Arthur & George (28 page)
They are to meet; they are to be alone together for limited periods; they are allowed to kiss; they are not to become carried away. Their situation is intensely dangerous. But again she appears to be only half-listening.
“It is time I left home,” she says. “I can share a flat with other women. Then you may come and see me freely.”
She is so different from Touie: direct, frank, open-minded. She has treated him from the start as an equal. And she is an equal in terms of their love, of course. But he has the responsibility for them, and for her. He must see that her straightforwardness does not lead her into dishonour.
There are times, in the following weeks, when he even begins to wonder if she was not expecting him to make her his mistress. The eagerness of her kisses, the disappointment at his drawing back; the way she presses herself against him, the sense he sometimes has that she knows precisely what is going through him. And yet he cannot think this. She is not that sort of woman; her lack of false modesty is a sign that she trusts him entirely, and would trust him even if he were not the man of principle that he is.
But it is not enough to solve the practical difficulties of their relationship; he also needs moral approval. Arthur takes the Leeds train from St. Pancras in a state of trepidation. The Mam remains his final arbiter. She reads every word he writes before it is published; and she has done the equivalent for his emotional life. Only the Mam can confirm that the course of action he proposes is correct.
At Leeds he takes the Carnforth train, changing at Clapham for Ingleton. She is waiting at the station in her wickerwork pony-and-dog cart; she wears a red coat and the white cotton cap she has taken to affecting in recent years. The two ambling miles in the cart seem interminable to Arthur. The Mam defers constantly to her pony, which is called Mooi, and has its eccentricities, such as a refusal to go past steam engines. This means that roadworks have to be avoided, and each whim of equine inattention flattered. At last, they are inside Masongill Cottage. Arthur immediately tells the Mam everything. Everything, at least, that counts. Everything necessary for her to give him advice on this high and heaven-sent love of his. Everything about the sudden wonder and sudden impossibility of his life. Everything about his feelings, his sense of honour and his sense of guilt. Everything about Jean, her sweetly direct nature, her incisive intelligence, her virtue. Everything. Almost everything.
He backtracks; he starts again; he goes into different detail. He stresses Jean’s ancestry, her Scottishness, a lineage designed to seduce any amateur genealogist. Her descent from Malise de Leggy in the thirteenth century, and by another line from Rob Roy himself. Her present condition, living with wealthy parents in Blackheath. The Leckie family, respectable and religious, who made their money in tea. Her age, twenty-one. Her fine mezzo voice, trained in Dresden and soon to be perfected in Florence. Her supreme ability as a horsewoman, which he has yet to witness. Her quickness of sympathy, her sincerity and strength of character. And then her personal appearance, which sends Arthur into rapturous mode. Her slender frame, small hands and feet, dark gold hair, hazel-green eyes, gently elongated face, delicate white complexion.
“You paint a photograph, Arthur.”
“I wish I had one. I asked her, but she says she takes a poor picture. She is reluctant to smile for the camera, because she is self-conscious about her teeth. She told me quite straightforwardly. She considers them oversized. Of course they are nothing of the sort. She is such an angel.”
The Mam, listening to her son’s account, does not fail to observe the strange parallel that life has thrown up. For years she was married to a man whom society politely chose to regard as an invalid, whether he was being brought home by cadging cabmen or locked away under the disguise of an epileptic. In his absence and incapacity, she had found comfort in the presence of Bryan Waller. Back then, her sulky, aggressive son had dared to criticize; at times, by silence, almost to impugn her honour. And now her favourite, her most adored child, has in turn discovered that the complications of life do not end at the altar; some might say that this is where they begin.
The Mam listens; she understands; and she condones. What Arthur has done is correct, and consistent with honour. And she would like to know Miss Leckie.
They meet; and the Mam approves, as she approved of Touie back in Southsea days. This is not an unthinking endorsement of an indulged son. In the Mam’s view, Touie, pliant and agreeable, was exactly the right wife for an ambitious yet confused young doctor needing acceptance in the kind of society that would provide him with patients. But were Arthur to marry now, he would need someone like Jean, someone with capabilities of her own, and with a clear, forthright nature which at times reminds the Mam a little of herself. Privately, she notes that this is the first intimate woman friend to whom her son has not given a nickname.
