Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 13

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Caroline reminded herself, in an imitation of Michael’s voice, that there was no need to sit forward on the edge of the seat in the taxi. “The process, my sweet, does not in any way affect the speedometer or the traffic-lights,” she echoed as she let down one window with a slam, straightened her back and continued to sit on the edge. “I can’t unknot myself yet,” she explained to the image of Michael. “This is the best kind of being tired; when one’s muscles are made of electric wires and one’s thoughts go feathery and one says something funny and well-shaped before one has recognised the intention of saying anything at all.”

She stared at the lighted streets; north of Oxford Circus they were empty and somehow disapproving. She was talking to herself: “Here are the respectable streets; the narrow, flat-faced houses; all full of doctors and gynæcologists and radiotherapists, and heaven knows what practitioners in parts of people; with Baker Street for a boundary; such a dull boundary. I wonder whether anyone likes Baker Street,” she thought and was instantly sorry for it. Here was the square, and the house on the corner. It stood out from the others by reason of its new black-and-white brick façade, its pale wooden door, the antique, wrought-iron lamp on the railing at the foot of the steps. “A smart-alec of a house,” Caroline thought, not for the first time. “How I used to hate it. I used to think it was against me. But I’ve got the hang of you now——,” she said to it. “That was before I ever slept under your roof; when I thought I never would.”

She knew that he was waiting, for the light went off at the ground-floor window as she walked up the steps. She heard him whistle on the other side of the door; she whistled back. He opened the door. He pulled her into his arms and hugged her close.

“D’you hate me?” he asked brusquely, letting her go.

“Whatever for? Oh, I see, for not being there. Ass; of course I don’t.”

“Why do I have to fail you?” He sounded so cross and grim that she said, “Oh, dear; oh, dear; it isn’t such a tragedy; and I don’t imagine that you could help it. Was it your lady with the osteomyelitis?”

“It was. She blew up just to spite me. Perishing woman,” he said.

“Did she perish?”

“No; I avoided that issue for her. I only just got back,” he said; “I hope Dennis fed you.”

“He did; what about you?”

“Banfield has left some rather odd-looking cold things on plates in the study.” He put his arm round her waist. “Come and have a drink and tell me how good you were.”

“I was so bloody good you wouldn’t have known it was me. Much better than last night.”

She sat by the fire in the study upstairs, drinking beer while he ate the cold supper; she talked about the play, wondering why she could sing with excitement for him as never for poor Dennis. “If I live to be a hundred, which God forbid,” she said, “I’ll never have anything better than that. It felt like ski-ing on champagne. Oh God, how I wish you’d been there; I’d just got used to your not being, and now it has all come back to me. Too sad.”

He shook his head exasperatedly, pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette.

She said, “Leopold Rokov was in front; he wants me to go and see him to-morrow.”

“Has he got something for you?”

“Dennis says he has.”

“What sort?”

“According to Dennis, a leading part for which all the girls are fighting; to no avail because he doesn’t like any of them. But when I get there I shall probably know different. Dennis was in a crusading mood.”

Michael’s eyebrows lifted. “That sounds all right. You know what I’m going to say to you now, don’t you?”

“Yes; and I’m not paying the slightest attention; you have been warned.”

He sat very still; the profile like the profile on a coin was sunk in lines of weariness; below the chin, she thought, there was an air of crumpled officialdom about him, in the wing collar, the black jacket and striped trousers.

“Darling; if it is a job, and a good job, and an immediate job——”

“Oh stink and drains,” said Caroline, “I wish I hadn’t told you at all; I thought of not; but for me to decide to dissemble is enough to guarantee that it will come bursting out at the earliest opportunity. Look—whatever the job, it can’t stop my coming to America with you.”

“Yes, it can. It must.”

“Michael, it won’t.”

He said, “There is no point in our arguing. Now that you know my views, let’s leave it until the job materialises.” He smiled at her.

She said, “That is about the most irritating and grown-up attitude that you could take.”

“I’m sorry, Caro.”

“Are you dead tired?” she asked. “You look it.”

He said, “Rather less tired than you, my love.”

