A Garden of Trees (31 page)

“It is as if there was a war on. When you know there is a war you naturally act differently from the way you would act if you didn't. It is useless worrying about yourself in a war.”

“What is this war?”

“What we have always talked about. What we have always fought in, too, I think, except that once I didn't know what we were fighting. Now I do and I see things in terms of it. Perhaps that is why I sound odd.”

“Yes. Soldiers never know why they are fighting.”

“Don't they?”

“They treat everyone as if they were already dead.”

“Perhaps they do.” His eyes flashed at me.

“As if they were dead themselves,” I said.

We had by this time reached the door of Alice's house. On the steps he stopped, as if he had remembered something. He still had the knowledgeable look on his face. “I forgot,” he said. “Annabelle is with Alice this afternoon.”

“Annabelle?” I said. I wondered if he would not go in because I was there. I felt that he was even capable of knowing what had happened between Annabelle and me that morning. Then I remembered what had happened between her and him. “What is Annabelle doing with Alice?” I said.

“What? Just seeing her. I don't think I should go in at the moment, perhaps.”

“All right,” I said. We walked away again. I was beyond even being surprised at his calmness about Annabelle, although I felt, with a shock, that there was something uncanny about it.

“I wonder if you would be very kind and do something for me,” he said.

“Of course.” He seemed embarrassed, and I thought he was going to ask me something about Annabelle.

“I wonder if you would very kindly put me up in your room for a short while until I go home. I remember staying with you before, and I will only be sleeping there.”

“Of course,” I said. “You are leaving Alice's?”

“Yes, I think so.” I did not ask why. It seemed extraordinary that he should not then have preferred to go to a hotel. “That is really very kind of you,” he said.

We stopped. I felt that I should leave him, but there was an awkwardness that held us. “You are going away soon?” I said.

“Yes. I saw in the papers to-day that there has been trouble in my island.”

“Trouble?”

“Rioting. I must get back for it.”

“Will we ever see you again?”

“I hope so,” he said.

“You all seem to be intent on killing yourselves.”

“Didn't we say a long time ago that we were already dead?” he said, flashing his eyes again at me.

I said good-bye to him. As I turned to go he stopped me; and then, almost formally, with great embarrassment again, he said, “I must thank you for what you did for my wife before she died, you cannot know how much it meant to us, I am sorry I have not said this before to you, but I want to thank you now and tell you how important I think it was. Perhaps I have to thank you for many things.”

“No,” I said. “No.” I found myself as embarrassed as he.

“That is why I tell you not to worry,” he said.

He turned to go. I did not understand him, I did not know why I should not worry, but I was filled with such a peculiar remorse that I found myself running after him, saying, “Marius, tell me, am I a lunatic?”

“No,” he said, “surely, I don't think so at all.”

When I got back to my room I found a message from Peter asking me to ring him up. I did so. He was out.

I sat on the edge of the bed. I thought: It would have been easier if Marius had said I was mad.

All confidence had gone. I could not remember it. Marius had talked about a war, and if there was war then I was a refugee and not a participant. I was lost, bewildered—a man wandering up a road with his belongings left behind him.

The road was crawling as if with ghosts. The armies went past, heedless, in a different direction. What war? The war between good and evil, light and darkness—was there really a world of which I knew nothing? A world in which a war was being fought by people to whom it was the only reality, who marched and acted and who in the intervals could afford to be frivolous because frivolity is part of war, the jokes of serious people are part of their armoury. If the war was true, the world of which I knew nothing, then I could forgive them their jokes. But I was still a fugitive, in the wrong direction.

I rang up Peter again. This time he answered. As I listened to his voice the road thickened until it was difficult to keep up on the surface.

“I had to tell you,” he said, “it was really most extraordinary. I have been talking to Father Jack, you know, like you suggested, we went on from where we left off at breakfast, and he says he absolutely agrees with me, agrees with me entirely, that it's all right for me to be as I am, to go on as I am, don't you think that's odd? I said that faith seemed nonsense to me, all the contradictions and so on, and he said, yes, of course, to some people it does; and I said Is that all right then? And he said Yes, indeed it is; and then I said about just sticking to right and wrong, and my conscience, or whatever it is, and he said, Good, that's perfect, and gave me a pat on the back. Don't you think that's odd?”

