Nuns and Soldiers (38 page)

‘Oh my dear Anne,’ said the Count, ‘can it be true?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Anne, ‘but I’ll find out and let you know.’

Her practical tone seemed to alarm the Count even more. Perhaps he felt it sounded crude, as if he had run round to recruit a spy. ‘No, I didn’t want-I just wanted to ask you in case you knew - much better not to say anything-I feel one ought simply to ignore anonymous letters, destroy them, obliterate them, I’ll tear it up -’

‘No, don’t do that, keep it.’

‘But if you think it’s sure not to be true - Gertrude would be so hurt to think that we seriously-I mean we
can’t
believe that she would - so soon after - do that - and with -’

‘Don’t worry, Count. Let me deal with this. You’re right, we can’t ignore it, it must be cleared up. Don’t worry. It’s probably some weird piece of pure spite, something we may never understand at all, or else -’

‘You feel certain it isn’t true?’

‘Yes. But I’ll find out for sure, and much better to do so at once.’

‘You won’t tell her about the letter or that I came round - ?’

‘Leave it to me. You’d better go back to the office. Off you go.’

The Count was reluctant to go. He wanted to stay and be comforted, told that this horror was impossible. But Anne picked up his coat, opened the door of the room and the door of the flat.

‘Will you telephone me at the office? I’ll write down the number.’

‘I don’t promise to,’ said Anne. ‘Oh well yes I will. Just stop worrying, go and do your work. Go, go.’

The Count departed.

Anne went back into the drawing-room. What an amazing possibility. She thought of Tim Reede as she had seen him with one hand inside Gertrude’s fridge, the other holding the bag with the stolen goodies. Their eyes had met. He had stopped with his mouth open, the picture of guilt. She had frowned and turned away. Her majestic Gertrude and that petty man?
No.

Anne went to her bedroom. She took off the amber necklace and put it on the dressing-table with the other things which Gertrude had wanted to give her. Then she took off the black dress and put on her dove-grey dress with the white collar. She put her hand to her face, realizing that she had toothache. She must make an appointment with Samuel Orpen. She recalled the gloomy convent dentist who had told her, while doing intricate bridge-work, that he had lost his faith. She looked at her books which were piled against the wall. There were not many, devotional works, Latin authors. She had left most of them behind. The convent had been vague about ownership of books. Gertrude had offered her a bookcase but she preferred to keep the books in an unordered pile. She picked up her Greek grammar and laid it down again. She was no longer in love with novel reading. She had never finished
The Heart of Midlothian
. During her brief retreat she had read nothing. The absence of organized work from her life was bad. Many things were, now, bad. She seemed to be living in a fever of subdued excitement and fear, perhaps in expectation of the darkness which was monstrously playing with her. The devil was alive in her life and seemed to have taken over some of the functions of God. She thought about the horrible letter. This too was part of the excitement and the badness.

Anne left her bedroom and began to walk about the flat. She went into the room where Guy had lain when he was ill and where he had died. Gertrude had sent the bed away, sold it no doubt. The small room was characterless now, a clean neat room with oddments of furniture, including the empty bookcase which Gertrude wanted to move into Anne’s room. Gertrude had dispersed Guy’s books, given some of them to the Count. She had removed, for it caused her too much pain, Guy’s ‘look’ from the flat. Anne recalled her conversation with Guy, his hawk-face and glittering eyes, and how he had wanted the precision of judgement and purgatory. Vice is natural and general, virtue is particular, original, unnatural, hard. Guy would have understood about her devil, her monster. Guy too had wanted to keep out of the mess of life. His virtue was accuracy. That was his kind of truth. His desire for justice was his very private substitute for holiness. He worked for other men, he served his family, he was kind and generous and decent, but would have given himself no credit for that. His need for things to be precise and clean was a part of his secret judgement upon himself. Her idea that he had wanted to confess something to her now seemed like a piece of romanticism. Perhaps he had simply wanted to say certain words aloud to somebody: justice, purgatory, suffering, death. He had wanted to feel that their precise
meaning
was there somewhere, kept safe by someone, even just at one moment existent in thought. He lay there in the small last light of his mind, calculating, trying to get something clear, to get something right. Then one day it was over, the feverish humming electricity had ceased, the spark was gone, the room was empty, and Gertrude was crying out like a wild beast.

