“I would not have said that you would ever be bored. I would have suggested, had I cared to make any suggestion to myself, that John Blaydon could never suffer from mere boredom after the reality of his earlier experiences.” He spoke heavily with accentuated gutturals, and John felt that he was seeing Greenbloom’s French self, the ‘foreigner’ who lived with Gallic disillusionment in the night streets of Paris. His left foot crossed over his right knee and flexed closely at the end of his good leg, swung impatiently to and fro over the squares of the flagstones; it reminded John of the twisting tail of some predatory animal: a wolf or a lynx. The patent vexation of his questioner coming so soon after his rebuffs by the two girls in the drawing-room roused him in his turn, so that when he spoke it was with a vehemence which surprised him.
“Why shouldn’t I be bored? You were bored, weren’t you? Or you wouldn’t have come out here? You’re getting to be as bad as everyone else. You don’t seem to know why you do things any more than old Mick does.”
Pursuing his argument with all the remorselessness of a person who has heard but rejected an interruption, Greenbloom spoke reflectively.
“One does not tear down flowers when one is bored. One drinks or has intercourse—Possibly one travels.”
“I didn’t tear it down, I just picked it; the branch was tough.”
“Lying is not morally wrong—but on occasions it can be tiring. You are lying; the flower is immaterial, you know that because you are intelligent. I am intelligent too and we both know that what should be discussed is the fact of your despair.”
“My despair?”
“Yes—you have come to despair have you not? Boredom eludes you; one whom suffering has convinced of his own existence cannot be bored to death if you understand me; but he may well come to what we call despair, and despair being an activity of the imagination is reprehensible.”
Their silence was emphasised by the gurgle of the flask as Greenbloom refilled the cap.
“Sartre of course would not agree with me.” He drank briefly. “You must meet him. For him the imagination, not the style, is the man; hence he elevates despair as a Priest elevates the Host, but with this difference, that he sacrifices a negation to a negation and prefers to be unobserved while he does so. For Jean-Paul as I understand him, boredom is the equivalent of what the mystics call ecstasy: the apprehension of a vacant Truth by a vacant imagination. Do you follow me?”
“Not really.”
“No, I thought not; but it is unimportant. Everything is unimportant—even your despair.” He held out the full cap of brandy, “Drink this before we are interrupted by further observers.”
“Thank you.”
John took the silver cap and drained it. He sat down a few feet away from Greenbloom who waved at the pool, the encircling balustrades, the dark olive coloured enclosure of shrubs and the silvery bulk of the Admiral’s boathouse at the far end.
“A madman constructed this,” he said. “What did he imagine his intention was?”
“The Admiral,” said John tangentially, “Lady Geraldine calls him her Red Admiral, has been working on this place ever since he retired. She didn’t really tell you about it at all. You ought to see it by daylight, dozens of statues and urns, bits of carved stone, pottery from the Holy Land, chimney stacks and cannons mounted in concrete with flowers and bushes growing out of them, ships’ bells, flagstaffs, coloured figureheads from Nelson’s navy, even a live torpedo behind the boathouse—at least he says it’s alive: he uses it as a threat and—”
“And I suppose,” interrupted Greenbloom, “he keeps his Barge in the boathouse?”
“Yes. No one but John Hughes is allowed near it.”
“Who is John Hughes?”
“Well actually he’s the gardener, but he was in the Navy with the Admiral at some time or another and the Admiral always refers to him as his Cox’n. As far as I understand it, an Admiral always has a Coxswain in the Navy who’s in charge of his Barge and I believe that when the Admiral ‘puts out’ as he calls it, John Hughes is always made to act the part. He has to run up the flags and use the punt pole and so on—” John laughed unconvincingly.
“A moment if you please!” Greenbloom cut him short irritably. “I would give very much to see the spectacle of the Admiral and his Cox’n putting out in the Barge. It would be of considerable interest to my friends in Paris. Do you think it might be arranged if we were to speak to Lady Geraldine?”
