His eyes did not see. I knew this look of eyes that did not see, I had stood so often myself with my head turned upon an imaginary shoulder, my own yet not my own because I was so distant from it, that it might have been I who was standing there on the opposite side of the road with my head drawn down beneath a waterfall of dreams. His ears did not hear. I did not believe that he could be sadder than I, having given up hope of the returning spring. Yet I was afraid of it. I wished I could throw something at him through the spray of sunlight.
There were horses trotting. I had seen them before, with Marius, in the running of crowds. Then a brick had been thrown through the stillness. “Peter!” I yelled.
Hearing only himself, or what he was thinking, with the band between us, he did no more than lean forwards into the sun so that the shadows came down over him like Marius again. Was then Marius now the bright-eyed angel? Peter having taken upon himself the sadness of the earth.
The carriage passed. Peter walked away. I would lose him on the barriers of interminable soldiers. I could not bear that my hope should go so suddenly.
I ran down a subway. There the crowd was swerving, thick, a child leaned steadily against my knees. I stepped over it, pushed, kicked against an ankle, they all turned behind me in affected concern. I fled, dodging, up some steps marked down. In the street there was dispersal. I ran to Trafalgar Square and found Peter beneath a fountain.
“You’re back,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
When he saw me he looked to each side of him as if he were expecting someone else. I thought, Perhaps he has been with people so long that he doesn’t understand his loneliness. “Didn’t you?”’ he said. “No, we didn’t know where you were.”
“I saw you when the band went by. I thought I had lost you.”
“Those damn bands,” he said. “They should only play at funerals.”
“I knocked a child over in the subway. I thought you had gone.”
“I hadn’t gone far,” he said.
He was leaning against the edge of the fountain with the water coming down behind him in a curtain. He screwed up his eyes as if the spray was in his face. “What have you been doing?” he said.
“Nothing important,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Nothing important.” It was as if he were leaning into the wind with the salt sea hurting him.
“And you?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “there really isn’t anything to do, is there?” People were beginning to look at him as if he were ill.
“Shall we go somewhere?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
We crossed the road and passed beneath an arch that hung in forgotten triumph. In the Mall the trees narrowed into the distance. “When did you get back?” I said.
“The other day,” he said. A long straight road carrying cars to a palace. A world of Cinderellas with the fairies dead. “We didn’t know where you were,” he repeated.
“Nowhere that I could not have found you.”
“There is nothing to find,” he said.
We walked on. A ruined terrace beneath a ruined colonnade. In the park thin grass was brushed up over baldness, the trees shed palely the pretence of the sun. “There is nothing to find?”
“Up this road go savages to the sack of Rome,” Peter said.
We walked into the park. Lovers sat on the grass in couples. It was as if we were seeing ourselves already from memory. “Can you tell me a thing worth doing?” he said.
“Not if you think that is a question worth asking,” I said.
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Damn them for making me hate them.”
“Who?”
“The beautiful people who lie on the grass,” he said.
A man lay with his girl’s head on his shoulder. Another leant with hair against his throat. “That is your answer,” I said. “Is that why you hate them?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then it is you who are the savage at the sack of Rome.”
I stopped by a tree. I watched a leaf-bud drooping before me. The air contained it like rain. I thought, At this moment I know it is all over, that Peter never again will recognize the spring: I wonder how long it will take me to believe this.
“I was told,” Peter said, “to go abroad and gather flowers. These are instructions which are supposed to be profitable to a young man. It is presumed to be an encouraging metaphor. You see people practicing it in the bluebell woods in summer.”
“Didn’t you work?” I said.
“I sat in an office and circulated papers. Is that work? The papers enabled others to move upon the bluebells. Whatever it was, there was a great destruction in the woods.”
“Damn the woods. What did the work do to you?”
“I sat in a room like an electric cooker. There were a lot of figures: the figures did not mean anything, they were just on paper. Nothing meant anything. There was nothing but paper. We had enormous paper assets and not a penny to spend. What is the meaning of assets if you sit in a cooker? We bought and sold stuff that didn’t exist, we transferred money that didn’t exist to people who didn’t exist, the non-existent people spent the non-existent money on non-existent goods. The awful thing was that there weren’t even any bluebells. I couldn’t even get angry. I just cooked. I have now officially been eaten.”
“Why then did you try it, you knew . . . ”
“What else was there for me to try?”
“I don’t know.”
“Should I have stood at street corners and made my complaint to the chariots? Would they have listened?”
“Then be a doctor or a teacher or make something with your hands.”
“Can you see me as a doctor or a teacher?”
“No,” I said.
“And there is nothing that I can make.”
“Lie on the grass, then. For God’s sake lie on the grass.”
“There was a girl called William. They all have boys’ names now. I could not speak to her.”
