Arthur and George (27 page)

His mother is the only woman to whose governance he is prepared to submit. With other members of the sex he has been, variously, large brother, substitute father, dominant husband, prescribing doctor, generous writer of blank cheques and Father Christmas. He is solidly content with the separation and distinction of the sexes as developed by society in its wisdom through the centuries. He is resolutely against the notion of votes for women: when a man comes home from work, he does not want a politician sitting opposite him at the fireside. Knowing women less, he is able to idealize them more. This is as he thinks it should be.

Jean therefore comes as a shock to him. It is now a long time since he looked at a young woman as young men habitually do. Women—young women—it seems to him, are meant to be unformed; they are malleable, pliant, waiting to be shaped by the impress of the man they marry. They hide themselves; they watch and wait, they indulge in decorous social display (which should always fall short of coquetry) until such time as the man makes apparent his interest, and then his greater interest, and then his especial interest, by which time they are walking alone together, and the families have met, and finally he asks for her hand and sometimes, perhaps, in a last act of concealment, she makes him wait upon her answer. This is how it has all evolved, and social evolution has its laws and its necessities just as biological evolution does. It would not be thus if there were not a very good reason for its being thus.

When he is introduced to Jean—at an afternoon tea party in the house of a prominent London Scotsman, the sort of event he normally avoids—he notices at once that she is a striking young woman. He knows from long experience what to expect: the striking young woman will ask him when he is going to write another Sherlock Holmes story, and did he really die at the Reichenbach Falls, and perhaps it would be better if the consulting detective were to marry, and how did he think up such an idea in the first place? And sometimes he answers with the weariness of a man wearing five overcoats, and sometimes he manages a faint smile and replies, “Your question, young lady, reminds me why I had the good sense to drop him over the Falls in the first place.”

But Jean does none of this. She does not give an agreeable start at his name, or shyly confess herself a devoted reader. She asks him if he has seen the exhibition of photographs of Dr. Nansen’s voyage to the far North.

“Not yet. Although I was present at the Albert Hall last month when he lectured to the Royal Geographical Society and received a medal from the Prince of Wales.”

“So was I,” she replies. This is unexpected.

He tells her how, after reading Nansen’s account a few years previously of crossing Norway on skis, he acquired a pair of them; how from Davos he skiied the high slopes with the Branger brothers, and how Tobias Branger wrote
“Sportesmann”
in the hotel registration book. Then he begins a story, which he often tells as an adjunct to this one, about losing his skis at the top of a snow-face and being obliged to come down without them, and how the strain on the seat of his tweed knickerbockers . . . and this really is one of his best stories, though perhaps in the present circumstances he will amend the conclusion about being happiest for the rest of the day when standing with his trouster-seat to a wall . . . but she seems to have stopped paying attention. Taken aback, he pauses.

“I should like to learn to ski,” she says.

This is also unexpected.

“I have excellent balance. I have ridden since I was three.”

Arthur is somewhat piqued at not being allowed to finish his story about tearing his knickerbockers, which includes mimicry of his tailor’s assurances about the durability of Harris tweed. So he tells her firmly that it is most unlikely that women—by which he means society women, as opposed to female Swiss peasants—will ever learn to ski, given the physical strength required and the dangers attendant on the activity.

“Oh, I am quite strong,” she replies. “And I imagine I have better balance than you, given your size. It must be an advantage to have a lower centre of gravity. And being much less heavy, I should not do so much damage were I to fall.”

Had she said “less heavy” he might have taken offence at such pertness. Because she says “much less heavy” he bursts out laughing, and promises, one day, to teach her to ski.

“I shall hold you to it,” she replies.

It was all a rather extraordinary encounter, he reflects to himself in the subsequent days. The way she declined to acknowledge his fame as a writer, set the subject of the conversation, interrupted one of his most popular stories, exhibited an ambition some might call unladylike, and laughed—well, as good as laughed—at his size. And yet she managed to do it all lightly, seriously, enchantingly. Arthur congratulates himself on not having taken offence, even if none was intended. He feels something he has not felt for years: the self-satisfaction of the successful flirt. And then he forgets her.

