The Sea, the Sea

SIX

IT WAS A SHORT TIME LATER. Time had passed for me in a haze of misery and bitter remorse and the resolutions of hatred.

Gilbert had to go back to London to act in a television play. Lizzie stayed, and I got used to her unhappy face, reddened with crying. Peregrine stayed, but boorishly, almost angrily; dressed in tweed trousers, shirt and braces, he walked inland every day into the country near Amorne Farm, and arrived back hot and irritable. He was obviously wretched but seemed unable to drag himself away. Once or twice he drove Lizzie to the village for shopping. James stayed but was very withdrawn. He was gentle and considerate to me, but had little to say. We remained together, though we could not talk to each other, out of some sense of mutual protection. Of course they did not want to leave me alone. Perhaps each intended to be the last to go. It was as if we were all waiting for something.

Lizzie did the cooking. We lived on pasta and cheese. It was impossible to return to the ordinary feasts and festivals of human life, the meals to which people look forward and which they enjoy. We all, except James, drank a lot.

On the day which I shall now describe I woke up in the early morning and realized I had had a terrible terrible nightmare. I had dreamt that Titus was drowned. I experienced the relief of the awaking dreamer. And then remembered…

I got up and went to the window. It was about six o’clock and the sun had been up for some time. Cool summer weather had come back with a misty sky and a calm sea. The water was a very pale luminous grey-blue, almost white, the same colour as the sky, shifting with a quick small dancing movement, and scattered by the misted sun with little explosions of metallic pale-gold light. It had the look of a happy sea and I felt I was seeing it through Titus’s eyes.

I had returned to my own bedroom. The other three, though I disliked their proximity to each other, slept downstairs. I had decided that today I would tell them all to go. I felt strong enough now to do this, and although in a way I dreaded to be alone, my plans demanded solitude. I dressed quickly and went downstairs to the kitchen. Peregrine was there shaving. He ignored me and I went through onto the lawn. James was just climbing down from the rocks. A moment later I could hear Lizzie talking to Peregrine. We were all early risers on that day.

James sat down on the natural seat beside the trough where I put the stones I collected, or rather used to collect. Someone, perhaps Titus, had picked up the scattered stones from the lawn after the destruction of James’s ‘mandala’ on the night of the party. My stone ‘border’ was comparatively undisturbed. I went and sat down too. The rocks were already warm.

James had shaved; his face, reddened and browned by the sun, was very smooth above the dark stippling of his beard. He seemed somehow clearer and more visible than usual, or perhaps it was just that the light was better. His murky brown eyes were displaying their ochre-coloured streaks, his thin clever lips were finely textured, ruddy, his dark hair more vital and glossy, hiding his bald spot. The mysterious mask-resemblance to Aunt Estelle was more present than usual, though he was not smiling.

‘James, I want you to go, I want you all to go. Tomorrow. OK?’

James frowned. ‘Only if you come too. Come and stay with me in London.’

‘No, I must stay here.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got things to do.’

‘What?’

‘Oh this and that, things about the house, maybe I’ll sell it after all. I want to be by myself now. I’m all right.’

James picked up a stone from the trough, a golden-brown one with two light blue lines running round it. ‘I like your collection of stones. Can I have this one?’

‘Yes, of course. So that’s settled, is it? I’ll tell the others.’

‘What are you going to do about Ben and Hartley?’

‘Nothing. That’s over.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

I shrugged my shoulders and was about to get up only James held the sleeve of my shirt.

‘Charles. Tell me what you think you are going to do. I know you are planning to do something.’

What indeed was I planning to do? I was in a state which I well knew was close to a sort of madness, and yet I was not mad. Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so. I wanted to kill Ben.

When I say that I wanted to kill him I do not mean that I had yet a definite plan or a definite programme with a date. That would come to me, and come soon, once I was alone. The necessary period of sheer miserable brooding was over, and I would soon be able to make decisions. Ben had attempted to kill me; and it now amazed me in retrospect that I had been able so far to overlook or ‘forgive’ this crime, this insult, as not to feel compelled to punish it as such. My late and now outdated plan to besiege Hartley by ‘tramping in and out’ had had as its end her rescue, not his chastisement. I had proposed to intimidate him simply in order to get her away; to destroy him had not been my prime object. But now the situation was entirely different. I could not ‘overlook’ the murder of Titus or let it go unavenged. Because I had failed to die, Ben had struck Titus on the head and drowned him. He had killed the boy out of pure hideous spite against me; and that he could be crazy enough to do so I could well believe as I considered how crazy I now was myself. In truth the basis of my madness was sheer grief, the loss of that precious precious child, the horror of his sudden death, together with a sense of having been the victim of a wanton wickedness. The only balm for Titus’s death was hatred and the immediate transformation of misery into revengeful purposeful rage. As in a civil war, further killing was the only consolation; and, as it seemed to me then, to survive the murder of Titus I had to become a terrorist.

During the last days, as I allowed myself to be quietly watched by James and Lizzie, and as I played my part of simple mourning, I had filled out in imagination how terribly Ben, with his mad beliefs, must have hated me, and because of me, Titus, throughout the miserable years of Titus’s childhood. The connection between me and Titus in his mind must have become a dynamic obsessional pattern. The boy, continually before him, was (as he thought) the visible symbol of his wife’s inconstancy and of the jaunty unpunished escape of the hated rival, whose jeering image he so regularly saw in the newspapers and on the television screen. Ben was a naturally violent man, a destroyer, a killer. How he must have loathed me and my changeling brat, and torn his own entrails with that loathing. Punishing the wife and the boy could never be enough while the prime culprit ran scot free and laughing. Sheer hatred can be a commanding form of madness. Many and many a time, in all those years, Ben must have killed me in his imagination.

When we at last met he was soon to see that his own violence and anger were matched by equally fierce emotions in me. He knew perfectly well of my impulse to push him in, on that occasion when we faced each other on the rocky bridge. He knew that I wanted him out of my way, and may have conjectured how very far I might, in the end, be prepared to go. He could even argue that he had tried to kill me in self-defence. Then when I had so disobligingly failed to die and was still there, taunting him with my free existence and brazenly protecting as my ‘son’ the hated bratling, what could be more natural than that Ben’s mad rage should turn against me through the boy, bringing about perhaps an even more satisfying act of vengeance? I recalled Ben’s last words to me, wherein a curse on the ‘vile brat’ was joined with ‘I’ll kill you’.

Could I now walk away into the world and ‘get over’ this act, this fact? It was unthinkable. Act must match act. But how? In all these thoughts I was just sane enough to try to steady myself by the image of Hartley. I tried to see her face looking at me, wistful and calm, beautiful as it had once been and perhaps would be again. Later, I would move to her and embrace her and we would console each other at last. What I could not really get myself to see or feel however was just how the path through the destruction of Ben led to Hartley or what exactly the destruction of Ben would be like. Now that I felt free to destroy him I sometimes felt that I hated him even more obsessively than I loved her; at least I knew, watching my obsession, that I was not now wanting to remove him simply because of her. The removal had become an end in itself.

Concerning what I was actually going to do I had evolved a number of quite different plans, which were still more or less at the stage of being fantasies. When I was alone I would have the concentration necessary to convert one of these into a practical proposition. I thought of going to the police. Someone had attempted to kill me and an explanation of all the circumstances would point an unambiguous finger at Ben; and it would, I guessed, be in Ben’s character to answer a formal, or even hinted, accusation with a defiant avowal of guilt. This indeed might be the simplest easiest way to catch him: to open a big net and let him run straight into it. I saw Ben as a simple aggressive man who would be made uneasy by the subtleties of the law and would then scorn the refinements of lying. I played with this fantasy so much that the whole thing began to seem as good as done. On the other hand, if Ben did consistently deny the charge, I was certainly short of proof.

I also, and equally, considered various mixtures of guile and violence. If I could lure him to the house and push him into Minn’s cauldron that would be the justest thing of all, but of course he would be too cautious to come. I considered other ways of drowning him. None was easy. I was more attracted by some straightforward sort of violence, which however could not be too straightforward since Ben was a strong dangerous man, and if he were to do me a serious damage while I was trying to damage him I really would go mad with chagrin. An accomplice would help, but I had vowed to act without one. I had not forgotten what Hartley said about Ben having kept his army revolver. I had no doubt that he kept it oiled and polished but he might have no ammunition. I possessed, but in London, a beautiful replica automatic, property of the theatre. Suppose I were to hold him up with that, make him turn round, then hit him with a hammer! And then? Tell the whole story to the police? Get Hartley to testify that I did it in self-defence? As it was at every moment possible that Ben might make another attempt to kill me, my fantasy actions did in fact begin to look to me more and more like self-defence.

Those who are caught in mental cages can often picture freedom, it just has no attractive power. I also knew, in the midst of it all, that some unexamined guilt of my own was driving me further into hatred; but this was no moment to be confused by guilt. As I moved like a ghost, performing in the house and its environs a sort of ritual dance under the eyes of James and Lizzie and Perry, I thought about Hartley and I pictured peace with her, in that little house where we would hide forever after. Yet if I did what I so intensely desired and consoled myself by desiring, if I destroyed Ben, if I killed him or crippled him or damaged his mind or got him sent to prison, could I then walk away with Hartley in peace? What would that peace be like? What would the idea of justice be able to do for me afterwards? Was it not, under all these disguises, my own death that I was planning?

I said to James, pulling away my sleeve which he was still holding, ‘I am not going to do anything. I just feel all smashed up by misery.’

‘Come to London with me.’

‘No.’

‘I can see you’re scheming. Your eyes are full of awful visions.’

‘Sea serpents.’

‘Charles, tell me.’

These particular words brought back to me how extremely difficult I had found it to mislead James when I was a boy. He had a way of worming things out of one, as if the intended lie turned into truth on one’s very lips. I was not going to tell now however. How could I reveal to anyone the horrors that now crowded my mind? ‘James, go to London. I’ll come later, soon. I’ll come and sort out my flat. Don’t torment me now. I just want a day or two of peace here by myself, that’s all.’

‘You’ve got some awful idea.’

‘I have no idea, my mind is empty.’

‘You said something to me before about imagining that Ben pushed you into the cauldron.’

‘Yes.’

‘But of course you don’t really think that.’

‘I do, but it’s not important any more.’

James was looking at me in a calculating way. Lizzie called from the kitchen that breakfast was ready. The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.

‘It is important,’ said James. ‘I don’t want to leave you behind here with that totally false notion in your head.’

‘Let’s have breakfast.’

‘It is false, Charles.’

‘You sound quite passionate! That’s your view, and I have mine. Come on.’

‘Wait, wait, it’s not just a view, I know. I know it wasn’t Ben.’

I stared at him. ‘James, you can’t know. Did you see it happen?’

‘No, I didn’t, but-’

‘Did someone else see it?’

‘No-’

‘Then how can you know?’

‘I just do. Charles, please, will you trust me? Surely you can trust me. Just don’t ask any questions. Accept my statement that Ben didn’t do it. Ben did not do it.’

We stared at each other. The intensity of James’s tone, his eyes, his fierce face, carried conviction into my resisting mind. But I could not believe him. How could he know this? Unless-unless-James himself had pushed me in? What after all lay behind that Red Indian mask? We had always been rivals for the world, I the more successful one. A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime. James was an odd card, a funny man with a funny mind. He was in a ruthless profession. I recalled his respectful remarks about Ben. It might even be that he had tried to remove me simply because he knew I had guessed that he was a secret agent and was returning to Tibet. I put my hands to my head.

I said however, ‘Listen, James, and stop trying to impress me. Not only did Ben try to kill me. Ben killed Titus.’

‘Oh-Lord-’ said James. He turned away with an air of distracted hopelessness, then said, ‘What’s your evidence for his having killed Titus? Did you see him?’

‘No, but it’s obvious. No one examined that blow on the head. Titus was a strong swimmer. And when Ben had tried to murder me-’

‘Yes, that’s your “evidence”. But I know it isn’t so.’

‘James, you can’t know! I understand this man and how much he can hate. You were just gratified to see a fellow soldier. What I see is an able killer and a man absolutely consumed, mad, with jealous spite, with a whole history of it. And I know what jealous spite is like.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said James, ‘your spite. What can I swear upon that will satisfy you? I swear by our childhood, by the memory of our parents, by our cousinhood, that Ben did not do this thing. Will you not please just accept this and ask no more? Oh let it all go now, let it go. Come to London, let’s get out of this place.’

‘How can I “accept” it? I notice you argue that it wasn’t Ben, but not that I imagined it all! Would you just “accept” the fact that some person unknown had tried to kill you? And you can’t be sure it wasn’t Ben. Unless by any chance it was you?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ said James frowning, ‘don’t be absurd.’

I felt a ridiculous degree of relief. Had I then for a moment seriously entertained the idea that my cousin was filled with murderous hate against me? Of course I believed him at once, and of course it was absurd. But if it was not James, or as he argued, Ben, who was it? I was impressed by his solemn oath, though I could not believe him. Gilbert, mad with secret jealousy because of Lizzie? Rosina mourning for her lost child? Perhaps there were quite a lot of people with motives to murder me. Freddie Arkwright? Why not? He hated me, he was now at Amorne Farm where Ben had been to get the dog. Suppose Ben had hired Freddie to kill or perhaps just maim me, and it had ended with that dreadful fall?

James could see me speculating and he made a hopeless gesture.

‘I’m no good at guessing games,’ I said. ‘I thought it was Ben and I still think so.’

‘Come inside then,’ said James, and he rose.

We came into the kitchen. Lizzie was standing at the stove. She had pinned her hair back and was wearing a very short check overall over a very short dress. She looked ridiculously young and had an anxious silly schoolgirl look which she sometimes wore. Perry was sitting at the table with his legs stretched beneath it and his elbows upon it. His big face was already greasy with sweat and his eyes were glazed. He might even have been drunk.

James just said, ‘Peregrine.’

Peregrine said, without moving, his glazed eyes still staring ahead, ‘If you’ve been discussing who killed Charles or failed to kill Charles, it was me.’

‘Perry-’

‘My name is Peregrine.’

‘But, Peregrine, why on earth-did you really-why?’

Lizzie moved, without surprise, sat down to watch. She evidently already knew.

‘You ask why?’ said Peregrine, without looking at me. ‘Just think why, just think.’

