An Accidental Man

  Much love

  Bet

  Charlotte stared at this thoughtfully for some time. The letter and the snapshot she had found together in an old leather wallet. The third item, which she now began to consider, she had discovered separately among a lot of Betty’s old school magazines at the bottom of the trunk. It was a certificate issued by a sports committee of the Fulham Swimming Baths to attest that Miss Elizabeth Granger had obtained a first-class diploma in General Swimming, comprising breast stroke, crawl, butterfly and life-saving.

  Charlotte pushed her chair back. One of her lower front teeth was loose and she rocked it painfully with her tongue. It had been general knowledge that Betty Gibson Grey could not swim. Yet why was it general knowledge? Because Asutin had always said so. And when had Austin always said so? After her death.

  In retrospect it seemed an odd marriage. Betty was not considered to be a good match by those who care about good matches. She was a typist in a firm that did business with Austin’s firm. Clara had said she was ‘without distinction but jolly’. Betty had certainly been, in the mode of a by-gone age, jolly. She danced and sang and played the guitar badly. Her guitar in fact still existed, at the back of the cupboard where Charlotte found the trunk. Presumably on Dorina’s advent the relics of Betty had been just bundled into the darkest place. Charlotte could not imagine Dorina sorting these things out and asking Austin if they should be kept. Dorina walked innocent and blind over the remnants of her predecessor.

  Poor Betty. Destined for a happy ordinariness, what demon had set Austin in her way? And how was it that Austin was so attractive to women? Every woman thinks of herself as a healer. Did they somehow sense the leprosy within and feel confident that they could take the world-resentment out of those fine eyes? Dorina had thought it.

  Poor Betty. How had a good swimmer managed to drown herself accidentally in a calm river on a summer afternoon? She fell into a lock. Armidale Deep Lock, the name came back to Charlotte. Austin found her there already drowned. Well, she could have hit her head on the side of the lock, only no one had suggested that.

  Austin was a curious man. He inspired love. He inspired fear. Dorina feared him. Everyone had got used to regarding Dorina as a crazy little thing. But perhaps Dorina was not being just irrational and neurotic. Perhaps there was some quite other pattern behind it all.

  Charlotte took the things from the table and put them back where she had found them in the trunk. It was lunchtime, whatever that meant now. She leaned into the darkness at the back and drew out Betty’s guitar. She touched a string and it twanged with a surprised painful loudness in the quiet flat. Charlotte sat down nursing the guitar. She forgot Austin and began to think about Matthew. Tears came to her as she sat alone and rocked her decaying tooth with her tongue and strummed tunelessly upon the strings of the guitar.

  During luncheon at Pitt’s Lodge Clara was exceptionally gay.

  George said, ‘You’re in high spirits, darling. Have you bought a new hat, or what?’

  ‘No, Pinkie, it was just this morning at Valmorana. It’s awful to laugh I know, but it really was such a hoot.’

  ‘Well, what did happen, you tell me.’

  ‘We were all so solemn and what everybody said was quite idiotic, it didn’t make sense. Dorina said, “I have no friends”, and Char said, “I have no friends either”.’

  ‘It sounds like an Oxford group session.’

  ‘And Mavis said, “You shall do whatever you want”, and Dorina said, “I don’t know what I want” and Garth said Austin and Dorina ought to go to Italy at Matthew’s expense!’

  ‘Oh was Garth there? Has he got a finger in the Dorina pie?’

  ‘And then Dorina started howling and had to be led away. And Char was being sorry for herself as usual.’

  ‘We must invite Char.’

  ‘We might invite her with Penny.’

  ‘You know Char hates bridge. Where are the love birds, by the way?’

  ‘Oh dear. They’re out looking at a car. Oliver Sayce is trying to sell them his ghastly sports car.’

  ‘I can’t see Ludwig at the wheel of a sports car.’

  ‘Let’s hope reason will prevail. I so don’t want Gracie to learn. After what happened to Austin one wonders whether one wants to drive at all.’