Anne heard a step on the stair, the sound of the key touching the flat door, and she came quickly and guiltily out of the room. Gertrude came in, but she was not alone, a man was with her. It was Tim Reede.

Tim and Gertrude were both rather red, nervously smiling. ‘I met Tim. I’ve brought him for a drink.’

‘Is it still raining?’ said Anne.

‘No, it’s stopped.’

‘You go in. I’ll bring the drinks.’

They left their mackintoshes in the hall. Anne fetched glasses and sherry, vermouth and gin.

‘I think we might leave the bottles on the marquetry table like we used to,’ said Gertrude. ‘There’s no need to take them away every time.’

‘I’ll try to remember. And whisky too. Would you like some now?’

‘No, sherry’s fine. Sherry, Tim? Won’t you have anything, Anne?’

‘No I don’t feel like it.’

‘You don’t drink much?’ said Tim, smiling.

‘No, not really.’

‘Anne mopped up the local cider when we were in the north.’

‘You can get good cider in London,’ said Tim. ‘I know a place in the Harrow Road.’

‘Aren’t the flowers lovely? Anne did them.’

‘Lovely.’

‘She used to do the flowers at the convent.’

‘I was one of many people who did,’ said Anne.

‘They’re lovely,’ said Tim. He smiled at Anne, then turned back towards Gertrude. Gertrude moved slightly away, touching the mantelpiece with a feigning gesture, avoiding Tim’s eye. Then she looked quickly at Tim and looked away again.

It’s true
, thought Anne; and a feeling of the horribleness and dangerousness of life overcame her like a sudden nausea. This was the warmth, the mess, which she had fled from to the convent and which Guy had wanted so much to exorcize by the precise working of his own private justice.

 

 

‘You didn’t want him to stay to lunch?’ said Anne. ‘I was trying to intuit what you wanted.’

Tim had gone. They had chatted for twenty minutes.

‘No, no, just a drink. He’s nice, isn’t he? Have we any lunch, by the way?’

‘Yes, there’s some of yesterday’s stuff left.’

‘Your masterpiece! It should be delicious cold. Or shall we heat it up?’

‘You stay and finish your drink. I’ll do everything.’

‘You’re an angel.’

Anne had already decided not to say anything to Gertrude about the anonymous letter. She was even angry with the Count for showing it to her. Such filth should not circulate. Surely the Count could have said simply that he had ‘heard a rumour’? But that reflective evasion, that discreet lie, was not in the Count’s character. Anne’s head buzzed with angry crazy unhappy thoughts, and she found herself banging the plates about in miserable exasperation. Meanwhile the Count was sitting in his office, in torment, waiting for her telephone call. Well, perhaps her intuition had been wrong. She could only hope that now Gertrude would tell her of her own accord. But if she did not?

‘What’s the matter, Anne, you seem bothered?’ said Gertrude, holding her glass, standing in the doorway.

There was something the slightest bit cold and detached about Gertrude’s tone and the way she stood. We are being separated, thought Anne. She is beginning to treat me like a servant, she thought. Then this seemed mad. Then am I not a servant? Whatever else should I be between now and the end of the world?

‘I think I’ll have a drink after all,’ said Anne. ‘Lunch can wait a bit. There’s nothing to do anyway.’

They both went back to the drawing-room and Anne poured herself a glass of sherry. Gertrude took another one.

They stood there, at opposite ends of the mantelpiece, drinking; each of them, out of a deep old knowledge and with a sensitive probing intelligence, was trying to read the mind of the other. Anne was looking at the monkey orchestra, Gertrude at Anne’s arrangement of blue and white irises with sprays of dark green box.

Gertrude said, in a conciliatory tone, for she had understood Anne’s reaction to her last remark, ‘I hope you really liked the necklaces and things. It would give me such joy to see you wearing them.’

‘Oh yes - yes-I do like them - thank you -’

‘I mean keep them, they’re yours now.’

