The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “It’s not rubbish,” she said evenly, still holding my eyes with hers. “He can’t bear the sight of us together; he hates me because you love me; he looks at you when he thinks I don’t see.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  “You know it’s not, James.”

  I sat still, fighting the dawning realization that maybe she was right.

  “How can you possibly know?” I asked at last.

  She flicked her cigarette, half-smoked, into the quarry. “Women can sense these things,” she said quietly at last. “It crossed my mind in Prague, but I dismissed it then. I thought he might resent my presence for other reasons. But last night I knew; standing by this bench I knew. That’s why I didn’t sleep with you.” And as she said this something in her seemed to crack. “You know it too, Jamie,” she said, her voice wavering again and the suggestion of tears reappearing. “You know he’s in love with you. You may not admit it to yourself but you know.”

  There was a pause. “Since I’m not in love with him, what bearing can Eric’s feelings have on us?” I asked hoarsely.

  Ella straightened herself. “How do you know you’re not in love with him?” Her eyes met mine coolly now; her tone was more level.

  “What?”

  “How do you know you’re not in love with him?”

  “Because I know.”

  She looked at me steadily. “No you don’t. The way you’ve buried your knowledge of his feelings only proves how frightened of them you are.” She breathed deeply. “You won’t admit to yourself that Eric loves you or that you might love him back because you’ve always been told that one man can’t love another.”

  “I …”

  But she held up a hand to stop me. “You’re frightened, that’s all,” she said, and there was derision in her voice again. Turning to face me squarely she continued every word measured and even. “Before we can go as before I want to know that it’s me you really want.”

  “It is you I want.” I took her hand but she pulled it away.

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Oh yes I can.”

  “No you can’t. You can’t make an informed decision unless you …”

  But I cut her off. “I’m not … like that, Ella.”

  “How do you know you’re not unless you face the possibility that you might be?”

  “I …”

  “I don’t want to be your safe option, James.”

  I looked at her helplessly, incredulous. “Are you trying to say that you want me to sample the alternatives?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  I tried to look into her eyes but she turned from me towards the quarry and wouldn’t shift her gaze to meet mine. “You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re completely crazy.”

  From the twitch of her shoulders I saw that I had touched a chord. “Don’t ever say that to me again,” Ella hissed.

  “But …”

  “But nothing. Don’t ever say it again.”

  I nodded, humbled by her anger. Mutely I looked at her, searching for an explanation for her words; none was given me. Instead she rose to her feet.

  “I cannot love emotional cowards,” she said with slow deliberation.

  Fighting a spreading sensation of numbness I asked her what she meant.

  “Precisely what I say.”

  There was a pause; my pulse beat a steady tattoo in my head. “Are you trying to test me?” I ventured at last, lost.

  There was silence. “I suppose so,” she said finally. She turned away. “I want you to prove to me that it’s me you want, that I am not a safe option, that you know yourself and your desires.”

  “And how can I do that? How can I prove anything to you if you won’t believe what I say?”

  There was silence.

  “A simple kiss would probably suffice,” she said softly, still not looking at me. “Once you’ve kissed him I imagine you’ll know how you feel. You’ll have forced yourself to face something. Then you’ll know whether or not it’s me you really want.” And with that she walked quickly away and I heard the crunch of her shoes on the gravel as she disappeared into the trees. I sat numbly, staring after her retreating form.

  The boy on that bench long ago is a stranger to me now. He does not hear as I call. He sits numbly as wave after conflicting wave crashes over him; he cares nothing for my warnings. I tell him not to be distracted by the letter of what Ella has said, but to look for the meaning hidden in her words. He does not hear me; he cannot. He feels sick and lost and dizzy with the effort of thinking. He is falling, falling into swirling waters he does not understand; and as he falls he reaches out and clutches onto a small shard of unthinking, unexamined resolution. It is to this he clings, for in it he sees his salvation; he clings to it in the mistaken belief that it will help him to float. He does not know treachery yet; or what it does.

  From a distance of fifty years I call to him, for I understand now what Ella said in a way he could never have hoped to do. I see her again in that café in $$$. I hear her as she tells me that you’ve no idea how sane you have to be to survive a session with a really respected psychiatrist; that doctors with their endless questions could make anyone doubt themselves and those around them. But he will not hear me; and he sits impassive as I tell him that when we sin we must accept the possibility of those we love sinning too; that when she took a man she did not love from her cousin Ella dealt herself a blow just as damaging as anything she did to Sarah.

  I tell him that his love betrayed herself; and that from the moment she had done so she had to live with the terrible fear that others she loved would betray her in their turn. It was that fear which made Ella push me away; that fear which made her need me to prove—by whatever means—my devotion to her. I know now that betraying her own trust made Ella lose her trust in the world; and my heart aches for the fragile girl who wanted only the safety of the knowledge that I loved her completely.

  I curse the cruelty of a fate which did not grant me the perception to see that there are some things which even love does not sanction.

