Lewis Percy (29 page)

Then began his ordeal, repeated every evening, when he returned to his empty house and became aware of his loneliness. But he was still determined to sustain the effort of the day. He laid his table, ate carefully, even elaborately, and washed up after himself. What he ate was not interesting to him; it was only the ceremony that counted. And then that frightening hour before he could go thankfully to bed. Music was dangerous. Sometimes television could be relied on, although his attention wandered. More often than not he switched on the radio and took it from room to room with him as he tidied up. He had become meticulous in the upkeep of his house. Mrs Joliffe came only intermittently now. He left the same money for her, but she put in only a
brief half-hour now and then, on various days of the week – sometimes twice, sometimes not at all – as if she too knew that he was no longer a real householder. Her obligations to him were dwindling away. She no longer saw any reason to take him seriously.

Sleep, therefore, was not only a valuable commodity but an essential one, the consolation after the effort of the day, with its endless exercise of goodwill. Once safely in bed, it was easy to feel generous again. The smile returned as he thought, quite prayerfully, of his good friends, his pleasant house, his interesting work, and above all his daughter. This was what people meant by counting one’s blessings, he supposed, and it was easy to do so in these moments of respite, when all was quiet and easeful, and the darkness was kind. After all, he reminded himself, he was in good health. That was what counted, wasn’t it? And he had a little money put aside: his daughter would want for nothing. The only thing that wearied him was that it seemed such a long time to wait for her to come and join him. Sometimes the waiting seemed intolerable. Sleep usually delivered him from thoughts like these, and in the morning, with just that little necessary effort, he was ready, once more, to face another day. Of good and evil he thought little. He apportioned no blame, not to Tissy, not to himself. Or, rather, no longer to himself. All that mattered was to think of life as an experience which he, like everyone else, was in the process of undergoing. There were to be no excuses, no heavenly alibis. One day he would be old. And it would be important then to have no unfinished business with which to torment himself. He did not want to be a burden to anyone. To whom, in any case, could he be a burden? Certainly not to his daughter, who would be as free as she wanted to be. He saw that freedom might be difficult for her, but he also saw that she must learn the discipline for herself. He knew, somehow, that when she was grown up he would be far away. He would leave the house for her, and leave her in it, perhaps to work, perhaps to marry. This part of her future was unclear to him. He only knew that he
himself would not be on hand to witness it. For he would have gone, although he did not yet know where he would have gone, or why, or even how. All he could look forward to, before this happened, was a few years alone with her, teaching her, guiding her, endowing her, before he left her, perhaps for ever.

Of course there were bad days, days when he noticed the grey hairs coming through, when his daughter was already asleep on the evenings of his visits, when all his resources failed him. Then it was even more important to pretend that everything was all right, or at least going according to plan. But it was not easy. And without a woman to comfort him he found life very painful. Yet he knew that he could never again enter the great game. Once, when calling on Pen early one Sunday evening, he had found Emmy there. His heart had given a great knock. She had looked no different, unlike himself. She lay rather than sat in a chair, her full skirts looping down to her ankles, her hand idly fingering her long strings of beads. He saw that she was not as put out by the encounter as he was, having no doubt heard all about his situation from Pen, and from this he deduced that she too had discarded him. Conversation was derisory; she was much too sophisticated to start asking searching questions. Only her eyes were speculative. Pen’s presence ensured that only the most general, the most anodyne of matters were discussed, but Lewis was conscious of all that was not being said. He found it a strain, and announced that he had to be getting back, although he was only going home to an empty evening. ‘I’ll walk with you a little way,’ said Emmy, and he was not as pleased as he might have been a year, two years ago.

‘What are you doing with yourself these days, Lewis?’ she asked. The afternoon was mild, windless; people in the streets looked aimless, distracted by Sunday melancholy.

‘Oh, much the same as usual,’ he answered. ‘You know how dull I am.’

‘I know what I know,’ she said. ‘Although you may be right.’

‘And you?’ he ventured.

‘Madly busy,’ she replied promptly. ‘And I may be getting married. Did Pen tell you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, he didn’t.’

‘Well, it’s about time somebody made an honest woman of me. And I do rather like the idea of being a rich lady. I think I’d look rather good, don’t you?’

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘And do you love him, whoever he is?’

