The Unburied (9 page)

He seemed to reflect for a moment before saying: ‘Let me put it like this. Passion is what is at issue if the person you feel about in this way asks you to do something that goes beyond all moral bounds and you agree to do it.’

‘You mean something like lying or stealing?’

He smiled. ‘Yes, if you like. Or perhaps something worse, if you can imagine it.’

‘I can’t conceive of doing that.’

‘No. Can’t you?’

After a moment I asked: ‘Am I to assume, then, that there is at this moment some object of your passion?’

He nodded without speaking.

‘I’m intrigued,’ I said, pausing to allow him to say more if he chose. He remained silent. Who could she be, the mysterious person with whom he was in love? Could this be related to his reason for inviting me here? Was this the cause of the trouble I was sure he was involved in?

‘Tell me, has it made you happy? This pursuit of passion.’

‘Happy?’ He laughed. ‘Happiness is what you feel when you go for a walk on a beautiful day or when you get home from a pleasant evening with friends. No, it has not made me happy. It has brought me to the deepest abyss of despair. It has carried me to the height of rapture.’ And then almost in a whisper so that I was hardly certain that I had heard him say it, he muttered: ‘And to perdition.’

‘If we have the choice,’ I said, ‘then I would choose happiness rather than passion.’

‘You’re the undergraduate,’ he said, ‘if you can brush it aside so easily.’ Then in the most contemptuous tone he said: ‘You’ve had enough passion, you say? Your brief marriage all those years ago was enough?’

‘Don’t say any more about it, Austin.’

‘I think you’re in a worse case than I am,’ he said gravely. ‘When you come to die you’ll realize that you have not lived.’

‘Oh, I’ve lived, Austin.’

‘Once. And that more than twenty years ago.’

I was astonished that he should talk about it so coldly, almost sneeringly. Was he trying to make it look as if he had not understood how much it meant to me? Had he not understood?

‘I would prefer that we not talk about it.’

‘I suppose you blame yourself?’

‘Blame myself? Yes, I suppose I do. I was naive, trusting, unworldly. And since we are speaking frankly, I might as well tell you that for a long time I was angry with you.’

‘You were angry with me?’

‘But, Austin, whatever I may have felt at the time, you must understand that if I still felt resentment for the part you played, then I would not have accepted your invitation to come here now.’

‘What part did you think I played?’

‘No, you must make do with what I’ve just said, I’m afraid. I’m not going to conduct a species of post-mortem examination on what happened all those years ago.’

‘Have you really not heard any news ...?’

‘She is dead. She is dead to me.’

‘I heard from an old friend in Naples ...’

‘I don’t want to know, Austin. Don’t tell me any more. I assume she still lives because someone would have told me if she had died.’

‘I heard from an old friend in Naples that they have a child.’ he said. ‘Did you know that?’

I felt a shaft of pain in my side as if someone had stabbed me. I shook my head. Austin’s voice seemed to be coming to me muffled by water.

‘A girl. She is now about fifteen. I am told she is very clever and very beautiful. She has the features of her mother with the eyes of her father.’ I covered my face with my hands.

‘You don’t like hearing the truth, do you? A strange quality in a historian. Don’t you find it something of a professional handicap?’

I took my hands from my face and turned away: ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

‘It’s all part and parcel of your desire for a bland compromise.’ He laughed briefly. ‘That’s your passion: compromise. Don’t ridicule anyone’s beliefs however wrong you think they are. How middle-class and English and Philistine. But there’s so much you don’t understand. Your life has been so privileged and protected. And you’ve narrowed it even further and shut out so much. You’ve lived such a safe, cautious life. I’ve known such horror and degradation and exaltation that you couldn’t begin to imagine.’

He paused. Then he said: ‘But I’m so glad you’ve forgiven me.’

We sat in silence for at least a minute. I became aware of the darkness and the shadows around us in the light of the single candle and the dying embers of the fire. I could even hear the clock ticking on the landing below.

It’s too late to go to a hotel,’ I said, standing up. ‘But I will leave the house immediately after breakfast.’

