With a sudden movement, Mrs Amberley crumpled up the paper and threw it from her. ‘That beast! He absolutely forced me to put my money into this. And now look what’s happened!’ The tears overflowed, carrying the black of her painted eyelashes in long sooty trickles down her cheeks.
‘He did it on purpose,’ she went on through her angry sobbing. ‘Just in order to harm me. He’s a sadist, really. He likes hurting people. He does it for pleasure.’
‘For profit,’ Anthony almost said; but checked himself. She seemed to derive some consolation from the thought that she had been swindled, not from vulgarly commercial motives, but gratuitously, because of a fiendishness allied to and springing from the passion of love. It would be unkind to deprive her of that illusion. Let the poor woman think the thoughts she found least painfully humiliating. Besides, the less she was contradicted and diverted, the sooner, it might be hoped, would she stop. Prudently as well as considerately, he contented himself with a non-committal nod.
‘When I think of all I did for that man!’ Mrs Amberley burst out. But while she recited her incoherent catalogue of generosities and kindnesses, Anthony could not help thinking of what the man had done for her; above all, of the terms in which Gerry was accustomed to describe what he had done. Gross, extravagantly cynical terms. Terms of an incredible blackguardism. One was startled, one was set free into sudden laughter; and one was ashamed that such inadmissible brutalities should contain any element of liberating truth. And yet they were true.
‘All the most intelligent people in London,’ Mrs Amberley was sobbing. ‘He met them all at my house.’
‘These old hags!’ Gerry Watchett’s voice sounded clearly in Anthony’s memory. ‘They’ll do anything to get it, absolutely anything.’
‘Not that he ever appreciated them,’ she went on. ‘He was too stupid for that, too barbarous.’
‘Not a bad old bitch really, if she gets enough of it to keep her quiet. The problem is to give her enough. It’s uphill work, I can tell you.’
The tone changed from anger to self-pity. ‘But what shall I do?’ she wailed. ‘What can I do? Without a penny. Living on charity.’
He tried to reassure her. There was still something. Quite a decent little sum, really. She would never starve. If she lived carefully, if she economized . . .
‘But I shall have to give up this house,’ she interrupted, and, when he agreed that of course she would have to give it up, broke out into new and louder lamentations. Giving up the house was worse than being penniless and living on charity – worse, because more conceivable, a contingency nearer to the realities of her actual life. Without her pictures, without her furniture, how could she live? She was made physically ill by ugliness. And then small rooms – she developed claustrophobia in small rooms. And how could she possibly manage without her books? How did he expect her to work, when she was poor? For of course she was going to work; had already planned to write a critical study of the modern French novel. Yes, how did he expect her to do that, if he deprived her of her books?
Anthony stirred impatiently in his chair. ‘I don’t expect you to do anything,’ he said. ‘I’m simply telling you what you’ll find you’ve got to do.’
There was a long silence. Then, with a little smile that she tried to make ingratiating and appealing, ‘Now you’re angry with me,’ she said.
‘Not in the least. I’m merely asking you to face the facts.’ He rose, and feeling himself in danger of being inextricably entangled in Mary’s misfortune, symbolically asserted his right to be free by walking restlessly up and down the room. ‘I ought to talk to her about the morphia,’ he was thinking; ‘try to persuade her to go into a home and get cured. For her own sake. For the sake of poor Helen.’ But he knew Mary. She’d start to protest, she’d scream, she’d fly into a rage. It would be like a public-house brawl. Or worse, much worse, he thought with a shudder, she’d repent, she’d make promises, she’d melt into tears. He would find himself her only friend, her moral support for life. In the end, he said nothing. ‘It wouldn’t do any good,’ he assured himself. ‘It never does do any good with these morphia cases.’ ‘One’s got to come to terms with reality,’ he said aloud. Meaningless platitude – but what else was there to say?
Unexpectedly, with a submissive alacrity that he found positively disquieting, she agreed with him. Oh, absolutely agreed! It was no use crying over spilt milk. No use building castles in the air. What was needed was a plan – lots of plans – serious, practical, sensible plans for the new life. She smiled at him with an air of connivance, as though they were a pair of conspirators.
