Trust (55 page)

"They didn't invent the Communists," I said.

"But they invented the masses. In fact they went all over the Continent looking for this particular invention of theirs, in order to stir it up. After Germany," he persisted in a thickness of pursuit, "they went to London. Vand was organizing there. A terrific riot afterward, I never got it straight why. Something about Poland. Little Sparrs got the worst of that one. Finally in the middle of the summer the two of them went down to Brighton and took a cottage. By then they had been traveling more than a year. A year, more than a year, a year and a quarter—"

I interposed in surprise, "You let it go on so long?"

William pinned me with a derision so acutely spurning that I felt beggared and demeaned and had to persuade myself not to fear those fine milky triangles that, by their innocent contrast on either side, burnished the abscess-like roundness of his eyeballs. His intention was to humiliate. "My—dear—child," he lilted at me with a kind of contemplative danger, "exactly
what
would you have had me do? What, what, and then what?
They
had me"—he turned away and I wonderingly saw how the danger crumpled like a paper thorn—"they had me wearing horns."

"Then you ought to have horned in on them," I said at once and without pity. "You let them get away with it. You could have gone over there and stopped it."

"You like to speculate," he said harshly. "It couldn't be done. The difficulty of—the implausibility—I was at the time in no—" he twitched and switched away—"position to leave my affairs unguarded. The incident, its occurrence on the property, had brought on—"

"You mean that boy's suicide," I said.

"—certain investigations, there were a number of contrivances, I was forced—"

But this aroused me. "Oh, that's good Business English: affairs that can't be left unguarded. And
her
affairs? Hers?"

He wearily rubbed his forehead with a single moist finger. "This won't do. I am not accustomed to arguments of this nature—"

"If
she
had an affair you could leave it unguarded!"

"You sometimes have a distinctly coarse way of expressing yourself."

"Maybe it's the subject-matter that's coarse."

"The subject-matter is one I notice you chose for yourself," William said.

"You could have written to her then. You could have," I insisted. "But instead nothing. No claim, no protest. Not a word. Nothing!—The subject-matter was too coarse," I flung at him without the support of ridicule.

"You want to blame me."

"It's just as fair, isn't it? You're the one who let her get away with it! If you'd said a word, a single word—"

"You want to accuse. You put your teeth into it." And there was his odd stiff fist against his vest, seeming to clutch at a button. Then quite suddenly he told the truth: "But it was too much."

"What?"

"A single word," he repeated. "I had lost the faculty."

"Of licking a stamp."

"Of speaking."

"You do it well enough now and again, according to the
Times.
"

He separated his hand from his body, and opened out the knuckles with their stretched whorls like shut eyelids, and turned the wrist, and set it down upon the desk as though all of it—the taut fingers, the thumb purplish at its fatty base, the palm with its private linear text—offended him by certain betrayals. This was bizarre: William was not given to obvious gesture. "When we met again—when she came back," he said, obscurely apologetic, "we shook hands. It was all right, you see, eventually."

"Yes," I said.

"There were a great many matters of essence that had to be attended to."

"Yes."

"I'm referring to her return. We had a number of necessary conferences."

I said caustically, "The faculty returned when she did."

He began, but discovered he was hoarse.

"I mean the power of speech came back," I pushed on.

"I addressed her," William said through a clot in his throat, "as a client of particular value."

I did not ask him value to whom: I feared he might say to the firm. "It's always possible to speak to a client," I said merely; but I saw in his cheek a visible snap of discipline; of recovery; and I laughed. "You know Queen Victoria's complaint about Gladstone?—She said he addressed her like a public meeting. I read that in Lytton Strachey. Of course," I modified, "he was only the Prime Minister, he wasn't married to her."

William looked over as though he were about to compliment me on my astounding grasp of British Constitutional History. Instead he remarked testily, "You choose cynical authors for false applications."

"I wasn't comparing you to Queen Victoria," I said.

"Perhaps you read too much."

"I don't have anything else to do. I've been going through the newspapers all summer. They're full of crises and emergencies that nobody's made up. It's really remarkable. What happened in Brighton?"

"In Brighton?"

"You said they went to Brighton. —Your client," I explained it, "and her novel-in-progress."

It was plain he despised me for this. "I haven't mentioned her novel."

"Yes you have. You said it was the reason she was staying in Europe. —There," I pointed out, "if I put it that way you can't say I'm being coarse."

"She finished it there."

"In Brighton?"

"Yes."

"The affair?"

"The novel," William threw out, blazing.

