The Chinese Room by Vivian Connell

Author:Vivian Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789128956
Publisher: Phocion Publishing
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

On the next Monday, as Muriel rested in her room before going over to lunch with Therese Waldenham, she felt somewhat relieved at being today her own worst enemy. In her heart she had never believed in Harley Street’s opinion that she was not meant to be a mother, and had safeguarded herself through Saluby, and therefore had been able to enjoy herself with MacGregor.

She pictured him in his cottage by the lochs in the Highlands. He did not have a pantechnicon of luggage rumbling at his heels, as she and Nicholas had. She had never got Nicholas away by himself from the bank and Barrington. Since their talk on the evening that Grierson had thrown the sailor out, she had guessed that Nicholas was tired of the heavy gold shackles that buckled him to old Dorman and the bank. But she wondered if he would, when they offered him a peerage, answer as old Jock had: “D’ye think I want to lift myself up by me golden bootstraps into the Lords!” Nicholas had annoyed her all the week. He was, she thought bluntly, getting old. He was letting himself get old. And he was dull. He had let himself grow dull. He seldom laughed, and laughed out of his belly only when he recalled a crusty saying of old Jocks. She felt that Nicholas was a good deal more intelligent than he knew himself and that banking was not enough to use up all his mind. And he was developing kinks. This business of writing himself letters, even as an idle experiment, was nonsensical for a grown man. She guessed that Nicholas wanted her now, but she could not give herself to him. It was his own fault. He had let his body go into putty. Soon he would have a pillion backside. The realism of sex was giving her thought a realism, and she no longer dodged away in her mind from physical considerations. When she thought about MacGregor she thought about the whole man. She was being sharpened into an impatience by the feeling that she had been tricked out of her youth. She had wanted a Byron and had been landed with a one-pip subaltern. She was now beginning to understand the implication of the way Mrs. Canjole used to say “one-pip” when she spoke of army youth.

She looked at the clock. It was time to put on something to go and see Therese. In a few days’ time, she knew, she would have a fresh problem—to find a new lover. A lover who would somehow remind her of MacGregor or of Nick as he might have been. Her mouth hardened. It was a pity that Nicholas could not simplify his vague existence to one plain need like that. She snapped open her hygiene box. She was damned well sick of English sexual bumbledom. She nearly spoke her angry thought aloud: “What a bloody idiot I have been! My God, how Therese would laugh if she

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