Please forgive me for writing to you, I think it’s better than by telephone. As I expect you know, I am staying with Emil for the present. I expect we are all suffering from shock after that terrible evening at Peter’s house. But we must wait in hope. I am sure we shall see him again before long. My own life has changed lately and in drastic ways. I will tell you more about this later on, perhaps when you are older. I write to say this: I think, as matters stand now, that it was a mistake, a fruitless grief for both of us, to separate myself from Anax. I have missed him terribly and I have no doubt that he has missed me terribly. I am very grateful to you all, and you especially, for looking after him during this period, when I have been, as it were, in retreat – or in eclipse, or in never-never land – somewhere else anyway! I think now I am able to take Anax back, and I do hope you will not mind parting with him. I can imagine, when you are still at school, and most of you out all day in any case, he must have been a mixed blessing! I would like to come, if possible, tomorrow, that is Saturday (when you will have received this letter), to pick him up. I’d like to come at about eleven. If that’s not convenient, then would you telephone me chez Emil, the number is above. I am so grateful to you, dear Moy, and to all of you! I would not have entrusted him (or, as I thought then, given him away) to anyone else. So if I don’t hear by telephone I’ll come at eleven. I look forward to seeing you, and on some other occasion we must have a good talk! With much love, yours
Bellamy
P.S. Please have his collar and lead ready. And, it occurs to me, as he will be so extremely glad to see me, I mean he’ll bark and jump about, could the reunion take place in the Aviary? I hope he won’t knock things over! I think it would be best if you were to shut him into the Aviary, and then let me in quietly, I shall say nothing till I see him. Then you could leave us together! Thank you, dear Moy –
Moy put the letter in her pocket. She knelt down again and took the lead off Anax, leaving his collar on. He started once more to lick her face. She put him aside gently, then went to the telephone and rang Miss Fitzherbert to ask if she could come tomorrow morning instead. Sefton emerged from her room and seeing Moy’s face said, ‘What is it?’ Moy said, ‘Bellamy wants Anax back, he’s coming to fetch him this morning.’ Sefton, who understood, said ‘Oh – Moy – ’ She put her hand on Moy’s arm. Without looking at her Moy touched her fingers. Watched by grieving Sefton she climbed the stairs to her attic. Anax ran after her, frisking about her feet. It was just after nine o’clock. There were two terrible hours ahead.
Moy spent the two hours with Anax, at first trying to draw him. (Of course she had drawn him many times.) Then sitting on the floor hugging and caressing him and looking into his blue eyes which could express such ecstasies of joy and love. Then lying flat on her bed with the dog warm and quiet beside her, his heart beating near her heart. As it neared eleven o’clock she went down with him to the Aviary and shut him in, leaving his lead on the floor near him. Sefton had gone to the library, Louise was out shopping. Moy sat on the stairs near the door. Punctually the bell rang and she opened the door. Bellamy stood on the doorstep in the cold sunshine, his round face beaming, his pale hair lifting in the breeze. Behind him she could see, drawn up at the kerb, Emil’s big car and Emil at the wheel. Emil waved, Moy waved. Bellamy stepped in and Moy closed the door. He whispered, ‘Oh thank you, thank you,’ clumsily grasping for Moy’s hand. She put her finger to her lips and led him up the stairs. She opened the door of the Aviary, Bellamy went in, she watched from the doorway. Anax was curled up on the sofa, his copious tail covering his nose and eyes. Hearing the door he looked up. He did not bark but screamed. He sprang down, he ran to Bellamy, he leapt up at him, nearly knocking him over, Bellamy sat down on the floor, then lay down, embracing the moaning scrabbling body of the dog. Moy left them together. From her room upstairs she heard the long piercing howling cries of ecstasy. Then the door opening and the descent to the street. Bellamy called out something. Then the door closed and the sounds died away. Moy wept.
