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Five
I always think of Rembers as my mother's house, though my grandfather bought it originally and Alexander has had it altered considerably since father died. But somehow the house retains indelibly the mark of my mother's gentle fey rather vague personality, and it is in my thought of it perpetually clouded over with a romantic, almost a medieval, haze. It ought most probably to be surrounded by a thick forest of twining roses, like the castle of the sleeping beauty. Yet it is not an old house. It was built about 1880 and is half-timbered with its stucco washed a rich Irish pink. It is a solitary place, built on high ground above the river Stour, on the outskirts of a Cotswold hamlet not far from Oxford, and commanding a view of empty hillsides visited only by hares. The yews and the box which my mother planted have grown well, and the garden might look older than the house were it not for the ageless charm of the place, infinitely decayed at the same time, like something issued from the imagination of Sir John Millais or Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
It was lunch-time on Christmas Eve, and I was in the Oxford train. The sky had been leaden yellow in London and as we passed Reading some snow began to fall in rare large flakes out of a still air. It was very cold. I had decided to spend Christmas with Alexander and Rosemary, and I had telephoned them two days ago to tell them that I was coming, and to tell them briefly that Antonia and I were parting. Antonia and Palmer had pressed me with an astonishing warmth and fervour to spend Christmas with them. It was remarkable how rapidly, after Antonia's revelation, 'they' had come into existence as a sort of institution with its palpable strength, atmosphere, and even traditions. Antonia now divided her day between Hereford Square and Palmer's house in Pelham Crescent, doing her best to be in both places at once. I had never seen her so happy; and I realized with mixed feelings that an important part of her happiness consisted in looking after me. I let her. She had insisted on spending the two nights prior to my departure at Hereford Square, where in any case we normally occupied separate rooms. I went to bed each night blind drunk. I had refused their Christmas offer, not through any fear of anger and violence, but through fear of a too great compliance. I needed to withdraw in order to dress myself again in some shreds of dignity and reason. 'They' had whirled me naked. I hoped now to retrieve at least some tawdry semblance of self-respect by playing, before Rosemary and Alexander, the role of the deceived husband. More simply, I wanted time to think; more simply still, time to feel.
I was only now begi
Yet I had behaved well. That, at least, had emerged, and was indeed the main thing that had been, almost with a gentle insistence, established. I had taken it well; and a warm radiance of gratitude for this was continually perceptible, in which, deprived of other comforts, I was invited abjectly to bask. It was the inevitability of just such basking which I was now in process of ru
It was ironical, I reflected as I sat in the train, that a week ago I had seemed in secure possession of two women; now I was likely to be in possession of neither. It was not clear to me whether the rupture with Antonia had not in some mysterious way also killed my relation to Georgie, as if these two growths had, so far from competing, strangely nourished each other. I was far from sure of this, however, and my thoughts warily, even shyly, returning inconclusively to the image of my mistress. I had not communicated with Georgie since that day of the revelation, and since the thing was not yet common knowledge, she was still presumably ignorant of the change in my situation. I did not look forward to telling her. It was not a time at which I felt well able to have things expected of me; and as I speculated and wondered about what exactly Georgie would expect, it occurred to me how little, after all, I knew her. That she would vulgarly press me to marry her was of course out of the question. It was a matter rather of how far and how she would, in turn, let me off; it was an additional, and when I attended to it a terrible, pain that if in this new situation either Georgie or I 'flagged' we would be betraying and indeed destroying a precious and tender relation which in secrecy and ambiguity had so much flourished. I needed Georgie, I loved her, I felt I could not possibly, especially now, do without her. Yet I did not quite see myself marrying her. Still, it was, I reflected, far too soon to know. I had not yet even begun to fit the pieces together; and there might be some way of fitting them together which would make out a picture of happiness for me and for Georgie. At rare moments, in a quite abstract way, I imagined this happiness, something utterly remote from my present misery and confusion, and yet not totally unco
Rosemary was to meet me at Oxford and drive me to Rembers. I felt in no mood for confronting Rosemary. She had never quite got on with Antonia and would on the one hand be delighted at what had happened, while on the other she would maintain a conventional air of distress: distress such as persons feign at the death of an acquaintance, and which is in fact a glow of excitement and pleasure, perceptible on waking in the morning as a not yet diagnosed sense of all being exceptionally well with the world. Rosemary, I should say, is for her sins a Mrs Michelis, having got married young, and against all our wishes, to a dislikeable stockbroker called Bill Michelis, who subsequently left her; and like most people whose marriages have failed she had a sharp appetite for news of other failed marriages. I had expected Rosemary to marry again, as, quite apart from being a rich girl, she is very attractive to men, but so far she has prudently refrained. Although with her small precise features, refined prim voice, and Lynch-Gibbon pedantry in speech, she gives the appearance of a prude, she is in reality far from prudish and is almost undoubtedly at her somewhat mysterious flat in Chelsea, to which she rarely invites me, involved in continual amorous adventures.