The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

  “Goddam it, I want a night’s sleep. And now we’ll have this bloody storm all night long.”

  Muriel listened to the fierce pant of air that would soon develop to a hysterical wind and said calmly: “Take a couple of aspirins and a large whisky and you might sleep through it all.”

  “I dream like hell in a thunderstorm.” Nicholas suddenly picked up The Times. “By God, it’s full moon.” Muriel looked at him with some alarm. She knew that he dreaded sleep tonight more than he would hate sitting down here awake and listening to the tumult around the house. She would not have hesitated for a second in doing what her woman’s sense told her to do, seduce him to her bed, but she knew that it was quite useless, so deranged was his system, and all she could think of was to pour him a large drink and have one herself. She persuaded him to have a couple of tablets and then went upstairs. She could feel that every flash of lightning jammed into his mind.

  She did not undress for half an hour until she heard him come into his dressing room, and then she knew that he would at least get some sleep. She did not get to sleep herself for a long time.

  Nicholas put his head on the pillow and plunged into the nocturnal world of dream.

  In the jungle, faces that sat like white owls on the bough had moons for eyes. A flash of lightning ricocheted on the faces, and the page of his child’s nursery book flipped over and each face had become a square that was the Ben Nicholson room inside the black lines and also the white blotting pad in the bank. After the flash, he waited for the bang of thunder, but it alighted noiseless on his head like a white owl, and the huge gong in Elder’s hall was lying on the silent carpet. Then the gong jumped up and was hanging on the wall of darkness again and multiplied itself out in Saturnine moons that balanced on their rims along the bough, and one had to be careful not to let a thought knock against them lest they topple off their edges, for the moons had visages closed yet open like windows. He could not stop his thought looking into them, and suddenly they widened as if to shout in agony and they had become swans, and he saw that it was a gust of wind which had blown open their wings and each swan had a hoof cloven instead of a beak and suddenly the hoof slammed together and a long yellow tooth stuck into the underlip and Sarah Fuidge was looking out the window and stayed for a long time until a bottle of red ink on the sill jumped at his fist hitting the desk and Sarah’s face was blotched in blood and sank into the blotter until it was far away in the sun outside Elder’s room that turned crimson as it balanced on the horizon. Then Elder pulled the curtains and the wings closed on the swans and made them round, smooth Barbara Hepworth marbles. He put out his hands through the blue veil on Sidonie but he could not lift the marbles although they looked very light and had the soft pink flesh of clouds and then he collapsed from the effort and lay under a golden shawl of hair and he could feel the beating of her heart and when she breathed out he pulled her breath into him and when she breathed in the breath was pulled out of him and his sides were shutting and opening like a bellows and each time he ached until he could not stand the pain and had to put his hands up behind his neck and rend himself asunder down the middle but she said it did not matter as the silk jacket had to come off anyway. A notch slipped in space and his sundered halves had joined him whole again and he was in the bank and one of the swans flew in the window although its wings were shut and fell on his desk and he got a paper-knife and opened its wings where they locked in the clasp and he read on the vellum instep a message saying he had a will to death in his hands and then he took up the envelope and the hoof fell out and Roberts ran over the edge of the desk and picked it up just as the car screeched aside and he carefully thanked Roberts and put the hoof in his pocket and looked back to see the moonshine on Sarah’s nightdress where old Fuidge had hung it behind the lodge and there along the boughs again were the faces like owls that had moons for eyes.

  He awoke sweating and with his mouth parched, but he could not get up for a glass of water because he had to lie motionless and keep the dream motionless in the thunder that was shaking the world in case it damaged the pictures in the lunar mirror of his mind and made the glass fly into shrapnel around his head. But he could not get the dream quite the same again and at last the hoof somehow kicked out through a cloud of white swans and clanged the gong in the hall of Elder’s house and the noise awoke him into a shout and somehow switched on the lights that searched him out through the dark....

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I heard you shouting.”

  Muriel was ghostly behind her torch and wore a dressing gown with a hood that somehow made her fully dressed.

