Midsummer Night in the Workhouse Read online

  Safe in her bedroom, how strange, it began to go away. He stood by her door. ‘May I come back to say good night?’ he asked softly and she did not answer, smiling and looking down. She did not think, only that this was better, it was really going. But she cleaned her teeth quickly because to be caught doing that is so ...

  Then on her naked body she put her dressing-gown and went smiling, not thinking, to the window to see what was the great noise. Perhaps it was because she was now so very tired that at this moment only the noise interested her. It was an open-air cinema, a western – and oh the soundtrack! no wonder these rooms were cheap. ‘Look!’ said Rose when Paul came sidling round the door, ‘if we lean out of my window we can see a film, a western.’ ‘So,’ he said, and came beside her, his arm round her waist, and they leant together; but feeling her naked under her dressing-gown Paul turned her roughly towards him and kissed her on the mouth and this time she did not turn away her face. They kissed a long kiss, the dressing-gown unbuttoning, and Rose thought how odd that kissing should make sickness go quite away instead of making it worse, while Paul murmured: ‘May I, may I please, oh come, come to the bed.’ His heart was beating so, oh his heart! What, she thought suddenly, does one do with a Greek doctor dead in one’s bed in Venice? Goodness, thought Rose.

  Which it was, it was surprising because surely she had mostly been thinking him funny? It was very good and seemed the right thing to be doing without a doubt in a narrow bed with a hard mattress. They knew each other very well, it seemed, and after they had made love they found they loved each other so that they had to say it, even knowing it was only true at that time. ‘I love you, no, don’t laugh, I know, but I love you,’ he said as he stroked her body, gazing and stroking. And she put her arms round his neck and kissed him with joy saying, ‘I love you too.’ It was very good. ‘Did you expect this on the steps?’ he said. ‘What a waste, two rooms.’ But they agreed that then it would have been impossible to think of one, it would have been shocking, for although they both knew now that earlier they had expected, no, intended it, perhaps, at the time they had not known they knew. What is it? wondered Rose, nearly asleep, turning her head so that her lips were against his shoulder. It is not that he is a ‘better’ lover – and she shied from the memory of Neville’s conscientiously professional embraces. It must be just that he loves women as warmly as he loves himself and I – good God, I do believe that I love men.

  So that was almost all they saw of Venice because in the morning they were too lazy for more than the Piazza San Marco where they saw the American family sitting at Florian’s and very clean. ‘Now,’ said Paul, ‘I must say good morning. I was with them at the conference, to pass by would be rude.’ Bowing he hurried to them between tables to shake hands, Rose there as though by chance. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I found a hotel without trouble and so, it seems, did Miss Rose.’ Oh dear, those women’s faces left no room for misunderstanding, while embarrassed the father smiled, nodded and stared up at the campanile. But Rose did not mind, she was pleased, she was wearing a prettier dress than either of those women and what were they to her as she stood in the sun?

  Resting before packing, when they made love again, he asked her for the first time about her husband. ‘I am going to leave him,’ she said. ‘It is my fault, he is a good man and I have tortured him to death almost, I should never have married him. He makes love a battle always, and he hasn’t the courage to win it.’

  ‘Does he not love you?’ asked Paul, not understanding.

  ‘Oh yes, he loves me, but with him love is a question of proving something – it is always a worry, it has made me too unkind.’

  ‘He must be a fool,’ said Paul. He did not want to talk about any suffering but his own. ‘Feel my heart,’ he said, and it was indeed beating much too fast. ‘I give up smoking,’ he said, ‘and I give up drinking and I give up walking up many stairs, but this I will not give up, I would like to die like this.’ Which, she thought lazily, was all very well, only luckily he stayed alive. And when they talked again it was again about him and Rose did not mind, she liked it. He is wonderful, she thought. Even when he bowed his head in sorrow speaking of his country and how great the struggle, how great the poverty, he lifted his head soon to say proudly: ‘It is because we are undisciplined, we think only of ourselves; why worry about a better world for my children when it is my life I am living?’ (But he loved his children passionately, they were himself.) It is strange, thought Rose, that a man so full of self can love women so openly and kindly. Perhaps he has never been crossed by a woman all his life, cherished man- child, respected husband, adored lover, absolute father, so that he can love women without any grudge.