‘You mean-good heavens, you mean Rosina?’

‘Yes, oddly enough, I do. You deliberately smashed my marriage, you took away my wife whom I adored, you did it carefully, cold-bloodedly, you worked at it. Then when you had got her away from me you dropped her. You didn’t even want her for yourself, you just wanted to steal her from me to satisfy the beastly impulses of your possessiveness and your jealousy! Then when they were satisfied, when my marriage was broken forever, you went jaunting off somewhere else. And what is more you expected me to tolerate this and to go on liking you! Why? Because you thought everybody always went on liking you whatever rotten things you did because you were wonderful wonderful Charles Arrowby.’

‘But, Peregrine, you yourself said to me, more than once, that you were glad to be rid of the bitch-’

‘OK, but why did you believe me? And don’t use that foul language please. Of course everyone knows you regard women as trash. But what bugged me was that you wrecked my life and my happiness and you just didn’t seem to care at all, you were so bloody perky.’

‘I don’t believe you were happy-you just say so now-’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake! You took her out of sheer spiteful jealousy. OK, I can be jealous too.’

‘But you yourself encouraged me to feel it was all right! Why did you bother to pretend, and mislead me? You can’t blame me now-If you had looked more stricken I would have felt more guilty. But you were so nice to me, so friendly-you always seemed so pleased to see me-’

‘I am an actor. And perhaps I was pleased to see you. We sometimes like to see people whom we hate and despise so that we can stir them up to further demonstrations of how odious they are.’

‘So you’ve been waiting all these years for revenge!’

‘No, not like that. I enjoyed leading you on and just looking at you and gloating and thinking how surprised you’d be if you knew what I really felt. You’ve been a bad dream to me all these years, you’ve been with me like a demon, like a cancer.’

‘Oh my God. I’m sorry-’

‘If you imagine I want to hear you apologizing now-’

‘I may have behaved badly to you, but I didn’t deserve to die for it.’

‘No, all right, I admit it was an impulse and I was drunk. I just pushed you and walked on. I didn’t really see what happened and I didn’t care.’

‘But you said you were non-violent, you said you never-’

‘OK, you were a special case. The last straw was seeing bloody Rosina suddenly sitting on top of that rock like a black witch. I thought you must still be carrying on with her, well obviously you are-’

‘I’m not.’

‘I don’t care-’

‘I wondered why you stopped talking about her. You were planning to kill me.’

‘I don’t care, I don’t want to know, I don’t believe anything you say, I think you’re a worthless person. I just couldn’t stand seeing her there, and the windscreen getting broken, I couldn’t stand it, it was a shock, it made me feel mad, it made a sort of hole in me, and all the old stored-up hate came pouring out and all the green-eyed jealousy, as fresh as ever. I had to do something to you. I really just wanted to push you into the sea. I daresay I was pretty drunk. I didn’t choose that spot, I didn’t think it was that awful whirlpool or whatever you call it-’

‘Then you were lucky, weren’t you. I might be dead.’

‘Oh I don’t care,’ said Peregrine, ‘I wish you were dead. I thought of calling you out, only then I thought you might kill me instead, because you drink less than I do. I suppose honour is satisfied now anyway, and I won’t have to offer you any more drinks, thank God, and I won’t even want to tell you what a four-letter man you are. You’re an exploded myth. And you still think you’re Genghis Khan! Laissez-moi rire. I can’t think why I let you haunt me all these years, I suppose it was just your power and the endless spectacle of you doing well and flourishing like the green bay tree. Now you’re old and done for, you’ll wither away like Prospero did when he went back to Milan, you’ll get pathetic and senile, and kind girls like Lizzie will visit you to cheer you up. At least they will for a while. You never did anything for mankind, you never did a damn thing for anybody except yourself. If Clement hadn’t fancied you no one would ever have heard of you, your work wasn’t any bloody good, it was just a pack of pretentious tricks, as everyone can see now that they aren’t mesmerized any more, so the glitter’s fading fast and you’ll find yourself alone and you won’t even be a monster in anybody’s mind any more and they’ll all heave a sigh of relief and feel sorry for you and forget you.’

There was a moment’s silence.

I said, ‘But if you’re so pleased about it, why tell? You only had to keep quiet-or did you want me to know?’

‘I don’t care what you know or don’t know. Your cousin got it out of me by one of his interrogation techniques. He said you thought it was Ben and you were working yourself up.’

‘You pretend you always detested me, it isn’t true. You aren’t all that good an actor. You told me about your Uncle Peregrine.’

‘I have no Uncle Peregrine.’

I felt totally confused. I said, ‘But what about Titus?’

‘What do you mean?’ said James.

‘What happened to Titus? Who killed Titus? I mean-I thought-surely Ben killed him?’

Lizzie answered this after a moment. She said, ‘Charles, it was an accident, no one killed him.’

Peregrine got up. He said, ‘Well, that’s that, that’s sorted that out, and I hope the General is satisfied. I’m going back to London. Goodbye Lizzie, nice to have seen you.’ He marched out and I could hear him collecting his things. Then there was the sound of the Alfa Romeo backing violently onto the causeway, and then its diminishing roar.

James had got up and was looking out of the window. Lizzie, soundlessly crying, was filling the kettle at the tap. She put it on the stove and turned the gas up.

I said to James, ‘You said you didn’t want to leave me behind here with a false notion in my head. Well, now it’s gone, so there’s nothing to detain you.’

James turned round. ‘Won’t you come to London?’

‘No.’

‘But what are you going to do about them?’

‘Nothing. It’s over. It’s over.’

But of course that was not true.

That day and the next day passed in a sick trance, a period of time which seemed like the peace of resignation and hopeless quiet mourning, but was really full of fear and venom. I passionately wanted James to go, his appearance, his company, his obtrusive unseen presence irritated me into torments. Lizzie irritated me too, partly by her frequent tears, which she seemed unable to control, and partly by a silly beseeching sympathetic expression which she put on when I looked at her, and which made me suddenly see the picture which Peregrine had sketched of me as an ageing powerless ex-magician for whom people were sorry.

I could understand why Lizzie refused to go. She wanted to be in at the kill. She was waiting for the moment when I could stand no more and would turn to her helplessly to be seized and carried off. Why James wanted to hang around was less clear. He certainly believed what I told him, that I no longer regarded Ben as a murderer. He might suspect that I had not given up my idea of rescuing Hartley, but after all he could not go on watching me forever. It was quite plain that I was not proposing to return to London in his Bentley. A little tact, and he was not usually deficient in tact, might have prompted him now to leave me and Lizzie alone. He did not even seem to want to talk to me any more. It was as if he was staying on for some purpose of his own. I guessed that he was brooding on Titus and somehow blaming himself, as I blamed myself, for not having attended more to what the boy was doing. At this time I avoided the rocks and the sea, but James was always out there, walking about on the cliff, standing on Minn’s bridge, and climbing up to the tower, almost as if he were measuring the distances involved.

On several afternoons Lizzie and I walked inland, past the place where in a previous existence I had intended to put my herb garden, into the country which I had never explored. The region just beyond the road was bog, full of outcrops of rock and gorse and little black pools. There was some scrappy heather and a lot of those tiny yellow plants that catch flies, and purple and white flowers that looked like miniature orchids. Two pairs of buzzards inhabited the blue air. After the bog there was ordinary farm land, sheep-scattered hillsides, distant mustard fields catching the sunlight with their huge patches of glowing yellow. There were many ruined stone cottages, roofless and full of willow-herb and wild buddleia and butterflies, and we came on the ruin of a big house, with the box hedges of the formal garden grown into a forest and covered with rambler roses. I record these details, which I recall so clearly, because they are the very image of sorrow; things seen which might have given pleasure, but could not.

I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart. Lizzie, walking with me, had wept her fill for Titus, and was still often weeping, but now more privately and self-indulgently; with a woman’s economy in grief, I could feel her tentacles clasping me. Lizzie was not going to perish, not for anyone, if she could help it. If I had fallen dead she would soon have been crying in someone else’s arms. These are unkind words; but I felt a special localized bitterness against Lizzie then because I knew how temporary her affliction was, and how soon, if I required her sympathy, it could turn into a possessive triumph. Lizzie is one of those very sweet, very kind kittenish women whom men love for their sympathetic gentleness, but who have a truly relentless power of self-preservation. Well, why not? We spoke little as we walked and I could see Lizzie looking at me now and then and she was thinking to herself: it is a relief to him to walk with me thus in silence. My presence, my silence is healing him. With no one else could he quietly walk and walk like this. (This last belief was probably justified.) Of course guilt too had fed my rage. My responsibility for Titus’s death, which now so largely occupied my mind, amounted to this: I had never warned him about the sea. Why had I not done so? Out of vanity. I recalled now very clearly that first day when Titus and I had dived in off the cliff. I had wanted to show him that I too was strong and fearless. It would have spoilt the charm of that moment if I had said, ‘It’s rather dangerous’ or ‘It’s not easy to get out’ or ‘I don’t think I’ll swim here’. I had to dive in with him and conceal the difficulties I knew so well. I never stressed the impossibility of climbing out in other places. I never recommended the tower steps; in fact I had not renewed the rope there, and with a strong sea running the steps would be as dangerous as the cliff. I never, for Titus, watched the sea. I acted out of vanity, and out of a silly vicarious pride in his youth and his strength, in the agility which I had seen him display upon the tower on the first day. Of course he always wanted to dive in. No young boy climbs cautiously into the sea if he can dive. I did not want to spoil my picture of Titus or Titus’s picture of me by any mean prudence.

I went over and over and over these things in my mind, thinking of what I might have done and what I should have done, just as James was perhaps doing as he paced it all out upon those rocks which I now could not bear to look upon. And my misery about Titus, my sobbing grasping sense of the loss from my life of what might have become its greatest blessing was the more intense now that my obsessive belief about Ben had been taken away. It had indeed been a consolation, and Ben had carried my guilt. That madness was gone, but did not leave behind a saner or purer mourning. My burden of sin and despair was constant and had simply been redistributed. New aspects of grief were opened to me. I had killed Hartley’s child, I had wantonly entered her life and taken away her blessing, which was hers in a way that it could never be mine. I did not dare to imagine her sorrow and how it might affect her feelings about me. Would she now see me as a murderer? Sometimes I felt that, in an odd way, it would not occur to her to blame me, she would not be capable of such a thought, of seeing me simply as a wanton wandering cause. And sometimes I felt that our grief for Titus might actually, excluding Ben, draw us together. For the moment I could only wait. I even felt that it was now likely that she would give me a sign. And in thinking this I was, as it turned out, right.

And so, waiting, watching, brooding, mourning, Lizzie and I walked the countryside. And then we began to talk about the old days, about Wilfred and about Clement, and Lizzie said how jealous she had been of Clement even when I was no longer living with her. ‘I always felt that, whatever happened, Clement owned you.’ We talked about the theatre and how wonderful it was and how awful it was and how glad Lizzie was to be out of it. Lizzie asked me about Jeanne and I told her a little and regretted it because it clearly hurt her so much. Lizzie on these walks, sweating, puffing, wearing crumpled faded dressed, her face shiny and red with sunburn and with sudden tears, looked her age. She was a woman whose appearance varied immensely. She could still look childish, in the mysterious way that old and young can mingle in a woman’s looks. But she had lost her radiance, or else my vision of her was dulled. She was faithful and sweet and she tried so hard to console me, always speaking of peripheral things, not of the centre. ‘Of course Perry didn’t hate you, he never did, he just said that. He loved you, he was devoted to you, he always spoke of you with such admiration.’

One afternoon we came back by a road which led unexpectedly past Amorne Farm, which I had usually tried to avoid. We passed quickly by to a chorus of yapping collies, and I was just feeling relieved when suddenly the Black Lion man, Bob Arkwright, came round the corner out of a side lane. He approached us, with the quiet intent look of a dog who approaches silently, about to snarl and bite.

‘That was a bad business, Mr Arrowby.’

‘Yes.’

‘I warned you about the sea, didn’t I.’

‘Yes.’

‘He couldn’t get out, that was it.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I seen him, just the day before, I was up near the tower and I seen him trying and trying to get up that sheer rock near your house, and he kept falling back. It was mad crazy to swim with the waves like that. Then he managed to get up somehow, but he was dead beat. When he got up the top he just flopped. What must have happened he tired himself out and then the waves threw him against the rocks. That was what happened, I bet. He shouldn’t have been let swim there. That sea’s a killer, I told you, didn’t I, didn’t I?’

‘Yes. It shouldn’t have happened.’ I moved on.

He called after me. ‘My brother Freddie knows you. He knows you.’

I did not turn round. Lizzie and I were silent all the way home. I decided I would tell James to go tomorrow, and I would despatch Lizzie the following day. I could not cashier them together because I did not want James to give Lizzie a lift to London. I felt I no longer needed her, and I could certainly dispense with him, and it was beginning to be intolerable to have them as witnesses of what I increasingly felt to be the punishing horror of my degradation.

I entered the house resolved to seek my cousin out and tell him to leave the next morning, when I heard a most extraordinary rhythmical shrieking sound. It took me a moment to realize that it was the telephone, whose presence I had forgotten. This was the first time that it had rung, and I immediately thought that it might be Hartley. Then of course I could not find the thing, could not remember which room it was in. I located it at last in the bookroom and ran to it with desperate hope.

It was Rosina’s voice.

‘Charles. It’s me.’

‘Hello.’

‘I say, I’m sorry about that wretched boy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Very sorry. Well, what can one say? But listen, Charles, I want to ask you something.’

‘What?’

‘Is it true that Peregrine tried to kill you?’

‘He pushed me into the sea. He wasn’t trying to kill me.’

‘But he pushed you into that awful hole where the sea churns about.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At the Raven Hotel. I’ve got a bit of news.’

‘What?’

‘You know that monster epic film of the Odyssey that Fritzie Eitel is going to make?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s offered me the part of Calypso!’

‘That should suit you.’

‘Isn’t it marvellous? I don’t know when I’ve felt so delighted and so happy.’

‘Good. Just leave me alone, will you, Rosina?’

‘I am leaving you alone.’ She rang off.

