Will Boase
Danby read this curious missive with raised eyebrows. Then he handed it to Adelaide.
Adelaide looked at it. It fell from her hands to the floor. She crushed her fingers into her mouth to stifle the issuing cry. Then her voice came bubbling forth. ‘I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him, the only man who ever really loved me!’
25
LISA STOOD IN the door of the drawing room dressed in her brown mackintosh with the collar turned up. A large tartan suitcase stood on the floor beside her. A sunny rainy light filled the room with a peculiar brightness. Miles was standing by the window.
‘Close the door, Lisa.’
Lisa made an interrogative gesture, pointing behind her into the hall.
‘She’s upstairs,’ said Miles. ‘Anyway she doesn’t suppose you’ll leave the house without seeing me!’
‘I don’t want to add anything–anything–’
‘To her pain? It makes no difference. What about our pain?’
‘It’s better not to talk,’ said Lisa. She closed the door.
‘But we have talked. It was essential.’
‘Maybe. But one of the good things is that we haven’t talked more than was essential.’
‘You treat this thing–surgically.’
‘It’s the only way.’
‘It may be the right way. I’m not even sure about that. It’s certainly not the only way. It’s unnatural.’
‘What is right is often unnatural.’
‘God, you chill my blood, Lisa.’
‘I know. I love you, Miles.’ She uttered the words coldly.
‘I love you. I love you terribly. I’ll love you always to the very end of my life. I shall think about you all the time.’
‘Not all the time, Miles.’
‘And if you imagine this is the end of the story you’re bloody mistaken. You can’t dispose of a thing of this size in this cool way.’
‘I don’t feel cool, Miles. Now I am going to call Diana.’
‘No, no, no, not yet.’
Miles crossed the room to the door. As he reached the door Lisa moved back into the room. They faced each other.
‘Lisa, take off your coat.’
‘No.’
‘It’s not too late to decide something else. It will never be too late and it certainly isn’t too late now.’
‘No talk,’ she said, ‘no talk. The more we talk the more agony it will be later. And we know that we have no other course of action at all.’
‘We’ve discussed it so little.’
‘You know what discussion is like in a case like this.’
‘Oh Lisa–we’re acting like mad things.’
‘See it’s hopeless, Miles, see it. Before you loved me, all right before you knew you loved me, it was possible for me to live here. It was painful, but it was good too. It was a manageable life. But now it would be torture to me, and torture to Diana. And you know you can’t leave Diana. Anyway you love her. And you can’t run us in two houses. I wouldn’t tolerate it even if you and Diana would. Just see it, see the pattern, see the machine. You can’t struggle against necessity.’
‘Is there nothing else, nothing we haven’t thought of?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I could leave Diana. We haven’t really considered–’
‘You couldn’t. Miles, this is just the sort of talk we mustn’t have. We’ve got to go on functioning as people and we can. No one dies of love. It’s all crazy and inflated now. But we’ll feel better in six months’ time, though people in love hate to admit this.’
‘I won’t feel better in six months’ time, Lisa. I don’t think you realise how important this is for both of us. It’s something I’ve waited for all my life.’
‘I have realised it, Miles. You know how much I love you. And I’ve waited too. I’ve lived for years with this love. I didn’t know it would end like this. Though even if I had known I would still have loved and waited. But we can’t run a course straight into ruin, ruin of Diana, ruin of you, ruin of me. How could we live together, abandoning her? Could you write poetry, could I go on doing any of the things that I do for people, if we were living with an action like that?’
‘You say we exaggerate things. Perhaps we exaggerate this thing about Diana. Perhaps she’d be all right, better off–’
‘You’re married to Diana, she’s given you her life. It’s not just a calculation.’
‘Oh God, I know it’s not just a calculation–’
‘You see the case for me now. If we went away together you’d see the case for Diana.’
