A Disturbing Influence (14 page)

And the really funny thing was that I didn’t care whether he stayed or went, because I didn’t
like
him very much. I enjoyed doing it with him
very
much, but I didn’t like him, and it never occurred to me that I might be in love with him, though Daddy would say: ‘You’re seeing a lot of that young man, aren’t you, Jane?’ and wink a lot, which was stupid, because I simply didn’t care if I never saw him again, though I hoped I would, because—well, it was
fun,
though he wasn’t much fun, never saying anything, if that makes sense. And, anyway, I knew he’d come back, because he seemed to enjoy it, too, and, besides, he had this thing about wanting me to sweat, which I never did, and sure enough he came, nearly every day, and he’d arrive in his ordinary clothes so he’d have an excuse to come upstairs to change, and he’d use Teddy’s room, which was next to mine, with a bathroom in between with connecting doors, and he’d undress down to his pants and come through the
bathroom
into my room without even knocking and put his hand straight there and hardly say anything till we’d finished, and then he’d cover himself as though he had some inkling of delicacy, which he didn’t, not a notion, and say: ‘You didn’t sweat,’ and then we’d go and play tennis, and I always beat him, but he gave me a jolly good game, and sometimes took a set off me, and afterwards the
same thing would happen again, so I had to admire his virility if nothing else.

But I still didn’t like him, in fact I felt terribly detached about him, though not about his body, of course. I had no idea what was going on inside him at all, and I really didn’t care very much. Why, I don’t know, because I’m always falling in love with people just for their looks, but not him. In fact I behaved rather peculiarly, but if I didn’t like him I was certainly intrigued, though he never said anything about
us
that wasn’t exclusively about going to bed, and when I complained he just said: ‘What do you want me to say? I love you?’ and I didn’t want him to say that, I just wanted him to say
something
that showed he knew I was a person, not an animal, but he never did, and complaining was like talking to a concrete wall. He never even invited me to a dance or a cocktail party, though I invited him once or twice, but he always refused on some obviously invented excuse which he would defend even when I’d proved to him that it was all lies. But somehow I didn’t care, there was no one to care about, no one to take offence at, behind the lover and the tennis-player, at least not that I could discover, though his body was marvellous and he was the only person within miles who could give me a reasonable game of tennis, so we just went on like that for about a fortnight.

One week-end Teddy suddenly appeared from Oxford, the way he so often did, without telling anyone he was coming, and then pretending it was us who had failed to remember. I’m mad about Teddy, he’s the sweetest brother you could want when he isn’t being silly, though he usually is, and he’s terribly good-looking with auburn hair and green eyes, except they’re really grey, though they ought to be green, and if he wears a green shirt or even a green tie they
look
green, so I always give him something green for his birthday and Christmas, though he says I’m just trying to turn him into a vegetable. Teddy’s always excited about something, and when we were children he was always inventing games and then he would make me play them with him without even telling me the
rules, so naturally I did things wrong and then he’d get furious, or else he wouldn’t let me play with him at all. I was never allowed to choose a game of my own, so we were always fighting, but we always made it up again quickly, and he’s only two years older than me and now we get on terribly well, and I love him very much indeed, though he can be infuriating at times. I don’t know what they do at Oxford, but to judge by Teddy they sit around talking about Life and Sex and Art and Religion all the time, because he was always coming home with some crazy new idea which he’d try and explain to me, and of course I never understood a word, and he used very
difficult
words, too, like ‘empiricism’ and ‘syndrome’, which I had to ask him to spell and then went and looked up, and he was just the same as when we were young, because either he was making you listen to some terrible nonsense full of difficult words, or he’d sit alone in his room and lock the door and complain bitterly at being made to attend regular meals. He gave me the most obscure books to read, which I would hide under the mattress and pretend I’d lost, and then he’d accuse me of being irresponsible and not caring about really fundamental things like the one he was on to at the moment, whatever that might be, but he was awfully lovable in spite of all the silliness, and we got on very well, in fact we always had. I only ever won one battle with Teddy, and that was about calling him Teddy, because he suddenly decided that Teddy was too nursery, and would we please call him Edward, or if we had to shorten it, Ed, only Mummy said she certainly wasn’t going to allow anyone called Ed around the house, Ed was a butcher’s boy sort of name, and Daddy agreed that he ought to be called Edward now, but I could never remember, and though he’d get very angry, eventually he gave up, and let me call him Teddy as I always had.

