‘Stuart, old chap, could you please bugger off?’
‘Right oh. Come down soon.’
As Stuart disappeared Edward was studying a short entry in the obituary column.
Max Point, who died last week, was a member of the Jesse Baltram circle and a friend of Baltram. His early painting shows the influence of Baltram’s ‘mythological’ subjects, but he is best known and esteemed for his mature portraits in the style of Soutine and Motesczicky. His paintings of the Thames, beside which he lived, probably attained most popularity and may be seen in provincial collections. The Tate Gallery possesses, but has rarely exhibited, a portrait of Baltram by Point. This will be on view during the promised and eagerly awaited Jesse Baltram exhibition. Max Point, who painted little in later years, was certainly a versatile and underrated artist. It is time he was rediscovered.
Edward sat staring at the obituary, letting it stir up such a mixture of intense and painful feelings. He remembered the silvery northern light upon the river and Max Point’s face in the brown darkness, distorted as perhaps in one of his portraits in the style of Soutine. He recalled how he had said to Thomas somebody should do something, and Thomas had said why not you. He had meant to go back. Then he remembered that this was perhaps Ilona’s father, and that he had never spoken of him to Ilona. Better so. Ilona too had been seeking her father. Now he was dead. And Mark was dead and Jesse was dead and Mrs Quaid was dead and Edward’s first child was dead, or rather had never existed. And my Brownie is dead, he thought, or never existed. And I am dead too.
Except of course that I’m not and am alive and suffering. I am in love with two dead people and one lost one. I shall never be happy again because everything in the world will remind me of Mark, and I shall always be wishing that I could undo the past, when so little needs doing to it in order to give me a happy life. Stuart said let the fire burn. It has burned and burned and me with it, burning alive and screaming. Chin up, put it behind you, there’s nothing deep, God isn’t watching you, personal responsibility is a fiction, you’re simply ill, it’s an illness, you will recover, think of it as a spiritual journey, your image of yourself is broken, there is life after death, you will thrive on disasters, suffer, don’t evade anything, live in pain, reach out and touch something good, remorse must kill the self not teach it new lies, hope only for the truth, the soul must die to live. All right, all right, all right. But the awful fact was that he had not moved an inch, all movement, all journeying, had been an illusion, he was back at the beginning, back with Mark, back in hell. I’m branded, he thought, I’m walled up, I’m crawling with cockroaches, I stink of misery and evil, I haven’t any being left, it’s all been scraped away. I’m a raw rotting wound. It seemed as if something was happening, but I was having a dream, now I’m back in reality, I felt it touch me as I read that letter, I’m back where I started. It was
all
magic, all those ideas people had, all the words they said, everything I hoped for, the spiritual journeys, the redeeming ordeals, the healing draughts, reconciliation, salvation, new life. It was all hallucination, everything that seemed good and ordinary and real. That wasn’t for
me.
The light which I saw wasn’t the sun. It was just a reflection of the fires of hell.
The uprush of these thoughts was so fast that Edward gasped, then moaned, then got up quickly pulling his shirt away from his neck and opening his mouth. He felt as if his mouth was full of sulphur and went to the basin to wash it out. Leaning over he felt sick. A blackness hovered above him as if he might faint. He opened one of the drawers of the chest intending to lean upon it, saw Jesse’s ring which he no longer wore lying inside, and shut it hastily. He went to the window and opened it. The sun had gone and a wind was tugging the dusty leaves of the trees in the gardens round about. They already looked tired of summer. Behind it all lay the derelict dirty horror of London, doomed city. Now I
am
ill, thought Edward, except that it’s the soul, the soul. The soul can die. I saw that in my dream. He wondered if he should run downstairs and ask Stuart to help him.