Six weeks later he walks into a musical afternoon and she is singing one of Beethoven’s Scottish songs while an earnest little fellow in white tie accompanies her. He finds her voice superb, the pianist mannered and vain. Arthur draws back so that she will not see him observing her. After her recital they meet in the presence of others, and she behaves with the sort of politeness which makes it difficult to judge whether she remembers him or not.

They separate; a few minutes later, with some ghastly cellist groaning away in the background, they meet again, this time alone. She says at once, “I see I shall have to wait at least nine months.”

“For what?”

“For my skiing lesson. There is no possibility of snow now.”

He does not find this forward, or flirtatious, though he knows he should.

“Are you planning it for Hyde Park?” he asks. “Or St. James’s? Or perhaps the slopes of Hampstead Heath?”

“Why not? Wherever you wish. Scotland. Or Norway. Or Switzerland.”

They seem to have passed, without his noticing, through some French windows, across a terrace, and are now standing under that very sun which has long banished all hope of snow. He has never resented a fine day more.

He looks down into her hazel-green eyes. “Are you flirting with me, young lady?”

She looks straight back at him. “I am talking to you about skiing.” But those, it feels, are only her nominal words.

“Because if you are, be careful I do not fall in love with you.”

He barely knows what he has said. He half means it entirely and half cannot imagine what has got into him.

“Oh, you are already. In love with me. And I with you. There is no doubt about it. No doubt at all.”

And so it is said. And no more words are needed, or uttered, for a while. All that matters is how he is to see her again, and where, and when, and it must be arranged before someone interrupts them. But he has never been a lothario or seducer, and never known how to say those things which are necessary to arrive at the stage beyond the one where he currently stands—not really knowing either what that further stage might be, since where he is at the moment appears, in its own way, to be final. All he can feel rising up in his head are difficulties, prohibitions, reasons why they will never meet again, except perhaps decades later, in passing, when they are old and grey and will be able to joke about that ever-remembered moment on someone’s sunny lawn. It is impossible for them to meet in a public place, because of her reputation and his fame; impossible for them to meet in a private place because of her reputation and . . . and all the things that make up his life. He stands there, a man approaching forty, a man secure in his life and famous in the world, and he has become a schoolboy again. He feels as if he has learned the most beautiful love-speech in Shakespeare and now that he needs to recite it his mouth is dry and his memory empty. He also feels as if he has ripped the seat of his tweed knickerbockers and must instantly find a wall against which to set his back.

Yet almost without his being aware of her questions and his answers, it is somehow arranged. And it is not an assignation, or the start of an intrigue, it is merely the next time they will see one another, and in the five days he is obliged to wait he cannot work, and he can barely think, and even if he plays two rounds of golf in one day he finds, in the seconds between addressing the ball and bringing the club-face down against it, that her face has come into his head, and his game that day is all hooks and slices and the endangering of wildlife. When he propels the ball from one sandhole directly into another, he suddenly recalls golfing at the Mena House Hotel, and feeling then that he was in a perpetual bunker. Now he cannot tell whether this is still true, indeed truer than ever, with the sand even deeper and his ball buried invisibly, or whether he is somehow on the green forever.

It is not an assignation, though he finds himself getting out of the cab on the corner of the street. It is not an assignation, though there is a woman of indeterminate age and class who opens the door and disappears. It is not an assignation though they are at last alone together sitting on a sofa covered in satin brocatelle. It is not an assignation because he tells himself it is not.

He takes her hand and looks at her. Her glance is neither shy nor bold; it is frank and constant. She does not smile. He knows that one or other of them must speak, but seems to have lost his daily familiarity with words. But it does not matter. And then she half-smiles and says, “I could not wait for the snow.”

