by Ellis Peters
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
On the Other Side of the Night
1
The quarrel flared up and burned out, leaving them languid in the deep twilight, silent and exhausted, motionless because from that battlefield they knew no place to which they might go. There was no energy left in either of them for the violence of regret which commonly followed their frenzies. Even the struggle, while it lasted, was not the familiar disrupting paroxysm of frustrated love; it was all hers, a threnody of grief and rage, ebbing away into despair; while he did no more than defend himself stoically, holding her off, suffering her, crying out a little when she hurt him beyond what he could bear, but not this time – oh, never again! – striking back at her wound for wound. He could not fight with her any more. It was not as if there remained anything profitable to be said, or any ease to be had for his own pain in striking at her. All he could do was endure it, and wait for it to pass.
The living-room was still in twilight, the soft, bluish May dusk clung at the window, diaphanous and cool. Now that they were silent they could sense how large was the silence outside the house, no wind stirring in the woods, no traffic in the lane, only the faint sounds from the town coming in tentatively upon the very edge of hearing, as if from an infinite distance, another world.
Suspiria lay so still in the depths of the big chair that he could scarcely detect her presence except by the one lax hand lying open and empty over the arm, and the almost imperceptible stirring of light which marked the rise and fall of her breast. She breathed long and deeply, but without ease, and lay half-dead, as sometimes in the exhaustion of love, incapable of any effort but the soft, limp effort of breathing, and continuing to live, and following him with her eyes if he moved a step away from her.
The tide of passion, which had been wont to go out devastatingly as the recoiling sea, wringing their hearts, rolling them about and about in its breaking waves like so much drift on the Atlantic ebb, sighed away now into a terrible quietness. Dennis sat in the corner of the window-sill, half-hidden by the curtain, his cheek against the cold glass, his half-closed eyes on the vast, clear, impersonal cobweb-greyness of the night. He was spent, there was nothing in him but the ache of her remembered outcry against him, and the hollow silence he had opposed to it. Everything, all that tumult and defiance and splendour, had come down to this flat and quiet end.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ he heard himself say; but he said it without resolution or protest, only pointing out what was obvious. ‘You see that!’
But what was the use of saying it, when for all their writhings and turnings they could do nothing but go on like this? They knew only too well that their course was fixed.
She said nothing; she had so sunk into the shadows of the chair that she seemed rather to have dissolved away, leaving only that discarded hand, open and empty, outstretched towards him but making no appeal and offering no promise, meaning nothing.
‘What are we to do?’ he said in a whisper, to the silence, not to her.
The twilight scent of foliage was coming in through the open window in faint, recurring drifts, the perfumed breath of the May night. Somewhere there were young poplar saplings, late in coming to full leaf, for they still had the sweet and drunken scent of their buds about them.
‘I never meant to hurt you,’ he said. ‘I love you! But I’ve only done you harm.’
She still said nothing, but he saw a stirring of the dim outlines in the chair, as she gathered herself slowly together, dragging herself upright by the crooked fingers of the one visible hand. There was a small, pure pallor which was her face. He supposed she would not speak because she hated him for what he had done to her by blundering into her proud, inviolate life and breaking it to pieces. Or perhaps she had not yet the heart or the will to speak, for speech, too, can be an intolerable burden. She had pulled herself to her feet, and with a lame movement was shaking her skirts into order, a hand buried in the big pocket on her right thigh, so that the thin arm ended at the wrist. When she turned her back on him, and began to cross the room, she went like a cripple, groping her way.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘Nowhere.’ The slight, grey voices, dwindling into the greyness of the dusk, hardly troubled the silence. She was at the whisky cabinet, he heard the glasses clink; he wondered listlessly why she did not switch on the light, and almost got up to do it for her, but it did not seem worth the effort, nor did he yet want to see or be seen too clearly. She went fumbling patiently in the dark, and was about it a long time.
‘If only there were something we could do!’
She was coming towards him across the room, moving between the piano and the lamp with a drifting lightness, as if she had no weight. She had a glass in either hand. Untroubled by alternations of light, their eyes could find the way very well as yet in the deepening dusk. She stood in front of him, holding out one of the glasses. He saw her face as a floating oval of sourceless light, and half of the light again translated into a great twin darkness and brightness of eyes.
He put out his hand to take the drink she was offering him, and then, abruptly, horribly, he was afraid. It made no sense, it came out of nowhere, a stabbing reminder, full of humiliation, because fear between them was an offence, and he felt it as such without understanding it. He got up quickly, and went past her, and switched on the light.
The first thing he saw, in the sudden dazzle, was the small glass phial lying at the rim of the circle of light cast by the lamp upon the open cabinet. It was pushed in there beside the whisky bottle, the screw cap lying beside it; and it was empty.