Reluctantly, and with mistrust, he accepted her invitation to sit on the edge of the bed. The plans unfolded themselves – serious to a degree. A little flat in Hampstead. Or else a tiny house in one of those slummy streets off the King’s Road, Chelsea. She could still give an occasional party, very cheaply. The real friends would come, in spite of the cheapness – wouldn’t they? she insisted with a rather pathetic anxiety to be reassured.
‘Of course,’ he had to say; though it wasn’t the cheapness that would put them off; it was the dirt, the squalor, the morphia, this sickening smell of ether on the breath.
‘One can have bottle parties,’ she was saying. ‘It’ll be fun!’ Her face brightened. ‘What sort of bottle will you bring, Anthony?’ And before he could answer, ‘We shall get infinitely tight with all those mixed drinks,’ she went on. ‘Infinitely . . .’ A moment later she had begun to tell him about the advances that George Wyvern had taken it into his head to make to her these days. Rather embarrassing, in the circumstances – seeing that Sally Wyvern was also . . . well! She smiled that enigmatic smile of hers, close-lipped and between half-shut eyelids. And what was really too extraordinary, even old Hugh Ledwidge had recently shown signs . . .
Anthony listened in astonishment. Those pathetically few real friends had been transformed, as though by magic, into positively a host of eager lovers. Did she seriously believe in her own inventions? But anyhow, he went on to think, it didn’t seem to matter whether she believed in them or not. Even unbelieved, these fictions evidently had power to raise her spirits, to restore her, at least for the moment, to a state of cheerful self-confidence.
‘That time in Paris,’ she was saying intimately. ‘Do you remember?’
But this was awful!
‘The Hôtel des Saints-Pères.’ Her voice deepened and vibrated with a subterranean laughter.
Anthony nodded without raising his head. She had obviously wanted him to echo her hint of significant mirth, to take up the scabrous reference to that old joke of theirs about the Holy Fathers and their own amusements under that highecclesiastical patronage. In their private language, ‘doing a slight Holy Father,’ or, yet more idiomatically, ‘doing Holiers,’ had signified ‘making love.’ He frowned, feeling suddenly very angry. How did she dare . . .?
The seconds passed. Making a desperate effort to fill the icy gulf of his silence, ‘We had a lot of fun,’ said Mary in a tone of sentimental reminiscence.
‘A lot,’ he repeated, as unemphatically as possible.
Suddenly she took his hand. ‘Dear Anthony!’
‘Oh, God!’ he thought, and tried, as politely as might be, to withdraw. But the clasp of those hot dry fingers never relaxed.
‘We were fools to quarrel,’ she went on. ‘Or rather, I was a fool.’
‘Not at all,’ he said politely.
‘That stupid bet,’ she shook her head. ‘And Sidney . . .’
‘You did what you wanted to do.’
‘I did what I didn’t want to do,’ she answered quickly. ‘One’s always doing things one doesn’t want – stupidly, out of sheer perversity. One chooses the worse just because it is the worse. Hyperion to a satyr – and therefore the satyr.’
‘But for certain purposes,’ he couldn’t resist saying, ‘the satyr may be more satisfactory.’
Ignoring his words, Mary sighed and shut her eyes.
‘Doing what one doesn’t want,’ she repeated, as though to herself. ‘Always doing what one doesn’t want.’ She released his hand, and, clasping her own behind her head, leaned back against the pillows in the attitude, the known and familiar attitude, that in the Hôtel des Saints-Pères had been so delicious in its graceful indolence, so wildly exciting because of that white round throat stretched back like a victim’s, those proffered breasts, lifted and taut beneath the lace. But today the lace was soiled and torn, the breasts hung tired under their own weight, the victim throat was no more a smooth column of white flesh, but withered, wrinkled, hollow between starting tendons.
She opened her eyes, and, with a start, he recognized the look she gave him as the same, identically the same look, at once swooning and cynical, humorous and languidly abandoned, as
