Gloria. Once more I wondered, as I wonder yet, why she had not come for me when I was at the gate-lodge. Even she would not be able to guess where I had landed up now, here with the Plomers and their Prince.
“Ah!” Freddie suddenly said, making the rest of us start, even Polly’s mother, who raised her eyebrows and blinked. He was looking at me, with what in him passed for animation. “I know who you are,” he said. “Forgive me, I’ve been trying to remember. You’re that painter, Oliver.”
“Orme,” I murmured. “Oliver is my first—”
“Yes yes, Orme, of course.”
He was tremendously pleased with himself to have remembered me at last, and slapped his hands flat on the table before him and leaned back, beaming.
Mr. Plomer cleared his throat, making a sort of extended rolling bass trill. “Mr. Orme,” he said, a trifle over-loudly, as if it were we who were hard of hearing, “is a great admirer of the poets.” He turned to me invitingly, as though to give me the floor. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Orme?”
What was I to say? — picture a helpless fish-mouth and a wildly swivelling eye. Pip, perhaps mistaking the slight tension of the moment for a wordless rebuke directed at her, began to wail.
“Polly needs changing,” Mrs. Plomer announced, gazing complacently at the red-faced infant.
“Oh, there there,” Mr. Plomer said, leaning across the table towards his granddaughter, baring his dentures in a desperate smile.
Extraordinary what a crying child can do to a room. It was like that moment in the ape-house when one of the big males sets up a howl, leaning forwards on his knuckles and turning his lips inside out, and all the animals in their cages round about begin to gibber and shriek. As Pip screamed on, we all, except Polly’s mother, did something, moved, or spoke, or lifted hands in helpless alarm. Even Janey appeared, popping into the doorway with a wooden spoon in her fist, like the goddess of chastisement made balefully manifest. Polly rose exasperatedly from her chair, surging up like some great fish, and fairly flung herself at the child and plucked her from the high-chair and dashed with her from the room. I, stumbling, trotted after, Jack to her Jill.
It has just struck me, who knows why, that old Freddie is probably younger than I am. This is a bit of a shock, I can tell you. The fact is, I keep forgetting how old I am; I’m not old-old, but neither am I the blithe youth I so often mistake myself for. What was I thinking of, at my age, to fall in love with Polly and make such a ruinous hash of everything? As well ask why I steal — stole, I mean — or why I stopped painting, or why, for that matter, I started in the first place. One does what one does, and blunders bleeding out of the china shop.
When I got into the hall Polly was nowhere to be seen. I tracked her, guided by the sound of the child’s wails, to a curious little cubby-hole connecting two much larger rooms. The tiny space was dominated by a pair of opposing white doors and, between them, a tall sash window looking out on to the lawn and the drive winding away in the direction of the front gates and the road. Under the window there was a padded bench seat, and here Polly sat, holding the babe on her knee. Mother and child were by now equally distressed, both of them crying, more or less forcefully, their faces flushed and swollen. Polly glared at me and gave a muffled cry of anguish and anger, her eyes shiny and awash and her mouth an open rectangle sagging at the side. One sees why Pablo, the brute, so often went out of his way to make them cry.
Polly, before I could get in a word, began to rail at me with a violence that even in the circumstances seemed to me uncalled-for. She started off by demanding why I had come here. I thought she meant here to Grange Hall, but when I protested that it was she who had insisted I take her home — her very words, remember? — she cut me off impatiently. “Not here!” she cried. “To the town, I mean! You could have lived anywhere, you could have stayed in that place, Aigues-whatever-it’s-called, with the flamingos and the white horses and all the rest of it, but no, you had to come back to us and ruin everything.”
In her agitation she was bouncing the child violently up and down on her knee, like a giant salt-cellar, so that the poor mite’s eyes were rolling in her head and her sobs were compressed into a series of gargles and burps. The sudden shadow of a cloud swooped across the window, but a moment later the pallid sunlight crept out again. No matter what else is going on, one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond.
“Polly,” I began, holding out suppliant hands to her, “dearest Polly—”
“Oh, shut up!” she almost shouted. “Don’t call me that, don’t call me dearest! It makes me sick.”
Little Pip, who had stopped crying, was fixed on me with moony intentness. All children have the artist’s dispassionate gaze; either that, or vice versa.
Now abruptly Polly’s tone changed. “What do you think of him?” she asked, in almost a chatty tone. I frowned; I was baffled. Who? “Mr. Hyland!” she snapped, with a toss of her head. “The Prince, as you call him!” I took a step backwards. I didn’t know what to say. Was there a catch in the question, was it a test of some kind? I progress through the world like a tightrope walker, though I seem always to be in the middle of the rope, where it’s at its slackest, its most elastic. “He’s very shy,” she said, “isn’t he?” Is he? “Yes,” she said, “he is,” glaring at me, as if I had contradicted her.
Outside, once more, the sunlight was doused with a soundless click, and yet again cautiously reasserted itself; far off, a line of bare, gesticulating trees leaned their branches slantwise in the wind.
Polly sighed. “What are we going to do?” she said, sounding not angry now but only vexed and impatient.
The child pressed her head against her mother’s breast and snuggled there possessively, casting back at me a spiteful, drowsy-eyed glance. I say it again, children know more than they know.
I asked Polly if she intended to go back to Marcus. The question was no sooner out than I knew I shouldn’t have asked it. Indeed, more than that: I knew before I asked it that I shouldn’t ask it. There is something or someone in me, a reckless sort of hobbledehoy, lurking in the interstices of what passes for my personality — what am I but a gatherum of will-less affects? — that must always poke a finger into the wasps’ nest. “Will I go back to him?” Polly said archly, as if it were a novel notion, one that had never occurred to her until now. She looked aside then, seeming more uncertain than anything else, and said she didn’t know; that she might; that anyway she doubted he would have her, and that even if he would, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be taken back, like damaged goods being returned to the shop where they had been bought. Evidently I figured nowhere in these considerations of hers. And why should I?
I felt tired, immeasurably tired, and Polly made room for me beside her on the seat and I sat down, leaning dully forwards with my hands on my knees and my eyes fixed vacantly on the floor. The child was asleep by now, and Polly rocked her back and forth, back and forth. The wind keened to itself in a chink in the window frame, a distant, immemorial voice. When the time arrives for me to die I want it to happen at a stilled moment like that, a fermata in the world’s melody, when everything comes to a pause, forgetting itself. How gently I should go then, dropping without a murmur into the void.
Why did I come back and ruin everything? she asked. What a question.
I heard footsteps approaching and sprang guiltily to my feet. Why guiltily? It’s a general condition. Little Pip, still huddled against Polly’s breast, stirred too and awoke. Yet another thing about children: you can fire off a revolver next to their ears and they’ll sleep on without a stir, but pocket the weapon and try tiptoeing out of the nursery and you’ll have them up yelling and waving like shipwrecked sailors. Pip had particularly sharp hearing, as I learned on the one disastrous occasion when Polly brought her to the studio and tried to get her to sleep while we made furtive love on the sofa. She did sleep, curled in a splash of sunlight on a nest of paint-encrusted dust-sheets, until Polly, eyelids aflutter and her throat pulsing, let escape the tiniest, helpless squeak, and I peered over my shoulder to see the child sit up abruptly, as if jerked by a string, to stare in solemn-eyed amazement at the single, naked, monstrously entangled creature into which her mummy and her mummy’s naughty friend had somehow been transformed.