Jackson's Dilemma (27 page)

‘What do you mean? Surely you know, you see, that I love you,
only you—
’

‘I told you the last time—’

‘How
can
you speak of Edward like that! Can’t you recognise real
love
? I love you desperately and deeply and to the end of time, I love
you
and I
know
that you love
me
— you do love me, don’t you, please say that you love me - please take my hand.’

Tuan took her hand, then released it. He said, ‘Don’t cry. Well, do cry if you must.’

‘Have you got a handkerchief, I’ve lost mine.’

‘Yes, here take this big one. Rosalind, you are still a
child.
We are two very different people, we come out of two very different worlds. Marriage is a mystery, a very profound and difficult matter, it can be a terrible mistake, a
lifelong
mistake.’

‘Not if we love each other as we love each other. Love overcomes all — I
know
you love me, Tuan, I see it, I
know
it, we shall be together, we
must
be together, I want to be with you
always—
’

He thrust her away and got up and resumed his pacing up and down. She watched him breathlessly, holding his handkerchief in her hand.

He said, ‘I have told you various reasons why we cannot marry, even if you love me - and love can be unreal and ephemeral. I should say too that I have never been with a woman, or a man.’

‘And I have never been with a man, or a woman.’

‘I have had my own terrible - inward - problems and difficulties—’

‘So you keep saying, but
I
am here and our love can hold us and cure us. We can both earn money, and even if we were very poor it wouldn’t alter - ’

‘No, no, no — I told you last time — ’

‘Oh my dear, I am so tired, do let us stop fighting, I want to lie down, let us at any rate lie down together, in there, let us at least rest together, please please my love, come with me. Let us go there together, come—’ She rose and reached out her hand.

He stared at her, then took her hand. He let her lead him to the bed. They sat down on either side of the bed gazing at each other.

Rosalind felt faint. An extraordinary wave of being which she had never experienced before overwhelmed her, even as she sat, a disintegration of her body, so painful, so weird, like a sudden electric shock. She leaned away from him, pulling off her dress. Tuan sat still, watching her, and his eyes were quiet and calm, as if he had been thinking, gazing at her dreamily for a very long time. He was breathing deeply, his lips apart. He began to unbutton his shirt, then paused.

‘Come to me, hold me, Tuan darling, surely we have won—’

‘Perhaps
you
have won, my child. However it remains to be seen — ’

‘Well, thank God all
that’s
over at last,’ said Owen as he sat in the kitchen watching Jackson making a
ratatouille
for lunch. ‘But fancy her rushing off with that Australian fellow. I wonder if he followed her, or perhaps he was here all the time.’

‘I wonder,’ said Jackson.

‘She might have let us know a bit sooner! Well, she might have made up her mind a bit sooner that she wanted the Aussie and not our poor Edward.’

‘Indeed,’ said Jackson.

‘She’s dragged us all through hell, especially Edward, of course, but also Benet. Still, I’m sorry for Benet, I mean about her not marrying Edward. That night - of course you were in London - when that ghastly message came through the door. I wonder just how it all worked out - was her Australian friend already there, was it he who wrote the message for her, no, it was her writing wasn’t it, or perhaps simply that she realised that Edward was not for her, she didn’t really like him, and Benet had engineered the whole thing.’

‘Possibly,’ said Jackson.

‘Edward has been very elusive hasn’t he. Benet said he was terribly depressed when he went to see him at Hatting. Edward is the kind of chap who would go into a depression and stay there.’

‘Maybe,’ said Jackson.

‘You
will
stay with me, dear? You heard how I dealt with Benet when he rang up and asked if I had any news of you! I nearly choked! All right, I won’t bother you, not yet anyway. I’m just so glad that you’re with me. I do think about suicide. Well, that’s a boring topic. You know Mildred’s gone to India. I can hardly bear it. Perhaps one of her gods brought you along instead. Of course you’re still suffering from shock, I wonder just what Benet - well, I won’t enquire, whatever it is he’s a bloody fool, perhaps I’ll go round and horse-whip him, no I won’t, I bet you wouldn’t let me, you are so forgiving - Damn, what’s that, go and see will you, darling, it can’t be Benet so soon - no, I’d better go, it might be anybody.’

There had been a ring at the front door bell. Owen opened it. It was Mildred.

‘Oh
God
! You’re back again, you bitch, I thought you were gone
forever
! Are you coming to say another last sickening farewell? What do you want? If you’re going please go
now
as far as I’m concerned. If you want to shed your tears of farewell once again, oh bloody hell - just when - oh, all right come in - come up to the drawing room, will you, I’m in the midst of something in the kitchen - don’t start crying already, everybody’s after me, come on, and please
stay
in the drawing room till I fix something, otherwise I’ll scream.’

Owen pulled Mildred up the stairs to the drawing room and closed the door upon her. Then he ran down to the kitchen and closed the door there. Jackson raised his eyebrows.

‘Listen, don’t make a
sound,
it’s Mildred, confound her, I don’t want her to see you, just
keep quiet
will you, I’ll get rid of her as soon as possible, I promise, just you stay here, dear boy—just close the bloody door and
keep it closed.
’

Jackson nodded.

