Under the Net (36 page)

We crossed the lawn and the gravel and leapt over the chains and bolted along the pavement in the direction of Goldhawk Road. Hugo's bandage was coming undone and flapped behind him like a pennant. Before we turned the corner I looked back; but there was no sign of pursuit. We slowed down.

‘And how's your head
now
?' I said to Hugo. We must have been doing a good twenty miles per hour.

‘Hellish!' said Hugo. He leaned against a wall. ‘Damn it, Jake,' he said, ‘you might have let me pick up my boots. They were special ones. I got them in Austria.'

‘You'd better see a doctor some time today,' I told Hugo. ‘I don't want to have any more on my conscience.'

‘I'll see a chap I know in the City,' said Hugo. We walked slowly on in the direction of Shepherd's Bush.

The light was increasing fast. It must have been after five, and when we reached Shepherd's Bush Green the sun was shining through a mist. There was no one about. We stopped once to fix Hugo's bandage. Then we padded along in silence. As I looked at Hugo's big feet, which were bulging through various holes in his socks, I could not but think of Anna; and with this thought I suddenly felt for Hugo a mixture of compassion and anger. What a lot of trouble the man had caused me! Yet none of it could have been otherwise.

‘You've made me lose my job,' I told him.

‘You may not have been recognized,' said Hugo.

‘I
was
recognized,' I said. ‘That fellow that saw us works in Corelli. He's my enemy.'

‘Sorry,' said Hugo.

We were walking along Holland Park Avenue. It was broad daylight and the mist had cleared. The sun, just risen over the houses, gave us sharp shadows. We passed by sleeping windows. London was not yet awake. Then one or two workmen's buses passed by. Yet still we walked. Hugo's head was down, and he was biting his nails and looking sightlessly at the pavement. I observed him closely as one might observe a picture or a dead man. I had a strange sense of his being both very distant and yet closer to me than he had ever been or would be again. I was reluctant to speak. So we went for a long time in silence.

‘When are you going to Nottingham?' I said at last.

‘Oh,' said Hugo vaguely, lifting his head, ‘in two or three days, I hope. It depends how long it takes to wind things up here.'

I looked at his face, and although no line of it had changed I saw it as the face of an unhappy man. I sighed. ‘Have you anywhere to live up there?'

‘Not yet,' said Hugo. ‘I shall have to find digs.'

‘Can I see you again before you go?' I asked him.

‘I'm afraid I'll be very busy,' said Hugo. I sighed again.

It then occurred to us at the same moment, both that this was the end of our conversation and that it was going to be very difficult to take leave of each other.

‘Lend me half a crown, Jake,' said Hugo. I handed it over. We were still walking.

‘I must dash on, if you'll excuse me,' said Hugo.

‘O.K.,' I said.

‘Thanks a lot for helping me out,' he said.

‘That's all right,' I said.

He wanted to be rid of me. I wanted to be rid of him. There was a moment of silence while each of us tried to think of the appropriate thing to say. Neither succeeded. For an instant our eyes met. Then Hugo said abruptly, ‘I must dash. Sorry.'

He began walking very fast, and turned down Campden Hill Road. I followed him at my ordinary pace. He drew ahead. I walked after him along the road. He turned into Sheffield Terrace, and when I turned the corner he was about thirty yards ahead. He looked back and saw me and quickened his pace. He turned into Hornton Street; I followed at the same pace, and saw him in the distance turning into Gloucester Walk. When I got to the corner of Gloucester Walk he had disappeared.

As I walked through Kensington the day began. There was nothing to do in it. I wandered along looking into the windows of shops. I went into Lyons' and had some breakfast. That took up quite a long time. Then I set off walking again. I walked down the Earls Court Road and stood for a while outside the house where Madge had lived. The curtains on the windows had been changed. Everything looked different. I began to doubt whether it was the same house. I moved on. Beside Earls Court Station I had a cup of tea. I thought of ringing up Dave, but couldn't think that I had anything particular to say to him.

