‘I couldn’t marry you with such a thing between us. If a love is true, it’s true. You don’t shore it up with falsehoods as basic as that.’
‘Did you kill her because of me?’
‘I don’t know.’
She frowned, as yet not looking at me. Since she came in I had hardly had a glimpse of her eyes.
I said: ‘Of course I’ve worked on that—to persuade myself it was not at all because of you. It was vital that I should if we were going to … But obviously our love affair, it must have had—an influence, even though the act, what I did, was a thing of the moment, not deliberate, not even strictly rational.’
‘And now seems to be preventing what it was intended to help on.’
‘Yes … That’s true.’
‘So it wasn’t rational at all.’
‘Maybe not. Maybe I’m just a little insane.’
She took out a handkerchief and wiped the corners of her mouth.
She said: ‘What if I still were willing to marry you?’
Well, I’d wondered—half hoping, half fearing. Hesitation now would have been an insult.
‘It wouldn’t work. It’s another of the things I’ve beaten out and beaten out. Even if you were generous enough to try … If it wouldn’t work with one of us knowing, it couldn’t with both.’
‘At least there would be no falsehood between us. Wasn’t that what you were most afraid of?’
‘Her death would lie there.’
‘Living people can’t be separated by the dead, Morris. They can be separated only by themselves.’
‘Darling, we are only what we are.’
She looked at me now, with hostility, eyes slightly bloodshot. ‘And you are a murderer. Is that it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else are you? A decent man in torment for taking one false step. Determined because of it to ruin the rest of his life—’
‘Determined not to ruin yours … Alexandra, think what it would be like. I’ve tried. This might happen between two fairly dull, unimaginative people, and it might not worry them much. It would be there, like a scar—one of those accidents which couldn’t exactly be forgotten but could be absorbed into the memory and lived with, and no particular disturbance because of it. Not us. I tried to fool myself for a time. But not us. There’s too much high-tension wire.…’
I sat down on the corner of the settee and looked at her, not able to go on.
‘So?’
‘Oh, we could get married and to hell with the consequences. But sooner or later—and I think it would be sooner—the chance remark that could be taken two ways would set one or the other of us on edge. ‘‘But, darling,’’ you’d say, ‘‘I didn’t mean it.’’ ‘‘Well, of course not, it was just the way you said it that made me think …’’ This would happen. It couldn’t help but happen. There would be a—an erosion of love. Thoughts can never be anything but secret, and it’s the secrecy that damns. It’s not knowing that breeds suspicion. The—the smallest evasion magnifies itself into a betrayal. ‘‘What were you thinking?’’ ‘‘Oh, nothing, of course.’’ ‘‘ I thought perhaps you were wondering what would happen if we had a child.…’’ and so on.’
‘Do you think I should be afraid?’
‘No. Being you, you wouldn’t. But I am. I’m afraid of destroying you.…’
We were silent for some time. Her hair, which was loose today, hid most of her face, but there was that about the set of her head which was not submissive.
‘Alexandra, I don’t know what else to say to you. Except try to forgive me. Please try. I’m only saying what I know to be the truth.’
She said: ‘ You’re older than I am, Morris, and cleverer. But I’m not sure if you’re wiser. Sometimes you reason too much like writing a play. What you’ve just told me—what you’ve just said, that might have come out of one of your plays. How do you know that living with me is like that? How do you know for certain that it would happen? If we know the risk, why can’t we avoid it?’
I did not speak, and she began to pat the window seat with a clenched fist. ‘ Isn’t the coming together of two people always dangerous? All marriages are dangerous. No man can take a woman or woman a man without running the risk of a sort of destruction. All the things that can happen. Suspicion, jealousy, small-mindedness, contempt, nagging, hatred, oh, all the things that can pull down and destroy; well, they can destroy just as completely as the knowledge that we would share. There’s risk in our getting married—but there’s risk in everything that’s worth while. If I am willing to take the risk, why should you not be?’
‘Because you are innocent and I’m not.’
‘I don’t want innocence! Let it go. Life is to be lived! I wasn’t brought up to be a nun.’
