‘No,’ said Simon. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, Will was rather disillusioned after that. He came back to Hensfield – that was the house in Suffolk – and that’s when we really fell in love. Mother was dead; father was hardly ever there, and we both hated him anyway. It was a wonderful summer. We were alone together for about two months. In the autumn Will went up to London to start at the Foreign Office. I came up too and worked in an art gallery. I still went out with other men for form’s sake, and Will went out with girls, but we saw each other at least twice a week all that year. Then he was sent abroad and that was awful.’
She paused with a melancholy expression on her face as if remembering that period of her life. ‘I’ve never suffered as much as I did then,’ she went on. ‘Indonesia was so very far away, and although we never spoke about it, we both thought that we ought to use the separation to find someone else. I almost became engaged to a poor old chap called Geoffrey. He was terribly proper and never laid a finger on me, not even in taxis. The only way I could bring myself to smile when I was with him was by imagining the look on his face if I told him about Will and me.
‘I broke up with Geoffrey. I couldn’t face marrying him or anyone else. I decided quite by myself that if I couldn’t live with Will, I’d live alone. I suppose that’s why incest is forbidden: if you are close to your brother, you’ve got so much in common, so many shared experiences and tastes, that adding sex makes it quite exceptional …’ She stopped again and looked pensive. ‘Perhaps,’ she added, ‘if we had been happier as children, we might have found it easier to get on with other people. As it was, we both felt that only the other could understand that misery which was part of our characters, and that someone outside the family would never comprehend it.’
‘Did Willy then send for you?’ asked Simon.
‘No. I went to live in Morocco. I had some money and wanted to try and be a painter, so I bought a house near Marrakesh. I set myself up as an eccentric English spinster and was going to stay there forever.’
‘So what happened?’ asked Charlie.
‘Father died. Both Will and I came back for the funeral. We just looked at one another over the grave and both knew that it was no good. We couldn’t go on without being together.’
‘So you flew to Singapore?’ said Simon.
‘Yes. More or less.’
‘But weren’t there aunts and uncles and cousins who wondered what had happened to you?’
‘I didn’t go straight to Singapore. I went back to Marrakesh and lived there for four and a half months. It’s still my address as far as people like the solicitors are concerned. One friend from school came out to see me there, but after that, no one.’
‘No relatives? No cousins?’
‘I think I told you,’ said Priss, ‘that my father was an exceptionally unpleasant man. We had cousins on both sides of the family, but we never saw them. He thought they were a waste of time. Anyway,’ she added, ‘it’s surprising how quickly people forget you when you go abroad.’
Remembering how quickly he had forgotten Willy, Simon did not disagree. ‘Were you married in Singapore?’ he asked.
‘No. How could we marry? We arranged a sort of blessing by a Buddhist monk who Will found in a sidestreet somewhere. He didn’t know, of course. I think he thought we were marrying without our parents’ consent.’
‘Then you sailed away …’
‘Yes.’
‘And how long did this idyll last?’ Simon asked in a drawl.
Priss glanced at him sharply to see how much sarcasm he had intended. ‘It was an idyll,’ she said. ‘We met in Singapore and then sailed away from everything – from our wretched childhood, from the stupid conventions of the middle classes, from a country that was finished – and for months, no for years, we were completely happy.’
‘What went wrong?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It happened so slowly. I think Will was bored: that was one of the problems. He tried ranching but wasn’t much good at it, and he hated the Argentinians – all that maté and machismo. He had nothing in common with them; there were no theatres or cinemas, and anyway he couldn’t speak Spanish, so he used to read – novels, and then philosophy, and finally the Bible.’ She said this last word with great contempt.
‘Why the Bible?’ asked Charlie.
‘He pretended it was only curiosity, but the more he read it the more gloomy he became. I tried to get him onto P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, which are the sort of books I like, but he said they were superficial, and that he didn’t read to amuse himself but to learn. Yet all this so-called learning just made him more and more depressed, and the only way out of his depression was drink.’
‘Do you think he feels remorse?’
