Souls in the Twilight

by Roger Scruton

  “I think we should leave,” Harold said at last. “Only Sarah: why are you here?”

  The girl looked up. Large, globular tears—as ingenuous and graceless as everything else about her—detached themselves from her eyelids and made their way across her face.

  “It’s where you would have wanted,” she said and added, after a pause, “you had better go. You have a whole nother life. I can look after them.”

  “Forgive me Sarah,” he whispered.

  “There’s nothing to forgive and no one’s to blame because I did everything on my own.”

  Harold turned quickly and went through the door. The young militiaman watched him with impassive features and then got up to follow. For a moment everything was still, the rifle-shattered silence briefly healed. Judy stood in the darkened room, among those collapsed old people, her eyes fixed on the broken doll in the chair before her, her hope and her love cascading into the bottomless hollow that had opened within her. And she began to laugh, soundlessly at first, but soon with a shaking, sobbing, convulsive howl that seemed to mock the suffering around her and condemn her as an alien thing.

  “Sorry,” said the girl. “That sounds stupid because no one’s to blame. I’m OK here. You should go.”

  Judy looked at her, full of hatred, not for the girl, whose undistinguished innocence made hatred as impossible as love, but for herself, for Harold, and for the poisonous fantasy which they had concocted between them and honoured with the name of love. Her laughter had subsided to a rattle of anger, but words seemed ridiculous in the face of the intolerable fact. She turned to go, shaking, aiming beyond the door, beyond the war-torn madness of the streets outside, beyond Lebanon and Harold, beyond all that she had planned and hoped and needed, to a life alone.

  At the door, she paused. Something, she knew, should be said, something that would detach this scene from herself and cast it into the abyss. She forced the words between her teeth.

  “Don’t waste your life for his sake.”

  The remark was presumptuous: she knew nothing of Sarah’s story, other than the catastrophe of loving Harold. But there seemed no other way to hurt the girl, who had taken all her hope away. In a second she must face him; in a second all the sordid, lying excuses would be handed to her, a plate of shit on a silver tray. She held back beneath the lintel, with the hot sun muzzling her shoulder.

  “Tell him that I will write and you can read it too what happened when I can manage it. With my other arm I mean.”

  And Judy, who had no tears, envied the ungainly globes that sloped across those cheeks to nowhere.

  Outside she began to run, Harold shouting to her from the jeep, the militiaman running after her and seizing the canvas sleeve of her jacket.

  “La!La! Khatir huna!”

  “He’s telling you it’s dangerous. Get in!”

  She found herself beside him in the front seat as they sped along the Green Line. She pressed against the window and stared at the fleeing barricades. Above them, the bullets spent themselves in impotent slaps and howls. She could not look at him, could not speak to him, and would have stopped her ears against his vile confessions had her hands not been pressed against the dashboard.

  “I understand what you feel,” he said. “But it is over now, and Sarah meant nothing.”

  “That makes it worse,” was all she said.

  “What was it that I loved in Judy? O.K. “Loved” is the wrong word. What I felt for her was more than love, and also less than love. Everything about her was graceful, orderly, inherited. She had breeding, discretion, an ability to live outside the moment. She was like a promontory extended from the past over the sea of changes. I wanted to anchor myself to her, to come home to her, to be at peace with her. Even her occasional waywardness had authority for me: it was an ancestral quality, the virtue of her family of eccentrics. What in anyone else would be a sign of flux and instability, in her, was the mark of firmness. She lived above the world’s opinion, needing no one’s endorsement but her own. And how English she was—is, I should say, since I cannot think of her even now, except as an English lady, upright and dignified among Chippendale chairs and marquetry cabinets, and then busying herself about her studies, and on the verge of both a Ph.D. and a published monograph until the moment it ended between us. She justified me by believing in my projects. Call them quixotic if you like—I would be the first to admit the charge. But how are we, how am I, supposed to live, when everything around us is decaying? Should we do nothing? Invest our hopes in some illusion, and pursue utopias that endanger everything we have? Judy understood the point of me—she understood that a hopeless endeavour ceases to be hopeless when pursued with faith and charity. The old Pauline virtues grow together, and hope comes in the midst of despair, in the very fact of despair.

  “But I failed her. She wanted all of me, even the part that was unsafe to give. I did not need Sarah. I was not even flattered by this blind devotion. But her youth spoke to my youth; she was the mirror in which I could visit my transgressions. She was time off from responsibility. Yes, and let’s be frank about this, she was sex—clean, youthful, eager sex, but sex that was out of bounds, locked away and stolen. Through Sarah, I could be one step ahead of my sneering contemporaries, one step further down the path of the forbidden. I laughed at them in my soul, for their fond belief in my stuffiness and prudishness, as they pursued their sordid affairs in public. I had the greatest proof of my own liberation, in a love that could not be confessed to, not even to them.

