The Dead Seagull (2 page)

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And some mornings, in the first winter of our marriage, we would lie late in bed, without breakfast, and talk about the past like a long-united couple. “You were a rather horrible creature,” I hear her whispering, “you were so conceited and so arrogant and so self-centred. And I was so much older than you. But you would never respect it.” And she would look up at me from the enormous depths of her eyes; eyes in which I knew that I should one day see, in the nine-month distance, my own face and nature finally fulfilled.

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We had a little money. Not much, but enough to buy food, a few books, a few small pleasures—the cinema, brief visits to London—and I was in expectation of receiving a grant of money from a literary society.

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The cottage in which we lived cost virtually nothing—it was remote and in an unfashionable part of the county. The sea dashed its spray on our southern windows and the gulls, on quiet days, strutted about on the whitewashed window sills. We could look out and watch ships crawl across the horizon, taking a whole afternoon for a voyage that, with our eyes, we could cover in an instant.

Or we would walk together over the hills by the sea. And as the gestation made its claim upon her body and upon both our minds, so our talking, as we walked, died away. Often we did not speak for an afternoon or an evening. We could observe on her body the measurable dimensions of sin. O that heavenly hour beside a river in Wiltshire, with the swifts in the clouds and the boys, far off, bathing minutely in the river, when, under the tree of knowledge, hissing with invincibility, the serpent uncoiled from my loins at the injunction of her love! The dominant ovum devours us or destroys itself.

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I think that we were like those children of whom one reads in German folk stories—harmless and hand in hand, with flowers in their hair, they wander lost through forests haunted by everlasting presences. The consciousness of natural sin went with us on our walks or stared at us, like an image we dare not look at on the wall, when we sat, seldom talking, by the fire in the evening. The noiseless and overwhelming engines of procreation laboured about us in the room, paralysing us; I had continually the emotions of a person who stands under a dam and watches the walls quake and crack. Looking across at Theresa, I sometimes seemed to see those fissures open in her face through which, at the proper time, the flood of retributory suffering would rush out. Taking her face in my hands I sought to restore it with tenderness or with a kiss. But I knew that I was holding the broken shell in my hands, from which, as I say, at the right season, the proud flesh must come out strutting into the world.

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“What shall we christen it? We ought to make up our minds.” Theresa looked across from the bed upon which she lay resting and put down the book that she could no longer read.

“I thought you had decided yourself.” I went and sat beside her on the bed. “I don’t know why—I thought you must have made a choice—it is a simple matter to decide. Shall we christen it with the name that we both know is right?”

She smiled a little sadly and said: “I refuse to call the baby ‘it’ any longer. From now on he is Sebastian.”

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“I saw our lives, two naked and childish forms, huddled together for warmth in a dark corner of the palace of human existence. We waited for an angel to cry to us, ‘Waifs, it is time for you to come home.’ Uncomprehending we saw about us the happily damned indulging in happiness and damnation. Monsters got born, lived, flourished, and died, and no one recognised that they were monsters. Over our heads great ecclesiastics and equally great statesmen forfeited the future to the expediential present. Athletes of unparalleled prowess demonstrated the pointlessness of progress. A comedian wrote: ‘They cut down elms to build asylums for people driven mad by the cutting down of elms.’ Categories jostled and jigsawed about our heads in a sort of seasick anarchy. Only two things remained constant: the anguish of being and the anaesthesia of the kiss.” I wrote this at that time.

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Then the spring arrived; it brought a sensation of relief and amelioration. The bright light, touching her face as she lay carelessly sleeping on a yellow pillow, seemed to invest her features with an external smile. Her dark hair leaped about in what appeared to be an orgy of immobility. I saw, not for the first time, that her beauty—the imitation of the image—brought upon itself the responsibility of sin. Such beauty imperiously demands its own destruction. Love, the double fury, engendering the exhaustion of itself, passes, at its climax, into death. Just as the spring engenders summer and then dies of its own excess into the autumn and the winter. The fulfilment of love is death, no matter how long the corpse goes on walking.

