In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  “There was no relationship—nothing at all.”

  “I fear that I know something about young men—more obviously than you give me credit for.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “In the most exact sense of the word, I have a rudimentary knowledge of which I am rather tired. So let us make an end of these lies.”

  “They’re not lies, sir.”

  “But Blaydon! You have already admitted that you lied to Peter—to Probitt; that you lied to the stranger you met on the beach; and that you lied to these women.”

  John said nothing.

  “If you are frightened Bowden, and it is usually fear that makes young men lie, I can assure you that at my hands you have no cause for fear.” He was regaining his own self-confidence. “That is of course unless you continue to lie.”

  John muttered.

  “It is ugly to mutter, Blaydon! I do not like young men to mutter. Hatred is an unpleasant and destructive emotion and I am quite aware that at this moment you are filled with hatred for me, are you not?”

  They found one another’s eyes with horrible ease.

  “I am, sir.”

  Mr Victor smiled. “We must not digress, pleasant as it may be to do so. I must repeat that if you continue to lie I shall have to take steps to punish you. I cannot afford to have pupils who set their wills against my own; both my livelihood and my reputation depend upon my being the master in my own house.”

  He said, “Yes sir.” The moment of his advantage seemed to have side-slipped but he awaited the repetition of it with confidence.

  “Very well then! Perhaps you will now admit to me the truth I might have suspected some weeks ago when your visits to the beach, your new-found pleasure in bathing in those unclean waters, first became apparent.”

  “I like the sea sir—that’s all.” From somewhere he smiled; remembering Anglesey in that last idle Summer following the trip with Greenbloom, the white waves heaving against the washed rocks.

  “It is not all. You are prevaricating and your guile seems to cause you some amusement. For a moment I thought that my use of the word ‘premeditation’ had upset you in some way; I was prepared to be lenient to you. I see now that my first impression was correct. You take a pleasure in your cunning, you enjoy it. I have no more time to spare, Bowden or Blaydon, whichever you prefer to be called, admit your guilt, confess to your lies, assure me of your premeditation and—”

  “Don’t use that word! Don’t use it.” He moved forward and looked through the interval of the air which separated them.

  He could feel the blood draining from his face leaving it as paper-white as the newspapers he had read at the time. The man had planned it all in the morning, had returned to have tea with them, even while drinking from her cup in the cave he had been working out in his mind ways of getting her to himself, of killing her. He had talked and smiled, been friendly with his lips and eyes while behind them he had been thinking of what he might do and how he might do it.

  Mr Victor stood his ground. John could still discern his outline and he knew that this time the moment would not be lost to him.

  “Go back Blaydon. Sit down. Take your chair.”

  “You are the liar and you don’t even know that you are lying. I told you the truth but you can’t hear it. Everything I said was true; if you suggest that I thought of the girls in the way you often think of Probitt, that doesn’t matter; it doesn’t mean anything. I never did more than think of them and I did not encourage the thoughts, and I knew what I was thinking. But you don’t; you have no idea what you are thinking. You don’t know what you are thinking about me and you don’t know what you are thinking about Probitt; but we do, all of us, from Humphrey to Jones. We are not like Probitt; we are different and if you weren’t blind you would be able to see it.”

  “You are ill, Blaydon, you are ill.” He stretched out a hand as though to draw a curtain across the french window and then, just as John had forgotten the door, he forgot the window.

  “It was the Murderer. I saw him: nothing else matters: not what I was thinking nor what you were thinking nor Probitt nor the priest. It is the Truth that matters and you can’t hide it. Although I had done nothing except know him like you have known me and Probitt, he frightened me and that is why I ran to my confession. I wanted to find out the Truth before I did anything—”

  “The door, Bowden, the door is ajar—a moment.”

  John addressed himself to the looking-glass over the mantelpiece. He saw Mr Victor hurry behind him, diminished, smaller than the brown tobacco-jar behind which he passed in his run to the far corner of the study.

  “But I shall never go again. Never. The Church was empty and the priest was empty; only Christ, dead on the Cross, not even bleeding; and King Edward the Seventh, the place where he sat; and then back here to you breathing lies at me, accusing me and frightening me because you are guilty about something yourself. I know what it is and it doesn’t really matter—I suppose it’s Probitt, something to do with him anyway. But why should I be blamed for what you are thinking and what you have done? I’ve got enough to be wrong about and so have you. We should help one another, we should—”

  “Bowden!” Mr Victor shouted at him; his hands caught him round the waist and he swivelled him away from the mirror. John wrenched himself free and stepped backwards into the light streaming in through the french windows.

  “Don’t touch me! I don’t like to be touched by men and I’m not ill. It’s just that nobody knows what they are thinking. Father Delaura is lying; he doesn’t mean to, but he would never have rung you up if he had been sure of himself; the Murderer is lying, and you are lying; that’s why you talk so much. If someone found the Truth they wouldn’t talk at all; unless they were saints they would be silent; but nobody since the saints has found it and that’s why everybody is talking. I shall go to the Police; they’ll understand. They are specialists in lying; I’ll tell them and they’ll believe me because they know which lies to believe.”

