Lewis Percy (20 page)

They settled themselves in deck chairs, ate hastily and ravenously. He noticed her onyx pendant and ear-rings, and the
shape of her breast as she leaned forward to return the bottle to the bag. She was too big, he told himself; too untidy. Yet her hands were long and fine; a ring gleamed gold on her little finger. He hoped that she was not easily bored, for he doubted that he had the resources to entertain her as she expected to be entertained; perhaps she was naturally restless. As he lifted his face to the sun, she brushed crumbs from her skirt and stood up. ‘Let’s walk,’ she said. ‘You’re not in a hurry, are you?’

‘Well, I should be getting back soon …’

‘Oh, come on. It’s far too nice a day for mouldering indoors, and I’m sure you’re entitled to a few hours off. Everyone else seems to be. Who was that incredibly old man creeping around? You don’t want to end up like him, do you?’

‘Ah,’ said Lewis. ‘That was Arthur Tooth. And I may very well end up like him. Bound to, I should say.’

‘Then I reckon you ought to strike out while you can. As far as the Serpentine, at any rate.’

The wind had dropped, and the air seemed milder. The sun had died down, leaving a white even calm. With this calm came a curious silence, an absence of volatility. They wandered away from the little groups of people, already dispersing to do the afternoon’s work, down to the water’s edge. Here the silence was almost palpable. Only the feet of an occasional duck, fluttering the surface as it came in to land, disturbed the peace. Light lay flatly on the water. The wide empty scene was touched by a very slight melancholy; the still sunless sky promised a wet evening. The unvarying grey, opaque, without brilliance, yet harsh to the eyes, oppressed Lewis, making him long for some gorgeous manifestation of the new season, some generosity, some expansiveness. He was conscious of something withheld. He found himself without the resources necessary to break the curious spell cast by the white light, the mild air, and the silence. They walked on, not speaking, past the Serpentine, into the secret depths of the park, towards the Long Water. Conscious now of his
failure to be amusing, conscious of a child-like distress, he felt the onset of an immense disappointment.

They stopped finally by the Italian Garden and kissed. He had thought her vivid, disruptive, but now she looked at him sternly. The need for a statement of intention was present in his mind, although he delayed it as long as possible. When they finally broke free, he smoothed the hair from her forehead, and said,

‘What is all this about, do you suppose?’

‘This is how it starts, Lewis. Don’t you know that by now?’

‘But nothing can start, we both know that. I’m a married man, and you, well, you’re Pen’s sister.’

‘What an ass you are,’ she said. ‘You can’t leave me now.’ She was flushed and nervous; her insistence impressed him, for it was no less than his own. He brushed aside his reasons in the surprise occasioned by her forwardness. He was not shocked, but he felt immeasurably older. As he took her hand and led her to the balustrade he knew that he was probably ruining his life, or, rather, some part of it.

‘Emmy,’ he said gently, as if to someone very young. ‘You don’t want me. I’m not really your type, am I? I’m dull, loyal, pedestrian – all the things you despise. I’m not even good-looking. I’m suburban man. I go to work every day and I read myself silly, and I watch Arthur Tooth and think I’ll be like that when I’m old. And then I walk home in the evening. To my wife. And we eat dinner, and perhaps watch television, and then we go to bed.’

‘You don’t love her, do you?’

‘I can’t decide,’ he said. This constituted his second infidelity. ‘Perhaps I do. I feel for her, I want to protect her, I can’t bear for her to be hurt.’

‘That’s not love, Lewis. That’s responsibility.’

‘Yes, but you see, I
am
responsible. And I shall go on being responsible. There’s no way out of responsibility once it has become your lot.’

‘Couldn’t you look on me as a sort of good conduct prize? An award for your constancy?’

‘Do you think I could take you as lightly as that?’

She shrugged. ‘Most men do. Men with wives. Most of them are so famously married that they think they deserve a treat. Men who have everything. The day comes when they reckon they’ve done such a splendid job that they can take on a mistress as well. The difference being that the men have someone to go home to and the mistress is left alone.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I’ve had lovers since I was sixteen.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I’m supposed to be immoral, aren’t I? Even if things are changing. And I’m involved with somebody now, although he’s only involved to the extent of once a fortnight. I never wanted this, do you know that? I wanted to be married, like you. I wanted children, roses round the door, the whole thing. The trouble is, I don’t look the part, so I never got the offers. And now I’m typecast, I suppose.’

She burst into tears of frustration, like a child. He kissed her again, put his arm round her waist, held her while she wept. Presently she wiped her eyes.

‘I hated your wife,’ she said. ‘I hated her resistance, her unpreparedness. I imagined all the wives banding together, ready to turn me out of their houses. And making no effort to please. That disgusted me. Only mistresses make that sort of effort, and they get called all sorts of names for doing so. Why don’t you come home with me, Lewis? No one will ever know. I won’t ruin your marriage. I’ve never ruined anybody’s. I’m too accommodating.’

‘You don’t want me, Emmy. One afternoon with me isn’t going to solve anything for either of us. And I can’t marry you, you know. That’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be married. My dear girl, you couldn’t stand me on that basis. I’d bore you to tears.’

She said stubbornly, her tears now dry, her cheeks still flushed, ‘Come home with me now.’

‘Ah,’ he said sadly. ‘But, you see, you don’t love me. And
I would certainly love you. And you would soon get tired of me. You don’t love me – you just hate my wife, all wives. I understand, I truly do understand. You are a marvellous girl, but I can’t come home with you. I might just be the sort of unfaithful husband whose marriage you really did break up. And you wouldn’t like that half as much as you think you would. And then you’d be stuck with me.’

They walked in silence to the Bayswater entrance.

