An Accidental Man (56 page)

Gracie lay back in the boat, limp, her light dress of papery thin cotton tacky with sweat, gently plucking the warm flesh at her thighs, at her neck. The trees were green, were black, floated and swayed dizzily and were taken away. Now there was only sky, almost colourless with its brightness, quiet and empty and sizzling with light. Hollow sounds of distant voices came over the water, weightless wooden balls of sound bouncing lightly on the azure ripples, skipping and echoing away into the slumbrous afternoon. A coolness crept upon the water, concentrated now in her trailing hand as it silently broke the surface. A hand made of peppermint, made of coconut ice. Gracie's eyes closed and she existed floating in the midst of a warm pink sphere, lying limp and boneless, her body light and extended and drooping like a plucked tossed flower. The hollow sounds boomed far distantly, buzzed and droned.

Gracie was in a woody glade. Her mother's white dress had mingled with green leaves and faded. Her mother, leading Patrick by the hand, had gone away down another vista. This was Gracie's place and she was alone in it and suddenly panting with a sense of significance and fear. Before her, across a little lawn of cropped velvety grass, there was standing all by itself a single tree with a smooth shaft of light grey close textured trunk of a glowing colour between silver and pewter. Above the high shaft a thick cloud of leaves moved, though there was no wind, with intricate tiny curtsying movements, and seemed to wink noiselessly, turning dark and pale sides alternately in the absorbed still complex light. The dim leafy cone swelled and diminished, its fine top thinning into an extremity of pure sky. Gracie knew of the leaves, of the pencil-thin peak and of the void beyond, but she gazed at the trunk of the tree, at its perfect smoothness and roundness and she felt a shudder of urgency pin her to the earth as if an arrow from directly above her had passed through her body and her feet and pierced the earth below with a long thin electrical thrill.

She was conscious of herself with a fullness she had never known before, and yet also she was absent, or something was absent, there was no anxiety, no thought even, just this thrilling sense of full and absolute being. She stood quite still for a while breathing deeply and staring at the tree. There was fear but now it was uninhibited, impersonal. She kicked off her shoes and stood barefoot, feeling the cool grass creasing the soles of her feet with little precious patterns. She thought, I must walk to the tree, and in doing so I shall make a vow which will dedicate me and alter my whole life, so that I will be given and will never belong to myself again ever. I have to do this. And yet at the same time I am free, I can stay here, I can run back into the wood. I can break the spell which I know I am in some way weaving myself. I can make the tree cease to glow and shimmer, make my flesh cease from trembling, unbind my eyes and disavow this vision. Or I can walk to the tree and make everything different forever.

She began to take off her clothes, her dress fell from her. She stood there white and lithe as a boy, compact and dense, an arrow, a flame. Still in the midst of fear, she began to walk springily across the grass. If she could but keep this visitation pure and whole some greatness would come to be, if she could but cover this precarious space and lay her hands upon the tree she would be filled with angelic power, the world would be filled with it. She moved without sound or sensation upon the grass. She reached the tree and knelt, circling it with her arms, laying her lips upon its cool close-textured silvery bark, a little pitted and dimpled to the touch. As she knelt upright now, pressing her whole body against the shaft, she felt an agony of shame, impossibility, achievement, joy. She lost consciousness.

Something was rubbing softly against her ankle. She stirred and groaned, tried to sit up but seemed to fall, her head rolling away into the dark. She opened her eyes and saw slowly moving green branches above her, saw blue sky, heard hollow sounds of voices over water. She began to pull herself up.

Garth's bare foot, which had been pressing upon her leg, withdrew. He sat resting on the oars, smiling, blinking.

‘Oh dear, I fell asleep!' said Gracie. ‘Was I asleep for long?' She pulled down her skirt.

‘Only a few minutes. You'd got into such a funny position, I thought you might hurt your arm. And you were squashing your pretty hat.'