  They caught another train that afternoon not very early and found a small compartment with no one in it (it was a journey of wonders) so that they sat embracing all the way. For one week, they said, they would think of each other all the time and for the next week half of the time and after that less often, but they would not forget. Rose indeed would not forget. She did not now have to think (or to try not to think) about her homecoming, she would have time to think about it later and she knew now in what way it would be sad and that it would look after itself. At Milan she borrowed more money from Paul for the journey and did not mind leaving him, she still felt so warm and happy; but he seeing her silence thought it grief, naturally he thought it, he would. When at last he kissed her goodbye he was most moved by the grief he thought she had at losing him.

  ‘Don’t be sad,’ said Paul tenderly, ‘don’t be sad, be happy. Think that you have given me much joy.’

  When Rose began to laugh he was surprised, he was almost hurt, but she gave him a great kiss and said: ‘Darling Paul, I won’t be sad I promise. I love you, darling Paul.’

  So that journey ended much better than it began.

  AN ISLAND

  ‘But don’t you see, the important thing – the enormously important thing – is not commitment. You go on about commitment in a political sense as though that were what mattered. God, it annoys me! Because . . .’

  ‘Darling, you are being a bore. Do stop being such a bore for one little tiny minute.’

  ‘My wife is drunk. Do you find that, Lucy – George, I mean? Do you find that when your wife gets drunk it all comes out? This little itch to get at the male? Listen, ever since that bloody awful party at the Schmidts’, and that was only three months after we got married, you’ve been getting at me whenever you’ve got drunk. You sound like those women who resent being underneath in bed so much. .. .’

  ‘Martin, if you’re going to start on the half-baked Freudian kick we’d better be going. It’s time we went, anyway.’

  ‘Nonsense, it’s only midnight, they don’t want us to go yet. You don’t want us to go yet, do you, Lucy?’

  ‘Martin, if you don’t come I’ll go without you.’

  ‘All right then, go.’

  ‘Throw him out when you’ve had enough,’ said Madeleine Cross to her hostess, in what she thought was a cool, amused voice. She picked up her purse and was on the front-door steps before she realised that she had left her long green gloves on the arm of her chair and was still holding an empty wine- glass. If Lucy doesn’t put the gloves in his pocket, she thought, I can pick them up tomorrow. I’ve remembered them and I’ve thought what to do about them. I’m pretty sober, you see.

  Her heels went tap-tap tap-tap on the pavement in a marching rhythm. How fast she was walking, and steadily, too. She could change the rhythm if she wanted to, walk slower or faster, or even make her feet go the other way, take the wine- glass back and leave it on their doorstep. If she wished to decide to do that, she could: it was just that she did not wish to. And if she might not have had to think about her walking in quite this way, supposing that she had been sober, at least it showed how almost sober she was that she recognised it. Certain things about being a little drunk were amusing: feeling sober b
ecause of it, then seeing that feeling sober meant being drunk, then recognising that seeing that feeling sober meant being drunk was really sober. . . . Goodness! It was like peeling an onion. Madeleine smiled indulgently at her drunkenness, marching in the wrong direction through the moonlight, holding the wine-glass upright in front of her.

  Well, what a relief! Why had she never done it before?

  The house she had left stood in a square. To reach the street which would take her into a busier street where a taxi might be found, she should have turned to the right outside the door instead of to the left, so now she would have to walk right round the square instead of along one side of it. Martin would expect her to notice her mistake, to falter and to go back past the house: he would be standing by the window, laughing. So tap-tap went her heels, all the way round, back to the side on which the house stood, and out at the corner into the street. Ha!

