In the Time of Greenbloom (57 page)

John sat very still and by pressing her feet against the floor she began to rock the seat gently backwards and forwards, ruminatively; re-creating the motion of the railway carriage, swinging the two of them evenly to and fro in the half-darkness of the boathouse. John forced his back against the cushions and stopped it, drawing them to a standstill rudely.

“What did he look like?” he asked.

“Oh, rather good looking at first sight. Brown-skinned and blue-eyed, short hair, very curly. I found I didn't like to look at him not only because he was what he was, but because he had
rude
eyes as though he despised everyone. That's what spoilt him I think and he was
just
common, not in his voice except very occasionally, but in the way he moved his mouth and refused to be quiet. Some people always have to be very much
there
. He was like that, he wanted to be noticed.”

“Did he smoke?”

“No, he ate sweets, peppermints I think they were.”

John sat very still on his corner of the stationary seat.

“Did he whistle?”

“Not out loud but he had a way of putting his lips together as though he were whistling to himself. He did it in between sentences—” she paused. “Why are you so interested?”

“Er—” he tried to look less tense. “I can't tell you
now
. It's just that it may have had something to do with what we were talking about before you came out.”

“Who? You and that Greenbloom person?”

“Yes.”

With a little effort at concentration, she frowned. “Something to do with what you were talking about?”

“I said it
may
have had something to do with it. I'm not sure, that's the trouble—I never am.”

“How funny! I wonder whatever it could have been!”

“Perhaps one day I'll be able to tell you. I don't know though for certain. The thing I'm interested in doesn't seem immediately important any longer; it did once but it doesn't now. I'm getting tired of it. You can't go on for ever trying to solve things, can you? They get left behind.”

“Yes, I suppose they do.”

She started to swing the seat again and this time he didn't stop her.

“Will you just tell me one more thing?” he asked, “and then we won't talk about it any more.”

“Yes, if I can, but it's not easy. It was strange, I find it hard to think of somehow.”

“What was the story he told you?”

“It was about this girl he'd known. He kept on about her, round and round in a circle, no not a circle, that was the odd thing. He'd get so far with it and then stop and start again. ‘She was very like you,' he would say, ‘like you liking me and you were just what she might have been if she had been old enough to be like you. And fancy, if I'd met her today as I've met you, then it would all have started again and she would have been a match for me at your age just as you are
a match for me at my age, sitting there not wanting to know me,
not much
, and pretending, like
she
would have pretended—' “She broke off, “That was something like it. Can you understand how horrible it was and yet how it made you want to go on listening? Each time he took it a bit further but never to the end.”

“Never to the end?”

“No, the train stopped at Penmaenmawr and before I could get up he opened the door. He leaned right forward over me and said, ‘this is where I get out, this is journey's end but it doesn't end in lover's meeting, does it?' I said, ‘I wish you would go', and he said ‘I know you do, but thank you for listening just the same.'”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Yes he said ‘Tell them all if they want to know; tell them all but don't tell
me
,' and he laughed.”

“Was he mad?”

“Yes, I'm sure he was. He seemed to be several different people all putting on an act. He didn't behave like one person; he didn't seem to know who he was. After the train left the station I began to feel terrible. The fright he had given me began to come back and I began to loathe myself for having listened to him and for not having helped him. Yet at the same time I was quite sure that if I had given in to him in any way, if I'd spoken a single word or let him see that I was frightened and interested he might have—it made me sick; after he had gone I really
was
sick—out of the window.”

She was silent and they continued to swing backwards and forwards in the half-darkness. The fact that she kept so still, that she had ceased to do her share towards keeping up the rocking motion of the seat, made him sense her discomfort loudly but he refused to make any comment. Instead he returned to the thoughts which her story had set on their dark procession through his mind.

It could have been the same man of course; but what did it matter? Quite soon, in fifty or sixty years, everyone would be dead, everyone of his own generation; and what had
once been a crime would survive only as a curiosity. The reality of it was dead already, buried in his own heart deeper than Victoria; and Greenbloom had been right when he had said that everything was unimportant unless it made you suffer.

That seemed to be Greenbloom's new message, to welcome suffering and keep it greedily to yourself so that you would know you were alive, to let no one distract you from it by telling him about it: to drink, as some men drank, alone; to celebrate, love, hate, suffer and die as you were born, alone. He remembered some lines from a poem about Jack and Jill which he had once memorised:

“
Her lady-smock all stained with his blood
She'll dry away the cold tears and the mud,
She'll staunch his trickling scalp with vinegar
And tell no soul her sorrows
—”

It was not a comforting doctrine but at least it was much more sensible than Mother's and Father's which seemed only to have provided them with blunt weapons. No one could ever effectively love or hate anyone else no matter how much they knew, no matter how great their love or their hatred might be, simply because everyone was fundamentally alone, what Aldous Huxley had called ‘a solitude'.

If his solitude, his own desert, had been planted with the solitary evergreen of Victoria's death then according to Greenbloom he should have been grateful, not to any person, not to any god, not even to Victoria herself but to the sensibility which allowed him to be aware of it as it stood there for ever vivid and vital in the vast and silent landscape of his mind.

So it did not matter, on these terms, whether or not it
had
been the same man. There were thousands of such people in the World; quite apart from the millions of men who had killed with honour in the Great War. There were multitudes of murderers and eccentrics at large whose crimes and
follies were only noticed if they happened to be unfashionable. In an educated society, one that had absorbed a valid philosophy like Greenbloom's, there would be no fashions and therefore no need for Police, Judges, or Priests, because its members would realise that responsibility did not exist; that the acts of everyone were as remote as the emanations of the night stars, which, though they appeared to make up constellations and be involved one with another were in reality separated by distances so vast that they failed to share even the same Time.

