'You've gone and made me cry!' she whimpered in self–contempt.
'I'm sorry! Rosemary, dear one! Don't cry, PLEASE don't cry.'
'Gordon, dearest! WHY do you have to be so beastly to me?'
'I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Sometimes I can't help it.'
'But why? Why?'
She had got over her crying. Rather more composed, she drew away from him and felt for something to wipe her eyes. Neither of them had a handkerchief. Impatiently, she wrung the tears out of her eyes with her knuckles.
'How silly we always are! Now, Gordon, BE nice for once. Come along to the restaurant and have some supper and let me pay for it.'
'No.'
'Just this once. Never mind about the old money–business. Do it just to please me.'
'I tell you I can't do that kind of thing. I've got to keep my end up.'
'But what do you mean, keep your end up?'
'I've made a war on money, and I've got to keep the rules. The first rule is never to take charity.'
'Charity! Oh, Gordon, I DO think you're silly!'
She squeezed his ribs again. It was a sign of peace. She did not understand him, probably never would understand him; yet she accepted him as he was, hardly even protesting against his unreasonableness. As she put her face up to be kissed he noticed that her lips were salt. A tear had trickled here. He strained her against him. The hard defensive feeling had gone out of her body. She shut her eyes and sank against him and into him as though her bones had grown weak, and her lips parted and her small tongue sought for his. It was very seldom that she did that. And suddenly, as he felt her body yielding, he seemed to know with certainty that their struggle was ended. She was his now when he chose to take her, and yet perhaps she did not fully understand what it was that she was offering; it was simply an instinctive movement of generosity, a desire to reassure him—to smooth away that hateful feeling of being unloveable and unloved. She said nothing of this in words. It was the feeling of her body that seemed to say it. But even if this had been the time and the place he could not have taken her. At this moment he loved her but did not desire her. His desire could only return at some future time when there was no quarrel fresh in his mind and no consciousness of four and fourpence in his pocket to daunt him.
Presently they separated their mouths, though still clinging closely together.
'How stupid it is, the way we quarrel, isn't it Gordon? When we meet so seldom.'
'I know. It's all my fault. I can't help it. Things rub me up. It's money at the bottom of it, always money.'
'Oh, money! You let it worry you too much, Gordon.'
'Impossible. It's the only thing worth worrying about.'
'But, anyway, we WILL go out into the country next Sunday, won't we? To Burnham Beeches or somewhere. It would be so nice if we could.'
'Yes, I'd love to. We'll go early and be out all day. I'll raise the train fares somehow.'
'But you'll let me pay my own fare, won't you?'
'No, I'd rather I paid them, but we'll go, anyway.'
'And you really won't let me pay for your supper—just this once, just to show you trust me?'
'No, I can't. I'm sorry. I've told you why.'
'Oh, dear! I suppose we shall have to say good night. It's getting late.'
They stayed talking a long time, however, so long that Rosemary got no supper after all. She had to be back at her lodgings by eleven, or the she–dragons were angry. Gordon went to the top of the Tottenham Court Road and took the tram. It was a penny cheaper than taking the bus. On the wooden seat upstairs he was wedged against a small dirty Scotchman who read the football finals and oozed beer. Gordon was very happy. Rosemary was going to be his mistress. Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. To the music of the tram's booming he whispered the seven completed stanzas of his poem. Nine stanzas there would be in all. It was GOOD. He believed in it and in himself. He was a poet. Gordon Comstock, author of Mice. Even in London Pleasures he once again believed.
He thought of Sunday. They were to meet at nine o'clock at Paddington Station. Ten bob or so it would cost; he would raise the money if he had to pawn his shirt. And she was going to become his mistress; this very Sunday, perhaps, if the right chance offered itself. Nothing had been said. Only, somehow, it was agreed between them.
Please God it kept fine on Sunday! It was deep winter now. What luck if it turned out one of those splendid windless days—one of those days that might almost be summer, when you can lie for hours on the dead bracken and never feel cold! But you don't get many days like that; a dozen at most in every winter. As likely as not it would rain. He wondered whether they would get a chance to do it after all. They had nowhere to go, except the open air. There are so many pairs of lovers in London with 'nowhere to go'; only the streets and the parks, where there is no privacy and it is always cold. It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money. The 'never the time and the place' motif is not made enough of in novels.
7
The plumes of the chimneys floated perpendicular against skies of smoky rose.
Gordon caught the 27 bus at ten past eight. The streets were still locked in their Sunday sleep. On the doorsteps the milk bottles waited ungathered like little white sentinels. Gordon had fourteen shillings in his hand—thirteen and nine, rather, because the bus fare was threepence. Nine bob he had set aside from his wages—God knew what that was going to mean, later in the week!—and five he had borrowed from Julia.
He had gone round to Julia's place on Thursday night. Julia's room in Earl's Court, though only a second–floor back, was not just a vulgar bedroom like Gordon's. It was a bed–sitting with the accent on the sitting. Julia would have died of starvation sooner than put up with such squalor as Gordon lived in. Indeed every one of her scraps of furniture, collected over intervals of years, represented a period of semi–starvation. There was a divan bed that could very nearly be mistaken for a sofa, and a little round fumed oak table, and two 'antique' hardwood chairs, and an ornamental footstool and a chintz–covered armchair—Drage's: thirteen monthly payments—in front of the tiny gas–fire; and there were various brackets with framed photos of father and mother and Gordon and Aunt Angela, and a birchwood calendar—somebody's Christmas present—with 'It's a long lane that has no turning' done on it in pokerwork. Julia depressed Gordon horribly. He was always telling himself that he ought to go and see her oftener; but in practice he never went near her except to 'borrow' money.
When Gordon had given three knocks—three knocks for second floor— Julia took him up to her room and knelt down in front of the gas– fire.
'I'll light the fire again,' she said. 'You'd like a cup of tea, wouldn't you?'
He noted the 'again'. The room was beastly cold—no fire had been lighted in it this evening. Julia always 'saved gas' when she was alone. He looked at her long narrow back as she knelt down. How grey her hair was getting! Whole locks of it were quite grey. A little more, and it would be 'grey hair' tout court.
'You like your tea strong, don't you?' breathed Julia, hovering over the tea–caddy with tender, goose–like movements.
Gordon drank his cup of tea standing up, his eye on the birchwood calendar. Out with it! Get it over! Yet his heart almost failed him. The meanness of this hateful cadging! What would it all tot up to, the money he had 'borrowed' from her in all these years?