A Word Child (32 page)

‘Yes.' She was still weeping, but quietly, mopping her eyes rhythmically with a handkerchief.

She had broken with Arthur so as to be alone, to be there, ready, waiting, in case Gunnar should remember her, should need her, should want to see her. What a pathetic illusion! She had broken with Arthur for the same reason that I had broken with Tommy, to be available. But even as I thought these vile lunatic thoughts I knew that they were mad. Crystal could not seriously think that Gunnar could need her any more than I could seriously think that, except as a mere device, Kitty could need me.

‘You're insane,' I said. ‘You're behaving like a hysterical unbalanced woman. It's meaningless to go on “loving” somebody like that, somebody you'll never see again. Anyway, you don't love him. You don't know what the word means in that sense. I don't exactly blame you for what happened, it was like a sort of brainstorm — but you must have wits enough to imagine how Gunnar must have felt afterwards, how he must nave hated himself and you. For him it's just a terrible disgusting memory. You don't imagine he's going to come round again to kiss your hand, do you?'

Crystal just shook her head, still mopping steadily at her steadily weeping eyes.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. I knew I was being cruel, but it was such an unexpected blow, I felt sickened, frightened. The idea of this curious, weird relationship, which for Crystal at least was still alive, between her and Gunnar made me feel some awful primitive pain. (Jealousy?)

Crystal was making an effort to compose herself. She said, now looking at me timidly, ‘Dear — it doesn't make any — difference — does it? I mean you aren't so shocked and so — that you hate me? It is all right, isn't it, as it's always been? I thought I just had to tell you because — But it is all right, isn't it?'

I thought, no, it is not all right, it will never be all right again, something is lost and spoilt and ruined forever. Oh Crystal, Crystal, my pure darling, how could this awful thing have happened to us? I said, ‘Yes, it's all right, of course.'

‘You don't hate me, do you? I shall die.'

‘Don't be silly, Crystal.'

‘Well, will you — please — have your supper — we could have supper now, couldn't we? It's fish cakes like you like — and nice — tomatoes and — '

‘Supper after this! No thanks. I couldn't eat anything.'

‘Oh, please, please — ' She began to cry again.

‘Oh stop it, Crystal! I've got enough without your tears.'

‘I don't want you to see him.'

‘I don't see why not, if you're still in love with him!'

‘He might think — '

‘Might think what? Do stop blubbering and talk clearly. Might think I wanted to bring you together or something? Oh Crystal darling, return to reality! Gunnar isn't interested in you. You're just a nasty obscene incident in the remote past. It's me he's interested in. And I've got to see him. I've got to. What you've told me makes me feel absolutely sick, but it doesn't alter the situation, it doesn't alter my duty.'

‘Are you going to see
her
again?' Crystal was sitting upright, staring at me, squeezing her handkerchief which was now so soaked with her tears that drops of water were falling from it onto her woollen skirt.

‘I don't know, I told you, I don't know, you're tormenting me!'

‘You said you were in love with her.'

‘I was raving.'

‘You'll hate me now, you'll hate me because I told you, I won't be able to be any more a place for you to come to, we can't be together any more like when we were children, it's all gone, it's all gone, oh why did I tell you, oh why — '

‘Don't, Crystal, you're killing me.' It was indeed as if some bond with childhood had been broken, some bond which had lasted crazily preternaturally long, some innocence. ‘Look, I'm sorry, I'm going now.' I felt I wanted to get out, I wanted to breathe purer air, to
run.
‘Don't be upset, nothing's spoilt or changed, it can't be, it's just that I'm under such awful pressure. Forgive me. You eat the fish cakes. Don't worry, don't worry.'

I was pulling my coat on. She said nothing more and did not try to stop me, but watched me quietly, her face swollen and almost unrecognizable with weeping. I stopped on the way to the door.

‘Crystal — there hasn't ever been anybody else — ever — like that, has there?'

Her cry of denial was like the wild scream of a bird. I stumbled out of the door and down the stairs, and when I reached the street I began to run.

