The Mass had only one performance. It was in St. John’s, Smith Square, with the Britten singers and a little orchestra Guy had scratched together from his students. She had formed the resolution to tell him about Robert. They would slip away after the concert, to dinner at the Golden Cornet where they had celebrated their little successes—she her novels, and he the two quartets from his early days. He would know that she was offering her life to him, making her confession so as to give him the right to choose. And the Mass would cast its benign light over their loving kindness, as first she, then he, sought true forgiveness from each other.
But when, in the all but empty concert hall that had once been a church, the choir faltered through those antiquated harmonies, and Guy’s sad face froze over in despair, she abruptly changed her mind. Mary was not musical. But she heard how limp and flat and easy were the notes dolled up by the choir. And she sensed the insincerity of the composer, who was papering over his lack of faith with these pious clichés. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi—the lovely words, which contain within themselves the whole mystery of the Christian religion, its power both to trouble and to soothe, to imbue the soul with humility and gratitude, to capture in one rhythmic phrase the astonishing truth of our redemption—these words, in Guy’s setting, were chanted like an advertising jingle over white chords on harp and vibes and glockenspiel, the vibraphone being the only concession that he made to contemporary fashions. And yes, precisely because he made so few concessions, the music had lost its sense. It spoke neither to our world nor to the world from which it borrowed its worn-out gestures. It was pale and insubstantial as a ghost, and its bloodless sounds were both ridiculous and chilling in their emptiness. Mary left the church at his side in silence. They walked through winter streets, while she sought in vain for words to console him.
“It was a confession, of course. A confession to you. The music said it all—how childish and empty and self-deluded. O.K., it was a notch better than ‘Kumbaya, My Lord,’ and it was in a minor key. But it shouldn’t have been in any key. Keys are chains. The worst thing about it was that it brought me face to face with the truth. Who wants to be face to face with anything, let alone the truth? I realized that music can be as deceitful as any other art—as deceitful as those sentimental films of Piero’s.”
Yes, that was when it really happened. That was the moment when he had changed, the moment when she had become his enemy. He ceased then to share his griefs, or even to confess to them, opting instead for an insolent contempt towards her, and a flaunting of his carefully nurtured vices. One by one the blows rained down on him, and he received them all with an asinine cheerfulness that was appalling to behold. Yet in everything he depended on her; she was the source of guilt, without which he could not believe in his creative powers; and she produced food, drink, and shelter, which he snatched from her angrily, lest the thought should arise in him of his shameful sponging.
He was coughing again, bent forward in the armchair, his left hand on his chest. Her eyes rested for a moment on the damask curtains, gathered into the casement and softly glowing in the light from outside. Her father, in his bereavement, had kept them closed for two years. The room was to keep vigil over Mummy’s things, until the thought of her absence could be borne. And when he died, Mary came home from Italy, and the curtains were opened. That was the first change. The second was Guy, who had broken and abused Mummy’s furniture, and filled the room with his drink and his anger and his noise. The Durbridge ghosts had fled his presence, and now she too was fleeing. Yet this usurper could not survive alone, and in leaving him she was condemning him. He gasped and half turned in her direction.
“I never got to the bottom of this religion thing. I was embarrassed and bewildered at first, when I saw you praying. After all, you were the normal sixties product; you had slept around, indulged yourself, taken no interest whatsoever in the poor in spirit and the pure in heart. You were as greedily into me as you had been into Piero, and no fasting or penitence was on the menu that I could see. But you wanted me to believe, and I got the knack of pretending, waiting for the reason why.”
It was love that made her believe—love for Guy, and also the love of home and parents and childhood, and the deep down need to return to the place where wounds could be tended and fears overcome. He wrecked that place, like a rampaging soldier, and raped and strangled the loving child in her. She had turned to Robert as one hardened adult turns to another, without hope or faith or charity, but only desire. Had she told Guy of the affair when she intended, she could have relinquished it; there would have been hope of a kind, faith of a kind, and the charity they deeply needed. But it was the Mass that stood between them. Not Guy’s music only, but the holy words that he abused. Only if they had gone down on their knees in mutual penitence could their love have been saved. But the Mass forbad them. It was spoken into regions from which their souls had fled.
And because she had not confessed her fault, the visits to Robert continued. She would enter his office in the city, in the forlorn and silent hour when the secretaries had left for the suburbs, and cast her body like a ransom on the woollen carpet. They exchanged few words, and she was grateful for this, for Robert thought and spoke accountancy, and she dreaded the moment when he might weigh up the cost. Robert had no understanding of art and literature, no time for religious hesitations, no ability to perceive the quiet residue of pastness that she looked for everywhere, like one gathering flowers in a building-site. But he admired Mary. His desire was a tribute to her strangeness; she was for him an icon of the spiritual life, of all the things that were impassably remote from his concerns, but which mattered in ways that he could only guess. He would rise from the floor bearing on his square-jawed face an expression of boyish tenderness, as incongruous as a poem on the lips of a bear. It wanted only a moment’s thought for his desire to crystallize as love, for the vast bullying resources of his ego to lean towards absolute possession, and for the cost of her remoteness to become unbearable. Robert was successful because he was ruthless and would tolerate no expenditure that did not lead to profit. She fled from his presence before his investor’s instincts could be aroused. For he could never be anything to her beyond these moments of eager pleasure in the city stratosphere, where they floated in a dream, buoyed aloft on the unreal clouds of commerce. Even the thought of meeting Robert elsewhere, of encountering him on terra firma, of knowing his earthly presence as woman knows the reality of man, was abhorrent to her. And thinking of this, she felt a wave of revulsion at her betrayal—a betrayal not of Guy only, but of herself.
