Henry and Cato Read Free Page B

at the nape of her neck with a large tortoiseshell slide. When loose it just covered her shoulders. Did she dye her hair, Lucius wondered. He lived surrounded by mysteries. Gerda, especially in this light, could still look uncannily young. Of course she was faded and her features were less fine. She had a pale rather wide face and a nose which seemed to have become larger with age, the nostrils more powerfully salient. The eyes were a dark brown and glowed—like Sandy’s, like Henry’s. She was neither short nor tall, perceptibly plumper. But she still had the authority of a woman who had been a beauty. Watching her stride and turn, tossing her long blue and green skirt, he thought, she’s a woman every second, bless her. Her old-fashioned coquetry was so natural it had become a grace.
    Lucius was sixty-six years old. It was many years now since he had become the slave of glowing-eyed Gerda. When he first met her she was already married to tall red-headed Burke and carrying a lusty red-headed baby in her arms. Lucius had fallen in love, not intending to make of this his life’s work. How had it happened? His fruitless passion had become a family joke. Gerda patronized him. (‘At least English intellectuals are gentlemen’, said Gerda.) Nobody feared Lucius. Burke, who felt, for no good reason, that Lucius could perceive, superior to everyone, patted Lucius on the back and told him to make himself at home at Laxlinden Hall. Little did Burke or Lucius dream how thoroughly this would come about.
    Lucius had been, making almost a profession of it, a beautiful young man. He had had long flowing light brown hair at a time when this was unusual, a defiant sign of some remarkable oddity. Lucius, very conscious of this, felt that his oddity was simply genius. How he despised Burke, despised even his younger college friend John Forbes through whom he had met Burke. Everybody in London adored Lucius then; it was only at Laxlinden that he was a failure. He belonged to a stylish literary milieu and had published poems before he was twenty. A number of quite well-known men were in love with him. He was the child of elderly parents. They were poor folk, but they had sent him to a good school. They lived to see his book of poems and also the novel which followed it. He had a younger sister but she was uneducated and they had nothing in common. Spurred by an idealism which was one with his self-confident ambition he early joined the Communist party. He soldiered, bravely and decently enough he thought in retrospect, through the years of disillusionment. Perhaps joining the party had been his mistake? He had made some mistake. Perhaps he should simply have sat still and worked it all out a priori as other people did. It seemed obvious enough afterwards. What a lot of his young strength he had wasted on fruitless controversies, now rendered dim and tiny by the relentless, and to Lucius always surprising, onward movement of history.
    He had lived in this strange way with Gerda for several years now. Of course much longer ago, after Burke died, he had proposed to her. Or had he? He could not now remember the exact form of words. She turned away. He went back to London. He worked as a journalist, then for a publisher, saving up for his freedom. The first novel was a success, the second one was not, he never wrote a third. Instead he wrote literary love letters to Gerda. He gave up poetry and started to write a big book about Marxism. He visited Gerda regularly and told her that she was the only woman he had ever loved, which was not quite true. He talked to her impressively about his book. One day she suggested that he should come and stay at the Hall until he had finished it. It was still unfinished. So Gerda had turned out in this strange way to be his fate after all. Was he glad? Was she glad? He had never been to bed with her. But she seemed to need him, she seemed to expect him to stay on. Perhaps, as the years go