Keep the Aspidistra Flying (18 page)

Presently they separated their mouths, though still clinging closely together.

‘How stupid it is, the way we quarrel, isn’t it, Gordon? When we meet so seldom.’

‘I know. It’s all my fault. I can’t help it. Things rub me up. It’s money at the bottom of it. Always money.’

‘Oh, money! You let it worry you too much, Gordon.’

‘Impossible. It’s the only thing worth worrying about.’

‘But, anyway, we
will
go out into the country next Sunday, won’t we? To Burnham Beeches or somewhere. It would be so nice if we could.’

‘Yes, I’d love to. We’ll go early and be out all day. I’ll raise the train fares somehow.’

‘But you’ll let me pay my own fare, won’t you?’

‘No, I’d rather I paid them. But we’ll go, anyway.’

‘And you really won’t let me pay for your supper—just this once, just to show you trust me?’

‘No, I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ve told you why.’

‘Oh, dear! I suppose we shall have to say good night. It’s getting late.’

They stayed talking a long time, however, so long that Rosemary got no supper after all. She had to be back at her
lodgings by eleven, or the she-dragons were angry. Gordon went up to the top of the Tottenham Court Road and took the tram. It was a penny cheaper than taking the bus. On the wooden seat upstairs he was wedged against a small dirty Scotchman who read the football finals and oozed beer. Gordon was very happy. Rosemary was going to be his mistress.
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over
. To the music of the tram’s booming he whispered the seven completed stanzas of his poem. Nine stanzas there would be in all. It was
good
. He believed in it and in himself. He was a poet. Gordon Comstock, author of
Mice
. Even in
London Pleasures
he once again believed.

He thought of Sunday. They were to meet at nine o’clock at Paddington Station. Ten bob or so it would cost; he would raise the money if he had to pawn his shirt. And she was going to become his mistress; this very Sunday, perhaps, if the right chance offered itself. Nothing had been said. Only, somehow, it was agreed between them.

Please God it kept fine on Sunday! It was deep winter now. What luck if it turned out one of those splendid windless days—one of those days that might almost be summer, when you can lie for hours on the dead bracken and never feel cold! But you don’t get many days like that; a dozen at most in every winter. As likely as not it would rain. He wondered whether they would get a chance to do it after all. They had nowhere to go, except the open air. There are so many pairs of lovers in London with ‘nowhere to go’; only the streets and the parks, where there is no privacy and it is always cold. It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money. The ‘never the time and the place’ motif is not made enough of in novels.

T
HE PLUMES OF THE CHIMNEYS
floated perpendicular against skies of smoky rose.

Gordon caught the 27 bus at ten past eight. The streets were still locked in their Sunday sleep. On the doorsteps the milk bottles waited ungathered like little white sentinels. Gordon had fourteen shillings in hand—thirteen and nine, rather, because the bus fare was threepence. Nine bob he had set aside from his wages—God knew what that was going to mean, later in the week!—and five he had borrowed from Julia.

He had gone round to Julia’s place on Thursday night. Julia’s room in Earl’s Court, though only a second-floor back, was not just a vulgar bedroom like Gordon’s. It was a bed-sitting with the accent on the sitting. Julia would have died of starvation sooner than put up with such squalor as Gordon lived in. Indeed every one of her scraps of furniture, collected over intervals of years, represented a period of semi-starvation. There was a divan bed that could very nearly be mistaken for a sofa, and a little round fumed oak table, and two ‘antique’ hardwood chairs, and an ornamental footstool and a chintz-covered armchair—Drage’s: thirteen monthly payments-in front of the tiny gas-fire; and there were various brackets with framed photos of father and mother and Gordon and Aunt Angela, and a birch-wood calendar—somebody’s Christmas present—with ‘It’s a long lane that has no turning’ done on it in pokerwork. Julia depressed Gordon horribly. He was always telling himself that he ought to go and see her oftener; but in practice he never went near her except to ‘borrow’ money.

When Gordon had given three knocks—three knocks for second floor—Julia took him up to her room and knelt down in front of the gas-fire.

‘I’ll light the fire again,’ she said. ‘You’d like a cup of tea, wouldn’t you?’