“I heard you packing, by the way. Sounds as though you plan to take some of the books. Don’t go to any unnecessary trouble. I’ll be out of here in a fortnight, and you can return, enjoy your position as the heir to the house of Durbridge. It would do me good to live elsewhere. Shit!”
He spluttered again, this time so violently that the glass fell from his hand on to the carpet. She stepped forward, then regretted her instinct and stood still. There was a curious sound upstairs—a faint padding of slippered feet, and a mumbled monologue, as though some mad old person were patrolling one of the bedrooms. Often in recent days, she had heard this sound. She put it down to her indecision. She had read of a woman who, having made up her mind to live apart from her husband, had found herself impeded by imaginary people. They would stop her in the street, give advice on irrelevant subjects and detain her with trivia. She had encountered them at home, sitting in familiar chairs and addressing the air with songs and news stories and shopping lists. And when one morning she awoke to discover that her intentions had changed, and that it was no longer on the cards to leave her husband, the visitors vanished, their mission achieved.
The sound persisted. It was no longer a faint shuffling in a bedroom, but a definite footstep on the landing, as though the hermit of those upper regions had been moved to investigate their grief. She thought of the house and its dead and felt a chill. Perhaps she was going mad. Per
haps nothing that she heard or saw or did was really real. If only Guy would love and protect her: it was all she asked for, although she could not bring herself to ask. Suddenly a voice whispered.
“Mary.”
She turned and looked into the stairwell. A light shone from her bedroom door, and the Chinese vase which stood on the landing table glittered with red and gold flames. The footsteps had ceased. Nothing moved. Silence. She shuddered and turned back to Guy.
“Mary.”
What was it that startled her? The tenderness, the need for her, the promise of love, how strange they sounded in this room, where love had died. Who was it, reaching out to her in this dark abyss? She thought of her father—a frail, grey, broken man, a magenta dressing-gown pulled tight around his crumbling body, his lips thin, sad and stoical beneath the military moustache. He had been her refuge from the storms of childhood, and his rare smiles were for her. Invalided out of the army, he had spent his days at his desk, composing appeals to people in high places, who wrote back out of respect for the name of Durbridge, but with words that could not console. Now he was back, speaking to her in the soft and all-forgiving voice that he reserved exclusively for her.
“Mary.”
No. It was not her father’s voice. Yet it was spoken into her heart and trembled with concern for her. Guy’s voice too had trembled, for the year or two when they lived in this house as sovereigns, bowing and retreating at the untouchable majesty of love. They had looked on each other with awe. She hesitated to enter the room where he sat, so full was it of his presence. Every gesture was an offering, and they laid out their words as gifts. What had happened was not Guy’s fault but hers. It was she who, on that fateful day which for some reason she only now remembered, had doubted the reality of their love. It was she who, closing her notebook for the morning, with the thousand precious words completed and stored, had come down to where he sat, and condemned his willed sterility. How queer and grey and anxious was his face, as he raised it from the desk. He had asked her what she meant, and all of a sudden and without warning, a torrent of grievances rose within her and spilled over into words. He was not a husband to her, scarcely a lover, so preoccupied was he with his affairs, or lack of them. He had no concern for her work, her hopes, her loneliness, even her daily survival. O.K. he knew how to cook. But when did he sit down and converse with her? When did he share the anxiety that consumed and destroyed him? Foolishly, she mentioned their religion, suggested counselling, a visit to Rory Backhouse, the Anglican monk who practised his own kind of brow-soothing therapy in the resurrected monastery of Purfield, and who had been an army friend of her father’s.
“Do you think that will work?” he cried. “Do you really think that will work on me, a person with a brain and a smattering of scientific knowledge? Am I likely to sit with arms folded and eyes closed while some phony old Etonian puts his hands on my head and mumbles, and believe that he is purging me of my devils? Anyway, I like my devils. They are mine, made in my own image. In a certain manner, they’re all I’ve got.”
At once he took her hand and begged forgiveness, promised to mend his ways, promised even to visit Brother Rory. But she could not forgive him. From his beseeching looks that day she turned in silence.
Suddenly the room was plunged into darkness. She shrank against the wall. A few shards of light gathered in the window, and Guy’s head was etched against them. The street-lamp flickered, cast a quick shaft of yellow on the carpet, and went out again.