‘My arm does feel stiff — ooh — pins and needles. Fancy my going to sleep like that.'

Gracie streaked back her loose hair, tugged at the neck of her dress, patted a little dew of sweat from her temples. ‘I'm all hot and crumpled. Oh how strange, I had a dream, just in that little time, so vivid.'

‘What was it?'

‘Well, it wasn't really a dream, it was a memory, something which really happened, one doesn't dream real things, does one.'

‘I think one does sometimes — one sort of embroiders them — and then one doesn't know what one's remembering and what one's imagining.'

‘Perhaps it was like that — but no. I do remember it quite clearly, not just as dream. It was something that happened to me when I was about eleven, a sort of mystical experience.'

‘What happened?'

‘Oh, it's nothing to tell. And I can't convey the atmosphere. I was alone in a wood and I took my clothes off and kissed a tree. It was a sort of sustained vision. It was like being released into another world, as if I'd never ever be the same again. Yet it wasn't religion really, it was nothing to do with God or Jesus Christ.'

‘And were you the same again?'

‘I — don't — know. It seems silly not to know, but — It comes back to me sometimes with a sense of being reserved — sort of —'

‘Reserved for?'

‘I don't know. It's sometimes made me disappointed with things as they are. Then occasionally it would all come back in a sort of
feeling
about a particular thing, as if that thing partook of
it
, came from that world —'

‘I think I — yes —'

‘What does it mean?'

Garth said nothing. He moved the boat onward very slowly, lipping the glossy surface delicately with the light oars.

‘It was odd, dreaming it suddenly like that. I have dreamt about it — sometimes — I think — only unless one tells one's dream one forgets it. Do you find that? So I was never certain. And now — oh yes — in this dream I ended up by fainting. That was rather marvellous actually. Do you ever faint in dreams?'

‘But in real life — if you remember — you didn't faint?'

‘Oh no. I held on to the tree for a while, and even then it was all fading. And then I put on my clothes and ran after my mother and Patrick. I never told anybody,
anybody
.'

‘Not even — ?'

‘No.'

The boat glided into a bower of willows and Gracie gently arrested its movement, letting the lanky green streamers pull through her hands.

‘And — so strange — you know we often went back to that wood afterwards but I could never find that special tree again, though I looked for it and looked for it. Wasn't that odd? And it wasn't any kind of tree that I knew at all.'

‘Where was it? Somewhere in Scotland?'

‘No, in Gerrards Cross.'

‘Well, there are gods even in Gerrards Cross.'

‘Then you think it was religious?'

‘There are gods and gods.'

‘You know, I had that feeling,
that
feeling, and almost that sort of faintness, when —'

‘When?'

‘Oh well — nothing — I'm making too much of it. I usually don't think about it at all.'

They were silent, Garth regarding the girl, Gracie edging herself up a little more and trying to pull her pink sun hat back into shape. It was not and green in the domed willow arbour but there was a coolness of watery smells muddled in the air. Gracie looked up.

Garth propelled the boat quietly out into the open and London was distantly lucidly hazily present, smudged with trees, the Serpentine bridge, the Hilton hotel, Knightsbridge barracks, and tiny and far away the towers of Westminster.

‘Did you ever have anything like that?' said Gracie. She punched her hat.

‘Yes.'

‘Well, what
is
it?'

‘You'll be cross if I tell you.'

‘No, I won't — Oh you don't mean —'

‘Yes.'

‘Just sex?'

‘You needn't say ‘just'. Intellect is sexless, but spirit is almost all sex. In fact it is all sex, only it sounds misleading to say so.'

‘It sounds horrid.'

‘Not horrid. Consider Shakespeare. All sex, all spirit.'

The boat glided a little faster now towards the bridge. Gracie looked at Garth. He was looking thin and fit and sunburnt, his face hard and shiny. The sun had made golden tints in his flowing dark hair and he looked a little more like his handsome father only — what — grimmer. She turned her head aside and said, ‘There's Peter Pan. I met Matthew there once.'

