lucky, especially living in a place like this. Yes, I do like your house. Is that your pussy cat, isn’t he charming? ’ I gestured towards the colour photograph of the cat which was hanging over the bed.
Ben turned towards the photo and for a second his brow and his mouth relaxed and his eyes lightened and widened. ‘Yes. That’s Tamburlaine. We called him Tambi. He’s dead now.’
‘What a splendid name. It’s so important what you call a cat. Tabbies are top cats, don’t you think? I’ve always been such a rolling stone I’ve never been able to keep an animal, such a pity. Have you got a cat now?’
Ben threw the invitation card and the crumpled envelope onto the bed. The brusque movement put an end to my chatter. He stood for a moment opening his mouth and showing his uneven teeth in some kind of indecision. He ruffled up his short thick mousy hair. He said, ‘Listen.’ There was a pause, he gulped breathlessly and my own breath was suspended. We stood together bulkily in the little room, I leaning a little over him. ‘Listen, it’s not on, sorry, we don’t want to know you. Sorry to put it like that but you won’t seem to take a hint. I mean, there’s no point, is there. All right, you knew Mary a long time ago, but a long time ago is a long time ago. She doesn’t want to know you now, and I don’t want to start, see. You don’t have to see people now because you saw them once or went to school with them or what. Things change and people have their own worlds and their own places. We aren’t your sort, well, that’s obvious, isn’t it. We don’t want to come to your parties and meet your friends and drink your drinks, it’s not on. And we don’t want you barging in here at all hours of the day either, sorry if this sounds rude, but it’s better to get it understood once and for all. I don’t know how you live with your friends in your world, but we don’t live like that, we’re quiet folk and we keep ourselves to ourselves. See? So as far as this stuff about “old school friends” or whatever goes, forget it. Of course we’ll pass the time of day with you if we see you in the village, but we don’t want to be on visiting terms, that’s not our kind of thing. So-thank you for your invitation-but, well, there we are.’ Here he fumbled loudly with the door handle, presumably to warn Hartley to be out of the way.
As he spoke, and as I listened to him, I had been looking down at the narrow scantily covered divan. That was certainly not Ben’s bed; so they slept together. I listened to his rigmarole almost without any surprise, almost as if it were a cassette which I myself had invented. I felt at the same time angry, confused, and tormented by the certainty that Hartley was in the house, silent, hiding from me.
One thing I had firmly decided beforehand was that however Ben reacted I was not going to lose my temper or display any emotion. It was certainly at this moment not easy to retain my mask of urbanity. Ben, after his speech, was standing stiffly, wrought up by his own words, frowning as if puzzled and staring at the photo of the cat. He had not raised his voice, indeed he had spoken in rather low though emphatic tones, and he had not yet opened the door. Doubtless he wanted, when he did so, to be sure of making a quick job of getting me out of the house.
I felt my accursed tendency to blush betraying me. My face and neck had changed colour, my cheeks were blazing. I said as coolly and airily as I could, ‘Well, all right, but I hope you’ll think it over. After all we are neighbours. And if you think I’m some sort of jet set grandee or something you’re quite wrong. I’m a very simple person, as I hope you’ll discover. I’ll write to you again later on. I wonder if I could see Mary just for a moment before I go?’
‘She isn’t here.’
‘I expect she’s out shopping. Maybe she’ll be back soon? I’d love to see her.’
He was standing between me and the door, and there was an awkward moment. He backed a little and I made a concessive flourishing gesture with my hand, instinctively designed to dissipate the sudden aura of violence. I got past him into the hall and began to fumble with the front door. Ben, who had immediately followed me, began to open the door and our hands touched. I then had to sidestep again to get out of the house. I was not able to look back towards the kitchen, and was in any case blind with emotion. I saw with terrible clarity the glaring scarlet and orange of some extremely large roses growing beside the path. The door banged. I fumbled hastily with the complicated fastening of the gate and managed to get out onto the pavement. I walked fast down the hill. I did not run. I began to walk more slowly, more slowly, and by the time I reached the village I was strolling. Acute feelings of anger, fear and a sort of boiling shame gradually subsided. Had I scuttled out like a frightened dog? I decided that the answer to that question did not matter. I touched my burning cheeks and cooled them with the back of my hand.
And as the violent feelings became calmer another emotion, darker, deeper, came slowly up from below. Or rather there were two emotions closely, blackly, coiled together. I felt a piercing pain connected with the vision of that mean flimsily covered divan and with the inference that… Hartley… slept… with that brutal ageing schoolboy. I knew that I felt this particular pain now not just because of the divan, but because, until I had made sure of what I had made sure of, I had been attempting to block out altogether certain reactions to the situation, certain pictures, certain terrible sensations. The other emotion which now, closely embraced with this one, rose dark and gleaming to the surface was: a kind of frightful
THREE
‘EVERY PERSISTING MARRIAGE is based on fear,’ said Peregrine Arbelow.
But let me explain. I am writing these pages, as I have written the previous ones (since page 100 in fact), in London, in my peculiar miserable derelict new flat. It has even occurred to me that if I wanted to live as a hermit retired from the world this would be a far better habitat! (Someone said something like this to me lately, Rosina?) So much has been happening, I thought I would write it as a continuous narrative without too many reversions to the present tense. So I am writing my life, after all, as a novel! Why not? It was a matter of finding a form, and somehow history, my history, has found the form for me. There will be plenty of time to reflect and remember as I go along, to digress and philosophize, to inhabit the far past or depict the scarcely formulated present; so my novel can still be a sort of memoir and a sort of diary. The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
I arrived here two days ago and have spent most of the time writing. On the second evening, as I shall shortly recount, I visited Peregrine. Today I shall continue to write; it is oddly enough easier to write here, amid all this cramped chaos, than in the open spaces at Shruff End. I have been able to concentrate; and my God there is plenty to concentrate on. This evening I shall take the train back home. (Home? Home.) I have telephoned to the local taxi to meet me at the station. I am sitting at a rickety table up against a window, from which I can see the unutterably feathery tops of a very bland green plane tree and beyond its lilting leaves a jumble of walls and windows and chimneys, and backs of houses built out of the crusty dung-brown Victorian brick out of which this part of London seems to be constructed. I sold my big airy apartment in Barnes, so near the river, so near the railway, in a fever of haste when I was buying Shruff End. And this little flat was, almost in my intention, a sort of penitential chapel. I have not even yet had time to arrange the furniture. Beside me as I write is an armchair with a television set on top of it. (Thank God for the impossibility of television at Shruff End.) Beyond, a bookcase stands facing the wall, presenting to me its greyish back, draped with cobwebs and pitted with woodworm. Pictures, lamps, books, ornaments and rolled-up rugs cover the floor, together with a sinister scattering of pieces of broken glass and china. I hustled the removal men and they were not at their best. Crates of kitchen ware, not unpacked, fill the tiny kitchen. Even though I sold many things and put some in store (including several trunks full of theatre souvenirs) there is far too much stuff here. The two bedrooms are small, but have an attractive view down a mews where many plants and trees are growing outside the little houses. The kitchen, if you can get in, is satisfactory, with a good gas stove and a refrigerator. Yesterday I lunched on tinned macaroni cheese jazzed up with oil, garlic, basil, and more cheese, and a lovely dish of cold boiled courgettes. (Courgettes should never be fried, in my opinion.) I must remember to buy more courgettes and some green peppers to take back with me. And talking of food, I have just this moment remembered that last night (when I was with Perry) was the night when I was supposed to be
