I could not overcome my confusion by any rational
considerations, such as the short time for which she was
to be away, her availability on the telephone and the several
necessary, even pleasant, things that needed doing, both at
home and at work. Time did not seem measurable in the
normal way. An hour was not an hour; a night was not a
night. Though I tried to get on with this and that - gardening,
reading, planning next week's business - I could settle
to nothing, and tasks that I would ordinarily have expected
to finish quickly and easily now seemed chores stretching
away like asphalt roads in the rain. I had heard it said that
some people cannot enjoy retirement and die from a sense
of sheer pointlessness and deprivation of everything they
feel worth-while. Now I understood why. Without Kathe
I was at the loosest of ends.
There are certain writers, composers and painters whose
work, without necessarily being among the most profound,
nevertheless possesses very strong individual style, recognizable
instantly and capable, while one is under its influence,
of permeating one's life by seeming to give to everything
an arbitrary direction in the light of a distinctive personal
vision. This is often called 'creating a world', but it has always
seemed to me that the effect is due less to sheer stylistic
creation than to selection and emphasis. Some aspects of
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reality are omitted or played down, while others are given
more importance than we would accord to them if left to
ourselves. Of the supreme artists, few have this compulsive
kind of effect on me; the reason being, I suppose, that their
very greatness embraces so much and excludes so little. Yet
Chopin has it, and Tchekov, and they are great enough. Come
down a rung and in certain cases it is overwhelming - Delius,
Walter de la Mare, Rousseau le Douanier.
Kathe possessed this quality. Delius had nothing on her.
Her presence imparted a singular tendency, a characteristic
tone to everything round her, so that no one could fail to feel
and be affected by it. Her absence, similarly, was felt by
others as well as myself. 'Don't rightly seem the same without
Mrs Desland, do it?' remarked Deirdre on Wednesday
morning. Naturally, however, I, who had now been almost
continuously in her company for five weeks and was entirely
addicted, was the most susceptible: yet even so I was unprepared
for my own absurd and involuntary sense of deprivation.
I felt like the pinned-down Federal sniper in
Ambrose Bierce's story, who went from sanity to madness
in twenty-two minutes spent beyond the bounds of ordinary
time.
Another phenomenon which I experienced was that of
remembering things I did not know and of which I had never
consciously been aware. Thus, I found myself recalling a tiny
fleck of black in the skin of Kathe's cheek, below her left
eye. In recollection I could see it clearly, though as far as I
could recall I had never consciously observed it. Nor had I,
to my knowledge, ever noticed a particular way she had of
moving her wrist when picking up a fairly heavy object - the
portable wireless, say, or a full saucepan. While I had been
with her these things had remained unremarked. Now, like
the commonplace, taken-for-granted sights and sounds of
home to a boy sent to boarding-school, they recurred with
the greatest poignancy.
Her remembered image drowned rational thought beneath
a flood of emotional impulses and pulled the rug out from
under any normal ability to distinguish between what was
and was not practical and sensible. One night I began think257
ing, 'Oh, hell, anything's better than this! I'll get the car out
and drive down to Bristol.' And I was already out of bed and
putting on my shirt before I realized the foolishness of the
notion. Til ring her up again.' But out on the landing I
grasped, not that it was two in the morning (I knew that
already), but the absurdity of ringing up at two in the
morning. They say that often the thought-processes of madmen
are entirely logical except for being based on some
ludicrous premise. Admit the premise and all the rest makes
sense. My premise, induced by longing, was that time, since
it was not passing, was not measurable either by the clock
or the sun.
I had been expecting her to return on Thursday, but about
ten that morning she telephoned me at the shop to say that
she would be away another day. She was full of warmth and
affection, begging me not to be upset and assuring me two
or three times over that she was missing me even more than
I could be missing her. Yes, the dance had been quite fun
but really rather dull without me, though Flick and Bill had
made sure that she had as nice a time as possible. Everyone,
in fact, had been very kind. She thought she was getting on
well with everybody but couldn't wait to be back at Bull
Banks. Would I ring early that evening, as they were all going
out to dinner at Colonel Kingsford's?
I'm not sure how the idea came into my mind, but before
she rang off I suggested that as a sort of homecoming it
might be nice to invite a few friends round for drinks on
Saturday morning. She fell in with this at once, and that
afternoon I telephoned eight or nine people - Freda and
Tony, the Stannards, Lady Alice and one or two more. Everyone
accepted, and I found myself remembering what Flick
had said - 'No one will be able to forget her'.
At least, I thought, checking the stock of drink in the
house and making a list of what I needed to buy would keep
me sensibly occupied for twenty minutes that evening. I
might even be able to spin it out to three-quarters of an
hour. Kathe would see to the olives and cheese straws and
things when she got back to-morrow. Knowing her, there'd
be a lot more provided than olives and cheese straws. We
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should be spending too much again. Never mind. She'd be
home.
That night was hotter than ever, and there was no moon.
