The Furnished Room (19 page)

‘That's a bloody unfair argument.'

‘I don't care if it's unfair or not. It just happens to be the way I feel. I need a faithful partner. Whether or not I'm justified and fair in that need, doesn't matter. The thing is, I need one.'

Ilsa said: ‘You don't realize that I exist in my own right, too. You don't recognize me, or anyone else for that matter, as a person. I love people and I want them to love me. But you don't care; you're just indifferent to people. Do you know, when we're together I feel that you're not really there at all. Nothing I say really touches you. You live behind a glass wall. You don't love, you only lust. And, anyway, you won't have to bother with me any more because I'm getting the hell out.' She got out of bed and switched the radio on to full volume. Latin-American music beat against the furniture. She started to drag her clothes on, lighting a second cigarette from the stub of the first and parking it on the mantelpiece while she dressed.

He shouted against the music: ‘How will you —?'

‘What?'

He turned down the volume of the radio. ‘Do you mind not waking the entire house?'

‘Yes, I do mind.' She turned the volume up again.

He turned it down.

She turned it up.

He shouted: ‘Stop it, for Christ's sake, I'll murder you.' He turned the volume down again and they stood glaring at each other in silence. He took a deep breath and enquired : ‘How will you get home, now that you've missed the last Tube?'

‘Walk.'

‘You can't do that. I'll give you some money for a taxi.'

‘Thanks, but I'd rather walk.' She tapped her foot to the diminished music, shut off from him as she made up her icy face in the mirror.

‘It's a long way.'

‘I'm not complaining.'

He paced up and down.

She said: ‘Must you act the caged tiger?'

‘Oh, shut up.'

After a while, she said irrelevantly: ‘I'm going to take a job in a club.'

‘Are you?'

‘Yes. The owner's a friend of Larry's. He says I've got the looks and the right sort of personality.'

‘I hope you're successful.”

‘Don't worry; I shall be.” She slashed lipstick on her mouth.

There was a pause. Then he exclaimed angrily: ‘It's just the sort of rotten job you would take. Flirting with a lot of tired old businessmen.'

‘So what? It's none of your business.'

‘I detest you.'

‘Fair enough, I detest you too.' She dragged the comb through her hair, then clipped on her ear-studs and patted them. After a final peer into the mirror, she said: ‘Well, goodbye. I'm going now.'

‘Got all your things?'

‘Yes.'

‘Goodbye, then.'

She stood, tense, in her gay flimsy dress, in the doorway. ‘You'd better give me some taxi-money after all. It's too far to walk.'

‘Cold, too.'

‘Yes, isn't it? I'll make myself some tea when I get in.'

“Do you want some here? I mean, have a cup if you like.'

‘No, thanks all the same, I'd better get home.'

He gave her a pound note. He only had thirty-seven and threepence left. ‘Here you are.'

‘I don't know how much it will cost.'

‘Keep the change.'

‘I'm only borrowing it. I'll pay you back.'

‘Don't bother.'

‘I will.'

‘All right,' he said, ‘you will.'

‘You don't believe I will?'

‘What does it matter? I don't care whether I get the pound back or not.'

‘But I will pay you back! I will, I will! I don't want to owe you anything.'

‘All right,' he said. ‘You've made your point.'

She looked at him, pushing the hair back from her forehead. Then she said: ‘Goodbye.'

‘Goodbye.'

She stilll hesitated. Then she made a sudden dash for the radio and turned the volume on full. The next second she was out of the room with the door slamming behind her and the sound of her high heels clattering down the stairs.

The music blared. Something about Señore and Amore. He turned it off. The illuminated panel no longer pleased him; he had a general sensation of tastelessness. He noticed that her cigarette had burnt out on the mantelpiece, blistering the paint. Her lipstick, with the cap off, was beside the mirror.