‘Remorse? I don’t know. What is remorse? I think that once you’ve made your bed, you must sleep in it.’
‘With no second thoughts?’
‘What’s the point? The reasons we had at the beginning for rejecting the conventional view of the rights and wrongs of incest still hold good, so it’s particularly stupid to read books like the Bible which can only make you feel guilty.’
‘Perhaps Willy’s a sort of spiritual masochist?’ said Charlie.
‘Then he wouldn’t drink to dull the pain,’ said Priss.
‘That’s true.’
‘Do you ever discuss his state of mind with him?’ asked Simon.
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
She frowned. ‘He knows that I think any guilt or remorse is self-indulgent.’
‘You’re exceptionally confident of your point of view.’
‘To do wrong,’ said Priss, ‘you have to harm others. Whom have we harmed?’
Simon shrugged his shoulders. ‘No one, certainly, other than yourselves.’
‘We haven’t harmed ourselves,’ she said firmly.
‘You have had to make sacrifices.’
‘What sacrifices?’
‘Well, you can’t live in England or have a child. Perhaps Willy now regrets that you have had to give up one or the other of those?’
‘Both those problems could be solved,’ said Priss, looking at Simon with an expression in her eye which referred him to their earlier conversation.
‘You could adopt a child,’ said Charlie blithely.
‘Or Will could have one by someone else,’ said Priss. ‘I wouldn’t mind.’ She glanced at Helen and Helen smiled.
‘Or you could have a child by another man,’ Simon said to Priss with a trace of mockery in his voice.
‘I can’t,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s too late for that now.’
TWO
Willy slept until mid-afternoon, when Priss and Helen fed him some soup. He then slept again, for an hour or so, and when he woke asked for Simon and some tea.
When Simon entered he was sitting up in the four-poster bed, dressed in a blue and white striped nightshirt. His face was strikingly pale, and Helen was brushing his hair almost as if she was dressing a corpse. He turned his head slowly as Simon came into the room and lifted his hand off the counterpane as a sign of greeting.
‘I hear the cat’s out of the bag,’ he said in a slow, weak voice, ‘but that none of you have fled the den of iniquity except for Charlie’s American …’
‘She didn’t leave because of that.’
‘I know. She left because of me. I was such a swine …’ His chin sank onto his chest as he pondered his behaviour of the night before.
Simon came and sat on a chair which Helen, like a competent nurse, had placed by his bedside.
‘Isn’t she enchanting, my angel of mercy?’ said Willy, looking up at Helen who, with a serene and selfconsciously responsible expression, hovered next to his bedhead. ‘But you must leave us, dearest Grächen. Simon and I must talk business.’ He smiled at the idea that he should have any business to discuss.
Helen glanced at Simon as if to say – as nurses always say in films – that h
e must not tire the patient, but then seemed to decide against it and left the room with only a smile for the two men.
As soon as she had shut the door, Willy clutched Simon by the hand. ‘You know what Priss will do next?’ he whispered. ‘She’ll put her in a uniform. She knows my weakness for girls in uniforms …’
‘I should wait until you’re a little stronger,’ said Simon.
Willy grinned. ‘One gets exceptionally lecherous on the brink of death,’ he said. ‘It’s the life force asserting itself. I’ll need all my strength to stop myself …’
‘Why stop yourself?’ asked Simon.
Willy sighed. ‘Ah, why indeed. That’s really what I want to talk to you about. You see, I love that girl with two contradictory passions – one a benevolent, paternal solicitude, the other a ravenous lechery like Faust’s passion for Margareta. Now while I’m sober, I wish her well – that is, I want her to get out of here and get married to some nice, dull fellow, and live happily ever after. But it won’t last. I’ll forget my good intentions, and with Priss pimping like Mephistopheles …’
‘She thinks Helen should bear you a child.’
Willy winced. ‘I know. A delightful child, I dare say – a little girl like herself, and when she’s ripe Priss will be pushing her into my bed saying: “What’s wrong? It’s just a bourgeois convention …”’ He sank back on his pillows.
