“Oh Marius, darling,” Alice was saying, “thank heavens you are here. I am having another of these dreadful serious arguments with your friends. Do try and be amusing, darling, because this is such a lovely room. One really should not be serious in a room like this.” She turned to Annabelle. “Do you know what I mean?”
“We have not been so very serious, have we?” Annabelle said.
Alice laughed. “How right, how terribly right you are,” she said. “Oh Marius, darling, do give me a cigarette.”
The ground had already changed. Peter was out of it, solitary, and Annabelle and Marius were being engaged. Marius was getting the “darlings” as I once had done. Then Marius had been the enemy and the weapons of jealousy had been used against him. Now they were being used against Annabelle. She was sitting on the ground with her elbow touching Marius’s knee. I did not think words would hurt her.
“Do you know what suffering is?” Peter said.
“Tell me,” Alice said to Annabelle, “how long have you been living here?”
“About a year,” Annabelle said.
“And where were you before that?”
“We were abroad, with my father.”
“Oh yes.”
“There is no suffering except physical suffering,” Peter said.
“Nonsense,” Alice said. And then to Marius as he offered her a match—“Isn’t it nonsense, darling?”
“Sometimes,” Marius said.
“These cigarettes are like brown paper, where on earth do you get them?”
Peter walked over to me. He pointed at Marius. “He is betraying me,” he whispered loudly. Then he went back to the piano.
Alice was saying, “I am sure that sooner or later one will be poisoned by the cigarettes and drink that people give one.”
Peter played a note on the piano. “Anything but physical suffering you can change,” he said.
“A friend of mine went blind, literally, from drinking gin.”
“Then change it,” Annabelle said. Peter did not seem to hear her.
“He had to stay in bed for a week.”
“Suffering is when you can’t even die,” Marius said.
“How pompous, darling.”
“Yes,” Marius said.
Annabelle had gone back into her silence. Alice was looking at her restlessly as if she resented this. Peter banged again on the piano. “I expect he was blind already,” he said.
“Tell me,” Alice said, “does this go on all the time?”
“Not all the time,” Annabelle said.
Peter played a chord. “Did he think he had been put in a concentration camp when he drank the gin?”
“Doesn’t it get terribly on your nerves?” Alice said.
“We have no nerves,” Peter said furiously, shutting the lid of the piano.
“Marius,” Alice said, “how is your wife?”
The air had suddenly become difficult to breathe. There was a shock, an alarm, an embarrassment in the room that dared not be looked at. Annabelle had turned her head so that her hair fell downwards across her face, shutting it away from us, as if she were hiding herself from the thing that Alice’s words had created. Peter walked over to the window where he became a silhouette either approaching or receding, and it was only Marius who smiled into Alice’s eyes.
“I wondered if, when you saw her, you would give her my love.”
“Thank you,” Marius said.
I did not know about Marius’s wife. I did not know what anyone knew about Marius’s wife. The air was unbearable.
“I wondered how often you saw her now,” Alice said.
“I often see her,” Marius said.
“She is so lovely.” From where Alice was sitting she could not see Annabelle without turning to her, so after a while she did turn, and Annabelle was still leaning with her hair like a curtain over her face. “Don’t you think she is lovely?” Alice said.
“I have never seen her,” Annabelle said.
“Oh,” Alice said. “Oh haven’t you?” She gazed at Annabelle heavily, like a jealous sister.
I did not know who would ever speak next. I could not speak myself, for I did not know what was happening. The three who were sitting seemed frozen, enclosed, as if their hearts held their muscles rigid with waiting. Peter, by the window, seemed to be moving; although he never got any closer and never any farther away. He was like a ship on the horizon, which only proceeds when you cease to watch it. I looked down at the floor and tried not to think of Marius’s wife, not to feel anything, until I should know about her. I tried to think of how the embarrassment might be ended, but every second that it lasted seemed to show that the situation was final, the battle over, we had been defeated and there was nothing more to be done. I found that I was saying these words to myself over and over again — we have been defeated, we have been defeated — not knowing what I was meaning but feeling that the defeat was greater than on the simple terms on which we had begun. I felt that it was a vital defeat, a large-scale defeat, a defeat on our own terms (for why should there be such disaster at the mention of Marius’s wife?), and I was sensing the ruin of this, the outrage, when Annabelle shook the hair back from her face and stood up and walked over to Peter.
The others did not hear what she said. I did. “Now you can begin,” she said.
She went past him, and waited, and again I had the impression of movement that was not visible. They both had their backs to us. Then Annabelle was coming towards us again and it seemed that Peter almost pushed in front of her. “You are right,” he said.
He sat on the arm of Marius’s chair, facing Alice. “You are right, we have nerves, we live on them.” His smile fluttered towards Alice’s jealousy like a bird. “Don’t mind when we rest them.” Alice did not look at him. “I, of course, not we,” he said. “I know nothing of suffering.” Alice flicked the ash from her cigarette into the fireplace. “But I know what you mean,” he said. “Perhaps you know what I mean too.”
Alice did not answer him. Peter put his head in his hands. The bird, wounded, trailed its wings across his face. “I wonder why one ever speaks,” he said. “Speaking gets things wrong, and it doesn’t get them right again.” He looked up at Alice. “What one says means nothing, and what does mean something when there is nothing to say?”
“Darling, it seems that you know the answer to that,” Alice said.
Annabelle was coming forwards carrying glasses and Marius stood up and they were both talking suddenly as if a spring had been released. We were on new ground and could breathe again. Annabelle was offering a drink to Alice who was reaching for it and chatting, I couldn’t hear what about, with her eyes bright, pleasantly, and Marius was nodding his head at her and grinning. Peter was sitting with his hands on his knees looking up at the ceiling and Annabelle came over so that she stood by my side. The scene, instead of a battlefield, was now a conversation piece: with each one of us appearing to be posed according to the balance of the grouping. The talk ran, all at once, nonsensically, like water; with Marius in the lead, charming, controlling it, saying—
“Alice, do you remember, when we first came to London, and I stayed with you, how funny it was, when you used to go out to the shops in your dressing-gown, and you were so annoyed, because no one thought it was a dressing-gown, but a coat.” “Quite untrue, darling,” Alice said. “And the woman next door sent you flowers.” “She sends me fish now, darling.” “And came to you for advice, why fish?” “They have holes in them, why do they?” “And you gave her such cruel advice, you are the sort of person people always come to with their troubles.” “She had a lover who was a bicyclist, do you remember?” “But really no reason to discourage him so.” “I am sure it would have been unhealthy,” Alice said.