Nuns and Soldiers (74 page)

‘She loved someone else. And why should she love me? I’m not irresistible.’

‘Aren’t you? I heard you offering to take her home from the Polish Pope party. Would you have kissed her in the car?’

Manfred was silent.

‘And this migraine you suddenly developed -’

‘Fictional. I was looking for something in common. We could have swopped pills.’

‘How furious Gertrude would have been, she would have fallen in love with you directly. Do you know you share your passion with Ned Openshaw? He fell totally in love with Anne.’

‘Discerning boy.’

‘I hope she
has
left the country?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it’s really over?’

‘Yes - it’s really over.’

‘Don’t you want to chase her now the Count’s out of the way - or are you sure you’d fail? I know you hate failure.’

‘You see-I think she’s become a nun again - not in a formal sense, but - I’d never get her, never.’

‘Too worldly? An attractive man is never too worldly for a lonely woman. However, don’t think I’m trying to persuade you!’

‘I’ve lost her,’ said Manfred. ‘And I have ... made up my mind ... to that.’

‘It’s not like you not to seize what you want. I conclude you did not love her enough.’

Manfred was silent.

‘Now you’re angry with me. I feel alienated from you. And you’ve been - you know - and that was why.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I endure your moods. I always have, it’s part of the treaty.’

‘I am grateful.’

‘Pah! Now you regret having told me. You know my discretion, where you are concerned, is absolute.’

‘Sometimes I feel sick to death of myself and everything about my life. But I recover.’

‘My loving you is part of what you’re sick of. But you recover. My love is a bond and a burden to you.’

‘A burden sometimes, a bond never.’

‘All right. You’d be off like a flash if you fancied someone.’

‘Well, I’m still here.’

‘I wish I had the magic to make you happy. I haven’t. Yet here we are.’

‘Here we are.’

Veronica looked at Manfred’s profile. She did not make any move towards him. She tucked up her feet and narrowed her eyes.

Manfred said, ‘I’m sorry you put it about that Guy and I were enemies. I loved Guy.’

‘You said he was cold to you near the end. I wonder if he saw you married to Gertrude.’

‘No, that would have been impossible, and I’m sure Guy knew it, it would have been incestuous.’

‘Because Guy was a father to you.’

‘In any case I could never have viewed Gertrude in that light.’

‘I wish you’d made that clearer earlier. I suppose you were throwing dust in my eyes.’

‘It was your idea, and it kept you occupied.’

‘It kept me thoroughly unhappy.’

‘I’m still sorry we didn’t say Kaddish for Guy.’

‘You would never have found a quorum
parmi les cousins et les oncles
.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Your persistent secret sentimentality about our old religion amazes and touches me. Guy never felt like that, he wouldn’t have thanked you for your prayers.’

‘How can one be sure? When he was dying, I heard him talking to the ancestors.’

‘What ?’

‘On one of those curious evenings I came through the hall and heard him talking Yiddish.’

‘I didn’t know Guy knew Yiddish.’

‘He was all alone -’

‘Perhaps it was the inspiration of death. I shall be there myself tomorrow. Chattering Yiddish in Abraham’s bosom.’

‘Veronica, I wish you wouldn’t always pretend to be so old.’

‘Protective colouration.’

‘At least you don’t have to pretend with me. How old
are
you?’

‘Older than you think, younger than you think. When we travel together people say “he’s so kind to the old dear”. This used to amuse me, it doesn’t any more. But I tell you one thing on the day when you really go off with someone else I shall become a hundred in an hour like someone in a fairy tale.’

‘Oh don’t be so -’

‘Vulgar is the word. I sometimes think you fear vulgarity more than evil.’

‘Vulgarity is evil.’

‘You must admit that no one has the faintest idea about
cosa nostra
.’

‘No, thank God.’

‘That leaves you free.’

‘All right, all right -’

‘Everyone think’s you’re queer, and that helps of course.’

‘Veronica, please -’

‘I wish you were queer, I could bear your loving boys.’

‘Oh don’t start that again.’

‘Sometimes I feel, like my own pain, how very very sad you are inside.’

‘I have no inside.’

‘I have. I live with fear. I have nothing in my life except my addiction and that fear. Sometimes I wish a friendly cancer would end it all, or that cosmic catastrophe Gerald keeps hinting at.’

The bell rang.

‘Damn!’ said Veronica.

‘Who can it be at this hour?’ Manfred went to the house telephone. ‘Hello? Who’s there?’ He turned to Mrs Mount. ‘It’s Balintoy! ’

‘Oh
good
! Let him in, my darling.’