“Did you have to speak?”
“Yes, I had to speak. Any ass can like a William without speaking.”
“And couldn’t you admit for once that you are an ass?”
“Could you?” he said.
We walked again. It was sad that he was playing the part that I wanted to play and was beating me. I wondered what I should have said to myself, but I knew that he was different. He was, I realized, even sadder than I.
“Besides,” he said, “William was a friend of Annabelle’s.”
I was angry that he was different. “Is it true then that you have to live on incest?” I said.
He stopped. “What?” he said.
“This mumbo-jumbo of incest, this Hamlet rubbish, are you really the savage that should have to be kept from the smell of Annabelle?”
“Damn you,” he said, “don’t you love her?”
“I am not her brother.”
“God damn you to hell,” he said.
We moved on. I remembered how I had been angry once before with Marius. And then I had been happy. But now I did not know what I could say to someone with not even hope.
“Have you then gone over to the side of the old?” he said.
“Hamlet was old. He was twenty-six.”
“I thought he was seventeen.”
“No you see, it is you who are on the wrong side. It is the old who are ditched by their own imaginations.”
“But they do not know it and I do.”
“They are the very old. They are the dead.”
“You don’t know how right you are about Hamlet.”
“Why?”
“You will see,” he said. For the first time he smiled.
Walking and stopping in jerks we reached the palace. A flag licked limply against the sky. I said, “I know that one has got to do something or one goes mad.”
“That does not matter, one has to do the right thing.”
“Th
e choice should not be difficult.”
“It is. Doing the wrong thing sends one mad too, and then it is worse, because then, as you say, one is dead. It is not simply a matter of application.”
“Then choose, choose and try it. You can choose for the whole of your life.”
“I do not believe you can.”
“These are old questions, anyway, why did you ask them now?”
“Because now we are old too, didn’t you say so?”
“I meant that we should be younger,” I said.
We watched a man sweeping up the gravel. He moved precariously like a toy that is running down. “They are the questions that saints ask,” Peter said.
“The questions that saints answer.”
“They ask them first. The most developed form of extrovert is the thug.”
“Is Marius back?” I said.
“Introspection deals with conscience. Conscience is life. Extroversion is the denial of conscience.”
“Or the fulfillment of it.”
“I don’t know whether Marius is back. You have to cultivate your conscience. Yes, after all, I believe Marius is back.”
“And then you have to grow something when your conscience is cultivated. Cultivation is a means and not an end.”
“Yes, yes, but do not deny the means.”
“I am afraid I have not been able to,” I said.
Peter then turned and for the second time he smiled. “And now you must come and see Annabelle,” he said.
“How is she?” I said.
“Old,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders. “Older and older. As old as Hamlet’s mother.” He laughed and walked into the middle of the road and waved for a taxi.
There was something wicked about him. He seemed, in a way, to have suddenly turned into one of those sinister men in foreign cities who take young men round the brothels. It was as if he was eager for ruin like a general haranguing troops before an attack.
As we climbed into the taxi I said, “What has happened?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing ever happens.” We drove up Constitution Hill past the crocuses. The sun was warm. I might have been angry with him, but I preferred him sinister to hopeless. “They want to have me psychoanalysed,” he said. He said this almost with relish.
“Who are ‘they’?” I said.
“My father,” he said.
“That is nothing new either.”
“You will see my father.”
“Fathers always want to have their children psychoanalysed. They like hearing about themselves.” This was a silly remark, I thought.
“They want Annabelle to see a doctor, too,” he said.
“Why?”
He laughed again that desperate laugh of a child at a tragedy. I do not know why I was not afraid. Perhaps anything was more endurable than Annabelle being well and apart from me.
Revisiting a scene that in the past has meant much to you plays tricks with time and is as unnerving as ghosts. Driving to Grosvenor Square through the angry traffic I had the sensation that all the scenes that had been enacted there had happened twice, that I was living in a circle of endless repetitions and it was my folly not to break the circle with the knowledge that my memory gave me. But my memory played me false I felt;—I did not know how many times I had made this journey in the taxi or how often I had met and renounced Annabelle—it was only after the event that the sense of duplicity became apparent. All I knew was that that evening I should feel that I had done something twice, and that at the second time of doing I should have remembered the first.
I thought: Perhaps there is a life as it is intended as well as a life as it happens, and it is only in memory that one can know if they are the same.
The taxi stopped. Flowers, scent, the wealth of carpets. We squeezed into the lift like an upright coffin. I thought: If the scene that is about to happen is already in my memory should I not feel more sad or more excited rather than wishing to escape? The lift carried us.
Peter opened the door. I followed him. There was a small man sitting on top of a step-ladder. “This is my father,” Peter said.
