‘But what do you think I ought to do?’ Marjorie brought herself finally to ask.
Elinor shrugged her shoulders. ‘What can you do, but hope he’ll get what he wants and soon be sick of it.’
It was obvious; but Marjorie thought her rather unfeeling, hard and cruel to have said it.
In London the Quarleses sketchily inhabited what had once been the last of a row of stables in a Belgravian mews. You passed under an archway. A cliff of cream-coloured stucco rose sheer on your left—windowless, for the Belgravians had declined to be aware of the squalid domesticity of their dependants. On the right stretched the low line of stables with the single storey of living rooms above, tenanted now by enormous Daimlers and the families of their chauffeurs. The mews ended in a wall, over the top of which you could see the waving planetrees of Belgravian gardens. The Quarleses doorstep lay in the shadow of this wall. Set between the gardens and the sparsely inhabited mews, the little house was very quiet. The coming and going of limousines and the occasional yelling of a child were the only disturbances.
‘But fortunately,’ Philip had remarked, ‘the rich can afford to buy silent cars. And there’s something about internal combustion engines that makes for birth control. Who ever heard of a chauffeur with eight children?’ Coach-house and horse-boxes had been knocked together in the reconstruction of the stable, into a single spacious living-room. Two screens hinted at a division. Behind the screen on the right, as you entered, was the drawing-room end of the apartment—chairs and a sofa grouped around the fireplace. The screen on the left concealed the dining-table and the entrance to a tiny kitchen. A little staircase slanted up across one of the walls, leading to the bedrooms. Yellow cretonnes mimicked the sunshine that never shone through the northward-looking windows. There were many books. Old Bidlake’s portrait of Elinor as a young girl hung over the mantelpiece.
Philip was lying on the sofa, book in hand. ‘Very remarkable,’ he read, ‘is Mr. Tate Regan’s account of pigmy parasitic males in three species of Cerativid Anglerfishes. In the Arctic Ceratias holbolli a female about eight inches in length carried on her ventral surface two males of about two-and-a-half inches. The snout and chin region of the dwarf malewas permanently attached to a papilla of the female’s skin, and the bloodvessels of the two were confluent. The male is without teeth; the mouth is useless; the alimentary canal is degenerate. In photocarynus spiniceps the female, about two-and-a-half inches in length bore a male under half an inch long on the top of her head in front of her right eye. In Edriolychnus schmidti the dimensions were about the same as in the last case, and the female carried the pigmy male upside down on the inner surface of her gill-cover.’
Philip put down the book and feeling in his breast pocket pulled out his pocket diary and his fountain-pen. ‘Female Anglerfishes,’ he wrote, ‘carry dwarf parasitic males attached to their bodies. Draw the obvious comparison, when my Walter rushes after his Lucy. What about a scene at an aquarium? They go in with a scientific friend who shows them the female Anglers and their husbands. The twilight, the fishes—perfect background.’ He was just putting his diary away, when another thought occurred to him. He reopened it. ‘Make it the aquarium at Monaco and describe Monte Carlo and the whole Riviera in terms of deep-sea monstrosity.’ He lit a cigarette and went on with his book.
There was a rap at the door. He got up and opened; it was Elinor.
‘What an afternoon!’ She dropped into a chair.
‘Well, what news of Marjorie?’ he asked.
‘No news,’ she sighed, as she took off her hat. ‘The poor creature’s as dreary as ever. But I’m very sorry for her.’
‘What did you advise her to do?’
‘Nothing. What else could she do? And Walter?’ she asked in her turn. ‘Did you get a chance to be the heavy father?’
‘The middle-weight father, shall we say. I persuaded him to come down to Chamford with Marjorie.’
‘Did you? That was a real triumph.’
‘Not quite such a triumph as you think. I had no enemy to fight with. Lucy’s going to Paris next Saturday.’
‘Let’s hope she’ll stay there. Poor Walter!’
