An End and a Beginning (31 page)

“Poor Father,” Peter said. “Poor Mother,” and he got up and went and got himself another drink from the bottle. The drop is a trickle, and the trickle a pool. He sits there, glass in his hand, he listens, in spite of himself.

“We went off down the street,” Sheila said, “and never in my life had I felt so far away from my own home, my own life. What I was seeing was too strange to contemplate, or even understand. I could
not
get that silent couple out of my mind. I thought of a lifetime of it, of her lonely nights when he was away from her, and of her too-silent ones when at last he came home. And I kept asking myself then, “What is the end? And what will it be like? To me there was a dreadful, pressing, blood-sucking monotony, even about the so-called devotion. I just couldn't accept it, Peter. It all seemed so utterly stupid. If she hated the place so much, I thought, then why hasn't she run away from it? Just gone, and to hell with the consequences. Why hadn't she? Or was it just that she
dare
not? I put all that to Desmond in a few words, and I remembered him laughing at what I had said.

“‘She'd never do that,' he said, ‘not so much out of loyalty to Father, but because I think she feels that if she broke it up, she herself would break up, too. She'd miss the silence, the quarrels, she'd lose the old battle-axe, the one bloody excuse for making life difficult for everybody. All you may do with people like that is to let them go their own way, right to the very end. You can't improve on a thing. Leave them alone. I would never have gone near the damned house this evening but for the fact that I always see Father the night before he sails away. Sometimes, of course, I meet him outside, and we go off some place and have a drink. To-night it had to be
there
. I wish I'd never suggested it.'

“We reached our own home, and he paused with his key in the door. He then said, ‘We cannot help one another. We never could. I don't want you to go there again, and I want a promise from you that you won't.'

“‘It's unkind,' I said, ‘it's inhuman.'

“‘Nevertheless——' And I promised him, and I didn't keep the promise. Later, I saw her alone,” she said.

Miss Fetch battered the gong. It was lunchtime.

9

“How he must have loved his mother,” she thought, “in spite of all that happened. A fool of a woman, really. I much preferred the father. Such a gallant old man. And he's never once mentioned the prison, or the isolation, the loneliness of it.”

She thought it was to his credit. “This terrible sense of loss. How he lacerates himself.”

They have been close again, happy again. The light is out, and the room is silent. And then he woke, very suddenly, with a shout. “Sheila!”

“What on earth's the matter?”

He sat up, switched on the light. He saw her lying on her back at the edge of the bed, her head half on and half off the pillow.

“Oh God!” he said, “I'm sorry I woke you up, Sheila. I must have been dreaming, I just woke, something
made
me wake. I'd the most horrible feeling, I thought you'd gone.”

“No, dear. I'm still here,” she said, and quickly shut her eyes against the light. She was struck by the horror in his voice.

“It's all right. Go to sleep, dear. And put out the light. It hurts my eyes.”

She feels the weight of an arm, the pressure of fingers, and she is drawn in again, drawn down, giving again. Happiness is insatiable.

“Sheila!”

“Yes, dear?”

“Nothing, oh nothing,” he said, blind with happiness, with relief; it was only a dream.

“If only he knew,” she thought, “if only he knew,” loving as she gave, loathing as she remembered. “I wonder what he intends to do?” Not a word about to-morrow, the future, nothing to build on, not a plan in sight. “I wonder what he'll decide in the end?”

“Sheila?”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, and they asked the question. “Couldn't we stay together. For good? He'll never come here, never. I know. Besides you've said you're finished with him. I'll do anything, go anywhere.”

“Up in the clouds,” she thought. “Happiness feeds on itself.”

“Can't we? I love you,” he said.

“Put out the light, dear. I told you it hurts my eyes,” and he switched off the light. “Be happy now,” she said, holding him.

“
I
am.
”

The weight of the man is upon her, the weight of the prison, the weight of his loss. “Were you really dreaming?” she asked.

“You seemed so far away,” he said, and you looked so peaceful, I watched, I waited for you to open your eyes. Were you dreaming, too?”

