The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (49 page)

After breakfast we decided to walk inland and look for a shop. The air was chilly and Julian was wearing one of my jackets as an overcoat, since it had not occurred to her to purchase a coat during her shopping spree. We walked along a footpath beside a little stream full of watercress and then came to a signalman’s cottage and crossed the railway and then went over a humpy bridge which was reflecting itself in a very quiet canal. The sun was piercing the mist now and rolling it up into great cloudy spheres of gold in the midst of which we walked as between huge balls which never quite touched us or touched each other. I felt very troubled about what had happened, or rather not happened, during the night, but I was also being made insanely happy by Julian’s presence. To torment us I said, ‘We can’t stay here forever, you know.’

‘Don’t use that tone of voice. That’s your “despair”. Not again.’

‘No, just saying the obvious.’

‘I think we must stay here a while to learn happiness.’

‘It’s not my subject.’

‘I know, but I’ll teach you. I want to keep you here until you become content in your mind about what is going to happen.’

‘You mean about our marriage?’

‘Yes. Then later on I’ll do my exams, everything will be – ’

‘Suppose I were much older than – ’

‘Oh stop worrying, Bradley. You want to sort of justify everything.’

‘I am by you eternally justified. Even if your love were to end now I am justified.’

‘Is that a quotation?’

‘Only from me.’

‘Well, it isn’t going to end now. And do stop boring me about your age.’

‘For all that beauty that doth cover thee is but the seemly raiment of my heart, which in thy breast doth live as thine in me. How can I then be older than thou art?’

‘Is
that
a quotation?’

‘It’s a damn rotten argument.’

‘Bradley, have you noticed anything about me?’

‘One or two little things, I suppose.’

‘Have you noticed that in the last two or three days I’ve
grown up
?’

I had noticed that. ‘Yes.’

‘I was a child and perhaps you are still thinking of me as a child. But now I am a woman, a real one.’

‘Oh my darling girl, hold on to me, hold on to me, hold on to me, and if I ever try to leave you don’t let me.’

We walked across a meadow to a little village and found our shop and as we began to walk back the mist cleared away completely. And now the dunes and our courtyard were huge and glistening with sun, all the stones, dampened a little by the mist, shining in their different colours. We left our basket beside the fence and ran on down towards the sea. Julian suggested that we should collect some wood for a fire, but this proved difficult because every bit of wood we found was far too beautiful to burn. However we did find a few pieces which she consented to immolate, and I was carrying them back through the sandy dunes to our collecting point, leaving her still on the beach, when I saw in the distance something which absolutely froze my blood. A man in uniform on a bicycle was just riding along the bumpy track away from our bungalow.

There could be no doubt that he had been to Patara. There was nowhere else to go to. I immediately dropped the wood and lay down in a hollow of sand and watched through a vault of wet golden grass until the bicyclist had ridden out of sight. A policeman? A postman? I have always dreaded officials. What could he want with us? Was it us he wanted? No one knew we were here. I felt cold with guilt and terror: and I thought, I have been in paradise and I have not been grateful. I have been anxious and destructive and stupid. And now something is going to happen, and I shall learn what it is like to be really afraid. So far I have been playing at fear when there was no need.

I called to Julian that I was going back to the house to get the car to carry the wood, and she should stay and go on collecting. I wanted to see if our bicyclist had left anything. I started off across the courtyard, but in a moment she was calling ‘Wait for me!’ and racing after me and clasping my hand and laughing. I averted my terrified face from her and she noticed nothing.

When she got to the house she stopped in the garden to inspect some stones which she had placed there in a row. I moved without obvious haste to the porch and went in through the door. A tele gram was lying on the mat and I picked it up with a quick swoop. I went on into the lavatory and locked the door.

The telegram was addressed to me. I began to fumble at it with trembling fingers. I tore the whole thing, including the telegram itself, then stood there holding the two halves of the paper together. It read
Please telephone me immediately Francis
.

