The Dead Seagull (4 page)

*  *  *  *

By the dying fire that same evening, with the rain a sort of susurrus outside the window, and the sound of the sea increasing, Theresa and I sat, listening to the gramophone. (We are fortunate in sharing a taste for Scarlatti.) She had sewing on her knees; occasionally she added a few stitches, but for the most part leaned back in her chair with her eyes focused beyond the ceiling. She seemed rather tired. Neither of us had any notion of Marsden’s whereabouts: her cases, with dresses and jewels and brassieres and stockings spilling out of them, lay about her room in a sort of indecently intimate disorder. On the floor, under the window, a handful of bright books fell lop-sidedly against each other—she must have felt a disinclination to put them on the bookshelves, threequarters empty, that ran along one wall. A dozen or so Mexican cigarettes had spilled about the room. On the mantelpiece, under the mirror, an assortment of innumerable cosmetics glittered in bottles and phials with inscribed silver stoppers. By them lay two paper-covered pamphlets, one entitled,
The Wild Flowers of the Netherlands,
and the other,
How to Sin in San Francisco.
We looked around—it occurred to Theresa that Marsden might quite possibly have left a message—and it was only too likely that, if she had done so, it would have been left in her room. But there was no note. She had simply vanished.

About midnight I had fallen almost asleep when there were voices calling outside and a light knocking on the door. Marsden hissed “Theresa! Theresa!” through the letterbox. Theresa, asleep, did not wake. I went to the door.

She was leaning forward shaking the rain from her hair; the light from the lamp in the hall caught it; she unspangled gold all about her. “Thank God I left my stockings off,” she exclaimed, stepping inside. “Come in, Theo,” she said, extending a hand behind her towards the darkness.

A small, rather broad-chested man of some fifty years, wearing a pair of corduroy trousers and a thin dark shirt open down to his waist, stepped in behind her. The rain hung in the hairs of his exposed chest and dripped from a large pair of eyebrows. He had a cunning look that might have been given to his face by an over aquiline nose and small eyes set closely together. He wore his hair in a long fringe that came straight down from the crown of his head, like a Japanese boy’s. “This is Jean Theokopolos.” Marsden introduced us. He took her by the arm as he bowed very slightly to me.

“You must need a drink,” I said. “Theresa was sleeping, but she’ll be delighted to see you. We thought that you had left.”

Theresa, excusing herself, retired to bed soon after she had been introduced to Theokopolos. I went to the kitchen and brought out the half bottle of whisky I happened to have there.

“Thank you, no,” Theokopolos said; “I cannot bring myself to drink hard spirits. If you have any wine? I adore wine. I adore Mediterranean wine. I find,” he continued, looking straight at me as I tried to apologise, “that I accrue a whole architecture of
mauve
satisfaction when I drink wine.” He held his hands to the fire.

“From
white
wine?”

“We’re awfully tired,” Marsden interrupted. “Do you mind very much if we go to bed?” She looked up through a hanging coil of her hair. Her expression combined impertinence, challenge, nervousness, uncertainty. Her dress had been torn at the collar.

“You must be exhausted. I’m going to read a little. I could wish, for your sake, Theokopolos, that the bed was larger. But it’s the only one we have.”

Marsden, with her shoes in her hand, led him out of the room. She turned, as they left, and, looking brazenly across at me, exclaimed: “Well, it all depends on the plough.”

*  *  *  *

Theokopolos, who left yesterday after staying for three days, turned out to be an artist. He was also a raconteur whose stories, related in highly eccentric but carefully memorised idioms, delighted us at first, but soon, after the second or third repetition, lost the brilliant extemporised felicity that at first we found irresistible. Marsden, who had obviously listened to all the anecdotes of his repertoire often before, still hung over his conversation—his monologue—with an attention I finally thought transparent. And, suddenly in the middle of a monologue, he would break off, seize Marsden in his arms, and sweep her into a violent exhibition of dancing about the room. Crushing each other together, they spun and whirled, or, halting in an instant, stamped their feet in a rhythm I assumed might be negroid. Then they would toss their heads like trotting horses and spring away from each other, crying out. Marsden, her eyes abstracted and glowing, her feet parted and her knees slightly bent, would imitate the coupling of the species; Theokopolos, a yard or so away from her, would respond with the ferocity of an ageing erotomaniac. Sooner or later one of us would start the gramophone playing; then they repeated the dances. Until, finally, after an exceptionally violent leap from which he could not recover his balance, Theokopolos sprained his wrist. But Marsden, galvanic as a visionary in a trance, stepped her way with the fastidiousness of a chicken around the table. She shuddered and put her hands up to her breasts.

