Dark Entries (15 page)

After dinner they went up to the music room and for hour upon hour played to each other or played duets or played simultaneously upon the two pianos. The maid at intervals brought them coffee and cubes of Rahat Lacoum, placing the trays on the coloured table between them. A fire which had been lighted so illumined the room as to make lamp and candles almost superfluous, especially as both players seemed so well to know the music.

‘Who is that bust over the mantelpiece?’ asked Carfax.

‘I have no idea, absolutely no idea,’ she replied. ‘He just goes with the house. He is part of the house.’

There were long pauses in their playing as they talked eagerly and softly of the wonders and beauties of music: the hardships and frustrations and irreparable disappointments of the musician. Outside all was still except for an occasional wind which rattled and echoed in flue and window frame. There was no clock and the hours passed, faded, and were lost.

Carfax at last stopped playing and crossed to where she sat at the other piano. She had started to play what she said was an air of the Island: ‘arranged by myself’. It curled and dripped through the thickly curtained silence. It seemed without meaning.

Carfax’s hands fell upon her black-covered shoulders.

‘Oh Ariel,’ he said. ‘Ariel . . . I love you with all my heart and soul.’

She continued playing the rather thin, even silly, little air. The melody accompanied her reply, spoken slowly and with pauses while she went on playing. She spoke while she softly played, some lines of verse:

A few more bars and she stopped. Rising a little wearily, she crossed to the small table and, going through the motion of pouring from the coffee pot, demonstrated its exhaustion. She made an indescribable little motion: indicative, it might be, of the bankruptcy also of poesy.

‘It must be late,’ she said, smiling her steady smile. ‘We had better go to bed. We had better go to bed.’

When Carfax returned to his own room in the morning, he found it flooded with sunshine, and swept, to the point of discomfort, by the breeze through the open window. The previous evening upon his return from the garden he had found the shutters and blinds drawn against the oncoming night; so that it was not until now that the contrast once more struck him between the view from his window and the view from outside the house. Now, again seeing the open moorland spread before him, he began to feel an uneasy wonder at the absence, in the view, of those compelling hills which were to be the main feature of his picture. He wondered also at the unwonted lack of method which had accompanied his inattention to the problem while he had been in the garden the day before. But the problem was at once so enormous and, when compared with the other happenings of the previous twenty hours, so small and unimportant, that
the mind tended somewhat to reel, at once baffled and bored. Carfax continued, none the less, to stand staring out of the window, half-naked and shivering slightly in the draughts which forced their way round the edges of the now closed sashes.

He resolved at breakfast lightly to besiege the beloved Ariel with some very reasonable questions.

One enquiry answered itself, however, at least in part; for not only did she appear dressed for riding, in
breeches and boots, but soon remarked that he would not be seeing her again until the evening. Her attitude, affectionate rather than amorous, seemed in no way influenced by the occurrences of the night; but Carfax’s initial disappointment was soon modified by an uprush of feeling, already increasing steadily and rapidly, that whatever she did was the best possible thing to be done, at least from his point of view, the thing most in his own interest. Her doings were mainly mysterious, but seemed to provide him, as well no doubt as her, with odd but complete gratification . . . Now he would have time to get on with his picture . . . He would be able to paint knowing she would return . . . Wonderful foreknowledge . . . Her daytime activity taking her from him, about which he had been intermittently speculating, appeared to be riding. It sufficed.

‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘why the very nice room you have given me is so different in style and furnishing from all the other rooms I have seen in the house – from your own, for instance?’

‘The house has been built and rebuilt several times,’ she answered politely but without displaying much interest in the matter. ‘Even on several different sites. And occupied, of course, by many different people. I expect these are the reasons.’

‘I thought perhaps my room is in the style of decoration you reserve for your male guests,’ he continued, the presence all the time of this thought in his mind and his consequent eagerness to express it impeding his full immediate awareness of her answer.