  “Shouting?”

  “Yes. Perhaps you had a nightmare!”

  “I believe I had. It’s nothing.”

  She paused for a moment, and he resented her mind trying to probe his mind along the shaft of light.

  “Oh, very well. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Now he knew that he would not get to sleep again. If she said in the morning that he ought to have a holiday or see a doctor, by God, he would kick her on the backside.

  He might be a damned fool, but he knew that long before the letters had ever come, it was the inhibition she had put on his sexual life that had caused this nightmare. To hell with her, coming in like a bloody nurse!

  THIRTY-TWO

  Some fitful bouts of sleep in the dawn hours only dislocated Nicholas’ rest, and he got up in the morning with a cold, empty headache. He felt somehow that the gale blowing through him during the night had gutted him of all the fears and pictures and even feelings, and he was only a husk. He let up the blind and contemplated the dreary landscape under a rain that slanted from the southwest. The room was cold, and he hoped to God there would be a good fire in the breakfast room. He knew that for days now there was going to be an intolerable nagging rain. Often, at night, when it rained, he could feel the rain drumming down on his head as one heard it on the roof of a conservatory. Last night behind this curtain of rain was the full moon, and even old Fuidge knew what a storm on the night of full moon did to the worried mind. Now he was gutted by the wind and swabbed out by the rain, and the bathroom was cold and aching and white as a hospital washroom and he wished to God that he did not have to shave before going down. Then hunger began to attack him and he left his razor uncleaned and hurried down to the breakfast room and thanked God that Muriel was not there. He could not look at the porridge but ate three fried eggs and two juicy slices of Virginia ham and swallowed a pint of hot coffee and sent Margaret out of the room on some errand so that he could enjoy a couple of enormous belches. Then Muriel came in looking as happy as a Tahitian girl at the North Pole and looked out the window and shuddered and helped herself to porridge, and he looked at the yellow cream on the porridge and without a word of apology got up and went into the smoking room and found that the fire was not lighted. He rang the bell and a maid came in and he asked why there wasn’t a fire there, and she said the logs had got wet because the roof had blown off the timber shed, and she knew that he never liked a coal fire in this room, and she was trying to dry some logs in the kitchen. He walked about the house while she tried to make a fire and felt like a guest having a look over a new hotel. This house was everything but a home, and he supposed the only reason he had bought it was that some homing instinct had made him come to the neighborhood of that small farm over past Yeoman Spire where his grandfather had worked first as a hired man and then as the owner; if a tenant farmer could be called an owner. Barrington had cost eighteen thousand pounds, and he still did not know more than two of his tenants by sight and still took a doubtful turning if he went into the north wing. When he was away, he could hardly place the furniture from memory, but now he could remember the place and texture and personality of every chair and cup and utensil in the small cottage in Northumberland. There was something one put into a house that made it come alive, and no one had put it in here, and this morning the house was damp and hollow, and a gooseflesh was coming on
his skin as he stood by a window and looked at the tunnels of water upon the vinehouses.

  Suddenly it began to get him down, and he felt a kind of nausea of loneliness in the empty world of his life, and he knew that he did not care a fundamental damn about Muriel or Sidonie at this moment. He was like a mouse in the bottom of an empty barrel and he did not know how he could get out of it. He wondered if old Jock was watching him with a cynical eye in the empty barrel of Bude’s Bank. He thought of all the men he knew in Lombard Street and in the City and how busily they went about their lives, dictating hastily in cars and taxis, or signing some document that changed pounds into dollars or francs, and he wondered if they fancied they were doing some urgent work in the world, when they were no more, really, than moneychangers in a bureau who, handling millions, could not buy anything for themselves.

  He wandered about the unused rooms for an hour, getting cold and damp, and returned to the breakfast room to find Muriel reading the morning papers. Last night, suddenly, he had come almost to hate her. He looked out at the rain and said in an irritable way: “I think I’ll go out in the car. Do you want Blake?”

  “No. Where are you going?”

