Nuns and Soldiers (48 page)

‘I
hate Aida.
’

‘You were talking about Gertrude and Tim,’ said Victor. ‘Any news?’

‘I had a drink with them,’ said Manfred.

‘Anyone else there?’

‘No.’

‘It’s funny,’ said Victor, ‘but Tim Reede doesn’t seem to have any friends.’

‘He doesn’t want Gertrude to meet his boozy drinking companions, now he’s joined the bourgeoisie.’

‘After all
we
never met any of his friends.’

‘We didn’t try very hard to,’ said Gerald.

‘I asked Gertrude about that,’ said Manfred. ‘She said he mentioned a chap called Jimmy Roland. Gertrude hasn’t met him -’

‘Jimmy Roland?’ said Ed Roper. ‘I used to know a Jimmy Roland. He used to sell brass ornaments to pubs, things like that.’

‘Talking of girls, anyone seen Sylvia Wicks?’ said Victor.

‘She seems to have sunk without trace. Manfred says he invited her.’

‘She’s probably invented an illness for herself, leukemia or something.’

‘Oh shut up, Victor, I know you’ve had a bad day -’

‘All right, Veronica, to return to Tim and Gertrude -’

‘We can’t - Manfred won’t let us - he thinks it’s in bad taste.’

‘Oh I don’t mind,’ said Manfred. ‘I just wanted an interval.’

‘Well, I think that pair is unpredictable.’

‘That’s what makes them so endlessly interesting.’

‘Anne-I have just heard something extraordinary - and terrible.’

So spoke the Count.

Two weeks had passed since the visit of Jesus Christ, two weeks in which Anne had been intensely busy in her mind. She had during this period seen the Count twice, once on the occasion of her attack on her sitting-room and once, uneventfully, a week later. She had also seen Tim and Gertrude once, and Gertrude alone once. She had seen no one else except for Mr Orpen the dentist. She had sat alone in her flat and walked immensely in the streets of London.

Mr Orpen had filled her tooth which ached no more. She had almost enjoyed talking to him. He was a cool man and, though a cousin, pointedly detached from the Ebury Street set. Anne intuited that he regarded them as snobbish. It emerged that he was a Roman Catholic. He knew of Anne’s defection. He said, ‘You’re famous.’ Anne did not pursue the matter. They discussed some Vatican politics of which Mr Orpen knew a surprising amount.

With Tim and Gertrude Anne had been merry, this was now quite easy. Tim exerted himself to please her and she found him quite amusing, though she was constantly irritated by the warm loving glances which Gertrude darted to and fro between her husband and her friend. Alone with Gertrude it was harder. Both of them knew that at some deep level all was well between them, but ordinary communication was destroyed in ways which neither could fully grasp. Gertrude half wanted and half did not want a heart-to-heart talk with Anne. Anne could see Gertrude, almost from minute to minute, calculating her moves. Gertrude was wondering whether it was too early, too soon after the recent shocks, to draw Anne close to her. She was estimating Anne’s attitude to Tim and whether it was changing and how fast. Meanwhile a sort of wry formality reigned between them over which, so obvious was it, they could almost at times smile at each other.

Anne was wrapped in her terrible secret. She too was busy calculating. Her mind had never felt more like a computer, a computer conscious of time limits and of possible deep mechanical faults. A number of things had become clear to her in the last fortnight. If her enterprise with Peter failed, Gertrude must never know. Part of the hell of the personal into which Anne had fallen back was this: that she felt that if Gertrude knew that Anne had loved Peter in vain, Anne’s relation to Gertrude would become intolerable. Perhaps, for the sake of something, the intolerable could be tolerated, the unendurable endured, but Anne could not see that far. Nor could she see what Gertrude would feel or do should Anne’s enterprise succeed; but about this she remained agnostic and worried less. That outcome was concealed in a blaze of light, and if Peter could love her all else would fall into place.

Meanwhile Anne watched Peter lynx-eyed, considering him in her soul, meditating upon him and bending her will upon him. She invited him, for the present, with a studied rarity. He did not invite her, but then he invited no one. She felt that, at their last meeting, she had discovered some slight change. He seemed a little less obsessed, a little less unhappy and she allowed herself to think in her dark secret heart,
he is recovering.
But she did not yet dare to stretch out towards him the hand that would change the world.

She meditated too, of course, upon her other visitor. She inclined now to think that she had received some kind of ‘genuine’ visitation. That is, she had not been dreaming or having some kind of chemically-induced hallucination. The source of the thing was a spiritual source. This however left much unclear. Anne was experienced enough (after all she had spent many years as a ‘professional’) to be willing to let the nature of her revelation declare itself slowly. The way it had lasted, even strengthened, in her mind and her heart made her feel a kind of faithful patience concerning its reality. This did not indeed exclude the possibility that her visitor was, or represented, the Other, or some ambiguous spiritual intermediary, some detached and wandering quasi-magical figment. Anne knew how terribly close, for human beings, all things spiritual lie to the deep fires of the demonic. Concerning this, she waited, she cultivated still the metaphysics of waiting. And she
noticed
in herself, like the slow growth of an innocent indifferent plant, a renewed impulse towards worship and towards some kind of prayer. What kind of prayer this new prayer would turn out to be she did not yet know. Sometimes, alone in her room, she knelt down, remaining quiet, wordless and blank. She was grateful to her visitor. And in some way, whatever his identity, she asked his pardon for the violent preoccupations and fierce desires which carried her continually away from a calm and humble attention.
That
must be settled
first
, she kept saying to herself and to anything which lay beyond. Sometimes she felt so unhappy that she wanted to die in some holocaust of doomed endeavour. Sometimes, when she felt quieter and calmer, she reflected that this calm was simply a disguised form of a wicked fantasy hope that pictured her safe at last in Peter’s arms. There can be no compromise, no muddle. He will, when the time comes, hold me entirely, or else I will automatically be thrust away into empty space. Would there then be any home for her in that emptiness?