‘I’m sure she won’t do that,’ said Simon.
‘No, dear boy. Don’t take me so literally. I’ll be dead long before there’s any danger of me sleeping with my daughter. But to keep to the point. I need your help. You brought the girl here. You must take her away. Take her home, Simon. Take her back to her parents – ghastly as they sound, poor child. Because if she stays, I’ll corrupt her just as I’ve corrupted everyone else – Priss, Charlie …’ He sat up and gripped Simon’s hand again. ‘But not you, Simon. You, my good fellow, you’ve proved yourself incorruptible. You were always too English to fall for my Continental speculations, weren’t you? You are the branch that will bear fruit, whereas we are the dead wood that will burn for all eternity.’
‘No one is going to burn for all eternity,’ said Simon.
Willy laughed. ‘Don’t be so sure.’
‘It’s the alcohol,’ said Simon. ‘You’ve been suffering from hallucinations.’
‘That’s what Priss says,’ said Willy, ‘but I know the difference between the rats and the devils because the devils come after me when I’m sober and they are worse, Simon, far worse …’ He sank back. ‘They are coming for me,’ he said, ‘just as they came for poor Judas.’
Simon watched his friend, uncertain as to what extent he was still affected by the delirium of the night before. ‘I think,’ he began cautiously, ‘that you are exaggerating your own wickedness. The taboo against incest comes from more primitive societies …’
‘That’s vanity,’ said Willy, ‘to think that our age is somehow different from other ages.’
‘You once believed in Progress,’ said Simon, ‘so you must have thought that society in the future would be different from society in the past.’
‘Yes,’ said Willy. ‘I did, didn’t I?’
‘Better.’
‘Yes.’
‘And don’t you believe that now?’
Willy sighed. ‘I don’t even believe in society. There is no society. There are only people who agree among themselves certain rules for the convenience of living together. And then, perhaps, there is a God – a capricious, possessive, jealous, unreasonable God who sets little tests for men to see if they love Him or not.’
‘If there is a God,’ said Simon, ‘He can’t be unreasonable.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because He has made us in His own image and likeness, and men are reasonable …’
‘You may be reasonable, Simon, but most men don’t know why they do what they do, and only use reason to justify it afterwards.’
‘But if you abandon reason,’ said Simon, ‘what is left?’
‘Conscience,’ said Willy.
‘What did your conscience tell you about marrying your sister?’
‘I used reason to persuade myself that I was doing something brave, but I knew, I think, that I was acting from weakness. The other girl – do you remember? After that I was afraid of women. That’s why I went off with Priss.’
‘And your political convictions? Were they an expression of weakness?’
‘In a way, yes.’ He hesitated: a mischievous look came into his eye. ‘That reminds me. I hear you think that I was responsible for what happened to poor Hamish in Borneo.’
Simon blushed. ‘I only suggested that your convictions at the time might have led you to …’ He floundered. ‘To cooperate with the Communists in Indonesia.’
‘You were absolutely right.’
Simon looked up with the sharp glance of a cat in sight of its prey. ‘You mean you did?’
‘I only mean,’ said Willy with a taunting smile, ‘that you were right to think that the things I believed in at the time might have led me to sacrifice poor old Hamish on the altar of World Revolution. He was a friend, of course, and it is normally thought swinish to betray a friend: but good Communists are always doing that sort of thing, aren’t they? The Party comes first. And even old father Abraham was ready to cut the throat of his own son for his God.’
‘No one would think the worse of you, Willy,’ said Simon in a quiet, confidential tone of voice. ‘In fact I have been given the authority to reassure you that there’s no question now of arrest or prosecution.’
‘That’s why you came out here, isn’t it?’ said Willy with an expression of slight sadness on his face. ‘To find out if I was a traitor?’
Simon looked away from Willy’s eyes. ‘It wasn’t just that,’ he said, ‘but they know – they always knew – that the map came from someone inside the Embassy; that it could only have been photographed in Labuan. It had to be you or that other man, Baldwin.’
