The Book and the Brotherhood (58 page)

Rose breakfasted early the next morning, and said goodbye to her guests who duly came down and seemed to be orderly and sane, and for whom Annushka’s more elaborate breakfast arrangements were now waiting. The sun was shining upon the wet garden. They waved Rose off; but before the sound of her car had died away Jean broke down. She ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom. Duncan, outside, could hear her sobbing hysterically. At intervals he knocked and called. He was not impatient. He sat down on the floor in the corridor and waited. Annushka brought him a chair and a cup of coffee. As Duncan sat, listening to Jean weeping, a kind of resigned calm descended on him. He would have preferred to sit on the floor, but had to sit on the chair out of politeness to Annushka.

At last the door was opened. Jean unlocked it, then rushed back to the bed and lay there crying more quietly. Duncan looked round the familiar room, where the wood fire was
blazing brightly. He noticed, which he had scarcely taken in yesterday, the demoted picture and the rectangle of blue paper. He picked up the octagonal table, decanted the books upon it onto the floor, put it beside one of the windows and placed two upright chairs beside it. Then he went to the bed, sought for Jean’s two hands, pulled her up and led her to the table. They sat, half facing each other, half facing the sunlit view over little green hillsides, some distant village houses and the tower of the church. As soon as Duncan seized her Jean stopped crying. She sat now with her hands palm downwards on the table, her lips parted, her face wet, her hair tousled, looking away out of the window. She was still wearing Rose’s tweed dress, but had taken the belt off. Duncan watched her for a while in silence. Then he drew out a handkerchief and leaned over and carefully dried her face. He drew his chair closer and began to caress her hands, and her arms, thrusting back the loose sleeves of the dress, then to stroke down her hair, combing it out with his fingers. Jean began to sigh quietly, bowing her head to the rhythmical movement of his big heavy hand.

After a while, moving away from her, he said, ‘So the Rover is a write-off?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘I was running away, too fast.’

‘Will you run back equally fast?’

‘No. That’s smashed – too.’

‘Aren’t you still in love?’

Jean said, gazing out of the window, ‘It’s over.’

‘I shall take some convincing.’

‘I will convince you.’

‘It’ll take a long time, you know, to put us together again. Many tears. We must show all our wounds, tell each other the truth, abstain and fast. Time must pass. We do not know what we shall be or what we shall want.’

‘But we’ll be together.’

‘I hope so.’

‘You pity me.’

‘I pity you very much, that is something you will have to put up with.’

‘I am afraid of you.’

‘Oh good – but, oh my darling, let us be happy at last.’

‘Just when everything’s going well, you spoil it all!’ cried Lily.

‘Sex is going well,’ said Gulliver. ‘Nothing else is. And don’t say “what else is there”. I’m tired of your smartness.’

‘I’m not smart. I just try to be. You’re hurting me deliberately. You’ve become mean and cruel. What’s the matter with you?’

‘I’ve told you what’s the matter, I’m worthless.’

‘That’s what I say! So we’re both worthless! So let’s stick together!’

‘No, you’re real, you’re something. I’m nothing. You’ve got money, that’s something.’

‘Then let’s celebrate, let’s go to Paris.’

‘No. And you’ve got some inside, you’ve got courage, you’re naive, that’s something too, you’ve got being, you are uneducated and stupid, but you actually want to do things, you’ve got
joie de vivre.
’

‘I wish you had. You’ve been a perfect misery for days. All you need is a job.’

‘All I need is a job! How dare you taunt me! You despise me!’

‘I don’t. You’re tall and dark and good-looking.’

‘I shall never be employed again, never. Do you realise what it’s like to face that? You don’t care, you actually like doing nothing. I don’t.’

‘You can write can’t you? You started writing another play.’

‘It’s no good. I can’t write.’

‘Couldn’t we do something together, set up a small business, money could do that.’

‘What sort of small business? Manufacturing ball-bearings or face cream? We haven’t any skills. We’d just lose your money. Anyway, I’m through with your money.’

‘Oh stop it, you bloody man! Can’t Gerard get you a job? He tried before, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, and he’s just tried again, he oh so kindly sent me to a man who ran a literary agency who told me to get lost! Gerard doesn’t care. He only does fake good works to make people admire him.’

‘That’s not true. You said he led you on and dropped you! That’s why you’re against him!’

‘He didn’t even lead me on!’

