by Tim Jeal
‘I didn’t know precisely what I had forgiven her for then.’ She noted the sarcasm in my voice. ‘I suppose Mark told you that I’d be bound to do the decent thing. Decent, my God, what a mockery of a word. What did you think when you saw me taking my son out to the cinema? When you so kindly gave me your permission?’
She sniffed slightly as though about to cry again.
‘Did you expect me to tell you? One tries to do the best for one’s children. Sometimes they ask impossibly hard things.’
I said harshly:
‘I’m not even going to try to explain why everything I ever felt for Dinah is dead. If you’d had the smallest bit of imagination you wouldn’t have come.’
‘My coming here has nothing to do with imagination. How right you are. If you’d listened, you would have heard what I said. That children ask impossibly hard things.’
‘Dinah isn’t exactly a child herself. Why can’t she come and do her own begging instead of getting you to humiliate yourself?’
Mrs Lisle’s eyes flickered with anger.
‘She didn’t ask me to come.’
‘Then how do you know she’s the slightest interested in seeing me again? If I’d behaved to somebody as she behaved to me, I shouldn’t be in a hurry to fall into their arms.’
‘Dinah may be humbler than you.’
‘She was arrogant enough to get married without …’ I stopped before completing my sentence. I tried to sound kind as I said: ‘Look, my quarrel isn’t with you. There is no quarrel. Because of what happened I can’t help any of you. It wouldn’t be fair if I tried. There’s no greater cruelty than deception. I should know that.’
For several seconds she said nothing. Then with the incredulity of wounded motherhood:
‘Andrew is your child.’
Cheap and obvious emotional blackmail it may have been. Her last appeal. The one she hated herself most for making. Yet as I stared down at my desk I began to feel again. Anger and pain, sickness. I said slowly:
‘I’ve offered to set up a trust. I can do no more than that.’
How can one love somebody one has never known? And yet.
Mrs Lisle took off her glasses and put her hands over her eyes.
‘Can you ask Mark to come back? Can you tell him what you’ve told me? I’ve got his address here.’ She started fumbling in her handbag and then remembered she had taken off her glasses. Her voice was choked. ‘I’ve been already. I told him he was mad to think you’d do what he wanted you to. He’s not a selfish man. Just an unrealistic one. He’ll listen to you.’ She gazed at me. The same imploring look I had seen earlier. ‘You will go, won’t you?’ I nodded as she backed towards the door.
Twenty-one
As I drove towards Gloucestershire and the village where Simpson had buried himself I started to think how much I knew about him. I had not learnt a lot from his hospital writing. Perhaps I knew from it that his ideas about love, sacrifice, and suffering were a refutation of the conventional atheist argument that if there is a good God, why so much pain. I had also seen that he considered human self-sufficiency a myth. I had noted the irony in the fact that his acknowledgement of this self-sufficiency had led him to leave all the people he had known. After all, communication with a supernatural power, that was original in more than one way, could prove more interesting than the more predictable and mundane workings of the minds of men. This, of course, if one felt there was such a power to talk to, or with whom one found the way to talk.
For me there had been no sudden awakening on the Damascus road, no awakening either sudden or slow. I do not wish to lower the tone, but I did once envy a man I had met who had seen Christ walking on the Thames near Mortlake and Jacob’s ladder in the Edgware Road. Any religious feelings I had were founded predictably on fear of exclusion from any possible paradise. Sudden panic had come, fortunately infrequently enough to be dismissed. I saw my life with clarity lost in an eternity before and behind. Why here and not there? Why now as opposed to then? Could life be a gift from above, rather than a push from below? I suppose I could see that it was unsound to make logic the slave of the eyeball, and yet I did so. I relied and still do rely on my senses as proof of anything. Comparisons with what lay out of my line of vision never impressed me. Well, you can’t see what’s behind the curtains and yet you don’t doubt its existence. Too true. I knew that there was a pub and a post office, three lamp posts, a stunted tree. Could it not be argued, the school chaplain had suggested, that life was the appearance of something that neither began with birth nor ended with death? Could it not be argued, an awkward child had suggested, that God would not have been so wasteful a manufacturer as to have made the whole of space for man? Could it not further be argued that it would be presumptuous of him if he felt that all that had been made for him? Both my parents had been atheists. Religion and eccentricity had become closely entwined for me at an early age. It is hard to get rid of the preconceived ideas born in adolescence. If I myself had been more religious in orientation I do not suppose that I would have felt much more confident that I could have persuaded Mark to return to his responsibilities. Nor do I seriously feel that had I considered the Old Testament something other than a gruesome selection of arbitrarily assembled lantern slides I should have fared better. For all I knew his views might have changed considerably since he had written what I had read.
