been the spoilt child of fortune, how could this happen to her, how could she be so woundingly insulted by fate? But it was more than this, deeper, more metaphysically awful. Tim had not just gone, he had gone to another woman, to whom he gave his physical love, the jests and sweetness and animal charm which Gertrude had so foolishly thought that she owned exclusively. She had learnt how death defeats love, at any rate defeats sex and tenderness. Now her tenderness was frustrated, embittered, but her desire raged. Tim had turned the light of his countenance elsewhere, and she would never know why or see that light again. Jealously she missed him, with anger and frenzy and bitter spiteful rage, and about this she could speak to no one.

  ‘All the same,’ said Gertrude to Anne, ‘we ought to-I ought to - give him a chance to - explain. I mean, I don’t want to see him - but he was so incoherent and -’

  ‘Presumably he is silent because there is no explanation except a damning one.’

  ‘I know. It’s just that I want it to be all settled, finished. I want to settle down to it, do you see? I want to know that he has had a chance to defend himself and has refused it. I need to know that. Then I’ll feel - better -’

  ‘You are generous,’ said Anne.

  ‘Oh Anne - don’t talk to me like that-I feel you’re acting a part - sorry, I know you love me, I know you sympathize -’