‘I shall have to go.’
But before he could rise, Mrs Amberley had quickly leaned forward and laid her hands on his shoulders.
‘No, don’t go. You mustn’t go.’ She tried to repeat that laughingly voluptuous invitation, but could not prevent a profound anxiety from showing in her eyes.
Anthony shook his head and, in spite of that sickening smell of ether, did his best to smile as he lied about the supper-party he had promised to join at eleven. Gently, but with a firm and decided movement, he lifted her confining hands and stood up by the side of the bed.
‘Good-night, dear Mary!’ The tone of his voice was warm; he could afford to be affectionate, now. ‘Bon courage!’ he squeezed her hands; then, bending down, kissed first one, then the other. Now that he was on his feet, and with the road to freedom clear before him, he felt at liberty to plunge into almost any emotional extravagance. But, instead of taking the cue, Mary Amberley returned him a look that had now become fixed and as though stony with unwavering misery. The mask he had adjusted to be so radiant with whimsical affectionateness seemed all of a sudden horribly out of keeping with the real situation. He could feel its irrelevance, physically, in the muscles of his face. Fool, hypocrite, coward! But it was almost at a run that he made towards the door and hurried down the stairs.
‘If a woman,’ Helen was reading in the Encyclopaedia, ‘administers to herself any poison or other noxious thing, or unlawfully uses any instrument or other means to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of . . .’ The sound of Anthony’s feet on the stairs caught her ear. She rose, and quickly walked to the door and out on to the landing.
‘Well?’ She smiled no greeting in answer to his, simulated no pleasure at seeing him. The face she lifted was as tragically naked of all the conventional grimaces as her mother’s had been.
‘But what’s the matter, Helen?’ he was startled into exclaiming. She looked at him for a few seconds in silence, then shook her head and began to ask him about those shares, the whole financial position.
Obviously, he was thinking as he answered her questions, one would expect her to find it all very upsetting. But upsetting to this point – he looked at her again: no – one wouldn’t have expected that. It wasn’t as if the girl had ever had a wild devotion for her mother. In the teeth of Mary’s ferocious egotism, how could she? And after all, it was nearly a year since the wretched woman had started on her morphia. One would think that by this time the horror would have lost some of its intensity. And yet he had never seen an unhappier face. Such youth, such freshness – it wasn’t right that they should be associated with an expression of so intense a despair. The sight of her made him feel somehow guilty – guiltily responsible. But when he made another gesture of enquiring sympathy, she only shook her head again and turned away.
‘You’d better go,’ she said.
Anthony hesitated a moment, then went. After all, she wanted him to go. Still feeling guilty, but with a sense of profound relief, he closed the front door behind him, and, drawing a deep breath, set off towards the Underground station.
Helen went back to her volume of the Encyclopaedia ‘. . . to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of felony. The punishment for this offence is penal servitude for life, or not less than three years, or imprisonment for not more than two years. If the child is born alive . . .’ But they didn’t say which the proper poisons were, nor what sort of instruments you had to use, and how. Only this stupid nonsense about penal servitude. Yet another loophole of escape had closed against her. It was as though the whole world had conspired to shut her in with her own impossibly appalling secret.
Melodiously, the clock in the back drawing-room struck eleven. Helen rose, put the heavy volume back in its place, and went upstairs to her mother’s room.
With an unwontedly careful precision of movement, Mrs Amberley was engaged, when her daughter entered, in filling a hypodermic syringe from a little glass ampoule. She started as the door opened, looked up, made a movement as if to hide syringe and ampoule under the bedclothes, then, fearful of spilling any of the precious liquor, checked herself in the midst of her gesture.
‘Go away!’ she called angrily. ‘Why do you come in without knocking? I won’t have you coming into my room without knocking,’ she repeated more shrilly, glad of the excuse she had discovered for her fury.
Helen stood for a second or two in the doorway, quite still, as if incredulous of the evidence of her own eyes; then hurried across the room.
‘Give those things to me,’ she said, holding out her hand.
