Island

  "Maggots?"

  "You know, those little pale worms with black heads that one sees on rotten meat. Nothing had changed, of course; people's faces were the same, their clothes were the same. And yet they were all maggots. Not even real maggots--just the ghosts of maggots, just the illusion of maggots. And I was the illusion of a spectator of maggots. I lived in that maggot world for months. Lived in it, worked in it, went out to lunch and dinner in it--all without the least interest in what I was doing. Without the least enjoyment or relish, completely desireless and, as I discovered when I tried to make love to a young woman I'd had occasional fun with in the past, completely impotent."

  "What did you expect?"

  "Precisely that."

  "Then why on earth...?"

  Will gave her one of his flayed smiles and shrugged his shoulders. "As a matter of scientific interest. I was an entomologist investigating the sex life of the phantom maggot."

  "After which, I suppose, everything seemed even more unreal."

  "Even more," he agreed, "if that was possible."

  "But what brought on the maggots in the first place?"

  "Well, to begin with," he answered, "I was my parents' son. By Bully Boozer out of Christian Martyr. And on top of being my parents' son," he went on after a little pause, "I was my aunt Mary's nephew."

  "What did your aunt Mary have to do with it?"

  "She was the only person I ever loved, and when I was sixteen she got cancer. Off with the right breast; then, a year later, off with the left. And after that nine months of X rays and radiation sickness. Then it got into the liver, and that was the end. I was there from start to finish. For a boy in his teens it was a liberal education--but liberal."

  "In what?" Susila asked.

  "In Pure and Applied Pointlessness. And a few weeks after the close of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public course. World War II. Followed by the nonstop refresher course of Cold War I. And all this time I'd been wanting to be a poet and finding out that I simply don't have what it takes. And then, after the war, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but try to write something decent--good prose at least, seeing that it couldn't be good poetry. But I'd reckoned without those darling parents of mine. By the time he died, in January of 'forty-six, my father had got rid of all the little money our family had inherited and by the time she was blessedly a widow, my mother was crippled with arthritis and had to be supported. So there I was in Fleet Street, supporting her with an ease and a success that were completely humiliating."

  "Why humiliating?"

  "Wouldn't you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery? I was a success because I was so irremediably second-rate."

  "And the net result of it all was maggots?"

  He nodded. "Not even real maggots: phantom maggots. And here's where Molly came into the picture. I met her at a high-class maggot party in Bloomsbury. We were introduced, we made some politely inane conversation about nonobjective painting. Not wanting to see any more maggots, I didn't look at her; but she must have been looking at me. Molly had very pale gray-blue eyes," he added parenthetically, "eyes that saw everything--she was incredibly observant, but observed without malice or censoriousness, seeing the evil, if it was there, but never condemning it, just feeling enormously sorry for the person who was under compulsion to think those thoughts and do that odious kind of thing. Well, as I say, she must have been looking at me while we talked; for suddenly she asked me why I was so sad. I'd had a couple of drinks and there was nothing impertinent or offensive about the way she asked the question; so I told her about the maggots. 'And you're one of them,' I finished up, and for the first time I looked at her. 'A blue-eyed maggot with a face like one of the holy women in attendance at a Flemish crucifixion.'"

  "Was she flattered?"

  "I think so. She'd stopped being a Catholic; but she still had a certain weakness for crucifixions and holy women. Anyhow, next morning she called me at breakfast time. Would I like to drive down into the country with her? It was Sunday and, by a miracle, fine. I accepted. We spent an hour in a hazel copse, picking primroses and looking at the little white windflowers. One doesn't pick the windflowers," he explained, "because in an hour they're withered. I did a lot of looking in that hazel copse--looking at flowers with the naked eye and then looking into them through the magnifying glass that Molly had brought with her. I don't know why, but it was extraordinarily therapeutic--just looking into the hearts of primroses and anemones. For the rest of the day I saw no maggots. But Fleet Street was still there, waiting for me, and by lunchtime on Monday the whole place was crawling with them as thickly as ever. Millions of maggots. But now I knew what to do about them. That evening I went to Molly's studio."

  "Was she a painter?"

  "Not a real painter, and she knew it. Knew it and didn't resent it, just made the best of having no talent. She didn't paint for art's sake; she painted because she liked looking at things, liked the process of trying meticulously to reproduce what she saw. That evening she gave me a canvas and a palette, and told me to do likewise."

  "And did it work?"

  "It worked so well that when a couple of months later I cut open a rotten apple, the worm at its center wasn't a maggot--not subjectively, I mean. Objectively, yes; it was all that a maggot should be, and that's how I portrayed it, how we both portrayed it--for we always painted the same things at the same time."

  "What about the other maggots, the phantom maggots outside the apple?"

  "Well, I still had relapses, especially in Fleet Street and at cocktail parties; but the maggots were definitely fewer, definitely less haunting. And meanwhile something new was happening in the studio. I was falling in love--falling in love because love is catching and Molly was so obviously in love with me--why, God only knows."