  I had neither wisdom nor experience, you see; I was a child playing an adult’s game. In my youth and weakness I succumbed to the logic of her insecurity. I came to believe as I sat on that lonely bench that I had been set a challenge, that to prove my worth to Ella I had to pass the test she had set me. And I knew as I sat there that I could not bear the derision of her cool green eyes. I did not know that what I took for derision was in fact fear; that my love was also a child playing an adult’s game; that other proofs might have done in place of the one I finally offered her. As my world spun before me and all ideals of friendship and faith crumbled under the weight of her challenge, I did not know that the test Ella set me was in fact the reaction of a proud mind to the fear of grave loss, however unfounded that fear might be; I did not know that what she needed so desperately was a proof of my devotion to her and not of my courage with others.

  It is true, you know: those who give much expect much to be given to them; those who take much expect much to be taken from them. Ella took the person Sarah valued most from her and after that she could never be sure of anyone completely. As Charles had been taken from Sarah so might I be taken from Ella; that was her fear, and fear is the undoing of many. That is how I understand it now. The only way Ella could be sure of me was to drive me away and have me back on her terms; and because she was young and Eric—sweet, trusting Eric—was on hand, he and his love for me were the means she chose. And I, tormented by love for her, driven by the coolness of those haunting eyes—a coolness in which I saw no fear, no weakness—set my mind to the task ahead; I resolved to accept Ella’s challenge, to prove myself to her on her terms.

  That was my undoing; that was my crime. And like Ella’s crime it shaped my life from that moment onwards. Sitting on that rusty bench above the quarry I decided that I would give up the riches of friendship and self-respect for Ella’s love; I decided—and here I was weakest—that I cou
ld not imagine life without her love, that it was worthy of any sacrifice I had it in my power to make.

  I was wrong. No love is worth that. No human being is worth the total abdication of self. But I did not know that then; and though I dimly suspected the damage I might do by accepting Ella’s challenge I ignored all scruple. My only thought was the selfish gratification of my own desire, my only prize the restoration of our mutual trust. I was not old enough to know that this trust might be restored in other ways; that it was not emotional cowardice which Ella feared but betrayal; that as I sat by the quarry then, trying to think, I was being presented with my last chance to save us both.

  I knew none of these things; and because this was so I got up slowly from the bench and went in search of Eric. I found him alone in the salon, reading; and with a first shiver of treachery I put my hand on his and said that we should leave. I remember his surprise, remember his wide brown eyes and his mouth opened to protest. I remember too how his protest died on his lips, how his look changed from one of mystification to comprehension, how he bounded from his chair and went to pack, spurred on by sudden joy and undreamed of hope. I saw Ella for a moment before I left and I kissed her good-bye with a fury that was new to me. It scared her and I was glad that it scared her; I wished her to know the strengths in me which she had stirred; and I wished her to doubt, perhaps, whether I would return: I wished her to doubt the outcome of her test so that when I passed it her confidence in me would be all the greater. Sitting in this icy room now I can hardly speak.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT IS COLD OUTSIDE; the sun is setting over a roaring sea; the light is fading. For the first time I do not want to go on. For the first time the telling of what I have done sticks in my throat and I cannot speak. The boy my story has concerned so far has been innocent; willful perhaps and undoubtedly weak, but innocent, naïve. Now he is no longer so. He can no longer claim to have no knowledge of what he does; he cannot escape judgment for what he will do; and I must live with the consequences of what he did again. I have spent my life living with them, living with them and trying to forget. Now I must remember. I must seek out the images that Sarah taught me so well to bury; must trace thoughts and motives I had thought obliterated forever; must steel myself to the sound of Eric’s laugh ringing back at me in my dreams. I think that that laugh will be the hardest memory to bear, for it is so trusting, so fearless. Eric’s love for me was pure and warm and freely given. I abused it coldly and calculatingly. And I have spent a lifetime trying to forget that, trying to bury what I did. Now I owe it to Eric to follow this story to its end in all its wealth of shameful detail. I owe it to him to spare myself nothing, to remember; for frankness is the only reparation I can make and I must make it freely. That much I know.

  My first memory of the days we spent together is of the train journey we took after leaving Ella’s house. We were going to Vaugirard to stay with Eric’s family—though what possessed me to go there I do not know—and I remember our journey because it contrasted so completely with one we had so recently taken together from Prague. I mean, of course, that I contrasted so completely with the excited boy who only the day before had gone to see his lover full of hope and joy and thoughts of future happiness. I was different on the second journey because I understood Eric’s smiles now and returned them; because I knew with absolute clarity that Ella was right and also, though this sickens me to say, that I would pass her test. I try to remember precisely what I felt beyond this, whether I gave any attention to the possible consequences of my actions, whether I would have cared if I had done so. Behind each and every thought of mine were my love’s eyes, distant and derisive, the eyes I had seen by the quarry that morning. I wanted to make myself worthy of their approval, to make them shine for me again. I wished to prove, once and for all, that I had the qualities which Ella sought. I thought that by passing her test I would cement our love and for that prize I would have risked anything.

