What was wrong with me, I wondered, what had happened to me, that I, who had seemed cut out for some extremity or other, should be here now bending over a washing machine to pick out a button or two and some bits of soggy wet cotton? What chances were there now for the once-famous Emma, whose name had been in certain small exclusive circles the cause for so much discussion and prediction? They would not think much of me now, I thought, if they could see me, those Marxists in Rome, those historians and photographers in Hampstead, those undergraduates, in two universities. There were more odds against me than there had been against Mrs. Von Blerke, and she had gone under.

10

THE first night of The White Devil was a close social repetition of the first night of The Clandestine Marriage: I wore the same dress, a dingy cement-coloured thing, Mike Papini arrived on the same train, complained in the same words about the journey and we went and sat in the same seats. The only differences lay in the play itself and in the fact that the death of Mrs. Von Blerke had by now been announced. Presumably, this play being a bloody tragedy, they thought its acknowledgement would augment and not detract from the atmosphere. And this time Wyndham did not sit in front of me, though his sister and her husband did. He was presumably busy elsewhere.

The play impressed me, despite myself: such fury, such destruction, such passion, and everyone acting well because, as Wyndham had said, they all thought they had the best parts; and as Wyndham had also said, David really had got the best part. As I watched him I saw at last why we were here in Hereford, why David had brought me here: to play this role in this obscure play he had been willing to submit me to unlimited boredom and fresh air and, as he might have foreseen, to infidelity. He justified himself, too. I felt, while watching, that it was worth it. In the last scene of the play, in his last, dying speech, he had some lines that came closer to him than anything I had ever heard him say on stage before: “I do not look,” he said clutching at his mock wound,

“Who went before nor who shall follow me.

No, at myself I will begin and end.”