  “And then I succumbed to a greater temptation. There is a deep truth in that saying of Oscar Wilde’s. I can resist anything except temptation—anything at all, for only the highest failings have ever truly appealed to me. And the appeal is irresistible. I wanted to drag this innocent love beside me into danger, to set it down in all its modern outrageousness in the middle of a religious war, among communities for whom the modern world means nothing apart from guns and bombs and horrors. To tell you the truth, I was glad when she disappeared into the church in Kafr el ‘Ain, glad when that evil zombie went in search of her, glad at the thought of her lonely death in a land of which she knew nothing. She freed me from my youthful corruption, freed me from the need to prove myself through evil, freed me at last for Judy. Of course, I felt terrible too. I knew what I had done, and knew that it would scar me forever. But the scar belonged henceforth to the past. It was a wound that would heal and never again be opened. I would never have to behave in that way again.

  “But my cover was blown. She did not die. They took her away for inspection: this curious and reckless creature, who had no words for them and could express herself only in writing. They tortured the arm which wrote until it could write no more. They assumed that this frail body harboured the will of a woman, and that rape, torture, and solitude would break that will. They assumed that like a good Muslim, she would crawl away from them to die. But she did not die.

  “It was not Sarah who avenged herself on me, since vengeance is foreign to her nature. It was God who punished me through her destruction. Even losing Judy was less of a catastrophe than the sight of that ruined body. And then, three years later, a letter came from her. It had been posted in Turkey. I have it here.

  “You probably didn’t expect me to write.

  “She always addressed me as ‘you’. Never once did she indicate that I had descended so far in the scheme of things as to possess a name.

  “You probably didn’t expect me to write. But I can manage with my left arm now—no good for Arabic but that’s as may be. If I were a believer I would pray for your happiness with that lady. Of course there was trouble between you: how could there not be? I am sorry if I caused it. But she looked real, sensible, the kind of person who forgives. And anyway, what was there to forgive? They tried to make me hate you. As they did those terrible things to me they tried to make me believe that you were the cause of them. But I was the cause, and I want you to accept this because it is the truth. Everything changed for me
when I was taken from that church. You cannot imagine what it is like, to see human beings as they are, when everything human has been removed from them and only the animal remains. No, you can imagine it, because you imagine things so well. After that, it was not possible to go back to life. I was glad that no one knew of my coming here. I have disappeared. When I look in the mirror I see nothing. There is no one there, only an absence. I have accomplished my destiny, which was to become real in loving you, and then to vanish.

  “I am writing because I don’t want you to feel bad about me. Everything happened as it should, and now that I exist only in the eye of the beholder my troubles are over. A mortar-bomb exploded in our yard, in the place where you came with her, and we had to leave, taking the survivors with us. We have a little community now, among Carmelites, North of Beirut, and we look after the old and the wounded. They have got used to the silent inklizia with the useless arm, and find the other arm quite helpful. Always I shall do what I can to bring peace to these people, since it is what you wanted. I have been reading the Sufis, who have weird notions. This letter will come to you through Turkey, since one of us goes that way. Should I give you my address? No, I think not; and in any case the post is dangerous.

  “I think only of you. Be well.”

  “Why was I not comforted by such a letter? Precisely because she did not blame me. Because she found nothing to forgive. I lit in her a flame, and then snuffed it out. And that, for her, was all.

  “It was a bad time for me. Nobody but Judy knew what had happened, and Judy had left without a word. The college made enquiries; Sarah’s father replied half-heartedly, but seemed scarcely to mind that his daughter had disappeared. I kept quiet, every day expecting the scandal to break, knowing the eagerness with which it would be greeted, and retreating from my old haunts and old friendships, so as to minimize the hurt. And then a letter came from the Principal, saying that a grave complaint had been made against me, and that I must answer to charges of professional misconduct. I was summoned to his office, and went with a sinking heart. People imagined me to be hard, angry, invulnerable. Now they were going to see how easy it was to make me suffer.

  “But the Principal knew nothing of Sarah. The letter he showed me had been signed by several colleagues in the English department, and related to an article in the Monitor in which I had argued that my colleagues had renounced academic excellence in favour of political conformity as the criterion for professional advancement. The letter might have been designed precisely to confirm my diagnosis, since it asked for my dismissal for political rather than academic reasons. Of course, my crime was described as ‘professional misconduct’—but that did not disguise its true nature, as the crime of political dissent.”

  Harold talked on more happily, now that the matter of Sarah was clear. Recounting all this, he felt a growing tumult of relief. Sarah and Judy were both pushed aside, and in their place came a warming flood of indignation. The broken trophies of his isolation were carried upon this flood and scattered along the avenues of consciousness. Every little humiliation and indignity that he had suffered was thrown up in the volcanic storm, and delivered as a proof of good intentions. When he had finished he was laughing—not with amusement, but with anticipated triumph. Only when the paroxysm turned into a fit of coughing, which in turn necessitated a trip to the kitchen, a glass of water, and a nip of whisky from the bottle that was hidden there, did he return in his thoughts to Sarah. And he saw at once that his sufferings were no more than a farce, his isolation no better than a flight from judgement. His head ached; he was tired, exasperated, fretted to a shade by guilt that could not be shriven. He sat down heavily and raised his eyes to his friend’s.