“He told you not to worry?” I said.

“Yes, exactly, he is really a most sensible man, he understood me directly, he has an extraordinary faculty for knowing what I mean, which is more than most people do. Isn't it funny? Perhaps his racket's all right after all, perhaps it's all quite proper. These priests are really far less bigoted than one thinks.”

“Did he talk about a war?”

“What war?”

“Nothing. Marius talks about a war.”

“Oh that, yes, that's all about the spirit, it is very complicated, I don't understand a word.”

“What spirit?”

“But that doesn't matter either, you see, because everyone's got this spirit, apparently, even me—isn't it funny?—and we battle like anything.”

“How the devil can one battle without being in an army?”

“But that's just it, one fights the devil, people do it in different ways, Father Jack says so, his way is not better than anyone else's.”

“He said that?”

“Yes.”

“I don't believe it.”

“He did, so that makes his racket just an ordinary one, like any of the others.”

“I think he's mad.”

“Why? It makes it all right for you and me.”

“I don't want it to be all right.”

“You can't have it both ways. What's wrong with it?”

“I don't believe a word that any of them say.”

“It seems all right to me. And it's one in the eye for Annabelle.”

“Why?”

“She won't like it at all.”

“It was better when they thought us crazy.”

“I'm quite happy,” he said. I rang off.

I went back to my bed. I was in the ditch now, with the ghosts of the road on top of me. If everything was in terms of war then all was fair in terms of the war, and they were capable of anything. Truth became propaganda, love became defence-work, actions might be camouflage or bluff. Looking back on the afternoon it seemed that Marius might have meant anything by asking if he could stay with me, Annabelle might have meant anything by visiting Alice, Father Manners might have meant anything by talking to Peter. My suspicions rose in a body until I was suffocated by what I did not understand. I found that I had even lost the power of introspection, since I was as suspicious of myself as of others. Nothing was real—the chairs and tables might be phantoms—the world was haunted by a world that was not there. This haunting, this intrusion of what was deathly, was worse than the loneliness that I had known before. Now I felt the necessity for company like someone who has been frightened. It was with an enormous relief that I remembered Marius was coming to stay with me. Perhaps that was why he was coming. Questions were futile.

But there was the whole of the evening in front of me. Alone it was not bearable. Aloneness is insufferable in a world of ghosts. I went out into the street, and walked, rapidly. I found myself going towards Alice's house. I thought that there I might find Annabelle, or if I did not I would at least find with Alice a world which was familiar to me.

I found Annabelle climbing into a taxi and I ran up and held the door open while she sat inside looking frightened. I must have appeared rather mad. I stood in the gutter in the flickering light and spoke to her. “Tell me,” I said, “what you said to me this morning, what you said about faith, did you believe it to be true?”

“What?” she said. I repeated the question. The taxi-man was motionless, like a statue. I wanted to giggle. “Of course it is true,” she said.

“Is it true in the way that a person who thinks it untrue is wrong?”

“Of course he is wrong,” she said.

“And is there nothing else but this faith that can make a person true at all?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“And it is something to worry about?”

“Of course it is something to worry about.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” I stepped away.

“Don't go,” she said. “Please don't go.”

“There is one more thing,” I said. “Does Father Manners like Peter?”

“Like him? No, I don't suppose he does. Why?”

“Does he like me?”

“I don't know, I don't know.” But I could see the truth in her eyes. The truth for all of them. “Stay,” she said, “stay, where are you going?”

“You will find out,” I said. I laughed. I was quite mad then. “You will find out when it catches up on you.” I did not know what I was saying.

“Come here,” she said, but I slammed the door, and waved to the taxi-man. He drove off and I ran up the steps into the house.

Inside I waited. Alice was not in the ground floor rooms. For a moment I considered killing myself. As I climbed the stairs I looked down towards the basement and felt rather sick. I had the sensation again that something was going to happen that had happened before. I waited on the landing. Something was going to happen and then I would remember it. The sound of the taxi door when I had slammed it against Annabelle had been like the thud of an axe. Heads were falling, the world of death was intruding, it did not seem that I was responsible for the future or the past.

