Dream of Fair to Middling Women (24 page)

“Without systematised interpretations” she replied “I can suppose you nervous I suppose when I see you clawing your face without ceasing.”

He was only too willing to admit that he was nervous, just nervous, technically so. He extended his hand in corroboration.

“It trembles” he said “like an aspen. Look. I have a genuine tremor. Look.”

“Smoke less” she said “drink less, brood less.”

“Brood?” He was shocked to hear it called that.

“You brood” she said “like a sick hen.”

And herself, he would have the courteous impertinence to be interested to know en passant, before effecting a breach into a subject…

“Oh, me” in the comfortable tone of one delivered from hope
”my soul has no use for an anchor.”

… a subject that happened for once to be rather near and dear to him. He stormed it, he battered in.

“I do no brood” he said resentfully. “My mind goes blank. It is no brooding, it is no reflecting. It is the abdication of the daily mind, it is hush and gloom ousting the workaday glare…”

He let her have the whole saga, it came gushing out like the Bhagavad-Gîtâ of a co-operative Cincinnatus. Sewerly the Alba was too intelligent to associate silence, a somatic silence and accidental tension of countenance, with the sulks or sorrows of the mind pouting over a grievance, poring over its stock of woe. Sewerly…

“Like a sick hen.” The Alba stuck quite rightly to at least one of her barrels. He could talk and talk. He would not invalidate her thesis. The pith of her thesis, simile included, would stand.

But the important thing was that he again in his youth had stiffened against her. Scraps of German played in his mind in the silence that ensued; grand, old, plastic words. As for her, she adjusted herself for her greater comfort of body, she was a sensible girl, and quietly delivered herself up to the place and the hour, pleased, not that she had had the last word, that was not her genre, that was too easy, but that she had pricked him into elucidating, i.e. defending, a position.

It was strange how this expression of themselves at odds, the surface ruffled, if they had known (she may have), of the profound antagonism latent in the neutral space that between victims of real needs is as irreducible as the zone of evaporation between damp and incandescence (We stole
that one. Guess where.), a wedge of Ophir if they only knew it between them, prising them apart, the key of the relation that cannot do more than couple them, set them side by side, if they are of any consequence: it was strange how the bubbles of this essential incompatibility seemed always to introduce a passage of something like real intimacy. No, not strange, simply so. It is possible that she, knowing what those bubbles betrayed, thanks to the abundant legacy of her failures to annul in real encounter the bed from which they rose and to the fine filter of her great désœuvrement, provoked them. What wisdom she had acquired, from which she had distilled a
savoir ne pas faire
that was seldom abashed, she had, in common with her consœurs, acquired empirically. It was of merely human scope. It was valid only up to a point. This also, instinctively, she seemed to know. This core of awareness, a greater treasure than any extract of experience, set her apart, separated her from the few women he had met and the few more he was ever likely to meet.
Savoir ne pas faire
was a jewel of great price in man or woman: the delicacy, on the spiritual plane, that has a sense of distance, and does not lose smell of the fact that what is breath of balm for one may very well be halitosis for another. But the further inner awareness, the recognition of a plane on which noses had something better to do than be turned up, and surety of abstention, free nilling, was of as little use as elegant participation, and was from the uttermost coasts, as rare as heavenly bodies colliding. Do we exaggerate her credit? But she had said:
my soul has no use for an anchor.
She had said that.

He wondered could she lend him a book on hens.

“There is a long poem” he said “waiting to be written about hens and eggs. There is a great subject there, waiting to be written.”

The Alba thought that having waited so long…

“They have fleas” she said “I can't relish them.”

Christ, she thought, he is a literary man.

One more brief evisceration (or, perhaps better, decortication) of the Alba, and thenceforward we keep our hands off her, we let her speak for herself, we state her dearworthy cuticle and hair if we state her at all, and leave it at that.

She could just manage to appreciate Belacqua's stand-offishness, his shrinking away from contact with the frail dust of her body. She could even contrive on occasions to be flattered that she for him remained a climate that did not comfort and a dream that did not serve. Had he not made it clear that he did not propose to Blake her, did not propose to Hieronymus Bosch her? She was to remain quite useless and beautiful, like the very best music that could be had.

