A Misalliance, page 17
‘But if that were so nature would tell us to desert our parents when they became tiresome, murder our rivals, take what we wanted, no matter how much it cost other people.’
‘Nature simply tells us to enjoy ourselves from time to time.’
‘I know that, Patrick. And perhaps you are willing to pay the price.’
‘What is the price?’
‘Ah, nobody knows. That is the catch, you see.’
‘I think I am willing to pay it.’
‘Then you had better telephone Sally, while I mix the salad. For some reason she doesn’t answer.’
‘I will ring her later, Blanche. When I get home.’ He assumed the faraway look of one who will shortly communicate with the Muses. Clearly he telephoned her every night, deriving emotional sustenance from her vague and elliptical remarks, marvelling at the sheer unfamiliarity of it all, and believing that unaccountability contains erotic messages, messages of intrigue, of favours withheld, of penalties meted out. Delighting in the danger.
‘I have thought that I might arrange for Elinor to have a little money,’ said Blanche, coming back with the tray. ‘When she is seventeen. That is the age at which to commit follies. Of course, I would rather not. The money wouldn’t matter, but I have a feeling that I am buying off my conscience and doing a very dreary thing at the same time. It is what old ladies do, always postponing things as long as they can. And who is to say that Elinor will not turn out like her parents?’
‘Sally is actually quite a good mother.’
‘Yes, I can see that she might be great fun. But I have the feeling that Elinor does not quite like all this fun. She is a much more serious person.’
‘She is only three years old, Blanche. We don’t know what she will become.’
‘No, and I don’t intend to wait and see. She is not my child and nothing could ever make her so. I have never wanted substitutes. Or I don’t think I have. When I first saw her, I thought she looked lonely. I know about lonely children. Some people are lonely children all their lives. I think I wanted to prevent that. As far as that goes, I suppose I too was emotionally involved.’
‘I have often wondered why you had no children of your own.’
‘So have I.’ She looked down. ‘Do have some more of this chicken, Patrick. A kind neighbour brought it when I was unwell.’ She noticed that he had not asked after her, admittedly restored, health. He is far gone, she thought. But then it was the intensity of his self-absorption that had always stood in the way of greater intimacy. Until this evening, when they seemed to be speaking naturally, she had always had the feeling that he counted any personal remark she made as a kind of intrusion on his own stream of consciousness. He is not only far gone, she thought: he has gone as far as he is likely to go. When they no longer have the telephone to keep them apart but are forced into daily contact, they will reveal themselves to each other. And then she saw that this was all a dream of Patrick’s, that Sally would never go away with him, not even to Marbella or to Ischia. Sally’s instincts were too good. She saw the self-absorption, the undeniable respectability, the wistful desire to regress; above all, she saw the sheer lack of practice. Sally saw all this; that was why she was currently unavailable.
The sound of a key in the lock brought her back to her own circumstances, and she prepared herself to entertain Patrick and Mrs Duff for the rest of the evening. But it was Bertie who stood in the doorway, looking tanned and annoyed.
‘I thought you were ill,’ he said. ‘Barbara said you were ill. Good evening, Patrick.’
‘Patrick looked in to see how I was,’ said Blanche smoothly, feeling a trifle faint. ‘I will sit down for a moment, if you don’t mind. I think I have been quite unwell.’
‘Not too unwell to cook, I see,’ said Bertie, eyeing the apple tart. After a minute or two he helped himself to a slice. Nobody said anything. He ate moodily, distancing himself from enjoyment, as one does in the presence of the sick.
‘And how was Crete?’ asked Blanche.
‘Corfu. Very hot. Rather noisy. There seemed to be a number of people there one knew. Or almost knew. You know how it is. Dinner with a crowd of about ten every night. Great fun, of course. Enormously enjoyable.’
‘How was the villa?’ asked Blanche, thinking of dinner with a crowd of about ten every night.
‘Well, we shared it with another couple, friends of Mousie’s. We all got on pretty well. Well, we had to, there wasn’t all that much room. Mousie’s friend’s friend was pretty annoyed. Said he was going to complain to the agency. Kept taking photographs of the bathroom to prove that it was inadequate. I just made the best of it. It does one no harm to rough it from time to time.’
Blanche, who remembered Bertie as a man of the utmost fastidiousness, filling the bathroom with smells of verbena and sandalwood, marvelled at this, only saying, ‘You are eating Patrick’s pudding, Bertie.’
‘So I am,’ said Bertie, taking another small but crucial slice.