As I came out of the book room I could now hear Lizzie talking to James in the kitchen. The door was shut, but something about the tone of the conversation struck me as odd. I paused, then went and opened the kitchen door. James, looking at me over Lizzie’s shoulder, said, ‘Charles.’

Prophetic terror pounces quickly. My heart became fast, my mouth dry.

‘Yes?’

They came out into the hall. Lizzie was red-faced, frightened.

‘Charles, Lizzie and I want to tell you something.’

Very fast does the human mind rush towards the most precise visions of disaster. I lived in two seconds through a long experience of mental torture. I said, ‘I know what you are going to say.’

‘You don’t,’ said James.

‘You are going to say that you have become very attached to each other and feel that you must tell me so. OK.’

‘No,’ said James, ‘Lizzie is attached to you, not to me. That is the point, and that is why I have got to tell you something which I ought to have told you long ago.’

‘What?’

‘Lizzie and I have known each other for a long time, only we decided not to tell you because you would be sure to be irrationally jealous. That is the matter in a nutshell.’

I stared at James. He looked as I had I think never seen him look in all his life. He looked not exactly guilty but somehow confused and at a loss. I turned round for a moment and opened the front door wide.

‘You see-’ said Lizzie, near to tears.

‘Let me do this,’ said James.

‘I don’t think you need to say anything more,’ I said.

‘You are leaping to conclusions,’ said James.

‘What do you expect me to do?’

‘Listen to the truth. I met Lizzie a long time ago at a party which you gave for a first night. I happened to be in London, I happened to come.’

‘For once. I think I can even remember the occasion.’

‘Lizzie remembered me simply because I was your cousin. Then at a later time, after you’d left her and when she was unhappy, she rang me up to ask if I knew your address in Japan-that was when you were working in Tokyo.’

‘I wanted to write to you, I felt I had to,’ said Lizzie in a choked voice. ‘It was my idea, I pushed him into it-’

‘But you met each other,’ I said, ‘you didn’t just talk on the telephone.’

‘Yes, we did meet, but very very rarely, perhaps in all those years six times.’

‘Do you expect me to believe that?’

‘He was sorry for me,’ said Lizzie.

‘You bet he was! So you met to discuss me.’

‘Yes, but only in what I might call a business-like way.’

‘Oh, very business-like!’

‘I mean, Lizzie just wanted to know where you were, how you were. We never otherwise discussed you. Our acquaintance was slight and it was impersonal and unemotional.’

‘That cannot be true.’

‘It was entirely concerned with you, not with Lizzie and me. And as I say, we scarcely ever met or indeed communicated in any way.’

‘He told me to stop bothering him,’ said Lizzie, ‘but sometimes I so much wanted to know how you were-’

‘James is the last person who ever knew how I was!’

‘Of course,’ said James, ‘we ought to have told you long ago that we knew each other slightly. But the nature of the acquaintance was likely to irritate you. I know, if you will forgive my saying so, what an insanely jealous disposition you have.’

‘You have been at pains to make clear that I had left Lizzie at the time your acquaintance ripened-’

‘It never ripened. And la jalousie naît avec l’amour…’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘What does it mean?’ said Lizzie, who was still looking red and frightened and miserable.

‘Jealousy is born with love, but does not always die with love.’

‘But why tell me now?’ I asked James. ‘You could both have gone on fooling me forever.’

‘I should have told you earlier,’ he repeated, ‘it should not have happened at all. Any lie is morally dangerous.’

‘You mean you may be found out!’

‘It has been a barrier. And a-and a-’ he found the word judiciously, ‘a flaw.’

‘In your conception of yourself.’

‘In our-our-’ he searched again, ‘friendship, and-yes-in me.’

‘Friendship! Whatever it is between you and me it certainly isn’t friendship!’

‘And earlier I felt I must protect Lizzie.’

‘Of course!’

‘But now-lately-it becomes necessary to tell you, for Lizzie’s sake, so that there may be no impediment.’

‘Impediment to what, for God’s sake?’

‘To her loving you, to your loving her. Secrets are almost always a mistake and a source of corruption.’

‘And then there was Toby,’ blurted Lizzie.

‘Toby? Christ in heaven, how does Toby come into this? You don’t mean Toby Ellesmere, do you?’ I asked Lizzie.

‘He saw me and Lizzie in a bar together,’ said James. He hated this bit.

‘Talking about me of course!’

‘Yes.’

‘And as you were afraid he’d tell me you felt you had to! Otherwise you’d have gone on and on lying.’

‘We would have told you anyway,’ said Lizzie. ‘We felt we had to. It was beginning to be a nightmare, at least it was to me. It seemed such a little thing to begin with, there was so little to it, and it just seemed sensible, not to tell you, knowing what you’re like. And you must understand, we only met sort of every other year for five minutes. And I very very occasionally rang him up to ask about you. Usually he wasn’t there anyway-’

‘Too bad. You were both spying on me. At least that’s how it started-’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ said James, ‘but of course if one starts lying one deserves what one gets.’

‘And when you met here you pretended not to have met each other-that’s a scene I shall remember!’

‘We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d be determined to misunderstand,’ said Lizzie, ‘and you are determined to misunderstand. ’

‘So I suppose you both think it’s all my fault for being, as you put it, insanely jealous!’

‘The fault is mine,’ said James.

‘No, no, it’s my fault,’ said Lizzie. ‘I forced it on him, I knew he hated it-’

‘Perhaps I know James better than you do after all,’ I said to Lizzie. ‘He is a man on whom no one ever forced anything he hated.’

‘It isn’t his fault-’

‘This argument does not interest me,’ I said. ‘You can continue it elsewhere and I am sure you will both enjoy it very much.’

‘I told you he’d be like that,’ said Lizzie to James, ‘I told you he wouldn’t understand-’

‘Well,’ said James, ‘there it is. It’s not a very attractive confession, but I hope you can see, or will see when you calm down-’

‘What do you mean, calm down?’

‘That it’s not, from your point of view, a matter of world-shaking importance. Naturally it irritates you. But you will see on reflection that it does not damage your relation with Lizzie, nor, I hope, your relation with me. It’s obvious how and why it happened, OK, it shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry-’

‘Do you imagine that I believe you?’

‘Yes,’ said James. He looked at me frowning but his face expressed an almost absurd sort of distress at a loss of dignity, at a loss, for once, of the initiative.

‘Well, I don’t. Why should I? How can I? It’s mean, it’s horrible. You admit you only told me because Toby saw you secretly meeting Lizzie in a bar. Am I supposed to be pleased that you’ve been meeting for years-’

‘Very very infrequently.’

‘And talking about me?’

‘You don’t see what it was like,’ said Lizzie, with tears in her eyes. ‘It wasn’t an all-the-time sort of thing at all, and it wasn’t like you think a relationship, it was just that we did happen to have met accidentally at that party-’

‘The moral is, never give parties.’

‘And we couldn’t undo that, and I did ask James sometimes how you were and where you were, because I loved you, and it was my only connection with you, all the time you were with Jeanne and-and that time when you were in Japan and in Australia and-I was thinking about you-and there wasn’t anyone but James I could-’

‘There wasn’t anyone but James, a very adequate substitute I daresay. Can’t you see how wickedly hurtful this is?’

‘She’s right,’ said James, ‘it isn’t like what you are thinking at all. However-’

‘I can just see you holding hands and talking about me!’

‘We never held hands!’ said Lizzie.

‘Christ! Do I care whether you held hands or not? Or whatever else you did which you will never confess? You’ve been telephoning and meeting and looking into each other’s eyes-I expect you’ve known each other forever, I daresay you knew Lizzie before I ever met her, you were there first, you were there before me, as you were with-as you were with-with Aunt Estelle and-and with Titus-you’d met Titus before, he said he’d seen you in a dream. I expect you were the person he was living with for those two years, no wonder he wouldn’t say! And you made Lizzie sing that special song of Aunt Estelle’s. I’m sure Lizzie dreams about you every night, you’re everywhere, spoiling everything in my life, you’d spoil Hartley if you could, only you can’t get at her, she’s the only thing that’s absolutely mine!’

‘Charles!’

‘You’ve been everywhere before me and you’ll be everywhere after me, when I’m dead you and Lizzie will be sitting in a bar discussing me, only then it won’t matter who sees you.’

‘Charles, Charles-’

‘I’m disappointed in you,’ I said to James. ‘I didn’t ever think you’d do anything mean or treacherous, I didn’t ever believe you’d put yourself into this sort of squalid muddle. It’s a kind of ordinary sly human stupidity which I was foolish enough to imagine you didn’t suffer from. You’ve behaved like ordinary people do who can’t imagine consequences. And one of the consequences is that, I don’t believe you, I can’t believe you. There could be anything between you and Lizzie. Ordinary mediocre people think that if they confess one tenth of the truth they’re in the clear. You’ve made all your words into lies, you’ve devalued your speech and-and in a moment you’ve spoilt the past-and there’s nothing to rely on any more.’

‘Perhaps it was a mistake to tell you in this way,’ said James. He seemed to be getting annoyed though he was also very upset. ‘Of course you were bound to hate it whenever it emerged, we never underestimated that. I hope and believe that you will appreciate later that the thing concealed was trivial, though the fact of the concealment was not. I realize that all this has been an affront to your dignity-’

‘Dignity? My dignity?’

‘Well, an affront. I am heartily sorry for it. But given the mistake, the fault, you can hardly have wished it to continue. This truth-telling is something painful which we do for your sake. Lizzie felt that she could not be as she wished for you with the lie unconfessed. She wanted there to be, especially now, no barrier of untruth between you.’

‘Why “especially now”? What’s special about now?’

‘Please,’ began Lizzie, ‘please-’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not excited, I’m not even angry, this isn’t anger.’ I had not raised my voice at all.

‘Then it’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all all right?’

‘What you say in your devalued words may even be true, as true as such words can make it-’

‘Then it’s all right-Charles darling-?’

‘It’s just that it’s brought this to an end.’

‘Brought what to an end?’ said James.

‘I want you both to go now. I want you to take Lizzie back to London.’

‘I was proposing to go and leave Lizzie here,’ said James. ‘Now I’ve told you surely I can go and leave her. That was the point of telling you. That was what I waited for.’

‘You thought I might blame you and let her off because I needed her so much? I don’t need her all that much, I can tell you!’

‘Charles, don’t destroy yourself,’ said James. ‘Why are you always so intent on breaking everything that surrounds and supports you?’

‘Go please. Go together.’

I suddenly seized Lizzie’s hand, and for a moment it clasped mine, then it became dead. I seized James’s hand and I forced their two hands together. The hands struggled in mine like small captive animals trying to escape.

James wrenched himself away and went into the book room. I could hear him throwing things into his suitcase.

I said to Lizzie, ‘Go and pack,’ and she reached out towards me, then turned away with a sob.

I went out onto the causeway and walked on until I reached James’s Bentley. It was big and black and expectant, a little dusty, in the lazy afternoon sunshine. I opened the door. The interior had an opulent quietness like the interior of a grand mansion or a rich silent shrine. The polished wood glowed, the brown leather gave off a fresh rare smell. The gear nestled in a soft crumpled skin. The carpet was thick, spotless. The silence, the intimacy of the car invited a privileged habitation. And in this sacred interior I was about to enclose James and Lizzie and despatch them forever, just as surely as if I were shutting them in a sealed casket and drowning them in the sea.

As I turned back towards the house I looked automatically at the stone dog kennel, where Gilbert had so carefully installed the basket to keep the mail out of the rainwater. I saw there was a letter in the basket. I went and picked it up. It was from Hartley. I put it in my pocket.

Lizzie came out first, carrying her handbag and crying. She started to say something to me but I held the car door open and ushered her into the passenger seat and closed the door on her with a soft final sound.

James came out, carrying his case and Lizzie’s, and stopped on the causeway wanting me to come to him, but I would not. I went round and opened the other door and stood by it. James came on and put the cases in the boot. He came round to the door.

I said, ‘I don’t want to see either of you ever again. You have spoilt each other for me with an effectiveness which I shall soon begin to see as malignant.’

‘Do not see it so. Don’t be a fool. What happened was accidental and forgivable. Just stop driving yourself mad with jealousy.’

‘I mean what I say. I don’t want to see you again, James, or you again, Lizzie, ever, between now and the end of the world. I shall destroy your letters unread, I shall close the door in your face, I shall cut you in the street. Don’t either of you come near me again. This may seem harsh, but you will soon see that there is a kind of automatic justice about it. You spoke about automatic justice, James, well this is it. You have, between you, made a machine and this is how it works. If you feel upset, I am sure you will soon console each other. I want you to be together. I shall think of you together. You don’t have to wait till I’m dead after all, you can hold hands now. As James is such a good driver you can hold hands all the way to London. Goodbye.’

‘Charles-’ said James.

I walked back to the causeway and began to cross it. I heard the door of the Bentley close quietly and the engine begin to purr. The car was moving away and the sound rose in pitch, then began to fade as it turned the corner. Then there was silence. I entered the empty house with my fingertips upon Hartley’s letter in my pocket.

I did not open the letter at once. Its presence there in my pocket was an absolute comfort. At any rate, I would feel it so for a time and banish fear. I wanted it to remain, for the moment, a thing, a simple object, a talisman, a magic stone, a sacred ring, a precious relic, something entirely protective and tender and pure. For now I had nothing left in the world but Hartley and her unspoilt separated being. Yes, James had always spoilt things for me. He had spoilt Aunt Estelle. Had I said something to him just now about Aunt Estelle? I could not clearly remember what I had said. My head boiled with feelings. My fingers touched the precious letter. My God, I needed salvation and I needed it now.

Yet even as I let Hartley’s healing and her peace stream into me in a race of therapeutic particles I was thinking in another part of my mind that in a little while I would be suffering the most frightful regret and remorse at having sent James and Lizzie off together. Why had I been such a perfect fool? It had been an ‘inevitable’ impulse of sheer destructiveness, the self-destructiveness of which James had accused me. I could have dismissed James, kept Lizzie, then dismissed her. Half an hour would have done it. I did not have to press them into each other’s arms like that. But I wanted to make what was terrible so much worse so as to be sure that it was fatal; like Hartley protecting herself by thinking I must hate her. I had sent them off together so as to make sure that I would never relent; and I had insured myself yet further. James would never never forgive such an enforced loss of face. Lizzie and James had, for me, destroyed each other, as in a suicide pact. I even suddenly pictured James with his revolver against Lizzie’s brow, then against his own. What truly demonic arrangement of fate had brought just those two together? Whatever might or might not have happened between them in the past, and I would never know, Lizzie’s hair would be spread out on James’s shoulder long before they got to London. What a trap I was in. But really I had been wise. The only cure here was death. They were both gone out of my life.

