“That is the point of them, that by having nothing but rules they are free to make a choice.”
“Rules?”
“That is where old people are so stupid, they have rules to stop you making a choice instead of to enable you to.”
“Like what?” Marius said.
“Children are free to do anything.”
“They are not.”
“They are free from this sort of responsibility which is not practical because it is over and done with and there is nothing fresh.”
“Like what?” Marius said.
“This room,” she said.
I did not know what they meant. They were looking at each other and there was something disturbing between them, and I wondered if I should leave them on their own.
“When we are hurt,” Marius said, “this is where we shall come to.”
“No,” she said.
“This is where we shall come.”
“You have done something very beautiful for me, you have made my garden, but this will never be a garden for you.”
Marius looked at her. She went on:
“Gardens are old things, they are where things start from, they are only a myth later, they are only for people who can live in myths.”
“You . . . ” Marius said.
“People who are dying can live in myths. For the rest you can do what is proper.”
“You frighten me,” Marius said.
I touched a leaf of the tree and dipped my finger in the water. “I must go,” I said.
“Don’t go just yet, you see this you have done for me, but there are other things to do for other people, I have gone back into the past because that is what I had to remember, but for others there is not a past but a present and I know it now for myself having gone to the past.”
“You frighten me,” Marius said.
“When you get hurt you must go forwards, I can do that now, but perhaps you will have to look backwards sometimes as I have done.”
“What will we do?” Marius said.
“You will know,” she said.
She looked very tired. She lay back on the pillows and rested her head, but she was not as I remembered her the first time I had come into the room, the face no longer breakable and fragile with china eyes but soft and heavy like a dying flower, the edges curling, the hands no longer a shell, a coral, but fallen petals from a yellowing rose. There is a softness in dead flowers that is terrible. As Marius looked at her I wondered if he were now frightened in the way in which once he had frightened her.
“I am going backwards,” Marius said.
“For a little,” she said.
The fishes pointed steadily, the leaves of the tree shone backwards, they were going with them where I could not follow them, the sand by the sea where the wind was crying. From the past I did not know what they would remember and what they would learn, but out of the sad broken unutterable tiredness of her face there was something she had to give him and something she had to do. Her eyes were like candles and I was not frightened for them. Above her head was the crucifix. “Goodbye,” I said.
“Goodbye,” she said. “Do not be unhappy.”
“No,” I said.
I went to the door. I remember the terrible softness of the fallen rose, the flame burning within the waxen ruins, the candle gutted and rearing into shapes that were wild and gentle against the altars of her face. “Thank you,” she said. At the last I remember this flame that was burning that was very clear and very bright and then I left.
11
A golden evening. When the play is over you put on your coat you follow the crowd you go out into the street and then what do you do? The sun is setting on a thousand faces. When the lights went up you were caught, perhaps, there was a tear in your eye and there were no tears in other people’s eyes and why were there no tears? Everything happens just once and never again. You have found your handkerchief and surreptitiously used it and there is no need to conceal your pride. In the street there are no tears and what do you do?
Standing by the cross-roads the day ran down like a tired clock, the day that was two days, the hours squeezed into one by the pressure of necessity, the effort that had lasted and that now was gone. The ticking of faces shambled to a standstill. The day in which for the first time in my life I had done something, the day which had happened and which would never happen again. Along the pavement people passed with the tired rush of those who are going nowhere and for whom tears are a luxury that they cannot afford.
Standing is a forgetting, there is nothing to do. After the play that you have loved that you have laughed that you have cried at you go back to the silence of a life that is dumb. People go past you in circles ceaselessly their mouths opening and shutting with the hunger of insects their heads nodding grotesquely in a puppet parade. There is no noise. They seize upon the crumbs that agreement offers them, the crumb of criticism, the crumb of approval, the crumb of “it is over now, there are other things to think of.” From the silences of their eyes you can see them watching you, you are afraid they will get you they will make you forget. Memory is a luxury that they cannot attain. There is only poverty, the poverty of agreement. Richness is in moments, and the moments happen once and never again.
If you wish to have the sickness you say—That is a moment I shall never forget, the moment when the curtain descended and the lights went up and there were no tears in any eyes except my own. Then you are alone, very alone, and for a while you stand on the corner of a street and the evening comes down on you like a descent of birds and the cries of starlings are above your head. You watch the people and you do not hear them and the silence is a mantle to deceive your eyes. Then they cannot bear it. Agreement is that there shall be no silence and you shall never be alone and the mouths and the glances are above you this time like vultures and they get very close to you because you are dead.
