Henry and Cato

  ‘You know, I think Gerda suddenly chose happiness too, when she decided to see Stephanie off.’

  ‘If your theory is right. Poor Steph.’

  ‘Being sorry for her is a kind of contempt. I think she’s done rather well.’

  ‘It is true that I was never really interested in her.’

  ‘What a monster you are. But you are interested in me?’

  ‘Women will make conversations so personal. When I thought of marrying Stephanie it seemed like doing the unthinkable, something one could only do blindfold and in terror. And I thought marrying anybody would be like that.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’

  ‘No. Marrying you was calm and lucid.’

  ‘You were trembling.’

  ‘The gross effects of passion. You’re sure you don’t hate sex?’

  ‘Sure!’

  ‘Some girls do.’

  ‘I just wanted to wait.’

  ‘Perhaps virginity was your magic. Stephanie felt it. She was frightened of you.’

  ‘It’s all yours now.’

  ‘How can you love me! You must be making a mistake. How valuable you are. How lucky I am. I say, darling, I thought perhaps I wouldn’t tell you but—’

  ‘You must tell me everything.’

  ‘Yes, I know I must, it’s a neurotic urge. But—it’s a bit weird—you know, that ring, the Marshalson Rose—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I would have loved to give it to you.’

  ‘But it’s lost, and I love the ring I’ve got.’

  ‘I saw Rhoda wearing it.’

  ‘Rhoda—wearing the Marshalson Rose?’

  ‘Yes, at our wedding. It was the most extraordinary thing. You know how Rhoda usually wears gloves, one’s got sort of used to seeing her in gloves. Well, when we were coming out of the church, actually corning down the aisle, I saw Rhoda, she was at the end of a row, and her hand was sort of hanging as if— as if she wanted to show it and there was the ring— there was no mistaking it.’

  ‘How extraordinary. But you said nothing?’

  ‘To her? Of course not. I didn’t tell anybody.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’

  ‘I felt so sort of odd about it, I felt I ought to keep it secret. I’ve always felt a bit odd about Rhoda—’

  ‘Not in love with her?’

  ‘No, of course not—I felt she was eerie. And then, her having stolen that ring and sort of actually showing it, flaunting it, at that moment when you and I were getting married—I felt as if it might be an evil omen. There, I’ve told you and now you must comfort me. That’s what a wife is for. You tell her awful things and she tells you they’re not really awful at all and you cheer up.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s awful. What makes you think she stole it?’

  ‘Well, she must have done, what else?’

  ‘Henry, there’s something I must tell you.’

  ‘Oh God. You’re secretly married to Duckling. I shall shoot myself.’

  ‘No, listen. There’s something that happened years and years ago and I promised I’d never tell anyone, only now I feel somehow that I’m released from the promise—’

  ‘Colette, you’re killing me, quick.’

  ‘It’s about Sandy.’

  ‘Oh Colette, Christ in heaven, not—’

  ‘No, no, stop interrupting. It was ages ago when I was about eight. I was wandering about in the garden just here—I think. I was looking for you and Cato, you know how I used to follow you about. And I don’t know why, I decided I’d climb up to the folly. And I climbed up and—’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I found Sandy there making love to Rhoda.’

  ‘Oh—how strange—how—oh God—how touching and—awful and—oh God—’

  ‘Sandy was a bit upset. I don’t know what Rhoda thought. She just stared at me with those strange eyes.’

  ‘Ibis-eyed. What did Sandy say?’

  ‘He offered me half a crown to keep mum.’

  ‘And now you’ve told.’

  ‘I kept the half crown. I got Daddy to drill a hole in it. I didn’t tell him why. I used to wear it round my neck. I’ve still got it.’

  ‘So you loved Sandy too.’

  ‘No, I loved you. But Sandy was- sort of grand.’

  ‘Yes, he was, wasn’t he—sort of grand.’

  ‘So you see. Perhaps Rhoda has a right to the Marshalson Rose after all. I’m sure Sandy gave it to her.’

