The whisky was going down. Maybe I depended on it too much these days; but it gave a sort of courage.
‘Say what you have to say.’
‘Well … We have a Scots girl in our office who knows a young man in Paris called David McNair. This McNair was engaged to a girl called Alexandra Wilshere—until she broke it off and became your mistress.’ As I was going to speak he took his leg down. ‘ I know: it’s your own business. My only concern in mentioning it is to speculate on Harriet’s nervous susceptibility. If she knew of this—’
‘She didn’t … Did you tell her?’
‘Oh come. I had too much concern for her well-being to run to her telling tales. But if I’d heard of it indirectly, so might she.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘Not even when she got to Paris? It would explain a lot.’
I looked at him. ‘ What would it explain, Tim?’
He wrinkled his forehead and took off his glasses to polish them. ‘It would explain her being overwrought; it would explain perhaps a recklessness, a lack of concern for her own person. She was very devoted to you, Morris, and the fact that you were being unfaithful to her, however unimportant the affair really was to you, would unsettle her and drive her psychologically into a corner—’
‘She didn’t commit suicide, if that’s what you’re implying.’
He looked pained. ‘ I’m not suggesting anything so unsubtle. The overt act can have been entirely accidental, but the underlying subconscious condition may have predisposed her towards self-disregard, even self-injury.…’
‘In other words,’ I said, ‘ you’re following the school which argues that in murder, there is not only a will to kill on one side but a will to be killed on the other.’
‘Well … if you put it that way. It’s not by any means as illogical as it sounds.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘ since Harriet knew nothing of what you call my ‘‘affair,’’ her subconscious wish to end her own life can hardly have existed.… So it turns out to be what the rest of us have known all along—that she died from a sheer bloody accident, motiveless, senseless, cruel. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Senseless and cruel,’ Tim said. He reached behind the settee to put his glass down on the African chest. ‘Did you know I once nearly asked Harriet to marry me?’
‘When?’
‘In 1946. She was only twenty then. But it didn’t come off.’
‘You mean you didn’t ask her?’
‘… We went about for a bit and then drifted apart. Then I met beautiful bitchy Valerie and instead asked her to marry me. It wasn’t a success, as you know.’
The Angola rug had got turned up, and I bent down to straighten it. The furnishing still smelt new.
‘Were you in love with Harriet?’ I asked.
‘One can’t answer that until one has defined the term ‘‘ love.’’ I admired her greatly; I always felt at my best in her company. If she had been free when my own marriage went for six, I should have asked her then. Does that answer the question?’
‘I imagine it’s as direct an answer as I can expect from a lawyer.’
He got up. It was now full dusk in the room and his face was hardly visible. ‘You and I must meet and talk about this again, Morris. I’ll not deny that I was upset by Harriet’s death—and speaking about this and about her should act as a sort of catharsis for us both. Don’t you agree?’
I switched on one of the table lamps. Light recreated the room discreetly. His shadow moved ahead of him to the door.
There he turned and smiled. ‘Anyway, we’ll meet as soon as this case comes up. Lucky you didn’t go in the river that night. The mud saved you.’
Chapter Six
My second meeting with Alexandra, on the Friday, was if anything stranger than the first. It was as if I were trying to reach her through a Perspex barrier in my own emotions. I knew what I ought to feel for her, but I had to tell myself to feel it. I knew what I ought to say, and said it, but I remained withdrawn, speaking meaningless lines. She made no comment this time but, because she had spoken of it on Tuesday when I had had more hope of seeming natural, I knew what she must be thinking today.
I thought, really, you’re self-conscious, nothing more. You can’t relax, be natural, forget yourself. (Wasn’t that what Harriet more than once had said about me?) To try to relax I began to drink, but seeing Alexandra’s eyes on the bottle I gave up the attempt.
Pleasure was walled off from me, true sensations; I lived within myself and looked out at a world which lacked validity. This girl that I loved was there to speak to, to touch, to make plans with, to kiss, to caress; my future wife. But was she to be the wife of a walking zombie? It would pass. It was the strangeness, some sense of guilt still clinging, the acting of a lie; all these things would pass. Time; that was all that was needed: time.
I drove with her to the airport. ‘I’m going to sell that flat,’ I said.
She looked at me with relief. ‘Where shall we live?’
‘Next time you’re over we’ll go house-hunting. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t prefer to live in the country for a change. What do you think?’
‘I like living in a city, with a week-end cottage. Could we run to that?’
‘I have one already, but I think it suffers from the same disadvantages as Spanish Place.’
She was silent. I told my father about you last night.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he’d like to meet you.’
‘Of course. When can you come over again? Next month?’
‘I can come over again any time, once we make it public.’
‘Let’s make it the first week in December—just to tell a few friends. Then get married the following month.’
‘Whenever you say.’
I was silent while the traffic flicked past the hired car. She put her hand on mine. ‘What is it Morris? What’s wrong?’
‘Wrong?’
‘It’s obvious something is. You haven’t been yourself at all.’
I said: ‘Are you a practising Christian? I mean, do you believe in it completely as a faith?’
