Trust (57 page)

Me: That's the first unpolitical thing you've ever said.
Enoch: Not at all. Freedom is the most political subject there is.
Me: But you weren't talking about political freedom. You were talking about freedom in human relationships. That's what you said.
Enoch: Oh, in human relationships
by definition
there is no freedom.

—I don't know whether I agree with that or not, because marriage is a human relationship, isn't it?—and I think if I were married, I mean to Nick,
I'd
feel free. I wouldn't have to go
do
anything, I'd just sit still and be happy, and now I have to move around and go to London and then America and pretend it's on account of War Clouds I'm doing all that, when it's not at all, I don't care about war or no war, I
hate
patriotism exactly the way you hate Roosevelt, because it deprives you of
personal
self-interest and possibilities you can make up for yourself. I think about being married practically all the time. I mean married to Nick. That time I went to Cape Ann with you I thought it would be a certain way, full of eternity and freedom and Sacred Beauty and a very, very delicate sort of owning. I thought it would turn out like that no matter
whom
I married, it would come just from being married. Like the Doctrine of Grace the way your mother once read it from a sermon in a book she had. Also I believed everything
felt
should be
stated.
That's why I took along the Shelley—to state it. But I was dry all the time. I was just dry, so I threw Shelley in the water and watched him drink, but still I was dry in myself, and I never felt Grace till. Nick, and without being married, so it proves you don't need to be married to feel it. But still I wish I were: not because I'm a nail and want to nail him into my side. But it would be a Statement, do you see? Oh, I want to be married to him! All day long and all night through I think how it would be, Greek if he wants it Greek, Pagan if he wants it Pagan, Socialist if he'll let me, and free, free, free, the baby in a little cart of its own being pulled up a hillside all furred with daisies and susans and marigolds and smoky-headed dandelions, though I suppose after a while it would grow
up,
and start running around on its own. The question is what am I to do all the time it's growing up? I can't just sit and watch it, I'm not the type to carry off loneliness by naming it motherliness, I don't know what to do. That's why I'm coming home, to think out what to do, and where he's gone. He's gone, he's gone, I don't know where, Sicily he was thinking of. If I came to talk it out with you it could be fixed up for a legal thing, couldn't it, finding Nick? I could say he ought to marry me on account of the baby, I could say it didn't matter before, but now it really does, wherever he's gone, maybe Italy, maybe not. I thought you could know how to find him, you could send him a warrant or whatever they use, you could call it Desertion or whatever they call it, you could call it Abandonment. I'm abandoned, I'm deserted, it's a desert here, nobody here, nobody, just myself abandoned. It sounds terrible to say that word, like people who live in the slums, but what's legal is legal for all classes, and it can't be legal for Nick to go off to Italy when there's a baby left behind, can it? There must be something in International Law that you would know about, something strict and stern about paternity and infants, I know in law there aren't lovers, so let it be fathers and daughters, whichever way you want to do it: the trick you did when you fixed up Incompatibility instead of Adultery, fix it up fathers and daughters instead of lovers, which ever way you want to do it. Only help. You have to help, you can't help helping, it's part of the trust that you have to help, isn't it? I asked Enoch if he'd watch the baby for me, the tiniest sort of vigil while I went to Italy to look myself, to look for Nick wherever he is, but Enoch thinks whatever can be done you'll know how to do best, because of the trust. It means he doesn't like the baby, but after all he's right, he doesn't think you'll mind—I told him I don't believe you have very bad thoughts about me, at least not the way I have terrible and evil thoughts about Nick. About Nick I have terrible and evil thoughts. I want to put a nail in him till he bleeds. Into his eyes: even that, even there. The trouble with a person who has impressive and extraordinary eyes is that they never look distracted—they're all eye, and all aye and yes yes yes, and all Now This Minute, and later on you find out it's nothing but a sickening fraud on you and they were plotting an Afterward that disgorges you. Plain average eyes can't dissemble like that, they're too naked, if they leave you out you know it right away, a smudge of color and a lid and a look and that's it, no horrible deadly polish on them like the sun if the sun were blue all around and inside itself and throwing the blue of itself on itself. What I'm saying is he didn't betray a waver and he didn't waver when he betrayed, he just walked off right in the center of happiness and took it with him. Afterward when it was nearly night and I had your blue dots and there was nothing but a tin of tuna fish and pabulum I felt blind, it was like all at once turning blind. He took away his eyes and I couldn't see. That's the truth, even though it's only a metaphor. And now the first thing is I have to go to London and stay in Enoch's room—he owes me a hideout he says, but oh it's a haven I need, and such a tiny room it is—I stayed there once with Nick. The baby's
