A Man of Forty (2 page)

“Why didn't you then?”

“I meant to. I forgot.”

It was disconcerting, the suddenness with which, from time to time, a sad sobriety descended on him, quenching the lamp in his bosom. But as it came suddenly, so it went, and with its going the lamp was rekindled. That luminous core of irresponsible self-satisfaction bobbed up and down, swayed and revolved, flashed and vanished and flashed again, in the waters of his changing mood. Forgetting his broken promise to the David Bromes, he saw with dangerous clarity how attractive she was. Definitely beddable. And, up to a point, likeable. She didn't go with his water-colours : at least her voice didn't. But on the other hand ...

“Who are they, these friends of yours?”

He stared at her greedily.

“ Oh, they're relations of sorts.” He came close and put his arms round her.

“Anybody I know, I wonder?”

If only you'd hold your tongue, girl! Can't you see how this chatter wearies me?

“I don't think so, Lily.” He gazed at her with sensual, sentimental ardour. The mixture as before.

“Why don't you?” she said, wriggling free of him. “ I might have.” She pouted. “ But you needn't tell me if you don't want to.”

To hide his impatience he pretended to levity. “ The name, my dear young lady, is Brome. David Brome. Also Lydia, his wife Four in family. Does that content you?”

She wrinkled her brow. “ I don't think I know them. Is Mr. Brome your uncle or something?”

“Something, undoubtedly. But not my uncle. A good fellow, David. But my uncle he never was, nor shall be. Not to deceive you, Lily, he is merely my mother's cousin. That was the best he could manage.”

Oh, let her go, let her go, he thought. What does it matter, anyhow? He fetched her cloak and put it round her lovely young shoulders. He felt a trifle noble. Also a trifle tired.

“Well, my gallant little gate-crasher!” Dear me, quite the benevolent uncle. But he couldn't, at this time of night, turn her out without ceremony. “ Look, shall I telephone for a taxi?”

“I suppose so.” She glanced timidly at the clock. “ Coo, it isn't half late!”

Her tone was flat, disappointed. She stared at the carpet, then raised her eyes to look at him. “ Well, you'd better say goodbye then, if you want to.”

He made no movement towards her. They looked at each other in silence. There was shyness in her eyes and a faint smile on her lips. So that's how it is, he thought, smiling to himself. The silence gathered and quickened. Whether he would or no, he was caught in the net of his own simple vanity; for her transparent unwillingness to escape from him was a challenge he couldn't let pass.

He came towards her with a quiet and controlled deliberation, and very gently, with an almost tentative air, removed the cloak from her shoulders and dropped it on the chesterfield.

This David Brome, whom Adam is to visit, what is he, what his personal quality, his environment, his habit of life? I see him as a rather large, fairish man ; by temperament a lover of idleness, by force of circumstances industrious and precise ; good-tempered, easy-going, tolerant, but a secret worrier. At sixteen, after a sketchy suburban schooling, he was planted by his father in the Civil Service, where he underwent, stage by stage, the normal process of evolution from inky-fingered red-eared junior to head of a not very important sub-department. In all that part of his history, the major part in point of time, he has been passive, or, if active, mechanically so. The same, almost, could be said of his marriage. That has been a mild affair, part of the accepted inevitable pattern. There have been moments of excitement, a quiet happiness, a dulling of the painful ecstatic dream, and through it all a growing together, a mutual engrafting of two lives. He sees this, sometimes as a sublime, sometimes as a highly inconvenient fact. He has a wholesome respect for all natural processes, and he knows that a real marriage, like a tree, is the product of slow growth, time and habit being of its essence. He knows, too, or in sober moments thinks he knows, that the thoroughgoing romanticism to which he's secretly addicted is a juvenile (shall we say adolescent?) simplification of life. Anyhow, here he is, at forty plus, beginning for the first time to be himself and wondering what precisely that will involve. For he is now, superficially, a free man, having with a conscious if somewhat anxious audacity retired from the service long before his normal term. With perhaps only half his life lived, his time is now his own—and Lydia's, and little Paul's. He lives on his modest means in a house in the country ; though it won't be country long, now the railway company and the builders have decided to “ develop “ it. Three or four acres to mess about in, and the option of buying a five-acre field adjoining. Lydia is a passionate gardener, and would, if she could, be a farmer as well. She is lean, sunbrowned, cheerful, sisterly. She is also efficient and managing. She is proud of the fact that her husband has apparently read all the books in the world, and equally proud of herself for being too sensible and practical to have done so. She has the habit of quick judgment,
especially of people. She never meets a new person, man or woman, without at once fixing a label to him and putting him into a pigeonhole.

