Eyeless In Gaza (11 page)

Helen also laughed, but with a surprising bitterness. ‘I
am
somebody else.'

‘Meaning what?' he asked, uncovering his face to look at her.

‘Meaning what I say. Do you think
I
should be here – the real I?'

‘Real I!' he mocked. ‘You're talking like a theosophist.'

‘And you're talking like a fool,' she said. ‘On purpose. Because, of course, you aren't one.' There was a long silence. I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price? Yes, above all, at what price? Those Cavells and Florence Nightingales. But it was impossible, that sort of thing; it was, above all, ridiculous. She frowned to herself, she shook her head; then, opening her eyes, which had been shut, looked for something in the external world to distract her from these useless and importunate thoughts within. The foreground was all Anthony. She looked at him for a moment; then reaching out with a kind of fascinated reluctance, as though towards some irresistibly strange but distasteful animal, she touched the pink crumpled skin of the great scar that ran diagonally across his thigh, an inch or two above the knee. ‘Does it still hurt?' she asked.

‘When I'm run down. And sometimes in wet weather.' He raised his head a little from the mattress and, at the same time bending his right knee, examined the scar. ‘A touch of the Renaissance,' he said reflectively. ‘Slashed trunks.'

Helen shuddered. ‘It must have been awful!' Then, with a sudden vehemence, ‘How I hate pain!' she cried, and her tone was one of passionate, deeply personal resentment. ‘Hate it,' she repeated for all the Cavells and Nightingales to hear.

She had pushed him back into the past again. That autumn day at Tidworth eighteen years before. Bombing instruction. An imbecile recruit had thrown short. The shouts, his panic start, the blow. Oddly remote it all seemed now, and irrelevant, like something seen through the wrong end of a
telescope. And even the pain, all the months of pain, had shrunk almost to non-existence. Physically, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him – and the lunatic in charge of his memory had practically forgotten it.

‘One can't remember pain,' he said aloud.

‘
I
can.'

‘No, you can't. You can only remember its occasion, its accompaniments.'

Its occasion at the midwife's in the rue de la Tombe-Issoire, its accompaniments of squalor and humiliation. Her face hardened as she listened to his words.

‘You can never remember its actual quality,' he went on. ‘No more than you can remember the quality of a physical pleasure. Today, for example, half an hour ago – you can't
remember
. There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky.' He was smiling now. ‘Think, if one could fully remember perfumes or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be! And what woman with a memory would ever have more than one baby?'

Helen stirred uneasily. ‘I can't imagine how any woman ever does,' she said in a low voice.

‘As it is,' he went on, ‘the pains and pleasures are new each time they're experienced. Brand new. Every gardenia is the first gardenia you ever smelt. And every confinement . . .'

‘You're talking like a fool again,' she interrupted angrily. ‘Confusing the issue.'

‘I thought I was clarifying it,' he protested. ‘And anyhow, what
is
the issue?'

‘The issue's me, you, real life, happiness. And you go chattering away about things in the air. Like a fool!'

‘And what about you?' he asked. ‘Are you such a clever one at real life? Such an expert in happiness?'

In the mind of each of them his words evoked the image of a timorous figure, ambushed behind spectacles.

That marriage! What on earth could have induced her? Old Hugh, of course, had been sentimentally in love. But was that a sufficient reason? And, afterwards, what sort of disillusions? Physiological, he supposed, for the most part. Comic, when you thought of them in relation to old Hugh. The corners of Anthony's mouth fairly twitched. But for Helen, of course, the joke could only have been disastrous. He would have liked to know the details – but at second hand, on condition of not having to ask for or be offered her confidences. Confidences were dangerous, confidences were entangling – like fly-paper; yes, like fly-paper . . .

Helen sighed; then, squaring her shoulders and in a tone of resolution, ‘Two blacks don't make a white,' she said. ‘Besides, I'm my own affair.'

Which was all for the best, he thought. There was a silence.

‘How long were you in hospital with that wound?' she asked in another tone.

‘Nearly ten months. It was disgustingly infected. They had to operate six times altogether.'

‘How horrible!'

