She approached him and knelt in front of him but he did not turn down the sound. She put her hands on his knees and said:
‘Pink, love, if it’s about not giving Daddy my address; if that’s what’s really eating you, it doesn’t matter, I promise.’
He stared at her stupidly.
‘I beg your pardon, old flesh?’
‘I wouldn’t harbour it. I love you. I do.’
His expression never changed. He reached out, but not to turn down the volume. Instead he retrieved his glass.
‘In point of fact, old thing,’ he said, ‘I’m a triffle predestinately pissed.’
A moment later she turned round and left.
‘California,’ Pink said, as the door closed, ‘here I come.’
BOOK FIVE
From the Lab
TWENTY-THREE
ALMOST THE LAST picture is of her standing in front of a swagger golfing hotel looking quite exhausted, her eyes washed out with tears. She is oblivious both of the porters by the swing-doors who stare at her and of the broad-beamed business men who look over their shoulders at her as they pass by, pushing trolleys of expensive matching sets of golf clubs in enormous bags. There has already been a shower of rain, and the porters’ two big striped umbrellas lie open, on their sides, by the front step. Mary herself looks a little heavier. She is in a cotton frock and a suède coat with a dark green silk square tied loosely round her neck. She is not looking at me, but staring blankly at the mauve clouds, at the formal borders of flowers by the perfect lawns, at the fountains, and beyond, at the first green Lowland hills, and she is saying flatly:
‘I’ve sinned. This time, I’ve torn it. This time I’ve sinned, I know.’
And I reach out and seize both her hands and shake them but I have no argument. I close my eyes and say again and again:
‘No, no, no! We have. Not you.’ And I think I meant both Stephen and Pink in that ‘we’.
Let me take it from the telephone call. I suppose it was about eighteen months after the Colonel died: a little more, because they were hay-making at the edges of the fairways on the course, that morning, before it rained. It must have been June. I rang from a box in the internal Post Office. It was that sort of hotel.
Her voice, then, was flat enough.
‘Who is it?’
‘David.’
She sounded weary and asked only for facts. I told her where I was and why. I was staying at the hotel by invitation, with all expenses paid, to read a paper at a Conference on Management in Industry. I talked brightly and made it sound as if I were enjoying myself. The title of my paper, believe it or not, was ‘Work and Play’, and the invitation to prepare it had followed the successful publication of Obligatory Scenes. In the allied fields, in and around social science, I promise you, one can get away with murder.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said to all that.
‘Hundreds of brisk business men,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Pretty Wildian pages and happy Dickensian boot-boys constantly at one’s service. All with Glasgow accents. The Secretary of the Conference calls me D.D. You must come at once and rescue me from unqualified success.’
‘It’s not very easy,’ she said at last. ‘Stevie’s got the Jaguar.’ I remember particularly that she did not just say ‘car’.
‘Oh come.’ My accent, I suppose, as usual, grew more affected and ‘Oxford’, as I sensed the possibility of failure. ‘Let’s be pals. You can’t leave me to the sharks. I’ll give you the hell of a lot to drink.’
She replied, after a pause, ‘Macdonald’s out in the fields just now. They’re hay-making.’
‘I’ll come and fetch you, I’ve got a car.’
‘No.’ She was very definite about that. ‘I might catch a bus about twelve.’
‘Excellent. It only takes an hour.’
‘Why are you inviting me to lunch, David?’
‘That’s not allowed. No. That’s a wrong question. Because I want to ask you to lunch. You must come.’
‘All right. Things need organising, that’s all. There’s Pink trouble. I won’t be able to stay very long. And there’s a baby-feed at two, but Cathie might manage that. All right. I’ll come. How are you?’
‘Bloody,’ David said with a loud laugh.
‘I thought you must be.’
‘One o’clock then.’
‘About then.’
It is easy, and oddly enough, comforting, after the disaster, to write it all down in the dark hours and passionately blame and abuse oneself. It gives one the same kick that drives young people at those horrifying Retreat week-ends to confess publicly to sins which they never committed. This I have already done in a pile of unposted letters to her, now burnt along with the dead cats. But this I am determined not to do, for a simple reason. I blame my breed almost as much as myself. Some of the responsibility, after two years of exhausting self-examination, I place bitterly and sadly on the angels.
