“Very much,” Basil said, crushing her to him, “but not just now.”
“You don’t have to, you know,” Honey said, removing her mouth from his. “I understand – about Elisabeth.”
“Damn Elisabeth!” Basil shouted. “And damn the whisky and the rain and most of all damn, damn, damn myself.” He picked Honey up in his arms and strode with her to the bed, turning off the radio on the way.
“And a damned good job, too.” Arthur Dexter, sitting up in bed in the upstairs flat, said. He was referring to the sudden quiet. “Making a row like that on a Sunday morning!”
Fourteen
Basil, lying in bed beside Honey, thought, I haven’t told her half. I have told her about Elisabeth working in the baby-shop and me trying to write and then my job with her uncle and how he chucked me out, but I haven’t told her how it really was with me and Elisabeth. I haven’t told her why it was that Elisabeth, darling Elisabeth who was willing to stick anything, finally left. He glanced at Honey who had fallen asleep, her customary happy smile still on her lips, her face almost buried by the cloud of dark hair which smothered the pillow and flowed onto his shoulder. Elisabeth had been right, of course, but that same devil that egged him on to try to write at the expense of earning a living had made him, time after time, after time, hurt and humiliate her. He thought of the last months in the flat. Each night as it grew dark Elisabeth had let herself in with her key, laden usually with the shopping she had collected on the way home. At one time, in the early days, she had crept up behind him as he sat at the typewriter and putting her arms round his neck and her cheek against his, whispered words of love. That had stopped a long time ago though, together with the laughing and the joking and the hundred and one silly things they had shared together. Recently she had only come in, moving quietly as she always did, but with the quietness of defeat, and tired and laden she would go straight into the kitchen to dump her parcels, then into the bedroom and the bathroom to wash off the dirt of the day’s work and only then into the little study where he worked, to glance over his shoulder at the blank paper in the typewriter or the crumpled pages hurled in desperation to the floor. And in self-defence he’d say, “Well, why don’t you say it straight out? I’m no bloody good and you should never have married me.” And, hurt, she’d disappear into the kitchen to get the supper. Except sometimes when she’d answer back that they had loved each other once and why couldn’t he face up to his responsibilities like other men? Then he’d say how misunderstood he was and she, goaded, would say she was fed up with keeping him, and he would say then why didn’t she get out, and the words would fly back and forth more vituperative and more hurtful as the argument progressed, until finally it was he who got out, slamming the door behind him and leaving his wife to sob while he found solace in as many double whiskies as he could afford which usually wasn’t very many. And when he came back he’d sit at the typewriter again, and at midnight or often later Elisabeth, bearing the olive branch, would come to the door in her dressing-gown and say very softly, “Basil, come to bed now”, in such a way there could be no doubt she still loved him and wanted him and he, not looking at her would say, “Later”, and without looking round know she had gone, and he would be left to sublimate himself in the work that never materialised. When he finally did go to bed Elisabeth would be asleep, only sometimes sobbing occasionally as she slept. And by the morning, refreshed, he would feel remorse and overwhelming love for what he was slowly killing and stretch out his arms for her but she with red-rimmed eyes would say, “Not now, Basil, I have to go to work”, and so she had, and the whole dreary day would start again. And all the time there was the demon that was holding him back for the greatness he felt he must achieve so that he was unable to give himself to any job of work, unable to give himself even to his wife except on rare occasions, as if they had been married thirty years instead of three. Perhaps had he not known what he was doing it would not have been so bad. But with every fibre of his being he knew that he was, day by day and night by night, destroying that which he loved most. And he could not stop himself. He stood and watched the murder, so that his hands would remain clean for a task that in ten years he had not been able to begin. Whitecliffs had seemed a chance. He believed that by taking it he would at last give birth to what had been growing inside him for so long. That the period of gestation would be over; that by his achievement he would win Elisabeth back. All he had done was to prove faithless to a marriage he had himself wrecked, and achieve precisely nothing. Looking at Honey beside him, he knew that he had only ravelled more tightly the tangle into which he had got himself. He had sought from her the solace Elisabeth had longed to give him. He wished he knew what had made him so cussed, and why he loved what he did not love and turned his back on that which he would die for.