‘It’s that I can’t face it, Lisa, now it’s come. I didn’t believe it before, that was why I allowed you to argue in that way, saying it was all inevitable. Now that there’s something quite unendurable to endure I just know that the argument must be wrong. There must be an alternative. I feel you just can’t be going away, all that terrible long way away–’
‘Believe it, Miles, believe it. Look, here is my aeroplane ticket. London-Calcutta.’
Lisa opened her bag and took out the red aeroplane ticket. She displayed it, holding it up with her two hands.
‘When?’
‘It’s better you don’t know. Miles, I love you desperately, I love you more in this moment than ever before. I could faint with it. I love you so much now when I can see that you are beginning to believe that I am going. We must keep this love uncontaminated even if we kill it. Don’t you see?’
‘Love and death. It doesn’t seem very romantic to me, Lisa.’
‘It’s not romantic, Miles. This is real death. We shall forget each other.’
‘No, no, no. You are sacrificing–for Diana and me–too much–’
‘I am not sacrificing anything for Diana and you. I make the sacrifice to my own love. I can’t, with so much love, do anything else.’
‘You mean accept any compromise?’
‘Accept any compromise. The only thing is the impossible thing–if I had only met you before–’
‘Oh God, oh God, before, first–Why is it impossible, it can’t be impossible–’
‘I won’t be here any more.
‘We shall meet again.’
‘We shall not meet again.’
‘You’re going to Parvati’s country.’
‘I’ve always wanted to.’
‘And there really is this job?’
‘Yes. I fixed it all up with the Save the Children Fund people. I’ll be at their office in Calcutta and then somewhere out in the country. I shall have to learn Hindi. I shall be terribly busy.’
‘I shall not be busy. I shall be here with grief. I shall be yearning for you.’
‘You will be writing poetry. Oh believe it, Miles, see it, accept it.’
‘I can’t. It wouldn’t change me, Lisa. I just feel completely crippled by this.’
‘You have gods, Miles. They may reward you.’
‘They don’t give rewards for this kind of thing.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘Will you write to me?’
‘No.’
Miles stretched out his hand towards her, drew his fingers along the mackintosh sleeve to the warmth of her wrist. Then quite slowly he took her in his arms. She stood limp in his embrace, only inclining her head on to his shoulder. She said into his coat, ‘It was my fault, Miles, for coming here at all. I ought never to have come. There are secrets that can’t be kept.’
‘I love you. It wasn’t just your secret.’
‘I infected you with love.’
‘It’s not leprosy. Oh Lisa, this won’t get less. Have some mercy–’ He began to kiss her brow and her cheeks.
She pulled gently away. ‘We shouldn’t have had this conversation, Miles. You will try to help Diana, won’t you. This will be your task so you won’t be idle. You’ll have to help her positively. She has her pain which is different from ours. Only I mustn’t speak of that.’
‘Lisa, don’t talk in t
hat awful tone as if you were condemning us to death.’
‘Now I really must go. I’ll call Di.’
‘No, no, no, not yet, please–Oh Lisa, there must be more to say–we haven’t arranged anything–I don’t know where you’ll be–we’ll meet again in a few days, when we’ve had time to think things over. I can’t just let you go.’
Lisa opened the door and called ‘Diana.’
Diana came slowly down the stairs. She was carefully, even smartly, dressed in blue tweed. She was wearing earrings. She had been crying.
‘I’m just going, Di. Don’t be cross with me. And don’t forget to go and see Bruno.’
‘Bruno, also, wants you, not me,’ said Diana in a strained voice, staring at her sister.
‘He’ll soon want you. Just hold his hand and stroke him, I mean really stroke him–’
‘All right, all right.’
‘Di, will you just walk with me as far as the station? No, Miles, don’t you come. Di will just see me to the station. Get your mac, darling, it’s still raining a bit.’
Lisa went across the hall and Diana followed her slowly without looking at Miles. He stood in the doorway and watched them. The hall door was opened revealing the street full of blue rainy light.
