The Squatter
Jenny Petherbridge was a widow, a middle-aged woman who had been married four times. Each husband had wasted away and died; she had been like a squirrel racing a wheel day and night in an endeavour to make them historical; they could not survive it.
She had a beaked head and the body, small, feeble, and ferocious, that somehow made one associate her with Judy; they did not go together. Only severed could any part of her have been called ‘right’. There was a trembling ardour in her wrists and fingers as if she were suffering from some elaborate denial. She looked old, yet expectant of age; she seemed to be steaming in the vapours of someone else about to die; still she gave off an odour to the mind (for there are purely mental smells that have no reality) of a woman about to be accouchée. Her body suffered from its fare, laughter and crumbs, abuse and indulgence. But put out a hand to touch her, and her head moved perceptibly with the broken arc of two instincts, recoil and advance, so that the head rocked timidly and aggressively at the same moment, giving her a slightly shuddering and expectant rhythm.
She writhed under the necessity of being unable to wear anything becoming, being one of those panicky little women who, no matter what they put on, look like a child under penance.
She had a fancy for tiny ivory or jade elephants; she said they were luck; she left a trail of tiny elephants wherever she went; and she went hurriedly and gasping.
Her walls, her cupboards, her bureaux, were teeming with second-hand dealings with life. It takes a bold and authentic robber to get first-hand plunder. Someone else’s marriage ring was on her finger; the photograph taken of Robin for Nora sat upon her table. The books in her library were other people’s selections. She lived among her own things like a visitor to a room kept ‘exactly as it was when—‘. She tiptoed, even when she went to draw a bath, nervous and andante. She stopped, fluttering and febrile, before every object in her house. She had no sense of humour or peace or rest, and her own quivering uncertainty made even the objects which she pointed out to the company, as, ‘My virgin from Palma’, or, ‘The left-hand glove of La Duse’, recede into a distance of uncertainty, so that it was almost impossible for the onlooker to see them at all. When anyone was witty about a contemporary event, she would look perplexed and a little dismayed, as if someone had done something that really should not have been done; therefore her attention had been narrowed down to listening for faux pas. She frequently talked about something being the ‘death of her’, and certainly anything could have been had she been the first to suffer it. The words that fell from her mouth seemed to have been lent to her; had she been forced to invent a vocabulary for herself, it would have been a vocabulary of two words, ‘ah’ and ‘oh’. Hovering, trembling, tip-toeing, she would unwind anecdote after anecdote in a light rapid lisping voice which one always expected to change, to drop and to become the ‘every day’ voice; but it never did. The stories were humorous, well told. She would smile, toss her hands up, widen her eyes; immediately everyone in the room had a certain feeling of something lost, sensing that there was one person who was missing the importance of the moment, who had not heard the story; the teller herself.
She had endless cuttings and scraps from journals and old theatre programmes, haunted the Comédie Française, spoke of Molière, Racine and La Dame aux Camélias. She was generous with money. She made gifts lavishly and spontaneously. She was the worst recipient of presents in the world. She sent bushel baskets of camellias to actresses because she had a passion for the characters they portrayed. The flowers were tied with yards of satin ribbon, and a note accompanied them, effusive and gentle. To men she sent books by the dozen; the general feeling was that she was a well-read woman though she had read perhaps ten books in her life.
She had a continual rapacity for other people’s facts; absorbing time, she held herself responsible for historic characters. She was avid and disorderly in her heart. She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person; somewhere about her was the tension of the accident that made the beast the human endeavour.
She was nervous about the future, it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time—because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.
One inevitably thought of her in the act of love emitting florid commedia dell’arte ejaculations; one should not have thought of her in the act of love at all. She thought of little else, and though always submitting to the act, spoke of and desired the spirit of love; yet was unable to attain it.
No one could intrude upon her, because there was no place for intrusion. This inadequacy made her insubordinate—she could not participate in a great love, she could only report it. Since her emotional reactions were without distinction, she had to fall back on the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and related, and over those she seemed to suffer and grow glad.
When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions. As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora’s for Robin. She was a ‘squatter’ by instinct.
Jenny knew about Nora immediately; to know Robin ten minutes was to know about Nora. Robin spoke of her in long, rambling, impassioned sentences. It had caught Jenny by the ear—she listened, and both loves seemed to be one and her own. From that moment the catastrophe was inevitable. This was in nineteen hundred and twenty-seven.
At their subsequent engagements, Jenny was always early and Robin late. Perhaps at the Ambassadeurs (Jenny feared meeting Nora). Perhaps dinner in the Bois—(Jenny had the collective income four dead husbands could afford)—Robin would walk in, with the aggressive slide to the foot common to tall people, slurred in its accent by the hipless smoothness of her gait—her hands in her pockets, the trench coat with the belt hanging, scowling and reluctant. Jenny leaning far over the table, Robin far back, her legs thrust under her, to balance the whole backward incline of the body, and Jenny so far forward that she had to catch her small legs in the back rung of the chair, ankle out and toe in, not to pitch forward on the table—thus they presented the two halves of a movement that had, as in sculpture, the beauty and the absurdity of a desire that is in flower but that can have no burgeoning, unable to execute its destiny; a movement that can divulge neither caution nor daring, for the fundamental condition for completion was in neither of them; they were like Greek runners, with lifted feet but without the relief of the final command that would bring the foot down—eternally angry, eternally separated, in a cataleptic frozen gesture of abandon.