‘Not particularly.’ She sounded surprised. ‘I like him all right – I’ve known him for ages. But after all, marriage is a job like any other, isn’t it? I mean, you have to work at it. Or so they tell me. I’d rather let someone else do all the work, actually. You see,’ she said lightly, ‘I always wanted to be married. I told you, didn’t I?’

His heart turned in him, but mostly with pity for her childish obstinacy.

‘You
were
daft, Lewis.’

‘You knew my situation,’ he said, still patient. Somehow he could not be angry with her, although he felt tired out, almost old. ‘I find it hard to believe that you wanted me as much as you said you did. I always wanted to believe you did. But now I don’t want you to tell me. I’ve lost you anyway. I lost you a long time ago. Do you know that every day I look in
The Times
, on the weddings page, to see if your name’s there? I’ve thought of you every day since I last saw you. And now I’ve seen you again, and soon I shall see the announcement, presumably. And that’s the end, I suppose.’

‘What a fool you were to go and spoil it, Lewis. You could have had me. Others did. I didn’t hear them making such a fuss as you’re making now.’

‘Perhaps I didn’t want to be like the others. You didn’t seem to like them very much.’

‘Oh, Lewis, nothing lasts. Don’t you know that?’

They walked on in silence. She seemed suddenly to make up her mind about something.

‘Well, take care of yourself,’ she said, stopping abruptly. ‘You can always find me through Pen. That’s about all I can say, isn’t it?’ And she turned away. When he looked back at her, striding along in her long skirts, she raised her hand and waved, without turning round, as if she knew he was looking at her. Then she seemed to melt into the shadows of the fast growing dusk.

‘Emmy,’ he called after her. She turned. He moved slowly towards her, as if under water, while she stood still and watched him.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I loved you that first evening, at my house. But what could I expect? From you, I mean. I didn’t want you to go on having what you tell me you hate, another married lover. Is that what you want?’

‘What a carry on,’ she said lightly. She was still angry, he could tell, and still unrepentant. But not unfair. She was not – never had been – unfair. ‘I simply wanted you to choose me. Does that sound frivolous? It isn’t. I wanted that … enactment. Not promises, not consolations – I’ve had those. I wanted to start again, with somebody straightforward.’ She hesitated. ‘Did you ever consider me at all?’

‘I’ve never stopped thinking about you.’

‘No, I dare say you haven’t. It didn’t take you very far, did it?’

‘Come home with me now.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Even if I wanted to I wouldn’t.’

‘Did you want me?’

‘You know I did. I
liked
you. We’re not talking about love, now. I doubt if I can love – that’s my trouble. You’re stupid, but you’re kind. You’re kind to women – too kind, perhaps. Anyone else would have buggered off long ago. And I can tell you the truth and not be blamed for it. That’s almost enough in itself. It’s what I’ve never had.’

‘Would you marry me?’ he asked.

‘If you were free, you mean? I’ve had proposals like that before. I might, that’s all I can say. It’s become serious, you see. Maybe it always was. If you’d slept with me it might
not have done. You could have saved yourself all this bother.’

‘Emmy, you’re relentless. You tell me what you don’t want and ask for it at the same time.’

‘I’m not asking for it now, am I? This time I want more. Goodbye.’

She turned on her heel and left him. He ran after her.

‘You wanted a husband – I know that. Strange, when nobody else seems to. But would anyone have done? That’s what I want to know. I must know that.’

‘You shouldn’t ask me that, not now. It’s up to you to make a few decisions – it always was. Couldn’t you just do what you wanted? People do, you know.’

‘It doesn’t always answer,’ he said. ‘Life becomes full of discards.’

‘What of it?’

‘I wanted something better, you see. Something different, new. I didn’t see how I could bring it about.’

‘You fantasize too much. You’ve probably read too much.’

‘Yes, I have. I see that. I’ve had unrealistic ideas, antiquated notions. All wrong – I see that too. But were the ideas wrong? Or did I just misapply them?’

‘You see how safe I should have been with you? Your standards would have taken care of me. I don’t have any standards myself. I want that taken into account,’ she said seriously.

‘We didn’t know each other too well, then, did we? I probably envisaged more talk than you did. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I always thought that necessary.’

‘Yes, shut up, why don’t you? And grow up. Look at yourself. You’re an attractive man.’

