The Dead Seagull (6 page)

*  *  *  *

The morning mists wandered about the surface of the river when I arose and, as quietly as I could, left the house. Marsden, an arm falling down by the side of the bed, slept deeply: she looked like a film actress simulating death, the consciousness of her beauty sitting on her lips even in sleep. I should, I suppose, have undergone some hesitation—some qualms—at leaving her in so surreptitious a manner. But I did not. Her hysteria would have done very little but evoke more violence. And I had, furthermore, no heart for a quarrel—I knew that in fact I was running away from nothing at all, for I knew a catastrophe had occurred that nothing, now, except its own fulfilment, could stop. If running away from her should discourage Marsden, I ought of course to do so: but it will not. She has behaved with all the abandon of a gambler who puts every penny on the red, and looks like winning.

And, in the end, I am determined to take Theresa the money that she so urgently needs at this time. (Oh how incorrigibly one conceals one’s real motives from oneself!) For the truth is I had, in spite of my passionate desire for her, accrued a whole recoil of revulsion to Marsden. Her slatternliness disgusted me, her laziness provoked me, and her selfishness victimised me. I was sick of love. I knew, now, what it was that Marsden meant to me: she meant a field of wild oats that would one day spring up fully armed and destroy me.

*  *  *  *

The train, flying south through a countryside of streams and cathedral towns, took my mind, also, for a short while, away from its obsessional places. I saw, with relief and with concern, that May, Theresa’s penultimate month, was about us: the small trees displayed their blossoms with a sort of pouter pigeon splendour; the magnificat was receiving its annunciation. A horse and cart, laden with early vegetables, lumbered down an old road. A farm, like a tortoiseshell cat, curled up under a hill. The train whistled through the monuments of our national immemoriality. I could believe that the past fluttered in its cemeteries as we flounced by. Children with baskets and workmen with little tin boxes lifted their hands to us, and, for a moment, I felt like an exile coming home.

The nightmare of moral paralysis. The debris of my character swilled about inside my mind in a seasick rocking of conscience. Glimpses, accidental as lightning, showed me the havoc of the devastation. I realised, without any perturbation, that I was perfectly prepared to sleep at Theresa’s side without speaking a word about Marsden or the last three weeks. Remorse? I caught a sideglance of it, lifting a despairing hand as it went under the waters of my deceit. (Yes, it might drown, but the corpse will go on floating.)

The misery and grandeur of victory. I heard the defeated armies murmur: “Don’t go.” How can I possibly discover what Marsden most deeply desires? I do not know what I most desire. I am moved in my heart of hearts by two convictions: that I can do no wrong, and that I can do no right. The paradox at the centre of the human heart is that, by reason of being an amoral being, it aspires to be a moral being, for it has seen a vision of the heaven of morality. I have learned from Marsden one truth: it takes more than the rubbing together of egoes to bare sins big enough to bear sons. And so, entirely satisfactory conclusion, I discover, to my puzzled convenience, that I cannot commit adultery with an adultress! The deceptions have converted me: I no longer know when I am lying to myself. You might be persuaded to think the truth quite simple, that I want to possess both Theresa and Marsden. If only it were as simple as that! No, Providence is my black beast. How dare she create them separate, these two who are so incontestibly one?

As I gazed out of the open window of the train I heard the murmur in the distance and then the rumbled tick-tocking and then the appalling cacophony all around as the approaching train swept up and past us; and intermittently, interrupted by blanks and shadows, I saw my own face flying opposite, transfixed on the train that raced backward to the place I had come from: the mindlessness of those three weeks, that, I concluded, was the moral paralysis; then I had experienced the immense demotion of being a dog.

*  *  *  *

Theresa, lying on a coloured blanket in the little garden at the rear of the cottage, looked up slowly as I closed behind me the door that opened into the garden. Her concentration upon the knitting in her fingers had allowed an expression of abstracted dereliction to arise from her unguardedness and to appear in her face; but, as she looked up from her knitting, this expression, slowly, like the permutations of clouds, became one, first, of delighted incredulity and then she smiled and lifted up her left hand towards me. She said nothing. I felt that nothing could so properly express the spell-bound poignancy of our re-union as the silence, the glittering silence, of that meeting. I sat beside her on the blanket and held my arm about her shoulders: she rested her head against my cheek, and, discarding her knitting, locked her fingers in mine. And we watched the clouds, by this time foreshadowing the evening, conduct their chorus of ballet out towards the sea. It was the silence, the silence of the time and the occasion, of the clouds, of the countryside, and, most of all, of our own fulfilment, that overcame me: I lowered my head on my knee and the withheld tear burned in the corner of my eye like a flaring star.