I stared at these deadly words. They could only mean something catastrophic. And the incomprehensibility of this visitation was terrifying. Francis did not know this address. Someone must have found out, how? Arnold presumably. We had made some slip, how, when, what, some fatal mistake. Even now Arnold was on his way here and Francis was trying to warn me.

Julian called ‘Yoo hoo!’

I said, ‘Coming,’ and emerged. I had to get to the telephone at once and without letting Julian know.

‘I think it’s lunch – time, don’t you?’ said Julian. ‘Let’s fetch the wood after.’ She was putting the blue and white check table cloth on to the table again. She put the jug of flowers in the centre of the table, from which it was always ceremonially removed as we sat down to eat. Already there were these customs.

I said, ‘Tell you what, you get lunch and I’ll just take the car down to that garage. I want to have the oil done and I could get a bit of petrol. Then we’ll be ready if we want to go somewhere this afternoon.’

‘But we can go then on the way,’ said Julian.

‘They may be shut this afternoon. And we may not want to go that way.’

‘I’ll come with you then.’

‘No, you stay here. Why don’t you go and pick some of that watercress we saw? I’d love some for my lunch.’

‘Oh good, yes, I’ll do that! I’ll get a basket. Don’t be long.’ She pranced off.

I went to the car, then failed to start it in my agitation. At last it started and I set off bumping horribly slowly along the track. By road the nearest village was where our big church was. There must be a telephone box there. The church was just outside the village on the side towards the sea, and I could recall nothing of the place from our night arrival. I passed the garage. I had thought of asking the garage man if I could use his telephone, but it might not be private. I drove past the church and turning a corner saw the village street and a public telephone box.

I stopped outside it. Of course the box was occupied. Inside it a girl, gesticulating and smiling, turned her back on me. I waited. At last the door opened. I found I had no change. Then the operator would not answer. Finally I achieved a reverse charge call to my own number and heard Francis, who had picked up the receiver at once, babbling at the other end.

‘Francis, hello. How did you know where I was?’

‘Oh Bradley – Bradley – ’

‘What’s the matter? Has Arnold found out? What sort of a mess have you made of things?’

‘Oh Bradley – ’

‘What is it, for God’s sake? What’s happened?’

There was silence, then a high whining sound. At the other end of the line Francis was crying. I felt sick with fear.

‘What – ?’

‘Oh Bradley – it’s Priscilla – ’

‘What?’

‘She’s dead.’

I became suddenly and strangely conscious of the telephone box, the sunshine, somebody waiting outside, my own staring – eyed face in the mirror.

‘How – ?’

‘She killed herself – she took sleeping tablets – she must have had them hidden – I left her – I shouldn’t have done – we took her to hospital – but it was too late – oh Bradley, Bradley – ’

‘She is really – dead – ’ I said, and I felt that she simply couldn’t be, it was impossible, she was in hospital where people were helped to get better, she simply could not have killed herself, it was another false alarm. ‘Really – dead – Are you sure – ?’

‘Yes, yes – oh I am so – it was all my fault – she’s dead, Bradley – she was alive in the ambulance – but then they told me she wasn’t alive any more – I – oh Bradley, forgive me – ’

Priscilla wasn’t alive any more. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said mechanically. ‘It’s my fault.’

‘Oh I’m so wretched – it’s all my fault – I want to kill myself – I can’t live after this, how can I – ’ More whining and crying.

‘Francis. Stop that whimpering. Listen. How did you find out where I was?’

‘I found a letter in your desk from the agent – I thought you might be there – I had to find you – Oh Bradley, I’ve been in hell, in hell, not knowing where you were – thinking this had happened and you didn’t even know – I sent the telegram late last night but they said it wouldn’t arrive till this morning.’

‘I’ve just got it. Hold on. Just keep quiet and hold on.’ I stood silent in the slanting ray of the sun, looking at the pitted concrete of the telephone box, and I wanted to cry out, she cannot be dead, has everything been done, everything? I wanted to take Priscilla in my arms and make her live again. I wanted desperately to console her and to make her happy. It would have been so easy.

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God – ’ Francis was saying softly, repeating it again and again.

