Denis looked deeper into the book. There were caricatures of other people: of Priscilla and Mr Barbecue-Smith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anne and Gombauld; of Mr Scogan, whom Jenny had represented in a light that was more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and Ivor. He scarcely glanced at them. A fearful desire to. know the worst about himself possessed him. He turned over the leaves, lingering at nothing that was not his own image. Seven full pages were devoted to him.
‘Private. Not to be opened.’ He had disobeyed the injunction; he had only got what he deserved. Thoughtfully he closed the book, and slid the rubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went out on to the terrace. And so this, he reflected, this was how Jenny employed the leisure hours in her ivory tower apart. And he had thought her a simple-minded, uncritical creature! It was he, it seemed, who was the fool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thing wasn’t Jenny herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her red book represented, what they stood for and concretely symbolized.
They represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they symbolized something that in his studious solitariness he was apt not to believe in. He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch the crowds shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious, intelligent, individual being among all those thousands. It seemed, somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as elaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. The red notebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It put beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.
Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this unpleasant truth for some time. Still chewing on it, he strolled pensively down towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece of stick at the slowly pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking it was something to eat.
He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.
‘Under the spreading ilex tree . . .’
He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn’t.
‘The smith, a brawny man is he,
With arms like rubber bands.’
Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller exercises more regularly.
He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him, reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the summer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne’s bare arms and seal-sleek bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.
‘And little Luce with the white legs,
And bouncing Barbary . . .’
Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?
He walked slowly round the water’s edge. In an embayed recess among the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.
‘Hullo!’ he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say something.
Mary looked up. ‘Hullo!’ she answered in a melancholy, uninterested tone.
In this alcove, hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pubic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.
At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a façade sixteen windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the moment, however, Mary’s mind was not moved by these considerations.
On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor’s bold, large hand, a single quatrain.
‘Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell!
Like bright plumes moulted in an angel’s flight,
There sleep within my heart’s most mystic cell
Memories of morning, memories of the night.’
There followed a postscript of three lines: ‘Would you mind asking one of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades I left in the drawer of my washstand. Thanks. – IVOR.’
Seated under the Venus’s immemorial gesture, Mary considered life and love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing the expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new and hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor. . . . She couldn’t do without him now. It was evident on the other hand, from the poem on the back of the picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at Gobley now; so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last verse of the song he had sung that night in the garden.
‘Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage
Aurait donné moutons et chien
Pour un baiser que le volage
A Lisette donnait pour rien.’
Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her life before.
It was Denis who first broke the silence. ‘The individual,’ he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, ‘is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognizance of the existence of other universes beside himself.’
He had contrived this highly abstract generalization as a preliminary to a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation that was to lead up to Jenny’s caricatures.
‘True,’ said Mary; and, generalizing for herself, she added, ‘When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she – or he, of course, as the case may be – must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.’
‘One is apt,’ Denis went on, ‘to be so spellbound by the spectacle of one’s own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents itself to other people as well as to oneself.’
Mary was not listening. ‘The difficulty,’ she said, ‘makes itself acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or inflict suffering. If, on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risks the equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. As you see, it’s a dilemma.’
‘When I think of my own case,’ said Denis, making a more decided move in the desired direction, ‘I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people’s mentality in general and, above all and in particular, of their opinions about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened to the outside world.’ He made a gesture that was faintly suggestive of the drawing off of a rubber band.
‘It’s an awful problem,’ said Mary thoughtfully. ‘One has to have had personal experience to realize quite how awful it is.’
‘Exactly.’ Denis nodded. ‘One has to have had first-hand experience.’ He leaned towards her and slightly lowered his voice. ‘This very morning, for example . . .’ he began, but his confidences were cut short. The deep voice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated down from the house. It was lunch-time. Mechanically Mary rose to her feet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual experiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house without speaking.
CHAPTER XXV
‘I HOPE YOU all realize,’ said Henry Wimbush during dinner, ‘that next Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to help in the Fair.’
‘Heavens!’ cried Anne. ‘The Fair – I had forgotten all about it. What a nightmare! Couldn’t you put a stop to it, Uncle Henry?’
Mr Wimbush sighed and shook his head. ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘I fear I cannot. I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; but the claims of Charity are strong.’
‘It’s not charity we want,’ Anne murmured rebelliously; ‘it’s justice.’
‘Besides,’ Mr Wimbush went on, ‘the Fair has become an institution. Let me see, it must be twenty-two years since we started it. It