Austin looked like a man coming to himself after an anaesthetic or a mesmeric trance: ‘Of course you must stay. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. I don’t know why I said those things. You won’t go, will you?’

‘I think I should.’

‘Look, to be absolutely frank, I’m not myself at the moment. Please sit down.’

Hesitantly, I did as he said and he went on: ‘There is something weighing upon my mind. Otherwise I would never have said those things.’

‘I guessed as much.’

‘I wasn’t talking about you just now but arguing with myself. I would have said those things to anybody who was unfortunate enough to be sitting where you are now.’ He turned away. ‘I tell you in all honesty, in the last few weeks I’ve come perilously close to the very edge of my being.’

‘Won’t you tell me about it?’

He turned his anguished face towards me: ‘I can’t do that. But can you imagine being put in a situation so intolerable that you begin seriously to think of destroying yourself as the only way out?’

‘Dear God! You must not let yourself contemplate such a hideous deed. Tell me you are not serious.’

A slow, sardonic smile appeared on his face: ‘I have rejected that option. Set your mind at rest on that score, at least.’

‘Won’t you trust me enough to tell me what this is all about, Austin?’

‘You’ll stay until Saturday?’

‘Very well. Yes, I’ll stay.’

‘Bless you, old friend.’

I waited for him to speak but it was clear that he had no intention of confiding in me. Even so, I was about to broach the subject he had touched on but at that moment the clock on the landing struck once.

‘Is it so late?’ I exclaimed.

‘It’s much later,’ Austin replied, taking out his watch. ‘Didn’t you hear the Cathedral? It’s nearly two. That clock keeps time very badly.’

‘Then why not have it seen to?’ I asked.

He smiled.

Irritating, baffling, unfathomable Austin! I had loved him when we were young and I had been deeply grieved to think that I had lost his friendship. ‘I have much to do tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I should go to bed.’

We shook hands and parted. I went upstairs first, finding the stairs and then the bedroom horribly cold after the warmth of the sitting-room. I pulled a curtain a little to one side and saw that the fog was, if anything, thicker than before. Austin went downstairs and after twenty minutes I heard him come up and go into his room across the landing. I got into bed and read for half an hour – a habit without which I could not sleep – but on this occasion I found it hard to concentrate.

Austin’s anger had upset me. I did not recall his having such a short temper when he was an undergraduate. It must be because he had so much on his mind. I wondered once again who it was he was in love with and whether it was that amour that endangered his position at the school. The wife of a colleague? The mother of a pupil?

I could not put from my thoughts the piece of news he had thrust upon me. It was precisely to protect myself from such knowledge that I had at the time severed connections with certain friends and acquaintances. Why had Austin insisted on talking about the past and passing on that cruel piece of information? Did he feel the need to exorcise his guilt? I had seen no sign even of regret for the role – the important role – which he had played at the time.

All I had wanted twenty-five years ago was a life of scholarship and a wife and children, but Austin had clearly not wanted that. I used to think he had wanted less than I, but now I began to wonder if he had wanted more. He had failed to get the degree to which his gifts entitled him because he had got into one of his scrapes – as he called them – just before the examination. There was something naked and dangerous in Austin which I had almost forgotten about until I saw it again just now. He was capable of acting without dignity or self-control. Had a sense of frustration and failure led him to make some serious misjudgement?

I blew out my candle and tried to sleep. Austin was right: the Close was completely silent. It was like College during the vacation. Almost too quiet. I thought of how, a year or two after the great caesura in my life, I had found the house on the outskirts of Cambridge too silent and had moved back into my old bachelor rooms in College. During the term the noise of the undergraduates is comforting, only occasionally disturbing; in the vacations the silence becomes oppressive. The only sound now was the Cathedral clock striking the quarters and when it had uttered its deep chime on the hour, there were answering cheeps from other church-steeples coming muffled through the thick fog that must lie upon the town like an ocean, the spires and towers peeking through. Apart from that, the only noises were from inside the house when the woodwork creaked like an old man’s joints as if the ancient building were groaning in pain at its long decline. I thought of all that must have happened in this house: the people who had died, the babies that had been born, the sadness, and the laughter. The creaks were like the groaning boards of an old wooden ship. The house was a ship, but the sea of clouds was over our heads. It was a ship that travelled under the surface of the water, then. My head filled with such nonsense, I drifted into sleep, or a kind of half-sleep.

