Souls in the Twilight

by Roger Scruton

  “Maritain,” he said, once more matter of fact. “And what is worse, the abyss is visible only to the one who hangs there.”

  His words amazed me. They suggested thought and experience far beyond our suburban boundaries. I wanted to know how you came across such words, how they could be recuperated from the debris of human speech and fitted into phrases. Who was this Maritain? Embarrassed by my ignorance, I walked on without speaking, hoping meanwhile that he would not go away. After a long pause, during which he breathed with a kind of theatrical strenuousness, Bill Harrup spoke again.

  “I’ve seen you passing every day,” he said. “Your name is Michael. Michael Sillitoe. You go to the grammar school. You are studying sciences. They will send you to Cambridge.”

  He spoke as though I were receiving this information for the first time. I muttered something and he came up beside me, suddenly animated.

  “But you never decided on this. Your parents made the choices, and you went along with them. Isn’t that right?”

  Startled, I made no reply.

  “Your house contains no books to speak of, save a few pulp novels. No music, save drivel from the telly set. No pictures, save a few woodland scenes and kitschy girls in cottages. Right?”

  I wanted to issue a protest on my parents’ behalf. But then I realised they would not regard Bill’s words as criticism. So I remained without speaking.

  “All the windows bricked up. Not a light-beam entering anywhere,” he said, and walked on in silence. We turned a corner towards the bus-stop, and he abruptly came to a halt.

  “I don’t go beyond here,” he said, as though declaring a policy. “But I’ll tell you what. You come round this evening. Mum and Dad are playing whist. There’s some whisky. O.K.?”

  Then, for the first time, he looked at me, a long, unshifting gaze that seemed utterly devoid of curiosity, like the gaze of a fish.

  I was not used to invitations and wondered how to reply. Before I could do so, however, he had suddenly thrust out his hand in my direction.

  “Bill Harrup,” he barked, as though he had just chosen a name.

  I held my hand towards him, and he squeezed it painfully, before turning brusquely and walking at a rapid pace back home.

  That evening we sat in his parents’ living room and drank the whisky that they kept for visitors. The unfamiliar liquid descended like a flame-thrower, and I coughed in protest and pain. The Harrup living room was like ours: a chintz-covered three-piece suite; glass-topped coffee-table; glazed fireplace with pine-cones and china dogs; mass-produced prints—Vermeer, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Constable in frames of pickled oak. The bambi-bothered mantelpiece carried photographs of mum and dad, but none of Bill, whose existence was obviously negotiable. But there Bill was, resting heavy hands on spindly thighs, a figure so out of place among these visual clichés that they took on a new meaning, like words spoken on the stage.

  Except when he looked up, which was rarely, his craggy brow hid his dark brown eyes. But the wrinkles around the bridge of his nose were in constant motion like waves on a rock, signalling his rapid changes of mood. At one moment he would be sunk in gloom, and at the next agitated, pouring out strings of words that continued to surprise me—words I had never heard before, or never in these strange formations.

  “Let’s get this straight,” he said as I arrived. “I have stood my whole life long before a sea of possibilities, paddling in the shallows. And then I tripped and drowned. Some bastard gave me the kiss of life.”

  It was meant to be encouraging—so I decided. He seemed very old, like someone in retirement. He did not ask me about myself. Instead, he told me.

  “You have hardly read anything suitable,” he said. “Shakespeare, Chaucer in some ghastly modern version, maybe D.H. Lawrence and Moby Dick. That’s as it must be, in a place like this. I suffer from drapetomania—and look at the result.”

  “Drapetomania?”

  “A useful word,” he said. “It refers to the disease discovered in slaves in the cotton fields, and consists of a pathological desire to flee from captivity.”

  “I haven’t succumbed to it yet.”

  “You will, you will.”