Wait a minute, though : is this true of Lydia, or is it only what * David, in moments of nervous despair, thinks of her? I must be careful about that. And so must Brome : it's the kind of mistake he's prone to. Yet Brome's simplicity is of the heart rather than the mind. For he
has
a mind, active and cultured, like his father before him. He is shy but not inarticulate. There is something he hides, something he is half-conscious of hiding, though it is hidden also from himself : something that appears in his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth, when he remembers with a sort of panic that he is over forty. At such moments, though he doesn't know it, he looks fourteen ; for it was at fourteen (and I think he will have forgotten this) that he caught sight of (shall we say?) Helen of Troy, short-skirted, her hair in two plaits, and carrying a tennis racquet. And at such moments he is haunted by the desolate conviction that he has missed something—missed, in a sense, everything—though in fact, when be comes to tot things up, he seems to have all that a man of simple tastes could reasonably wish for. His mother died when he was a child. That doesn't trouble him, for he can't remember her ; but perhaps this very fact, I mean his not remembering, constitutes a something missed. He does remember, and even now regrets, his failure to get to Oxford. If his father could have afforded to keep him at school another two years, David might—there was a chance—have got into his father's old college on a scholarship. Put like that it sounds very remote and hypothetical; but at the time, for some days together, he entertained the crazy hope ; and I suppose those days have left a small mark on him somewhere.

But it's not any of these things, it's nothing specific, that Brome is vaguely aware of having missed. Whatever it is, or isn't, there is nearly always that faint gleam of expectancy in his eyes, as though at any moment, round the very next corner, he might come upon—what? Now, as I look at him, he is a point on a map, joined by a series of fine lines to numerous other points. He is like a station in one of those elaborate railway-systems which he used to be so fond of designing in the grain of his desk-lid at school. This is his pattern : a complicated and flowing pattern, for his relationships are with beings as real and mobile as himself, and if he is the conscious centre of a universe, so
too are they, each man, woman, child among them. The flick of an eyelid, the fall of an acorn, is an event having endless repercussions in time and space : to know Brome fully we should have to know the entire universe, past and present. That inquiry will have to wait a bit. Meanwhile, here is Lydia, his wife; here is Eleanor Rook, his wife's step-daughter ; here is Paul, his seven-year-old son. And in quite another corner of my fancy I find a small, plump woman, drably clothed, who leans over a scullery sink, and presently, hearing a knock at the door, wipes her hands on her apron and scuttles away. She is Katie Parzloe, who lives at Bell Green : we shall come to her in due time.

At the moment when Adam Swinford, having stepped into his dresstrousers, began wondering who besides the usual mob of pressmen and theatrical people would be at the Buckrams' party ; at the moment when Miss Lily Elver, in her new gown, lipstick in hand, peered at her distorted reflection in the deal-framed rectangle of looking-glass that stood on her yellow chest of drawers ; at this moment, eight twenty-three of the clock on a Friday evening in late February, David Brome brought his car to a standstill outside Chiselbrook railway station, and switched off his headlamps. He glanced at his watch : not much more than a minute to go. Hardly worth while turning off the engine. Still, might as well. The pulse of the car ceased, and in the ensuing silence, an interval all his own, David Brome sat at ease, motionless, conscious of power wielded, of plans well carried out. A clear winter's evening, a well-running car, no hurry, no hold-up, no waiting. Presently, at leisure, he would get out of the car and saunter up to the platform barrier. By the time he got there the train would be gliding in, and in another moment Adam Swinford would get out and come bouncing down the platform, looking searchingly towards him, his expressive open face ready to break into that amused impudent smile of his.