‘Goodbye, Miles.’
The door closed. They were gone. Miles returned to the drawing room and sat down.
He thought, it’s not final. Now I’ve simply got to think. Hope stirred in him, lessening the pain. He looked out through the window into the soaking garden where a little rain was falling through the bright air. She would not say where she was staying, but he could find out. Perhaps Diana knew. Anyway he could always fly to Calcutta. She was not really dying, she was not really going away for ever. No, no, no, he thought to himself, I will not accept Lisa’s sentence of death.
26
BRUNO WAS ASLEEP. His huge head, made even larger by the ragged unclipped beard, lolled uncomfortably sideways, his mouth open, a moist lower lip showing amid the dull grey growth. He drew his breath in and out with a long shuddering sigh. His dark spotted hands with their swollen knuckles trembled and clutched a little on the yellowish white surface of the thin counterpane. Diana wondered if he was dreaming.
He had asked for Lisa. Diana had told him Lisa was away. He had asked when she would be back and whether Miles was away too. He seemed to imagine that Lisa was married to Miles. Diana had answered vaguely. He had been peevish and abstracted and twice said aloud, as if unconscious of her presence, ‘Poor Bruno, poor Bruno.’ At last she had managed to induce something like a conversation, and they had talked, about the various houses he had lived in and about the merits of different parts of London. They talked about how London was changing, and whether it was as handsome as Rome or Paris. Bruno showed a little animation. Diana could not bring herself to stroke him as Lisa had enjoined, but, a little selfconsciously, she had taken his hand which he let her hold, squeezing her fingers rather absently from time to time. She felt rather less physical horror of him, but the smell was hard to bear and she had a terrible intuition of his inward parts and of his pitiable mortality. There was something so strange and pathetic about the thin wispy emaciated body, so scarcely perceptible under the bedclothes, as if it were doing its best to shrivel right away leaving nothing but the head. An hour of the afternoon had passed in something like talk. She did not want to risk meeting Danby, whom she did not yet feel quite ready to encounter, and had just begun to say that it was time to go, when Bruno had suddenly, still holding her hand, fallen asleep.
Diana had been disconcerted and had immediately wondered if he was dying. She released her hand cautiously from his and stood up. His breathing seemed to be regular and steady. Even as she was moving the chair and rising to her feet she was able to measure the intensity of her attention to Bruno by the sudden violence of her misery at remembering about Miles and Lisa. She stood for a while looking down at Bruno until he became ghostly and almost invisible. Then as she began to make her way to the door she saw, clear and separated like a detail in a Flemish picture, a big bottle of sleeping tablets which was standing upon the top of the marble-topped bookcase. She knew what they were, because Bruno had mentioned them in reply to a question of hers about how he slept. Diana stood still again, staring at the bottle of tablets.
Diana had so far found herself quite unable to discuss the situation with Miles. He had made one or two half-hearted attempts to refer to it, but had seemed relieved when she had, with a kind of submissive animal gesture, simply turned her head away and refused to reply. In the two days since Lisa’s departure they had lived in the house together like two maniacs, each totally absorbed in a tempestuous inferno of private thoughts. Yet with all this they managed to behave with a certain degree of normality. Diana went shopping, Miles went to the office. They slept in the same bed, or rather lay awake for hours side by side, motionless and silent. Diana cried quietly, not wiping her tears, soaking the pillow. By day they were immensely polite and considerate and solicitous and rather formal. The only evident change in their routine was in the matter of meals. By tacit mutual consent they had abandoned any pretence of serious eating. Diana laid out, at intervals, a sort of buffet in the dining room at which, usually not together, they occasionally picked, a little shame-faced at being able to eat at all.