box
would take half of it. That's because it's a greengrocer's box; a chemist's box Enoch thinks would be more compact, in certain ways he's very practical, so I'll get one. I put the address at the top of this letter, in case you finally decide to answer—don't forget to put c/o Adam Gruenhorn,
not
Enoch Vand. It feels so queer here right this minute, I can't explain. I don't really mind packing and unpacking, so long as it's done thoroughly, all moved in or all moved out, everything settled and nothing by halves: it's
what
I pack that kills. For instance, a print I got in Moscow of this fantastic old basilica with domes like onions that's a museum now, I just put it fiat at the bottom of a suitcase and stared straight down at it, which sort of turned it into a photograph, with that archaic look even recent photographs get pretty soon. There weren't any people in the print but I
saw
people, all by thinking it was really a snapshot—Nick and Enoch and Hugh and Dickie" Sparrs and me bundled together trying to keep warm in the plaza in front of this gigantic oniony church on the day we had that awful quarrel—I wrote you about it, Enoch saying we hadn't any loyalty and were damaging the Movement by going off, and Nick arguing he'd be more useful as a contact in different places, and Enoch answering that was Hugh's job, because Hugh's a linguist—it was almost autumn, and all our breaths were standing still in the air in front of us. I remember that because the moment I was actually in the
middle
of that incident, with everybody's voices all mixed together full of meanness, and foreign fiat-nosed Tartar faces going by giving us mean and hostile looks, it
felt
like a snapshot. I thought: this is me, this is Moscow, this is Nick, we don't dare sway or we'll blur. The print is sort of blurred anyway, it's got that mistiness of line artists use when they want to make a thing seem very remote and ideal: it's as though they're withholding, they're not really
telling.
But to me a thing isn't real until you tell it. (That's why I brought the Shelley that time.) Enoch said: The Movement doesn't care who anybody lives
with
, just so long as it's assured what he's living
for.
If he's living for the cause, we're not interested in his cohabitations. In spite of that Nick and I left, we needed to—though I made us go with Hugh, so Enoch would see we weren't leaving the
Movement,
just the crowd. And for months and months afterward we helped with all the rallies, and Nick wasn't against it because at first I was getting enough to cover taking trains to different places very comfortably, but then you cut the money down to practically nothing and we had to sit still in one niche, so we came to Brighton and were glad after all. Not that Nick wasn't really
immense
at these rallies—sometimes he had absolutely brilliant and fantastic ideas, like the amazing incident I told you about that happened in that hall on New Oxford Street—but he said the Movement cramped individual invention, and he was right, for instance I didn't touch
Marianna
for a year or more while we were marching in parades and things. And he said it was foolishness to march in parades anyhow, and he was tired of it. So I said the
Greeks
had parades, and Nick said they weren't ordinary agitating parades, they were religious processions for Dionysus and Demeter, and when the ancient Greeks dealt with agricultural output they meant wine and fertility instead of bloodless ideas like land value and commodities per capita, and when they dealt with industrial potential they were thinking of Penelope at the loom, patient for the return of Odysseus. And he said the Greeks weren't afraid of getting drunk, like Enoch and all the other Jews. And he said he didn't like Athens, where Socrates was always wandering around the streets lecturing people, but cared only for the goddess of the coppice, and that's how we began to throw darts at the tree I told you about, to make her cry out. And sometimes, if you closed your ears with your palms and listened hard, she did. And all the while it was really only Brighton we were in, so