*  *  *  *

Was this, O Gabriel, the last that I shall ever know of natural happiness? What were you bearing so everlastingly away, evening that seemed to vanish over the horizon in the instant of my tear; You had taken my innocence. For those first moments, in their ineffable tenderness, blinded all other emotions with their brightness.

And for the last time, I knew, I felt at one with the world. This is the innocence of the pagan who is not deceiving or being deceived by life, but who is simply welcoming it with a ceremony of appropriate emotions. But the last act of a happy man is to know that he is happy. The sun fell out of the sky into the English Channel. I heard myself speaking from remote distances down corridors that invested my voice with an unrecognisable theatricality.

“
 
…
 
delay
 
… the swans
 
… Selfridges
 
… with a walking stick
 
… handed the cheque to me in a quarto envelope and said
 
…
 
”

Theresa, the pupils of her eyes enormously enlarged, seemed to be staring at me as one stares at an acrobat performing a dangerous trick, believing but not believing. I must have led her out of the garden into the kitchen, for I see her face, then, smiling in a glaze of pallor like a cracked plate, break and spin away as I heard myself shout, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let’s have tea.”

And after taking tea in silence she came and stood behind my chair so that her arms fell like a Hawaiian festoon about my neck and her hair flickered, when she lowered her head, at my cheeks. By this time the kitchen had filled with immense shadows, and on a wall, emblazoned in a dazzling brightness, a last hieroglyph of light wrote valedictions. The cups gleamed. I sensed, as one sometimes does in dreams, that an experiential altitude had been reached from which there is nothing to do except cast oneself headlong down. Then her voice took to its wings from that peak and I sat in silence listening.

“My dear love,” she said, “now that you are home again I wish to say to you the things that my loneliness without you has made clearer to me. Because I love you so much I am tempted to make many demands of you, to insist that you do this or that as I would wish you to do. Oh, how deeply I yearn for your absolute truthfulness, for your wholehearted honesty, for your trustworthiness. If I could I would implant these things within you just as you have planted yourself within me. But I do not love you for what you are, I love you because you are. Loving you, I desire to possess you; and possessing you I desire to make you part of me; and this desire is so strong that if it took a viper to its breast it would change it into a virtue.

“No, do not interrupt me. I have a sort of second knowledge about you, for we have known each other so well and so happily. I could believe that I feel it when motor cars only just miss running you over in the street. And when you are in the room with me I understand the absurdity of the outer spaces, for then they are empty. When you are not with me I am like them, empty and absurd.

“I do not want to know why you stayed away, because I think that I already know. I think that I knew this before you had been gone a week. And the first night of this knowledge—you know it was knowledge and not fear or suspicion—I thought that my heart was breaking with every beat. Until, as I seemed to reach the vacuum of anguish, the child inside me kicked and spoke. What it said is what I now say to you. And if, my dear love, you cannot help killing me, I beg you, in the name of my love for you, to kill quickly.”

Her arms unwound themselves from my shoulders; she lifted her head and moved away. If, unlike Orpheus, I could only turn around and stretch out my arms, would we both be saved?

But I sat quite still, feeling the moral paralysis overtaking my emotions, my mind and my body. Now, it seemed to say, now if you so little as lift a finger it will be murder. I heard the door close behind her and her step, heavy with burden, die away down the passage that led to the bedroom. And with the dying away of her going I think that my whole past life died within me. I rose from the chair and took up my mackintosh: I do not think that I was visible to the three men I passed on my way to the little pub in the village.

*  *  *  *

Dark nurse of sleep, star-fingered shepherdess, look in at her window and quieten her restlessness. Is there nothing and no one in her room but the whimpering beast of my infidelity spread over a naked form that is both her dead body and the lineaments of Marsden’s gratified desire? The tighter she closes her eyes the brighter the image of her anguish is. She dreams, perhaps, betrayals of her own, done, in turn, upon me. I can almost pray so.

