‘Your father was easy-going?’
‘Oh, far from it. But tyrant is the wrong word.’
‘What is the right one?’
‘Difficult … touchy … unpredictable. I remember he had a sort of angry preoccupation with asepsis.’ I laughed. ‘No woolly or unhygienic toy was ever tolerated. And meals, when he was in, were pretty tense. I was a poor eater, and there used to be scenes, with hysterical tears and the rest, because I wouldn’t eat stewed figs or ground nuts with milk or one of his pet dishes.’
‘And your mother took your side?’
‘Not in front of him. But she’d try persuasion—which usually worked.…’ I put a poker in the fire and lifted it so that the blaze grew. ‘ Mind you, he could be very good company at times—jovial, amusing. But because of his tendency to blow up unpredictably I never was altogether at ease in his company. There was a constraint between us—still is, a little, though it has lessened with the years. Now I like him and admire him very much.’
Tim thrust out a doubting bottom lip but did not speak. I said: ‘Preparing a psychological study?’
‘Far from it. My own early life was nothing to write eulogies about.’
We sat in silence for a while. Tim was wearing an old suit, and the metal of the knee had worn the tweed thin, so that a glitter showed through.
‘Odd how one thinks back on one’s life,’ I said. ‘… I remember when I was about nine sitting quiet in a corner while my mother and father argued angrily about some patient who had died of an overdose given in compassion by a nurse. My father said, knowing what the patient was suffering from, it could only be of minor importance. My mother was strongly against the shortening of life by a single day. Life to her, you know, had the precious, priceless quality of the true Christian: suffering was part of it, unimportant except as a stage in spiritual development. To my father, who dealt in it every day, life was better snuffed out as soon as it became a burden.’
‘Which do you agree with, Morris?’
‘When I came to walk the wards I came to agree with my father.’
‘That life, if inconvenient, should be snuffed out?’
‘Not if inconvenient, my dear Tim. If an insufferable burden.’
‘But who is to say that the burden is insufferable? The person suffering? One of the relatives? It opens up loopholes.’
‘I think you’re objecting from a legal point of view, not a Christian.’
‘The two aren’t always so far apart as you might think.’ I got up and blobbed more whisky in my glass. ‘Another of the same?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I assume you’re not harking back to the theme that some possible affair I had in Paris drove Harriet to take her own life.’
‘I never thought it had, in so many words. But even though I naturally accept what you tell me, that she knew nothing of your affair in Paris, don’t we all have some responsibility for the behaviour of others? Wasn’t it Donne who said, ‘‘Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind’’? Is the world, for instance, as a whole guiltless of the Nazi war crimes? Still less in the case of individuals can we be without responsibility, and the nearer we are to each other the greater the responsibility becomes.’
‘I thought the purpose of psychology was to help to free people from guilt, not to saddle them with it.’
He stretched across and put soda in his glass. ‘ Did you know that Harriet had quite a bit of literary talent of her own? She wrote some good short stories in the early fifties, and they were published in one of those short-lived quarterlies.’
‘I knew of them, of course. She never let me see them; she said she’d lost the copies.’
‘I often used to urge her to have another shot at it, but she always said one writer in the family was enough.’
I took a reflective drink. ‘Tell me about the break-up in your married life, for a change.’
He smoothed his greying hair. ‘Oh, that. It was just the story of two selfish people who couldn’t get on with each other. Not at all interesting.’
‘Perhaps it would be to an outside observer.’
‘Besides, our marriage came unstuck in a normal way. One of us didn’t die.’
‘You feel there’s something unexplained about Harriet’s death?’
‘Not in a physical sense perhaps. I suppose it’s just …’ He shrugged. ‘ Possibly any sudden accidental death … In my profession—in both my professions—when faced by any unexplained effect we instinctively search for the cause, even when in moral terms there isn’t one.’