  "I can see several possible reasons why. She might have loved you because..." Susila eyed him appraisingly and smiled. "Well, because you're quite an attractive kind of queer fish."

  He laughed. "Thank you for a handsome compliment."

  "On the other hand," Susila went on, "(and this isn't quite so complimentary), she might have loved you because you made her feel so damned sorry for you."

  "That's the truth, I'm afraid. Molly was a born Sister of Mercy."

  "And a Sister of Mercy, unfortunately, isn't the same as a Wife of Love."

  "Which I duly discovered," he said.

  "After your marriage, I suppose."

  Will hesitated for a moment. "Actually," he said, "it was before. Not because, on her side, there had been any urgency of desire, but only because she was so eager to do anything to please me. Only because, on principle, she didn't believe in conventions and was all for freely loving, and more surprisingly" (he remembered the outrageous things she would so casually and placidly give utterance to even in his mother's presence) "all for freely talking about that freedom."

  "You knew it beforehand," Susila summed up, "and yet you still married her."

  Will nodded his head without speaking.

  "Because you were a gentleman, I take it, and a gentleman keeps his word."

  "Partly for that rather old-fashioned reason, but also because I was in love with her."

  "Were you in love with her?"

  "Yes. No, I don't know. But at the time I did know. At least I thought I knew. I was really convinced that I was really in love with her. And I knew, I still know, why I was convinced. I was grateful to her for having exorcised those maggots. And besides the gratitude there was respect. There was admiration. She was so much better and honester than I was. But unfortunately, you're right: a Sister of Mercy isn't the same as a Wife of Love. But I was ready to take Molly on her own terms, not on mine. I was ready to believe that her terms were better than mine."

  "How soon," Susila asked, after a long silence, "did you start having affairs on the side?"

&nbs
p; Will smiled his flayed smile. "Three months to the day after our wedding. The first time was with one of the secretaries at the office. Goodness, what a bore! After that there was a young painter, a curlyheaded little Jewish girl whom Molly had helped with money while she was studying at the Slade. I used to go to her studio twice a week, from five to seven. It was almost three years before Molly found out about it."

  "And, I gather, she was upset?"

  "Much more than I'd ever thought she'd be."

  "So what did you do about it?"

  Will shook his head. "This is where it begins to get complicated," he said. "I had no intention of giving up my cocktail hours with Rachel; but I hated myself for making Molly so unhappy. At the same time I hated her for being unhappy. I resented her suffering and the love that had made her suffer; I felt that they were unfair, a kind of blackmail to force me to give up my innocent fun with Rachel. By loving me so much and being so miserable about what I was doing--what she really forced me to do--she was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom. But meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her. Pity," he repeated, "not compassion. Compassion is suffering-with, and what I wanted at all costs was to spare myself the pain her suffering caused me, and avoid the painful sacrifices by which I could put an end to her suffering. Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside, if you see what I mean--sorry for her as a spectator, an aesthete, a connoisseur in excruciations. And this aesthetic pity of mine was so intense, every time her unhappiness came to a head, that I could almost mistake it for love. Almost, but never quite. For when I expressed my pity in physical tenderness (which I did because that was the only way of putting a temporary stop to her unhappiness and to the pain her unhappiness was inflicting on me), that tenderness was always frustrated before it could come to its natural consummation. Frustrated because, by temperament, she was only a Sister of Mercy, not a wife. And yet, on every level but the sensual, she loved me with a total commitment--a commitment that called for an answering commitment on my part. But I wouldn't commit myself, maybe I genuinely couldn't. So instead of being grateful for her self-giving, I resented it. It made claims on me, claims that I refused to acknowledge. So there we were, at the end of every crisis, back at the beginning of the old drama--the drama of a love incapable of sensuality self-committed to a sensuality incapable of love and evoking strangely mixed responses of guilt and exasperation, of pity and resentment, sometimes of real hatred (but always with an undertone of remorse), the whole accompanied by, contrapuntal to, a succession of furtive evenings with my little curlyheaded painter."

  "I hope at least they were enjoyable," said Susila.

  He shrugged his shoulders. "Only moderately. Rachel could never forget that she was an intellectual. She had a way of asking what one thought of Piero di Cosimo at the most inopportune moments. The real enjoyment and of course the real agony--I never experienced them until Babs appeared on the scene."

  "When was that?"

  "Just over a year ago. In Africa."

  "Africa?"

  "I'd been sent there by Joe Aldehyde."

  "That man who owns newspapers?"

  "And all the rest. He was married to Molly's aunt Eileen. An exemplary family man, I may add. That's why he's so serenely convinced of his own righteousness, even when he's engaged in the most nefarious financial operations."

  "And you're working for him?"

  Will nodded. "That was his wedding present to Molly--a job for me on the Aldehyde papers at almost twice the salary I'd been getting from my previous employers. Princely! But then he was very fond of Molly."

  "How did he react to Babs?"

  "He never knew about her--never knew that there was any reason for Molly's accident."

  "So he goes on employing you for your dead wife's sake?"

  Will shrugged his shoulders. "The excuse," he said, "is that I have my mother to support."

