The blood rushed to his face; but he tried to keep up the pretence. ‘How could I what? ‘ he asked.
‘You’ve been to see that woman again.’
‘But what are you talking about?’ He knew it was useless; but he went on pretending all the same.
‘It’s no use lying.’ She got up so suddenly that her work basket overturned and scattered its contents on the floor. Unheeding, she walked across the room. ‘Go away!’ she cried, when he tried to follow her. Walter shrugged his shoulders and obeyed. ‘How could you?’ she went on. ‘Coming home reeking of her perfume.’ So it was the gardenias. What a fool he was not to have foreseen….’After all you said last night. How could you?’
‘But if you’d let me explain,’ he protested in the tone of a victim—an exasperated victim.
‘Explain why you lied,’ she said bitterly. ‘Explain why you broke your promise.’
Her contemptuous anger evoked an answering anger in Walter. ‘Merely explain,’ he said with hard and dangerous politeness. What a bore she was with her scenes and jealousies! What an intolerable, infuriating bore!
‘Merely go on lying,’ she mocked.
Again he shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you like to put it like that,’ he said politely.
‘Just a despicable liar—that’s what you are.’ And turning away from him, she covered her face with her hands and began to cry.
Walter was not touched. The sight of her heaving shoulders just exasperated and bored him. He looked at her with a cold and weary anger.
‘Go away,’ she cried through her tears, ‘go away.’ She did not want him to be there, triumphing over her, while she cried. ‘Go away.’
‘Do you really want me to go?’ he asked with the same cool, aggravating politeness.
‘Yes, go, go.’
‘Very well,’ he said and opening the door, he went.
At Camden Town he took a cab and was at Bruton Street just in time to find Lucy on the point of going out to dinner.
‘You’re coming out with me,’ he announced very calmly.
‘Alas!’
‘Yes, you are.’
She looked at him curiously and he looked back at her, with steady eyes, smiling, with a queer look of amused triumph and invincible obstinate power, which she had never seen on his face before. ‘All right,’ she said at last and, ringing for the maid, ‘Telephone to Lady Sturlett, will you,’ she ordered, ‘and say I’m sorry, but I’ve got a very bad headache and can’t come to-night.’ The maid retired. ‘Well, are you grateful now?’
‘I’m beginning to be,’ he answered.
‘Beginning?’ She assumed indignation. ‘I like your damned impertinence.’
‘I know you do,’ said Walter, laughing. And she did. That night Lucy became his mistress.
It was between three and four in the afternoon. Spandrell had only just got out of bed. He was still unshaved; over his pyjamas he wore a dressing-gown of rough brown cloth, like a monk’s cassock. (The monastic note was studied; he liked to remind himself of the ascetics. He liked, rather childishly, to play the part of the anchorite of diabolism.) He had filled the kettle and was waiting for it to boil on the gas ring. It seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time about it. His mouth was dry and haunted by a taste like the fumes of heated brass. The brandy was having its usual effects.
‘Like as the hart desireth the water brooks,’ he said to himself,’so longeth my soul…With a morningafter thirst. If only Grace could be bottled like Perrier water.’
He walked to the window. Outside a radius of fifty yards everything in the universe had been abolished by the white mist. But how insistently that lamp-post thrust itself up in front of the next house on the right, how significantly! The world had been destroyed and only the lamp-post, like Noah, preserved from the universal cataclysm. And he had never even noticed there was a lamp-post there; it simply hadn’t existed until this moment. And now it was the only thing that existed. Spandrell looked at it with a fixed and breathless attention. This lamp-post alone in the mist—hadn’t he seen something like it before? This queer sensation of being with the sole survivor of the Deluge was somehow familiar. Staring at the lamp-post, he tried to remember.
Or rather he breathlessly didn’t try; he held back his will and his conscious thoughts, as a policeman might hold back the crowd round a woman who had fainted in the street; he held back his consciousness to give the stunned memory a place to stretch itself, to breathe, to come to life. Staring at the lamp-post, Spandrell waited, agonized and patient, like a man who feels he is just going to sneeze, tremulously awaiting the anticipated paroxysm; waited for the long-dead memory to revive. And suddenly it sprang up, broad awake, out of its catalepsy and, with a sense of enormous relief, Spandrell saw himself walking up the steep hard-trodden snow of the road leading from Cortina towards the pass of Falzarego.
