Nuns and Soldiers (56 page)

‘Oh stop -’

‘
You
stop! Do I seem to you like somebody who writes anonymous letters? I ask you! Anonymous! I’m not afraid of those buggers. If I’d wanted to give them a piece of my mind I’d have written a plain honest letter and signed it. Christ Jesus, do you know me so little after so long?’

‘Well, somebody wrote it, and -’

‘God, if you could only see your mean fussy little face! Shall I find you a mirror? You look like a nasty ferrety little police clerk. What the bloody hell does it matter who wrote the shitty letter? Are you writing your autobiography or something?’

‘You were in a very vindictive state -’

‘“A very vindictive state”! What words you dredge up! I wasn’t vindictive, I was angry, fed up to the bloody teeth. If I’d wanted to put the boot in I wouldn’t have done it in a mean secretive roundabout way -’

‘Oh all right, maybe you didn’t write the letter, but you must have told all those lies to foul Anne Cavidge.’

‘What lies?’

‘Oh about us having planned that I should marry a rich woman and so on and about our having been together after I got married and -’

‘I didn’t! Bloody Jimmy Roland started all that up according to you!’

‘She said Jimmy Roland started it, God knows why -’

(What Tim did not know was that Jimmy Roland had never forgiven Tim for, as Jimmy saw it, jilting his sister Nancy. The news of Tim’s fine marriage had come as an unpleasing reminder. Jimmy also disliked Daisy for mocking Piglet. The drunken ‘disclosure’ to Ed Roper had been a piece of impromptu random spite.)

‘Who’s this “she” you keep talking about?’

‘Of course Jimmy might have heard us drivelling away in the Prince of Denmark any time. But Gertrude would never have believed it if you hadn’t said it was true.’

‘Said what was true?’

‘Oh fuck, all that that I said! Gertrude said you told Anne Cavidge it was all true!’

‘God knows what I said to that bitch. I may have said “oh yes!” to some insulting rot. Can’t she recognize sarcasm? I just wanted to get her out of the door. I thought it was a bit much being persecuted by your wife’s best friend. You know why she came of course?’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s in love with Gertrude.’

‘Oh don’t be stupid!’ The idea was new to Tim. He thrust it away. It simply added to the ghastly jumble. ‘You think everybody’s queer.’

‘You think nobody is.’

‘You agreed to everything she said because you wanted to smash up my marriage.’

‘I didn’t want to smash up your bloody marriage! I wanted to be left alone at last! I wasn’t interested in your marriage. Do you think I’d have raised a finger to get you away from your precious fatty? Anyway you don’t seem to have needed any assistance. You seem to have smashed it all up pretty effectively yourself!’

‘You must have made her think we’d been together after -’

‘Oh hell’s bloody bells, do stop raking it over! Leave all that muck behind you. You’re here, you came running back to me with your tail between your legs. We’ve even moved house because you’re so frightened of that unspeakable mob. Isn’t that enough? Do I have to listen to your endless reminiscences as well?’

‘They’re not reminiscences. I’d like to know the truth.’

‘Truth! That’s a funny word coming from you! You don’t know what it means. You’re all soft in the middle, Tim Reede, your soul’s full of nasty squelchy pulp.’

‘Why are you so unkind to me when you know I’m so unhappy -’

‘Go back to darling Gertie, then.’

‘You know I shall never do that.’

‘Well I don’t care what you do. Go and hang yourself.’

‘If you weren’t drunk half the time we wouldn’t quarrel. Oh I’m so tired of it!’

‘Who drove me to drink? You haven’t any occupation except the bottle. Let me tell you something. I didn’t miss you when you were away. I drank less, I worked more, I got on quite well with my novel. I haven’t written a word since you so graciously came back.’

‘Well, we’ve been moving house.’

‘To suit you!’

‘You said you liked it here.’

‘It’s a bit sleeker than my place, but we’ll come down to earth with a bump when Mrs Reede’s cash runs out. I haven’t seen
you
earning much money lately.’

‘You know I can’t -’

‘Because you’re so mopy and sulky and whiny, yes!’

‘Oh, I
will
earn money - You’re destroying me, you’re eating me, you destroy my substance, I feel I’m being gradually consumed when I’m with you. Just don’t needle me the whole time.’

‘You’re doing the needling. I’d prefer to ignore you. If it wasn’t for you I’d have a trade and a life of my own.’

