”Good-bye, Miles.” The door closed. They were gone. Miles returned to the drawing room and sat down.
He thought, it’s not final. Now I’ve simply got to think. Hope stirred in him, lessening the pain. He looked out through the window into the soaking garden where a little rain was falling through the bright air. She would not say where she was staying, but he could find out. Perhaps Diana knew. Any way he could always fly to Calcutta. She was not really dying, she was not really going away forever. No, no, no, he thought to himself, I will not accept Lisa’s sentence of death.
26
Bruno was asleep. His huge head, made even larger by the ragged undipped beard, lolled uncomfortably sideways, his mouth open, a moist lower lip showing amid the dull grey growth. He drew his breath in and out with a long shuddering sigh. His dark spotted hands with their swollen knuckles trembled and clutched a little on the yellowish-white surface of the thin counterpane. Diana wondered if he was dreaming.
He had asked for Lisa. Diana had told him Lisa was away. He had asked when she would be back and whether Miles was away too. He seemed to imagine that Lisa was married to Miles. Diana had answered vaguely. He had been peevish and abstracted and twice said aloud, as if unconscious of her presence, “Poor Bruno, poor Bruno.” At last she had managed to induce something like a conversation, and they had talked, about the various houses he had lived in and about the merits of different parts of London. They talked about how London was changing, and whether it was as handsome as Rome or Paris. Bruno showed a little animation. Diana could not bring herself to stroke him as Lisa had enjoined, but, a little self-consciously, she had taken his hand, which he let her hold, squeezing her fingers rather absently from time to time. She felt rather less physical horror of him, but the smell was hard to bear and she had a terrible intuition of his inward parts and of his pitiable mortality. There was something so strange and pathetic about the thin wispy emaciated body, so scarcely perceptible under the bedclothes, as if it were doing its best to shrivel right away leaving nothing but the head. An hour of the afternoon had passed in something like talk. She did not want to risk meeting Danby, whom she did not yet feel quite ready to encounter, and had just begun to say that it was time to go, when Bruno had suddenly, still holding her hand, fallen asleep.
Diana had been disconcerted and had immediately wondered if he was dying. She released her hand cautiously from his and stood up. His breathing seemed to be regular and steady. Even as she was moving the chair and rising to her feet she was able to measure the intensity of her attention to Bruno by the sudden violence of her misery at remembering about Miles and Lisa. She stood for a while looking down at Bruno until he became ghostly and almost invisible. Then as she began to make her way to the door she saw, clear and separated like a detail in a Flemish picture, a big bottle of sleeping tablets which was standing upon the top of the marble-topped bookcase. She knew what they were, because Bruno had mentioned them in reply to a question of hers about how he slept. Diana stood still again, staring at the bottle of tablets.
Diana had so far found herself quite unable to discuss the situation with Miles. He had made one or two half-hearted attempts to refer to it, but had seemed relieved when she had, with a kind of submissive animal gesture, simply turned her head away and refused to reply. In the two days since Lisa’s departure they had lived in the house together like two maniacs, each totally absorbed in a tempestuous inferno of private thoughts. Yet with all this they managed to behave with a certain degree of normality. Diana went shopping, Miles went to the office. They slept in the same bed, or rather lay awake for hours side by side, motionless and silent. Diana cried quietly, not wiping her tears, soaking the pillow. By day they were immensely polite and considerate and solicitous and rather formal. The only evident change in their routine was in the matter of meals. By tacit mutual consent they had abandoned any pretence of serious eating. Diana laid out, at intervals, a sort of buffet in the dining room at which, usually not together, they occasionally picked, a little shame-faced at being able to eat at all.
Diana had not at any point talked to Lisa either. She had made no comment to her sister, nor had Lisa attempted to speak to her, although twice she had taken Diana’s hand and squeezed it and laid it against her cheek, while Diana looked back at her blankly without responding. Diana conjectured that Lisa had determined on her flight immediately after Miles’s nocturnal visit. Then she had kept her silence during the time in which she was arranging for the job in India. She announced her departure on the morning of the day on which she left, and Diana could see that Miles was just as stunned as she was. On the final walk to the station Lisa had been cool and businesslike, talking fast, and Diana had been silent. Lisa had been trying to impress upon her that she must prevent Miles from trying to find Lisa before her departure to India, and that he would certainly fail if he tried. She did not tell Diana where she was going. When they got to the station she spoke again about Bruno. They embraced with closed eyes, clasping each other hard. Then Lisa was gone.
Diana had walked about the streets on that day and on the next day. She had sat on benches in parks and in churchyards. She rehearsed the situation endlessly in her mind, trying to find some way of thinking about it which was less than torture, but she could not. She had begun by believing that Miles and Lisa would run away together. Now she believed that they had finally and definitively crucified their love for her sake. It was not at first clear to her which was worse. In thinking them capable of running away she had made a judgement which seemed to bear not so much upon the honesty of either as upon the intense and terrible thing which was their love. Diana had fully taken in the scale of it, as with her first violent shock of horror she realized that the unthinkable had happened and that her life was utterly changed. She had apprehended with certainty this thing, huge, full-fledged, and monstrous in the house, when at a certain moment she had seen Miles and Lisa looking at each other across the dining table. She had not foreseen it. The pity for Lisa which she had so long shared with Miles had made her incapable of seeing her sister as pre-eminently able to charm her husband.
Her appalled and frightened imagination could not now inhabit the alternative. Once the dreadful fear of Miles’s flight had become less it began to seem to her a far worse and a far more difficult thing to accept their sacrifice. It would have been better to be their victim. That at least would have justified and made endurable the extreme jealousy and resentment which she could not stop feeling, and which she felt undiminished and intensified as she now saw Miles frantic-eyed at Kempsford Gardens, pacing and shuddering inside the walls of the house like a creature in a cage. For her too the house, the garden, had become utterly changed, a prison, a desolation. He could not expect her to be grateful, even though he had in a sense behaved impeccably. That impeccable behaviour tormented her almost more than anything. The situation somehow demanded her gratitude in a way which humiliated her utterly. How had they spoken of her? She had tried not to watch them. They could have spent the days together outside the house while she, at home, sat waiting for their judgement upon her-“You can’t leave poor Diana.”
”Poor Diana would break her heart.”
”After all, she is your wife, Miles. She has nothing but you.”
”She is not strong, Lisa, and independent as you are.” How strangely she and Lisa had now changed places. Now it was Diana who was the bird with the broken wing who would ever after be trailing her feathers in the dust.