So now he understood everything. He turned and looked again at Suspiria; she was standing where he had brushed past her, gazing at him with eyes slightly narrowed against the suddenness of the light, and still holding the two glasses before her carefully, one in either hand. The eyes which watched him had a glitter he had never seen in them before. Tears were so alien to her that for a long moment he did not recognise the source of that shining along her lashes; then he saw that she was weeping for him, silently, with a motionless face. He understood everything. Yes, by this method, then, if there was no other, he could be free and set her free. He had been waiting for it with fear for a long time, but now it was quite different. He found himself thinking, strangely, almost gratefully: ‘The great thing is not to be afraid – never to be afraid of anything. Fear is the only real violation.’
He reached back quietly with one hand, in the shelter of his body, and picked up the little bottle, and slipped it into his pocket; then he went towards her. He felt that he was smiling, but could not understand what there could be in his face to hold her eyes so imperiously. She drew back the one glass towards her breast, and held the other a little towards him. Her eyes had dilated again, there was little left of her but that great, shining stare, and the sheen of tears which would not gather and fall. She was filled with grief, drowning in the flood of her pity. He wished he could think of something comforting to say to her, but he knew that she would understand his silence afterwards.
He took the glass from her, the one she offered to him so carefully. She put the other one to her lips and then she seemed to lose the impulse to drink, and stood gazing at him over the rim, every other sense drained into the intensity with which she watched him.
He drained the glass, shivering at the slight bitterness that wrung his mouth. When it was all gone, he smiled at her with the most tender reassurance. There was nothing he need say, no advice he need give her. She would be all right when he was gone; and surely she would understand that he acquiesced, that he knew there could be no other way out for them. She was suffering now, but she had done only what she had to do.
He put down the glass, and going to her quietly where she stood, took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the lips, very gently and restrainedly, as he might have kissed a shy child who must not be startled. All the time she held the untouched drink before her in both cupped hands; and as hi
s lips touched hers she drew breath sharply, and he felt her tremble between his palms. The tears spilled, and ran silently down her cheeks. Her eyes, as he turned from her, had a stunned and uncomprehending look that hurt him, and caused him to keep his chin on his shoulder, still smiling back at her, as he moved towards the door.
He did not want her to torment herself. Into the last look he gave her he poured all the love, all the tenderness he could find in his liberated spirit. That was what she did not yet understand, of course; that was why she continued to stare after him as he withdrew himself from her; but afterwards she would understand. She would know that he had consented of his own will, that at the last moment he had lifted the burden from her; and in her recovered liberty she would be able to remember him without guilt or bitterness.
She was just opening her lips as he closed the door between them. He almost expected her to cry out after him, but she did not, and the last picture he had of her was of the frozen oval face blanched with wonder, and the tragic eyes following him to the last glimpse in a valedictory passion of love and regret.
2
He walked round the house, climbed through the fence at the end of the garden, and went up the steep rise of the hanging wood, because she would not look for him there, and he did not want her to follow him and find him, now that it was done. He did not want her to see him again, it was better that he should be found somewhere else, by some other person, some independent witness. At best her position would not be easy this time, but he thought he could make it secure.
He wondered how long he had before the tablets began to take effect; the very thought made him quicken his pace, scrambling upward through the clinging bushes and the tufted grass. He had lost the anchorage of time, because he would never again have any need of it; but before sleep came over him he must put a decent distance between himself and Suspiria, so that she might truthfully disclaim all knowledge of where he was, and be in some obscure and merciful way absolved from all responsibility for him.
The night was still, without a breath of wind, and yet full of sounds. He felt the stirring of silent and furtive life all about him, among the bushes and the trees, and he was not aware of any loneliness. The interlacing of branches above his head made a pattern of black filigree upon a luminous blue sky, and away through the tangles of the wood behind him he could see the glow of the town’s lights, and the long unrolling chain of stars which was the high road. They seemed an infinite distance away, and the quiet air brought to him only a very faint murmur of traffic, a mere hum in the remotest edges of hearing. He might have been many miles from any evidences of humanity. The house was lost already, its single light cut off from him by the rising curve of the hill; and she had not followed him.
There was no moon yet, and the sky had too much innate light for the stars to be able to show themselves. He went up steadily to the crest of the ridge, and over it to the edge of the fields which belonged to the upper farm, rough chalk pasture gently undulating along the top of the hill for some distance, before the richer fields declined towards the valley and the village beyond. There was a stone wall along the rim of the wood, and just within the gate the remaining half of a straw stack, sheeted against the weather. He sat down there on the crackling litter of straw, and settled his back against the stack. It was as good a place as any other. What point was there in withdrawing himself to a still greater distance, when here was a solitude into which no one was likely to intrude before morning? Remote enough to preserve him from the indignity of being rescued, and harried, and walked up and down all night, and filled up with coffee, by interfering people who had no right in his affairs or Suspiria’s; but not so remote that he could lie undiscovered for so much as one full day after his death.
He had to think of so many things. He did not want to be too ugly when they found him; she might have to identify him, and if his looks had ever given her pleasure, he wanted her to keep the last sight of him as a not unpleasant memory. After all, it was the easiest, the most serene of deaths, his tranquillity would leave no burden of horror upon her such as Theo had left.