  He had been so childish, getting riled like that by George. As soon as he began to splutter ‘the important thing – the enormously important thing’ he was bound to make a fool of himself, he always did. Soon he would be saying ‘the point is’ and never getting to it. Now he would probably be remem- bering that she never put money into her evening purse, and he would not be worrying, he would be laughing, because he did not know that she happened to feel like walking – she would walk even if she had some money. At this rate she would be home in half an hour, and the air smelt of lime trees in flower – ‘Ach, linden Duft. . . .’ The soaring line of Mahler’s little lime flower song was running through her head, but she was not going to sing, oh no. Drunk she might be, but not so drunk as that.

  The middle of the night in a quiet residential neighbour- hood: no one about and not a taxi to be seen. The summer air was silky on her face, light glinted on the wine-glass, and how pretty it was: a simple, tulip-shaped glass with a plain stem and a rather broad foot, the best shape for a wine-glass – and when you came to look at it, in itself a perfect shape. She held it up in front of her, ran a finger round its rim and down the curve of the bowl. What a pity that transparency hadn’t been invented at one blow. They had experimented for centuries with the stuff, getting there slowly, painfully, after thousands of near misses, and think what a miracle it would have been if they had hit on the right mixture straightaway, so that one man in Alexandria or somewhere could have seen the impossible blossoming as he breathed into it: pure transparency, nothingness embodied. It’s so beautiful, she thought, so really beautiful. I’m glad I’ve still got it.

  ‘All right then, go. . . .’ And she – she! – had got up and gone. He had not expected it for one moment, but he had seen her skirt whisk round the door, heard her steps in the hall and the front door shutting (not slamming) and the tap-tap on the pavement – going in the wrong direction, of course, that was a pity. But it was also funny, and she giggled at the thought of it. She had looked such a fool, and he had waited, leaning on the windowsill, she was sure, expecting her to come back, and when he had seen her silhouetted by a street lamp, turning out of the square after all, he (or George or Lucy) must have said, ‘Good God, she has gone, too!’ Had he returned to his chair and started pontificating again, or would he follow her at once? It didn’t matter.

  She had never done such a thing before, or even wanted to, and why should she, married as she was to a man who suited her so well? She did not think, now, of him and her together, because she did not need to. His name in her mind meant his high forehead, his deep-set brown eyes, his long bony nose and his mouth turning down at the corners when he smiled, and when she saw that, there it all was. They had been married for three years and neither of them had the least doubt about it. Sometimes it occurred to Madeleine that the extra thing between them, in addition to their tastes in common and the comfort of their bodies together – the thing which had made them fall in love at once and which made it impossible to imagine living with anyone else – was that the parts of each of them which had not changed since child- hood happened to be at home together. ‘That’s what compatibility is,’ she had said once. He was a black-and-white man, like George with his political commitment but about other things, and she was the only person who knew how black-and-white he was – how genuinely puzzled he was by people who used minor dishonesties like saying they were out when they were in; how painfully distressed by any form of callousness. Other people would have thought that he exaggerated, so he had learnt to recognise the boundaries of naïvety and over-sensitivity, and to avoid crossing them too often and too openly with other people. With her it was all right, just as it was all right with him for her to cry over hurt animals, or to love sea-shells so much. They used no little language, but she could see why other lovers did: like herself and Martin they had no façades on the sides they presented to each other so that everything was too familiar to be ridiculous. And come to think of it, she and Martin did call porridge ‘podgers’, which came from her childhood. . . . ‘If you don’t get your podgers you surely will die,’ she sometimes sang as she stirred it, and very silly that would sound to anybody but him.

  She did not exactly think of these things as she marched along: she just saw his face, and oh no my dear, she said in her head to Lucy. No, you haven’t been witnessing the first crack in the Cross ménage. He’s mine, the silly ass, and it’s all George’s fault anyway, for pouring such monstrous drinks. Martin never pontificates unless he’s drunk, and he never starts on that old Freudian kick unless he’s stewed, and you know how rarely he gets stewed. It’s not that veritas we’ve hit on, it’s nothing to do with him.

