“The squeezing did it, the awful pressure. It was the weight of the sky and the air. How can one human body support all that weight without bruising into a pulp?”
He made a little water in the trench. The reptiles were floating back to the sea round the rock. They said nothing but sat on the flat sea with their legs hidden.
“I need a crap. I must see about that. Now I must wear everything and sweat this heat out of my body.”
By the time he had pulled on all his clothing dusk was come and he felt his way into the crevice with his legs. The crevice enlarged and became populous. There were times when it was larger than the rock, larger than the world, times when it was a tin box so huge that a spade knocking at the side sounded like distant thunder. Then after that there was a time when he was back in rock and distant thunder was sounding like the knocking of a spade against a vast tin box. All the time the opening beneath his window was dribbling on like the Forces Programme, cross-talking and singing to people whom he could not see but knew were there. For a moment or two he was home and his father was like a mountain. The thunder and lightning were playing round the mountain’s head and his mother was weeping tears like acid and knitting a sock without a beginning or end. The tears were a kind of charm for after he had felt them scald him they changed the crevice into a pattern.
The opening spoke.
“She is sorry for me on this rock.”
Sybil was weeping and Alfred. Helen was crying. A bright boy face was crying. He saw half-forgotten but now clearly remembered faces and they were all weeping.
“That is because they know I am alone on a rock in the middle of a tin box.”
They wept tears that turned them to stone faces in a wall, masks hung in rows in a corridor without beginning or end. There were notices that said No Smoking, Gentlemen, Ladies, Exit and there were many uniformed attendants. Down there was the other room, to be avoided, because there the gods sat behind their terrible knees and feet of black stone, but here the stone faces wept and had wept. Their stone cheeks were furrowed, they were blurred and only recognizable by some indefinite mode of identity. Their tears made a pool on the stone floor so that his feet were burned to the ankles. He scrabbled to climb up the wall and the scalding stuff welled up his ankles to his calves, his knees. He was struggling, half-swimming, half-climbing. The wall was turning over, curving like the wall of a tunnel in the underground. The tears were no longer running down the stone to join the burning sea. They were falling freely, dropping on him. One came, a dot, a pearl, a ball, a globe, that moved on him, spread. He began to scream. He was inside the ball of water that was burning him to the bone and past. It consumed him utterly. He was dissolved and spread throughout the tear an extension of sheer, disembodied pain.
He burst the surface and grabbed a stone wall. There was hardly any light but he knew better than to waste time because of what was coming. There were projections in the wall of the tunnel so that though it was more nearly a well than a tunnel he could still climb. He laid hold, pulled himself up, projection after projection. The light was bright enough to show him the projections. They were faces, like the ones in the endless corridor. They were not weeping but they were trodden. They appeared to be made of some chalky material for when he put his weight on them they would break away so that only by constant movement upward was he able to keep up at all. He could hear his voice shouting in the well.
“I am! I am! I am!”
And all the time there was another voice that hung in his ears like the drooling of the Forces Programme. Nobody paid any attention to this voice but the nature of the cretin was to go on talking even though it said the same thing over and over again. This voice had some connection with the lower part of his own face and leaked on as he climbed and broke the chalky, convenient faces.
“Tunnels and wells and drops of water all this is old stuff. You can’t tell me. I know my stuff just sexual images from the unconscious, the libido, or is it the id? All explained and known. Just sexual stuff what can you expect? Sensation, all tunnels and wells and drops of water. All old stuff, you can’t tell me. I know.”