“No, dear. I was just lying there. I wasn't asleep.”

Happiness gnaws again; contentment is a rack. “Sheila!”

“What?”

“I wish I
really
knew how you feel about me,” he said.

“I sometimes wonder if people really know when they're happy,” she said, and the tip of her finger was circling his lips.

“Can't you tell me?”

“No, dear, I can't,” she said.

“There's nothing wrong?” he asked. “You did seem so far away from me, I wondered what you were thinking about, I wondered if perhaps you'd changed.”

“There's nothing wrong. I told you. You've just had a nasty dream, dear. I'm not surprised. For God's sake don't keep on tormenting yourself. Leave well alone. Be happy when you can. Now be good and go to sleep. I'm tired.”

“I'm sorry, darling.”

Happiness is afraid, is always afraid, and now he sees it lie so close to the cauldron of his fear. “Tell me, Sheila.”

“Tell you
what?
”

“Open your eyes. Why don't you open your eyes and look at me?
Please.
” She opened them. She smiled up at him, she pulled his hair, she laughed.

“There is something,” he said, “I can tell, I can
feel
it, somehow you're different.”

“Do go to sleep,” she said. Happiness will not rest, and will not close its eye.

“I'm sure there's something,” he thought, “it's something I've said, she's remembered it, something I've done. God! I wish I knew. If only she'd say it, just the once. ‘I love you. I love you.'”

She seemed to divine his thoughts. “Can't you be content. Isn't this enough?” she asked.

Happiness bends, crawls on its knees. “Yes, I am happy, I
am
happy.”

“Then go to sleep.”

The darkness had come like a mask, as a relief. She wanted to draw away, but could not, his hand remained anchored in her own. “He doesn't even understand,” and she wondered how it would be broken, how it would end.

Later she heard his deep breathing and knew him asleep.

She could not sleep. She lay there, motionless, poised again for a journey that had ended suddenly in a shout. She waited, she listened to the silence of this room. And then she was moving again, backwards through the darkness, beyond it, and beyond the sleeping man, back to a day that is greying with age.

“I told Desmond it was the end, and it
was
the end.” She cannot shut him out; he seems to have travelled far, out of the darkness of Gelton, she has felt him near, she has heard his footsteps behind her, from room to room, up and down stairs, and in this moment as her boat sails she seems to see him standing in this room. Towering and close, looking down, at her, into her. She can see his outstretched arms, hear him say very quietly, without a single note of protest, “Why have you done this to me?”

And behind him there rises up the very feel, and shape, and breath of Gelton, the sprawling city she has turned her back upon, the ugly, rambling house out of which she walked. She sees the man, the house. One of a row of twelve very tall houses, very detached, very redoubtable. These houses seem to have been built to last forever. They lie away in a pleasant backwater of Gelton, and they nest in a pool of silence. Their doors are rarely open, and there is a marked absence of children. There are a few dogs, and these, as if committed to the silence, only occasionally bark. The curtains upon windows hang like icicles. Behind them there seems to lie a locked-in and mysterious life. In the hours of daylight it goes to the ground. The passer-by hardly ever hears a shout, and, much less, a laugh. In this oasis the air is cleaner, the pattern of life stiffly conventional, the respectability intense.

Sheila can see this house very clearly through her shut eyes. She sees herself seated at her husband's desk. There is a pen in her hand; she is writing a letter; she has torn it up, begun again, stopped, bitten the pen, written another, as she asks herself, “Will this be it, the final one, the one that ends it, that tells him, that opens wide his eyes? She sees herself writing once again, the hand moving more steadily across the page, as though now she knows. Yes, it isn't difficult, feelings are out, smashed, there are only the words lined up in her mind like soldiers. There is no effort, no inner struggle. Nothing to leap out except the words. And, lying on this bed, far from Gelton, far from her life, she remembers them. She has written the letter, sealed it up, and placed it where he
must
see it.

