The Book and the Brotherhood (60 page)

Gulliver stood up and unbuttoned his overcoat. He put his hand inside into his pocket and drew out his wallet. He opened the wallet and drew out a five-pound note. He handed it to the man, who seemed to be expecting it, and said, ‘Here, just a little present, good luck to you.’ Then, replacing his wallet and buttoning up his coat, he walked briskly away. He was instantly consumed by misery and rage and fear. When he had walked some distance he looked back. The man had gone, probably to get some more drink somewhere and shorten his life a little more. Gulliver wished that he had given the man his coat, or rather he wished that in some other ideal life some Gulliver, who was certainly not himself, had been able to enact a good action spontaneously without degrading it into a superstition. He sat down on another seat and closed his eyes and buried his head in his hands.

After a while, retaining self-consciously the attitude of despair, he opened his eyes and looked miserably down through his fingers at a small area of the dirty concrete below him, covered with cigarette ends and chocolate papers. He stared at it for a while. Then he removed his hands and sat up a little. An odd little round thing about the size of a ping-pong ball was lying under the seat. Gulliver wondered what it was. Still sitting he stretched one hand in under the seat but could only touch the little thing with his fingertips. It rolled away. He thought, I’m bewitched today, I must get hold of that thing, what on earth is it? He got up and peered under the seat. The thing had moved again, perhaps accidentally kicked by one of the people passing by. Gulliver knelt down and tried to reach for it again, but now it was lying farther off, out in the open, likely to be stepped on at any moment. In an anguish of anxiety he pursued it, made a quick dart and seized it, then stood holding it in his hand. When he saw what it was he stared at it with disconcerted surprise.

Duncan was looking at a hammer. It was an old familiar hammer with a heavy head and a shortish thickish well-worn wooden handle. The grain-striped handle was unpolished save by the grip of many hands, and was splintered a little at the end. It was beautifully balanced. Duncan could remember his father using that hammer in a little workshop in the garden where he pursued his hobby of mending furniture. The hammer had travelled with Duncan, in his bachelor flats, later into his marriage, a friendly serviceable old hammer, always finding its modest place in a suitable drawer, always to hand, ready to tack a carpet, or hang a picture. Its head, with its substantial shining nose, was pleasantly rounded, as if worn, as if it had spent thousands of years in the sea, it looked like a dark glossy ancient stone. Duncan weighed the heavy head in his hand, testing its firmness, caressing it in his palm, then drew his fingers down the warm smooth wooden shaft. It was a good old tool with a friendly face, humble, faithful. He had gently rubbed the end of the handle with sandpaper. He laid it down on the kitchen table and looked at it. It had never before been for him an object of contemplation. It looked primitive, it looked innocent, a quiet symbol of unassuming diligent toil. He put it away in a drawer. He drew out of his pocket a letter which he had received two days ago and read many times. It was brief and ran as follows.

This letter had arrived two days ago. Duncan had at once replied accepting the invitation. He had told no one. It was now Wednesday.

Jean had been present when, at breakfast time, he had
unsuspectingly opened the typed envelope. He had dissembled his emotion and pocketed the letter quickly. His first sensation had been fear, his second elation. He was living now in a state of extreme terrified excitement. He had of course considered every possible explanation, including the implausible one to the effect that Crimond wanted to bring about some sort of reconciliation. Such a project was contrary to common sense, but Crimond’s brilliant crazy mind did not accommodate common sense. After all, he and Crimond had once been friends, even, in the context of the group, quite close friends, in those far off but eternally significant Oxford days. Perhaps Crimond had continued to like him, even felt, as man to man, sorry that they had been divided by a woman. Men who have loved the same woman can feel a bond over many years. Such a bond can have various foundations, of which contempt for the woman in question could be one. There is a relationship, which can also consist of chivalrous surrender on one side and grateful possession on the other. There can also be shared loss and romantic nostalgia mutually enlivened. Working along these lines, for of course he had thought in the interim of nothing else, Duncan could just imagine that what Crimond wanted was a cosy chat, a manly conversation, wherein they would both reminisce about their relations with Jean, and conclude that really, in the end, they were both satisfied with the situation as it was now and need no longer regard each other as enemies. They might even envisage the occasional meeting, a drink together, perhaps billiards or chess. However, distraught as he had become in the intervening days, Duncan was not quite mad enough to take this picture seriously. It was difficult enough to think of Crimond in this mood, it was even more difficult to believe that he might expect Duncan to fall in with it.

