Lucky Jim

'Now, Margaret, you know I didn't mean it like that; don't be ridiculous. I was only…'

In a high voice, kept steady only by obvious effort, she said: 'Please go.'

Dixon fought hard to drive away the opinion that, both as actress and as script-writer, she was doing rather well, and hated himself for failing.

Trying to haul urgency into his tone, he began: 'You mustn't take it like that. It was a bloody stupid thing to say, on my part, I admit. I didn't mean you actually barged in, in that way, of course I didn't. You must see…'

'Oh, I see all right, James. I see perfectly.' This time her voice was flat. She wore a sort of arty get-up of multi-coloured shirt, skirt with fringed hem and pocket, low-heeled shoes, and wooden beads. The smoke from her cigarette curled up, blue and ashy in a sunbeam, round her bare forearm. Dixon moved closer and saw that her hair had been recently washed; it lay in dry lustreless wisps on the back of her neck. In that condition it struck him as quintessentially feminine, much more feminine than the Callaghan girl's shining fair crop. Poor old Margaret, he thought, and rested his hand, in a gesture he hoped was solicitous, on her nearer shoulder.

Before he could speak she'd shaken his hand off, moved over to the window, and begun to talk in a strain that marked the opening, he soon realized, of a totally new phase of the scene they were evidently having. ' Get away. How dare you. Stop pushing and pulling me about. Who do you think you are? You haven't even had the grace to apologize for last night You behaved disgracefully. I hope you realize you absolutely stank of beer. I've never given you the least impression… Whatever made you think you could get away with that sort of thing? What the hell do you take me for? It isn't as if you didn't know what I've had to put up with, all these last weeks. It's intolerable, absolutely intolerable.

I won't stand for it. You must have known how I've been feeling.'

She went on like this while Dixon looked her in the eyes. His panic mounted in sincerity and volume. Her body moved jerkily about; her head bobbed from side to side on its rather long neck, shaking the wooden beads about on the multicoloured shirt. He found himself thinking that the whole arty get-up seemed oddly at variance with the way she was acting. People who wore clothes of that sort oughtn't to mind things of this sort, certainly not as much as Margaret clearly minded this thing. It was surely wrong to dress, and to behave most of the time, in a way that was so un-prim when you were really so proper all of the time. But then, with Catchpole at any rate, she hadn't been proper all of the time, had she? But of course it was all wrong to think like this, very bad, in fact, to allow his irritation with some of the things about her to do what it always did, to obscure what was most important: she was a neurotic who'd recently taken a bad beating. Yes, she was right really, though not in the way she meant. He had behaved badly, he had been inconsiderate. He'd better devote all his energy to apologizing. He booted out of his mind the reflection, derived apparently from nowhere, that in spite of her emotion she seemed well able to keep her voice down.

'I was thinking only yesterday afternoon about the relationship we'd been building up, how valuable it was, something really good. But that was silly, wasn't it? I was dead wrong, I…'

'No, you're dead wrong now, you were right then,' he broke in. ' These things don't stop just like that, you know; human beings aren't as simple as that, they're not like machines.'

He went on like this while she looked him in the eyes. The rotten triteness of his words seemed, if anything, to help him to meet her gaze. She stood with one leg partly crossed over the other in her favourite attitude, no doubt designed to show off her legs, for they were good, her best feature. At one point she moved slightly so that her spectacles caught the light and prevented him seeing where she was looking. The eeriness of this disconcerted him a good deal, but he soldiered pluckily on to his objective, the promise or avowal, not yet in sight, which would end this encounter, bring some respite from the trek away from honesty. Boots, boots, boots, boots, marching up and down again.

After a while she was no more than implacably annoyed; then annoyed; then sullen and monosyllabic. ' Oh James,' she said at last, smoothing her hair with a convex palm; 'do let's stop this for now. I'm tired, I'm terribly tired, I can't go on any more. I'm going back to bed; I couldn't manage to sleep much last night. I just want to be left alone.

Try to understand.'

'What about your breakfast?'

'I don't want any. It'll be over by now, anyway. And I don't want to have to talk to anybody.' She sank on to the bed and closed her eyes.

'Just leave me alone.'

'Are you sure you'll be all right?'

She said 'Oh yes' on a great sigh. 'Please.'

'Don't forget what I said.'