Lewis Percy (23 page)

‘I don’t know how to leave you,’ he said.

‘Oh, men always say that. Then they push off, never to be seen again, Go, just go.’

But he took her in his arms, and held her for a time, until he felt the anger leave her, and something like his own sorrow take its place. Then he kissed her and left.

It was very late and the streets were deserted. Not a car passed. He walked down Pembridge Crescent, the large houses ghostly in the moonlight. In Kensington High Street he thought he might pick up a taxi, but there was nothing to be seen. He walked down Earl’s Court Road into Old Brompton Road, then down Redcliffe Gardens and Edith Grove into the King’s Road. From there it was his usual walk home. He glanced at his watch almost indifferently. It was three o’clock. The entire adventure had been concluded in under four hours, exactly as if he were guilty. He felt clandestine, ignoble, sick at heart. The very irregularity of the evening disturbed him; the fact that he should be out on the streets at this hour seemed to him so unsettling, so much against the natural order, that guilt for this was added to his already heavy burden. Matters being equal, he might have regarded this night-time excursion as intriguing, even stimulating, but when the very reason for it was grounded in shame he doubted whether he could even bear to remember it, always supposing that it might be concluded without
incident, which was by no means certain. There would have to be explanations, reassurances. His heart smote him as he thought of his home life, put in danger because of Emmy, yet unbearable without the thought of her. And Pen: how would Pen behave towards him when they next met? Was he to lose Pen as well as Emmy? If so, his life would be a desert, a penitential round of work and home, without a refuge from all that he was beginning to feel was most alien to him.

He preoccupied himself with thoughts of Pen. When he thought of Emmy, he felt a quaking, an inner desolation, as if his physical foundations had literally shifted. And with the thought of Emmy came the unwelcome memory of his own behaviour. He felt utterly reduced, as if he could not bear to look at himself again. Perhaps she had been right: no harm would have been done. Yet he knew, with a melancholy knowledge, that he was not a good enough actor for adultery, was not sufficiently self-serving. In any event it was not what he wanted. And Tissy was still innocent, there was no getting round that. What he had told Emmy was true: he wanted a better life. His face burned steadily as he thought of what had taken place. In addition to his shame and regret, he felt guilty of a grave fault merely by being involved in behaviour that was henceforth to be entered on his record. He felt himself to be in a serious state of error, and that no one who claimed to be above board should be in the streets at three o’clock in the morning, and finally, furtively, entering his own house like a burglar, intent on making no noise.

Tissy was awake. He knew she was awake, although she insisted on pretending to be asleep. He spoke her name experimentally, whispered it into her ear, but her body remained still, her eyes closed. Only her rigidity gave her away. He knew that it would be worse than useless to try out some sort of an explanation: the thought was not even to be entertained. The truth was out of the question and any falsehood would be immediately detected. He knew that her
suspicions of Emmy had been aroused at their first meeting. The situation was unendurable but would have to be endured; he did not see how he could face the following day. For his wife he felt a reluctant pity, not because she had been injured by his own defeat – he had, he hoped, saved her from that – but because the events of this horrible evening might have injured her in ways she could not even contemplate. For now he loved Emmy, whom he had renounced, and there was no hope for him.

Yet at some level he seemed to be unalterably married, and thus it was from his wife that he sought absolution, or at least as much as would provide a safe passage back to whatever normality could be salvaged from the ruins. Once or twice during the course of his sleepless night he made as if to wake her, shaking her gently, and murmuring, ‘Tissy? Tissy?’ But she remained adamant, and when the first light of a beautiful day pierced the gap in the curtains he knew that she had condemned him, without his having to say a word.

11

From her expression, Lewis could see that it was all up with Mrs Harper. Consideration of this distracted him momentarily from the situation in which he found himself. Mrs Harper’s habitual grimness of feature, from which the original petulance and coquetry had long departed, was now overlaid with an air of desperation, and also of incredulity, as if she could not believe that she had once again been clobbered by fate. Whatever wordless plans she had made for her own future – at the bridge table, perhaps, in sunnier climes, or merely baking cakes for the doctor – had been swept away by this throw of the dice, of which she knew nothing beyond the fact that Tissy had returned to her, evidently with the intention of staying. Opening the door of her house on to its crimson interior, now a little darker, a little shabbier than when Lewis had first seen it, she welcomed him almost as an ally. He came, of course, as a suppliant, knowing himself to be deeply in the wrong, but not as wrong as all that, simply wrong in the way that men have always felt themselves to be in the light of a woman’s accusatory disapproval.

Tissy’s accusations were silent and therefore menacing, hinting at a limitless number held in reserve. They had lived together uneasily after his night of – what had it been? Love? Infidelity? Or rather fidelity? He no longer knew – unwilling to sever the ties that still held them together, but frighteningly, separately, angry. Was it for this? This was the question
in Lewis’s mind as Tissy sat tight-lipped and unbelieving throughout his explanations. To her the insult was mortal. Her status as a married woman had been deprived of its dignity, and she found that righteousness, which in her case had always been authentic, no longer served her as well when it was assumed for other purposes. In the guise of outrage her innocence no longer pleased, became ugly, middle-aged. Lewis came home nervously in the evenings: weekends were torture. And yet nothing had happened. He repeated this until it began to sound false even to himself. After all, something had happened, and Tissy was not stupid enough to think otherwise. What had really happened soon dwindled in his mind into a wistfulness, not fully remembered, and certainly not weighty enough to measure up to what was being enacted here: his estrangement from his wife and her growing resentment at his presence.

