The Road from the Monument Read online

  Beatrice said slowly,

  ‘An old child. Yes, a child. Children have sharp eyes. They see quite mercilessly… but a very old child might have learned pity.’

  Gregory yawned involuntarily. ‘Well, he was happy, poor old chap — delighted with his evening.’

  ‘I sincerely hope so….’ She opened her eyes widely, in a pretence of innocent amusement. ‘At least our dear Lambert was delighted. Do you realise that he has been manœuvring for months to get himself invited with Arthur? Now, you’ll see, he’ll follow it up, and before long he’ll have persuaded Arthur that he’s the right person to sit on one of his most important committees, and from that he’ll be asked to join another, even more important, until finally he becomes chairman of one of them and is consulted and invited by very influential men to their clubs — and so on and so up. He’s not, you know, an ordinary snob. He admires power more, quite genuinely more than he admires a title. And really there’s more in him — a better mind, less vulgarity, less vinegar, than there is in that pretentious wife of his, so anxious to be a figure in the literary world — why should anyone? — and her collection of fourth-rate writers. Geese — who simply have to be swans, to reflect glory on her. Extraordinary.’

  Gregory laughed. When it was not turned on him the sting in his wife’s tongue amused him. ‘I don’t share Lambert’s passion for committees — never did. But he’s excellent on them, you know. A bit too much the civil servant for members of our own Board, but useful to me. I don’t like his wife. Fortunately, she doesn’t like us.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ Beatrice echoed. She gave way to an impulse she knew she would regret, but it was too strong for her. ‘Did you notice that Harriet scarcely opened her mouth? She’s useless at a dinner-party. Either she says nothing or she drinks too much and talks indiscreetly. I don’t know which is worse. And her hair. Is there any reason why intelligent women should be slovenly?’

  ‘Harriet,’ Gregory said gently, ‘has her own sort of elegance. ‘I don’t know why you laugh at her — she’s fond of you.’

  ‘Of you, you mean.’ Since she had begun to scratch, she might as well go on. ‘She’s devoted, as you’ll call it, to me only so that I shall go on inviting her to dinner where she can sit and gaze at you with those great staring eyes of hers, like marbles. And that’s not the whole story. She’s devoted in the way of a poor relation — she has flattery in her nerves. But that, my dear boy, is what you like, you can swallow flattery for ever.’

  ‘You’re unjust to poor Harriet,’ Gregory said without resentment, ’and you know it. What’s more, you don’t dislike her.’

  His patience irritated her far more than coldness would have done. It pushed her beyond endurance. ‘Your Egerias amuse me. They hang round me — her glance had fallen on Harriet’s jade seal — ‘But look at that ridiculous thing! — coming here with their presents and their hypocritical enquiries about my health — My dear Beatrice, how is your poor sciatica, you really must let me send you some of the stuff my aunt takes for hers. Infallible! There have been so many of them that I can’t remember their names. Oh, I completely forgot to tell you — one of them rang up yesterday. She’s been in America for a year, she said — How are you, Beatrice darling, I can’t wait to see you again.… I was in a great hurry and rang off without asking her her name. I knew her voice quite well, a very public voice, but who on earth is she? You must remember her, Gregory, she was Miss——? Miss——?—the lady who married a lord.’

  The contempt she squeezed into the last six words amused her husband so much that he roared with laughter. ‘I never heard anything so arrogant.’

  Vexed and hoping to outrage him, she said,

  ‘All these devoted women. Aren’t you getting a little old for — what can I call it? — spiritual fornication?’

  ‘You’re putting me properly in my place this evening,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Forgive me.’