There is nothing that induces disturbing dreams like being
too warm in bed. I woke twice, each time troubled, not by a
nightmare but by the vague apprehension, during sleep, of
the approach of some constantly-changing, minatory presence.
Then, dropping off once more, I entered upon a tangled
dream in which it was I myself who had become protean now
a child, now a youth and again, my present age. I was
paddling in the sea, a little boy suddenly terrified by a great
fish that emerged to seize and drag me down. I was an unprepared
student half-mad with anxiety as the day of the
exam, drew nearer. The clown at the circus, grinning, was
blowing up a balloon to burst in his own face, while I, in the
front row, buried mine in my hands. I was thrusting and
thrusting in the throes of love, knowing that the orgasm
>
I could not restrain would bring about the death of Kathe.
I woke in the dark, and as I realized that it was all a dream,
found myself recalling - in that moment it seemed intensely
sad - that the full moon by which we had made love at the
open window had waned and gone. I switched on the light
and had just picked up Malory from the bedside table when
I became aware of a faint, intermittent noise, somewhere
outside the room but inside the house, as it seemed. I sat up
and listened. It was the sound of water.
Oh, damn! I thought. Is it only the washer gone on a tap,
or could it be a burst pipe or the tank in the roof? I listened
more attentively, but for the life of me couldn't tell whether
it was trifling or serious. At one moment it sounded like
nothing more than dripping, at the next like a steady trickling
and again, like something worse - a kind of gushing
flow. There was no ignoring it: something or other was
wrong and I should have to get up and see what it was.
Still confused from the dream, I went out on the landing.
I felt as though I had not slept at all - heavy-eyed, reluctant,
assailed by everything outside myself. The sound was plainly
audible now, but I could neither identify nor locate it. I
stumbled along to the bathroom. The harsh electric light,
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as I switched it on, started a stabbing, neuralgic pain behind
one of my eyes. There was nothing amiss that I could see.
Pressing a hand over my eye, I came back to the landing
and listened again.
I felt sure, now, that the noise was above me - a fast
drip-drip-drip, muted by coming from behind something like
a ceiling or a door. It must be up in the roof. I went along to
the far end of the house and lurched up the uncarpeted stairs
leading to the attic and the cold tank. The attic door had no
catch, being fastened only by a stiff bolt, and as I pulled this
back I cut my index finger on the pointed corner of the
socket. I groped for the switch and pressed it, but no light
followed. The bulb must have gone. I listened for several
seconds, but could hear no sound from the darkness inside.
As I remained standing there the noise came up at me
from below - from the ground floor. It sounded worse than
ever; as though a full sink were spilling over on a floor already
covered in water. Without bothering to shut the attic
door I plunged down again, sucking my bleeding finger, to
the first-floor landing and along to the head of the stairs.
Here there was a switch controlling the light in the hall, and
no sooner had I turned it on than I thought I could see a
great, dark patch on the carpet by the kitchen door. But
when I got down there I found it was only a trick of the
light, though I had never noticed anything of the sort before.
The kitchen was dry as a bone; so were the lower lavatory
and the sink in the little annexe where my mother used to do
the flowers. At each door I opened there was silence, but
then, as I stood still in perplexity, I would hear dripping,
trickling, splashing from elsewhere.
The neuralgia was now as bad as it could well be - a
stabbing pain with every beat of the pulse - and I was moreor-less
forced to sit down and cover the eye with one hand.
After a little the pain diminished, my senses came up through
it and my head began to feel clearer. Standing up once more,
I listened, but could not hear a sound throughout the whole
empty house.
I stood still, trying to think. Certainly I had heard those
noises and been in no doubt that they were real. Now I
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could no longer hear them. If this was hallucination, it was
frightening less in itself than because of what it meant that
apparently I could not distinguish between what was
real and what was not. It was the middle of the night and I
was alone in the house. Was I suffering from some sort of
mental illness? Ought I to ring up the doctor? But what
could I say? How did they deal with such cases? Would he
send me to hospital, or what? No work, no money. Besides,
these things tended to get around and did you no good.
The gurgling and splashing sounds began again - muffled,
vague, somewhere and nowhere - and I began to sob with
fear and nervous tension. If this sounds weak and unmanly,
all I can say is that someone else, woken from bad dreams,
can try searching an empty house alone at night, with
agonizing neuralgia and the growing belief that he is in the
grip of a delusion. There was only one thing to do - I
realized that now. I must ring them up at Bristol, apologize,
try to explain myself and ask for advice and reassurance.
Rather unsteadily, I went along the hall to the telephone, the
noise of the water coming and going in my very ears, as
though I were swimming.
If only Kathe were here, I wondered in my misery, would
she be able to hear it too? If someone else - anyone else at
all - could hear it, then there must be some rational explanation,
even though the house itself might be as dry as Cottington's
Hill. But she's not here! I said to myself. She's not
here! 0 God, she's not here! 'She's not here!' I shouted
hysterically. 'She's not here! She's not here!'
