—
LATER, HE POURED them both glasses of whisky, hers well diluted in deference to the hour. She lay on the pillow, looking up at him, her eyes in this half-light unreadable tunnels of darkness. He reached for his cigarettes and offered to light one for her, but she waved it away.
“Did you know this was going to happen?” She sounded faintly accusing.
“No, I just thought we deserved a drink after last night. That poor child.”
They were silent a moment, thinking back. But that was yesterday and the pressure of their lives, the exhaustion, the nightly raids, meant they’d already started to move on. An apparent callousness very familiar to him from the last war, but he thought it would be new to her, and disturbing.
“Did you know about Paul?” he asked.
“And that girl? No. I think I was probably the last person to know.”
“I wouldn’t have told you.”
“No, I know. Men stick together, don’t they? The Boys’ Brigade.”
“That isn’t why.”
“Nobody told me; I saw them leaving his studio, having obviously both spent the night there. I just wish somebody had told me; it wouldn’t have been so much of a shock. It’s one of the worst things, knowing everybody knew except me.” She pulled herself up until she was leaning against the headboard. “I think I will have that cigarette.”
He lit it for her and handed it across. Her eyes closed as she inhaled. “You know what Paul said? He said it didn’t matter. She wasn’t important.” A snort of derision. “Why do men think that makes it better? It doesn’t; it makes it worse.”
“Has it happened before? I mean, him—?”
“Once. We-ell, once that I know about. One of his students. He was going through a bad patch with his painting, and of course she thought everything he did was absolutely wonderful. Well, I think a lot of what Paul does is wonderful, but you see, I know. And he knows I know.” She pulled a face. “Not the same, is it? Her admiration was — Oh, I don’t know…reassuringly automatic.”
“But you took him back?”
“He never left — she didn’t matter either. The minute I found out, he dropped her. You know, the first time he asked me to marry him, I said no—”
“Yes, well, you were good at that.”
“He said it was probably just as well because he wouldn’t have been faithful.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I believed him. I don’t think I did; I can’t remember.”
Neville was wondering what the last hour in bed had meant to her — if anything. A chance to get back at Paul? They seemed to have been talking about him ever since. “So, do you think you’ll get back together again?”
“No.” She looked steadily at him. “No.”
He drew on his cigarette, creating a small red planet that hovered in the gloom. “Everybody’s doing it, Elinor.” He couldn’t think why he’d said that. Why would he want to excuse Paul’s behavior when her hurt and anger had been so delightfully convenient for him?
“Oh, don’t worry, I know. It’s like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, isn’t it, everybody getting mixed up, swapping partners?” She laughed. “Goering as Puck — now there’s a thought. In tights.”
“Only they woke up, didn’t they?” He waited. “Is that what’s going to happen, do you think? We wake up?”
“Who knows what’s going to happen?”
She swung her legs to the side of the bed, leaned forward to reach for her wrap, and he thought — the artist’s eye unexpectedly reasserting itself — that the human spine was one of the most remarkable sights on earth.
“When can I see you again?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to the cottage this weekend, I might stay a few days — I really do need to get some work done.”
“When you get back, then?”
A barely perceptible hesitation, then she nodded. He felt she was waiting for him to go. He’d just got to his feet and was reaching for his trousers when the doorbell rang, and rang again. She crossed to the window and pulled the blackout curtain to one side. “Oh my God, it’s Paul.”
His heart thumped. “You don’t have to let him in.”
“I’m afraid the nurses already have. They’re on the ground floor, they let everybody in. I keep telling them.” She turned to face him. “Look, you stay in here, I’ll get rid of him.”
“Can’t you pretend you’re not in?”
“I think he just saw me.”
A minute later, he heard Paul’s voice at the door of the flat. He started to get dressed, pulling on his trousers, snapping his braces into place, fumbling with socks and the laces of his boots, feeling all the time like a character in a farce. Elinor, who seemed to be talking to Paul in the living room now, sounded cool, confident, amused — not like anybody he’d ever met. Dressed, he sat on the side of the bed, his hands loosely clasped between his knees, feeling humiliated and resentful. Why was he being made to feel like a stage adulterer? It wasn’t meant to be like this. The voices went on and on at a low murmur; he couldn’t hear the words. Would Paul ever go? But he was beginning to feel slightly less alarmed. After all, there was no reason for Paul to come in here; all he had to do was keep quiet and wait. He tiptoed across and listened at the door: something about the house, photographs, a package Paul had rescued. But the voices were still very low, hardly more than whispers. They must be sitting side by side on the sofa. Well, why not? They were married, after all. He felt sad, old, fat, disillusioned — and very much alone.
At last, sounds of movement from the other side of the door. For one horrible moment, he thought he heard footsteps coming towards him. They were. He put his hands flat on the door, feeling Paul on the other side, inches away, but then Elinor said something, a floorboard creaked, and Paul moved away.
A few seconds later, Elinor’s voice called “Good-bye” from the top of the stairs. Neville could breathe normally at last, though it took a while for his heart to slow down. He wiped his palms on the front of his trousers.
Elinor came into the room, pale but composed.
“What did he want?”
“Oh, nothing, he just brought me these.” She was holding a brown envelope from which she pulled out a sheaf of photographs. The top one had been taken on a picnic, one of the annual outings the Slade had arranged for its students; he saw himself sitting beside Elinor, surrounded by faces he recognized, Henry Tonks’s skeletal form visible in the back row. He had no memory of the occasion, but there they all were.
He wished he hadn’t seen it. Elinor grimaced and put the envelope down on her dressing table. “He keeps bringing me things; it’s very good of him, really — it can’t be easy — but…Oh, I don’t know, sometimes I think he’s returning our married life to me in installments.” She smiled, as if to soften the bitterness. “I don’t think we should go on drinking, do you? I’ll put the kettle on.”
While she was busy in the kitchen, he combed his hair, straightened his tie, looked around for something to do, something to postpone the moment when he would have to think. He noticed a couple of paintings stacked against the wall — presumably another of Paul’s “installments.” Kneeling down, he turned the nearer painting round to face him.
Paul. A full-length nude study; shocking, as nude portraits tend to be. How very much too thin he was, that was Neville’s first reaction. The elongated arms and legs hardly seemed to belong with the slightly rounded, middle-aged belly and the scrotum’s sweaty sag. Kit’s gaze roamed all over the body before settling on the face, the eyes. He forgot, sometimes, how good Elinor was, but he was reminded of it now. Paul was here in the room. And had been all along, staring out of the canvas while they thrashed and heaved on the bed. Nonsense, of course. Absolute nonsense, of course he hadn’t. But the sense of Paul’s presence in the room with them remained. He couldn’t talk himself out of it and it disturbed him so deeply and at so many different levels that in the end he just wanted to get away and be alone.