The meeting at the opera had not been the first, but Jenny, seeing the doctor in the promenoir, aware of his passion for gossip, knew she had better make it seem so; as a matter of fact she had met Robin a year previously.
Though Jenny knew her safety lay in secrecy, she could not bear her safety; she wanted to be powerful enough to dare the world—and knowing she was not, the knowledge added to that already great burden of trembling timidity and fury.
On arriving at her house with the doctor and Robin, Jenny found several actresses awaiting her, two gentlemen, and the Marchesa de Spada, a very old rheumatic woman (with an antique spaniel, which suffered from asthma), who believed in the stars. There was talk about fate, and every hand in the room was searched and every destiny turned over and discussed. A little girl (Jenny called her niece, though she was no relation) sat at the far end of the room. She had been playing, but the moment Robin entered she ceased, and sat, her two small wax-like hands tender with the new life in them cupped up in her lap, staring under her long-lashed eyelids at no one else, as if she had become prematurely aware. This was the child Jenny spoke of later, when she called on Felix.
The Marchesa remarked that everyone in the room had been going on from interminable sources since the world began, and would continue to reappear, but that there was one person who had come to the end of her existence and would return no more. As she spoke, she looked slyly at Robin, who was standing by the piano speaking to the child in an undertone; and at the Marchesa’s words Jenny began to tremble slightly, so that every point of her upstanding hair—it stood about her head in a bush, virile and unlovely—quivered. She began to pull herself along the enormous sofa towards the Marchesa, her legs under her, and suddenly she stood up.
‘Order the carriages!’ she cried. ‘Immediately! We will go driving, we need a little air!’ She turned her back and spoke in agitation. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘The carriages! It is so close in here!’
‘What carriages?’ said the doctor, and he looked from one to the other. ‘What carriages?’ He could hear the maid unlocking the front door, calling out to the coachmen. He could hear the clear ringing sound of wheels drawn close to the curb and the muttered cries of a foreign voice. Robin turned around and said, a malign gentle smile on her mouth, ‘Now she is in a panic, and we will have to do something.’ She put her glass down and stood, her back to the room, her broad shoulders drawn up, and though she was drunk, there was a withdrawal in her movement, and a wish to be gone.
‘She will dress up now,’ she said. She leaned back against the piano, pointing with the hand that held her glass. ‘Dress up, wait, you will see.’ Then she added, thrusting her chin forward so that the cords in her neck stood out: ‘Dress up in something old.’
The doctor, who was more uncomfortable perhaps than anyone in the room and yet who could not forbear scandal, in order to gossip about the ‘manifestations of our time’ at a later date, made a slight gesture and said, ‘Hush!’ And sure enough, at that moment, Jenny appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, got up in a hoop, a bonnet and a shawl, and stood looking at Robin who was paying no attention to her, deep in conversation with the child. Jenny with the burning interest of a person who is led to believe herself a part of the harmony of a concert to which she is listening, appropriating in some measure its identity, emitted short, exclamatory ejaculations.
There were, it turned out, three carriages in all, those open hacks that may still be had in Paris if they are hunted up in time. Jenny had a standing order with them and when they were not called upon still they circled about her address, like flies about a bowl of cream. The three cabbies were hunched up on their boxes, their coats about their ears, for though it was an early autumn night, it had become very chilly by twelve o’clock. They had been ordered for eleven and had been sitting on their boxes for the past hour.
Jenny, cold with dread lest Robin should get into one of the other carriages with a tall slightly surprised English girl, seated herself in the farthest corner of the foremost fiacre and called, ‘Here, here,’ leaving the rest of the guests to dispose of themselves. The child, Sylvia, sat across from her, the ragged gray rug held in two clenched hands. There was a great deal of chattering and laughter, when to her horror Jenny saw that Robin was moving toward the second carriage in which the English girl had already seated herself. ‘Ah no, no!’ Jenny cried, and began beating the upholstery, sending up a cloud of dust. ‘Come here,’ she said in an anguished voice, as if it were the end of her life, ‘Come here with me, both of you,’ she added in a lowered and choking tone; and assisted by the doctor, Robin got in, the young Englishwoman, to Jenny’s consternation, taking the seat by her side.
Doctor O’Connor now turned to the driver and called out: ‘Ecoute, mon gosse, va comme si trente-six diables étaient accrochés à tes fesses!’ Then waving his hand in a gesture of abandon, he added: ‘Where to but the woods, the sweet woods of Paris! Fais le tour du Bois!’ he shouted, and slowly the three carriages, horse behind horse, moved out into the Champs Elysées.