Owen then hurried back to the drawing room. ‘So you’re back again, or are you, you can’t stay here you know, all right, you’ve come to tell your story, it’s damned inconvenient, yes, sit down, and I’ll sit down too—’

Mildred’s story, briefly, was as follows. She had put her flat up for sale, but she had not decided where she was going to live in India. She had been to the British Museum to consult her gods but had received no definite answer. She was inclined toward Calcutta, the abode of Mother Teresa, a place of absolute squalor and misery, where, however humbly, one might add one’s tiny offering, on the other hand - during this time of painful indecision, as a sort of penance, she had gone to the East End of London, to prepare herself for more terrible scenes in India. Here, entering a church at random, she had met an Anglican priest who was working there, and been moved by his humble holy selfless way of life, a light to all kinds of people who came to him in their brokenness. Of course Mildred had seen many other such, but simply this particular glimpse of his simple life, the possibility of so pure a heart, brought suddenly to Mildred, as she was waiting for an illumination, a new ray of light. It had become clear to her that it was after all
not necessary
for her to go to India, she was not so called, what was needful was there before her. What was now so necessary, coming to her in a beam of light, was the preservation of Christianity in the form which the time, the new century, demanded, like the other great religions who knew how to mediate the past into the future, to preserve in this pure form the reality of the spiritual, keeping and cherishing what was profoundly and believably true, onward into the new eras of the world. This deep mystical understanding, which had once belonged to Christianity, had been therein eroded by the great sciences and the hubris of the new Christian world which had kept their Christ and God as stiff literal persons who cannot now be credited. But what is
real,
the mystical truth of Christianity, as the great mystics saw it, Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, as it was now seen by the few great saints of today,
that
is what must be preached now, where it is needed, in the West. So, Mildred concluded, it is here, in England, in London, that I am destined to preach religion in my own very humble way, and not in India. I even went to the British Museum and stood before the great image of Shiva, and saw him nod his head!

‘Well, blow me down!’ said Owen. ‘And what about that priest of yours, when are you going to marry him?’

Mildred laughed, and said she hoped now to be ordained as priest herself. ‘I may yet hold the Chalice!’

‘You’ll want the Grail next,’ said Owen. ‘See how your eyes gleam!’

Mildred said, ‘The Grail is the Chalice! I’m sorry to have bothered you, but I had to tell you I was still here - don’t be angry with me, dear Owen. Now I must go.’

‘All right, all right. I’m glad you’ll be doing your act here, not there, after all. But to the devil with that priest.’

He led her down towards the front door where, seeing tears, he kissed her. She put her arms round his neck. The front door bell rang.

‘Oh fuck,’ said Owen, and thrusting Mildred away opened the door. It was Benet.

 

‘But what exactly did you say in that awful letter?’

Owen, raising his voice and preventing Mildred and Benet from beginning a serious conversation on the doorstep, had managed to push Mildred out, pull Benet in, and pull Benet up to the drawing room where he informed Benet he was sorry, he just had to rush down to the kitchen to put something on. Having closed the door upon Benet he hastened to the kitchen where he whispered to Jackson, ‘Benet!’ closed the door upon Jackson and ran back to Benet, closing the drawing room door.

Owen had rarely seen Benet so upset. However he had no intention of ‘relieving his mind’ and every intention of punishing him. Benet, rambling, had been saying he so much regretted sending Jackson such an ‘awful letter’.

‘Well — I said I was fed up because he was always disappearing—’

‘Yes, always going to the rescue of someone else. You haven’t seen him since? But what
did
you say in the letter?’

‘I said he’d been drunk, and he
was
drunk, at Tara, I’ve never seen him so overtaken - he was asleep on the drawing room sofa dead drunk.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing, I just left him asleep, then I wrote the letter and left it in the hall and went back to Penn.’

‘Good heavens, was that all?’

‘I said I needed someone more reliable, and that he had had a woman in the Lodge—’

‘Oh
—had
he?’

‘I thought so - I never made that out. I said evidently he found it dull with me and this was the last straw, I was going back to Penn and wanted no traces of him when I got back to Tara.’

‘And were there any?’

‘Absolutely none.’

‘Were you pleased then?’

‘I kept telling myself I’d done something very sensible, and he had been very sensible to go away - but then—’

‘You had second thoughts?’

‘I began to be sorry and shocked and wondered how I could have been so hasty, I ought to have waited and
talked
to him, perhaps he had been taken ill, and after all I knew so little about him — ’

‘Oh there was very little that any of us knew about him - I doubt if we shall see him again.’

‘And I started thinking about Uncle Tim—’

‘Of course Tim loved Jackson, he gave him the love that Jackson wanted, and after Tim died — I thought at the time that Jackson wouldn’t stay long with you.’

‘I had a dream, Uncle Tim was looking at me, then looking down at the floor, and there was a long black shadow on the floor — and that was — Jackson—’

‘Well, I expect we shall never know, I thought he’d vanish—he may have died of grief, killed himself, thrown himself under a train or something.’

‘Oh how I wish I hadn’t written that idiotic letter, just that
letter,
why did I write it, I was just spiteful, vindictive, I must have been
mad—’

‘Well, there it is - some people are so sensitive. I expect he’s gone, starved himself in some miserable hole in loneliness and sorrow - he was so silent — perhaps he just felt he had run his course — ’

‘Oh, Owen, I shall never recover, he will never come back to me - I shall never see him again - it’s all my fault!’

Edward put something into his pocket, then set off early from his London house. He began to walk slowly along taking deep breaths. He had carefully chosen his tie, but now after a while he took it off and put it away. His demeanour, his walk, his eyes were evidently strange, since at times people stared at him and even turned to gaze after him. He walked as if marching. He did not appear to be in a hurry, rather to be in some state of quiet relentless determination. His arms were swinging, his lips were parted, his eyes appeared to be sightless. Some who saw him likened him to a man bent upon suicide, or else who had committed a murder or was about to commit one. He walked as if at any moment he might fall stiffly flat upon his face.