The house was curiously weirdly silent. I realized that for a long time now I had not been alone in it. What a lot of visitors I had had. Gilbert, Lizzie, Perry, James. Titus. His little plastic bag with his treasures, his tie and the cuff links and the love poems of Dante, was still lying in a corner of the bookroom like an abandoned dog. I recalled Bob Arkwright’s words. Titus had refused to be beaten by the cliff. He had tried again and again to get a hold on it and each time the strong quiet waves had simply pulled him off. Then when he was desperate and weary a yet stronger wave had dashed him against the rock. I went into the kitchen and poured out some of Perry’s whisky. A breeze was blowing in from the sea through the open door and I could hear the bead curtain clicking on the upper landing. I drank the whisky. Now everything in the world depended on Hartley’s letter. I sat down at the table. I looked at my watch. It was nearly six o’clock. James and Lizzie would stop for dinner on the way. James was sure to know a good restaurant. They would turn off the motorway. They would sit in the bar and study the menu. They would recover from their shock and feel liberated. No more secrecy now. It doesn’t matter who sees them holding hands. Oh God, if I had only told Titus, don’t swim there, it’s dangerous. If there’s any swell you can’t get out. Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea’s a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking. I took Hartley’s letter out and pressed it to my brow and prayed to her that she would save me out of the desolation and the wreck.

I looked at the envelope. I had not received a letter from Hartley, it occurred to me, for over forty years. Yet of course I had recognized the writing at once. It was much the same, a little smaller and less neat. I had kept all her old letters for a long time, then destroyed them all in a mood when it upset me (or perhaps exasperated me) too much to see them, then regretted this. I had of course already invented dozens of possible letters which she might have written to me. Charles, goodbye, I can never see you again. Or Ben has gone, whatever shall I do? Or Darling, I shall come to you, have a car ready tomorrow. I had already checked the number of the local taxi and placed it beside the telephone. I had felt the envelope and decided it was a short letter. Was that a good sign? At any rate it was not an incoherent inconclusive unburdening of the heart. I love you, but I cannot leave him, etc. etc. for pages and pages. Not that anyway. Had Hartley really made up her mind? What would we say, what could we say, when we met, about Titus? This was the overwhelming thing, this would perhaps decide all. How strange, how terrible, of fate to bring him to me and then to drown him. Would I ever mourn for him with Hartley? Whatever would this mourning be like, and whatever would it do to us? So I put off opening the letter. But of all the things I imagined, not one was what she had actually written.

In fact not a very long time passed. I stopped drinking whisky. I hate the stuff really. I walked all round the house, entering every room. I even climbed up to the attic and looked at the hole in the roof. The place was still very damp up there. Lizzie and Gilbert had put two buckets under the hole. These were both brimming full. I left them there. I searched the house as if I were looking for something, and all the time now I was holding Hartley’s letter in my hand. At last I threw myself down on my bed and began to open the letter as if I were a child and this were some strange treat which I had carried off to enjoy at last in secret. What spurred me to end the play of hopes was the thought that if I were to carry Hartley off effectively I had better book the taxi at once. And at the very last moment I fell into a frenzy because it occurred to me that I might already have delayed too long.

Then real absolute panic came. My teeth were chattering, my trembling clumsy fingers tore the envelope, tore the letter, spread it out. Then I had to get up and run to the window for a better light.

Dear Charles,

We would be very glad if you would come and see us for tea. Four o’clock on Friday would suit and we will expect you then unless you write otherwise. I hope that you can come.

Yours truly,

Mary Fitch.

This letter stunned me partly because I could not think or feel how to react to it. Was it good or bad? It asked for a meeting, but with ‘us’. If Hartley simply wanted me to do nothing, her best course was to do nothing herself. But here was a letter. What did it mean, what was its deep meaning? Friday was tomorrow.

I stared at the letter blushing and trembling and tried to understand it. I was not very bright. It even took me a little time to realize that it was not a real letter from Hartley at all. It was signed ‘Mary Fitch’. She had written it but not composed it. It was a letter written for the eye of her husband, even perhaps under his dictation. But then what did that mean? Had she perhaps cunningly put it into his head to agree to my visit? But how had she done it and what did she want to happen? Had Hartley, in order to see me, perhaps simply to see my face, argued Ben into inviting me? And would she, when I arrived, give me some cue? Or was it perhaps a trap, a dreadful revenge plan with which she had been forced to cooperate? If Ben blamed me for Titus’s death he might now be half mad with his own remorse and resentment against me. Now he would feel how much he loved Titus, and the only relief might be to feel how much he hated me. Just as I had sought relief from Titus’s death in blaming Ben. Well, even if it was a trap, I would walk straight in.

I kept looking at the letter and turning it over and over and even holding it up to the light in case there was some hidden message. The time of the appointment had been changed. What had originally been written was six o’clock, but this had been altered to four o’clock. This could be made sense of. Under Ben’s dictation, under his eye, she had written six, then hastily just as she was putting it into the envelope she had changed it to four, knowing that at four Ben would be absent. Perhaps away fetching somebody or something for the trap? So perhaps she would be alone after all? And she would throw herself into my arms as she had done on that night, the night when she had run away onto the rocks because she was so afraid of Ben, afraid of returning to him, afraid of staying with me. She had come to me then of her own accord. That was a piece of evidence, in fact the chief one.

I then thought, supposing she is alone then and supposing she says: take me away. I must have a car. I reflected rather desperately and miserably on this, hope fighting with fear, as I imagined how awful it would be to have the car and no Hartley: the symbol of escape but not the princess. I decided however that I must trust hope and plan for it, so I rang up the taxi man and asked for the taxi to be waiting outside the village church from four o’clock onward tomorrow. After I had done this I felt very much better, as if I had actually improved my chances.

By this time it was after nine o’clock and I decided to go to bed. I drank some wine and ate some bread and honey and then took a sleeping pill. As I lay down I remembered that I had lost James. And as it seemed to me then I had lost him not so much because of his sin, the ‘flaw’ he had spoken of, but simply because he had gone away in his big black car with Lizzie. Gone to perdition, by my doing. There was no getting back to my cousin now ever, through the barrier which he and I between us had so ingeniously erected. We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.

The next day was simply a problem of filling the time until four. At first I thought the problem insoluble and that I should run screaming mad with anxiety. However, I managed to pass the time without excessive anguish by busying myself continually with little tasks which had to do with Hartley. I paid some attention to my appearance, though there was an element of pretence in this, since I could not imagine Hartley cared about the details of my looks, and anyway I was quite sufficiently presentable when shabby and untidy, perhaps more so. I washed one of my better shirts and dried it in the sun. I got out my light black jacket and clean socks, and chose a smart pretty tie. I washed my hair and made it fair and fluffy. I had given up swimming, but it was still a bit stiff and salty. I decided it would be wise to pack a small suitcase, ready for possible instant flight, and I did so with a fast beating heart. At lunch time I ate sufficiently, not with appetite but out of a sense of duty, and drank no alcohol.

After lunch I went round the house carefully closing and fixing all the windows. I emptied the water out of the buckets in the attic and replaced them under the hole in the roof. As I came downstairs and into the little red room I suddenly saw, lying on the table and partially concealed by blotting paper, the envelope which contained the long letter which I had written to Hartley before Titus died and which I had never managed to deliver: the letter about how Ben had tried to kill me and about ‘tramping in and out’ and about the little quiet secret life we were going to lead together. Much of this had been made horribly out of date by Perry’s confession and Titus’s death, and I saw it with pain and was about to destroy it but decided to read it first. That I should actually reconsider this letter belonged somehow to the macabre economy of that day. It seemed a pity to waste the eloquence of the early part and the important explanation which it contained, so I destroyed only the last two pages which referred to Titus and Ben. Then I wrote on a separate sheet: I wrote this letter to you earlier but never delivered it. Read it carefully. I love you and we will be together. I also added my telephone number. I sealed it all up in a new envelope and put it in my pocket.

I set off early for the village, carrying my suitcase, and changed a cheque at the shop. I bought, together with razor blades, some cream and face powder of the kind which Hartley used. It was still not yet half past three, and I walked down towards the church. I was feeling sick with fear and hope, ready to vomit, ready to faint. The taxi was already waiting since the taxi man, as he told me, had nothing else to do. I told him to wait until I came. He said laughingly, ‘Three hours?’ I said, ‘If necessary.’ I went into the churchyard and looked at Dummy’s grave and remembered how I had meant to show it to Titus. I went inside the church and sat there panting and then suddenly thought I was going to be late and ran out and hurried up the hill. It was a warm day, but with plenty of sea breeze.

I came up as far as the house and stopped to get my breath with my hand on the blue wooden gate with the complicated latch. The blaze of big garish roses, every possible colour, flickered in the sun. I found that I was still carrying my suitcase, which I had intended to leave in the taxi, and Hartley’s make-up in a paper bag, which I had intended to put in the suitcase. Then I heard something awful, horrible, which chilled my blood and made me gasp with emotion. Inside the house a treble recorder and an alto recorder were in unison playing Greensleeves.

It was not simply that a recorder duet was the last thing I now expected to hear. Greensleeves had been, for Hartley and me, in the old days, our signature tune. I had had a recorder on which I laboriously rendered it, and we used to pick it out on her parents’ old piano. We sang it to each other. It was our theme song, our love song. If I had heard it played now on one recorder I would have taken it instantly as a secret message of hope. But on two recorders… was it possible that it was a deliberate insult, an intentional desecration of the past? No. She had simply forgotten.

All this passed through my mind during the time it took my fingers to undo the gate. I stepped slowly onto the path. The music ceased and a dog began to bark hysterically. I walked up to the door controlling my mind and already having fresh thoughts. The Greensleeves sacrilege meant nothing. Perhaps he liked the song and she had not been able to prevent its becoming a favourite. The recorder playing meant nothing. Obviously if she were intending to run she would be careful to behave as usual. Or perhaps the tune really had been intended as a sign to me? It was however already obvious that she was not alone. I rang the bell though the dog had made this unnecessary and his frenzied noise drowned the sound.

Hartley opened the door. She had her head thrown back in a way which gave her a proud air, but she was probably just agitated. She stared at me unsmiling, her lips parted, and I stared back, blushing hotly and feeling that my eyes were as round as saucers. I could somehow perceive that Ben was behind her at the open door of the sitting room. Even if I had planned some private communication for this moment it would have been impossible, we were both paralysed. The dog, a slinky black and white collie with a long nose, was now at Hartley’s feet, still barking.

Against the din I said, ‘Good afternoon’ and Hartley said, ‘Kind of you to come.’

I moved in. The smell of the roses, of which there were several vases even in the hall, mingled with the stuffy stench of the house, a sweetish sickly fussy interior smell like the smell of a very old woman’s room.

Hartley said ‘Be quiet!’ to the dog who finished its barking in its own time and then began to sniff me and wag its tail. Ben said from the sitting room, ‘Come in.’

I walked on in. The picture window displayed the sloping meadow and the rise of the blue sea receding into a heat haze and never had a pretty view looked so sinister. The two recorders lay on the wide white window sill, beside the field glasses.

‘Sit you down,’ said Hartley. I noticed she was almost smart today. She had had her hair waved into a respectable mop, and was wearing a straight plain blue shift dress over a blue and white striped blouse. She looked younger and healthier. She said, ‘Would you like to sit there, or there?’

I sat down in a low chair with wooden arms, avoiding the tub chair I had got stuck into before.

An elaborate tea had been laid out on a little round table and on a plate stand. There was bread and butter, scones, jam, some kind of sandwiches and an iced cake.

‘I’ll wet the tea,’ said Hartley and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with Ben.

Ben, still standing, busied himself with the dog. ‘Chuffey!’ This was evidently the animal’s name. ‘Chuffey, come here. Good dog. Now sit down. Sit.’ Chuffey sat, and Ben then seated himself, by which time Hartley had returned with the tea and Chuffey had got up again.

‘Let it mash a bit,’ said Ben.

Hartley shook the teapot and said, ‘It’s all right,’ and to me, ‘milk, sugar?’

‘Thanks, yes, both.’

‘You don’t mind milk in first? A sandwich? Or something with jam? The cake’s home-made but not in this home, I’m afraid!’ Hartley poured out the tea.

‘Sandwich, thanks. I love your view.’ This remark was totally automatic, I was almost unconscious with emotion.

‘Yes, it’s fine,’ said Ben. He added, ‘Fine.’ Then to Chuffey, ‘Sit! Good boy.’ He gave him a piece of sandwich.

‘You spoil him!’ said Hartley.

‘That’s the dog from Amorne Farm, isn’t it?’ I said, the automatic machinery still working. I then wondered if I was supposed to know that, then thought, it doesn’t matter.

‘Yes, they breed them,’ said Ben. ‘Good little chaps, Welsh collies. This fellow never cottoned on, though, no good with the sheep, were you, Chuff? You weren’t going to waste your time with those silly sheep, were you, boy?’

Chuffey sprang up again wagging his tail.

I had placed my suitcase on the floor beside me and on top of it the paper bag with Hartley’s make-up and my razor blades. I put down my cup, opened the case, put the bag inside and closed the case. I was afraid that Ben would somehow see or intuit what was in the bag. Ben and Hartley watched me.

‘I was interested to meet your army brother,’ said Ben. Hartley could not have discussed my family situation in any detail. Monsters do not have families.

‘He’s my cousin.’

‘Oh yes, cousin. What’s he in?’

‘King’s Royal Rifle Corps.’

‘Green Jackets.’

‘I mean Green Jackets.’

‘Is he still staying with you?’

‘No, he’s gone back to London.’

‘I wish I’d become a regular soldier,’ said Ben.

‘It might be rather dull in peace time,’ said Hartley.

‘I wish I’d done that,’ said Ben. ‘You really know people in the army. You get around. Still it’s nice to be at home too.’

‘Very nice.’

‘How’s your house?’

‘Rain got in.’