  ‘Did you remember to go to Mollie’s boutique?’

  ‘Yes. I bought a horrible white tea cosy with white embroidery on it.’

  ‘Put it away for a Christmas present.’

  ‘And that reminds me. Richard Pargeter rang up. He wants us to go with him in his new yacht to the Mediterranean.’

  ‘He’ll drown us.’

  ‘He wants us to chaperone him and Karen Arbuthnot.’

  ‘Did he say so?’

  ‘No, but that’s it. I must say I’m surprised at Karen. I always thought she was keen on Sebastian.’

  ‘And Richard is no chicken.’

  ‘Richard has been around forever. Mollie is putting a brave face on it, according to Hester. She says Karen can’t resist boats.’

  ‘I can though. Must we go?’

  ‘It would be rather fun, Pinkie. The Greek islands in September.’

  ‘Could we take Patrick?’

  ‘Patrick disapproves of Richard.’

  ‘Our son is austere. By the way, I suppose you didn’t persuade Dorina to come and stay?’

  ‘No, Pinkie, but I will. I want Dorina and I’m going to get her.’

  ‘Dearest Clara, you think of everybody but yourself.’

  Garth sat beside the bed in the middle of the big sunny ward. There was a murmur of sympathetic embarrassed visiting-hour conversation, the awful doom-ridden tension between the healthy and the sick. The place was blanched and lineny with an apocalyptic impersonal light and people shaded their eyes and lowered their voices. Death lived there and was only casually absent. Garth was holding Mrs Monkley’s hand. He had taken hold of it, squeezed it, and now, as it still clutched his, could not relinquish it.

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ Mrs Monkley was saying. ‘I feel all collapsed inside, as if my innards had gone, the doctors don’t say, I feel as if I was dying and I wish I could die.’ All the time she spoke huge tears slowly flowed and her eyes though directed to Garth did not focus upon him.

  ‘You will recover,’ he said.

  ‘No, I won’t. I know other people recover, but I won’t. My little girl was everything to me, she was my joy, everything I did I did for her. It’s not the same for Norman, being her stepfather, he doesn’t feel it like I do. It’s awful to say it now, but he never really loved the child properly, she was a nuisance to him, a child is a nuisance if you don’t love it, a child in that little caravan, of course there were difficulties and bad times. Nature means something, you know, and it wasn’t Nature for him like it was for me. We were on the housing list years, but when her father died, my first husband that was, we went down to the bottom again. I loved him, I can’t believe it now they’ve both been taken, it’s too cruel, he was such a wonderful man, an educated man, he was a schoolmaster, he knew everything. Rupert was his name and he named the little one.’

  ‘What was her name?’ asked Garth. It was odd that he had never heard it.

  ‘Rosalind. Like in Shakespeare, I forget which play. He said she’d be a tall girl. But she was just a little bundle when he died, he died of his stomach, and now they’re both gone — She was such a wonderful clever child, just like her father, bright as a button at school — Oh I can’t believe it when I wake up every morning —’

  ‘Don’t give way,’ said Garth. ‘We all have to die. It’s a short walk through a sad place for the best of us.’ He could find no words to engage with hers, no eloquence to answer hers. He said, just in order to ask a question which she could easily answer, ‘What does your present husband do?’

  ‘Oh he’s in the motor trade, on and off that is. He’s been in prison. That’s why I married him really. When he told me he’d been in prison. I
was that sorry for him.’

  ‘You’ve been good to him.’

