I bin afraid p'raps you might be thinkin' otherwise, but fact
is everyone as knows you feels very sorry. You got plenty of
friends round 'ere, same's what you've always 'ad. 'Hope you
don't mind me mentionin' it, but I reckoned I would, seein'
as we've knowed each other a fair old time, like.'
On Thursday morning, the day on which I first returned to
the shop, I found Barbara Stannard helping Deirdre to unpack
a crate of glass.
'I hope you don't mind my having come in, Alan,' she said,
looking up from the floor where she was kneeling. 'There
didn't seem any point in ringing up or bothering you before
you came back. I heard you were short-handed, so I just
came along.'
'It's very kind of you,' I answered. 'What about your own
job?' (She was secretary to a training stable near Chieveley.)
'Oh, they're quite happy to let me go for a bit. David
asked me to tell you it's quite all right, as long as you feel
I can be of some help here.'
Deirdre followed me up the glass-roofed passage to the
office, which was empty.
'Mrs Taswell not in to-day?' I asked, looking at the unopened
morning's post.
'She's gone, Mistralan. Didn't no one tell you?'
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'I expect my sister forgot to mention it, Deirdre. You mean
she's left?'
'That's right, Mistralan. She's bin gone - oh, more'n a
week now. Why, she wasn't never in that day when the
police rang up. That's why they was s' long gett'n' through wasn't
no one in 'ere, see?'
'You mean she hasn't been here at all since the Monday
of last week?'
'That's right, Mistralan. She's gone altogether, 'cos I goes
round to 'er place, find out when she was coming back, an'
they tells me she packed and left that Tuesday mornin'. Never
said where she was goin' ner nothin'. Didn't leave no address.'
'So she left even before - yes, I see, Deirdre. Well, never
mind; we shall manage, shan't we? It all looks quite tidy.'
'Well, Miss Stannard bin doin' a bit in 'ere, Mistralan. She
told me she's answered one or two letters, an' the rest she
left to ask what you wants doin' with 'em, like.'
'Thanks. I'll have a look through them.'
But instead of going back to the shop Deirdre began to
cry, so that I found myself in the strange position of having
to try to comfort her. I was surprised by the obvious depth
of her grief. For some time she wept unrestrainedly. At last,
raising her head from the desk, she said, 'I'm ever s' sorry,
Mistralan. I knows you must reckon as I'm goin' too far,
like. On'y where 'tis, see - I never said nothin' before - my
Mum left home - bin gone best part of a year now. There's
on'y bin just Dad an' me. And Mrs Desland, she was that
good to me - such a beautiful lady - like an angel she was I
never known anyone like 'er - oh, she'd 'ave made such a
wonderful mother.' And the poor child began to sob again.
I told her to sit in the office for as long as she wanted,
and went back to try, as best I could, to give some instructions
to Barbara.
Though I cannot tell why, I know without doubt that I
shall never again undergo any supernatural experience. That
music has ended, and now there will be silence. In waking
life, one person cannot be another: identity is single and
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absolute; but in dreams it is otherwise. Mrs Cook - Kirsten Kathe
- is gone, and will never return. I wonder, did Armand
Deslandes feel the same diminution and loss when Jeannette's
vengeance came down on him and he fled to England with
his workaday young wife? And what was the truth, I wonder,
about Armand and Jeannette Leclerc? No telling.
No telling. And I - I am left alone with No Telling. What
I know I can tell to no one - not to my mother, not to my
beloved sister or my priest. No Telling has set me apart,
solitary as the sleepless King of the Grove, the slave of Nemi
with his drawn sword. What was it Tony said of Kathe's
beauty? 'People like her carry a heavy load. It's another way
of life, with its own rules.' Well, Kathe no longer carries that
load, but she has left me another, to carry until the time
comes to lay it down where she is lying.
