The Bachelors

  Patrick has tried to explain how let down he always feels by people who trust him and enter into an agreement to trust him, as it were against their better judgment, blinding themselves, and then suddenly no longer trust him, and turn upon him. Mr. Fergusson perhaps understands this.

  There is another charge, and the unfortunate sentence, but afterwards Mr. Fergusson, with his strong-looking chest and reliable uniform, is still sitting at the police station, and they make another arrangement about information so that Patrick feels much better and feels he has a real friend in Mr. Fergusson with his few words, even though Mr. Fergusson cannot help putting him on a charge sometimes; and he is afraid of Mr. Fergusson.

  Patrick contemplates Alice curled up in distress. It is so much easier to get away from a girl in any other part of the country than in London. In the provinces one only has to go to London and disappear. But once you have a girl in your life in London she knows all your associates, you have established yourself, she knows some of your affairs; she knows where to find you; and it is impossible to disappear from Alice without disappearing from the centre of things, the spiritualist movement — Marlene — his Circle — ‘My bread and butter.’ Patrick is indignant. He has loved Alice.

  He has not taken any money from her. He has given her money, has supported her for nearly a year. She has agreed to trust him, it is a pact. She is mine, he is thinking. The others were not mine but this one is mine. I have loved her, I still love her. I don’t take anything from Alice. I give. And I will release her spirit from this gross body. He looks with justification at the syringe by her bedside, and is perfectly convinced about how things will go in Austria (all being well), since a man has to protect his bread and butter, and Alice has agreed to die, though not in so many words.

  Patrick watched her calmly and reflected that he had been weak with Alice. She had talked and talked about marriage, as if he were a materialist with a belief in empty forms. He had told her frequently he was not a person of Conventions: ‘I live by the life of the spirit.’ She had only replied ‘I’m not conventional, either.’ And when she had conceived this disgusting baby she had been frantic for marriage. It was absurd that she refused to have the baby done away with and was frantic for marriage.

  It was her love for him and his spiritual values that made her so like the other women, crumpled up on the bed after their fury. A little dread entered in among his bones: it was about the chances of the Flower case coming up, and the possibility of a conviction. He absented himself from this idea and gave himself up to spiritual reflection again. Before Alice had recovered herself, he, watching from his chair, was surprised by a sensation which he had never experienced before. This was an acute throb of anticipatory pleasure at the mental vision of Alice, crumpled up — in the same position as she now was on the bed — on the mountainside in Austria. She is mine, I haven’t taken a penny from this one, I have given to this one. I can do what pleases me. I love this one. She has agreed to trust. Crumpled up on the mountainside in Austria, Alice, overloaded with insulin, far from help, beyond the reach of a doctor, beyond help — far from the intrusive knowledge of his friends and enemies in London, outside the scope of his bread and butter, free from her heavy body, beyond good and evil. She has agreed to it, not in so many words, but…

  She looked up from the bed, and was startled. But the fear left her face. There is a pact, he thought. She has agreed to believe in me.

  It was still Sunday night and Ronald had gone up the stairs to Elsie Forrest’s room at no Vesey Street near Victoria and had sat on the stairs awaiting her return at half-past eleven, when, as she approached her door, he stood up.

  ‘Christ!’ she said when she saw him.

  ‘I hope I didn’t give you a fright.’

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘To come inside and talk to you,’ Ronald said.

  ‘You threaten me, I’ll wake up the house.’

  Ronald sat down on the top stair. ‘I’m not threatening you. I’m only asking if I may talk to you. If you don’t want me to talk to you, would you mind talking to me?’

  She opened the door. ‘Come on in,’ she said, and stood and looked at him as he walked into her bed-sitting-room.

  ‘I’ve got nothing in the place to drink,’ she said.

  ‘Not even tea?’ said Ronald.

  She said, ‘Take your things off and sit down.’

  She took off her own coat and hung it in the cupboard, from which she brought a coat-hanger and carefully set Ronald’s coat upon it and set it up on a hook behind the door. Ronald sat on the divan and stretched out his legs.

  As she put the kettle on the little electric grill stove behind a curtain she said, ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’ She looked at him from the sides of her eyes as she set out the tea cups.

  ‘Anything you like.’

  She was looking at him, not to size up what he had come to talk about, but in an evaluating way which made Ronald feel like something in the sales.

  ‘You’re Ronald Bridges,’ she said.

  ‘You’re Elsie Forrest,’ he said.

  ‘You want the letter,’ she said. She went over to the window and drew the limp short makeshift curtains.

