I shall have to see him again, Miles had thought, even before Lisa brought him the reconciling message. Things could not be left like that, all mangled and awful. It would wreck his work, it would haunt his dreams. The pitifulness of it all had sickened Miles. He did not want to hear Bruno’s confessions. As far as he was concerned now, Bruno had no past. He had long ago forgiven Bruno, that is he had amputated from his mind and his heart all further consideration of Bruno’s of fences. He did not want to think about the past in the company of his father. The past was terrible, sacred, his. He would have been prepared to enact the dutiful son if this could have been done in a dignified rather impersonal sort of way. Or he would even have been prepared to chat with Bruno, if that would have helped, only what can one chat about with a stranger who is dying? What he could not do was enter into a live relationship with his father which involved the reopening of the past. He could not bear the presence now to both of them of those things, that they should see them together. The idea was hideous, sickening. Of course no one could be expected to understand this. It was inexplicable but absolute. He could share no intensity with Bruno. And he would certainly accept no briefing from Danby. Yet he had to go there again and get through it somehow and act some sort of part. And when he did now try to think about how to do it he said to himself: my gods do not know about things of this kind. His mind reverted to the scene in the cemetery. This was somehow part of the same business, he felt it was somehow caused by some emanation from that awful room in Stadium Street. Of course Danby was just a clown, but the scene had been in some way horrible. The whole thing was partly Danby’s fault anyhow. Not that Miles imagined Danby had put Bruno up to summoning him. Danby was probably rather un nerved by Miles’s late appearance on the scene. Miles recalled the wording of the message which Bruno had sent him through Lisa: “Tell him I didn’t mean what I said at the end.” What did that signify? Was it just a general revocation of an old man’s curse, or did it mean that Miles would get the stamps after all? Miles had not thought about the stamp collection in years. He had settled down to assuming that Danby would have it. However supposing Miles did get it it would certainly not be un welcome. It would mean that he could give up the office and spend all his time writing poetry.
Miles banished the vulgar idea of the stamps from his mind. He got up restlessly and began to walk about his room. Three paces took him across it and three paces took him back, past the lighted grainy polished table which he kept so neat with his Notebook of Particulars and his row of varicoloured pencils and his fountain pen and his silver ink pot, which Diana had given him, and his neatly aligned sheets of blue blotting paper and the little Chinese vase of red and purple anemones. He paused to look at his face in the small square mirror. He used to think that he resembled the young Yeats. What he saw now in the gilded square, a little blurred as in a small painting by Cezanne, was a long thin crooked face with a lopsided tremulous mouth and a long pointed nose and frowning eyes and an anxious insecure expression, surrounded by jagged wavering stripes of limp dull dark hair well streaked with grey.
He showed his wolf’s teeth unsmilingly. It did not matter anymore what he looked like. He began pacing again. He thought about Lisa in the cemetery.
His reaction had indeed been, to use Lisa’s expression, rather “Victorian! Of course Lisa could look after herself. She was a hundred times tougher than a drunken trifler like Danby. It was odd that although he had got so used to seeing Lisa through Diana’s eyes as a “bird with a broken wing” he had also, and as it now seemed to him from the start, apprehended her as a person with strength. Lisa was somebody. It must be no joke being a teacher in that school. Miles had visited it once and been appalled by the atmosphere of dirt and poverty and muddle, the smell, the haggard mamas, the children brawling in the street. Lisa lived in a real world which seemed very unlike the reality which in his poetry he was attempting to join. That was her vocation and he respected and admired it.
Why then, since Lisa was so patently able to deal with Danby’s foolery, had he been so upset? And why had it seemed so clear that Diana must not be told? Lisa was a part of the household, a part of his life. He and Diana had long ago decided that Lisa would never marry, that she would be with them forever. Diana had asked did he mind. No, he did not mind, he was glad that Lisa should be there, very glad. She had become a part of his contentment. She gave him a kind of companionship which Diana could not give, she could talk to him about things which Diana did not understand. Miles had come to think of her as a person secluded, segregated, enclosed. She did her work and she lived with Miles and Diana. She was not as other women, she was a kind of religious. After all, she had actually been a nun for several years and the experience had marked her with a coldness and a separateness. Was that why he had been shocked then, as if one had seen a gross man insulting a nun, dragging her by her habit?
”Is it so very odd that a man should want to have lunch with me?” No, it was not really odd. Lisa was not pretty as Diana was. Indeed one had to know her well before one could see her attractiveness at all. Miles could see it. He could even, he felt now, see her beauty, her secret beauty, that dark intensity of eyes and mouth. This must be invisible to an outsider. He could imagine how Lisa must look to the outsider, like a gaunt untidy middle-aged schoolmistress. Yet even such people occasionally got invitations to lunch, he supposed. Only not Lisa. Danby’s gyrations were meaningless of course, probably the outcome of drink, but they had posed a question, and Miles had begun to be aware of the question like an infixed dart. How would he feel if Lisa had a suitor?
In a way he knew very little about Lisa. In a way the concept of the broken-winged bird had served to conceal her. He had never discussed her past with her. He had imagined, it did not now seem very clear why, that she preferred not to speak of it. He knew nothing about her sex life, if it had ever existed. Diana had mooted a theory that Lisa was not interested in men, and Miles had rather vaguely taken the theory over. When he asked his routine questions about Lisa’s “day” it had never occurred to him to wonder if the day had included a man. In fact he did not imagine that Lisa had any secret life. But what he had now received from that glimpse of the by-play in Brompton Cemetery, and what he now knew that he could never rid himself of, was the idea that it was possible for Lisa to be courted. She was loseable. She was free.
As Miles continued to pace his room, brushing the mantel piece at one end and the doorhandle at the other, he began slowly to take in the significance of the prophetic terror which he had experienced beside the cemetery railings. He had discovered something new and dreadful and growing with which he would now have to live, a deep and unpredictable menace to his peace of mind. Something at the very heart of his world which had been sleeping was now terribly awake. Lisa be longed at Kempsford Gardens. He loved Lisa. Lisa was his.
18
“Danby!”
Danby, who had just completed a letter to Lisa and put it in an envelope, cursed and laid his electric razor down on top of the envelope. As there was no table in his room he had writ ten the letter standing up beside the chest of drawers.
”Danby!”
”Coming, Bruno, coming!”
Danby went up the stairs two at a time.
”Don’t shout so, Bruno.”
”Danby, one of the stamps has gone.”
”I daresay it has the way you scatter them around.”
”But it’s gone, it was there in its case, last time I looked and I’m certain I didn’t take it out.”
”You probably did, you know. Don’t get out of bed, Bruno. I’ll look for the damn thing.”