Friendly Young Ladies (23 page)

“Stuck?” asked Leo, with concealed hope.

“Uh-huh. Carry on, I can go to sleep.”

“It’s too hot. I’ve been bogged half an hour. Want to go in?”

“If you like. Might fish.”

“I brought some cheese along. Do for chub or something.” She looked vaguely about for it, rolled over and relaxed again, her arms behind her head. Joe knocked out his pipe, made a half-hearted movement towards his tackle, picked up the writing-pad instead and stretched himself beside her. To Leo, who knew him well, the fact that he had not dumped the manuscript somewhere out of sight indicated a willingness to talk about it. She said, “Sorry you’ve seized up. I thought you seemed to be going rather strong.”

“I was. It’s all right. It’s only that I’ve got through the amusing part and come to connective tissue. The prospect of work’s all my trouble. I’ll get down to it tonight. Damn Milton, and his father before him.”

“What did his father do?”

“Most of the damage, probably. Gave him a classical education and brought him up respectable. God, to think what he might have produced if he’d knocked around like Shakespeare did, instead of sitting indoors ruining his eyesight and thinking up filthy words like connubial and affable and congratulant. I suppose when they were fresh, all the writers in the country must have gulped them down like unspoiled savages getting their first taste of gin. Now we’re sodden with ’em, and all the rest of his fancy diseases.
He
can afford them; he’s never less than archangel ruined, blast him. But he’s left the English tongue like Satan left Adam and Eve—fig-leaved and self-conscious. If I ever get to heaven I’ll tell him what I think of him.”

“How he’d love having you thrown out for obscene language, wouldn’t he? Go back home and read Berners’
Froissart
.”

“What’s the good. He crawls in like original sin. Simplicity can never be innocent any more; only penitential, like a whore parading in bare feet and a shift.”

“It’ll probably read better in the morning.”

“I’ll try some on you in a minute. Not this last part; it stinks. I’ll have to do it over. How’s yours?”

“Oh, slogging along. Rather boring, really, because I’ve written the next three chapters in my head and now it’s just clerical work; I could almost do it straight on the type-writer. … I don’t like Milton either, but it’s probably a bias due to a suspicion I have that he wouldn’t like me.”

“Well, maybe you’ve got something there.” He grinned at her with the sun in his eyes, and sprawled down more comfortably. “I suppose the first, spontaneous flavour of those Adam and Eve passages is one of life’s incommunicable things, like the taste of cod liver oil.” He expanded his chest and began to declaim with sonorous relish, directing his piece at the sky or, possibly, at the author.

Leo, lying with her eyes closed against the deepening light, listened and lost half the sense of the words. She wondered why it had never occurred to her before that
Paradise Lost
was primarily a composition for a male voice.

“God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more

Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise—

Revolting, isn’t it?”

“Horrible,” said Leo, rousing herself. “Do you know any more?”

“Yards. It fascinates me. ‘Nor turned, I ween, Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites mysterious of connubial love refused.’ The first love-scene in creation, and that’s what he does with it.”

“Don’t you know any decent bits?”

Good-natured as always, Joe obliged with a dozen lines about Hell.

“That’s better,” remarked Leo when he had run himself to a standstill. “Thanks.”

They lapsed into drowsy silence, their minds drifting back, through the receding Miltonic echo, to their labours of the afternoon.

“Do you ever worry,” said Leo sleepily, “about the situation you leave your characters in when you stop writing? I mean, they’ve got to stay put like that till one starts again.”

Joe opened his eyes to laugh. “Why, no. Do you?”

“Well, you notice it more in the sort of thing I do. When you’ve left a man bound and gagged in an upright position in a ruined shack with night coming on, and coyotes, and he’s had nothing to eat since breakfast, it makes you think a bit.”

“You silly ass,” said Joe with affection. “Well, anyway, my people can’t complain. I left them in bed. First time, too. They should be O.K.”

“Oh, have you got that far? Milton apart, how’s it going?”

“Not too badly, as a matter of fact. Funny thing, I often like the stuff best that I’ve turned out working with you. Other people around put me off.”

“You can feel people’s minds fidgeting if they’re not as busy as you are. I’m working too, so I’m as good as not there, that’s all it is.”

“Maybe it’s that.”

“When do you reckon to finish?”

“Oh, not for months yet. This is a side-line, the real subject’s only just getting under way. I aim to get it out next spring, if possible. So far, it shapes better than the last.” He added, thoughtfully, “I hope so, anyway. Because before very long I foresee an interruption to one’s experiments lasting several years.”