‘Gull, don’t be so awful when things are getting better.
We’re
better, Tamar’s gone home, thank God, and she’s back at work, Jean’s come back to Duncan, it’ll soon be Christmas –’

‘Tamar’s another damned soul who’ll kill herself with drugs or cancer. And Duncan will kill Jean, he can’t forgive her twice, he’s just pretending, I bet she’s scared stiff. One night when they’re in bed she’ll find him staring at her like Othello, and then he’ll strangle her.’

‘You’d better go to a doctor and get yourself seen to.’

‘Why do you talk about
them
as if they cared about
us?
You’re a snob. You’d like to belong to that horrible set, but they’d never regard you, or me, as one of them, not in a hundred years, so you needn’t try so hard!’

‘Oh shut up! Go and join the Foreign Legion!’

‘I’m going away, I’m serious. I’m giving up my flat, I’ve sold the furniture to the next tenant, I’ve sold my books –’

‘No!’

‘Well, most of them, what do you think was in those boxes I asked you to store for me? I can’t afford to live like that any more, and I’m not going to sponge on you. I’m going to the north.’

‘To the
north?
’

‘I want to be where people are really suffering and not just
pretending to. I want to join the dregs of humanity, the bottom people, I want to be really poor. I’ve got to stop thinking I’m a bourgeois intellectual. If I can stop thinking that I can get a job. But not here, not with you lot, not with bossy Gerard and smarmy Jenkin and aristocratic Rose –’

‘I’ll come with you –’

‘Don’t be silly. You’re another thing I’ve got to get away from, you’re a bad symbol, you’re an idle woman.’

‘I think you hate women, I thought that when I first met you. I wish you’d let me do your horoscope.’

‘And you’re superstitious, and your grandmother was a witch, and –’

‘Gull, do stop
terrifying
me, you’re not yourself.’

‘I have no self.’

‘Now you’re being smart. You don’t mean all those horrid things you said about –’

‘About
them
, no, all right, I didn’t. But can’t you recognise a man in
despair?
’

‘Well, I’m in despair too, only I don’t make such a fuss about it. All right, I’ve got some money, but I can’t do anything with it or myself – then you turned up and I thought life made sense at last, and now you bother me with your bloody despair!’

‘There comes a time when a man has to be
alone, really
alone.’

‘Gull, please, won’t you go and talk it over with someone, with Jenkin, I’ll ring him up –’

‘You won’t. He’s running away too, and I don’t blame him, he’s going to South America.’

‘How did you know, did he tell you?’

‘Marchment told me, that schoolmaster, I even went crawling to him for a job. Jenkin’s fine, only he’d tell Gerard, and I don’t want to go to South America.’

‘I should hope not! You’re
ridiculous.
Why not stay in London and live here with me? If you want to work with bottom people there are plenty in this city, I could work with you –’

‘Lily, I don’t want to work with people, like a social worker,
I want to be with people! It’s no good, I’m through with compromises.’

‘Gulliver, don’t leave me. You’re the only person who has ever really made me
exist.
We love each other, we agreed that the night before last. Let’s get married,
please
let’s get married.’

‘No. I’m leaving.’

‘Where do you imagine you’re going to?’

‘Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, I haven’t decided. Everyone’s unemployed up there.’

‘You’re mad – I’ll tell Gerard to stop you –’

‘If you do I’ll never forgive you.’

‘But you’ll let me know where you are?’

‘I’ll write, probably, but not at once. Now please don’t make a scene.’

Lily jumped up and began to cry. ‘You’ll never write, you’ll disappear, you’ll marry a girl in Leeds and get a job in a factory and I’ll never never see you again!’

Jean and Duncan, now back in London, seemed to their anxious friends to be coming to terms with each other more easily than had been predicted. They were both
very tired.
They had been carrying heavy burdens and were glad now to lay them down, together, exhausted. There was a mutual agreement to tend themselves and each other. They were assisted here by a deep and determined hedonism, an early bond between them. With Duncan again, Jean soon rediscovered the pleasure principle. They made jokes about this. They fell over each other trying to invent consolations, gratifications, treats. They felt that, after surmounting mountainous difficulties to be together again, they deserved to be rewarded. Once they were known to be back they were showered with invitations.