‘Am I?’ he said, startled.

She smiled unwillingly. ‘I’m not here to complete your sentimental education, you know. You have to do that for yourself. When you grow up give me a call. Now I really am late. Goodbye. I mean it this time.’

‘But do you …’ he shouted after her. ‘Love me,’ he
added more quietly, although there was no one in the street but themselves.

‘Who knows? But in these circumstances, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’

Watching her departing figure, disappearing, melting into the dusk, he wondered whether he were any happier. Oh, go home, he thought tiredly. Read a book. Men have problems too, he wanted to tell her. Endless conflicts. Being this, being that, being damned for either. He thought of his daughter, and gave thanks that she was a girl. But for the rest of the day he thought of Emmy.

She would never concede defeat, any more than his wife would ever be magnanimous in victory, or what she would understand as victory. She would never simply love or console. Somehow a gigantic conflict of principle seemed to have been mounted; that was the trouble. Both of them were now stuck in their respective corners, each a challenge to the other. He was disgusted with himself, with his life. He was also confused. Why had it been his lot to become involved with such implacable women? He had looked to women for mercy, not for conflict. Since his earliest days he had thought of women as kindly creatures, benevolent, well-disposed. This had apparently been all wrong. What they wanted was precisely to engage you on a matter of principle, even if that principle were improvised or matured in secret. He no longer had the key to his wife, who seemed to have changed into a complete stranger, and who was not made in the least thoughtful by the direction her life was taking, away from him. She saw it as a golden opportunity to cancel the past, her past, and had, so she implied, no further interest in him. There was something unyielding about her now, as there was about Emmy, although he had once thought of them both as fallible, weak, unprotected. He had thought that it was up to him to safeguard their honour. That was, in essence, what he had tried to do. But they regarded his efforts as misguided. Emmy, in particular, would have preferred a defiant flouting of the rules. He began to see what an affair
with her would have meant. The logistics would have been frightful, for she would not have cared for concealment; on the contrary, she would have challenged it. She would have telephoned him at home, at work: she would have demanded openness, cards on the table. She would have wanted to establish them as a couple, with the intention that they should marry. And whereas her status would not have been damaged by such a stratagem, his own would have been ruined for ever. He had wanted so much to behave well. And although she professed so flagrantly her wish to marry she had in fact none of the attributes of a wife. She was easily bored, became impatient with routine, was ever alert for a new beginning. With her charm, her power, her inventiveness, she was born to be a mistress. And, knowing this, had come to hate men, the men who would not marry her but preferred her as she was. Tissy probably hated men too, he now thought, but for a different reason. There was nothing of the mistress about Tissy. But she considered that she had been sold into slavery, and all her efforts now were in the direction of emancipation. In the group she had probably learnt to compare herself with ethnic minorities or the working class, on whom it was beholden to rise in revolt, to claim freedoms that had been denied to them. Apparently that was what they were both doing. Emmy would marry her rich man and revenge herself yet again by despising or deceiving him, probably both. And Tissy, presumably, would never look at a man again. In many ways they had a lot in common.

He tried to understand, failed, and gave up. He only knew that he wanted his daughter to be different. When she considered him dubiously, unsmilingly, he wondered if the process of rejection had already started. It was then that he was at his most gentle with her, although he never failed to demand a full accounting from Mrs Harper. Did she eat well? Did she get enough fresh air? No detail of her day’s activities went unscrutinized. To the child, if she were aware of him at all, he was merely the man who came in the
evenings and sometimes read her a story. He realized that she probably felt more comfortable with the doctor than she did with him, for the doctor was all sprawling acceptance, all mumbling affection. The doctor sat her on his knee and stroked her hair, gave her titbits from his plate, kissed her lavishly. Although it pained Lewis to know this, and sometimes to witness it, he understood that his reaction was unreasonable. There was no real harm in the man, after all: he simply offended one’s preferences in the matter of good behaviour, or, to be fair, of ideal behaviour, the behaviour demanded of a child’s guardian. And he looked so awful, with his waistcoat undone and his abundant hair untidy. What his patients must have thought of him Lewis could not imagine. Perhaps he had no patients left. Apparently he had given up his surgery some time ago, and now went out on call, privately, to a favoured few. Old people, despairing of other company, would no doubt be glad to see him.