10
A tongue of summer lightning licked right inside the inner crevice so that he saw shapes there. Some were angled and massive as the corners of corridors and between them was the light falling into impenetrable distances. One shape was a woman who unfroze for that instant and lived. The lightning created or discovered her in the act of breathing in; and so nearly was that breath finished that she seemed only to check and breathe out again. He knew without thinking who she was and where she was and when, he knew why she was breathing so quickly, lifting the silk blouse with apples, the forbidden fruit, knew why there were patches of colour on either cheek-bone and why the flush had run as it so uniquely did into the nose. Therefore she presented to him the high forehead, the remote and unconquered face with the three patches of pink arranged across the middle. As for the eyes, they fired an ammunition of contempt and outrage. They were eyes that confirmed all the unworded opinions of his body and fevered head. Seen as a clothed body or listened to, she was common and undistinguished. But the eyes belonged to some other person for they had nothing to do with the irregularity of the face or the aspirations, prudish and social, of the voice. There was the individual, Mary, who was nothing but the intersection of influences from the cradle up, the Mary gloved and hatted for church, she Mary who ate with such maddening refinement, the Mary who carried, poised on her two little feet, a treasure of demoniac and musky attractiveness that was all the more terrible because she was almost unconscious of it. This intersection was so inevitably constructed that its every word and action could be predicted. The intersection would choose the ordinary rather than the exceptional; would fly to what was respectable as to a magnet. It was a fit companion for the pursed-up mouth, the too high forehead, the mousey hair. But the eyes—they had nothing in common with the mask of flesh that nature had fixed on what must surely be a real and invisible face. They were one with the incredible smallness of the waist and the apple breasts, the transparency of the flesh. They were large and wise with a wisdom that never reached the surface to be expressed in speech. They gave to her many silences—so explicable in terms of the intersection—a mystery that was not there. But combined with the furious musk, the little guarded breasts, the surely impregnable virtue, they were the death sentence of Actaeon. They made her occupy as by right, a cleared space in the world behind the eyes that was lit by flickers of summer lightning. They made her a madness, not so much in the loins as in the pride, the need to assert and break, a blight in the growing point of life. They brought back the nights of childhood, the hot, eternal bed with seamed sheets, the desperation. The things she did became important though they were trivial, the very onyx she wore became a talisman. A thread from her tweed skirt—though she had bought it off the hook in a shop where identical skirts hung empty and unchanged—that same thread was magicked into power by association. Her surname—and he thumped rock with lifted knees—her surname now abandoned to dead Nathaniel forced him to a reference book lest it should wind back to some distinction that would set her even more firmly at the centre than she was. By what chance, or worse what law of the universe was she set there in the road to power and success, unbreakable yet tormenting with the need to conquer and break? How could she take this place behind the eyes as by right when she was nothing but another step on which one must place the advancing foot? Those nights of imagined copulation, when one thought not of love nor sensation nor comfort nor triumph, but of torture rather, the very rhythm of the body reinforced by hissed ejaculations—take that and that! That for your pursed mouth and that for your pink patches, your closed knees, your impregnable balance on the high, female shoes—and that if it kills you for your magic and your isled virtue!
How can she so hold the centre of my darkness when the only real feeling I have for her is hate?
Pale face, pink patches. The last chance and I know what she is go
ing to say, inevitably out of the intersection. And here it comes quickly, with an accent immediately elevated to the top drawer.
“No.”
There are at least three vowels in the one syllable.
“Why did you agree to come here with me, then?”
Three patches.
“I thought you were a gentleman.”
Inevitably.
“You make me tired.”
“Take me home, please.”
“Do you really mean that in the twentieth century? You really feel insulted? You don’t just mean ‘No, I’m sorry, but no’?”
“I want to go home.”
“But look——”
I must, I must, don’t you understand you bloody bitch?
“Then I’ll take a bus.”
One chance. Only one.
“Wait a minute. Our language is so different. Only what I’m trying to say is—well, it’s difficult. Only don’t you understand that I—Oh Mary, I’ll do anything to prove it to you!”
“I’m sorry. I just don’t care for you in that way.”
And then he, compelled about the rising fury to tread the worn path:
“Then it’s still—no?”
Ultimate insult of triumph, understanding and compassion.
“I’m sorry, Chris. Genuinely sorry.”
“You’ll be a sister to me, I know.”
But then the astonishing answer, serenely, brushing away the sarcasm.
“If you like.”
He got violently to his feet.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here for Christ’s sake.”
Wait, like a shape in the driving seat. Does she know nothing of me at all? She comes from the road house, one foot swerved in front of the other as in the photographs, walking an invisible tight-rope across the gravel, bearing proudly the invincible banner of virginity.
“That door’s not properly shut. Let me.”
Subtle the scent, the touch of the cheap, transmuted tweed, hand shaking on the gear, road drawing back, hooded wartime lights, uncontrollable summer lightning ignoring the regulations from beyond that hill to away south in seven-league boots, foot hard down, fringes of leaves jagged like a painted drop, trees touched, brought into being by sidelights and bundled away to the limbo of lost chances.
“Aren’t you driving rather fast?”
Tilted cheek, pursed mouth, eyes under the foolish hat, remote, blacked out. Foot hard down.
“Please drive slower, Chris!”
Type-scream, gear-whine, thrust and roar——
“Please——!”
Rock, sway, silk hiss of skid, scene film-flicking.
Power.
“Please! Please!”
“Let me, then. Now. Tonight, in the car.”
“Please!”
Hat awry, road unravelled, tree-tunnel drunk up——
“I’ll kill us.”
“You’re mad—oh, please!”
“Where the road forks at the whitewashed tree, I’ll hit it with your side. You’ll be burst and bitched.”
“Oh God, oh God.”
Over the verge, clout on the heap of dressing, bump, swerve back, eating macadam, drawing it in, pushing it back among the lost chances, pushing it down with time back to the cellar——
“I’m going to faint.”
“You’ll let me make love to you? Love to you?”
“Please stop.”
On the verge, trodden with two feet to a stop, with dead engine and lights, grabbing a stuffed doll, plundering a doll that came to life under the summer lightning, knees clapped together over the hoarded virginity, one hand pushing down the same tweed skirt, one to ward off, finding with her voice a protection for the half-naked breast——
“I shall scream!”