  He was silent and satisfied; he could look at Mr Victor quite calmly; see him become a face and body again as he stood against the arm of his chair, his pipe shaking slightly in his hand, a fine gleam of sweat on his grey forehead.

  “I want you to have a cup of tea with me Bowden—kindly press the bell.”

  “Yes sir.”

  John moved over to the white china switch with flowers painted on it and pressed the central stud.

  “Humphrey is out,” said Mr Victor suddenly sitting down on the hide-covered chair. “Mrs Foley no doubt—”

  John sat down on the edge of the chair.

  “I see I have done you an injustice, Bowden. There is very much more in all this—I want if I can—”

  The door opened and Mrs Foley came in. She was wearing her usual white kitchen coat like a laundress; she gave Mr Victor her sheet-like smile.

  “A pot of tea if you please, Mrs Foley.”

  “Toast sir?”

  “No thank you. Would you like toast Blayd—Bowden?”

  “No thank you sir.”

  “Just the tea then, Mrs Foley.”

  The door closed behind her. Mr Victor got out his handkerchief and passed it swiftly across his forehead.

  “It is a little close in here. I wonder if you would mind opening the french windows. The wind appears to have dropped.”

  “Thank you Bowden. As I was saying, I want if possible to persuade you to reconsider your decision about going to the Police. Don’t think that I am in any way trying to interfere with your conscience, Bowden, or with the course of justice; that is very far from my intention; but I rather hope that when we have examined the facts calmly, you might yourself see that it’s quite possible that no good may come of such an action.”

  “That would be their affair, sir.”

  “Quite! But not entirely; you would be involved and so too, though this is not really important, would Rooker’s Close.” He smiled slowly, “You see how frank I am being. You have forced
me to it; we are none of us, unfortunately, saints and therefore for the time being we have need of the words you so greatly distrust.”

  “I exaggerated a little, sir; but at the time I saw it all so clearly—”

  “Yes, yes! But let us keep to the matter in hand. I am as I say being frank with you, John. I don’t want if it can be avoided—honestly avoided—to have the Blaydon case reopened under these circumstances and at this time.”

  “No sir.”

  “And I know that you have not lied to me; that is quite certain. I also know that you are mistaken—listen to me very carefully, if you please.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You are not unwell. But quite obviously you are a highly imaginative boy and something happened this afternoon which unleashed that imagination: a variety of circumstances, a strange moment in time, a complex of events connected with your confession which clouded your judgment. Would you mind telling me exactly what it was which made you so certain that the stranger you met on the beach was in fact the murderer whom you had only previously seen two years ago for the space of half an hour in the darkness of a cave?”

  “It was his whistle. He whistled the same tune, the same tune he whistled in the—the same three notes that were whistled—”

  “And what was your reaction? What did you do immediately afterwards, more important, what did you feel?”

  “The wind in the tent. It was green in there, I heard the wind and then it went. I was back in the cave and he was there splashing towards us striking matches. I felt—”

  “Yes, yes. Go on.”

  “I felt as though nothing had ever happened since. I felt like the darkness; quite empty, waiting for something to happen in it. I was what I had been, changed back again. I couldn’t move at all for a moment; it was very strange, very horrible, like a person dying twice.”

  “I think that will do.” He got up and opened the door in response to the knock which John had not heard.

  He returned with the tea-cosied tray and put it on the desk as Mrs Foley closed the door. He poured out the tea meticulously, running it into the milk at the bottom of the cups and then handed one to John.

  “Drink this!” he said, “and relax. Afterwards, when we have cleared up matters a little further, we must discuss your future. After that I think it would be a good thing for you to take a brisk walk before supper.”

  “I think I would rather lie down or read a book sir.”

  He sipped his tea and wondered what did it all matter. It had seemed certain and important; but if it was not certain it was not important. Nothing was important because nothing was true. He thought of Father Delaura ringing up like that; so quickly.

  Mr Victor replaced his cup on his saucer. “Let us start by examining in order the points of evidence you will have to offer to the Police in order to convince them of the necessity for action; let us put ourselves in the place of the Police. After that, let us consider the possible effects of their action, if any, on the immediate future—on your future, John.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I am beginning to think that Rooker’s Close may not after all be quite the most suitable place for you …”

  In the garden he saw the stand of the yew hedges surrounding the rose-bed and guessed at the scent of them. To talk in circles, to move in circles, as Mr Victor had said, was very soothing.

  He closed his eyes.

  6

  Island Summer

  Give them ear! and let the dead,

  Interred no deeper than Antigone’s lost tears

  For Polyneices, rise again and choose

  To travel with you further than the ears hear

  Or the heart can lose.

  Island Summer

  He put Father’s bicycle away in the garage, unstrapped his satchel from the little grid at the back, and swinging it carelessly walked slowly down the drive to the cottage.