  ‘Not really. We always quarrelled. And I couldn’t help comparing him with Rupert and I’d say so too. It was a lot for a man to bear. And the caravan was too small and the money came in dribs and drabs and he’d hold out on me and we quarrelled about Rosalind. She was such a good dear little thing she could never bear to hear our voices raised after she’d been put to bed, though she was that tired as Norman would never turn off the telly, we used to quarrel about that too, and she’d come wriggling out of her little cubby hole in her nightie and holding up her little hands and sometimes we’d stop, even Norman would, for very shame at the child. Oh I could bear it all when she was there, I’d think about her away into the future when she’d be a tall girl at the university maybe, and it was like a line of happiness going right away into the future. And now I’ll never see her again, never hold her in my arms again, oh how can it be, just because she ran out of the door at just that moment, just that particular moment, if only I’d called to her, spoken to her just once again —’

  The white apocalyptic light was splintering in Garth’s eyes, there were tears somewhere, his tears, strangers. He thought, this is what it is really like to look at death. He thought of the dark New York street and the cry of ‘Help me’ and the heavy body slowly let down into the gutter and the figure of himself walking on, walking on. That had been the text written in small letters. This now, the blankly sunny hospital ward, Mrs Monkley’s clutching hand, her endless crying, her lips wet with tears, this was the text written in larger letters and held up before him. This was the rhetoric of the casually absent god. But could he read it, and was it even meant for him to read?

  There were connections, but could they work in his life? Because a child could step into the road and die there was a certain way in which it was necessary to live. The connections were there, a secret logic in the world as relentlessly necessary as a mathematical system. Perhaps for God it was a mathematical system, the magnetism of whose necessity touching the here and now was felt as emotion, was felt as passion. He had recognized, at times, that touch and trembled at its awful certainty, being sure that he could not now be otherwise contented. It was an eternal doom. These deaths were merely signs, accidental signs even. They were not starting points or end points. What lay before him was the system itself. What burnt him was a necessity which was the same throughout. But could this searing darkness be for him other than an experience? Was this his fallen state? Was this every man’s fallen state? Experience was impure and inextricably mingled with delusion. Even words tormented to the utmost retained that haziness and warmth without which perhaps poor humans cannot live. Yet what was action without these, could one go on in the dark after meaning had died? Absolute contradiction seemed at the heart of things and yet the system was there, the secret logic of the world, its only logic, its only sense.

  Mavis lay back relaxed in a big armchair at the Villa. It was late evening. Matthew, with a glass of brandy in his hand, sat in an upright chair leaning towards her. Only one lamp was alight. They were not touching each other. There was no need. That would come. Passion and happiness joined their bodies.

  Speech was loosened and had become perfect. They talked intermittently, often at random. Everything needful had been said. Now everything in the world could be said and there was a huge calm expansion of time.

  Matthew had unbuttoned his waistcoat. He felt comfortable and justified inside his body at last. Mavis’s faint touch upon his wrist, now withdrawn, made him feel light and pure as if a golden line had defined him altogether and lifted him slightly out of the grosser world: while yet, luxuriously incarnate, his desire waited, confident and curbed.

  He saw in Mavis the counterpart of his own feelings, as she lay back, her shoes kicked off, her dress undone at the neck, her hands caressing her throat and breasts, her fuzzy halo of greying hair spread out behind her head, as it turned heavily to and fro.

  ‘So you see,’ Mavis was saying, ‘I just don’t know what to do for the best about Dorina. I fear making some terrible mistake. There’s some very delicate thread which only she can unravel. One can’t cut the knot. Sometimes I’ve felt that she just wanted me to force her to do something. But even if she did really want it I doubt if it would be wise. What could a psychoanalyst make of that child? There are some things which are very obvious and it could take a lot of time and a lot of pain to go over them. But psychoanalysis is such a blunt instrument. Dorina knows, she knows.’

  ‘Knows what?’ said Matthew.

  ‘The obvious things. Sometimes I think it’s like a puzzle and she can see and yet not quite see. I watch her sort of knit her brows over it. She’ll have to find Austin again, they’ll have to come together very quietly at some moment when she’s ready. It may be quite soon.’

  ‘You are stating the problem, not its solution.’

  ‘Stating it in a certain way excludes certain solutions.’