  Her anger vanished in a familiar annoyance with herself…. Why can’t I keep my tongue in order? Nothing I say to him is any use. Nothing provokes him into losing patience. He is impenetrably, unforgiveably kind — as though I were a sick child. If he had once, just once in all the years, fifteen, we have been married, lost his temper with me, there might have been some hope for me…. She had taught herself to remember almost without bitterness how foolishly grateful she had been to him for his gentleness and considerate handling of her during the first months of their marriage. A year, two years, then… how many more — three? — before with a shock of humiliation she understood that he no longer had any love for her. She never spoke to him about it; after a time, she would have felt horribly embarrassed if he had made an attempt to treat her as a wife. Not that he ever did. He as well as she turned a polite back on their divorce. One by one doors that had been standing open between them closed; he confided in her less and less — until the easiest way she could draw his attention to herself was to make tart fun of him, especially when other people were present. It gave her little satisfaction, since he treated her spurts of bad temper and mockery with the same kindness as her frequent bouts of sciatica…. How did I disappoint him? she asked herself drily. Was I too old? A woman who at thirty-eight had never had any, what is the word?, experiences, never known a man at all intimately…. Or too stiff, too gracelessly sensible? Or was he attracted, and then bored by these very things? How can I tell? I know nothing about men…. Strangly, it was no comfort to her to feel certain that he had not been unfaithful to her, in the sexual sense of the word. (Nor, she reflected bitterly, faithful in any other.) Why hadn’t he? Because he was lazy? Or because, no longer a young man, he grudged energy and time robbed from his writing? Or because of his respect for marriage? Or — who knows? she thought — for me. No, all that’s nonsense. The fact is, he can’t let himself go. In any sense. He’s too committed to his prose style, or his high — they really are high — principles. Like all men who believe absolutely in themselves and their greatness, he’s a personage, not a human being…. It amused her to reflect that the wildly generous lovers, the Tristan and Iseult of his novel, had sprung in the imagination of a man who was more than a little shy, especially with emotional women.

  A ridiculous thought seized her. If I were to tell him that I love him…? She looked down at her hands, lined, covered with brown blotches, older than the hands of a fifty-three-year-old woman. A jeering self rose through her grief. Is it even true any longer? Do I still love him? Isn’t it much more likely that what I feel now is only a form of vanity, the vanity of possessing, as his wife, a great man? Something that Father Martinson said to me, warning me — ‘It’s one thing to pray for humility, and quite another to will it.’

  She said lightly, ‘I’ll ring Harriet up in the morning, and tell her I don’t after all want that book.’

  ‘What book?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you tired?’

  ‘Do I look tired?’

  ‘No. But it’s close on eleven.’

  She stood up. A joint creaked in her stiffened body. Without seeming to notice her stiffness, he put a hand under her elbow so that she was able to move easily. Her bedroom was on this floor, at the end of the wide passage. They walked slowly towards it, and she stopped at an old narrow glass on the wall to look closely at herself. The light thrown down from the cornice showed her lines puckering the skin above her upper lip and fanning out at the ends of mouth and eyes. She turned the same acute glance on her husband.

  ‘I age. You don’t — or hardly at all. In ten years you haven’t changed.’

  ‘We’re neither of us old,’ he said smiling.

  She asked abruptly, ‘Are you happy?’

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course.’

  He left her at the door of her room and went quickly, with an unacknowledged sense of relief, upstairs to his own. At one of the windows, a curtain had not been drawn, and before turning on the light he went over to it and stood for a min
ute looking down at the road. Its black surface was covered with cars like phosphorescent shell-backed insects skimming the stagnant waters of a pond, their globular eyes projecting a fan of light and creating, in their ceaseless circling past the blanched columns of the Park gates between the blaze of other lights, fixed, harsher, the illusion of an immense fair-ground. Above the shadowy mass of Park Lane, the flood-lit penthouses of a hotel and the single light at the tip of a crane stood out against a sky the colour of dark water: nearer, between his house and the formless line of trees on the edge of the Park, the streetlights turned the lower leaves to a greenish bronze and the faces of passers-by to fragments of dirty white paper scattered about the road.

