‘Why should I be?’
‘Well, you have every right. Fainting like that . . .’ Her face felt naked and exposed; withdrawing her hand from his grasp, she once more hid her shame. Fainting like that . . . The recollection humiliated her. Thinking of that sudden, silent, violent gesture of his, ‘He loves me,’ she said to herself. And Brian? But Brian’s absence seemed to have been raised to a higher power. He was not there with an unprecedented intensity, not there to the point of never having been there. All that was really there was this living presence beside her – the presence of desire, the presence of hands and mouth, the presence, potential but waiting, waiting to actualize itself again, of those kisses. She felt her breast lift, though she was unaware of having taken a deep breath; it was as though someone else had drawn it. ‘He loves me,’ she repeated; it was a justification. She dropped her hands from her face, looked at him for a moment, then reached out and, whispering his name, drew his head down towards her.
‘Well, what’s the result?’ Mary called from the sofa as he entered. By the gloomy expression on Anthony’s face she judged that it was she who had won the bet; and this annoyed her. She felt suddenly very angry with him – doubly and trebly angry; because he was so spiritless; because he hadn’t cared enough for her to win his bet in spite of the spiritlessness; because he was forcing upon her a gesture which she didn’t in the least want to make. After a day’s motoring with him in the country she had come to the conclusion that Sidney Gattick was absolutely insufferable. By contrast, Anthony seemed the most charming of men. She didn’t want to banish him, even temporarily. But her threat had been solemn and explicit; if she didn’t carry it out, at least in part, all her authority was gone. And now the wretch was forcing her to keep her word. In a tone of angry reproach, ‘You’ve been a coward and lost,’ she said. ‘I can see it.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I’ve won.’
Mary regarded him doubtfully. ‘I believe you’re lying.’
‘I’m not.’ He sat down beside her on the sofa.
‘Well, then, why do you look so glum? It’s not very flattering to me.’
‘Why on earth did you make me do it?’ he burst out. ‘It was idiotic.’ It had also been wrong; but Mary would only laugh if he said that. ‘I always knew it was idiotic. But you insisted.’ His voice was shrill with a complaining resentment. ‘And now God knows where I’ve landed myself.’ Where he’d landed Joan and Brian, for that matter. ‘God knows.’
‘But explain,’ cried Mary Amberley, ‘explain! Don’t talk like a minor prophet.’ Her eyes were bright with laughing curiosity. She divined some delightfully involved and fantastic situation. ‘Explain,’ she repeated.
‘Well, I did what you told me,’ he answered sullenly.
‘Hero!’
‘There’s nothing funny about it.’
‘What! did you get your face slapped?’
Anthony frowned angrily and shook his head.
‘Then how did she take it?’
‘That’s just the trouble: she took it seriously.’
‘Seriously?’ Mary questioned. ‘You mean, she threatened to tell papa?’
‘I mean, she thought I was in love with her. She wants to break it off with Brian.’
Mrs Amberley threw back her head and gave utterance to a peal of her clear, richly vibrant laughter.
Anthony felt outraged. ‘It’s not a joke.’
‘That’s where you make your mistake.’ Mary wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘It’s one of the best jokes I ever heard. But what do you propose to do?’
‘I shall have to tell her it’s all a mistake.’
‘That’ll be an admirable scene!’
He shook his head. ‘I shall write a letter.’
‘Courageous, as usual!’ She patted his knee. ‘But now I want to hear the details. How was it that you let her go as far as she did? To the point of thinking you were in love with her. To the point of wanting to break it off with Brian. Couldn’t you nip it in the bud?’
‘It was difficult,’ he muttered, avoiding her inquisitive eye. ‘The situation . . . well, it got a bit out of control.’
‘You mean, you lost your head?’