Anthony shrugged his shoulders. At least it had preserved him from those trenches. But for the grace of God . . . ‘Queer,' he added, ‘what unlikely forms the grace of God assumes sometimes! A half-witted bumpkin with a hand-grenade. But for him I should have been shipped out to France and slaughtered – almost to a certainty. He saved my life.' Then, after a pause, ‘My freedom too,' he added. ‘I'd let myself be fuddled by those beginning-of-war intoxications. “Honour has come back, as a king, to earth.” But I suppose you're too young ever to have heard of poor Rupert. It seemed to make sense then, in 1914. “Honour has come back . . .” But he failed to mention that stupidity had come back too. In hospital, I had all the leisure to think of that other royal progress through the earth. Stupidity has come back, as a king
– no; as an emperor, as a divine Führer of all the Aryans. It was a sobering reflection. Sobering and profoundly liberating. And I owed it to the bumpkin. He was one of the great Führer's most faithful subjects.' There was a silence. ‘Sometimes I feel a bit nervous – like Polycrates – because I've had so much luck in my life. All occasions always seem to have conspired
for
me. Even
this
occasion.' He touched the scar. ‘Perhaps I ought to do something to allay the envy of the gods – throw a ring into the sea next time I go bathing.' He uttered a little laugh. ‘The trouble is, I don't possess a ring.'

AT PADDINGTON,
Mr Beavis and Anthony got into an empty third-class compartment and waited for the train to start. For Anthony a railway journey was still profoundly important, still a kind of sacrament. The male soul, in immaturity, is
naturaliter ferrovialis
. This huge and god-like green monster, for example, that now came snorting into the station and drew up at Platform i – but for Watt and Stephenson it would never have rolled thus majestically into its metropolitan cathedral of sooty glass. But the intensity of delight which Anthony felt as he watched the divine creature approach, as he breathed its stink of coal smoke and hot oil, as he heard and almost unconsciously imitated the ch-ff, ch-ff, ch-ff of its steamy panting, was a sufficient proof that the boyish heart must have been, in some mysterious way, prepared for the advent of Puffing Billy and the Rocket, that the actual locomotive, when it appeared, must have corresponded (how satisfyingly!) with some dim prophetic image of a locomotive, pre-existing in the mind of children from the beginning of Palaeolithic time. Ch-ff, ch-ff; then silence; then the terrible, the soul-annihilating roar of escaping steam. Wonderful! Lovely!

Bonneted, in black, like a pair of Queen Victorias, two fat and tiny old ladies passed slowly, looking for a compartment where they would not have their throats cut or be compelled to listen to bad language. Mr Beavis looked very respectable indeed. They paused, held a consultation; but, leaning out of the window, Anthony made such a face at them that they moved away again. He smiled triumphantly. Keeping the compartment to oneself was one of the objects of the sacred game of travelling – was the equivalent, more or less, of a Royal Marriage at bezique; you scored forty, so to speak, each time you left a station without a stranger in your carriage. Having lunch in the dining-car counted as much as a Sequence – two hundred and fifty. And Double Bezique – but this, as yet, Anthony had never scored – was being in a slip carriage.

The guard whistled, the train began to move.

‘Hurrah!' Anthony shouted.

The game had begun well: a Royal Marriage in the very first round. But a few minutes later he was regretting those two old ladies. For, rousing himself suddenly from his abstracted silence, John Beavis leaned forward and, touching his son's knee, ‘Do you remember what day of the month it is?' he asked in a low and, to Anthony, inexplicably significant tone.

Anthony looked at him doubtfully; then started to overact the part of the Calculator, frowning over a difficult problem. There was something about his father that seemed to make such overacting inevitable.

‘Let me see,' he said unnaturally, ‘we broke up on the thirty-first – or was it the thirtieth? That was Saturday, and today's Monday . . .'

‘Today's the second,' said his father in the same slow voice.

Anthony felt apprehensive. If his father knew the date, why had he asked?

‘It's exactly five months today,' Mr Beavis went on.

Five months? And then, with a sudden sickening drop of
the heart, Anthony realized what his father was talking about. The Second of November, the Second of April. It was five months since she had died.