SUNDAY

I
T WAS Sunday morning. It was raining, and a rackety wind was sweeping the rain in little wild gusts across the windows, as if bombarding them with tin-tacks. I was lying (fully clothed) upon my bed, and Tommy was sitting on a chair beside me, knitting.

Sunday had of course brought Tommy, who was at last lucky in finding me at home. With an exercise of the considerable intelligence of which she was capable, she had taken in immediately that I was abstracted, obsessed, miles away, scarcely able to apprehend her, and she had refrained from tears or questions, had gone into the kitchen and made some coffee, which she also distributed to Christopher, Mick, Len and Jimbo. She tidied things, washed things, and watered the gloomy plant which Jimbo had given me.

Kitty had said, ‘Oh, you have a sister?' So (unless she was deliberately deceiving me?) Gunnar had not told her about what happened on the night of Anne's death. This was not improbable. She had said they had never discussed
that
time in detail and Gunnar might well have felt this piece of nightmare reminiscence to be unnecessary. He must simply detest the memory of it. That is, if it really happened. But had it happened? Hysterical middle-aged women, especially virgins, sometimes imagined such tales, that a man had broken in, that they had been seduced, raped, something perhaps which they both feared and wanted? I could not see Crystal in that light. Yet how far, for any purpose, could I see her objectively? Had she really got her head screwed on? Had she not every sort of reason and excuse for being, in lonely middle age, rather dotty, a somewhat peculiar virgin? And yet if it was true, so strangely not one. There was indeed something here which I could not bear. The loss of Crystal's innocence, a tie with childhood, a refuge, a pure unsullied place? Crystal mixed up with Gunnar, tied right into the middle of that hellish business, no. Gunnar had not told. Did this mean that it had not happened, or did it mean that it was for him too potent a source of nightmare?

Tommy was knitting because I had once said to her, just in order to utter some vague sugary nonsense, ‘I love to see you knit, it looks so domestic.' This was not even true. I hated to see her or anybody knit. It reminded me of foul Aunt Bill. It made me feel wolfish. It conjured up images of complacent family life which made me want to vomit. Tommy was knitting an obviously large jersey, designed obviously for me, only I had not given her the pleasure of answering a question about what it was she was knitting. Today, Tommy sitting there quietly click-clicking with those needles while I stared at the ceiling gave me a sense of being an invalid. I was ill and Tommy was my nurse. I was in prison and Tommy was visiting me. Tommy had kidnapped me and was waiting for me to confess. Getting rid of Thomas was proving embarrassingly difficult. I had not the strength or the will to decide even how to get her to leave me now, to get her out of the room, let alone how to induce her to go away and stay away forever. However it did not seem urgent since this was another interim. About Tommy, for the moment, I felt conscienceless. I had told her to go often enough. If she still stayed, her suffering was her affair. She had timidly suggested that we should go to the Round Pond. I had simply shaken my head.

I knew that I ought to go and see Crystal again. That was important. What was she doing now, crying, regretting? I had trained her so well that I knew she would not communicate with me, would not alter the routine one iota. But I ought to go and see her, I ought at least to ring her up. I had left her in the midst of desolation. I had felt, I still felt, a horror of her which I could not control and which I had been unable to conceal. The picture of her stay in Gunnar's house had added a new dimension of horror, a great room, a great space, to my memory of that awful time. Gunnar coming in and saying, ‘Anne is dead.' Crystal getting into her nightdress. I would have to live with these images forever and I could not forgive Crystal for imparting them to me. There was only one thing now which seemed to prevent utter misery and ferocious madness from overwhelming me (the sort of ferocity, for instance, which could send Tommy running away screaming) and that was my attentive agonizing anxiety about Kitty and when I should hear from her and when if ever I should see her. Until that awful pain, in which there were deep mysterious grains of joy, was altered by certainty into some other pain (for there was no escape from pain) I had no time to deal even with Crystal and with the urgency of her despair. My whole occupation was waiting.

The front door bell rang. Laura? Biscuit? Kitty? I was off the bed in a single spring and reached the door. It was Biscuit.