we hung the print of the oniony Moscow church on the wall, to remind us how some people in the world have to live without dryads watching their doors. The frame is only celluloid, and cracked, so I haven't packed it—still, it's odd how an empty picture frame on a cold white wall, with the screw showing exactly where it snakes into the plaster, seems spooky when you're all alone in a place you're not accustomed to being sad in. It got sad toward the end. You never sent the money and the baby kept screaming, and Nick swore it was screaming Money Money with the consonants left out; it really sounded like that, and then out of the blue he went off, while I was writing all about how love in bed makes you feel, private and all sweet. That's the part I've put in here for you to read after you finish this letter. And he took away my ENCHIRIDION—my lovely tiny book full of poison flowers, and lovely perfect drawings of the red hard shiny waxy berries we used to hang on the green horn to make Enoch go away, and he went away. I don't know why he took it, I guess it just happened to be in his summer-jacket pocket, and he went out wearing his summer-jacket under his overcoat, because of the cold; the last time we went walking to get berry-twigs it was still October a whole year since we left Moscow to go everywhere together and amaze ourselves with ourselves. That's Nick's, that part: "we'll amaze ourselves with ourselves," and it came true, and now he's in Italy, or maybe not, with my flower book I bought in Southampton coming into England in his pocket, and out the window there's nothing on the tree but an old stuck dart with dirty snow on its tail, and I think how happy and gorgeous it was here, all green, and how it was with the tree and us and the coppice-goddess, as though there could be a goddess in Brighton, or a dryad! So Brighton's the place I hate, in the whole world I hate Brighton most of all, you always hate the place you were happiest in. Poor William, poor you, I guess there isn't any place for you to hate like that. But you're lucky too, it means you don't hate any
person
either. I told Enoch I'm sure you don't hate me, you only have contempt for me, but that's your religion and you can't help it, you think I'm fallen. And you know what Enoch said?—Presbyterians have contempt, but Pagans have babies. In spite of not having a sense of humor or laughing much, Enoch doesn't really take anything very seriously, except Social Justice. He feels about Social Justice exactly the way Nick feels about Sacred Beauty and ancient Greece, but Nick laughs all the time, he laughs the most marvelous lonesome laugh, as though he were seeing visions nobody else ever saw. It's silly to keep imagining he left his laugh behind in this room (oh I hate this room) when it's only the baby that's awake and jiggling some walnut shells Nick twisted into a paper bag for a rattle. Rustle, rustle, it could be Nick's laugh but it's only the baby playing, he took his laugh with him and his eyes with him and my little ENCHIRIDION with him, everything, and I think of him right now on that Island of Sicily, spread out on a beach in the sun the way I used to watch him spread out on Brighton beach in the sun and getting practically as black as Hugh, or rowing around in a boat with a foot overboard in the water, and I get so full of wish, wish, wish I begin to believe wish, wish, wish will break whole out of my skeleton and work on him, on his long foot in the water and his long hand trailing in the water. I mean I wish he would die. After that boy, I can't describe my feelings but this even you can take in exactly and give it out again without a lawyer's lie, after that dead boy and what I saw, and how it happened because of the trust, the trust
made
it happen, I really did
swear
(just as though I believed in God) I would never again wish anybody's dying. Because before then I sometimes used to wish people would die: I wished my father would die, and he died, but left that horrible horrible trust, that murdering trust that killed a boy with its inflexibility. The trust killed that Armenian boy. And that weird widow-girl who came and took the knife, as though the knife killed him!—I
told
you you should have given her the trust to take home instead of the knife, but instead you went to the funeral, all because you thought it was the right and proper thing, on account of his family's being poor; and you tried to give them money, I know you did. Wergeld!—That's what Hugh said it was called, paying off the family for the body. The body was awful. I remember the hands up at the neck, like the baby's when it's asleep, there and not there, because I touched one of them, just the fingers, just the dead thumb really, and how it was. And even in spite of that, even in spite of that, I feel it now, in spite of that I feel it again, wishing a dying for someone, because there's Nick all black-skinned in a boat down there, laughing and laughing in that hot place full of sun that goes down there right through the water, shimmering dropped through the water spread-winged, and after everything me here freezing alone after Brighton after freezing after everything it's no wonder, I don't wonder in spite of that boy I wish he dies, I hope he drowns, for all I care let him drown down deep there. Because of Brighton Brighton Brighton. Because of Brighton.