A Garden of Trees

by Nicholas Mosley

  Peter stood in the middle of the room holding a tennis racquet. “Are you better?” he said.

  “Much better,” Annabelle said.

  He looked at her slily and then twirled the tennis racquet around in his hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t produce Father Jack for you,” he said.

  “I didn’t want him.”

  “I thought you did,” he said.

  “No.”

  I wished that Annabelle had not come. I was afraid that she was still more ill than she admitted. Our day had gone quickly and I did not believe that there was any need to worry about Peter. In fact I found it difficult to care about Peter at all. He was swishing at the flowers with his racquet.

  “I saw Marius this morning,” he said.

  “Did you?”

  “I met him in the street. Does he know Father Jack well?”

  “Quite well.”

  “He is coming round this evening to say good-bye. He should be here soon. He is going away to-morrow. Father Jack will be back too. It will be quite a party.”

  “Peter, do be careful with that racquet.”

  “Racquet!” He knocked the top off a daffodil. “Father Jack is a hypocrite,” he said.

  “Is that what Marius told you?”

  “Marius said Father Jack doesn’t like me at all. That is very wrong of him, you know.” He said this in a off-hand way that was almost arch. “Silly of him to think that and not to tell me.”

  “What didn’t he tell you?”

  “I had a talk with him, do you remember, that day after breakfast, and I thought I’d be nice to him as he is after all an awful bore, so I said what I thought quite pleasantly and he simply lapped it up, at least he said he did, and he told me to go ahead, it was all right by him, so he’s a liar. I suppose they have to be nice to you if you’re nice to them.”

  “I suppose they do,” Annabelle said.

  “Well they shouldn’t. He’s an old hypocrite. A silly old gardener leading fools up the garden path.”

  “Did Marius say he was leading you up the garden path?”

  “He used absurd language. That was what he meant. ‘Knowing well that there would be thistles on the way,’ Marius has become like a guidebook, one can simply hear the capital letters. As if fools cared!”

  The room was hot. I felt that Peter’s indignation was enormously trivial. He was trying to hit the broken head of the daffodil through the open window.

  “Are you going to play tennis?” Annabelle said.

  “Definitely.”

  “Who with?”

  “Father Jack,” Peter said.

  I think it was the day that Annabelle and I had spent together that left us unprepared for the scene in the evening. Emotion is never trivial to the person who feels it. I should have known this. But we forgot it, and did not know that Peter was desperate. We did not manage the scene well.

  “When is Marius coming?” Annabelle said.

  “Soon. I didn’t know you’d be here. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t mind.”

  “I suppose it will be nice for you to say good-bye to him.”

  “Peter!”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.” She suddenly looked very ill as she had done the evening before.

  “I mean, you probably won’t see him again. What does Father Jack think of that?”

  “I expect he thinks it’s dreadful.”

  “For a man who has lived with us for a month, who has eaten our food and been waited on by you, he seems to have rather a low opinion of us.”

  “He loves us,” Annabelle said.

  “I hope he doesn’t love you like Marius did,” Peter said. “Or perhaps that would be a good way to get rid of him.”

  “Oh Peter, please.”

  “Sorry,” Peter said. “Sorry. Let’s ask him what he thinks of Marius. Perhaps he loves him too.”

  It was I, standing by the window, who saw Father Jack arrive. He was a tiny black figure crossing the road with a suitcase. I nodded to Annabelle, and she went out of the room. “Where’s she gone?” Peter said.

  “Father Jack has arrived.”

  “Damn her,” he said. He started for the door.

  “He’s coming up,” I said.

  “Has she gone to warn him to bring some thistles for the fool?”

  “She’s gone to tell him something about herself, nothing about you.”

  “To say she’s sorry?”

  “Yes.”

  “How miserable. How bloody miserable!” He threw his tennis racquet onto a chair and then picked it up again. “How damnable of him to demand it!”

  When Father Jack arrived his face was wrinkled in smiles and he began talking at once. Peter went to take his suitcase with an affectation of politeness and it was then that I began to be as worried as Annabelle was. “Have a drink, Father,” Peter said.

  “I think I will, thank you, I have a throat like parchment.”

  “A good big one, there, that will be nice for you.”

  “Aren’t you drinking, Peter?”

  “No, I’ve given it up, I suppose that is dreadfully immoral of me.”

  “Indeed, I hope not, I should not like to think so.”

  “I hear that you think us all quite dreadful, Father.”

  “Indeed I do not think that you are dreadful.”

  “Myself, at any rate, you think I am most wrong.”

  “There is no one, I suppose, who is not most wrong.”

  “Can’t you do anything about it, Father, or would you like another drink?”

  “I do not think I will have another drink, thank you.”

  “Perhaps a little omelette which Annabelle will cook for you?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “I am afraid we have nothing else to offer you. What can you do for people who are most wrong?”

  “You must remember, I think, that one is wrong oneself.”

  “Really? And is that an excuse for not doing anything?”

  “Certainly it is not an excuse.”

  “So?”

  “But what are you asking me, Peter?”