On Saturday night he came into my room about midnight and woke me up, of all things, though we’d always come in and out of each other’s rooms without bothering about knocking or
anything
because we would often have long talks together at night,
even when we were quite small, and if it was cold we would get into the other’s bed, just to keep warm, but we were too old for that sort of thing now, we thought, so we usually just sat on the bed. So there wasn’t anything unusual about his coming in, though it was a bit mean to wake me up, I’d been playing tennis all afternoon with David and some other people, and afterwards there’d been the other business, so I was really pretty tired, and it’s awful to wake up just after you’ve got off to sleep. You feel dizzy and horrid for a few minutes, and often you can’t get back to sleep again, which is awful, and, besides, for a moment I thought he was David and I couldn’t think what he was doing there at that time of night, but it was Teddy. And he wanted to talk, obviously, and he was started even before I’d woken up properly, and he looked as though he’d be going on for hours, and I couldn’t understand a
word
of what he was saying, though it seemed to be about honour and things, only then it turned out to be about David and me, and how had he found out? I wondered, so I listened, though I would have told him anyway, in fact we always told each other everything, he even told me about what he did at school, and about his first girl who was a tart somewhere, and his eyes were
very
green, because he was
wearing
the pyjamas I’d given him for his twenty-first birthday, and he walked up and down making huge gestures as though he was addressing a crowd, not just me, his sister, curled up in her
nightgown
and just watching him and thinking how handsome he was and not really listening at all.

Teddy said David was evil, so I said that was nonsense, and what did he think he was talking about, he’d only met him that
afternoon
, and anyway what does evil mean? But once Teddy gets an idea it’s very difficult to get him off it, and he paced up and down with eyes flashing green, saying: ‘I
know
he’s evil, I can sense it, I feel it with every pore, with every minute hair on every inch of skin. I feel the evil as something absolutely repugnant, the way you smell a rotten egg and suddenly you know there’s a whole range, a whole spectrum, of smells and sights and sounds, too, probably,
which aren’t merely rotten, whose rottenness is only a disguise for their utter corruption, which are
against
, actively
against
, the smells and sights and sounds we like, which are only symptoms of a whole principle of corruption and evil, a whole anti-morality, and you can’t rationalize, you can’t explain how you recognize it, you can only apprehend without being able to comprehend, and I tell you, Jane, he is evil, he is
against
.’

Well, naturally I didn’t understand
what
Teddy was talking about, so I just said: ‘If you knew him as well as
I
know him, you wouldn’t talk such rubbish.’

‘I know him better than you do, Jane, because I can
see,
I can watch, I’m not tangled in him the way you are. I could see from the way you looked at him that you weren’t seeing him as he was but as some dream of your own, you probably think you’re in love with him——’

‘I do
not
.’

‘—and who’s to say whether you are or not, it makes no
difference
what you call it, because you’re caught, and there’s no way out, you’re trapped, wrapped up and ready for destruction,
corruption
, whatever he wants, but I’m detached, I can see him as he is, and he’s against us, Jane, against everything.’

‘Against
what
?’

