“I must really go,” he had said, standing up.
But Lucy had protested, cajoled, commanded. In the end he sat down again. That had been more than half an hour ago, and now they were out in Soho Square and the evening, according to Lucy and Spandrell, had hardly begun.
“I think it’s time,” Spandrell had said to Lucy, “that you saw what a revolutionary communist looked like.”
Lucy demanded nothing better.
“I belong to a sort of club,” Spandrell explained. He offered to take them in with him.
“There’ll still be a few enemies of society on view, I expect,” he went on, as they stepped out into the refreshing darkness. “Good fellows mostly. But absurdly childish. Some of them seem genuinely to believe that a revolution would make people happier. It’s charming, it’s positively touching.” He uttered his noiseless laugh. “But I’m an aesthete in these matters. Dynamite for dynamite’s sake.”
“But what’s the point of dynamite, if you don’t believe in Utopia?” asked Lucy.
“The point? But haven’t you eyes?”
Lucy looked round her. “I see nothing particularly frightful.”
“They have eyes and see not.” He halted, took her arm with one hand and with the other pointed round the square. “The deserted pickle factory, transformed into a dance hall; the lying-in hospital; Sbisa’s; the publishers of Who’s Who. And once,” he added, “the Duke of Monmouth’s palace. You can imagine the ghosts.
“Whether inspired by some diviner lust
His father got him with a keener gust …
“And so forth. You know the portrait of him after the execution, lying on a bed, with the sheet up to his chin, so that you can’t see the place where the neck was cut through? By Kneller. Or was it Lely? Monmouth and pickles, lying-in and Who’s Who, and dancing and Sbisa’s champagne—think of them a little, think of them.”
“I’m thinking of them,” said Lucy. “Hard.”
“And do you still ask what the point of dynamite is?”
They walked on. At the door of a little house in St. Giles’s Spandrell called a halt. “Wait a moment,” he said, beckoning the others back into the darkness. He rang. The door opened at once. There was a brief parleying in the shadows; then Spandrell turned and called to his companions. They followed him into a dark hall, up a flight of stairs, and into a brightly lighted room on the first floor. Two men were standing near the fireplace, a turbaned Indian and a little man with red hair. At the sound of footsteps they turned round. The red-haired man was Illidge.
“Spandrell? Bidlake?” He raised his invisibly sandy eyebrows in astonishment. “And what’s that woman doing here?” he wondered.
Lucy came forward with outstretched hand. “We’re old acquaintances,” she said with a smile of friendly recognition.
Illidge, who was preparing to make his face look coldly hostile, found himself smiling back at her.
A taxi turned into the street, suddenly and startlingly breaking the silence. Marjorie sat up in bed, listening. The hum of the engine grew louder and louder. It was Walter’s taxi; this time she felt sure of it, she knew. Nearer it came and nearer. At the bottom of the little hill on the right of the house, the driver changed down to a lower gear; the engine hummed more shrilly, like an angry wasp. Nearer and nearer. She was possessed by an anxiety that was of the body as well as of the mind. She felt breathless, her heart beat strongly and irregularly—beat, beat, beat, and then it seemed to fail; the expected beat did not make itself felt; it was as though a trap door had been opened beneath her into the void; she knew the terror of emptiness, of falling, falling—and the next retarded beat was the impact of her body against solid earth. Nearer, nearer. She almost dreaded, though she had so unhappily longed for, his return. She dreaded the emotions she would feel at the sight of him, the tears she would shed, the reproaches she would find herself uttering in spite of herself. And what would he say and do? what would be his thoughts? She was afraid of imagining. Nearer; the sound was just below her windows; it retreated, it diminished. And she had been so certain that it was Walter’s taxi.
She lay down again. If only she could have slept. But that physical anxiety of her body would not allow her. The blood thumped in her ears. Her skin was hot and dry. Her eyes ached. She lay quite still, on her back, her arms crossed on her breast, like a dead woman laid out for burial. “Sleep, sleep,” she whispered to herself; she imagined herself relaxed, smoothed out, asleep. But, suddenly, a malicious hand seemed to pluck at her taut nerves. A violent tic contracted the muscles of her limbs; she started as though with terror. And the physical reaction of fear evoked an emotion of terror in her mind, quickening and intensifying the anxiety of unhappiness which, all the time, had underlain her conscious efforts to achieve tranquillity. “Sleep, sleep, relax”—it was useless to go on trying to be calm, to forget, to sleep. She allowed her misery to come to the surface of her mind. “Why should he want to make me so unhappy?” She turned her head. The luminous hands of the clock on the little table beside her bed marked a quarter to three. A quarter to three—and he knew she could never go to sleep before he came in. “He knows I’m ill,” she said aloud. “Doesn’t he care?”
A new thought suddenly occurred to her. “Perhaps he wants me to die.” To die, not to be, not to see his face any more,
