A Coat of Varnish (22 page)

That had always been the trouble. With her parents: she watched them, she could be funny, but when they needed simple love they received another of her splinters. Somehow she could not believe or seem as though she were at one. She had never been able to say, even to herself, what she wanted to do. As a girl, fortunate, courted, pursued, friends had asked her what she intended. The best she could produce – voice high, wandering away – was that she supposd that she would drift into marriage. She had done exactly that. Her husband had been a loving, conscientious man, and very kind. Kinder than Paul, though nothing like so perceptive. She had tried to be loving and conscientious in return. It hadn’t been enough. He hadn’t complained. He had left her.

She had sometimes thought that she would have been less lost at a time everyone really married for life – you made your bed and you lay in it. She wouldn’t have minded if her husband had taken other women – it would have been her fault. She could have made do. She wouldn’t have minded if Paul had taken other women. Again, she could have made do.

There her self-insight left her. It would have surprised even Paul, it didn’t seem to fit her nature, but she was jealous. She had been more than normally jealous when young Susan had been attempting to collect Paul. All Celia had done was given one of her splintered jokes. No more. She couldn’t let him see or hear what she really felt. It might have brought her better luck if she could.

Ah well. She wasn’t going to begin pitying herself. Somehow one went on. Life might be a disappointing business, but there was no option. She studied her son, now raptly regarding a tug on the oil-smooth river. That was something. She looked again at the Huskisson statue. That really was a most ridiculous creation. Her face was etched into her handsome indrawn smile, which a good many men had found mysterious. Just now, there was nothing mysterious about it. She was smiling at the concept of the statue.

The sun was getting low. Late for the boy’s bedtime. Time for her dinner. She took him out on the pavement. They walked a few yards. He was talking cheerfully. She stopped. They had to cross, to the island in the middle of the road. The boy began to run across the street. A car, travelling very fast, came past a lorry parked against the kerb. She shouted. The boy might not have heard, but he saw the car as it swung towards him. His reaction was quick, he checked his run, his gymshoes held fast on the tarmac. The car passed him, with a foot to spare. The driver made threatening gestures and yelled.

Celia’s stomach had lurched. She was pallid as, the boy’s hand in hers, they stood on the mid-road island. She waited a long time until there was no traffic at all before they crossed to the far side.

When they were walking towards home, the boy said: ‘Anything the matter, Mummy?’

‘Nothing much. You must be very careful crossing the roads. There’s so much traffic. On these main roads, you must always wait for me. Please.’

That was all that she said. The boy gave an intelligent, placatory smile. That was all. She said nothing more.

On the Saturday evening, twenty-four hours after Celia had been thinking about her mischances, sitting in the riverside garden, Humphrey and Alec Luria had met for their ritual drink in the pub. By random chance, it happened that Celia’s name was mentioned. Has anything been heard of her, Luria enquired. As curious, it seemed, about former acquaintances as he was about the sociology of English institutions. It was only later that Humphrey thought that there might be rather more to that enquiry. As it was, he replied simply, ‘Not by me.’ She had been friendly, but only through her connection with Paul: now that was broken, she had passed out of contact.

‘What a pity.’ Luria, sipping dutifully at his pint of bitter, looked kind and thoughtful. He had had spells of silence as though he had something on his mind.

The pub was quiet, with a late-summer stupor. A couple of men, who knew them both by sight, had said good evening. A wasp had been whirring round, now gone. Through the window at the far end, the evening was fading gently to twilight: it was as hot as in the weeks before, but as August ended the northern nights were shortening.

Humphrey, comfortable in the quiet, said idly that newcomers didn’t realise how far north London was. Luria nodded. ‘Like Labrador. It’s lucky there’s the Gulf Stream.’ He said it with mechanical competence, but no interest, still preoccupied. He started to speak, then stopped. After a time, he spoke again. ‘Humphrey?’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘There’s something I want to say to you. You’ll have to forgive me.’

For an instant, Humphrey wondered if Luria was going to ask about the case. He was punctilious about official secrets, but maybe his curiosity was getting too active. Anyway, Humphrey had nothing to tell him except guesses, which he could have made himself.

What Luria did say, was this: ‘I’m not in a position to intrude, forgive me, but of course you’re getting very involved with Kate Lefroy? Right?’