  ‘As a consolation prize. You know I felt so sorry for Stephanie because, as I thought, Sandy had been too bloody snobbish to marry her.’

  ‘So you felt you had to. I hope you won’t feel this about Rhoda?’

  ‘No. Rhoda always scared me stiff. That tiny head, those huge eyes. Now I’m even more scared.’

  ‘You mustn’t be. She showed you the ring on purpose.’

  ‘As a threat, as a warning. To show us she ought to have walked down that aisle with Sandy.’

  ‘No, I’m sure she never expected Sandy to marry her. She just wanted to show us that she was sort of one of the family.’

  ‘One of the family! I remember now, Sandy could always understand what Rhoda said. I never could.’

  ‘And she wanted you to know where the ring was.’

  ‘Well, she can keep it.’

  ‘You won’t tell Gerda?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Do you want me to throw away that half crown? I’ll throw it in the lake if you like.’

  ‘No, angel, darling, keep it. You know I feel—oh so much better about Sandy these days.’

  ‘I’m glad. Gerda knows that.’

  ‘I hope so. I was a devil when I came home.’

  ‘You’ll never be a devil to me, will you? I should die.’

  ‘Bring your feet on board I want to kiss them. They taste of lake water. Your lips taste of lake water too. You are a changeling out of the lake. Oh God I do love you.’

  ‘I feel so happy—except that—except that—’

  ‘I know. Cato. And what happened.’

  ‘Death is so terrible. That death was so terrible.’

  ‘I’m glad you talked to me about it.’

  ‘Death is awful, awful, it’s a private dark place, it separates one more than anything else.’

  ‘You must try to forget it. It’s not our business, it’s not for us to worry about death now, we don’t want that lesson, not yet. Happiness is our sign.’

  ‘I hope Cato never finds out that it was all for nothing. Oh that poor poor boy, and I could have managed him—’

  ‘Stop it, Colette. I think you rather overdo your confidence in your virginity. The world is rid of a crook.’

  ‘Cato wouldn’t see it like that. He must be in hell.’

  ‘God will look after Cato. God will bring Cato back to us. You know when I saw him in that old black cassock I thought I’d found a spiritual leader.’

  ‘He’s broken now.’

  ‘God will mend him.’

  ‘You don’t believe in God.’

  ‘People like Cato invent God. He exists for them. We can’t do it. We lesser folk just sponge on the God that holy men invent. Ah well—’

  ‘You’re thinking that if you hadn’t married me you might have been a holy man yourself.’

  ‘Me? No. I have no identity. I have to be invented too. You’ll have to keep me in being by your will.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Isn’t that love?’

  I suppose I have made a mistake, thought Henry. I ought to have sold the place and gone away. I ought not to have married. Then perhaps I could have been a holy person after my fashion, diminishing in that little white wooden house in America in the middle of nowhere, diminishing and diminishing into a sort of inoffensive beetle. I was born to be nothing and to have nothing. Of course I know that this house is an illusion, but now I’m stuck with it. And I’ve let myself be conned into love and happiness and I shall have to play the role of the happy husband and the loving so
n and one day I suppose God help me the responsible father for ever and ever now. It’s so bloody easy to make women happy. And there I shall be manufacturing happiness and tied up to this bloody beautiful house for the rest of my days and I shall never be able to make up my mind to sell it. For a while I shall get rid of things, send the most valuable pictures to the salerooms, but after a while I shall begin to buy things, I shall begin to embellish the place again. I shall become a connoisseur and I shall have good wine in the cellar. I’ve been caught by property after all and by a young wife. As a spiritual being I’m done for. The pity that I felt for Stephanie was probably the only spiritual experience that I ever had. And he looked up at the house, reclining on its green fold of hill, the southern facing façade glowing tawny-golden in the sun. Yes, I’m done for, thought Henry. Now I shall never live simply and bereft as I ought to live. I have chosen a mediocre destiny. I shall never finish my book on Max, I shall become like Sandy, which I suppose was what my mother wanted. Perhaps her will has done it all, or Colette’s will, or the will of my bloody ancestors. I have failed, but I don’t care. I shall be happy. I never expected it, I never wanted it or sought for it, but it’s happened. Apparently I am doomed to be a happy man, and I shall do my damnedest to make it last.

