The first time I saw this woman clearly, I mean without being dazed with drugs myself, I was struck by her rather hideous beauty. She could not have been much older than Dorothy and I had firsthand knowledge of the slender youthfulness of her body; but her face was a field of ruins. I have never again seen such a face and I trembled at the idea that it prefigured what Dorothy would look like in a few years’ time. Not that the wrinkles that lined it were particularly deep, but they were flabby and shifting. As if a colony of worms had settled under the mortified skin. She was called Viola. I presume, from her Southern accent, that she came from Malta, Cyprus or Egypt. Perhaps she was a Copt. She worked in a film studio and came home around teatime, when Dorothy would make tea between two doses of the drug.
When we met again in a more or less normal state, she gave me a look of connivance above her full cup, a salacious wink which would have been enough to make me understand, had I not guessed it already, that I was a mere extra, an instrument of pleasure, that she tolerated my presence near Dorothy for this reason only, just as she must have tolerated a good many other lovers before me. The overheavy teapot having almost slipped out of Dorothy’s hands, I caught it by its long, banana-shaped spout.
“Fie, fie,” said Viola, with a ribald smirk, “what manners!” And stroking my cheek, she added: “But if that’s what you fancy, we’ll get you suited-the more, the merrier.” Whereupon Dorothy gave a nervous burst of laughter and tousled my hair.
Had I been in a completely normal state I believe that so much vulgarity and Dorothy’s laughter would have promptly driven me out of that room forever. But the powder box was, as usual, lying about on the table like a simple salt cellar, and indeed everybody helped himself almost absent-mindedly, as if to a pinch of salt, thus sustaining a blissful torpor in anticipation of more violent exploits. So that I too, I am afraid, gave a cowardly snicker in answer to Viola’s obscenities, and the one I have reported is just a specimen. All the same, her filth left an indelibly nauseous imprint on my mind, and heightened my disgust. Whereas Dorothy’s spineless submissiveness, the same no doubt that she had shown to her infamous husband, and for similar reasons, gradually made me lose all hope of ever being able to wrest her away. Perhaps it made me also lose all desire for her-and well before I even realized it.
In point of fact, I believe I soon realized (though maybe only confusedly at first) that the choice was no longer the one I had foreseen. It no longer lay in the pressing alternative of saving Dorothy or abandoning her, but in the no less pressing one of abandoning her or being shipwrecked with her. I continue to think, though, that she loved me-with the love of a praying mantis; only she too realized very soon that I would prove recalcitrant and not allow her to suck my brains. At all events, the frenzied ardor she showed in those first days, when I did not resist the drive to drag me down, was lazily abandoned as soon as she felt me draw back-or at least so I imagined. Why else did she begin to treat me with sly indignity-if the term still means anything in this context?
I well remember the last slights. Returning from one of the brief strolls I took to ventilate my mind as well as my lungs, like a frog coming up for air, I found the door closed. I mounted the stairs and there indeed were the two women, almost comatose, gorged with drugs. Dorothy raised a languid hand to show the powder box, clearly meaning: “Help yourself if you care to.” She could not have informed me more openly that I was merely being tolerated.
I left them and stayed away for two days. Dorothy called me upon the second evening. “What’s the matter? Please come!” When I arrived, she wept. It was a spark of hope and I thought my time had come. I implored her to leave this room, this house, and settle at the hotel with me. She did not answer but her tears had dried. She threw herself back on the bed and remained motionless for a long time, looking up at the ceiling. I did not speak either. I was waiting. At last she murmured, still without moving, “Come back tomorrow.” I left the room wordlessly and she let me go.
The next day was a Sunday. When I walked into the room, the other woman was there. I turned on my heels, but she caught my arm, made me sit down by force. “Come on! Come on!” she said, sitting down opposite me. “Let’s have it out.”
Dorothy was sprawling on an armchair, munching her Turkish delight. She avoided my eyes.
For a few seconds, Viola observed each of us in turn, her eyes screwed up ironically. “Well?” she said. “A lover’s quarrel?” She must have seen me stiffen and went on in a less mocking tone: “Why do you complicate things? We were getting on so well, the three of us. Wouldn’t I have more reason than you to show jealousy? Everything would be all right if you’d do your bit. But don’t imagine that I’ll ever give up this adorable kitten-to anyone. You may as well give up hope. She is attached to me, and faithful too, like a kitten. Aren’t you, my little puss?” She held out one arm and Dorothy, letting herself slide down from the armchair, came and squatted at her knees, laid her cheek on one thigh, and from there gazed at me with placid eyes.
That is the last picture I have of Dorothy. More than all her slow, vile self-abasement, that spineless look of bestial cowardice confirmed that the battle was lost. Her father had told me, “The worst of it is that she seems happy.” Perhaps it wasn’t the right word. Rather than happy, I would say that she had contentedly sunk into a peaceful abdication, a definite renunciation of what little human freedom she had conserved until that day.
An hour later I was on the train taking me back to Wardley Station.
Chapter 29
I HAD opened a book but I was not reading. Through the carriage window I watched the English countryside pass by. How lovely it can be in September! The pastures are green again and have the mellow softness of velvet. The ancient oaks, standing all alone in the middle of the fields like tortured sentinels, are only just beginning to turn brown, while the birches on the banks of soft-spoken brooks are already blazing with a million gold coins stirred by the wind. I had lowered the window a little so that I too might be lashed by the cold air, and I felt the process of rebirth. Viola and Dorothy, the padded room, all the sensual details of the past days-how quickly it all receded! A bad dream. The good thing about a nightmare is the awakening and its concurrent lighthearted feeling. And best of all was my joyous impatience to see Sylva again.
For now I knew, I knew that I was justified, that I was right to love her. I kept repeating to myself, with gladness, the truth that had flashed upon me once before but which I had later tried to forget: the dazzling intuition that the quality of a soul is not measured by what it is but by what it becomes. I amused myself by applying this new yardstick to my fellow travelers in order to check its accuracy. First that child sitting opposite me. Yes, where does it spring from, this poignant interest we take in childhood, even the tenderest one, if not from the mysterious future it bears within itself, from which we expect so much hidden wealth? Why would I otherwise show such benevolent curiosity for the stupid puerile pranks of that little boy in his school cap with the fading colors of King’s Lynn College, who doesn’t stop fidgeting, kicks my shin every now and then and keeps sniffling all the time? What he is is still an uncouth harum-scarum, a handful of scrubby ignorance. But what he will become-what promise! Whereas his grandfather, next to him, absorbed in his study of The Times, his head no doubt stuffed with noble thoughts and all sorts of knowledge, has stopped “becoming.” He is forever what he is today, congealed in his past-present until his death.
Yes, isn’t that the true curse of old age, that it is this petrifying fountain? From which only a few genuises escape-a Moses, a Leonardo? And how many men, alas, though still young and full of strength, have already reached the same point? Solidified, sclerosed-when they have not slowly been reduced to less than themselves by the drugged lethargy of habit? That chap in the corner, for instance. His briefcase announces his activeness in the world, but his torpid, indifferent eyes, flaccid lips and sagging jaw confess that his soul stagnates at a low altitude. Plainly there is little chance that it will ever rise any higher. He may, for all I know, be a good father, a good husband, a good citizen: is he a man at all? Yes, but made of wax-a dummy.