“I doubt that. I’m still treading champagne.” She went to sit beside him on the sofa, with her legs tucked under her, holding his hand. She thought that a blind person would know that this hand was unusual, feeling the shape of the bones.

“You’re my authority anyway,” she said. “So you have the advantage that Dennis lacks.”

“It is not the only advantage I have that Dennis lacks.”

“We fought,” she said.

“About me?”

“Yes.”

Michael said, “I wish he’d leave you alone. Which—I suppose—is what he wishes about me. He is a good friend, but he isn’t always wise.”

“Is he your good friend, do you think?”

“Oh, lud, yes,” said Michael. “You wouldn’t hear him say a word against me if he hadn’t fallen in love with you. Come here.”

She lay cradled against his shoulder, her mind still made light and lively by fatigue, her body beginning to be at rest; she was aware of the room rather than of Michael, as though she sat here waiting for him. It was a room walled almost completely with built-in bookcases; its colours were blue and grey. The sofas and the chairs were large, square, modern things; all the ash-trays were uniformly big, made of heavy glass; there was a solid, curved desk, built out from one wall, at an angle to the window.

Over the fireplace, the portrait of Michael carried on the pale colours of the room; it was a cloudy, youthful portrait, more a decorative panel than a picture. In it he was wearing a white coat, whose shadows were blue. It looked casual, unfinished, the likeness fleeting, the young, dramatic head barely sketched, the hands traced as lightly as skeleton-leaves. “It is like the ghost of you” she had said when first she saw it.

She had gone through the phase of hating the portrait because Mercedes Knowle was the artist, and now she was merely puzzled by it; it made a point of uncertainty in the room, a wispy threat, somebody else’s secret.

“Come to bed,” said Michael.

There began for them the urgency from which they could not escape, the obsessing appetite; she knew that it haunted him as persistently as it haunted her. There were the first minutes, when tenderness remained distant and apparently impossible, when there were only two bodies, each greedy and alone. This changed, until she said, “I love you so.” (And more than you, she thought, I now love what your body does; your own desire driving you, while you resist, because, until the last bearable moment, you will make sure of my delight before you meet it with yours.... Over the top of the mountain; and here the mind dies and I am all body.... And now we fall like stones and are the two other people who never knew that ecstasy, the tumbled, friendly people with heavy limbs.)

Presently she turned up the lamp to see whether he slept. When she spoke to him, he gave a small sigh and his eyelashes fluttered. Perhaps he would not wake again to-night. His insomnia was still a worry to her; a mysterious, adult affliction. She could sleep for nine hours, no matter what time she went to bed. For the moment, she was wide-awake.

“And what is more,” she thought guiltily, “I am hungry.” She climbed out of bed and picked Michael’s blue-and-gold dressing-gown off the chair; she turned out the lamp.

In the study, the fire had burned low, but the room was still warm and she curled up in one corner of the sofa, grabbing from the plate of biscuits and cheese. She smoothed her fingers on the prickly brocade of the dressing-gown. “What a beautiful, solid feeling it has; but it is too Burlington-Arcade for Michael; he doesn’t entirely suit it, any more than he suits this house or this room. He is simpler than all his possessions. I can imagine him so easily when he was a shabby student.”

The end of hunger meant that she must smoke. She put her plate from her and lighted a cigarette, reminded at once of their first encounter when she had claimed to have all the appetites. She could remember every word of the dialogue. Sometimes she liked the accuracy of her verbal memory; sometimes it was a demon that plagued her furiously with the sad things.

To-night it was set to conjure the ghost of her quarrel with Jay Brookfield and her abrupt relegation of her stage career to a secondary importance. This had happened in July of ’36, when the intellectual thriller was still playing to capacity.

She sighed, unwilling to recapture that afternoon. But because she thought that a similar decision might await her to-morrow, she went back to there in her mind.

