‘Can I be—’ The last word was not spoken.
‘Can’t he, Emmanuel?’
‘Ah, mais non, alors!’ exclaimed Uncle Emmanuel, in tones of outraged military propriety.
‘Strange! These people at the War Office understand nothing!’
The wedding had been fixed provisionally for April the 13th, but Aunt Teresa seemed sad, reluctant, and avoided all discussion tending towards any definite decision on this point. ‘You never think of me, you never think of your poor ailing Aunt Teresa,’ she complained, insinuating that my impending theft of her one remaining child was hard on her.
‘I do. I always think of you, ma tante. I think: “Lord, how lucky for her to have such a splendid nephew!” ’
My aunt did not behave as though she thought this was a superlatively brilliant joke; and, on second thoughts, I was inclined to agree with her that it wasn’t.
‘Naughty! Naughty!’ Natàsha said, after a pause, shaking her finger at me. ‘Naughty!’
‘Georgie-Porgie, pudding and pie,’ said my aunt.
‘Georgie-Porgie,’ she laughed her bubbling laughter: ‘Georgie-Porgie-g-g-g-g-g.’
I looked at my aunt with compassion. Poor woman, she seemed to me a mental, moral, physical, and above all financial, wreck! ‘You see,’ I said, conceiving suddenly the thought of curing her by auto-suggestion, ‘there’s really nothing much the matter with you except what you yourself imagine. What you have to say is: “Every day, in every way, I am feeling better and better.” ’
‘But I don’t. Enfin, c’est idiot! How can I say I feel better if I feel worse?’
‘Take care: you will feel worse if you say so.’
‘But I do.’
‘And I wish you joy of it,’ said I, exasperated.
‘But what can I say if I feel worse and worse? Do you want me to lie to myself?’
‘Then say: “I feel the reverse of better and better.” ’
‘Is that all right?’
‘Well, at any rate it’s better.’
But nothing came of it. Aunt Teresa told me that she had une crise de nerfs from my auto-suggestion. She assured me she felt worse. My aunt was not a good disciple of Monsieur Coué. The crux of it, of course, was that she did not want to feel better, or in fact to make us think she did so. But the small children took to Coué like duck to water. While my aunt felt worse and worse, Nora told us she felt ‘batter and batter’. What it came to, anyhow, was that those of us who had felt bad didn’t feel so well, and those who had felt well, felt well and better. The Doctor said that Aunt Teresa was not really ill. But Aunt Teresa thought that she was ill, and to all intents and purposes she felt the same as if she had been ill. Clearly then she had a ‘complex’. I began to think of using for her benefit the discoveries of Freud and Jung with a view to liberating Aunt Teresa’s ‘complex’. I had only read a few pages of Freud’s Introductory Lecture to Psycho-Analysis, while waiting at the Oxford Union for a friend. I knew, however, that the pith of the whole thing was that the ‘complex’ had to be dissolved to free the patient of his particular delusion or affliction. Clearly Aunt Teresa was in love with her own person. This, at any rate, was my diagnosis of her case. To ‘side-track’ my aunt’s affections from Narcissus into normal channels had now become my earnest purpose. But I was not a little nervous lest, according to Freud, my aunt’s Narcissus were ‘side-tracked’ on to me and she began to love me with a passion not entirely becoming to an aunt. I began by delivering a lecture on psychology. I spoke of motor-centres and bus centres and railway centres and the reflections of the conscious and subconscious mind — and that sort of drivel — for an hour and a half. My aunt listened strenuously and tried to look as if she understood. ‘There is something in you that wants an outlet and cannot find it, and because of that is worrying you.’ I took her hands into mine. ‘Aunt Teresa dear, tell me.’
She was very still, but said nothing. And again I had the fear lest my aunt’s Narcissus should begin loving me ‘by transference’. My mood at that time was, in proportion to the preparations being made, steadily declining against marriage. I am not a cynic; but from what I’ve seen of married life in our own home, it has definitely put me off it for the remainder of my life. Only yesterday I heard a married man compare marriage to a rotten egg. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it looks all right from the outside, and before you taste it you do not know that it is rotten. ‘You may reproach me for fickleness in love. But what writer is sure of his livelihood with so fickle a public as ours? You may, for example, be reading this book — but it does not follow that you have bought it. Latterly my tongue would loiter with persistence round about my canine tooth. I came up to my shaving-glass, opened my mouth and looked in. What a cavity! Yes, wars were not to be fought with impunity. It was some time since I had been to the dentist. And it occurred to me that if I married Sylvia (who already had a gold crown at the end of her mouth) I would have to pay her dentists’ bills in addition to my own, for all the fillings, crowns, fantastic bridges, and so forth, with which she would palliate the encroaching ruin of the years, ward off the desolation, till, one day, the disaster could be forestalled no longer, and she would order a complete set of artificial teeth — an upper and a nether plate — for which I, too, should have to foot the bill. Out of what? Out of literature, forsooth!.. My grandfather rose in his grave.
Poverty — and the children catch measles. Winter — and a shortage of coal. From bad to worse, until you sit in your shirt-sleeves, maybe, in a one-roomed lodging, and having pushed aside the pans and saucers begin to write your book, A Psychological Analysis of the Succeeding Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude, the children howling ‘I doan want to!’ Sylvia, thin and angry and exhausted, perhaps turned into a shrew. To keep them from starvation you set your teeth and write a novel. At last it’s finished. You send it to Pluckworth on the 7th of November and it comes back on the 15th of December, on which date you send it to Jane Sons, and Jane Sons return it to you on the 3rd of January, on which date you send it to Norman Elder, who sends it back on the 15th of March.
Suddenly I fell asleep. I dreamt that we were dining in a restaurant and Sylvia protested: ‘I want French wine!’ The waiter came, I had no money, and began to cry. I woke up in a sweat.
No, I did not want to get married.
After tea I went up to my attic, intent on settling down to a prolonged spell of solid work. But my tangled thoughts, revolting stubbornly, chased after those running streams of life which found their spring in Sylvia. Then, finally, I laid aside my papers and went to her. As I saw her, again I visualized our future life when I might be unkind to her; and because I wanted to be kind to her I craved to have this union broken before it was too late; and yet I knew that she, unconscious of future painful hours thus evaded, would suffer from the knowledge of a happiness missed; and it distressed me that I could not, without wounding her, explain these manifold considerations.
‘Darling, frankly: do you want to marry me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s so nice to be married, darling. To be always together. To live in the same house. To feel the same things. To have the same thoughts.’
Sylvia playing the Four Seasons of the Year. I take her for a walk, but think my own thoughts: though we couldn’t be nearer, we couldn’t be farther apart.