Читать книгу The Essence of the Thing - Madeleine John St. - Страница 8

Jonathan waited, staring into the fire which was not there, until Nicola’s tears subsided; at last she blew her nose, and looked up. She could almost have wished her tears to continue, for the icy darkness of this dreadful new consciousness. Whatever was wrong was deeper and more secret an affair than she could have guessed. It lay in the very heart of their lives, it lay in them, it lay, for all one knew, in their actual souls: if souls they possessed.

‘I don’t understand you,’ she said once more. ‘I don’t understand anything you’ve said.’ And she could not have spoken, could never have spoken, so truly. Her whole mind was black with incomprehension. Jonathan had stood up again; he leaned once more against the mantelpiece. ‘I think that rather proves my point, doesn’t it?’ he said.

Even now she could not quite believe that he could say such a thing to her, at such a moment. She was silenced, but at the same time she found that tears had once more filled her eyes. She picked up the handkerchief and wiped them away, but more came; she was on the point of sobbing again. ‘It’s just the shock,’ she found herself thinking; ‘it’s simply the shock.’

Jonathan made a shrug of impatience. ‘Please don’t cry any more,’ he said. ‘It really isn’t helpful.’ He poured some more tea into her cup. ‘Here, drink this,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel better.’

She left the tea where it was. ‘I’m sorry you’ve taken this so – hard,’ he said. She knew, instantly, that he had been on the point of saying ‘badly’, and had stopped himself just in time. ‘I really didn’t expect it. That you should have thought we were happy was the last thing I expected. But there you are. We don’t understand each other, as you said. We’ll be much better off by ourselves’. And he said this almost with satisfaction. It was clear that he thoroughly believed it.

It was only now that the likeliest, the most banal, explanation occurred to Nicola’s dazed and grief-stricken mind.

‘Is there someone else?’ she said. She looked at his face carefully, steadily. His surprise was unmistakable; he even looked rather affronted by the suggestion. ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘I would have told you if there had been.’

There was a pause. ‘No,’ he continued. ‘No one else. Just us.’ ‘Us,’ she repeated. ‘And now, it seems, there’s no us.’ He said nothing: an infinite boredom seemed to have possessed him: she recognised that expression, she remembered this sensation: he had hardened his heart, and closed his mind, against her. He would answer no questions, he would be cold to every appeal; she was altogether, for the present time at least, shunned. She recognised that expression, she remembered this sensation of death-in-life, and she was filled with a desolation which made her tears of a few minutes ago seem luxurious. ‘Jonathan,’ she said; ‘don’t do this.’

He ignored her. She might not have spoken. He picked up the tea-tray. ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room,’ he said. ‘Are there sheets in there?’ She looked away from him with a kind of disgust, and ignoring this too he went on. ‘And by the way, I’ll be away at the weekend – parents.’ Just so. And tomorrow was Friday. ‘I’ll go straight down after work. Okay?’ She shrugged slightly, still speechless, and got up. ‘Well, good night,’ he said blandly. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ She stared at him dumbly, and left the room. Having been cast out by him, she now found – as she had found before – that she was capable only of speaking and acting, even to a degree apparently of feeling, like a stranger. But struggling, terrified and helpless, a loving and trusting Nicola shrieked in anguish from the depths of this stunned and frozen stranger.