“I think Theokopolos has had an accident,” I said to no one in particular.

“I have,” he muttered. “My wrist is broken. I slipped.”

*  *  *  *

Theresa tells me that when she asked Marsden why we had not been forewarned of Theokopolos’s arrival, Marsden declined to do anything but sulk. I suspect, myself, that she felt determined and guilty—determined that Theokopolos should come, and guilty because, in order to bring his visit about without any question, she had to resort to an accomplished fact. And, as I see it, such an admission could never be extorted from her—she is like the women in Baudelaire who want to be violated because they are proud. However, by the time Theokopolos had been thoroughly exhausted of his stories, and as a direct consequence of a violent row between them—it ended with Theokopolos, whom I had not thought physically capable of the feat, picking an hysterical and kicking Marsden up in his arms and carrying her, agitating just enough not to fall from his arms, into the bedroom—as a consequence of this simple consummation Marsden virtually dismissed Theokopolos from her presence. “You know where I am,” he said to her with a sort of tolerant anticipation; “it’s still the studio.” And with his shirt still open down the front and half the fly-buttons of his trousers unfastened, he walked out with the gait of a ballet dancer incognito. I found both embarrassing and entertaining their practice of displaying the most intimate disagreements in what I suppose would in these circumstances constitute the public. I feel that one of my most obscure perversions has been fortuitously pandered to by them. They behave as though someone were constantly watching them through an expensive keyhole.

*  *  *  *

Marsden burst into the small room in which I was writing, and, throwing herself triumphantly into a chair, announced: “Theresa says you can take me to the Black Rocks. Now. This moment. Hurry. I want to go.” She sprang up and planted her feet apart; with her hands on her hips she looked down at me boldly. She had mended the collar of her pretty milkmaid frock, and wore sandals and her hair tied up like an onion on the top of her head. As I admired her, she arched her arm slowly over her head like a carrier of baskets, drew one foot up to her knee and spun in a pirouette—crying out “Come. Come. Come”, she rushed from the room. If it were not all so deliberately calculated it would entrance me. As it is, I tend to resent the ineffectuality of her coquetry. With a book in my pocket I followed her soon. She was in the garden gathering flowers for Theresa, “I’ll give them to her,” I said, and took the handful of bright blossoms from her. “Yes, do,” she said softly, looking out to sea. “She’s resting in her room.”

We had not gone far over the hills when she flung herself down on the turf. “Come and talk to me.” She held her hand towards me. “I simply could not believe it,” she murmured, “when I learned that Theresa was married to you.”

“Why not? Is it so unlikely?”

“I have had hundreds of dreams about you. It was your book. When I read it I sat down and wrote one exactly like it. I told Theresa. About the dreams. I went to dozens of parties simply in order to meet you. Oh, why”—she shook her head so wildly that her hair fell and whipped about her face—“why, why, why, were you never there!” And in a seizure of petulance she rolled over on her belly and turned her face away. As she turned, her hand caught a flounce of her frock and the action of her body drew the skirt away from her thighs. She was naked except for her frock. She lay there without moving. I experienced the same sort of hypnotised revulsion that I imagine might have excited me if I had awakened and found a mermaid in bed beside me. Suddenly she sprang to her feet. As she did so she seized my hand and gathered it to her bosom. “How fascinating,” she murmured, “you haven’t even kissed me.”

I said, “That’s easy,” and did so.

“Come and watch me swim,” she said, and led me by the hand down to the shore. Then she slipped her frock off her shoulders, and, with her sandals still on her feet, fled naked, a mythological image of gold and pink with flowers in its hair, into the cold waves.

*  *  *  *

Theresa looks on with her huge ecclesiastical eyes and occasionally smiles from between the green leaves of her fruition. It cannot be more than a matter of nine or ten weeks before the infant Sebastian steps weeping into the world.

