Ritual in the Dark (19 page)

No doubt. But I probably wouldn’t enjoy it. You know, we had a phrase for it in the RAF. We called it ‘having your oats’. That really catches its meaning—the straightforward physical act—having a nibble, a screw, dipping your wick. But that’s not sex. Sex is the opposite of all that. It’s the opposite of this feeling of being worthless, unintended. It’s an overwhelming sense of power and security. It’s the complete disappearance of the feeling of being mediocre. It’s a strange conviction that nothing matters, that everything’s good.

Nunne said with interest: Does it really mean all that to you?

Sometimes.

Then you’re lucky.

Maybe. Maybe I’m not particularly lucky. Everybody’s lucky, if only they knew it.

Even sadists and hopeless neurotics?

Everybody. You know, you say you often feel worthless. So do I, sometimes. But, fundamentally, I know I’m not. When I was a kid, my parents used to say I was born lucky. And the funny thing was, I always felt lucky, fundamentally. . .

Then you were lucky, Gerard. I wasn’t. I had a loathsome childhood. My father bullied me, and my mother sat on me like a hen hatching eggs. She practically suffocated me. My main feelings in my childhood were shame and furtiveness. That’s what my childhood was like. What do you say to that?

I understand it. I used to feel the same pretty often. Anybody does when they’re children. Unless you spend most of your time day-dreaming. It’s just the feeling of total lack of purpose in a child. You don’t start to possess your own soul till you become an adolescent. And that sense of purpose, being your own master, is the greatest thing that can happen to you.

Nunne said:

Provided you’re not up to your neck in a treacly mess of emotions.

Throw them off. Strangle them. I did. Anyway, you get moments of insight into yourself that make up for everything.

You do, perhaps.

Yes, I do. You know the Egyptians all believed they were descended from the gods? That’s the feeling. For the Egyptians, man was a sort of god, a god in exile. For the Christian Church, he was an immortal soul, poised between heaven and hell. Today he’s just a member of society with a duty to everybody else. It’s the steady devaluation of human beings. But that’s our job, Austin, yours and mine. We’re the writers and poets. We can fight the inflation. Our job is to increase the dignity of human beings, try to push it back towards the Egyptian estimate.

He began to feel excited and happy as he talked, and grateful to Nunne for releasing this sense of certainty. Nunne was listening with an expression of interest, but there was no response in his face. Looking at him, Sorme remembered his image, being burnt out inside, like a hole in a carpet. That was it. Something had short-circuited Nunne inside. His capacity to respond had been burnt out by guilt and fatigue. Nothing Sorme could say would strike any response; there was nothing to respond. Sorme stopped and stared at him, feeling the futility of saying more. He said finally:

You know, Austin, I wish you could tell me what’s worrying you so much.

Why, nothing. Nothing you don’t know about.

I don’t understand. What’s the use of being conscience-stricken? If you’ve done something bad, why waste time regretting it? If you can’t stand by your action, then forget it. Dismiss it. Start again.

Nunne sat up in the chair. Sorme was aware of the effort it cost him. He smiled tiredly at Sorme.

Listen, Gerard, let’s forget it, eh? I can’t explain to you. I will one day. Don’t get the idea it’s a mystery. It’s not. But let’s not talk about it.

Sorme said:

Austin, I’m going to leave you. You look dog-tired.

I am. I shall take a strong sleeping-draught. Do you mind very much if I don’t drive you home?

Of course not.

I’ll send you in a taxi. . .

No!

Yes. I really insist.

Don’t be a fool. I’d enjoy walking.

When he came back from the lavatory a few minutes later, Nunne was returning the phone to its rest. He said: The taxi will be here in a few minutes. It’s on my account, so don’t pay.

He yawned, then stretched, and looked at himself in the mirror, saying:

Hair of a woman and teeth of a lion. One of the beasts in Revelation. Why was I born so ugly?

Sorme sat down and picked up the wine glass

You really are an idiot, Austin.

Nunne reached out, and touched Sorme’s hair briefly.

He said:

Dear Gerard.

He picked up the phone again and listened for a moment. He said:

Hello, is that the night porter? Mr Gregory? Ah, this is Mr Nunne speaking. Do you think you could put my car away for me? It’s outside now. No, I’m sending a friend down with the key in a few minutes. Thank you. Goodnight.

