She looked at her watch. “Oh dear. I’m so sorry. But Gunnel and Benjie will be waiting for me at King’s Cross. Those lovely cakes…”
They lay in their repulsive polychrome splendor, untouched.
“I think one pays for the pleasure of not eating them.”
She grimaced agreement, and I beckoned to the waitress for the bill. While we were waiting she said, “One thing I wanted to tell you is that in the last three years Maurice has had two serious heart attacks. So there may not even be… a next year.”
“Yes. He told me.”
“And you did not believe him?”
“No.”
“Do you believe me?”
I answered obliquely. “Nothing you said could make me believe that if he died there would not be another year.”
She took her gloves. “Why do you say that?”
I smiled at her; her own smile. No other answer.
She nearly spoke, then chose silence. I remembered that phrase I had had to use of Lily: out of role. Her mother’s eyes, and Lily’s through them; the labyrinth; privileges bestowed and privileges rejected; a truce.
A minute later we were going down the corridor towards the entrance. Two men came down it towards us. They were about to pass when the one on the left gave a kind of gasp. Lily de Seitas stopped and threw her arms back; she too was caught completely by surprise. He was in a dark-blue suit with a bow tie, a mane of prematurely white hair, a voluble, fleshy mouth in a florid face. She turned quickly.
“Nicholas—would you excuse me—and get me that taxi?”
He had the face of a man, a distinguished man, suddenly become a boy again, rather comically melted by this evidently unexpected meeting into a green remembering. I made a convenient show of excessive politeness to some other people heading for the tearoom, which allowed me to hang back a moment to hear what the two might say. Lily de Seitas said nothing, but he spoke.
“My dear Lily… my dearest girl…” and he couldn’t say any more. He was holding both her hands, drawing her aside, and she was smiling, that strange smile of hers, like Ceres returned to the barren land. I had to go on, but I turned again at the end of the corridor. The man he was with, a department curator or something, had walked on and was waiting by the tearoom door. The two of them stood there. I could see the tender creases round his eyes; and still she smiled, accepting homage.
There were no taxis about and I waited by the curb. I wondered if it had been the “someone quite famous” in the sedan; but I did not recognize him. Or some last trick, a professional adoration. His eyes had been for her only, as if the business he had been on shriveled into nothingness at the sight of that face.
She came out hurriedly a minute or two later.
“Can I give you a lift?”
She was not going to make any comment. Either it was arranged, or it had been by chance but was now being used by her, as her daughters used clouds that crossed the sun and casual strollers down a road; and something about her hermetic expression made it, yet once again, infuriatingly, seem vulgar to be curious. She was not good-mannered, but expert with good manners; used them like an engineer, to shift the coarse bulk of me where she wanted.
“No thanks, I’m going to Chelsea.” I wasn’t; but I wanted to be free of her.
I watched her covertly for a moment, then I said, “I used to think of a story with your daughter, and I think of it even more with you.” She smiled, a little uncertainly. “It’s probably not true, but it’s about Marie Antoinette and a butcher. The butcher led a mob into the palace at Versailles. He had a cleaver in his hand and he was shouting that he was going to cut Marie Antoinette’s throat. The mob killed the guards and the butcher forced the door of the royal apartments. At last he rushed into her bedroom. She was alone. Standing by a window. There was no one else there. The butcher with a cleaver in his hand and the queen.”
“What happened?”
I caught sight of a taxi going in the wrong direction and waved to the driver to turn.
“He fell on his knees and burst into tears.”
She was silent a moment.
“Poor butcher.”
“I believe that’s exactly what Marie Antoinette said.”
She watched the taxi turn.
“Doesn’t everything depend on the tone of voice? And who was the butcher crying for?”
I looked away from her intelligent eyes. “No. I don’t think so.”
The taxi drew up beside the curb. She hesitated as I opened the door.
“Are you sure?”
“I was born on the butcher’s side.”
She watched me for a moment, then gave up, or remembered.
“Your plate.” She handed it to me from her basket.
“I’ll try not to break it.”
“It carries my good wishes.”
“Thank you for both.” We sounded formal; she had set herself on the queen’s side; or perhaps, truer to her role, and sunt lacrimae rerum, on no side.
“And remember. Alison is not a present. She has to be paid for. And convinced that you have the money to pay.”
I acquiesced, to make her go. She took my hand, but kept it and made me lean forward, first to my surprise to kiss me on the cheek, then to whisper something in my ear. I saw a passing workman look disapprovingly at us: the bloody enemy, striking our effete poses inside the Petit Trianon of the English class system. She stood back a moment, pressed my arm as if to drive home what she had whispered, then stepped quickly inside the taxi. She gave me one look through the window, still the look of the whispered words. Our eyes met through the glass. The taxi moved, the head receded.
I gazed after it until it disappeared out of sight past Brompton Oratory; without tears, but just, I imagined, as that poor devil of a butcher must have stared down at the Aubusson carpet.
76
And so I waited.
It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison’s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality—one couldn’t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time. But I was long past philosophizing. The next weeks consisted of a long struggle between my growing—not diminishing—impatience and the manner of life I took up to dull it. Almost every night I contrived to pass through Russell Square, rather in the way, I suppose, that the sailors’ wives and black-eyed Susans would, more out of boredom than hope, haunt the quays in sailing days. But my ship never showed a light. Two or three times I went out to Much Hadham, at night, but the darkness of Dinsford House was as complete as the darkness in Russell Square. For the rest, I spent hours in cinemas, hours reading books, mainly rubbish, because all I required of a book during that period was that it kept my mind drugged. I used to drive all through the night to places I did not want to go to—to Oxford, to Brighton, to Bath. These long drives calmed me, as if I was doing something constructive by racing hard through the night; scorching through sleeping towns, always turning back in the small hours and driving exhausted into London in the dawn; then sleeping till four or five in the afternoon.
It was not only my boredom that needed calming; well before my meetings with Lily de Seitas I had had another problem.
I spent many of my waking hours in Soho or Chelsea; and they are not the areas where the chaste fiancé goes—unless he is burning to test his chastity. There were dragons enough in the forest, from the larded old bags in the doorways of Creek Street to the equally pickupable but more appetizing “models” and demi-debs of the King’s Road. Every so often I would see a girl who would excite me sexually. I began by repressing the very idea; then frankly admitted it. If I resolutely backed out of, or looked away from, promising situations, it was for a variety of reasons; and reasons generally more selfish than noble. I wanted to show them—if they had eyes present to be shown, and I could never be sure that they hadn’t—that I could live without affaires; and less consciously I wanted to show myself the same thing. I also wanted to be able to face Alison with the knowledge that I had been faithful to her, though I partly wanted this knowledge as a weapon, an added lash to the cat—if the cat had to be used.