No. The invitation meant war, it signified confrontation. But of what kind? Could Crimond be considering some kind of belligerent self-justification? Was it just possible that he did not want to cut, in Duncan’s vision of him, too bad a figure? He would not want Duncan to see him as a mean despicable rat, would want to explain, perhaps, how inevitable it had all
seemed, how eloquently Jean had represented her marriage as unsuccessful, unimportant, virtually over in any case. This was also difficult to envisage and would involve a sort of denigration of Jean, a sacrificing of her in the interests of some kind of understanding with Duncan, which did not seem at all characteristic of Crimond. It was equally out of character to think of him as wanting to demonstrate to Duncan how little he cared that Jean had gone, how relieved he was, to explain perhaps that he had positively thrown her out, so as to efface any image of himself as a defeated man. Crimond was far too arrogant, also perhaps too much a gentleman, to descend to any such justification, however belligerent in tone. Duncan could not really imagine any conversation between them as likely to be possible. He was in any case determined not to let any such conversation begin, and felt sure that Crimond did not envisage it either. These exclusions left only the possibility of some sort of fight – but then again of what kind?

It was certainly possible that Crimond was testing his courage. If Duncan refused to come Crimond would despise him and Duncan would know that he was despised. If Duncan accepted Crimond might contrive to humiliate or terrify him. Duncan of course dismissed the undignified, indeed contemptible, idea of arriving with a bodyguard. This was man to man, and it was a safe bet that Crimond hated Duncan as much as Duncan hated Crimond. The detested, also the ridiculous, husband. Duncan remembered Jean’s stories of Russian roulette, which she had described as being both tests of courage and elaborate charades. Jean had never believed that the guns were loaded, but it had also been clear that she was required to take the risk. From something which Jean had said, not of course in answer to any question from Duncan, it appeared that Crimond still played with guns, at any rate possessed them. Supposing in this case, the guns were loaded, supposing Crimond intended simply to kill Duncan and make it out to be an accident? Was not Duncan walking straight into a trap, offering himself gratuitously as a target to a man who loathed him? What was clear, was that whatever grim dramas he might imagine now, it was impossible to refuse the
challenge. Supposing, later on, Jean were to discover somehow that he had funked it?

Duncan’s inflamed mind went on to imagine a variety of outrageous and ingenious ways in which Crimond might intend to entrap and torment him. The most horrible prospect was that of humiliation, of being tied up, handcuffed perhaps, tortured till he begged for mercy. The room could contain traps, devices. Well, he would act rationally, he would not resist, he would not risk serious injury or extreme pain, he would capitulate and say and do whatever was required. As he imagined scenes of this kind Duncan writhed with misery and rage. After anything like that it would be impossible for Duncan to go on living without killing Crimond. Here he reverted to old familiar, now almost traditional, fantasies of how he would one day destroy his rival.