‘I was thinking of going away for a bit myself,’ said Blanche. ‘I have been in the flat for what seems to me a very long time. I am not needed here.’
‘What do you mean, Blanche, not needed?’
‘I mean, Bertie, that no one would notice if I disappeared. It is, of course, delightful to see you again, and you too, Patrick, but I am sure that I am not essential to either of you. You both have other commitments. That leaves me quite free. I shall go south and sit in the sun. As Patrick and I have agreed, it is sometimes essential to please oneself. Nature tells us to.’
She began to put plates, knives, and forks on to the tray, having apparently decided that the meal was at an end. Patrick made a half-hearted attempt to help her, getting up from his chair, pushing his plate towards her. Having done this he sat down again.
‘Of course,’ said Blanche pleasantly, ‘I can see that either of you might want to drop in from time to time. My hospitality, though modest, is profound. I shall never be guilty of saying that your visits are inconvenient. As a matter of fact they are not. I am not, as you must have noticed, excessively busy. But who is to say that I might not want to be somewhere else?’
‘You invited me, Blanche,’ said Patrick.
‘So I did. That was only because we had something to discuss. But I was thinking of you, Bertie. You seem to expect me to be here all the time, just as I always was.’
‘I came because Barbara told me you were ill. I wondered if you needed anything.’
‘You wondered if I needed anything? How thoughtful. But as you see, I am, as I always was, self-sufficient. Oh, are you going, Patrick? Must you? I am suddenly feeling rather sociable.’
Patrick, looking grave, had picked up his briefcase. ‘I will telephone you, Blanche, about the arrangements. You will want to know as soon as possible. And I do realize what I am doing, you know.’
‘But he doesn’t,’ said Blanche to Bertie, as she came back into the room after seeing Patrick to the door. ‘He looks so senatorial that one invests him with more wisdom than he could possibly possess. I was right to worry about him, all those years ago. I think I knew that something would always stop him making up his mind. And now he is in the grip of a great decision. It will be a defeat for him either way. Patrick’s effectiveness stops short of action. Action is by now so foreign to him that it presents itself as a disaster. And he knows this in his heart of hearts. It is just that he is so tired of being safe. I do understand that.’
‘You have apparently got to know him very well.’
‘Have a drink, Bertie. I always knew him well. I knew how he suffered from his own shortcomings. As we all do. I wanted to make him feel safer than he knew how to feel on his own, safer than he deserved to feel. Perhaps it was silly of me. One shouldn’t try to buttress people against the world. The gods are stronger than we are.’
‘Blanche,’ said Bertie.
‘No, don’t stop me. I have been thinking a great deal about the past and now I see it more clearly. You were bound to leave me, Bertie. I had served my term. The restlessness that drives men to folly drives them away from people like me. It was as futile for me to try to keep you as it would have been for me to try to turn myself into someone twenty years younger. And then I saw the pattern. The pattern is plain for all to see. One visit to the National Gallery would convince you, if you were in any doubt. There they all are, the good and the indifferent. I incline to think that there are no bad. Indifference to the good is all that is needed.’
‘If you are alluding to Mousie, then you are wrong. Mousie is fundamentally a very good and caring person.’
‘Mousie is a novice, Bertie. Mousie’s weapons are a girl’s weapons, crude. Basically she is rather timorous. Afraid of the wrath to come. Why else does she keep sending you round here to see if I have put my head in the gas oven? Why else does she need the approbation of her friends to keep her going? Why share a villa in Corfu when she could have had you to herself? No, Mousie is not a bad person. She is a child, defying her elders, and she is so charming that they do not slap her. But grown-up children can be very dangerous. Women who persist in thinking of themselves as little girls tend to think their misdemeanours unimportant. I have to say that they usually get away with it. You can open that other bottle if you want to. Patrick seems to have drunk most of the first. It is a sign of his agitation.’
‘He looked pretty comfortable to me. And can’t we talk about something else? Must I always do penance?’
‘It is what you come here for, Bertie. And there is no need, you know. I have just been trying to explain to you. I see the pattern.’
‘I do wish you’d shut up, occasionally, Blanche. You always did talk too much.’
‘And you get less talk in Fulham?’
‘It is of a different nature.’
‘I can see that women drive men mad,’ said Blanche, lighting a cigarette. ‘What I can’t see is why some of them get away with it.’
‘No, I’m sure you can’t. The corkscrew is by your elbow, if you wouldn’t mind. I should just like to point out that I have done a hard day’s work and that I should like a moment’s peace and quiet.’
