‘But my dear Charles,’ said Rosina, ‘I know you are a most eccentric creature, but you cannot want a woman who looks eighty and has a moustache and beard!’
It was the following day. I had got back very late. The taxi was waiting at the station all right, but the run home was slow because of a thick fog. There was no dinner on the train because of a strike, so I had had to make do with the custard cream biscuits, which I felt annoyed and sad to think of my mother stuffing into James’s pockets long ago. When I reached Shruff End I ate some bread and cheese. (The butter had all gone rancid.) My bed was uninvitingly damp, but I managed to find a hot water bottle and exhaustion sent me to sleep. I awoke late, feeling stiff and cold, and as I sat up my teeth began to chatter. Well might I be frightened of what I was proposing to do that day.
I put on my warmest available clothes, including the thick Irish woollen sweater which poor Doris gave me, but found myself still shuddering. Perhaps James’s suspicion about the ’flu had been right after all? A thick grey-golden mist still covered the land and the sea, bringing with it a terrible blanketed silence. The sea, where it was, when I walked out, just visible, caressing the rocks, was oily-smooth. The air felt damp and chill though I suppose it was not really very cold. A shirt which I had left drying upon the lawn was soaking wet. The interior of the house on the other hand was really icy, tomb-like, with an entirely new smell of mildew, and the insides of the windows were streaming with water. I tried, and failed, to light the new paraffin heater which I had purchased at the Fishermen’s Stores. I made some tea and was beginning to feel a little better when I heard a motor car hooting at the end of the causeway. I guessed rightly that it was Rosina, and felt for a few moments such intense irritation that I wanted to run out at her screaming. I also considered hiding, but I was beginning to feel hungry and did not see why I should abandon my house to a perhaps prolonged invasion. Then I conceived, an intelligent self-protective device, the idea of simply telling her. It was the right move.
We were sitting in the kitchen, with the calor gas stove on, eating dried apricots and cheddar cheese. (Dried apricots eaten with cake should be soaked and simmered first, eaten with cheese they should be aboriginally dry.) I was drinking tea, Rosina was drinking brandy, which she had demanded. The fog was now so thick that the room seemed to be curtained, and I had lit two candles which seemed strangely unable to spread any of their pale little illumination through the opaque brown twilight of the room. An ‘exciting light’, Rosina called it. I had decided to tell her some version of the Hartley story because I could not, in my present mood, with my present terrible plan, abide the prospect of lying and fencing and perhaps having a dangerous row. To tell the truth, I was almost superstitiously afraid of Rosina’s hatred. I wanted to neutralize her for the time, so as not to have to worry about her. I would soon have quite other dangers and decisions; and I had an intuitive conception, which turned out to be correct, of how she would react to my confidences.
She opened hostilities by saying (as I expected) that she had not believed a word of my recent story about having given up Lizzie, and had not believed that I was going to stay in London, and how right she had been, and if I imagined I was going to get rid of her—I cut this short by telling her, briefly and selectively, the story of the ‘old flame’. How very convenient these cliché phrases are, how soothing to the pained mind, and how misleading, how concealing. Here I was, about to make a decisive move, tormented by love and fear and awful incipient jealousy, telling Rosina a bland, even humorous, story about an ‘old flame’ and thus, while telling the truth, deceiving her. Rosina was cool, intrigued, delighted, intelligent. She was a very different auditor from my cousin and a much more satisfactory one. In fact I found a certain relief in telling the edited tale to this clever and, as it turned out, not unsympathetic woman. What I had intuited at the start, seconds perhaps (so swift is the mind) after hearing the maddening impertinent hooting of the little red car, was that Rosina would view ‘the Hartley question’ in quite a different light from ‘the Lizzie question’.