Diana had not at any point talked to Lisa either. She had made no comment to her sister, nor had Lisa attempted to speak to her, although twice she had taken Diana’s hand and squeezed it and laid it against her cheek, while Diana looked back at her blankly without responding. Diana conjectured that Lisa had determined on her flight immediately after Miles’s nocturnal visit. Then she had kept her silence during the time in which she was arranging for the job in India. She announced her departure on the morning of the day on which she left, and Diana could see that Miles was just as stunned as she was. On the final walk to the station Lisa had been cool and business-like, talking fast, and Diana had been silent. Lisa had been trying to impress upon her that she must prevent Miles from trying to find Lisa before her departure to India, and that he would certainly fail if he tried. She did not tell Diana where she was going. When they got to the station she spoke again about Bruno. They embraced with closed eyes, clasping each other hard. Then Lisa was gone.
Diana had walked about the streets on that day and on the next day. She had sat on benches in parks and in churchyards. She rehearsed the situation endlessly in her mind, trying to find some way of thinking about it which was less than torture, but she could not. She had begun by believing that Miles and Lisa would run away together. Now she believed that they had finally and definitively crucified their love for her sake. It was not at first clear to her which was worse. In thinking them capable of running away she had made a judgement which seemed to bear not so much upon the honesty of either as upon the intense and terrible thing which was their love. Diana had fully taken in the scale of it, as with her first violent shock of horror she realised that the unthinkable had happened and that her life was utterly changed. She had apprehended with certainty this thing, huge, full-fledged and monstrous in the house, when at a certain moment she had seen Miles and Lisa looking at each other across the dining table. She had not foreseen it. The pity for Lisa which she had so long shared with Miles had made her incapable of seeing her sister as pre-eminently able to charm her husband.
Her appalled and frightened imagination could not now inhabit the alternative. Once the dreadful fear of Miles’s flight had become less it began to seem to her a far worse and a far more difficult thing to accept their sacrifice. It would have been better to be their victim. That at least would have justified and made endurable the extreme jealousy and resentment which she could not stop feeling, and which she felt undiminished and intensified as she now saw Miles frantic-eyed at Kempsford Gardens, pacing and shuddering inside the walls of the house like a creature in a cage. For her too the house, the garden, had become utterly changed, a prison, a desolation. He could not expec
t her to be grateful, even though he had in a sense behaved impeccably. That impeccable behaviour tormented her almost more than anything. The situation somehow demanded her gratitude in a way which humiliated her utterly. How had they spoken of her? She had tried not to watch them. They could have spent the days together outside the house while she, at home, sat waiting for their judgement upon her–‘You can’t leave poor Diana.’ ‘Poor Diana would break her heart.’ ‘After all, she is your wife, Miles. She has nothing but you.’ ‘She is not strong, Lisa, and independent as you are.’ How strangely she and Lisa had now changed places. Now it was Diana who was the bird with the broken wing who would ever after be trailing her feathers in the dust.
If only they had gone away, thought Diana, I could have survived. Of course it would have been terrible. She tried to imagine the house suddenly empty, deprived of that dear familiar animal presence. They had lived together for so long like animals in a hutch. But all she could feel was the hollow misery of her irrevocably transformed marriage. ‘Things will never be the same again, never.’ But if they had gone, she thought, then all the energy, all the pride, all the sense of self would have been on the side of survival. I would have wanted to show them and to show the world how well I could survive. I would have felt less bitter. I could have sought for help and found it in other places. As the wife, retained, triumphant, I can appeal to nobody, least of all to myself. Every way I lose. She has taken him from me, she has destroyed our married love, and I have no new life, only the dead form of the old life. They have acted rightly, and just by this I am utterly brought low. My pain and my bitterness are sealed up inside me forever. I have no source of energy, no growth of being, to enable me to live this hateful role of the wife to whom they have together planned to sacrifice their great love. I am humbled by this to the point of annihilation. Sooner or later Miles will begin to speak about it. He will speak kindly, gently, trying to make me feel that his love for me is something real. But I saw that thing, their love. Miles and I never loved so.