She was alone in her dressing-room, after a matinée. It was a hot afternoon in the middle of the time of doom. Mercedes had arrived in England; she had come for the express purpose of quarrelling with Michael about Cold Ash, the country house that was their joint property. But it felt like doom. Nothing was safe; London was changed and Michael, when last seen, had been more than usually grown-up; calm and balanced and businesslike, saying, “This happens from time to time and is soon over.” Now, every day brought her one of his long, talkative letters; sometimes two came in one day. He was staying in Sussex, in his father’s house, five miles from the bone of contention, the property. Mercedes was at the local inn, with a French maid and, according to Michael, a mood that would try the patience of the Heavenly Hierarchy.

Caroline drank neat whisky, sitting before her looking-glass and annotating aloud a paragraph from the evening-paper on her knee:

“Mrs. Michael Knowle (the well-known Rich Bitch) who is (of course) the only daughter of the late Sir Lewis Barry, our former Ambassador to Paris and Washington (uffle, uffle, wuffle). Mrs. Knowle (who persecutes for a hobby) has lately been visiting the United States (tactful way of saying that she hasn’t lived with her husband for years). She is a person of various talents (blow me), has studied art in Paris under Depuy (what a thing), is well-known here and in America as a stage-designer. (And if she doesn’t clear out soon and exercise one of her bloody talents a long way off, she is likely to find herself with her throat cut from ear to ear.)”

“Hullo, puss; talking to yourself?” said Jay. She looked up and saw him leaning against the door. He wore a pale suit and a dark shirt; he looked like all his photographs, fragile and cynical and sure of his ground.

“Hullo,” said Caroline gloomily. “Would you care for a drink?”

“I would not. Nor do I care to see my little girl lowering four inches of whisky between performances. Put that down at once.”

“Certainly,” said Caroline, tilting the glass at her lips. Jay shook his head and made a clicking sound with his tongue. He said, “In order to prevent you from sitting here drinking yourself into a stupor, my pet, I am going to take you to my flat and feed you with chicken-sandwiches.”

“Thank you kindly.” She was flattered; she leaned towards the looking-glass, adorning her face. She saw that she looked shabby; it was a listless black silk dress that would do so long as Michael remained away. She was in debt and she had begun to hoard her better clothes carefully. As she rose, she saw Jay looking her up and down.

“Thin, aren’t you?” he said.

“Too thin?”

“Yes, I think so.” He appeared to be giving it serious consideration.

Jay’s flat was in Fitzroy Square; he was said to delight in the shock received by his public on hearing that the boy who held the mirror up to Mayfair should live in Bloomsbury. The flat was entirely Victorian. There were antimacassars, heavy dark pieces of furniture, red curtains, shell boxes and steel engravings. It was an enormous room and in the tired evening sunlight it seemed to Caroline a cool and ghostly place, as though he had taken her with him into another time. He rang the bell and his manservant, who wore side-whiskers, wheeled in a table that held sandwiches, coffee and iced orangeade. Having settled Caroline in a large plush chair beside the window, Jay threw himself into another large plush chair and put up his feet on a beaded footstool. The table was between them.

“Change is coming into your life,” he said. “I want you to take your holiday next week, Caroline.”

It was an order, spoken in the clipped voice. She stared at him.

“I know you weren’t due to take it until the end of August, but that’s out of the question.”

“Why is it?” She felt that her stomach had shut like a box: the sandwich was now completely undesirable.

“Because you’re coming out of the play and going into another. My new comedy,” said Jay. “You’re a very lucky little girl. I am going to read it to you to-morrow afternoon; here. With——” he named three current lions—“who compose the rest of the cast. Two o’clock here? All right? The script isn’t back from the typist yet or I’d let you have a preview to-day.”

She said, “Look——” Jay went on imperturbably, “I want to begin rehearsals by August the sixth, latest. We shall open in Edinburgh towards the beginning of September. You’re playing the second lead; in fact more interesting than the lead; you’re rather a tart, dear. Will you like that?”

She said, “Jay, I know I’m going to make you cross, but I can’t do it.”

“Pardon?” said Jay in Cockney. “ ’Didn’t quoite cetch.”

“I said I couldn’t take the part.”

He looked winded. He said, “Oh, don’t tell me you’re going to marry Dennis and leave the stage. You can’t marry him, dear; you’ll be so bored. If it’s a question of marrying my brother, leave all that to me.”

