Most Loving Mere Folly Read online

  ‘I should get that drink, if I were you,’ said Suspiria, with an unkind curl of her lips. ‘You need it!’ And she turned her back on him, and went to wash the clay from her hands.

  3

  Now he was fairly in it, and flight was no longer even a possibility. He couldn’t turn and sneak out while her back was turned; she knew his name, she’d remembered where he belonged, he’d seen it in her eyes. So it was too late to hope for anonymity. Here he was stuck with her husband, who was imperiously reminding him of the whereabouts of the whisky. Better shut him up, at any rate! As she’d said, it could hardly make much difference.

  He was furious at the chatter of the glass against the bottle. Good God, why should his hand shake? It was she who ought to be feeling humiliated. He pushed the glass into Theo’s hand, and turned his back upon him angrily. The full, fluent voice went on lauding the vanished woman, and expounding the excellences of her work, which filled the shelves behind him. Not nice, bright china, but plain pots and vases and jugs, a bit heavy and undecorated to his taste. Was that what she made? He didn’t see that it was so wonderful. There wasn’t a nice, stencilled pattern or a flower among the lot! Some of the colours were nice, but they weren’t finished properly; even the shapes weren’t all symmetrical. And fancy raving about a wife like that, as if she were something to be proud of! Why, she was just a slut! What else could you call her? Her house was dirty, and cluttered up with muck. You’d think she’d at least keep this room decent, in case anyone came, but she didn’t seem to care a rap. Why, if anyone had caught his mother with her parlour looking like this, she’d have died of shame. This one just kicked the filthy paint-rag from under her feet when it got in her way, and took no more notice of it!

  And look at the woman herself, with her hands clotted up with clay, and her overall stiff with it, and smears of clay and colour even in the hair at her temples! Fancy living in the middle of a chaos like this, and for ever as dirty as a farm-hand, he thought, with a mechanic’s partial vision. If that was what being an artist entailed he was thankful there wasn’t one in his family; his mother would go mad. He liked the arduous and pathetic cleanliness to which he had been bred, the virtue which had always been held up to him as next to godliness; for he was by nature and training a young man very obedient to the demands of virtue.

  ‘My dear chap, you haven’t got a drink! Fill up! I want to show you what I’m working on. Better bring the bottle! No, wait for Spiri, though – can’t have a proper party without her.’

  She came in with a resigned and angry quietness, unwound the scarf from his neck without a word, and began to extricate him from his coat, a long and complicated business because of all the hand-changing it entailed. Theo’s solicitude for his glass, almost empty as it was, was the one thing which drove her for a moment into laughter. When she had the coat over her arm, she tilted Theo back into his chair with a perfectly assured and indifferent hand, and brushed her fingers across his ruffled hair with a gesture which assorted oddly with her disregard of all the worse disorder round her. She was not ungentle, but she was not gentle, either; she did what presented itself to be done, waiting to get through the inevitable delay in her plans. That was all it meant to her.

  She let her husband go on talking, while his flow of words slid from her senses without a mark. She hung up the coat, and came across to where Dennis was hovering miserably and eyeing the door. She had taken off the overall, but the result was hardly more flattering, for she was still in old grey slacks and a dark red jersey blouse, and the slacks were dappled with occasional smears of clay as high as the knee. He admitted to himself that she wore them better than most women, being as slender as a boy; and maybe she might have been justified in presenting herself in them if they’d been reasonably clean and possessed of the ghost of a crease. But not many women would want to be seen like this. He hadn’t realised how slight she was. What on earth did she do with her husband when he came home in this state, and she was left to deal with him alone? She couldn’t possibly get him up the stairs. Anyhow, it wasn’t a proper job for a woman, putting a drunk to bed; not even her own husband.

  ‘I’m quite aware that I have clay in my hair,’ said Suspiria, in a tone equable but cold, ‘and I fully agree that I must be a fairly electrifying sight. You’ll probably feel much happier about it if you drink this. It makes most things look considerably better. That’s why Theo takes so much of it so often – all a part of the search for ideal beauty, no doubt.’

