My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (55 page)

And another time, again when they were on a journey, his mother fell ill. Hyacinth, who had to write to Father on her behalf, said irritably: “But I don’t know what to say.” This from Hyacinth, who wrote reams to Mother whenever he was away! Then there was a quarrel, for again the boy had grown angry, and his mother began to feel worse: she seemed to be seriously ill. Something had to be done for her, and Hyacinth’s hands kept on getting in the way of his, and he kept on pushing them aside. At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: “Why do you keep on pushing me away?” The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

That is not difficult to understand. Yet he was capable of sitting in his room, tortured by jealousy and telling himself that he was not jealous at all, that it was something quite different, something out of the ordinary, something oddly invented; and yet this was himself and his own feelings. When he raised his head and looked about him, everything seemed to be the same as usual. The wallpaper was green and grey. The doors were reddish brown, with faint gleams of light reflected on them. The hinges were dark, made of copper. There was a chair in the room, brown mahogany and wine-red plush. But all these things seemed to be somehow tilted, leaning to one side. There was a suggestion, in their very uprightness, that they were about to topple over. They seemed endless and meaningless.

He rubbed his eyes and then looked round again. But it was not his eyes. It was the things. The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world’s eyes, the world already in one’s own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky. He only needed to look out of the window to see how the world of, say, a cab-driver waiting in the street below was suddenly intersected by the world of a clerk walking past. The result was something slashed open, a disgusting jumble, an inside-out and side-by-side of things in the street, a turmoil of focal points moving along their tracks, and around each of them there extended a radius of complacency and self-confidence, all aids to walking upright through a world in which there was no such thing as above and below. Volition, cognition, and perception were like a tangled skein. One noticed this only when one tried to find the end of the thread. But perhaps there was some other way of going through the world, other than following the thread of truth? At such moments, when a veneer of coldness separated him from everything, Tonka was more than a fairy-tale: she was almost a visitation.

‘Either I must make Tonka my wife,’ he told himself, ‘or I must give her up and give up these thoughts.’

But no one will blame him for doing neither one nor the other, despite these reasonings of his. For although all such thoughts and feelings may well be justified, nobody nowadays doubts that they are very largely figments of the imagination. And so he went on reasoning, without taking his reasoning seriously. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was being sorely tried, but when he came to himself again and spoke to himself again, as it were, man to man, he had to tell himself that this ordeal consisted, after all, only of the question whether he would force himself to believe in Tonka against the ninety-nine per cent probability that she had been unfaithful to him and that he was simply a fool. Admittedly this humiliating possibility had by now lost much of its importance.

X

It was, oddly enough, a period in which his scientific work went remarkably well. He had solved the main problems involved in his project, and it could not be long now before he got results. There were already people coming to see him, and even if it was chemistry that they talked about, they brought him some emotional reassurance. They all believed that he was going to succeed. The probability of it already amounted to ninety-nine per cent! And he drugged himself with work.

But even although his social existence was now taking on firmer outlines and entering, so to speak, the state of worldly maturity, the moment he stopped working his thoughts no longer ran along in definite grooves. The faintest reminder of Tonka’s existence would start a drama going in his mind: figures in a play, one taking over from the other, none of them revealing its meaning, all of them like strangers daily encountering each other in the same street. There was that commercial traveller of a tenor whom he had once suspected of being the man with whom Tonka had betrayed him. And there were all the others to whom he had ever pinned his certainty. It was not that they did anything. They were merely there. Or even if they did do that frightful thing, it no longer meant much. And since they were sometimes two or even more persons rolled into one, it was no straightforward matter being jealous of them. The whole situation became as transparent as the clearest air, and yet clearer still, until it reached that state of freedom and emptiness which was void of all egoism, and under this immovable dome the accidents of terrestrial life pursued their microscopic course.

And sometimes all this turned into dreams. Or perhaps it had all begun in dreams, in a pallid shadowy realm from which he emerged the instant he shed the weight of his working hours, as though it were all meant as a warning to him that this work was not his true life.

These real dreams were on a deeper level than his waking existence; they were warm as low-ceilinged, bright-coloured rooms. In these dream-rooms Tonka would be harshly scolded by her aunt for not having shed any tears at Grandmamma’s funeral; or an ugly man acknowledged himself to be the father of Tonka’s child, and she, when he looked at her queryingly, for the first time did not deny it, but stood there, motionless, with an infinite smile. This had happened in a room with green plants in it, with red rugs on the floor and blue stars on the walls. But when he turned his eyes away from that infinity the rugs were green, the plants had big ruby-red leaves, the walls had a yellow glimmer as of soft human skin, and Tonka, still standing there, was transparently blue, like moonlight.

He almost fled into these dreams as into some simple-hearted happiness. Perhaps it was all mere cowardice. Perhaps all they meant was that if only Tonka would confess, all would be well. He was much confused by their frequency, and yet they had not the intolerable tension of the half-waking state, which was gradually bearing him higher and higher, away out of it all.