It was a long time since Humphrey had been invaded like this. He wasn’t prepared. In spite, or because, of his candour with himself, he guarded his own secrets. All he could reply, with a smile of put-on irony, was: ‘I think we could reasonably say that.’

‘Yes. This is what I have to tell you. I very much wish you would get out of it.’

Again, it was a long time, many years, since Humphrey felt himself blushing. He was taken off balance. His temper broke through, his voice was as hot as his cheeks.

‘In God’s name, what do you mean?’

‘I’m afraid I mean, so far as I can see, there’s no future in it.’

Humphrey’s voice had become calmer but still resentful. ‘She’s one of the nicest women I’ve ever met. I think the nicest.’

‘That’s one of the reasons why I can’t see any future in it.’

‘I may as well tell you,’ Humphrey said, looking at Luria with rancour, ‘that, if these words mean anything, I love her, and I believe that she has some love for me.’

‘My impression is, more than that. But, if I have the situation anything like right, that could make it worse for both of you.’ He was looking at his friend with sombre affection: under the great brow his dark eyes were sunk deep, brimming with melancholy. ‘You don’t think I specially like telling you home truths, do you? You’re about the last person I should choose. But, it doesn’t need me to say, at our age we haven’t infinite time ahead. I don’t want to see you waste too many years.’

Just then, still angry, as a younger man might have been (age made no difference, though, Humphrey thought later in cooler blood), he was nevertheless touched by Alec’s elaborate consideration. He had gone out of his way to speak as though he and Humphrey had the same prospect of future existence: Luria, though one often forgot it, was a dozen years the younger.

‘She’s right for me,’ Humphrey said flatly.

‘If you could get her. But I’m afraid you can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘When it comes to the crunch, I don’t see her able to get away.’

‘You’re not inside the situation.’ He was protesting more harshly since Luria was voicing his own doubts. ‘I’m nearer than you are. There’s nothing left between her and her husband.’

Luria stayed gentle in spite of Humphrey’s anger. ‘You know, sometimes an outsider sees more of the game. I’m asking you not to rely on what you think. Perhaps it’s what you want to think. Listen just a minute. I’ll try and explain how it looks to me. She’s a real woman. She could give you life and fun, and love it. But there’s something else. She has a need for someone to depend on her. She falls for phonies, we’ve gone over that before. Superior phonies like Monty. She could fall for that doctor who fancies himself as a thinker. She seems to worship them. But this is my version. I believe that underneath she feels that they’re no good, and so they have to depend on her. She’s a much stronger character than that phoney husband, and I’m afraid you’ll get it wrong unless you admit the thought that that is what she wants.’

Humphrey had become mutinous and savage, skin dead white with temper. His voice, though, was under control. ‘Life can be very strong,’ he said.

‘You’re not a phoney, no one less so. You’ve never really depended on anyone in your life, and you never will. You would provide everything she’s never had. But I wish I could think that she could tear herself away and leave a derelict behind her.’

Humphrey did not utter. With a hesitation he hadn’t shown before, Luria added: ‘I couldn’t make up my mind whether to speak or not. I won’t say any more.’ Humphrey said, with civility, not with warmth: ‘If that is what you think, you were right to say so. Of course. Thank you.’ He waved to the barman, calling for another drink. There was a lull between them. Then Alec Luria spoke again, deep voice rumbling away, but not so firmly: ‘As a matter of fact, I have a problem of my own.’

‘What’s this?’

Luria gave a curiously sheepish smile. ‘Oh, my wife’s getting rid of me.’

‘Is she, by God?’ Luria’s wife had been absent all summer, Humphrey had met her only twice, and had no knowledge of the relationship. Luria had not been comporting himself like a man deprived. Humphrey went on: ‘I have to ask. How serious is this for you?’

‘It’s not life or death. I can’t pretend that I’m heartbroken. But I do feel several varieties of a fool.’

‘Will it make much difference? Practically, I mean.’

‘Oh, I shan’t see so much of the high life. Unless I marry one of her girlfriends. I shall be pensioned off pretty handsomely, by the way. A couple of million dollars, the lawyers talk about.’

This marriage had lasted five years. The wedding had been a social event in New York. She was part-heiress to one of the older eastern fortunes.

