Lewis Percy (14 page)

‘Tissy has always been artistic,’ said her mother distantly.

So he would take her to museums, to galleries. That suited him very well. He would suggest this as soon as … As soon as what? There was no reason to delay. He wandered out into the chilly garden. All this is less than heroic, he said to himself quietly, very quietly, so as not to disturb his resolution. But then for a man life is a desperate business. One must seek what refuge is available. All this makes sense,
and yet it is a disappointment. The worst thing – and I must face the fact now – is that happiness simply doesn’t come into it. Tissy must never know. She must think I love her, which I almost do. Not too much: it would break her. Terrible, terrible half-measures, for which I shall surely pay. But she must not be hurt, she must be happy. Raising his face to the empty sky, he murmured, Please let me do well.

7

There are those for whom the performance of a duty, however tedious or unpleasant, is a reward in itself. Such people are rare, although one comes upon them from time to time. Tissy Harper, once she had become Tissy Percy, seemed to find fulfilment in the role of being married, and of performing like a married woman, although Lewis was never quite sure whether or not this entirely satisfied her. This he put down to his false expectations of happiness: both great literature and unpretentious fiction had taught him that he would experience some kind of apotheosis, which would leave him dazed but mysteriously matured once its effects had died away. He had been encouraged to think of the first months of marriage as a kind of saturnalia, a permitted period of extravagance, after which he would be summoned to join the ranks of the adults. But if he had expected folly and licentiousness for however short a time he was to be disappointed, or perhaps less disappointed than surprised, for Tissy at once assumed a grave air of maturity that accorded ill with all his prognostications. Within thirty-six hours of marrying him her demeanour changed: for the better, he was forced to admit. Ranging round his house, which she accepted in its totality, she discovered treasures that his mother or even his grandmother, when widowed, might have put away for ever, thinking they had no place in a reduced life, a life without men. Thus Lewis would return
in the evening to find silver trays, polished and refulgent, bearing decanters with silver throats and labels, or elaborate china tureens and sauceboats on the sideboard, waiting, with the huge platters that had once borne gargantuan joints of meat, to be reintegrated into the fabric of their married life. The excavations and the renovations undertaken by Tissy, the care she devoted to what he supposed were his belongings, and in some way his inheritance, the dynastic seriousness with which she made inventories, impressed upon him that he had married a more substantial woman than perhaps he had intended to do. While he had seen in her the frail companion whose intimacy he need not fear, the secret-sharer of his imaginings who would come to grateful life in his embrace, she had possibly had no such insights, and simply regarded being a married woman as occupation enough. Such duties as a married woman might expect to have were construed by her with a narrowness that accorded with her narrow face, her narrow frame, and although Lewis would wistfully try to detain her in the early mornings before they were both dressed she would break away almost sternly, as if he were asking her to infringe certain rules. These rules were not rules of propriety – for she assented to his overtures without demur – but rather rules of employment. Her curatorial role seemed to leave her little time for leisure or even for conversation, although she never failed to enquire after the progress of his work or of his day. ‘And where did you have lunch?’ she would ask. ‘Did you see Pen today?’ She had only met Pen briefly at the wedding but had taken him on as part of her husband’s furniture. ‘We must have him to dinner soon,’ he suggested, while wondering if it would be in order to invite Pen’s friend, George Cheveley. But the problem was shelved as Tissy revealed further programmes of restoration. ‘Wait until I’ve washed the curtains,’ she might say. ‘And a lot of the bedlinen needs replacing. Wait until I’m straight.’

He supposed that she was happy enough. But how much happiness was enough? He had expected, for himself, an almost mythological state, a metamorphosis, and it was true
that on some mornings he felt his feet virtually skimming the pavement. He liked, too, the sensation of returning home to what was in fact becoming a small marital museum, virtuous with household tasks punctiliously performed. He thought of Tissy sentimentally, as his child bride, yet she was in effect shedding her childishness; even her disability seemed to constrain her less, although her mother still collected her every morning and took her shopping. As her expression was always grave, even in the intimacy of their bedroom, he often wondered, with a touch of uneasiness, what she was thinking. She had assumed that maternal air of women who regard men as children, to be kept clean and fed, and disciplined out of unruly thoughts. Such women look on the activities that captivate men as nonsense and men themselves as fantasists: their calculating and repressive gaze establishes members of their sex as persons possessing a more mature understanding of the world and its priorities. Tissy had such a measuring look, while her responses remained soft and dutiful. Her voice was never raised, but the great eyes, which were basically without expression, sometimes ranged beyond him, as if preoccupied with weightier matters, as if the infinite were no longer contained in what he had to offer her; they would return to rest on him with absolute and dispassionate calm. He began to see a resemblance to her mother, and was almost amused.

He had no time for Mrs Harper and was reassured by her absence. One of Tissy’s more discreet achievements was to confine her mother’s visits to the mornings. She was willing to go shopping with her but not to keep her company as before. Very occasionally Mrs Harper was allowed to visit at the weekends, but such visits were in the nature of a favour conferred. Reduced to pointlessness, and possibly loneliness, Mrs Harper (and to Lewis she would always be Mrs Harper, although he conscientiously addressed her by her Christian name) had utterly lost her ability to offend him. He supposed too that Tissy, who, although good as gold, was only human, rather enjoyed this reversal of
roles. Through the agency of her marriage she was at last permitted to view her mother from a position of equality.