‘I’ve still got that bottle of Power’s whisky!’

They ran to the door of the flat to welcome the Irishman.

Balintoy came bounding in. His weather-beaten face looked to them older, but his eyes were a radiant piercing dark blue, a little moist now from the cold outside. Tiny snow flakes sparkled upon his overcoat and upon his curly well-tended shock of brown hair. They laughed and made much of him and settled him down with his whisky. And Balintoy, who knew more about them than they imagined, looked happily and affectionately from one to the other, and stroked them with his outstretched hand. ‘Now, my dears, tell me all the news!’

 

 

Anne Cavidge was sitting in the Prince of Denmark with Perkins on her knee. Outside it was snowing. Inside it was warm and smoky and noisy and rather dark. Anne had been there for some time, moving from one seat to another until she had got herself into a corner from which she could survey the whole bar. She was looking for Daisy.

Her aeroplane ticket to Chicago, dated tomorrow, was in her handbag. She had been deliberately vague, even mystifying, about her day of departure. Gertrude would probably reckon now that she had been gone over a week. She had seen, for her farewells, no one else; and she and Gertrude had tacitly avoided any ‘last scene’. ‘I expect you’ll be off soon.’ ‘Yes, haven’t quite fixed.’ They shunned each other’s eyes. Anne said she would ring, then did not ring. She sent a hasty note saying ‘Just leaving’. Gertrude would understand.

She had left her flat and had moved into a hotel. No one knew where she was. No one had especially asked, since it was quickly assumed that she had left the country. Only Ned Openshaw made some vain attempts to find her, cheering his failure by a mystical certainty that they were bound to meet again. In fact, Anne was at the hotel where she had intended to stay when she arrived in London a year ago. She was wearing the blue and white dress which she had hastily bought in the village to put on when she took off her black robes forever. She touched the aeroplane ticket in her bag. She touched a grey stone which was in there too.

Anne had, in her final quest, now visited ‘the old Prince’ several times. Tonight was her last night in London and she did not now think that she would find Daisy. She had got used to spending evenings in the Prince, it was an occupation. No one spoke to her. No one, she felt, saw her. She looked and listened. She could not now think how it had not been clear to her that she ought to have looked for Daisy as soon as she returned from France, as soon as it was plain that Tim had returned to his wife. She should have done so at once instead of fretting about her own fate. Her unbroken pride had separated her from Gertrude, her vanity had nearly drowned her in Cumbria, could not at least some vestige of professional smartness have prompted her not to lose
this
trick? Why had she not imagined Daisy’s loneliness, her possible plight, her possible despair? Anne had been too absorbed in her own hopes; and earlier when she had visited Daisy she had been too highmindedly concerned with organizing the defeat of those hopes to have any thought to spare for catastrophes which her selfless masochistic morality might be bringing about in Daisy’s life.

Only later did she take to picturing that room with its chaos of clothes and its smell of drink. She recalled her own coldness, her inquisitorial hostility. She remembered Daisy’s friendliness, then her anger. She thought suddenly, supposing Daisy were to kill herself? Everyone was busy surviving, seeking their own, arranging to be happy. No one seemed to have given a thought to Daisy, as if she had never been an actor in the drama at all. Daisy was an inconvenient embarrassing fading memory. Anne, sitting in her chilly hotel room, thought these thoughts quietly, and had leapt up in a sudden frenzy. She ran from the hotel and took a taxi to Daisy’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Someone replied to the bell and Anne mounted the stairs. Daisy was gone. Her successor, a pleasant young girl, told Anne she was sorry, she had no idea where Miss Barrett was, she had left no address. Anne looked over her shoulder into a clean tidy bright room full of books. After that Anne took to going to the Prince of Denmark.

