again buried his head in his hands.
“Cathleen,” said Wylie, “tell the Professor the worst.”
“Eight sixes forty-eight,” said Cathleen, “and twos sixteen one pound.”
In the street Neary said:
“Wylie, why are you so kind?”
“I don’t seem able to control myself,” said Wylie, “in the presence of certain predicaments.”
“You shall find me I think not ungrateful,” said Neary.
They went a little way in silence. Then Neary said:
“I cannot think what women see in Murphy.”
But Wylie was absorbed in the problem of what it was, in the predicaments of men like Neary, that carried him so far out of his government.
“Can you?” said Neary.
Wylie considered for a moment. Then he said:
“It is his—” stopping for want of the right word. There seemed to be, for once, a right word.
“His what?” said Neary.
They went a little further in silence. Neary gave up listening for an answer and raised his face to the sky. The gentle rain was trying not to fall.
“His surgical quality,” said Wylie.
It was not quite the right word.
5
The room that Celia had found was in Brewery Road between Pentonville Prison and the Metropolitan Cattle Market. West Brompton knew them no more. The room was large and the few articles of furniture it contained were large. The bed, the gas cooker, the table and the solitary tallboy, all were very large indeed. Two massive upright unupholstered armchairs, similar to those killed under him by Balzac, made it just possible for them to take their meals seated. Murphy’s rocking-chair trembled by the hearth, facing the window. The vast floor area was covered all over by a linoleum of exquisite design, a dim geometry of blue, grey and brown that delighted Murphy because it called Braque to his mind, and Celia because it delighted Murphy. Murphy was one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else. The walls were distempered a vivid lemon, Murphy’s lucky colour. This was so far in excess of the squeeze prescribed by Suk that he could not feel quite easy in his mind about it. The ceiling was lost in the shadows, yes, really lost in the shadows.
Here they entered upon what Celia called the new life. Murphy was inclined to think that the new life, if it came at all, came later, and then to one of them only. But Celia was so set on computing it from the hegira to the heights of Islington that he left it so. He did not want to gainsay her any more.
An immediate flaw in the new life was the landlady, a small thin worrier called Miss Carridge, a woman of such astute rectitude that she not only refused to cook the bill for Mr. Quigley, but threatened to inform that poor gentleman of how she had been tempted.
“A lady,” said Murphy bitterly, “not a landlady. Thin lips and a Doric pelvis. We are P.G.s.”
“All the more reason to find work,” said Celia.
Everything that happened became with Celia yet another reason for Murphy’s finding work. She exhibited a morbid ingenuity in this matter. From such antagonistic occasions as a new arrival at Pentonville and a fence sold out in the Market she drew the same text. The antinomies of unmarried love can seldom have appeared to better advantage. They persuaded Murphy that his engagement at even a small salary could not fail to annihilate, for a time at least, the visible universe for his beloved. She would have to learn what it stood for all over again. And was she not rather too old for such a feat of readaptation?
He kept these forebodings to himself, and indeed tried to suppress them, so genuine was his anxiety that for him henceforward there should be no willing and no nilling but with her, or at least as little as possible. Also he knew her retort in advance: “Then there will be nothing to distract me from you.” This was the kind of Joe Miller that Murphy simply could not bear to hear revived. It had never been a good joke.
Not the least remarkable of Murphy’s innumerable classifications of experience was that into jokes that had once been good jokes and jokes that had never been good jokes. What but an imperfect sense of humour could have made such a mess of chaos. In the beginning was the pun. And so on.
Celia was conscious of two equally important reasons for insisting as she did. The first was her desire to make a man of Murphy! Yes, June to October, counting in the blockade she had almost five months’ experience of Murphy, yet the image of him as a man of the world continued to beckon her on. The second was her aversion to resuming her own work, as would certainly be necessary if Murphy did not find a job before her savings, scraped together during the blockade, were exhausted. What she shrank from was not merely an occupation that she had always found dull (Mr. Kelly was mistaken in thinking her made for the life) but also the effect its resumption must have on her relations with Murphy.
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