When you are alone you are dead and the vultures pick at you. The mantle is torn off you and the noise comes in in waves, the insect clatter the machinery of tongues the vibrant voices that have to forget that have to make you forget that have to take you with them so that you will never remember. As I moved down the street I said that I should never be dead, that I should be alive with Annabelle or alive beneath the vultures but that I should never be dead. The machinery mocked me. But I knew that if I was to remember this was what it would mean, to be for ever with her who could know and not deceive me, which was a decision I could not make and which had nothing to do with me, or to be for ever with the vultures that would wait with naked necks in the smell of rottenness that went on and was endless. At the end of this day with the blinds coming down across what I had done I thought I could try it. I went not alone because I loved and have loved and the golden evening was inviolate about. Whatever happened I had done one thing, and I went to Annabelle so that at least I could remember.
12
“We are coming to the end of something,” I said.
“Are we?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to cook supper,” she said. She put down the tray that she was carrying and went back into the kitchen.
“You are so serious,” I said.
I sat on the edge of the table and waited for her. She had been out when I had arrived, and it was late. Peter had not come in. When I was alone with her there was no awkwardness now, but just the suggestion that what we said meant more than the words we used. “Marius stayed with me last night,” I said.
“I thought he must have done.”
“We were tired. Time has gone so quickly that it is difficult to remember what has happened and what has not.”
“We got back very late, I wondered where you were.”
“I waited by the statue. I think time will go more slowly now. When did you first meet Marius?”
“Just before I met you, a year ago.”
“And has that time gone quickly? I did not really meet you then.”
> “I saw you, I remember I was nervous and there was something in your eyes.”
“Marius and I went to the hospital to-day. I think his wife will be better now, she is happier.”
“Have you done that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Annabelle was carrying knives and forks going in and out of the room all the time so that the talk was disjointed.
“I remember you in the pub, we talked about musical-boxes,” she said.
“Do you remember Marius saying that only individuals can begin things?”
“Is that what you mean by coming to the end of something?”
“Yes,” I said. “For two weeks we have been together . . . ”
“For a year,” she said.
“But I . . . ”
“We often thought about you, Marius said it was like being in a monastery, one is much closer to people then.”
“Has Marius been in a monastery?”
“No,” she said.
She was out of the room again and I wandered over to the piano where there was a large photograph of Peter and Annabelle as children with their father and their mother. Peter looked fat and portentous and Annabelle was sitting on the ground peering cautiously through her curls with her small frightened face. “I should have liked to have known you as children,” I said.
“You have,” she said.
“Yes.” Her father and mother looked unreal as people of that generation do in photographs. He was a small man sitting bolt upright with his hands on his knees and she was draped indistinctly across the back of the chair. I knew it was not like them. “And your father and mother,” I said.
“You know,” she said, “we may have to go back to them soon.”
“May you?” I said. This news did not hurt me as I thought all the time it should have done, because I knew there was something ending and the details were only reflections of the sadness that bathed us like light.
“Peter won’t go back to Oxford,” she said. “He will have to get a job and I suppose my father will get him one.”
“And you?”
“I will go back too.”
“And you will cook suppers for the rest of your life?”
“I suppose so,” she said.
I followed her into the kitchen. She was busy with pots and pans and I squeezed out of her way between a cupboard and the door. Whatever I did not feel, I had to say it.
“I hate this ending of a year,” I said.
“Do you? You see, we are not yet individuals.”
“I don’t want to be an individual.”
“You do, I think you became an individual when you got angry with Marius, and then you have your work to do, haven’t you?”
“I loathe my work,” I said.
“Do you?”
“And now I am not angry with Marius, I am quite under his spell again, I want to go on as we have been going. Have you ever been angry with Marius?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“So you see, it is no good.”
“What is no good?”
“There is something intolerable in this, that we want to go on as we are and we cannot act as individuals.”
“Why cannot you . . . ”
“Because I am fond of Marius as well as in love with you,” I said.
She broke some eggs into a bowl and began to whisk them vigorously. “You know,” she said, “you are much more part of the world than Marius is.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t know. I think you are the thing that endures.”
“Endures!”
“Yes. Marius is transitory, and Peter too in a way.”
“How do you see the future then?”
“I would never say,” she said, “not even to myself.”
She tipped the bowl of eggs into a sauce pan and turned up the gas. “You make me feel like a pair of overalls,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “you are.”
She was rummaging in a drawer of the cupboard and I could see her laughing to herself. Squeezed behind the door I felt as if I were in a coffin. “You ought to put some milk in those eggs,” I said.
“Never milk with butter.”
“Let me stir the damn things then,” I said.
She went back into the drawing-room and I stirred the eggs lethargically with a wooden spoon.
