room. Three paces took him across it and three paces took him back, past the lighted grainy polished table which he kept so neat with his Notebook of Particulars and his row of varicoloured pencils and his fountain pen and his silver ink pot, which Diana had given him, and his neatly aligned sheets of blue blotting paper and the little Chinese vase of red and purple anemones. He paused to look at his face in the small square mirror. He used to think that he resembled the young Yeats. What he saw now in the gilded square, a little blurred as in a small painting by Cezanne, was a long thin crooked face with a lopsided tremulous mouth and a long pointed nose and frowning eyes and an anxious insecure expression, surrounded by jagged wavering stripes of limp dull dark hair well streaked with grey.
He showed his wolf’s teeth unsmilingly. It did not matter anymore what he looked like. He began pacing again. He thought about Lisa in the cemetery.
His reaction had indeed been, to use Lisa’s expression, rather “Victorian! Of course Lisa could look after herself. She was a hundred times tougher than a drunken trifler like Danby. It was odd that although he had got so used to seeing Lisa through Diana’s eyes as a “bird with a broken wing” he had also, and as it now seemed to him from the start, apprehended her as a person with strength. Lisa was somebody. It must be no joke being a teacher in that school. Miles had visited it once and been appalled by the atmosphere of dirt and poverty and muddle, the smell, the haggard mamas, the children brawling in the street. Lisa lived in a real world which seemed very unlike the reality which in his poetry he was attempting to join. That was her vocation and he respected and admired it.
Why then, since Lisa was so patently able to deal with Danby’s foolery, had he been so upset? And why had it seemed so clear that Diana must not be told? Lisa was a part of the household, a part of his life. He and Diana had long ago decided that Lisa would never marry, that she would be with them forever. Diana had asked did he mind. No, he did not mind, he was glad that Lisa should be there, very glad. She had become a part of his contentment. She gave him a kind of companionship which Diana could not give, she could talk to him about things which Diana did not understand. Miles had come to think of her as a person secluded, segregated, enclosed. She did her work and she lived with Miles and Diana. She was not as other women, she was a kind of religious. After all, she had actually been a nun for several years and the experience had marked her with a coldness and a separateness. Was that why he had been shocked then, as if one had seen a gross man insulting a nun, dragging her by her habit?
”Is it so very odd that a man should want to have lunch with me?” No, it was not really odd. Lisa was not pretty as Diana was. Indeed one had to know her well before one could see her attractiveness at all. Miles could see it. He could even, he felt now, see her beauty, her secret beauty, that dark intensity of eyes and mouth. This must be invisible to an outsider. He could imagine how Lisa must look to the outsider, like a gaunt untidy middle-aged schoolmistress. Yet even such people occasionally got invitations to lunch, he supposed. Only not Lisa. Danby’s gyrations were meaningless of course, probably the outcome of drink, but they had posed a question, and Miles had begun to be aware of the question like an infixed dart. How would he feel if Lisa had a suitor?
In a way he knew very little about Lisa. In a way the concept of the broken-winged bird had served to conceal her. He had never discussed her past with her. He had imagined, it did not now seem very clear why, that she preferred not to speak of it. He knew nothing about her sex life, if it had ever existed. Diana had mooted a theory that Lisa was not interested in men, and Miles had rather vaguely taken the theory over. When he asked his routine questions about Lisa’s “day” it had never occurred to him to wonder if the day had included a man. In fact he did not imagine that Lisa had any secret life. But what he had now received from that glimpse of the by-play in Brompton Cemetery, and what he now knew that he could never rid himself of, was the idea that it was possible for Lisa to be courted. She was loseable. She was free.
As Miles continued to pace his room, brushing the mantel piece at one end and the doorhandle at the other, he began slowly to take in the significance of the prophetic terror which he had experienced beside the cemetery railings. He had discovered something new and dreadful and growing with which he would now have to live, a deep and unpredictable menace to his peace of mind. Something at the very heart of his world which had been sleeping was now terribly awake. Lisa be longed at Kempsford Gardens. He loved Lisa. Lisa was his.
18
“Danby!”
Danby, who had just completed a letter to Lisa and put it in an envelope, cursed and laid his electric razor down on top of the envelope. As there was no table in his room he had writ ten the letter standing up beside the chest of drawers.
”Danby!”
”Coming, Bruno, coming!”
Danby went up the stairs two at a time.
”Don’t shout so, Bruno.”
”Danby, one of the stamps has gone.”
”I daresay it has the way you scatter them around.”
”But it’s gone, it was there in its case, last time I looked and I’m certain I didn’t take it out.”
”You probably did, you know. Don’t get out of bed, Bruno. I’ll look for the damn thing.”
”It’s one of the Cape triangulars, it’s worth two hundred pounds.”
”Don’t get out of bed! And don’t fuss so. I’ll search, Adelaide will search, it’s probably somewhere in this room on the floor.”
”It
”Adelaide! ADELAIDE!”
It was late evening, nearly Bruno’s bedtime. Rain was beating against the windows. The lamp shone on the pale scrawled counterpane, Bruno’s supper tray with half-eaten beans on toast, the usual litter of stamps,
A champagne glass rolled off the bed onto the floor and broke. Adelaide came in looking tired and irritable and began to pick up the pieces of the glass.
”Adelaide, Bruno has lost a stamp, a triangular stamp. It must be somewhere here on the floor. You do that side of the room and I’ll do this side.”
”It can’t be in this room, I’m sure it was in its case-“
”Oh shut up, Bruno. Lift the carpet up at the corners, Adelaide. I’ll help you shift the books. Mind you don’t put your knee on a bit of glass. Oh Nigel, hello, Bruno’s lost a stamp, a triangular one. Could you help us look? It must be on the floor.”
Danby and Adelaide crawled slowly along the floor towards each other while Nigel stood dreamily at the door and watched them.
”I’ll do under the bed, Adelaide. There’s that hole in the carpet, it might have got underneath there.”
”It’s no good your looking, Danby, I
”Well, where is it if it’s not in this room?”
”I don’t know, but I know-“
”Oh stop blithering. You’re being jolly helpful aren’t you, Nigel. Bruno, get back into bed. Well, it looks as if it’s not on the floor, I’ll look in the drawers and on the shelves. You can knock off, Adelaide, just take that damn glass away, will you, don’t leave it in the wastepaper basket. And the tray. And don’t bang the bloody door like that!”
Adelaide was heard noisily descending the stairs. Nigel continued to watch while Danby searched the chest of drawers, moved it away from the wall and looked behind it, looked behind the bookcase, looked behind the books in the bookcase.
”It may have got
”It’s the best one of the set. It’s worth two hundred pounds.”
”Well, that doesn’t matter to