"So he was right. Nick. He got her to do it."

"It was simply that she stopped traveling. She settled down to it."

"He got her to settle down to it."

"She settled down," he contradicted impatiently. "Before that they were joining up with Vand at one place or another, wherever he claimed to need them. She took the cottage expressly to finish. No moving about and no interruptions, only that Vand stopped there now and then."

"She wrote you that?"

"She wrote everything."

"Well it worked," I said. "She finished it. She's never finished anything since."

"You have very curious values."

"—It's only that I believe in finishing things." I might have said marriages, I might have said divorces, I might have ventured love. I might in fact have said anything, but I just then preferred the safety of ambiguity.
Odi et amo,
that vague old squeal: he had kept her on as "client," but he had kept her on. He had kept her, he was keeping her yet. It gave him an intimacy without the requirement of intimate address, that lost faculty for terror he mourned.

"Excellent," he pronounced without a pause—it was his old tone, the speaking monument. "You believe in finishing things. Then let us suit your creed to our interview."

But awe for William had abandoned me. Let me be granite: that scorn did not command me. We faced one another in that exceptional nakedness of equality which now and then afflicts fathers and daughters—a relationship I entertained in contemptuous metaphor only.

"So they lived on what you sent," I summed it up without a blink.

"I don't know what they lived on. Air. I sent half of whatever she asked for."

"She had to ask."

"She asked enough for two. I sent enough for one, poverty for two."

"It was her money."

"My wife's money. I saw no reason for my wife's money to support anyone other than my wife. She was still my wife, you see. I wasn't out to subsidize a lapse in morals."

"It wouldn't have been the first time," I said.

"You refer to the camp. Yes. The unfortunate incident. The Armenians are a very rash people. Irresponsible as Italians, and none of the Italian frivolity of nature. A heavy-natured people, a peculiar sullenness in them—"

"You make it sound like a national movement."

"You think I make it too great?"

"You make it too little. A boy died."

"Killed himself."

"Was murdered."

He gave the stare of Zeus.

"Your son says it that way," I supplied. "He lays it all at your feet"

"I see. —My feet."

But I found I could be brutal. "He thinks they're made of clay."

"My feet," he said again. He toned aside. "Plausible. I won't contradict."

"He doesn't trust you any more. I told you. On account of finding out
that.
He holds you accountable."

"And you?"

I exhaled a token of a breath signifying detachment. "What do I care? You're not
my
father."

"You don't hold me accountable?"

"Not to me."

"Then you think morality is between persons only? If you are not offended in yourself, then there has been no offense? One can't offend against a tenet?"

"All that's theology," I said.

"Precisely."

"It's why you let my mother starve."

"I didn't let her starve."

"Poverty for two you said."

"I didn't let her starve."

"You weren't out to subsidize a lapse in morals."

"You misunderstand. I had no wish—after the camp—to encourage—" He stopped. "They were investigating the estate, it was with the greatest difficulty the thing was kept out of court, the county wanted to litigate—"

"Spite. You wanted to make it hot for her."

He regained himself. "I didn't intend to let it seem that I would abet a further breach of trust. The camp was enough."

"The boy was enough."

"You keep insisting on that boy."

"Theology again. Or maybe I imitate your son."

He struck the desk-top with an extraordinary vitality—startling after that pizzicato of guilt. "Leave my son out of it, can't you?"

I reflected. "All right. History did, so I wilL
He
wasn't in Brighton. What happened in Brighton?"

"She wrote."

"You said that. Wrote and finished."

"I don't mean the book. She wrote a letter."

"And you never answered it. You've
said
that."

"It was as long as any of them. A long letter, so I went ahead finally with the divorce. —I mean to say I arranged for her to be divorced from me immediately."

"Over a letter?" I marveled. But it was not so wondrous after all: once I had believed it was over a chapter. And whether a letter is more substantial than a chapter is moot, particularly when a novelist has written both.

William said: "She told me in it that she was several months short of having a child. I was not its father."

"No," I agreed, "not you," and closed the openness that had been between us. For hostility is openness; it is at least dialogue; but narrative is a fence-making to keep out the other.

Then I heard how I was born.

