‘And big Philip?’ she now asked.
‘You see how well he looks,’ Elinor answered for his health, though she knew that the question had not concerned his bodily wellbeing. It was with a certain dread that she looked forward to the conversation that impended. At the same time, however, she was glad to have an opportunity of discussing that which so constantly and distressingly occupied her thoughts.
‘Yes, yes, I can see that,’ said Mrs. Quarles. ‘But what I really meant was: how is he in himself? How is he with you?’
There was a silence. Elinor frowned slightly and looked at the floor. ‘Remote,’ she said at last.
Mrs. Quarles sighed. ‘He was always that,’ she said. ‘Always remote.’
He too, it seemed to her, was lacking in something—in the desire and the capacity to give himself, to go out and meet his fellows, even those who loved him, even those he loved. Geoffrey had been so different. At the memory of her dead son Mrs. Quarles felt her whole being invaded by a poignant sadness. If anyone had suggested that she had loved him more than she loved Philip, she would have protested. Her own feelings, she felt sure, had been initially the same. But Geoffrey had permitted himself to be loved more fully, more intimately than his brother. If only Philip had allowed her to love him more! But there had always been barriers between them, barriers of his erecting. Geoffrey had come out to meet her, had given that he might receive. But Philip had always been reluctant and parsimonious. He had always shut doors when she approached, always locked up his mind lest she should catch a glimpse of his secrets. She had never known what he really felt and thought. ‘Even as a little boy,’ she said aloud.
‘And now he has his work,’ said Elinor after a pause. ‘Which makes it worse. It’s like a castle on the top of a mountain, his work. He shuts himself up in it and he’s impregnable.’
Mrs. Quarles smiled sadly. ‘Impregnable.’ It was the right word. Even as a little boy he had been impregnable. ‘Perhaps in the end he’ll surrender of his own accord.’
‘To me?’ said Elinor. ‘Or to someone else? It wouldn’t be much satisfaction if it was to somebody else, would it? Though when I’m feeling unselfish,’ she added, ‘I wish he’d surrender to anyone—anyone, for his own good.’
Elinor’s words set Mrs. Quarles thinking of her husband—not resentfully, though he had done wrong, though he had hurt her, but pityingly, rather, and solicitously. For she could never feel that it was entirely his fault. It was his misfortune.
Elinor sighed. ‘I can’t really expect to receive his surrender,’ she said. ‘When one has become a habit, one can’t very well suddenly turn into an overwhelming revelation.’
Mrs. Quarles shook her head. In recent years Sidney’s overwhelming revelations had come from such unexpectedly humble sources. The little kitchenmaid, the gamekeeper’s daughter. How could he, she wondered for the thousandth time, how could he? It was incomprehensible.
‘If at least,’ she said almost in a whisper, ‘you had God as a companion.’ God had always been her comfort, God and the doing of God’s will. She could never understand how people could get through life without Him. ‘If only you could find God.’
Elinor’s smile was sarcastic. Remarks of this sort annoyed her by being so ridiculously beside the point. ‘It might be simpler,’ she began, but checked herself after the first words. She had meant to say that it might be simpler perhaps to find a man. But she remembered her resolution and was silent.
‘What were you saying?’
Elinor shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
Fortunately for Mr. Quarles the British Museum had no Essex branch. It was only in London that he could make researches and collect the documents necessary for his book. The house in Portman Square was let (Mr. Quarles blamed the income tax, but his own speculations in sugar were mainly responsible); and it was in a modest little flat in Bloomsbury (‘convenientlah nyah the Museum’) that he now camped whenever the claims of scholarship brought him to town.
