JOYCE.’
The other letter – and that was why she had gone to meet the postman – was from Hugh Ledwidge. If the letters had been brought to Mrs Amberley on the lawn; if she had sorted them out, in public . . . Helen flushed with imagined shame and anger at the thought of what her mother might have said about that letter from Hugh. In spite of all the people sitting round; or rather because of them. When they were alone, Helen generally got off with a teasing word. But when other people were there, Mrs Amberley would feel inspired by her audience to launch out into elaborate descriptions and commentaries. ‘Hugh and Helen,’ she would explain, ‘they’re a mixture between Socrates and Alcibiades and Don Quixote and Dulcinea.’ There were moments when she hated her mother. ‘It’s a case,’ said the remembered voice, ‘a case of: I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not ethnology more.’ Helen had had to suffer a great deal on account of those letters.
She tore open the envelope.
‘22.vi.27.
‘Midsummer Day, Helen. But you’re too young, I expect, to think much about the significance of special days. You’ve only been in the world for about seven thousand days altogether; and one has got to have lived through at least ten thousand before one begins to realize that there aren’t an indefinite number of them and that you can’t do exactly what you want with them. I’ve been here more than thirteen thousand days, and the end’s visible, the boundless possibilities have narrowed down. One must cut according to one’s cloth; and one’s cloth is not only exiguous; it’s also of one special kind – and generally of poor quality at that. When one’s young, one thinks one can tailor one’s time into all sorts of splendid and fantastic garments – shakoes and chasubles and Ph.D gowns; Nijinsky’s tights and Rimbaud’s slate-blue trousers and Garibaldi’s red shirt.
But by the time you’ve lived ten thousand days, you begin to realize that you’ll be lucky if you succeed in cutting one decent workaday suit out of the time at your disposal. It’s a depressing realization; and Midsummer is one of the days that brings it home. The longest day. One of the sixty or seventy longest days of one’s five and twenty thousand. And what have I done with this longest day – longest of so few, of so uniform, of so shoddy? The catalogue of my occupations would be humiliatingly absurd and pointless. The only creditable and, in any profound sense of the word, reasonable thing I’ve done is to think a little about you, Helen, and write this letter . . .’
‘Any interesting letters?’ asked Mrs Amberley when her daughter came out again from the house.
‘Only a note from Joyce.’
‘From our mem-sahib?’
Helen nodded.
‘She’s living at A-aldershot, you know,’ said Mary Amberley to the assembled company. ‘At A-a-aldershot,’ she insisted, dragging out the first syllable, till the place became ludicrously unreal and the fact that Joyce lived there, a fantastic and slightly indecent myth.
‘You can thank your lucky stars that you aren’t living at Aldershot,’ said Anthony. ‘After all, you ought to be. A general’s daughter.’
For the first moment Mary was put out by his interruption; she had looked forward to developing her fantastic variations on the theme of Aldershot. But her good humour returned as she perceived the richer opportunity with which he had provided her. ‘Yes, I know,’ she cried eagerly. ‘A general’s daughter. And do you realize that, but for the grace of God, I might at this moment be a colonel’s wife? I was within an ace of marrying a soldier. Within an ace, I tell you. The most ravishingly beautiful creature. But ivory,’ she rapped her forehead, ‘solid ivory. It was lucky he was such a crashing bore. If he’d been the tiniest bit brighter, I’d have gone out to India with him. And then what? It’s unimaginable.’
‘Unimaginable!’ Beppo repeated, with a little squirt of laughter.
‘On the contrary,’ said Anthony, ‘perfectly imaginable. The club every evening between six and eight; parties at government house; adultery in the hot weather, polo in the cold; incessant bother with the Indian servants; permanent money difficulties and domestic scenes; occasional touches of malaria and dysentery; the monthly parcel of second-hand novels from the Times Book Club; and all the time the inexorable advance of age – twice as fast as in England. If you’ve ever been to India, nothing’s more easy to imagine.’
‘And you think all that would have happened to me?’ asked Mary.
