‘Do you mean he’s hard in looks or in character?’
‘Looks; I don’t know enough about his character. Oh, it was just an idea.’
‘Still, I know what you mean,’ said Miles. ‘There’s a touch of rigidity about his whole personality.’
She was instantly defensive. ‘Perhaps it’s just that he belongs to a different world from ours – less emotional.’
‘Could be that. Anyway, I find him likeable, not to mention good-looking.’
That gave her great pleasure but she managed to sound dubious. ‘Is he good-looking?’
‘Oh, surely. They’re a good-looking family. Any news of the ravishing Julian?’
‘Only that he’s gone abroad.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Miles concentrated momentarily on his supper.
Had she managed well, sounded natural, casual? She thought so. Relieved, she almost shovelled in her Sole Véronique, barely conscious that she was eating, let alone what she was eating.
‘You’re liking that better than I am,’ said Miles. ‘But I’m just not hungry.’
She switched to talking about the play’s failure and worked hard at it – for whenever the conversation flagged she began to think. And she wasn’t going to allow herself the luxury of thought until she was in bed and Miles was safely asleep.
Only then did she relax and let herself re-live her day; the drive amidst the holiday traffic, the first glimpse of the melancholy house, herself alone in it, Thornton’s young face in the photograph, his face as it was now, the moment when he had first kissed her – at the memory of which she experienced a vertigo not unlike what she felt on the flat’s balcony, except that this present vertigo was wholly pleasurable; all the same it was alarming because she had never experienced anything like it before. Even for Jack, in those days she had so vividly remembered this afternoon, her desire had been more emotional than physical. Well, ten years of repression accounted for much, and she must beware of being fooled by her body, particularly as its sensations had never come up to her expectations in those days of love making in dressing rooms and on the hard floor of that blasted box. I am not, she told herself, a really physical woman … and then blissfully sank into sleep.
An Unidentified Flower
She awoke to find it was ten o’clock and Miles was already up. She could not recall having outslept him since the earliest days of their marriage, when it had been a toss-up which of them slept worst, woke earliest. She was further reminded of those days when he arrived with a breakfast tray, saying, ‘It’s a long time since I had the chance to do this for you.’
She said she couldn’t think why she’d slept so late.
‘Perhaps it was the country air you breathed in yesterday.’
‘Precious little of it. I was mainly in the car or in the house.’ To have agreed that the air might have affected her would have been a bit ridiculous. ‘Just a minute, darling, while I freshen up.’
When she came back from the bathroom he had brought his own breakfast tray and settled back in bed, having supplied them both with Sunday papers. This was the way their Sundays usually began except that, normally, she was the one to bring the trays and papers.
She drank her coffee and gazed unseeingly at a front page; little short of a declaration of World War Three would have rivetted her attention. Anyway, one could not cope with a grapefruit and read. She put the paper down.
But one could cope with a grapefruit and think and her thoughts were not welcome – though no doubt they ought to be, as part of the stock-taking she must do during her week of armistice. Miles’s arrival with the tray had so vividly brought back the time when they had first come to count on each other’s kindness. Those interminable nights … they had tried various sleeping pills but none of them had proved too satisfactory and, anyway, Miles had a horror of becoming dependent on them. So they had chucked the lot away. Her worst times had been when they put the light out and she remained utterly wakeful. He would then recite to her, in a veiled, monotonous voice which always ended by soothing her to sleep. (He once said, ‘I shall never dare to play Shakespeare again after using him as a soporific’) His worst times had been just after dawn when he would wake with a devastating realization that Alan was gone for ever. He would try not to disturb her but it seemed that just his need of her woke her. They would then talk and she found that her best way of distracting him was to get him interested in doing things for her, taking her somewhere, buying her something. (She once said, ‘Getting your mind off your troubles always ends by being so expensive for you.’) He would fall asleep again eventually but, one way and another, they hardly had good nights. Yet in retrospect those nights had charm for her, a heart-breaking charm.
Well, so had the days, with Miles always behaving as if she was the one woman in the world for him (which, in a sense, she was). All their sight-seeing and shopping, she remembered buying her first fur coat –
Miles, looking up from his paper, said, ‘Will you need a new fur coat this year?’
Extremely startled, she gasped, ‘Goodness, no. I had one last year. Whatever made you ask?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ He glanced back at his paper. ‘Yes, I have. There’s a picture of a girl in a fur coat. I suppose I noticed it unconsciously.’
Well, maybe. But they so often experienced flashes of telepathy, and at present she wanted no leakages from her mind to his. She must lay off private thinking when he was at hand. She finished her breakfast hurriedly, trying to concentrate all her thoughts on it … grapefruit, scoop it, eat it; coffee, pour it, drink it. (And why, in the midst of this, did she suddenly think of the Taj Mahal?) She took a final gulp of coffee and said, ‘All right if I have the first bath?’
He said, ‘Surely,’ without looking up from his paper.
