Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [97]
‘I was making love to a woman when I was interrupted, first by the screaming of a cockatoo, then by the arrival of a visitor.’
The comment would be enormous and derisive laughter. His confession would have been a smokingroom joke. And yet he could not be suffering more if he had lost his mother.
He wandered for an hour through the streets, in Regent’s Park. The light gradually faded out of the white and misty afternoon; he became calmer. It was a lesson, he thought, a punishment; he had broken his promise. For his own good as well as for Marjorie’s, never again. He looked at his watch and seeing that it was after seven, turned homewards. He arrived at the house tired and determinedly repentant. Marjorie was sewing; the lamplight was bright on her thin fatigued face. She too was wearing a dressing-gown. It was mauve and hideous; he had always thought her taste bad. The flat was pervaded with a smell of cooking. He hated kitchen smells, but that was yet another reason why he should be faithful. It was a question of honour and duty. It was not because he preferred gardenia to cabbage that he had a right to make Marjorie suffer.
‘You’re late,’ she said.
‘There was a lot to do,’ Walter explained. ‘And I walked home.’ That at least was true. ‘How are you feeling?’ He laid his hand on her shoulder and bent down. Dropping her sewing, Marjorie threw her hands round his neck. What a happiness, she was thinking, to have him again! Hers once more. What a comfort! But even as she pressed herself against him, she realized that she was once more betrayed. She broke away from him.
‘Walter, how could you?’
The blood rushed to his face; but he tried to keep up the pretence. ‘How could I what? ‘ he asked.
‘You’ve been to see that woman again.’
‘But what are you talking about?’ He knew it was useless; but he went on pretending all the same.
‘It’s no use lying.’ She got up so suddenly that her work basket overturned and scattered its contents on the floor. Unheeding, she walked across the room. ‘Go away!’ she cried, when he tried to follow her. Walter shrugged his shoulders and obeyed. ‘How could you?’ she went on. ‘Coming home reeking of her perfume.’ So it was the gardenias. What a fool he was not to have foreseen….’After all you said last night. How could you?’
‘But if you’d let me explain,’ he protested in the tone of a victim—an exasperated victim.
‘Explain why you lied,’ she said bitterly. ‘Explain why you broke your promise.’
Her contemptuous anger evoked an answering anger in Walter. ‘Merely explain,’ he said with hard and dangerous politeness. What a bore she was with her scenes and jealousies! What an intolerable, infuriating bore!
‘Merely go on lying,’ she mocked.
Again he shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you like to put it like that,’ he said politely.
‘Just a despicable liar—that’s what you are.’ And turning away from him, she covered her face with her hands and began to cry.
Walter was not touched. The sight of her heaving shoulders just exasperated and bored him. He looked at her with a cold and weary anger.
‘Go away,’ she cried through her tears, ‘go away.’ She did not want him to be there, triumphing over her, while she cried. ‘Go away.’
‘Do you really want me to go?’ he asked with the same cool, aggravating politeness.
‘Yes, go, go.’
‘Very well,’ he said and opening the door, he went.
At Camden Town he took a cab and was at Bruton Street just in time to find Lucy on the point of going out to dinner.
‘You’re coming out with me,’ he announced very calmly.
‘Alas!’
‘Yes, you are.’
She looked