Friendly Young Ladies (34 page)

Just then she lifted her head, looking almost towards him. He saw her face, smiling, unhappy and perverse. He shut his teeth, and stared hard at the ground. This is plumb crazy, he thought, not recognizing the idiom of his boyhood; this won’t get me any place. This is senseless destruction. A good evening’s work; a good friend, too, as straight as a man. As it is I shan’t get down to anything more now, tonight. … There’s something destructive too in her. He doesn’t see it; he looks eminently pleased with his efforts, damn him. Has he. … No. I think not.

She’ll see me, he thought, if I move now. It was a miracle, indeed, that she had not seen him already; and, when Peter’s head bent over hers, he moved out from the tree’s shadow again, to go. Tonight’s obsession, he thought, would not, thank God, survive five minutes’ normal conversation with her. They had been good and useful company together for nearly three years. He had, as a rule, no difficulty in seeing his own moods objectively, and had no doubt of being able to do it tonight, once he could get away. He would remember, for an hour or two, her defiant and reckless face; his imagination, in which it had disturbed a kindred recklessness, would keep him awake perhaps till the dark before dawn; and what would it matter? He would sleep till eleven instead of eight next morning, and that would be the end of it.

She’s put me in my place once already; no, twice, if you count that damned silly couple of minutes on the Chelsea Embankment. He paused, remembering it, with his hand on the rough bark of the apple-tree. And here she is with someone who presumably suits her. So what gives me this idea that I could have her tonight? He paused over the thought, found it hot and unprofitable, and pushed it aside. And supposing I could, what afterwards? Afterwards we should want things back as they were before. Against the thought of their day-today companionship, what he felt seemed, even in the moment of its force, unreal. He was not twenty, to see romance in wrecking something sane and good for the sake of a disastrous impulse. The conclusion of all this was obvious, and he translated it, at last, into action. He had got half-way across the garden; already it was all falling into the past, and he was, in anticipation, alone on the river, setting straight his mind and holding it at arms’ length for analysis, when he heard the click of the gate.

Peter too was leaving. He waved his hand to Leo; a filter of moonlight, full on his face, revealed an expression of grave, self-satisfied benevolence which Joe found ultimately insufferable. It could take only a moment or two to catch him up and knock him into the river; and, during the moment of his disappearance, Leo, standing between, scarcely existed for Joe except as the most evident obstacle to this. Then, suddenly, Peter was gone, and there was only Leo to see.

She was humming “The Strawberry Roan” between her teeth (he remembered teaching it to her, one evening on the island), and prosaically buttoning her dress at the neck. As soon as she turned to go in—which was almost at once, without a glance at the receding figure on the towpath—she saw him.

For a moment neither of them moved. Everything else in the garden, the swaying willows, a bird rustling among the tangled roses, a grasshopper, the lap of the water’s edge, seemed full of whispers because they were so still.

“Why, Joe, is that you?” She came to him over the long grass, which made a soft whishing noise about her feet, smiling. The colourless light bleached her face and clothes, showing only the darkness of her hair; but he knew that she was blushing by her eyes, which were too bright. “I never heard you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her. “I ought to have made more noise.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Her voice had the slightly altered timbre of people who, however trivially, have been making love. He could hear that she was still a little out of breath. “I’m very glad to see you, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, thanks.”

She was quite close now, and looked up at him quickly. It will be all right, she was thinking; we only need to behave quite ordinarily for a minute or two. “Come on in, if you’ve time. We’ve got some sherry.”

No doubt, thought Joe savagely. “Sorry, I can’t stop. I only came—” he remembered, as he spoke, the reason—“to collect my pipe.” Indoors there would be a light. He tried to pretend to himself that she had noticed nothing, that their thoughts were entirely secret from one another. All I need is to go home and sleep this off; it will be all right in the morning.