Before I rang her from the hotel, I was very certain of my position. I rang her because I wanted to put things right. I wanted to see her so that I could explain; which is to say, apologise; which is to say take the blame; which would have meant abusing myself. I had had nearly two years in which to try to find out why I had been so unbearably cruel to her, because when I was with her, I had better make it quite plain, not a day passed without its cruelty. I never lost an opportunity to damage her self-confidence. I actually struck her on several occasions and in the end, of course, I went to great lengths to break her faith in the two people who loved her. But last of all (a point which I failed to notice on my first examination), I somehow got it across to her, at the same time, that I was myself shocked by my treatment of her. By a look a day or a word a week I managed to tug at her sympathy, and this, because it made her stay on, was perhaps the most cruel of all.
I now wanted to tell her the curious conclusion I had come to. On all previous occasions, when she had asked me, like a child (she would simply ask ‘why’ again) what made me treat her so, I had talked a little mysteriously of odi et amo, and all that. I accused her, quoting all her fabulous fibs in evidence, of skating on life’s surface, or refusing to be real, and therefore of being unable to love. As my love, I explained and flattered myself, was real and fundamental, I reacted violently against all her falseness. I honestly think I convinced myself. And of course love is complicated for the complicated just as it is simple for Romeo or Juliet. But so conditioned was I by the arguments and discussions of my mind-bending friends that the utter absurdity of the suggestion that we hate those we love, as it were, by definition (and if you don’t hate her, then, my goodness, you had better whip up your passion) did not occur to me. That we are capable of this hatred is undeniable: but that is to say something quite different.
Gradually I came round to the workman, the spade and the otter and very gingerly, because it was far from comforting, I began to face the fact that the most passionate affair of my life, with Mary, had very little to do with love and much to do with envy. Mine was the bite of the dog in the manger. ‘You shall not be free.’ With a nasty cold feeling in the very middle of me, I began to see that I was acting out a very old play.
For many years, usually when drunkish, I have bored my friends with the suggestion that the Scots, of all people, are misunderstood. A glance at their history or literature (and especially if you count Byron as a Scot, which after dinner, at least, is permissible) reveals what lies underneath the slow accent, the respectability and the solid flesh. Under the cake lies Bonny Dundee. But even as I put forward these theories with enthusiasm I was doing everything in my power to suppress the one contemporary sign of that splendid vitality which I had ever come across. They christened her Mary. I cast myself, perversely, as Knox.
This much I realised when I went north to read ‘Work and Play’ for big business in the swell hotel, and the reasons for my envy seemed clear enough. Anybody who has shared the heavily moral, non-conformist unbringing knows how the hoodoos stick even into m
iddle life. Mary, although she was due for just such an education, had, primarily by the accident of her father’s indiscretion and her mother’s subsequent death, avoided these troubles, even if she and poor Pink had run into a load of others. Nor do I withdraw any of these conclusions, now. But they were not enough, because knowing this much, and already loving Mary in the way which is truly best described by her own ‘cousin-style’ I then waded in again and probably, in that one afternoon, did more damage than in the six months that had gone before.
What is perfectly horrifying is that I now believe I knew I was going to do this as I waited for her in that plush cocktail bar which looks like the waiting-room in a Warsaw brothel. There is always a clue. When I had said, on the phone, ‘I’ve got a car. Shall I come and collect you?’ she had said, at once, quite definitely ‘No,’ meaning ‘Don’t show yourself here, at the farm.’ I can at this moment, still feel my heart leap.
That we are the perverts and the peeping-toms, the sex maniacs and even the murderers, we, the sons of the righteous, everybody knows. But we are something else, whose childhood was stolen from us, who never, without correction (not necessarily punishment) told Mary’s splendid stories; who never went with Alice through the looking-glass. It is the curbing of our imaginations, the firm guidance back to the grammar and the prose, that make us so hungry now for experience. But for a special sort of experience; a kind of imagination of the flesh. We are the tinkers, who move on; who invite experience but flee from consequence. At the last moment our eyes turn furtively away. This is to say that we are the most dangerous of all: the permanently immature. And for that I blame the angels.
