An Accidental Man (60 page)

It had stopped raining. The streak of silver light had closed up and the sea was more ponderously grey, choppier now that the calm rain had ceased to stroke it, throwing up little fragments of white foam which left the wave crests and were whipped up into the coldly driving air. Ludwig thought about Oxford and the pain brought tears into his eyes and the sudden tears warmed his cold damp face. He had no books with him on the ship, for the first time no books. He had sacrificed something of immense value, something very particularly his, and which he would now almost certainly never find again. Would he in later years detest the Ludwig who had made that sacrifice and would his life be soured by hatred for that feckless person? Perhaps that bitter disfiguring regret, and not the human completeness of which he had spoken to Matthew, would be his reward for this decision. Not wholeness, but to be devoured by obsessive remorse. Perhaps. Well, it was done. He had let the college down of course. They would be without an ancient history tutor for the Michaelmas term. He wondered if Andrew would cancel the Aristophanes class. Perhaps he would do it with MacMurraghue. At the thought of the Aristophanes class he closed his eyes. He had wanted that Aristophanes class more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, more than he had wanted Gracie.

He fumbled in the pocket of his raincoat for something which he had brought with him for a purpose. He drew it out. Gracie's engagement ring. She had sent it back to him for the second time with a sweet tragic note, which Ludwig had read through once and then destroyed, in case he should be tempted to read it again. He remembered it by heart nevertheless and he knew that it would remain with him for his torment.
I am so unhappy I think I shall die of it. I want nothing in the world except what I can't have, you, you
 . . . Ludwig looked at the ring and remembered the scene in the jeweller's shop and how he had kissed Gracie in the taxi afterwards. He recalled the rather crinkly striped dress she was wearing and how he had smelt the fresh smell of the material mingled with the faint scent of her make-up and her sweat when he laid his head down on her breast and felt her heart beating against his cheek. How appallingly clear memory could be. Would these pictures ever mercifully fade? He looked at the ring. Then with a quick motion he threw it into the Atlantic. Eight hundred pounds' worth of Bond Street diamond flashed away from him to vanish into the brightening air. He did not see it hit the water. And as he saw it go he thought, a greater man would have kept it.

Matthew was doing his meditating in the upstairs passenger lounge. It was not yet time for him to meet Ludwig in the bar. They had talked so much at Oxford, there was now a slight shyness and by tacit agreement they let each other alone during parts of the day. Then there were the regular rendezvous to be looked forward to. Matthew wished that the voyage might never end.

While Matthew had been helping Ludwig to clarify his motives for leaving, he had hoped somehow at the same time to clarify his own; for he had realized, a day or two before he went to Oxford, that he would probably have to go. He had not of course discussed his own situation with Ludwig, and Ludwig with the sweet egoism of youth had not enquired or, Matthew believed, even wondered. When Matthew announced that, if Ludwig had no objection, he would accompany him, Ludwig had cried, ‘Gee, that's great of you!' and seemed to imagine that the pleasure of his company would be quite a good enough reason for Matthew to take the trip. And in a way, thought Matthew, he was right, even righter than he dreamed. But of course there were other things. And he had not told Ludwig that he was going away forever.

His departure had come to seem to him inevitable. But what did that mean? Had Austin, with unerring instinct, made the one move which would render his brother powerless? Had he not only broken the spell but turned the tables? Matthew's quaint sadness at having been unable to be the instrument of his brother's salvation seemed something puny now when there was so much more to regret. Had he lived all these years with himself to find himself at the end still so unpredictable? Was he now just running away out of chagrin?

Something or other had, in however ghastly a sense, done Austin ‘good'. Perhaps it was simply Dorina's death. And perhaps the ‘good' was temporary, a prelude to some new and different phase of obsession. If Austin now seemed ‘free' without going through any of the procedures of spiritual reconciliation and liberation recognized by Matthew, could it still be that he was, in this respect at least, really free? Was it genuinely the case that Austin didn't care any more? It almost seemed to Matthew at one point that Austin had simply forgotten, as if some banal almost impersonal relationship had been slipped into the place where the horror had been. The fear seemed to have gone and the hatred was changed. To say that the hatred was gone would be to say too much. But again, in some way quite outside Matthew's calculations, it had changed.

