The Book and the Brotherhood (51 page)

Tamar was sitting beside the little gas fire and gazing at it. She had wrung water out of her wet skirt. She had refused food, tea, coffee, but had accepted a glass of whisky and water, which she had held onto without drinking and now put down on the floor. Jenkin, in distress, was asking, ‘Tamar, dear child, what is it, tell me, please tell me?’

She lifted her head at last, not looking at Jenkin but sightlessly across the room, and said, ‘Yes, yes, I’ll tell you. I became pregnant with Duncan’s child, and now I have killed it.’

Jenkin, who had been standing, retained his shock, stepping back as if some great object had been propelled against his body. His face flushed and he gasped. He sat down opposite to her, pulling his chair near and leaning forward. ‘Tamar, dear, take it easy. Just tell me exactly what you mean.’

Tamar gave a very long deep shuddering sign and went on in a dead listless voice, ‘Oh I don’t mean I had the child and drowned it or anything like that. It was never born. I had an abortion.’

‘What a terrible experience,’ said Jenkin, stupid with pity and anguish. ‘But – but – you say it was – Duncan’s child?’

‘Yes, I went to bed with Duncan once – I mean on one occasion. I felt I loved him, I wanted to comfort him. He said he couldn’t have children. So perhaps it was a sort of miracle. Only I killed the child.’

‘Are you sure it was Duncan’s?’

‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

‘Does he know?’

‘No, of course not. It must be a secret. You said he wanted a child, and there was a child, only now it isn’t alive any more.’

‘Why didn’t you – you didn’t think of telling him, or –?’

‘No!’ Tamar wailed the word, but her face was rigid, looking past Jenkin into the corner of the room. ‘How
could
I? You said Jean was coming back to him. I wasn’t going to stop that from happening by standing there and saying that I had his child. I thought the best thing to do was to get rid of it. Only I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what would happen to me afterwards, that I’d be in hell for it with nothing to do but to die.’

‘Tamar, don’t look like that, I won’t let you be in hell.’

‘It’s murder, it’s the irrevocable crime for which one suffers death. I shall never have another child, that one would kill any other child. It wanted to live, it wanted to live, and I wouldn’t let it! I can’t tell anybody – but keeping it secret eats my inside away –’

‘But you’ve told me, and I’ll help you.’

‘You can’t help me. I only came here to say it was all your fault –’

‘Why –?’

‘That day down by the river you said Jean would come back and they’d be happy again, and you advised me –’

‘Tamar, I didn’t advise you –’

‘You couldn’t have known whether Jean would come back or not, she hasn’t come back, perhaps she won’t and I’ll have done it for nothing. When the child was alive I wanted to tell Duncan, I wanted to run to him and tell him and say I loved him, but now I hate him and I can never see him again because I killed his miracle child in a fit of madness. And only a few days ago it was alive, and it was
mine
–’ Tamar began to cry at last, still rigid, her mouth open now, her eyes pouring tears which fell from her chin onto her lap.

Jenkin had tried to take hold of her hand but she had pulled it away, jerking herself back. He was appalled by what he heard. In the few minutes she had been with him Jenkin had
seen into the hell she spoke of, and although he spoke of helping her he did not see any way in which it would be possible. He wished he could take away her consciousness so that all this pain would cease. ‘Tamar, try to hold onto yourself, I’m going to help you, just
hold on
. Have you told anybody else about this?’

‘I told Lily I was pregnant, she gave me the money, I didn’t say who it was, she said it happens to everyone. And I told that parson in the country, I just said I was pregnant and he said keep it. I wish I’d come to you, even last week, you’d have said keep it and I’d have kept it, I wish I’d told you then on that day by the river, if only you’d asked what was the matter, I’d have told you and everything would be all right, only you didn’t ask me, you went on and on about Jean and Duncan and how
they’
d be all right, it was all about
them
, and I wanted to tell you about
me
– And now I hate you too, I hate everybody, and when one hates everybody one dies. I hate myself with such a hatred, I could kill myself by torture, I wish I could die tonight, I wish you could kill me and burn me.’

‘Stop, Tamar, you’re distraught, drink some of the whisky. Stop wailing, be quiet, here, drink some of this.’

Tamar drank a little, her hand trembling, slopping it onto her dress. She stopped crying.