A Gower-Bell loudspeaking telephone, shaped like a candlestick, stands on the hall table at Undershaw. It has its own number—Hindhead 237—and, thanks to Arthur’s name and reputation, it does not, as many others do, share a party line with a neighbouring house. Even so, Arthur never uses it to telephone Jean. He cannot imagine working out when Undershaw will be empty of servants, the children at school, Touie resting and Wood off on his walk, and then standing in the hall with lowered voice and his back to the stairs: standing beneath the stained-glass names and shields of his ancestors. He cannot picture himself doing that; it would be proof of intrigue, not so much to anyone who might see him in that posture, but to himself. The telephone is the chosen instrument of the adulterer.
So he communicates by letter, by note, by telegram; he communicates by word and by gift. After a few months Jean is moved to explain that the flat she occupies has only a certain amount of space, and though she shares it with trusted friends, the ring of the delivery boy has become embarrassing. Women who receive large numbers of presents from gentlemen—or, more compromisingly, from one particular gentleman—are assumed to be mistresses; at the very least, potential mistresses. When she points this out, Arthur rebukes himself for a fool.
“Besides,” says Jean. “I do not need assurances. I am certain of your love.”
On the first anniversary of their meeting, he gives her a single snowdrop. She tells him that this brings her more pleasure than any amount of jewellery or dresses or potted plants or expensive chocolates, or whatever it is that men give to women. She has few material needs, and these are easily met by her allowance. Indeed, the fact of not receiving presents is a way of marking that their relationship is different from the humdrum arrangements of others in the world.
But there is the question of the ring. Arthur wants her to wear something, however discreet, on her finger—it does not matter which—to send him a secret message whenever they are in one another’s company. Jean does not favour this idea. Men give rings to three categories of women: wife, mistress, fiancée. She is none of these, and will wear no such ring. She will never be a mistress; Arthur already has a wife; nor is she, can she be, a fiancée. To be a fiancée is to say: I am waiting for his wife to die. There were such understandings between couples, she knew, but that is not to be theirs. Their love is different. It has no past, and no future that can be thought about; it has only the present. Arthur says that in his mind she is his mystical wife. Jean agrees, but says that mystical wives do not wear physical rings.
Naturally, it is the Mam who solves the matter. She invites Jean to Ingleton, suggesting that Arthur come himself the following day. On the evening of Jean’s arrival, the Mam has a sudden idea. She takes from the little finger of her left hand a small ring and slips it onto the same finger of Jean’s hand. It is a pale cabochon sapphire which once belonged to the Mam’s great-aunt.
Jean looks at it, twirls her hand, and promptly removes it. “I cannot accept jewellery that belongs in your family.”
“My great-aunt gave it to me because she thought it went with my colouring. It did then; but no longer. It goes better with yours. And I think of you as part of the family. I have done so from the first day I met you.”
Jean cannot refuse the Mam; few can. When Arthur arrives, he is theatrically slow to notice the ring; finally, it is pointed out to him. Even then he disguises the pleasure he feels, commenting that it is not very large, and giving the women a chance to laugh at him. Now Jean wears not Arthur’s ring but a Doyle ring, and that is just as good; perhaps better. He imagines seeing it against the cloth of a cluttered dining table and the keys of a piano, against the arm of a theatre stall and the reins of a horse. He thinks of it as a symbol of what binds her to him. His mystical wife.
Two white lies are allowed to a gentleman: in order to shield a woman, and to get into a fight when the fight is a rightful one. The white lies Arthur tells Touie are far more numerous than he ever imagined. At the beginning he assumed that somehow, in the bustle of his days and weeks, his ventures and enthusiasms, his sports and travels, the need to tell her lies would not arise. Jean would disappear into the interstices of his calendar. But since she cannot disappear from his heart, she equally cannot disappear from his mind and his conscience. So he finds that every meeting, every plan, every note and every letter sent, every thought of her, is hedged around with lies of one sort or another. Mostly they are lies of omission, though sometimes, necessarily, lies of commission; lies anyway, all of them. And Touie is so utterly trusting; she accepts, she has always accepted, Arthur’s sudden changes of plan, his impulses, his decisions to stay or to go. Arthur knows she is without suspicion, and this scrapes at his nerves the more. He cannot imagine how adulterers can live with their consciences; how morally primitive they must be simply to sustain the necessary lying.