*
The air was not clear as it had been when I had taken Dinah and Andrew down to Tim’s. The sky was a uniform and leaden grey; the early morning mist had not dispersed and still hung cold and dank in the valleys. A time only relished by the moles and hedgehogs sleeping in their subterranean beds of leaves. Mark’s village was six or seven miles the other side of Stroud. The country became more hilly. Houses seemed to hang from the side of steep slopes, smoke curled upwards, untroubled by wind. When I reached the village I went to the pub. I was nervous, even though I knew better than Mrs Lisle that he would not be likely to come back. In the pub I ordered a double whisky and watched a group of men playing darts. They were talking about a newly planned housing estate. I wondered if Mark had heard about it. Really, I reflected, there was nothing for me to be worried about. This time it would be for me to state my position and it would be for him to square his conscience concerning his desertion.
The village sprawled in an unplanned manner over the brow of a hill and trailed off into the valley below. The publican had told me where the cottage was. It was one of a low row of cottages just past the post office. The gardens were unkempt and the fences broken down. A line of washing hung outside one. In Mark’s garden, a mangle, several pram wheels and a tricycle rusted together in the long grass. There were no curtains in the windows; for a moment I wondered whether Mrs Lisle could have been mistaken. The knocker on the door had been recently polished. There was a rhyme on it:
One ship sails west and another sails east
With the self-same gales that blow,
But it isn’t the gales,
But the set of the sails
That tells them the way to go.
I managed to see a message in this for me. I had time. I tried just as when I had visited Mrs Lisle’s house, when Dinah was there, to keep my attention from myself by remembering everything I saw. I too resolved not to be guided solely by the storm.
I grasped the knocker and banged twice. I did so very deliberately, so I can remember the number. Simpson answered the door, looking better than I had yet seen him. Although he was using a stick he even seemed to be walking with less difficulty. He smiled at me.
‘First my mother-in-law and now you.’ He watched me looking at the bare hall. ‘I’m afraid it’s still a bit primitive but I haven’t quite settled in yet.’
The place was not only empty but also bitterly cold. He went on:
‘I shan’t ask you to take off your coat till we get into the one warm room.’ He led me through the kitchen. I noticed a new fridge and cooker. He evidently wasn’t planning a brief retreat. ‘
Mrs Jeans, who lives up the road, comes in and cooks for me. I’m intending to do everything for myself in time.’
He opened a door and showed me into a small sitting room. One wall was entirely occupied by a book-case. There was one deep arm-chair and over by the small window a table and an upright chair. The fireplace was in a corner of the room. A coal fire was burning.
‘I can manage to do the fire already.’ I was beginning to be irritated by his childish pride in his achievements. The boy scout goes camping for the first time. ‘I’ve already had lunch. If you haven’t had anything I’ll get hold of Mrs Jeans.’
‘I ate something on the way‚’ I lied. He turned round the upright chair and sat down. I sat in the arm-chair. He said:
‘I suppose Mrs Lisle persuaded you to come?’
I nodded. He pointed to the wall behind me.
‘Do you think I’d be able to get my piano in there? Actually I’m not too sure that it would get through the door.’
‘I haven’t come to talk about your domestic improvements.’