  Dennis came out of his trance to find her holding out a glass to him, and became uneasily aware that he had been staring at her long and intently. There was no bitterness against her husband in the sour joke. She took this kind of thing quite for granted. If she was hitting at anyone, it was at him – at Dennis Forbes, who had done nothing whatever to her, who had gone out of his way to bring her old man home safely, and was now being made to squirm for it. And if once he got out of here, he’d take good care never to come within reach of either of them again.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he said furiously, accepting the glass with too eager a hand because it gave him something else on which to concentrate. ‘I didn’t mean to come in and disturb you, but he would have it. And he wasn’t steady enough on his feet to stick up by himself. I’ll go, as soon as he forgets about me.’

  ‘That will probably be some time,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘At this moment he loves you far too well to let you go easily. You’ll have to view the thing he’s working on, if you don’t have to vet all the other stuff too. I’m afraid you’ve had rather a trying time with him. Where did you find him?’

  ‘He came to the garage for petrol. Mr Grover thought—’

  ‘—thought I ought not to be driving,’ said Theo from the rim of his empty glass. ‘And how right he was! Grover likes to take good care of his customers, provided he doesn’t have to lift a finger himself. Good old George, found me a nursemaid without putting himself out an inch – not an inch!’

  She looked at him over her shoulder with no personal anger, rather indulgently, in fact, but still with that dedicated rage against the situation burning in her face. ‘I wish he’d been a couple of hours longer finding a sucker to be responsible for you, that’s all!’

  ‘If I hadn’t brought him home,’ said Dennis, outraged, ‘he’d probably have ended up by being run in. The sergeant’s on the main cross-roads tonight – he’d never come looking for gratitude, the Lord knew, but she couldn’t even be civil. For all she cared, her husband could have been in a ditch somewhere; nothing mattered but whatever it was she’d left there at the back of the house – that precious work of hers that had given her dirty finger-nails and a navvy’s hands.

  ‘It would have done him good,’ she said, with a lift of her slight shoulders, ‘and I should have had some peace.’ She saw the scandalised rage in the boy’s face, saw him tongue-tied between the desire to give vent to his feelings, and the inability to be rude to a lady. Even such a lady as I am, she thought, equally touched and irritated by his helplessness. He’d been very well brought up, this child. If she had even known how to make concessions to his prejudices she would have done it; but she knew she could never hope to keep it up long enough to be convincing. ‘You’ve been very kind, I’mn sorry if I shock you. But don’t expect me to pretend my programme hasn’t been smashed. I don’t feel in the least obliged to assure you that it doesn’t matter a bit! It matters like hell!’

  Theo, leaning dangerously across to set down his glass upon the table, said brightly: ‘You married me, my love! For better or worse, for richer or poorer – remember?’

  She steadied him with a tolerant hand, and he put his arm round her waist, and held her swaying with his weight; and all the while her cool and critical eyes never left Dennis’s face. She answered in the same tart but impersonal tone: ‘Maybe I didn’t know how much worse and how much poorer it was going to be. There ought to be reasonable limits, don’t you think, my heart?’

  ‘Til death do us part,
my angel, is limit enough!’

  She smiled, and her long, large hand spread its spatulate fingers upon her husband’s shoulder. Dennis felt a fool, and resented it bitterly. How could you find your way among the things these two said to each other? One minute you were trying to guess how light a breath it would take to blow their marriage apart, and the next they were making oblique jokes at your expense, and leaving you high and dry out of their world, a funny little creature who thought he could improve on a mutual understanding far too subtle for his comprehension. ‘I’m sorry!’ he muttered, hardly knowing why he should be apologising.

  ‘My dear man, for what? It isn’t your fault, it’s hardly even Theo’s. Let me get you another drink!’ She was a little sorry they had teased him, he looked so rattled and so apprehensive, feeling his way cautiously along the barriers of their unfamiliar conversation to find a way through. At the suggestion of a way of escape he jumped in eagerly. ‘No, thanks, I really ought to be going, I haven’t been home yet.’

  Suspiria would have been willing to let him go, but Theo was not. He came out of the big chair exuberantly, and lunged across the room to fold a penitent and loving arm about Dennis’s shoulders.