This time John’s laughter was spontaneous. “Good Lord no!” he said. “She’d be frightfully upset by the mere suggestion. The Admiral never allows anybody to see him when he brings out the Barge, he’s even been known to threaten people with revolvers if he suspected that they were trying to watch him. As a matter of fact I believe he very seldom goes out in it nowadays. He spends most of his time adding disused equipment to the lakeside; stuff he buys from Admiralty sales and so on.”
Greenbloom looked round gloomily, peering intently through long narrowed eyes at the yellowing clutter of objects standing on the banks beneath the leafy horizon of the Shrubbery.
“Interesting!” he said at length. “A private madness almost as publicly expressed as Trafalgar Square.”
With a sudden change of voice and manner he looked round at John sharply.
“Why did your sister Mary refer three times to your impending suicide during dinner at Plas David?”
“Did she? I—didn’t notice.”
“Have another drink and cease lying to me!” He waved angrily at the flask. “Fill it yourself.”
“When I’m with you,” said John, reaching for the flask, “I always seem to drink. Do you remember Ireland?”
“I remember the flight to Chantilly very well,” said Greenbloom distinctly. “It was foolish of you to leave us like that without seeing anything of the pays or the people.”
John coughed and replaced the flask.
“What happened to Rachel?” he asked. “I’ve often wondered. Where is she now?”
“She is in Heidelburg. Her name is now Grossblutte—Frau Rachel Grossblutte—it serves her right,” said Greenbloom simply. “She married a professor of philosophy at the University there—”
The duration of his pause was indeterminate and feeling that his frown was a consequence of his own subterfuge in having changed the subject, John was loath to interrupt him afresh.
“Shortly,” went on Greenbloom, “both she and her husband will be refugees.”
“Refugees?”
“Grossblutte is an unintelligent thinker, but I do not believe that even he is sufficiently muddle-headed to visualise any future for himself in the new National-Socialist Germany.”
“Oh you mean this Hitler man?”
“I mean the little Austrian who until he makes the mistake of dining on the Pope and wining on the Jews is likely to make Europe very noisy and tiring for some time to come—” He broke off and then in the same tone of voice but with another full glance at John, said:
“What method had you in mind?”
“Drowning,” said John, “the Point. Beautiful! very strong and clean. You would go under fighting, with clouds and waves and sun surrounding your head—or stars. I might do it at night, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No audience then,” said Greenbloom heavily. “No observer. Yes, that is good. You sound as though you may be serious.” With one of his new judicious pauses he looked over at the low moon. “We will go together. Delightful!”
“You mean—you want to watch me?”
Greenbloom’s laugh disturbed something sleeping in the hedge; there was a clatter of branches and wings and a drowsing bird rose into the moonlight and flew silently away between two of the flag-poles.
“Watch you? Certainly not, I will help you. It will be a case of ‘encourager les autres’. At the last moment as you take up your position on the—wet rocks, you may find that you shrink from the ultimate committal. Believe me, small things at such times can wield a disproportionate influ
ence on one’s powers of action; a cold wind, for instance, a moment of emotion, even the renaissance of some false sentiment. I will be there to see that this does not happen to you. Quite simply, at the moment critique, when you have made your final dispositions of course and not before, I will push you. Greenbloom will precipitate the void into the Void, and then return home silently the way he has come, taking one more secret with him.”
He seemed entirely serious and for a moment John was quite nonplussed. He reached out for the flask again but Greenbloom removed it to his other side with solemn emphasis.
“No,” he said, “not for you at a moment like this. You must think clearly if you are to appreciate the beauty of what I have offered to do for you.”
“But I don’t think—” John sought for the words, “somehow that doesn’t seem—”
“Of course not.” Greenbloom’s smile was slow and coldly studied; it spread over his waxen face like a face-pack in the hands of a masseur. “One must become accustomed to these things. Tomorrow, when I have submitted to your Mother’s blackmail about her Church, we will discuss our final arrangements together: but before that there are a few questions I should like to ask you. Your death has become important to me—I feel involved in it—a sense almost of responsibility.”