  He ushered me to a chair. As he poured the whisky I noticed that his glass, which stood on the floor beside the sofa, was already almost empty. He picked up a long-playing record from the floor, placed it on a turntable behind the TV set, and dropped the needle. I was used to background music, and to parties where Buddy Holly, Adam Faith and the Beatles made conversation impossible. But Bill treated words and music in the same way—they were things to be weighed and valued. As he settled back on the sofa, he commanded silence with a wave of the hand. A most wonderful melody soared from hidden speakers. I listened in astonishment as a flute made filigree patterns around a frame of string-sound. There was a pause, and Bill got up quickly to lift the needle.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  He threw the record sleeve across to me. Orfeo ed Eurydice, by Christoph Willibald Gluck. The name was vaguely familiar.

  “The dance of the blessed spirits,” he said. He pulled a string of laughter from his throat, made a flourish with his hands, and looked at me. “Blessed spirits” he repeated.

  “You don’t know much about music,” he went on, “so you won’t understand Gluck’s achievement in that piece. It is not easy to express the idea of heaven: you have to transcend the world, but simply, quietly, without the least hesitation.”

  “Are you religious?” I asked, uncertain whether the question were permissible.

  “Religious! I like that.”

  He laughed again, a laugh without humour, which seemed to be directed against himself. And as he laughed, he rocked back and forth on the sofa, his big dry hands beating the air as though to fend off marauding birds. Through his gestures, he seemed to mock his own existence. But his words were deadly serious, with urgent messages that I must receive while there was time.

  “It is true that I have always relished solitude. But then I asked myself one day—against whom is this solitude directed?”

  I could find no response to Bill’s sentences. But one thing was clear to me—Bill was not mad at all. I was convinced that he had seen something, felt something, that the world denied. He had broken through the paper walls of our suburb and peered into infinite space. I was amazed and flattered that he should have chosen me to receive his confessions. All at once, my vision of myself was transformed. I ceased to be a schoolboy swot and became an outsider, standing with Bill against my parents’ world.

  “You must acquire precise ideas,” Bill said, “but only about things that matter.”

  “What things?”

  “For instance, the correct tempo of the third movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.”

  Bill recounted how he had lost his moral virginity. It happened during his first term at Cambridge. He was shuffling back to college from lectures, scuffing his feet in the piled-up autumn leaves, and breathing the foggy air of the fens, when he looked up at the yolk of sun, which had broken into the evening sky, leaving streaks of red above the slate-grey rooftops. The world became paper-thin. He could punch his fist through Being, and it would fall apart. Reality was too fragile to sustain his weight. He fell through the veil of Maya into nothingness. He knew that all was permitted, that nothing impeded him, nothing stood in his way. He did not need to murder, rob or betray; he carried these possibilities securely within himself into the void. He would be forever alone, and solitude would also be salvation.

  I listened to all that in astonished silence. The words seemed to have been broken down and re-assembled in a form that defied the rules of language. That night, Bill went on, he borrowed from his neighbour the book he had heard about in the afternoon’s lecture—Eliot’s Four Quartets.

  “You don’t know it, of course. You don’t know that a book can be the point where past and future meet. Not because the book changes you, but because you change it—you read yourself into the pag
e, and are astonished by what you find there. Listen.”

  Until that moment, poetry had meant nothing to me, apart from ridiculous protestations of love, descriptions of gods and heroes, and thee, thou and ’twas. But as Bill recited “Burnt Norton,” I felt a kind of inner convulsion, as though the words had escaped from the normal channels of consciousness to invade the most secret, most vulnerable and most unconscious parts of my body.

  Footfalls echo in the memory

  Down the passage which we did not take

  Towards the door we never opened

  Into the rose-garden. My words echo

  Thus, in your mind.

  But to what purpose

  Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

  I do not know.

  The words were my words, words I had lost once, had been unconsciously seeking, and had found again. And the door opened on to that mysterious rose-garden, where I was to dwell alone like Bill, and yet joined to him across an infinite distance—the distance of what might have been. From time to time as he recited I glanced at his face. It was like a mask, rigid apart from the rhythmic movement of the lips, the eyes fixed far away and the skin drawn taut across his bony features. Bill had escaped from his face into the words. He had discovered the avenue to freedom.