I sat staring at her, watching her as if for some new illumination, but did not speak. I knew it was a mistake to see her femininity as something immature, indecisive or frail.
‘How would you feel,’ she said, ‘if this were the other way round?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean if I had killed someone.’
‘I just can’t see it.’
‘You must. Wouldn’t you still want to marry me?’
‘Darling, darling, you can’t work it like that. It would not be my choice then, it would be yours.’
‘And d’you think you’d be content to let me say no?’
A snatch of a poem was in my head from some early reading. So shakes the needle and so stands the pole, As vibrates my fond heart to my fixed soul. Apt now, if a little cynical. It left a taste on the tongue.
I said: ‘You can’t argue that way, Alexandra; it just doesn’t make reason. It’s such a hypothetical set-up that one can’t begin to argue on it. Maybe I’d not be content, any more than you are; but if you—if you had been married before and …’ I put my hands to my head. So shakes the needle and so stands the pole. Byron probably. As vibrates my fond heart …
She was sitting on the arm of my chair. ‘Morris, if possible try to stop thinking it out. Thinking is all right so far as it goes, but in cases like this it eventually leads to a dead-end. What do you judge by after that? I don’t know. Instinct? Feeling? Emotion? Darling, I don’t know—but you have to go beyond. And you have to have trust.’
I leaned my head wearily against her side. She put her hand a couple of times over my hair and then stopped, and then waited. I knew she was waiting.
Out of some terrible depths of desolation of spirit I said: ‘My love, my love …’
‘Rest a while.’
‘… I seem to have no feeling left—as if this is the finish, the finish of all loving for me.’
‘It’s only a question of time. You can’t stop feeling if you are alive. You’re too close to everything yet. I’ve been too pressing, but of course I didn’t realise. Now I know, it’s easy to see that there ought to have been a longer gap—three months, six months.…’
The tapping of water on the end of the window seat had changed its note as a tiny spoon of water formed on the fabric. My fixed soul. Had I a soul? The suicide is buried in unconsecrated ground.… The criminal could ask no more.
‘No!’ I said, perking up. ‘No, Alexandra! It isn’t any good. No darling, it’s over between us.’
She had stood up, almost unseated. Now she was staring at me. ‘You still love me?’
‘Of course I do!’
‘Then how can this be the end?’
‘It’s got to be. I can’t go on with it. I just can’t go on!
‘You mean that?’
‘Yes …’
Her eyes had changed their focus, as if she were peering into me more closely. ‘Is there some other reason?’
Fighting a woman you love isn’t a gentler business than fighting your greatest enemy, because there are so many more weapons and they are all sharper. It’s like playing with razors.
‘Yes.’
‘There is another reason?’
‘If you can call
it a reason.’
‘Well, tell me. I want to know.’
‘In eight weeks I’ve come to face the fact that if I’m not to become insane, really insane—if I’m to stay on the rails at all … always assuming that there’s something to save, then the only way to save it is to forget.… To forget Harriet and to forget the act and to forget—everything connected with it …’
She pushed her hair and gave a sort of gulp. ‘Including me?’
‘Yes, God help me, including you! My darling … What I did, what I did that night has ruined everything by a sort of contamination. It’s in my memory as a sort of contamination and I can’t cut it away.… There’s nothing I can do about it; there’s no way out, Alexandra, no way out.…’
Life often stage-manages anticlimaxes. Now, when we were both wrought up to the point of breaking, the telephone went. At first the noise was in my head; then I groped across (nothing so damnably claimant, so unignorable), stopped it ringing in the only way.
‘Yes?’
‘Is that Mr. Morris Scott? … This is Knight, Dickinson & Clarendon. I have a call for you from Mr. Dickinson. Will you hold the line, please?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not now,’ and slammed the thing back.
She was standing up. My sight was blurred for a minute and I couldn’t see her exact expression. Then I saw it was twisted. She looked like a little girl.