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
‘I knew a parson who was always having to say things like that when he visited parishioners on the local council estate. They’d offer him tea and a look at their favourite television programme. It must have been hell having to say: “I haven’t come for tea or for television, I’ve come to talk about God.”’
‘You’re going to have to go back, Mark.’
‘I can’t. I’ve already explained some of the reasons.’
‘They weren’t enough.’
He ignored this and said:
‘She’ll be able to get a divorce on the grounds of my desertion. He paused. ‘Have you been to see her yet?’
I leant forward in the chair and gripped the arms. Exasperation mingled with anger.
‘Can’t you see that what you told me makes that impossible?’
He looked at me with patient tolerance. I continued:
‘If you’re going to live your isolated pie-in-the-sky life, you can’t hope to please yourself and rely on somebody else to ease your conscience.’
He smiled and said:
‘I don’t. Whatever you do, I shall still do what I am doing. Let me list the reasons why I can’t do anything else. In the first place she never loved me and still doesn’t. In the second she deceived me as much as she deceived you. The third reason is that I trapped her by becoming a liability, which incidentally made her hate herself for pitying me. Then she took a lover. Finally Andrew is not my child. You see, it’s not for me to ease my conscience, it’s for you. I have already made up my mind and this will not change, whatever you choose to do.’
I did not reply. What was there to say? Mark said:
‘Dinah is the one person who hasn’t come begging me to go back. She’s too sensible to be proud over something like this. The reason must be that she doesn’t want me back.’ He got up and walked over to the fire. With finality he dropped several pieces of coal on to the pure red glow. The fire started to crackle as the coal dust flickered into tiny flames. He broke up the largest bit of coal with the poker as he said: ‘My dear mother-in-law has only one concern, and that is that her daughter should not be left impoverished.’
‘A fairly natural concern,’ I cut in sharply.
‘Of course. I naturally don’t intend to see her destitute. I am not a poor man. I shall make over most of my capital to her. This should be enough for both Andrew and her for a number of years. I don’t suppose you were told about this.’
‘I seem to have wasted a journey. But still I’m glad to see that you’re settling in so well. You ought to get quite good at the piano. If there’s a village hall, how about a concert? What’s the meat like round here? Can you get veal? Does the baker call on Thursdays? You’ll be able to look up at the stars and know how amazed you would be if they appeared once in a lifetime.’ My bitterness was spent.
Simpson came over to me and sat on the edge of my chair.
‘Do you remember when we did Wordsworth at school? I suppose in a way I am tracing the river back. I do feel exhilaration when I see dark moving clouds reflected in muddy puddles.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘I’m not sure whether I quite feel that “all things among the mountains breathe immortality”. But perhaps even that would come if there were any mountains in Gloucestershire.’
‘I’m not ungrateful, Mark, but you needn’t try so hard to be nice to me.’
‘You were nice to me once. My first day at school. Do you remember?’
‘I suppose being a guardian angel made me feel superior.’ I managed to smile.
‘We might have quite liked each other if things had been different.’
‘I wonder how many people have said that before.’
‘Perhaps they’ll forgive me for plagiary,’ he replied as he got up. I watched him go over to a small cupboard by the table in the window. He unlocked it and produced a microscope. ‘We’d be awfully lucky if human reproduction was like the fern’s. I’ve got some slides here. They do it by means of spores.’ He looked up at me and noted my expression. ‘No, I’m not going to ask you to look at them, fantastic as the prothalli are. I’m not trying to annoy you.’
‘That’d be too easy, I suppose?’
‘I thought you were going to add: “Like fighting for one’s wife”.’
I didn’t smile. He said:
‘I really am genuinely interested in plant life. That something so humble as a fern should be so complex and yet so perfect, gives me great pleasure. The prothallus produces male and female elements.’ He bent over the microscope. ‘The male elements aren’t passive like pollen cells. They have little bodies shaped like a corkscrew with a tuft of lashing tails at one end. Their action is not unlike the human sperm’s.’
