Slug-abed habits were not the only things in Mary that distressed him. During those first months of their marriage he was often, secretly and against his own principles, shocked by her. Mary soon learnt to recognize the signs of his unexpressed disapproval and made a point, when she saw that she had shocked him, of shocking him yet more profoundly. The operation, she thought, did him nothing but good.
‘You’re such an absurd old puritan,’ she told him.
The taunt annoyed him, because he knew it was well founded. By birth, to some extent, and yet more by training, he was half a puritan. His father had died when he was only a child and he had been brought up exclusively by a virtuous and religious mother who had done her best to abolish, to make him deny the existence of all the instinctive and physical components of his being. Growing up, he had revolted against her teaching, but with the mind only, not in practice. The conception of life against which he had rebelled was a part of him; he was at war against himself. Theoretically, he approved of Mary’s easy aristocratic tolerance of behaviour which his mother had taught him was horribly sinful; he admired her unaffected enjoyment of food and wine and kisses, of dancing and singing, fairs and theatres and every kind of jollification.
And yet, whenever, in those early days, she began to talk in her calm matter-of-fact way of what he had only heard of, portentously, as fornication and adultery, he felt a shock, not in his reason (for that, after a moment’s reflection, approved), but in some deeper layer of his being. And the same part of him obscurely suffered from her great and whole-heartedly expressed capacity for pleasure and amusement, from her easy laughter, her excellent appetite, her unaffected sensuality. It took him a long time to unlearn the puritanism of his childhood. There were moments when his love for his mother turned almost to hatred.
‘She had no right to bring me up like that,’ he said. ‘Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree. No right.’
And yet he was glad that he had not been born a noble savage, like Mary. He was glad that circumstances had compelled him laboriously to learn his noble savagery. Later, when they had been married several years and had achieved an intimacy impossible in those first months of novelties, shocks and surprises, he was able to talk to her about these matters.
‘Living comes to you too easily,’ he tried to explain. ‘You live by instinct. You know what to do quite naturally, like an insect when it comes out of the pupa. It’s too simple, too simple.’ He shook his head. ‘You haven’t earned your knowledge; you’ve never realized the alternatives.’
‘In other words,’ said Mary, ‘I’m a fool.’
‘No, a woman.’
‘Which is your polite way of saying the same thing. But I’d like to know,’ she went on with an irrelevance that was only apparent, ‘where you’d be without me. I’d like to know what you’d be doing if you’d never met me.’ She moved from stage to stage of an emotionally coherent argument.
‘I’d be where I am and be doing exactly what I’m doing now.’ He didn’t mean it, of course; for he knew, better than anyone, how much he owed to her, how much he had learnt from her example and precept. But it amused him to annoy her.
‘You know that’s not true,’ Mary was indignant.
‘It is true.’
‘It’s a lie. And to prove it,’ she added, ‘I’ve a very good mind to go away with the children and leave you for a few months to stew in your own juice. I’d like to see how you get on without me.’
‘I should get on perfectly well,’ he assured her with exasperating calmness.
Mary flushed; she was beginning to be genuinely annoyed.’very well then,’ she answered, ‘ I’ll really go. This time I really will.’ She had made the threat before; they quarrelled a good deal, for both were quick-tempered.
‘Do,’ said Rampion. ‘But remember that two can play at that going-away game. When you go away from me, I go away from you.’
‘We’ll see how you get on without me,’ she continued menacingly.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘What about me?’
‘Do you imagine you can get on any better without me than I can get on without you?’
They looked at one another for a little time in silence and then, simultaneously, burst out laughing.
CHAPTER X
A regular technique,’ Spandrell repeated. ‘One chooses them unhappy, or dissatisfied, or wanting to go on the stage, or trying to write for the magazines and being rejected and consequently thinking they’re dmes incomprises.’ He was boastfully generalizing from the case of poor little Harriet Watkins. If he had just baldly recounted his affair with Harriet, it wouldn’t have sounded such a very grand exploit. Harriet was such a pathetic, helpless little creature; anybody could have done her down. But generalized like this, as though her case was only one of hundreds, told in a language of the cookery book (‘one chooses them unhappy’—it was one of Mrs. Beeton’s recipes), the history sounded, he thought, most cynically impressive. ‘And one starts by being very, very kind, and so wise, and perfectly pure, an elder brother, in fact.
And they think one’s really wonderful, because, of course, they’ve never met anybody who wasn’t just a city man, with city ideas and city ambitions. Simply wonderful, because one knows all about art and has met all the celebrities and doesn’t think exclusively about money and in terms of the morning paper. And they’re a little in awe of one too,’ he added remembering little Harriet’s expression of scared admiration; ‘one’s so unrespectable and yet so high-class, so at ease and at home among the great works and the great men, so wicked but so extraordinarily good, so learned, so well travelled, so brilliantly cosmopolitan and West-End (have you ever heard a suburban talking of the West-End?), like that gentleman with the order of the Golden Fleece in the advertisements for De Reszke cigarettes. Yes, they’re in awe of one; but at the same time they adore. One’s so understanding, one knows so much about life in general and their souls in particular, and one isn’t a bit flirtatious or saucy like ordinary men, not a bit.
They feel they could trust one absolutely; and so they can, for the first weeks. One has to get them used to the trap; quite tame and trusting, trained not to shy at an occasional brotherly pat on the back or an occasional chaste uncle-ish kiss on the forehead. And meanwhile one coaxes out their little confidences, one makes them talk about love, one talks about it oneself in a man-to-man sort of way, as though they were one’s own age and as sadly disillusioned and bitterly knowing as oneself—which they find terribly shocking (though of course they don’t say so), but oh, so thrilling, so enormously flattering. They simply love you for that. Well then, finally, when the moment seems ripe and they’re thoroughly domesticated and no more frightened, one stages the denouement. Tea in one’s rooms—one’s got them thoroughly used to coming with absolute impunity to one’s rooms—and they’re going to go out to dinner with one, so that there’s no hurry. The twilight deepens, one talks disillusionedly and yet feelingly about the amorous mysteries, one produces cocktailsvery strong—and goes on talking so that they ingurgitate them absentmindedly without reflection.
And sitting on the floor at their feet, one begins very gently stroking their ankles in an entirely platonic way, still talking about amorous philosophy, as though one were quite unconscious of what one’s hand were doing. If that’s not resented and the cocktails have done their work, the rest shouldn’t be difficult. So at least I’ve always found.’ Spandrell helped himself to more brandy and drank. ‘But it’s then, when they’ve become one’s mistress that the fun really begins. It’s then one deploys all one’s Socratic talents. One develops their little temperaments, one domesticates them—still so wisely and sweetly and patiently—to every outrage of sensuality. It can be done, you know; the more easily, the more innocent they are. They can be brought in perfect ingenuousness to the most astonishing pitch of depravity.’
‘I’ve no doubt they can,’ said Mary indignantly. ‘But what’s the point of doing it?’
‘It’s an amusement,’ said Spandrell with theatrical cynicism. ‘It passes the time and relieves the tedium.’
‘And above all,’ Mark Rampion went on, without looking up from his coffee cup, ‘ above all it’s a vengeance. It’s a way of getting one’s own back on women, it’s a way of punishing them for being women and so attractive, it’s a way of expressing one’s hatred of them and of what they represent, it’s a way of i expressing one’s hatred of oneself. The trouble with I you, Spandrell,’ he went on, suddenly and accusingly raising his bright pale eyes to the other’s face, ‘is that you really hate yourself. You hate the very source of your life, its ultimate basis—for there’s no denying it,’sex is fundamental. And you hate it, hate