  “Have you heard from Judy at all?” he asked.

  The friend shook his head.

  “Nobody has,” he said.

  Bill

  MY FATHER WAS LOCAL MANAGER of an insurance firm, my mother a part-time secretary. I was an only child, and the three of us led a quiet middle-class life in a Tudorbethan villa south of Croydon. The houses in our street contained no books, other than those issued by the Reader’s Digest. Nobody played the piano, although most households had inherited a piano from the days before the gramophone. The walls were embellished with woodland scenes in plain frames of fumed oak; and the furnishings consisted of mock-Jacobean leftovers interspersed with the latest Swedish suites in pine, chrome steel and leatherette. In short, it was a street cut off from culture, in which blameless people led more or less guilt-free lives.

  In those days, when Edward Heath and Harold Wilson took it in turns to manage our political decline, our dormitory town was bounded by farms, and most of those who worked commuted to the southern suburbs of London. Our neighbours shared our routine: office, television, and Sunday outings in the car. There was a golf club, a Women’s Institute, a never-ending chess tournament, and a philately circle. Occasionally someone would steal another’s spouse. But such adventures, designed to render their protagonists interesting, were usually over in a month or two, when the new partner was found to be as boring as the old. There was an Anglican church, but few people attended it. Only the Catholic minority, whose church was five miles away, had much time for God, since only they believed that God had time for them. The rest of us, brought up in a vague idea that God had once checked up on the English and found them satisfactory, assumed that the relationship was best carried on at a distance. God remembered Christmas and funerals, but otherwise, like the rest of us, he kept his head down.

  I attended the local grammar school and was a diligent student of the sciences, my parents having hit on science as the avenue to success in an age of technology. I had no firm view in this or any other matter, and was content to go along with their opinion. Thanks to differential calculus, I got through puberty with neither dishonour nor distinction. My days in school were spent in a cocoon of solitude, among boys from the rougher parts of town whose interests—girls and football—were impassably remote from mine.

  Of course, there were other teenagers in our suburb. But breeding was not high on the local agenda, and the few children were modelled on their parents. The boys were designed for the city, the girls for marriage. And the fact that both designs had been made obsolete by the Sixties would be discovered only later, when the children had left the assembly line and disappeared into the metropolitan chaos. When they returned, it was in pieces. The process had already begun in my sixth-form days, and one of our local wrecks, who was awaiting re-assembly in a Tudorbethan house ten down from ours, is the subject of this tale.

  Bill Harrup was twenty-four when I met him in 1975—eight years my senior. He had been sent to Cambridge to study law, and afterwards to a London solicitors’ office, where an army colleague of his father’s was senior partner. At Cambridge, he had discovered books—poetry, history, criticism—and had attended lectures on every subject save law. He neither cared for legal work nor understood it, and would arrive so late at his desk and leave so early that his employers had been forced to sack him. An allowance from home kept him in whisky and cigarettes while he pretended to look for another job. By day, he wrote the epic poem that was to be his vindication—a modern Odyssey whose hero works his way from the alien regions of suburbia to his spiritual home in a Soho brothel. By night, he drank among drop-outs and navvies in the pubs of Kensal Green.

  Bill was on his second nervous breakdown when I met him. He had been brought home by his father, having been arrested in a bookshop where he was abusing customers and removing his clothes. He was a tall, gaunt figure, very thin, and already half bald. I passed his house each day on the way to school, and would see him standing motionless in the living-room window, his hands clasped before him, and his dark hooded eyes fixed on the house across the street. His thin lips were set in an expression of resigned hostility, and his pale translucent skin clung to the bones of his face like a butcher’s wrapping. The gossip was that only a last frail spasm of parental guilt stood between Bill and the
loony bin, and we were all curious as to when the decision to trash him would be made.

  One spring morning, to my surprise, I found him standing on the pavement as I passed his house, shifting slowly from one foot to the other, and wrapping his large parchment hands in his sleeves. Only as I passed him, and heard his body creak into motion, did I realize that he had been waiting for me. I felt no fear. On the contrary, I was overcome by a kind of troubled sympathy for the figure who strode in silence behind me. I wanted to hear his story, to endorse the experience that had brought him to this pass, and to enter into his world as a companion. But lacking words, and knowing nothing of life save its dim reflection on the TV screen, I remained silent, and welcomed him only by slowing down my pace so that he could come up beside me. However, he remained behind, as though not wanting me to see him, and when he spoke it was with an abstract, impersonal tone of voice, addressing the world in general.

  “I am sitting in my ego,” he said, “like a saint in a shrine.”

  And he laughed, a long-drawn-out and gentle laugh, an inward-turning laugh, the saddest and most solitary laugh that I had ever heard. I nodded my encouragement.

  “The more perfect soul is suspended above the more fearful abyss,” he went on. His tone changed to one of accusation, as immediate and personal as his previous manner had been abstract and remote. “Who wrote that?” he shouted.

  “I don’t know.”

  The words sounded stupid and defensive, and a schoolboy blush came stampeding upwards across my face.