The Book and the Brotherhood (71 page)

They had both been thinking, and each allowed a space for the other to speak first.

‘They’ll be back,’ said Gideon, ‘at least Pat will ring the bell and I’ll carry down the cases. The car is a good way off. We’ve got ten minutes. But of course I’ll come in tomorrow.’

Violet said, ‘Why did you spring this loathsome charade on me? That creep McAlister was the last straw.’

‘It was his idea,’ said Gideon not entirely truthfully. The strategy had been the priest’s, the tactics certainly Gideon’s. ‘It was a device, you understand.’

‘To get Tamar away.’

‘Yes.’

‘But she could have gone any time, I wasn’t keeping her a prisoner!’

‘You know, in a way, you were. You had taken away her will. She had to have moral support –’

‘
Moral
support?’

‘To get out in a definite intelligible manner, with a reasonable explanation.’

‘You mean sponging on you?’

‘She couldn’t just cut and run. There had to be a raid by a respectable rescue party.’

‘It shows you think nothing of me, you think I’m not a person. That mob pushing their way in here without any warning! You wouldn’t do that to anyone else. You feel contempt for me.’

‘No, Violet –’

‘All of you acting well-rehearsed parts.’

‘You were acting too.’

‘You think so? It was designed to humiliate me. All right, it was clever. My reactions could have been predicted, all my lines could have been written beforehand. It was like – it was – an attempt on my life.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gideon, ‘but look, you don’t really mind my paying a bit for Tamar at Oxford?’

‘I don’t care a hang –’

‘Good, that’s out of the way –’

‘So long as I never see her again.’

‘Then there’s you.’

‘I don’t exist.’

‘Oh shut up, Violet,
think
, you
can
think. McAlister thinks that Tamar really deeply loves you and –’

‘She hates me. She’s always been cold as hell to me, even as a small child. Obedient, but icy cold. I don’t blame her. I hate her, if it comes to that.’

‘I don’t know about Tamar, I want to deal in certainties. Let’s say I’m a person, possibly the only person, who not only knows you, but loves you. OK so far?’

Violet this time, instead of returning a cynical reply, said, ‘Oh Gideon, thanks for loving me – not that I believe it actually – but it’s useless – it’s sour milk – only fit to be thrown away.’

‘I never throw anything away, that’s why everything I touch turns to gold. Let me help you. I can do anything. Just by sheer will power I drove Gerard out of that house in Notting Hill. Look, let’s sell this flat, Pat’s right, it’s awful, it’s haunted. Come and live at our place.’

‘With Tamar? Being the housemaid? No thanks.’

‘You and Tamar must make peace, you both need peace – never mind the details – you must live, you must be
happy
– what’s money for after all?’

‘It’s no good. You’re a happy person. Someone like you can’t just manufacture happiness for someone like me. I’m finished. You can look after Tamar. That’s what this is all about.’

The door bell rang.

‘I’ll come in tomorrow.’

‘I won’t be here.’

‘Don’t terrify me, Violet. You know I care for you –’

‘Don’t make me sick.’ She went out into the hall, opened the flat door, then disappeared once more into her bedroom and locked herself in.

Gideon, hearing Pat call below, lifted the cases out onto the landing. He closed the door of the flat. He said to himself, she won’t kill herself. I’m glad I said all those things to her. She’ll
think
about those things.

In fact, although it was not tonight that Violet would kill herself, she was nearer to the edge than Gideon surmised. She had been frightened by Tamar’s mysterious illness, not so much on her behalf as her own. She had seen in Tamar’s death pallor and face wrenched by misery the picture of her own fate – her death, since she would never recover, whereas Tamar would recover, to dance on her grave. She was shaken by the new cruel self-willed Tamar, so unlike the cool but submissive child she was used to, and now dismayed by Tamar’s departure, which she had not at all expected. After all she had needed, she had replied upon, Tamar’s
presence
. She felt hideously lonely. Her sense of her own vileness, together with her chronic resentment, made any attempt at human society increasingly difficult. Soon it would be impossible. There were no pleasures. She hated all the plump glittering giggling people she saw on television. Even solitary drinking, which now occupied more of her time, was not a relief, more like a method of suicide. A sense of the unreality, the sheer artificiality, of individual existence had begun to possess her. What was it after all to be ‘a person’, able to speak, to remember, to have purposes, to inhibit screams? What was this weird unclean ever-present body, of which she was always seeing parts? Why did not her ‘personality’ simply cease to be continuous and disintegrate into a cloud of ghosts, blown about by the wind?