When he thought about it later he wondered whether this resentment had not always been there, but disguised as tolerance, a tolerance for which he had always been grateful since it was slightly ostentatious and therefore made him feel humble. There was something non-negotiable about this tolerance of Tissy’s: he could not always expect it. He was grateful to be forgiven, yet again, for faults so native to men that their existence could be assumed, taken for granted even, by women who might, but then again might not, extend the hand of mercy. Nothing less than total incorruptibility, he thought, would satisfy her, and yet he had tried to be incorruptible. But he could no longer ignore the fact that in her eyes he was damned, whatever he might or might not have done. And he could see no way in which he might undo this. His inability to defend himself grew in proportion to her refusal to believe him. There is something contemptible about a man who says, ‘But nothing happened!’ Her mouth tightened when she looked at him; she became an expert at leaving the room in a manner which established her innocence and his guilt. He became exasperated but still felt helpless. Since they continued to sleep in the same bed he
very occasionally made love to her. But this was in the dark, when they were both half asleep, and in any event wordless. He never knew what she felt, since the morning restored her to her tight-lipped self-sufficiency. She probably added these incidents to the weight of the evidence already piled up against him. That she should become pregnant as a result of one of these half-conscious encounters demonstrated, finally, how base her husband had turned out to be.

She was older than he was and had always been frail, or so she said: Lewis was accustomed to treating her as if this was in fact the case, although she seemed to have as much stamina as the next person when she wanted to use it. It was simply that she had fallen, early in her life, into a series of attitudes that ensured the protection of others. In this way she had never had to learn the skills appropriate to maturity. She had remained young,
jeune fille
, as if the years had no purchase on her. Others were there to serve her; their company was necessary if she wanted to go out. She never betrayed any interest in the character of anyone but her mother, whom she pitied for her hard life, yet this pity held something unexamined, a mixture of incuriosity and rivalry, all disguised as a need for her mother’s company, as if her mother could not properly exist without her, whereas, as far as Lewis could see, Mrs Harper still had ambitions for herself. She was still a good-looking woman, although Lewis was now forced to add ‘for her age’. Not a lot more would happen to Mrs Harper; he supposed that that was why she clung to the doctor. That Tissy should want to go back to this pair seemed to him quite simply unbelievable: that she should deliver her pregnant self to her mother, to the extent of moving back into her old room, was, to Lewis, something so awful that he could hardly bear to contemplate it. That she should want to do this instead of staying with him, as surely even nature intended, simply marked the width and depth of the gulf that now existed between them.

He did not for a moment believe that she had left him. The suspicion began later, as the weeks passed. He thought
at first that for a person of Tissy’s susceptibilities pregnancy, and a late pregnancy at that, was bound to be upsetting. What he was unprepared for was the muteness of her rage and grief, her fury at him and his kind, her hatred for his very helplessness. Guilty and helpless: that was precisely how they both knew him to be, in his very essence, his blameless appearance, his attempts to pacify her. One day she was gone, a note on the kitchen table merely stating, ‘I am at Mother’s’. At first he supposed her simply to be there for the evening: this was unusual but within the bounds of possibility. He even enjoyed the peace and silence of the house, although he was surprised to see that no food had been prepared. He wondered if Mrs Harper had been taken ill, but surely she would have telephoned him in that case. ‘I am at Mother’s’ probably meant just what it said. Yet Mrs Harper could not be expected to bring her home at the end of the evening. Lewis had sighed and got to his feet, yet a nebulous anxiety had made the sigh a mere formality. In any event he felt at a loss without her. Even if she disliked him, as he feared she really did, he had no wish to see her go.

He loved her, in a hurt damaged way. He loved her as a child might love a broken doll, half frightened at having caused the breakage. He loved her with all the dark mournful memories of a child’s loneliness, that loneliness which age almost though never entirely obscures. His love seemed to him a pitiful thing, literally filled with pity, not only for his wife but for himself. When Emmy had appeared in his life it was as if she had come to him as an adult and thus called to him to be an adult as well, leaving behind the shameful needs of childhood. This was the virtue of Emmy, that she had thought him to be as bold as she was herself. And he had disappointed her. He no longer pondered the rights and wrongs of the case, but merely knew that he had disappointed her. For this reason he was ignoble. Yet his wife presumed him to be ignoble in quite another way, and for quite another reason. In this he knew that she too reasoned as a child does, for she refused to listen to him, turned her head obstinately
away when he held her by the arms and tried to speak to her. He wondered whether either of them had ever been worth all this trouble. Yet of the two his wife moved him more, precisely because of that smarting childishness that he had recognized in himself when Emmy’s scorn had fallen on his undefended head, when he had awkwardly picked up his jacket and put it on. The gesture had made him feel as Adam must have felt in the Garden, his accusation dying on his lips. Lewis felt the tears rise to his eyes when he thought of either woman. He ached for both of them, and only incidentally for himself.