Harry was in the kitchen washing up. He had refused Stuart’s assistance. He was thinking about his parents. That is he was thinking about Midge, which he did all the time, and at another level he was thinking about his parents. Had they been happy, had his father had love affairs? It seemed very likely. When he could have found out he didn’t care. Had his mother resented all those sacrifices she made, becoming a typist instead of a pianist, to serve that blond handsome egomaniac? She thought he was a genius. The sense of the distance away of their world made him feel giddy. Of course the simple fact was that Casimir hated music. Harry hated it too. He had an early memory of the sound of the piano in the drawing room, always sad, conveying pointlessness, annihilation, death. How pretty his mother was, with that gentle apologetic face and pale fluffy hair frizzed by the hairdresser, and little feet in shining high-heeled shoes which gave Harry his first conscious erotic experience. Lying on the floor under the piano he had watched the jerky irregular powerful movements of those little feet upon the pedals, and listened to the soft mechanical sounds which the pedals made, so much more exciting to him than the music of Bach or Mozart. After Casimir died the piano was heard again, but it had lost its heart. The music had no more authority. Teresa too, the girl from far away, had sat in that drawing-room on that sofa and Harry had watched his young wife watching his young mother. Teresa had played the recorder before they got married, but Romula’s piano silenced her. They had got on well, though Romula was jealous. She moved out of the house into a flat. But the house rejected Teresa, she was never really its mistress. Casimir never met Teresa. Would he have found her attractive, would he have teased her and called her his wild colonial girl? She was not wild. She was a hard-working student who had saved up to come to England to do a diploma. He never saw her parents or her homeland, not even the albatross could make him take that journey, and he could not now remember why he had loved her. It was all so long ago and she had lived so short a time, it was as if he had killed her. She hovered in his memory as something undefiled, not quite of this world. Perhaps he had been enchanted because she had loved him so much and with so virginal a love. He was her first and only lover. So young and unmade, she had seemed to crystallise for him a brief idealism, out of what was confused before and cynical after. Chloe, whom Romula never knew, was another matter. Chloe was like him. Oh God, why had he not instantly discovered Midge when Chloe died — little Midge living down in Kent, whom Jesse had noticed and said, ‘Who is that girl?’
Midge was perfect, right, his right woman, his mate. Oh why did he meet her so late, and why had he now, for such bad muddled reasons, lost her? For he had lost her, Harry had given up hope. He had been out-manoeuvred, out-witted, cheated, mystified, baffled, made a fool of by Thomas, Stuart, Edward, chance, fate, Midge herself. He would get his own back on them all. He would find another perfect woman and marry her. He would dumbfound Thomas, dazzle the boys, and cripple Midge with jealousy and rash regret, paying in full for the pain which he was suffering now. There were other women. He could even recall having had that thought, as if it were the very same thought floating back in a capsule, after Teresa died, after Chloe died. Had he had it before they died? No, he had been faithful, perhaps because he was not, in either case, tested for long. There were women in the world! He might even have one in view already. But oh the pain, the longing, the absence, the sheer physical torture of a desire which had grown, out of perfect satisfaction, so habitual, so strong, and so precise. Harry knew that he was not the type of a martyr. He would not die of love, he would, in time, cheer up, look about, find other sports and joys. He would write another novel, he already had some ideas. He would not fall out of his boat and see it drift away faster than he could swim. All that, knowing the future, he knew. What a strange thing is a man’s life. But this knowledge did not ease the present anguish as he looked down at the plate which he was holding and realised that he would not be with Midge,
his
Midge, his beautiful perfect lover, ever again in the world.
‘Dad, I wish you’d let me do that.’
‘No, I like it, it’s good for me.’
‘Shall I go to the shops?’
‘No, I’ll shop. I’m going to do some serious cooking.’
‘Oh splendid!’
‘You and Edward need some decent food, you boys never eat. Where is Edward?’
‘He’s talking on the telephone.’
‘Who to?’
‘I don’t know. When are you going to Italy?’
‘Friday. I may stay a bit, I want to work on my next novel.’
‘Oh good. You’ll be beside the sea?’
‘Yes. From my bedroom window I shall see Vesuvius.’
‘That should be inspiring. What’s he like, your publisher — he must be very nice to invite you — ’
‘Oh very nice. He’s a she — ’
Edward had dialled Thomas’s country number. He got Meredith. Thomas and Midge were out to lunch with some people called Shaftoe. Edward talked to Meredith. His precise slightly raucous voice was made by the telephone to sound like Thomas’s. Later their voices would be indistinguishable. Edward suddenly recalled the awful dinner party at the McCaskervilles’ when he had sat in a corner and pretended to read a book and Meredith had come up and touched him. He talked to Meredith about his school, about the dorms, the masters, the games, starting to learn Greek. He talked about Meredith’s dog. He put the ‘phone down and went back to his room.
The mad black fit had passed, leaving ordinary misery behind. I suppose I’ll get better, he thought, I suppose I won’t always be totally wretched. I must be a bit better if I can even think this. I wonder if the madness, the terror, the horror will recur at different times in my life, coming back as if it had never been away, prompted by some other dreadful happening? Perhaps there will be many of these catastrophes I can’t conceive of now, perhaps I am doomed to have an unlucky life. But this is a senseless idea which I reject. I suppose Brownie will fade, I think I never let myself fully believe in her, I
pretended
that everything depended on her, but that wasn’t really our situation. Our relationship was always strained and willed. We never got past the stage of using each other to placate Mark. The word ‘placate’ brought with it the image of a sad envious ghost knocking at the doors of life to hold the dimming attention of those whom he loved, who loved him once. I wasn’t to blame, said Edward to Mark, it wasn’t my fault, I never wished you any harm, we are parted now, and you will stay young and I will grow old, and I won’t forget you, but I can’t let you destroy me. My life belongs to others, those who are here now and those who are to come. But oh Brownie, dear dear Brownie, whose real face he would never see again. He had not made love to her in that room, it would have been a sacrilege; and yet by that very sacrilege he might have won her. If he had done
that
could she have left him? But these too were senseless thoughts which must be banished. All that time she was yearning for Giles who was yearning for Stuart.