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I confess that in those early days of my marriage I was not unduly curious about her sensibilities; for there seemed to be none. Perhaps I should put it another way: I remember no occasions on which our natures conflicted. It may have been by reason of the simplicity of the life we lived: it gave, after all, few opportunities for differences of feelings or opinion. And, again, we had, as children, played together; as adolescents we had held hands in cinemas; we had, without ever deliberately seeking to know each other, nevertheless learned, in simply being together, that with the other each was happy. We had, as they say, things in common: what these things were it is easy to say: they were our lives.

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There was a week when I was ill—every so often my throat had a habit of turning septic—and I lay for days in bed dreaming of fizzy drinks I dare not swallow or of peremptory operations that would put an end to the discomfort. From the bed I could look out of the window and watch the sea’s procession—I remember a small trawler far out, that, in the windless day, carried above itself a decoration of smoke shaped like nothing so much as a cornucopia and suddenly I was lost to the whole world. It was on other stars that people sat down in restaurants, or played ping pong, or risked their wages on thorough-bred horses, or died, or overthrew governments. I was in a tower of septic poisoning. The sea and the ship might have been painted on the window—silent, not really changing.

Then the door of the bedroom opened and Theresa came in noiselessly. “Are you awake?” she whispered. I opened my eyes. “I’ve brought someone to see you. He was the only person I could find that I thought you might like to see. He is a priest. He was walking along the shore. Shall I bring him in?”

“A priest? But I’m not going to die.”

“I could bring you flowers, or sweets, or grapes,” she said lightly. “Instead I bring you a friend, and what do you do?”

It is perfectly apparent to me that this state of quiet cannot continue for long. Too many emotions—fear, anticipation, love—exercise their stronger stresses upon us. All the while we live like two people who share an unmentionable secret, each suspecting the other of an incapacity to bear it much longer. Sometimes it seems that she hates the unborn child and hates me also; her virtue was her only garment and now she is naked to the worst winds of all the worlds. I think she sees her virginity with its face turned away weeping in every corner. The torn lips of the hymen hymenaeus need more than the lascivious hand of a lover to heal them.

There are so many necessary sins that nevertheless can never be forgiven. Who shall forgive the virgin mother for sacrificing her virginity and her self-love? Who shall forgive the infant for being? Let us utter a holy No to that greatest of all duties, the homicidality of love. Not all of those whom the destructive god visits can bring themselves to look upon the massacres that ensue. Bald tobacconist in Tooting High Street, I no less than the angel with the gold pen have seen that bed in the back room where three corpses lie under the sheets. The girl in a blue dress whose hope died when you last saw her on a Saturday evening, the mother who died when you pulled out the umbilical like a telephone wire, severing all communications, and the wife who had died under your infinitesimal infidelities. The desire of the whole is death where the pursuit of the whole is love.

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There is really so little to say of these months that preceded the summer when the child was born. I could almost wish that something had happened to us that, by no matter how twisted a rendering, could now be understood as a kind of foreboding. Or again, it may be that such omens were present but that, at the time, I had no eye for them. I saw a dog run over by an omnibus. I recall only that as it lay spread out like a torn oil painting on the road, I marvelled at the brilliant crimsons and the mauves and the blues of its shattered physiology. All it was, as it lay, could have been put together by a child with a paint box. What had the faithful eye and the affectionate tongue or the attendant allegiance or the courage to do with the colourful mess in the middle of the road? I know only one thing: it had obeyed its greatest master.

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No, destiny visited us in even more oblique disguises. On an April afternoon we walked in fields; Theresa, in a bright frock with a studded belt, and large, by this time, with child, but perfectly capable, went in happy spirits. “Let’s walk the whole afternoon,” she said; “we can take tea at a village on the way home.”