He noted the ‘again’. The room was beastly cold—no fire had been lighted in it this evening. Julia always ‘saved gas’ when she was alone. He looked at her long narrow back as she knelt down. How grey her hair was getting! Whole locks of it were quite grey. A little more, and it would be ‘grey hair’
tout court
.

‘You like your tea strong, don’t you?’ breathed Julia, hovering over the tea-caddy with tender, goose-like movements.

Gordon drank his cup of tea standing up, his eye on the birchwood calendar. Out with it! Get it over! Yet his heart almost failed him. The meanness of this hateful cadging! What would it all tot up to, the money he had ‘borrowed’ from her in all these years?

‘I say, Julia, I’m damned sorry—I hate asking you; but look here——’

‘Yes, Gordon?’ she said quietly. She knew what was coming.

‘Look here, Julia, I’m damned sorry, but could you lend me five bob?’

‘Yes, Gordon, I expect so.’

She sought out the small, worn black leather purse that was hidden at the bottom of her linen drawer. He knew what she was thinking. It meant less for Christmas presents. That was the great event of her life nowadays—Christmas and the giving of presents: hunting through the glittering streets, late at night after the tea-shop was shut, from one bargain counter to another, picking out the trash that women are so curiously fond of. Handkerchief sachets, letter racks, teapots, manicure sets, birchwood calendars
with mottoes in pokerwork. All through the year she was scraping from her wretched wages for ‘So and so’s Christmas present’, or ‘So and so’s birthday present.’ And had she not, last Christmas, because Gordon was ‘fond of poetry’, given him the
Selected Poems
of Sir John Drink-water in green morocco, which he had sold for half a crown? Poor Julia! Gordon made off with his five bob as soon as he decently could. Why is it that one can’t borrow from a rich friend and can from a half-starved relative? But one’s family, of course, ‘don’t count’.

On the top of the bus he did mental arithmetic. Thirteen and nine in hand. Two day-returns to Slough, five bob. Bus fares, say two bob more, seven bob. Bread and cheese and beer at a pub, say a bob each, nine bob. Tea, eighteen-pence each, twelve bob. A bob for cigarettes, thirteen bob. That left ninepence for emergencies. They would manage all right. And how about the rest of the week? Not a penny for tobacco! But he refused to let it worry him. Today would be worth it, anyway.

Rosemary met him on time. It was one of her virtues that she was never late, and even at this hour of the morning she was bright and debonair. She was rather nicely dressed, as usual. She was wearing her mock-shovel hat again, because he had said he liked it. They had the station practically to themselves. The huge grey place, littered and deserted, had a blowsy, unwashed air, as though it were still sleeping off a Saturday night debauch. A yawning porter in need of a shave told them the best way to get to Burnham Beeches, and presently they were in a third-class smoker, rolling westward, and the mean wilderness of London was opening out and giving way to narrow sooty fields defiled with ads for Carter’s Little Liver Pills. The day was very still and warm. Gordon’s prayer had come true. It was one of those windless days which you can hardly tell from summer. You could feel the sun behind the mist; it
would break through presently, with any luck. Gordon and Rosemary were profoundly and rather absurdly happy. There was a sense of wild adventure in getting out of London, with the long day in ‘the country’ stretching out ahead of them. It was months since Rosemary and a year since Gordon had set foot in ‘the country’. They sat close together with the
Sunday Times
open across their knees; they did not read it, however, but watched the fields and cows and houses and the empty goods trucks and great sleeping factories rolling past. Both of them enjoyed the railway journey so much that they wished it had been longer.