‘Against—against Mendleton, against history, against tradition, against society. Oh, probably he never thinks of it like that, he’s probably not even aware of what he is doing, simply doing it, and if you told him he’d just mock you with his big brown eyes and tilt his nose for an instant in derision to let you know he didn’t care whether you were right or not. Because he doesn’t think like that, you can tell from watching him listen to people talk. He thinks we’re all insane, talking of things that don’t matter, ridiculous things, like love and morality and right. He doesn’t act the way we act, with a sense of principle. He no more thinks like that than an animal. He lives for the precise moment and its possibilities, not planning for things to happen, but causing them by his presence, by his failure
to plan and to think like us, putting us at a perpetual disadvantage, so the things he’s caused seem inevitable, uncontrollable. And if you appealed to his better instincts you would appeal to something that’s not there. He has instincts, all right, but they’re neither good nor bad to him, they’re simply instincts and to be obeyed, so you can’t tell the instincts from the man as you can with normal people, where the struggle between instinct and society or morality or training shows on the face, in the eyes, in a gesture checked or a nervous contraction, but for him there
is
no struggle, no conflict to show in the eyes, no moral world at all, don’t you see, simply the world? It’s as though his moral sense has been amputated, as though he lacked some obvious faculty like sight or hearing, as though somewhere in Borneo or one of those places he was talking about a witch-doctor had operated on him with some voodoo drug and removed it, leaving no scar. But not even that, quite, for after an amputation the patient goes on feeling the lost limb, the man without a leg aches with his missing toes, and the ache is as real as when the toes were there, the senses play tricks, you can never forget you once had a limb where there is now only space or a wooden leg or a metal shoe, and even an appendix whisked out by the best surgeon in London leaves its absence in the tangible reminder of an intimate scar, but with him there is no scar, no continuity of feeling after the amputation, so he must have been born without one, without that sense which distinguishes men from beasts;
perhaps
he doesn’t even know he’s defective, different, doesn’t realize how much advantage he takes of people.’

‘I simply have no idea of what you’re talking about, Teddy,’ I said. ‘You’ve met him exactly
once,
and you’ve hardly spoken to him, and then you come out with all this piffle. What suddenly made you
know
all this nonsense?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said Teddy, and he pulled his pyjama jacket tight round his neck and hunched himself up. ‘I don’t understand it myself, I just know what happened to me when I got
close,
and then I sensed it. I’ve never been so frightened in my life.’

‘Well, that’s rot, utter rot, and I ought to know, I’ve
slept
with him.’

‘He’d sleep with anyone,
anyone
.’

‘I dare say he would. But that doesn’t make him all the things you’ve been talking about. Sometimes you make me wonder if you’re all there, Teddy.’

‘I can feel it. I
know
it.’

Well, a blank wall like that isn’t worth arguing with, and I seriously wondered if Teddy might not be feverish or something, because there was a very odd look in his eyes indeed, and he
absolutely
refused to tell me when and where he suddenly came to his fantastic conclusion. He just said it was something he had to absorb and understand for himself before he could talk about it, but that he felt he had to tell me David was evil, and I said that was piffle again, and then we kissed good night and he went away, and thank goodness for that, I thought he was going to go on all night, but he gave up suddenly like that as though remembering how frightened he’d been stopped him. And of all the nonsense that was the most ridiculous, because there was nothing frightening about David, though he was rather odd, as I’ve said.

And a few days later he was really very odd indeed, because we’d been playing tennis and had come in and he’d just entered my
bedroom
and put his hand there when he said something that no one had ever said to me before and certainly I hope they don’t ever again, because it was a very dirty word indeed, and I wasn’t even quite sure what he’d said, though I’d heard right the first time, or exactly what it meant, though it was obviously
very
dirty, so I said: ‘What did you say?’

And he repeated it, and I asked what it meant, though I was a bit put out that he should say it to me, and then a sort of cold dreamy look came over his face and he explained very slowly and in great detail and I would really have been terribly shocked, only I didn’t have time to be, because he suddenly launched himself on me and by the time we’d finished I
was
sweating, because it was like nothing
that had gone on before. And then he covered himself up as usual, and lay absolutely still, though with a smile on his face and his eyes open, and I couldn’t move at first, I felt terribly lethargic, and that I was going to sink off to sleep, which I’d never done before, I felt
exhausted,
but at last I forced myself awake, and for no reason I suddenly said: ‘I think I hate you,’ which wasn’t true, really, though when I’d said it I wondered if it might not be. But he didn’t move a muscle, he just lay there looking at me in a sated sort of way, and then he said: ‘It does you credit,’ and turned over on his back and went to sleep. And so I watched him, lethargically, wondering whether I
did
hate him, and why he’d said that word, and why I’d said I hated him when I didn’t, or did I? And I felt terribly aloof and distant from him, though our sides were touching, and I was very conscious of his skin and bones and tissue, but I still didn’t have any feeling about
him
very much, and while I was thinking about all this, he woke up and said: ‘You sweated that time,’ and I said: ‘Yes, I did, so what?’, but he didn’t answer, he just sighed in a contented way, so I said: ‘What makes you
tick,
David?’