He noticed a pocket diary on the floor. He must have missed seeing it when he retrieved her belongings. The entries, in her neat office-girl backhand, stated that she ‘Went to jazz club. Wore new check shirt and tight jeans', or ‘Bought sweater from Marks & Sparks, as was payday', or ‘Had coffee in Troubadour with Katey'. She had listed the records she had bought and the films she had seen with comments ‘not bad' or ‘v. good'. Drawings of a bottle beside the written entries denoted the days on which she had got drunk.

Looking for references to himself, he found ‘Went to cinema,' and ‘Went to bed'.

Over the days of her holiday in Sussex she had scrawled ‘FOUL TIME!'

The last entry read: ‘Met a boy called Larry. He is dark, he has a black sweater over a red shirt. He is keen on B. Bugloss (like me!). We went to bed.'

Beckett found the remains of a wrapped sliced loaf in the cupboard, and made a sandwich with cheese and a hunk of raw onion. He sat in the armchair, eating, and dropping crumbs down his bare chest. His thoughts were not of Ilsa, but of Dyce, whose proposition was always present at the back of his mind. It was a constant factor, like a headache.

The next evening he had still not arrived at a decision. Sometimes he knew he would do it. At these times he imagined his future supplied with a private income. It would be a pleasant modest life, devoted to study and research into the nature of existence, and made extraordinary by the secret of the crime he had committed. It was an attractive prospect, but it was immediately destroyed by the knowledge that he would not do it. At the times when he knew he would not do it, he felt relieved, as if he had thrown off a burden. Yet soon the idea of the crime became attractive again, and he started rebuilding his ideal life. These two states, knowing he would do it and knowing he would not, succeeded each other endlessly.

He decided to visit Gash. He was admitted by the landlady, who again thanked him for paying for the window. Beckett hardly heard what she said. His replies were so strange and incoherent that she asked him whether he was ill.

‘Oh no,' he said. Then added: ‘It's the heat, you know. It's been terribly hot these last weeks.' He wiped his brow.

‘It gets you down. I thought the thunderstorm would clear the air a bit, but it's got just as bad again.'

Beckett gabbled some sort of reply, then knocked on Gash's door.

Gash greeted him with: ‘I'm pleased to see you.' Behind his old man's, womanish face, with its aureole of hair, the new window-pane shone clean like steel. He held up his hand in blessing.

Beckett was reminded of Father Dominic's hand holding the chess piece. ‘I met an acquaintance of yours recently. He's a priest now, but you knew him when he was at school. His name's Dominic.'

‘Yes, I remember the Dominic boy. He was very clever for his age. It was a great occasion when he was elected president of his school debating society. He worked all night in the bedroom, writing his speech. Poor Mrs Dominic couldn't get him to go to bed. And the motion he was proposing was astonishing — “that falsehood is preferable to truth”.' Gash was quite excited. ‘I remember it all clearly. The charming parents, the pale, serious boy. His bedroom, which he used as a study, was a holy of holies to him. His parents were not admitted except by special invitation. He invited me up once, for the purpose of an argument whereby he tried to convert me to Catholicism.'

‘Did he? Well, he's still at it. He tried to convert me, too.'

‘With any success?'

‘No, I can't be reconverted. But he made me feel more interested and friendly towards the Church. Also he surprised me by agreeing that actions are determined and therefore there is little freedom.'

‘Little free will,' Gash corrected him. ‘There is still freedom.”

‘Aren't they the same?'

‘Not at all. It was thought that there was an immaterial tenant of the material brain. The tenant was called the mind, the personality, the I, or what you will. Then determinism announced that there was no such tenant, and that the brain was a sort of automatic signal-box without an ‘I' at the controls. But however much the tenant is planed down, it cannot be entirely abolished. It still remains in the form of consciousness. Consciousness is the seat of freedom.'

Beckett scratched his head, trying to follow.

Gash went on: ‘Man is the intersection point between the God dimension and the human dimension; between timelessness and time. That point of intersection is consciousness. It is there that we receive the God-force with its qualities of freedom and timelessness. That is why I believe we have freedom, in spite of our limited free will.'

