§ 2
And now all these things were stale by three months.
By this time she had got used to having tea on Sundays at the Trants’ house. She was so much at home there that she could say: “Oh, do you mind if I shift this Taj Mahal thing while I play? It rattles so.” After a little while they learned her fancies, and had it always removed when she came.
And she was used to George. Everything of him she now knew. His hopes, his dreams, his peculiarities, his vices and virtues, the colours of all his neckties—all had been exhaustively explored during the course of many a hundred hours together. He kissed her now every time they met—he expended much ingenuity in arranging times and places suitable for the ritual. Sometimes, after he had seen her home from the theatre, his kisses were hurried, stereotyped, perfunctory, as purely a matter of routine as putting two pennies into the machine and drawing out a tube ticket. On other occasions, as for instance when they strolled through country lanes at dusk, she could sense the imminence of his kisses long before they came. When they turned down Cubitt Lane towards the Forest at twilight it was tacitly comprehended between them: “We are going in here to be sentimental....” When they returned the mutual understanding was: “We have been sentimental. That ought to last us for some time....”
People deliberately left them alone together. They looked at the two of them as if they were or ought to be bliss personified. They seemed to assume that an engaged couple desires every available moment for love-making. At meal times, for example, it was always contrived that George should be next to Catherine. Once when Mr. and Mrs. Trant had made the excuse that they would stroll round the garden, Catherine, noticing that Helen was about to follow unobtrusively, said sharply:
“Please don’t go, Helen. I want you to try over a few songs.”
Catherine wondered if Helen understood.
The fact was, being engaged was deadly monotonous. It had no excitement, no novelty. Everything was known, expected, unravelled. When she met George at a concert she did not think: “I wonder if he has come here on my account.” She knew beyond all question that he had. When at some social function she saw him chatting amongst his male friends she did not think: “Will he come up and speak to me or not?” She knew that his very presence there was probably on her account, and that he would leave his male friends at the first available opportunity. And when they had ices at a tiny table in some retiring alcove it was not possible to think: “How funny we should both have met like this! How curious that we should be alone here!” For she knew that the whole thing had been premeditated, that the alcove itself had probably been left attractively vacant for their especial benefit. There was no point, no thrill, no expectancy in asking the question: “Is it really me he comes to all these places for?”
He had declared his passion in unequivocal terms that left nothing to be desired. That was just it: there was nothing left to be desired. She would rather he had been ambiguous about it. And occasionally the awful thought came to her: “If this is being engaged, what must it be like to be married? ...”
Life was so placid, so wearyingly similar day after day, evening after evening. Every night he met her at the stage-door of the theatre and escorted her home. Every night he raised his hat and said “Good evening!” Every night he took her music-case off her, and they walked arm-in-arm down the High Street. Their conversation was always either woefully sterile or spuriously brilliant. On the rare occasions when they had anything particular to talk about they lingered at the corner of Gifford Road. But she could not confide in him. To tell him of her dreams and ambitions would be like asking for a pomegranate and being given a gaudily decorated cabbage. Their conversations were therefore excessively trivial: she retailed theatrical and musical gossip, or, if the hour were very late and she were tired, as frequently happened, she replied in weary monosyllables to his enquiries. She found her mind becoming obsessed with hundreds of insignificant facts which by dint of constant repetition he had impressed upon her. She knew the names, histories, characters, and family particulars of all the men who worked with him in the stuffy little basement of the accountant’s office in Leadenhall Street. She knew the complicated tangle of rivalries and jealousies that went on there—how Mr. Smallwood did this and Mr. Teake did that, and how Mr. Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering) frequently lost his temper. She knew all the minutiae of George’s daily work and existence, the restaurant he frequented for lunch, the train he caught on the way home, the men he met day after day in the restaurant and on the trains. Nothing of him was there which she did not know....
Yet it was all so terribly, so tragically dull. Even his brilliance palled. His brilliance was simply an extensive repertoire of smart sayings culled from the works of Ibsen, Shaw, Chesterton, etc. In three months she had heard them all. Moreover, he had begun to repeat some of them.
Out of a forlorn craving for incident she quarrelled with him from time to time. His genuine sorrow at the estrangement and his passionate reconciliation afterwards thrilled her once or twice, but after a few repetitions became stale like the rest. Undoubtedly he was in love with her.
And she?