  ‘Darling, do leave that scar alone.’

  ‘Henry, listen to the cuckoo.’

  ‘Bugger that bird.’

  ‘Henry—’

  ‘I must go and see the borough engineer.’

  ‘Henry—’

  ‘Well, get on with it.’

  ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Oh no! Oh God!’

  ‘Would you like the walnut cake?’

  ‘No thanks, just the anchovy toast.’

  Bird-headed Rhoda set the tray down on the quilt in front of Lucius and departed.

  Lucius felt a little light-headed, giddy. He thought, something odd has just happened. Then he thought what it was. He had understood what Rhoda said. How strange, after all these years. Had he just gradually come to it by listening to her talk? Or was she now speaking more distinctly? Or what? Whatever it was, he had certainly understood her today. And he had understood her yesterday too, he had had a conversation with her about crumpets.

  Lucius lay there in bed touching these ideas vaguely, not really thinking. He felt so formidably tired. Still, he felt best at tea time. The mornings were hell. Hot Indian tea and anchovy toast do concentrate the mind. Thank God there are still some enjoyments left.

  The afternoon sun was shining into his room revealing the dust on top of the chest of drawers where his things lay in a muddle. A brush which his mother had given him when he went to college. A comb full of strands of silver hair. Two ties, still knotted. Money. Cuff links. Dust. He had never had a woman to tidy up for him.

  His mouth was hurting, his back was hurting, there was a sort of hollow in the centre of him where a drum was beating solemnly as if for the dénouement of some rite. His breath came fast. They had all forgotten him. No one noticed now that he stayed all the time in his room, no one asked him to come down to watch the television any more. Rhoda fed him as one might feed an old pet in a cage. No, all this was unjust and wrong. They did come to see him, they did suggest that it was such a nice day he ought to go out for a walk. They were kind to him. Only he was invisible to them because they were happy. Colette, her face glowing with a dewy light, her eyes vague with joy, was the very presence of youth, the perfect presence of that which sometimes seemed to Lucius as he lay there to be the most precious thing of all, better than virtue or wisdom or art, simply youth and beauty, the healthy human animal, mature and utterly unspoilt, the body, the mind pure and clean in the only way after all in which such merits are ever really acquired, not by dirty old men in caves, but simply by unsullied unpuzzled nature.

  Henry was happy too in his secretive way, never admitting it, his dark eyes glowing like stars, his curly hair electric with force. He and Colette ran about a lot and shouted like children. Lucius could hear the regular thud as they leapt the steps from the front door. Gerda was more dignified, trying to conceal her satisfaction at the success of her schemes. When John Forbes came to the house, which was every day now, she either did not mention it to Lucius, or she described his visit as a surprise. She always gave a harmless reason for his coming, that is a reason other than his desire to see her. She looked much younger and had bought a lot of new clothes. Suddenly with a man in the house she was back again in the land of her youth, in the land proper to her own being. She too glowed. Lucius lay in bed or sat in his dressing gown at the table and listened to Henry’s maniac laughter and to the deep authoritative boom of John Forbes’s voice.

  So I am not a man in the house, he thought. No. Henry was not a man either, but then Henry was an elf and would survive elvishly. I used to imagine that I was Tiresias, thought Lucius, but the mantic power was never given. I could have won Gerda, after Burke died, even after Sandy died, if I had been an ordinary man with ordinary selfish appetites and will. I did want her and love her, I do want her and love her, but she can see that I’m a ghost and she rightly prefers flesh and blood. It isn’t goodness, this lack of grasp, I used to think that it was. I am simply one of those who have not and from whom will be taken away even that which they have.

