Part 36 (1/2)
But this aroused me. ”Oh, that's good Business English: affairs that can't be left unguarded. And her affairs? Hers?”
He wearily rubbed his forehead with a single moist finger. ”This won't do. I am not accustomed to arguments of this nature-”
”If she had an affair you could leave it unguarded!”
”You sometimes have a distinctly coa.r.s.e way of expressing yourself.”
”Maybe it's the subject-matter that's coa.r.s.e.”
”The subject-matter is one I notice you chose for yourself,” William said.
”You could have written to her then. You could have,” I insisted. ”But instead nothing. No claim, no protest. Not a word. Nothing!-The subject-matter was too coa.r.s.e,” I flung at him without the support of ridicule.
”You want to blame me.”
”It's just as fair, isn't it? You're the one who let her get away with it! If you'd said a word, a single word-”
”You want to accuse. You put your teeth into it.” And there was his odd stiff fist against his vest, seeming to clutch at a b.u.t.ton. Then quite suddenly he told the truth: ”But it was too much.”
”What?”
”A single word,” he repeated. ”I had lost the faculty.”
”Of licking a stamp.”
”Of speaking.”
”You do it well enough now and again, according to the Times.”
He separated his hand from his body, and opened out the knuckles with their stretched whorls like shut eyelids, and turned the wrist, and set it down upon the desk as though all of it-the taut fingers, the thumb purplish at its fatty base, the palm with its private linear text-offended him by certain betrayals. This was bizarre: William was not given to obvious gesture. ”When we met again-when she came back,” he said, obscurely apologetic, ”we shook hands. It was all right, you see, eventually.”
”Yes,” I said.
”There were a great many matters of essence that had to be attended to.”
”Yes.”
”I'm referring to her return. We had a number of necessary conferences.”
I said caustically, ”The faculty returned when she did.”
He began, but discovered he was hoa.r.s.e.
”I mean the power of speech came back,” I pushed on.
”I addressed her,” William said through a clot in his throat, ”as a client of particular value.”
I did not ask him value to whom: I feared he might say to the firm. ”It's always possible to speak to a client,” I said merely; but I saw in his cheek a visible snap of discipline; of recovery; and I laughed. ”You know Queen Victoria's complaint about Gladstone?-She said he addressed her like a public meeting. I read that in Lytton Strachey. Of course,” I modified, ”he was only the Prime Minister, he wasn't married to her.”
William looked over as though he were about to compliment me on my astounding grasp of British Const.i.tutional History. Instead he remarked testily, ”You choose cynical authors for false applications.”
”I wasn't comparing you to Queen Victoria,” I said.
”Perhaps you read too much.”
”I don't have anything else to do. I've been going through the newspapers all summer. They're full of crises and emergencies that n.o.body's made up. It's really remarkable. What happened in Brighton?”
”In Brighton?”
”You said they went to Brighton. -Your client,” I explained it, ”and her novel-in-progress.”
It was plain he despised me for this. ”I haven't mentioned her novel.”
”Yes you have. You said it was the reason she was staying in Europe. -There,” I pointed out, ”if I put it that way you can't say I'm being coa.r.s.e.”
”She finished it there.”
”In Brighton?”
”Yes.”
”The affair?”
”The novel,” William threw out, blazing.
”So he was right. Nick. He got her to do it.”
”It was simply that she stopped traveling. She settled down to it.”
”He got her to settle down to it.”
”She settled down,” he contradicted impatiently. ”Before that they were joining up with Vand at one place or another, wherever he claimed to need them. She took the cottage expressly to finish. No moving about and no interruptions, only that Vand stopped there now and then.”
”She wrote you that?”
”She wrote everything.”
”Well it worked,” I said. ”She finished it. She's never finished anything since.”
”You have very curious values.”
”-It's only that I believe in finis.h.i.+ng things.” I might have said marriages, I might have said divorces, I might have ventured love. I might in fact have said anything, but I just then preferred the safety of ambiguity. Odi et amo, that vague old squeal: he had kept her on as ”client,” but he had kept her on. He had kept her, he was keeping her yet. It gave him an intimacy without the requirement of intimate address, that lost faculty for terror he mourned.
”Excellent,” he p.r.o.nounced without a pause-it was his old tone, the speaking monument. ”You believe in finis.h.i.+ng things. Then let us suit your creed to our interview.”
But awe for William had abandoned me. Let me be granite: that scorn did not command me. We faced one another in that exceptional nakedness of equality which now and then afflicts fathers and daughters-a relations.h.i.+p I entertained in contemptuous metaphor only.
”So they lived on what you sent,” I summed it up without a blink.