Later on, over the gin bottle, she thought, perhaps I
will
go to their place, to that flat. Tamar will move out. But they’ll never get
me
out! I’ll stay there and make their lives a misery.

Father McAlister, who had of course no one living nearby to see, was now concerned with getting back to his parish. He was sitting, in an unhappy state of mind, in an underground train. It was easier to set people free, as the world knows it, than to teach them to love. He often uttered the word ‘love’, he had uttered it often to Tamar. In the thick emotional atmosphere generated by frequent meetings between priest and penitent Tamar had declared that ‘really’ she loved her
mother, and ‘really’ her mother loved her. It was what he expected, and induced, her to say. Was he however so much influenced by, so much immured with, images of the power of love that he could miss and underestimate the genuine presence of ordinary genuine hate? Was he too tolerantly aware of himself as a magician, pitting against an infinite variety of demonic evils a power, not his own, which must be ultimately insuperable? The case of Tamar had excited him because so much was at stake. He was sadly aware that much of his work in the confessional (and he was a popular confessor) consisted in relieving the minds of hardened sinners who departed cheerfully to sin again. At least they came back. But with Tamar it had seemed like life and death; if he could free her she would be free indeed. After so much experience he could still be so naive. Oh she had been brave, but what had made her brave? Had all that awful travail simply provided her with the strength required to leave her mother? Was there in the end nothing but breakage, liberty from obsession and nothing enduring of the spirit?

The priest recalled, as a sacred charm, the innocence of the children who had acted, under his direction, in the Nativity Play, always put on in the village church at Christmas time, the delight of the little children dressed up as Joseph and Mary and the Three Kings, and the Ox and the Ass (always favourite parts), the pride of their parents, the tears of joy shed by their mothers as they watched the little ones, with such natural tenderness and reverence, enact the Christmas Story. The crib containing the Child, the Saviour of the World, of the Cosmos, of all that is, became in that little cold church a glowing radiant object so holy that at a certain moment those who watched spontaneously fell on their knees. Could this be mummery, superstition? No, but it was also something of which he was not worthy, from which he was separated, because he was a liar, because a line of falsity ran all the way through him and tainted what he did. He said to himself, I don’t believe in God or the Divinity of Christ or the Life Everlasting, but I continually say so, I have to. Why? In order to carry on with the life which I have chosen and which I love.
The power which I derive from my Christ is debased by its passage through me. It reaches me as love, it leaves me as magic. That is why I make
serious mistakes
. In fact, in spite of his self-laceration, a ritual in which he indulged at intervals, the priest felt, in a yet deeper deep self, a sense of security and peace. Behind doubt there was truth, and behind the doubt that doubted that truth there was truth… He was a sinner, but he
knew
that his Redeemer lived.

It was a long cold journey home. The heating in the train had broken down, but he managed to get a taxi from the local station to Foxpath instead of having to walk. When he had got inside his little cottage he closed the shutters and lit a wood fire. Then he knelt down and prayed for some time. After that he felt better and heated up a saucepan of stew which he had kept in the fridge. His Master, handing back the problem to him, had informed him that his next task was Violet Hernshaw.

Altogether elsewhere in the early spring sunshine Jean and Duncan Cambus were sitting together at a café restaurant in a little seaside town in the south of France. They both looked in good health. Their brows were clear; Duncan had lost weight. They had found, and bought, just inland from where they now were, exactly the old picturesque stone-built farmhouse for which they had been searching. Of course it needed a lot to be done to it, renovating it was going to be so exciting. At present they were staying in a hotel.