Her glance was surprised, but she considered a minute. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I don’t think much about it. Why?’
‘It was just a thought.’
She said: ‘My mother’s technically still a Catholic, I suppose, but I was never brought up anything. We keep the laws, behave ourselves in a good-neighbourly way, keep most of the Ten Commandments. Apart from that, I don’t suppose it would ever occur to any of us to go inside a church. It’s the way one comes to live.’
‘I was brought up more conventionally. To be a Christian in the orthodox sense was the accepted thing in our family. But I don’t know how deep any of it went except for my mother. She conformed because she conformed. When she died we lapsed, more or less. Though of course it leaves its mark.’
‘You still haven’t said why you asked.’
‘It was just a thought.’ I hesitated, knowing that Alexandra was not the person to be content with half-tones and equivocations. Her directness had not yet been undermined by experience, and she would not accept less from me. Yet again on the brink, I turned away. ‘Darling, I …’
‘Yes?’
‘I have to tell you that there’s a rumour going around that when Harriet went to Paris for the first night she discovered about us … and that induced her to commit suicide.’
The car turned into the airport, the driver slid back the partition. ‘Is it B.E.A., sir?’
‘No, Air France,’ Alexandra said, then she looked at me. ‘ Why did you leave it so late to tell me this?’
‘I hoped it wouldn’t ever be necessary to tell you.’
‘But if we’re ever to marry, we mustn’t begin by trying to keep things from each other.’
‘But this is my problem—’
‘No, Morris. If I’m to be your wife I have to know these things.’ Alexandra suddenly stared. ‘Did you tell
her—that night, did you tell her?’
‘No … I was still the coward.’
The car pulled up behind a taxi at the departure bay.
‘Then there was no reason whatever why she should have taken her own life.’
‘None. I can tell you she didn’t. I was in the room, and know.’
‘Then what is there to fear?’
What was there to fear? A porter came along and opened the door. ‘Where for, sir?’
‘Paris. Just the lady.’ I got out and held the door for her. ‘ It’s the eighteen fifty-five.’
‘Yes, sir.’
We walked slowly into the airport, following the porter with the bag. It was weighed and her ticket stamped. If she went on to the passport office now I could not follow her.
She said: ‘For a while I was frightened.’
‘What were you frightened of?’
‘That something in Harriet’s death had cut us off from each other.’
‘How?’
‘Morris, there’s nothing wrong with having been in love with me. Is there? Is there?’
‘No, of course not. How could there be?’
‘Well, now, Harriet is dead—from an accident that no one could have prevented. So … people talk. People, some people, always would talk. It can’t be stopped, but we can deal with it. If you want me to, I’ll marry you tomorrow.’
‘My love,’ I said, ‘I think I need you very much—your courage and your sanity. Living alone, one gets ingrown. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this before.’
‘I’m sorry too.’
We moved towards the passport counter. I felt then that if I had really had the guts to confess everything to her from the beginning I should have gained so much in ease, in courage, in sanity, in resource.
Or would I instead have lost her altogether?
A writer has to be much alone. He cannot create except by drawing on the wells within his own personality, and to do this he must be solitary and self-contained. But solitariness is something which can only be accepted on its own terms; and sometimes those terms are intolerable. They were now.
I would cheerfully have set fire to the flat. It offered me nothing but memories that I could not comfortably entertain; and Alexandra’s visit to it, instead of overlaying them, had rubbed the healing skin away. I was conscious of being glad that Harriet was gone. I was delighted with my own freedom. But I could decide nothing. I could explain nothing. I could forget nothing.
A sense of freedom, while heady enough as an emotion, can’t exist in a vacuum. Something has to be done with it. I found myself flailing around with nothing to hit. I did not need money; I had so much it was becoming an embarrassment; and enough fame went with it to satisfy a man not specially fond of the limelight. An effort to return to medicine had been a failure. An effort to be shrived in a Christian fashion had expired half done, and for the moment I couldnt bring myself to return and begin again. Of course I could go away. I could go anywhere, do anything, the South of France, Greece, New York, Hollywood, Tahiti. I could take a year, two years off and still be rich at the end of it.
But these were things to do after marriage to Alexandra, not before. Drifting from place to place on one’s own was even more exacting than living in this haunted flat. It was marriage to Alexandra which was the watershed of a new existence.
But under what circumstances could marriage with her take place?
It was about nine when I got back to the flat, which was too early to go to bed and too late for a theatre. On Friday evenings my club would be nearly empty. I took a taxi to Cambridge Circus and walked down to a fashionable night club called The Curiosity Shop. This too had an end of the week look about it, but, being the popular place of the moment, there were a few theatrical people I knew by sight, and a group of pop singers who were relaxing over beer and sandwiches. I stayed there until 1 A.M. talking in a desultory way, listening to the wits swapping stories and keeping up with the drinking.
There was a girl there called Carol who sat with me a good bit, and in the end I offered to take her home. When we got to her flat she asked me in for a coffee. I knew it would have been easy from there on, and thought perhaps this is the obvious way out. What’s the good of freedom unless you put it to some use? But I heard myself refusing and getting back into the taxi.