  He finished and we did not speak. Outside, a squad of motor-scooters passed, and Bill suddenly jerked into life, turning with a rapid movement to the lace-curtained window.

  “Always out there, watching, waiting!”

  He said it in a whisper, but with utmost vehemence. He had begun to tremble, and to pass his hand repeatedly over his face, as though trying to free himself from the mask. In time I was to become familiar with this crisis, yet it never ceased to disturb me. Bill was living on a knife-edge. Nothing that he valued, none of his knowledge or culture, could make him safe in the world beyond the window. The avenue to freedom that he had opened before me was one down which he could escape only in theory, and only because I was there to learn from him. Otherwise he was a prisoner—an invalid held in custody prior to the administrative decision that would settle his case.

  I sat in guilty silence until the crisis passed. Then, abruptly resuming his didactic manner, Bill informed me of my ignorance of Quartets and of the astonishing thing that Beethoven had done with them. He made me drink another glass of whisky before playing the F major op. 135. I listened in amazement to the dense texture of sound, through which the instruments spoke with human voices, questioning, affirming, each one touched with the deepest inner solitude.

  When I left Bill’s house that evening, it was with a new conception of the world and my place in it. Henceforth nothing mattered to me save culture—which inadequate word was nevertheless the only one I had to summarize Bill’s knowledge. I had entered the rose-garden, where mysterious music sounded, and the pages of a book turned slowly in a shaft of sunlight. Suburbia ended at the threshold of my being. My parents, our house and car, our TV, coffee table, and drinks cabinet, all those precise and pretty trinkets ceased to be normal and became, on the contrary, signs of a deep disorder. The real world was elsewhere, inside me, and I in it. Only through culture could you enter this world, where your eyes were always open in astonishment and your hair always on end.

  We established a routine. On Wednesday evenings, when Bill’s parents were out playing whist, we would sit in the two armchairs that stood like heraldic beasts to either side of the fireplace. We would stare at the glow from the artificial coals and listen to Bill’s collection of classical records. The only sounds apart from the music were the soft sipping of whisky when Bill lifted his glass from its place by his feet, and the dry scrape of his hands when he changed the record on the gramophone. He took the LPs from a pinewood cupboard behind his chair and handled the records tenderly, smoothing the translucent jackets around them before coaxing them into the sleeve. As he did so, his hands shook. I felt that, in these trembling caresses administered to a disk of black shellac, he was rehearsing a love that he would never find. How far that was from the truth, I was yet to discover.

  On my free afternoons, Bill would wait for me in the garage next to the house. I would enter beneath the tip-up doors, carefully easing them down behind me so as to make no noise. The family car was absent during weekdays, creating a space amid the suburban clutter. There, among packing cases, golf clubs, garden tools and wellington boots, stood an old chair with scuffed leather arms and a brass-buttoned back, which had been thrown out when the house was refurbished in the Swedish style, but which Bill’s mother couldn’t bring herself to part with, it being, as Bill put it, an offering to Hymen. He always spoke of his parents in those terms, as though their story were an archaic myth with no clear basis in reality.

  In this chair, Bill would be waiting for me, his hands twisting in his lap, his face papery in the light that entered from a window on to the garden. Through this window you could see only a pair of tonsured yew trees and a white-washed wall; they were like shapes in a modernist painting, emphasizing with their clean lines the enigma of Bill’s taut expression. He would greet me with a silent stare. He did not soften this stare but merely turned away as I took up my allotted position on a packing case inside the door. Although I took care to arrive at the agreed time, he never failed to convey the impression that I was late, distracted from my duty by some trivial matter that it would be embarrassing for either of us to mention.