  “Oh, I just thought 1’d go over to the Roebuck and have lunch.” He paused. “I want to get away from myself.”

  “Why don’t you go for a walk?”

  “Well, goddam it, I can get away faster in a car, can’t I?”

  She looked up at his sharp, ridiculous remark, and he wondered if she had guessed that the annoyance in his voice was a resentment against her. He was getting damn tired of living this separate existence in the same house.

  “Well, you would get away still faster and farther if you took a holiday.” She got up and looked testy. “Don’t snap at me as if it is my fault, if you can’t make up your mind to leave that wretched bank for a month.”

  She paused, “I’m going on a holiday, a good long way.”

  Then she went abruptly out of the room, leaving him in a bad temper. Blast her, her anger only made her sexual power all the more potent.

  He was in very bad humor when he got into the car and said to Blake: “I’m going over to lunch at the Roebuck Inn. Take any road you like. It’s such a lovely day, we might as well enjoy the country.” Blake smiled carefully, as if unsure whether to laugh or not. Suddenly Nicholas stopped as he was stepping into the car and looked at Blake. “Blake, if you had this car, and somebody to drive you, what the hell would you do with yourself on Saturday?”

  Blake was surprised by the question, and confused. “Blessed if I know, sir.”

  “Then it’s bloody hard for me to know. Never mind the run, Blake. Soon I’ll have you putting on my pants for me.” Nicholas saw that he was discomfited. “It’s all right, Blake, I’m not annoyed with you. I’m just sick of this weather.”

  “So am I, sir. It’s knocked all my apples down. Had a lovely crop.”

  “Never mind. You can get some here.”

  “Thank you, sir, but”—Blake smiled—“your apples are all down too, sir.”

  Nicholas laughed and felt a little better. Forsyte and Blake had at least something tangible to worry about. Nicholas looked out in a despairing way at the ruined and disheveled countryside. Where the farmer had not beaten the storm, the stooks lay tumbled on the stubble, lashed by the ceaseless rain. It was like a March day strayed into August.

  Blake had taken the road through the hamlet of Yeoman Spire, and now they turned out into the bleak countryside, and Nicholas felt in him the hopeless frustration of the farmers who looked with sullen eyes at the rain and had to suffer it as a man suffers blows with his hands tied behind him. Over that hillock was the farmhouse where his grandfather had lived and where his father had been born, and Nicholas wondered if it was on such a day as this, looking at the ruined harvest, that Jock had made up his mind to swing his pick in another country and strike something harder than the mushy clay. Now they were coasting down to the valley of the farm, and Nicholas had a feeling that he was somehow driving back into his ancestry, and a curious subterranean longing arose in him to fight somehow this weather as the peasant tried to fight it with his hands. And all he could do with himself was to get rid of his boredom by lunching at the Roebuck Inn with others as bored as himself.

  Down in a hollow by the roadside, where the earth was yellow marl, a peasant was hacking out a drain to carry away the flood from the adjacent field of roots. Wet in rain and splotched by the yellow mud, he swung his grubber to work out the roots and allow him to use the spade, and, as if he knew that the mangolds would soon be naked and afloat if he did not stop this river of water, he worked in a kind of fury, like a bull rooting at the ground.

  Nicholas tapped on the glass shutter behind Blake’s head and told him to pull up. Unaware that the car had stopped, above him on the road, the man continued to hack away as if he were digging a hole into the bottom of the world. Nicholas had a feeling that he was working in the way a man might work who felt his pick near gold. Now he saw that he was almost an old man, perhaps sixty, but his whole body was an instrument of sinew and muscle almost as hardy and virile as that of a young man. Blake looked around for the second time and then realized that his master had stopped merely to watch this man working.

  At last the man straightened his back to take a spell for a moment, and then he saw the car. He looked up in curiosity, wiped the rain and sweat off his face, and thought of something. He shouted up to Blake: “Got a match, mister?”

  “Yes.”

  Blake had delayed a moment before replying, as if he wondered if he should answer him while driving his master. Nicholas felt a jerk of annoyance in him and opened the door and got out.