‘Matthew —'

‘I feel I've lost Matthew.'

‘I feel I've lost him too. It doesn't matter.'

‘I know. It doesn't matter. Now I feel almost sorry for him somehow — and I think that's a bit awful — a sort of sacrilege — and yet —'

‘One must relax one's grip on people. Your pity doesn't harm him, you know. It doesn't even touch him. It doesn't even reach him.'

‘I know what you mean.' She sighed, and with the sigh all her sorrow came flooding back, not after all diminished by one merciful iota. The boat moved into a cool echoing cave in the shadow of the bridge. Dim watery lights wanly flickered overhead. Obscurity at once brought tears into her eyes, like the blank undiverted relaxation of the night-time.

Her days were dreadful now. She lived inside a maimed wreck of herself. Insane hopes still survived in scattered parts of her being, and there were terrible encounters with little separated minds which did not yet know that all was lost. A blind stupid idea of consolation, dying but refusing to perish, was her chief torment: the idea of being consoled by Ludwig for all this suffering. She would take it, where else should she take it, to him. His sweetness, his absurdity, his pure strength, his absolute devotion, were present in every detail to all her thoughts, and he was sovereign over her misery. There was no question of there being anything else in the world at all. Love rolled her and tossed her and trampled her. She had wept more than all her childhood's tears, and such bitter unrelieving tears these were now, tears of hopeless regret and defeat and the rending tenderness of a rejected heart. If she could only hold him in her arms and all be well again. Oh if only if only if only.

‘I'll take you back and get you a taxi,' said Garth.

‘Sorry —'

‘That's all right, Gracie. Old friends must help. And I did know you when we were both children.'

‘You're so kind, Garth, you help everybody.'

‘One does one's best.'

‘And I meant to ask you about your novel. Did you hear from the publisher?'

‘Yes. They're going to publish it in the autumn.'

‘I'm so glad.'

It is odd, thought Gracie. I am still alive. I have put a pretty dress on. I cannot remember putting it on, but here it is. Though I am screaming mad in my heart I can converse. I can even check my tears. I am here in a rowing boat on the Serpentine. I can feel the sun.

‘Garth.'

‘Yes.'

‘This will sound silly and I don't mean it that way but —'

‘Go on.'

‘You know I said I sometimes had
that
feeling, that special feeling, about things — on some occasions — you know —'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, I had it that day in the King's Road, when you followed me and wouldn't come to me.'

‘Really.'

‘I don't quite know why I call it that feeling, because it was different too — and yet it was that, it sort of shook me, I suppose it's a kind of fear, a sense of the world being quite without order and of other things looking through. I mean, when you went away and then I turned round and saw you walking behind me along the road.'

‘And you pretended not to notice.'

‘And I pretended not to notice — that was part of
it
— but I knew that you knew —'

‘Yes.'

‘I felt quite frightened on the station platform, as if I were afraid that you would arrive before the train.'

‘Sorry.'

‘No, no, it wasn't bad at all. Then we met again by accident. Wasn't that odd?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you asked me for a drink. Would you have got in touch with me if we hadn't met in the street on that evening? I suppose you wouldn't. I've never asked you why you wouldn't talk to me at Matthew's?'

‘It would have been all false.'

‘But this isn't false.'

‘This is — nothing, Gracie. I help you to pass the time. That is really all you have got to do just now. This is a little enclosed moment. You will move out of it and forget even its atmosphere. You will remember nothing of this time. You will recover. You have many friends who are waiting for that. One friend perhaps in particular.'

‘You mean — yes. I must try to — believe in the future. You are so kind, Garth. You are a kind helper and a kind person.'

‘An instrument. All's well here at least. Let me help you out.'

Gracie took his warm hard hand in hers. With a slight shock she stepped from the rocky yielding surface of the boat onto dry land.

‘Are you thinking of taking a holiday?' said Austin.