  “I am asking you what you do when the world is going to hell.”

  “The world is not going to hell. It is individuals who may go to hell.”

  “Then do you tell them the truth of this?”

  “One is not in a position to say who will or who will not go to hell.”

  “Do you tell them the truth?”

  “The truth as you endeavour to see it.”

  “Or do you endeavour to assert your superiority over them by every trick at your command?”

  “You do not.”

  “Then, again, what do you do for them?”

  “I can tell them what to do but I cannot make them do it.”

  “You lead the old horses to water but you cannot push them in?”

  “People are not horses.”

  “No, of course not, they are much wickeder than horses. So you drag them to the water and pour a bucketful over their heads. Is that what you do to help them?”

  “It is something that may help them.”

  “And if after the ceremony they commit all the crimes that human wickedness can imagine, you do not take this as an adverse reflection upon the ceremony but merely as an illustration that men are wickeder than horses?”

  “There is no question of horses.”

  “Have you ever known a horse that is so bestial as a Christian? All right, there is no question of horses, there is the question of the man to whom evil happens because he has no faith in eternity and the man who causes evil in the name of God.”

  “They may both be punished.”

  “And when there is an institution that does evil in the name of God, that for centuries has been responsible for more killing, starving, imprisoning, and torturing than any other institution in history, do you not take this responsibility as a reflection upon the institution or do you happily look forward to a further riot
of punishment in the light of which these earthly crimes might indeed appear beautiful?”

  “Peter!” Annabelle said.

  “And when you call out to this God your Father to spare you from this punishment, do you not consider it pathetic that this cry should be made to the one who has created you, who is supposed to love you, whose nature is said to be forgiveness? Pathetic that you should be expected to crawl on your knees to this Father, this so-called father, who loves you but would have you groveling before he deigns to listen to you, let alone give his blessing to you? Pathetic that you should use such a word as father to describe such an image of malevolence? Is there any earthly father who would not weep to see you crawl?”

  “Peter!”

  “Has he not created you and created you thus? Is it for him too to create hell for you? Those whom he has created wicked, does he not know them to be wicked and is not hell where he has desired them? And is not this creation to hell the deed of a devil? And you, you who follow him, is not that why you regard the desperation of the world with such equanimity, why you drink your drinks and laugh your laughs and make such light of agonies, why you smile as you lie and continue to sin excusing murder and every atrocity? There is no destruction that has not had the blessing of the church upon it, no false blessing that has not had a fictitious devil to excuse it. Why do you bless hatred and search for excuses in the name of a creed that condemns hatred and has no cover for excuses? Why do you lie and sin and allow all villainy if it is not power that you desire instead of truth? There is no truth to you, there is only power. Why do you behave as devils when you say that you are fighting the devil? Why else except that there is no devil but that which you call your God!”

  Annabelle began to cry.

  “A pathetic God and a pathetic devil whom you crawl to love on your knees like cats, who bids you love your neighbour with the strangulation of frogs—on top of him, always, superior to him, scorning him—soft frogs squatting on top of the world’s monstrosities. For two thousand years you have ministered to the world, have had your power over it, have done what you wanted to it; you have assisted at the birth of every generation and seen them reborn into Christ; every generation has worshipped you, followed you, and this is what you have got—frog spawn, frog spawn, a nasty mess in the mud-heap with a tadpole as Holy Ghost!”

  There was a silence for a while and then Peter said in a voice which by this time he made no effort to prevent from shaking: “Or would it be more charitable just to think you mad?”

  Father Jack replied, calmly, “Peter, you must realize this, that either you believe in the God of Love or else you will think for ever that the world is mad.”

  “Then I think it mad.”

  “You must realize also that it is not possible to live in a madhouse. It is not possible to remain a human being if you believe that the world is a madhouse.”

  “I believe it a madhouse!”

  “Then you better get out of it quick.”

  I do not know if this was said in anger. Father Jack’s old wrinkled face betrayed no anger. But Annabelle looked at him through her tears and I wished he had not said it, and then I thought that perhaps it was said on purpose because Peter at that moment would have done anything rather than obey Father Jack’s instructions. But we none of us guessed the speed of Peter’s reaction.

  The reaction from pride. The last refuge of pride. I should have guessed it.

  Marius arrived. There was something unbearable in his coming. He looked at us all quickly and then went straight to Annabelle. He was embarrassed like a child that is introduced to strangers. For a long time they had not seen each other and now they were saying good-bye. Father Jack joined them. Annabelle was smiling and Marius had lowered his head. They stood there. It was as if they might join hands and remain.

  And for Peter, I thought, it was his best friend who was saying good-bye to the sister whom he had seduced and was leaving with his child. And the priest to bless them. As I watched him this was what I imagined.

  They ignored Peter. As if in defiance to him they stood in their circle with their backs to him and denied him. What was between them was very evident, like the holding of hands. I did not know what this would mean to Peter. When I looked at him again I thought it was only his position in the room that made him seem so lonely.

