‘Yes, I’ll go,’ I said.
Ralph swallowed. ‘You’ll what? You’ll go? Well done! I thought it was a pretty forlorn hope. I’ll ring Carl tonight! What’s made you change your mind? No, don’t tell me; I don’t want to know! Just assure me that you’ll not change it back again?’
‘I’ll not change it back again.’
Ralph seemed so delighted that I patted him on the shoulder and said: ‘Nobody’s left you a fortune, Ralph. It’s only one of your hacks turning out to pull the cab to order.’
‘What a hack,’ he said, ‘and what a cab! Isabel was right: you are feeling better!’
‘Not better,’ I said. ‘Not at all better. But there’s something to be said for getting away.’ We were out in the foggy side street. ‘And talking of cabs, I think I’ll take this one. I want to get home.’
I wanted to get home, and I got home. The taxi driver was one of those who talk semi-audibly through the window slit all the time, so with trying to catch what he said and trying to answer him, I didn’t have much opportunity to think.
There’d be plenty of time later. If I was to stay alive, there’d be years.
I paid him and fished out my key and went in. This afternoon I had only had time to change hurriedly, and a pile of post was untouched where Mrs. Snow had left it on a table. I sifted it through now. There was a small parcel from France but it was not in Alexandra’s writing.
I left the letters there and switched on more lights and the electric fire. The flat was centrally heated but it was cold tonight. Recently I had greatly felt the cold.
So much had happened in the last three days that I was rocking on my heels with the effects. Yet the clear-sightedness of hunger still remained. I thought of my mother and Tim’s ludricrous insinuations. I thought of my father and his ludicrous second wife. I thought of Harriet, bossy, deeply involved in everything I did, long-legged, slightly limping because of her back, trousered, pill-taking, tidy, full of ideas, living a playwright’s life vicariously, through me. I thought of Alexandra, clear-eyed, without guile, soft as youth is soft and strong as youth is strong, avid, lovely, a continuing obsession.
I made myself some tea.
In the kitchen I thought, you’re safe, completely safe at last. Yesterday was the depths of danger. Unless you go into a police station and make a voluntary confession no one can ever touch you. Tim has shot his bolt. If he had had any more evidence, Sergeant Baker would have produced it yesterday.
And the time of confessions was over too. I was certain of that. I had done my best, God knew, telling no less than three people of it. But none of them would ever speak, and I would never speak again. Never again to anyone. My business was to go on living, as Tim had said.
Perhaps indeed my business was to go on writing—even if, as a result of what had happened since September, I never wrote the same sort of play again. The trauma of these days would mean a radical change of purpose and perspective; but what I had to say could still be worth the communication.
Some of Tim’s last accusations made in the pub this evening still floated in my mind, like muddy flotsam in a full stream, but on the whole I dismissed them as utterly irrelevant. Having failed to intimidate me into confession, he had blown a few last poison darts, loaded with his own toxic interpretations, hoping that one or two might stick.
I was in process of becoming a famous playwright. Interesting. The text of the plays would be published, perhaps with an introduction tracing my dramatic ancestry. Very learned and very high-brow. It was strange how esoteric a dramatic critic could become over the flimsiest of comedies. Intellect did not at all go with creative imagination; it went with the people who discussed the creators. Perhaps only I knew what a shoddy structure Rhesus Boy was, because only I—illumined by the hind-sight of self-knowledge—could perceive how it had been built on bad foundations.
The tea warmed and comforted me. I went back into the living room and looked through the post again. I opened the little package from France. It was from the Proconsul, informing me that, as a result of his application to the French authorities, they had now released the jewellery and personal effects which had been found on my wife after her death at the Hotel Ballet. Would I kindly write acknowledging receipt of the following articles?
I unwrapped the tissue paper and out fell the cornelian ring. With it was her wrist watch. And there was the thin chain identity bracelet she wore on the other wrist, and two worthless paste buckles off her shoes.
I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a second cup of tea. When I drank it the hot liquid seemed to slip into deep crevices of my thoughts, like water into an old mine. They were crevices which had been blocked with fallen rubble since the day Harriet died.
You can’t be destroyed by a cup of tea. It isn’t an acid or a subtle poison. All it can do is slip into the deep crevices of one’s thoughts, like water into an old mine—and then the ways are clear. The sinuses of self-knowledge are open to the air. I knew now what had been troubling me ever since Harriet’s death. It was not just conscience. My conscience wasn’t as powerful, as unsleeping as that. Alone it would never have forced me into the vicarage study, arguing with the old priest. Still less would it have sent me to Chelsea, seeking consolation and guidance from a Buddhist. Nor could it ever have forced me to give Alexandra up. Alone it would have done none of these things. Reason, rationalisation—the slippery rationalisation of modern man, justifying where he can, excusing where he can’t—would have won long before now. I could have lived with the crime—and lived with Alexandra, as she had rightly judged. But she—like me—had perceived only half the truth. She would never know the other half, for it was better that she should not.
I wondered, if I told her, whether she would think me insane. I wondered if everyone else would. I did not feel insane—indeed I felt more surely balanced for knowing this now than I had done for some time; though my mind was black with pain.
I emptied the teapot and washed out the cup and put the things away. There were some of Harriet’s sleeping pills in the bedroom. Three would help to blanket out the world until tomorrow. Suicide was not for me. My business was to go on living, and alone.
I went back into the drawing room and picked up the cornelian ring. My mind was black with pain because I knew now that I had lost the woman I truly loved, and that woman was not Alexandra.
I put the ring on the mantelpiece and picked up the watch. It was still that cheap one I’d bought for a few pounds, my first present to Harriet. It had stopped at twenty past two. It had stopped at twenty past two on the night (or morning) of September twenty-fourth (or twenty-fifth). The glass wasn’t broken.
You don’t love someone necessarily because you like them all the time; or because they have the most beautiful body in the world; or have the sweetest temper. You don’t cease to love them because sometimes they get drunk and do and say silly things for which you feel responsible, or because they pester and try to organise you and take too much interest in your creative work, or strike angry sparks from you by being too intellectually active, or get in your way.
You don’t even cease to love them when they irritate you past endurance; or even when you have an obsessive passion for someone else.
The point is that you have no control over that. The only control you have is over your actions.
I picked up the paste buckles and the identity bracelet and carried them to the mantelpiece too. Then I picked up the watch again and wound it.
I held it to my ear, and it began to tick.
Copyright
First published in 1965 by Hodder & Stoughton
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After the Act Page 24