Of course his feelings were impure. Whose feelings are not? He had thought to subdue her and to release her simultaneously, whereas he now found himself taken for granted. He loved her for her wifeliness, which told him where he stood, established him as a man with a social position, yet felt a little dismayed at having his romanticism brought so impassively to heel. He supposed her to have been mysterious all along, and, despite himself, thrilled to the long-term prospects of loving an enigmatic woman. She was not what she seemed: that was his most tentative conclusion. She had, despite her mild appearance, something like authority. That this authority was entirely passive gave it a curious additional weight. As to her inner thoughts and reflections, which were hidden from him, he had no idea of how to gain access. He tried not to dwell on what, for him, amounted to a disappointment which he knew to be inappropriate, for he felt gratitude and devotion when he saw her sitting in his mother’s place, filling what had been to him an intolerable void, and serving him his soup with the great silver ladle which she had found, black with tarnish, at the back of a cupboard in the kitchen. He loved the orderliness of his home, the shining windows, the laundered sheets, the smell of wax polish. She had even subdued Mrs Joliffe, who now only came on two mornings a week and took her bearings accordingly. Of the little boy there was no further sign. Lewis rather missed him, but had to acknowledge Tissy’s mastery in the matter.

All these tasks she performed as one called to higher service. When he would telephone her during the day, having been visited by an amorous thought, she would say, ‘I can’t linger, Lewis. I’m washing the paint. What time will you be home?’ He supposed that she was old enough to behave like this, although he himself felt frivolous in comparison. It was as if the few years’ difference in their ages had been multiplied by two or even by five. When he returned in the evening he would greet her ardently, willing and even anxious
to delay dinner, and she would usually disengage herself without much more than a smile. This smile, he sometimes thought, was directed at him, or over his head, to an unseen crowd of witnesses, and he wondered why desire should have to be postponed so often. When, however, postponement was no longer in order, she was acquiescent, competent, even intelligent. But she was not silly, not the mindless grateful creature he had occasionally entertained in his imagination. He gained the impression that she was prepared to accommodate him as part of the arrangement, but that she would not be much put out if they settled down together as brother and sister. Her hitherto excessive shyness and timidity he ascribed to the influence of her mother and the regular visits of the odious doctor. Together they had kept her subservient, childlike – in her shape, her movements, her air of concentration – but she was no longer timid. His embraces were permitted and even indulged, but she allowed no passionate exhibition to derogate from her dignity. He sometimes felt ashamed of his own insistence, in comparison with which she displayed a propriety which disconcerted him. This merely intrigued him further, although it sometimes made him feel downcast. He felt, obscurely, that she lived on a higher plane than he did, and therefore considered himself to be at fault.

Her status, which had been augmented by marriage, was precious to her. To see evidences of her in his bedroom, to see her wide-skirted dresses hanging in his wardrobe, her pale stockings rolled in the drawer of the tallboy, sometimes gave him a pang of longing for her but also revealed a shocking loneliness. It was not exactly what he had wanted. His acquiescence at the reasonableness of her manner and at the life that she denied him – and that he would now never have – he disguised as a sort of jaunty tolerance which nevertheless had something tired about it. He longed for her to overwhelm him, to seduce him, or even just to surprise him. But nothing came, and he was too puzzled ever to allude to this disappointment and too good-natured ever to complain about it. He supposed that men talked to
other men about these matters, but he swore to himself that he would never betray Tissy, or indeed his own desires. He blamed himself for not loving her properly, but knew that he lacked the courage to live alone and wait for the woman whom destiny had reserved for him, if such a woman existed. And if she did not? He would always seek the company of women, and, if permissible, their love: his own, he felt, was simply waiting to be engaged. How, then, could he have ignored Tissy, when she had languished within his reach? How could he ignore her transformation into contented housewife? For he supposed that she was contented, having escaped her thraldom, having graduated to the adult world. What she felt for him he did not quite know. There was something obedient about her that saddened him. Yet she seemed perfectly happy.

He sought to make her understand that she could now express herself. He was still beguiled by her innocence, to which his physical response was never lacking. He loved to adorn her. Fashion now dictated that the wide-skirted dresses should be put away. He bought her the new short skirts, which gave her a bewitching air of juvenility. With her thin legs and her slightly knock-kneed stance on view, she lost some of her dignity, and with it her ability to repress him: he was correspondingly grateful. He watched entranced as her long beige hair was cropped into a geometrical shape which made her eyes look even bigger. No longer dowdy in her matronly clothes, she began to attract glances in the street. When they walked down the King’s Road on a Saturday afternoon – for she waited for him before doing the weekend shopping, still a little uncertain about her ability to go out alone – he felt a glow of pride and told himself that he was now in truth a married man. His reward would come later, when his wife was confident enough to shed her wifeliness. At the same time he warned himself not to frighten her with his ardour. He had waited so long that he could wait a little longer before coming into his own.