And if Time was an illusion then so were responsibility and guilt and Greenbloom was right.

Beside him the girl stirred. She withdrew her left arm from the back of the seat and folding it across her lap said:

“I suppose I shouldn't have told you that.”

“I'm sorry—what did you say?”

“I said I wished I hadn't told you that.”

The repetition of the sense of her first remark recalled to him the actual words she had used and it was to these that he replied from the midst of his preoccupation.

“Of course you should have told me. I
wanted
you to tell me.”

“No, I meant about being sick. A thing like that puts people off, doesn't it?”

He sat up. “Good Heavens no! I'd forgotten all about that. You
must
think me unsympathetic. I was trying to work something out, you see, and it was very difficult.”

“About my man on the train?”

“Yes, partly. It was like something that happened to me once and I was wondering whether to tell you about it and then I decided I wouldn't.”

“Was that what this Greenbloom man was talking about to you?”

“Yes.”

“And did
he
tell you not to talk about it?”

“I suppose he did in a way.”

“Well, I think that's jolly unfair,” she said. “He lets you
tell
him
all about it and then advises you to tell no one else, not even
me
when I've just confided something in you that I wouldn't have dreamed of telling to anyone except perhaps Brigid.”

He stared through the brackish darkness at her. Something about her spontaneity, the ingenuous school-girl indignation of her outburst, reminded him of Victoria. The very tone of her sentences, quick and unwatched, the little shake of her head disturbing the dark outline of her hair, brought back to him the clear remembrance of Victoria's presence as sharply as did the scent of heather or the bars of the Mendelssohn's Wedding March.

With total recollection and an excitement so powerful that he was momentarily unable to speak or to move, he was once again at the lake-side in Northumberland hearing the vanished sounds of the forest, seeing the dead and living face of Victoria as she stood before him with her eyes closed while he breathed in afresh the scent of still water, mud and growing trees.

She was not, this girl was not, never could be the same. No one could rise from the grave and wear the liveries of the dead or carry again the particular loveliness which had flowered once and once only in one person. But she was like, she was wonderfully like. She was tall pale delicate and generous in the way Victoria had been generous: ready to quarrel with warmth, to sit walk or stand with you at your suggestion and to say what she thought the moment she thought it.

She was no more afraid of unhappiness than Victoria had been, drooped in the same way when she felt depressed, thought and felt alone if she must, yet did not want to go on with it afterwards and rebuff you from behind a closed door like all those others he half-remembered. But more than all this, with all her differences: eyes that were darker, a less immediate gaiety and a lighter voice, she was alive; a person and not an idea; someone who could be seen with the eyes, quarrelled with and crossed, touched and loved
with the lips hands and the whole shivering conjunction of the mind and body.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “I'm awfully sorry.”

“Oh that's all right! I'm just a fool, I always blurt things out to people and then regret it afterwards. If you really want to know I'd have told you in any case. It's no good pretending that I'm reserved. I was only doing that to try and embarrass you and make you feel mean.”

“I know you were,” he said. “That's why I'm sorry that I can't tell you. But perhaps one day I'll be able to.”

“When?”

“Next year in Ireland,” he said.

“In
Ireland
?”

“Yes. You live there don't you? Well next year at the very latest I'll be going there. I'm going to start Medicine in Trinity College Dublin; at least I am provided I've passed an exam I've just been taking.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes.”

“How odd.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm going there myself next year. I'm going to read Modern Languages—my Mother was at T.C.D. and we only live a few miles outside Dublin.”

“What's your name?”

“Dymphna. What's yours?”

“John—Blaydon.” She did not question it; it meant nothing to her and gratitude illumined him.

“If I'd known I was going to see you again I don't think I would have told you all that,” she said. “Seriously.”

“But it's wonderful!” He talked wildly, mixing the tumble of his metaphors in his sudden exhilaration. “The very best sort of introduction, something very private and generous like—real hospitality where you give something to a person, not just a name or a look at your house but part of you—part of yourself. Things that happen to you
are
you in a way.”

“Yes, but then you've given me nothing in return.”

“Yes, I have. Like a good guest I've taken everything you offered and enjoyed it and been interested.”

“You're very quick aren't you?” She smiled at him through the shadows. “Are you Irish too?”

“Only a little. I've got some rather splendid cousins who live in Ireland.”

“That'll be useful.”

“Will it?”

“Very! it's the snobbiest country in the World. My parents nearly crippled themselves sending me to Wycombe Abbey just for the snob-value of it. Isn't it absurd?”

“No, I don't think so. I
love
splendour and flunkeys myself and I'm always wishing we were richer or had a title in the family.”

“Oh that's different. What I meant was that it's ridiculous to behave as though you were rich when you're not. For instance, do you know why it is that I'm having to P.G. here for the next few weeks instead of going home to Kildare?”

“No.”

“Because
my
Parents have the house full of P.G.s themselves and there's no room for the rest of the family until some of them leave. Naturally they weren't expecting me to break up so soon. Now, you must admit
that's
stupid?”

He laughed happily. “Yes that really is.”

“And they, I know, will be saying in their most far-back voices ‘
Darling Dymphna, our eldest, is staying with Admiral and the Lady Geraldine Bodorgan in Anglesey you know
,' and having to stick a little bit extra on the bills of their own P.G.s in order to pay for it.” She broke off, “Good Gracious! What on Earth's that!”