No one betrayed me, he thought. Myself betrayed me. But when? Long, long before Nice.
He was lying on his bed, wide awake, arms crossed behind his neck. He must have slept. A thin grey light filled the room. He heard birds, their notes nearer and much sharper than the roar of the traffic below the window. The air was alive with their spattering cries, which reminded him of… of what? He frowned. The memory rose in him from a great depth, slowly. He heard two sounds, much alike, and going on together, in an uneven counterpoint: the tap dripping lightly in the sink behind the open door of the kitchen, and fat crackling in the pan where the old captain was preparing their breakfast: through the window open on to the yard, the cold air of a northern spring entered the room, with the scent of a lilac in full bloom. There was also the warm smell of the bread his father took from the side of the oven, the lingering smell of his tobacco and, when he opened the back door to throw out a little water from the teapot, the sharp earthy scent from the bed of mint he grew there, behind a border of London Pride.
Judge me, he cried silently; I shan’t dream of appealing against your sentence.
There was a moment of silence in the traffic. Voices were raised in the street in an argument which ended in a burst of drunken or crazy laughter. Silence again. Then a slow sound of footsteps, going on and past, dying away in the half-light. He had no need to grope in his memory for what it recalled: stronger and more obsessive than a memory, it moved with a piercing shock into the place waiting for it. Einsiedeln: the long slow sound of feet on the cobblestones, on and on in the near-darkness, then the empty square and the solitary crawling man, alone, like the young airman, with his thirst.
A hard painful excitement gripped him. Getting up, he stumbled to a window. A light as colourless as water had invaded the world. The time was just after half-past four, and the coffee stall was at last packing up; a man was washing cups in the stone trough, two others swept the thickly-strewn litter into a neat pile in the gutter. A meagre cluster of girls and youths still clung to the stall, and the tramp, sunk ever farther into himself, still slept.
‘I must wait,’ he said involuntarily.
If there is no God, he thought, coldly, then there is no point in trying to satisfy any less lethal thirst — no lesser satisfaction is worth stooping for…. The felt absence of God was worth more than any of the idols, social necessity, order, charity, a civilised life, with which he had been deceiving himself so long.
At this precise instant he felt a touch. Less a touch than an infinitesimal point of light. No, it was both: the inner touch and the inconceivably brief flicker. He was pierced by a triumphant joy. It stayed with him for much less than a second — as if, groping his way in complete darkness along a wall, he had caught sight of a feeble crack of light. And lost it again at once. He thought feverishly: Perhaps I have been sentenced to spend the rest of my life feeling about the wall with my fingers, without ever coming across the crack again. Right. All right. I accept.
A white cloud swollen by the first rays of the sun moved past the window, slowly, stained a pale rose at the edge like a bud breaking from its calyx, round and naked for the first time in the light. Elongated shadows of trees pointed across the scorched grass. He noticed with an obscure pleasure that the rays had penetrated as far as the lower trough, its surface barely ruffled by the same gentle breath that was moving the branches, a spectre of a wind, moving and stretching itself among leaves glittering in the light like splinters of glass: the glitter rippled from tree to tree into the distance as waves follow each other in an endless swell to the horizon.
This was the moment when his son, coming into the world a few days before he was expected, was born in the labour room of a London hospital south of the river, almost exactly in the direction in which he was looking.
He moved with an effort. Although he had spent a good part of the night sitting at his table, and had slept, it seemed to him that he had been standing against the window, in this same place, for hours. His eyelids were burning, but he was not sleepy. His body was stiff and when, to shave, he had to look at his face in the glass, it was almost the face of an old man. Below his eyes, two deep lines, scored under a patch of discoloured flesh, turned across his cheeks to meet the heavier lines running downwards from his temples. Other lines had been drawn just under the thin surface. He noted the change with indifference and a trace of derisive amusement.
Abruptly he remembered his wife. If it had not been much too early to disturb her, he would have gone to her room. Or so he told himself. In fact it was with relief and an almost light heart that he sat down to write.
After all, you won’t have to go to France, I’m going away now. This will make things easier for you, I hope. I’ll write to you from…
He had no idea where he would go from Danesacre. No, don’t plan, he thought: any plans you make will be a mistake. He crossed out the last word.
I’ll write to you. Thank you from my heart for more than fifteen years of friendship and loyalty,
sincerely,
GREGORY
He heard the housekeeper open her door at the end of the landing, and walk cautiously past his to go downstairs. The sediment of life in this house possessed by the past as a savage by his fetish had stirred. He began to hurry — to get away while the servants were shut safely away in the kitchen, drinking their first cup of tea.
He had got everything he needed into a small case. He looked once more round the room. Was there anything else? His passport. Taking it from the drawer in his writing-table, he pushed it into a pocket with the single page of his book. Salvage, he thought lightly, nodding at the old sea-captain.
Until he was outside the house he did not feel safe. Then the light, the heat, opened to him like great doors. He had expected to feel a little, if not very much, grief or regret; but he felt nothing of the sort, nothing but a naked curiosity and a hard yet serene and humble expectance.
THE END
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Storm Jameson 1962
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ISBN: 9781448200795
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The Road from the Monument Page 36