It was still raining. He could hear it hissing through the trees. He got up and dressed and, smiling at Honey who still slept as though she had not a care in the world, went back to his own flat.
He started on his notebooks. He ripped the pages, some covered with his writing, out of the covers, and tore them into small pieces. It was satisfying. When he had finished he turned his attention to his papers: flimsy quarto sheets, some with notes, some with doodles, some with chapter headings and nothing more, received the same ruthless treatment. When he had finished, the bin in the kitchen was full and his dressing-table clear. He put the lid on the typewriter, snapped the hasps and, lifting it down from the dressing-table, took it into the hall where he stowed it in the cupboard beside the electricity meter. When there was no trace any more that he was a writer, or rather a would-be one, he sat down on the bed. He felt lost, desolate, worse even than when Elisabeth had left. There was an emptiness in himself, as well as in the flat, that seemed unbearable. In an hour he had thrown away the burden he had carried for ten years. The hollow it left was intolerable. I have something to say, he thought, and I cannot say it. Soon something must break. Not bothering to put on his coat, he left the flat in its unaccustomed tidiness and walked out into the rain.
On the promenade, now soaking wet, he watched the sea, angry, collect up in grey, foamy waves and hurl itself against the concrete, swirling the top with water which slowly ran back into the ocean. It had been his own fault as everything had been his own fault. On that last night he had been at his typewriter as usual when Elisabeth, going to bed, had come into the room and faced him.
“I can’t go on like this, Basil,” she’d said. “I don’t think you love me any more.” Her face was white and the violet eyes looked large. She waited for him to speak. When he said nothing she said: “Well, do you? I think it’s time we had the truth.” Inside himself he had been weeping with love for her. He had said nothing, aware of his own failure; had not been man enough to say anything. She had gone to bed. Next day, towards evening he had sat as usual waiting for the sound of her key in the door. It hadn’t come. By the time it was dark he knew it would not, and that he had only himself to blame. He stepped nearer the edge of the promenade and looked down into the gloomy depths of the sea whose surface was dimpled by the rain. If I took one step more, he thought, all my damned worries would be ended, but I’m not even man enough for that.
“Not contemplating suicide by any chance?” a voice said.
Basil turned round, his shoes squelching in the water. Doctor Gurney, well wrapped up in raincoat and cap, was watching him, his hands deep in his pockets, his head bowed against the rain and the spray.
“Why should I be?” he said.
“Well, for one thing you’re absolutely soaked through; you’ve no coat and you must have known it was raining. And for another thing I know you sensitive plants.”
They stepped back as a large wave sloshed towards them.
“How do you mean?” Basil asked against the wind, and aware now of the wet blowing into his face.
“The frustrations and indecisions and the sense of inadequacy and the moodiness and the fits of depression…it’s a common syndro
me. Do you mind if we walk along?”
Basil fell into step beside him. “You mean other people feel the same?”
“We’re none of us unique,” Doctor Gurney said. “We all fit roughly into one category or another. I’ve watched you since we’ve been down here. I didn’t think you were very happy.”
“Have you a cure?”
Doctor Gurney put his arm round Basil’s shoulders. “Listen, old boy, I’m not down here in my professional capacity. Why don’t you pull yourself together, change into some dry clothes and come and have a drink before lunch? There’s a nice little road-house up towards Canterbury.”
“What a splendid idea!” Basil said, and they walked towards the flats.
The ‘Landscape’, a picturesque old house with a pleasant, timbered bar, stood amongst trees set back from the main London Road. The car park was full, and inside the coat racks laden with raincoats and hats. In the bar one could forget that it was raining; forget that it was August and should not have been raining; forget everything in the warmth and the peace of a Sunday morning drink. There was not very much noise, only a gentle hum of conversation and a slowness and unhurriedness one did not find in London bars, and the smell of beer, and sometimes one caught the drift of roast beef cooking as a door was opened, and what might have been Yorkshire pudding and probably was. The landlord, tall and with a handlebar moustache, said, “What will it be, gentlemen?” as Basil and Doctor Gurney pushed their way to the bar, and he stood as though he had all the time in the world.