  “I’ll take him down a match.”

  Blake was rather surprised to see Mr. Bude get over the gap in the hedge and walk down through the mud as carelessly as if he were on the pavement in Pall Mall. Certainly Mr. Bude was in a queer mood this morning.

  The old man, who Nicholas now realized was perhaps seventy years, touched his sopping felt hat, and said:

  “It be a nasty morning, mister.”

  Nicholas looked down into the honest eyes with time’s stitching about them. Up to the waist in the drain, one might almost think he was digging his own grave.

  “Yes. You want a match?”

  Nicholas had pulled out a box.

  “Thankee, mister, I do.” He had a look of apology. “It be your driver I called at.” He looked at Nicholas in his Savile Row suit, St. James shoes, Jermyn Street silk shirt and collar and tie. “I didn’t want ee to come down slammerin’ in the mud.”

  Nicholas handed him the box.

  “I’ll take a couple, sir.”

  “Keep the box. I’ve got a lighter.”

  “Oh, thankee, sir.”

  Nicholas looked about and surveyed the distance needed to allow the drain to cut off the water from the channel it had broken through into the mangold field.

  “Do you expect to get up there today?”

  “Mebbe. I be goin’ to work on at it, though it be Saturday, unless the flood go rollin’ down them mangolds like billiard balls. Mebbe, I!ll have driven her up by the dark, or mebbe no, for them blasted roots be like my old teeth that won’t stop in nor come out. This one be a sally and it be fair hooked up and all hingy. I be once an’ I’d get so mad with the bastin’ at it that I’d fair haul it out by my teeth, the way it’s gainsettin’ me. But I be no younker now, like when I was quarryman to old Bude.”

  “Bude? Is this Bude’s farm?”

  “It be, a long time back, but now it be Maclew’s, since the old Simon himself be gone, for that son of his had no use for danderin’ about on the land.” The old man chuckled. “I’m tellin’ ee, ‘twas no sally root Jock Bude struck his pick into, but grains o’ gold, and they be after growin’ now into Bude’s Bank, if ee have ever heard the name. Aye, it be a long story of some goin’ up, an’ others goin’ down, but old Simon, he bided by the land.” The old man paused. “Ther
e I be danderin’ on, and the rain soakin’ in to ee.” He touched his hat again. “Well, thankee, sir.”

  Nicholas knew that he could not go. “Go on working, I’ll see that root come out.”

  The old man hacked away, grunting as the roots sank from the edge of the grubber into the clay bottom. Nicholas measured the run of the drain and wondered if this old man could ever cut all the way up before dark. He had a feeling that it would heartbreak him if he did not, having given up his Saturday half-day, probably not because he wanted to earn the extra-time money, but from his instinct to fight the weather and save the mangolds from the water each moment heavier in the flood as the rain swathed down. The old man cursed in healthy anger and straightened up again.

  “It be tough, and fightin’ at me.”

  “Give me that grubber!”

  The old man was alarmed as Nicholas grabbed the implement.

  “Heigh, sir, ee can’t be slip-sloppin’ and sliverin’ them clothes in the mud...”

  “Come on. Get out, and let me get in.”

  Bewildered, the old man took hold of Nicholas’ hand and was hauled out of the drain. Nicholas handed him his overcoat and took the grubber and jumped into the drain. For about five minutes he whacked at the roots and felt it was about as much use as trying to decapitate an eel in the water. There was no backing in this clay to cut against. He straightened himself up, looked down at it, realized the cynical, shrewd eyes of the old man watching him, and worse, saw that Blake had come down. Then he bent over the root and began to wrestle with it. For the first time in his life he felt that he had something in his hands. They singled out the main rootholds through the mud which had already plastered Nicholas from head to foot, and, settling himself, he got a leverage with his knee against the side of the trench. Then he hauled. For about two minutes he tried it in every direction, until, at last, he felt that he discovered the angle from which he could wrench out the anchor root. Then to get a long pull of breath, he stood up.