She said: ‘ It’s hard to believe.… You know I … didn’t think you’d ever …’ Her voice too had changed now; it was no longer strong and combative. I realised she had come here today almost without thought of defeat.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t think so either, didn’t dream that … Oh, God, I’m so sorry. So very sorry.’
‘This means for ever? Even—without marriage.’
‘Oh, please forgive me. Oh, please go.…’
‘I’m going.’
At the door. In the hall. Her raincoat had dripped on the floor. I ought to ask her how she came, how she would get back to London, but the damned bloody banality wouldn’t utter itself. She was so young, so pretty. What was I giving up, throwing away, because of a single excusable crime? Had I ever meant to get rid of Harriet? Wasn’t it all a hideous mistake? Why shouldn’t I take the risk if Alexandra was willing? What was I throwing away? One word now before it was too late.
She was struggling into her raincoat. I must not touch her to help her. One word. She was defeated, that was the terrible thing. The razors had drawn blood on both sides.
She put the hood over her hair. I suddenly realised I might never see her again, that this might be the very last time. I fancied I saw her as I had seen her that time we met in September near the Eiffel Tower. Her eyes were reflecting the liquid pewter of the river. I had taken a taxi then and driven with her to a cheap hotel in Montmartre.…
She was going; the door, this door was open; she was half through it; defeated—and by what? The scruples of one tired and dispirited man. I had only to say the word now. Alexandra. Stay with me. I didn’t really mean any of it. Let’s face this together. If you can have the strength I will have the strength.
She glanced at me briefly, her eyes a sort of blue-grey blaze of anger and grief. She seemed about to say something more, seemed to be gathering her strength for a last attack, then abruptly turned and went out.
The front door closed behind her. I was alone. What had I thought that evening, after I had met her again at the Place de Varsovie? Life isn’t just disillusion, I had thought; it’s everything, from ecstasy to horror, from the stink of disease to the beauty of beauty. It’s creation and pullulation, the germinal seed for ever flowering and bursting, the contact and conflict of a thousand million egos, the divine spark run amok.…
I stared round the hall. And now the divine spark had gone out. Something was dripping on my hands. It was not water from the roof but water from my eyes. It seemed as if it were all my youth and my heart leaking away.
Chapter Nine
I don’t remember how the rest of the day passed. I didn’t eat much. Later I remember settling down to write and working right through till about 11 P.M. without a stop. The creative effort acted as a purgation. Then I flopped down on the bed and slept restlessly for about eight hours. I hadn’t bothered to get undressed, and next morning I must have been a dishevelled figure, moving around as if still punch-drunk from the emotional stresses of the day before.
About midday I went for a newspaper and a drink, the only bottle in the house having got itself finished overnight. On the theatrical page was a piece: ‘Among interesting first nights this week will be the first London performance of Rhesus Boy, an early play by Morris Scott, the author of the highly successful Widow’s Peak, now in its ninth month at Wyndham’s. Rhesus Boy concerns the struggle of a …’
Concerns the struggle of a … Concerns the struggle of a highly successful playwright to cling to normality and mental equilibrium when the sloping ground on which he stands tilts ever nearer to the pit. Which way helps most? Stay cold sober and your nerves jazz like telephone wires in a storm. Anaesthetise the nerves with drink and your mind and limbs get weighted and sluggish like a prisoner in chains.
I was Rhesus Boy. Drain out the blood and refill with a commoner, more stable group. Concerns the struggle of a …
Where had I thought that before? Must remember. When the mind starts falling into well-worn tracks, first sign of senescence. Tell the same story to the same friend twice. Jolly good friends—that’s what life is. No good sweating nervously—that’s youth. Poise comes with maturity. All good friends. He’s a good fellow and ’twill all be well.…
‘Are you all right, dear?’ said the barmaid. ‘Like a sandwich or something? Don’t do to drink too much pop on an empty stomach.’
Rhesus Boy; life is bursting in me. Alexandra would get over it; I knew her well enough for that; she would be cut deep but she had strength, great resilience. And youth. On the rebound perhaps David McNair. Or someone quite fresh. But would I get over it? Wobble, wobble went sanity, went the cool reasoning brain, went steady nerves and abiding ambition. Get out of this mess.