In these dreams Tonka was always as great as love itself, and no longer the care-worn little shop-girl she was in real life. And she looked different every time. Sometimes she was her own younger sister (not that she had ever had a sister) and often she was merely the rustling of skirts, the ring and cadence of another voice, the most unfamiliar and surprising of movements, all the intoxicating charm of unknown adventures, which came to him, the way such things come only in dreams, out of the warm familiarity of her name—and they gave him the floating sense of joy that lies in anticipation, even though still tense with unfulfilment. These ambiguous images made him feel a seemingly undefined, disembodied affection and more than human intensity of emotion, and it was hard to say whether these feelings were gradually detaching themselves from Tonka or only now really beginning to be associated with her. When he reflected on this he guessed that this enigmatic capacity for transference and independence that love had must also manifest itself in waking life. It is not that the woman loved is the origin of the emotions apparently aroused by her; they are merely set behind her like a light. But whereas in dreams there is still a hair’s-breadth margin, a crack, separating the love from the beloved, in waking life this split is not apparent; one is merely the victim of
doppelgänger
-trickery and cannot help seeing a human being as wonderful who is not so at all. He could not bring himself to set the light behind Tonka.

The fact that he so often thought of horses at this time must have been somehow connected with this, and obviously was a sign of something significant. Perhaps it was Tonka and the sweepstake in which they drew blanks. Or perhaps it was his childhood—those beautiful brown and dappled horses, their heavy harness decorated with brass and fur. And then sometimes there would be a sudden glowing of the child’s heart in him, the heart for which magnanimity, kindness, and faith were not yet obligations that one disregarded, but knights in an enchanted garden of adventures and liberations. Yet perhaps too this was merely the last flaring up of a flame about to die, the itching of a scar that was beginning to form. For it was like this. The horses were always hauling timber, and the bridge was always echoing under their hooves, a muffled wooden sound, and the timbermen wore their short, checkered jackets, purple and brown. They all doffed their hats as they passed the tall cross, with the tin Christ on it, halfway across the bridge. Only a little boy who stood there by the bridge, looking on, in the winter, refused to doff his hat, for he was a clever little boy and didn’t believe in such things anymore. And then he suddenly couldn’t button up his coat. He couldn’t do it. The frost had numbed his little fingers, they grasped a button and tugged at it, hard, but just as they were pushing it into the button-hole, it jumped out again, and his fingers were left helpless and amazed. However hard they tried, they always ended up in paralysed bewilderment.

And it was this memory that came back to him so often.

XI

Amid all these uncertainties Tonka’s pregnancy took its course, revealing the harshness of reality.

There was the shambling gait, with Tonka seeming in need of a supporting arm, the heavy body that was mysteriously warm, the manner of sitting down, with legs apart, unwieldy and touchingly ugly: all the changing aspects of the miraculous process, steadily transforming the girlish body into a seed-pod, altering all its proportions, broadening the hips and pressing them down, taking the sharpness from the knees, thickening the neck, making the breasts into udders, streaking the skin of the belly with fine red and blue veins, so that it was startling to see how close to the outer world the blood circulated—as though that were a sign of death. All this unshapeliness was in fact a new shape, moulded as much by passivity as by main force; and the same distortion of human normality was reflected in her eyes: they now had a blank look, and her gaze would linger on things for a long time, shifting only with an effort. It would often rest for a long time on him. She was now keeping house for him again, waiting on him laboriously, as though she wanted to prove to him in these last days that she lived only for him. She showed no trace of shame for her ugliness and deformation, only the desire to do as much as she could for him in spite of her awkwardness.

They were now spending nearly as much time together as in earlier days. They did not talk much, but they liked to be near each other, for her pregnancy was advancing like the hand of a clock, and they were helpless in the face of it. They ought to have talked the whole thing out together, but they did nothing about it, and time moved on. The shadowy being, the unreal element on him, sometimes struggled for words, and the realisation that everything ought to be measured by quite different standards almost broke surface—but, like all understanding, even this was ambiguous and without certainty. And time was running on, time was running away, time was running out. The clock on the wall had more to do with reality than their thoughts had.

It was a suburban room where nothing of importance could happen. There they sat, and the clock on the wall was a round kitchen clock, telling kitchen time. And his mother bombarded him with letters proving everything up to the hilt. Instead of sending money to him, she spent it on getting opinions from doctors, in the hope of making him see reason. He quite understood this and no longer resented it. Once she sent him a medical statement that made it really clear to him that Tonka
must
have been unfaithful to him at that time. But far from upsetting him, it was almost a pleasant surprise. As though it had nothing to do with him, he wondered how it had happened, and all he felt was: Poor Tonka, she has had to pay so dearly for a single passing aberration! Yes, sometimes he had to pull himself up short, on the point of saying quite cheerfully: ‘Listen, Tonka—I’ve only just realised what we’ve been forgetting about—who it was you were unfaithful to me with, that time!’ So everything petered out. Nothing new happened. There was only the clock. And the old familiar bond between them.

And even although they had not talked about it, this brought back the moments when the bodies desired each other. They came like old friends who, returning after long absence, will simply walk into the room. The windows on the far side of the narrow courtyard were eyeless in the shadow, the people were all out at work; down below the yard was dark as a well; and the sun shone into the room as though through frosted glass, making each object stand out sharply, in a dead gleam. And there, for instance, lay a little old calendar, open as though Tonka had just been going through it, and on the wide expanse of one leaf, like a memorial erected to that one day, there was a small red exclamation-mark. All the other leaves were covered with everyday domestic entries, shopping-lists, sums, and the like, and only this one was empty except for the one sign. Not for an instant did he doubt that this betokened the memory of the incident that Tonka denied. The time just about fitted. His certainty was like a rush of blood to the head. Yet certainty itself merely lay in this vehemence, and in the next instant it had again dwindled into nothingness. If one was going to believe in what this exclamation-mark might signify, then one might just as well believe in the miraculous. What was so appalling was, after all, the very fact of believing in neither.