Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [82]
‘Do you remember that curious time of ours in Paris?’ he asked, still thinking of her intent and eager face. Once, three years before, he had been her lover for perhaps a month.
Lucy nodded. ‘I remember it as rather perfect, while it lasted. But you were horribly fickle.’
‘In other words I didn’t make as much of an outcry as you hoped I would, when you went off with Tom Trivet.’
‘That’s a lie!’ Lucy was indignant. ‘You’d begun to fade away long before I even dreamt of Tom.’
‘Well, have it your own way. As a matter of fact you weren’t enough of a murderee for my taste.’ There was nothing of the victim about Lucy; not much even, he had often reflected, of the ordinary woman. She could pursue her pleasure as a man pursues his, remorselessly, single-mindedly, without allowing her thoughts and feelings to be in the least involved. Spandrell didn’t like to be used and exploited for someone else’s entertainment. He wanted to be the user. But with Lucy there was no possibility of slave-holding. ‘I’m like you,’ he added. ‘I need victims.’
‘The implication being that I’m one of the criminals?’
‘I thought we’d agreed to that long ago, my dear Lucy.’
‘I’ve never agreed to anything in my life,’ she protested,’ and never will. Not for more than half an hour at a time, at any rate.’
‘It was in Paris, do you remember? At the Chaumiere. There was a young man painting his lips at the next table.’
‘Wearing a platinum and diamond bracelet.’ She nodded, smiling. ‘And you called me an angel, or something.’
‘A bad angel,’ he qualified, ‘a born bad angel.’
‘For an intelligent man, Maurice, you talk a lot of drivel. Do you genuinely believe that some things are right and some wrong?’
Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. ‘Dear Lucy,’ he said, ‘you’re magnificent. And you must never bury your talents. Well done, thou good and faithful succubus!’ He kissed her hand again. ‘Go on doing your duty as you’ve already done it. That’s all heaven asks of you.’
‘I merely try to amuse myself.’ The cab drew up in front of her little house in Bruton Street. ‘God knows,’ she added as she stepped out, ‘without much success. Here, I’ve got money.’ She handed the driver a ten-shilling note. Lucy insisted, when she was with men, on doing as much of the paying as possible. Paying, she was independent, she could call her own tune. ‘And nobody gives me much help,’ she went on, as she fumbled with her latchkey. ‘You’re all so astonishingly dull.’
In the dining-room a rich still-life of bottles, fruits and sandwiches was awaiting them. Round the polished flanks of the vacuum flask their reflections walked fantastically in a non-Euclidean universe. Professor Dewar had liquefied hydrogen in order that Lucy’s soup might be kept hot for her into the small hours. Over the sideboard hung one of John Bidlake’s paintings of the theatre. A curve of the gallery, a slope of faces, a corner of the bright proscenium.
‘How good that is!’ said Spandrell shading his eyes to see it more clearly.
Lucy made no comment. She was looking at herself in an old grey-glassed mirror.
‘What shall I do when I’m old?’ she suddenly asked.
‘Why not die?’ suggested Spandrell with his mouth full of bread and Strasbourg goose liver.
‘I think I’ll take to science, like the Old Man. Isn’t there such a thing as human zoology? I’d get a bit tired of frogs. Talking of frogs,’ she added, ‘I rather liked that little carroty man—what’s his name?—Illidge. How he does hate us for being rich!’
‘Don’t lump me in with the rich. If you knew…’ Spandrell shook his head. ‘Let’s hope she’ll bring some cash when she comes to-morrow,’ he was thinking, remembering the message Lucy had brought from his mother. He had written that the case was urgent.
‘I like people who can hate,’ Lucy went on.
‘Illidge knows how to. He’s fairly stuffed with theories and bile and envy. He longs to blow you all up.’
‘Then why doesn’t he? Why don’t you? Isn’t that what your club’s there for?’
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘There’s a slight difference between theory and practice, you know. And when one’s a militant communist and a scientific materialist and an admirer of the Russian Revolution, the theory