‘What else could have happened? You don’t imagine you’d have gone about buying Pascins in Quetta?’
Mary laughed.
‘Or reading Max Jacob in Rawalpindi? You’d have been a mem-sahib like all the other mem-sahibs. A bit more bored and discontented than most of them, perhaps. But still a memsahib.’
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed. ‘But is one so hopelessly at the mercy of circumstances?’
He nodded.
‘You don’t think I’d have escaped.’
‘I can’t see why.’
‘But that means there isn’t really any such thing as me. Me,’ she repeated, laying a hand on her breast. ‘I don’t really exist.’
‘No, of course you don’t. Not in that absolute sense. You’re a chemical compound, not an element.’
‘But if one doesn’t really exist, one wonders why . . .’ she hesitated.
‘Why one makes such a fuss about things,’ Anthony suggested. ‘All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn’t really a self – just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course,’ he went on, ‘once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don’t make a fuss – that is, if you’re sensible. Like me,’ he added, smiling.
There was a silence. ‘You don’t make a fuss,’ Mrs Amberley repeated to herself, and thought of Gerry Watchett. ‘You don’t make a fuss.’ But how was it possible not to make a fuss, when he was so stupid, so selfish, so brutal, and at the same time so excruciatingly desirable – like water in the desert, like sleep after insomnia? She hated him; but the thought that in a few days he would be there, staying in the house, sent a prickling sensation of warmth through her body. She shut her eyes and drew a deep breath.
Still carrying the kitten, like a furry baby, in her arms, Helen had walked away across the lawn. She wanted to be alone, out of earshot of that laughter, those jarringly irrelevant voices. ‘Seven thousand days,’ she repeated again and again. And it was not only the declining sun that made everything seem so solemnly and richly beautiful; it was also the thought of the passing days, of human limitations, of the final unescapable dissolution. ‘Seven thousand days,’ she said aloud, ‘seven thousand days.’ The tears came into her eyes; she pressed the sleeping kitten closely to her breast.
Savernake, the White Horse, Oxford; and in between whiles the roar and screech of Gerry’s Bugatti, the rush of the wind, the swerves and bumps, the sickening but at the same time delicious terrors of excessive speed. And now they were back again. After an age, it seemed; and at the same time it was as though they had never been away. The car came to a halt; but Helen made no move to alight.
‘What’s the matter?’ Gerry asked. ‘Why don’t you get out?’
‘It seems so terribly final,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Like breaking a spell. Like stepping out of the magic circle.’
‘Magic?’ he repeated questioningly. ‘What kind? White or black?’
Helen laughed. ‘Piebald. Absolutely heavenly and absolutely awful. You know, Gerry, you ought to be put in gaol, the way you drive. Or in a lunatic asylum. Crazy and criminal. But I adored it,’ she added, as she opened the door and stepped out.
‘Good!’ was all he answered, while he gave her a smile that was as studiedly unamorous as he could make it. He threw the car into gear and, in a stink of burnt castor oil, shot off round the house, towards the garage.
Charming! he was thinking. And how wise he had been to take that jolly, honest-to-God, big-brother line with her! Ground bait. Getting the game accustomed to you. She’d soon be eating out of his hand. The real trouble, of course, was Mary. Tiresome bitch! he thought, with a sudden passion of loathing. Jealous, suspicious, interfering. Behaving as though he were her private property. And greedy, insatiable. Perpetually thrusting herself upon him – thrusting that ageing body of hers. His face, as he manoeuvred the car into the garage, was puckering into folds of distaste. But thank God, he went on to reflect, she’d got this chill on the liver, or whatever it was. That ought to keep her quiet for a bit, keep her out of the way.
Without troubling to take off her coat, and completely forgetting her mother’s illness and for the moment her very existence, Helen crossed the hall and, almost running, burst into the kitchen.
‘Where’s Tompy, Mrs Weeks?’ she demanded of the cook. The effect of the sunshine and the country and Gerry’s Bugatti had been such that it was now absolutely essential to her that she should take the kitten in her