At that moment Ralph rang up from London and this broke the discussion. But Tim accepted my invitation to stay the night, and every now and again through the Sunday—a walk in the morning, drinks and sandwiches at a pub, sitting indoors watching the raindrops caterpillar down the windows during the afternoon—we skirted the subject. He asked me more about my life in Winchester as a boy, and I told him more than I ever have anyone else. Talking even helped me to remember incidents and details I had forgotten.
I was not such a mug as not to be aware that he was pumping me to try to piece together some picture in his own mind, but this didn’t worry me. I enjoyed it. I found it a stimulus and a challenge. What he suspected, how much he suspected, I didn’t yet know; but that was hardly important. He was entitled to the facts; all the facts except the central one; without that he could do nothing.
And once again talking was a relief. But after he had gone to bed I lay listening to the drumming of the rain and wondered at some of the things we had said to each other. They had an intimacy which had never remotely existed between us before, a frankness that can only exist between close friends—or close enemies. I wondered which we were. Nearer to the latter; yet I felt little resentment towards him and wondered if he had any for me. It was as if he was hungering after a truth and I was feeding it to him, and more excitement had come into this chase than there would ever be in the outcome. For only by feeding it to him could I come at it myself.
Chapter Seven
When I got back I felt a bit better, and did two days’ work on the new play, work that I knew would not have to be destroyed. Then Ralph telephoned in great excitement. Sun International had accepted all our terms for Widow’s Peak and furthermore would like the author to script it. Terms for the scripting could be agreed later, but could I fly over and see them at once, as they would like to meet me to discuss the whole project?
I hesitated a while, knowing how Harriet would have urged me to accept, and therefore the less inclined to. It was during this period, while going to and from Ralph’s office, that I first thought I was being followed; but after some consideration I put this down to fancy—the sort of fancy that can so easily magnify itself into a hallucination. On the Friday I decided to go to Hollywood.
A hectic six days with scarcely any time for thought about the major problems of my life; yet all the time I was in California—through interviews, friendly parties, story conferences, bizarre meals, late night talks—the thread of indecision and doubt persisted, the canker in the apple grew no less. Everything was there to make me forget: a new way of life, a city and a continent I had never visited before, a modest notoriety so that enough fuss was made of me and not too much. There wasn’t a person in the whole state who was not a stranger to me.
But you carry yourself about. Man has many skins in himself, covering the depths of his heart. The kingdom of hell is within us.
On the flight home there was a girl in front of me who reminded me of Alexandra—as once in a restaurant someone had done—and staring for hours at the dark curling hair falling over the fresh young cheek I knew once again that she was central to the whole problem. All my feelings, my thoughts, were in one way or another modified or slanted because of her. Their orbits were different because of this planetary pull. Therefore, until the ultimate decision was reached about her, nothing else, no other decision or sensation, was valid.
But
how could the decision be taken? Where was the point of judgement external to oneself? Did the Church offer it? Or some skull shrinker in Harley Street? Or the works of Plato? Or the teachings of William Law?
When I got home the first thing I did was ring Ralph and tell him that, delightful as I found everyone in Hollywood, I had decided not to script Widow’s Peak. My feeling was, I said, that I had said all I wanted to say in the play. To adapt it, to cut it, to alter it for another medium would be frustrating and unnatural. There were plenty of skilled writers who would jump at the job. I didn’t want it and didn’t need the money.
My second telephone call was to Isabel Chokra.
The address in Chelsea was an unexpectedly fashionable one. It might have been that of a wealthy mother who had taken it to launch her daughter for a season.
But once inside the picture changed. Bare walls, an arid waiting room with bookshelves and two Rexine armchairs, drab cotton curtains, three framed texts, Oriental matting on the floor, and pervading everything the smell of an Eastern temple.
The little Burmese who had let me in said that the Venerable Doctor Sangham would see me in five minutes. I was by that much early for the appointment.
In five minutes exactly I was shown into a tiny study. It was even barer than the waiting room. Two smaller leather chairs, a mat, a round table with a top of beaten brass; in one corner of the room was a small gold Buddha inside an ornate ivory altar.