  ‘No, can’t hear of it! Should feel criminals if we let you run off like this! Take no notice of my wife, she was badly brought up – can’t tell lies to save her life. ’Tisn’t because she thinks ’em so wicked, it’s because they’re beneath her dignity. She won’t go that far out of her way for anybody – not you, nor me, nor the Lord Chief Justice. Say to her: “I’m afraid I’ve come at an awkward time,” and what d’you get? From anyone else: “Oh, no, not at all! Do come in!” Not Spiri! Oh, no! She says straight out: “Yes, you have!” She likes you, she’s even glad to see you, but, damn and blast you, you have come at an awkward time. Come on, let’s get out of her way till she forgives us.’ But he hadn’t plotted a wavering course to the curtained door before he was reaching back for her with the other arm, sweeping her along with him into the stone corridor. ‘Let’s all go! Let’s go and look at Spiri’s portrait. Best thing I’ve done for three years. Shark of a dealer wants it, but I’m not selling – it’s too good to sell until we’re flat broke.’

  Suspiria braced herself resignedly under the weight of his arm, and wound her own about him with the expert gentleness of old custom. She looked across at Dennis, and felt with a dual sympathy and impatience his unhappiness at being handled. He was like so many of the humble and respectable, she thought irritably, insensitive enough to any mental contact which passed beyond the obvious, but physically one skin short of normal. One would have to be for ever either explaining something to him, or protecting him from the suspicion that there was something to be explained. As for Theo’s imperious embrace, the young man flinched and fidgeted under it with a fourteen-year-old’s embarrassment; from before that age, his kind shunned being touched by any but their contemporaries and fellows, with whom they went closely wreathed for a few years in a brief banditry before girls broke into their lives. And Theo should no doubt have realised, even when drunk, that he was neither a contemporary nor a fellow. The trouble was that Theo held himself to be all men’s contemporary and all men’s fellow. It had never been fully borne in upon him that humanity had sub-divisions.

  ‘You haven’t been monkeying about in the studio, have you? I left everything the way I wanted it. She doesn’t tidy,’ he confided to Dennis blithely, ‘she untidies. If she’s short of a hand-rag, she takes my paint-rags – when she doesn’t tear up my shirts.’ Proud and fond, thought Suspiria, even before Dennis could be felt thinking it, as of a clever toddler’s pranks.

  She slipped her hand within the open door on the right of the passage, and put on the light, and received eagerly the shock of delight which rang like a clear note of sound from Theo’s easel, the clangour and gaiety, the shout of the dark-hot blue and the magenta, and the quivering mauve. Nothing but two dahlias and an aster that she had dropped this morning from her basket, and he had picked up for their scream of exultation. By tomorrow he would be tired of them, but she would never forget them. They had set in front of her eyes the colours of a glaze which she had never yet captured.

  ‘It screeches!’ said Theo. ‘Or am I too tight to be able to stand it tonight? This afternoon I liked it. It had a texture, thick and waxy and cool like a dahlia, you could almost smell that peppery vegetable smell. Is it still there?’

  ‘It’s still there.’ But she knew he would never like it quite so much again, because it had succeeded in saying everything it had to say while it was still technically only half-finished, and therefore it was most truly finished for him, and to touch it again would be supreme waste of time. He was never interested in things which were finished.

  Dennis advanced gingerly, looking round the methodical chaos of the large room with uneasy eyes, and flinching most of all from the canvases propped against the wall, and the two or three Watman boards lying on the long bench among the tubes of colour and the mottled rags, and the litter of rough sketches. How if he should be expected to produce opinions? He was willing to say he admired the fellow’s paintings, even if they were totally incomprehensible to him, but if more should be required of him he would be miles out of his depth. He didn’t know the proper terms, and all modern pictures seemed to him equally mad, and a good many ancient ones not much better. And yet there must be something in it, if so many superior people said so. Anyhow, he wasn’t going to lay himself wide open in front of these people; he’d have to stick tight to safe generalities. With wary eyes he examined the flowers and their portrait, still in high bloom while the originals lay limp and shrunken on the bench. He was a little encouraged, because they were recognisably dahlias and an aster. But why should they be made to look as crude as that? And anyhow, the thing was nowhere near finished.