‘You’ve just missed her,’ said Sefton, opening the door to Harvey. ‘She’s gone to the clinic.’
‘Oh, so he’s better?’
‘No, I mean there’s been no news. She just felt she had to go.’
‘I bet they won’t let her in.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘So she’ll be home soon.’
‘She said she was going on somewhere else afterwards, visiting or something, she has compulsions.’
‘My mother has them too,’ said Harvey. ‘I’ve just been having lunch with her at Cora’s place.’
‘Look, do you mind if I close the door? It’s letting in the cold air. Can you decide whether you want to stay out or come in?’
‘Oh, all right, I’ll come in.’
‘I didn’t mean to influence you one way or the other.’
‘You haven’t influenced me.’
Harvey stepped inside and Sefton closed the door.
‘Moy is out too, she’s gone to see her painting teacher. Did you hear, Bellamy has taken Anax back, he came and apprehended him yesterday in Emil’s car. Moy was in tears. How’s your mother?’
‘All right. Thank heavens she’s with Cora.’ Harvey did indeed feel relieved that his crazy mother was staying with dotty exotic yet somehow sensible Cora. But his satisfaction had been checked when, just as he was leaving, Joan had whispered to him, ‘I don’t like it here. I’m not going to stay. It’s the end.’ What did ‘It’s the end’ mean? Did it just mean ‘it’s awful’? Probably, knowing his mother, it meant nothing, not even an intention to leave.
‘I’m just going to have some lunch,’ said Sefton.
‘Lunch? But it’s after three o’clock.’
‘Is it? I thought it was earlier. Would you like some?’
‘I’ve told you, I’ve had lunch with Cora!’
‘Well, would you like some tea? Come into the kitchen anyway, it’s warmer. It looks awfully cold out there, perhaps it’s going to snow again.’
Harvey hung up his coat in the hall. He said, ‘I’d like some coffee, if you have any. I feel a bit drunk, actually.’ He realised with dismay that what he really wanted now was another alcoholic drink. Sitting at the kitchen table he watched gloomily while Sefton produced coffee for him, tea, bread, butter and cheese for herself.
‘What do you think about all that, Sefton, I mean the Peter Mir business?’
‘I don’t know. I feel very sorry for him. There can scarcely be anything worse than surviving something which shatters your mind and leaves you obsessed with revenge.’
‘But he recovered, he repaired his memory.’
‘But did he really get his mind back? I think he was probably just a decent good man before, and then suddenly got it all back but in a lurid light.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. Meditation is good. I sort of meditate myself.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I just sit.’
‘How spiritual. So you don’t think he’s some sort of fraud? He lied about his job.’
‘That was superficial, almost a joke, as he said. I think there has been terrible suffering for both of them.’
‘Both of them? You mean Lucas too? Can he suffer?’
‘Yes, but we can’t see inside. It’s like Moy’s spider.’
‘Moy’s spider?’
‘Yes, Moy had a spider she was very fond of in her room, a big chap, I saw him, living in a crack in the boarding which he’d covered over with a furry thick silky web like a curtain, with a hole in which he sat, and if he was disturbed he ran back through the hole into the crack, it was like a little house, Moy called it his house. Then one night she saw another spider, rather like him but a bit larger, walking along the wall. When Moy’s spider saw the other spider he ran back into the crack and the big spider came and followed him in. Moy says she watched it all with a kind of fascination, the new spider was so large and a slightly different colou
r, she didn’t realise at once, though she says she ought to have done, that this was the female of the species who had travelled perhaps from far away, walking wearily and long, surmounting all kinds of obstacles, to find her mate. Moy then got terribly upset when she told me about it the next morning, she cried. She ought to have understood and instantly captured the female in a glass and taken it away and let it go in some very distant place from which it would never be able to find its way back. As it was, she could just sit and look at the little house and could not stop herself from picturing what was happening inside. She said it was like something in a play, or perhaps it must have been an opera, like in Rigoletto, when the music plays loudly and the stage is darkened when a murder is going on behind a closed door. She went to bed but she couldn’t sleep, and she got up early in the morning, and she thought perhaps after all her spider would be there again, sitting so pleased with himself in his hole in his web, only of course there was no one there, and very quickly the web fell into disrepair and began to fall away. A little bit later on, I forget how much, perhaps almost at once, Moy saw the female spider walking away along the wall and she said she knelt down and as she put it, “startled the spider”, menaced it somehow, and it ran away quickly. And afterwards Moy said she felt ashamed of herself for senselessly and wrongly threatening the poor spider who had only done its natural duty and enabled the continuation of the race. And of course her spider would probably have died of old age quite soon anyway, if he hadn’t been eaten. But she kept looking for him, just in case he was still alive, and remembering the moment when she could so easily have saved him by capturing the other spider.’