*  *  *  *

In the Goat and Compass a farm hand named Jim brought his pint across to the window where I sat and lowered himself, giving a puff, onto the seat. “Glad to see you again,” he said, “will you have a drink?” Then he saw that I had my glass. We drank in silence for a time. He pulled occasionally at a pipe. He turned his head as a remark occurred to him. “How’s the wife now?” he asked.

I told him that she was pretty well all right. But from the tone of his question I suspected that his enquiry was more than a casual formality. “Why ‘now’?” I asked him, not expecting a very clear answer.

“Well,” he pulled slowly at his pipe, “I suppose she hasn’t told you. Trust me to go talking out of turn. It wasn’t nothing to worry much about. She was lying out on the hills. My bitch found her. She said she had a giddy spell, and couldn’t rightly remember what happened. I fetched her home. She was fairly done in. But we gave her a drop o’ whisky in milk, and she perked up. Oh,” he told me, when I asked, “about a week or so back. I wouldn’t take on. I’ve had the cows a-dying on their four legs and when the time comes they drop their calves and they lick ’em and up they get and look around for a bull.”

I bought more drink. By now Jim seemed a bit the better for it. “And talking about bulls,” he went on, with a face so expressionless that it might have been cut in wood, “that other young lady you had down—the one with the yellow hair—she was a brash one, sir, if I may say so. She comes to me in the shed—you’ll not mind my telling you—I’m there with William, the young brown bull—and she talks to me like this. ‘Jim, tell me, are you frightened of the bull?’ And ‘Jim, tell me, how many cows does he serve?’ She stands in the mud and stares at the bull. William, he doesn’t take kindly to strangers. But she goes up to him and takes his horn in her hand. I tell you I was taken aback a bit. So I take her away from William. ‘But Jim,’ she says, ‘what I’ve always wanted to know is how you geld ’em.’ She asks me do I use scissors or knives or what. And when I tell her, pincers, she says, ‘Pincers. You clip the strings like wire.’ And she walks away from us.” Jim finished off his beer without looking at me to see what effect his story had had upon me: largely, I suppose, because he knew me quite well enough to take my concurrence for granted.

“Did you like her?” I asked, searching for a meaningless remark.

He smiled. “She was the prettiest face I ever saw in this valley,” he said, and got more drink from the bar.

*  *  *  *

I find continually that, in telling this story, it is not so much a sequence of events that I have to relate, as the evolution of emotions within emotions within events. For it is the emotion engendered by any one event that decides, by a sort of episodic parentage, the nature of the events that will ensue from its existence. The gratified duplicity we feel when we execute our first adept deception is the source of our second and more adept deception. The hedonists in us, O God, will tear us to pieces—and not for their delight, but for our own. And the perplexity in all this complexity is that puzzled suspension of criticism to which unthinking sentimentalists give the term, the love of life. For, in truth, this elaborately complicated machine, the existential engine, in which emotions evolve behaviour which in turn evolves emotions wholly unpredictable from any of their precedents—in which the origin of actions can be simply the passion to encompass their own eventual destruction—this machine, like an engine made of glass, shows us exactly how the rose leaf and the bus ticket we insert at one end, may emerge, after heaven knows what metamorphoses, as history, or the will to power, or the poems of Paul Verlaine at the other.

*  *  *  *

The deep sea monsters stir in the abysses of their misery and, clasping their tentacles about each other, copulate without knowing it: thus, in obedience to the laws of zoology, I, no less the son of their ignorance than my son is of my knowledge, stir, so many generations later, and love in the depths of my misery. Sweet Pascal, I think that you were wrong: because we know that we suffer we are, as I see it, lesser than the animals. For the degree of our suffering is the degree of our deviation from the divine will. Every twist of the snake as it kills gesticulates to the glorification of God: does every desire I undergo degrade Him? Physical love is a sin because there, and not in the arguments of atheists, god has been rendered unnecessary: in the centre of the ovum is the atheistical void. To redeem our immersion in this void we are destined to beget a second generation of victims and sufferers. Thus the purpose of the suffering in life is to redeem the blasphemy of having begot it. And the blasphemy of two lovers, at that mutually sufficient moment of consummated love, when god, standing in the corner of the room, knows that, at that kiss, he is unnecessary, this is the blasphemy that drives him, no matter how briefly, out of our house. Not until the soul has divested itself of the love of created things can it aspire to the divine union.