Suddenly the fear seemed to leave me and I felt I could
cope. The attack, or whatever it was, had passed off - just as
asthma does, they say. The water noises had ceased and I
felt intuitively that they would not return - or not until next
time; if there was a next time, which heaven forbid. My head
was clear. I could hear a wren trilling in the garden. It
must be growing light. Full of an exhausted but most cornforting
sense of reality restored, I went back to bed and slept
until quarter past eight.
I was making some tea in a favourite earthenware pot, my
dressing-gown, the kitchen and a better frame of mind, when
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I heard the letter-box clatter. Letters were not all that
frequent at Bull Banks, since most of my post, apart from
rate demands, electricity bills and so on, was usually addressed
to the shop. I went into the hall and saw in the box
an envelope with my mother's hand-writing. 'That's odd,'
I thought. 'What's she writing for? Why not telephone?'
Could it perhaps be something about Kathe - something nice
and laudatory? Perhaps she'd written specially to say what
a nice girl she was? I took it back to the kitchen, poured out
a cup of tea and opened the envelope.
Thursday 27th June
My dearest Alan,
I know you'll be wondering why I've written, so I'll tell you at
once that it isn't bad news. I hope you'll agree with me, dear, that
it's just the opposite.
But before I come to it, I must tell you how much I like your
Kathe - we all do. I really believe Flick's quite jealous - Bill
thinks she's absolutely wonderful, and we're all so very happy for
you! I knew,
of course, that she'd be beautiful and charming, because
Flick was full of it when she came back a fortnight ago, but
'behold, the half was not told me', as Daddy used to say. I will
admit I was wondering, apart from that, whether you were getting
properly fed and looked after, but I needn't have worried,
need I? Kathe has done some cooking since she arrived on Tuesday,
and I needn't say more than that. She says I'm to tell you that
this time she didn't put one egg too many in the chocolate mousse,
so it got properly stiff. She said you'd understand. If that's her
biggest cooking disaster so far, I'm sure you must be putting on
weight!
But now I must tell you my news, and if it's a shock I hope
it will be a nice one. I am going to be married to Gerald Kingsford.
When you meet him, which I hope will be soon, I'm sure
you'll be just as happy about it as I am. He's such a fine man,
Alan, and so much liked and respected by everyone who knows
him.
Things don't happen the same way twice - well, you know
that - and of course there's no question of my ever forgetting
dear Daddy and all our happy times together when there used to
be four of us at Bull Banks. That's one thing and this is another
thing. I know you'll understand.
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Gerald and I have become devoted to each other since we first
met not quite a month ago, and of course I feel terribly honoured
and excited by the way things have turned out. I believe I feel just
like you, dear - I'm doing this because I know it's right and
more important than anything else, and other things must just
come along behind and get themselves sorted out in due course.
But now I'd better come down to earth and tell you a little bit
more about Gerald and our plans.
Gerald is sixty-two and was a lieutenant-colonel in the Green
Howards. He's been married before and has two grown-up sons one
in Canada now. His poor wife died about six years ago. Since
he left the Army he has been farming down here. He's a great
friend of Bill's family - that's how he and I met, of course. He's
done well, partly because he's a good farmer and partly because
he's so much liked and respected by everyone in the neighbourhood.
In fact, he's just now in the process of moving to a bigger
farm which he's bought. This means a lot of extra work - there
are all sorts of things to be sorted out - he's selling his present
farm too, of course - so we're going to be married in about six
weeks' time, when he can 'bring me back to the new house', as
he puts it! Can you see me as a farmer's wife, feeding the chickens
in gum-boots? It's a lovely house - he took me over to see it the
other day. All of two hundred years old.
Well, I won't go into any more details for the moment, dear,
but I do hope you'll be able to come down very soon and meet
Gerald. When you've been able to take it all in, I'd like to hear
that you feel happy about it. You'll always be - well, you know
what I'm trying to say, don't you? - you'll always be my Alan,
even though we share each other now with Ka'the and Gerald.
Gerald's giving a little party tomorrow evening - Friday - just
a few friends - when we're going to ANNOUNCE our engagement!
All very correct and military! We've persuaded Kathe to stay
for it. You won't mind, dear, will you? She'll be back with you
on Saturday morning. I asked if she had any message to go in
this letter and she said to tell you something about looking forward
to Rome - but I can't remember exactly and now she's gone
out with Flick and I must catch the post. Aren't I silly? Never
mind, I'm sure it'll keep.
Do wish me well, darling, won't you?
Ever your loving
Mummy
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I read this three times, taking it in from all angles. If I
hadn't, I reflected, been full fathom five in Kathe ever since
my mother had first gone down to Bristol, no doubt those
would not have been pearls that were my eyes and I should
have seen it coming. The more I thought about it, the better
it seemed. Of course, it was a bit of a shock - only natural
to any son when his mother marries again - but nevertheless
it appeared providential. She was clearly happy and there
was no problem any more about where she would live (or
what on) or who was to be mistress, of Bull Banks. This