  The sessions in the garage were arranged to coincide with my free afternoons, which were Tuesdays and Fridays. Their purpose, Bill said, was entirely educational, and my role was to listen as he expounded his vision of the world. This took the form of stories, recounting important episodes in his life from which I was free to draw whatever moral they suggested. The stories were impersonal in tone and the main protagonist—whom he referred to as Bill—had only a fleeting and inconstant resemblance to the narrator. I was told that Bill had been born and raised on an ocean-going yacht, his mother having run away with a French sailor who had been captured at Mers el-Kebir, when the French North African navy had been destroyed on Churchill’s orders. This French sailor, to whom Bill gave the name Ampoule, had been held as a prisoner of war in Portsmouth until joining the free French forces as captain in a purely imaginary navy under the charge of General de Gaulle. Ampoule was not in fact Bill’s father, his mother having been impregnated by a Polish airman called Marek, whom she had met in the Polish Club in London during an air-raid, and with whom she had maintained a close relationship right up until the end of the war.

  Bill’s birth at sea had been long-drawn out and painful, and his mother would have died in child-birth had it not been for a passing ocean liner that stopped in answer to Ampoule’s distress call, and hoisted the mother on board. I should say, Bill went on, that Bill’s mother is not the woman you see padding along the corridors of this house, polishing the brass, straightening the furniture and stacking the Reader’s Digest books beneath the television. That woman assumed charge of Bill during his early years, after his real mother had died in an accident on a model railway in Whipsnade zoo. Nor need I add that Bill’s father, no trace of whom remains, has no connection with that woman’s husband, whom she married in an ordinary ceremony in a registry office in Croydon, some months before receiving Bill into her keeping. But what a start in life, if ever there was one!

  His real mother loved him, of that Bill was sure when he lost sight of her forever aged 3; and he is still sure of it. It is from her that Bill acquired his love of poetry and music, and often in the dead of night, when he starts awake and his eyes see lights on the far horizon, he hears her calling to him, hears again the soft voice with which she had soothed his infant nightmares, smells again the cheap talc which she always wore, a large box of which had been stolen for her use by Marek when he was working at the camp for Polish airmen, a box which he had handed to her with ceremonial Polish chivalry the day before he committed suicide by jumping under a goods train. Often in the early years, before t
hey had tamed him and compelled him to a life of study, Bill would wander far from home, always sensing her voice, guiding him, encouraging him, speaking to him of a love that would never be removed from him since it depended on no mortal circumstance, but lay buried beneath his life, like a treasure that drew him to a secret place that had been set apart for him, and where one day he would enter and be at home.

  Meanwhile, however, there were the dull routines of exile. This is what they hadn’t understood, Bill’s guardians and tormentors. They hadn’t understood that he did not belong in the place where they had confined him, and that there was no need to summon the police, as they invariably did, when his bedroom was found empty in the morning, and his rucksack absent from the coat-stand in the downstairs corridor. The main purpose of these adventures was to explore the modern world as it was, to obtain a spiritual map of the place that God had only recently abandoned, and to compose a book of instructions for future travellers. Oh yes, the world will be grateful one day for Bill, when the guide-book has been committed to paper. And you, Michael, will be grateful to have it from Bill’s lips.

  The adventures began when Bill was a teenager. Until that moment, he had kept his mission to himself, lived in exile among the Giants without challenging their ludicrous stories, including the story that he was their son and the heir to their stupidities. It was in the early hours of a damp, misty morning in the summer of 1967 that he left on the first stage of his mission. He went by bus and train to London, lodged in a hostel for the homeless in Mile End, and began to patrol the streets of the great metropolis in search of shadows. Those shadows were everywhere in T.S. Eliot’s day, and the first thing Bill discovered was that The Waste Land described a world that had disappeared. Here and there, it is true, he came across a shadow, blown across his path like a scrap of paper bearing some enigmatic message. But for the most part, he walked in a light that hurt his eyes and his mind. The bright windows of shops and restaurants, the radiant aisles of the bombed-out churches, the hurrying streets of the city and the green crescents of Notting Hill—all stood in a light that rained down on them from the future, a future to which Bill could never belong. He made friends with a tramp, an expert on the writings of James Joyce, and together they studied Ulysses, in which a real city is allegedly described, full of the real people that make cities possible. Bill was not taken in. He understood at once that Joyce’s Dublin is a place more dreamed than lived, that the realities have been carefully concealed behind the images, and that Joyce’s art is an art of subterfuge, a way of cheating one’s way to the thought that life goes on.