“I mean that you are the sort of working clothes,” she said. “That is what I mean by overalls.” She was speaking from the passage and I wished I could see her face. “Something that saves the stuff underneath. Without overalls you get terribly worn, and people splash you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I am too, in a way. I cook and have things ready and I don’t put milk in buttered eggs, that’s what I do.”
“And do you have children and sow and knit and take dogs for walks in the country?”
“Perhaps. We both have things to do, to keep us going.”
“I hope we get somewhere,” I said.
We took the buttered eggs through to the drawing-room and ate them sitting cross-legged on the floor. I tried to imagine her in ten years time with a pack of dogs on strings. I imagined it easily. “There is not enough salt,” she said.
“I am feeling unbearably sentimental,” I said.
“I cannot bear sentimentality,” she said.
“Then you are wrong, you are a sentimental person.”
“Why?”
“Because you remember what we said in the pub, and while I was away you felt as if you were in a monastery.”
“That was not meant to be sentimental.”
“But it was, because sentimentality is always remembering everything and having a great regard for what is important and taking care of people.”
“I thought sentimentality was going soft in the centre like Peter and chocolates.”
“Peter overdoes it, but that is what I mean. Peter may one day overdo it too much, and I do not think that he will feel as if he is in a monastery.”
“I did not mean that I was like those women in French novels who end up nuns.”
“No, French novels are not sentimental.”
“I don’t think I could be a nun,” she said.
She went to make coffee. When I was alone I felt impatient as if the time we had left was running out upon the floor. “I thought about you too,” I shouted. And there was something that I was afraid of saying if she were not there to stop me.
“Are you sentimental because things are coming to an end?” she said.
“It is because I am that they are.”
“Why?”
“It is because I have cared so much for the last week that I cannot break it by asking it to continue. I cannot ask you . . . ”
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said.
She came back with the coffee. “Perhaps you are right about sentimentality,” she said. “Things don’t change all at once, people are very stupid about that, they expect them to and then they don’t and they are miserable. You have to preserve the old things and they change very slowly and then what you want often happens on its own.”
“So we just endure,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
We drank our coffee sitting cross-legged again opposite each other as if at some ceremony. I remember her with her two hands holding her cup up to her lips and myself waiting until she should put it down. When she did I said, “And if you go away what will Marius do?”
“There is his wife,” she said.
“Supposing his wife wanted him to go with you?”
She stared at me. “That is not what you have done,” she said, “is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Her eyes became frightened. She put her cup down slowly. “He wouldn’t go,” she said.
“He might do. When I left them she was trying to tell him something, I don’t know what it was, I think she was trying to make him . . . ”
“What?”
“Be an individual. I think she wanted him to be free of her because as long as he is with her he can never escape his past.”
“Is that what you meant when you said that you were fond of Marius as well as . . . ”
“Yes,” I said.
She hung her head and pushed her finger into the carpet with the intentness of a child. “I don’t think . . . ” she began softly.
“But you said that things must happen slowly, that if you try to change them all at once it is disastrous.”
“It is you who are changing them.”
“No, I have done nothing, it is only what happens.”
“You make them so complicated.”
“That is what they are.”
She looked up. “I don’t believe that,” she said.
“If they were not I would . . . ”
“At the bottom there are simple things, I think they are quite simple.”
“It needs a great effort to keep them simple.”
“I don’t think so, that is what Marius says, but he is wrong, they are quite easy.”
“It needs a sacrifice.”
“A sacrifice?” She looked frightened.
“Yes, that is what you would say as well as him.”
“It only needs what you said, remembering everything and caring for people and keeping yourself open to what is important for others.”
“So you see you are sentimental, and Marius will probably go with you.”
“Supposing he is sentimental too?”
“If he is it depends on what has happened this evening with his wife.”
There was a silence for a while and then she leaned forwards and said “You are wrong, you know. Why are you trying to do it?”
“If it is wrong what would you have me do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She put her hand up to her face in a gesture of dismissal. “It is too complicated,” she said. She stood up wearily and smoothed her hair back from her forehead. “One day we shall know it was wrong. Perhaps when Marius comes back we shall know it.”
She cleared the cups and plates and left me. It was sad now I was impatient only with myself, because I did not know what should be happening. I looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly midnight. I thought suddenly that perhaps there were only a few more times that I should see her, and when I thought this it was so unbearable that I stood up and was about to follow her into the kitchen when I heard the sound of a key in the door of the flat and Peter came in. I was at least glad it was not Marius. Peter threw his coat on to the sofa, and I tried to appear at ease. I did not want to involve him in what was happening because I was ashamed of it. I did not know why. “There is something dreadful to-day,” Peter said; “Like an eclipse.”
A Garden of Trees Page 18