‘If you like to put it that way,’ he admitted reluctantly, thinking what a fool he had been, what an utter fool. He ought, of course, to have retreated when she turned towards him in the darkness; he ought to have refused her kisses, to have made it quite clear that his own had been light-hearted and without significance. But instead of that he had accepted them: out of laziness and cowardice, because it had been too much of an effort to make the necessary and necessarily difficult explanation; out of a certain weak and misplaced kindness of heart, because it would have hurt and humiliated her if he had said no – and to inflict a suffering he could actually witness was profoundly distasteful to him. And having accepted, he had enjoyed her kisses, had returned them with a fervour which he knew to be the result only of a detached, a momentary sensuality, but which Joan, it was obvious now (and he had known it even at the time), would inevitably regard as being roused specifically by herself, as having her for its special and irreplaceable object. An impartial observer would say that he had done his best, had gone out of his way, to create the greatest possible amount of misunderstanding in the shortest possible time.
‘How do you propose to get out of it?’ Mary asked.
He hated her for putting the question that was tormenting him. ‘I shall write her a letter,’ he said. As though that were an answer!
‘And what will Brian say about it?’
‘I’m going to stay with him tomorrow,’ he replied irrelevantly. ‘In the Lakes.’
‘Like Wö-ödsworth,’ said Mary. ‘What fun that’ll be! And what exactly do you propose to tell him about Joan?’ she went on inexorably.
‘Oh, I shall explain.’
‘But suppose Joan explains first – in a different way?’
He shook his head. ‘I told her I didn’t want her to write to Brian before I’d talked to him.’
‘And you think she’ll do what you ask?’
‘Why shouldn’t she?’
Mary shrugged her shoulders and looked at him, smiling crookedly, her eyes bright between narrowed eyelids. ‘Why should she, if it comes to that?’
CHAPTER XXXIV
March 3rd 1928
‘REORGANIZATION . . .’ ‘Readjustment . . .’ ‘Writing down of capital values in the light of existing trade conditions . . .’ Anthony lifted his eyes from the printed page. Propped up on her pillows, Mary Amberley was staring at him, he found, with an embarrassing intentness.
‘Well?’ she asked, leaning forward. Hennaed to an impossible orange, a lock of tousled hair fell drunkenly across her forehead. Her bed-jacket opened as she moved; under soiled lace, the breasts swung heavily towards him. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means that they’re going bankrupt on you.’
‘Going bankrupt?’
‘Paying you six and eightpence in the pound.’
‘But Gerry told me they were doing so well,’ she protested in a tone of angry complaint.
‘Gerry doesn’t know everything,’ he charitably explained.
But, of course, the ruffian had known only too well; had known, had acted on his knowledge, had been duly paid by the people who wanted to unload their shares before the crash came. ‘Why don’t you ask him about it?’ he said aloud, and in a tone that implied some of the resentment he felt at having been dragged, this very evening of his return from New York, into the entanglements of Mary’s squalid tragedy. Everyone else, he supposed, had fled from her since she’d started taking that morphia; alone of all her friends, having been out of England for half a year, he had had as yet no opportunity and been given no reason to flee. Absence had preserved their friendship, as though in cold storage, in the state it was in before he left. When she had asked him urgently to come and see her, he had no excuse to refuse. Besides, people exaggerated; she couldn’t be as bad as they made out.
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ he repeated irritably.
‘He’s gone to Canada.’
‘Oh, he’s gone to Canada.’
There was a silence. He laid the paper down on the coverlet. Mrs Amberley picked it up and re-read it – for the hundredth time, in the absurd and desperate hope that there might, this hundredth time, be something new in it, something different.
Anthony looked at her. The lamp on the bed-table lit up the profile she presented to him with a ruthlessly revealing brilliance. How hollow the cheeks were! And those lines round the mouth, those discoloured pouches of skin beneath the eyes! Remembering how she looked when he had seen her last, that time in Berkshire, only the previous summer, Anthony was appalled. The drug had aged her twenty years in half as many months.
And it was not only her body that had been ravaged; the morphia had also changed her character, transformed her into someone else, someone (there had been no exaggeration at all) much worse. That engaging absence of mind, for example, that vagueness, of which, as of yet another feminine allurement, she always used to be so irritatingly vain, had now degenerated into almost an idiot’s indifference. She forgot, she wasn’t aware; above all, she didn’t care, she couldn’t any longer be bothered. Grotesquely dyed (in the hope, he supposed, of regaining some of the attractiveness which she could not help noticing that she had lost), the hair was greasy and uncombed.
A smear of red paint, clumsily laid on, enlarged her lower lip
