She put up her hand to her head.
It makes me feel quite bad, she said. I would have come in, but my head. I’m awfully sensitive, doctor. I just can’t stand it any more.
He’ll be up in a day or two. Then there won’t be anything to stand.
He took up his hat and went out into the garden, into the sun and the smell of earth that is very hot, and nettles in the sun. It licked up the smell of Mrs Moriarty, the powder caked in sweat, and he was glad, while feeling a twinge at the same time, because Moriarty there in bed, and I’m awfully sensitive, doctor, perhaps not emptying the wash-basin because of this, because an erotic blonde. There is something distinctly nauseating about love in its obese blonde aspect. Though Moriarty was not conscious of this, that wedding group over the bed, the gloves and the flowers and all the paraphernalia of a stiff photographic convention that was almost cynical in its confidence, placing a head here, turning a shoulder just an inch towards the bride. It’s very hard on poor Vic, he said. But she pitied herself enough for two.
He trod carefully in the dust to avoid a cloud, walked at the side of the road along a margin of dead grass, kicked a bottle shard, green and swimming in the sun. Mrs Moriarty molten with self-pity and sweat. But Alys Browne had come into the dispensary that day and he had despised her for the same reason before probing, but Mrs Moriarty was not Alys, even if to her husband, she was perhaps Alys, and Alys to him. He brushed a shoal of flies away from his face. Thinking about it again, he said, and her room so cool, why do I think of music, glistening in the chords a breeze. He must send medicine to Moriarty, though more, he could not give him more, he wanted to give him more, he wanted to give so many people the impossible through the existing wall that somehow the human personality seems to erect. Only she played Chopin and it crumbled to non-existent brick and they looked at each other, each time for the first, or looked at Moriarty for the first time, as if she had made it possible. I am not in love with Alys Browne, he said, and his foot, slurring the dust, sent it up in a fine cloud. I am not in love with Alys Browne. It is only a matter of gratitude for this fresh chord struck, with something universal in its tone, that penetrates isolation, even the farthest planet, lending significance to the hitherto insignificant. It is only this.
12
Alys Browne and Mrs Belper, the patterns scattered and the cutting scissors, were drinking tea in the sitting-room at the bank. Alys had gone down to help Mrs Belper run something up. That was the difference between Mrs Belper and the other people, Alys Browne went to Mrs Belper, whereas the others went to Alys Browne. Another difference was that Mrs Belper thereby got something off, an issue at first illogical, but consider the distinction of Running Up, I mean as apart from Making a Dress, and she always gave a slap-up tea and really it was only right. Not that Mrs Belper was mean, she practised what she called economies. So here they were having tea, in the sitting-room at the bank, with its encrustations of pokerwork and pervading smell of dog. Mrs Belper had a passion for dogs. There was always one in her lap, or one protruding from under her skirts, the little fox-terriers that she bred, or if she answered the front door there was always a screaming, and snarling, and gnashing of teeth from little flighty, spring-toed dogs and laborious bitches about to whelp, the pandemonium threaded through with Mrs Belper’s soothing voice, her there, there, Trixie, you know who it is, or, how nice to see you, Mrs-er, no, no, Box won’t bite, will you, Box, my lovely boy? So on the whole it is not surprising that the sitting-room, or even Mrs Belper herself, should be redolent of dogs. For she did smell of dogs, and nicotine, and she had a rich rasping cough, of which you were never certain how much was laughter and how much cough.
God bless my soul, said Mrs Belper, I’m sweating at every pore. Like a pig.
Mrs Belper is very unconventional, said Mrs Furlow once upon a time, unwilling to launch a suspicion that Mrs Belper was common, I ask you, using expressions like that. This was before she learnt about Mrs Belper’s cousin who was secretary at Government House, which made her decide that after all Mrs Belper was just a Good Sort. It did not worry Mrs Belper. Nothing annoyed her, except when other people refused to trumpet like herself, or somebody cast a disparaging eye at the pool that one of the puppies had made, as if they could help it, the lambs, she said. The Belpers’ house was like that, you had to tread warily on account of pools, and sometimes even worse.
Drink up, Alys, cried Mrs Belper. And you’re not eating a thing.
Alys Browne, sitting with her cup in her hand, removed from Mrs Belper, let her mind wander vaguely, wondered if he would come this afternoon, though of course it was not to be expected, coming the afternoon before, when she had played that polonaise that he said. And why was a polonaise in stripes, the pink and black and yellow stripes, unfolding like a roll of stuff. All that on the floor, and the pins. And he would come perhaps and find that she was out, could not be in always, and why should she be in? Elbow on knee, she leant forward suddenly and said:
I was wondering about flounces, Mrs Belper. How they’d look. Starting perhaps from the knee. And there could be little flounces at the shoulders too.
Walking up the path would hear no sound, open the door perhaps, sit down and wait in room, waiting, while…
Me in flounces? My dear girl!
Then Mrs Belper began to laugh. It was too good. The idea. So she had to laugh, rich and rasping from cigarettes, and her breasts stirred happily beneath the large-mesh silk jumper that she wore.
Cissie Belper in flounces! she laughed. Alys, you must be off your head. And what would Joe have to say to flounces? Oh dear, no, she said.
I once had a dress with flounces, said Alys, looking down into her cup, the leaves spread like a fortune for Mrs Stopford-Champernowne to tell. It was when I was at the convent, she said.
That’s all very well, said Mrs Belper. You in flounces and a convent. But that has nothing to do with me.
She continued to shake all over, spherical and convulsed, her hands working on her skirt or over the body of a little dog crouched in the hollow of her quaking lap.
You shouldn’t’ve left that convent, she said. You should have become a nun, Alys. But I don’t understand you, of course. Living up there all by yourself. You’d have done much better in a convent, even if it’s only hens. Because, I mean to say, well, company, and somebody else’s face. And they can’t have such a bad time there or they’d all come pouring out. Take my word, it’s the priests. They get all the entertainment, and there’s no talk of the tax.
From the convent in those blue afternoons you watched the bay, white with yachts, spread out like a book when reading, an illumination, or the Lily Maid upon a barge when Tennyson was always in your lap, and the wax face of Sister Mary cut in above the rustle of her skirt, made you think that perhaps after all you should have become a nun, even without vocation, as Mrs Belper said, and not look into teacups and wonder if in the leaves, but walk in the garden by the laurels, and the variegated laurel clump, with Sister Mary holding a hand, and it was evening, and the trams hung an unimportant apostrophe between the laurel clump and the lights. Perhaps I should have done all this, she said. I don’t know. Perhaps I shall never know.
That’s what you ought to have done, Mrs Belper said. We’ll never find you a husband here.
And if I don’t want a husband? said Alys.
Well, there’s not much chance of your going off the rails. No one even for that.
What’s all this? asked Mr Belper, coming in suddenly and clapping his wife on the back.