“Mary.”
The one who spoke her name had need of darkness. He was the god of terrors, not the god in whom she once believed, but a god who lived inside her like a worm. He knew her faults and conspired to double them. He led her into danger and vanished when she turned for help. There was no weapon that could vanquish him, save steadfast love: the love that she had thrown away. Silence: as though the house were holding its breath. Mary was on all fours, crawling toward him. How good he had been to her; how gentle and forgiving as he tended her wounds. Never until today had he sneered at Piero, though God knows Piero deserved it. Instead, he had lifted her carefully like some rare plant from the swamp in which she had fallen, and shaken her roots free of the slime. It was he who must forgive her—now, this instant, before the god prevented her.
“Mary.”
The voice was in the room now, seeking her out, owning the darkness. She was sweating as she crawled along the carpet; the smell of dust and shoes tickled her nostrils. If she could reach him, she was safe. She wondered why he did not speak. Was he so drunk that he noticed nothing, not even the darkness? She must hold his hand.
“Mary.”
She reached the chair, and fumbled along the arm in search of his hand. She knew now that it was Guy who spoke, that the pretence was over for him as it was for her. She took his hand and pulled it away from the chest. It fell heavily towards her. She was surprised by its weight.
“Guy,” she said. “Forgive me. I want to stay with you. Always.”
He did not move, nor did he respond to the pressure of her fingers. His hand lay in hers like a fruit dropped from the bough. The fingers were stiff crops of cartilage, which sprang back against her as she squeezed them. She replaced the hand across his body, and again she was surprised by the weight of it. As she touched the dishevelled cardigan a sadness came over her. Guy’s shabbiness was after all the signal of his need. She let her hand rest for a moment on his chest and looked up at his face, grey and barely visible.
The eyes were closed, and on the craggy cheeks two tears were shining. She rose on her knees, to study his features in their sudden repose. And an image came into her mind of the view from the street of these silent figures, poised in the act of repossession, coming home to each other, weary, loving, reconciled.
From outside there is no part of human life that is not mysterious, as a closed warehouse in a suburb is mysterious after dark, even to those who work there. Most mysterious of all is love: not the love that shows itself in the disco or on the park bench, but the love that precisely does not show itself, being glimpsed through a window, or implied when a curtain is drawn. And of all these secret loves, none is more mysterious than that which is most common—the love of the family from which strangers are shut out. This is where God shows himself, at the place where human beings hide. In her imagination, she saw herself and Guy frozen into a religious icon, all their strife redeemed. And suddenly, easily, her faith returned. She could not frame it in words. But it was real—as real as the memory of their country church, where a chancel light lay in pools about them as they prayed.
“Oh Guy,” she said.
But his eyes did not open. Upstairs she heard a door softly close, as though someone were returning to his room. And by the dead body of the man who would not marry her, she knelt in prayer.
Sarah
SHE WAS STANDING OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM in which he had finished lecturing on the Holy Sonnets of Donne: a girl of no special beauty, but with a fresh, serious expression in her grey eyes, and an earnest upturned face that seemed to ask for instruction.
“Are you waiting for me?” he asked.
She nodded, and fell in step beside him, like a dog. Her feet were cased in leather hiking boots, and she wore black tights beneath a sober skirt of blue cotton. A kit-bag swung from her shoulder, and she held its strap with her right hand as she walked.
Haldane College was built in the nineteen thirties, with long corridors and glass-panelled doors of varnished pine. To reach Harold Strickland’s office, it was necessary to descend two flights of steps on which a continuous crowd of students flooded to and from the classrooms. Many of them stared at Harold; some gave a distant greeting. He tried to make it appear as though the girl who followed at his heels had nothing to do with him. He neither spoke to her as they descended nor looked in her direction. But he was conscious of her eyes and of the step that she matched to his exactly.
“This is where I work,” he said.
It was imp
ossible to enter the room in any elegant or welcoming manner, since the door was kept shut by a fire-hinge, and had to be held ajar with one foot while quickly sliding the other forward. The operation was made doubly difficult by the books that Harold carried in his arms, and by the necessity to prop the door open as he passed beyond it, so that the girl too could slide through. The effect of their two bodies wriggling together into the private space beyond was like an illicit intimacy. Standing at last in the space of the office, he felt compromised before her. Yet he had often entered here with others and felt no such thing. There was something in the look that she gave him, from her wide-open unblinking eyes, that unnerved him.
“What can I do for you?” he said at last.
“Can I sit down?”
“Please do.”
He brought up a chair from the wall, and placed it so that she could face him across the desk. But she retreated to the wall and sat against it in another chair. Her hair was close-cropped, and she swept her hand across it with a boyish gesture.
“I don’t think you are one of my students.”
“No. Though I was hoping…I…”
“It is probably too late to take the course.”
“I was hoping...”
“Though if you want to sit in, I’ve no objection.”
“I was hoping you would prove that I exist.”
Souls in the Twilight Page 6