Jenny, with nothing to protect her against the night but her long Spanish shawl, which looked ridiculous over her flimsy hoop and bodice, a rug over her knees, had sunk back with collapsed shoulders. With darting, incredible swiftness, her eyes went from one girl to the other, while the doctor, wondering how he had managed to get himself into the carriage which held three women and a child, listened to the faint laughter from the carriages behind, feeling, as he listened, a twinge of occult misery. ‘Ah!’ he said under his breath. ‘Just the girl that God forgot.’ Saying which, he seemed to be precipitated into the halls of justice, where he had suffered twenty-four hours. ‘Oh, God help us,’ he said, speaking aloud, at which the child turned slightly on her seat, her head, with large intelligent eyes directed toward him, which had he noticed, would have silenced him instantly (for the doctor had a mother’s reverence for childhood.) ‘What manner of man is it that has to adopt his brother’s children to make a mother of himself, and sleeps with his brother’s wife to get him a future—it’s enough to bring down the black curse of Kerry.’
‘What?’ said Jenny in a loud voice, hoping to effect a break in the whispered conversation between Robin and the English girl. The doctor turned up his coat collar.
‘I was saying, madame, that by his own peculiar perversity God has made me a liar—’
‘What, what is that you say?’ demanded Jenny, her eyes still fixed on Robin so that her question seemed to be directed rather to that corner of the carriage than to the doctor.
‘You see before you, madame,’ he said, ‘one who was created in anxiety. My father, Lord rest his soul, had no happiness of me from the beginning. When I joined the army he relented a little because he had a suspicion that possibly in that fracas which occasionally puts a son on the list of “not much left since", I might be damaged. After all, he had no desire to see my ways corrected with a round of buckshot. He came into me early in the dawn as I lay in my bed, to say that he forgave me, and that indeed he hoped to be forgiven; that he had never understood, but that he had, by much thought, by heavy reading, come back with love in his hand, that he was sorry, that he came to say so; that he hoped I could conduct myself like a soldier. For a moment he seemed to realize my terrible predicament: to be shot for man’s meat, but to go down like a girl, crying in the night for her mother. So I got up in bed on my knees and crawled to the foot where he stood, and cast my arms about him and said, “No matter what you have done or thought, you were right, and there’s nothing in my heart but love for you and respect."’
Jenny had shrunk into her rug and was not listening. Her eyes followed every movement of Robin’s hand, which was laid now on the child’s hand, now stroking her hair, the child smiling up into the trees.
‘Oh,’ said the doctor, ‘for the love of God!’
Jenny began to cry slowly, the tears wet, warm, and sudden in the odd misery of her face. It made the doctor sad, with that unhappy yet pleasantly regrettable discomfort on which he usually launched his better meditations.
He remarked, and why he did not know, that by weeping she appeared like a single personality, who, by multiplying her tears, brought herself into the position of one who is seen twenty times in twenty mirrors—still only one, but many times distressed. Jenny began to weep outright. As the initial soft weeping had not caught Robin’s attention, now Jenny used the increase and the catching in her throat to attract her, with the same insistent fury one feels when trying to attract a person in a crowded room. The weeping became as accurate as the monotonous underplay in a score, in spite of the incapacity of her heart. The doctor, sitting now a little slumped forward, said, in an almost professional voice (they were now long past the pond and the park, and were circling back again, toward the lower parts of town), ‘Love of woman for woman, what insane passion for unmitigated anguish and motherhood brought that into the mind?’
‘Oh, Oh,’ she said, ‘Look at her!’ She abruptly made a gesture toward Robin and the girl, as if they were no longer present, as if they were a vista passing out of view with the movement of the horses. ‘Look, she brings love down to a level!’ She hoped that Robin would hear.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Love, that terrible thing!’
She began to beat the cushions with her doubled fist. ‘What could you know about it? Men never know anything about it, why should they? But a woman should know—they are finer, more sacred; my love is sacred and my love is great!’
‘Shut up,’ Robin said, putting her hand on her knee. ‘Shut up, you don’t know what you are talking about. You talk all the time and you never know anything. It’s such an awful weakness with you. Identifying yourself with God!’ She was smiling, and the English girl, breathing very quickly, lit a cigarette. The child remained speechless, as she had been for the duration of the drive, her head turned as if fixed, looking at Robin, and trying to hold her slight legs, that did not reach the floor, from shaking with the shaking of the carriage.
Then Jenny struck Robin, scratching and tearing in hysteria, striking, clutching and crying. Slowly the blood began to run down Robin’s cheeks, and as Jenny struck repeatedly Robin began to go forward as if brought to the movement by the very blows themselves, as if she had no will, sinking down in the small carriage, her knees on the floor, her head forward as her arm moved upward in a gesture of defence; and as she sank, Jenny also, as if compelled to conclude the movement of the first blow, almost as something seen in retarded action, leaned forward and over, so that when the whole of the gesture was completed, Robin’s hands were covered by Jenny’s slight and bending breast, caught in between the bosom and the knees. And suddenly the child flung herself down on the seat, face outward, and said in a voice not suitable for a child, because it was controlled with terror: ‘Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!’
The carriage at this moment drew smartly up into the rue du Cherche-Midi. Robin jumped before the carriage stopped, but Jenny was close behind her, following her as far as the garden.
It was not long after this that Nora and Robin separated; a little later Jenny and Robin sailed for America.