Physically there was quite an alarming difference. She was already sunburnt and her hair was at its lightest red. Her eyes, therefore, looked their most brilliant green, and none of the other men in the American bar failed to take a second look at her. Rather blandly, she stared them out. Her movements seemed to be slower. Her shoulders, barely covered by the loose cotton frock, looked heavier, and she was wearing a pair of brown sandals with no heels. There was something more than careless in her dress. It was a slovenly quality, which in the ordinary way I might have associated with a Lesbian. She had developed the same off-hand manner as if she felt it no longer necessary to please. And yet, by the looks on the faces of both the men and women round about, it was clear that she now caused considerably more stir, wherever she went. We played the name-game.
‘Not Mary,’ I said, after a long pause.
‘Brenda,’ she replied. It was not the only time that she seemed to take pleasure in disparaging herself, but I shook my head.
‘No,’ I said. ‘What about Georgina or Margaret?’
‘You tell me.’ She ate another olive.
‘I think it’s Georgina.’
‘Heather,’ she suggested.
‘You really mustn’t be so rude to yourself,’ I pleaded, ‘it’s embarrassing. Tell me, in one word, if we can’t get it in a name.’
She looked at me for a moment, then said, ‘David, if I’m to get back before tea-time we had better go in to lunch.’
From a huge menu, she chose a straightforward meal, without delay or hesitation. The last time I’d lunched her, even on that day at Bianchi’s, she had been unable to decide on a meal. It used to infuriate me when she made me decide first, then chose exactly the same menu. There was none of that, and I thought I had found the clue.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘you lunch here often?’
‘No.’
‘This sort of place?’
‘We often go out on a Saturday,’ she said.
‘To a country club?’
‘That sort of thing,’ she replied. ‘Or one of the hotels.’
‘Fair enough,’ I nodded. ‘For a dinner dance?’
‘That sort of thing,’ again, she replied.
‘Money,’ I said. ‘You’ve come into money.’
‘I hate to think what I look like,’ she said slowly. ‘You’re staring at me as if I’m something out of a museum.’
‘You look very beautiful.’
‘But not so vulnerable,’ she said.
‘Not so obviously,’ I remember replying (and how wrongly), adding the academic ‘I confess.’
TWENTY-FOUR
VULNERABLE ONE, cousin. If all these things were revealed to me, if I wasn’t in love with you and knew it, if I could not give before I ever came upstairs that afternoon, how, you ask, did I continue tomake physical love? But there is no problem here. Those of us who have failed to break the bonds that tie our hearts, still manage, by a trip to the big city, by a journey back to boue to cure the rest. We may have no passion, but we are wanton enough. Give us a girl, a boy, a prostitute, give us even a scone for a wife, we can perform and do. Stephen is no Scotsman there. His fastidiousness is foreign to the line that leads back to the wynds of old Edinburgh and to your friends Ina and Elspeth and all the others in that inaccurate, timeless, fanciful but true tenement in the back streets by the Tay. His troubles are surely the responsibility of the more civilised successors of Dr Arnold; the makers of agnostic monasteries.
I go through the scenes in the swell hotel, often, often, usually late at night in the lab when I wait for the cigarette to burn down, the Pentothal to wear off, or the cat to right itself. My lab’s on the top floor now. I look down on Mill Hill and Hendon and the lights of London beyond and am transported back, wondering what trick it is that brings all the ghosts of passion that make a soul so fluently to the surfaces of the skin and into those special tears that are never shed. For a moment, or an hour, they brought a sweet and unfathomable depth into your eyes. There was an ocean sounded by a deep bell. I heard it from the shore.
I sat for a quarter of an hour as you surfaced. The white sheet tucked round your waist made your skin browner than I had seen it before and I remember that my thoughts for moments on end could not leap beyond the sensation of colour. Your hair looked darker red against the big pink coral shells on your breast. You slipped noiselessly into shore.