It was the middle of the morning. At the Hospital they would be washing up the mugs in the kitchen of Corelli III. I went into a flower shop and ordered a grotesquely large bunch of roses to be sent to Miss Piddingham. I sent no note or message with them. She would know very well who they were from. At last the pubs opened. I had a drink. It occurred to me that I had something to say to Dave after all, which was to ask whether there was any news of Finn. I telephoned the Goldhawk Road number, but got no answer. My need of Finn began to be very great and I had to force my attention away from it. I had some more drinks. The time passed slowly.

During this time I didn't at first think of anything special. There was too much to think about. I just sat quietly and let things take shape deeply within me. I could just sense the great forms moving in the darkness, beneath the level of my attention and without my aid, until gradually I began to see where I was. My memories of Anna had been completely transformed. Into each one of them a new dimension had been introduced. I had omitted to ask Hugo when exactly it was that Anna had encountered him and, as he so horribly put it, taken one look. But it was very likely that since Hugo's acquaintance with Sadie dated back such a long way, Hugo's acquaintance with Anna might well overlap with the later phases of my relations with her, before our long absence from each other. At this thought, it seemed that every picture I had ever had of Anna was contaminated, and I could feel my very memory images altering, like statues that sweat blood.

I had no longer any picture of Anna. She faded like a sorcerer's apparition; and yet somehow her presence remained to me, more substantial than ever before. It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself. To experience this was extremely painful. Yet as I tried to keep my eyes fixed upon where she was I felt towards her a sense of initiative which was perhaps after all one of the guises of love. Anna was something which had to be learnt afresh. When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

I began thinking about Hugo. He towered in my mind like a monolith: an unshaped and undivided stone which men before history had set up for some human purpose which would remain for ever obscure. His very otherness was to be sought not in himself but in myself or Anna. Yet herein he recognized nothing of what he had made. He was a man without claims and without reflections. Why had I pursued him? He had nothing to tell me. To have seen him was enough. He was a sign, a portent, a miracle. Yet no sooner had I thought this than I began to be curious again about him. I pictured him in Nottingham in some small desolate workshop, holding a watch in his enormous hand. I saw the tiny restless movements of the watch, I saw its many jewels. Had I finished with Hugo?

I left the pub. I was somewhere in the Fulham Road. I waited quietly upon the kerb until I saw a taxi approaching. I hailed it. ‘Holborn Viaduct,' I said to the driver. I lay back in the taxi; and as I did so I felt that this was the last action for a very long time that would seem to me to be inevitable. London sped past me, beloved city, almost invisible in its familiarity. South Kensington, Knightsbridge, Hyde Park Comer. This was the last act which would provoke no question and require no reason. After this would come the long agony of reflection. London passed before me like the life of a drowning man which they say flashes upon him all at once in the final moment. Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue, New Oxford Street, High Holborn.

I paid the taximan. It was the middle of the afternoon. I stood upon the Viaduct looking down into the chasm of Farringdon Street. A pigeon flew up out of it, moving its wings lazily, and I watched it flying slowly south towards the spire of St Bride's. The sun was warm on my neck. I dallied. I wanted to hold on, just a little longer, to my last act. A premonition of pain made me delay; the pain that comes after the drama, when the bodies have been carried from the stage and the trumpets are silent and an empty day dawns which will dawn again and again to make mock of our contrived finalities. I put my foot on the stair.

It was a long way. When I was half-way up I stopped to listen for the starlings, but I could hear nothing. It is towards evening that they sing and chatter. The question of whether Hugo would be there or not was one that I had hardly even asked myself. On the penultimate landing I paused for breath. The door was shut. I came up to it and knocked. There was no reply. I knocked again, very loudly. The place was completely silent. Then I tried the door. It opened, and I stepped in.