“You are white music” he had given her indirectly to understand, he seemed to say something of this kind, “shall I plaster you with cuckoos and tempests?”

Her mind was flexible enough to wheedle a few drops of pleasure from the ineffable reverberations of this attitude. A rather despairing pleasure, for she was full of lassitude and pain, her soul had no use for an anchor. She played up to him when she felt like it, the way one tip of a tweezers plays up to its vis-à-vis. She mirrored his oscillations when she felt like it. When he sheered off, she on her side sheered off. When he bent a little towards her she activated the rather despairing, full that she was of lassitude and pain, sympathy that would bend her a little towards him. Is not that abominably clear?

But: it would not do. It could not go on. She was beyond the puerile graciousness of such a relation. She had
got over the salt-marsh phase, the pretty-pretty noli-me-tangere love-wound phase, while she was yet a child, before she put up her hair or sheared it off or did with it whatever was done when she was ceasing to be a child. All this pallor and umbilicism à deux might be the very thing for a certain class of gémisseur, it might be the very thing for him, permanent and pertinent and all the rest of it for him. But it was fundamentally all my eye for her. It might, like a new game, entertain her for a time, but it would never be anything more than light entertainment, a piece of mildly amusing, and, for a soul whose drifting was not distress, on the contrary, rather tragic codology. She used to say affectionately that he would get over this and that, she bestowed “niño! “s and “mamon's on him when she felt like it, but her real opinion the whole time was that there was little hope for him, that he was too irremissibly naive for her altogether, too permanently selfish, faithful to himself, trying to be like himself as he fancied himself all the time, an irretrievable stickler for his own wretched standard, and wretched was what she thought, and wretched was what she meant. He lay coiled up in the shadow, always the shadow, of the dread of leze-personality, at his own hands or another's. Personality! That old bugbear bastard of hell! She thought that he would not get over it, that he did not want to get over it, that he thought of getting over it as the sin against the Belacqua third person. And that he thought of her, at times, as being, in spite of her satisfactory mirror and tweezer work up to date, if anything rather too willing to give him a leg over it. When she would make up her mind finally that all that was so, that he was inextricably Limbese, then that was where she stepped off He could rot away in his darling gloom if that was what he wanted, she would not be there to listen.
Nolle consolari
ab aliqua creatura …!
The filthy blague! To hell with purity, fake purity, to hell with it and to hell with it.

How far she was right and how far wrong belong to another story, a far far better one.

The distinction between her impatience with this heir of a penny heaven and the Smeraldina-Rima's purely technical chagrin is too plain to require comment.

Now we really must be getting on.

Followed upon her strangulation of the hen motiv an immense nebulous conversation obiter that only our fever to have done refrains us from recording in its entirety, we nearly made the grave blunder of saying in toto, so witty and revelative was it in parts: all in overtones and a fairly good standard of obscenity. They enjoyed themselves very much. When he forgot himself so far as to utter she found him less of a crab. Uttering here to be opposed advantageously to the ghastly incontinence of his interior poliloquy, hors d'œuvre of colostrum never to be suivis, and not worthy to amuse an infant in arms. But when he forgot himself he could hold his own with the best in the bandying of gross and subtle futilities, and that was what she liked best, since it was a question here below of talking most of the time.

So engrossed were they in this agreeable banter that the hours slipped by unbeknown to them and the shore grew cold and dark. When he (for she, like a woman of Spain, would have been quite happy to sit on till the cows of the dawn) was astonished to see how the day declining had stolen a retreat on them:

“Before we rise to go” he said, pompously, “for go, willy-nilly, now we must, and call this happy afternoon off for ever, may I enquire do you know a… a girl called Frica?”

“Both mare and filly” said the Alba, organising herself
sullenly for departure, “for my sins. You're in a great hurry.”

“But it will be black night” he exclaimed “before we know where we are.”

“And then?” said the Alba. “Are we birds?”