  When Marius had said what he had come to say he moved as if to go. Then he saw Peter. “Good-bye,” he said. We were separated from Peter by enormous distances. It might have been true that we did not care about him. “You are not going?” Peter said. “Yes,” Marius said.

  Annabelle had sat down; and now, as if the spring of her energy had broken, the white face of the stone had returned and she looked as if she were dying. Her hand clutched the arm of the chair and her body was twisted.

  “Don’t go,” Peter said. “Please don’t go.”

  Because of Annabelle again we ignored him. We moved towards her, and in a last violence of effort she said, “Marius, remember everything, and now you must go.”

  “Annabelle,” Peter said, coming across the room.

  She snatched herself away from him. “Go, go, for God’s sake go,” she said. And it was Peter who went.

  From the middle of the room where he had stood alone and in loneliness had denied us and in loneliness been denied he went out softly so that we still did not notice him. Then as we caught Annabelle falling forwards in her chair she put out her hand to me and drew my head down to her own and whispered, “Peter, now,” and I understood and I left her still falling forwards as if she were dying.

  20

  Peter was not on the landing. He is going to kill himself. He was not in the lift because the light in the panel was stationary at the bottom. He is going to kill himself to make amends and Annabelle is dying. I ran down the stairs in an unending spiral. You do not kill through scorn or hatred or even despair, you kill because something has happened that has killed you already. I stopped and listened and could hear no footsteps. You kill because you are lonely and your love has denied you. I saw the huge well of the staircase and a stone floor at the bottom. Annabelle loves Marius she will always love Marius it is Peter whom for one moment she has ceased to love. Still no footsteps and a stone floor at the bottom. Peter is standing upon the staircase and looking at the bottom.

  I began to run down again. He is alone with everything that he has loved denied to him, everything he has lived for destroyed by his loneliness. He is alone knowing that love is a lie and that life is too much for him. There is only pride left to him and only one thing pride can do. Existence is nothing when there is only pride, and he can only make an end of it. It is I who have known this feeling. And then I was at the bottom of the staircase among the graves of the basement and I knew that Peter could not have been in front of me because all the way down I had seen the bottom. I must do this I must do this one thing because Annabelle would have done it and now she has asked me. I must do it because we ignored him and it was my fault that he was denied. I must do this thing if I never do anything else in my life. And then I thought he has gone to the roof.

  I was running again. Upon the roof the sun was white like dead stone faces. Peter sat on the parapet with his legs over the edge. He had put his tennis racquet on the wall beside him and on top of it a tennis ball. He saw me. I felt very tired. I thought he is like a child, this has got to be something extraordinary.

  Across the enormous spaces of grey concrete a life such as everyone’s on the edge of the sky. A life to be saved or to go to damnation. Twenty yards of dust and eternity to span it. If I approach him, I thought, he will have no alternative.

  Words, Marius’s words, I remembered. “Everybody wants to love their neighbours, of course they do, but they can’t. They don’t know how to set about it.”

  He is a child, I thought. I cannot approach him and I cannot leave him. He would then have to jump, to create his eternity. His car is running downhill. And he is facing the wrong way, that is what I have
got to tell him, that he is facing the wrong way. I have got to give him eternity. When you jump you do not jump to damnation, that is worse than wreckage, more deathly than the iron in the rusty sun. It is ironical, I thought, that he should have used the word jump. All his life he has been ready for this and now he thinks that he has come to it. He has not, and it is I who have always known this, that if you make your own moments you are facing the wrong way and when you jump facing rightly it has nothing to do with you. It is to do with those who are concerned about you. “It must be something new,” I remembered.

  I walked keeping my distance from him and I sat on the parapet at the far corner of the roof. Twenty yards of stonework and the precipice at our feet. I will sit here, I thought, until I have destroyed those spaces. In eternity all spaces are destroyed.

  London lay at our feet like the world. A pale grey evening upon the heights of the wilderness. There was an old temptation;—to cast yourself down, to be picked up, to prove that you were a God. And now;—to cast yourself down, never to be picked up, to prove that you are a devil. This is a new temptation.

  The people of London like ants on a mound of dust. O world, world, flat round shapeless shape, be loved or not loved but do not ask for everything. Suffer us to have the illusion that we are beyond you. Perhaps after all we can fly.

  Peter did not do anything. He was looking at his toes in the evening sun.

  O God, God, to destroy those spaces you must destroy time. Let us go back and begin again and then this will not have happened. This is what you have promised, what you have told us is possible. It is only that I must remember, and there is something I must do.

  I thought:—Perhaps we must all become again as children. Was it not this that we were told?

  A sky of violet and an earth of grey and ourselves in between them. Once we were part of them, we spread veins to enclose us, around us and the universe there was a body that was whole. There is nothing new, it is just what is old that has been forgotten. You can always go back, that is what I have known is true, when the car is running downhill there are always trees on the roadside. The trees are all the same, it is only one tree that is needed. We have looked for something permanent, but a moment will do. A tree is eternity. There would be moments if I could remember them. I remembered an evening with the square huge and moonlit when a statue stood folded like the wings of a bird.