“Darling, why do you ask me? If you want to leave University, if you want to get a job, for Christ’s sake why don’t you? I can’t stand you when you’re timid and uncertain. Damn it all, you’re not under Mummy’s wing now, are you?”
“But I am. So long as I stay at University and they keep me, of course I am.”
I went over to him and put my arms round his knees; he played with my hair, tugging it back behind my ears. “They’re looking for a house again,” I said, speaking of the Marcuses. “Jenny definitely pregnant?” “Almost certain.” We looked at each other as if to say, how can people let these things happen. “That’s the trouble with being married,” he said. I smiled. “But it can happen to any of us.” “Yes, but when you’re married the social sanction makes you careless. People say they won’t be, but they always are. You know … what does it matter, after all, if something should go wrong, we are married. … And there you are. Houses, families, necessity for money and more money, all the things you want to do pushed off into some vague future.” We held each other close in our agreement on this. The idea of domestic life came to me as a suction toward the life of the Mine, a horror of cosy atrophy beckoning, and it was becoming impossible for me to ignore the fact that even the marriage of John and Jenny had some disquieting elements for me.
“Joel once suggested marriage as the career for me. I was indignant.”
“Did he? I wouldn’t want a woman to make a career of me. If being married turns into a career afterward, that’s too bad. But I’d want it to start off because whatever else she wanted to do, she wanted to do it living with me.”
I knew that I had not conveyed accurately what Joel had said and meant, but the small injustice to his perception seemed unimportant. I closed my eyes and was conscious with a kind of pleasurable fear that the whole world had narrowed itself down frighteningly into the possession of what I felt in my arms; my life had settled on Paul. “That’s what I want,” I said. “Whatever else I do, I want to do it living with you. The marriage part is incidental.” He dragged me up from the floor and kissed me as if I had something in my mouth he wanted to take from me. We had one of those moments of pure fascination in the absorption we had in each other. He said to me, studying my face with what was almost exasperation, “What is it in you? What are you, after all …? I ask myself that a million times. …” And he touched my face with a finger like a feather, and suddenly took my head in his hands and squeezed hard, as if he would crack a nut.
Later Jenny came back from a walk to the shop at the corner. She had the baby with her in his little cart, where he sat propped upright, his big head wavering in its knitted cap with the cat’s ears. As she wheeled him in she called sharply: “Throw something over the machine, quick!” But his gums had bared in the aghast silent preparation for a howl. She snatched him up and the scream came out, face down in her neck. “He’s terrified of the sewing machine,” she said to Paul. It seemed to me that she never entered the room these days without calling out some warning or instruction — The window, please, there’s a draft and he’s cutting his lower teeth. John, for God’s sake — those drawing pins. You know he puts everything into his mouth. Helen, put on a record with less brass, I think it makes him restless, it’s too loud. …
Paul was gently whirring the handle of the machine. “Look, old fellow, listen to the lovely noise. …” But Jenny covered it again authoritatively. “No, he’s too frightened. It must have some association for him we don’t understand.” And she repeated to Paul a theory from one of the books on child care in which she was increasingly absorbed. Then we went on to speak of the proposal to buy a house. Paul mentioned the house of an acquaintance at the office that possibly might be for sale. “It doesn’t matter about it being old,” she said, wiping the baby’s unwilling face with a napkin. “We couldn’t afford a new one, anyway. I’ve found that out in the week I’ve been round the agents. But how do the bedrooms face?” Paul had been there only once, and could not be sure. She stood listening to him with her head tilted seriously. “You see, children’s bedrooms should face east, so that they get the sun when they wake up in the morning.”
When John came in I said: “Paul’s got a house for you in Parkcrest.” Jenny and he looked at each other and her nose wrinkled—“Oh, is that where it is—”
“Why?”
“Well, we thought we’d like to stay on somewhere around Hillbrow — our friends are here, or most of them — and somehow all the progressive, less materialistic people seem to live here.”
“Parkcrest belongs so solidly to the small bourgeois with his wife and his children. …” added John.
I began to laugh. It was not the kind of laughter that draws others warmly in, even if they do not know its cause. I laughed on my own and could hear my own laughter, a woman’s high peal, coming down through the room the way one sometimes hears a laugh in a restaurant and turns to see where it comes from. Paul looked at me with the little bracket of a smile marking the corners of his mouth. “Hillbrow,” I said, “full of dear old ladies living in boarding houses — that’s all — it’s just the idea of Hillbrow being a Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village.”
When John and Jenny were annoyed, they had a way of discounting the perpetrator of the annoyance by pretending that they were too much occupied in the conduct of their own affairs to notice unimportant comment. Now they both had their eyes fixed on some point in the room that ignored me, and he said, not as casually and irrelevantly as it might seem, “I asked Nathoo Ram for Thursday, Jen. And I’ve put off the von Berheims.” “Oh, good. It’ll be the girl’s day off and that’s always better for tempers all round.”
“D’y’know, Paul,” he said, with a careless laugh, “we run the risk of getting kicked out of this building every time Nathoo Ram comes? There’s a clause in the lease that says no non-Europeans are allowed on the premises unless in the capacity of servants.”
Chapter 23
It always amazes me to notice the disproportion of feeling to action which human beings show in their lives. In theory, there is an abstract value put on event which has little basis in reality. It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women — a new job, a new town, a divorce — which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. This gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of life; decisions made with reason and the tongue may never be made valid by the heart — a woman may continue to love her husband when all her friends agree she was perfectly right to rid herself of such a worthless creature. And it also gives rise to those small mysteries which affront us when what we consider the appropriate emotions fail to appear in people: his friends are shocked by the passive acceptance of his wife’s leath by a man who cannot explain, for he scarcely knows it himself, that her presence has been dead to him for several years.
The changes of the next few months of my life came about almost absently. I passed through them like someone pushing a way unseeing through a crowd, her eyes already on the figure she knows is on the other side. I left the University with less emotion than I had sometimes felt over giving up a dress that I no longer wore; I saw my mother and father off at the station when they left for England with the mildly stimulated response to their excitement that one catches from even the most casual of holiday farewells, and that disappears the moment the train pulls out and you turn into a café where the measureless fascination of your own life waits over coffee.