Duncan was well aware that Crimond had in him some sort of steely element, some pure mad self-indifferent recklessness, which Duncan, however strong his emotions, however fierce his hatred, simply lacked. Whatever the game was, Crimond was likely to win it; and Duncan even found himself relying, contemptibly, for the outcome, upon Crimond’s rationality, or upon some hypothetical sense of decency which would preclude too brutal a treatment of the hated husband. And from here he would revert to discarded hypotheses about unimaginable conversations. One thing Duncan was determined to attempt was not to lose the initiative. Here the picture was not a very clear or well-omened one. A very little preliminary talk would make clear
what it was to be.
Then Duncan would hurl himself upon his adversary, as he had done in the tower, relying on his weight and a quick wrestling hold to frustrate whatever fiendish device Crimond seemed to be intending to bring into play. So, he would fight, but not under Crimond’s rules. It was a function of this scenario that Duncan had, on the previous day, purchased a knife. He had posed as a bookbinder who wanted a long sharp knife with a narrow blade which could pass up the spine of a large book, a not too flexible knife with a sharp point, opening with a spring. He had considered and dismissed arming himself with a revolver.
It would not be easy to get one in the time available, and the weapon seemed to him otiose. A knife would be unexpected and at close quarters more effective. Close up against this imagined encounter Duncan found his thoughts dwelling not so much upon murder as upon grievous bodily harm. It was in this context that he then thought of the hammer. The smashed kneecap, the crushed right hand, the eye reduced to pulp, Crimond in a wheelchair, Crimond blind. Of course with
such
a Crimond still alive Duncan could never sleep secure. On the other hand, a murder charge could rest upon him, with its consequences which in his distraught state he was scarcely counting. The knife man would remember selling the knife. A few well-aimed hammer blows delivered with all his force could do irrevocable damage, and yet could also be passed off, by Crimond, later, discovered bleeding and alone, as some sort of accident; and here Duncan found himself, with another twist of the screw, relying upon something like Crimond’s generosity! There was also Crimond’s vanity, his pride, his unwillingness to appear so very publicly as the victim of the man he had wronged. As Duncan went about his work in the office and lived his quiet convalescent life with Jean, his mind crowded with these gory fantoms, he felt at times that he was going insane.

After a short time it began to seem to Duncan that Crimond’s letter constituted a sign. It was fated, it came at its moment duly. This feeling was obscurely connected with what was still wrong, sometimes, he despairingly felt, irretrievably wrong, between himself and Jean. What was wrong was, it seemed, nothing obvious. With what was obvious they could deal. To say that he ‘forgave’ Jean was to use superficial language. Well, of course, he forgave her, but that was only a part or aspect of some enormous package, something as large as the world, which in being with her again he
accepted.
He accepted the pain, the wreckage of their lives, the desolation and the ruin in both their hearts, even the possibility that she might run away again. He accepted all the things he did not know and would never know about her relations with Crimond. It was like asking God to pardon the sins one has
forgotten as well as those one remembers. He soon gave up the problem of whether she had left Crimond or whether Crimond had left her, it became like some piece of metaphysics finally seen to be empty. Perhaps Jean did not know, perhaps God did not know. He no longer tried to riddle out what exactly had happened on the night when Jean arrived at Boyars, crashing her car on the wrong road. He listened to the little that she said, and asked few questions. Jean was relieved and grateful, her love enlivened by relief and gratitude and by their world renewed. She was not happy, but, they both agreed, she was almost happy. She would become happy. He did not speculate too much now about her thoughts. He was not happy, but would become happy. All their talk about living in France, the books they opened and the maps they studied, were the symbol, not the substance of happiness to come. Sometimes he wondered whether they were wrong to want or expect to be happy, as they had once been; but
had
they been, perhaps their memory deceived them, or
that
was not what it was? Perhaps they had hold of the wrong concept. Perhaps all this thought, all this
analysis
in which they were both indulging, was simply a mistake, a substitute for some more substantial living in the present? Their living in the present so often seemed (and here too they tacitly agreed) like an
ad hoc
hedonism which put off the real issues into an elsewhere. This uncomfortable dualism seemed, after the first excitements, to intrude even into their renewed sexual relations which, though apparently so surprisingly satisfactory, took place inside a cloud of anxiety and dread. Of this, in kindness to each other, neither of them spoke. They thought that time would heal them, love would heal them, that love would heal itself, that just here was the place for faith and hope. At the same time he was conscious of something wrong which had not been put in the reckoning, a missing item which made the problem not only insoluble but unstatable. It was after the arrival of Crimond’s letter that Duncan concluded that the missing item simply represented the fact that Crimond was still alive.