It is an interesting fact about jealousy (and jealousy is no doubt a major topic in this memoir) that although it is in so many respects a totally irrational as well as a totally irresistible emotion, it does show a certain limited reasonableness where temporal priority is concerned. I had taken up with Lizzie after I had met and appreciated Rosina, and it was fixed (quite erroneously) in Rosina’s mind that Lizzie had somehow ‘stolen me away’. Lizzie was moreover still an attractive woman. Such things made up a classical picture and evoked a typical response. But Hartley, under the ‘old flame’ heading, was a different matter altogether, and here Rosina’s sheer intelligence did work on the side of reason. Hartley belonged to my remote past, Hartley was ‘old’ (that is, my age), Hartley was unattractive and undistinguished and (a not unimportant point) thoroughly married. These data quick Rosina had taken in and assembled, I could almost see the computer working behind her sparkling crooked eyes. Rosina had assessed my chances and did not rate them high. Like James, she thought it would end in tears; and my truthful narrative subtly encouraged this belief.
It was soon clear that of course Rosina could not, from any point of view, regard Hartley as a serious rival; so much was this so that she was even able to pity her, not maliciously, but with a kind of interested objectivity. What Rosina had grasped was that the encounter with Hartley had withered my interest in Lizzie. So . . . when the whole foolish episode had ended in disaster . . . intelligent sympathetic Rosina would be there to pick up the pieces. Of course Rosina saw my relief at talking, my gratitude for her lively clever responses; and indeed I was, just for this moment, pleased with her. And of course I did not tell her everything, least of all my immediate plans. So dedicatedly Machiavellian did I feel just then that I had no sense of treachery as I thus talked Hartley over with dangerous witty Rosina. I led Rosina, and, where it was necessary to me, her own inventive cleverness conveniently deceived her.
It was interesting that Rosina clearly remembered the occasion when the headlights of her car had revealed Hartley to me pinned against the rock. ‘I thought I was going to squash the old bag like a beetle. Come, Charles, she is an old bag, the poor thing, you can’t deny it.’
‘Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat—’
‘Bats have radar. Yours doesn’t seem to be working.’
‘Use your intelligence, anyone can love anyone, consider Perry’s Uncle Peregrine.’
‘Perry’s what—?’
‘Never mind—’
‘I knew you were fibbing that time I drove you to London. You’re a rotten actor, I can’t think why you ever went into the theatre at all. I knew there was something going on, but I thought it was Lizzie.’
‘I never felt like this about Lizzie.’
‘Well, it had better not be Lizzie.’
‘It isn’t! Hasn’t even this convinced you? I love this woman.’ I love her, I thought, just as if I have been actually married to her all those years and have seen her gradually grow old and lose her beauty.
‘Oh, come, darling, that’s got to be a lie. This sudden move to the sea has unhinged you, and this ghastly pointless house. I think it’s the nastiest house I’ve ever been in. No wonder you’re having delusions.’
‘What delusions do you mean?’
‘I remember your talking about a first love, but these things are imaginary, they are fables. You’re just suffering from the shock of seeing her, give it a fortnight. And she’s got a bourgeois marriage and a son, and, Charles, she’s ordinary, you can’t do it to an ordinary woman just because you fancied her at school, it’s nonsense and she wouldn’t understand! Besides, you wouldn’t be able to, you’re not all-powerful, not in real life you aren’t. You’d simply get yourself into a very unpleasant mess, just the sort of mess which you of all people hate. You’d lose face! Think of that! Have enough self-knowledge to see how you’d hate it, you haven’t any role here, you haven’
t any lines. You even admit she doesn’t want to talk to you!’
‘That’s because she’s afraid, she loves me too much, and she doesn’t yet know enough to trust my feelings. She will trust them. And then her love will simply sweep her to me.’ I thought: I must let her know, I must convince her, that I love her absolutely, I must write a long letter and get it to her secretly, and once she really understands . . .
In my solemn but rather general and undetailed version of the story I had mentioned Titus but had not, for some reason, said anything about his being adopted, or about his having run away. Perhaps I was still reluctant on my own account to reflect on the subject of Titus, and on how he might affect my chances. Nor did I describe my thoroughly unnerving tête-à-tête with Ben. Here the idea of ‘losing face’ could indeed find a foothold! I said that Titus was not at home and that I had had inconclusive meetings with Hartley in the village and polite conversations with her and her husband. I had not conveyed the fear and danger in the situation. Fortunately Rosina was too amused to ask really detailed questions.