They ordered, and with their drinks turned to find somewhere to sit. At a table in the corner, next to the window with its leaded lights looking onto the dripping garden, they found Arthur Dexter and Howard.
“Bloody weather for August,” Basil said to Howard. “How did you get here?”
“It is a little inclement,” Howard said. “Mr Dexter found his Sunday morning mood disturbed by Honey’s radio, and he asked if I wanted to come for a drive. I’d heard about this place. It’s owned by a man I once defended. He hasn’t recognised me yet. I was interested to see what it was like.”
Basil, grinning as he thought of Honey’s radio, found his mood lighten suddenly. He pulled his chair in. “Well,” he said, “we’re almost back where we were when we first met in Fleet Street. Only Doctor Gurney wasn’t with us, and now we’re all off our treadmills.”
Arthur said: “It’s peaceful. On Sunday morning at home I’d be drinking, too, but not like this. Not with people I want to drink with. I’d be at home all dressed up as carefully in my casual clothes as I would be in my City ones during the week, and the house would be tidy and I’d be making polite conversation to people Vera thought I ought to make polite conversation to, either at my home or theirs. Do you know,” he leaned towards Doctor Gurney, “for the first time in years I’ve been sleeping without my tablets, and I’ve been dreaming, too: I suppose you’ll laugh, but not about mortgages and properties and toys and imports and exports, and a hundred and one other things I’d been worrying about during the day, but about children! Children playing on the beach and paddling in the water. And when I wake up in the morning I feel as if I’ve slept and not as if I’d been pacing up and down all night. What about you?” he said to Basil. “After all it was more or less your idea.”
Basil said, “Perhaps it wasn’t such a clever idea after all. I’m beginning to think that there is no treadmill except in our imagination. That it’s ourselves we’re trying to run away from, and there is, when you come to try it, no escape, however hard, however fast you run.”
“Talking of treadmills,” Howard said, putting his glass down on the polished oak table, “there’s a story of a Judge, in the days when in prisons there actually were treadmills, who was being taken round a prison on a tour of inspection by the Governor. The Judge, when he saw the prisoners turning the wheel step after step after step, asked if he might be allowed to get on. He wanted to know how the punishment felt to which he committed those who came up before him. The Governor asked the prisoners to stop their weary task and the Judge, an elderly man, took his place. After one or two turns of the mill, with the learned Judge doing his share of the work, the Governor was called away. The Judge, having had enough, asked the prisoners to stop the wheel so that he might get off. To the prisoners it was a chance to retaliate for the sentences that had been meted out to them. They had no intention of stopping, and the poor old Judge had no choice but to tread step after step after the others. By the time the Governor remembered the old boy he was in a state of collapse. They say it actually happened. And then there was the story about the Judge who, or so the story goes…”
Doctor Gurney wasn’t listening. Arthur Dexter would ask him next, he was sure. Ask him if he was pleased he had come to Whitecliffs, happy to be away from his practice. They had come, of course, in the first place for Jonathan, whose health had been much improved by the sea air. Had it not been that he was worried about him he would never have left his practice. It had been strange at first for Mary and himself. Used to listening in a state of constant tension for the first ringing of the telephone, they had been unable to believe in its uncanny silence. At night they had for the first few weeks still slept in a state of semi-tension, sure of being disturbed. Only in the last few weeks had they allowed themselves to sleep deeply, and marvelled in the morning that no one had rung, to be prescribed two aspirins, to be visited or to be advised. No one had rung at all, and neither had they during the day. It had been difficult to get used to. No coughs, no colds, no throats, no abdomens, no backs; no injuries, no illnesses, no surgical interventions, no going out at night, suit hurriedly over pyjamas; no histories, no diagnoses; no palliatives, no treatment; no sedatives, no tranquillisers, no antibiotics, no steroids. Only his wife and his family and the sea and the beach, and at the café his not very arduous task of looking after the till. At mealtimes he still bolted with a sense of urgency whatever was put in front of him, but although he still ate quickly