”He’s pathetic.”
”No, not pathetic. Just cut off.”
”He still hasn’t asked about the stamps?”
”No, thank heavens.”
”I’m rather glad they’ve gone.”
The stamp collection had perished in the flood. The box had evidently floated out of the window. When the water subsided it was found in the yard, tilted over with some of its drawers missing. The few stamps that remained in the box were completely ruined.
Miles gently squeezed his wife’s shoulder. Everything that had happened to him lately had been completely unexpected. What a terribly complex thing his life must be to be able so utterly to surprise its owner! Miles felt as if everything had been somehow turned inside out. The shape was much the same, but the colour was different, the feel was different. It was the old world made new or else perhaps really seen for the first time.
For several days after Lisa’s departure he had lived in a state of stretched tense physical pain. He had let Lisa go, he had let her walk away down the street, and he had thought then that he was suffering. He did not experience her departure until nearly a day later, as if the news needed time to penetrate his body. When it had at last done so the real pain began. He could not eat or sleep. He did not attempt to go to the office, though he left the house every morning as if he were going to. He walked the streets all day. One day in Warwick Road he passed Diana on the pavement and could see from her strained inward face that she was similarly employed. She did not see him. In the evenings he sat in the drawing room and pretended to read. Diana went off to bed about eight. Miles, who could not now bring himself to share her bed, stretched himself out on the hearth rug and lay there stiff and open-eyed through the night hours. He began to think that he would soon die simply from lack of sleep.
He had thought at first that he would find Lisa, that he must find Lisa. He could not conceive how he had ever let her go out of his sight. Two houses. It would have worked. He could have forced it on her. He had asked Diana where she was, but Diana obviously did not know. The Save the Children Fund people did not know either. They said her forwarding address was their Calcutta office. He imagined finding her, meeting her in the street perhaps, or stopping her at the airport. He imagined the light sound, one evening, of her key in the door at Kempsford Gardens. “Miles, I’ve come back, I had to. I’ll never leave you again.” He imagined a meet ing in India, the circle of wondering dark faces as Lisa laughed and cried in his arms. Yet he did not visit travel agents or haunt London Airport. He did not even write to her. Something very small inside him believed that she was gone, that he had really lost her, and he bent over in physical agony to contain that small searing lump of belief.
All this while he and Diana had scarcely spoken to each other. Diana spent an increasing amount of time in the bed room, indeed in bed, and seemed to be crying a good deal. Once or twice she had made pitiful attempts to smile at him when they met on the stairs, but Miles’s face could not smile, and once when she touched his arm beseechingly he jerked away as if he had received an electric shock. Diana had passed by and gone on into the kitchen with a wailing sob. Miles knew that he was becoming crazed by lack of sleep but had no will to do anything about it. He waited patiently, resignedly, for his exhausted body to commit some merciful violence upon his tormented mind. On about the fifth day towards evening he found himself not so much falling asleep as entering a state of trance. He could see his surroundings with an increase of vividness but seemed to have withdrawn from them into a condition of remote dreamlike helplessness.
Later he woke from an unconsciousness which had not seemed like sleep. It was night and the moon was shining into the drawing room, where he was lying on the floor. It seemed to Miles that he must be dead. He seemed to see himself lying there, as if his soul had left his body and was standing like a tall sentinel beside it. He lay in the moonlight trying to remember who he was and what had happened to him. Then he remembered. Parvati had been killed yesterday in an air crash. He recalled how he had parted with her so lately at the airport. She had a shy way of waving, with one thin little hand fluttering beside her hair, then darting to toss the heavy pigtail back over her shoulder. She was wearing the red and gold sari which he so particularly liked. She was still so slim, the child not yet showing within her. She waved, and he could see the flash of her smile, and then she was gone through the doorway. It was the first time in years they had been really parted. “Soon back, darling, soon back,” he had repeated to himself, as she had said it to him, as he looked at the empty doorway. And now she was dead, broken and scattered upon a mountainside, utterly gone out of the world, existing no more anywhere, Parvati and his child. Miles turned away from the moonlight and rested his forehead upon the carpet. He lay there open-eyed and gazed and gazed upon the fact of her death. She was utterly gone out of the world forever. She did not exist anymore at all.
