“No.”
“Palestine. Cuba. And then—I know where you’ve come from.”
A faint, far-off voice from behind the face on which a new face had been marked out by make-up.
“Obviously.”
“England’s turn, is it? The superior, blinding bastards!”
“We’re considering. Looking round.”
As if to demonstrate this, Toni began to move round the room, peering at the places on the wall where the pictures had been. All at once, Sophy felt a kind of glee that awoke in the depth of her body and bubbled up, not to be quelled.
“Have you seen him?”
Toni shook her head. She picked at a scrap of a picture still sticking to the plaster. The glee bubbled up and up.
“You said ‘We need you.’ Well?”
“Well?”
“You have men. Money. Must have.”
Without moving her feet, Toni sank down and sat on the end of the divan, very slowly. She waited. Sophy stared out of the dormer and at the blind windows of the old house.
“I have access. And a project. Know-how. It’s saleable.”
Now she, in her turn, sank down on to the divan slowly and faced the enigmatic contact lenses.
“My deah, deah Antonia. All over again! We’re going to be everything to each other.”
Part Three
One Is One
Chapter Twelve
Next door to Sprawson’s, in Goodchild’s shop, Sim Goodchild sat at the back and tried to think about First Things. There were no people browsing along his shelves so it should have been easy. But as he told himself, what with the jets soughing down every minute to London airport and the monstrous continental trucks doing their best to break down the Old Bridge, any thought was impossible. Moreover he knew that after a moment or two on First Things (getting back, he sometimes called it) he knew he would be likely to find himself brooding on the fact that he was too fat, also as bald as bald and with a cut at the left corner of the chin, acquired in the process that morning of shaving a jowl. He said to himself you could work of course. You could do a bit of rearranging and fool with the job of reticketing so as to limp after inflation. It was really the only sort of thought possible in all the town-racket, what with being bald and old and breathless. You could also brood on what to do in the large sense, as a businessman. The oil shares were all right and would last their lifetime. They provided the bread and butter; but no jam. The shop wasn’t providing any jam either. What to do? How bring in the Pakis? How the Blacks? What brilliant and unique stroke of the antiquarian bookseller’s craft would prise that crowd of white people away from the telly and bring them to read old books again? How to persuade people of the essential beauty, lovableness, humanity even, of a beautifully bound book? Yes. You could brood on that for all the rumpus, but not on First Things.
This was the point in his daily brooding when he was accustomed to finding himself stood on his feet by a kind of interior pressure. The pressure was the memory of his own shortcomings and he stood up because if he did not the memories would take on time and place, which was intolerable. He stared at Theology, Occult, Metaphysics, Prints, the Gentleman’s Magazine—and flash! the very episode which he had stood on his feet to avoid shot bang into awareness.
About a month ago, the auction.
“£250, £250. Any advance? Going for the last time at £250—”
That was when Rupert Hazing from Midland Books had bent to him.
“This is where I step in.”
“What? With one year missing?”
Rupert’s mouth had stayed open. He had glanced at the auctioneer then back at Sim. It had been enough. While Rupert hesitated the books had been knocked down to Thornton’s of Oxford.
That was sheer wantonness, not helping the business but hindering Rupert. For fun. The diabolical thing down there disporting itself. And you could not embark on the long voyage of reparation that could make all well, could not give Rupert Hazing all the volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine for £250 with, say, ten per cent on top for himself—could not do it because, to change the metaphor, this latest piece of wantonness was only a bit on the top of the pile. The pile was a vast heap of rubbish, of ordure, of filthy rags, was a mountain—it did not matter what one did, the pile was too big. Why pick the last bit of filth off the top?
Sim blinked and shook himself as he always did at this point and came up out of the pile to the modified daylight of the shop. This was the bold, the cynical point in his mornings when he walked down between Novels, Poetry, Literary Criticism on the one hand and Bibles, Prayer Books, Handicrafts and Hobbies on the other. It was the point where he sneered at himself and his ancestors and the good old family business now going so inexorably to the dogs. He was accustomed even to sneer nowadays at the children’s books he had arranged, years ago, at one side of the great plate-glass window. Ruth, when she came in from shopping the first time after he had done it, had said nothing. But later when she had brought his tea to him at the desk she had glanced away down the shop.
“I see you are changing our image.”
He had denied it but of course it was true. He had seen Stanhope’s little girls coming up the street hand-in-hand and quite suddenly he had felt every speck of dust in the shop was made of lead, and that he was made of lead and that life (which he was missing) was bright and innocent like the two children. With a kind of furtive passion he had begun to buy children’s books, new ones at that, and arrange them in the left side of the window. Sometimes parents bought a book at Christmas, and rarely, in between, for birthdays, perhaps, but the addition to turnover was imperceptible.