‘It did rain, didn’t it.’

‘Have another sandwich,’ said Hartley. ‘Oh, you haven’t eaten that one.’

I clutched the sandwich. I crushed it and some cucumber sped out onto the floor. I started to put the sandwich in my pocket. I said, ‘I am so sorry-I am so sorry about-about-’

‘About Titus,’ said Ben. ‘Yes. So are we.’ He paused, then added, ‘It was one of those things.’

‘It was a tragedy,’ said Hartley. She spoke as if this was some sort of definitive description.

I went on desperately. I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling, I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness. But I could not find suitable words. I said, ‘I feel it was my fault-I can’t-I shall never-’

‘Of course it wasn’t your fault,’ said Hartley.

‘It certainly wasn’t your fault,’ said Ben judiciously. ‘It’s more likely to have been his fault.’

‘I can’t bear it, I can’t believe it, I-’

‘We have to bear it and believe it,’ said Hartley. ‘It has happened. It’s no use talking.’

‘No, it’s no use talking,’ said Ben. ‘Like in the war. Something happens, you go on. You got to, eh?’

Hartley was sitting with her hands on her lap. She did not look at me as she spoke. She shifted self-consciously and patted her soft orderly bush of hair. She was wearing no lipstick and her tanned face showed no sign of make-up. She had unbuttoned the neck of her stripped blouse to reveal her sunburnt neck and collarbones. She looked sleeker, cleaner and better cared-for than at any time since our reunion.

Ben too I noticed had an almost prosperous air. He was wearing a clean shirt with a wide stripe and a matching tie. He had a loose brown summer jacket with lighter brown trousers and new-looking white canvas shoes. His shirt-clad stomach bulged comfortably over his tight leather belt. His short school-boy hair was smoothly combed and he was cleanly-shaven. He had a curious expression of distant calmness on his face. His eyelids drooped a little and his short upper lip was tensed, drawn up in a kind of poised fastidious manner. He too did not look at me. He had eaten several sandwiches during the previous exchanges.

‘I suppose so,’ I said, in answer to Ben’s question.

‘Let me give you a serviette,’ said Hartley, ‘you’ve got your hands all sticky.’ She took a paper one from a drawer and handed it to me.

‘You going to spend the winter here?’ said Ben.

They had evidently finished with the subject of Titus.

I could not blame them. Why should they display their emotions to me? They had to recover from that death in their own way. They were relieved that the subject had been mentioned between us and could now be dropped. Possibly that was the point of the meeting.

‘Yes. I live here.’

‘I thought you might go to France or Madeira or somewhere in the winter like rich folks do.’

‘Certainly not. Anyway I’m not rich.’

‘It’s bloody cold here, I can tell you.’

‘Look at him, look at the way he’s sitting!’ said Hartley, indicating Chuffey who was now sitting with his front paws neatly curled in and his back legs stretched out at full length. The dog looked up, pleased with itself.

‘You’re a funny dog, aren’t you?’ said Ben. Chuffey wagged his tail in agreement.

‘Are you going to get a dog?’ said Hartley to me.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Cat man, eh?’ said Ben.

‘What?’

‘Cat man?’

‘Oh-er-no.’

‘It’s a bore about the quarantine,’ said Ben. ‘Six months, like here.’

‘The-quarantine?’

‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘We’re off to Australia. No more English winters for us. We didn’t know it was so long when we got Chuff, but we can’t leave you behind, can we, boy?’

‘To Australia, you mean-for good?’

‘Yes.’

I looked at Hartley. She met my glance with her wide open calm violet eyes and with a sort of smile, then got up and took the teapot out into the kitchen.

‘To Australia?’

‘Yes, I can’t think why everybody doesn’t go. Lovely climate, cheaper grub, cheaper housing. God, I wish I was young again, I’d have a go out there.’

‘Ben can draw his pension in Australia,’ said Hartley, coming back with the teapot.

‘Ever been there?’ said Ben.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve been several times. It’s a marvellous country.’

‘Sydney harbour, Sydney opera house, cheap wine, kangaroos, koala bears, the lot, I can’t wait.’

‘When are you going?’ I said, looking at Hartley, who was busied with Ben’s cup.

‘Oh not at once, be five or six weeks. Got a lot of things to fix up, see my sister and that. We’ve been planning it a long time, but with the boy gone it’s easier.’

‘But-so you were always going to do this?’ I tried to catch Hartley’s eye. ‘I mean, it takes some time to plan to go to Australia-I didn’t know you were meaning to leave here-I’m rather surprised you didn’t tell me.’ I said this to Hartley.

‘I could hardly believe it,’ she said, smiling vaguely. ‘It seemed like a dream.’

‘You’ll believe it when you see that opera house,’ said Ben, ‘smiling like a great shell on the blue water.’

If they were leaving in five or six weeks the Australian plan could surely not have been made since I last saw Hartley. Why did she not tell me? What an extraordinary thing to do, not to tell me. Then I thought, maybe she didn’t believe it would happen. And if she was trying to make up her mind to bolt with me she would not tell me, that is just what she would do, not tell. I kept staring at her, but after the vague smile she looked elsewhere.

She said to Ben, ‘Do you think Chuffey will know us after all that time in quarantine?’

‘ ’Course he will! Won’t you, Chuff, eh, eh?’

‘Have some more tea?’ said Hartley to me. ‘Have a scone, some cake?’

I gulped some down and handed over my cup. I ate the piece of smashed sandwich which I had failed to put in my pocket. I felt completely confused, utterly at a loss, like a man in a strange country who is the victim of some quiet impenetrable charade. I could not understand.

‘I see you’re off somewhere too,’ said Ben, indicating my suitcase.

‘Oh-just a night in London-I’ll be back directly, I’ll be here-’

‘I can’t stand London,’ said Ben. ‘All that noise, all those people, bloody foreigners come to do a bit of shop-lifting.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is rather full of tourists at this time of year.’ I drank up my tea.

‘Well,’ said Ben in a tone which clearly implied the end of my visit, ‘maybe we’ll see you again before we go, but if not cheerio.’

‘Oh I’m sure we’ll meet again,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in the village tomorrow. I’ll be at home all the time, no travel plans. Well, I must be off now. Thank you for the tea.’

I got up. Idiotic Chuffey began to bark at once. I gave a vague wave to Ben, picked up my case and made for the door. Hartley followed me. Ben shouted at Chuffey, then closed the sitting room door after us to stop the dog from rushing out. I was alone with Hartley for a few seconds at the front door.

‘Hartley, you’re not going to Australia, you’re not?’ The dog’s loud barking covered my words.

She shook her head, waved a hand, opened her mouth, seeming to indicate that it was impossible to talk in this noise.

‘Hartley, you can’t go. Come away with me now. I’ve got a taxi waiting at the bottom of the hill. Come, now, run, run with me, we’ll go to London, anywhere you like-look, I wrote you this letter, it explains everything.’ I hardly knew what I was doing. I took the ‘quiet life’ letter out of my pocket and thrust it into a pocket in the skirt of her blue dress.

Ben opened the sitting room door and slipped out. Chuffey was still barking and I could hear his claws clicking on the inside of the door. Ben glanced towards us, then went into the kitchen leaving the door open.

I took a step backward, taking Hartley’s bare arm and trying to pull her after me. She had rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and her arm was soft and warm, like the arm of a young girl, it had not yet grown old. We were both now just outside the door.

‘Hartley, darling, love, my own love, come with me now, now, we’ll run down the hill to the taxi.’

She shook her head, and drew her arm away. She said something that sounded like ‘I can’t’. The damn dog was still barking.

‘You’re not going to Australia, I won’t let you. Let him go, you stay. Look, the taxi’s down beside the church. I’ll be there in the church, I’ll wait an hour, two hours, make an excuse and come down, we can get away at once. It doesn’t matter about packing, just come. Hartley, don’t stay there with that man. Choose happiness, come to me.’ I took her arm again.

She looked at me as if she were about to cry, but there were no tears. She moved a step back and I released her. ‘Hartley, speak to me-’

She said, but I could scarcely hear her, ‘You haven’t understood-’

‘Hartley, darling, come to me. I’ll be waiting for you, I’ll wait two hours in the church. Or I’ll expect you tomorrow. I’m not going away anywhere, I’ll be at home. You love me, you came to me that night, you told me those things. You must come, it isn’t too late, it’s never too late-’

The sun, the roses, dazzled my eyes. Ben had come back into the hall and I could see him in the shadows beyond Hartley’s head. One moment her face seemed a mask of pain, then, but perhaps it had not really changed, it looked empty, blank. Her big tearless eyes were blank.

Ben said loudly, over Chuffey’s barking, ‘Well, cheerio then.’

I stepped backward, then turned and walked to the gate. After I had gone through the gate I looked back. They were both standing at the door waving. I waved too and began to walk down the hill.

I sat in the church for more than two hours but she did not come. I paid off the taxi man and walked home.

So, I had five weeks. I was not beaten yet. What after all could Hartley say to me, with Ben behind her listening in the kitchen? What had she actually said, what had I said? Already it was fading. At any rate she had the letter, and the letter was clear. It would make a focus for her thoughts.

What on earth was the purpose of that invitation to tea? It had obviously been Ben’s idea. Perhaps Ben had more sense and more subtlety than I had credited him with. He had set a scene where Hartley could see me, quietly and in his presence, for the last time and take a dignified and final farewell. The idea was intelligent and could even be considered humane. It was however an irrelevant device. It was plain that Hartley did not want to go to Australia, that was Ben’s plan. When had he made it? When he first knew that I was in the village, or earlier? Anyway, Hartley would not go. She would jump, at the last moment, into the rescue boat.

I had taken to drinking in the evenings. At any rate, four days had passed and I had been drunk four evenings, on wine of course. I sat long long with the bottle in the kitchen, thinking, until the late midsummer daylight had entirely gone. Again, it was a time to wait, to wait and to reflect. Of course nothing had happened, no telephone call, no letter, nothing. But there would be a sign; Hartley or the gods would give me one.

The weather continued warm. The sea had regained its bejewelled purplish look, inlaid with spotted lines of emerald. It glittered at me as it had done on the first day. There were a few clouds, big lazy chryselephantine clouds that loafed around over the water exuding light. I gazed at them and wondered at myself for being too obsessed to be able to admire the marvels that surrounded me. But knowing how blind I was did not make me see. I sometimes looked for seals, but there were none. I had no heart to go swimming and wondered if I would ever swim again.

I tried not to think about Titus. Perhaps it was just this effort that drove me to drinking. I persistently directed my thought away from him, or busily thought of him in other contexts and relations, as part of other and still living problems. I anxiously and meanly thrust him away and let myself hope that if I could only put him off a little longer I would find that, after all, I had reentered the callous world of those who have recovered from bereavement. I had my own troubles and I had to survive. Now was no moment to have my mind laid waste by guilt and the torments of loss. So I did not think of him and that he was dead. There was a sort of grey dripping figure that kept trying to rise up in my mind and which I ruthlessly violently banished. At moments I almost felt afraid as if he were still somewhere, calling my thought, attracting my attention, and resenting my refusal to mourn. I busied my quick thought with other matters. But the dripping figure remained somehow present to me.

I thought about James and Lizzie. Which of those two had decided to tell me and why? I guessed that, especially after the sordid encounter with Toby Ellesmere, Lizzie’s nerve had broken, chiefly because there was by then too much at stake. She had let her old love for me take possession and she had reason to think that the quarry was weary and near to dropping. Her love was impatient, hungry. I would soon turn to her entirely, she thought, and she wanted to be safe. A nagging guilty anxiety made cause with her honesty to make her take the risk of telling. She was, in the long orbit of her love for me, at the nearest point. She wanted, for the great moment that was coming, to be in the clear, to be made by confession pure, to have no haunting revelation left to fear. She was perhaps not to know how searingly destructive was her combination with James. He knew. But by then the curious situation was beyond his control, and he had to play the gentleman, both by denying that it had originally been her idea (which I was inclined to believe) and by, when it came to it, letting her speak. Such can be the awful consequences of a prudent lie. Lizzie had feared to tell about James as Hartley had feared to tell about me; well, the women had all lied, it was their nature: Hartley, Lizzie, Rosina, Rita, Jeanne, Clement… God knows how many lies Clement must have told me. I would never know.

And I thought about the far past, sitting there in the kitchen in the warm summer twilight, drinking wine until my head reeled, with no lamp and no candle, and the form of the wine bottle outlined against the faint rectangle of the open door and a sky which was never to become entirely dark. And I heard the voice of Aunt Estelle, and not of Lizzie, singing Roses in Picardy, and I recalled the brilliant radiance of her presence and all the joy and all the pain she caused me once. God, how the young and beautiful vanish and are no more seen.

And I thought of Hartley on her bicycle and of her pure truthful face as it was then, so strangely like and unlike her worn old face which had suffered and sinned away all those years when I was somewhere else with Clement and Rosina and Jeanne and Fritzie. Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously, for I have loved you so long, delighting in your company. I had invested so much, as the years went by, in my belief in Hartley’s goodness. Yet had I always cherished this icon? The young too are ruthless and must survive. After I had lost all hope of her return, all hope of finding her, I had lived for a time on my resentment, on the relief of: let her go then! And I recalled now, dredged up out of the deep sea caves of memory, a conversation I had had about her with Clement. Yes, I had told Clement about Hartley. And Clement had said, ‘Put her away in your old toy cupboard now, dear boy.’ My God, I could hear Clement’s powerful resonant voice saying those words now, as if she were uttering them in the dark room. And I had put Hartley away, for a time. I had certainly, after those early days, never talked of her to Clement again. It would have been bad form, and Clement did not forgive bad form. Possibly Clement forgot her. But I did not forget, and Hartley lay like a seed in my heart, and grew again, purified as of old.

It was only now clear to me how very much I had made that image, and yet I could not feel that it was anything like a fiction. It was more like a special sort of truth, almost a touchstone; as if a thought of mine could become a thing, and at the same time be truth. It was the dismissive resentment, the ‘let her go then’, which was a lie. My odd almost mad faithfulness had become its own reward in the end. I had smoothed Hartley’s brow and unclouded her lovely eyes as the years went by, and the ambiguous tormenting image had become gentle and a source of light.