“I am not going to marry Dennis.”

“If you’re going to have a baby——”

“I am not going to have a baby.”

He took his feet off the beaded stool, rose, stood in front of her with his hands in his pockets and said crisply, biting off each word, “Then would you mind telling me precisely why you cannot play the part?”

“I am going to Italy with Michael Knowle.”

Jay’s harlequin face sagged in bewilderment. “Forever, d’you mean? To live there? To get evidence for a divorce, or something?”

She hesitated. She recalled a maxim taught by Michael: “When you’re using what seems to you a weak argument, leave it as bare as you can; don’t bolster it up.” She said, “No. For a holiday. For two weeks at the end of August. He can’t get away before.”

Jay said, after a pause, “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re insane.”

“Yes, well....”

He took three paces along the carpet, stopped and came back, flinging himself into the chair.

“Now look here, Caroline. As chap to chap. For God’s sake—I know about being in love.”

“It isn’t any good your talking, Jay. We have counted on this holiday for months—I’m not going to do anything that would endanger it.”

“Oh, my poor deluded girl, will you use your wits?”

She said, “I’m sorry; I am bloody sorry. If you can postpone the rehearsals——”

“I-am-trying,” said Jay with his eyes shut, “to-maintain-a-modicum-of-self-control.” He screwed up his face until he looked like a Chinese. “Apart from that piece of supreme impertinence, which I should not have expected from a whipper-snapper like yourself; quite apart from that——” he gasped.

“I’m sorry if——”

“Shut up. Please shut up. Let me do this. Do you imagine for one moment, for one single moment, that anybody as intelligent as Michael would countenance such imbecile behaviour?”

“It simply doesn’t arise. I shan’t consult him.”

“I shall, though,” said Jay, with his eyes tightly shut.

This possibility had not occurred to her. She said, “Look—if you do, you’ll be everlastingly sorry. I’ll never forgive you. Just the sort of ——ing interference that I used to put up with from my mother. If you go to Michael about this, I’ll break my contract and walk out of your company.”

“Caroline!” He was now quite green. “Listen to me. You are a very obstinate, moronic little girl and you don’t make yourself any more attractive by flourishing threats. Who the devil do you think you are? Quiet, please. I shall ring up Michael to-night and tell him that I want you for a part that will make your career. And if you don’t want me to throttle you here and now, that is the end of the argument.”

She was frightened of him and this was somehow stimulating; a David-and-Goliath situation, the challenge to make the most of her feeble weapons. She said, “I repeat that if you do that I’ll walk out of the company to-morrow; and I’ll never speak to you again.”

Beside the dying fire in Michael’s study, Caroline made a sympathetic grimace towards that gesture of defiance. It had proved useless. Jay had telephoned to Michael in the country; Michael had written her four pages of placid, understanding persuasion. For him, she had climbed down, suffered the tortures of defeat and rehearsed the play. Six weeks later she had found herself the possessor of good notices in the otherwise unanimous abuse that greeted Jay’s comedy. It ran for two weeks in London and the end of it saw the end of her friendship with Jay. They had been limping along in an uneasy armistice ever since that afternoon; throughout rehearsals he had behaved as though he were an acid governess and she the stupidest pupil in the class. She thought that the failure of the play gave her, in his mind, a belated, undeserved victory. At least she had never worked with him again; Dennis and Kate were still her friends; Jay was her enemy.

“And it is curious to remember how many things went wrong, from the moment that Mercedes came. As though the bad luck stayed even after she had gone. Nothing but flops and quarrels and people calling me unreliable. I suppose I was.”

By then, she thought, the theatre had ceased to be her profession; her profession was Michael.

“And I didn’t do so well at that one, in the beginning.”

She was reluctant to let her memory take over at this point. The path of these thoughts would lead her into dark places; past all the betrayal of that first confident assurance that she could love him forever and be content with his way of loving. She must pass by vows and recantations, by pain that was as violent as toothache; past unreasonable jealousy, humble withdrawal and the sterile suffering that went on throughout his absences. She must taste again the pure hatred of Mercedes, who was less a target for jealousy than an ultimate obstacle, the wife who was adamant, the arch-priestess of the Spoilers-of-the-Fun. She must see herself swayed like a person under a spell; with Michael standing by, always courteous, patient and truthful; the rock of strength on which, in her darkest moments, she could feel that she dashed herself to pieces.