  ‘Quite. Do you think,’ said Matthew, ‘that there is only one thing the matter with Dorina, or are there many things, all quite unconnected with each other? When someone’s in trouble like that one is often tempted to simplify, to think there’s one answer, one exit.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mavis. ‘I believe there’s one thing. I believe it will all come right together. But then I do so much want to — as it were — release her — I mean as one might release a bird. Especially, and this doesn’t make my thinking any clearer, now, my darling.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Do you think that she can — if that is the word — save — Austin?’

  ‘Yes, I believe it.’

  ‘You don’t think it, you believe it?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it’s like religious faith here. One has certain beliefs for other people, half trying to help them with the beliefs.’

  ‘I know. Austin needs a job. I’ve been trying. George has been trying. It’s not so easy. His age and lack of — And some sort of idea about him that’s got around.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It could all get pretty incurable.’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t think any one thing should wait on another. I want Dorina to see him soon, to want to see him. If he has any good angel —’

  ‘Yes, and he knows it,’ said Matthew. He added, ‘There’s no point, you know, in my seeing her.’

  ‘Yes. That’s impossible.’ They looked at each other.

  ‘If only, if only —’

  ‘What, Mavis?’

  ‘If only they could both be somewhere absolutely else and be happy.’

  Matthew held her serious gaze. ‘That’s not good enough.’

  ‘I know that too. But there are moments when one gets tired out with loving and finding it’s all vague in the end, not a great river moving a delicate mechanism, but just — spray.

  Matthew smiled at her. ‘I think your river and your mechanism here —’

  ‘Yes, yes —’

  ‘But I wish too — You at least can speak of love. What can I do for Austin? You know I came back for Austin?’

  ‘I know you did, and it makes me specially happy, it makes everything far better — here —’

  ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Isn’t love the name of what made you come back for Austin?’

  ‘How far can a name penetrate into darkness?’

  ‘Let it fly there — like a flaming arrow —’

  ‘You are full of metaphors tonight.’

  ‘I am full of — oh — poetry — love —’

  ‘Mavis, I —’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Come.’

  ‘You will read my novel, won’t you.’ said Norman. ‘I mean it, I want to know what you think. It’s a psychological thriller really, make a marvellous film. It’s about this chap who never has a chance in life, he’s a clever chap, as smart as paint, but he has bad luck, has an accident when he’s five, well, it’s not an accident really, his father throws him out of a window and he damages
his jaw and has an impediment in his speech ever after so that he can sort of talk but people always misunderstand him and think he’s saying something else, some of these bits are a scream, but sad at the same time and sort of symbolic, and then he meets this girl, well, I won’t tell you the whole story otherwise there won’t be any suspense, and it ends with his getting a gun and going into a supermarket and shooting down everybody within sight and —’

  ‘Excellent fellow,’ said Austin.

  ‘Well, here it is, I’ve got several copies. I keep it in this steel box folder thing with a spring, it’s rather heavy. We can discuss it next time.’

  ‘What makes you think there’ll be a next time?’

  ‘Stop kidding. I want to get your brother in on the act.’

  ‘My brother would crush you like an insect.’

  ‘I don’t see why he should. He’s sorry. He’s a damn sight sorrier than you are. Now get this straight. I’m not blackmailing you.’

  ‘You are. You’re breaking the law. And I’ve got your letter to prove it.’

  ‘Well, as to the law, you’re the one who’s for the high jump. My letter was just an emotional outburst.’

  ‘If you approach my brother he’ll go straight to the police.’

  ‘No, he won’t. He’ll make terms. For your sake and because he’s sorry. I only want a little. Christ, can’t you understand. I’ve had this awful loss and —’

  ‘Wait till I get a job,’ said Austin. ‘I’ll give you a little now and then, just because I’m — sorry — I am sorry, you know. But I can’t now — I haven’t got anything.’

  ‘I asked for twenty pounds and you got twenty pound. I bet you’ve got plenty stashed away.’

  ‘Oh God —’

  Austin had gone round to the flat when Charlotte was out looking for something that he could sell. There was nothing of value except a little diamond ring and matching brooch belonging to Dorina. He sold these for twenty-two pounds and suspected that he had been cheated. The shop man could see that he was desperate.