Relaxing in her bath she took up her thoughts where they had broken off. (Presumably a solid wall precluded telepathy.) But soon she reached the memory of her miscarriage and after that came the time she had boggled at thinking about when talking to Thornton, and she still boggled. That must wait until she was sure of being alone for a good long while, with the whole flat to herself. Good heavens, she couldn’t turn off all secret thought for every minute she was with Miles. Perhaps it would be all right if she now definitely decided she wasn’t going to leave him; that would somehow act as a safety device on her thoughts. Anyway, she would decide it for today. Unfortunately, this decision made her feel more in love than ever with Geoffrey. It was the first time she had thought of him as ‘Geoffrey’, not ‘Thornton’ – though one really thought of people as they existed, more than by name.
She got out of the bath, dressed, and busied herself with washing up and bed making. Miles, when he was dressed, went back to the papers.
On Sunday, they generally lunched at a hotel, their usual restaurants being closed or apt, somehow, to seem off-key. Today Miles chose the Ritz and, with slightly histrionic determination, treated the occasion as a celebration. When he ordered champagne she blankly said, ‘But why?’
‘Because we must think of ourselves as at the beginning of a holiday. Any ideas, now the Thornton house has fallen through? Would you like to go abroad?’
‘Me?’ She never went abroad with him nowadays. For years his (less and less frequent) ‘I think I’ll go abroad for a while’ had meant just one thing. As far as she knew, all his affairs were now conducted on the Continent and she rarely knew with whom they were conducted. He had become more and more secretive about his sex life. And as, in the days when he had talked more freely, she had never shown the slightest disapproval, she could only take it that he had come to prefer secrecy. Now she hastily followed up her astonished ‘Me?’ with ‘Yes, if you’d like us to.’ It was the last thing she wanted – though perhaps she ought to welcome the delay.
He began to talk of various possibilities, almost as if trying to sell them to her. Then he said, ‘Oh, well, let’s just toy with the idea. Get some travel brochures if you like. But we’ll only go if you really wan
t to.’ The last words were accompanied by a particularly kind, direct look. She feared she hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm, and instantly said she would get the brochures.
Back in the flat after lunch they watched television. And in mid-afternoon Peter Hesper rang up and asked them to supper. Miles relayed the invitation.
Jill said, ‘Not me, but you should. Do! I’ll promise to order myself a good meal.’ And she would tonight. Although not hungry now, she felt sure she would be if she could be left on her own.
‘All right, then.’ Miles accepted for himself, then hung up and said poor Peter was out of luck – ‘That job he was expecting has fallen through and now Gaston’s insisting on being taken on a Continental holiday which Peter says he can’t afford.’
‘I wouldn’t break your heart. Peter makes plenty. I’ll get tea. Would you like toast and jam?’
‘I like the sound of toast and jam. It suggests a cosiness we never achieve in this flat. But unfortunately I couldn’t eat a bite.’
When she came back with the tea he was staring at the window. Rain was driving across the balcony. He said gloomily, ‘I wonder what this room will be like in winter.’
‘At least it’ll be warm – plenty of central heating.’ It flashed through her mind that she might not be there in the winter, but she reminded herself that her decision for the day was not to leave Miles.
Soon after six the rain stopped. He said he would start early and walk. ‘I need exercise. Oh, I might be late getting back. Peter wanted me to go to some party with them.’
She said, ‘Good idea. I won’t wait up,’ – and thought, after the door of the flat had closed behind him, that he could hardly have said anything more liable to liberate her – for the evening, anyway. She had a shrewd idea of what kind of party Peter would be taking him to. Was it only now that she felt a twinge of resentment or had she, in the past, fooled herself about not feeling it? Which brought her to something which had been trying to invade her thoughts all day. Could one really be dishonest with oneself? Had she, in fact, known all through that sunny week in the Spa Town that she was falling in love?
She had certainly been particularly happy and had sometimes come near to forgetting the very existence of the play Miles was acting in. She’d felt guilty about that afterwards, especially that morning when she’d looked through the telescope and seen Miles at the window of the Lion. And even before that there had been her experience when listening to the Schubert Octet. She had told the girls about her mental picture of a comic little town band, but not about what she had pictured during the last movement … someone, some woman, escaping, running towards joy, under the blossoming chestnuts. But had she equated the woman as herself? And anyway one couldn’t accept a childish bit of imagination as a proof one had fallen in love, and with a man she had only met a few times. Of course one could fall in love at sight but not without knowing, surely? She remembered her first meeting with Geoffrey, the walk to the hat shop, and the memory gave her such pleasure that she now felt she must have known even then.
Was one some kind of schizophrenic? Three weeks ago she had sat in this room while Miles, as now, had gone to Peter Hesper’s, and she’d been utterly unaware of what it now seemed she must have been aware of. She couldn’t have been sane. But she was sane enough now, and particularly clear-headed; also in very good spirits. And having spent the day on Miles’s side, as it were, she was going to spend the evening on Geoffrey’s.
She telephoned the restaurant below for a fillet steak, zabaglione, and a large pot of black coffee. Then she got herself a drink.