No Telling. To have a grim and bitter secret from those
dearest to me - to carry it alone, always - where shall I
find strength for this? Already, once, before realizing what
I was doing, I have involuntarily come close to letting slip
the burden. On the evening after the burial Flick and I were
sitting together in the drawing-room. We had said nothing
for some little time. She was knitting and I was trying to
read. Suddenly there came upon me once again the memory
of the still, inshore water beside the beach. With sharp and
dreadful clarity I saw the unnatural rippling of the surface
and felt the cold wave lap over my naked flesh. Springing
to my feet, I crossed the room and fell on my knees before
Flick, clasping her wrists and drawing her hands down against
my face.
As she comforted me, supposing me to be moved by grief,
I felt her sensible, intelligent love drop like a steel grille
between my fugitive self and my hysteria howling like a mob
outside.
'Flick?'
'What, dear?'
'Do you believe in the supernatural?'
She considered. 'Yes - in a sort of way.'
'When something terrible has happened - has been done
- do you believe that it may sometimes bring itself to light?'
388
At length she answered, 'I think - only to people who
already know unconsciously. It would be like Macbeth's
dagger, wouldn't it? - or like a dream. You know - we make
up our dreams ourselves, but then they tell us something
we didn't know we knew. You remember that ballad about
Binnorie. If the people in the hall heard the harp sing "There
sits my sister who drowned me", it was because they knew
already, but hadn't consciously realized it.' She stroked my
hair. 'Why do you ask?'
'Oh, well,' I replied, 'just something that came into my
mind.'
'The dead are at peace, Alan dear,' she said. 'That's a sure
comfort, however little else we know. Kathe's at peace. And
you're not to blame. No one thinks so - no one at all.'
I had shifted the load for a moment, felt it slip and caught
it before it could fall. It will never slip again, Kathe.
Many times, though not of my own wish, I have found myself
pondering how - in what way - it might have happened:
and perhaps I know. It would not have been difficult, given
resolution. They would have left her lodgings together on
the Sunday afternoon, ostensibly to go direct to Kastrup
airport; no one concerned to see them off, no one caring
particularly - the drowsy, dull-witted landlady, the lodginghouse
acquaintances with something better to do on a Sunday
afternoon: even Inge - if she ever existed - given some
; plausible excuse. But then they would have gone north, up
the east coast of Sjaelland; beyond Helsing0r, I dare say,
where the shore is more accessible and in places more lonely.
Somehow I imagine their journey ending in the neighbourhood
of Gilleleje. But there is no deep water inshore anywhere
along that coast: so it would be necessary to have
thought carefully beforehand, and then to act quite deliberately,
before going on to spend the night in some place where
one was not known and returning southward next day to
catch the flight to England.
And in whatever was done I also played my part - small
but integral. For her intuition was not unsound. She perceived
clearly enough, did she not, a man who preferred life
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to be tidy; who had already, so far as possible, set up his
barriers against irregularity and intrusion? 'It'll catch up with
you one of these days.' If, in Copenhagen, she had told me
all that she could, I have little doubt what my reaction would
have been.
Her religion, I think - the deep, unreasoning heart - was,
really, primitive, a kind of superstition related to locality.
Avoid the temenos of any deity with reason to be hostile; or
else propitiate. (And if propitiation should fail?) Yet who is
to say she was mistaken in this? My former faith, at least, lies
in fragments behind her footsteps.
Tony has been in every day, each time prepared with something
for us to do or talk about, so that neither Flick nor I
should be apprehensive - though we would not - that he
might be meaning to offer consolation or speak of religion.
Once he brought with him one of Korchnoi's games of chess,
involving a brilliant sacrifice, which had been printed in the
previous day's Guardian, and we played it through together;
though I recall little now about the moves. Next day it was
a new Iris Murdoch; and yesterday he brought one of his
own pelargonia, plainly unhappy in its pot, and asked my
advice. We re-potted it in some fresh John Innes and I put it
in the greenhouse to keep an eye on it.