During the last few weeks the claims had been more than usually peremptory. His visits to London had been frequent and prolonged. After the second of these visits Mrs. Quarles had wondered, sadly, whether Sidney had found another woman. And when, on his return from a third journey and, a few days later, on the eve of a fourth, he began to groan ostentatiously over the vast complexity of the history of democracy among the Ancient Indians, Rachel felt convinced that the woman had been found. She knew Sidney well enough to be certain that, if he had really been reading about the Ancient Indians, he would never have troubled to talk about them over the dinner-table—not at such length, in any case, nor so insistently. Sidney talked for the same reason as the hunted sepia squirts ink, to conceal his movements. Behind the inkcloud of the Ancient Indians he hoped to go jaunting up to town unobserved. Poor Sidney! He thought himself so Machiavellian. But his ink was transparent, his cunning like a child’s.
‘Couldn’t you get the books sent down from the London Library?’ Mrs. Quarles rather pointedly asked.
Sidney shook his head. ‘They’re the sort of books,’ he said importantly, ‘that are only in the Museum.’
Rachel sighed and could only hope that the woman could be trusted to look after herself well enough to keep out of serious trouble and not so well as to want to make mischief.
‘I think I shall run up to town with you to-morrow,’ he announced on the morning before Philip and Elinor took their leave.
‘Again?’ asked Mrs. Quarles.
‘There’s a point about those wretched Indians,’ he explained, ‘that I ryahly must clear up. I think I may find it in Pramathanatha Banerea’s book…Or it may be dealt with by Radakhumud Mookerji.’ He rolled out the names impressively, professionally. ‘It’s about local government in Maurya times. So democratic, you know, in spite of the central despotism. For example…’
Through the inkcloud Mrs. Quarles caught glimpses of a female figure.
Breakfast over, Sidney retired to his study and addressed himself to the morning’s crossword. A kind of onion, six letters Anticipations of the morrow distracted him; he could not fix his attention. Her breasts, he was thinking, her smooth white back…What about ‘chive’? No good; only five letters. Walking over to the bookshelf he took out his Bible; its thin pages rustled under his fingers. ‘Thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like young roes that are twins.’ Solomon spoke for him, with what rich thunders! ‘The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.’ He read the words out loud. Gladys had a perfect figure. ‘Like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor.’
These orientals knew what passion was. Miscalling libidinousness ‘passion,’ Mr. Quarles regarded himself as a very passionate man. ‘Thy belly is like an heap of wheat.’ Passion is respectable, is actually respected by the law in some countries. For the poets it is even sacred. He agreed with the poets. But ‘like young roes’ was an odd, inadequate simile. Gladys was plump without being fat, firmly resilient. Roes, on the contrary…As a man of great passions, Sidney could regard himself as positively a noble and heroic figure. ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire with spikenard; spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh…’ But, of course, the word was ‘garlic’! Six letters. A kind of onion. ‘Myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.’
Their train next morning was nearly twenty minutes late. ‘Scandalous,’ Mr. Quarles kept repeating, as he looked at his watch, ‘disgraceful.’
‘You’re in a great hurry to be at your Indians,’ said Philip, smiling from his corner.
His father frowned and talked about something else. At Liverpool Street they parted, Sidney in one taxi, Philip and Elinor in a second. Sidney reached his flat only just in time. He was still engaged in washing the grime of the journey from his large, flesh-padded hands, when the bell rang. He made haste to rinse and dry himself, then, adjusting his face, he stepped into the hall and opened. It was Gladys. He received her with a kind of condescending regality, his chin tilted, his chest thrown back, his waistcoat projecting, but smiling down at her (Gladys called herself ‘petite’) and graciously twinkling through half-shut eyelids. It was an impudent, vulgar, snubby little face that smiled back at him. But it was not her face that had brought Mr. Quarles to London, it was not the individual Gladys Helmsley; it was the merely generic aspect of the woman, her ‘figah,’ as Sidney would have euphemistically put it.
‘You’re very punctual, my dyah,’ he said, holding out his hand.
Gladys was rather taken aback by the coolness of his greeting. After what had happened last time, she had expected something tenderer.
‘Am I!’ she said, for lack of anything better to say; and since human beings have only a limited number of noises and grimaces with
