”I’m not being cruel. I see no point in this sort of discussion. You seem to me to take a very peculiar view-“
”I haven’t explained properly. Let me explain. Let’s meet more and talk, please-“
”I’m a very busy person and I have a life of my own as I’m sure you have too. Now will you get out of the way.”
”I can’t let you go like this, I’ll write, you will come tomorrow, won’t you-?” Danby contorted himself in front of her and then stretched out a hand which brushed the sleeve of her coat as she stepped quickly into the long grass to get past him. “Lisa!”
She was hurrying towards the gate. In another moment she was outside and had disappeared into the steadily moving crowd. Danby looked after her for a moment. Then he turned back and began to walk slowly away down the long avenue of tombstones.
17
Miles Greensleave, returning from the office, stopped abruptly in the Old Brompton Road as he saw in a shaft of sunlight Lisa and Danby Odell deep in conversation inside the railings of the cemetery.
Behind the railings in the green shaded meadowy expanse with its distant vista of pillars in the rainy sunlight the two figures looked large, clear, significant. There was something too about their attitudes, their intentness, which suggested a great seriousness, something at issue. Miles felt a sense of disagreeable shock, as if of fear. He stopped and watched. As he watched Danby suddenly threw out his hands in a theatrical gesture as if he were trying to prevent Lisa from passing him. Miles looked on with amazement. Still keeping them in view, he began to walk quickly along in the direction of the gate. But before he reached it he saw Lisa dart past Danby, who appeared to be making a sort of lunge at her, and emerge onto the pavement. She dodged between the passersby and had crossed the road before Miles could catch up with her.
He ran across the road after her and came up beside her as she reached the corner of Eardley Crescent.
”Lisa!”
”Oh, Miles, good, hello.”
”Lisa, what on earth was going on? I saw that fool Danby-what was he doing?”
”Oh he just-We were talking about Bruno.”
”Was he trying to make a pass at you or something?”
”No, no. He had some problem or other. He-he wanted me to have lunch with him.”
”To have lunch with him?”
”He said he wanted to see me-“
”To see you? I hope you told him to go to hell. He seemed to be behaving in a damned impertinent manner, standing in front of you like that and making a grab at you-“
”It’s all right, Miles, don’t take on.”
”I will take on! You didn’t say you’d have lunch with him, did you?”
”No, I didn’t.”
”I should think not, that pathetic ass, making a scene like that in public.”
”I don’t think he was very serious.”
”Probably blind drunk. Fancy his wanting to have lunch with you!”
”Is it so very odd that a man should want to have lunch with me?”
”No, no, Lisa, of course not. I mean, you’re-Danby’s such poor stuff. You wouldn’t think he’d have the nerve to approach someone like you. He drinks like a fish. He’s probably making passes at girls all the time.”
”Maybe. I expect that explains it.”
”Let me know if he annoys you again.”
”Really, Miles, I’m not a Victorian maiden. I can look after myself.”
”I hope you won’t go round to that house again, to Stadium Street.”
”I did say I’d go and see Bruno.”
”Well, go sometime when Danby’s out at work. I suppose he does work. Or let Diana go. The old man probably can’t distinguish you anyway.”
”Diana, well-“
They turned to mount the steps of the house in Kempsford Gardens. Diana, who had been watching out for them from the front window, as she so often did, threw open the front door. “Come in, come in, you poor tired things, let me take your coats. Lisa, your mac is quite wet, you can’t have hung it up properly this morning, you are bad. Oh Miles, you’ve got me the Evening Standard, good, I meant to remind you, come on in, I’ve lit a fire in the drawing room and now the sun’s doing its best to put it out. I bought a new sherry decanter, eighteenth-century one, in that shop in the Fulham Road, you must both have a sip of sherry before you do another thing. Look, cut glass, isn’t it lovely? It was quite cheap too. Do sit down, you both look exhausted, did you meet on the train?”
”No, just outside the station,” said Miles. He sat down. The sun was shining into the little neat coloured drawing room which Diana kept so fanatically tidy. A small fire was burning gaily in the grate. On a bright Scandinavian tile-topped table the new sherry decanter stood with three glasses. This was his home.
Diana poured out the sherry and gave a glass to Lisa, who was still standing in the doorway unknotting her scarf. “Any dramas?” Diana often asked them this question when they came home in the evening.
”No, no dramas,” said Lisa. She took the glass.
Miles lifted his head towards her, but she had already drifted away through the door taking the sherry with her.
In fact he had already known, even without the hint from Lisa, that it would be better not to tell Diana about the scene with Danby. Why?
”The fragile pearly shaft sinks into the table and located where there is a dim red blotch, a shadowed unred red, reflection of a flower. Above yet how above it stretched the surface skin of grainy wood, a rich striped brown. Red reddest of words. Brown luscious caramel word. Yet also loneliest of colours, an exile from the spectrum, word colour, wood colour, colour of earth, tree, bread, hair.”
Miles closed up his Notebook of Particulars and stared at the red and purple anemones which his wife had placed upon his work table. A page which he had torn out and crumpled up was uncrumpling quietly with a little mouselike sound in the wastepaper basket. It was late in the evening and the curtains were drawn. The women knew better than to come porlocking at this hour. The expanse of dark time was his.
However he could not work. He had intended to describe the anemones, to continue what he had begun to write about them yesterday evening in daylight. He had wanted to catch in words the peculiar watery pallor of reflections in polished wood. But now it suddenly seemed pointless. The anemones, the strength of whose rather thick thrusting stems had struck him yesterday, now seemed to him just a bunch of rather vulgar flowers, pert faces with frilly collars. Diana had put them in a little cheap Chinese vase which increased if anything the vulgarity of their appearance. He could not see them properly any more. They were not worth looking at anyway. He felt distressed, hurt.
That idiotic scene in the cemetery between Lisa and Danby had unsettled him, given him a sense of pointlessness, that old pointlessness which he remembered so well from the war time. He knew the vulnerability of his strength. Seeing Bruno, that had made everything go wrong, it had made him feel guilt, and with the guilt had come that fatal weakness. Miles hated muddle and thinking ill of himself. If only he had kept his head with Bruno and not got excited and upset. How easy it was afterwards to see this and to see how simple it would have been to have acted otherwise. But he had been so shocked and moved by simply seeing Bruno again and had not had time to collect himself. He knew now that he had quite deliberately tried not to foresee what it would be like, tried not to use his imagination. The father to whom he wrote respectful letters twice a year, and whose fault it patently was that they never met, had been long settled in the background of his life, a venerable image housed in a niche, looking rather like a sage rep resented by Blake. The terrible sick old man in the shabby little room in Stadium Street was something quite else, something requiring thought, something demanding, something frightening.