On Friday evening, as we were walking together in the
garden, I said - merely out of a wish to make him think
that he had helped me; because I would have liked to feel
it and not because I did - 'I'm grateful, at any rate, for this
continuum.' It could have referred, as I hoped he would feel,
either to the garden or to his own company.
'Yes,' replied Tony, 'I suppose one has to try to make oneself
feel something of that kind.' He stopped to pull some
pods off an antirrhinum and went on, 'It's none of my business,
Alan, but for what it's worth, I think you should refuse
to be comforted.'
'Oh?'
'It's like trying to feel fervent during the two minutes'
silence - it doesn't really work.'
390
'You mean, don't let anybody try to offer me comfort; or,
don't think there's any valid comfort they could give?'
'Well, I meant a bit more than either, actually. I meant,
don't even be comforted in yourself. Don't seek comfort.
Don't pray for it. Don't avoid the suffering, don't try to
palliate it at all.'
I waited silently for him to go on.
'Clergymen see a good deal of misery, you know; clergymen
and doctors. More than most people, I dare say. And for
some reason there's a general misconception that the purpose
of religion - or one purpose, anyway - is to enable
people to suffer less. God knows where that came from, but
it's about as silly as the other idea - that religion's got some
explanation to offer of human suffering. No, don't seek cornfort,
Alan. Kathe deserves all your grief.'
Now indeed my loneliness and isolation came down upon
me like a blizzard, even more bitterly than when I had
realized that I could not tell what I knew to my own sister.
My closest friend, and the best clergyman that I had ever
known, was talking good sense from the natural assumption
that I, like any normal person, could not help resenting a
heavy misfortune and bereavement, and must wish by some
means to try to lessen my unhappiness. Here was a bitter
paradox. In the light of the truth which he did not know, his
advice was right. Whence should I seek comfort? Yet because
he did not know the truth, in offering that advice he was
further away from me than if he had been some sanctimonious
old numbskull of seventy years ago, maundering
about God's infinite wisdom and the trials sent to afflict us in
this vale of tears.
I cannot justify my resentment of the death of Kathe. It
was appointed that she should die. Yet though I cannot
justify it, in my heart I wish I had shared both what she did
and what she underwent. I wish I had died with her. She has
dispersed from that heart like twilight a life-time of conventional
faith and belief. Night splits and the dawn breaks
loose. I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on,
stalk on. This is not the kind of world in which comfort is to
be sought or expected.
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Nor any such comfort as a good conscience - whatever
that may mean. I am perjured. Deliberately, and with a
sense of achievement in the plausibility with which it was
done, I perjured myself in order to conceal what I believe
was the truth. I suppose many people, if they knew, might
sympathize with and even condone my deception, since
coroners' courts are not the places for speaking of such experiences
as mine, and in any case I could not have given
an honest account without being believed mad. Yet even
setting such considerations aside, they might well say, 'You
loved your wife, she was and remains dead, and what purpose
would have been served by disclosing something better
left concealed, something which could do no good and bring
no one back to life?'
I know. Yet far beyond such questions, there is a flame with
which I burn in the dark alone. It is this: I neither condemn
Kathe nor dissociate myself from whatever she did. 'Ah, my
beautiful wife - how could she do it?' I know very well how,
and why. I feel her motive as she felt it. That is why I was
appointed to be her lover. She could not forgive herself, and
so she died. But I forgive her. More - I do not, I cannot wish
anything undone, if that would mean that we had never
loved - no, not though I heard, and shall never forget, the
weeping in the garden.
On the beach she said, 'You know, don't you? And you
love me - you can't help it?' What would I care what she
had done, or even whether she might do the same to me, if
only she were alive again? It is not for me to know the times
or the seasons, which Kathe put in her own power. She needs
no forgiveness for any act - not even one unnatural beyond
all course of kind. God does the like every day. If she were
to return to me now - to walk in at the door - I wou
ld help
her to conceal it; not from shame, but simply so that our
love might continue, secure from all who could never cornprehend
it.