“The Frica…”he hesitated to predicate the Frica.

“Offered herself” suggested the Alba.

“Oh” he said “in holocaust to heaven, that daily, like a P.R.B. belch. Not to me.”

“Well then?”

“She asked me to a party…” “Well?”

“She said she asked you.”

The Alba, clearly, did not know what he was talking about.

“Needless to say” needlessly he said “I wouldn't be seen there.”

My God, she thought, you most likely would not.

She was genuinely at a loss. She beseeched him to let her know in as few words as possible what all this had to do with the tide coming in, to get it off his chest and pull her quick out of the sand seeing that they had, apparently, to go.

“Your going” he bent towards her a little “would put a different complexion on the proposition.”

Hah! Now he was beginning to talk!

“Hah!” she clapped her hands like a child “hah! the great greedy wild free human heart of him!”

This transfixed Belacqua.

“You extraordinary girl!” he exclaimed. “What's that?” The great, greedy.

She pointed out that if he had already regretted to be
unable he could not suddenly turn round now and discover great pleasure in accepting.

“I swooned” he explained “into my reserve of slush, leaving the door open.”

She exhorted him to slam it rudely at once.

“Ah.”

“I want to go and be the belle of the ball. And how can I be that with you there mourning your mace in your little black corner?” Let him make what he chose of that.

“The belle of the ball?”

“Of the ball” she said “and of the party. What else?”

“The idea” said Belacqua, not one whit abashed by the cruel gird she had just administered, “I had in the back of my mind in asking was that if you were there we might crowd into a little private shade together beside the basin of cup. They have announced cup. So far” he said bitterly “as far as I am concerned, they have announced cup and you.”

She was white and still and Hermioned all of a sudden. Now she would make a definite statement.

“I hate Omar” she said “and your fake penumbra. Haven't we had enough of that in this festering country. Haven't we had enough Deirdreeing of Hobson's weirds and Kawthleens in the gloaming hissing up petticoats of sororarrhoea? Haven't we had enough withered pontiffs of chiarinoscurissimo. ‘The mist' ”she sneered “‘an' it rollin' home UP the glen and the mist agin an' it rollin' home DOWN the glen.' Up, down, hans arown… Merde. Give me noon. Give me Racine.”

“Help yourself” he said, mollifying her with a betrayal of annoyance, “but Racine is all twilight.”

“All brightness” she said.

“Well anyhow” for it was too late to go into that “I can take it you'll be there.”

“You can take it from me” she said “that I'll be there in my scarletest robe.”

Here ends the Silver Strand episode, unless it be worth while to add: one, that the wooing engaged there that afternoon with such good auguries, though it broke in no love storm after all, was pursued apace, its main features as they have appeared developed, but not there, elsewhere, in the city vaguely, here and there, far into the night and the following morning, neither party having previous engagement; and, two, that brusquely as, turning their backs on the sea that we let off the epithet just this once, they made to leave the place, and he, taking her gingerly by the arm, urging her unhangable person up the bank of shelving sand that clove the foreshore from the shingle, a phrase to the effect that life taken in the gross, as seemingly it ought to be taken, is but an Irish Sea, floated up in his desolate mind, and on its heels the banal nostalgia for the hour empowering him to rise from siesta on its shore, for none would dispute that his being was in the marge, he had chosen the marginal part, as now at the threat of nightfall he had risen.

We thought it might be wiser to mention that, one and two, before bringing down the curtain on this episode.

Next: two little haply elephantine dreams in brackets for jolly youngsters. Alba speaking.

1.
Mild Form.

I was all set in a long white silk gown that became me to marry a man in a bowler whom I had never seen
and did not want to, for somehow he was not worth seeing. Suddenly I thought: My God, I can't be married in white, off with this bloody thing. Then I saw that it was not white silk, but rather écru. Still I thought: can't possibly be married in this bloody thing. So I tore it off in handfuls, I ripped it away in tufts, it seemed to be coming
up
rather than
off,
from my hips, breasts and shoulders. Grandmother was there and I regretted having to destroy the gown.