“And after that I never gave it another thought, and I went up to my room, and Milly helped me to pack. In ten minutes it was finished, in twenty I was in the bus to the city, and in an hour I was on the ship. In two hours I was in the middle of the sea, and when I looked over the rails there was only the water and the rapidly approaching darkness, and I knew it was over.”

She can feel him in this room, see him, touch him. She can feel his warmth, his anger, his violence, his mute appeal. “Come back to me, Sheila? Won't you?” If she put out her hand she could touch this man; he is real, he is flesh and blood. He is standing there, arms still outstretched in appeal, as he waits for the answer. The words are alive, warm in her ear. “Another five minutes,” she thought, “and my courage would have gone, I would have backed out, relented. That would have been worse than the decision.”

The man sleeps heavily beside her, but it is another's breathing that she now hears, as she watches her husband look down, look in. He seems taller, more powerful, more determined.

“There was no other way out,” she told herself. “No other way.”

She talked to him in the dark room. “What a curious mixture you are, but you always were. And yet I actually loved you, headlong, madly, I thought there was nobody like you on the whole earth.”

She sees again the document-strewn desk, the untidy room, she can hear the pen fall to the desk, she can see the letter waiting for him. Ink flows from the nib, washes to the sea. A shore is long, sun-drenched, the man is there, she is at the turn of her life. “I wasn't the least bit afraid of him, of a new country, a new life. I was young then. And one simply isn't afraid. I felt as if I'd known him all my life. I was entangled. I just went off with him to this other life. The way he talked to me, I can hear him now, like a father, a priest, a schoolmaster. But he was afraid, yes, and I knew it quickly, he was afraid I'd come with him, afraid I wouldn't. That long, dream-like walk we had together along the shore, right to the town. How exciting it was, something leapt up in me, as we left the town, as we boarded the boat, and I never once thought of my home, of what I had left behind. And I didn't care. That first long, long night on the ship, huddled together, lost under overcoats, and then I fell asleep. I remember that also, and I never woke until he touched me on the shoulder, then kissed me and said, ‘This is it.' And it was.”

The ship is so dark that she cannot see him, she only feels him there, and she presses her head against his shoulder, and shuts her eyes. It is too soon to look. And the bright eyes of a ship seek, and find, and hold to a great stretch of sleeping coastline. It is too soon to ask questions. It is too late to be afraid. She hears the sea tumble, and she opens her eyes, and it is so dark, so silent, that she asks him a single question. “Are we really there?” “Almost” she hears him say.

The sea glows in the blackness. The ship pitches, and her head goes down, a sea comes over, washes to the scuppers, and suddenly the wind changes.

“We'd better change sides again,” he said, making for the lee shelter.

“Yes, I remember that curious night, that long morning, and I remembered wondering how long it would be before the light came. Is Gelton very big?”

“Huge.”

One after another lights twinkle along the shore. “Let's walk around the deck,” he said. The benches, the hatches, even the dark corners held their groups of silent people. Suddenly she stops dead, and points to the sky.

“What's that?”

“Gelton,” he said.

The coastline grows, seems to flow towards the ship that now is full of action, full of strange noises. Feet thundered along the decks, the derricks moved and the guy ropes swung idly over hatches, the blocks shrieked; the telegraph rang, a megaphoned voice roared from the quay.

“Hold on to my arm, Sheila.”

“I held on to his arm. That time I did feel afraid, really afraid.”

Sheila turned over on her side, looked towards the open window, out to the darkness, and thought how strange it was, lying there, thinking about it, hearing the shouts, seeing the man again, feeling him so close beside her, as she moved headlong into another life. “How earnest he was. How honest.”

“Are you afraid?” he said.

“I'm not afraid, Desmond.”

“Even now, you can turn back if you wish to.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No, Sheila, why should I be?”

“I don't know.”

I didn't.

“You may not like it,” he said.

A father again, my hand is lost in his own huge hand, and bending over me, like a mountain, so concerned, so tender, so warm. “I'm only afraid that it may frighten you,” he said.