She knew what he meant. They had discussed the thing before from the political angle, and did not reopen it now. She only said, “Why interrupt them? I don’t suppose one sane war book would come amiss.”

“Four or five years after it’s over—just about the time when the reading public’s sick of the subject—I shall probably decide the conditions are ideal for trying to write one.”

“Yes,” said Leo with an irony that had no cutting edge. “When it’s too late to cash in on the action or the reaction, I’m sure you will.”

“Good books will be written, mind you. There’s no virtue in being unable to handle your stuff till it’s cooled. It’s just a matter of knowing your limitations. But if you do work cold, it imposes certain obligations, I think.”

“Which might conflict with certain others?”

“Which would, inevitably. If it’s done with your eyes open, it doesn’t take much to damn your soul. Just leave out a little something, and shift the high-lights somewhere else, and change a bit that would never do for something that will do at a pinch. Well, it’s all right if you can take to it, I suppose. I’d sooner go to bed with a woman for money.”

“So what?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I suppose I shall use my intervals of leisure, if any, noticing what traces of ordinarily conditioned human behaviour, if any, remain on view, and doing what I think about them. Too bad.”

“And when you’re at the front, up to the knees in muck and stink, you’ll get a wad of clippings from London telling you what an escapist you are.”

“Shouldn’t wonder,” said Joe, unmoved. “Though without—as yet—any personal experience, I imagine war is about the most potent escape from the problems of its own solitude that the human ego has ever thought up.”

“Yes,” said Leo, half to herself. “I think that’s possible. And at the end of it, one’s problems would be just what they were before. Or rather worse.”

Joe asked for no elaboration of this. They were both people who could rely on one another to say, with or without persuasion, exactly as much as they wished.

“Your books will boom, anyway,” was all he said. “They’ll appeal to the nostalgia of the mechanized cavalry.”

“There was a rumour earlier on,” she reminded him, “that you were going to read me some of yours. Or have you gone off the idea?”

“No. You had it coming. I’d be glad to know what you think, as a matter of fact.”

“Good,” said Leo lightly, “go ahead.” She settled herself, her head turned a little away from him, to listen.

He fished the manuscript out of its folder, settled himself on one elbow, and began to read. Being confident of his work and his audience, he read very well, without the monotony or over-stress which self-consciousness produces; his pleasant, even voice intruding itself as little as a page of well-spaced print.

It was a dialogue between a man and a woman, dropped in, after a manner Joe had, with a delusive air of sudden irrelevance and with practically nothing in the way of preliminaries. The effect of these passages was apt to be curious, ranging from the Elizabethan intrusion of a lyric to a general impression on the reader that a hitherto sober and solid fabric had been struck by lightning. This extract was of the second sort. Joe read it like the work of someone else, to which he was anxious to be fair.

How can he? thought Leo, as she had thought once or twice before at such times. He was actually writing this an hour ago. Hasn’t it left anything behind at all? She felt her own breathing quicken a little, and, ashamed both of this and of a failure in critical detachment, devoted all her strength of will to imagining herself alone. The chapter came to an end before she had succeeded; and Joe put it away as coolly as he had got it out. He made no comment and asked for none; but she knew he was waiting, he was human enough for that.

“Well,” she remarked, “I see your difficulty in getting down to sea-level again from there. It must be about as good as anything you’ve done.”

Her voice was boyish and hard. The emotion it suppressed appealed to Joe as a compliment both subtle and sincere. His mind warmed to her; he thought, as he often did, what reliable company she was and how free from difficulties. He smiled down at her, leaning on his elbow as he had propped himself to read. The wind had blown the powder off her smooth skin, but her mouth was a clear scarlet in her cream-brown face. Her silk shirt, limp with the heat, had moulded itself to her small high breasts. She met his smile and looked past him into the sky, her eyes following the flight of a passing bird. Joe stayed as he was, and looked at her. He had not, in spite of the appearance which seemed to him good form, been wholly unmoved by what he had been reading.

A lace-wing fly, pale and helpless as a Victorian lady, fluttered over the side of the punt, and settled in Leo’s hair. Its delicate green pleased him against the glossy darkness; he watched it till it began to be entangled and to wave, in feeble fright, its transparent wings.

“Keep still a minute,” he said. “There’s a creature losing its way in your hair.” He rescued the lace-wing, and put it over into the rushes; but the dark hair was warm and vital and sweet-smelling. He stroked it lightly, and slid his hand under its weight. Leo felt his touch; she supposed him to be still seeking the mayfly or whatever it might be. Partly to help, partly in a drowsy impulse of contentment, she turned a little; it brought her head into the palm of his hand.