“Scream away.”
“You filthy, beastly——”
Then the summer lightning over a white face with two staring eyes only a few inches away, eyes of the artificial woman, confounded in her pretences and evasion, forced to admit her own crude, human body—eyes staring now in deep and implacable hate.
Nothing out of the top drawer now. Vowels with the burr of the country on them.
“Don’t you understand, you swine? You can’t——”
The last chance. I must.
“I’ll marry you then.”
More summer lightning.
“Chris. Stop laughing. D’you hear? Stop it! I said stop it!”
“I loathe you. I never want to see you or hear of you as long as I live.”
*
Peter was riding behind him and they were flat out. It was his new bike under him but it was not as good as Peter’s new one. If Peter got past with that new gear of his he’d be uncatchable. Peter’s front wheel was overlapping his back one in a perfect position. He’d never have done that if he weren’t deadly excited. The road curves here to the right, here by the pile of dressing. They are built up like rock—a great pile of stones for mending the road down to Hodson’s Farm. Don’t turn, go straight on, keep going for the fraction of a second longer than he expects. Let him turn, with his overlapping wheel. Oh clever, clever, clever. My leg, Chris, my leg—I daren’t look at my leg. Oh Christ.
The cash-box. Japanned tin, gilt lines. Open empty. What are you going to do about it, there was nothing written down. Have a drink with me some time.
She’s the producer’s wife, old boy.
Oh clever, clever, clever power, then you can bloody well walk home; oh clever, real tears break down triumph, clever, clever, clever.
Up stage. Up stage. Up stage. I’m a bigger maggot than you are. You can’t get any further up stage because of the table, but I can go all the way up to the french window.
“No, old man. I’m sorry, but you’re not essential.”
“But George—we’ve worked together! You know me——”
“I do, old man. Definitely.”
“I should be wasted in the Forces. You’ve seen my work.
“I have, old man.”
“Well then——”
The look up under the eyebrows. The suppressed smile. The smile allowed to spread until the white teeth were reflected in the top of the desk.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this. That’s why I didn’t kick you out before. I hope they mar your profile, old man. The good one.”
There were ten thousand ways of killing a man. You could poison him and watch the smile turn into a rictus. You could hold his throat until it was like a hard bar.
She was putting on a coat.
“Helen——”
“My sweet.”
The move up, vulpine, passionate.
“It’s been so long.”
Deep, shuddering breath.
“Don’t be corny, dear.”
Fright.
“Help me, Helen, I must have your help.”
Black maggot eyes in a white face. Distance. Calculation. Death.
“Anything my sweet, but of course.”
“After all you’re Pete’s wife.”
“So crude, Chris.”
“You could persuade him.”
Down close on the settee, near.
“Helen——”
“Why don’t you ask Margot, my sweet, or that little thing you took out driving?”
Panic. Black eyes in a white face with no more expression than hard, black stones.
Eaten.
*
Nathaniel bubbling over in a quiet way—not a bubble over, a simmer, almost a glow.
“I have wonderful news for you, Chris.”
“You’ve met an aeon at last.”
Nat considered this, looking up at the reference library. He identified the remark as a joke and answered it with the too profound tones he reserved for humour.
“I have been introduced to one by proxy.”
“Tell me your news. Is the war over? I can’t wait.”
Nathaniel sat down in the opposite armchair but found it too low. He pe
rched himself on the arm, then got up and rearranged the books on the table. He looked into the street between the drab black-out curtains.
“I think finally, I shall go into the Navy.”
“You!”
Nodding, still looking out of the window:
“If they’d have me, that is. I couldn’t fly and I shouldn’t be any use in the Army.”
“But you clot! You don’t have to go, do you?”
“Not—legally.”
“I thought you objected to war.”
“So I do.”
“Conchie.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. One thinks this and that—but in the end, you know, the responsibility of deciding is too much for one man. I ought to go.”
“You’ve made your mind up?”
“Mary agrees with me.”
“Mary Lovell? What’s she got to do with it?”
“That’s my news.”
Nathaniel turned with a forgotten book in his hands. He came towards the fire, looked at the armchair, remembered the book and put it on the table. He took a chair, drew it forward and perched on the edge.
“I was telling you after the show last night. You remember? About how our lives must reach right back to the roots of time, be a trail through history?”
“I said you were probably Cleopatra.”
Nat considered this gravely.
“No, I don’t think so. Nothing so famous.”
“Henry the Eighth, then. Is that your news?”
“One constantly comes across clues. One has—flashes of insight—things given. One is——” The hands began to spread sideways by the shoulders as though they were feeling an expansion of the head—“One is conscious when meeting people that they are woven in with one’s secret history. Don’t you think? You and I, for example. You remember?”