‘Les Baldwin? Yes. I remember him. He was plump and had ginger hair and told jokes.’
‘Could he have been the traitor?’
Willy smiled. ‘Possibly, yes. Despite the jokes, he had no sense of humour. But he’s a less likely candidate than me.’
‘Was he a Communist?’
Will shrugged his shoulders. ‘He certainly didn’t admit to it, but it was difficult to tell what he believed. He hid his thoughts and feelings behind his bluff, jovial north-country act. He was ambitious, I remember, and ashamed at the same time of doing so well and leaving Leeds behind him. I used to call him Les Miserables which he didn’t find funny. And certainly, for all his northern charm, I don’t think he took to Hamish. I should never have brought him along to Labuan, but then if I was capable of sending old Hamish to a nasty death in the jungle, I would hardly hesitate to spoil his last days on earth with the company of a Yorkshire bore like Baldwin.’ He laughed, coughed, and lay back on his pillows.
‘You were capable of it, weren’t you?’ said Simon.
‘In those days,’ said Willy, ‘I was capable of anything.’
‘They only thought it was you because you ran off to Argentina.’
‘And now that you have an alternative explanation for that,’ said Willy – again with a mocking smile – ‘you don’t know who it was.’
‘And we have to know,’ said Simon. ‘Baldwin is going to Washington.’
Willy sighed and smiled. ‘But if I tell you it wasn’t me, I might still be lying.’
‘I know, but I think I would believe you.’
‘It’s even possible that Baldwin and I were in it together.’
‘Were you?’
‘It seems to me the most likely explanation. If I was working on my own, I would hardly have taken Baldwin along to Labuan. And Baldwin on his own couldn’t have known that the old Cambridge friend of his colleague in the Embassy was about to be dropped into the jungle. Unless, of course, he acted on the spur of the moment.’
/> ‘Won’t you tell me, Willy?’
‘Why do you need to know?’
‘Baldwin, in his new post, will see all the classified documents on both sides of the Atlantic.’
‘Secrets, secrets,’ Willy murmured. ‘What difference does it make in the long run?’
‘Please tell me,’ said Simon.
‘I will,’ said Willy, ‘if you do something for me.’
‘Yes. What? Anything.’
‘Get rid of the girl.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘When she’s gone, I’ll tell you.’
Simon looked sour. He walked to the window and looked out at the balconies of the large block of flats which stood between the villa and the sea.
‘I rely on you Simon,’ said Willy from his bed. ‘You’re the only one I can trust because you’re my only failure. You didn’t succumb, did you? Whereas Charlie – he’s my creation. If it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t be an ineffectual little pansy, unable to make up his own mind about anything at all. He’d be married with children … And Priss, too – I moulded her. I told her that there was no God – no right and wrong, no morals, no convention – so how can I expect her to understand me now? I read her Nietzsche just as I read him to you, and she lapped it up, and then we saw each other by the grave – his grave – the earth going down onto his coffin. Ha, what a swine he was! If he had been only halfway decent, I wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to hate God, to hate Him by denying Him, and deny Him by fucking my sister …’
Again he sank back on his pillows, panting to recover his breath; but quickly sat up again to speak in an urgent, feverish tone of voice. ‘But you should have seen her, Simon, behind her black veil at the churchyard at Hensfield – her blue eyes and little nose, and her two plump lips, neither sour nor smiling but waiting, hoping – like the eyes. She was lovely, Simon, she was always lovely – and even now, this other girl is nothing next to Priss. She has a young body, that’s all. But Priss – I’ve been watching her now for twenty years for some blemish on which to build a revulsion; but there isn’t one, Simon. She’s flawless and lovely, while the girl is only fresh and young.’ He paused again, panting. Simon waited for him to go on. ‘You must take her away, Simon. Take her back to England now, while I’m strong. She’s so passive and willing, as women always are. They make you feel that you must come to them, that that is what they are for – to be kissed and touched – but I won’t, I can’t. Not another …’