“How do you do,” the man said. “I am sorry I cannot get down. This machine folds up on me like a mousetrap.”
“How do you do,” I said.
“I am trying to remove these curtains. If you would kindly hold on to the ladder I should feel more secure.”
“Yes,” I said.
Peter had gone. Annabelle was not there. If this has ever happened to me before, I thought, I am sure I should remember. I clung to the ladder.
“Spring cleaning is a ritual to which I am addicted. My wife and daughter are not. My wife is three thousand miles away. My daughter is making tea. Will you stay to tea?”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I find that now it is not the custom to invite people to tea. My children are consistently rude. Peter, for instance, has not mentioned tea?”
“No,” I said.
“In my day it was natural to mention tea. It appears that now it is taken as an insult. People imagine that one is accusing them of greed. I fear that soon one will not be able to offer a bed to a visitor without it being taken as an improper remark.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t know how people can think of what to say without manners. I am supposed to be a very rude man, but I am not, I simply can’t think of what to say. Now you, I can see, have good manners. Would you be good enough to hand me the scissors?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thank you. It is the same with spring cleaning. People despise it now. And soon they will despise eating, and sleeping, and breathing, and then they will die. They simply won’t think it worth while.”
“No,” I said.
“You are a young man of great equanimity. The prospect does not disturb you?”
“No,” I said.
“I find that most remarkable. I, I fear, was upset even by these curtains. My daughter says she never drew them because she liked looking at the night. I myself can never find anything to see in the night. It appears to me to be quite dark.”
I began to laugh. He descended the ladder. He had pale smoky eyes and hair that was brushed with great precision. A small, dapper man with a face like a nut. He folded the curtain and placed it on a chair. “Annabelle,” he called, “your friend is laughing at me.”
“Tea is nearly ready,” replied Annabelle from the kitchen.
I wanted to go and see her, but I did not know what to do. Pale eyes watched me courteously. This was something that could never have happened to me before, even the room was not the same when he was in it. I had the impression that he did not want to be in it, that he had talked to excuse his presence and make light of the change he had wrought. Annabelle remained in the kitchen. He took a cigarette and fitted it into a holder and began talking again. He spoke of London in the spring. I could not hear him. Annabelle was in the kitchen. If he stopped talking I felt that I should die. Stop sleeping stop breathing and die. His voice was necessary to me and he knew it.
When Annabelle came in from the kitchen she was carrying a tray in front of her and I did not see. “Hullo,” she said. She put the tray down with her back to me and I still did not see. Then she turned round and for a moment I did not think that it was her at all, and then I saw that she was going to have a child.
“Hullo,” I said.
Her father was saying, “The dreadful thing about living in a tropical climate is that one cannot believe in the seasons. Returning to England is a return to nature. Elsewhere climate is geography.”
She looked at me calmly. I was sure she did not mind. It was I who turned my eyes away because I was so glad to see her.
Peter came in and we sat down to tea. Peter did not speak. Men in foreign cities come no farther than the door.
I said, “But living with the seasons makes people callous, don’t you think, in the country one is of no importance until one has been destroyed by a bicy
cle or a pig, and then one is only a joke that holds its own for a moment with the seriousness of vegetables.”
He said, “But I like vegetables, I like them much better than people, I know exactly what to do with them and I don’t know what to do with people at all.”
We talked like this. We talked for a quarter of an hour. He did it naturally, I think, for he was an expert talker: and I followed him better than I could normally have done because I needed this flow of nonsense to conceal an emotion that I did not understand. We sat in a small square around the tea-table, the four of us, while Peter’s scowl deepened as our chatter increased (“You can’t really love vegetables.” “Indeed I can, yes, the aubergines at Toulon those I really love.”) and Annabelle sat back holding her saucer in front of her as if waiting for birds to perch on it from the sky. I do not remember looking at her but I know exactly how she seemed, calmly and monumentally waiting for some great joke to burst about our heads that would confound us, to be sure, but never her, because she had heard the joke, and knew it, and would be pleased only to notice the reactions of our eyes. And for me, too, the emotion was one of laughter: for her sake I would enjoy the joke, for her sake I would smile. It was she, after all, who was having the child: and if she was pleased to be benign about it with her saucer held out to receive pennies or crumbs, I swore that it would not be me who would pass her by without giving what I had.
“If you loved food, really, long enough, you would turn into a vegetable yourself.”
Her composure, in profile, was that of a shuttered house on a burning day, the lids of her eyes heavy with a suggestion of sleep, her breathing like the heat of a lazy mimosa. Around her was an air of preternatural stillness like the echoless calm that precedes a thunderstorm. She awaited our laughter with the tranquility of flowers: and after the storm had passed, I thought, there she would be with the rain untouched on her lashes.
A Garden of Trees Page 21
