And instead of simply pointing out that she had in no way broken it, Griselda replied reflectively ‘Things are never quite the same after marriage as they were before it,’ and offered Lotus another glass of lemon tea.
After weeks of apparent rebuff and equivocation Lotus tumultuously capitulated at the end of February.
‘You’ve won him and I’ve lost him,’ she said to Griselda over morning coffee. ‘You’ve been stamping out my body like wine beneath your little feet. I need renewal. I always find it in the same place.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Sfax.’
In due course, a picture postcard of a grinning Arab under a palm tree laden with dates, confirmed Lotus’s decision; but Griselda wondered what in Kynaston’s life had replaced the satisfactions, however limited, which, even by his own account, Lotus had given him. She looked at the sky of Sfax, almost unnaturally ultramarine, at the camels on the horizon, at the Wagons-Lits official in the foreground; and supposed that Kynaston must at last have found a purpose in life. Really it was most unlike him.
About a week after Lena’s outburst in the shop, Griselda received a visit from Guillaume. It was a Saturday afternoon; and Griselda was lying on her back, gazing at the ceiling, and eating Pascall’s crкmes-de-menthe. She and Kynaston had not yet found a better place to live; indeed lately the search itself had flagged.
‘Sorry Geoffrey’s out. How’s Florence?’
Guillaume was wandering about the small sitting-room collecting cushions.
‘Losing weight just a little, I’m afraid. She strains you know. I try to open her eyes to the wonder of life, but I doubt if the brightness of it all is ever wholly clear to her.’
He filled an armchair with his accumulation and sank his large body slowly into the midst of it.
There followed a long silence. Guillaume looked like a dingy Mother Goose.
He restarted the momentum of intercourse. ‘I thought I’d take a chance of finding you in.’
‘Have a crкme-de-menthe?’
‘May I take a handful?’ He nearly emptied the small green tin. ‘I’m engaged on research at Soane’s. The work of years. Probably my very last chance. The final brief passage before the volume closes.’
‘Surely not?’
‘I’m a disappointed man, you know, Mrs Kynaston.’ He smiled like the last sunset of autumn. He had difficulty in extracting the sweets entirely from their papers, so that every now and then he ejected a tiny moist scrap which had accidentally entered his mouth.
‘Florence told me.’
He seemed disturbed. ‘That she had no right to do. Even a failure has his pride.’
‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Where is it that you’ve failed?’
‘Can you look at the world around you and ask me that?’ he replied. ‘On the one hand the dream. On the other the reality. And I started with such hopes.’ He was feeling for his pocket handkerchief. Griselda feared that he was about to weep, but he only sought to remove some of the stickiness which his large moist hands had retained from the sweets.
‘Take only one case,’ he continued, ‘Take the state of affairs in denominational schools. Little children exposed naked to the blast of bigotry. Take the mines. Do you know that the faces of miners are black all the time they work? Men born as white as you or I. Take the so-called catering industry. Have you ever worked for twenty-four hours on end in an underground kitchen? Do you know that the world’s supply of phosphorus is being consumed at ten or twenty times the rate it’s being replaced? Look at the cruelty and waste involved in the so-called sport of polo alone! If you live in Wallsend, you have to walk ten miles to see a blade of grass. Is anything being done to harness the energy in the planets? Even though there’s enough to extirpate work everywhere. Think of the millions deceived by so-called free insurance schemes, paid for out of profits!’
‘I see what you mean.’ said Griselda.
‘And in other countries things are worse. What have you to say about the Japanese? Or the Andaman Islanders, who pass their entire lives in a prison camp? Or the so-called freed slaves in Liberia?’
‘Perhaps we’d better stick to England. At least to start with.’
‘There’s a great danger in parochialism. The aboriginal Tasmanians discovered that.’
‘How?’
‘Very simply. They were trapped, killed, and eaten by men of more progressive outlook.’
‘I think there is a lot in what Lord Beaconsfield said.’
‘Of course there is,’ said Gullaume unexpectedly. ‘But did he put it into practice?’
Griselda was far from sure. But almost certainly Guillaume was thinking of some other remark of the sage’s. In any case, he resumed speaking immediately.
‘Though who am I to throw the first stone?’ he enquired. ‘William Cook, the failure. You didn’t even know that my real name was William?’
‘It would never have occurred to me. I suppose you disliked being called Bill? I know I should.’
‘In those days no one would have ventured. I was a man of spirit then. I knew Hubert Bland quite welclass="underline" and Hyndman too. No. I chanced my name, Mrs Kynaston, solely in order to appear to advantage with women.’
‘I’m sure you did impress them.’
‘Not one. I might have saved myself the cost. Never has one woman truly opened her heart to me, although my heart finds room for the whole human race.’ He looked into Griselda’s eyes and coughed back into his mouth a crкme-de-menthe which had involved itself with the lump in his throat.
‘You have Florence. She’s devoted to you.’
‘A mere Ahaviel. A simple handmaiden,’ he replied irritably. ‘If I could have made my own, utterly my own, a woman of spiritual power, comparable with mine, mountains would have moved.’
For some reason this remark annoyed Griselda. ‘I think Florence is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.’
‘Nice is the just word,’ he replied bitterly. ‘But you speak to a prophet. My responsibility is wide. I seek the divine flame, not soapsuds.’
‘I won’t have this,’ said Griselda quietly and putting on her shoes. ‘I am fond of Florence. You’re lucky to have her.’
‘Florence is Florence. Naturally no one estimates her more justly than I do.’
‘She is beautiful and intelligent and devoted and faithful and kind. Kind people are rare. As a prophet you ought to know that.’
Guillaume eyed her through the gathering October dusk. ‘I understand why you set store by at least one of those qualities.’
‘I set store by all of them.’ Griselda suspected another attempted seduction.
‘We need not pretend. Your business partner still lives at Juvenal Court, you know. Florence has known Lena for years.’
Griselda thought quickly and clearly before deciding what to say next. Then she decided.
‘I’m sorry I can’t offer you tea. I’ve arranged to join Geoffrey.’
‘Like everybody else, you under-estimate me. Had you been taking tea with Kynaston, I should not have chosen today to visit you.’
Griselda had not expected that either. But for reasons she had not yet had time to determine, Guillaume’s surprising remarks had the effect of clearing rather than unsettling her mind.
‘I’m afraid I must ask you to go. Please give my love to Florence.’
‘I am quite used to eviction and condemnation, as to many other unpleasant things. I should be a poor creature if by now I had not my philosophy, strong as iron.’ Laboriously he rose from his cache of cushions, like the nook of an animal about to hibernate. Still sucking and spitting, he crawled across to the window and stared into the encroaching night. Griselda stood by the open door, waiting.
‘I was absorbing the peace of the lamplighter at work,’ said Guillaume after a while, ‘like a glowworm. Or, perhaps more nearly, a firefly.’
‘I often watch him,’ said Griselda, who had never previously noticed him.