But what had happened now? I conjured up that weird scene in the sitting room at Nibletts with the scones and the cucumber sandwiches and the iced cake and Ben and Hartley looking so clean and well. (After they had waved me off, did Ben go back and cut himself a large slice of cake?) There had been a kind of creepy peacefulness. It was indeed like a primitive picture, the virtuous and happy couple in their pretty little house complete with collie dog. They were ‘plumped out’ in my memory, as art plumps out its subjects, making them fatter and smoother than life and more absolutely there. They looked better, healthier, handsomer than I had seen them before. Why? What had given them that calm satisfied look? The terrible answer came to me: Titus’s death.

I recalled what Hartley had said on the day that she ran to me and told me of her unhappiness, and so much filled me with the hope of delivering her, the day which I had told her was ‘evidence’. She had said that she was broken, her inner structure cracked, her integrity destroyed, by having through the years been forced to side with Ben against Titus. And I had wondered, was she a suffering redeemer or just a wreck? ‘Everything was broken, as if one could still stand up but all one’s bones were broken, all the bones and the little joints were broken, one wasn’t whole any more, one wasn’t a person any more.’ It could be that those awful years had really destroyed her sympathy with Titus. She had suffered too much for him. I recalled her words, ‘Sometimes I felt he hated us… sometimes I almost wish he were dead.’ The burden of guilt was too great to sustain without slow deep resentment. Titus, that fatal bundle that she herself had wantonly sought, and carried one day into the house, had ruined her marriage and ruined her life. But now it was as if Titus himself was the redeemer, he had vanished taking her guilt with him. The accusing consciousness was gone. Ben would be quietly relieved, and more secretly still she would join him, secretly, instinctively, blindly joining in his relief. The murder over, they would both feel better. Now the guilt would begin to fade. So in a way the death of Titus was fated; and in a way Ben had really killed him after all.

Of course these were rambling drunken thoughts, but I could not help thinking that I was right to see an awful relief as well as an awful resignation in their acceptance of that death. And of course in trying to see it as so weirdly falling into the pattern of their lives, I knew that I was surreptitiously attempting to ease my own remorse and guilt. How soon we cover up the horror of death and loss, if we can, with almost any sort of explanation, as if we had to justify the very fate which had maimed us.

The flight to Australia could now also be envisaged with a clear conscience. How could Hartley have accepted the idea of leaving England with Titus still lost? Had she accepted it? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was why it had to seem to her ‘like a dream’. I was certain that she had not, in her awkward innocent little conversations with Titus, told him about the Australian plan. After all, she had not told me. This omission now seemed to me a good omen. She had not told me because she was already making up her mind to stay.

Titus had said of her that she was a ‘fantasist’. As I went on thinking, the probable proportion of falsehood in what she had told me seemed to grow. Her structure cracked, like broken bones that would never knit, broken by Ben, by Titus, she had lost her way, her sense of direction to the truth. So where was my ideal now? The strange thing was that there was still a source of light, as if Hartley herself shed light upon Hartley. I could take it all, I could embrace it all, whatever she was like it was her I loved. It had happened so in my life that I had only one place where blameless love was taught and only one teacher. Thus people can be light sources, without ever knowing, for years in the lives of others, while their own lives take different and hidden courses. Equally one can be, and I recalled Peregrine’s words, a monster, a cancer, in the mind of someone whom one has half forgotten or even never met.

But supposing it should turn out in the end that such a love should lose its object, could it, whatever happened, lose its object? Some loves are not defeated by death, although it is not as easy as we think to love the dead. But there are pains and devices which defeat love more ingeniously. Would I at last absolutely lose Hartley because of a treachery or desertion on her part which should turn my love into hate? Could I begin to see her as cold, heartless, uncanny, a witch, a sorceress? I felt that this could never be, and I felt it as an achievement, almost as a mode of possession. As James said, ‘If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light.’ My love for Hartley was very nearly an end in itself. Twist and turn as she might, whatever happened she could not escape me now.

My reflections did not always maintain this high level. A passing thought of Rosina brought me back to the image of Ben looking so curiously prosperous, as Fritzie Eitel would say so ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’. Was that only the result of an awful death endured and accepted as a way to freedom, the prospect of the opera house reflected in the waves? Where had Rosina spent the night before that hideous day when we took Hartley back? I recalled what Gilbert had said about hearing a woman talking in the house, when he came to deliver the letter. Rosina had declared she was going to ‘console’ Ben. This could have been just a spiteful jest. On the other hand, Rosina was capable de tout. If something had ‘happened’ between Ben and Rosina this might account not only for his curious air of satisfaction but also for his more liberal attitude to Hartley, his tolerance of my visit, of a doorstep discussion lasting almost a minute and so on. Perhaps Rosina had done Hartley a good turn, either by giving Ben a little something to conceal and feel guilty about, or by making him realize how much his funny old wife was to be preferred to a flashy show-business bitch. These were, in fact, however I turned them about, unsavoury thoughts. But at the level of a vulgar curiosity they were at times a relief from the intensity of higher longings.

It then occurred to me that Rosina might still be at the Raven Hotel and that I could simply walk along and ask her, and even if she lied I might learn something.

I was of course reluctant to leave the house because I was, from one moment to the next, expecting Hartley or her ‘sign’, but I decided to risk it, and left a note on the door saying H. Wait. Back very soon. I decided not to telephone the hotel beforehand, as I wanted a little advantage from surprise. If I rang, Rosina would have time to invent an elaborate falsehood. I also wanted the tiny consolation of seeing her sudden pleasure at seeing me. For I had to admit that I wanted from Rosina not only information relative to my case, but also some touch of the comfort which an affectionate woman can give, even if she is a bitch. The walk, the objective, was in itself a distraction, a task, in a period of time when inactive waiting and thinking were already becoming a burden. If Hartley gave no sign I would soon act again. Meanwhile the investigation of Rosina might even turn out to be useful.

It was a warm cloudy day and a little wind was tossing bits of white foam off the many-capped wavelets in Raven Bay. The sea was in a restless fussy mood, dark blue in colour, that grim cold northern blue which even in summertime can convey a wintry menace. The sky too had its northern look, a pallid cool blue between compact and very white fast-moving clouds. The sunlight came and went as I walked along the familiar road, and the big round boulders of the bay leapt out into a surprising variety of grotesque stony shapes, pitted with shadows and blotched with old seaweed stains and eyes of brilliant yellow lichen, then quietly faded again as the light was dipped.

I reached the hotel. I had not been there since the day when I was expelled from the dining room for not wearing a tie. The sun was shining into the cheerful comfortably furnished front hall as I went in, and it occurred to me how clean and tidy and pleasant it was after the filth and squalor of Shruff End, where I had no heart to embellish any more. There were bright chintzy armchairs and a huge vase full of wild buddleia and fuchsia and willow-herb and some of the mauve mallow which was growing among the rocks. A not too sneering servitor came forward to enquire my business. I was wearing dirty cotton trousers slightly rolled up and straying blue shirt, but this could pass muster in the morning, even in the presence of chintz armchairs.

I said, ‘Excuse me, but is Miss Vamburgh still staying in the hotel?’

The man gave me a slightly funny look and replied, ‘Mr and Mrs Arbelow are in the lounge, sir.’

My God! I walked to the door he indicated. The big lounge, with a huge view of the bay, was empty except for two people seated by the window and looking out. They turned as I came in.

‘Charles!’

‘Why it’s our favourite fun person! Charles, old man, we were just hoping you’d come, weren’t we, Rose?’

Two faces were turned towards me, blazing with amused malice.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How nice to see you two together again. May I buy you a drink?’

‘No, no,’ cried Peregrine, ‘drinks are on us! Waiter, waiter! A bottle of that champagne we had yesterday, please, and three glasses.’

‘Did you go back to London,’ I asked Peregrine, ‘or did you come straight here?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I just stopped to drown my sorrow and there the old cross-eyed bitch was.’

‘And you fell into each other’s arms.’

‘Not at once,’ said Rosina. ‘We had a sort of jolly row to begin with. Peregrine was rather aggressive. He seemed to be chiefly annoyed about his windscreen.’

‘The windscreen bugged me,’ said Peregrine, ‘but it was mainly symbolic. Thank you, waiter.’

‘Let me open it,’ cried Rosina. ‘I love opening bottles of champagne. ’ The cork flew, the golden stuff foamed. ‘Charles!’

‘Thank you. Your health, Mr and Mrs Arbelow.’

‘We can hardly believe it, actually,’ said Rosina. ‘We’re happy. At least I’m happy. Are you happy, Peregrine?’

‘This unfamiliar sensation I identify unerringly as happiness. Charles, the best to you. Is your macabre military cousin still around?’

‘No, he’s gone.’

‘So you languish with the ever-faithful Liz?’

‘No, she’s gone too.’

‘All alone?’ said Rosina. ‘What about the bearded lady?’

‘Oh, they’re going away. Anyhow I’ve given up the Quest of the Bearded Lady. It was a brief mental aberration.’

‘That was the general view,’ said Peregrine. ‘We congratulate you.’

‘Are you going back to London?’

‘Tomorrow. Though it’s lovely here and the food is excellent. I’ve got a TV thing. May we drive you?’

‘No, thanks. And are you really joining forces again?’

‘Yes,’ said Rosina. ‘Everything has sprung back into place. We never got over each other and now we shall never have to. It’s as simple as that. But do you know, Charles, what made me suddenly see the truth?’

‘What?’

‘Peregrine murdering you!’

‘Well, trying to,’ said Peregrine. ‘I must be modest.’

‘Why was that so endearing?’ I asked.

‘Oh I don’t know, it was splendid. After all, you deserved to be murdered. For what you did to us, if for nothing else.’

‘Let’s not talk of that,’ I said.

‘Oh, don’t worry, we won’t list your sins, we’re feeling far too cheerful. But it was so sort of sporting and splendid of Peregrine to push you into that hole. I always hated the idea that he’d forgiven you. I only wish you’d drowned, it would have been more aesthetic.’

‘I can’t think why you didn’t,’ said Perry.

‘It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man really, a man who’s a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way. You are an awful crook, Charles, but basically you’re soft. I can’t imagine why I got so attached to you. I think it was your own illusions of power that fascinated people, not personal magnetism. We were just duped by your conceit. As a man, you’re a softie, I can see that now.’

‘I like being nice and soft, like a squashy toy. But are you actually going to marry again? Surely you won’t go that far? I thought you said marriage was hell, Peregrine, you said it was brainwashing. ’

‘Not when you marry the same person for the second time. Everyone should do it.’

‘But what about Pamela?’

‘Oh, haven’t you heard? Pam’s gone off with Marcus Henty. You know he’s become a gentleman farmer. The manor house life should suit Pam down to the ground.’

‘So I thought I’d better grab Peregrine before he started making passes at Angie!’

‘God!’ said Peregrine. They laughed crazily, Perry’s big wrinkled face red with the sun and the champagne. Rosina as usual was perched, now on the arm of Peregrine’s chair, swinging long bare legs, her white dress hitched up. She leaned over him, brushing his hair with her nose. They both twinkled at me, then regarded each other solemnly and went off into another fit.

‘I hope there’s a part for Peregrine in Fritzie’s Odyssey,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he could enact the old dog.’

‘Oh, that’s off,’ said Rosina.

‘Fritzie’s changed his mind?’

‘No, I’ve changed mine.’

‘We’re going to Ireland,’ said Peregrine.

‘To Ireland?’

‘Yes, to Londonderry. We’ve had enough of West End show business. We’re going to bring theatre to the people.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Don’t you mock, Charles. This is going to be the beginning of something great-’

‘So you’re giving up the Calypso part, Rosina?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

I said, ‘You’ve impressed me, at last.’

‘The beginning of something great,’ said Peregrine. ‘We’re going to write the plays ourselves and get local people to act them. The Irish are natural actors, and there’s a darling little theatre that’s only a bit bombed-’

‘I’m not mocking,’ I said. ‘I think you’re brave, both of you, I wish you the best of luck. No, no more champagne, thanks, it’s made me drunk already.’

‘Charles never had a head for drink,’ said Peregrine, pouring himself some more.

‘I’m not a monster in your mind any more, I hope?’ I said to him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I killed the monster when I pushed you into the sea. I’m glad you survived, really. All’s well that ends well.’

‘Ah, but when is the end? I must be off. Thanks for the champers.’

‘I’ll see you to the door,’ said Rosina. She skipped out, and I saluted Peregrine and followed.

Rosina’s white dress turned out to be a sort of shapeless prophetess’s robe made of some very light fabric which practically floated on the air all round her. She held out her arms and flapped it, then drew it closely about her. We came out and stood a moment in the sun on the stony verge of the road. Rosina’s feet were bare.

‘So you think this’ll work, I mean you and Peregrine?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘There was never anything the matter between us except jealousy.’

‘A big matter. And ubiquitous.’

‘Well, it’s a sign of love. Peregrine was simply obsessed about you, then he married that Pam simply to annoy me. And, you know, I couldn’t bear Peregrine being so passive about your stealing me away, I always wanted him to fight for me.’

‘The Helen of Troy complex. It’s fairly common.’

‘And when I heard he’d killed you…’

‘He boasted of it?’

‘Naturally-’

‘Well, good luck to you. Tell me, Rosina, that day when you went off and said you were going to see Ben, did you go?’

Rosina peered up at me with her intense crossing eyes. She chuckled and hugged the white robe more closely around her. ‘Yes.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Oh nothing happened. We had a tremendous talk.’

‘I would call that a happening. What about?’

‘Charles, you ask too many questions,’ said Rosina, ‘and you want something for nothing, you always did. But I can assure you of one thing-your bearded lady is a lucky woman. That man is extremely attractive.’

‘Oh-!’ I turned away with a wave. I would have given a lot for a tape-recording of that ‘tremendous talk’-if it really took place. It then occurred to me for the first time to wonder, had Ben and Hartley come together through sexual attraction?

‘Charles!’ Rosina had run a little way after me, padding on the grass verge with her bare feet, her white robe fluttering free.

I waited.

‘Charles, darling, tell me, I must know. When you came here today were you going to offer yourself to me?’

‘You ask too many questions,’ I said.

I could hear her laughing merrily as I walked on. Her having given up that film part, that had the hard touch of reality all right.