  The others of course would all have passed the exam, they always did; and even if one or two of them had failed it would not greatly matter. He was eighteen, but their average age could not be much more than fifteen, and another year at the County School would not affect them in the least; their parents would scrape the fees together somehow and the news would spread through Benllwch, Bodorgan, or Pengross that John Hughes ‘Chemist’, Nellie ‘Chips’ or Owen ‘Pie Bron’ had ‘failed School Certificate, look you!’ There would be shakings of heads for a Saturday or two and then it would all be forgotten.

  But if he had failed this time after all the money spent on him at the Abbey, Beowulf’s, Rooker’s Close and a year’s ignominiously hard work under the seedy conditions of the County School at Llanabbas, it would be the end of him; either the Point or Father’s sixteen bore.

  He couldn’t face even another term at the County School, let alone the prospect of a second year—even supposing he were given the chance of it. As it was, his age and his background had been as much an embarrassment to the School staff as they had been to the family and to himself; but neither the School nor the family could possibly know what it had been like for him to have to catch the School train every morning at ten-past seven, to sit wearing the school cap in the carriage listening to the stream of colloquial Welsh while trying to appear inconspicuous, though one was English, older than anyone else and, once, a Public Schoolboy.

  If one used the gun there would be the difficulty of pulling the triggers: people usually managed it by rigging up strings or wires, but when that was done it couldn’t possibly be made to look like an accident; and he was damned if people were going to be allowed to despise his death.

  It would have to be the Point then; just after the turn of the tide when the Race was at its fullest. For the hundredth time he visualised it: the casual wave to people by the springboard, the perfect knife-like dive, and the half-mile swim out to the Lighthouse. He would swim very beautifully so that they would remember it: the clear cold passage alongside the rocks out to the Pwll Glas, the Blue Pool, where he had so often fished for bream with Father in the earliest Anglesey days; and then on farther into the forbidden waters beyond the Lighthouse. Once he had reached these it would be unnecessary to do anything more; the current would take over. How many times he had sat above it on the rocks throwing the heads of sea pinks into the smooth water, watching them hesitate turning slowly round and round before they began to slide out gently at first, and then faster and faster, as the millions of gallons of the Bay’s sea-water emptied itself into the frenzy of the Race.

  In the past ten years two people had drowned in the Race, and at least three or four been rescued from it when in extremis. He of course was terrified of it: the whirlpools with their turning mouths, ample enough to suck down an elephant, the great smooth eiderdown hills, the sheets of green glass surrounded by hissing wave-tops, and the continuous roar which on still days could be heard even from the top of the ‘Mountain’.

  It would be clean though and probably fairly quick, particularly if he put up no real resistance but drank in the thick water eagerly. He would just have to be brave during the first part as the current took hold of him; after that, he could give a few shouts and signals for the look of the thing and then abandon himself to the strength of it, somersaulting his body into its green and white folds like a child on the counterpane of its mother’s bed.

  Terrible that he wasn’t really interested any longer in what people might say or anxious that they should care: that meant that the idea was becoming real and truly personal; a private matter between himself—and himself.

  Half-way down the drive he stopped. How could a decision rest between himself and himself? He must really be mad, a split personality, if he were beginning to think of himself as two people. Suicide was a single act between one person and—who else? God, of course; that’s what they would say; but either there was no God or else there were a hundred gods all cancelling one another out; Mother’s god, Rudmose’s god, Victor’s god, Greenbloom’s god, Mrs Blount’s god, Father’s god, his b
rother David’s god; in fact, a million gods, as many gods as there were people; a lunacy of gods, a revolting magnified concatenation of superhumanity clustered on the summit of some Olympus a little higher than the World. And who made Olympus? he asked himself. Men made it and peopled it with gods in their own image. Well, his god had better watch out or he would soon find himself without a worshipper just as old Rudmose’s had done.

  He stooped and picked a red wallflower from beside the drive: very beautiful, so beautiful that the scent of it hurt him as he pushed it through the hole in his lapel. It was good camouflage, would make him look as though he thought he might have been quietly successful in the Exam, would discomfort Mary who did not like him to look pleased with himself, clean and spruce; who preferred him when he was hangdog, in a black and dangerous mood under whose influence he might do or say some unpremeditated thing which would arouse Mother to a white fury and precipitate one of the rows that were so essential to them all. Yes the wallflower was a good idea; like incense it could cover the aura of his thoughts so that no one would discern them; and it was appropriate too for the party at Porth Newydd in the evening; would make them think that all was well and that he was looking forward to his week-end.

  He pushed open the front door and hung his satchel in the cloakroom. Good! Greenbloom had arrived and presumably his poet friend as well. There were two white suitcases, marked with the initials H. G., standing beneath the coats together with a very battered one fastened with a leather strap and covered with French labels. He looked at the name:

  MR JANE BOSCAWEN-JONES

  C/O THE GOAT HOTEL

  LLANGOLLEN

  Extraordinary name for a man; but then of course poets were different. How, he wondered, had Boscawen-Jones managed to persuade his parents to christen him Jane so that when he grew up he could become a poet. What would he look like? Shelley? Rupert Brooke? Keats? Would he be Welsh or English-Welsh? Mick knew very little about him, only that he was Greenbloom’s newest discovery and that shortly the private press which Greenbloom had recently started would be publishing a book of his poetry.