Alice was lying on her bed in her dressing-gown. It was as if she had not moved since I had left her the day before. The room was scented like a velvet box. Time had stopped, we were into another dimension, our existence was not that of the people we might have remembered ourselves to be. I stood in the doorway and watched her. I wondered if she had been taking drugs. The light was muffled by stained-glass curtains, shedding pools of violet above her head. “Oh darling,” she said.

I went in and sat on the bed. Ghosts, there were nothing but ghosts. The air was thick with them. “Oh darling,” she said.

“Dear darling, darling, talk, yes, will you? Will you sit with me, here it is so terrible, it is the nights that are terrible, what is there to do? I close my eyes and then there is a lurching like a ship, something goes over on to its side and I cannot straighten it, it is like a ship that someone invented which had its inside hung on hinges so that it was supposed not to roll, and when they got it out on to the sea it rolled twice as much, it rolled even when the sea was quite calm, it must have been terrible. Once when I was young my inside was hung on hinges and I tried to kill myself, I rolled little pills out of a bottle and they formed up in a line and they looked at me like cat's eyes in the darkness, and as I ate them one by one I could feel them in my throat like fingers and they strangled me before I could die. I lurched and I could not keep myself upright, so they could not go down. Dear darling, darling, it is better not to have an inside that swings on hinges and then you roll only when the sea rolls and you do not roll when the sea is calm.

“I am so much in love, it is the heights that are terrible. Dear darling, darling, have you ever been in love? I do not think you have, perhaps you have found the secret of the ship that does not roll, you are so calm, you are the only person I have ever known who is so calm. You can probe about inwards and inwards and you do not feel sick, you do not . . . I should like to shake you, I should like to upset you just for once so that you know what it is like, what love is like, you would have pity. I was married once to a man who came and cried each time he was unfaithful, and I hurt him so much that I thought I should kill myself. And then there were men who were not men at all but statues quite hollow who were cast in bronze and they had no inside, no inside to roll, and nothing to feel, and they were terrible to love. I do not think that anyone with an inside is so calm, so calm, but you are, and will you stay, will you stay with me then, will you give up for a little, oh darling what are you thinking of?

“Everything is so old, there is nothing to do about it. All this goes on and on and there is nothing left in the world to worry about. If you would just stay with me you would know and then you would stop probing inwards and inwards and then you would pity. There is nothing that is wrong until you know that everything is wrong, and until you have done something you will never know. Until you have done something wrong you will never have to forgive yourself, and until then you are not human. Until now you are not human, dear darling, darling, and afterwards you will know what humanity is and how it suffers, and when you hate yourself it will be good for you and then you will see. You will see everything in your life and how terrible it is and then you will have to forgive yourself. You will give up and you will be frightened and then you will be human.”

As I lay beside her on the bed I did not move and I did not answer, so she raised herself up on her elbow and leaned across me with one arm stretched on the far side of me to take her weight and I could see her ribs where she breathed, and as she bent down to kiss me I could feel her pressure on my chest like the weight of two soft hands. I put my arms around her and held her and I thought of Annabelle and Marius and how I did not care any more. She moved her body and I could feel nothing but the heaviness of her and the dryness of her mouth and I held her so that she might feel something better. I put my arms beneath her dressing-gown and stroked her, and I did not think it was myself who was lying. Then she lifted her head and pushed her hair back with her hand and she said, “Don't you love me darling?” and I said, “Yes,” and she went on looking at me with her sick enormous eyes, he dressing-gown was away from her front and from her shoulders and she tried to close it and then she said “It is Marius that I love.” “It doesn't matter,” I said. I tried to hold her again in my arms but she pushed herself away from me and sat up on the edge of the bed and I thought she was crying. She was searching under the pillow for what I thought was a handkerchief, but it was for a cigarette which she found and I watched her light it. “You'd better go now,” she said. The room seemed to hold me like a bath that has gone cold, and I did not want to get out of it. “Go on,” she said.