Dr. Sangham was a tall man for an Oriental, tall and bald, and plump, in a faded yellow robe, sandals, grey socks; a man of perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty. He bowed politely to me and waved me to a chair, smiling.
We talked generally for a few minutes. He was, he said, a Ceylonese who had lived in England for ten years. He had also for ten years lived and worked in the holy city of Benares. We discussed our friendship with Captain Bina Chokra of the Royal Thai Navy, through whom this meeting had been arranged. I congratulated Dr. Sangham on his command of English and he said he had of course learned it in Ceylon as a boy. Later he said, still smiling, it had for political reasons become a language ‘not spoken,’ but this was all now happily a thing of the past.
Then we sat together and there was silence. He moved his hands easily inside his wide sleeves, his eyes clear and unshadowed. I said to him abruptly that what I had come to discuss with him concerned the breaking of a civil law. In what degree could I rely on his discretion? He smiled again.
‘There is no degree in discretion, Mr.—er—Scott. It is absolute or it is nothing. Long ago—long long ago—mine became absolute.’
So for the second time since I had done that thing on the balcony I found myself telling of it in fullest detail—to a Buddhist monk in a small cell-like study in a tall Georgian house in one of London’s most fashionable neighbourhoods, while the distant sound of traffic rumbled outside and voices chanted in a near-by room. Half-way through the story I paused to think of all this and wondered if I really was crazy after all.
Dr. Sangham had no pipe to fill, no matches to strike, no vicarage floor to pace. He did not seem to need them but sat silent and still, his hands folded in his sleeves while I spoke, his plump face interested, pleasant, composed. It was quite a different proposition from telling this story to Jonathan Martin. This was not a man I had known from childhood but one separated in religion, in race, in up-bringing by the width of the world. In trying to explain even more fully I don’t think I explained it so well. I didn’t finish but tailed off, my voice dying away in the small empty room.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Yes.’ And then pleasantly, conversationally: ‘You have a grave problem, Mr.—er—Scott.’
I did not answer this and we sat again in silence, a long silence.
‘May I ask you,’ he said at length, ‘if you know anything of Buddhism?’
‘A little only. Captain and Mrs. Chokra are my close friends. But of course they do not know my problem.’
‘Yes. I see. Yes.’
Presently I said: ‘ Perhaps you consider it impertinent of me to come to you in this way.’
‘Impertinent? Oh, no. Oh, dear me, no.’ He smiled gently. ‘I am only too happy—too happy to see you—to try to help. Buddhism is religion for all. Many Londoners are Buddhists. Many come to me for help in one way and another. I am honoured if I can be of service.’
The chanting in the next room had stopped. He said: ‘Before I bring thought to your problem, perhaps I should try to explain a little of what we believe. Perhaps it will help us both to see this problem more clearly.’
‘I hope so.’
‘In Buddhism, Mr. Scott, there is no God. It is not that we deny him: he is not known. The Lord Buddha, to whom we make obeisance, is neither the incarnation of a god nor a prophet. He is the supreme human being who achieved perfect wisdom and became the peerless teacher of men. He is a Saviour only in the sense that he shows men how to save themselves.’ Dr. Sangham smiled at me. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Lord Buddha taught that ignorance is ultimate cause of existence. He taught, and we try to teach on his behalf, a lofty but realistic system of ethics, a clear analysis of life, a deep philosophy, sensible methods of mind training—all leading to path of deliverance: which is a deliverance from life, a deliverance from rebirth, a detachment from life, the achieving of extinction. The aim of all men is to be freed from birth, from death, from suffering, from decay, from sorrow, from pain. We cannot free ourselves from these until we free ourselves from sensuous craving.’