About the Count Anne felt deep awful pain but, although she continued to speculate, her speculations did not disturb her present plans and motives. Sometimes she felt that this ‘falling in love’ was an illness which had to come to her on her return to the world and which would before too long be cured. Or could she conceivably have combined duty and interest by securing the Count by ministering to his religious need? He had vaguely expressed such a need, but she had not been interested in his interest in Christ, only in his interest in her. Should she not have preached to him more fervently? Sometimes she obsessively relived past times, wondering, if I had only told him
then
, or
then
...? When he had spoken of suicide she should have seized him in her arms instead of offering him rational arguments. Proper scruples, reasonable prudence, self-punishing masochism, or that demonic pride which so many years ‘inside’ had not seemed to have diminished one iota? She felt that she would have died of a rebuff. She thought, I lived on ‘perfect moments’ with Peter, moments like that wonderful telephone call at night. ‘Good night, dear Peter.’ ‘Good night, dear Anne.’ That was the pure honey of love, of hope. I was afraid to move on with him into the horrors of history. Now she had the torment of ‘if only ...’ It was a consolation to think here of Gertrude and of what Anne had come to view as Gertrude’s
rights
in the matter. Anne’s monstrous love would have shocked the Count and perhaps impaired whatever happiness he might now achieve as Gertrude’s
cavaliere servente.
It would also certainly have upset Gertrude and perhaps made her ‘acquisition’ of the Count an impossibility. I have no place, no rights, thought Anne. Gertrude, always the princess, had to have whatever she wanted; and was it not proper that she should, as she herself had said, being secure in marriage, proceed to love everybody and be beautifully loved in return? ‘It’s so simple to love everyone and be loved by them. It’s like a sheepfold with the sheep gathered in.’ Ought Anne to have been magnanimous enough to be a sheep? She could even wonder whether she were not actually leaving, as Gertrude had expressed it, ‘in a huff’ and meanly depriving her friend of the perfection of happiness in ‘having Anne as well’.

Anne at least did not delude herself by imagining that it was her duty to abstain from Peter because of the imminent failure of Tim. She saw Gertrude and Tim as secure. She even endeavoured now to appreciate Tim; and she reflected, as she had reflected in the case of Daisy, upon her own failure to feel, when she should have felt it, pity. She recalled the conversation, perhaps momentous, in which she had pictured Tim’s corrupted future and told the Count that Tim ought to leave Daisy. How impure her judgement had been at that moment, how little sympathy she had really felt for the banished ‘scapegoat’. Of course her scrupulous mind could even see that little outburst as a ‘slip’, a failure to observe her ‘policy’ of ignoring her own interests. And it was a curious thought that perhaps her own censorious coldness at that moment had somehow given strength to the Count’s plea to Tim to return, or at least to separate himself from Daisy. How strangely interlaced all these histories were. Seeing it this way Anne wondered if, here at least, she had not acted half-consciously on her own behalf, but she soon dismissed such speculations as trivial.

Sometimes more simply she thought that she had been a coward and would pay a coward’s price. That was one way of looking at it. She should have played a bolder and more positive role, questioned the Count, not respected his secrecy and his reserve. What, in these reflections, she tried at all costs to avoid was the terrible love-yearning, the
I want him, I want him, I shall die without him
which kept returning and rising up in her heart. To this hot desire Anne opposed herself, and was cold, cold. That way indeed madness lay, an impure profitless suffering which at least she could spare herself. She could not yet banish him however, and saw again and again those pale eyes, that thin clever touchable face, and the awkward thin tall figure filling some enchanted separated area of space like the apparition of a holy saint. She saw him transfigured, saw his beauty which she was sure so few could see, and her body ached for him and she mourned. She reflected too upon his heroism, which she could not match. He loved Gertrude so much that he would stay beside her forever and see her belonging to another.

But I have to survive, Anne said to herself, and survive on my own terms. To stay, that would be heroism, yes: but I don’t want to be that sort of hero. And she recalled Gertrude’s words, in order to survive a terrible loss one has to become another person, it may seem cruel, survival itself is cruel, it means leading one’s thoughts away from the one who is gone. Yes, thought Anne, and with a strangely fresh pang she remembered the deaths of her mother and her brother, when she was still at school, her father’s death later when she was already a nun. How rarely she thought in detail about those loved ones now, though a certain consciousness of them, especially of her father, travelled always with her. How had she managed to survive those deaths? And now, with a swift dart of memory, she thought she could recall how even in the moment of hearing that Dick was dead, fallen from a cliff face in the Cairngorms, she had instinctively closed herself against pain, instinctively peered ahead into a time when she would be someone else who could be conscious of this loss without anguish. So, Gertrude too had survived, the healthy still youthful strength of her happiness-seeking being had reached out instinctively and found new consolations and satisfactions. Anne pictured her first arrival at Ebury Street and how, mixed with her sympathy and concern, she had felt suddenly safe, pleased with her warm well-appointed bedroom and with her sense of being in the right place. It couldn’t
anyway
have been like that, thought Anne. She was only just now receiving the full shock waves of her departure from the convent, the full violence of that amazing act, itself like a kind of bereavement, whose full consequences remained still so obscure. And she thought, I have got to survive that too. And she thought that perhaps later on she would see her mad love for Peter as only one incident in some large pattern of change.