A Suspension of Mercy

  MRS. LILYBANKS HAD HAD HER TEA-BREAK and a short rest on the living-room sofa and was up again putting away things in the kitchen, when Alicia Bartleby came over the next morning at eleven. Alicia was carrying a plate that held a quarter of an orange-iced cake under a paper napkin.

  After she had introduced herself, Alicia said, “I wish I could say I made the cake, but I didn’t. But it’s from a nice place in Ipswich.”

  Mrs. Lilybanks asked her to sit down and said she couldn’t be more pleased to meet her new neighbor so soon, because she had been wondering when she would.

  Alicia didn’t want to sit down. “I’d love to see around the house, if you don’t mind my seeing it before you’ve settled in. I’ve never been here before.”

  “No? Why of course I don’t mind.” Mrs. Lilybanks moved toward the stairs. “I’d have thought you looked at this house when you bought yours.”

  Alicia’s face spread in a wide smile. “They told us there was more to do here—plumbing and things—so we thought we’d take a house that wasn’t so much outlay. My husband and I have to watch our pennies. Turn them.”

  The house had three rooms downstairs and three up, plus a new bathroom. The furniture was Mrs. Lilybanks’ from her London flat, she said, and from the look of it, plus its abundance, Alicia drew the conclusion that Mrs. Lilybanks was quite well off.

  “You’re going to be here by yourself?” Alicia asked.

  “Oh, yes. I don’t mind being alone. In fact, I like it,” Mrs. Lilybanks said cheerfully. “It’s been fifteen years since I last had a house in the country—in Surrey—with my husband, so I thought I’d like a taste of it again.”

  “Have you got a car?” Alicia hadn’t seen one around.

  “No, but I think I’ll manage with buses. Then there’re the mobile butcher and greengrocer, I hear.”

  They were standing in Mrs. Lilybanks’ bedroom. The morning sunlight showed the crepe-like wrinkles below Mrs. Lilybanks’ blue eyes very plainly, and the wrinkles somehow fascinated Alicia. How was it possible to be so old one’s skin got like that, and still to have such bright, young-looking eyes? Mrs. Lilybanks’ hands were smallish but very active and flexible, not gnarled like some old people’s hands. Her nails had a pale pink polish, and on her left hand were the engagement ring and wedding ring one saw on most women’s hands, and on the other an emerald ring set in silver.

  Mrs. Lilybanks was appraising Alicia at the same time, though without appearing to stare at her. She liked what she saw—a very natural-looking young woman of around twenty-five, she thought, with frankly curious eyes like a child or a painter, perhaps, and Mrs. Lilybanks had noticed also the streak of blue paint on the paler blue slacks.

  Alicia pivoted on restless feet and faced the painting over the mantel. “That’s an interesting landscape. Where is that?”

  “Cannes,” said Mrs. Lilybanks. “I hung it just ten minutes ago. It’s one of my early efforts.”

  “Oh, you paint.” Alicia’s eyes widened with interest. “So do I. Some. Nothing as organized as that. Mine are sort of a mess.”

  “Mine are getting worse,” Mrs. Lilybanks said firmly and with a twinkle. “But I’ve brought my kit and I hope the new scene here will inspire me. Can’t I get you a cup of tea?”

  They went downstairs again, but Alicia did not care for tea.

  “If you ever need a lift—need a car for anywhere, please don’t hesitate to ring us,” Alicia said. “It’s four six six. I’m there all the time, practically, and my husband’s there most of the time.”

  “That’s very kind of you. Is your husband a painter, too?”

  “No, he’s a writer. Fiction. He’s working on a novel. But lately he goes in to London about once a week to have a conference with another writer. Not a writer, but a friend who does some writing. They’re trying to sell a serial to television. Not having any luck yet.” Alicia smiled as widely as if she had been reporting a triumph. “My husband’s an American.”

  “Oh, how interesting. How does he like England?”