Sim sometimes wondered whether his father’s display there had had the same kind of furtive and obscure motivation. His rationalist father had set out a skrying glass, the I Ching complete with reeds, and the full set of Tarot cards. Sim understood his own motive only too well. He was using children’s books as a bait for the Stanhope twins, who would be some substitute for his own children—Margaret, married but in Canada, and Steven, incurable in that ward where his parents met him week after week for a period of complete non-communication. The brilliant little girls had indeed come in, hardly tall enough to reach the doorknob but with the calm assurance usually connected with privilege. They had examined books with the solemn attention that kittens will give with their noses. They had opened books and turned over page after page, surely faster than not only they but anyone else could read. Yet they seemed to be reading: the fair one—Toni—turning from a child’s book to take down an adult one; then the other giggling at a picture while the dark curls shook all over her little head—
Ruth understood though it must have been bitter for her. She had them into the sitting-room for lemonade and cake, but they did not come back. After that, Sim would stand in his doorway when they went to school, first with the au pair and later on their own. He knew exactly when to stand, abstracted, and have his minute gift bestowed on him regally.
“Good morning Mr Goodchild.”
“And good morning to the Misses Stanhope!”
So they grew in beauty. It was Wordsworthian.
Ruth emerged from the sitting-room to go shopping.
“I saw Edwin yesterday. I forgot to tell you. He’s coming to see you.”
Bell lived in part of Sprawson’s; they had a flat. Once upon a time, Sim had envied the Bells for living so close to the twins. But that was past. The girls were little girls long ago—ten years ago, not so long after all—and quite beyond children’s books.
As if she saw his thought, Ruth nodded at the left-hand side of the shop window.
“You should try something else.”
“Any suggestions?”
“Household. BBC Publications. Dressmaking.”
“I’ll think.”
She went away up the High Street among the foreign costumes. Sim nodded and went on nodding, agreeing about the children’s books but knowing he wouldn’t change them. They would get their dust o
f lead. They said a stubborn something. Abruptly he turned to the books piled by his desk; the books from Langport Grange to be sorted and priced—work, work, work!
It was work he enjoyed—work that had kept him in his father’s business. Bidding was a trial, for he was a coward and not willing to chance his arm. But sorting afterwards—it was almost like panning for gold. You stalked the job lot, your eye having caught the tell-tale glint; and after the dreadful time of bidding—there was the first edition of Winstanley’s Introduction to the Study of Painted Glass in perfect condition!
Well. It happened once.
Sim sat down at his desk but the door flew open, the bell rang and it was Edwin himself, larger than life or would-be larger than life, in his check coat and yellow, dangling scarf—Bell, still dressed as an undergrad of the thirties and lacking only the Oxford Bags to be a complete period piece.
“Sim! Sim!”
A gust of wind, a kind of Edward Thomas crossed with George Borrow wind on the heath, great Nature, but all the same, cultivated, cultural and spiritually sincere.
“Sim! My good Sim! The man I have met!”
Edwin Bell strode up the shop and sat himself like a lady riding sidesaddle on the corner of the desk. He banged down the text book he was carrying and the copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Sim leaned back in his chair, took off his spectacles and blinked at the eager face seen so indistinctly against the light.
“What is it now, Edwin?”
“The man—Ecce homo—if that isn’t too disastrously blasphemous and really do you know Sim I don’t think it is? The most incredible creature with an effect—I am, do you know, I am—excited!”
“When were you not?”
“At last! I genuinely feel—It’s a case of everything comes to him who waits. After all these years—I know what you’re going to say—”
“I wasn’t going to say anything!”
“You were going to say that my swans were always geese. Well. So they were. I admit it freely.”
“Theosophy, Scientism, the Mahatma—”
Edwin subsided a little.
“Edwina implied much the same.”
It must have been intended from the beginning of the universe, this marriage between Edwin and Edwina Bell. There was more to the obviousness of the intention than the coincidence of the name. They looked so much like each other that unless a person knew them very well they had a kind of transvestite appearance simply by reference to each other. On top of that, Edwin had a high voice for a man and Edwina a low voice for a woman. Sim still winced at the memory of one of his early telephone conversations with them. A high voice had replied so that he had said “Hullo Edwina!” The voice replied “But Sim, it’s Edwin!” Then when next he had been answered by a low voice he had said “Hullo Edwin!” only to hear—“But Sim, it’s Edwina.” When they walked up the High Street from Sprawson’s or from their flat in Sprawson’s, they would both have much the same scarf blowing from much the same open overcoat. Edwina’s hair was a little shorter than Edwin’s and she had rather more bosom. It was a useful distinction.
“Edwina always did have more sense than you, I think.”
“Now Sim, you’re just saying that because it’s what people say about wives when they can’t think of anything else. I call it the Little Woman Syndrome.”
The phone rang.
“Yes? Yes, we do. Hold on a moment please. It’s in good condition. Seven pounds ten, I’m afraid—I mean seven fifty. We have your address? Right. Yes, I will.” He put the phone back, made a note in his desk diary, sat back again and looked up at Edwin.
“Well? Out with it!”
Edwin smoothed down the hair at the back of his head with a gesture exactly like Edwina’s. Growing together.
“It’s this man as I said. The Man in Black.”
“I’ve heard that before. The Man in Black. The Woman in White.”
Edwin gave a sudden, triumphant laugh.
“But it’s not so, Sim, not so! You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried! You see, what you’re being is literary!”