There was not more than a dozen years difference in their ages, but David couldn't help a little envying the young man his personal drive, his abounding energy, and above all the cool confidence that
enabled him to take his pleasure with a good conscience. David himself, now officially idle, had not yet got used to the idea that he need do nothing. He fancied he never would get used to it. With no grindstone to set his nose to he felt he was living in a state of sin : the more so because he didn't take to gardening quite as Lydia did. Partly it was Lydia's eagerness that put him off it : Lydia's busy, anxious, fussy enthusiasm and knowing all about it. She knew so much, or at least talked so fast, that it put him at a disadvantage, nipped his interest in the bud, made him feel like a schoolboy receiving more information than he could keep pace with. He would look at her blindly, with shut mind, waiting for the instructions to cease; and then, having done the thing differently, and perhaps wrongly, would oppose to her patient disappointment an equally patient despair, like that of a dumb suffering animal. I don't want to criticize, dear, she would say ; but unless this and that and so-and-so they'll just die, and you know how sorry you'll be then. Only Lydia had this knack of making him feel stupid. And not only stupid but a brute and inconsiderate, a man who wouldn't or couldn't listen when spoken to. Perhaps that's what wives are for, he thought, drawing his knees up, opening the door, twisting round in his seat to get his right foot on the running-board. They love and cherish us, and they make it clear that without their guidance we are helpless waifs, drifting on the tide of our own absent-minded follies. Too clear, for it hurts our vanity, that prodigious male vanity one hears so much about. Vanity unites us and vanity dissevers. In the beginning, to say I love you means You are marvellous. You are marvellous, he says. You are marvellous, she answers. And, male or female, we like that. We purr with pleasure. We are grateful. Our self-doubt is destroyed. I am marvellous. She says so. He says so. On this rock I will build my church. I mean my life, my future, my expanding self infinite in potentiality. So marriage, in the beginning, is a tacit agreement (the rest is not tacit, but that is) to say or to think You are marvellous. It is a mutual bolstering-up of two egos. But it can't be kept going like that : for everyday living-together the assumption is too absolute. And what then? With the first doubt the illusion of perfection is doomed : it may carry on a precarious existence, but it is doomed. And then I love you means no longer You are marvellous. It means something less illusioned, more complicated, in a way kindlier, in a way more
real. No, not more real ; all emotions are real when they happen. It means something we call friendship which is yet as different from friendship as it is from the first world-forgetting desire. It means, trite but true, that with all your faults I love you still, because to be loveless, unloving, is to be dark, lonely, afraid. It means a different compact : mutual tolerance instead of mutual flattery. And we don't like that so well.

The colour of these reflections, not themselves, drifted across David's mind in the three seconds it took him to get himself out of the car. Brown gipsy was his unformulated thought of Lydia whenever the dim dissolving image of her image occurred in the procession ; and scrawny came as an unformulated afterthought. Peaked face, hair still lustrous black, lips tight and thin, greenish-brown eyes peering with a half-alarmed eagerness through rimless lenses : all this and much besides, the staunchness of her, the diligence, the earnestness, the unquietness, all this in her absence could be contained in a single coin of the mind, a visual feeling, complex of various images of which each was a symbol of an abstraction from her living reality.

But now, as he strolled up to the ticket-collector's stand, drawn there by the thunder of the incoming train, it was not Lydia who occupied his mind's eye, and not even his little son Paul, whom an hour or two ago he had re-tucked up in bed and said good night to. Not these but Adam Swinford held the field : young, free, buoyant, sanguine, self-confident. A stimulating week-end was in prospect. Perhaps, too, a rather exhausting one. Adam was capable of talking the greatest nonsense. His mind was lively and unstable. He had an intemperate belief in the rightness of his own opinions ; and because (David thought) he had hardly begun to grow up, he acquired a new set of opinions every six months or so, opinions which he would then proceed to commend to you with the same passion as he had spent in denouncing them on his previous visit. He was a welcome but not a frequent visitor to Chiselbrook. David, who thought him superficial and liked him none the less for it, surmised that he had too many social irons in the fire to be able or willing to cultivate regularity in his relationships. Yes, he liked Adam : yet in some obscure fashion he always felt his coming as a challenge. Am I wiser than he, or merely slower, less vital? In a word, older. Train's in to time. Good.