Sorme said:

By the way, Austin, can you tell me anything about this chap Oliver Glasp?

Nunne lit a cigarette.

What do you want to know?

Well, who is he? He seems very talented.

Do you know his work?

Only the paintings in your flat.

You might like him. Except that he’s quite the most quarrelsome person in London. He has no skin.

Has he. . . any peculiarities?

He’s not queer, if that’s what you mean. I never enquired into his sex life. He’s been in mental homes—tends to fly into sudden rages and throw things. He also has some obsession about pain. It’s his favourite word—at least, it was when I knew him. We quarrelled—I couldn’t stand his touchiness. At the time, he was trying to be an ascetic—sleeping on the bare wires of his bed and all that. . .

The phone rang. Nunne said:

That will be your taxi.

*
  
*
  
*

Back in his own room, he collected the brandy flask and the glasses, and took them upstairs. The kitchen smelt pleasantly of fruit; a bowl of apples stood on the table.

He felt physically tired, and yet curiously excited. Talking to Nunne had given him an intuition of change. He thought, with sudden complete certainty: I have wasted five years. Stuck in rooms. The world was alive. I have done nothing.

Poor Austin. Sadistic and listless, sensual, caring only about people and places. I am freer than he is; yet for five years I have behaved like a prisoner. Why?

He opened the kitchen window and leaned out. The night air smelt fresh. He felt buoyed up by an intuition of kindness and gratitude. It came again: the sense of life, of London’s three millions, of smells in attics and markets.

As he stood there he heard a door close. He turned around and listened; it had been the Frenchman’s room. Probably Callet would come up to the kitchen. The idea of conversation gave him no pleasure. He went quietly down the stairs, and back into his own room.

Instead of switching on the light, he crossed the room and opened the window, then climbed out on to the fire escape. He sat there, staring into the darkness, faintly lit by lamps and the neon sign of the cinema. A light came on above him; it was in the kitchen. Looking up, he could see Callet’s shadow move across the glass. He congratulated himself on his foresight. But the light disturbed him; it made him feel as if he was avoiding Callet. After a moment’s consideration he went up the fire escape, to the landing outside the old man’s room. This was the top of the fire escape. From there, an iron ladder completed the remaining distance to the roof. He pulled at it to test its solidity before grasping the rungs and climbing up. It curved over the parapet, on to the roof.

The parapet was a foot high; it enclosed two sides of the roof, facing north and east. On the west side, only a gutter divided the slates from the drop past five stories to the waste ground between the house and the church. The breeze was cold. He moved round the angle of the roof to shelter from it, then sat cautiously on the slates, his feet braced against the parapet. Towards Camden Town, the lights of the plastics factory that worked all night lit the sky. The exhilaration was still in him, relaxing into a sense of quiet and power. When the sound of a heavy lorry passed on the Kentish Town Road his mind moved ahead of it, through Whetstone and Barnet, to the north. The thoughts were controlled, clear-cut and deliberate. The feeling that drove them seemed to flow steadily and certainly. They moved towards an image of gratitude, of reverence, of affirmation; it became a cathedral, bigger than any known cathedral, symbol of the unseen. He thought: This has taken me five years. A vision of all knowledge, of human achievement in imagination and courage. Not the mystic’s vision, but the philosopher’s, freed from triviality and immediacy. I am the god who dwelleth in the eye, and I have come to give right and truth to Ra. But how many times? Half a dozen in five years. And now stimulated by a sadistic queer and an infatuated girl. Nunne succeeds where Plotinus failed.

He began to laugh, his back jerking against the slates, his feet braced apart. It made him realise that he was cold. He began to wish that he had thought of bringing an overcoat.

Never make a yogi. Not enough patience. Or need the warmer climates. Intensity of life. Monastery in the Himalayas. An old man stared into the dawn, his face lined with strength of will, unimpressed by the five-thousand-foot drop into the valley. Isaiah or Michelangelo. In tense hands, he holds the world’s will, beyond tragedy. A faint pencil line of light along the eastern horizon.

To change. To change. To what?