‘Ham or cheese and tomato, dear? We’ve no brown bread. White all right?’
Witless, shallow, superficial, frivolous, vapouring. That’s what the play was. Rhesus Boy. Where the hell had I thought of that name? Was it from Harriet? People complimented me on my titles. Sleep is not for me. Sleep is for mortals, earth-bound and unshriven. I would lie down like a tired child and weep away the life of care.
‘That’ll be six and six, dear. And with the last drink, twelve shillings. Thanks … Twelve and six, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty. Thank you, dear.’
Noisy and warm in here. People talking. ‘I felt a right Charlie yesterday, bringing no umbrella.’ ‘Yes, the Costa del Sol. It’s like Southend, only worse.’ ‘It’s not tax evasion, it’s tax avoidance they call it.’
I remembered now. That phrase about changing the blood. It had occurred to me after that first night with Alexandra, when I had walked back all the way from Neuilly. He had had his blood changed, re-vitalised with a newer, stronger substance. He is alive, so that it hurts, so that the sun rises and sets with every breath. On earth I am a stranger grown; I wander in the ways of men, alike unknowing and unknown.
Alexandra. Would she get over it? Would she be willing to get over it? Youth can be ruthless not only with other people but with itself. Would she perhaps make still one more effort to persuade me before finally accepting defeat? It was unlikely. The last razors had cut deep.
But you can’t cry here, into the crusts of the sandwiches and the dregs of the whisky. Yesterday in the privacy of your own cottage it was excusable, even dignified. This would be unpardonable, insufferable sentimentality, a wallowing in self-pity, sufficient to make any decent person turn away in disgust. It was something to be a playwright: one learned the bounds beyond which one could not decently trespass.… God, this room was hot. Some damned fool jogged my arm. Witless clums
y fools people were. ‘Well, I didn’t spill it, man! Couldn’t you wait your turn to get to the bar?’
Someone shook my shoulder. ‘Are you all right, sir? Time you went home, I think. Can we get you a car?’
‘Oh, no, he only lives round the corner at Holly Cottage. It’s two minutes’ walk. He lost his wife, you know. Terrible accident. They say she …’
More snaking. ‘Are you all right, sir? Think you ought to be home before dark, you know.’
‘We had to put him here. Can’t really leave people in the bar; it’s against the law. And he was getting a bit quarrelsome, you know.’
‘You’ll probably be all right when you come out in the fresh air, sir. It’s a nice evening but there’s going to be a frost.’
I got up, swayed; someone took my elbow, but I straightened. ‘What’s the time?’
‘About half past four. You nearly passed out in the bar after that row you had, so we put you out here to sleep it off.’
‘It’s cold,’ I said. ‘Could you sell me a bottle of whisky?’
Whispered consultation. ‘We can’t yet. Against the law. Haven’t you anything in the house?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘Well, we could send something round later. George, take Mr. Scott’s arm.’
So they said it was a fine afternoon. Some hours had dropped away into that bottomless pit. The heavy rain of yesterday had washed the air clean—as clean as it had been sometimes in Paris. George, a husky stableman, walked with me to my door, but I was able to get along without his help. The sun was going down between the seven black poplars in the field beyond the cottage. I opened the door and went in.
A pretty exhibition. Well, I was near the edge now. One more push and I was over, either a nut-case or an alcoholic. I hadn’t washed or shaved since yesterday morning. I went into the kitchen and sluiced my head with cold water. Then, shivering, I crouched over the electric fire and rubbed myself dry.
There was a half bottle of gin in the cupboard after all and some sherry. No vermouth. I mixed a tumbler, half of each, and took a quick swallow. The taste was displeasing but it went to the spot. I finished the glass and my ears sang. Out in the garden the hollyhock stalk was almost down after a day of wind and rain; it leaned like a scarecrow, like a drunken man, some symbol of my own life. My chest felt heavy with the effort of breathing, my heart had a knife pain, not deep but surface sharp as if a dagger point were just pressing.
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