Room at the Top

29

The month was September, the time was eight o'clock, the weather was unsettled, with a sky mottled with indigo, copper, and tinges of oxblood red. The place was Elspeth's flat, the exact point of space from where I told her it was all over was the brown stain on the carpet in the lounge, just by the door into the corridor. I knew that stain well; I'd spilled some cherry brandy there one night before Christmas. By the time I'd finished telling Alice that I didn't love her, I could have drawn a coloured map of it and its surroundings, correct down to the last scroll of the silly little gilt chair next it.

I couldn't bring myself to look at her and I didn't want to come close to her. I did look at her, of course; she was wearing a black silk dress and a pearl necklace and a sapphire on her right hand which I'd not seen before. Her hands were clenched by her side, and the rouge which she had so carefully applied stood out in two patches on her cheeks. She wasn't wearing her usual lavender but something strong and musky with an animal smell in the background like a newly bathed tiger, if anyone were ever to bathe a tiger.

"So you've finished with me, Joe?" Her lips scarcely moved and she was breathing very quickly.

"I love Susan."

"That's very sensible of you."

"There's no need to be bitter."

"I'm not bitter. Only surprised. How quickly you've changed. How long is it since you - ?"

She described everything we'd done together in Dorset, using the simplest Anglo-Saxon words and talking with a cool, dry detachment.

"It hasn't left any mark on you, has it? It was only our bodies that did these things - your young one and my - my old one that's well past its best. Why don't you say it, Joe? I'm thirty-four and she's nineteen - you want someone young and strong and healthy. I don't mind, I should have expected it anyway, but why in God's name can't you be honest?"

"It isn't like that," I said wearily. "I did love you, but I can't now. Let's leave it at that."

I couldn't tell her about Jack Wales; it didn't seem important any longer. The knowledge that once she'd made love with him, him of all the people in the world, here on the very bed where I'd lain with her, had come between me and sleep all night; but now that I was with her it didn't matter, it was as dead as yesterday's newspaper. That she had let him make love to her had proved only her contempt for him; she'd used him in an idle hour - as a man might take a quick whisky when tired and depressed - and forgotten him. He was a trivial detail of a past era, dead millions of seconds Before Joe, just as my own dreary copulations in Dufton and Lincolnshire and Germany had been Before Alice.

"It wasn't wise for us to go on," I said. "It would have blown up in our faces anyway. Eva's found out about us, and it's only a matter of time before George does. He's too crafty to be found out himself - I'm going in no mucky divorce courts, and that's flat. And I'm not going to be thrown out of Warley either. What would we live on?"

Her mouth twisted. "You're a timid soul, aren't you?"

"I know which side my bread is buttered on," I said.

She slumped ungracefully into the nearest chair, shading her eyes as if against some arc lamp of interrogation.

"There's something else," she said. "Why are you holding it back? Scared of hurting me?"

"I hate hurting you." My head began to throb; it wasn't aching but it felt as if a big hammer inside it were stopping just short of the threshold of pain. I wanted to escape from the stuffy little room with its smell of scent and ill-health, I wanted to be in Warley. Alice didn't belong to Warley. I couldn't have both her and Warley: that was what it all boiled down to. I knew that I couldn't explain this to her, but I was forced to try.

"I'm engaged to Susan," I said. "I'm going to work for her father. But that isn't the reason that we've got to call it a day. It's impossible for us to love each other in Warley, and I can't love anyone anywhere else - can't you see?"

"No," she said. "I wish you wouldn't lie to me. It's perfectly simple and understandable and I wish you luck. You needn't dress it up with all this nonsense. Places don't matter." She rose and came over to me. I put my arms around her waist automatically. The hammer inside my head broke into the threshold of pain; it was a crackling neuralgic ache but it had no effect upon the tenderness and happiness that visited me when I touched her.

"There is something else," she said. "Please tell me, Joe. That's all I ask." She looked at me as pleadingly as a German child. Belsen or no Belsen, you gave those skinny little brats your chocolate ration; truth or no truth, I had to give Alice her self-respect. Susan wasn't the real reason for me ending our affair; but to have made it clear to her that I was leaving her for Warley would have damaged her pride past endurance. So I told her what was, with her body touching mine, a lie; though it wouldn't have been a lie the day before.

"I heard that Jack Wales was your lover once," I said. She stiffened in my arms. "I couldn't bear that. Not him. Anyone else, but not him. Is it true?"

If she'd denied it, I think that I would have taken her back. It was like the pound note I'd dropped on the floor after our quarrel in the winter; honour, like freedom, is a luxury for those with independent incomes, but there is a limit to dishonour, a sort of soft-shoe line of decency which marks the difference between manhood and swinishness.

"You hate Jack," she said. "I'm sorry about that. You needn't, because he doesn't hate you."

"He doesn't know I'm alive."

"He didn't when we first met. You hadn't come to Warley then. But he likes you."

"You've been with him - lately?"

She unloosened herself from me and went over to the sideboard. "I think we both need a gin." Her voice was calm. "I went with him twice. Once in his car, if you really want to torture yourself, and once here. He took me home from the Thespian Ball the first time." She handed me a drink. "There's only lime juice."

"What about the second time?"

"That was after we quarrelled. The night after. I ran across him in a hotel bar."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"It didn't seem important. I never asked you about your past - or your present, for that matter. We had an agreement about it, in case you've forgotten."

There was a heavy silence in the room, as if some had seeped in from the long grey corridors outside. There suddenly was nothing left to say. She was standing with her back to me at the sideboard; the sun had gone down and I couldn't see her very well, but I think that she had begun to cry.

"Goodbye, Alice," I said. "Thank you for everything."

She didn't answer, and I went out very quietly, as from a sickroom.