Edward opened the drawer and looked at Jesse’s ring. He took it out, and reaching farther in drew out Jesse’s sketch of Ilona, and the chain which Ilona had given him, and the photograph of Jesse which he had stolen. He propped up the photograph and the sketch, put the chain round his neck, and last, with some misgivings, put on the ring. It was like a religious ceremony. He tested his feelings. No warmth, no vision, quiet relics. It occurred to him that he might put the ring on to the chain and wear it round his neck, like Frodo. The idea amused him. He put the relics away, let them rest; and he wondered whether in the future, in some emergency, he might not, with greater expectation and with more remarkable results, put on Jesse’s ring. Jesse had always been more of a lover than a father, he had not finished with Jesse and, like the women, could not entirely believe that he was dead.
‘I’ve got to survive,’ he said aloud. He began to pick up the papers which were lying on the floor and put them in order on the bed. He folded Brownie’s letter and put it in his pocket. He wanted to destroy it, it was ghost material already, something uncanny and awful which he would dread ever to come upon in years to come. Yet he could not destroy it today. He would do so tomorrow. Perhaps when he read it again he would see it as a false letter, full of evasions and excuses. He suddenly realised that he would have to answer it, to say ‘it’s all right, don’t worry, be happy’. He would have to congratulate the happy couple. It might sound insincere, but they would not notice that in their joy! He tore up Mrs Wilsden’s first letter and pocketed the second. It meant less to him now. She had only ‘forgiven’ him because she was so pleased about Giles and Brownie. He looked at Ursula’s letter, it was a ‘nice letter’ but he threw it in the wastepaper basket; it had occurred to him that even Willy had worked against him, alarming Giles by the idea of a rival. So, in a way, Edward thought, I brought about Brownie’s happiness after all! Will this ever console me? He uncrumpled the letter from Sarah, understanding it for the first time. The letter smelt of incense and brought back that little dark room where Sarah had seduced him while Mark Wilsden’s life was being taken away. Now for the first time Edward recalled that he had enjoyed the seduction. Well, he had explained to Mark that it was not exactly his fault, and it certainly wasn’t Sarah’s fault. Perhaps Mark bound him to Sarah as he bound him to Brownie. He thought, I have a responsibility to her, I’m responsible for her, she’s unhappy, I must go to her; and he felt a stirring of curiosity, so often a motive to benevolence. Then he looked at the other two letters which had seemed so mysterious. Who on earth was Victoria Gunn, who wrote so familiarly, like an old friend, inviting him to a party to celebrate the liberation of someone called Stalky? The address was Flood Street. Of course, that was the dotty American girl he had met when he was looking for Jesse, and Stalky was her cat who had been in quarantine. But who was Julia Carson-Smith, writing from an address in Suffolk? Why she was the person who had lived in Jesse’s house and knew about Max Point. Her note accompanied a formal invitation card.
We are giving a coming-out dance (rather old-fashioned but rather fun!) for our youngest daughter Cressida, and we do so hope that you can come! I enclose instructions how to find us. A special bus will meet the 2.45 train from Kings Cross.
I’ll be there, thought Edward. I’ll talk to Sarah, I’ll drink with Victoria, I’ll dance with Cressida. There are girls in the world. It’s as Ilona said, there are all kinds of other people. I’ll start studying again, and I’ll learn Russian, and I’ll write a novel. I’ll write all about what has happened to me, or rather not about it, but about something terrible that I’ll
invent.
I’m so full of terrible things, enough for a lifetime of writing! And so, as Thomas said, I’ll thrive on disasters. Am I wiser now, or just more hardened? A picture of ordinary happiness came to him suddenly as a blue sea and a jostle of boats with huge coloured stripy sails. He thought, it’s not like what Thomas said about new being and so on, it’s more like what he said about the natural ego growing again! But he said there’d be some sort of evidence left behind. I must ask him about that sometime. Maybe I’ve just got so tired of it all I’m letting go and nature is curing me! Anyway I’ll try to do some good in the world, if it’s not too difficult, nothing stops anyone from doing that.