Without interrupting the movement of opening the door I emerged onto the landing, closed the door behind me, and strode towards the stairs. Biscuit followed. I went down the stairs two at a time and on through the hallway and out into the street. The wind was propelling a fine rain. I had neither hat nor coat. I began to walk on down the street, not looking back. I turned the corner and stopped. Biscuit caught up with me. ‘Well?' I said.

Biscuit was wearing her duffle coat with the hood pulled over her head. Her little sallow thin face inside looked like a boy's face, a child's face. She fumbled in her pocket and brought out
two
letters. I took them, the soft flung rain already blurring the writing. My name was written on each envelope. One letter was from Kitty, the other from Gunnar.

My head was bursting with anxiety and terror. I wanted to get rid of Biscuit with a violence which could have made me strangle her. I said, ‘Good. Now clear off.'

I turned from her and began to walk along fast in the direction of Bayswater station, holding the two letters in my hand in my jacket pocket.

When I reached the station I went to the door of the bar, but it was not yet open. I leaned against the door, my wet shoulders glued to the glass.

Biscuit came in. She saw me, threw back the hood of her coat, took a ticket from a machine, and went on towards the ticket barrier. As she passed me, without turning her head, she said, ‘Good-bye'. She passed the barrier and disappeared down the stairs towards the westbound platform.

I was fumbling frenziedly with the letters. I opened Kitty's first. It said,
Do as he asks, please. He must never know I saw you. Thank you and good-bye. K.J.
Then I opened Gunnar's. Gunnar's note was a little longer.
I would like to see you and talk to you, once only, and I hope you will agree to meet me. I suggest this evening, Sunday, about six o'clock at the above address. G.J.

So Gunnar too used Biscuit post. I put the letters away in my pocket and unglued myself from the door.
Thank you and good-bye.
The end of the quest was in sight, the Lady had already gone. I took a fivepenny ticket and went on down towards the eastbound platform. Sightless, breathless, I waited for an Inner Circle train. Bayswater, Paddington, Edgware Road, Baker Street, Great Portland Street, Euston Square, King's Cross …

Once again I was an hour early at Cheyne Walk. I had not returned to the flat. I spent most of the day on the Inner Circle. At lunch-time I stopped at Sloane Square and endeavoured to eat a sandwich. I drank a cautious amount of whisky, then mounted the train again. About four thirty I was back at Sloane Square. The rain had stopped, but a cold east wind was blowing. I was still, of course, coatless. I walked briskly along the King's Road and then down towards the river, passing Gunnar's house at about five o'clock. A light showed above the curtains on the first floor. I wondered if Kitty and Gunnar were there talking about me. I wandered a bit in the gardens and inspected a statue by Epstein representing a woman tearing her clothes off. I went into Chelsea Old Church and wandered about in the half dark reading the memorial tablets and wondering if when I was alone with Gunnar I would faint. At six o'clock exactly I rang the door bell.

Gunnar opened the door. A sort of gust of emotion came out of the house together with the warmth of the central heating.

‘Good evening. Nice of you to come.'

‘Not at all.'

‘Will you come upstairs?'

These astounding words were uttered.

I followed him up the stairs. The place smelt of solid well-to-do warmth and expensive furnishing and Kitty's perfume. I followed Gunnar up into the drawing-room.

The beautiful room was as menacing to me as if I had passed under a portcullis. Or perhaps it was more like the sultan's palace where you cross the marble courtyard and pass by the fountain and walk in under the mosaic colonnade to the room full of soft hangings where you are to be strangled. I had an instantaneous vision as I came in of Gunnar and me locked in frightful combat staggering about breaking vases and plates and lamps. A room to bleed in, a room to die in.

It was indeed a beautiful room. I had seen a number of wall-appointed drawing-rooms by this time, Laura Impiatt's for instance, and Clifford's, but this room was the most casually gorgeous I had ever entered. By comparison, Laura's taste was pretentious, Clifford's was cold. This was a big room with big confident furniture in it, lit by many lamps upon many tables. A large Chinese lacquer cabinet dominated one end, a carved marble mantelpiece with an immense gilt mirror over it the other. The carpet, which appeared to be Aubusson, strewed the centre of the room with roses inside an elliptical yellow medallion, and stretched away into shadow beneath tables, desks, bookcases. It was a grand man's grand room: a far cry from the muddled prettiness of a room which had existed once in north Oxford.

