He was silent, and Abbershaw, who felt himself drifting further and further out of his depth at every moment, looked at him blankly. There was no question that the man was sincere. The tone in his voice, every line of his face and body proclaimed his intensity.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Abbershaw.
Wyatt laughed softly and began to speak quickly, earnestly, and all in one key.
‘She was appearing in the crowd scene in The Faith of St Hubert, that beautiful little semi-sacred opera that they did at the Victor Gordon Arts Theatre in Knightsbridge,’ he said. ‘That’s where I first saw her. She looked superb in a snood and wimple. I fell in love with her. I found out who she was after considerable trouble. I was crazy about her by that time.’
He paused and looked at Abbershaw with his narrow dark eyes in which there now shone a rebellious, almost fanatical light.
‘You can call it absurd with your modern platonic-suitability complexes,’ he said, ‘but I fell in love with a woman as nine-tenths of the men have done since the race began and will continue to do until all resemblance of the original animal is civilized out of us and the race ends – with her face, and with her carriage, and with her body. She seemed to me to fulfil all my ideals of womankind. She became my sole object. I wanted her, I wanted to marry her.’
He hesitated for a moment and looked at Abbershaw defiantly, but as the other did not speak he went on again. ‘I found out that in the ordinary way she was what they call a “dancing instructress” in one of the night-clubs at the back of Shaftesbury Avenue. I went there to find her. From the manager in charge I discovered that for half a crown a dance and anything else I might choose to pay I might talk as long as I liked with her.’
Again he hesitated, and Abbershaw was able to see in his face something of what the disillusionment had meant to him.
‘As you know,’ Wyatt continued, ‘I know very little of women. As a rule they don’t interest me at all. I think that is why Joy interested me so much. I want you to understand,’ he burst out suddenly with something akin to savagery in his tone, ‘that the fact that she was not of my world, that her accent was horrible, and her finger-nails hideously over-manicured would not have made the slightest difference. I was in love with her: I wanted to marry her. The fact that she was stupid did not greatly deter me either. She was incredibly stupid – the awful stupidity of crass ignorance and innocence. Yes,’ he went on bitterly as he caught Abbershaw’s involuntary expression, ‘innocence. I think it was that that broke me up. The girl was innocent with the innocence of a savage. She knew nothing. The elementary civilized code of right and wrong was an abstruse doctrine to her. She was horrible.’ He shuddered, and Abbershaw fancied that he began to understand. An incident that would have been ordinary enough to a boy in his teens had proved too much for a studious recluse of twenty-seven. It had unhinged his mind.
Wyatt’s next remark therefore surprised him.