  Alicia laughed. “I suppose he likes most things. He’s been here two years. Not quite. His name is Sydney. Sydney Smith Bartleby, isn’t that funny? His father was crazy about Sydney Smith for some reason. I tell Syd it’s the only English thing about him, that name.”

  “What kind of fiction does he write?”

  “Oh—not things with plots. At least not just now. His first two novels had more of a plot, but the thing he’s working on now hasn’t. It’s called The Planners, and it’s about a group of people who decide to plan the experiences they want in life and live accordingly. It sounds as if it’d have a plot, but it hasn’t.” Alicia smiled. “He can’t sell it yet, either, though it’s been finished for a year. His television ideas have plots, of course, absolutely crammed, but so far no luck with them.”

  “Ah, well. The arts take time. Don’t let him get discouraged.”

  Alicia left, promising to call Mrs. Lilybanks—her telephone was already in and her number was 275—very soon and ask her for a meal.

  Then Alicia skipped home, pausing only to pick a daisy at the edge of the road and pull its stem through a buttonhole of her shirt, went into her house and up the stairs to report to Sydney on their new neighbor.

  Sydney was standing at the window of his study, smoking a cigarette. The door was ajar, so Alicia didn’t knock as she usually did when it was closed.

  “Well, she’s very nice. Not stuffy and she’s even got a sense of humor, I think. She paints. One wasn’t bad. But I only saw one. She’s all alone there, really. I was quite surprised.” Alicia wasn’t quite surprised, because they had not heard anything about anybody else with Mrs. Lilybanks, but her remarks on the visit were petering out in the face of Sydney’s lack of interest and his air of annoyance at having his thinking interrupted. “I really liked her very much.”

  “Good,” Sydney said. “So she paints.” He tossed a pencil down on his cluttered, ink-stained work table, where a blank sheet of paper gleamed expectantly in the typewriter.

  “Um-m. Just an old lady’s pastime, I suppose. Looks as if she’s got plenty of money.”

  Alicia went to Framlingham that afternoon to shop, and did not get back until five, because she ran into Elspeth Cragge in Carley and Webb (the grocery store where the Bartlebys often had a formidable bill that the store was very nice about), and they sat talking in a coffee shop for more than an hour. Elspeth was an Australian married to an Englishman, and she was expecting a child in three months. The sight of her growing body reawakened in Alicia her own vague yearning for a baby, but economics were against it at the moment, and, more important, she wasn’t sure how good a father Syd would be, wasn’t even sure their marriage would last forever. Alicia wanted a child, but now and then an awful thought crossed her mind: I want a child, but do I really want a child with Sydney? It was odd to have this ghastly thought and at the same time be rather in love with Sydney and to enjoy sleeping with him. And being in love, of course, meant his faults didn’t really bother her, or shouldn’t. It was a muddled state indeed, which was why she didn’t often ponder it. Time would effect changes, time always did, so she waited for that to happen, for better or for worse.

  Sydney came downstairs as Alicia was finishing putting away the groceries. “I’m going to pop that stuff off to Alex in tomorrow morning’s post, and ask him to come up Saturday, if it’s all right with you. That means both of them, of course, and staying overnight, but I’m damned if I’m going to do this Ipswich-London shuttle again on the same story.”

  “Of course, it’s all right with me, Syd.” Alicia’s mind was going over the bedsheet situation, the fact that Friday would have to be spent cleaning (Hittie was not neat, but the Polk-Faradays’ house was always cleaner than theirs), and what big meat dish could she serve, because Alex and Hittie were hearty eaters.

 
“If we don’t wind the thing up this weekend, then the hell with it, and I’ll start doping out another idea, I suppose.” He flung the yellow pencil down on the drainboard as if it were his desk, as if he were through with pencils forever.

  Alicia was used to the gesture, an outward turn of the wrist, the couple of bounces the pencil made, the pencil’s stillness. She never remembered seeing him pick a pencil up, yet he always seemed to have one to throw down. “Of course, darling, I’d rather like seeing them,” Alicia said with a sudden smile.

