Island - Aldous Huxley [52]
Will smiled his flayed smile. “Three months to the day after our wedding. The first time was with one of the secretaries at the office. Goodness, what a bore! After that there was a young painter, a curlyheaded little Jewish girl whom Molly had helped with money while she was studying at the Slade. I used to go to her studio twice a week, from five to seven. It was almost three years before Molly found out about it.”
“And, I gather, she was upset?”
“Much more than I’d ever thought she’d be.”
“So what did you do about it?”
Will shook his head. “This is where it begins to get complicated,” he said. “I had no intention of giving up my cocktail hours with Rachel; but I hated myself for making Molly so unhappy. At the same time I hated her for being unhappy. I resented her suffering and the love that had made her suffer; I felt that they were unfair, a kind of blackmail to force me to give up my innocent fun with Rachel. By loving me so much and being so miserable about what I was doing—what she really forced me to do—she was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom. But meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her. Pity,” he repeated, “not compassion. Compassion is suffering-with, and what I wanted at all costs was to spare myself the pain her suffering caused me, and avoid the painful sacrifices by which I could put an end to her suffering. Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside, if you see what I mean—sorry for her as a spectator, an aesthete, a connoisseur in excruciations. And this aesthetic pity of mine was so intense, every time her unhappiness came to a head, that I could almost mistake it for love. Almost, but never quite. For when I expressed my pity in physical tenderness (which I did because that was the only way of putting a temporary stop to her unhappiness and to the pain her unhappiness was inflicting on me), that tenderness was always frustrated before it could come to its natural consummation. Frustrated because, by temperament, she was only a Sister of Mercy, not a wife. And yet, on every level but the sensual, she loved me with a total commitment—a commitment that called for an answering commitment on my part. But I wouldn’t commit myself, maybe I genuinely couldn’t. So instead of being grateful for her self-giving, I resented it. It made claims on me, claims that I refused to acknowledge. So there we were, at the end of every crisis, back at the beginning of the old drama—the drama of a love incapable of sensuality self-committed to a sensuality incapable of love and evoking strangely mixed responses of guilt and exasperation, of pity and resentment, sometimes of real hatred (but always with an undertone of remorse), the whole accompanied by, contrapuntal to, a succession of furtive evenings with my little curlyheaded painter.”
“I hope at least they were enjoyable,” said Susila.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Only moderately. Rachel could never forget that she was an intellectual. She had a way of asking what one thought of Piero di Cosimo at the most inopportune moments. The real enjoyment and of course the real agony—I never experienced them until Babs appeared on the scene.”
“When was that?”
“Just over a year ago. In Africa.”
“Africa?”
“I’d been sent there by Joe Aldehyde.”
“That man who owns newspapers?”
“And all the rest. He was married to Molly’s aunt Eileen. An exemplary family man, I may add. That’s why he’s so serenely convinced of his own righteousness, even when he’s engaged in the most nefarious financial operations.”
“And you’re working for him?”
Will nodded. “That was his wedding present to Molly—a job for me on the Aldehyde papers at almost twice the salary I’d been getting from my previous employers. Princely! But then he was very fond of Molly.”
“How did he react to Babs?”
“He never knew about her—never knew that there was any reason for Molly’s accident.”
“So he goes on employing you for your dead wife’s sake?”
Will shrugged his shoulders. “The excuse,