‘You mention rebirth,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That is of course what Western people so much associate with our religion. But is often mistaken view. We do not see rebirth as a blessing but only as the inevitable result of too much selfish craving, too much self-seeking, too much that is done out of greed, lust and anger. These actions ripen into rebirth and in the rebirth such actions come to fruition. Where perfect living, perfect wisdom extinguishes selfish craving no future rebirth takes place. We do not believe in anything after death which is permanent, persisting or eternal.’
I had been sitting in a cramped position in the low chair, and I got up and went across to the Buddha. ‘How does all this relate to what I’ve just told you?’
‘We will come to that, Mr. Scott. Would you care for a cup of tea?’
I stared. ‘Is it usual?’
‘No. Oh, no; but it is four o’ clock. I usually drink tea in English fashion; it need not disturb our talk.’
‘As you wish.’
He pulled a bell.
‘What persists from life to life,’ he said, smiling, ‘we call the karma. It is not what you Western people call a soul, but is the sum of one’s actions in life. All beings are the heirs of their deeds; their deeds are the womb from which they sprang; their deeds—good or ill—shall be their heirs. Therefore, it is one of the Noble Truths that seeming injustices of this world cannot come into existence without cause.’
The little Burmese came happily into the room, and Dr. Sangham ordered tea.
‘Our whole destiny,’ he went on, ‘results from causes which arise partly from this life, partly from another existence. If your little girl were run over in street tomorrow, it might be because you had allowed her too much freedom; but, more certainly, it would be because of your karma and hers, your deeds, words and thoughts in another life. And how you behave in such bereavement now will determine your future karma. To be resigned to loss, to grieve not, to blame no one, these are the signs of a being on Path of Deliverance.… So in the East, you will understand, we are never at a loss to explain a calamity, and, what is more, we are better equipped to bear it. We do not set too much value on our lives. We are what you call fatalists—but happy fatalists. We try to live without craving, and we try to live without grieving.’
I came back and sat down again. He was still smiling gently.
I said: ‘So we are slowly moving from the general to the particular.’
‘Yes. Exac
tly. That was what I hoped to do.’
‘Are you asking me to interpret what I did in the light of what you have told me?’
‘No, Mr.—er—Scott, I will try to do that. But first there is a little more to say. Of the five moral precepts which form the basis of progress on the Path of Enlightenment, the first is, ‘‘I undertake to abstain from killing living beings,’’ and the third is, ‘‘I undertake to abstain from sexual misconduct.’’ ’
‘That rather eliminates me, doesn’t it?’
‘It is an obstacle but it by no means ‘‘eliminates’’ you, as you put it. There are endless stories in our mythology to illustrate that no man, however evil, is past redemption. The Buddha himself ennobled the lives of many sinners, and purified the corrupt lives of criminals. Even the worst sinner—far, far worse than you, Mr. Scott—has hope of attaining eternal peace. All depends on diligence, vigilance, discipline, above all self-mastery. A wise man becomes a man without sorrow. Irrigators can control water how they will, and a mind which by self-mastery has forsaken evil can achieve nobility and happiness.’
The Burmese servant brought the tea and then left. Dr. Sangham poured mine and offered me milk and sugar. I took them. He began to pour his own.
I said gently: ‘This is a good philosophy. But I happen to have killed my wife. I come to you for practical guidance.’
He sipped his tea and then licked his lips in appreciation.
‘Of course. But it is the common mistake to suppose that philosophy is not practical. The Buddha says even if man has done evil a hundred times he must erase evil and do good. Do good. That is practical. It cannot be more so. You ask me whence came this terrible impulse to destroy your wife; and I say it was in your karma. People meet and re-meet through their many existences. The fact that you have come to me today makes it likely that we have met before in an earlier life. You may marry same wife through succeeding incarnations. In that way harmony and love result. But you may marry a woman with whom you have not been closely acquainted in a previous incarnation; then because your karmas have not been attuned through the years there may be no harmony, and a divorce may result. You may even marry a woman who did you ill in a previous life—then an action such as yours may arise from it.’
After the Act Page 18