  He said, ‘Have the police been to see you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And you know they haven’t. You wouldn’t be fool enough to tell the cops until you had tried to get it back yourself. It would tell against your reputation, losing a confidential document, wouldn’t it? Why didn’t you keep it confidential if it was confidential?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You wouldn’t be foolish enough to tell the cops,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But a friend of mine has done so.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘No detectives have called here.’

  ‘I’ve told them to leave it to me for the time being.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The kettle’s boiling over,’ he said.

  She made the tea, and Ronald watched her. She looked very neurotic, moving in a jerky way, her body giving little twitches of habitual umbrage. Her blonde greasy hair hung over her face as she poured out the tea.

  ‘Your friend Matthew Finch came to see me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Ronald said.

  ‘He was after the letter.’ ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘He didn’t get it,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  ‘And that’s why you’ve come after it.’

  ‘I didn’t need to come after it,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘send the police. I’ll face all that.’ She sat down beside him on the sofa and, folding her hands in her lap, looked straight ahead of her. ‘I’ve faced it already,’ she said with tragic intensity, such as Alice employed when talking to a man and the stress of the occasion demanded it.

  All at once, Ronald quite liked her.

  ‘I have died,’ she said, ‘many deaths.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how that has happened.’

  She pushed back her hair from her bumpy forehead. She had a warped young face.

  ‘I have loved too much and trusted too much,’ she said, perceiving the success of her style, ‘I have given and I haven’t received.’

  ‘Have you had a lot of sex relations?’ Ronald said.

  ‘I have had sex without any relationships. I don’t know why I’m telling you this the first five minutes.’

  ‘You’ve met the wrong chaps,’ Ronald said.

  ‘All the chaps are wrong ones. If they aren’t married they are queer; if they aren’t queer they are hard; if they aren’t hard they are soft. I can’t get anywhere with men, somehow. Why am I telling you all this?’

  ‘I’m the uncle type,’ Ronald said.

  ‘Why d’you say that? Are you interested in psychology? — I’m very interested in psychology. Why are you the uncle type?’

  ‘Because everyone tells me their tr
oubles,’ Ronald said.

  ‘And don’t you tell people your troubles?’

  ‘No,’ Ronald said, ‘my troubles are largely self-evident and I’m not the filial type. To be able to tell people your troubles you have to be a born son. Or daughter, as the case may be.’

  ‘I must be a born daughter,’ Elsie said, ‘according to psychology.’

  ‘At the moment you’re being a niece if I’m being an uncle. Let’s keep our terms of reference in order.’

  ‘Well, I know a Father Socket,’ Elsie said. ‘He’s just let me down badly. I looked on him as a father, and now I’ve found out he’s a homosexual.’

  ‘You can overlook that,’ Ronald said, ‘if you think of him as second cousin.

  ‘I can’t overlook it. I hate queers. I want to conceive a child.’

  ‘Fond of babies?’

  ‘Not particularly. It’s not a question of having a child so much as conceiving a child by a man I love.’

  ‘You’d better get a husband,’ Ronald said. ‘That would be the obvious course.’

  ‘There aren’t any husbands that I know of. My own brother’s unfaithful to his wife; it makes me sick. And he expects me to encourage him. “Lend us your room for the afternoon, Elsie,” he says. And when I won’t lend the room he says, “You’re not much of a sister.” I said, “I object to the type of woman you pick up with.” So I do. I couldn’t have them coming here. That’s what my brother’s like. I always knew he would make a rotten husband.’

  ‘You’d better find a husband that isn’t like your brother.’

  ‘There aren’t any husbands so far as I’ve met. All the men I know want to lean on me or take it out on me. I did all Father Socket’s typing. That friend of yours, Matthew Finch, he only wanted to commit a sin with me and he ate a lot of onions and breathed on my face so I shouldn’t enjoy it. If he’s your friend, I can only say—’

  ‘Oh, if he’s my friend, we might leave him out of the discussion.’

  ‘Now, there’s another thing — the way you men stick together against us.’

  ‘Haven’t you any friends?’

  ‘Well, there’s Alice.’

  ‘We’ll leave her out of the discussion, then.’

