"Was she a painter?"
"Not a real painter, and she knew it. Knew it and didn't resent it, just made the best of having no talent. She didn't paint for art's sake; she painted because she liked looking at things, liked the process of trying meticulously to reproduce what she saw. That evening she gave me a canvas and a palette, and told me to do likewise." "And did it work?"
"It worked so well that when a couple of months later I cut open a rotten apple, the worm at its center wasn't a maggot- not subjectively, I mean. Objectively, yes; it was all that a maggot should be, and that's how I portrayed it, how we both portrayed it-for we always painted the same things at the same time."
"What about the other maggots, the phantom maggots outside the apple?"
"Well, I still had relapses, especially in Fleet Street and at cocktail parties; but the maggots were definitely fewer, definitely less haunting. And meanwhile something new was happening in the studio. I was falling in love-falling in love because love is catching and Molly was so obviously in love with me-why, God only knows."
"I can see several possible reasons why. She might have loved you because . . ." Susila eyed him appraisingly and smiled. "Well, because you're quite an attractive kind of queer fish."
He laughed. "Thank you for a handsome compliment."
"On the other hand," Susila went on, "(and this isn't quite so complimentary), she might have loved you because you made her feel so damned sorry for you."
"That's the truth, I'm afraid. Molly was a born Sister of Mercy."
"And a Sister of Mercy, unfortunately, isn't the same as a Wife of Love."
"Which I duly discovered," he said.
"After your marriage, I suppose."
Will hesitated for a moment. "Actually," he said, "it was before. Not because, on her side, there had been any urgency of desire, but only because she was so eager to do anything to please me. Only because, on principle, she didn't believe in conventions and was all for freely loving, and more surprisingly" (he remembered the outrageous things she would so casually and placidly give utterance to even in his mother's presence) "all for freely talking about that freedom."
"You knew it beforehand," Susila summed up, "and yet you still married her."
Will nodded his head without speaking.
"Because you were a gentleman, I take it, and a gentleman keeps his word."
"Partly for that rather old-fashioned reason, but also because I was in love with her."
" Were you in love with her?"
"Yes. No, I don't know. But at the time I did know. At least I thought I knew. I was really convinced that I was really in love with her. And I knew, I still know, why I was convinced. I was grateful to her for having exorcised those maggots. And besides the gratitude there was respect. There was admiration. She was so much better and honester than I was. But unfortunately, you're right: a Sister of Mercy isn't the same as a Wife of Love.
But I was ready to take Molly on her own terms, not on mine. I was ready to believe that her terms were better than mine."
"How soon," Susila asked, after a long silence, "did you start having affairs on the side?"
Will smiled his flayed smile. "Three months to the day after our wedding. The first time was with one of the secretaries at the office. Goodness, what a bore! After that there was a young painter, a curlyheaded little Jewish girl whom Molly had helped with money while she was studying at the Slade. I used to go to her studio twice a week, from five to seven. It was almost three years before Molly found out about it."
"And, I gather, she was upset?"
"Much more than I'd ever thought she'd be."
"So what did you do about it?"
Will shook his head. "This is where it begins to get complicated," he said. "I had no intention of giving up my cocktail hours with Rachel; but I hated myself for making Molly so unhappy. At the same time I hated her for being unhappy. I resented her suffering and the love that had made her suffer; I felt that they were unfair, a kind of blackmail to force me to give up my innocent fun with Rachel. By loving me so much and being so miserable about what I was doing-what she really forced me to do-she was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom. But meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her. Pity," he repeated, "not compassion. Compassion is suffering-with, and what I wanted at all costs was to spare myself the pain her suffering caused me, and avoid the painful sacrifices by which I could put an end to her suffering. Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside, if you see what I mean-sorry for her as a spectator, an aesthete, a connoisseur in excruciations. And this aesthetic pity of mine was so intense, every time her unhappiness came to a head, that I could almost mistake it for love. Almost, but never quite. For when I expressed my pity in physical tenderness (which I did because that was the only way of putting a temporary stop to her unhappiness and to the pain her unhappi-ness was inflicting on me), that tenderness was always frustrated 'i; before it could come to its natural consummation. Frustrated because, by temperament, she was only a Sister of Mercy, not a wife. And yet, on every level but the sensual, she loved me with a total commitment-a commitment that called for an answering commitment on my part. But I wouldn't commit myself, maybe I genuinely couldn't. So instead of being grateful for her self-giving, I resented it. It made claims on me, claims that I refused to acknowledge. So there we were, at the end of every crisis, back at the beginning of the old drama-the drama of a love incapable of sensuality self-committed to a sensuality incapable of love and evoking strangely mixed responses of guilt and exasperation, of pity and resentment, sometimes of real hatred (but always with an undertone of remorse), the whole accompanied by, contra- puntal to, a succession of furtive evenings with my little curly-headed painter."
"I hope at least they were enjoyable," said Susila.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Only moderately. Rachel could never forget that she was an intellectual. She had a way of asking what one thought of Piero di Cosimo at the most inopportune moments. The real enjoyment and of course the real agony-I never experienced them until Babs appeared on the scene."
"When was that?"
"Just over a year ago. In Africa."
"Africa?"
"I'd been sent there by Joe Aldehyde."
"That man who owns newspapers?"
""And, all the rest. He was married to Molly's aunt Eileen. An exemplary family man, I may add. That's why he's so serenely convinced of his own righteousness, even when he's engaged in the most nefarious financial operations."
"And you're working for him?"
Will nodded. "That was his wedding present to Molly-a job for me on the Aldehyde papers at almost twice the salary I'd been getting from my previous employers. Princely! But then he was very fond of Molly."
"How did he react to Babs?"
"He never knew about her-never knew that there was any reason for Molly's accident."
"So he goes on employing you for your dead wife's sake?"
Will shrugged his shoulders. "The excuse," he said, "is that I have my mother to support."