At that stage, and when that was clear, that change of some quite unauthorized kind was taking place, had taken place, Matthew felt with a blessed simplicity that it was time for him to leave off. Any further close interest or concern from him would be not only fruitless but intrusive and improper. Nature could now take its course in some soothingly vulgar way. There could be drifting apart. He could even allow himself to come, and he laughed suddenly at this, to detest Austin heartily. That was where his high purposes had got him, and the best they could apparently do. Oddly enough, Kaoru would have appreciated this. So it would drift on, London was quite large enough now to contain them both, and the quality of this failure would be the quality of his own final acceptance of an utter ordinariness of life.

But then, with the inner gasp of a man told by his doctor that he has a serious illness, Matthew realized how very much more awful the situation really was. Of course he had not minded Mavis looking after Austin, of course he had waited and understood. Of course Mavis was in some harmoniously inevitable way Matthew's future. This was the resting place and this the end. Time had circled to this point. And when Matthew had swallowed the knowledge that there was nothing more he could ever do for Austin except let him alone, and that this would be quite adequate, he associated Mavis instinctively with this sense of defeat and the inception of a humbler more domestic sort of life quite devoid of the drama which he realized he had with a certain eagerness returned to England to find. The unexpected simplicity of his love for Mavis had even seemed to symbolize the modest enlightenment which he had achieved.

But at a certain moment, with the sudden alteration of quantity into quality which dialecticians speak of, he saw. One way of putting it was that Austin had simply stayed with Mavis too long and had contaminated her. Matthew felt stirrings of a sudden blind painful rage which made him feel, for the first time in his life, that he resembled his brother. With a strange precision Austin had taken his revenge for the pollution of Dorina. Of course Austin had not really done this ‘on purpose'. It had all been, like so many other things in the story, accidental. But it was too beautiful not to have been also the product of instinct. Of course too they were not, he supposed, in love with each other. They did not need to be in love with each other, any more than he and Dorina had needed to be. Nor had Mavis's love for him swerved or faded. It did not need to fade, for everything to have become suddenly so dreadful. Naturally, Mavis had become fond of Austin, as women so often did become fond of Austin, sorry for him, maternal and so on. As Matthew had sincerely said in a letter, such plain affection was just what Austin needed at this juncture in his life. But then what? Mavis's affection could not be treated like a sticking plaster and pulled off when the wound had healed.

Austin was cunning. And Mavis, it became increasingly clear, expected Matthew somehow to ‘deal'. She could not manage without an initiative from Matthew which would inevitably seem like a re-enactment of the past. Of course Austin was not ‘cured', Matthew could now see, of course, the deep things were exactly as they had always been, and exactly as they would always be, whatever pious hopes the self-styled good might have about the matter. Mavis must be claimed or lost. Austin must be allowed once more to play the role of victim. This he expected and perhaps even wanted. The stage had been set again by whatever deep mythological forces control the destinies of men.

I am simply jealous, Matthew told himself, trying to find a simple brutal way to make sense of the misery he felt. He went to see Ludwig in Oxford to find distraction and to see if a look at someone else's mess could enlighten him about his own. In a curious separated way he had thoroughly enjoyed talking to Ludwig. It was, he told himself with bitter jocularity, his most satisfying sexual experience since the boy in the Osaka airport bookshop. As their discussion battered on he had sometimes almost panted with emotion. His affection for Ludwig blossomed to an extent which surprised him. So, in the midst of horrors, there could after all be something new. And as he listened to Ludwig and replied to his arguments, and as he studied the dear head, so grave and beautiful in debate, he rehearsed what he would do, how at a certain point he would simply take Mavis away, take her for a while out of England, how he would again enact the fake murder of his brother, and how absolutely fake it would be, and how Austin would enjoy shedding his crocodile tears and rolling in his humiliation and hating his brother and sobbing out to the fates that it was all as it had ever been. Only as, once again, listening to Ludwig, Matthew imagined it, he realized that he would never do it. Ludwig was godsent. He would go away with him.