“But it’s got nothing to do with you, I mean you only asked me about it and eventually I told you. At first I didn’t want to tell you, I didn’t want to tell anyone seriously but you were so insistent that you gave me no choice.”
“Enough! You are still prevaricating. Let us drink to it, I think there is enough Cognac left and after their betrayal of me to this galère of schoolgirls and materialists I have no intention of saving any for the others.” He filled the cap again. “I will drink first and you second. If I may quote, we will ‘seal this bargain to engrossing death’.”
“No,” said John. “I won’t drink! You don’t understand. You see I was waiting for the exam results first.”
“Nonsense, that is another prevarication. It is precisely because you envisaged such things that you took the very wise step of confiding in me. Believe me I shall not fail you, John. Drink!” He stood up with the full cap in his hand but John remained seated.
“What questions did you want to ask me?”
“Oh, they were quite unimportant. They will do tomorrow after we have discussed the more urgent arrangements for your suicide. Sunday by the way is an appropriate night, very appropriate, and you may count on me. Now drink! I will give you the toast.”
John remained obstinately seated. The rapidity with which Greenbloom had dissipated the secrecy of his intention and assumed the initiative was even more discomforting than his matter-of-fact acquiescence and his impatience to conclude something which was really no concern of his at all.
“I won’t drink,” he said. “At least not until you’ve asked me the questions.”
“Very well!” Greenbloom sighed. “I can see that I am going to have difficulties with you tomorrow night. It is not going to be so satisfactory as I had imagined. One might almost say that the quality of your despair is unworthy of us both. If you must know, I was interested only in minor details of the earlier tragedy.”
“You mean the Murder?”
“Yes, yes, the murder. I think it is only fitting that someone should be in possession of all the facts, and as the single surviving repository of your secret I feel that in order for the circle, the vacant circle, to be completed—as complete as these stone circles of the Red Admiral’s as you call him—that person should be myself. After all I have known you for some years now and I feel that I have not been without influence upon your thinking.”
“Oh, all right. What do you want to know?”
“A few things. What for instance has happened to the girl’s mother?”
“She’s in Canada.”
“Married?”
“Yes.”
“To whom?”
“To Mr Harkess.” John breathed out impatiently. “If you really want to know, they married about twelve months later. She always sends me a Christmas card.”
Greenbloom nodded. “Interesting,” he said, “in a sense almost Hamletesque—Shakespearean. Now that would have been a play! I mean for the Mother to have married the Prince’s murderer.”
“But he wasn’t her murderer. Mr Harkess had nothing—”
“In the narrower sense, no; in the broader sense, yes. Remotely we are all involved; he, this Mr Harkess, was very closely involved.” A yawn escaped him. “Forgive me! it is not that I am uninterested in the circumstances, the precedents of your approaching death; I can understand that to you it must seem of unique importance but tonight I am a little tired. Tomorrow night it will be different. I have no doubt that then I shall be feeling more alert. Now what was I saying? Ah yes! This man Harkess—that was his name was it not?”
“Yes.”
“It was inevitable that she should have married him; a woman would never be able to forgive a man for a thing like that.”
“But I keep on telling you. He had nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing?”
“No, nothing, except that he was in love with—with Victoria’s mother.”
Greenbloom spoke very slowly. In the light of the moon, which as it rose above the surface mists of the Island grew whiter and whiter, his eyelids drew down on their pale sclera leaving only the two irises, wet and black, to gaze out upon John through their nearly occluded margins.
“And the night that your Victoria was strangled,” he was precise, “where were they?”
“At the Races—no, in bed—they were in bed.” John swallowed. “You read it didn’t you? It was all in the papers.”
“All?”
Greenbloom smiled and John stood up. “No, not all. Not that bit. I never told anyone that bit. I thought it was important then but now I know it isn’t. They wanted me to keep it secret, it was important to them.”