In the night I dreamed that I saw an advertisement in the personal column of The Times which read: ‘Will the man whose wife was killed in an accident in Paris please go to 66 Spanish Place, where she is waiting for him.’ I dreamed I was getting out of a taxi at my own door and looking at the number and wondering if I dared go in. The taxi drove away and I stood there shaking. But although I was afraid there was no escape. I put the key in the latch and entered the little hall; the lights were on in the sitting room and there was a thin whisper of voices. I went towards the door and opened it and went in. A lot of people in the room, some of them in strange black Victorian clothes. Both my grandfathers and both my grandmothers were there; I recognised them from memory and from their photographs. They were talking in thin whispering voices like the sound of birds. When they saw me they all stopped whispering, and there was a profound silence. Then I saw my mother. She, unlike the others, was in white as if for a wedding; and I realised it was my father’s second wedding that she was dressed to attend. Then I saw Harriet, in the middle of them all. Her face was streaked with blood from broken glass, but she smiled at me as if she had no teeth at all. She was the only one in grave clothes. She said: ‘ Come in, Morris. We’re all dead.’
I woke to broad daylight and the telephone ringing. I was in the house with all those dead people: they were in the next room whispering and sneering. I clawed at the telephone.
‘Morris?’
‘Yes?’
‘This is Isabel. Isabel Chokra.’
‘Who? … Oh, yes?’
‘Sorry, have I wakened you? It’s after ten.’
‘No, I … was late to bed last night. What is it?’
‘I was thinking of what we talked about on Thursday. Do you really—are you really interested in the answers that Buddhism can give to the problems of human beings … suffering—bereavement? Or were you just talking for the sake of talking? I don’t want to entice you away from any philosophy you already hold.’
‘Why d’you ask?’
‘I was talking to Bina about it, saying how badly you were cut up. He said if you were interested, he could put you in touch with one of his friends who might be able to help.’
‘In what way?’
‘Morris, perhaps I’m intruding; perhaps I shouldn’t have rung.’
‘No, go on. Say what you were going to say.’
‘Well, you know, maybe it’s my Western ideas still bubbling through. Buddhists—true Buddhists—don’t try to spread their beliefs. They don’t go in for missionaries. I only thought—well, you know I come from an ordinary English home, not religious but not particularly anti-religious. When I married Bina no pressure was put on me to become a Buddhist. It was more out of affection for him that I began to ask questions. Then, when I’d showed interest, I was invited to meet a monk—a Thai, as it happened—and we talked things over in a friendly way. And what he said seemed to explain so much that otherwise is unexplainable. It made sense of things. It appealed to my reason which—although I’m an artist—is quite strong in me. So then after a time I became a practising Buddhist. In a very Westernised way, of course. Not much austerity attached to it, I’m afraid. But it did seem to work—for me.’
‘And you’re suggesting it might work for me?’
‘Heaven knows. Far be it from me, etc.… But since Harriet died you’ve seemed so troubled; so I’ve been troubled on your account. It would be such a desperate waste if you broke up because of what had happened. I believe so, anyhow. If you think this is a frightful intrusion on your private grief, you’re at perfect liberty to slam the receiver down. If you don’t, then let me know sometime. I can always arrange a mee
ting.’
‘My dear,’ I said, ‘I’m very touched by your concern.’
‘Oh, don’t please be on your dignity.’
‘I’m not, I’m not, sincerely. I mean it at its face value. I’ve been very lonely since Harriet died. That someone like you is so concerned …’
‘Well, of course I am. You have a lot of friends, Morris. I only wish you made more use of them.’
On the Thursday the Alfa Romeo was delivered to me, apparently none the worse for its many dents and scratches. I drove at once down to the cottage, glad to be off again. But when I got there I was no farther away from things than I had been in the London flat. Even the blackened flowers in the vases had been picked by Harriet; and she’d left clothes about, things that she thought only suitable for country wear.
First I had to get rid of these, shoving them in a cupboard under the stairs; then I went out to buy food. Shopkeepers whom we had got to know were discreetly anxious to show their sympathy. But in the end I found catering for myself too much trouble and ate most of my meals in neighbouring pubs.
On Saturday afternoon Tim Dickinson turned up.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, limping in. ‘I was on the loose this week-end so went to your flat. Your daily told me you’d come down here, so I followed.’
I wasn’t at all sorry to see him. It was as if he needed company just as much as I did. We only mentioned Harriet casually from time to time.
In the evening I lit a fire and we ate a cold meal by it.
Tim said: ‘I never quite knew why you took up medicine and then dropped it, Morris. Was your father very much of a tyrant?’
‘No. My mother was the influence in my life because she was always gentle with her—her inescapable persuasions. She dominated the household, though one would never have thought so as a casual visitor.’
‘Is that her photograph upstairs?’
‘The one on the landing. Yes.’
‘She minds me of Harriet.’
‘Oh, nonsense, they were utterly unlike.… At least, I suppose they were both tall and thin and dark-haired. There wasn’t any other resemblance.’
After the Act Page 17