 

 

The Count had spent the interim in great misery. What Anne had interpreted as signs of recovery were better perhaps described as impulses of rational despair. He had applied for a transfer to the north, but had as yet told no one. He now wanted intensely to leave London, he pictured himself alone in some quite other scene, in some other little secretive flat with his books and his radio set. Although warmly invited by them, he kept clear of the ‘Ebury Street mob’ who now met at Manfred’s flat. For the first time, he felt his nickname as a mockery, as a mark of genial contempt. It was time to go away and be among people who knew it not. In the north he would be ‘Peter’ from the start. He was, for them all here, a figure of fun. Any invitation offered by Gertrude he felt bound to accept. These invitations amounted to a drink with her and Tim every five days or so. The Count too could see Gertrude calculating, and he too was irritated, indeed maddened, by the way her affectionate gaze moved from him to Tim and back, and by the incoherent shy appeal which her looks expressed. Gertrude wanted him to do the impossible: to accept her marriage to Tim and to go on loving her all the same.

He struggled, or rather he did not struggle, he lived, with black demons of jealousy and resentment and remorse, with sins which were new and alien to him. He would not have believed that he could be so bitter. His quiet cloistered love had been turned by a brief hope into a possessive rage. Endlessly he rehearsed it all in his mind to see what he had done wrong. If he had only tried harder, if he had only been more positive, more aggressive, put his love more on display, been less discreet, less high-minded, less honourable. As it was the woman he loved had been taken by a simpler and less scrupulous man. The Count smiled blandly and chatted courteously with Tim and Gertrude, while a black veil covered his eyes. He had faith that the wicked bitterness would pass. But the pain, that would not pass.

He looked back upon the luncheon which he had had with Gertrude in the little Italian restaurant off Wardour Street on the day after Gertrude’s resolve to wed had failed her. She did not tell the Count then that she had dismissed Tim, but he knew it and rejoiced. And, set free, she had come at once to him. That
tête-à-tête
was probably the happiest time in the Count’s whole life, and, as he saw it now, his last happy time, the end of his happiness.

 

 

It was evening, about seven o’clock. A warm thundery day had ended in a light silver rain which was now gently, steadily falling. Anne had closed the windows. She was writing an application for a job when Peter suddenly rang her bell. She had put her name down for ‘supply teaching’ and had received a notice of a temporary post to teach French at a school in Edmonton, not however to start until January. Anne could not interpret his evident agitation, but this time she did not imagine that it betokened a declaration of love.

‘Something terrible? What, Peter? Oh what is it, what’s the matter?’

He walked to the window and stood for a moment with his back to her, as if to compose himself. His hair was darkened by the rain and adhered in long dark streaks to the white collar of his shirt at the back. He had dropped his wet mackintosh on the floor in the hall. The stormy light in the room was dark yet vivid, and as he turned towards her his face had a kind of lurid radiance, almost as if he were not appalled, but stunned by some revivifying amazement. He leaned back against the window.

‘Something - extraordinary. But it can’t be true.’

‘Peter, what? You’re upsetting me so much, you’re frightening me.’

‘Oh, don’t be frightened.’ He looked at her for a moment with that look of pale lucid gentleness which she now knew so well and which made her long simply to run to him. Then the lurid mask returned and he grimaced with a concealed emotion.

‘What
?’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s so
odd
- and I don’t know what to do - It’s - yesterday evening, quite late, Manfred rang up and asked me to go round to see him, and I went round because - it sounded as if he had something important to tell me.’

‘Yes - go on -’ Anne had sat down on the upright chair, staring at him.

‘Well, he told me this. Ed Roper has been in Paris. When he was there he met in a bar a man called Jimmy Roland, who is a friend of Tim Reede -’

‘Yes?’

‘And this man Roland told Ed that - that - Oh it’s scarcely credible -’

‘Go on!’

‘That Tim has got a mistress, someone he never told Gertrude about at all, and whom he still sees - and that - that he and the mistress had madea-a sort of plot that Tim should make a rich marriage and go on keeping this girl as his mistress -’

Anne waited. Peter, after his utterance, reeled back against the window pane, almost cracking it. Behind him the sun was trying to shine through the rain.

‘Is that all?’ said Anne, after a moment’s silence.

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘if this is simply a story told by a man in a bar it’s obviously false. It’s a fabrication or a misunderstanding. I am surprised at - at Ed Roper even repeating it - or Manfred taking it so solemnly - or -’

‘How can they not repeat it and consider it? Of course it may be false, but -’

‘Yes,’ said Anne slowly, ‘of course one can’t - not - go into it somehow.’

Anne now understood the wild lurid look upon Peter’s face. However much he condemned himself for doing so, how could he not delight in this horror? If this was the end of Tim and Gertrude.

‘But has anybody gone into it?’ she said. ‘Does anyone know who this secret mistress is? Has anyone told Gertrude this story?’

‘No,
of course
not. Ed Roper was absolutely stunned, and he just told Manfred, and Manfred just told me. Manfred felt he ought to do something, but he couldn’t think what to do. He suggested I should come and see you.’

‘But you haven’t said, are there any facts? It’s all so impossible, so crazy. Where is this man Roland now, is he -’

‘Well, he’s disappeared, that’s part of the trouble. Apparently he’s a sort of roving chap, a bit shady, no fixed address.’

‘Well then! Does Ed know him well?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But Ed believed the story, he didn’t think Roland had made it up, and after all why should he make it up, he could have no motive to.’