Us? Did she mean the two of us, her and me? It seemed not; it seemed decidedly not. Terror twanged in me like a gut string jerked tight. I said I didn’t know what she meant. I said I had gone for a walk — she had seen me going out at the front door, after all. I told her of my encounter, if encounter it really was, with the strange caravan of dark-skinned folk, and of how Freddie Hyland had come along and in his princely way had offered me a lift, and how I had thought to take the opportunity to pop into the studio here and check that all was—
She sprang at me. “Where is it?” she demanded, in a very loud voice, almost shouting in my face, and a speck of her saliva landed on my wrist; surprising how quickly spit cools, once it’s out.
“What?” I responded, a frightened quack. “Where is what?”
“You know very well what. The book — his book. The book of poems by what’s-his-name. Where is it?”
I said again that I didn’t know what she meant, that I had no idea of what she was talking about. My voice now had become light and tearful and sort of tottery, the voice in which the guilty always protest their blamelessness. There followed the inevitable back-and-forth music-hall routine of accusation and denial. I blustered and fussed, but in the end she refused to listen to any more of my bleatings, and shook her head and held up a hand to silence me, with her eyes lightly closed and her eyebrows lifted.
“You took it,” she said. “I know you did. Now give it back.”
Oh, dear. Oh, double dear. My life, it often seems to me, is a matter not of forward movement, as in time it must be, but of constant retreat. I see myself driven backwards by a throng of furiously shaking fists, my lip bleeding and my coat torn, stumbling over broken paving and whimpering piteously. Yet in this instance what impressed me most, I think, was not Polly’s rage, and outrage, impressive as they were, but the simple, plain dislike she was displaying towards me, the lip-curling distaste she seemingly felt at merely being in my presence. She had a withdrawing look, as of a person shrinking away from something unclean. This was new; this was wholly new.
“Come on, give it to me,” she said, in the tone of a tough policeman, putting out her hand with palm upturned. “I know you have it.”
Yes, I could see she did, and I felt something contracting inside me to the size and wrinkly texture of a not quite deflated party balloon.
“How do you know?” I asked, old rodent that I was, looking for a crack to escape through.
“Pip told me. She saw you take it.”
“What do you mean, Pip?” I cried. “She can’t even talk!”
“She can, to me.”
I was all in a muddle by now. Had the child really seen me take the book, had she really managed to betray me? If she had, and I must believe it, or accept it, at least, then the game was up. I reached under my oilskin coat and fumbled the book out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her. “I was only borrowing it,” I said, in a whine, sounding like a sulky little boy caught pilfering the gifts at a birthday party.
“Ha!” she said, with angry disdain. “Like you borrowed all the other things, I suppose?”
I peered at her. My heart was going now at a syncopated patter. “All what other things?”
“All the things you’ve taken from all of us!” She snorted, throwing back her head. “You think we don’t know about your stealing? You think we’re all blind, and fools, into the bargain?” She opened the book and riffled through the pages. “You don’t even speak German, do you?” she said, shaking her head in bitter sadness.
So here it was at last, the reckoning, and all so unexpected. As far as I knew, I had never been caught in the act before, never in all my years as a thief. Gloria, I had supposed, would have her suspicions — there’s not much one can keep from a wife — but I believed she had never actually witnessed me pinching something, and even if she had it wouldn’t have counted, somehow. But that I should have been found out by Polly, that indeed she should have known all along about my thieving, that was a great shock and humiliation, though humiliation and shock are inadequate terms in which to describe my state. I seemed to have suffered a physical attack; it was as if a stick had been stuck into my innards and waggled violently about, and I thought for a second I might be sick on the spot. Something had been taken from me; now I was the one who had lost something secret and precious. The little crimson-covered volume, that in my pocket had throbbed with a dark, erotic fullness, had become, as I handed it over to her, inert and exhausted, another sad little leaking balloon.
One thing I think I can safely say: I shall not steal again.
And yet there was more — yes, more! — for Polly herself had suffered another, a final, transformation in my eyes. There she stood, in that big rough coat, wearing no make-up, her hair misshapen from the beret, her calves bare and her feet planted flat on the floor, and she might have been, I don’t know, something carven, a figure at the base of a totem pole, a tribal effigy that no one venerated any more. As a deity, the deity of my desiring, she had been perfectly comprehensible, my very own little Venus reclining in the crook of my arm; now, as what she really was, herself and nothing more, a human creature made of flesh and blood and bone, she was terrifying. But what terrified me was not her anger, the recriminations she was hurling at me, the lip curled in contempt. What I felt most strongly from her now was plain indifference. And at that, finally, finally of finallys, I knew she was gone from me for good.
Gone for good? Gone for bad.
That, then, was the end, if one may speak of an ending, given the unbreakable continuum that is the world. Oh, inevitably it went on for some time, there in the studio, the redoubled outbursts of anger and the floods of tears, the accusations and denials, the how-could-you’s and how-can-I’s, the don’t-touch-me’s and don’t-you-dare’s, the cries of anguish, the stammered apologies. But underneath it all, I could see, she cared for none of it, and was going through it only for form’s sake, fulfilling the necessary ritual. And to think how lofty was the regard she used to hold me in! She thought I was a god, once, she said so, remember? When she saw me first, in Marcus’s workshop that day when I brought in my father’s watch for repair — it’s here on the table before me now, ticking away accusingly — she went to the library, she told me afterwards, and took out a book on my work — Morden’s monograph, I imagine, a paltry thing, for all its earnest bulk — and sat with it open on her lap by the window in her parlour, running her fingers over the reproductions, imagining that the surface of the cool glossy paper was me, was my skin. “Have you any idea what a fool I feel,” she asked now, mildly, wearily, “admitting such a thing?” I hung my head and said nothing. “And all the time you were just a thief,” she said, “a thief, and you never loved me.” Still I held my peace. Sometimes it’s an indecency to speak, even I acknowledge that.
The lamp-light shone on the floor at our feet, the star-light shone in the window above our heads. Night and night-wind and flitters of cloud. A very storm, outdoors and in. O world, O worlding world, and so much of it lost to me, now.
When at length Polly ran out of things to say, and with a last rueful shake of the head turned towards the door, I flew into a belated sort of panic and tried to stop her going. She paused for the briefest moment and looked at my hand on her arm with mild distaste, aloof as a stage heroine, then stepped away from me and walked out. I stood in a dither, my heart aflutter and my blood racing. I felt like one who, strolling along the harbour’s edge at twilight, has taken it into his head to leap at the last moment on to the deck of a departing ship, and stands now in the stern, watching in giddy disbelief as the known country steadily recedes, its roofs and spires, its winding roads, its smooth cliffs and sandy margins, all growing small, and faint, and fainter, in the fading light of evening, while behind him, in the far sky, malignant blue-black clouds roll and roil.