A cold white cloud had descended on to the valley. There were no more mountains. The fantastic coral pinnacles of the Dolomites had been abolished. There were no more heights and depths. The world was only fifty paces wide, white snow on the ground, white cloud around and above. And every now and then, against the whiteness appeared some dark shape of house or telegraph pole, of tree or man or sledge, portentous in its isolation and uniqueness, each one a solitary survivor from the general wreck. It was uncanny, but how thrillingly new and how beautiful in a strange way! The walk was an adventure; he felt excited and a kind of anxiety intensified his happiness till he could hardly bear it.
‘But look at that little chalet on the left,’ he cried to his mother. ‘That wasn’t here when I came up last. I swear it wasn’t here.’
He knew the road perfectly, he had been up and down it a hundred times and never seen that little chalet. And now it loomed up almost appallingly, the only dark and definite thing in a vague world of whiteness.
‘Yes, I’ve never noticed it, either,’ said his mother. ‘Which only shows,’ she added with that note of tenderness which always came into her voice when she mentioned her dead husband, ‘ how right your father was. Mistrust all evidence, he used to say, even your own.’
He took her hand and they walked on together in silence, pulling their sledges after them.
Spandrell turned away from the window. The kettle was boiling. He filled the tea-pot, poured himself out a cup and drank. Symbolically enough, his thirst remained unassuaged. He went on sipping, meditatively, remembering and analysing those quite incredible felicities of his boyhood. Winters among the Dolomites. Springs in Tuscany or Provence or Bavaria, summers by the Mediterranean or in Savoy. After his father’s death and before he went to school, they lived almost continuously abroad—it was cheaper. And almost all his holidays from school were spent out of England. From seven to fifteen, he had moved from one European beauty spot to another, appreciating their beauty, what was more—genuinely, a precocious Childe Harold.
England seemed a little tame afterwards. He thought of another day in winter. Not misty, this time, but brilliant; the sun hot in a cloudless sky; the coral precipices of the Dolomites shining pink and orange and white above the woods and the snow slopes. They were sliding down on skis through the bare larchwoods. Streaked with tree-shadows, the snow was like an immense white and blue tiger-skin beneath their feet. The sunlight was orange among the leafless twigs, sea-green in the hanging beards of moss. The powdery snow sizzled under their skis, the air was at once warm and eager. And when he emerged from the woods the great rolling slopes lay before him like the contours of a wonderful body, and the virgin snow was a smooth skin, delicately grained in the low afternoon sunlight, and twinkling with diamonds and spangles.
He had gone ahead. At the outskirts of the wood he halted to wait for his mother. Looking back he watched her coming through the trees. A strong tall figure, still young and agile, the young face puckered into a smile. Down she came towards him, and she was the most beautiful and at the same time the most homely and comforting and familiar of beings. ‘Well!’ she said, laughing, as she drew up beside him
‘Well!’ He looked at her and then at the snow and the tree-shadows and the great bare rocks and the blue sky, then back again at his mother. And all at once he was filled with an intense, inexplicable happiness.
‘I shall never be so happy as this again,’ he said to himself, when they set off once more. ‘Never again, even though I live to be a hundred.’ He was only fifteen at the time, but that was how he felt and thought.
And his words had been prophetic. That was the last of his happinesses. Afterwards…No, no. He preferred not to think of afterwards. Not at the moment. He poured himself out another cup of tea.
A bell rang startlingly. He went to the door of the flat and opened it. It was his mother.
‘You?’ Then he suddenly remembered that Lucy had said something.
‘Didn’t you get my message?’ Mrs. Knoyle asked anxiously.
‘Yes. But I’d clean forgotten.’
‘But I thought you needed…’ she began. She was afraid she might have intruded; his face was so unwelcoming.
The corners of his mouth ironically twitched. ‘I do need,’ he said. He was chronically penniless.
They passed into the other room. The windows, Mrs. Knoyle observed at a glance, were