I woke up suddenly and lay for a moment wondering what had disturbed me. Then I heard again the sound that had broken in upon my sleep. It was a whimpering cry somewhere between a shout and a sob – almost not human. I had some half-dreaming notion that I was hearing the ghost whose story Austin had told me, but this was a real noise and it was coming from somewhere inside the house. I lit my candle and the flickering shadows that this summoned up in the room did nothing to calm my fears. I somehow found the courage to leave my bed, don a dressing-gown and go out onto the landing. The sound was coming, as I had guessed, from Austin’s room. I knocked and after a moment pushed the door and went in.

In the dim light I saw a figure on the bed. I held up the candle and saw that Austin was kneeling on the bedcovers in his nightshirt. He had his hands over his ears as if he were trying to protect them from a loud noise. His eyes were open and he seemed to be looking at something at the end of the bed. When I saw his thin legs protruding from the nightshirt I felt pity and faint revulsion at their white boniness.

Looking at his pale, sensitive face in its moment of unguarded pain, I felt a sharp stab of affection despite all that he had done. Was it affection for the man before me or mourning for the youth he had once been?

I approached the bed. He looked at me – at least, his eyes were open and were turned towards me. I had the strangest feeling as I realized that he was looking straight at me and yet was not seeing me. Who or what he was seeing I had no idea.

Addressing me and yet not addressing me, he uttered the words: ‘She says he has deserved it for many years. She says it’s not vengeance but justice. He has escaped punishment all these years.’

‘Austin,’ I said. ‘It’s me. It’s Ned.’

Still with his head turned to me and his unseeing eyes fixed on my face, he said: ‘His account must be closed. She says so. And she says she’ll do it herself if we won’t.’

I took him and pressed him to me.

‘Austin,’ I said. ‘My dear fellow.’

He started suddenly and as he stared at me with his eyes wide open I saw recognition and realization dawn. For a moment he stayed in my arms, then he pushed me away quite brusquely.

‘My dear old friend,’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry to find you in such distress. Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘It’s too late for that.’ He breathed heavily twice and then said: ‘I’m all right. Go back to bed.’

‘Dear Austin, I don’t like to leave you in such a state.’

‘I’m all right. Go. It was just a nightmare.’

His tone was such that I could resist no longer. With much perplexity I did as I was bid, but it was long before sleep reclaimed me.

My resentment against him was largely dissipated by the vision of vulnerability and torment I had just seen. Had my old friend frightened himself with the ghost-story which he had promised would keep me from sleeping and disturb my dreams? The terror I had read on his face seemed to suggest something much worse than that. I sympathized, for I was often tormented by nightmares, and in particular at the worst period of my life when, for several months, I had almost been frightened to go to sleep. Was Austin’s nightmare related to that? Was he haunted by guilt for his part in that painful event? Although I was not clear exactly what role he had played, he had certainly borne some of the responsibility. Had he invited me here to try to make amends? Or was it because he needed help in the mysterious crisis in which he was involved? And was the woman he had spoken of just now in his dream the object of his passion?

Wednesday Morning

I was awakened by the Cathedral clock striking the hour, though I came to consciousness too slowly to count the chimes. The room was in darkness, the heavy curtains admitting no light that could give me a clue to the hour. I lit a candle and with an effort of will, forced myself out of the bed and into the bone-chilling cold of the unheated room. Once I was dressed I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock! Horrified at such self-indulgence, I pulled back the frayed curtains and found the fog still thick. Even in the muddy light, the time-blackened stonework of the Cathedral was startlingly close to the window.

As I went down the stairs a few minutes later I smelt toast and coffee and in the dining-room I found Austin laying the table for our breakfast. He smiled and the Austin of the nightmare – indeed, the belligerent Austin of our argument late in the evening – had vanished.