The lanes, with the flowering bushes fermenting along the banks, led us down from the hills. Sometimes a gold-tipped tree hung its head over like a lachrymal woman looking down into water. The weather, that afternoon, was perfect. It was quite warm enough for summer clothes. I held her hand and looked often at her; she would seem almost to smile but say nothing. She was full of her possessions; the day, the excursion, the embryo, the love, the husband, the vernal equinox of life, a pretty dress, a lipstick that made her mouth into a dragonfly alighting on her face. I thought that she had never been so beautiful as that afternoon; her pregnancy became her as it became those medieval women who so admired its lines that they wore gowns to give the belly a false size.

But before long she grew tired. She sat down on the bank by the side of the road and half laughing said: “I shall have to live here. I can’t move a foot.” I took her to the rear of the hedge, away from the road, and she rested in my arms. The white blossom was all about us. She gathered my hands to her breasts. It seemed to me that the whole world had gone procreant around my head. I could feel the reproduction of the species conducting itself in an orgy of imperious urgency inside every corpuscle of my blood. The pulse in my wrist leaped up like a line of lambs; the love had run loose throughout my vegetation, the banishment from paradise flashed between us, but we were beyond it. I took her, and, as I possessed her, out of the blossom, a yard or two at one side, I saw the most concupiscent face in the world, contracted with vicarious satisfaction, watching us as we lay.

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You are the first of my ghosts, you collision and collusion between the ovum and the sperm, you bullying embryo whom only the will of god wanted born, you stalked up and down the bed of our passion like a sentinel to see that we did not escape from you. I could watch myself staring at the big belly where my son was housed; I could examine the exact evolution of the jealousy that slowly soured into resentment and poisoned into positive hate. I saw my son pawing at me from the bulge and the bilge of his mother like a frog in an anthropologist’s jar, grinning with gratification, because it might be our Darwinian progenitor. I saw the contemplation of Theresa introvert itself, seeking, among the rocks of her own and her infant’s body, for the dove of individuality that must soon inhabit her child. Her curiosity, however, provides her with no answers. I am still the only victim for her virtues to revive. And, above everything else, the formidable knowledge that I have invented an instrument that can manufacture evil of its own volition: just as, of my own volition, I manufactured it.

O God, who did this, you, or I?

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Lucky dog, lying dead as paper on the road, what insoluble enigmas passed over your head! Whatever you did, the killing, the coupling, the chasing, the cringing, it was all the same—“this creature hath a purpose and its eye is bright with it”—you were the explorer of the experientially expedient. Whatever was, was right. In your world everything was necessarily best, down to the anatomical picasso your death stretched on macadam. Let the over-vulnerable biped continue to sweat and whine about its conditions. Every dog has its day.

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I had, one night in April, not many days after the event of the face in the hedge, a dream that took away some of the obscurity with which my feelings increasingly obfuscated themselves. In the day, everywhere I went I saw, with a kind of suppressed delectation, the figure of the child burning, it seemed, to ashes in the air. I saw this image in the broad daylight—it would appear, a tiny unnoticeable martyrdom, hanging in the branches of trees, or depicted in advertisements on the sides of buses; or in those happenings we witness in clouds. But the dream I experienced, this was an altogether different matter. It illuminated my jealousy of the child and of the mother; it equally illuminated the continual sense of my inadequacy and my unworthiness; it illuminated my positively albigensian attitude to the viciousness of human reproduction. I simply dreamed that I had become hermaphrodite.

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Yesterday Theresa received by the morning post a letter from a schoolgirl friend of hers with the improbable name of Marsden Forsden. Fairly automatically I assumed—I suppose from the association of the first syllable—that the schoolgirl friend was a young man—and then, without real reflection, I realised that it must be a girl. “Who is she? What does she want?”

Theresa gave me the letter. “She was to have been married on the same day that we were,” she said. “She would like to pay us a visit.”

“What happened? Why didn’t she get married?” I opened one of my own letters.

“She probably didn’t want to. She ran away.” I saw that, in spite of herself, Theresa wanted to speak about her friend. “It’s curious that you have never met her,” she said. “But she was one of those people one likes to keep away from one’s home, or one’s—what shall I call you?—one’s more valuable possessions. She has a gift of knocking things over with her intensity. She is almost the most beautiful person I have ever seen.”