And when it came to it he did not even care too much whether Mavis understood or not. People could not always be understanding everything. He wrote her a sad ambiguous letter. Let her read between the lines if she could. He recognized that he felt resentment against Mavis and that this helped. Her carelessness and then her sentimentality had brought about the whole thing. She had acted stupidly, she had acted like a woman. And after all he had never needed women in his life. It had been no ephemeral mischance that he had failed her in a crucial way. She had been sweet about it, almost as if she was pleased. Perhaps she was pleased. Perhaps it makes a woman feel maternal. It matters less to a woman, women are vague. It had made him feel very sad and mortal. And remembering that failure now he thought how many awful irrevocable things had happened. He thought about the child lying dead in the roadway, Norman lying unconscious on the landing. These moments would be forever in his nightmares. And he thought about Austin and he felt horror and hatred and a desire to get away. He wrote a rather abstract account of the whole matter to Kaoru.
Perhaps this is my ultimate spitefulness against my brother
, he said in the letter. Kaoru did not reply. Kaoru never wrote letters. Leaving, when it came to leaving, was suddenly quite easy. Later, he would feel tenderness and regret and loss. Later still he might feel that he had done the right thing. Now he simply felt that he was escaping.

As for Ludwig's troubles, he found them thoroughly exhilarating. He did not now at all try to analyse, as he would have done even a few years earlier, his love for the boy. It was enough that it was love and that its light fell a little way into the future. He would stick by Ludwig through whatever unpredictable trials lay immediately ahead. ‘I'll be asked what I represent.' ‘Yourself.' ‘They'll ask me about pacifism, they'll ask me about God.' ‘Deny everything.' ‘What am I then?' ‘A solitary conscientious American.' And a very good travelling companion to have, thought Matthew. He felt at the moment that he would willingly spend the rest of his life with the young man. But he was too old to worry himself with looking ahead and at least wise enough to know that it was useless. What would be would be. There was America to come and beyond America lay Japan. Perhaps he would end his days sweeping up azalea leaves after all.

Matthew, ensconced in an armchair in the upper lounge, was not in fact now thinking about the past or the future. He was reflecting that he had not really answered Ludwig's crucial question. Or was what he had said the answer? It was no use asking Kaoru. Kaoru would only laugh and offer him a cup of tea. Of course Ludwig did not need to know. It was marvellous how little Ludwig needed now that he was launched. Matthew felt that he was lucky to be with him even as a spectator. And then he recalled, with a poignant sense of connection, the scene in the Red Square, and the solitary conscientious Russian who had walked over to join the protesters and to shake their hands and who had possibly in that one instant wrecked his entire life. Was it not enough to have these as one's heroes, and to recognize and imitate them without otherwise knowing why? What Kaoru thought about it all he would never really know. He would never be able to share in Kaoru's mind. From the good good actions spring with a spontaneity which must remain to the mediocre forever mysterious. Matthew knew with a sigh that he would never be a hero. Nor would he ever achieve the true enlightenment. Neither the longer way nor the shorter way was for him. He would be until the end of his life a man looking forward to his next drink. He looked at his watch and drifted down to the bar.

‘Darling, our very first party!' said Gracie, now nearly two months pregnant, to her husband.

The drawing-room in the Villa was looking charming. Mrs Monkley, who came to do, had been cleaning and polishing all day, and everything glowed and shone. The creamy Sung vase which Matthew had given them for a wedding present occupied the centre of the mantelpiece. The room was full of small fat William Morris cushions, some placed upon the floor in case guests subsided. The many lamps were soft. It was already dark outside. On the table dozens of glasses glittered besides dozens of bottles. It was the moment of quietness before a big party when the host and hostess survey their lovely home and wonder why they have been such fools as to invite all those people.