While she was telling this story Sefton had eaten her bread and cheese and drunk her tea. Harvey did not like his coffee and had set it aside. He offered feebly to wash up. She refused his offer, washed up rapidly, and then began to move back towards her room. Harvey followed her into her room and sat on the bed. The room was rather dark. The red and blue Turkey carpet was covered with books. Sefton knelt down and began to sort the books, then stood up and put them back swiftly into their places on the shelves. The bookshelves entirely covered one wall of the small room and crept round beside the narrow window, making with their coloured bindings, a kind of tapestry.
Harvey watched her. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled up. The red and blue of the carpet were leaping to and fro before his eyes. He said, ‘I don’t see how Moy can go on existing, she identifies herself with all sorts of beings down to the tiniest ones, and they are all suffering.’
‘She is strange and wonderful. So is Aleph, only in a different way.’
‘But you were saying that those spiders in the little house are somehow like Peter and Lucas. But which of them is devouring the other?’
‘Oh I didn’t mean it was like in that way exactly, just that – I don’t know – just that they are bound together, they are tied together, somehow struggling with each other, and their suffering is in the dark, it’s a mystery.’
‘But about Peter being a Buddhist or whatever it was, do you think that was something real?’
‘Yes – I suppose one could try to find out – but I certainly don’t want to. Perhaps Lucas exalted him somehow – first a demon, then a saint. Maybe when he comes out of that place he’ll be ordinary again. Poor man – he said he had no family or friends – so he took up with us – and we can’t protect him, we can’t help him.’
‘So inside that dark house you think both of them are suffering, even Lucas is?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t think he’s a cruel sadistic cynic?’
‘No. He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just know. Sometimes I think he will become quite desperate – with the pain of simply being himself – he might do anything.’
‘But Sefton, he has already done something!’
‘I don’t know what he has done. I am thinking of what he might do.’
Sefton, who had now put away all the books, was sitting on the floor leaning against the end of the bed, her legs, clad in brown corduroy trousers, outstretched. She was not wearing her jacket. She unravelled the sleeves of her shirt, then frowned and turned them up again. Her shirt and trousers were old, impeccably clean, pleasantly faded by innumerable washings. She drew her fingers through her roughly cut brown hair in which, it occurred to him, the strands of red were increasingly visible. She raised her golden-brown eyebrows pensively as if staring into a far distance. He looked at the pale reddish hairs shining upon her strong forearms. She had always alarmed him a little. He thought, she is full of power, she is a phenomenon. This classification pleased him a little. He thought, she is already thinking about something else, not about me, about some crisis in the reign of Hadrian! I had better go. He moved as if to get up.
However, Sefton was thinking about him. She said, ‘I think you didn’t bring your stick with you. Did you bring a stick? I didn’t see one.’
‘No, I didn’t bring one – ’
‘So your leg, your foot, is better!’
‘Not really. Well, yes a bit. I use taxis!’
‘Why were you so cross with me on that day that I brought you back your stick which you’d left with Lucas?’
Now she was looking at him with her green eyes.