No weight of sleep hung upon his eyelids as yet. He supposed narcotics had to have time for their work. He could think of only one thing more he must do. Suspiria’s prints would be on the bottle, but that was right, that was needed, because it was her prescription, and he had stolen it; his own prints would be found overlying hers. But suicides, especially considerate ones who take care to remove the act from sight and hearing of their wives, almost invariably leave notes behind them. It was a poor light here for writing, even now that his eyes were accustomed to it, and found so much radiance within the dark; but if the results were readable, that was all that mattered.
He had a small diary in his pocket, and a propelling pencil, a cheap one his mother had given him while he was still at school, and which had outlived many subsequent and more expensive ones. He wished there had been time to make things up with his family, they would feel badly about it, and he did not want any untidy ends of grief left behind to strangle other people; but it was late for wishing now, and it could not be helped. He poised the pencil, and found himself momentarily without words. It had to be brief, it had to look sufficiently like his hand, and the matter of it had to convince the authorities; but more than that, it had to say something to Suspiria, too. What would be the good of accepting this way out at her hands, if he left another ghost to trouble her? No, he had not only to go cleanly away from her of his own indestructible will, but to take Theo’s shadow away with him. Who had a better right?
He wrote: ‘I didn’t want my wife to be the one to find me. Give her my love, and ask her to forgive me.’
That was all. Suicides do not explain, or justify themselves, they leave the world with some tired utterance which means far more to them than to those who will puzzle over their death when they are gone. He thought it was enough; he was sure she would understand it. He put the book back into his inside pocket, and stretched out his legs before him, leaning back warmly into the straw. Now he was ready, he almost wished that sleep would hurry to take him. And yet the world opened about him in the soft and lambent night with an invincible beauty.
Fear is the only real violation. He was not afraid to love life, now that he was leaving it. He was not afraid to feel its enchantment tightening upon him, and to open his heart to a passion of conflicting gratitude and regret. What he had done he had done with his eyes open, not out of temper, or despair, or arrogant self-sacrifice, but because it was the only way he could see of cutting them both loose from an untenable situation. He had never ceased to want life, he wanted it now, but if they could not remain together without mutual destruction, nor separate without as inevitable an end, it was true economy that one of them should make an exit by this single infallible door, and he could not bear that the issue should be complicated by arguing who should go and who should stay. She had more to give the world than he had; and she had taken the decision for both of them, and he endorsed her judgment. They would both abide by it.
He would have liked a cigarette, but was not sure that he might not fall asleep too soon, and let it fall still burning into the straw, so he did not light one. It was growing cold; he shivered a little, and arched his shoulders strongly back into the shelter of the stack, drawing up his knees and locking his arms round them. It was not important, he would not feel the cold for very long. Already he seemed to feel a weight upon his eyes, a soft, muffling weight that confused his vision, and made the undulations of the meadow rock gently before him like the waves of a calm sea.
You have to know what you are, and abide by what you are – every one of you, Theo and Suspiria no less than Dennis Forbes. He found himself believing in a judgment, a sort of supernatural justice which corrected all faulty balances, all untrue proportions, for whose who had the courage and the honesty to know what they were, and answer for it. He was not paying for Theo’s life with his, he was adjusting an exquisite equilibrium which had been throw
n out of gear. If there was no other way, this way would do. He had no complaint to make.
He sat and watched the night, and his mind drifted into a kind of spacious peace, through which the memory of Suspiria moved poignantly, a restored Suspiria, intact and full of the virtue of her gift, creative, erect, a work of art like the best of what she made. A soft and indefinable sorrow, mute and without regrets, came over him out of the darkness, out of the May night and the spring; and the heaviness of his eyelids burdened him like the weight of the world. There was a dryness in his mouth and throat, a minor discomfort which somehow displeased him acutely. He was slipping low out of the world, sinking down into a drowsy confusion of mind where everything had grown shadowy. He knew that he was dying, but the tired calm in which he lay was not shaken by the knowledge. He let his eyes close, unable to sustain the weight any longer; and instead of the cool and impervious night he saw only Suspiria’s face, and her body inclining to him out of the darkness of his senses, until all that remained of his consciousness was an aching sweetness of recollection, an ebbing anguish of longing.
His hands relaxed from about his knees, and lay open in the straw. A breath of wind came stirring across the field, rousing in the cold of the deepening night, and went shuddering through the trees over his head, over the sheltered roof of Little Worth; but it came too late for him to hear it, for sleep had already come with a remarkable stealth and gentleness, and taken him.
3
He awoke to an instant discomfort of cold and cramp, staring round him wildly at a dove-grey world of pre-dawn, and a thinly clouded sky, and the lurching downward run of the field before his face. For a moment he was filled with blind panic, recognising nothing, remembering nothing, and the tingling stiffness of his body, the pain of his coldness, seemed to him the attack of a hostile and alarming world never yet known to him.