But beyond practical difficulty, ethical impasse and sexual frustration, there is something darker, something harder to face directly. The key moments in Arthur’s life have always been shadowed by death, and this is another one. The sudden, wondrous love that has arrived can only be consummated and acknowledged to the world if Touie dies. She will die; he knows that, and so does Jean; consumption always claims its victims. But Arthur’s determination to fight the Devil has resulted in a ceasefire. Touie’s condition is stable; she no longer even needs the cleansing air of Davos. She lives contentedly at Hindhead, grateful for what she has, and exuding the gentle optimism of the consumptive. He cannot wish for her death; equally, he cannot wish for Jean’s impossible position to continue without end. If he believed in one of the established religions, he would doubtless put everything in the hands of God; but he cannot do this. Touie must continue to receive the best medical attention and the strongest domestic support in order that Jean’s suffering may continue as long as possible. If he takes any action, he is a brute. If he tells Touie, he is a brute. If he breaks off with Jean, he is a brute. If he makes her his mistress, he is a brute. If he does nothing, he is merely a passive, hypocritical brute vainly holding on to as much honour as he can.
Slowly, however, and discreetly, the relationship is acknowledged. Jean is introduced to Lottie. Arthur is introduced to Jean’s parents, who give him a pearl and diamond pin-stud for Christmas. Jean is even introduced to Touie’s mother, Mrs. Hawkins, who accepts the relationship. Connie and Hornung are also apprised, though nowadays they are much taken up with marriage, their son Oscar Arthur, and life in Kensington West. Arthur gives assurances to everyone that Touie will be shielded at all cost from knowledge, pain and dishonour.
There are high-minded declarations, and there is daily reality. Despite family approval, Arthur and Jean are each liable to bouts of low spirits; Jean also becomes prone to migraines. Each feels guilt at having dragged the other into an impossible situation. Honour, like virtue, may be its own reward; but sometimes it does not feel enough. At least, the despair it provokes can be as sharp as any of the exaltation. Arthur prescribes for himself the collected works of Renan. Hard reading, with plenty of golf and cricket, will steady a man, keep him right in body and mind.
But these recourses can only do so much. You can thrash the other side’s bowlers to all quarters, then pitch short into their batsmen’s ribs; you can take a driver and punish a golf ball into the farthest distance. You cannot keep the thoughts at bay for ever; always the same thoughts, and the same repellent paradoxes. An active man doomed to inactivity; lovers forbidden to love; death which you fear and are ashamed to beckon.
Arthur’s cricket season has been going well; scores made and wickets taken are relayed to the Mam with filial pride. She in return continues to give him the benefit of her opinions: about the Dreyfus Case, about the sacerdotal bullies and bigots in the Vatican, about the odious attitude towards France of that dismal paper the
Daily Mail.
One day, Arthur is playing at Lord’s for the MCC. He invites Jean to watch him, and knows, when he comes out to bat, just where in “A” Enclosure she will be sitting. It is one of those days when the bowlers have no secrets from him; his bat is impregnable, and scarcely registers the impact as he smacks and wheedles the ball around the field. Once or twice he lifts it straight into the crowd, and even has time to make sure beforehand that there is no danger of it dropping near her like a shell. He is jousting in the name of his lady; he should have asked for a favour to wear in his cap.
Between innings, he comes to seek her out. He needs no words of praise—he sees the pride in her eyes. She needs to walk a little after sitting on a slatted bench so long. They take a turn around the ground, behind the stands; beer wafts on the hot air. Amid an idling, anonymous throng they feel more alone together than under the friendliest chaperoning eye at a dinner table. They talk as if they had just met. Arthur says how he wishes he could have worn her favour in his cap. She slips her arm through his and they walk silently on, deep in happiness.