Mrs Amberley shrank back towards the wall. ‘Go away!’ she shouted.
‘But you promised . . .’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did, Mummy.’
‘I did not. And, anyhow, I shall do what I like.’
Without speaking, Helen reached out and caught her mother by the wrist. Mrs Amberley screamed so loudly that, fearful lest the servants should come down to see what was the matter, Helen relaxed her grip.
Mrs Amberley stopped screaming; but the look she turned on Helen was terrifying in its malevolence. ‘If you make me spill any of this,’ she said in a voice that trembled with rage, ‘I shall kill you. Kill you,’ she repeated.
They looked at one another for a moment without speaking. It was Helen who broke the silence. ‘You’d like to kill me,’ she said slowly, ‘because I don’t let you kill yourself.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, I suppose if you really want to kill yourself . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished.
Mrs Amberley stared at her in silence. ‘If you really want . . .’ She remembered the words she had spoken to Anthony only a few minutes since, and suddenly the tears ran down her cheeks. She was overwhelmed with self-pity. ‘Do you think I want to do this?’ she said brokenly. ‘I hate it, I absolutely hate it. But I can’t help it.’
Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Helen put her arm round her mother’s shoulders. ‘Mummy darling!’ she implored. ‘Don’t cry. It’ll be all right.’ She was profoundly moved.
‘It’s all Gerry’s fault,’ Mrs Amberley cried; and without noticing the little shuddering start Helen gave, ‘everything’s his fault,’ she went on. ‘Everything. I always knew he was a beast. Even when I cared for him most.’
As though her mother had suddenly become a stranger whom it was not right to be touching so intimately, Helen withdrew her encircling arm. ‘You cared for him?’ she whispered incredulously. ‘In that way?’
Answering quite a different question, parrying a reproach that had never been made, ‘I couldn’t help it,’ Mrs Amberley replied. ‘It was like this.’ She made a little movement with the hand that held the hypodermic syringe.
‘You mean,’ said Helen, speaking very slowly, and as though overcoming an almost invincible reluctance, ‘you mean he was . . . he was your lover?’
The strangeness of the tone aroused Mrs Amberley, for the first time since their conversation had begun, to something like a consciousness of her daughter’s real, personal existence. Turning, she looked at Helen with an expression of astonishment. ‘You didn’t know?’ Confronted by that extraordinary pallor, those uncontrollably trembling lips, the older woman was seized with a sudden compunction. ‘But, darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t imagine . . . You’re still so young; you don’t understand. You can’t . . . But where are you going? Come back! Helen!’
The door slammed. Mrs Amberley made a move to follow her daughter, then thought better of it, and, instead, resumed the interrupted task of filling her hypodermic syringe.
CHAPTER XXXV
August 4th 1934
RETURNED DEPRESSED from an evening with Helen and half a dozen of her young political friends. Such a passion for ‘liquidating’ the people who don’t agree with them! And such a sincere conviction that liquidation is necessary!
Revolting – but only to be expected. Regard the problem of reform exclusively as a matter of politics and economics, and you must approve and practise liquidation.
Consider recent history. Industrialism has grown pari passu with population. Now, where markets are expanding, the two besetting problems of all industrial societies solve themselves. New inventions may create technological unemployment; but expanding markets cure it as it’s made. Each individual may possess inadequate purchasing power; but the total number of individuals is steadily rising. Many small purchasing powers do as much as fewer big ones.
Our population is now stationary, will soon decline. Shrinkage instead of expansion of markets. Therefore, no more automatic solution of economic problems. Birth control necessitates the use of co-ordinating political intelligence. There must be a large-scale plan. Otherwise the machine won’t work. In other words, politicians will have to be about twenty times as intelligent as heretofore. Will the supply of intelligence be equal to the demand?
And of course intelligence, as Miller’s always insisting, isn’t isolated. The act of intelligently planning modifies the emotions of the planners. Consider English politics. We’ve made plenty of reforms – without ever accepting the principles underlying them. (Compare