‘You keep saying that.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Let’s go to the pub.’

‘It’s always “let’s go to the pub”, and then you accuse me of drinking! You’ve demoralized me with your idle feckless ways and now you hate the sight of what you’ve done! And I hate the sight of you, you’re a creepy-crawly. All right, go back to law and order and marriage and money!’

‘I’d have married you long ago you know that, only you hated the idea of marriage, you hated the very word!’

‘Do you imagine we’d have been different married?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s worse than ever. I feel I’m in hell.’

‘This is what hell is like, where we live, where we’ve always lived. No money, rows, and off to the pub. Christ, why did I ever get mixed up with bloody men?’

‘Oh let’s stop fighting. I apologize.’

‘He apologizes!
Laissez moi rire!
’

‘Let’s try and be as we were.’

‘We shall never be as we were.’

‘Not that that was up to much.’

‘You’re spoilt, you’re not my old Tim any more. You smell of that woman.’

‘Don’t say that, Daisy darling. Don’t hurt me. OK, we two have made our hell, but can’t we unmake it by mutual consent?’

‘Are you suggesting a suicide pact?’

‘Or at least be quietly together and not hurt each other.’

‘In the municipal graveyard under the mown grass.’

‘Oh be serious -’

‘ “Be serious” he says. Do you think I’m in a joking mood about this - this - Oh you unspeakable cad!’

‘Daisy, I know you’re jealous, or you were jealous -’

‘
Jealous?
You stupid shit -’

‘Yes, I am stupid, forgive me my stupidity and all the rest too. If you won’t forgive me, no one will, so you’ve got to forgive me.’

‘I don’t see why. I hope you burn. If you aren’t careful I’ll put you in my novel. That’s the worst punishment I can think of for anyone.’

‘Dear Daisy, you will be kind to me, you are kind to me -’

‘Oh you-I was going to say “rat” - you - guinea pig! You’re a male chauvinist guinea pig. Except that guinea pigs don’t whine.’

‘I’m not whining.’

‘You make me sick. The sight of your stupid pulpy face makes me sick. OK then, let’s go to the pub. Let’s get sozzled while the money lasts.’

 

 

Tim and Daisy were living in a furnished flat near Finchley Road Station. The flat had been let to them at a modest rent by one of Daisy’s mysterious female friends who was temporarily in America. It was a pleasant quiet flat mainly furnished with bamboo chairs and tables and very large brown cushions which lay upon the floor. There was plenty of room for Daisy’s ailing potted plants. Tim had felt a frenzied need to get right away from anywhere where
they
could ever find him. (Some of them lived in Hampstead, but not near Finchley Road.) The idea of seeing any of them again, Anne, the Count, Manfred, Stanley, Gerald, made him feel sick with horror. He did not consider seeing Gertrude, he did not touch this idea even with the finest remotest tentacles of his imagination. He was, in spite of Daisy’s battering, in spite of their ambiguous addictive quarrels, trying to settle down to his new life which was also in such a strange way his old life.

Of course they were not as they were. Tim now looked back upon the old days, when he was painting cats and Daisy was writing her novel and they were having picnic lunches together and meeting every evening at the Prince of Denmark and occasionally making love, as a period of aboriginal innocence. They had been as children. Now he had spoilt all that. He was not Daisy’s old Tim any more. The occasion of the loss caused him such misery that he did not come to work out whether he regretted the loss itself. No doubt the old world had been illusory, not as it seemed. Lies seemed to be everywhere in his life. He could see, still, the worth of Daisy, her courage, her extraordinary tolerant kindness to him. At the same time he saw even more clearly the impossibility of their relationship, an impossibility which they had lived with so long: the rows, the drink, the drift into chaos, the particular way in which they laboured at mutual destruction. Yet even all this could still seem innocent because, out of a kind hopelessness, they still forgave each other.

Tim was in extreme pain, a greater pain than he had ever felt before. When Gertrude had rejected him, when she had broken off their so improbable engagement and he had run back to Daisy on the previous occasion, he had suffered extremely. He had felt the misery of rejection and deprivation. He had loved Gertrude with wild erotic joy and deep attentive tenderness; and when she had said, ‘I cannot’, Tim had felt his grief as the most extreme that he had ever known. But it had been more bearable, not only because he had then, much as he loved his fiancée, loved her less than he had later loved his wife, but also because the miserable loss had not been his fault. He had run back to his hiding place thinking, I have always been unlucky, it was too good to be true; and he had thought this severance and this disappointment to be the worst thing that he could suffer.