‘Let’s sort this out, I can see it’s something terrible, awful for you, but you’re mixing it all up and blaming yourself for everything – we’ve got to be able to
think
about it, I’ll help you, you don’t hate me, you came to me, you must stay with me and trust me, you need people, you need love –’ Jenkin found himself babbling, just to keep the conversation going, hardly knowing what he was saying, uttering random words to try to soothe the massive wound which had so suddenly been uncovered to him.

‘Nobody loves me,’ said Tamar, now in a dull matter-of-fact tone, ‘nobody
can
love me. It’s impossible. I’m a person
outside
love, and I have
always been
.’

‘That’s not true. But, look, I’m going to ask you questions. I’m sorry if it hurts, but I
must
try to understand, you know I won’t tell anyone. This thing, this one occasion, with Duncan,
was there anything before it or after it, had you realised he was in love with you?’

‘No, he wasn’t, and there was nothing. I went to see him twice because – because Gerard asked me to.’

‘Gerard asked you?’

‘He thought I might be good for Duncan because I was so innocent and harmless. On the second time he’d just had a letter about divorce from the solicitor, and I felt so sorry for him, I said I loved him, and I did love him.’

‘Do you still love him?’

‘No. Then he put his arms round me and we went to bed.’

‘And after?’

‘After, nothing. He may have decided Jean would come back after all, or that I was a nuisance, a nasty incident, something he wished hadn’t happened. He ignored me at Boyars. I understood.’

‘And that weekend you knew you were pregnant?’

‘Yes. But I didn’t come to see him, I just came to get over being with him and knowing he didn’t love me and it was all over.’

‘You didn’t think it might go on?’

‘No. I saw it couldn’t – and I’d ruined all the things that Gerard thought – and all
that
was over forever. I knew it even before I realised I was pregnant. The things I asked you down at the river, I really knew how it was, though I hadn’t thought about Duncan so terribly wanting a child.’

‘I was just talking,’ said Jenkin. ‘I don’t know whether Duncan wants a child. He said once that he did –’

‘Anyway he wouldn’t have wanted this one. But
I
wanted it.’ The tears began to flow again. She said, ‘Oh, I’m so tired – I want to sleep.’

‘You must live with this as people do live with terrible losses. It is possible, you will discover how.’ He thought, there’s so much here that can’t be mended, or only miraculously. I wish I could share this burden with someone else, but I don’t see how I can. ‘Is there anyone else you’d like to talk to? What about that parson, Father McAlister? You told him –’

‘He forced me to tell him. He talked about Jesus and how
pure love made you penitent and your guilt was washed away and so on. But he didn’t know what it was all about, I can’t go back to him.

‘Look, who knows you’re here, beside Gerard? Does Lily?’

‘No, I ran out while she was shopping, then I walked about in the rain.’

‘Then I must ring Lily, and your mother must be told too –

‘No!’

‘People must simply know where you are. I won’t tell them anything else. I think I’ll ring Gerard, and he’ll tell them. Tamar, won’t you please eat something? No? Then you must go to bed when I’ve fixed the room. We can talk again tomorrow.’

Jenkin had made up the bed in the spare room and put in a hot water bottle and laid out a pair of his pyjamas. She crawled into bed in a state of complete exhaustion. Jenkin was about to take her hand and kiss her, but she had already fallen asleep. He watched her for a while, and then made a signal over her, a private signal of his own, for her protection.

As he went to the telephone to ring Gerard he suddenly recalled, which he had quite forgotten, the odd little scene with his friend which Tamar had interrupted. He paused with his hand upon the telephone. He could not remember exactly what he had said, he had the impression that he had been rather rude to Gerard in the earlier part of the conversation, and then he had laughed at what Gerard had said later. Well, there was nothing
there
that would need a miracle to mend. All the same he would have to think – He lifted the ’phone quickly and dialled Gerard’s number.

‘Hello.’

‘Gerard.’

‘I was hoping you’d ring. What’s the matter with Tamar?’

‘She’s all right. She’s asleep, I mustn’t wake her. I just thought, would you mind ringing Lily to say she’s here? And if Lily’s alarmed Violet –’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll sort all that out.’

There was a moment’s silence.’

‘Gerard –’

‘Don’t worry.’

‘I won’t.’

Jenkin sat down by the fireplace and poured himself out some more whisky. He felt upset, racked with pity, frightened, also excited. Inside a mix of disturbing sensations there was a cherishing gladness that there was in his house, safe and resting, a wounded creature who had run to him for protection. It was odd to feel he was not alone in the house.

