But mostly my father “fed” my mother as if they were partners in an act. “Wouldn’t mind being there now, eh?”—he pointed his pipe at a little painted wooden gypsy caravan they had bought in St. Ives to give to Maureen Eliot’s small boy. “Oh that creamed trout! And the view from our window …!” She shook her head as she sprinkled moth killer on a shelf of spare blankets. She twisted her head round to him. “Tell Helen about the fisherman who thought you had your own gold mine.”
And my father told the story, taken up here and there and expanded by my mother, and then handed back to him again while she waited, smiling, for the well-known point—“Co on, you go on.”
It seemed to me that in this unconscious pantomime of acting as a foil for each other, they oddly achieved a kind of intimacy that I had never seen between them before.
At lunch we had a bottle of red wine — because they thought I should like it, I knew. “—It may be cheap there,” said my mother, “but you can’t get a decent cup of tea anywhere in Italy.” I drank it although I dislike red wine and I talked all the time I ate, about how hot it had been at Christmas, and the muddle-up there had been at the post office about a cable they had sent me before they left, and the way the piece of chiffon my mother wanted to know about had turned out when it was made up. I talked about the camping week end that Jenny and John and Paul and I had planned for what proved to be the wettest week end for five years … and, warming to it, my heart beating fast at the horrible homeliness of my duplicity, I told my mother that Jenny was expecting another baby, and … “Well, she’s quite right. They’re young people, and I suppose he’s doing quite nicely now; they might as well have their family while they’re young.”
After lunch my father went to lie down. He said the wine had turned sour on his stomach, but he had that hazy pleasant look of wanting to drop down somewhere and doze that goes with wine that has agreed with one almost too well. My mother and I went to sit on the veranda, where it was cool. She was knitting; some special wool she had bought herself in Scotland. Her chatter died away, perhaps also because of the wine. I sat there with my heart beating up faster and faster. After a few minutes of sunny, warm silence she said to the bird dangling in his cage: “Chrr-ip, chrr-ip, eh? Chrrip!” and looked back to her knitting.
I said: “Mother, I should have told you I’m not living with the Marcuses any more, I’m living with Paul.”
Her face suddenly came alive out of its content of food and relaxation. She looked at me with the quick intense suspicion of an adult hearing from the mouth of a child something it cannot possibly know.
Then her glance stumbled; it was like a nervous tic catching a face unaware.
“What do you mean?”
And while she spoke coldness hardened into her face, it became something I have never known in the face of anyone else, possibly because the face of no one else could make that impression on me: stern.
“I’ve been living with him in his flat ever since he was sick.”
“You’re living with a man, living with a man as if you were married to him.” She stopped. “Living with this man and lying, writing letters and lying — What do you want? To end up on the street?”
I thought with a rising distress of panic, I knew she’d do this; it’s ridiculous — she’s making it a tragedy, terrible, world-comedown, hateful. She’s twisting it up into hysteria. But she had done it already; I was in it, shaking before her horror of myself.
I said: “It’s not like that. Don’t be silly, we’re going to get married anyway. People now—”
“Yes, they’ve got no respect for anything, you’ve got no respect for yourself. And what kind of a person is he, to behave like that with a girl from a decent home. … Women who must have a man to sleep with. Women who can’t live without a man. A university education to live with a man. How can women be such filthy beasts?”
All the time she had never taken her eyes off me.
She began to weep, and I saw that now that she was older she cried like other women; it was no longer hard for her to cry, and so it no longer had any more meaning than the simple relief of other women’s tears. I cannot explain the strong strain of peculiar joy that seized me, apparently so irrelevantly, as I understood this, so that I could say quite commandingly, “Don’t cry, if Daddy hears you cry he’ll be alarmed.”
“I don’t want to see you,” she said, and already it seemed in her face that she no longer saw me, “I don’t want you in this house again. You understand that?”
The peculiar joy swept into hatred. I hated her for leaving me, for blaming me, for making me care that she did. I trembled with hatred that for a moment made me want to laugh and weep and abuse; and that left me hot and cold at the escape of knowing that that was what she wanted: that that was how she wanted me to behave.
My father came in and the whole scene was gone through again, but in myself I was stubborn; it was over. I was sitting it out.
We even had tea before my father took me to the station. In silence as if someone had died. While we were sitting at the dining-room table drinking, the smell of the room when I bent over the table painting from my color box as a child came to me, immediate, complete, unaltered. The print-smell of the pile of English newspapers, the oil-smell of furniture polish, the cool dark fruit-smell from the dish on the sideboard; and the smell of ourselves, us three people, my father, my mother and me, with which everything in the house was impregnated like objects in a sandalwood box, and that, when I took out something from home in the atmosphere of the flat or the Marcuses’ house, gave me the queer feeling of momentarily being aware of myself as a stranger.
Chapter 27
As soon as I got into the train I dropped back my head and closed my eyes: Paul. Paul; Paul. I know that I should have liked to have said the name aloud, but opposite me in the empty carriage was a very young Afrikaans girl with a daughter of four or five years old, curled and hatted and hung about with trinkets, like her mother. Like her mother she was utterly composed, silent, absorbed in the trance of her Sunday best. She played with a little bangle engraved “Cecilia,” and stared at me without curiosity, as if she were measuring what I thought of her.
When the train jerked into motion I thought: Now; I shall soon be there. And my desire to say Paul’s name, as the little girl had to feel the shape of her bangle, I turned into a little movement of a smile with my lips.
I scarcely opened my eyes again until we reached Johannesburg. In the peculiar bright confusion that comes down with the felty blood-darkness of one’s eyelids, the clear images of the afternoon that had passed, the whole two days, were pushed away in a jumble, like the swept-up bits of a broken mirror. I hung to the thought of Paul that swelled, image, word and sound the way one’s last conscious thought looms and expands before sleep or anesthesia. In that darkness he was my one reality. It seemed that he must be thousands of miles away, unattainable in yearning. I could not believe that in less than an hour I should be standing in an ordinary call box hearing his voice matter of fact and that I should see him walking down the platform looking for me. …