“I knew it the first time I met her. What does Malory say? ‘A fair lady and a passynge wise’. But I never said a word. I was true to Arthur.”
“But you couldn’t stay true.”
“There came that night when we were talking about disguise, and I said that the beholder in very strong situations is a partner in the deception. He wills his own belief to agree with the desire of the deceiver. And Maria was scornful of that. Which surprised me, because she is so learned in medieval things, and surely has enough sense to understand that what underlay so much medieval belief is still alive in our minds today, and only waits for the word, or the situation, to wake it up and set it to work. That is often how we fall into these archetypal involvements, that don’t seem to make any sense on the surface of things, but make irresistible, compelling sense in the world below the surface. Didn’t Maria know that? I couldn’t think otherwise for a minute.”
“Well—you may have a point there.”
“And so there came that night when Arthur was away, and I had dinner with Maria and we worked till midnight at business details; contracts and agreements and orders for materials and all the complexity of stuff that is involved in a job like getting this opera on the stage. Not a word did we say that Arthur could not have heard. But from time to time I felt her looking at me, and I knew that look. But I never looked back. Not once. If I had, I think that would have been the end of it, because Maria would have understood what was happening, and she would have checked it in herself, and in me, too, of course.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“It was when I went to bed that I found I could not forget those looks, and I could not forget the laughing, rational Maria who had made fun of my theory of disguise. There I lay in bed, remembering those looks. So—I slipped into Arthur’s room, and pinched his dressing-gown, which was that very Arthurian thing Maria had made for him, when they were newly married and were still joking about the Round Table, and the Platter of Plenty and all that, and I put it on over my nakedness, and stole barefoot into Maria’s room, and there she was, asleep or almost asleep. A vision, Sim: a vision. And I demonstrated that my theory was true.”
“Did you? Could you swear she thought you were Arthur?”
“How do I know what she thought? But she didn’t resist. Was she under a delusion? I know I was. I was deep in such a tale as Malory might have told. It was an enchantment, a spell.”
“Now, just a minute, Geraint. That wasn’t Arthur’s Queen, that was Elaine Lancelot visited in that way.”
“Don’t quibble. As a situation it was pure Malory.”
“She must have known your voice.”
“Oh, Sim, what an innocent you are! We did not speak a word. No words were wanted.”
“Well, I’m damned.”
“No, Sim, you are not damned. But I think I am damned. This was more than adultery. I was a thief in the night—a thief of honour. It was breaking faith with a friend.”
“With two friends, surely?”
“I don’t think so. With one friend. With Arthur.”
“You put Arthur before Maria, whom you seduced?”
“I know that I deceived Arthur. I can’t say if I deceived Maria.”
“Well, whatever the fine points are, Maria is going to have a child, and it’s certainly yours. Did you know that?”
“I know. Arthur told me. He wept, Sim, and every tear was like blood from my heart. That’s something I can never forget. I wish I were dead.”
“Geraint, that’s self-indulgent rubbish! You’re not going to die, and Maria is going to have your child, and Arthur will have to find some way of swallowing the pill.”
“You see it from the outside.”
“Of course. I am on the outside, but I was a friend of Arthur and Maria before you were, and I shall have to do anything I can to make things work.”
“Don’t you think of yourself as a friend of mine, Sim? Don’t I need you at least as much as the other two? Me, the flesh-imprisoned man?”
“Stop blethering about the flesh as if it were the Devil himself!”
“What else is it? The Enemy of God, the Poison of Man, the livery of hell, the image of the animal, the Sinner’s Beloved, the Hypocrite’s refuge, the Spider’s Web, the Merchant of Souls, the home of the lost, and the demon’s dunghill.”
“My God, is that what you think?”
“That is what my father thought. I remember him thundering those words from the pulpit. He was quoting one of our Welsh poet-divines, the great Morgan Llwyd. Isn’t it lovely, Sim? Could you put it better?” Powell, whose normal voice was impressive, had risen to a Miltonic resonance and grandeur, declaiming with bardic vehemence; the man in the neighbouring, concealed bed was cheering at the top of his voice. The Hatters had won! Won by a last-minute exploit of the redoubtable Donniker!
A small nurse, big with authority and anger, burst into the room.
“What’s going on in here? Have you people gone crazy? Everybody on the corridor is complaining. We’ve got some very sick people on this floor, if you don’t know it. You’ll have to go.”
She took Darcourt by the arm, as he was the only able-bodied rowdy, and pushed him firmly toward the door. In his astonishment and confusion at the goings-on of Geraint, he had no resistance, and allowed himself to be, in a moderate use of the term, thrown out.
7
Darcourt was looking forward to his Christmas holiday. The doings of the autumn had worn him out, or so he thought. It was true that the mess of Arthur, Maria, and Powell drew heavily on his spiritual resources; although he was not at the centre of the affair, it seemed that he was expected to be confidant and adviser to all three, and that meant that he had to listen to them, give them advice—and then listen again while they rejected it. Of the three, Maria was the least troublesome. Her course was clear; she was going to have a baby, but for a woman of brains, highly educated and with a background sufficiently unusual to put her above bourgeois conventionalities, she was making heavy weather of it, and had decided that she had wronged Arthur irreparably. Arthur was being magnanimous; he had taken upon himself the role of The Magnanimous Cuckold and was acting it to the hilt. Magnanimity can be extremely vexatious to the bystanders, for it forces them into secondary roles that are not much fun to play. Powell was enjoying himself, finding new rhetorical ways of expressing his sense of guilt, and trying them out on his friend Simon whenever he visited the hospital.
It would all have been so much simpler if all three had not been utterly sincere. They were sure they meant everything they said—even Powell, who said so much, and said it so gaudily, and enjoyed saying it. If they had been fools, Darcourt could have told them so and called them to order. But they were not fools; they were people who found themselves in a tangle from which they could not escape and for which their superficial modernity of opinion offered no solace. Modern opinion stood no chance against the clamour of voices from—from where? From the past, it seemed. Darcourt did his best and poured out comfort as well as he could.
His chief difficulty was that he did not, himself, place much value on comfort. He regarded it as the sugar-teat stupid mothers pop into the mouth of the crying baby. He wished his friends would use their heads, but was well aware that their trouble was not one for which the head offers much relief; it insists on testing the aching tooth to see if it hurts as much as it did yesterday. Because he mistrusted comfort, he could only recommend endurance, and was told, in a variety of disagreeable ways, that it was easy to tell other people to endure. Ah, well, I’m their punching-bag, he thought. They are lucky to have a good, reliable punching-bag.
His own luck was that he was able to put aside his punching-bag character and rejoice in his role as triumphant artistic detective and potentially successful biographer. He wrote to Princess Amalie and her husband, and said that he had some new light to throw on their wonderful picture. Their reply was cautious. They wanted to know what he knew, and he wrote again, offering to explain everything when he had all his material in order. They were courteous but guarded, as people are likely to be when somebody offers to throw new light on a valuable family possession. Meanwhile he was marshalling his evidence, for, although he was sure what it meant, he had to make it convincing to people who might take it badly.