  3

  Alicia took the opportunity to invite Mrs. Lilybanks for dinner on Saturday evening. If she was cooking so much, one more was no trouble, and she felt Mrs. Lilybanks might enjoy meeting some people after nearly a week’s solitude.

  The Polk-Faradays arrived Saturday at three o’clock, an hour later than they had anticipated, but they had had lunch on the road, and they had had difficulties leaving their children in the charge of their half-time daily, Lucy.

  “No telephone in her house,” Alex said, “so we had to get a series of people to deliver a message, then Lucy had to pack and trundle over.”

  “She didn’t come Friday,” Hittie explained further. “Somebody sick in her family or something.” Hittie was a round-faced girl with straight blond hair which she wore with bangs. The bangs made her look like a blond Chinese.

  “Well, you’re here,” Alicia said. “A drink? Anything?”

  “Ah, nothing, my sweet,” said Alex, opening his arms and wrapping Alicia briefly in one. He was tall, dark, and pale-skinned, a trifle overweight. “It’s so great to be in the country and smell the air! Oh, to be in England now that April’s here. Except it’s May. Do you mind if I remove this jacket?”

  Sydney padded rapidly down the stairs, having deposited the Polk-Faradays’ bag in the guest room. “What do you mean you don’t want a drink?” he asked cheerily. “Are you on the wagon?”

  “No, it’s because—” Alex winked a large brown eye at Alicia. “Because we’re exerting our great intellects this afternoon, and we’re going to get that story in shape before sundown.”

  “Or shoot ourselves at sunrise,” Sydney said.

  “Yes. I’ll shoot you and you shoot me, simultaneously,” Alex said.

  Sydney and Alex had not got far by 5 P.M., though Sydney felt, as he inevitably felt when he hammered out ideas with Alex, that something tangible and important had been added to the story, simply because another mind had been at work on it. He also knew this feeling was unfounded.

  A huge blackbird pecked in the grass in front of Sydney. Somewhere else, the bird that attempted to sing “Blow the Man Down” was trying again. Sydney wondered what kind of bird it was. The sailorbird, perhaps. He shivered under his sweater as the sun went behind a cloud. He was bored to the point of sleepiness. They needed a miracle, nothing short of a miracle would create a plot, an idea that would take only a second to enter the mind, but would be the spark of life. He thought this even as he listened to Alex’s U drawl (“No, wait a mi—nute, wait a mi—nute. Nicky doesn’t know the girl’s met the jeweler, does he? Why should we assume or he assume she’d recognize him?”), and even as Sydney came up with an answer, he was blushing with professional shame, because a phrase like “spark of life” had crossed his mind. He was also afraid one would never again come to him, therefore the phrase seemed presumptuous, one that only a writer to whom sparks of life did occasionally come was still privileged to think of. He was sick of Nicky Campbell, and wondered how Alex could show such enthusiasm for still another try. Well, Alex had a job, and he wasn’t at this kind of thing half his time, only a tenth of his time. And Alex also was dying to make some extra money. He didn’t get any from his wealthy family, because for some reason Sydney had forgotten, they disapproved of his marriage, and they disapproved of Alex’s trying to be a writer. The family did something in Cornwall which they had wanted Alex to devote his life to. At the same time, they goaded Alex to earn more money, if he was going to produce a big family. Alex had told Sydney about them, laughing, yet obviously affected by what they said. Sydney continued his quiet exchanges with Alex while he daydreamed in the sun, until he was neither with his daydream nor with Alex, but somewhere in between, which was a place, or a state, of emptiness and nothingness.