At Slough they got out and travelled to Farnham Common in an absurd chocolate-coloured bus with no top. Slough was still half asleep. Rosemary remembered the way now that they had got to Farnham Common. You walked down a rutted road and came out on to stretches of fine, wet, tussocky grass dotted with little naked birches. The beech woods were beyond. Not a bough or a blade was stirring. The trees stood like ghosts in the still, misty air. Both Rosemary and Gordon exclaimed at the loveliness of everything. The dew, the stillness, the satiny stems of the birches, the softness of the turf under your feet! Nevertheless, at first they felt shrunken and out of place, as Londoners do when they get outside London. Gordon felt as though he had been living underground for a long time past. He felt etiolated and unkempt. He slipped behind Rosemary as they walked, so that she should not see his lined, colourless face. Also, they were out of breath before they had walked far, because they were only used to London walking, and for the first half hour they scarcely talked. They plunged into the woods and started westward, with not much idea of where they were making for—anywhere, so long as it was away from London. All round them the beech-trees soared, curiously phallic with their smooth skin-like bark and their flutings at the base.
Nothing grew at their roots, but the dried leaves were strewn so thickly that in the distance the slopes looked like folds of copper-coloured silk. Not a soul seemed to be awake. Presently Gordon came level with Rosemary. They walked on hand in hand, swishing through the dry coppery leaves that had drifted into the ruts. Sometimes they came out on to stretches of road where they passed huge desolate houses—opulent country houses, once, in the carriage days, but now deserted and unsaleable. Down the road the mist-dimmed hedges wore that strange purplish brown, the colour of brown madder, that naked brushwood takes on in winter. There were a few birds about—jays, sometimes, passing between the trees with dipping flight, and pheasants that loitered across the road with long tails trailing, almost as tame as hens, as though knowing they were safe on Sunday. But in half an hour Gordon and Rosemary had not passed a human being. Sleep lay upon the countryside. It was hard to believe that they were only twenty miles out of London.

Presently they had walked themselves into trim. They had got their second wind and the blood glowed in their veins. It was one of those days when you feel you could walk a hundred miles if necessary. Suddenly, as they came out on to the road again, the dew all down the hedge glittered with a diamond flash. The sun had pierced the clouds. The light came slanting and yellow across the fields, and delicate unexpected colours sprang out in everything, as though some giant’s child had been let loose with a new paintbox. Rosemary caught Gordon’s arm and pulled him against her.

‘Oh, Gordon, what a
lovely
day!’

‘Lovely.’

‘And, oh, look, look! Look at all the rabbits in that field!’

Sure enough, at the other end of the field, innumerable rabbits were browsing, almost like a flock of sheep. Suddenly
there was a flurry under the hedge. A rabbit had been lying there. It leapt from its nest in the grass with a flirt of dew and dashed away down the field, its white tail lifted. Rosemary threw herself into Gordon’s arms. It was astonishingly warm, as warm as summer. They pressed their bodies together in a sort of sexless rapture, like children. Here in the open air he could see the marks of time quite clearly upon her face. She was nearly thirty, and looked it, and he was nearly thirty, and looked more; and it mattered nothing. He pulled off the absurd flat hat. The three white hairs gleamed on her crown. At the moment he did not wish them away. They were part of her and therefore lovable.

‘What fun to be here alone with you! I’m so glad we came!’

‘And, oh, Gordon, to think we’ve got all day together! And it might so easily have rained. How lucky we are!’

‘Yes. We’ll burn a sacrifice to the immortal gods, presently.’

They were extravagantly happy. As they walked on they fell into absurd enthusiasms over everything they saw: over a jay’s feather that they picked up, blue as lapis lazuli; over a stagnant pool like a jet mirror, with boughs reflected deep down in it; over the fungi that sprouted from the trees like monstrous horizontal ears. They discussed for a long time what would be the best epithet to describe a beech-tree. Both agreed that beeches look more like sentient creatures than other trees. It is because of the smoothness of their bark, probably, and the curious limb-like way in which the boughs sprout from the trunk. Gordon said that the little knobs on the bark were like the nipples of breasts and that the sinuous upper boughs, with their smooth sooty skin, were like the writhing trunks of elephants. They argued about similes and metaphors. From time to time they quarrelled vigorously, according to their
custom. Gordon began to tease her by finding ugly similes for everything they passed. He said that the russet foliage of the hornbeams was like the hair of Burne-Jones maidens, and that the smooth tentacles of the ivy that wound about the trees were like the clinging arms of Dickens heroines. Once he insisted upon destroying some mauve toadstools because he said they reminded him of a Rackham illustration and he suspected fairies of dancing round them. Rosemary called him a soulless pig. She waded through a bed of drifted beech leaves that rustled about her, knee-deep, like a weightless red-gold sea.

‘Oh, Gordon, these leaves! Look at them with the sun on them! They’re like gold. They really are like gold.’

‘Fairy gold. You’ll be going all Barrie in another moment. As a matter of fact, if you want an exact simile, they’re just the colour of tomato soup.’