An image of Caroline came to him, and he felt a momentary distaste. The unseen, the imaginative adventure, was just what she did not represent. Like Kay, the girl from the Slade School, it was an idealism she offended. The warm, predatory body, the desire to be possessed. Her animal vitality conducted the tension away, like an earthing wire.

To change. But no physical change. Only a constant intensity of imagination that would require no cathedral symbol to sustain and remind. Isobel Gowdie, big-breasted farmer’s wife, sweating and curving to the indrive of an abstract darkness, the warm secretions flowing to abet the entry of a formless evil. To escape the dullness of a Scottish farm by daylight, the time trap. Symbol of the unseen. The unseen being all you cannot see at the moment. Until the consciousness stretches to embrace all space and history. Osiris openeth the storm cloud in the body of heaven, and is unfettered himself; Horus is made strong happily each day. Why the time trap? Why the enclosure? Invisible bonds, non-existent bonds, bonds that cannot be broken because they are non-existent. Human beings like blinkered horses.

The cold had penetrated the thin coat and trousers until he felt naked. He stretched and flexed his limbs, then blew into his cupped hands. The iron of the ladder numbed his fingers. He lowered himself back over the parapet, feeling with his feet for the rungs. Descending, he was afraid of the numbness in his fingers, aware now of the drop to the concrete flags below. He felt relieved as his feet touched the iron platform.

When he switched on the light, he saw that his hands were black with dust. There was a blur of grime on his cheek, where he had raised his hand to touch it. He went up to the kitchen, and found that the kettle was half full of hot water.

After he had washed, he set the alarm for eight o’clock. It was three-thirty. He was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PALE DECEMBER sunlight made him sweat as he cycled along Leadenhall Street. The traffic in the City was heavy. He was aware that it irritated drivers of cars when he was able to steer in the narrow lane between a line of stationary traffic and the pavement, and it pleased him to do it. When cycling, he felt that the driver of every car was a personal enemy.

The mental activity of the previous night had left a feeling of freshness, and he felt no irritation towards the traffic. When a woman stepped off the pavement in front of him, forcing him to brake sharply, he only smiled at her and shook his head in remonstrance; he guessed her to be a foreigner from the fact that she was looking left instead of right.

It was shortly after nine-thirty when he stopped in Aldgate High Street. He leaned the bicycle against the wall outside the Lyons Corner House, and locked the back wheel. The self-service bar was almost empty. He bought tea and two toasted buns, and sat at a table near the window. A middle-aged woman wearing a pink smock collected dirty cups off the table. He returned her smile, and felt as he did so a sense of anticipation that was like convalescence. The whole café with its food smells, the workman opposite reading the Daily Express, the heavy traffic in the street outside, all touched some mechanism of nostalgia in him. It felt like waking from a long sleep. He took the leather-bound notebook from his pocket, and wrote in it: ‘Whitechapel, December 1
^st
. I qualify as a modern Faust. Shut up in a room, thinking too much. Enter Austin Mephistopheles, twisting the waxed ends of his moustache. . . But who is Gretchen?’

He stopped writing, reflecting that Caroline or Gertrude might easily see the notebook. He had been about to elaborate the question. Instead, he wrote: ‘Like Mephistopheles, Austin sells me love or life. My side of the bargain is still obscure.’

On the opposite side of the road a barrel organ began to play, tinnily, each note jangling like a rusty can dropped from a height. It aroused in him a memory that was also a sense of smell and colour. For a moment, it eluded him, then returned: the City office, the smell of ledgers, and the French tobacco of the belligerent Scottish clerk who lived at Southend. The last time he had heard it played, Man coeur s’ouvre à ta voix, had been on the Thursday afternoon, five years before, when he had walked out of the office without giving notice, the solicitor’s letter carefully folded in his wallet, and had stepped into the traffic and sunlight of Bishopsgate, still dazed by the feeling of relief.

The memory reconstructed itself with a detail of sense and feeling that he found surprising; it revived the hot afternoon smell of dust and motor exhaust, and the damp smell of the entry below the office where he kept his bicycle. For a moment, he considered walking through Houndsditch to look at the office building again, then dismissed the idea, recalling the boredom and self-contempt that had accumulated there over a year.