The sun was hot, the air languid and still; a light haze hung over the river, promising greater heat to come. A pleasant lazy ache, too gentle yet to be called desire, crept over Joe and filled him with a vague and aimless tenderness. It came as naturally as breathing to smooth the warm silk with his free hand, gently and confidingly, till it came to rest over the light upward curve. A tiny movement, a breath perhaps, lifted it; the slightest of responses, but making his senses aware of themselves. To kiss her became obvious and necessary. He bent to do it, and met her eyes. She was looking at him as if she had surprised him with a knife levelled at her heart.

Softly and very carefully, with the tact he would have used equally to a frightened animal or child, Joe withdrew, blaming himself for a fool. An unprejudiced and considerate person, he made the deduction which was reasonable on such facts as he knew. It’s true, then, he thought, though I wouldn’t believe it when that woman told me. Well, she makes a damned good job of keeping it to herself. She thought I was safe, and so I ought to have been. What a lout I am, to have played her up like this.

He trailed off his caress into a friendly nothing, as if he had intended it. One ought to be able to tell, he thought; it seemed for a moment … oh, well, one imagines things. She remained unnaturally still. He said aloud—it was almost the same voice he had used to scared colts when he was a boy—“Sorry. I must be getting absent-minded.” As she gave no sign of having heard, he added, “Just formless emotion; bred, like your crocodile, from the operation of the sun”; and smiled at her, watching her fixed face relax.

“I know,” she said. “Don’t worry. I was half asleep, and you woke me up. I suppose it startled me.” There was a brittle quality in the naturalness of her voice. His hand was still under her head; he took it away, giving her hair a jocular little tug. She smiled and sat up.

“What about trying that cheese on the chub?” he said.

“Yes,” said Leo. “Let’s.”

Neither of them got a bite. Leo sat staring at her float on the water. She had braced the end of her rod against the punt, to hide the unsteadiness of her hands. It will pass off, she thought, in another minute. Please God, let it go away and don’t let me think about it any more. She fixed her eyes on the cool water that went slowly past, as if it would carry away with it, out of sight and mind, what she wanted to lose; the moment when his closed mouth, stooped over hers, had been beautiful and inevitable, making a heaviness in her throat, the shiver of regret that had shocked her when he had turned away. The water flowed on slowly, too slowly; the willow-leaf by which she had first reckoned its progress had hardly travelled a yard. She heard him move, and the scrape of a match as he lit his pipe again; presently the spent stick added itself to the willow-leaf in the slow procession downstream. Worst of all had been when he had spoken to her, and she had not been able to answer; she had wanted to strike at his gentleness and his friendly toleration, to hurt him, even physically, to punish, yes, but also to rouse him. She had sought escape as one seeks in a dream where there is no escape except by waking; and, when he had smiled at her, she had wakened in time. But the memory, the fact, remained, shaking and refracting the peaceful sunshine, rocking the settled happiness which, half an hour ago, had been too stable to know its own existence. She found herself dreading the moment when he would turn or speak, lest his face or voice should show that something remained with him also.

She wanted only to forget about it, not to shape it into thought; but like an image on water into which one has thrown a stone, thought re-formed, making its clear pattern on the surface of her mind; showing her the preciousness of what was threatened, a contentment which the very perception of it endangered. So easily, so casually and so long this friendly gate had swung ajar, till she scarcely remembered that it could be locked against her, or that there was, for her, no other passage through which the life of her instincts and imagination could enter the real world. Whether it was his gift of sympathy, which naturally inclined him to take people as they wished to be taken; whether it was a sense of personality in him so strong that it made him, often, indifferent to sex where the personality interested him more; or whether it was simply some fortuitous miracle between them, she had neither known nor cared. With him, and through him only, she had the company of her kind; freely and simply, without the destructive bias of sexual attraction or rejection, he let her be what her mind had made her and her body refused. For the rest, her way of life had always seemed to her natural and uncomplex, an obvious one, since there were too many women, for the more fortunate of the surplus to arrange themselves; to invest it with drama or pathos would have been in her mind a sentimentality and a kind of cowardice. Because of this confidence she had got what she needed from women easily, and without the sacrifice of pride. But no one, except Joe, had given her what she had wanted from men since she had swum and climbed with the boys of her Cornish home; a need as deep and as fundamental, to be a man with his friend, emotion-free, objective, concerned not with relationships but with work and things, sharing ideas without personal implication to spoil them, easily like bread or a pint of beer in a bar. She had accepted this gift from the first almost without thought, not analysing its goodness, only feeling it to be good; it had been so elementary and wholesome a part of life that she had never questioned it till now, when it was threatened.