Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [79]
‘Spandrell? Bidlake?’ he raised his invisibly sandy eyebrows in astonishment. And what’s that woman doing here? he wondered.
Lucy came forward with outstretched hand. ‘We’re old acquaintances,’ she said with a smile of friendly recognition. Illidge, who was preparing to make his face look coldly hostile, found himself smiling back at her.
A taxi turned into the street, suddenly and startlingly breaking the silence. Marjorie sat up in bed, listening. The hum of the engine grew louder and louder. It was Walter’s taxi; this time she felt sure of it, she knew. Nearer it came and nearer. At the bottom of the little hill on the right of the house, the driver changed down to a lower gear; the engine hummed more shrilly, like an angry wasp. Nearer and nearer. She was possessed by an anxiety that was of the body as well as of the mind. She felt breathless, her heart beat strongly and irregularly—beat, beat, beat and then it seemed to fail; the expected beat did not make itself felt; it was as though a trap-door had been opened beneath her into the void; she knew the terror of emptiness, of falling, falling—and the next retarded beat was the impact of her body against solid earth. Nearer, nearer. She almost dreaded, though she had so unhappily longed for, his return. She dreaded the emotions she would feel at the sight of him; the tears she would shed, the reproaches she would find herself uttering, in spite of herself. And what would he say and do, what would be his thoughts? She was afraid of imagining. Nearer; the sound was just below her windows; it retreated, it diminished. And she had been so certain that it was Walter’s taxi. She lay down again. If only she could have slept. But that physical anxiety of her body would not allow her. The blood thumped in her ears. Her skin was hot and dry. Her eyes ached. She lay quite still, on her back, her arms crossed on her breast, like a dead woman laid out for burial. Sleep, sleep, she whispered to herself; she imagined herself relaxed, smoothed out, asleep. But suddenly, a malicious hand seemed to pluck at her taut nerves. A violent tic contracted the muscles of her limbs; she started as though with terror. And the physical reaction of fear evoked an emotion of terror in her mind, quickening and intensifying the anxiety of unhappiness which, all the time, had underlain her conscious efforts to achieve tranquillity. ‘Sleep, sleep, relax’—it was useless to go on trying to be calm, to forget, to sleep. She allowed her misery to come to the surface of her mind. ‘Why should he want to make me so unhappy?’ She turned her head. The luminous hands of the clock on the little table beside her bed marked a quarter to three. A quarter to three—and he knew she could never go to sleep before he came in. ‘He knows I’m ill,’ she said aloud.’doesn’t he care?’
A new thought suddenly occurred to her. ‘Perhaps he wants me to die.’ To die, not to be, not to see his face any more, to leave him with that other woman. The tears came into her eyes. Perhaps he was deliberately trying to kill her. It was not in spite of her being ill that he treated her like this; it was because she suffered so much, it was precisely because she was ill. He was cruel with a purpose. He hoped, he intended that she should die; die and leave him in peace with that other woman. She pressed her face against the pillow and sobbed. Never see him again, never any more. Darkness, loneliness, death, for ever. For ever and ever. And on top of everything, it was all so unfair. Was it her fault that she couldn’t afford to dress well?
‘If I could afford to buy the clothes she buys.’ Chanel, Lanvin,—the pages of Vogue floated before her eyes—Molyneux, Groult….At one of those cheap-smart shops where cocottes buy their clothes, off Shaftesbury Avenue, there was a model for sixteen guineas. ‘He likes her because she’s attractive. But if I had the money…’ It wasn’t fair. He was making her pay for not being well off. She had to suffer because he didn’t earn enough to buy her good clothes.
And then there was the baby. He was making her pay for that. His child. He was bored with her, because she was always tired and ill; he didn