When the child was born the father vanished. Not immediately, but by degrees, like a barometer measuring weather. Italy was warm, for example; he measured that. He began merely by talking of Italy, because the coast of England was turning cold and dull and tedious. The cottage walls were the color of the inside of an eggshell, though more porous. In summer, when they first came there, the house was a creamy hump in a nest of green weediness, a place to tumble about in with a frying-pan lid for a cymbal; and Allegra was a joke on herself: "I'm a helium balloon!" "Then you'll be kept from floating off," said Nick, and tugged at her hair, which grew and grew like weeds, till she thrust it round out of her way. "Work," said Nick, and went to sleep in the narrow bed; he liked to sleep, and afterward reported the long adventures of his dreams, in which, oddly, she appeared only once, and then subordinately. But he dreamed often of Hugh, who was still in Italy. "Work," he said, and since he was asleep (he had finished the wine), she read a little in Oscar Wilde ("That's to prime the pump," said she) and went to
Marianna
with an elegant and erotic chameleon-pen, and wrote of flowers like an aesthetic druggist, meditating in a botanical handbook that told of vegetable cannibals, savages, and Macbeths. "Quit it now," he said, yawning himself awake; "come and show me what you've done." She showed him: "Is it awful?"—because he laughed. "It leaves me full of awe," he answered; "it's Walter Pater crossed with George Eliot." "But I meant it to be Socialist Realist." "Then that's just what it is. You've bred a hybrid, and have every right to give it a name. If only Dickens could have tried his hand in the middle of the seventh month!" "I don't see what
that's
got to do with it," she said haughtily. "Everything, everything. The female is an engine." "Well, my
mind's
not an engine." "True, but I wasn't speaking of your mind, I was speaking of your imagination. It's involuntary, like parturition. The male ought to be prevented from writing at all. Male literature ought to be abrogated for its wishy-washiness. There ought to be daily burnings, beginning with Voltaire, and including all the male poets before and after. I don't leaVe out Sappho, though he was unwillingly a woman. True literature is obscene, and only women know how to be truly obscene; they can't help it. Rabelais only imitates the talk of women when they're alone in a room together, and Lawrence goes a step farther by trying to
think
like a woman—Joyce too—but it's hopeless. No one, no matter how talented, can be as obscene as a female about to bear. Now look, that means I'm sure this chapter's better than the last—it's got more social justice for the unemployed lovers in it—so go and get the darts," They had no target, only a round bit of scallop on the cornice, with a worm-hole for a bull's-eye, and Allegra's throw went out the open window and pierced a little tree. They swore to one another that they had heard the dryad shriek. Every day for a month or so they wondered if she would shriek again to show she was not dead. But she was dead; it was winter; they never heard her. Then a shriek, howling and long, after all: and the child's head was born that moment.

The greengrocer was a far walk. The butcher was dear, the milk repulsive. The child shivered when the mother's hair fell down into its queer face—like pygmy notches carved into a wedge of coconut meat. "I
can't
drink wine, I'm not supposed to," said the mother, pale as milk. Then there was no safe place to keep the child, so they put it in a packing box begged from the grocer. "It smells of apples," said the mother. "It smells of sourgrass," said the father, "and if the money goes for milk we can't have wine." "He'll send the money now," said the mother. "Now? Why now? You said he was certain to send at least double the amount when you first told him, and that was months ago." "But it wasn't born then." "It's born now, and where's the
money?
—I tell you what, let's to to Italy, Hugh's living it up in Sicily on nothing at all." The child yowled. "Oh we can't go to Italy!" said the mother; "what's it yelling for? Look, its head is sort of funny, do you think I broke it off? Aren't you supposed to hold their heads a special way so they don't fall off?" "Can't drink wine," said the father, "can't go to Italy, can't get cash. Trust him not to send the money even now." "But it's freezing, that's the trouble! Can't you do something about the fire? Its lips are purple." "Oh damn its lips," he said, and fiddled with the hearth—"nothing's coming from America. Why don't you write him again?" "He never answers." "Well damn him." "Maybe if Enoch gets rid of the manuscript to a good London publisher—" "Hurray, you've got the Noble Outlaw for an agent. They're bound to treat him very respectfully at Chatto and Windus. They love their agents in Grecian sandals at New Year's. I say damn him." "—then I'd get an advance on it maybe, and we'd have some money right away. Anyhow it's not Enoch's fault he can't wear regular shoes with his feet in that condition. It's ever since the last Peace March, it's no joke from Glasgow down to Manchester, it's one of the longest they've ever done." "And the typist he got you was five pounds hard cash." "I had to have it
typed,
didn't I?" "Then damn you too. Give me your wallet, I'm going out." "Where?" "Where! To bring some breakfast. —Doesn't the thing ever shut up? We'll all end up deaf. Is this all the money there is?"