He tried to be calm and quiet. His laughter had been partly shock-laughter, a protection from any more immediate response. Yet it had been funny too, absurdly funny.
Come home
. Was he tempted? Yes, he was. Throughout the years Jenkin had been conscious, more conscious than Gerard, of, with their closeness, the distance between them. He had reflected upon this distance, this steady secure space, as if it were perhaps asking for a hand to be stretched across it. His hand? As he thought this, sitting by the fire and remembering he made an embryonic gesture. He had inhibited the possible gesture out of a kind of timidity or chaste shame, a sense, life-long it seemed now, of Gerard’s superiority. Had he feared the, kindest possible of course, barely perceptible perhaps, rebuff? Nor had he ventured to imagine what that step closer would be like, what it would entail, what his life would be like
without
that clear void (he pictured it as a kind of trough of sky, pale blue and full of light) across which he looked at Gerard. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous, something too solemn, a conceptualising of the unconceptualisable, to think about his relation with Gerard in this way. If they were destined to come closer, to be more intimate, to meet oftener, or however one described it, would not this happen spontaneously, and if it did not happen was that not because there were good reasons, invisible perhaps but good, why it should not happen? Why all the fuss? Well, there was no fuss, only this awareness, sometimes manifested as jealousy, of which Jenkin, who concealed
this carefully from Gerard, was certainly capable. And now, and unexpectedly, that so important structural space had suddenly been annihilated. The king had come to him, cap in hand – and Jenkin had laughed at him. Come home? I don’t think I can come home, thought Jenkin, it’s not in my nature to come home or have that sort of home. Even this home, this house, is a shell that must be broken. All right, so this is romanticism, it is sentimentality. But I must go away soon, sooner than I had planned, if I am not to run to Gerard.

There was another piece of the puzzle, old and faded but still there, which had been jolted by Gerard’s surprising declaration. That was the question of Rose. Jenkin was so used to being just the tiniest bit in love with Rose that it was scarcely to be called that any more, nor did he use such terminology to himself. Jenkin had loved women and had had, though not at all lately, more adventures than his friends imagined, or others who thought of him as hopelessly sexless. But Rose was a special case. He had never spoken of his odd not too uncomfortable feeling to anyone except once to a close Oxford friend, Marcus Field, who also loved Rose. Jenkin, sage even then, had kept his feelings on a lead. Rose’s love for Gerard went far back into the shades of history, almost as far back as Gerard’s love for Sinclair. Gerard had let her love him, what else could he do? Yet (Jenkin very occasionally allowed himself to think) was he not a trifle complacent about it, ought he not perhaps to have told her to go away and find someone else? However that might be, an element, not exactly a motive, in Jenkin’s decision to escape was his desire to get away, not only from Gerard, but from Rose.

Yet – how much of that delicately balanced picture of motive and decision, which he had been so long constructing and had now been completed, had been shifted, even seriously damaged, by Gerard’s extraordinary move? Jenkin had never had a homosexual relation or dreamt of considering his close friendship with Gerard in that light – nor did he now allow himself to wonder what exactly it was which now existed and previously had not. What he felt was a sudden increase of being. Gerard had
called
to him, and the echoing call stirred
things in deep places. Come live with me and be my love. Perhaps, after all, this changed everything?

Gerard had telephoned Lily, and Rose, whom Lily had alarmed, and driven round to Violet’s to tell her Tamar was with Jenkin. He stayed a while with Violet. She told him, and seemed glad to be able to do so, about Tamar’s weeping and screaming fits which had preceded her flight. Violet did not know why Tamar was in such a state. Violet was certainly unnerved, upset, frightened, perhaps even shocked into genuine loving concern for her daughter. Gerard took the opportunity of saying to Violet with an air of authority that really she
must
allow Tamar to continue her education. Probably Tamar’s grief on this subject lay behind her breakdown. Some young people
passionately
wanted to go on learning and studying, and the really difficult things, which would be possessions forever, had to be learnt when still young. If Tamar were frustrated now (so Gerard painted the picture) she might fall into depression and lose her job, whereas if she could return to Oxford she would get a much better-paid job later on. Gerard would be very glad meanwhile to help financially, and so on and so on. Violet, quickly recovering from her softened mood, soon put on an expression, familiar to Gerard, of quiet amused cynicism. He left hoping that he might nevertheless have made an impression.