The goal of being happy united them. The healing of deep terrible wounds was another matter. The question ‘Can I forgive her?’ had made, for Duncan, the concept of forgiveness so murky and complex that he ceased employing it. There were many other ways of handling the situation. They both referred to precedent; they had managed it last time, and hadn’t they managed it fairly easily? It seemed so, but they could not remember too clearly. It had seemed, at the beginning, that they must simply
work
at their reconciliation by long talks about the past, telling the truth, showing every scar, probing every misunderstanding. But this comprehensive programme of mutual revelation proved difficult, and was felt by both, privately, to be dangerous. They did talk a great deal however, and told each other how valuable this was. They talked, selectively, about what had happened in Ireland. That first drama seemed sometimes closer, more real, more full of pictures, than what had happened more lately, over which so many clouds now hung. Duncan told Jean, for instance, what he had never recounted before, how, when he was in Wicklow, he had sat in a public house among the damned. This evocation of Duncan’s state of mind seemed to have significance
for both of them. He had never told Jean, and certainly did not tell her now, of how he had found Crimond’s hair on the floor of their bedroom. This detail, utterly revolting to Duncan, had with the years gathered all kinds of filth in his mind, and he had no intention of giving it more power and form by putting it into Jean’s mind. Neither of course did he tell her about Crimond’s blow and its long frightful sequel, the damage to his eye, the damage to his soul; of these terrible things he was bitterly ashamed. In fact, although they talked and reminisced a lot, and carefully handled a good deal of interesting material, neither of them had much to say about Crimond. It was as if, in that important central spot, there was a curious lacuna. They constantly talked round him but not about him. Well, was it really so important to talk about him? Duncan had wanted to be convinced, and Jean had engaged to convince him, that her relation to Crimond was finally over. But it became evident that this could not be done in any direct or simple way. Of course time would show. But how much time would be needed, perhaps the rest of their lives? Duncan watching her, thinking about her, could not but believe her still in love with Crimond. Such a passion could not suddenly vanish, it could only die of long starvation. Let it starve then. But he found it difficult to ask straight questions about this mystery. ‘Telling each other everything’ was to have included a long and detailed reliving of her whole relationship with Crimond, including the details of exactly how they came to part, so as to determine to the satisfaction of both of them that it was now at an end. This did not come about. A look of such misery came over Jean’s face when he put certain questions that Duncan felt too sorry for her to proceed. He wanted to know what
exactly
they had said to each other which constituted ‘an agreement’; but Jean was vague, made contradictory answers, changed the subject. Nor could he, talking to her, make any sense of the car crash, which on reflection seemed to have something odd about it. One subject after another was clumsily handled and postponed. Perhaps that was the only way to proceed and perhaps they were thereby making progress. In fact they did make progress, but not by the clarification
and truthfulness method. The ‘fasting and abstaining’ which Duncan had had in mind concerned or included sex. He had had, at Boyars, no idea of how, when, or whether, they could establish anything like their former sexual relation. He sometimes wondered whether it was
conceivable
that she could move from Crimond’s bed to his, or that he could accept her with the aura of Crimond upon her. But a greater and more impersonal power, to which they both silently and readily submitted, brought it about that after a due time they found themselves in bed together again. This significant reunion was blessed and hastened by a sort of gentle tenderness with each other, an eagerness to please, which perhaps adequately took the place of showing wounds and telling the truth. They did not ask, ‘Do you still love me?’ But love was there, busily moving about inside what still seemed, at times, the awful mess of their damaged marriage.

The most important thing which Duncan did not tell Jean, and which he felt she did not guess, was the violence and ferocity of his hatred of Crimond. Of this he spoke to nobody. Of course it was taken for granted that Duncan loathed his rival. But as he and Jean gradually ‘learnt’ each other again, he felt that she, with enough to do struggling with her own darkened imagination, assumed that as Crimond receded from her, he receded from Duncan too. It was not so. Of course Duncan continued to wonder whether Jean had really left Crimond voluntarily, and whether, on any day, if he were to whistle she would run back. These were doubts and speculations which, constituting an intelligible pain, he had to live with. His hatred for Crimond was something else, obsessive, primaeval, poisonous, deep, living within him like a growing beast, living with his life, breathing with his breath. He continually rehearsed the defeat in the tower room, and his last sight of Crimond in that shameful encounter in the dark beside the river. The fall down the stairs, the fall into the river, awful images of his cowardly weakness and his stupid graceless suffering. These things must be paid for. Of course he wanted to settle down again with Jean, and his ‘let us be happy’ had come from the heart. Sometimes
that
future was
real, and he was pleased in her pleasure when they planned their treats and consolations. But at the same time there was another event in the future over which he brooded as over a precious dragon’s egg, a dream which was becoming hideously like an intention, the moment when he would go to Crimond and kill him.