‘Charles, be human. She’s timid, she’s shy, she must feel terribly inadequate and mousy and dull, after her life, meeting you after your life. She probably feels ashamed of her dull husband, and feels protective about him, and resentful against you. Use your imagination! And she’d bore you, darling, she’d bore you into a frenzy, and she knows it, poor old dear. She’s an old-age pensioner, she wants to rest now, she wants to put her feet up and watch television, not to have disturbances and adventures. And then supposing you did carry her off and then felt bored, whatever would you do, with yourself or with her? You’re used to witty unconventional women, and you’re an old bachelor now anyway, you couldn’t really stand living with anybody, unless it was a clever old friend like me. You couldn’t start a new woman, and that’s what she really is for all your touching memories of jaunts on bikes. I think you just want to break up her marriage, like you just wanted to break up mine. I’m pretty tough, but as it is you gave me a lot of misery over a long time, and I’m not going to let you off, you’re going to have to pay for my tears, like people in the sagas pay. You’ve lived in a hedonistic dream all your life, and you’ve got away with behaving like a cad because you always picked on women who could look after themselves. And my God you told us the score, you never committed yourself, you never said you loved us even when you did! A cold fish with clean hands! But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You’re like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer. No, no, but it’s different here, you must respect the poor old thing’s choice, her life, her son, her dear dull old husband, her nice little new house. Leave her alone, Charles. No wonder she runs a mile when she sees you!’
‘You don’t understand.’ How indeed could she? Much of what she said was sensible, more sensible even than she realized. But there was just one thing omitted: the absolute nature of the bond between myself and Hartley, and the certainty which, in spite of Hartley’s behaviour, we both had about the continuity of that bond. Hartley was not a ‘new woman’, she was the oldest strongest longest thing in my life. Nor could I or would I ever try to explain to Rosina how tired I was of ‘witty unconventional women’, and how it was that that ‘old bag’ was for me the dearest of all beings and the most precious and unspoilt creature in the world and the most thrillingly attractive. I had given to Hartley my first and my only completely innocent love, before I became a ‘hedonistic dreamer’ and a ‘cold fish’. Of course these insulting descriptions were the idle product of jealous spite; but in so far as I had been a ‘cad’, that in a way was Hartley’s fault! I had given her my innocence to keep, which could now miraculously be reclaimed. And these ideas somehow composed themselves into a passion of possessive yearning. I felt tenderness, pity, a deep desire to cherish Hartley, to protect her from any more pain or any more harm, to indulge and spoil her, to give her everything that she wanted, and to make her eternally happy. I wanted, in the time that was left to us, to console her as a god consoles. But I also wanted increasingly, and with a violence which almost burnt the tenderness away, to own her, to possess her body and soul.
Ever since the recognition scene, physical passion, roused, disturbed, confused, had twisted and turned in me, my senses in dialogue with my thoughts, because, as I worked and worked to join together her youth and her age, I so much desired to desire her. To achieve this was a crucial test, a trial, a labour undergone for her. Now, I realized, it was done; and my desire was like a river which has forced its channel to the sea. She made me whole as I had never been since she left me. She summoned up my whole being, and I wanted to hold her and to overwhelm her and to lie with her forever, jusqu’à la fin du monde; and, yes, to amaze her humility with the forces of my love, but also to be humble myself and to let her, in the end, console me and give me back my own best self. For she held my virtue in her keeping, she had held it and kept it all these years, she was my alpha and my omega. It was not an illusion.