His thought, winding ingeniously and endlessly in and out of the past, dwelt occasionally upon the fact that at that earlier time too he had been deceiving Gertrude upon a material point. Yet, she did not know it, which made him, because innocent in her eyes, more somehow innocent. And who was to say how soon he might not have told Gertrude everything if he had been left with her in his first happy state? The shock of her rejection, his loss of confidence, had, he told himself, tended towards the fatal delay in the confession later. There was also the
fact
that he had gone straight back to Daisy and to Daisy’s bed. How important was that? He was not then to know that he would win Gertrude back. Sometimes he wondered, what exactly is it that I am accused of which makes me feel so cripplingly guilty and gives me this awful
new
pain with which I can scarcely live? Had he deliberately pulled some filth of sinfulness over himself like a cover? He had been prompt to take Gertrude’s money out of the bank, and no small sum. He had once more run to Daisy, and if he was not yet in Daisy’s bed this was no doubt a temporary accident of their mutual unhappiness and congenital irritation with each other. What have I done, he thought, what does it
amount
to? Sometimes he felt that his punishment was the main evidence against him.

It remained that his frightful loss tormented him in a mode of intense guilty remorse. He felt himself permanently stained and damaged by what had happened. He recalled what Gertrude had once said about ‘a moral danger, a moral frightfulness’. What did she know of such perils? He had fallen into a trap of sin like someone falling into a deep pit and although he still did not quite understand why, he took the full consequences as something unavoidable and even just. He had messed around too long, juggled too much, tried to have everything every way and nothing properly, told too many easy and convenient lies. And if he now felt wretchedly miserable because he had been found out and punished, he did not thereby excuse himself. He fiddled around with the problem of what exactly Gertrude thought, what exactly she had said. But he knew that he had cheated. The phenomenon of Daisy was large in his life, it stretched far back into his earliest youth, it was, and perhaps would finally be, the main sense and enterprise of his existence. He could not magic it away out of his past or his present. When he thought of this phenomenon he sometimes hated Daisy; but this too was not for the first time.

The old Daisy problems were back. They could not live together, they could not live apart. They managed to share the flat for the moment because it was fairly large and they could get away from each other. They slept in separate rooms. Tim in the small bedroom slept with crossed arms, curled into a ball, or lay awake with his hands over his eyes, as the street lamps blazed through the thin curtains all night. During the day Daisy worked on her novel, or tried to and complained that she could not, but at least she stayed in her room. They went to various local pubs in the evenings and got drunk. Tim went out most of the day, occasionally he returned for lunch. Sometimes Daisy was out. They did not ‘tell their day’ any more. They irked each other with abrasive restless presences and itinerant unexplained absences. Doors banged. Tim had given up keeping the kitchen clean. The originally pleasant flat was beginning to resemble Daisy’s place in Shepherd’s Bush. He knew he would have to find somewhere else to live. They would have to return to the old method of meeting which had once (how touching!) seemed to them romantic. The problem of how they were to live was returning (as Gertrude’s money ran out) towards its old basis in lack of cash. Tim could not work and did not attempt to. He supposed that after a certain lapse of time it would be safe for Daisy to return to Shepherd’s Bush, for him to go back to the studio, but he could not bear to envisage it at present.
Lanthano.

When Tim had said to Daisy that he was ‘in hell’ he had indeed meant something that was ‘worse’, worse than ever before. Nightmares thronged his days and nights. He had frightful recurrent dreams. In one dream a soft floppy effigy, which he was watching with horror, and who was also himself, was being tossed in a blanket by a sinister circle of maliciously smiling girls. Similar effigies, in the form of half-animated demons, followed him slowly but relentlessly in dreams, like soft life-size dolls which came pushing up against him, and when he thrust them away came quietly back again. He was pursued by a stone head which rolled after him, groaning terribly as it went. He dreamed too of a hanged man whom, again, he saw but in some way was. The man, dead and yet also living and suffering horribly, was hanging from a long railing which looked like a stairhead. His eyes and mouth were open in frightful expressive pain, yet he was motionless, his hands and feet hanging limp, his head fallen on one side, a dreadful image of defeated punished guilt.