‘That’s something.’ Humphrey did not suppress a satirical grin. ‘That may help you to live modestly in the state of life to which it has pleased God to call you.’

The sheepish, shamefaced smile appeared again, looking entirely inappropriate in the sculptured face.

‘It’s a consolation,’ Alec Luria acquiesced. For an instant he was satirising himself. Then he said: ‘But I tell you, I do feel too many varieties of a fool.’ He was brooding. ‘Tell me, Humphrey, have you had much to do with the very rich?’

‘Very little.’

‘Somehow I can’t keep away from them. Which is an embarrassing tic for a serious scholar, haven’t you noticed?’ He was wanting to make confidences, finding it grittier than giving advice.

Humphrey in a mocking fashion helped him out. ‘Do your women really have to be all that rich?’

Alec Luria pensively considered the question.

‘They seem to have been, for marriage purposes. I was quite fond of Rosalind. I still am. She’s very bright. But she also had an aura because of the name and the money. You know, I used to read her name in the papers when I was a boy, two rooms for the whole lot of us.’

‘You moved out of that with remarkable celerity, didn’t you? Come on, Alec, you had your own name made before you were thirty, more than anyone I know ever will.’

‘Thank you,’ Luria said courteously, like an American woman being congratulated on a new dress. Then he gave one of his large snorting chortles. ‘That was why the rich wanted to buy me, of course. The rich think they can buy anything. It’s a curious experience, you ought to have had it.’

‘Nothing to sell. So I console myself that I shouldn’t have cared for it.’

‘You ought to have been born in Brooklyn. I tell you, it was a curious experience. Rosalind was a bright girl. Much brighter than the first wife. But somehow she couldn’t understand, if you’re going to have any ideas you have to sit still sometimes. They were all restless, her family, the whole crowd. Nothing to do, so they couldn’t stay put. Up and off on the spur of the moment, the Caribbean, Mexico, anywhere where they all had houses. Nice houses. Not houses to work in. And they wanted me around, just to help pass the time. As a mixture of a court jester and a guru. I wasn’t specially well cast as a court jester. Rather better, maybe, as a guru. You wouldn’t say that I was easily bored, would you?’

Humphrey smiled. Occasionally he had wished that his friend had been more so.

Luria said: ‘After one or two of those vacations, the bare mention of another bored me stiff. The rich think they can buy anything.’

Humphrey had a flicker of memory, quite capricious, of an old artistic acquaintance, once taken up by London magnates, who used to say the same. They think they can buy anything, so the acquaintance had pondered – they’d buy poverty, too, if they could get it on the cheap.

He told the story to Alec Luria, who wasn’t much amused. Humphrey changed the subject. ‘How long did you stand it?’

Luria answered, with a grimace. ‘I should be standing it now. It isn’t my doing, breaking up the marriage. It’s hers.’

Suddenly Alec Luria stripped off his authority. He had the puzzled, open, youthful appearance of one needing to confess. ‘I’m not a good husband,’ he said. ‘You know I’m fond of women…’

That had been clear since their first meeting.

‘But I’m fond of women in a rather uncomfortable way. When I’ve been to bed with one, as it might be Rosalind, I almost immediately want to have another. I don’t think that’s uncommon. In fact I’m sure it isn’t. I heard it time and time again when I was practising…’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Humphrey said.

‘Whether it’s common with women, the other way around, I’ve never been able to decide. The trouble with me, though, it wasn’t just a thought. I wasn’t just dreaming about another woman. I had to put it into action. I did so. It was a kind of aphrodisiac, if you like, though I’m not pretending I needed one. I just did it. It was another embarrassing tic for a serious scholar, like being interested in the rich. It was more embarrassing than that. Because the rich didn’t like it. At least neither of my wives liked it. Especially Rosalind. She believed she had everything a man could desire. She had a good deal. But she didn’t accept how odd men could be.’

‘Did it take long before she knew?’

‘I tried to hide it. But I am fairly conspicuous.’ That was an understatement, Humphrey thought. ‘And also,’ Alec went on, simply, without cover, ‘I am a very vain man. I don’t like pretending. It’s a great fault, but I want people to take me as I am. I have done some harm because of that.’