‘No. I draw no decorative distinction between the sexes
,
my darling,’ she replied in the same even tone of slightly patient commonplace. By now, however, something strange in the terms of her earlier answer had passed the resistance necessarily strong in any human mind to such strangeness, and had in part entered Carfax’s consciousness.

‘You talk the most sweet nonsense, dearest Ariel,’ he said. ‘And nonsense with a lovely strangeness about it. Lovely nonsense.’

‘A very ancient said that all beauty must have something of strangeness,’ she replied, again with her serene smile.

‘Like your carpets!’ he interjected quickly. ‘How did you get a stair carpet which is different on every step from every other step? Is it part of a very huge carpet or was it specially made to a design of your own?’

‘
Esprit
d’escalier,’
she replied, gently smiling. ‘
Esprit
d’escalier.
The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete – till afterwards it suddenly comes to you – when it is
too late.’

‘Will it be too late when I know the real answers to my questions?’ he asked.

‘You must have noticed it is always too late when questions are answered and hopes fulfilled and sacrifices made and murder done. Because it is always later than you think.’

The grey-clad maid brought in a large porcelain bowl heaped with fruit. They ate for a while in the silence of lovers.

Later she rang for the dishes to be removed.

‘Don’t get painter’s cramp or lead poisoning, my darling,’ she said as they stood alone in the hall. ‘I look forward so much to seeing you alive and well tonight.’

Emotion swept through him and he embraced her passionately. She opened the front door. Outside stood a black horse, beautifully accoutred, the bridle held by the efficient young woman who had driven the car on the previous day. Ariel mounted, smiled at him, and rode swiftly away, the horse’s hooves clattering excitingly down the spotless gravel of the drive. Carfax’s gaze followed her out of sight.
Then, noticing that the efficient young woman seemed to have gone about her business, he proceeded to go about his.

Progress with the wonderful painting proved disappointing. Carfax found himself intermittently re-troubled by the problem of the view. Several times he left his easel and, returning to the house, climbed the serpent staircase to his room for further cogitation and research. Though his knowledge of the technique of orientation was hazy, it seemed clear enough that his room faced south, also that the south front of the house was at his back as he painted; but looking up from the little terrace where his easel stood, he was quite unable either to determine which was the window he had just looked out of or to perceive how any window could possibly offer that wonderful airy panorama. Nor when he looked out from his bedroom could he, owing to the configuration of the house and ground, see his easel; and he had noticed when below that the three parts of the garden, corresponding to the three fronts of the house which did not contain the front door, seemed oddly alike in plan and planting, perhaps identical. In the end he resorted to the familiar device of hanging his towel from his bedroom window (first saturating it with water from his ewer to warrant the absurd procedure in the eyes of any inquisitive cleaner or bed-maker: also tumbling his bed anew, as he thought matters over, in his eagerness for the aspects of the wholly normal); but when he had descended to the garden he found the soaking object a small heavy heap on the ground and the appropriate window as impossible as ever to detect by any index of open or closed sashes. Irritably he ascended the staircase again (his fifth transit since Ariel’s departure), passing once more he noticed, as he had done on each previous occasion, the grey-clad maid, who seemed always so much more in evidence than any other member of the domestic staff.

Back in his room fear rose for the first time to his consciousness as, at the casual glance he had resolved upon, he at once fancied that the view had changed. Sick shivering gripped him as his eyes stared without blinking or moving
at a small building, a white-washed cottage of the type a fisherman might be supposed to occupy, which stood at the edge of the distant cliff where Carfax was so certain no building had stood before – no building had stood, in fact, less than ten minutes ago. His whole body was shaking as he sank into a chair and picked up a sheet of some newspaper he had used as packing for a pair of shoes. In the attempt to steady himself he read through the first item his eye lighted upon, though the paper shook so much that reading itself was slow and laboured. It was the report of Our Racing Correspondent upon happenings at Plumpton the day before, now more than a week ago. To Carfax it was all warmth and reassurance; like the aftermath of a bilious attack in school days twenty years before.