‘Men always say that. I remember my father saying it. Have you eaten, by the way?’
‘Only that piece of tart.’
Blanche went into the kitchen and came back with the rest of the jellied chicken, some buttered water biscuits, a piece of Wensleydale, and a peach. She assembled it all on a tray and put the tray on Bertie’s knees. ‘What were the arrangements that Patrick was talking about?’ he asked, picking up his fork and darting a quick glance at her when she was not looking.
‘Arrangements? Oh, the arrangements. Well, I rather think the arrangements are Patrick’s affair.’
Watching Bertie eat, as she had done so many times, she was distressed to find that she felt the simple satisfactions of an earlier mode of being. It was as if, in him, she found intimations of her own validity, as if without him that validity disappeared. This was no way, she knew, for a self-respecting modern woman to feel. She also knew that his absence had driven her to strange excesses, all the more strange because they seemed so harmless. Just as some women turn to drink, to food, to shoplifting, Blanche had turned to flirtations with other lives, good works, and uplifting pastimes. She had never doubted that her heart was not fully engaged in these activities, but she had accepted them, haplessly and with a feeling of humility, apologizing all the while to older and more vigorous memories of her former self, for her abject impersonation of worthiness, trying, without prejudice, to learn the art of self-sufficiency. She, who had called Mousie timorous, had become even more timorous herself, able to recognize in others the panic fight for freedom, able to appreciate, to admire, what she now thought of as indifference. For although her place was here, her services must be devoted elsewhere, whatever the misconceptions involved, whatever the misalliances, and despite the clouded conscience that came from an awareness that she was, in all this, without enthusiasm. Bertie, glancing at her over his fork, saw that she looked stern, mysterious.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked politely, knowing that this was the sort of question to which she always, and voluminously, responded.
‘I was thinking of other lives,’ she said, ‘and how attractive they always look. And how misleading they are when you know a little more about them. It is probably better to leave other lives alone. And I suppose I was thinking about children and how they present you with a version of yourself. Or how you feel yourself to be.’
But this was of no interest to Bertie, who at last came round to what was uppermost in his mind.
‘What will you do about Patrick?’ he said.
‘About Patrick? Why should I do anything about Patrick?’
‘I got the impression that you and he were going away together.’
Blanche laughed. ‘How little you know him. If there were any question of Patrick going away with me he’d be busy discussing it with somebody else. You surely can’t think, Bertie …’
‘Well, yes,’ he said stiffly. ‘I did rather.’
‘And how little you know me. If I went away with anyone it would hardly be with Patrick. I should choose someone with a little more, how shall I put it? Élan? Élan vital? Patrick is decorous. Do you remember how my mother approved of him for just that reason? Patrick might well go overboard for a woman but it would hardly be for someone like me.’
‘Why not? You are still attractive.’
‘But don’t you understand? Patrick sees me as decorous. Someone who can be relied upon to do the decent thing.’ She laughed again. ‘And if only you knew how tired I am of doing the decent thing. Or trying to do it.’ She gestured out of the window. ‘There are people out there, Bertie, who never do the decent thing. You know them. I know them. I used to think that I could spot them all over the place. I blame the National Gallery for that, of course. All those deities carrying on their uninhibited lives. In full view. It took me a long time to realize that anyone can do it, if they have a mind to. I still don’t know whether it takes will or just capacity. The character of such lives is to be unfinished, open-ended, escaping control. I suppose that is what gives them their mythic quality. Others abide our question; they are apparently free.’
‘Then who will you go away with?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe I shall go alone and make the best of it. My pleasures are very simple, as you know. It will not be a holiday like the one you have just had. There will be no crowd to make up a party for dinner. I enjoyed it once. I suppose you still do.’
‘I like company, yes.’
‘And I expect,’ she said lightly, looking out of the window, ‘that you and Mousie will get married one of these days.’
‘I dare say we shall get around to it.’
There was a silence, for this, to Blanche, was the end of everything. He watched her carefully. ‘When will you go?’ he said.
‘Oh, as soon as possible. There are one or two things to be sorted out here, one or two involvements, and then I shall go. I might even look for somewhere to live. I think that might be best. Yes, that is what I shall do. You can have this flat, of course. You always liked it more than I did.’
‘You seem to find it very easy to get rid of our past life.’