Cousin, to watch you and look after you was almost enough. Then, at least, I felt a strength, a protection, which I had never known was there. If not a lover, I was a man, and am thankful.
But to be loved like that, deep bell, is frightening. And as soon as you awoke, I was afraid. The ponk-ponk of the tennis balls came back, the jazz pattern on the curtains, the horrid wardrobe, the glass that still said L. M. S. I remember the little white chair which I’d taken from the bathroom squeaked as I moved back, ashamed that my eyes had woken you. Oh, this time it was David who spoke.
I can’t go through all that again. The meaningless piles of words, none as imaginative as yours used to be, but even greater fibs. I used every Dundee cake of an argument. Even facts. Money, my own divorce, the child, Stephen, even the differences in our age. Forget me walking up and down; forget me standing, dry-mouthed, by the window, quickly trying to think of a new argument, a new card to lay on top of the house that I had built. I was shaking, not in the hand but right in the middle of me.
At the end of it, when somehow I had returned to your side, you drew an arm out of the crushed summer sheet and touched my cheeks with your finger-tips.
Do you remember saying, ‘Your guttersnipe face’?
Once in Classroom IV, I spoke for you when you asked me to … But in the swell hotel you had the courage and the faith to give me my lines.
‘I’ll tell you what to say, Davie. Say “I want you to marry me. I don’t think I ever want to let you out of my sight again. I want to look after you always. I don’t want anything or anybody else. Say that.”’
I think you already knew. You said it with the same conviction with which you used to speak of your father and mother in those splendid fibs. You were saying it against yourself and I knew, I knew that we were sailing headlong for the rocks. I could hear the noises of the wreck. So could you.
There was no possibility of a reply. There was no hope of explanation. I stuck. Just stuck. How lo
ng after? You’d begun playing with your fingers, stretching a long red hair, scowling up at it, with your head still on the pillows.
Very calmly, you said, ‘We condemn ourselves out of our own mouths, David.’ It was not Davie, then. You were quite matter of fact. You looked at me, and you went on, ‘It was I who was the teaser, that’s what you said. It was I who was the tamperer with life. So you said.’
I remember biting my finger: sticking again. For ten minutes, was it? It might even have been more. I jumped up cheerfully in the end.
‘Let’s go down and get some tea.’
A pause. ‘Fine.’
TWENTY-FIVE
IT ONLY REMAINS for me to write down what I said and did for the rest of the day. I do so with a coolness, an attempt at objectivity which is false. The worst was to come.
When she was dressed, we wandered downstairs to the huge lounge where the palm court orchestra was reducing itself to tears. I sat, sweating slightly, ordering tea, and she went and telephoned home. She used no guile with Stephen.
She said, ‘I was having lunch with David Dow, darling, and it’s gone on. We’ll be coming back soon. How’s things?’
Stephen trusted her implicitly. He was very cheerful, he had had a good day in Perth. At home, so she said, the combine had not broken down once. The gun-field was finished.
Back in the lounge, the orchestra and the central heating had reduced the guests to such depths of apathy and depression, with a kind of nostalgia for nothing, that they took no interest in us. I drank several cups of tea but I gave my cake ration to her and she ate, in all, five chocolate éclairs.
I said, ‘I must have lost my balance altogether; I want to give you five more.’
About five minutes after, she swore it was only the music and the cakes, and apologised for becoming a schoolgirl again. But she began to cry so badly that I had to take her out. Everything in the hotel was miserably depressing as we moved down long corridors, trying to find something to cheer her up. She would not let me buy anything for her in the little shops by the main entrance. We went and looked at the empty ballroom and the billiards room filled with industrialists who had done their eighteen holes that morning. Both were equally depressing. We watched two boys who could not really play, banging about in a squash court, and somewhere else we heard the hydropathic click of ping-pong balls. In the swimming-pool, four children were yelling their heads off and the attendant was nowhere to be seen. Mary was still crying hopelessly so I ushered her into the spray room where we stood on the wet cork matting, along from the marble stalls. Steam swirled about the ceiling and I held her firmly by the arms. She looked younger then than I had ever seen her.
Household Ghosts Page 38
