I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had been to the studio, and it gave me an odd feeling to see her there now. She was wearing a big coat made of white wool. I dislike that coat: it has a deep collar, like an upside-down lampshade, inside which her head sits very high, as if it had been severed bloodlessly at the neck. She was regarding me coolly, still with a smile of amused reproach that was hardly more than a notch at one corner of her mouth. Well, I must have been a sorry sight.
“Are you growing a beard?” she asked.
“No,” I answered, “I’m growing stubble.” The bristles, I had noticed, with a shiver, in the mirror that morning, were strewn with silver.
“You look like a tramp.”
I said I felt like a tramp. She considered me in silence, rotating one foot in a half-circle on the point of its shoe’s high heel. I recalled the empty brandy bottle Marcus had dropped on the floor. What had become of it? I couldn’t remember having picked it up. What a strange, furtive life it is that random objects lead.
“Perry has been calling again,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at me in merry spite. “He’s threatening to come over.”
Perry Percival, my dealer, former dealer. I am convinced she summoned him, just to annoy me. Though Perry does have a habit of turning up out of the blue — literally, since he flies his own aeroplane, a dinky little craft, nimble and swift, with a silver fuselage and the tips of the propellers painted red. If she did call on him, what did she expect him to do, be a sort of flying stand-in for my wingèd muse? She thinks my inability to paint is a pretence, a piece of irresponsible self-indulgence. I should never have married a younger woman. It didn’t matter, at first, but increasingly it does. That dismissive briskness of hers, it can’t be borne at my age.
Soft rain was falling on the glass above our heads. I’m fond of that kind of rain. I pity it, in my sentimental way; it seems to be trying so hard to say something and always just failing.
Gloria took a slim silver case from the pocket of her coat, thumbed it open with a click, selected a cigarette, and lit it with her little gold lighter. She’s such a wonderfully old-fashioned creature, both chilly and warm, like one of those vamps in the old movies.
I was very much in need of a drink, and thought again with mournful longing of that emptied brandy bottle.
Gloria has a way, when she lights a cigarette, of drawing in the smoke very quickly between her teeth, making a sharp sound that might be a little gasp of pain. The last time we had spoken, though it could hardly be called speaking, was the day when she telephoned me at the gate-lodge. Had she talked to Marcus in the meantime? Of course she had. I didn’t care. Is there in other people too an inner, barren plain, an Empty Quarter, where cold indifference reigns? I sometimes think this region is, in me, the seat of what is popularly called the heart.
Marcus would have told her everything. I could almost hear her saying it, letting it swell in her throat and giving it a histrionic throb. He told me everything.
She turned and strolled across to the table and began picking things up and putting them down again, a brush hardened with old paint, a tube of zinc white, a little glass mouse. Watching her, I saw all at once, distantly but distinctly, as it is said patients sometimes see themselves on the operating table, the true measure of the mayhem I had caused, saw it all in all its awfulness, the operation gone fatally wrong, the surgeon swearing and the nurse in tears, and I floating up there under the ceiling, with my arms folded and my ankles crossed, surveying the shambles below and unable to feel a thing. General anaesthesia, that’s the state I’ve always aimed to live in.
I asked her if she was all right. At this she dilated her already large blue eyes.
“What do you mean, am I all right?”
“Just that. I haven’t seen you for a while.”
Now she snorted. “A while!” Her voice was not quite steady.
“Gloria,” I said.
“What?” She glared at me, then crushed the last of her cigarette on one of my paint-encrusted palettes, nodding angrily, as if she had succeeded in confirming something to herself, at last.
I said I wanted to come home. It was only when I was saying it that I knew it was the case, as it had been all along. Home. Oh, my Lord!
—
So it was as simple as that: me, tail between legs, back in the dog-house. It seemed I had hardly been away. Or, no, that’s not quite true; in fact, it’s not true at all, I don’t know why I said it. Years ago, when we were living in Cedar Street, Gloria and I were motoring back one afternoon from somewhere down the country and got caught in a freak summer storm, the tail-end of a hurricane that against all the forecasts had come whipping in from the Atlantic, knocking things down and causing havoc on the roads. There were floods and felled trees, and we were forced to make four or five complicated detours that added hours to the journey. When at last we got home we were in a state of trembling exhilaration, like children at the end of an unsupervised and gloriously disorderly birthday party. The house, too, although it had suffered nothing more than a couple of broken slates, had a tousled, dizzied air, as if it, like us, had been out in the storm, battling through wind and rain, and, though it had gained once more the shelter of itself, would never be quite the same again, after its wild adventure. That’s how Fairmount seemed, when Gloria brought me home, at the close of my brief but tempestuous frolic.
We settled down as best we could, not, as I say, to life as it had been before, but to something that to a stranger’s eye would have looked very like it. I kept indoors. I saw nothing of Polly, of course, and certainly not of Marcus, and heard nothing from them. Their names weren’t mentioned in the house. I thought of the Prince and his poetry and the fragment of it that Polly’s father had recited. World, invisible! I felt that something had been imparted, that something had been delivered specially to me. Wasn’t that what I had struggled towards always, wasn’t that the mad project I had devoted my life to, the invisibling of the world?
After leaving it I stayed away altogether from the studio, for reasons that were not as obvious as may seem.
Presently there appeared, as threatened, the unavoidable Perry Percival. He landed his plane out by the estuary, on the disused famine road that the farmer who owns the fields round about, thinking to make his fortune, had transformed into a makeshift airstrip in the days when everybody was still flying. It was a blustery morning and the little machine buzzed down out of a lead-blue cloud bucking and swaying, the tips of its propellers flashing lipstick-red in the pallid sunlight, then settled as delicately as a moth, ran on gaily for some way, and bumped to a stop. Gloria and I were waiting in the shelter of the wooden hangar that used to be a barn. Perry, with his leather helmet in his hand, descended daintily from the cockpit. Farmer Wright’s two under-sized sons, in cardboard-coloured boiler-suits, one of them trailing a set of chocks, scuttled out to the plane and began swarming all over it, checking and tapping. Perry, a compact chrysalis, was peeling off his airman’s overalls as he tripped his way towards us, revealing in stages, from top to bottom, as if by an act of conjuring, his short, plump, immaculately suited self in all its burnished, dove-grey glory. I’m certain that in the depths of Hell, where he and I shall most likely end up together, Perry will manage to find a decent tailor. He wore a blue silk shirt and an electric-blue silk tie. I noticed his shoes of dark suede; he could have done with a lend of Freddie Hyland’s galoshes.
He called out a greeting, and came up and kissed Gloria quickly, rising on tiptoe to do it. For me he had only a deprecating frown, by which I knew Gloria must have told him all about my latest escapades. “I have”—he drew back a cuff and consulted a watch that was almost as big as his hand—“some hours. I’m due in Paris at eight, to dine with — well, never mind who with.” It is Perry’s policy to be always on the way to somewhere else, a place much more important than here. Every time I see him I’m impressed anew by the show of lofty magnificence he affects. He is ageless, and very short, with stubby arms and legs, like mine only even shorter, and a paunch in the shape of a good-sized Easter egg sliced in half lengthways. He has a disproportionately large head, which might have been fashioned from pounds and pounds of well-worked putty, and a large, smooth face, slightly livid and always with a moist, greyish sheen. His eyes are palely protuberant, and when he blinks the lids come down with a snap, like a pair of moulded metal flanges. His manner is brisk to the point of crossness, and he treats everything he encounters as if it were a hindrance. I’m fond of him in principle, although he never fails to vex me.