  I imagined that solitude would instruct me, but when have I ever had real solitude? What an easy life I have had, he thought, and how fast it has fled away. I still feel that I am young and beautiful, that I haven’t aged really. Age is something far far away in the future. People have always protected me and looked after me and I have felt it right that they should. I haven’t ever suffered and struggled the way ordinary people do. I could not have done it and I can’t think how they do it! I always knew I was special. I was always waiting for something for which I had to sit, as it were, in a comfortable anteroom. Perhaps I was waiting for Gerda. Only now at last I know, perhaps I have only just found out, last week or yesterday, that she is lost to me. There was an intimacy, and a kind of nervous loving, only it lacked the coarseness of real life. Now she will despise me and pity me and I shall gradually become a burden to her. Can I ever make friends with Henry? No.

  Of course, he thought, I wasn’t just waiting for Gerda. I was waiting for that great work of art which was always there hidden behind the veil, my own great work of genius. And now it’s too late. All these feeble verses with which I’ve been covering the paper are just a substitute for the long hard struggle of real art, for the serious effort which I shall never make now. Only I’ve got to go on believing in them, I’ve got to go on deceiving myself into writing, if I stop writing I shall die. It’s funny, he thought, I did imagine that I could change my life, that I could go back to the literary pubs and sit there writing poetry on beer-stained tables and being a mystery to the young. Could I have done that? Perhaps it would have been better after all if Henry had stripped me and turned me out into the world like a starving dog.

  How terribly tired I feel, thought Lucius, even though I have been lying in bed all day. The sun is shining. I must get up. Perhaps I’ll put some music on, though it makes me feel so terribly sad now. I wish I wanted a drink, but I don’t. I must pretend that there has been a day, that there has been some activity, before the night comes. And then oh God let the sleeping pills work. A hell of sleeplessness now threatened every dark: a hell which he attempted to forget by day and which he could not picture. It was as if by night he became another person. Sleepless he wept sometimes with incoherent grief like a doomed child.

  Up we get, he thought, pushing his messy tray, with slopped tea and toast crusts, away across the counterpane. Why was it now so bloody hard to get out of bed? He must be anaemic or something. He ought to visit the doctor, only nobody had thought to suggest it.

  He sat up and manoeuvred his legs over the edge of the bed. His protruding legs were thin and white, covered with a mass of large blue veins. He looked down at his bare knobbly feet, then held his head hard. Inten
se giddiness had come upon him like a gust of violent wind. The ceiling became black and descended. He reached his hand out for the bed post which was moving rapidly past him. A frightful pain filled the void where the great drum had been beating.

  A while later Lucius became conscious that he was now lying on the floor. After a good deal of thought he managed, by some kind of mental rather than physical effort, to sit up, leaning against the chair beside his table. His right hand functioned all right, but his left was without power. So was his left leg, his left shoulder. His left eye. Lucius experimented with his face. He knew it was different. A pain in the back of his neck was forcing his head forward. He sat quietly for some time breathing gently and considering himself. After a while he felt as if he were asking for something, requiring something, asking somebody for something. What was it that he so much wanted now, perhaps the only thing? Something like justice, only certainly not that. Not love. All the words seemed to have left their things and to be flying about free in his mind. If he could only find the right word. What was it? Courage, he thought. Yes, courage.

  Very slowly he reached up to the table and pulled his pad of paper and his pen off onto the floor, onto the dusty familiar carpet. He had never sat on the floor like this before. He looked at the carpet how worn it was, how threadbare and old. It had been a good carpet once. He carefully took up his pen, balancing it awkwardly between his fingers. Was this the way fingers held a pen? He wanted to see if he could still write. The pad was steady against the leg of the table. In a strange scrawling hand he slowly wrote:

  So many dawns I was blind to.

  Now the illumination of night

  Comes to me too late, O great teacher.

  John Forbes was in bed with Dame Patricia Raven.

  ‘What I just can’t understand,’ said John, ‘is why he wrote those awful crawling letters. Imagine writing to your sister and asking her to give herself up to a gang of thugs.’

  ‘Only there wasn’t a gang.’

  ‘He didn’t know that, he still doesn’t know it.’