‘Listen, Francis. Does anyone else know I’m here, does Arnold know?’

‘No. No one knows. Arnold and Christian came over last night. They rang up and I had to tell them. But I hadn’t found the letter then and I told them I didn’t know where you were.’

‘That’s good. Don’t tell anybody where I am.’

‘But, Brad, you’re coming back at once, aren’t you? You must come back.’

‘I’m coming back,’ I said, ‘but not at once. It was only chance you found that letter. You must consider that this telephone conversation didn’t happen.’

‘But, Brad, the funeral and – I haven’t done anything – she’s in the mortuary – ’

‘You haven’t told her husband, you know, Roger Saxe?’

‘No, I – ’

‘Well, let him know. You’ll find his address and phone number in my address book in the – ’

‛Yes, yes – ’

‘He’ll organize the funeral. If he won’t, organize it yourself – Start organizing it anyway – Do whatever you’d do if you really didn’t know where I was – I’ll come when I can.’

‘Oh Brad, I can’t do it – you must come, you must – they keep asking – she’s your sister – ’

‘I hired you to look after her. Why did you leave her?’

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God – ’

‘Do as I tell you. There’s nothing we can do for – Priscilla – she isn’t – there any more.’

‘Brad, please come, please – for my sake – Until I see you I’m in hell – I can’t tell you what it’s been like – I must see you, I must – ’

‘I can’t come now,’ I said. ‘I can’t – come – now. Get on with the arrangements – get hold of Roger Saxe – I leave it all to you. I’ll come when I can. Good – bye.’

I put the receiver down quickly and came out of the box into the full sun. The man who had been waiting looked at me curiously and went in. I walked over to the car and stood beside it, touching the bonnet. The dry road had made it dusty. I made trails in the dust with my fingers. I looked along the quiet pretty village street, composed of eighteenth – century houses of different shapes and sizes. Then I got into the car and turned it and began to drive back very slowly past the church and on towards Patara.

There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind. Sometimes no doubt one acts rightly in resisting these simple promptings, one acts rightly in bringing into being the terrible refinements which lie beyond. I was not in fact then troubled about duty. Perhaps I assumed that I was acting wrongly, but the assumption attracted little of my attention. Of course I was stricken with guilt and horror at my unforgivable failure to keep my dear sister alive. But as I drove along I was also employed in minute calculations about the immediate future. I was perhaps absurdly influenced by the idea that it was a pure accident, a mere contingent by – product of my carelessness, that Francis had known where to find me. And if that terrible telephone call had been so little determined, so casually caused, it made it seem that much less real, that much easier to obliterate from history. In acting as if it had not happened I was scarcely distorting the real course of events at all. It had, because it so absolutely needn’t and shouldn’t have occurred, but a very shadowy existence. And if that was so I need not torment myself yet further by agonizing over whether I ought not at once to set off for London. Anyway, there was nothing more I could do for Priscilla.

As I drove along the road at about fifteen miles an hour I realized what an ambiguous and suspended state I had been in since our arrival, so long ago, at Patara. I had of course been prepared to
occupy
myself simply with being happy, simply with the miracle of her continued presence. This was right surely. These days of paradise, rescued from the slow anxious mastication of time, should not be marred by pusillanimous fears of the future, or by that despair which Julian called my ‘abstraction’. On the other hand, as I now saw, some deep reflection had been at work, must have been at work, within that seemingly thoughtless joy – of – presence. I had, half hidden from myself, terrible purposes. My problem was simply how to keep Julian forever. And although I had said, to myself and to her, it is impossible, I knew at the same time that having once been with her in
this
way I could not now surrender her. The problem of keeping her had once, inconceivably long ago, seemed like the problem of persuading myself that it would, in spite of everything clearly to be said against this, be right to accept her generosity and take every possible advantage of it. But by now the problem had become, within the quiet self – concealed flow of my relentlessly purposive ratiocination, something much more blackly primitive, something which was scarcely problem or scarcely thought any more, but more like a sort of growth in my mind.