‘Oh not all those -’

‘I like that dress too,’ said Gertrude, ‘though you ought to iron it, it’s getting creased. I’ll iron it for you. But you need some proper summer dresses. I suppose we will have some summer, after all it’s May, we might go shopping tomorrow, would you like?’

Gertrude’s manner was conversational, chatty, though with a little edge of deliberate gentleness. Anne thought, she just wanted Tim to show his face here. Now she wants to blur the effect, to change the subject.

Anne said, ‘I must work, I must find regular work, I am becoming demoralized. Perhaps your social worker friends would help me. How did this morning go, by the way?’ Not till that moment did Anne realize that of course the ‘social worker’ was a fiction. Gertrude had spent the morning with Tim Reede. She looked at Gertrude, who was blushing.

‘Oh, OK. I’ll introduce you to those people if you like.’

‘Gertrude -’ said Anne.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s some sort of thing between you and Tim Reede.’

Gertrude looked at Anne. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Intuition. It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, none of my business. I’ll get lunch now.’

‘Anne, don’t be a fool. Stay here
please.
’

Anne suddenly did not know what to do with herself. She regretted having forced Gertrude to tell her. Now, she did not want a discussion. But Gertrude would feel bound to talk, explain. Anne pulled a chair up near the window and sat looking out into Ebury Street. It was raining again.

Gertrude said, ‘Oh God -’

Anne said, ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you.’

‘Is it so obvious?’

‘Well -’

‘Did anyone say anything to you?’

Anne hesitated. ‘No.’

Gertrude thought, I told no one. Has Tim told anyone?

Anne thought, without the anonymous letter would I have noticed anything, thought anything? No. ‘I assume it’s a secret,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t mention it.’

‘I’m not worrying! Do as you like.’

‘I won’t mention it.’

‘I wonder what you’re thinking, Anne.’

‘I’m not thinking anything. It’s up to you. Nothing to do with me.’

‘That’s a rotten reply and you know it.’

‘I’m sorry, but what am I to say? I don’t understand and I’m not asking you to tell me -’

‘You’re angry. Why? Are you jealous?’

‘
Jealous?
You mean because you’ve got a man and I haven’t? Gertrude, we’ve never conversed at this level of stupidity.’

‘No, you fool. I mean - sorry, it was an idiotic way to put it.’

‘It was.’

‘You know what I mean. I feel possessive about you. Why shouldn’t you feel possessive about me?’

Oddly enough this aspect of the matter had not really occurred to Anne since the first awful shock of seeing the letter. The aspect existed. She said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose I do feel possessive, but not in any way which would make me resent a -’

‘A what?’

‘If later on you wanted seriously to marry somebody, somebody good-I rather hoped that one day you would recover and get married-I think I said so - And if you were happy like that I’d be very glad. I love you and I want your well-being, and maybe I’m conceited and optimistic enough to think that our friendship is indestructible.’

‘It is indestructible, let’s regard that as fixed. But still you’re angry.’

‘Not angry. Startled, sort of shocked.’

‘Because it’s so soon?’

‘Yes. And because it’s - who it is. Are you actually having a love affair?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m surprised.’

‘We fell in love in France. It was a
coup de foudre.
’

‘Does anyone else know?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Just as well. I suppose - well, it will pass, won’t it? Anyway - I’m sorry I seemed bothered. Let’s have lunch now.’

‘It won’t pass,’ said Gertrude. ‘I’m going to marry Tim.’

‘I should wait a while, if I were you, and reflect a bit. Let’s have lunch.’

‘I will wait. I am reflecting. I am going to marry Tim. Why are you so cold and beastly?’

‘How long does a
coup de foudre
take?’

‘About four seconds. That’s how long it can take two human beings to change the world.’

‘You’re pleased with yourself. But it isn’t true. I don’t believe in
coups de foudre
and “falling in love”. Loving people is a serious matter but falling in love is just a temporary form of madness.’

‘Maybe you found it so. You think I should just have a secret love affair and pass on?’

‘Yes. I think it’s all a pity, but if it’s started I suppose it’ll go on. People in love can’t restrain themselves, so it’s said. That is why they are traditionally forgiven.’