  His tiredness vanished in a rush of happiness, almost of gratitude for… for what? For having reached a peak in his life, for the satisfaction it gave him to be at the head of the Rutley Institute with its infinite possibilities, its stream of visitors from all countries, scholars, politicians, the directors of museums and art galleries, the managers of great opera houses, famous conductors, painters, the most important foreign writers — the ones who, as well as being celebrated writers, held positions of influence in their countries. All these threads that led into the centres of intellect in Europe and America came into his hands and he knew precisely how to handle them: that side of him which enjoyed the feel of power — not the power lent to politicians and steel kings, but the ferment of ideas in action in the world — was fully content. He had no need to envy anyone. Nor did he. And he had a deal else to feel grateful for. Confidence in his power as a writer filled him; he felt an energy, a certainty, a sense of triumph, which had nothing to do with security or money. The novel he was writing now — in three years he had written about half — was good. He knew it. And he felt… happiness is a slippery word. When one is young a moment of ecstasy starts up from nothing, from the outline of a hill at night, from the overhead brightness of a gull’s wing, from a word, a glance. He remembered one such moment. He was leaving Danesacre by the night train, not meaning to return, and as the train moved slowly past the harbour the reflection in the water of a few weak lights from an old unused wharf made him tremble with a pleasure that was almost sexual…. Happiness of that sort, he thought, is the dream. This, now, looking down at a city where I am at home, the sharing of an admirable dinner, civilised friends, the solitude of this room, the pages of my manuscript in the desk there, is the reality.

  He thought for an instant of Gate. The old boy has never had such an evening in his life, he thought, smiling. To have made the old man, for one evening, perfectly happy, gave him a warm pleasure: he savoured for a moment, with intense satisfaction, the impression of success and triumph he must have made on the old fellow who had helped and believed in him. I must try, he thought, to see him once more before he goes back…. Back into a past so remote in his mind, so rarely visited, peopled by ghosts whose names eluded him even when he had kept some shadowy memory of their features, that to see Gate still living, still the same shrewd simple graceless creature, had been almost a shock.

  He yawned. This is the last time I shall see him, he thought.

  However feeble, one ghost has the strength to lead on another. With painful clearness, he saw his father. Not the sixty-year-old sea-captain who had mothered as well as fathered an infant and a young child. But a lean older man, bent, as shabby as old Gate but less squalidly so, walking, shambling, with long strides of his bony legs. As he aged, his eccentricities — he talked to himself in the street, in church, in shops, he disliked old women and did not mind telling them so, he smoked vile tobacco and spat into the fireplace — hardened. Long before he was fifteen his son felt responsible for his future: he meant to do a great deal for this inarticulate untiring twisted old man. To see to it, when he could earn enough money, that he was happy. He died before I had done anything for him, he thought.

  His mind dodged, without looking at it, a point of intolerable bitterness. He did not recognise it. Something he had managed to forget, completely. A miasma, not a memory…. Poor old chap, he thought lightly, he wasn’t as lucky as Gate; he didn’t live to see what I’ve done, what I’ve made of myself…. A half-acknowledged sense of relief brushed him. It would have been excessively difficult to fit the old sea-captain into his life now.

  For a last moment his glance rested on the endlessly-moving lights of the insect-cars and the semi-circle of street-lamps inside the Park, fixed points in the mounting rumour of the city…. ‘My God, how happy I am,’ he said under his breath.

  Turning sleepily away, he felt a touch on the side of his face, as though the skin were being lightly plucked, and instinctively raised his hand to brush off non-existent fingers.

  In the morning as he was shaving, he noticed a wrinkle, very faint, running across his cheek from his eyes. He decided to take things easier for the next few weeks.

  Chapter Two

  At the moment when Gregory put his razor down, Lambert Corry was crossing the entrance hall of Rutley House. He rarely arrived more than a minute or two after nine o’clock, and his swift glance as he passed the ground-floor offices noted which of the clerks had not yet turned up. With the same rapid movement, it took in his own striding reflection in the immensely wide glass. This never failed to give him an instant of pleasure. He went to a good London tailor, and was well-turned-out and well-pressed — more so than Gregory, who knew better. He held himself badly. And he had all of his father, the Danesacre solicitor, in his glance, at once quizzical and patient, suspicious, and no man’s fool, confident of his ability to see through any pretension.