“When did it begin to be all right?” she asked herself bewilderedly. “How? Did I learn to behave, or did he learn to love me more? Or both?”

Because, lately, she could feel that she had won; that in patient bondage to the hopeless thing, she had builded better than she knew; that in contradiction to all theories of love, she had tied him to her by simple devotion. Was that too pretty a translation of the truth, she wondered, staring at the last gleam of red among the coals in the grate. “Oh, you can make it look any way you like. You could say that you had made yourself necessary to him.” (And if you looked at it in that light, you would see that it was a severe and exact apprenticeship, whose training had left no time for any other.)

Slowly, she had learned to rage in secret and to weep alone. She had learned to hide from him the small worries that he begged to be allowed to share. She had discovered early that she could make him laugh, and it became an obligation always to make him laugh, to save the funny things for him and hand them over, as toys to a child, at the day’s end. She had cured herself of questioning him, rebuking him and sulking at him. To suit his time-table, she would cancel at the shortest notice any prior engagement. She had set herself the task of being always decorative, always good-tempered, always punctual; this last was easy, for she was anxious never to lose a second of him; at least he looked grateful when he found her waiting. She had forced upon herself the study of his work, solemnly reading manuals of surgery that sickened her, acquiring medical knowledge from all the sources that she could tap. She had made the decision to stay on at the Rufford Hotel because this was a place where he could come at erratic hours, to sit in the elaborate lounge and eat and drink, still looking respectable and making love only in words. It was when that rendezvous became too public, when the snatched private hours failed to satisfy him, that she began to go regularly to the house in Manchester Square.

Looking back, she could see other assets than the sweetness of his company. From him she had learned wisdom; she respected him even when her mind was at its most detached, seeing them both for what they were. She could sneer at the list of losses on the other side of the balance-sheet; final estrangement from her mother; debts (never revealed to Michael); the collapse of her career and the thinning-out of her friends; Dennis’ implacable judgment; a life constantly threatened by time and public opinion and Mercedes. She felt that she had travelled a long way.

“And to-morrow?” she said aloud, pulling the heavy stuff of the dressing-gown more closely about her body. “Will to-morrow present me with that dear old problem on a plate, all freshly-cooked and hot from the oven? Leopold Rokov or Michael? Leopold Rokov or America?”

She was cold. She went back across the landing to hover at the bedroom door. His voice came out of the dark; he sounded very much awake:

“Caroline, why are you prowling?”

“I got hungry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Waking in the middle of the night is a thing that I can do without assistance; as you should know by now.” He turned on the lamp. “How enchanting you look in my dressing-gown.”

She stood gazing at him.

“But you will be warmer,” Michael suggested, “if you come back to bed.”

“What have you just decided to say to me about Rokov?” He smiled at her and shook his head: “You always see it coming, don’t you?”

“I was the seventh child of a seventh child of a seventh child of a seventh—the hell with it. Tell me, Michael; let us have the dreary thing.”

“It isn’t ultimately dreary; I am almost as much divided in my mind as you are.”

“But I am not divided at all; my mind is in one solid, unbreakable piece.”

“No, it isn’t, Caro.”

“Very well, it isn’t. But I am praying that Dennis has made it all up and that Rokov really wants to ask me whether I can get you to reconstruct his profile at a reduced fee.”

“I would, too,” said Michael. He moved restlessly: “I have shut so many doors for you. I had hoped that this time I could open one. America isn’t such a great adventure, but it is fun. It enlarges the horizons.” He said, “However, this isn’t by any means our last opportunity. I shall have to go again next year, unless there’s war.”

“We may be dead next year; even if there isn’t war.”

“Yes, my love, and you might be run over on your way back to the Rufford, but that is not a basis for argument.”

“I think it is.”