On Geoffrey’s side now: surely being the wife of a Member of Parliament couldn’t be so very difficult? She could learn to open bazaars and even do a bit of canvassing, especially if the girls came with her. She longed to see them again. Why did they like her? Even the lordly Julian wanted her in the family. It was the first time in her life that she had made a personal success – not that she’d really felt any lack of success since marrying Miles; his friends had accepted her and he had more and more made her feel her importance to him. And she had always enjoyed his success, been proud of it on her own account, as well as his, because she had continued to think of herself as a little (if lanky) nobody who had made a marvellous marriage (if with a catch in it). And now that same nobody had the chance of another marvellous marriage (which wouldn’t, anyway, have the same catch in it). Very, very ego-inflating. She remembered once looking up the word hubris because it occurred in a part Miles was playing and neither of them knew what it meant: insolent pride or security. Oh, she must beware of hubris!
The doorbell rang. It would be the waiter with her meal. She went to let him in.
He proved to be a pleasant Austrian boy who had served food in the flat before but not for some time, nor had she lately seen him in the restaurant. She asked him, while he set the meal out, if he had been away. Yes, he had been home for a holiday. And home, it turned out, was in a valley near Innsbruck. She knew it, to his delight, and had lunched in the village he came from – ‘But it was a long time ago, let’s see … over nine years.’ She couldn’t remember the name of the inn, not even when he told her the name of all three inns.
But she could see the inn and, once the waiter had gone, she saw it too vividly for her liking. For the inn, its surroundings and, above all, a mountain meadow she and Miles had walked up to after lunch, were all part of the memories she had up to now boggled at. They were definitely not on Geoffrey’s side, nor did they promote enjoyment of her meal. She left much of it uneaten, then returned to her armchair, taking the coffee with her. Now memory must have its head.
She was back in that dazzlingly green meadow, marvelling at the contrast between the vastness of the mountains rising all around and the tiny, fairytale villages dotted along the valley below. Had it been May’? No, she’d had the miscarriage in May and been too ill to travel for several weeks. It must have been June – late June, because it had been the last day of their holiday. Miles had taken a couple of weeks off between the closing of one show and rehearsals for another.
She had been feeling wonderfully better, physically and mentally, at times almost happy and all the more so because she believed Miles was becoming less unhappy. Sitting in the meadow, they had talked with a gaiety which was not just the surface gaiety with which they encouraged each other but – in her case, anyway – a genuine light-heartedness which had some thing of the serenity of the mountains and the sky. She was therefore a little surprised when, after a few minutes of joint silence, he’d said, ‘Are you still minding very much about losing the baby?’
She had answered, ‘Oh, it’s getting easier.’
‘You’re sure? Because if not … well, to the best of my belief I’m perfectly capable of fathering a child. And with you, I’d be willing.’
She had said instantly, ‘But you don’t want to, Miles.’
He hadn’t contradicted this. Instead, he’d tried to make her understand his particular kind of abnormality. As far as she could make out, only for men could he feel a love which had for him, as well as physical satisfaction, beauty, charm, romance. For women – anyway, for her – he could feel the warmest friendship, tenderness, affection, indeed love, but it was a love which had nothing to do with being ‘in love’.
How, then, she’d asked, could he bring himself to sleep with her? He’d pointed out that plenty of marriages, such as mariages de convenance, were consummated without anywhere near the affection they felt for each other. It would have been unthinkable for him while Alan was alive, but now … He had taken her hand and said – she could remember his exact words – ‘You are the one person in the world I truly care for and, apart from any question of a child, if it would give you pleasure it would give me pleasure too.’
She’d said she would like to think it over, and he’d said of course. All through the conversation she had been staring at a flower he had picked and handed to her on their walk up to the meadow, a very strange flower with hairy
petals, pink stained with green. She did not know its name and she had never thought about it since. But she could now see it with the utmost clarity and remember stroking its petals. And yet she could not remember how the conversation ended or what they had talked about, walking down to the village.
Had she then begun to realize what was happening to her? Certainly the full realization had come that evening, when they were back at Innsbruck, and in their historic old hotel bedroom, getting ready for dinner. He had asked if she was sorry their holiday was ending and she had said yes, in a way, but it would be fun to be home. And she had suddenly felt flooded by happiness and known that she was in love with him – and surely he would not offer to be a real husband if he was not more attracted by her than he was admitting to himself? Everything would come right. She would tell him now that she had made up her mind – no, she would wait until later tonight. This darkly romantic old room would make a good setting. It would be the perfect ending to their holiday.
They had dined in a cellar-like room, all antlers and beer mugs. At a near-by table had been a group of very young men, talking and laughing loudly. Miles had said, ‘I fear we’re in for a noisy meal.’ The waiter had handed large, confusing menus. She had studied hers for a few moments and then looked up to ask Miles for advice. He was gazing, over his lowered menu, at the group of young men, and there was an expression in his eyes she had never seen before. Usually they were reflective, sometimes sad, always kind. Now they were brilliantly alive, his whole face was more alive than she had ever known it to be. Only a few seconds passed before he turned to her, smiling and helpful; but in those seconds she had realized that one – possibly all – of those casually-seen young men attracted him more than she ever would. It didn’t change her feelings for him but it did stop her telling him about them. And that night, when they took a last stroll round the moonlit town, she said she thought their relationship had better remain as it was. She had been almost sure he was relieved, though he had finally said, ‘Well, the offer remains open.’