  He thought of his father, whom he hardly remembered, because he had died when Sydney was nine, and Sydney shook his head quickly, like a shudder. Sydney’s mother had separated from his father when Sydney was six, he had seen his father only on five or six occasions after that, but his father had tried to be a playwright, plus being a full-time theater manager in various theaters in Chicago. He had never made any money as a manager, and he had written only one play, The Snowman, that had ever got printed, and his father had printed that at his own expense. Often it occurred to Sydney that he was cursed with his father’s mediocrity, doomed to failure, cursed too with his drive to write something that the world would love and respect and that would insure his name’s being remembered for a hundred years at least, and hopefully for longer. These were sterile and frightening moments, when Sydney thought these things. Then his present life in England, his being married to an English girl who seemed to have no cares in the world even when things went badly, the very house they lived in with its tricky plumbing, its very real slanting and charming wooden rafters on which he bumped his head nearly every day, the English soil that got under his nails when he gardened, Alicia’s very snores that troubled his sleep about one night out of seven, seemed all unreal like a play he himself had cooked up, a not very good play. Above all, he wondered why he was here, if another girl would not have done as well (even though he believed he loved Alicia and was at least half in love with her), or if he needed a woman in his life at all. Sydney felt he was not realizing his potentials, and he was often baffled as to how he should start realizing them. Mainly he tried the usual method of plain hard work.

  I don’t like trying to think in the open air, Sydney thought suddenly with a rise of annoyance that woke him up from his semi-trance, and he almost said it to Alex.

  “Let’s try to go through it again,” Sydney said, “episode by episode.”

  This sometimes helped to give a sense of direction and movement to the thing, but by the time Sydney was narrating Episode Six from his notes, he felt merely tired, though Alex said it was shaping up.

  “Definitely shaping up,” Alex repeated.

  By then, they were ready for a scotch and soda.

  A little before seven, Sydney changed his clothes and even put on a tie, thinking it would please Alicia because of Mrs. Lilybanks. Alex always wore a tie at dinner, of course, and one could not imagine him not wearing a tie at dinner unless he were ill to the brink of dying, in which case he would not have been eating. Sydney remembered a hot day last summer when Alex had worn a tie on a picnic.

  “Why don’t I go over and get her?” Sydney said to Alicia, when they were all for some reason congregated in the kitchen.

  Alicia had just slid the roast beef into the oven.

  “Lovely, darling. Go now. She’s due.”

  Sydney set his drink down and went. He trotted, still in his tennis shoes. Mrs. Lilybanks’ front gate screeched. He hesitated, then went to the front door instead of the side kitchen door, which had the look of being more used and therefore more likely to open. He knocked with a heavy brass loop of a knocker. The knocker had just been polished.

  Mrs. Lilybanks opened the door.

  “Good evening. I’m Sydney Bartleby,” Sydney said with a smile. “I thought I’d walk with you over to the house.”

  “Why, how nice of you! Won’t you come in?”

  Mrs. Lilybanks was obviously ready, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a dark blue shawl with fringe draped in an interesting way around her shoulders and over one arm. Sydney said he wouldn’t come in, if she was ready, so Mrs. Lilybanks came ou
t and closed the door, not locking it.

  Sydney opened the creaky gate for her.

  “Must put some oil on that,” Mrs. Lilybanks murmured. “It’s enough to frighten all the birds away. Do you like birds?”

  “I like them. I don’t know much about them.”

  “You’re a writer, your wife told me.”

  “Yes. And you paint.”

  “I’m a Sunday painter. It’s one of my pleasures,” she said, as if she had many.

  Alicia introduced Mrs. Lilybanks to Alex and Hittie in the living room, then Sydney went off to make Mrs. Lilybanks a light scotch and soda, which she had chosen when offered a choice of gin, scotch, or sherry. Alicia was glad, because her present sherry was a rotten brand, and she had thought Mrs. Lilybanks would opt for that.

  “Where do you live in London?” Mrs. Lilybanks asked Hittie, and Hittie told her, and the conversation rolled along easily about Mrs. Lilybanks’ old London neighborhood, Kensington, and then branched off to Hittie’s children.