  ‘No we won’t. Alice is a case. She’s mad in love with that little weed Patrick Seton. I’ll admit he’s a brilliant medium. But what else is there to him? Now she’s getting a child by him. And what’s he done about it? Wanted her to have it taken away. She thinks he’s going to marry her, and she’s mistaken. I’ve told her. I’ve told Alice. I’ve told her he’ll never marry her. He says he’s getting a divorce, and the divorce never happens. And she believes him. Any awkwardness, and he recites poetry to her to explain everything away. I’ll bet he hasn’t got a wife. He was never the husband type from the start. He won’t marry Alice. She refuses to see that.’

  ‘Then why are you defending him, like a sister?’

  ‘I’m not defending him at all, I’m—”

  ‘You’re concealing the evidence of his forgery.’

  ‘Oh, the letter — I’m hanging on to that. I know that’s what you’ve come for. But I’m keeping it and I’ll take the consequences. I’ve already faced the consequences. So you can go.’

  Ronald got up and went to take his coat off the hanger.

  ‘Stay the night,’ she said, ‘and I’ll give you the letter in the morning.’

  Ronald sat down again. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Why? Don’t you want to sleep with me?’

  ‘No,’ Ronald said.

  ‘Why, tell me why? Is there something wrong with me?’

  ‘Uncles don’t sleep with nieces,’ Ronald said.

  ‘Isn’t that carrying the idea a bit far?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ronald said, ‘it is. I’m not an uncle, I’m a stranger. That’s why I can’t sleep with you.’

  ‘Am I a stranger?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ronald said.

  ‘You’re only playing for time,’ she said. ‘I’m well aware you’re trying to handle me. It’s the letter you’re after. Take all and give nothing.’

  ‘I thought we were having an interesting conversation, mutually appreciated as between strangers,’ Ronald said.

  ‘Yes, and when you go away you’ll feel “Well, I haven’t got the letter but at least I cheered up the poor girl for an hour.” And what d’you suppose I’ll feel? It’s much better for men not to come at all if they’re always going to go away and leave me alone. I’m not lonely before they come. I’m only lonely when they go away.’

  ‘There’s a whole philosophy attached to that,’ Ronald said. ‘It turns on the question whether it’s best not to be born in the first place.’

  ‘That’s a silly question,’ she said, ‘because if you weren’t born you couldn’t ask it.’

  ‘Yes, it is silly. But, since one has been born, it’s one of the mad questions one has been born to ask.’

  ‘I think it’s better to be born. At least you know where you are,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Aren’t you contradicting yourself?’ Ronald said.

  ‘I don’t care if I am. There’s a big difference between feeling lonely after a man’s gone away and not being born at all. Being born is basic. You don’t need to have company in the same way as you need to be born.’

  ‘There’s a lot in what you say,’ Ronald said.

  ‘I say it’s a mistake to have company, I wish I could stop it.’

  ‘You only need stick a note on your door saying “Away for a few weeks” and leave it there.’

  ‘I haven’t the guts,’ she said. ‘And I don’t get much companionship out of the men I know. All they want is sex, and perhaps we have an evening out with sex in view, but they’re anxious to get back to their mums and aunties or their wives.’

  ‘You should make them entertain you without sex, ‘Ronald said, ‘— an intelligent girl like you.’

  ‘They don’t want intelligence. They don’t come if there’s no sex. I’m a sexy type, I get excited about it. And that’s what they like. But it only leaves me lonely.’

  ‘Don’t you enjoy it at the time?’

  ‘No. But I can’t do without it, and these men know it. They fumble about with their french letters or they tear open their horrible little packets of contraceptives like kids with sweets, or they expect me to have a rubber stop-gap all ready fitted. All the time I want to be in love with the man and conceive his child, but I keep thinking of the birth-control and something inside me turns in its grave. You can’t enjoy sex in that frame of mind.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Ronald said, ‘it’s like contemplating suicide.’

  ‘Have you thought of committing suicide?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but something inside me turns in its grave.’

  ‘I’ve thought of suicide, but in the end I always decide to wait in case another possibility turns up. I might meet a man that wants to live with me and not keep slamming the door in my face with birth control. There were plenty wanted to live with Alice before she took up with Patrick Seton. And now she’s in for a let-down, though she won’t admit it. But at least she’s had her sex with a baby coming up.’

  ‘You can’t have babies all over the place,’ Ronald said. ‘It isn’t practical.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘Will you give me back the letter?’ Ronald said.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because you took it,’ Ronald said.

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve taken anything worth having off a man. And I want to keep it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It may come in useful. It may help Alice. If Patrick gets convicted she’ll be in the cart. I’d like to see him in gaol, but still he’s Alice’s man, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t destroy the evidence against him. I’m quite sure it’s a forgery.’