  The ease with which my ties of friendship with Eric dissolved under Ella’s influence shames me now. Then I’m almost certain that it didn’t. And as I talk I remember why it didn’t. I remember the tricks I used to bypass all considerations that might have weakened my resolution, the cunning by which my possessed mind protected itself and its intentions from all complicating scruple, from all distracting thought. I remember now how I taught myself to separate the Eric I knew from the Eric I had been challenged to explore. And I remember that I was so successful in this separation that the two sides of his nature—the passionate and the platonic—grew in my mind until they had formed two complete personas, linked of course but ultimately distinct.

  Eric the lover I did not know and did not care to know; him I transformed, with deft precision, from a person who might have feelings into a trophy whose sole purpose was to be won. Questions of loyalty and even of gender dissolved in the harsh face of my determination to conquer. Eric the friend could not, of course, be so dealt with. He was the Eric I knew, the Eric I would have turned to for advice in any situation but this, the Eric I had laughed with, drunk with, fought with and worked with for three heady months in Prague. He could not be made into a trophy and had instead to be separated so completely from the prize I wished to win that no concern for friendship or history would stand in the way of my desire for victory. I separated Eric the lover from Eric the friend with cold deliberation; and with the treachery of a Judas I saw the first fruits of my work even as our train pulled into the small station at Vaugirard. I found myself able to smile without affection; to put meaning into looks that held none; to make action and thought discrete. I had worked fast, that I knew; and I knew also that my work could not last long. I had anesthetized my mind, nothing more; but I thought, correctly as it turned out, that this would be adequate for my purposes. When my conscience stirred I had the duplicity to tell it that Eric himself had encouraged the separation which I so artfully executed. He, I whispered to it, had never said anything to me of his feelings for me. He had never been open or honest about them, had not attempted to widen our relationship to include or at least to acknowledge them. This I told myself so frequently and with such assurance that I almost believed it. I tried not to think of the signs he had given me, of the overtures he had made; for I knew that no betrayal of friendship can resist the light of examination for long.

  We arrived at Vaugirard in the late afternoon and were met at the station by Eric’s sister Sylvie, a large woman, prematurely middle-aged, in whose face the Vaugirard nose and jaw sat incongruously with a weak mouth and tranquil eyes. She kissed her brother and offered me her cheek, pointing as she did so to an old red Citroën parked nearby. As we pulled out of the car park she asked me, in correct but hesitant English, whether I had enjoyed my time in Prague.

  “Very much,” I replied.

  “I would have liked to go too,” she said. “It would have been wonderful.” She paused. “But I have my duties here.” And as she spoke she looked with a certain smugness at her brother, who ignored her.

  After this we drove on in silence, past the modern flats of a growing town and into the cobbled streets of its medieval past. On a hill which commanded the entire district was a château, fortress-like in construction and bearing, which was proudly pointed out to me as the family’s own.

  “Of course we do not own it any longer,” said Sylvie as we waited at traffic lights, “but the family stays on here nevertheless. There will always be a Vaugirard in Vaugirard.”

  And I thought of another castle, far finer than this one, and of another voice talking of ownership and duty. Eric said nothing.

  Louise de Vaugirard welcomed me with open arms and a hearty dinner. The family lived in one of the old houses in the center of the town, a high narrow building which from the street looked cramped but which was in fact cavernous, with low-ceilinged rooms leading into and out of one another in haphazard profusion. It was longer than it was wide and had been extended at various times into the garden behind it, so that only a small squa
re patch of lawn now remained.

  “We play croquet there in the summer,” said Louise, pointing it out to me. “What a pity you have come in the winter, for I fear the weather will be very harsh.”

  I had no desire for lazy summer afternoons with Eric’s family and looked at the cloud outside with gratitude. In the comfort of his own home, under the strain of his family’s kindness, I felt that my ingenious separation of him into friend and trophy would be difficult to prolong; and as I replied that the weather could be no worse than it would be in England, I wondered why I had come all and thought with relief that I had only promised to stay five days. For five days the anesthetic might endure; beyond that I could not be sure and I had no wish for its effects to wear off in the bosom of Eric’s family itself.

  After Sylvie had left us to cook for her husband and child, Eric’s father arrived and shook hands with his son and then with me with heavy dignity. He was a great squat man with huge hands and a powerful, viselike grip. It was possible to see, as Eric stood beside him, that although my friend resembled his father his features had been softened by his mother’s genes, for a prominent nose and strong jaw gave the elder man an air of terrifying caricature which the younger had escaped. Eric père was a friendly giant who sat quietly through dinner while his wife’s conversation warmed the room; occasionally he bestowed a hospitable smile on me, but more he did not do or say. When we had moved upstairs for coffee, however, he pulled me to one side.

  “I would like to thank you for what you have done for my family,” he said in a deep, gruff voice. “Eric speaks very well of you as do all who met you in Prague.” I thought of Mr. Kierczinsky and Pavel Tomin, remembering with a start that they existed, they who only a few days before had played so large a part in my life. Eric’s father spoke English slowly with a heavy accent.