  "And of course you wouldn't enjoy being poor."

  "I certainly wouldn't."

  There was a silence.

  "Well," said Susila at last, "let's get back to Africa."

  "I'd been sent there to do a series on Negro Nationalism. Not to mention a little private hanky-panky in the business line for Uncle Joe. It was on the plane, flying home from Nairobi. I found myself sitting next to her."

  "Next to the young woman you couldn't have liked less?"

  "Couldn't have liked less," he repeated, "or disapproved of more. But if you're an addict you've got to have your dope--the dope that you know in advance is going to destroy you."

  "It's a funny thing," she said reflectively, "but in Pala we have hardly any addicts."

  "Not even sex addicts?"

  "The sex addicts are also person addicts. In other words, they're lovers."

  "But even lovers sometimes hate the people they love."

  "Naturally. Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn't follow that I'm always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly--that's part of the Art of Loving."

  As succinctly as he could, Will told her the rest of the story. It was the same story, now that Babs had come on the scene, as it had been before--the same but much more so. Babs had been Rachel raised, so to speak, to a higher power--Rachel squared, Rachel to the nth. And the unhappiness that, because of Babs, he had inflicted upon Molly was proportionately greater than anything she had had to suffer on account of Rachel. Proportionately greater, too, had been his own exasperation, his own resentful sense of being blackmailed by her love and suffering, his own remorse and pity, his own determination, in spite of the remorse and the pity, to go on getting what he wanted, what he hated himself for wanting, what he resolutely refused to do without. And meanwhile Babs had become more demanding, was claiming ever more and more of his time--time not only in the strawberry-pink alcove, but also outside, in restaurants, and nightclubs, at her horrible friends' cocktail parties, on weekends in the country. "Just you and me, darling," she would say, "all alone together." All alone together in an isolation that gave him the opportunity to plumb the almost unfathomable depths of her mindlessness and vulgarity. But through all his boredom and distaste, all his moral and intellectual repugnance, the craving persisted. After one of those dreadful weekends, he was as hopelessly a Babs addict as he had been before. And on her side, on her own Sister-of-Mercy level, Molly had remained, in spite of everything, no less hopelessly a Will Farnaby addict. Hopelessly so far as he was concerned--for his one wish was that she should love him less and allow him to go to hell in peace. But, so far as Molly herself was concerned, the addiction was always and irrepressibly hopeful. She never ceased to expect the transfiguring miracle that would change him into the kind, unselfish, loving Will Farnaby whom (in the teeth of all the evidence, all the repeated disappointments) she stubbornly insisted on regarding as his true self. It was only in the course of that last fatal interview, only when (stifling his pity and giving free rein to his resentment of her blackmailing unhappiness) he had announced his intention of leaving her and going to live with Babs--it was only then that hope had finally given place to hopelessness. "Do you mean it, Will--do you really mean it?" "I really mean it." It was in hopelessness, in utter hopelessness, that she had walked out to the car, had driven away into the rain--into her death. At the funeral, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, he had promised himself that he would never see Babs again. Never, never, never again. That evening, while he was sitting at his desk trying to write an article on "What's Wrong with Youth," trying not to remember the hospital, the open grave, and his own responsibility for everything that had happened, he was startled by the shrill buzzing of the doorbell. A belated message of condolence, no doubt...He had opened, and there, instead of the telegram, was Babs--dramatically without makeup and all in black.

  "My poor, poor Will!" They had sat down on the sofa in the living room, and she had str
oked his hair and both of them had cried.

  "When pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel thou." An hour later, needless to say, they were naked and in bed. After which he had moved, earth to earth, into the pink alcove. Within three months, as any fool could have foreseen, Babs had begun to tire of him; within four, an absolutely divine man from Kenya had turned up at a cocktail party. One thing had led to another and when, three days later, Babs came home, it was to prepare the alcove for a new tenant and give notice to the old.

  "Do you really mean it, Babs?"

  She really meant it.

  There was a rustling in the bushes outside the window and an instant later, startlingly loud and slightly out of time, "Here and now, boys," shouted a talking bird.

  "Shut up!" Will shouted back.

  "Here and now, boys," the mynah repeated. "Here and now, boys. Here and--"

  "Shut up!"

  There was silence.

  "I had to shut him up," Will explained, "because of course he's absolutely right. Here, boys; now, boys. Then and there are absolutely irrelevant. Or aren't they? What about your husband's death, for example? Is that irrelevant?"

  Susila looked at him for a moment in silence, then slowly nodded her head. "In the context of what I have to do now--yes, completely irrelevant. That's something I had to learn."

  "Does one learn how to forget?"

  "It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living." She gave him a sad little smile and added, "It isn't easy."

  "It isn't easy," Will repeated. And suddenly all his defenses were down, all his pride had left him. "Will you help me?" he asked.

  "It's a bargain," she said, and held out her hand.

  A sound of footsteps made them turn their heads. Dr. MacPhail had entered the room.

  8

  "GOOD EVENING, MY DEAR. GOOD EVENING, MR. FARNABY."