  But although she saw that, and suspected for a moment that she would soon see the possibility of Martin’s being hurt as well as angry, and of her own regret, it did not seem important. To say out loud that he was a bore had been brutal, even if it was not true – but she only laughed when she remembered it, feeling pleased with herself, for who would have suspected her, so lazy and so willing to please, of such sudden dissidence? Love, she thought. What a tangle. And she danced a few steps at being alone in the quiet street. The branch of a tree reached over a wall above a lamp-post, its leaves still young and fresh, a brilliant theatrical green in the artificial light. Between the lamp-posts the sky reappeared, a deep purple-blue where the moon was suspended straight overhead, but rusty pink with London’s glow where it came down at the end of the street to outline the roofs. She need not go home. She could decide to walk all night, make for the river or Hampstead Heath, because she was not tired and her shoes were comfortable in spite of their heels. It was odd that the determined rhythm of her walking seemed so definitely aimed towards home. Here, for instance, was the busy street. If she turned to the left it would take her, after a long walk, into the City which at night would be deserted and strange – perhaps a single black cat sitting on the steps of the National Bank of Argentina. . . . But her feet went on, tap-tap along the street in the direction of home, and she held the wine- glass nearer her body so that the few people she now passed would not notice it.

  Soon she had to cross the busy street – not busy now, only brightly lit – at a point where it divided, islanding a church with a graveyard thrusting a wedge into the traffic. Between church and graveyard a narrow passage ran, a short cut for pedestrians. Tap-tap she went, past the iron post which stood in the passage’s entrance, into the shadow thrown by the trees in the graveyard, where it was very still: so still that it was like stepping into a different element and her feet slowed, then stopped. There were only a few cars passing behind her and ahead of her, but even if the street had been full the stillness would surely have been here. It was an island. The smell of lime trees was again heavy in the air, leaves rustled very slightly, and after the lights of the street it seemed dark so that she shut her eyes for a moment in order to see better when she opened them again. Sure enough, it was not dark, because of the moon; it was a patchwork of shadow and dim silver light, and when she went close to the railings between passage and graveyard,
rested one knee on the little brick wall in which they were set and peered through them, she could see that the man who had mowed the grass had been careless, leaving an irregular ridge uncut here and there between his coming and going: that was the extra smell, of course – new- mown grass. The graves had become history, not mortality, flat under the lawn, with a few eighteenth-century headstones left there for decoration rather than in memory of people.

  Carefully she stood the wine-glass on the railing, between two spear-heads, because she wanted to hold the uprights in her hands. She listened to the stillness and saw that a daisy had remained uncut because it grew right up against the nearest headstone. She leant her cheek against one of the uprights, indifferent to the sooty marks it would leave, and thought: the best way to remember is not to try, but to relax and let it soak in. For tomorrow she must remember this, it was essential not to make the mistake of dismissing it in the morning because of having been drunk. Being drunk made no difference: this was how it was. I must remember, she thought, I must remember, I must remember how beautiful it is, because now I can see it. It is so still, and the grass has just been cut, and the leaves are not being blown, they are just settling together, sometimes, on the air, and the wine-glass is standing on the railing, and I am alone. I am me, under the moon, on a summer night, alone. The moon is sailing slowly through the sky, and these railings are rusted under the paint so that it has flaked off in places, and if I could reach that daisy I would feel that its reddish stem is a little hairy. The wine-glass is standing there with its perfect curves and its broad foot, calm and transparent. Everything could always be like this, if only I can manage to remember.

  The sound of footsteps approached the end of the passage and she jerked her head back, waiting for them to turn in after her and be Martin’s. They went by, and that was all right. But since he might be following, and she was suddenly frightened at the idea of him catching up with her here, she had better go on. She took the wine-glass off the railing and turned it in her fingers, thinking poor thing, tomorrow it will be no more than a slightly smeary glass which I must return to Lucy, I can’t bear it. She drew back a step and stood wondering, looking at the glass, and then she began to laugh because she knew what she would do: she would leave it here. ‘Goodbye, glass,’ she said, holding it up towards the moon for a moment, then she threw it over the railing as hard as she could. It turned in the air, there was a tinkle as it hit a tombstone, but although she tried she could not see its fragments on the grass because it was in a shadowy patch. ‘I have shattered a wine-glass against a tombstone,’ she said aloud, in the light of the moon.