“Bookseller after all.”
“But I haven’t told you—”
Edwin was leaning across the desk, sideways, his eyes bright with enthusiasm, mouth open, short nose projecting in search, in passion, in anticipation. Sim shook his head with weary but still good-humoured affection.
“Believe Edwina, Edwin. She has more bosom than you O God why did I say that I mean—”
But once more, as on all the other occasions with all those other people, the thing was irretrievable. There were rumours about the Bells’ sex life, everyone knew the rumours and nobody said—surely now Bell was blushing against the light, flushing, rather, the good humour of his excitement changed to anger? Sim jumped up and struck the desk with his fist.
“O curse it curse it curse it! Why do I do it, Edwin? Why in the name of God must I do it?”
Bell was looking away at last.
“You know we once nearly, very nearly, took out a libel writ?”
“Yes. I did. Do. They said so.”
“Who’s ‘They’?”
Sim gestured vaguely.
“People. You know how it is.”
“I do indeed, Sim. I do indeed.”
Then Sim was silent for a while, not because he had nothing to say but because he had too much. Everything he could think of had a double meaning or was likely to be misunderstood.
At last he looked up.
“Two old men. Got to remember that. Only a few more years. Getting a bit ingrown, silly, perhaps, more than we—more than I am by nature if that’s possible. Only it can’t, can’t amount to no more than this, can it? This kind of dull, busy preoccupation with trivialities—I would do this and that but on the other hand there is that and this, have you read the papers, what was on the box, how is Steven, I can let you have it at eighty-five pence with postage and never, never a dive into what must be the deep—I’m sixty-seven. You’re—what is it?—Sixty-three. Out there are the Pakis and Blacks, the Chinese, the Whites, the punks and layabouts, the—”
He stopped himself, wondering a little why he had gone on so long. Edwin stirred on the corner of the desk, stood up and stared away at Metaphysics.
“I taught the other day for a whole period with my flies open.”
Sim kept his lips together but heaved once or twice inside. Edwin appeared not to notice. He was looking clean through the row of books, away and away.
“Edwin. You were telling me about this man.”
“Ah yes!”
“A Franciscan friar? A Mahatma? A reincarnation of the first Dalai Lama who wants to build a Potala in Wales?”
“You’re jeering.”
“Sorry.”
“In any case it wasn’t the Dalai Lama. Just a Lama.”
“Sorry. Sorry.”
“The Dalai Lama is still alive so it couldn’t have been.”
“O God.”
“But this—afterwards I found I was—not crying, because the implications of the word are a bit childish, a bit babyish—but weeping. Not for sorrow. For joy.”
“One for sorrow.”
“Not any more.”
“What’s his name? I like to have a name to hold on to.”
“Then you’re out, my dear man, right out. That’s the core of it. No names. Rub them off. Ignore them. Think of the mess, the ruckus, the tumultuous, ridiculous, savage complications that language has made for us and we have made for language—oh confound it, now I’ve started to orate!”
“He wants to get rid of language and has approached two people, you and me via you, who depend on language more than anything else for their existence! Look at these books!”
“I see them.”
“Think of your classes.”
“Well then!”
“Don’t you see? You talked once about being more worried by faux pas than sin. Precisely at that point you are invited to make a huge sacrifice that would stand our worlds on their??
?on its—head—the deliberate turning away from the recorded word, printed, radioed, televized, taped, disced—”
“No, no.”
“Good God, Sim, you’re older than me! How long have you got? How long can you wait about? I tell you—” And Edwin gestured so widely his greatcoat swung open—“this is it!”
“The odd thing is, you know, that I don’t care how long or how short I’ve got. Oh yes. I don’t want to die. But then, I’m not going to, am I? Not today, at any rate, with a bit of luck. There’ll come a day and I shan’t like it. Probably. But not today. Today is infinity and triviality.”
“You won’t take a chance?”
Sim sighed.
“I foresee the resurrection of the Philosophical Society.”
“It was never dead.”
“Resumption then. How wordy we are!”
“Transcendentalism—”
The word acted like a pulled trigger on Sim. He simply ceased to listen. The great wheel, of course, and the Hindu universe, alleged to be identical with the one the physicists were uncovering; skandhas and atavars, recession of the galaxies, appearance and illusion—and all the time, Edwin talking more and more like a character in one of Huxley’s less successful novels! Sim at this point began silently to rehearse his own particular statement. It is all reasonable. It is all, equally unreasonable. I believe it all as much as I believe anything that is out of sight; as I believe in the expanding universe, which is to say as I believe in the battle of Hastings, as I believe in the life of Jesus, as I believe in—It is a kind of belief which touches nothing in me. It is a kind of second-class believing. My beliefs are me; many and trivial.
Then once more he could hear Edwin and he looked up at him and nodded, a tiny typical dishonesty implying I see what you mean, yes, I was listening. The fact that Edwin was still talking sent him spinning away into his customary astonishment at the brute fact of Being and the brute fact that all he believed in as real, as deeply believed in, not as second-class belief, was himself as the man said because he felt himself thinking that he felt himself thinking that he felt awareness without end—