“Very” said Greenbloom. “Lyricism! The lyricism of the dispossessed!”
“I don’t know what you mean, I don’t want to know what you mean,” said John, “I’m tired of meanings.”
Still Greenbloom stood there smiling arrogantly with cold sagacity; his forehead white and unmarked in the untarnished light.
“There are no meanings. No meanings that we can apprehend. Ludwig Wittgenstein was right when he said that.”
“Oh Wittgenstein! If you think that you understand it all why do you ask me? Why do you keep following me? Why go on about it? I never think about it; it was—something, that’s all.” John’s voice fell away as he tried to explain. “It was—sensible; in a way I’m glad it happened. I know now why I am. Nothing else irremediable, nothing that makes sense has ever happened to me since and never can. That’s what’s the matter with me. I can see through everything all the time. I think I’m waiting for something like it—something as important I mean—to happen again. It should never have happened once to anyone; it should go on happening always: losing things to find them, love being killed while it was alive so that you could have it. I wouldn’t love her now if she were here, not like I do love her now that she’s gone. As it is, I do love her because she’s dead and that’s where I live—it’s where I lived and now I can’t stop it—”
“Do not try to stop it. You have left it too late.”
In the aftermath of his sudden warmth John shivered.
“How do you mean, ‘too late’?” he asked.
“Four years—five? It is too late! You should have killed yourself within three months; as it is you have delayed too long; you have left yourself with a most powerful raison d’être and I begin to think that it looks as though my services may not be required tomorrow night.”
“You mean you think I’ll want to go on living because I am so unhappy?”
“Of course.”
“You don’t think I will commit suicide?”
“Never! You have no disinterest. Very early in life you have suffered by a
ttachment, by a supreme attachment, that detachment which it is the object of all developed men to achieve.” He looked up and smiled briefly. “You must meet my friend Sartre. You might conceivably interest him and he would most certainly interest you. More than that, he would help you I am sure.”
“But he lives in Paris doesn’t he?”
“All writers if they are good live imaginatively in Paris. Sartre lives there physically as well. One day you may live there yourself. It occurs to me that perhaps in five or ten years when you start to write the story of your Victoria and how she was strangled you will live there.”
“Do you think I’m going to be a writer then?”
“I do.”
“Oh. Do you really?”
“Mais certainement!”
“Why?”
“If one thinks enough, sooner or later one must write. Already you have been made by your life to think more than enough, more profoundly perhaps than the majority of your contemporaries; and as I told you before, you are fortunate.”
Silently Greenbloom handed him the cap of his brandy flask and John drank from it.
“It is a pity that your great little mother can never be told about this,” said Greenbloom. “This afternoon I gave her an undertaking—.”
They both turned as someone emerged from behind the boathouse. They saw her standing there hesitant, looking over towards them, marked with the white lacunae of the moonlight as it fell through the freckling leaves and branches of the taller trees behind her.
“My God!” Greenbloom quickly screwed on the cap and pocketed his flask. “Another of them, and at a moment like this! The Irish girl, presumably the one who fainted on the train. I am afraid I shall have to go.”
“But wait a minute! Please don’t go for a minute. Please just tell me one thing—Greenbloom.”
“Well?”
His smile this time was natural. John saw the white flash of his teeth, the rise of the puffy lids beneath the long eyes.
“You don’t think I’m mad, do you? You obviously don’t, do you? You don’t think I’m a fool or backward or anything like that?”
“Your sisters are—banal. Your Mother, as I said before, has greatness, your brother Michael—constant possibilities; your Father I do not know very well because he is the sort of man who does not want to be known very well, but he seems to me to be a good man. Certainly he has sat out your Mother for many years and he is not a fool. As for yourself I can assure you that I shall continue to interest myself in your life for many years to come. Very possibly I shall be one of the first, if not the first, to publish you when you come to fruition.”
In the Time of Greenbloom Page 42