There was a marked silence. The windows must have been double-glazed. The embankment traffic was the faintest murmur, merely perhaps a vibration. Gunnar walked and I still followed to where a small fire was burning beneath the festooned marble of the mantelpiece. On a low table was a tray with bottles and glasses and cigarettes in a malachite box.

‘Would you like a drink?'

‘Thank you, yes. Whisky and soda.'

‘Do you smoke?'

‘No, thank you.'

‘Didn't you have a coat?'

‘A coat? No.'

After this piece of conversation Gunnar busied himself with the drinks. He filled a cut glass tumbler with whisky and soda, then went on holding it for a moment, looking into the fire and breathing hard, before handing it to me. He poured out some whisky for himself. He took a cigarette, then threw it back. He did not ask me to sit down. Then he began to look at me. We looked at each other.

It was an odd looking, like a sort of staring through time. As sometimes the cinema plays with a man's features, wrapping them in mist, then changing them from age to youth, so we looked. Gunnar, in the subdued golden glitter-laden light of his own drawing-room, looked younger than I had seen him look since his return into my life. In fact he seemed to have been getting steadily younger since that first moment when I had passed him upon the stairs. He had an outdoor look, only now more that of a sea captain than of a rugger blue. His face was weathered, larger but without flabbiness, more commanding, his bigness formidable still. He was wearing a soft dark tweed suit and a radiantly white shirt with a surprisingly gaudy tie. I was wearing my shabby greasy everyday office suit which had not been improved by a lot of lying about on beds and travelling in the underground and being rained upon. We stared at each other, standing there with a tense quietness which could have been the prelude to the reeling wrestling death struggle which I had been picturing just now.

Gunnar's look, however, was curiously objective. It was not angry, it rather expressed puzzlement, curiosity, perhaps a fastidious distaste. It was obviously going to be extremely difficult to begin the conversation. I was rigid with emotion, only my lower jaw had a slight tendency to tremble. I kept turning my drink round and round, feeling the criss-cross pattern on the glass. I had no conception of anything to say and had deliberately throughout the day avoided the invention of any possible speech. I wanted to be ready for anything, for incoherent fury, for emotional breakdown. I had not expected quite this awful coolness.

‘Thank you for coming,' said Gunnar.

‘Not at all.'

We had said that before.

Gunnar began to walk to and fro, a step or two to the window curtains, a step or two back to the hearth rug, rather as Kitty had paced upon the wooden jetty. Where was Kitty now? Was she at the door listening? This quietness could not last. What outburst would end it?

‘I wanted to see you
just once
and talk about the past,' said Gunnar. ‘Just once, because I think that will be enough. More would be an imposition. And I don't imagine you particularly want to see me.'

‘I imagine you don't particularly want to see me, in general that is — I felt suddenly that I was going to be stupid, and the idea of appearing stupid to Gunnar filled me with a black ferocious misery. He would say to Kitty, and perhaps this would be the great moment of relief: after all, he is a little stupid man.

‘No, of course. And obviously here there can't be any sort of ordinary — conversation — or,' he sought for the word, ‘armistice'.

‘Or — reconciliation — No, of course not.'

But why not? Was not this the only thing worth striving for, the only thing that really mattered? I felt the anguish, the tongue-tied stupidity, the sense of being gripped by a relentless and mocking past.

‘I daresay you detest me,' said Gunnar. ‘I messed up your life and one naturally hates people one has injured.'

‘Naturally.' It was as if Gunnar were putting the words into my mouth. And yet the old hatred and anger spoke for me with an authority which no gentleness could shake. ‘I messed up
your
life.' Stupidity.

‘Quite. But look — this is a — almost a technical question. You know, it has done me a lot of good just to see you.'

This could have been a humane remark, but in the context it sounded almost clinical.

‘You can perhaps have no idea,' Gunnar went on, ‘how obsessed I have been with the past. Some people can get over tragedies in their lives. I have never managed to get over this one.'