It will never do, Leo was thinking, to let him go like this; we shall be strained and different in the morning. We must have a drink and laugh it off. The afternoon in the punt had come back to her, with the sharpness of a thought which one knows to be shared. That his pride could be hurt now seemed, indeed, a kind of cruel joke. She took his arm and squeezed it. “Oh, don’t be a lemon, Joe. Come in and talk to me sensibly about something. I’ve been exasperating myself.”

He stepped back, taking his arm away. This in itself shocked her as if he had slapped her face.

“It’s no business of mine,” he said slowly. “But what a waste.”

There was no human creature less given to censure. For the first time she began to be afraid, and reacted with anger.

“Waste of just what, do you imagine?”

He did not answer. Her anger left her. The moon was at his back; he stood there, silent, compact and dark. There came over her, like a kind of sickness, the consciousness of being a woman, detached for a moment from all accompanying thought. She could feel it, even before she spoke, invading her voice, and the way she stood. To feel this with Joe was terrible, and must stop. She struggled against it, and tried to exorcize it with a laugh.

“I was just getting the moonlight out of my system. It didn’t take long; it never does. Don’t behave as if it were hydrophobia.”

He said, “I don’t think I’m being very intelligent tonight. Forget I was here. I’ll look in to-morrow.” He was going to add “Good night,” and walk away. The syllables sounded in his head, but did not come, and he stood where he was. The clouds had blown away now altogether from the moon. Their faces were clear to one another.

No, her mind cried out to her; oh, no. But it was lonely and afraid, and its cry was thin. They were standing a couple of feet away from one another; she seemed to see him, not with her eyes but with a sense of touch. Her mind grew stunned and silent, leaving her to the decisions which had already accumulated in the past. She moved towards him, without knowing why; because of the long habit of trust between them, because Peter had left her ready to reach after any certain reality, even this ruinous one; because there had always been rest here and freedom, and it seemed even now that she only had to ask. He took her by the shoulders, and held her a little away.

“Don’t be angry.” She had not known that she had words ready to say; they came now like late and foolish guests, whom everyone has forgotten. “Nothing happened, you know.”

He seemed not to hear. He stood still, holding her shoulders, as if he were listening to something within himself. She went on talking; it was as if the words had taken charge of themselves.

“You see, it’s easier when it isn’t important. It sounds silly. I don’t know why it is. Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t signify. It didn’t mean a thing.”

He drew her towards him, without haste. He moved like someone who, reluctantly, is obeying an order.

“Let’s see whether this will,” he said.

While he looked at her in the garden, he had thought of kissing her like this, and it was as if the thought had come to life in his arms, her first moment of stillness and slow unfaltering response; they seemed nothing to wonder at because in desire he had known them already. Her strong slim body wakened in his embrace, and, as he held her, he did not remember that she might have resisted, for this was a fulfilment of his thought. The violence of his own mood cut him off from everything but the moment, and she too seemed detached from the past and future, having the suddenness of dreams; he forced the pace to a breathless crescendo and did not consider what she might think or feel, for she answered him like imagination. But at last, when he pulled back her head meaning to kiss her throat, he saw her face, lost and desolate, staring past him into the dark.

“Leo,” he said. They looked at one another. Anger and bitterness were struck away from him; only the passion they had stirred remained, deepened strangely with remorse and compassion and that sense of the tragedy of things which lay always not far below the tranquil surface of his spirit, and found its way often into his written, but rarely into his spoken words.

“Leo. Before God, I’m sorry. I meant this not to happen, too.”

She said, slowly and with difficulty, “Have you wanted it to, then?”

“No, I swear it. Never till now. I saw you, over there, and … that’s all.”

“Is that the truth?” she whispered. “How funny.” She laughed, painfully and soundlessly; he could feel the rise and fall of her breast.

“Don’t. I’m sorry. You don’t believe me, do you? I was going away.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I believe you.”

“We were good together, weren’t we?” he said, and stroked her hair. “And now there’s nothing, I suppose. That’s what you meant, isn’t it, that’s why you kept me off. Nothing but this, now, tonight.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s all.”