‘Each second of the month – one tried to keep the day sacred.'

Anthony nodded and turned his eyes away with a sense of guilty discomfort.

‘Bound each to each by natural piety,' said Mr Beavis.

What on earth was he talking about now? And, oh, why, why did he have to say these things? So awful; so indecent – yes, indecent; one didn't know where to look. Like the times when Granny's stomach made those awful bubbling noises after meals . . .

Looking into his son's averted face, Mr Beavis perceived signs of resistance and was hurt, was saddened, and felt the sadness turn into an obscure resentment that Anthony should not suffer as acutely as he did. Of course the child was still very young, not yet able to realize the full extent of his loss; but all the same, all the same . . .

To Anthony's unspeakable relief the train slowed down for its first stop. The suburbs of Slough passed slowly and even slowlier before his eyes. Against all the rules of the sacred game, he prayed that somebody might get into their compartment. And, thank heaven, somebody did get in – a gross, purple-faced man whom on any other occasion Anthony would have hated. Today he loved him.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Mr Beavis retired again into a private world of silence.

In the carriage, on the way from Twyford station, his father added insult to injury.

‘You must always be on your very best behaviour,' he recommended.

‘Of course,' said Anthony curtly.

‘And always be punctual,' Mr Beavis continued. ‘And don't
be greedy at meal-times.' He hesitated, smiled in anticipation of what he was about to say, then launched his colloquialism: ‘however excellent the “grub” may be.' There was a little silence. ‘And be polite to the Abigails,' he added.

They turned off the road into a drive that wound between tall shrubberies of rhododendrons. Then, across an expanse of tree-islanded grass, appeared a façade of Georgian stucco. The house was not large, but solid, comfortable and at the same time elegant. Built, you divined, by someone who could quote Horace, aptly, on every occasion. Rachel Foxe's father, Mr Beavis reflected, as he looked at it, must have left quite a lot of money. Naval architecture – and didn't the old boy invent something that the Admiralty took up? Foxe, too, had been well off: something to do with coal. (How charming those daffodils looked in the grass there, under the tree!) But a dour, silent, humourless man who had not, Mr Beavis remembered, understood his little philological joke about the word ‘pencil.' Though if he'd known at the time that the poor fellow had a duodenal ulcer, he certainly wouldn't have risked it.

Mrs Foxe and Brian came to meet them as the carriage drew up. The boys went off together. Mr Beavis followed his hostess into the drawing-room. She was a tall woman, slender and very upright, with something so majestic in her carriage, so nobly austere in the lines and expression of her face, that Mr Beavis always felt himself slightly intimidated and ill at ease in her presence.

‘It was so very good of you to ask us,' he said. ‘And I can't tell you how much it will mean for . . .' he hesitated for an instant; then (since it was the second of the month), with a little shake of the head and in a lower tone, ‘for this poor motherless little fellow of mine,' he went on, ‘to spend his holidays here with you.'

Her clear brown eyes had darkened, as he spoke, with a sympathetic distress. Always firm, always serious, the coming
together of her full, almost floridly sculptured lips expressed more than ordinary gravity. ‘But I'm so delighted to have him,' she said in a voice that was warm and musically vibrant with feeling. ‘Selfishly glad – for Brian's sake.' She smiled, and he noticed that even when she smiled her mouth seemed somehow to preserve, through all its sensibility, its profound capacity for suffering and enjoyment, that seriousness, that determined purity which characterized it in repose. ‘Yes, selfishly,' she repeated. ‘Because, when he's happy, I am.'

Mr Beavis nodded; then, sighing, ‘One's thankful,' he said, ‘to have as much left to one as that – the reflection of someone's else's happiness.' Magnanimously, he was giving Anthony the right not to suffer – though of course when the boy was a little older, when he could realize more fully . . .

Mrs Foxe did not continue the conversation. There was something rather distasteful to her in his words and manner, something that jarred upon her sensibilities. But she hastened to banish the disagreeable impression from her mind. After all, the important, the essential fact was that the poor man had suffered, was still suffering. The false note, if falsity there were, was after the fact – in the mere expression of the suffering.