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In her room Caroline Bell would fall into long reverie, remembering though not pondering sights, episodes, and sensations, or lines she had read; like an old woman ruminating on the long, long past. She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.
Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement. This risk had come up before.
"Or the best." He smiled. His hound-face had lines, at eyelids and mouth, that were now at rest but might be put to use. His dark hair, greying, fell loose over his forehead. His body, too heavy and indolent for the precise little chair, was that of an active man who had taught himself to wait: an incongruous patience that could trouble those who wondered what might be restrained. He said, "Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."
Christian Thrale credited himself with special sensibilities towards pictures. In galleries where art had been sagely institutionalized, he walked and paused like all the rest, yet believed his own stare more penetrating than most; and, when others strolled ahead, would linger, patently engrossed beyond the ordinary.
He walked home perplexed by a sensation, sharp yet heavy, close to disappointment. Possibly he had imagined Caro cut out for some dénouement that would vindicate, or redeem, the cautious order of his own existence--a culmination, even tragic, that only she seemed fitted to enact. Or perhaps he had wished, for the greater common good, to see her sink into vapid domesticity like other women, sink into it as housewives sink exhaustedly into arm-chairs at evening. He detested the idea that she and Vail were lovers, but less for the imagined carnality than because Vail was personable, resolute, and rich. The satisfaction to Christian in withholding compassion from Caro had sprung directly from her need, her poverty. There was no power whatever now in letting Caro jolly well fend for herself. And he allowed himself, like a luxury, the honest thought: I might have helped her.
Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude."
Leadbetter's unlaced fingers came down on the blotter with a synchronized slap. "Miss Bell, do you really not find this incident utterly grotesque?"
"I know that any adherence to a principle can be called grotesque, and even made to appear so. At least for a time."
"You call it a principle. A tempest in a teacup."
"Mr. Bostock said, in a teapot."
He was now at white heat: molten Leadbetter. (To his wife that evening he would say, "I don't even mind insults, but will not tolerate verbal abuse.") "Miss Bell, since you yourself find our ways so unsatisfactory, perhaps you should seriously consider returning to--ah--New Zealand."
In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity.
"Ted." She had never used his name so much. "She is writing you today."
In that instant Grace somewhat resembled Caro, as always when matters grew serious. Ted could see it, the turn of head and the clasped hands. If he put his fingers to the nape, he would find the cord there, prominent as Caro's. He said, "She is getting married."
"Do sit down." A hostess receiving.
"I prefer to stand." A Victorian hero on the carpet, or carpets.
A salesman paused, and tweaked a nine-by-twelve.
"Thank you we're just looking." Staring at one another, Grace and Ted created a tension not easily absorbed into rugs.
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Caro would have known what to say: not the right thing, but the truth. Caro would have spoken truly or kept a true silence. In accepting to be the sweet one of the sisters, tame and tractable, Grace had by no means intended to cast herself away. She had enjoyed being sweet, and being thought sweet, but had believed she held in reserve an untapped bounty of more difficult humanity; which was not now forthcoming. Ted's suffering was not obscure to her--indeed, her imagination occasionally played out such matters in some Austro-Hungarian empire of the heart. But she could rouse no true instinct with which to feel his pain or comfort him. And was suddenly afraid that sweet people might have little imagination.
On any day of the year Grace Thrale might be smiled at in the street by an elderly couple or by some young mother herding her noisy brood: saluted, that is, as a kindred spirit. Caroline Bell never attracted this delectable complicity. There were times when Grace wished the world were not so sure of her, so confident that boredom had claimed her. Yet in her daily existence feared the smallest deviation from habit as an interruption that might bring chaos. Grace no more wanted adventure than Dora wanted peace. She did not convince herself, as some women do, that she retained capacity for a wholly different existence ruled by exalted and injurious passions: Grace knew perfectly how the practised conformity of her days gratified her own desires. Yet one might cling to security and still be bored by it. In its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance; but that rescue might wear down, like any other.
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Passing through decreed phases, Margaret Tice was first a bride, next a young housewife, and then an expectant mother. Later, would be constrained to talk of schools, join a tennis club and a committee. Would hear herself say, as if it were some other woman, "I never use cornstarch" or "I clean up as I go along." She felt this happening to her like symptoms of mild illness, and did not resist. But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.
Informed of the situation by Grace, Christian said, "Vail was a fool ever to get mixed up in it." But Christian was in fact content that Adam should take on Dora. It seemed something--like Lend-Lease, or the Marshall Plan--that an American should do. He told Grace, "I carried the burden long enough."
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In his solitude he said, "I blame myself." An accusation that seldom rings entirely true. If Christian placed blame elsewhere, then it was, curiously enough, on literature. He blamed--but that was not the word--the promptings and colourings of language, that put sights in his eyes and sentiments in his heart. He felt himself importuned by echoes that preceded utterance, betrayed by metaphors and exaltations that, acquired young, could never be eradicated.
Literature was a good servant but a bad master.