‘Oh Sefton – I’m sorry – ’
‘What did you talk about with Lucas?’
‘Oh – nothing – I mean I didn’t talk – ’ He thought, she’s jealous, she’ll hold it against me.
‘Well – never mind – ’ She smiled, observing his embarrassment.
He thought, are her eyes green, or are they brown? A sort of greenish brown. She’s being kind to me. She has lucid truthful eyes. He felt uncomfortable sitting on the bed, and looking down at her, so he slipped into sitting on the floor with his back against the bed and his knees up. He felt awkward here too. Now she laughed at him and wondered if he were blushing. He thought, she doesn’t believe me about Lucas. At that moment the room suddenly became brighter. The sun was shining. He said, ‘The sun is shining!’ He looked down. The Turkey carpet had become even brighter and more lively.
Sefton said, ‘Harvey, on that evening when you fell asleep in the sedan chair – ’
‘Yes, wasn’t I silly!’
‘You said you’d had a happy dream. Can you remember the dream?’
Harvey was about to say no, when he suddenly remembered the dream. ‘I dreamt you were pulling my hair.’
‘But I was pulling your hair, I was trying to wake you up!’
‘How strange – when I was waking I made it into a dream.’
‘A happy dream.’
‘Yes.’
They were silent for a moment, side by side, looking at each other.
Harvey said awkwardly, ‘How odd, I forgot the dream, and now I’ve remembered it, only it wasn’t a dream.’ He felt a curious electrical force which was somehow moving into his body and taking charge of it. He thought, of course I’m drunk, I even feel a bit faint. Sefton looked away at her books, then at the window where the sun still shone, then back again at Harvey. Her hand, supporting her, was beside him on the floor. He put his hand on top of her hand. Her hand moved like a little captive animal, gripped his hand for a moment, then retreated. They were looking at each other again. Harvey now stretched out his arm along the resistant surface of the counterpane and let his hand touch Sefton’s shoulders, feeling through her cotton shirt her warm back, her bones. They continued to look at each other, their intent questing gaze dissolving in a kind of blinded stare. Harvey let his knees slip sideways and levered himself a little forward with his other arm. He leaned forwards and his lips very lightly touched her cheek. He saw her close her eyes. He closed his eyes. Their lips, moving hastily, but with a quiet precision, like birds flying in the night, met for a second.
They drew apart and gazed at each other with a questioning astonishment, with fear, almost with terror. They were
trembling, shuddering. It was as if some great blow had paralysed them. They sat thus for a short while, awkwardly shifting their positions, panting, their hearts racing. Then Harvey again pursued Sefton’s hand and held it, stroking it, while they sat open-mouthed. Sefton then withdrew her hand and looked away.
Harvey said at last, almost in a whisper, ‘Can it really happen like this? Evidently it can.’
Sefton, not looking at him, said in an anguished voice, almost peevishly, ‘Well, what has happened? I’m not at all sure.’
Harvey said, ‘Do you mind if we lie on the bed?’
He slipped out of his jacket then arched himself up, edging back over the counterpane. He kicked off his shoes. Sefton somehow followed, lying inertly face downward. Harvey lay on his back, he stared up at the ceiling, noticing a crack, then that his teeth were chattering. He closed his mouth and breathed slowly and deeply through his nose. He felt and seemed to hear the noisy tumbling of his heart, he could also feel Sefton’s heart beating against his side. Turning he put one arm across Sefton’s back, then led his hand to touch the silky tangle of her hair, then to touch her neck which was burning hot. He opened his mouth again and bit his lower lip. He found himself moaning very softly. Withdrawing his outstretched arm he moved back against the wall, making a space for Sefton to turn towards him. Obeying or seeming to obey his movement she rolled over onto her back in the middle of the bed. Harvey undid his belt. Leaning on an elbow he touched her hot cheek, then began to undo her shirt. Her hand arrested him.