“It isn’t. If Rokov is serious, here comes your second chance. I robbed you of the first one; no, Caroline, you needn’t use coarse oaths; if it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have quarrelled with Jay. I refuse to rob you of this; you must see that.”

“Of course I see that, damn it. But can’t I do something I want to do, for a change?”

“I could blackmail you there by saying, ‘Not if you love me’.”

“Yes,” she said, “I give you all the right cues.”

“But I don’t take them. What I want to say to you now is: promise to be good and swallow it down. If he offers you the part to-morrow, you must accept. It is the only honest and intelligent thing to do. Am I sounding like a Spoiler-of-the-Fun?”

“Yes.” She was, as always, a little mollified by his use of her phrase.

“Well, there it is,” said Michael, “I want you to promise. Don’t promise me; promise you. The final importance isn’t to us, but to you as an artist. And that’s the last pompous thing I’ll say.”

She said, “Oh, hell,” and felt the tears come, suddenly and blindingly; though she had made rules against weeping in Michael’s presence. He cradled her and talked over the top of her head. “It seems worse because you’re tired; truly, darling. Everything always does. ‘When our spirits meet old Weariness, with his rust-eaten knife.’ Can you finish the quotation for me? not sure that I can finish it myself. Something like, ‘there is no corner of our house kept sweet that is not trampled bloody’. I was always grateful to that poet. Early in life he taught me to say, ‘This is only overwhelming because I am tired.’ My love, be quiet and close to me.”

His hands caressing her made her quiet. She did not mean to sleep and sleep came. Usually, in this bed, she struggled against it, because to sleep was a waste of Michael. Now she sank down into it without a fight.

When she woke, the light in the room was the dusty light of morning. She sat up, shocked.

“Hell’s teeth,” said Caroline. “It’s almost six.”

She flung herself out of bed, scooped up her clothes from the chair and carried them into the bathroom; she splashed through a shallow bath, dressed with a fury of speed and launched herself at Michael’s looking-glass to streak lipstick on her mouth. Michael moved and sighed and did not wake. She knew from this that he had slept little before dawn. She bent over him, touched his forehead and ran.

The staircase with the blinds drawn at the windows, the palpable daylight in the hall, made the house stiff, correct and inimical; a housemaid’s property. It was almost a housemaid’s hour; she thought that she heard a clang and a rattle down in the basement. The childish terror of being caught made her heart race and her hands tremble; she unlatched the door and let it slip behind her so that it banged. She ran down the steps and across the square; beginning to walk only when she was on the south side of it.

She felt dizzy and incompetent; her knees shook. She blinked at the unfamiliar landscape of early morning. “Many dustbins and no people,” she thought; Wigmore Street lay empty, like a shiny solid river all the way to Cavendish Square. A policeman, appearing out of an alleyway, looked her up and down with a meditative expression. She found a taxi, a slow taxi with a door that rattled, and an old, stooped driver. She sat on the edge of the seat, limp with tiredness and dizziness, her elbows on her knees and her forehead in her hands. “Coming home with the milk,” Caroline said aloud, “A quaint conceit; as though you brought the milk with you.”

She saw the neat width of St. James’s, with the palace-clock accusing her. She had to tell the driver which turning was St. James’s Place. As they came round the corner into the cul-de-sac, she saw that the night-porter had opened the doors and was sluicing the front steps. His shrunken nut of a face looked nipped with cold.

“Hullo, John,” said Caroline.

“Oh, good morning, Miss Seward,” said John, friendly and unperturbed. He paid the taxi for her.

“John, will you please leave a message in writing for whoever comes on at eight. I don’t want anybody put through to me unless Mr. Knowle rings; and I must be called at eleven-fifteen sharp.”

“Very good, Miss. I’ll leave a note on the pad here, for the day-porter. No telephone calls except Mr. Knowle—called-at-eleven-fifteen——”

“Wait a minute——” An idea had come into her mind; a light-headed, intricate rendering of the words that haunted her. “If he offers you the part to-morrow, you must promise to accept. If he offers you the part to-morrow. ...”

“Look,” she said. “Cross out the bit about calling me. I don’t want to be called. I’ll sleep as long as I can.”