As I entered Hugo's sitting-room there was a sudden wild flurry. The room was whirring and disintegrating into a number of black pieces. I grasped the door in a fright. Then I saw. The place was full of birds. Several starlings which had not found the window in their first dart fluttered madly about, striking the walls and the glass panes. Then they found the opening and were gone. I looked about me. Hugo's flat seemed already more like an aviary than the abode of a human being. White dung spattered the carpet, and through the open window the rain had come in and made a deep stain upon the wall. It looked as if Hugo had not been there for some time. I walked through into the bedroom. The bed was stripped. The wardrobe was empty. I pondered for a while on these phenomena. Then I went back into the other room and lifted the telephone. I had a strange fancy that I should find Hugo at the other end of it. But it appeared to be dead. Then I sat down on the settee. I was not waiting for anything. Some time passed. A clock in the City struck some hour. Then other clocks followed. I did not try to count.

My gaze, after wandering vaguely about the room, fastened on Hugo's desk. I looked at it for a while. Then I got up and approached it. I opened the top drawer. Inside the drawer, half hidden by a pile of empty files, was a copy of
The Silencer.
I took it out. On the first blank sheet Hugo had written his name in large letters. I turned over the pages. Here and there Hugo had underlined passages, put crosses and question-marks in the margin; and at one place there was a pencilled note,
Ask J.
This filled me with pain, and I closed the book and thrust it into my pocket. I glanced at the other contents of the drawers, and then I opened the top of the desk. It was crammed with letters and papers. I began very quickly to turn these over. As I delved further into boxes and pigeon-holes a flood of papers began to cascade on to the floor. I could not find what I wanted.

Old letters and bills and blunt pencils and sealing-wax and boxes of matches and many kinds of paper clips and half-empty books of stamps and obsolete cheque-books streamed through my fingers. In a small drawer I came upon a collection of sinister-looking objects which I identified as Belfounder's Domestic Detonators, of a rather smaller variety than the one which had liberated us from the film studio. Another drawer contained a pearl necklace: perhaps a gift bought with tender care and destined for Sadie, which now would never reach her; or which she had returned, and it had arrived one morning in a registered packet and lain there for days because Hugo had not had the heart to undo it. But I could not find what I wanted.

I sat down and took an empty sheet of paper. I wanted to write a letter to Hugo. I took one of Hugo's pens and Hugo's ink. A starling flew in at the window, saw me, and flew out again. There was a soft chattering on the balustrade. I looked up at the blue sky above it.
Hugo
, I wrote on the paper. Then I could think of nothing more to say. I thought of putting
Send me your Nottingham address,
but this sounded too weak and impersonal and I didn't write it down. In the end I just drew a curving line across the page, and signed my name at the bottom of it, adding the address of Mrs Tinckham's shop. I put the note in an envelope and balanced it on the bookcase and prepared to leave. As I turned, something caught my eye in the wall behind the bookcase. It was the green door of a safe.

I paused, and then moved the bookcase out a little from the wall. I pulled at the safe door, but it was locked. I stood looking at it pensively. Then it was clear to me what I must do. I went back to the desk and took from the drawer one of Belfounder's Domestic Detonators. I fingered this small explosive, wondering how powerful it was. I wondered this in a detached sort of way as I fumbled in my pocket for matches. The detonator was cone-shaped. I ran my finger over the door of the safe, trying to find some crack into which I could fit the point of the cone, but the whole thing was as smooth as a bishop's hand, even the hinges were stowed away inside. There were no crevices, neither were there any protuberances on which I might have tried to balance the detonator. Eventually I took a roll of stamp paper from Hugo's desk and with this I glued the object on at what seemed to be the point of maximum vulnerability on the lock side of the door. A small cotton fuse protruded from the blunt end, like the blue paper of a firework. I applied a lighted match to this and retired to the other end of the room. I watched thoughtfully. I think I would not have been either very surprised or very moved if the whole wall had suddenly disintegrated in a cloud of wood and plaster, revealing the open sky and a view of St Paul's.