Diana had found him in the morning still lying there, apparently paralysed and unable to move. She had sent for a doctor and Miles was persuaded to hobble up to bed. After a while he seemed more rational, complained like an ordinary invalid, accepted hot-water bottles and soup. He became pathetically dependent upon Diana, and could scarcely bear her to leave him for a moment, although he spoke to her very little. Then at last he began to talk. He talked to her for a whole day, for two whole days, about Parvati, he told her everything, about the child, everything, everything that he could remember right from the very beginning. He described to her in detail how he had first met Parvati when she was bi cycling along King’s Parade, and he had thought, if only that marvellous girl’s sari would catch in the wheel of her bicycle I could go up to her and speak to her. Then the sari had caught in the wheel of the bicycle and Miles had run up to help her to free it and had asked her to have tea with him. She refused. Two days later he met her again at a political meeting, and she accepted. He told Diana everything that he could remember, down to the way she had waved and tossed her pigtail at the doorway at the airport. And he told her about standing alone in the hall with the newspaper. And Diana listened with tears streaming down her face.
After that they talked about Lisa. Diana told him about their childhood and what Lisa had been like then. She found some old photographs and showed them to Miles. They talked about their marriage and why it had happened and what it was like. “I coaxed you into love, Miles. It was not like Parvati, not like Lisa.”
”You coaxed me back to life. Perhaps only you could have done it.” They talked of Miles’s loves and whether he had really loved Lisa from long ago and whether he would have married her if he had met her first. They talked in quiet voices like two very old people talking about things that had happened long ago in the distant past. It was then that Miles began to notice that some change had come about, that the world looked quite different, that it had been turned inside out.
The pain was not less. Or perhaps it must have become less since he could behave normally, eat meals and go back to the office. It was as if the pain remained there but he had grown larger all round it and could contain it more easily. It no longer bent and racked his body. He carried it inside himself gently, almost gingerly, as if it were a precious egg. He sat very upright in the tube train, sat quietly at his desk in the office, nursing his pain, letting his body hold it carefully, lightly. He thought a great deal about Parvati and a great deal about Lisa. Their shades travelled with him wherever he went. And he experienced his loss as if it were one loss, blankly and without consolation, and his eyes seemed to open upon it, wider and wider, as he stared at what had happened and nursed the great egg of pain inside him.
During this time he often heard Diana telling him to leave her and to go to Lisa. He heard her words, to which he gave no reply except to smile and shake his head. The words had no connection now with practice or with the everyday pat tern of his life. He knew now that Lisa was an impossibility and had to be an impossibility. That was indeed her role, her task, her service to him. He would never cease to love her. But he felt that he would probably never meet her again. She was dedicated, separated, withdrawn forever beyond a grille, behind a curtain. And he would worship her cold virtue until he could see her no longer. He recalled the superb negativity of her last appearance. “No talk.”
”Will you write to me?”
”No.” Indeed in his thought she was already changing. The girl whom he had known for so many years, the sick girl, the deprived one, the silent one, was already being obscured by something else. A tall cold angel, chilly and strong as a steel shaft, seemed to be materializing, never more to leave his side. The angel of death, perhaps of Parvati’s death.
Of course Miles knew what was going to happen next. He smiled his secret smile, he smiled alone, and he smiled at Diana, smiled through Diana, as she urged him that it was not too late to go to Lisa. He was in no hurry now, for he was in the hands of another power. On warm sunny spring evenings he sat in the little summerhouse, disregarding Diana’s anxiety about its being damp. When the weather was cold or rainy he sat at his study window watching the fast grey clouds falling down over the top of the Earls Court Exhibition Hall. When it grew dark he sat there in the darkness and looked out into the red glowing London sky. His thoughts became vague, floating, warm.