The room smelt of thug cat and Dettol and the stale smell of insanity. Here Gash half starved and slept on the floor, and talked of the God force.

Gash continued: ‘It wouldn't occur to young Dominic — to Father Dominic — that we have this freedom, for unless he is much changed since I knew him, he is no mystic. With him, everything is an intellectual problem. However, I'm surprised that he overlooked the most vital doctrine of his Church: that man is the temple of the Holy Spirit.'

‘Mr Gash, do you mind if I ask you an impertinent question?'

‘Not at all. I don't think I should find it impertinent.'

‘Well, I heard you were once in a mental home, and I wondered if it was true.'

‘Perfectly true. I was sent there because it was thought that I was incapable of taking care of myself. My sole preoccupation was to concentrate the force inside me. The force that can be called the God force or the life force or the Holy Spirit or what you please. I practised the concentration of this force until I could live in a state of ecstasy which would be unbearable to the normal man. Consequently, I grew careless about the routine business of life: crossing roads, carrying on conversations, eating food, and such things. Finally it was decided that I was in need of control and protection, with the result that I spent the next year in a mental hospital.'

‘How terrible for you.'

‘The hospital was excellent; very well run. I had no complaints, except that leisure was discouraged and we were supposed to fill our time with all manner of trivialities known as occupational therapy. Unfortunately, the whole treatment was designed for the sick; whereas I suffered, not from sickness, but from excess of health.'

‘I see.' Beckett looked at the new glass. A million pinpricks of light dazzled him. He picked up one of Gash's books and glanced at the title on the spine. Then he faced Gash, and said: ‘I asked, not because I think I'm going mad, but because I'd like to go mad and can't.'

‘An interesting affliction.'

‘Look. Last time I was here, you talked about the moments of assent, of affirmation of life. I've had that experience, but I also suffer from its opposite condition.'

‘Go on.'

‘Well, I remember once, when I was a child, my mother gave me a book of noble lives to read when I was convalescing from flu. One was Pasteur, I remember. Another was Father Damien, who founded a leper colony. In this chapter it mentioned the fact that a leper can't feel hot water. I mean if a leper immersed his hand in hot water, he wouldn't know it was hot.'

Beckett looked at his own hand.

Gash nodded, to indicate that he was following. ‘You can imagine a leper immersing his hand in hot water. They tell him that it's hot, and that he should have certain reactions to heat. He accepts what they say as correct, but it's meaningless to him. The word “hot” draws a blank with him. He has no reaction; he feels nothing.'

‘Yes.'

‘I am a spiritual leper. I am told that there is a point in life, but “point in life” is as meaningless to me as “hot” is to a leper. I lack the correct feelings and reactions, the correct convictions. If a leper has an impaired physical sense of touch, I have an impaired spiritual and emotional sense of touch. My sense of touch is dead.'

Gash asked: ‘What are you going to do about this problem?'

‘There is something I could do. An action violent enough to shock myself back into life. But it's drastic, criminal. I can't tell you about it.'

‘You're not a criminal. I don't think you would belong in their world.'

‘No. That's the point. I'd choose crime, I wouldn't drift into it. Suppose a man has grown up with certain beliefs and values. Then he loses them. He will become intellectually a nihilist, and emotionally numb like the leper. But eventually it will occur to him that if there is no meaning in life, he is able to impose his own. If he wants to live for pleasure, he can do. If he wants to go anywhere on the face of the earth, he can do. If he wants to substitute a goal of his own for the overturned goals of religion and social morality, he can for instance set out to make as much money as possible.'

‘Well, yes.'

‘And if he refrains from these things, it is either because he is blind or because his sight is so clear that it destroys everything he sees. The blind man has bandaged his eyes before the glare of his awful freedom. He won't live for pleasure because he has self-imposed duties to society and his family. He won't roam the world because he has limited himself to the area of his job, his place of residence, his timetable. He won't make money because he is somewhat afraid of it, and considers it immoral. In short, he prefers to construct a safe pattern of living as a barricade against his freedom.