Secret Places of the Heart Part 13

"Let myself go too. I'd never met anything like her before. It was her wit took me. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't my contemporary and as able as I was. As able to take care of herself. All sorts of considerations that I should have shown to a sillier woman I never dreamt of showing to her. I had never met anyone so mentally brilliant before or so helpless and headlong. And so here we are on each other's hands!"

"But the child?

"It happened to us. For four years now things have just happened to us.

All the time I have been overworking, first at explosives and now at this fuel business. She too is full of her work.

"Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with it. And in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably fond of each other.

'Fond' is the word. But we are both too busy to look after either ourselves or each other.

"She is much more incapable than I am," said Sir Richmond as if he delivered a weighed and very important judgment.

"You see very much of each other?"

"She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South Cornwall, and we sometimes s.n.a.t.c.h a few days together, away somewhere in Surrey or up the Thames or at such a place as Southend where one is lost in a crowd of inconspicuous people. Then things go well--they usually go well at the start--we are glorious companions. She is happy, she is creative, she will light up a new place with flashes of humour, with a keenness of appreciation...."

"But things do not always go well?"

"Things," said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man who measures his words, "are apt to go wrong.... At the flat there is constant trouble with the servants; they bully her. A woman is more entangled with servants than a man. Women in that position seem to resent the work and freedom of other women. Her servants won't leave her in peace as they would leave a man; they make trouble for her.... And when we have had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in particular has gone wrong--"

Sir Richmond stopped short.

"When they go wrong it is generally her fault," the doctor sounded.

"Almost always."

"But if they don't?" said the psychiatrist.

"It is difficult to describe.... The essential incompatibility of the whole thing comes out."

The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.

"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work anywhere. All she wants is just cardboard and ink. My mind on the other hand turns back to the Fuel Commission...."

"Then any little thing makes trouble."

"Any little thing makes trouble. And we always drift round to the same discussion; whether we ought really to go on together."

"It is you begin that?"

"Yes, I start that. You see she is perfectly contented when I am about.

She is as fond of me as I am of her."

"Fonder perhaps."

"I don't know. But she is--adhesive. Emotionally adhesive. All she wants to do is just to settle down when I am there and go on with her work.

But then, you see, there is MY work."

"Exactly.... After all it seems to me that your great trouble is not in yourselves but in social inst.i.tutions. Which haven't yet fitted themselves to people like you two. It is the sense of uncertainty makes her, as you say, adhesive. Nervously so. If we were indeed living in a new age Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one--"

"We can't alter the age we live in," said Sir Richmond a little testily.

"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular situation, that it is not the individuals to blame but the misfit of ideas and forms and prejudices."

"No," said Sir Richmond, obstinately rejecting this pacifying suggestion; "she could adapt herself. If she cared enough."

"But how?"

"She will not take the slightest trouble to adjust herself to the peculiarities of our position.... She could be cleverer. Other women are cleverer. Any other woman almost would be cleverer than she is."

"But if she was cleverer, she wouldn't be the genius she is. She would just be any other woman."

"Perhaps she would," said Sir Richmond darkly and desperately. "Perhaps she would. Perhaps it would be better if she was."

Dr. Martineau raised his eyebrows in a furtive aside.

"But here you see that it is that in my case, the fundamental incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social inst.i.tutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change them to suit an individual case.

That would be like suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano. As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and treats fuel--and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is an attack. We quarrel on that. It isn't as though I found it so easy to stick to my work that I could disregard her hostility. And I can't bear to part from her. I threaten it, distress her excessively and then I am overcome by sympathy for her and I go back to her.... In the ordinary course of things I should be with her now."

"If it were not for the carbuncle?"

"If it were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me to see her disfigured. She does not understand--" Sir Richmond was at a loss for a phrase--"that it is not her good looks."

"She won't let you go to her?"

"It amounts to that.... And soon there will be all the trouble about educating the girl. Whatever happens, she must have as good a chance as--anyone...."

"Ah! That is worrying you too!"

"Frightfully at times. If it were a boy it would be easier. It needs constant tact and dexterity to fix things up. Neither of us have any. It needs attention...."

Sir Richmond mused darkly.

Dr. Martineau thought aloud. "An incompetent delightful person with Martin Leeds's sense of humour. And her powers of expression. She must be attractive to many people. She could probably do without you. If once you parted."

Sir Richmond turned on him eagerly.

"You think I ought to part from her? On her account?"

"On her account. It might pain her. But once the thing was done--"

"I want to part. I believe I ought to part."

"Well?"

"But then my affection comes in."

"That extraordinary--TENDERNESS of yours?"

"I'm afraid."