Rosina, watching me, was now actually chuckling. I was sitting with my arms spread out on the table, still feeling cold in spite of the Irish jersey and the brandy (to which I too had now resorted) and although the calor gas stove was still burning, I had been about to light the fire in the little red room when Rosina interrupted me. She, perched on her chair, with one knee raised, was wearing wide blue cotton trousers, rolled up over blue canvas boots, and a casual blue and purple striped shirt pulled in at the waist by a narrow leather belt. She looked idle, practical, piratical, amazingly young. Her dark piercing crossed eyes regarded me with predatory amusement. Her thick wiry dark hair was now strained back and tied closely with a ribbon, giving her face a harsh animal intensity of expression. She had thrown off her coat, showing no sign of feeling the cold. And I thought, what’s the matter with me, it can’t be cold, after all it’s summer. But I shivered all the same. And was it not equally absurd to have candles burning at eleven o’clock in the morning? The candles seemed to be giving no light so I blew them out. Perhaps the mist was dispersing a little, though the window was still obscured. Rosina was just beginning to reply to me when the door of the kitchen quietly opened and someone came in. It was a woman, and for a crazy moment I thought it must be Hartley, embodied by my thoughts. But no: it was Lizzie Scherer.
Both the women uttered a tiny cry, a sort of suppressed swallowed yelp of shock, when they saw each other. Rosina got up very fast and moved behind her chair. Lizzie stepped towards me, looking at Rosina, and threw her handbag onto the table as if it were a gage of war. I remained seated. Lizzie was wearing a light brown mackintosh and a very long yellow Indian scarf, which she now unwound and carefully folded up and placed on the table beside the bag. She was blushing extremely. (So was I.) Her hair was covered with little drops of water. Perhaps it was now actually raining outside.
Rosina lifted her chair and threw it sideways onto the slate-flagged floor. She said to me, ‘You liar and you traitor!’
I said to Lizzie, ‘Is it raining?’
Lizzie said, ‘I don’t think so.’
I said, ‘Rosina is just leaving.’ Then just in time I got to my feet and moved hastily round the table. Rosina’s vermilion claws, making a slash at my face, just touched my neck as I got out of range. Lizzie retreated to the door. I faced Rosina’s rage across the table. ‘Look, I didn’t lie to you. I haven’t any sort of arrangement with Lizzie, she’s just arrived out of the blue and she doesn’t know.’
‘Does she live here?’ said Lizzie.
‘No! No one lives here except me! She just dropped in, people drop in, you have dropped in. Have some tea, some brandy, some cheese, an apricot.’
‘She doesn’t know?’ said Rosina, glaring at me but mollified. ‘Then hadn’t you better tell her? Or shall I?’
‘Are you going to marry Rosina?’ said Lizzie, stiff, hands in pockets.
‘No!’
‘Charles, can I speak to you alone?’ said Lizzie.
&nbs
p; ‘No, you can’t,’ said Rosina. ‘My God, if it was only Lizzie and me we could fight for you, with kitchen knives.’
I felt I had another shivering fit coming on and I sat down again at the table. ‘I don’t feel very well.’
‘Can I speak to you alone?’
‘No,’ said Rosina. ‘Charles, I want to hear you tell her what you have just told me, I want to hear you—’
‘Is Gilbert outside?’ I asked Lizzie.
‘No, I drove down by myself. All right then, if she won’t go—’ Lizzie, ignoring Rosina, sat down opposite to me at the table. ‘I wanted to say thank you for your sweet generous letter—’
‘Tell her, tell her!’
‘Thank you for your sweet generous letter. You were being very kind to both of us.’
‘I’m terribly sorry I didn’t turn up for dinner that night, I—’
‘Very kind to both of us. But it isn’t necessary for you to be generous like that. I was a perfect fool. Gilbert doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except that I’m yours on any terms. There’s nothing to argue about. I’m just yours, and you can do what you like, I don’t care if it all goes wrong, I don’t care what happens or how long it lasts, well of course I want it to last forever, but you will do exactly what you want. I’ve come here just to say that, to give myself to you, if you still want me, like you said you did.’
‘How touching!’ said Rosina. ‘What did you say to her, Charles, let’s have the truth about that at last.’ She picked up Lizzie’s handbag and threw it onto the floor and kicked it.
Lizzie paid no attention, she was staring at me, her flushed ardent face blazing with emotion, her lips wet, her eyes bright with the truthfulness of her self-giving submission. I was very moved.
‘Lizzie, dear—dear girl—’
‘You’re too late, Lizzie,’ said Rosina, ‘Charles is going to marry a bearded lady, aren’t you, Charles, aren’t you? And we were just discussing you, and Charles said he never really cared for you at all—’