  In the event it was easier than he had expected. Theo asked him nothing. It was a monologue of self-examination, to Dennis’s mind immodest in the extreme, though of course you had to make allowances for a man who was exalted drunk. The satisfaction of being among his own pictures steadied his feet, or else the worst was wearing off, for he led his nurse-maids round the room with hardly a lurch, weaving his way among the canvases with a wild dexterity, setting up first one and then another in the best light on the bench to be viewed and criticised. The woman strolled silently at his elbow, propping him occasionally with a resigned hand, and watching Dennis out of the corners of her large, oval eyes with a satirical, gleaming look. He took such pains to look critically intelligent as each canvas was displayed, and had his soft young mouth ready curved into words of wary appreciation, but his eyes, scared and hostile, fended off every assault as if it had been made against his virtue. He knows, she thought, that I know how completely he’s at sea, poor child! But her enjoyment of his predicament was something she believed she was successfully keeping to herself. It was a wonder she went to the trouble of trying!

  The portrait stood propped against the wall on the bench, its back turned coldly on the room. Theo hoisted it tenderly in his arms, and turned it for them to see, setting it well back where the light fell most gently. The canvas was almost square, and she was a coil of braced curves within the square, curled into a large, plain chair, with her arm crooked over the back dangling a book. The book was there only to provide a point of blue-black, fixed and steady within the coiled tensions of her body and limbs, and the only other stillness in it was her face, lifted aslant as if she had paused to consider something she had just read, and been brought up erect and taut by the whip of her own thoughts. A wild, potential but still look, about which like the swirl of her vivid possibilities the patterns of profound colour span, red-hot red, deep, silvery green and iris-grey, and filling the corner of the canvas, the deep, thick olive-green of her best celadon jar, smoking into the lighter green of the chair. The greys were so lucid and airy that you could put your hands into them, and bathe to the wrist.

  That was what Theo saw when he turned his treasur
e to the light. For Dennis there was only the blunt, expected bewilderment, threaded by the little shock of gratitude that the subject was at any rate recognisable. At least there was a face, a perceptible face. He clung to that as to his salvation.

  Theo said: ‘By God, it’s even better than I remembered it! All my life I wanted to get a grey like that. Look at the space, look at the air! You could throw your arms round her where she sits, bless her! About the jar I never felt so sure – that counter-roundness coming so far forward – but then, that’s Spiri, too. I wanted it to balance that other spinning plane, of course, but sometimes I wonder if it isn’t pulling the whole thing over.’

  Suspiria, moved to malicious mischief, and quite unable to resist the stab, said gently: ‘Well, Mr. Forbes is your guinea-pig, why don’t you ask him what he feels about it?’

  Dennis hated her with a burning bitterness which astonished him. He muttered hurriedly that he liked the colour. It seemed the safest thing to say. Retreating defensively, he added: ‘I don’t know much about it, but it seems very effective to me.’ That was a good word, effective! Simple enough to come naturally from a layman like him, and yet it didn’t sound silly. He heard her small, derisive murmur of agreement, and sweated with dislike of her.

  Theo sat down in the one rickety chair the studio contained, and settled himself to contemplate his darling. Dennis had no choice but to stare at it, too; it seemed impolite to become bored with it before its creator tired of displaying it. It was pleasanter looking at the copy than the original, because the woman in the picture was gazing beyond him, and he did not have to meet those dark eyes of hers which stung him into such discomfort.

  It was very like her, this painting, he saw that more clearly every moment; and it told him things about her which he had not noticed for himself, the natural rhythmic elegance of her movements, the erect, almost arrogant poise of her head, the unassertive distinction of her features, which grew gradually in his mind out of details he did not realise he had recorded. The eyes were of a dark greenish-brown, like the darkest possible hazel; the nose straight, narrow and fastidious, between fine high cheek-bones placed rather widely for the width of her face; the mouth both full and long, with a resolute but thoughtful set to it. Her hair was black, straight and short, cut closely to the shape of her head, not for fashion’s sake, though the result looked fashionable, but to keep it from getting in her way, and to ensure that it demanded the absolute minimum of her time and consideration to keep it in order. Looking at the woman herself, he was not aware that he had noticed any of these things, but his conviction on seeing them in the portrait was that he recognised, not discovered them.