his mind was no longer on the gall bladder or the middle ear infection he had to see, and he noticed what he ate. Occasionally he would worry if the locum he had left in charge would recognise Mrs Beechley’s attacks of pancreatitis, manage to talk young Toby Burns round when he started to get depressed, watch the small babies carefully for ears and appendices, deal firmly with Mrs Barbary whose frequent illnesses existed only in her mind. He had told Arthur Dexter that there was nothing of a vocation about his practice of medicine, that he did it, as he might do any job, because by it he earned his living. He was watching himself carefully to see if this was in fact true. If it was there was no reason why he should not get some other job, give up medicine and follow some less nerve-racking occupation where he could be sure of a night’s sleep and not wear himself out before he was fifty. He had not yet convinced himself. At the till in the café he watched the people pass, his eyes wandering over their trays; two teas, one ham sandwich, three chocolate wafers…two-and-seven…unilateral exophthalmos, looks a little as if she has a goitre…two lemon squash a shilling, old thymectomy there…one Bovril fourpence…she ought to get rid of that pigmented mole. Perhaps it was just habit. One couldn’t lose the training of years in a few weeks. Besides, such observations passed the time away: the time which seemed too slow in passing because there were no surgeries to do, no homes to visit, no sick to treat and well to comfort.
Howard was saying: “…I must say I find it extremely pleasant down here, quite amusing even. If only one hadn’t to scratch a living somehow…”
“A living, yes,” Arthur said. “I’ve been scratching for too much. Far too much.”
“Some people scratch and scratch just as hard as any of us and get nothing for it,” Doctor Gurney said, thinking of some of the patients who came to him sick with despair and overwork, but still unable to make ends meet.
“We’re back to the old treadmill again,” Basil said. “How about another drink?”
“You’ve been very quiet about all this, Doctor,” Arthur said. “
A bit of a dark horse. Are you happy at your cash register, or would you rather be incising boils or doing some of the other horrid things you usually do all day?”
“I reserve my judgement,” Doctor Gurney said. “I’m not sure that I hadn’t become fonder than I’d imagined of my own particular treadmill. Not that I’m not grateful,” he said to Arthur, “of the opportunity you gave me to get off. It’s nice in a way to stand back and watch the wheel going round and round as it did before without any effort from yourself. I don’t know if we can get away with it, though. If we’ve been given a part in this play, perhaps we have to play it.”
“Or is it an endless hurrying…” Howard said.
“Shut up, there’s a good chap,” Basil said, standing up. “Let’s just drink and be merry for once without analysing every bloody thing we do. There’s no reason to suppose that we’re not here for our own good. Same again all round?”
Fifteen
By Wednesday the weather, which had cheated many of their summer holiday since Sunday, seemed to have taken pity on those on whom it had rained, blown and chilled for three days. An innocent sun, as though it had never been away, shone from a clear sky, drying the beach, the soaked huts and the promenade and like a magnet drew parents and frustrated children from hotel and boarding-house in their hundreds.
In ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ they were all busy. Arthur, anxious to compensate for the meagre takings of the past few days, was behind them all. “More sandwiches,” he said, the sun was going to shine all day. “You’ll need all those apples today, Basil. Honey, help him put the sticks in, there’s a good girl.” The customers were already arriving for the first cups of tea and coffee. “Good morning, madam, Good morning, sir,” Arthur said from behind the counter. “Take a tray, if you please. What a splendid day! Two teas? With pleasure, with or without?” And at the fancy-goods: “You’ve broken your bucket? Victor, there’s a small girl here who says the handle’s come off her bucket. See what you can do for her, will you? One Bovril, madam, and have we some dry bread? We can do better than that, dear. Honey, bring out one of those scones from yesterday from the kitchen, will you, dear? Not at all, madam, it’s a pleasure. Louise, this gentleman would like a tray for six for the beach. Yes, sir, ten shillings deposit which you get back when you return your tray to this window. You’ve only half-a-crown in your shorts pocket? All right, sir, you’ve an honest face. Doctor Gurney, the gentleman will leave two-and-six deposit; give him a disc, will you.”
We All Fall Down Page 14
