Chapters (30)
‘Well, simply but! I mean, there is nothing else there. It had always seemed to me simple to like people and right to be liked, but I never can feel that much more is involved – is it? I have a horror, I think, of not being, and of my friends not being, quite perfectly balanced. I think moderation in everything – but perhaps I am cold … Will you take my purse now – if you won’t eat any more – and go in and pay for the cakes?’
To Sydney the cumulative effect of this succession of touches (especially the last: herself brandishing with commercial insistence a long bill that her bewildered debtor felt unable to meet) was of vulgarity. The attribution to herself of an irritable sex-consciousness vis-à-vis to Ronald did not hurt, but sharply offended. Mrs Kerr, however, sitting there with her half-smile, her evident deprecation of the interlude, her invincible air of fastidiousness, had maintained her own plane, whereon ‘vulgarity’ would be meaningless. Sydney could only suppose that cruelty as supremely disinterested as art had, like art, its own purity, which could be transcend anything and consecrate the nearest material to its uses.
The friend sitting back to back with Mrs Kerr had gone away minutes ago; the little blue tables one by one were deserted. The business of the Pâtisserie wilted temporarily before the approach of lunch-time. Surprised by this isolation, as though the trees of wood had melted away from around them, the two left the shade of the awning and stood dazzled for a moment, looking vaguely up and down the street.
‘Where now?’ said Mrs Kerr, and laid a hand on Sydney’s sleeve in her anxiety to be directed.
Sydney could make no suggestion; she remembered they were on an edge of Europe and had an impulse in the still active top of her mind to suggest Prague, the Hook, or Rouen. The facility with which it would be possible for her to cover larger distances and her present complete inability to move from the kerbstone presented themselves simultaneously. She could not command the few words, the few movements which should take her away from Mrs Kerr, or imagine where, having escaped, she would find a mood, room, place, even country, to offer her sanctuary. Her own background, apart from which the crisis of today, of these last weeks, had produced itself, was seen very clearly at this distance away from it, but presented an impenetrable façade with no ingress. She could see her life very plainly, but there seemed no way into it; the whole thing might have been painted on canvas with a clever enough but not convincing appearance of reality.
She thought, ‘So there is really nothing to go back to,’ and said, gently drawing her arm away from Mrs Kerr: ‘I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to the Hotel.’