Surprised, ‘But he told me that Mrs Foxe had tried to insist on his taking it.’
‘Oh, she made it seem as though she wanted him to take it. We were there for a week-end in May to talk it over. She kept telling him that it wasn’t wrong to take the money, and that he ought to think about me and getting married. But then, when Brian and I told her that I’d agreed to his not taking it, she . . .’
Anthony interrupted her. ‘But had you agreed?’
Joan dropped her eyes. ‘In a way,’ she said sullenly. Then looking up again with sudden anger, ‘How could I help agreeing with him? Seeing that that was what he wanted to do, and would have done, what’s more, even if I hadn’t agreed. And besides, I’ve told you, there was something rather splendid and wonderful about it. Of course, I had agreed. But agreeing didn’t mean that I really wanted him to refuse the money. And that’s where her falseness came in – pretending to think that I wanted him to refuse it, and congratulating me and him on what we’d done. Saying we were heroic and all that. And so encouraging him to go on with the idea. It is her doing, I tell you. Much more than you think.’
She was silent, and Anthony thought it best to allow the subject to drop. Heaven only knew what she’d say if he allowed her to go on talking about Mrs Foxe. ‘Poor Brian,’ he said aloud, and added, taking refuge in platitude, ‘The best is the enemy of the good.’
‘Yes, that’s just it!’ she cried. ‘The enemy of the good. He wants to be perfect – but look at the result! He tortures himself and hurts me. Why should I be made to feel dirty and criminal? Because that’s what he’s doing. When I’ve done nothing wrong. Nor has he, for that matter. And yet he wants me to feel the same about him. Dirty and criminal. Why does he make it so difficult for me? As difficult as he possibly can.’ Her voice trembled, the tears overflowed. She pulled out her handkerchief and quickly wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m making a fool of myself. But if you knew how hard it’s been for me! I’ve loved him so much, I want to go on loving him. But he doesn’t seem to want to allow me to. It ought to be so beautiful; but he does his best to make it all seem ugly and horrible.’ Then, after a pause, and in a voice that had sunk almost to a whisper, ‘I sometimes wonder if I can go on much longer.’
Did it mean, he wondered, that she had already decided to break it off – had already met someone else who was prepared to love her and be loved less tragically, more normally than Brian? No; probably not, he decided. But there was every likelihood that she soon would. In her way (it didn’t happen to be exactly the way he liked) she was attractive. There would be no shortage of candidates; and if a satisfactory candidate presented himself, would she be able – whatever she might consciously wish – to refuse?
Joan broke the silence. ‘I dream so often of the house we’re going to live in,’ she said. ‘Going from room to room; and it all looks so nice. Such pretty curtains and chair covers. And vases full of flowers.’ She sighed; then, after a pause, ‘Do you understand his not wanting to take his mother’s money?’
Anthony hesitated a moment; then replied noncommittally: ‘I understand it; but I don’t think I should do it myself.’
She sighed once more. ‘That’s how I feel too.’ She looked at her watch; then gathered up her gloves. ‘I shall have to go.’ With this return from intimacy to the prosaic world of time and people and appointments, she suddenly woke up again to painful self-consciousness. Had it bored him? Did he think her a fool? She looked into his face, trying to divine his thoughts; then dropped her eyes. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been talking a lot about myself,’ she mumbled. ‘I don’t know why I should burden you . . .’
He protested. ‘I only wish I could be of some help.’
Joan raised her face again and gave him a quick smile of gratitude. ‘You’ve done a lot by just listening.’
They left the restaurant and, when he had seen her to her bus, he set off on foot towards the British Museum, wondering, as he went, what sort of letter he ought to write to Brian. Should he wash his hands of the whole business and merely scribble a note to the effect that Joan seemed well and happy? Or should he let out that she had told him everything, and then proceed to expostulate, warn, advise? He passed between the huge columns of the portico into the dim coolness within. A regular sermon, he thought with distaste. If only one could approach the problem as it ought to be approached – as a Rabelaisian joke.
But then poor Brian could hardly be expected to see it in that light. Even though it would do him a world of good to think for a change in Rabelaisian terms. Anthony showed his card to the attendant and walked down the corridor to the Reading Room. That was always the trouble, he reflected; you could never influence anybody to be anything except himself, nor influence him by any means that he didn’t already accept the validity of. He pushed open the door and was under the dome, breathing the faint, acrid smell of books. Millions of books. And all those hundreds of thousands of authors, century after century – each convinced he was right, convinced that he knew the essential secret, convinced that he could convince the rest of the world by putting it down in black and white. When in fact, of course, the only people anyone ever convinced were the ones that nature and circumstances had actually or potentially convinced already. And even those weren’t wholly to be relied on.
Circumstances changed. What convinced in January wouldn’t necessarily convince in August. The attendant handed him the books that had been reserved for him, and he walked off to his seat. Mountains of the spirits in interminable birth-pangs; and the result was – what? Well, si ridiculum murem requires, circumspice. Pleased with his invention, he looked about him at his fellow readers – the men like walruses, the dim females, the Indians, emaciated or overblown, the whiskered patriarchs, the youths in spectacles. Heirs to all the ages. Depressing, if you took it seriously; but also irresistibly comic. He sat down and opened his book – De Lancre’s Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges – at the place where he had stopped reading the day before. ‘Le Diable estoit en forme de bouc, ayant une queue et au dessoubs un visage d’homme noir, où elle fut contrainte le baiser . . .’ He laughed noiselessly to himself. Another one for Mary, he thought.
At five he rose, left his books at the desk and, from Holborn, took the tube to Gloucester Road. A few minutes later he was at Mary Amberley’s front door. The maid opened; he smiled at her familiarly and, assuming the privilege of an intimate of the house, ran upstairs to the drawing-room, unannounced.
‘I have a story for you,’ he proclaimed, as he crossed the room.
‘A coarse story, I hope,’ said Mary Amberley from the sofa.
Anthony kissed her hand in that affected style he had recently adopted, and sat down. ‘To the coarse,’ he said, ‘all things are coarse.’
‘Yes, how lucky that is!’ And with that crooked little smile of hers, that dark glitter between narrowed lids, ‘A filthy mind,’ she added, ‘is a perpetual feast.’ The joke was old and not her own; but Anthony’s laughter pleased her none the less for that. It was wholehearted laughter, loud and prolonged – louder and longer than the joke itself warranted. But then it wasn’t at the joke that he was really laughing. The joke was hardly more than an excuse; that laughter was his response, not to a single stimulus, but to the whole extraordinary and exciting situation. To be able to talk freely about anything (anything, mind you) with a woman, a lady, a genuine ‘loaf-kneader’, as Mr Beavis, in his moments of etymological waggery, had been known to say, a true-blue English loaf-kneader who was also one’s mistress, had also read Mallarmé, was also a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire; and to listen to the loaf-kneader preaching what she practised and casually mentioning beds, water-closets, the physiology of what (for the Saxon words still remained unpronounceable) they were constrained to call l’amour – for Anthony, the experience was still, after two years and in spite of Mary’s occasional infidelities, an intoxicating mixture of liberation and forbidden fruit, of relief and titillation.
In his father’s universe, in the world of Pauline and the Aunts, such things were simply not there – but not there with a painfully, glaringly conspicuous absence. Like the hypnotized patient who has been commanded to see the five of clubs as a piece of virgin pasteboard, they deliberately failed to perceive the undesirable things, they were conspiratorially silent about all they had been blind to. The natural functions even of the lower animals had to be ignored; there were silences even about quadrupeds. That goat incident, for example – it was the theme, now, of one of Anthony’s choicest anecdotes.