‘In fact, I have to say, I can’t be sorry for you without being sorry for myself. But it has to stop there. I should like to behave well, I really should. And if that makes me a prig, I can’t help it. Priggishness may yet make a comeback, who knows?’

‘It already has,’ she said.

They both laughed, and then he kissed her goodbye, leaning into her soft strong body, which was everything he wanted a woman’s body to be. He watched her as she marched off towards Notting Hill Gate. He was immensely proud of her.

‘This is unlike you, Lewis,’ said Goldsborough, looking quite normal without his cap. ‘Arthur was quite concerned when you failed to return after lunch.’ One of Arthur’s less ingratiating habits was his overwhelming punctuality. ‘Nothing wrong, I hope? Not trouble at home?’

‘I’m sorry, Arnold,’ said Lewis. ‘I had a very pressing commitment in town.’ He could not think why he had said ‘in town’, when the image of that flat light-deflecting water would stay with him forever. ‘I’ll come in on Saturday morning to make up for it.’

‘Very good, Lewis. But let me know in advance if you’re going to do this sort of thing, won’t you? Dentist, was it?’

In that moment Lewis saw Goldsborough as simple, harmless, and greedy, the sort of man who has been a lonely fat boy at school. Suddenly he felt extremely well disposed towards Goldsborough, and even towards Arthur Tooth. He felt the onset of an unfamiliar exuberance.

‘I’ll do the late night tonight,’ he said to Goldsborough.
‘You go off. You’re more in demand than I am.’ He longed to be alone, to examine the complexities that had been revealed to him, to wonder if Emmy were thinking of him, as he was thinking of her. He wanted time to himself, before he could decently go home.

He sat in the library until nine o’clock, having even remembered to telephone Tissy to warn her. He felt no embarrassment, no division of loyalties, in speaking affectionately, reassuringly, to his wife. As the evening darkened, his euphoria, his feeling of having done the right thing, gradually waned, and he reviewed his behaviour with appalled misgivings. An episode, he tried telling himself; not even worth thinking about. Yet he did think about it, insistently, and the more he thought about it the more he blamed himself. He had rejected her, and nobody forgives a rejection, just as no one forgets a humiliation. But what could he have done? She was inconstant, she had told him so herself; for all he knew she did this all the time. He tried to feel sorry that any of this had happened, yet what he really felt was an awakening, a slow mobilization of all his dormant energies.

He put his head in his hands. What I said to her was in effect true, truer than I meant it to be, he thought. Why should she care for me? Why should anyone? Even Tissy does not love me, although she assures me that she is happy. But how can I go on like this? I never wanted moderation. He nodded to the last student, checked out the last book, then wandered round, turning off the lights. He cursed the reasonable words he had spoken to her, yet could not call them back. A figure of fun, he reflected, virtuous and vacillating. And her role in all this? She was there to make trouble, and to think nothing of it. He disapproved violently, and yet he adored her boldness. The difficulty – the supreme difficulty – was that he might have loved her. If things had been different, he thought, if he had been free. But he was not free. As he locked the door behind him, he reflected that at home he would find his dinner in the oven and an unflustered Tissy watching television. The thought did not comfort him. But at least nobody got hurt,
he thought, as he took the enormous burden of his disordered feelings and his cancelled expectations out with him, into the dark and now rainy street.

10

In the weeks that followed Lewis was extremely attentive to his wife, who suddenly appeared to him as she had done when he had first been attracted to her. He saw only her fragility, her docility, her virginal lack of independence. This gave her a legendary quality, rather as if she had stepped out of the Unicorn tapestry, or wore a metaphorical wimple. Above all, she carried about her an aura of chastity, which was, he saw, never to be entirely confounded. These qualities still moved him, mixed though they were in his mind with his own impatience, exasperation, and a degree of bewilderment that began to reach epic proportions. He strove heroically to maintain in himself the requisite family piety. When he saw Tissy moving about the quiet rooms of his house, or caught her carrying, hieratically, a dish for his supper, or watched her bent head as she read her book, his heart smote him, and there was nothing in the world he would not have done to shield and protect her. He felt a very real sadness when her large unclouded eyes ranged over his face and then beyond it, when her hesitant steps told him that she needed his arm to lean on. Sometimes, walking slowly with her in the quiet streets of early summer, he would detect within himself the seeds of a quite serious longing. He could say nothing of this to her, although she was the subject of his most pitiful speculations. Silently he addressed her in his mind, willing her to be alive to his confusion. Dearest little wife, he
thought, when will you be strong enough to do without me? What will quieten your fears? And on these wordless evening promenades, so staid, so undemanding, do you think of me at all? How will it be for you in the years ahead, when, contrary to expectation, life becomes more difficult? How will you age, or, rather, when will your eternal innocence yield to experience? When will you begin to learn those lessons – of concealment, of imitation, of duplicity – of which even I now have an inkling? This peaceful, even silent life came about as a result of your hesitations, the limits that had been imposed on you and which you now impose on me, for I begin to think that you are very strong, or rather that you possess a force of will that I never suspected. But that force is negative, dedicated to the preservation of a status quo that will not, cannot threaten you. As I walk with you, slowly, prudently, our eyes cast down, I feel that we have been married since the beginning of time, as if my own youth – which was as hesitant as yours – were bound to end in this becalmed state, as if old age will not surprise us, or, if it does, will be found not to differ very greatly from this strange condition. For if we still look young, it is a youth of which most young people would feel ashamed. Yet your white arm, in its short sleeve, is passed so naturally through mine that I could not now bear it to be absent. And although we are going, as usual, to visit your mother, the sun is mild, the air is kindly, the lime tree is full of scent, and there is nothing really wrong with either of us. Is there?