The sun was warm, but there was a chill breeze from the sea and they were wearing warm clothes, Duncan an old jacket of Irish tweed, Jean a vast fluffy woollen pullover. They were sitting out, under a budding vine trellis, on the
terrasse
, drinking the local white wine. Soon they would go inside and have a
long very good
lunch, with the local red wine, and cognac after. From where they sat they could see the little sturdy harbour with its short thick piers and wide quays, made of immense blocks of light grey stone, and broad gracious fishing boats full of rumpled brown nets, and the gently rocking masts of slim yachts.

Jean and Duncan were looking at each other in silence, as they often did now, a grave serene silence punctuated by sighs and slight twitching movements like those of animals luxuriously resting, pleasurably stretching their limbs a little. They had escaped. They were able to feel, now far away from them, superior to those who might have judged them or been impertinently curious about their welfare. Their love for each other had survived. This, which must be thought to be the most important part, indeed the essence, of their survival, was something they both thought about incessantly, but expressed mutely, in silent gazing, in shy sexual embraces, and in their
satisfaction
, in their new house, in being in France, in eating and drinking, in walking about, in being together. They constantly pointed out to each other what was interesting,
charming, beautiful, grotesque, in what they daily saw; they made many jokes and laughed a lot.

An aspect of their silence was that neither of them had told the other everything. There were things which were too awful to be told; and for each, the possession of such dreadful secrets provided, besides intermittent shudders of fear and horror, a kind of deep excitement and energy, an ineffable bond. Jean had not told Duncan why her car had crashed on the Roman Road, nor about Tamar’s revelations concerning her evening with Duncan, and the existence, then non-existence, of the child, nor about how Jean had found Crimond’s note about the duel and telephoned Jenkin. So Jean knew what Duncan knew but did not know she knew, and also knew what Duncan did not know. Duncan had not told Jean about what happened that evening with Tamar, which she knew, nor had he told her about the circumstances of Jenkin’s death, which she did not know. It did not occur to Jean that Duncan might have gone, after all, to see Crimond, nor to Duncan that Jean might have discovered Crimond’s note. Jean thought it very unlikely that Tamar would ever decide to tell Duncan about the child. She believed that Tamar would wish to put the hideous experience behind her, and would be decent enough to spare Duncan a gratuitous pain. She was also certain that Crimond would never open his lips about what happened on the Roman Road. Duncan too thought it impossible that Crimond would ever reveal how Jenkin died. Crimond was someone pre-eminently able to keep silent, and who would take it as a point of honour not to seem to accuse Duncan of something of which he himself was more profoundly guilty. Crimond had set up a death-dealing scene and lured Duncan into it and thus occasioned Jenkin’s death. For his own sake, as well as out of a proper regard for Duncan, he would keep his mouth shut. The fact that only one gun had been loaded was, very often, a subject of meditation for Duncan: of meditation rather than speculation. Duncan took the curious fact as an end point. Crimond had not planned to kill Duncan, he had planned to give Duncan a chance to kill him. Crimond had put the guns in place after the positions had been decided. Duncan dismissed the possibility
of their disposal being left to chance. He recalled Crimond’s saying, ‘You have to be used to firearms to be sure of killing somebody even at close range.’ Crimond was ready for it and wanted it properly done. Perhaps he reckoned he would win either way. If he died he would be rid of his life, which perhaps he no longer valued now the book was finished, and would leave Duncan to explain away what would look like a highly motivated murder. If he lived he would, according to some weird calculation made in his weird mind, have
got rid
of Duncan, made them eternally quits, and so henceforth strangers to each other. Duncan understood this calculation; indeed it had proved, it seemed to him, effective for him too. The unfinished business was finished. He even woke up one morning to find that he no longer hated Crimond.

In spite of all their motives for keeping off the subject, in an almost formal sort of way, as if it were a game they had to play not against each other but together, Jean and Duncan talked frequently about Crimond. This, they tacitly knew, was a phase they had to go through. Later on his name would not be mentioned. About Jenkin they thought a good deal but did not talk. It was a strange aspect of their mutual silence that they both blamed themselves for Jenkin’s death. Jean’s telephone call had sent Jenkin to the Playroom, Duncan’s finger had pulled the trigger. This was an irony which they would never share.