“I shall give you snowdrops on every anniversary of the day we met.”

“March the fifteenth,” she says.

“I know. I know because it is engraved upon my heart. If they cut me open they will be able to read that date.”

There is another silence. He sits there, perched on the sofa’s edge, longing to concentrate on her words, her face, the date and the thought of snowdrops; but they are all driven out by the awareness that he has the most tremendous cockstand of his entire life. It is not the decorous swelling of a pure-hearted chevalier, it is a thumping and unavoidable presence, something rowdy, something in off the street, something living up to that word cockstand which he has never himself uttered but which is pressingly in his head. His only other thought is a relief that his trousers are loosely cut. He shifts a little to ease the constriction, and in doing so inadvertently moves a few inches closer to her. She is an angel, he thinks, her look so pure, her complexion so fair, but she has taken his movement as a sign that he intends to kiss her, and so is trustingly offering her face to his, and as a gentleman he cannot slight her, and as a man he cannot help himself from kissing her. Being no lothario or seducer but a burly, honourable man in early middle age leaning awkwardly across a sofa, he tries to think of nothing but love and chivalry as her lips reach towards his moustache and inexpertly seek the mouth beneath it; still holding, but now beginning to crush the hand he has held since the moment he arrived, he becomes aware of a vast and violent leakage taking place inside his trousers. And the groan he gives is almost certainly misconstrued by Miss Jean Leckie, as is the way he suddenly throws himself back from her as if struck by an assegai between the shoulder blades.

An image comes into Arthur’s head, an image from decades earlier. Night-time at Stonyhurst, with a Jesuit quietly patrolling the dormitories to prevent beastliness among the boys. It worked. And what he needs now, and for all the time he can foresee, is his own patrolling Jesuit. What happened in that room must never happen again. As a doctor, he might find such a moment of weakness explicable; as an English gentleman, he finds it shameful and perturbing. He does not know whom he has betrayed the most: Jean, Touie or himself. All three to some degree, certainly. And it must never happen again.

It is the suddenness which has undone him; also, the gap between dream and reality. In chivalric romance, the knight loves an impossible object—the wife of his lord, for instance—and performs courageous actions in her name; his valour is matched by his purity. But Jean is less than an impossible object, and Arthur is no obscure gallant or unattached knight. Rather, he is a married man whose chasteness has been imposed upon him for the last three years by physician’s orders. He is fifteen—no, sixteen—stone, fit and energetic; and yesterday he discharged into his underlinen.

But now that the dilemma has manifested itself in full clarity and awfulness, Arthur is able to address it. His brain begins to work on the practicalities of love as once it worked on the practicalities of illness. He defines the problem—the problem! the aching, wracking joy and torment!—thus. It is impossible for him not to love Jean; and for her not to love him. It is impossible for him to divorce Touie, the mother of his children, whom he still regards with affection and respect; besides, only a cad would abandon an invalid. Finally, it is impossible to turn the affair into an intrigue by making Jean his mistress. Each of the three parties has his or her honour, even if Touie does not know hers is being considered
in absentia.
For that is an essential condition: Touie must not know.

The next time he and Jean meet, he takes charge. He must do so: he is the man, he is older; she is a young woman, possibly impetuous, whose reputation must not be tarnished. At first she appears anxious, as if he is going to dismiss her; but when it becomes clear that he is merely organizing the terms of their relationship, she relaxes, and at times appears almost not to be listening. She becomes anxious again when he is stressing how careful they must be.

“But we are allowed to kiss one another?” she asks, as if verifying the terms of a contract she has signed while happily blindfolded.

Her tone makes his heart melt and his brain blur. As confirmation of the contract they kiss. She likes to peck at him rather, with eyes open, in birdlike attacks; he prefers the long adhesion of the lips, with eyes closed. He cannot believe he is kissing someone again, let alone her. He tries to stop himself thinking in what ways it is different from kissing Touie. After a while, however, the perturbance starts up again, and he pulls back.