That evening the clouds gathered, the sun vanished, and it began to rain. The madcap English weather which had been putting on a passable imitation of June now decided to play March. A cold wind blew from the sea and brought the rain in aggressive irregular patterings, like flung pebbles against the back windows. The house was full of odd sounds of straining and creaking and the bead curtain kept up an irregular prattle of sudden flurried clicks. I looked for the Irish jersey and finally found it among the bedclothes and cushions which still lay on the floor of the bookroom. I tried to light the fire in the little red room, but my indoors store was exhausted and the outdoor wood was wet. I drank a lot of red wine after my lentil soup and went to bed early with a hot water bottle.

The next morning it was still raining a little but the wind had dropped and it was less cold. A thick clammy pearly-grey mist surrounded the house, it was impossible to see the end of the causeway. I carried the dustbins, which had not been cleared for some time, out to the road, and stood there for a while listening. The invisible countryside was a vast silence. I came in again, wet with fog and drizzle, and treated myself to a long breakfast of porridge with tinned cream and brown sugar, poached eggs, biscuits and honey (I had run out of bread) and several pots of hot tea. Sitting afterwards with a rug over my knees, my hand encountered in my pocket an object which my fingers were unable to ‘read’. I drew it forth and it turned out to be Hartley’s slide, which I had pocketed on the night when she ‘ran to me’. I stared at the almost senseless little thing and tried to grasp it as an omen, but it just looked pathetic and filled me with sadness and I put it away in a drawer in the red room.

I resumed my rug and began to review the situation.

One consoling and clarifying thought which kept returning to me as I tried to imagine Hartley’s state of mind, was that she might decide to wait until the last moment before making a dash for it. Let Ben go to Australia. It was certainly his wish, his idea, not hers. She could perhaps actually brush him off forever by slipping away just as he was about to sail. Then she would leap, like Lord Jim, down into my boat. Ben’s impetus would be greatest when he was all set to go, and he might then very well say: to hell with her. This view of the matter was ingenious and plausible. But could I rely on it sufficiently to remain inactive, and could I and dare I endure that much inactivity without a firm assurance from Hartley?

I decided I could afford to allow a span of two or three days more for Hartley to reflect upon the letter which I had left with her. I was glad she had that letter and I imagined it working upon her on my behalf like a little resident imp. I recalled too that I had the wit to give her my telephone number. Doubtless by now the woodwork class would know Ben no more, but he would surely have to leave the house sometimes to go somewhere, to pick up tickets, visas, money; and even though he might take Hartley with him he could not supervise her every move. Surely she could get away to a telephone and ring me up. Very few words would be necessary: Wait, I will come. Imagining those words carried me over one or two bad patches. And the constant possibility of the telephone call made endurable the short period of sheer waiting which I had decreed for myself.

But supposing nothing happened… and nothing happened…? Then of course I must contrive to see Hartley, by some method yet to be invented, and even if it were to involve some sort of ‘showdown’ with Ben. There must be no more charades. The prospect of this perhaps decisive showdown filled me with a mixture of fear and pleasurable excitement, as I saw this as the final barrier beyond which I could, if I knocked it down, see my prize secure. The ‘knocking down’ image was not altogether a reassuring one however. At the very least I must be prepared to use force in self-defence. Ben was a more violent man by nature, which was psychologically a considerable advantage. He probably liked hitting people. He was younger than me, a burly strong fellow, but now getting fat and a little out of condition, whereas I was fit and agile. The theatre demands physical fitness and I had always responded to this demand with the scrupulous keenness of an athlete.

With a view to self-defence I searched Shruff End for a suitable blunt instrument. At any moment I might, after all, receive a visit not from Hartley but from Ben. The idea of killing Ben had not entirely left my mind. It was as if, contrary to reason and more calm reflection, a deep trace had been left in my mind, like a memory trace, only this was concerned with the future. It was a sort of ‘intention trace’, or like what might exist in the mind of someone who could ‘remember’ the future as we remember the past. I am aware that this scarcely makes sense, but what I felt here was neither a rational intention nor a premonition nor even a prediction. It was just a sort of mental scar which I had received and had to reckon with. I refrained, as yet, from planning. I vaguely envisaged the moment of ‘battering through’ as a scene of legitimate self-defence. And I searched for a blunt instrument.

It was now late in the evening of the day following my meeting with Perry and Rosina. A bit earlier I had felt a distinct temptation to walk along to the Raven Hotel and follow Peregrine’s example of drowning my sorrows in the bar. I felt a need simply to see a few ordinary human beings who were living ordinary human lives, having holidays, honeymoons, quarrels, trouble with their motor cars, trouble with their mortgages. However I feared to discover the Arbelows still there and I felt I could now do with a long interval before encountering that pair again. Perhaps I would go one day to visit the darling little theatre in Londonderry, but I thought it more likely that I would not. I did not want to go to the Black Lion because of the painful proximity to Hartley and because of the inquisitive dangerous hostility of the clientele and because I might run into Freddie Arkwright. Besides I had to stay near the telephone. Looking for a weapon was at least an occupation.

Mrs Chorney had left various things behind in the attics, which I had searched by daylight and in vain. I had found, lying behind the bath, a long piece of metal, perhaps for use as a crowbar, but it was too heavy and too large to be carried in, as I envisaged the matter, a mackintosh pocket. I had of course reviewed my own tools, but these were ridiculously scanty: screwdrivers but no chisel, and only a sort of little ‘lady’s hammer’. Now in the dark late twilight, I was searching with the help of a candle a space I had discovered under the sink which seemed to be a hiding place of various items. Probing, amidst damp rotting wood and a colony of woodlice, I found a thick heavy piece of metal which turned out to be a hammer head. The shank or handle, or whatever the wooden shaft is called that propels the head, was lying separately and I placed both items on the table.

It was now almost dark outside, the mist, more like a cloud descended, obscuring whatever light the twilit sky might still have offered. A small rain was falling, and although the wind was not strong the house seemed to be moving, shaking itself and twitching, jerking and creaking and stretching like a wooden ship. I could hear the window frames shifting, the bead curtain clicking, the front door rattling, and a little very high tinny vibration which I had, after some search, detected as coming from the front door bell which hung in the kitchen. I was also startled by a sound coming from outside, from across the sea, a prolonged repeated booming, not unlike a ship’s foghorn. I had never heard a foghorn before upon our strangely unfrequented sea; perhaps it was a ship that had lost its way and would, after an interval of silence, suddenly crunch upon my rocks with a most unimaginable din? The foghorn noise, if it was one, had ceased for a time; but now there was another sound, the peculiar regular slapping boom which was produced by the water racing into Minn’s cauldron and being abruptly forced out again. I put the candle on the table between the hammer head and the wooden handle which looked, oddly separated from each other, like ritual instruments belonging to some unfamiliar cult. I listened to the loud hollow regular noise from the cauldron and the force of it seemed to enter my body, it began to seem like a strong beating heart, like a strong beating of my own heart, and then like the menacing accelerating sound of the wooden clappers used in the Japanese theatre.

I felt suddenly very uneasy and decided to lock the door onto the lawn. As I moved to it, with my back to the candle, I could see the scene outside dimly through the window. I stopped with a sharp pang of fright, seeing a dark figure standing near to the door, between the house and the rocks. Then the next second I somehow realized that it was James. We looked at each other through the glass. Instead of opening the door I turned back, picked up the candle, and went out into the hall to find one of the oil lamps. I lit the lamp, blew out the candle, and came back with the lamp into the kitchen. James had come inside in the dark and was sitting at the table. I put the lamp down, turned up the wick, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ as if I had not seen him before or perhaps expected it to be somebody else.

‘You don’t mind my turning up?’

‘No.’

I sat down and started fiddling with the hammer. James rose, took off his jacket which was spotted with rain, shook it, hung it over the back of his chair, folded back his shirt cuffs, and sat down again with his elbows on the table and watched me.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Mending this hammer.’ The problem was that the head fitted onto the handle all right, but loosely, so that it would come off in use.

‘The head’s loose,’ said James.

‘I have noticed that!’

‘You need a wedge.’

‘A wedge?’

‘Put a chip of wood in to keep it tight.’

I found a chip of wood (the house was littered with chips of wood for some reason), balanced it inside the metal hole and drove the shaft in, keeping the chip in place. I swung the hammer. The head held firmly.

‘What do you want it for?’ said James.

‘To crush a black-beetle.’

‘You like black-beetles, at least you did when we were young.’

I got up and found a litre bottle of Spanish red wine, opened it and put it on the table with two glasses. The room was cold so I lit the calor gas stove.

‘What larks we had,’ said James.

‘When?’

‘When we were young.’

I could not recall any larks I had had with James. I poured out the wine and we sat in silence.

James, not looking at me, was making patterns on the table with his finger. Possibly he was embarrassed; and at the idea that he might feel himself for once in the position of a suppliant I felt embarrassed too. However I was in no mood to help him out. The silence continued. This was getting like a Quaker meeting.

James said, ‘Can you hear the sea?’

‘That was Keats’s favourite quotation from Shakespeare.’ I listened. The beating sound had stopped and been succeeded by a kind of regular wailing hiss as the large methodical waves climbed the rocks and drenched them and fell back. The wind must have increased. ‘Yes.’

After another pause he said, ‘Anything to eat?’

‘Vegetable protein stew.’

‘Oh good, I’m sick of eggs.’

We sat on drinking for a while. James poured water into his wine and I followed suit. Then I got up to heat the stew. (I had thrown it together that morning as an emergency ration, it keeps well.) As I did so I reflected that the machine which I had ingeniously constructed to separate myself from my cousin forever did not seem to be working very well.

‘Bread?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Hell, there’s no bread, only biscuits.’

‘OK, anything.’

We settled down to the stew.

‘When are you coming back to London?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What about Hartley?’

‘What about her?’

‘Any news, views?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve given up?’

‘No.’

‘Seen her?’

‘I had tea with her and Ben.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Polite. More wine?’

‘Thank you.’

I was afraid that James was going to pester me with more questions, but he did not, he seemed to have lost interest. With an air now of generalizing he said, ‘I think you’re nearly through, out of it. You’ve built a cage of needs and installed her in an empty space in the middle. The strong feelings are all around her-vanity, jealousy, revenge, your love for your youth-they aren’t focused on her, they don’t touch her. She seems to be their prisoner, but really you don’t harm her at all. You are using her image, a doll, a simulacrum, it’s an exorcism. Soon you will start seeing her as a wicked enchantress. Then you will have nothing to do except forgive her and that will be within your capacity.’

‘Thank you-but as it happens I don’t love her image, I love her, even what’s awful.’

‘Her preferring him to you? That would be a feat.’

‘No, wreckage, carnage, what’s in her mind.’

‘Well, what is in her mind? Perhaps she was simply bound to your memory by a sense of guilt. When you released her from it she was grateful, but then her own resentment was set free, her memories of how tiresome you were perhaps, and after that she could revert to a state of indifference. Any cheese?’

‘James, you understand absolutely nothing here. And I have not given up, nor am I nearly, as you put it, out or through!’

‘It may even be your destiny to live alone and be everybody’s uncle like a celibate priest, there are worse ends. Any cheese?’

‘I’m not ending just yet I hope! Yes, there is cheese.’ I set out the cheese and opened another bottle of wine.

‘By the way,’ said James, ‘I hope you believed what I said to you about Lizzie?’

I filled our glasses. ‘I can believe it was all her idea and you had to be a gent about it.’

James sat for a moment concentrating. I guessed that he was wondering whether to start again on details about how often they had met and so on. I decided it didn’t matter. I believed him. ‘It doesn’t matter. I believe you.’

‘I’m sorry it happened,’ he said. It was not exactly an apology.

‘OK. OK now.’

James returned to making patterns on the table and I felt embarrassed again. I said rather awkwardly, ‘Well, tell me about yourself, what are you up to?’

‘I’m going away-’

‘Aha, so you said, you said you were going on a journey. To where there are mountains maybe, and snow maybe, and demons in and out of boxes maybe?’

‘Who knows? You’re a sea man. I’m a mountain man.’

‘The sea is clean. The mountains are high. I think I am becoming drunk.’

‘The sea is not all that clean,’ said James. ‘Did you know that dolphins sometimes commit suicide by leaping onto the land because they’re so tormented by parasites?’

‘I wish you hadn’t told me that. Dolphins are such good beasts. So even they have their attendant demons. Well, you’re off are you, let me know when you’re back.’

‘I’ll do that thing.’

‘I can’t understand your attitude to Tibet.’

‘To Tibet?’

‘Yes, oddly enough! Surely it was just a primitive superstitious mediaeval tyranny.’

‘Of course it was a primitive superstitious mediaeval tyranny,’ said James, ‘who’s disputing that?’

‘You seem to be. You seem to regard it as a lost Buddhist paradise. ’ I had never ventured to say anything like this to James before, it must have been the drink.

‘I don’t regard it as a Buddhist paradise. Tibetan Buddhism was in many ways thoroughly corrupt. It was a wonderful human relic, a last living link with the ancient world, an extraordinary untouched country with a unique texture of religion and folklore. All this has been destroyed deliberately, ruthlessly and un-selectively. Such a quick thoughtless destruction of the past must always be a matter of regret whatever the subsequent advantages. ’

‘So you speak as an antiquarian?’

James shrugged his shoulders. He was examining several moths which were circling about the lamp. ‘You have some splendid moths here. I haven’t seen an Oak Eggar for ages. Oh dear, I think that poor fellow’s had it. Do you mind if I close the window? Then they won’t come in.’ He deftly caught two of the moths and put them outside, together with the corpse of their handsome companion, and closed the window. I noticed that it had stopped raining and the air was clearer. The wind had blown the mist away.

‘But then you were just keen on studying the superstition?’ I said. I felt that this evening, in spite of our embarrassments, my cousin was more open to me than I had ever known him.

‘What after all is superstition?’ said James, pouring some more wine into both glasses. ‘What is religion? Where does the one end and the other begin? How could one answer that question about Christianity?’

‘But I mean you were just a student of-not a-’ What did I mean? I could not get my question clear.

‘Of course,’ said James, on whom the wine seemed simply to have the effect of speeding his utterance, ‘you are right to keep using the word “superstition”, the concept is essential. I asked where does the one end and the other begin. I suppose almost all religion is superstition really. Religion is power, it has to be, the power for instance to change oneself, even to destroy oneself. But that is also its bane. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. The short path is the only path but it is very steep.’