Perpetually she sits in a big chair, her hands folded over her son, her vision wandering among day dreams of the future. She is like a person, who, rather than waiting to give birth, is waiting to be born. I think that there in the stomach of the pregnant a nine-month phoenix dies to give us life. Every day deprives her a little of her own life, as it adds its quorum to the embryo. For her the events of the world in general and even of our own lives in the particular, concern her less and less. She smiles with a sort of remote concurrence in everything as it happens. She retires to bed leaving Marsden and me together in the evenings: it is the behaviour of a somnambulist or of a victress bearing away her prize in an amnesia of gratification. Then Marsden, dressed only in her loose dressing-gown, comes across and squats at my feet in front of the fire. Hugging her bare knees she says abstractedly: “Talk to me.” And gazing at me with dazzling directness she takes my hand and draws it under the gown to her breast.

*  *  *  *

This morning, without warning while I was out, she stuffed everything she possessed into her cases and left for London. Theresa had not yet risen. Written in the large careless hand-script I now recognised almost too easily I found a word scrawled on the last page of my notebook: “Come.” It was signed with the symbol of a heart.

*  *  *  *

Walking along the shore, I came upon a dead seagull; it spread its wings out, as it lay in a pool, like the imperial eagle of an insignia. Around it, reflected in the shallow water, clouds passed almost imperceptibly; a clot of blood, where a wound had killed it, exuded discolouration into the clouds. Its open eyes, scarcely below the surface, stared, dislocated, into nonexistent distances; the webbed feet, like closed parasols, travestied their departed function. Tar coagulated the feathers of the breast and, a little late, cauterised the wound. I remembered the dead dog in the road, and I saw the parallel of my wife’s virtues. I looked down at the seagull, and, almost unconsciously, laid my hand on the breast in which the symbol of the heart had broken.

*  *  *  *

Gull the bitch.

*  *  *  *

If only I could capitulate entirely to experience! What obstinate reserves in my nature withhold me from the crimes I commit by omission? One is too proud to give oneself to sins that could never, no matter how delectable, rival in salaciousness the sin of voluptuous self-love. I can spread my seed in a dozen fields. Damnation will accord me the trumpet and the red carpet and the roll of drums. When every corner-boy, as Auden says, consciously sins because God enjoys forgiving him, it is then time for one of us to rehabilitate the dignity of the unforgivable.

*  *  *  *

I see her face, gazing up out of the catastrophe destiny prepares for her, turn to me in guilt and self-accusation. “I burn,” she murmurs, “because I love too much.” The gods crumble under the stress of our adoration, just as too intense a dark creates illusory stars.

I have been asked to take personal receipt of the grant of money given me by the literary society in London.

*  *  *  *

O providence, providence, where is it that you so smugly lie, the strings of things dangling in your supercilious hands, half an eye cocked to keep you a little amused at our frantically useless antics? Where is your boss, you female manager, the magnitude of whose responsibilities conceals the irresponsibility with which you fail to fulfil them. What laws, my god, govern this frivolous sister who walks about the world slinging flame, seed and disaster out of the inexhaustible basket of possibility? What am I armed with, Eros, save only the toy water pistol of my will?

*  *  *  *

I see her, now, standing sadly in the door of my memory, as, that morning, I saw her, no less sadly, standing by a window, one hand half lifted in a wave of farewell, as I went down the road toward the station. She wore a long dress, and in her other hand clasped a household fork; I could almost hear her repeating softly to herself with every step I took in the opposite direction: “Now I am not really alone any more.” There was even the embryo of a smile on her mouth.

WHERE IS THAT INDESCRIBABLE CAPITAL IN which all the inhabitants are happy? It is whatever city we see with the visionary eye of love.

I looked upon London and saw that all the people were in a sort of conspiracy of felicity: but, hide their happiness from each other as they might and as they did, they could not conceal this happiness from me, I saw seven millions in a honeycomb building the architecture of human happiness. And, most of all, it was the apparently miserable who were the most gratified, for their misery hung about their bodies like a barbarous and magnificent decoration; they could never remain unnoticed. The vanity in the rags of the beggar outside Selfridges stood up and cockcrowed as he debased his humanity; when it won him a penny his ego clapped its wings. You, prostitutor of the female country, does it really degrade you when your admirer pays for gazing at the spot of
 
beauty? O whore of the stars, the price we have paid you for your satisfactions!