‘Yes, poor Walter. But I must tell you about Anglerfishes.’ He told her. ‘One of these days,’ he concluded,’ I shall really have to write a modem Bestiary. Such moral lessons! But tell me, how was Everard? I quite forgot you’d seen him.’
‘You would have forgotten,’ she answered scornfully.
‘Would I? I don’t know why.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘I’m crushed,’ said Philip with a mock humility. There was a silence.
‘Everard’s in love with me,’ said Elinor at last without looking at her husband and in the flattest, most matter-of-fact of voices.
‘Is that news?’ asked Philip. ‘I thought he was an old admirer.’
‘But it’s serious,’ Elinor went on.’very serious.’ She waited anxiously for his comment. It came, after a little pause.
‘That must be less amusing.’
Less amusing! Couldn’t he understand? After all, he wasn’t a fool. Or perhaps he did understand and was only pretending not to; perhaps he was secretly glad about Everard. Or was it just indifference that made him blind? Nobody understands what he does not feel. Philip couldn’t understand her because he didn’t feel as she felt. He was confident in the belief that other people were as reasonably lukewarm as he was himself. ‘But I like him,’ she said aloud in a last desperate attempt to provoke him into at least a semblance of caring. If only he’d show himself jealous, or sad, or angry, how happy she’d be, how grateful! ‘Very much,’ she went on. ‘There’s something very attractive about him. That passionateness of his, that violence….’
Philip laughed. ‘Quite the irresistible cave-man, in fact.’
Elinor rose with a little sigh, picked up her hat and bag, and bending over her husband’s chair, kissed him on the forehead, as though she were saying goodbye; then turned away and still without a word went upstairs to her bedroom.
Philip picked up his abandoned book. ‘Bonellia viridis,’ he read, ‘is a green worm, not uncommon in the Mediterranean. The female has a body about the size of a prune, bearing a string-like, terminally bifid, very contractile proboscis, which may be two feet long. But the male is microscopic and lives in what may be called the reproductive duct (modified nephridium) of the female. It has no mouth and depends on what it absorbs parasitically through its ciliated surfaces….’
Philip once more put down the book. He was wondering whether he oughtn’t to go upstairs and say something to Elinor. He was sure she’d never really care for Everard. But perhaps he oughtn’t to take it so much for granted. She had seemed rather upset. Perhaps she had expected him to say something—how much he cared for her, how wretched he’d be, how angry, if she were to stop caring for him. But these precisely were the almost unsayable things. In the end he decided not to go upstairs. He’d wait and see, he’d put it off to another time. He went on reading about Bonellia viridis.
CHAPTER XXII
From Philip Quarles’s Notebook
To-day, at Lucy Tantamount’s, I was the victim of a very odd association of ideas. Lucy, as usual, was the French tricolor; blue round the eyes, a scarlet mouth and the rest dead white against a background of shiny metal-black hair. I made some sort of a joke. She laughed, opening her mouth—and her tongue and gums were so much paler than the paint on her lips that they seemed (it gave me a queer creepy shock of astonished horror) quite bloodless and white by contrast. And then, without transition, I was standing in front of those sacred crocodiles in the palace gardens at Jaipur, and the Indian guide was throwing them bits of meat, and the inside of the animals’ mouths was almost white, as though the mouths were lined with a slightly glace cream-coloured kid. And that’s how one’s mind naturally works. And one has intellectual pretensions! Well, well.
But what a windfall for my novel! I shall begin the book with it. My Walterish hero makes his Lucyish siren laugh and immediately (to his horror; but he goes on longing for her, with an added touch of perversity, all the same and perhaps all the more) sees those disgusting crocodiles he had been looking at in India a month before. In this way I strike the note of strangeness and fantasticality at once. Everything’s incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths. Nothing’s in the least like what it seems—or rather it’s like several million other things at the same time. All India rushes like a cinema film through his head