The difference between others and Kathe was the difference
between overcast skies and a sky full of stars. Kathe,
merely by her presence, created pleasure, excitement and
beauty inconceivable save by me who experienced it and
392
those about us who glimpsed it; voluptuous and splendid
beyond imagination; tempest, cataract and rainbow, a world
where grains of dust were turned to jewels; full of a terrifying,
overwhelming joy, like huge waves breaking on a shore
where no ship can live. What has that world to do with relative
ideas of right and wrong?
Kathe needed nothing from God. He just had the power
to kill her, that's all; to destroy her flesh and blood, the tools
without which she could not work. The truth of Kathe was
no more subject to moral judgements than the weather is
subject to meteorology. She herself could not carry the weight
of it, was demented and driven beyond humanity by its
terrible brilliance. At her side I turned round, looked out of
the cave and saw the substances that cast the shadows. In
her arms my eyes were opened like the shepherds', so that for
a time I saw reality - the sky full of shining, choiring presences,
the grass trodden by flaming beasts and not one
blade disturbed as they seized and devoured their rejoicing
prey. I am that prey. I am Lucifer, falling, falling from morn
to noon, from noon to dewy eve, a summer's day. How
should I seek anything so trivial as comfort? Even the future
seems long ago now. It is me that she has drowned, and
henceforth, instead of flying at her side, I shall crawl, yard
by yard and alone, across the daily waste of littered, turbid
mud. Kathe giveth and Kathe taketh away.
Human beings in the universe are like dogs or cats in a
house. Most of what is really happening is beyond our cornprehension
and it is safest, as they do, simply to acquiesce
or ignore; to hope to be suffered to live out our lives in
peace. That peace is lost to me now, yet I ask no forgiveness,
either for not condemning her or for the resentment in my
heart against her condemnation. Tony was not to know that
I seek no solace - no, not even for the pain of loss. I would
incur any condemnation to lie once more in her arms for
three-quarters of an hour - yes, let's do it properly - to
clasp her, to look into her eyes and cry, 'O, it's here, it's now,
it's you!'
On the table before me stands the Girl in a Swing. Did
Samuel Parr himself model her, even as he wept for his
393
Phoebe? It is not impossible. Whatever may befall, I will
never sell her. Glazy, smooth and shapely as an acorn, she
contains within herself a value, like a great oak tree, which
might have been Kathe's future and mine - distinction,
wealth, prosperity; green boughs, spreading over us and our
children their myriads of leaves. But instead she has become
a keepsake and a talisman for one stumbling in the nettles
and the rain. So she shall never be planted now.
One other thing I know beyond question. They are neither
fortuitous nor sterile, my suffering and loss. 'Ah my lord
Arthur, what shall become of me, now y& go from me and
leave me here alone among mine enemies?' 'Comfort thyself,'
said the king, 'and do as well as thou mayest, for in me
there is no trust for to trust in; and if thou never hear more
of me, pray for my soul.' But I will not pray for Kathe. She
does not need my prayers. I would as soon presume to pray
for Kali.
'Do as well as thou mayest.' What the acolyte finds on the
cold hillside where he wakes, alone and trembling with the
fear of what for peace of mind's sake he had better never
have seen, is the wisdom found in the stony field, the knowledge
of work able to be done by himself alone. Kathe, flesh
and dancing spirit, sits in the swing, exquisite as porcelain,
secretly smiling to see that I alone perceive her swinging
between the huge, serrated leaves, from earth to sky and
back again. Porcelain and pottery - they are my mystery. The
world exists in order that we may create from it their excellence;
and so that I - I myself - can communicate to
others that beauty which else they might never see. I should
understand something now, should I not, of that grace and
those forms, dug from and shaped to transcend this dreary
The Girl in a Swing Page 45
