‘But what fun!’ cried Mrs Amberley. ‘Darling, I’m so glad.’
If she hadn’t known – by how bitter an experience! – that this mood of gaiety and affectionateness would inevitably be followed by, at the best, a spiteful despondency, at the worst, by a fit of insanely violent anger, Helen would have been touched by the warmth of her mother’s greeting. As it was, she merely suffered herself to be kissed and, her face still set and stony, stepped across the threshold into the horribly familiar nightmare of her mother’s life.
This time, she found, the nightmare had a comic element.
‘It’s all because of that beastly old femme de ménage,’ Mrs Amberley explained as they stood there in the smelly little lobby. ‘She was stealing my stockings. So I had to lock the bedroom door when I went out. And then somehow I lost the key. You know what I am,’ she added complacently, boasting by force of habit of that absent-mindedness of which she had always been so proud. ‘Hopeless, I’m afraid.’ She shook her head and smiled that crooked little smile of hers, conspiratorially. ‘When I got home, I had to smash that panel.’ She pointed to the oblong aperture in the lower half of the door. ‘You should have seen me, banging away with the flat-iron!’ Her voice was richly vibrant with laughter. ‘Luckily it was like matchwood. Cheap and nasty to a degree. Like everything in this beastly place.’
‘And you crawled through?’ Helen asked.
‘Like this,’ And going down on her hands and knees, Mrs Amberley pushed her head through the hole, turned sideways so as to admit an arm and shoulder, then, with surprising agility, pulled and pushed with a hand beyond and feet on the hither side of the door, till only her legs remained in the lobby. First one, then the other, the legs were withdrawn, and an instant later, as though from a dog-kennel, Mrs Amberley’s face emerged, a little flushed, through the aperture.
‘You see,’ she said. ‘It’s as easy as winking. And the beauty of it is that old Madame Roget’s much too fat. No possible chance of her getting through. I don’t have to worry about my stockings any more.’
‘Do you mean to say she never goes into your bedroom?’
Mrs Amberley shook her head. ‘Not since I lost the key; and that was three weeks ago, at least.’ Her tone was one of triumph.
‘But who makes the bed and does the cleaning?’
‘Well . . .’ There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Why, I do, of course,’ the other replied a little irritably.
‘You?’
‘Why not?’ From her kennel door, Mrs Amberley looked up almost defiantly into her daughter’s face. There was a long silence; then, simultaneously, both of them burst out laughing.
Still smiling, ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Helen, and went down on all fours. The stony face had softened into life; she felt an inward warmth. Her mother had been so absurd, peering up like that out of her kennel, so childishly ridiculous, that suddenly she was able to love her again. To love her while she laughed at her, just because she could laugh at her.
Mrs Amberley withdrew her head. ‘Of course it is a bit untidy,’ she admitted rather anxiously, as Helen wriggled through the hole in the door. Still kneeling, she pushed some dirty linen and the remains of yesterday’s lunch under the bed.
On her feet again, inside the bedroom, Helen looked round. It was filthier even than she had expected – much filthier. She made an effort to go on smiling; but the muscles of her face refused to obey her.
Three days later Helen was on her way back to London. Opening the English newspaper she had bought at the Gare du Nord, she read, with an equal absence of interest, about the depression, the test match, the Nazis, the New Deal. Sighing, she turned the page. Printed very large, the words, ‘An Exquisite First Novel,’ caught her eye. And below, in small letters, ‘The Invisible Lover. By Hugh Ledwidge. Reviewed by Catesby Rudge.’ Helen folded back the page to make it more manageable and read with an intense and fixed attention.
‘Just another book, I thought, like all the rest. And I was on the point of throwing it aside, unread. But luckily something – some mystic intuition, I suppose – made me change my mind. I opened the book. I turned over the pages, glancing at a sentence here and there. And the sentences I found, were gems – jewels of wrought crystal. I decided to read the book. That was at nine in the evening. And at midnight I was still reading, spellbound. It was nearly two before I got to bed – my mind in a whirl of enthusiasm for this masterpiece I had just read.
‘How shall I describe the book to you? I might call it a fantasy.
And as far as it goes, that description holds good. The Invisible Lover is a fantasy. But a fantasy that is poignant as well as airy; profound as well as intriguing and light; fraught with tears as well as with smiles at once subtly humorous and of a high, Galahad-like spirituality. It is full of broken-hearted fun, and its laughter is dewy with tears. And throughout runs a vein of naïve and child-like purity, infinitely refreshing in a world full of Freudians and sex-novelists and all their wearisome ilk. This fantasy of the invisible but ever present, ever watchful, ever adoring lover and his child-beloved has an almost celestial innocence. If I wanted to describe the book in a single phrase, I should say that it was the story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen . . .’
Falling into her memories of Hugh’s few ignominious attempts to make love to her, the words produced in Helen’s mind a kind of violent chemical reaction. She burst out laughing; and since the ridiculous phrase went echoing on, since the grotesque memories kept renewing themselves with ever heightened intensity and in ever fuller, more painfully squalid detail, the laughter continued, irrepressibly. The story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen! Tears of hysterical merriment ran down her cheeks; she was breathless, and the muscles of her throat were contracted in a kind of agonizing cramp. But still she went on laughing – was utterly unable to stop; it was as though she were possessed by a demon. Luckily, she was alone in the compartment. People would have taken her for a madwoman.
In the cab, on the way to Hugh’s flat – her flat too, in spite of Dante and Beatrice and Hans Andersen – she wondered whether he’d have gone to bed already, and just how upset he’d be to see her. She hadn’t warned him of her arrival; he would be unprepared to receive her, unbraced against the shock of her grossly physical presence. Poor old Hugh! she thought with a derisive pity. Enjoying his private and invisible fun, like Dante with his phantom, and then having to suffer the trampling intrusion of Signora Alighieri! But tonight, she realized, as she stood at last before the door of the flat, looking in her bag for the latch-key, that invisible solitude of his had already been invaded. Somebody was playing the piano; there was a sound of laughter and voices. Hugh must be having a party. And all at once Helen saw herself making a dramatic entrance, like Banquo’s ghost, and was delighted by the vision. The reading of that article had momentarily transposed her entire being into the key of laughter.
Everything was a vast, extravagant, savage joke – or if it wasn’t already, should be made so. It was with a tingling sense of excited anticipation that she opened the door and silently slipped into the hall. An assortment of strange hats hung on the pegs, lay on the chairs – a couple of rich hats, she noticed, very new and shapely, and the rest deformed, and ancient; hats, one could see, of the intellectual poor. There were some letters on the marble-topped table; she bent down by mere force of habit to look at them, and found that one was addressed to her – from Anthony, she recognized; and that too was a joke.
Did he seriously imagine that she would read his letters? Enormous ass! She popped the envelope unopened into her bag, then tiptoed along the passage to her room. How tidy it was! How dead! Like a family vault under dust-sheets. She took off her coat and hat, washed, combed her hair, made up her face, then, as silently as she had come, crept back to the hall and stood at the door of the sitting-room, trying to guess by the sound of their voices who were the guests. Beppo Bowles, for one; that giggle, those squeaks and fizzlings were unmistakable.
And Mark Staithes. And then a voice she wasn’t sure