He recovered; looked again; felt no fear at all; and decided he had been mistaken. The cottage was still there; but he must have failed to notice it through concentration on the wider view.

He descended once more; once more passing the grey-clad maid, now industriously polishing a suit of armour mounted on the first-floor landing. Something, necessarily something very slight, in the proportions of the armour seemed to him in some way familiar. A flood of feeling swept through him for Ariel who, he at once realised, owing to a lover’s inexactitude in such matters, momentarily seemed to him of just that size and (absurdly enough), in some sense, shape and build. Several times already since meeting her he had caught delightful shades and echoes of her loved form and presence where no such things could be except for the infatuate.

He returned to the garden and resolutely began to paint. The notion of further experiments, even of the smallest enquiry, was swept clean from his mind. His tired nerves automatically threw off the slightest trace of conscious anxiety about the view, the only disturbing element in the period of blissful happiness he was now entering upon. Or perhaps very nearly the only disturbing element. For another minor mischief began almost at once to suggest itself: the nearly miraculous concept for his picture had completely disintegrated. Before and after the excellent luncheon the grey-clad maid
had provided for him in
a little square study well suited to meals taken alone, he struggled and searched to recover what was lost, to produce even a passably good painting. Only daubs and smears and lightning zigzags resulted. A corner of his mind seemed at once to offer the suggestion that in some incomprehensible way, by forcing his thoughts so thoroughly from the mystery of the view he had injured his capacity to paint. Did his imagination in some way have to embrace everything or nothing?

He had heard no sound of Ariel’s return but was interrupted by her, returned also to her black Elizabethan costume, as he scratched and fought with lost inspiration. As on the previous evening, night was rapidly descending and he noticed that Ariel was shivering slightly in the sudden chill of the spring evening. It was an enchanting sight. Stretching out his hand, he touched her body between the edges of her deeply open white shirt.

‘I love you, Ariel,’ he said, ‘but I shall never be a great painter.’ He indicated the day’s several failures.

‘I think the secret’, she replied, kissing him, ‘is
to get it down quickly. Quickly. Immediately you see it
.
When you see it. Don’t stop till you’ve got it down.’

‘I wonder how you know? You’re perfectly right. Yesterday—’

‘That’s just it,’ she said. ‘Yesterday – and today everything’s different. Things only exist as long as you see them. And we are all of us nothing but the sum of our moods.’

‘Do your moods change very much?’ he asked.

‘Everything changes. All the time. Very fast. I’m no exception, I’m glad to say. Only the dead fear change. I’m alive, my dear. Really very warm and alive.’

‘How long will it be before you change about me?’

‘Oh!’ The slightly drawn-out ejaculation was enigmatic. ‘Shall we go in to dinner?’

He took her arm as a man takes a woman into dinner. From his other hand hung the day’s failures, slightly damp with dew or mist.

Every now and then he looked out of his bedroom window
and every now and then a new, small, rather distant building seemed to have appeared. One quiet night hour when he awoke without reason while Ariel lay unconscious in his arms, he found himself thinking the ridiculous thought: ‘I’m glad I don’t have to sleep in that room.’ His eye wandered round the warmly curtained walls of Ariel’s chamber, the ornate cabinets full of her clothes, the silk-covered furniture; all muffled in darkness save for the patchy starlight from the large opened window. The dimly glimpsed scene, the unique remote creature warm in his arms, composed the utmost possible tranquillity and joy. He forgot about the view in deep surrender to his own released unconscious. By day – after that first day he had seen the first house – his fears were swamped and scattered in sun and wind. But, despite her brief return more than once in conversation to the theme of change, he made no reference to the matter when talking to Ariel, did not risk another of those so natural interrogatives she so lightly made to seem so heavy and unnecessary.