I began to get up. I wondered whether he had calculated this little excursion into plant reproduction. Calculated it to remind me in factual terms of my own small miracle. The blob of jelly that had become a human being. He turned round as he heard me walk to the door.
‘I’m sorry you won’t stay to tea. I could have shown you some of my drawings. I’m getting pretty good. My ferns are almost up to text book diagram standard.’
As we walked through the kitchen he said:
‘I can see how brilliant Hardy’s description of the furled fern fronds was. He compared them to bishops’ crosiers.’ The rubber tip of his stick thumped on the flagstone floor. I could say nothing. I couldn’t even accuse him of play-acting. He probably wasn’t.
I reached my car and turned to look at the cottage. He called out from the door:
‘You must realise, I was death to her.’
I got into my white hearse and drove away, carrying with me the corpse of my final hope. A little dramatic perhaps, but it was how I felt at the time. I had precipitated the break-up of a marriage: a break-up that was no benefit to me, but one that caused me active pain.
Twenty-two
For the next month I did nothing. I felt that there was nothing else to be done. I wrote to Mrs Lisle and told her the result of my visit. I also pointed out that she had misinformed me about her daughter’s financial position. I told her that I no longer intended to set up a trust for Andrew’s education but would instead invest a sum which would be his on his twenty-first birthday. She did not reply. I hardly expected her to. Each evening became an ordeal to be got through. I had no inclination to go to concerts or theatres. I did not kill time by seeing friends. I felt that the emptiness of my life would show like some visible wound. I did not stop working. I still shaved and saw that my shirts were clean. I bought a television and sometimes watched it when I got home. It is hard to close one’s eyes and think of blackness, an empty sky or a deserted beach. Figures appear, a movement triggers off a memory. So much of my store of recollection was of my quest for Dinah.
*
It was late March when Dinah wrote to me. By then I had already begun to doubt the certainty entertained by Simpson and Mrs Lisl
e that she would fall at my feet and beg me to rescue her. As each day passed I had felt easier in my mind. The pain would go on, true, but I should not be called upon to make any agonising decision. I had tried vainly to guess how Dinah’s appeal might run should she ever make it. I also thought for hours about how I would word my inevitable refusal. In the end her letter came. It had to.
Aachen.
Thursday.
Dear Harry,
So a tortured man has told the secret that has been haunting him. Mark has set his conscience at rest, before walking out on the woman who fooled him. Dramatic stuff. I know this sounds unattractively bitter. I feel bitter, not only because I slaved for him when he came out of hospital, but also because I now have to admit finally to myself that I did the wrong thing. Having to write this to you is particularly galling for reasons that you know too well. From what my mother and Mark have told me of their conversations with you, I can guess that they begged you to help salvage the sinking ship. I can’t understand how my mother can have even considered allowing you to undertake the setting up of a trust for Andrew. I find this still more amazing when I think that she knew how I treated you. And then there’s dear old Mark (do you think of cripples as older than they are?), how sensible I’m sure he must have sounded. ‘Best thing for everybody … let’s all be sane and reasonable…. Your child after all … ask her round for tea…. Shake hands and Bob’s your uncle and Harry’s your husband.’ No other course of action could have done more to blight any chances we might ever have had. The terrible thing is that he’s not stupid, just criminally naïve. He couldn’t have done what he did simply so that there’d be no pieces to pick up. He’s not malicious.
So here I am in Germany. Germany’s terrible … Germany’s German. How do people who write letters that are published say these things? I went to a party last night and the woman next to me at dinner couldn’t tell me anything except that her daughter was at ‘equitation school in the Cotsvolds’. Everybody drank too much and then told jokes that defeated my slender grasp of the language. ‘Do you like visky? All the English do.’ And then mein host with a cheery grin handed me a tumblerful. This morning I was left alone with a granny of the house. There was a canary in a cage behind me. She kept on offering it things that I thought were for me. Conrad Heffner, the man I’m staying with, insists on swimming naked after work in the garden pool. Well, it’s not quite a garden pool, it has a glass roof over it in winter. I suppose everything’s very funny.