  He had been at work for an hour when Diana Yarde, Gregory’s personal secretary, came into his room. Hers were the only interruptions he did not resent. He had a liking for her which was stronger than the contempt he felt for what he thought of as her loose private life. He enjoyed looking at her. Almost invariably she wore a sweater, which defined as clearly as if they were naked the large pointed breasts she carried on a slender body. He did not stare frankly, but he was none the less conscious of them, without approval but with interest: he imagined weighing them in his hand.

  ‘Well, Diana?’

  ‘I’ve just had the Director on the telephone. He’s not coming to the office today, he doesn’t feel well, and he’d be very grateful if you would go round and see him this afternoon.’

  ‘Not well, eh? He was perfectly well last night. I suppose he’s had a stroke of genius and wants to write a couple of splendid sentences. What will you bet?’

  His joke went down badly. The devotion — pure — of Gregory’s secretary to him was the only sign she ever gave of having a taste for monogamy. ‘Mr. Mott never pretends to be ill,’ she said hotly.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked Lambert.

  ‘Thirty. As you know perfectly well.’

  He laughed at her. ‘Then you’re old enough — experienced enough, too — to bear a joke. Run away now, and tell the Director I’ll be round about three.

  On his way out that afternoon he paused outside a half-open door to brush the sleeve of his overcoat. A man’s voice inside the room, a light joking voice, said, ‘Diana’s beautiful breasts come between me and the arts.’

  He disapproved of sexual jokes. Since there was no one in the hall, he squinted through the crack of the door to see who had spoken. It was the young fellow with the queer name. Bonnifet. It would be, he thought. A young man he didn’t care for — too easy-going, too opinionated. Gregory had brought him in without taking the trouble to consult his Deputy-Director, which at the time annoyed him considerably: he had had his own candidate for the job. And he had no grounds for complaint: Bonnifet spoke five languages, two more than his candidate…. The morals as well as the accomplishments of a monkey, he said to himself.

  When Lambert came into the room, Gregory was standing with his back to it, at one of the windows. Without turning, he said, ‘Come and look out.’

  ‘The view from this house is just a little too good,’ Lambert
said.

  It stretched right across Hyde Park to the tall buildings on the south side; high pointed roofs, a dome, the great chimneys of a power station. In the clear sunlight, two figures, a man and a woman, dwarfed by the immense trees and the distance, followed a path crossing and recrossing the smooth brightness of the grass.

  ‘Why is it,’ said Gregory, ’that two people walking in an empty park have an air of legend? Rub them out and it’s nothing more than a fine view.’

  ‘They’re probably talking money.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He turned away. He was wearing the dressing-gown of his portrait by Sutherland, a splendid mandarin-like affair — an affectation, thought Lambert, but an innocent one. He lay back on the sofa and put his feet up. ‘I’ve been making notes about the arrangements for the Conference.’

  ‘Yes?’

  They had decided — Gregory’s scheme — to form an International Council of Fine Arts, with the Rutley Institute as its headquarters. The Institute could not do it alone. It could suggest, make arrangements, play host, take the credit and the glory — and remain, of course, the ruling centre. They were planning for a week-long Conference, during which the new Council would be officially born, in the loudest possible noise of trumpets. It was fixed for September 1957 — a year from now. Preparations had been going on for over a year already, and national sub-committees formed in several capitals, New York, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Brussels, to discuss the agenda sent them by Gregory. The Conference itself would be only the public unfurling of schemes which had been privately fought over, arranged, rearranged, compromised and agreed. Only — but what an only. The apotheosis, the crown, of Gregory’s career as Director of the Rutley. For less than a second, looking at his languid body on the sofa, Lambert reflected that, as usual, he had done the bulk of the work. Gregory’s brain child, yes, but it was his hands that were building and would shore up the pedestal on which Gregory would take his stand next year. Bah, he thought, I’m not working for myself.