For all men kill the thing they love: the bitter rhyme stirred in his mind, and he covered her face with his own, feeling her pain quicken desire in him, and his own pity helpless except to drown them deeper. He thrust her head backward and pressed open her mouth, longing for the easy forgetful sensuality which their natures denied them, and knowing that she too was trying to lose herself in vain. Her breath caught in her throat; her hands strained against him, slackened and fell. The coward does it with a kiss, he thought (bringing the verse and the kiss together to their unsparing conclusions) the brave man with a sword.

He lifted his head. It was full night; the last rusty streak of sunset had faded, the river reflected the luminous sky, empty, like dark, rippled glass. Clouds had covered the moon again, and diffused its light so that it seemed to come from everywhere, the water, the earth, the sky. A grasshopper burred somewhere at their feet.

“Nearly three years,” he said. “And now. …”

“As long as that?” There was so little of her voice left, that the effort with which she kept it level hurt him. He loosed her a little to look at her face.

“They were good years, too,” he said. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten because of this.”

In spite of everything she was aware of his perception, like an unsteady but still sensitive hand, reaching towards the inner doors of her thought and brushing lightly, uncertainly, against the locks. She drew away a little and stood straight on her feet, making a last desperate recovery of herself.

“Never mind, Joe.” She tried to speak as they had been used to speaking together, when something they had taken trouble over making refused to work, or their plans had been wrecked by the weather. “We just had a run of bad luck, that’s all.”

Confusing the effect with the intention, she did not know how far the one came short of the other; and what she saw in his face when she had spoken, she did not understand. He was moved beyond all that had passed before; by her forlorn and breaking courage, which tore at his emotions; by something unconquerable in her, which, below the levels of consciousness, his instincts received as a kind of defiance. The two forces met in him, opposed and united; he pulled her back to him with an abruptness like anger, and began to kiss her again, in a kind of blind deliberation, confused between the desire to console and subdue her; using as if by calculation all the experience he had, and, because he had passed the point of self-understanding, quite unaware of it. He was aware only of her, of the difficult abandonment of her last defences, the slightness of her body when its proud self-sufficiency was gone, and the bewilderment in her face turned to his, as if she were searching it for her own lost identity. His instincts approved; and, this part of their purpose achieved, made room for the tenderness which all along he believed he had been feeling.

“How could we know?” he said, finding his own voice altered; he was shaken beyond what he had believed was possible any more. “You’ve never let me touch you, all these three years.”

Memories streamed through her, like images distorted in flood-water; of the times when he had hauled her from the river into the punt when he had met her swimming; of rock-scrambles when he had heaved her up bodily to a hold that was above her reach; of the day when, during a brief phase of experiment with jiu-jitsu, she had been locked in his grip, on the floor, for five minutes at a stretch. They passed, like illusions, and vanished, and the floods covered them.

“You wanted things as they were,” he said slowly. “I know that. Perhaps I did too; I can’t remember. Maybe it’ll come back again. But there’s only one thing we can know tonight.”

She did not answer. His words were a sound, and a caress among many caresses; her mind, still struggling to find itself again, took no hold of them.

He held her closer. “Let’s do this well,” he said softly. “Let’s make it a damned good bonfire. We’ll have that, anyway.”

She had become a stillness in his arms. In the distance, slowly nearing and coming clear across the water, a party of trippers in a rowboat were singing “Show me the way to go home.” She moved her head a little away, as if she were listening to the sound.

“Well?” he said.

With a quick movement she turned towards him, looked him in the face and said, “Yes. All right.” The conclusion had been foregone to him, and, he supposed, to her also; so that something which was almost amusement stirred in a corner of his mind, she had spoken so much as if, for instance, he had bet her she couldn’t punt a canoe for twenty yards.

The boatload of trippers was getting nearer. They had started the chorus again; they had evidently become attached to it. “I’m tired,” they intoned in a slurred andante, “and I want to go to bed.”

He laughed under his breath, kissed her hard again, and felt her shiver.