‘I do, don’t I? Perhaps I should have done it earlier. I have been ridiculous, sitting here, waiting for you to come. And telling you not to. As if that were any way to live. Plato tells us that pleasures mixed with pain are only lesser pleasures. How right he is.’
‘Is that all I am? One of the lesser pleasures?’
‘What you are can no longer be serious, because it is half-hearted. Your life is somewhere else, somewhere inaccessible to me. One is supposed to get over these things, and I shall get over it, of course I shall. It is just taking rather a long time, that’s all. And I dare say I am to blame. At the moment my life is no longer serious either. I am playing at being something that I do not know properly how to be. And I shall see it through to the end because honour is the highest good. I believe that to be true. But how hard it is, sometimes. How I should like to be different.’
‘Don’t change, Blanche.’
‘I think I must, you know. I will hardly do as I am; my respectability is against me. I have cast myself for the wrong role. Well, it is too late to do anything about that. As I say, I shall see it through. But then I shall try to change. Try to live a little more carelessly. Artlessly. That is to say, without art. Art can be very subversive. I have found that out.’
‘I must go,’ he said, glancing at his watch.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You must.’
‘Your standards were always too high, Blanche.’
‘Were they? Then they will have to go too.’
She got up and started straightening cushions. He caught her arm, but she turned away.
‘I never was, you know,’ he said, turning away himself.
‘Never was what?’
‘Half-hearted,’ he said.
That night Blanche stood at the window, curtain in hand, watching the street. Then she went to bed and lay for a long time, unsleeping.
TWELVE
‘Had quite a party here last night, I see,’ said Miss Elphinstone, turning on both taps and speaking above the noise. ‘Mind you don’t go overdoing it, now. You don’t look at all well to me.’
‘I’m going away,’ said Blanche, feeling like Captain Oates. ‘I might be gone for some time.’
Nothing surprised Miss Elphinstone. Trained in the ways of the Lord, she was proof against all contingencies, although strangely indifferent to life’s more savage demonstrations. Routinely cheerful, she could be thought by the unwary to be complacent, were it not for her smile, which flashed on and off unpredictably; sometimes Blanche would attempt to cut short Miss Elphinstone’s elaborate marginalia only to be rewarded by a smile of great benevolence which revealed, if anything, a consciousness greatly superior to her own. Miss Elphinstone, upright and blameless, unchanging in her demeanour and her attributes, was a tribune of excellence before which Blanche was obliged to lay all her plans. Nothing was really tolerable without Miss Elphinstone’s approval. It was Miss Elphinstone who had cast doubt on Blanche’s attempts to entertain Elinor, saying that Elinor was too young to go out without her mother. Since that remark, Blanche had looked askance at her own efforts and had distanced herself from her earlier eagerness. Part of her reluctance to admit Sally to the flat stemmed from a sense of Miss Elphinstone’s disapproval, although this was not the entire story. On her only visit Sally’s appraising eye had been quick to compute the difference in income between Blanche and herself and had pitched her expectations accordingly; those expectations had been relentless but not on the whole unreasonable. Now that she was leaving, Blanche desired to put the record straight on as many counts as possible. A great movement of renovation was under way for which she must be worthy. She submitted to Miss Elphinstone her need for a change of air and was oddly relieved to see her nod in agreement. ‘Well, I’ve got my key,’ she said. ‘I’ll look in same as usual. I expect you’ll turn up again when you’ve had enough. Do you want to take that dish next door to Mrs Duff before you forget?’ For to Miss Elphinstone, the immediate task was more interesting than the remote possibility; it could be said that she had little imagination were it not for her sense of priorities, which safeguarded her against eccentricity. Miss Elphinstone was demonstrably sane, without fantasies; great was her interest in other lives, yet by some sort of divine sanction she was immune to any effect they might have had on her own. Blanche envied her her impermeability: having no sense of the relative importance or unimportance of others, Miss Elphinstone lived a life of true enlightenment, always mildly interested but never ill-served by curiosity, and virtuously immune to speculation. Miss Elphinstone would allow Blanche a certain leeway in her affairs though she would be quick to notice anomalies. She appeared to think that a short absence could be sanctioned. Blanche did not tell her by how much the absence might be prolonged, for she was not yet clear about this in her own mind. She thought in terms of reconnaissance, of looking for a house. But really she felt it was her removal from this place that counted, rather than her presence elsewhere, for she saw that presence as nebulous, immaterial. She allowed her mind to rest on the fact that Miss Elphinstone saw her need to get away; what was to happen next was as yet without definition and could be kept at bay for the time being.