‘I thought religious people felt weak and worshipped something strong.’

‘That’s what they think. The worshipper endows the worshipped object with power, real power not imaginary power, that is the sense of the ontological proof, one of the most ambiguous ideas clever men ever thought of. But this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and attachments compose our god. And when one attachment is cast off another arrives by way of consolation. We never give up a pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another. All spirituality tends to degenerate into magic, and the use of magic has an automatic nemesis even when the mind has been purified of grosser habits. White magic is black magic. And a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. Demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. The last achievement is the absolute surrender of magic itself, the end of what you call superstition. Yet how does it happen? Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.’

Perhaps James was drunk after all. I said, ‘Well, I don’t understand the half of what you say. Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned ex-Christian, but I always thought that goodness was to do with loving people, and isn’t that an attachment?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said James, rather I thought too casually, ‘yes-’ He poured himself out some more wine. We had opened another bottle.

‘All this giving up of attachments doesn’t sound to me like salvation and freedom, it sounds like death.’

‘Well, Socrates said we must practise dying-’ James was now beginning to sound flippant.

‘But you yourself,’ I said, for I wanted to hold on to him and bring all this airy metaphysic down to earth, and also to satisfy my curiosity when for once he was in a talkative mood, ‘you yourself have loved people, and after all why not, though God knows who they are, since you’re so damn secretive. You’ve never introduced me to any of your friends from the east.’

‘They never visit me.’

‘Yes, they do. There was that thin bearded chap I saw in your flat once, sitting in a back room.’

‘Oh him,’ said James, ‘he was just a tulpa.’

‘Some sort of inferior tribesman I suppose! And talking of tulpas, what about that sherpa that Toby Ellesmere said you were so keen on, the one that died on the mountain?’

James was silent for a while and I began to think that I had gone too far, but I let the silence continue. The sea was audible but quieter.

‘Oh well,’ he said at last, ‘oh well-’, and then was silent again, but was clearly going to tell something, so I waited.

‘There’s not much to that story,’ he said, rather disappointingly, ‘at any rate it’s soon told. You know that some Buddhists believe that any earthly attachment, if it persists until death, ties you to the Wheel and prevents you from attaining liberation.’

‘Oh yes, that wheel-’

‘Of spiritual causality. But that’s by the way.’

‘I remember I asked you if you believed in reincarnation and you said-’

‘The sherpa in question,’ said James, ‘was called Milarepa. Well, that wasn’t his real name, I called him that after a-after a poet I rather admire. He was my servant. We had to go on a journey together. It was winter and the high passes were full of snow, it was a pretty impossible journey really-’

‘Was it a military journey?’

‘We had to get through this pass. Now you know that in India and Tibet and such places there are tricks people can learn, almost anybody can learn them if they’re well taught and try hard enough-’

‘Tricks?’

‘Yes, you know, like-like the Indian rope trick-anything-’

‘Oh, just that sort of trick.’

‘Well, what is that sort of trick? As I say, all sorts of people can do them, they can be jolly tiring but-you know they have nothing to do with-with-’

‘With what?’

‘One of these tricks is raising one’s bodily warmth by mental concentration.’

‘How’s it done?’

‘It’s useful in a primitive country, like being able to go on walking for forty-eight hours at five miles an hour without eating or drinking or stopping.’

‘No one could do that.’

‘And to be able to keep oneself warm by mental power is obviously handy on a winter journey.’

‘Like good King Wenceslas!’

‘I had to cross this pass and I decided to take Milarepa with me. It would involve spending a night in the snow. I didn’t have to take him. But I reckoned I could generate enough heat to keep us both alive.’

‘Wait a minute! You mean you can do this thing of generating bodily heat by mental concentration?’

‘I told you it’s a trick,’ said James impatiently. ‘It’s got nothing to do with anything important, like goodness or anything like that.’

‘And then-?’

‘We got up to the top of the pass and got caught in a blizzard. I thought we’d be all right. But we weren’t. There wasn’t enough heat for two. Milarepa died in the night, he died in my arms.’

I said, ‘Oh God.’ I couldn’t think what further to say. My mind was confused and I was beginning to feel very drunk and sleepy. I heard James’s voice continuing to speak and it seemed to come from very far away. ‘He trusted me… It was my vanity that killed him… The payment for a fault is automatic… They can get to work on any flaw… I relaxed my hold on him… I lost my grip… The Wheel is just…’ By this time my head was down on the table and I was falling quietly asleep.

I awoke and it was day. A clear grey light of dawn, the sun not yet risen, illuminated the kitchen, showing the wine-stained table, the used dishes, the crumbled cheese. The wind had dropped and the sea was silent. James had gone.

I leapt up and called, running out onto the lawn. Then I ran back into the house, calling again, and then through and out of the front door onto the causeway. The blank grey silent light revealed the rocks, the road, and James just getting into his car. The car door closed. I called and waved. James saw me and lowered the window, he waved back but he had already started the engine and the car was moving.

‘Let me know when you’re back!’

‘Yes. Goodbye!’ He waved cheerily and the Bentley sped off and turned the corner and its sound fell into the silence. I returned slowly to the house.

I walked back over the causeway, aware now of a dreadful headache and a swinging sensation in the head: not surprising, since, as I established later, James and I had drunk between us nearly five litre bottles of wine. There was also a rapid sliding crowding curtain of spots before the eyes. I got inside, reached the kitchen and sat down again at the table, resting my head in my hands. I carefully worked out where I could find a glass of water and some aspirins and I got up and found them and sat down again and dozed. The sun came up.

I woke again, sitting at the table with my head lolling about and a violent pain in my neck. I recalled that I had had a curious dream about freezing to death in a snow-storm. Then I remembered that James had told me some very odd story about a journey in Tibet. And I half remembered a lot of other strange things that James had been saying. I got up, feeling horribly giddy and climbed upstairs and lay down on my bed and fell into a sort of sleep coma. I woke later on, not sure if it was morning or afternoon and feeling less giddy but rather mad. I went down to the kitchen and ate some cheese, then went back to bed again.

After that things became yet more confused. I must have stayed in bed quite a lot of that day. I remember waking during the night and seeing the moon shining. The next morning I came downstairs early and was suddenly persuaded, or perhaps I had had the idea in the night, that since I had given up swimming it was time that I had a bath. I did not fancy the labour of carrying hot water up to the bathroom. This time however I succeeded in lugging Mrs Chorney’s old hip bath out of its refuge under the stairs and started to boil saucepans of water on the gas stove. Halfway through this proceeding I felt a sharp pain in the chest and began to feel faint. I gave up the bath idea and made some tea, but could eat nothing. I felt a bit sick and decided to go back to bed. I was now sure that I had a temperature but possessed no thermometer. I stayed in bed. My bed felt rather like a hammock in a storm-tossed ship. I had coloured cloudy thoughts, or visions and was never sure if my eyes were shut or open. I wondered if I was seriously ill. Now I had a telephone but no doctor. I did not fancy summoning the one who had seen me at two a.m. after my ‘mishap’, anyway I never knew his name. I considered telephoning my London doctor and describing my symptoms, but decided not to since the symptoms would sound uninteresting and it was hard at the best of times to interest my London doctor. I comforted myself by reflecting that no doubt I had caught the ’flu or whatever it was that James had suffered from after I had survived my sea ordeal, and that James’s ailment had not lasted long.

Mine lasted I think longer. At any rate some days passed during which I remained prostrate, reluctant to move, unable to eat. No one called, no one telephoned. I crawled out to the dog kennel but no one had written either. Perhaps there was a prolonged bank holiday or a postal strike. I was not too worried at the lack of news. I was entirely occupied with my illness. For the time it absorbed me, as if it were something that I was working at. I even ceased to worry about it; and generally, as I had anticipated, it began to go away. I could walk downstairs once more without resting on every step, and I was comforted by sensations of hunger. I ate a few biscuits and enjoyed them.

That day, or perhaps the next day, as I remember I was feeling stronger and more normal, the telephone rang in the morning. I was now well aware what this strange sound was. I had been thinking urgently about Hartley and when I heard the shrill dreadful bell I said to myself at once, This is it. I ran, falling over my feet, to the bookroom. I grabbed the phone, dropped it, picked it up.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Charles!’

It was Lizzie.

I said, ‘Hello, wait a minute.’

I put the instrument down on some books and sat there trying to calm myself and collect my wits. I had a misery-pain in the stomach about Hartley which I knew would now not go away. Everything now was urgent.

‘Sorry, Lizzie, I was just turning off the gas.’

‘Charles, are you all right?’

‘Yes, why shouldn’t I be? Well, I’ve been having ’flu, but I’m better. Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m at the Black Lion. Can I come and see you?’

‘No. Stay there. I’ll come and see you. What’s the time? My watch stopped days ago.’

‘Oh about ten or something.’

‘Are they open?’

‘Who? Oh, the pub. No, but they will be by the time you come.’

‘I’ll be along.’

At the sound of Lizzie’s voice I felt a sudden frantic desire to get out of the house. I ran into the kitchen and looked at myself in the little mirror above the sink. I had not shaved during my illness and had developed a repulsive reddish beard. I shaved, cutting myself, and combed my hair. I found my very crumpled jacket and my wallet. A watery sun was shining but the air was cold. I ran out of the house and over the causeway and turned towards the village. I soon stopped running however as a sort of cloud of weakness enveloped my body and twirled it about. I walked on rather slowly, breathing carefully; and only then did it occur to me to wonder whether James had tipped Lizzie off to come and see me. I was glad to find that I did not care, and I stopped thinking about it. When I turned into the village street the first thing I saw was Gilbert’s yellow Volkswagen parked outside the Black Lion.

‘Charles!’

Lizzie saw me coming and ran to me. I could see Gilbert smirking at the door of the pub. What was my role in this play? I felt myself being relaxed and smiling like a man in a dream who cannot remember his lines but knows he can manage impromptu.

‘Why, Lizzie, hello there, and Gilbert too, how nice!’

‘Charles, you’re looking all thin and pale.’

‘I am gratified to hear it, I’ve been ill.’

‘Ought you to be still in bed?’

‘No, I’m fine. What a nice surprise to see you two here.’

‘Hello, dear Charles,’ said Gilbert coming forward. His handsome self-conscious much-wrinkled face wore a dog-like look of nervous guilty imminent delight. If patted he would jump, bark.

‘Charles looks quite ill.’

‘Not still infectious I hope?’

‘No, no.’

‘We’ve been sitting outside,’ said Lizzie. ‘It’s quite warm in the sun.’

‘How nice.’

‘What’ll I get you, Charles?’ said Gilbert. ‘No, no, you sit down, you’re the invalid, I’ll get it. What about some of that cider, or is it too sweet for you?’

‘Yes, fine, thanks. Well, Lizzie, what a treat to see you and how delightful you’re looking.’

Some women, and as I said before Lizzie was one, vary in appearance amazingly on the scale from really ugly to really beautiful. Lizzie was up the beautiful end today, looking young and bright, like a plump principal boy, her hair blown into little screwy curls by the wind. She was wearing a long blue and green striped shirt over black trousers. Her face expressed something of the same Gilbertian dog-like uncertainty, with in her case an added air of apologetic impish confidence.

We sat down on the wooden bench outside the pub and looked at each other, I vaguely beaming and she intent and shining-eyed. I felt as never before exposed to the citizenry, but there were very few of them about.

I said, ‘It was kind of you to ring me. Are you just passing through? Forgive me if I don’t ask you to stay, I’m not feeling up to visitors at present.’

‘No, no, we’ve got to get back to the motorway, Gilbert’s going to see somebody in Edinburgh. There’s this play coming on at the Festival-’

‘Don’t tell me.’

‘Oh Charles, darling, darling, you do forgive me, don’t you?’

‘Whatever for, Lizzie?’

‘Well, you do, don’t you?’

‘Yes, if it’s necessary, but I’m quite in the dark. What a little mystery-monger you are! Ah here’s dear Gilbert with the drink.’

Lizzie and Gilbert had come simply to be let off. They sat staring at me and smiling, like two children wanting to be given a certificate of forgiveness which they could rush off with, capering and flourishing it in the air. They wanted me to love them and to remove a blot on their happiness. How carefully they must have discussed the matter before coming to me almost formally like this. They were like children to me now and I suddenly felt old, and perhaps I had significantly aged in the time since I came to the sea.

I had lost Lizzie but when, how? Perhaps I should have grasped her at the start. Or perhaps she really did like Gilbert or life with Gilbert better. Or perhaps in some deep way when I sent her off with James I had frightened her too much. Lizzie was opting for ease and happiness and no more frights, I could not blame her. And I knew that James had made a barrier between us. Although with James there really had been ‘nothing there’, that ‘nothing’ was more than enough. That had always been the way with James. He could spoil anything for me by touching it with his little finger. Perhaps my childish idea was indelible, the idea that James must always be preferred. Of course James had intended no ill. But the lie itself was indeed a fatal flaw. I had probably not lost James but I had lost Lizzie, I had effectively ‘strayed’ her, as I had wanted to earlier on. And, I found myself almost laboriously remembering, I had wanted to stray Lizzie because of Hartley. And I had come running out of the house this morning finding it intolerable to stay there for a second longer, because of Hartley. My illness had marked the span of waiting time and it was now over. Lizzie’s telephone call had been an unwitting signal, a summons to action. For me and for Hartley the hour had come.

And meanwhile I sat there beaming at Lizzie; and smile as we might-and perhaps she smiled innocently, hopefully, not realizing what had happened and imagining that she could still hold me and not hold me, have me and not have me, and all manner of thing would be well-the bond was broken. I recalled what James had said about it being my destiny to live alone and be everybody’s uncle. I said, ‘So you’re glad to see your Uncle Charles?’

They laughed and I laughed and we all laughed and Lizzie squeezed my hand. I had given them the licence to be happy and I could see how pleased and grateful they were. Everyone seemed to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed except me.

The cider was too sweet and rather strong and it was beginning to have its effect. My air of joviality was becoming easier, when the thought of Titus came to me almost solemnly as if someone had brought in a severed head upon a dish. James had been saying something about Titus which I could not remember. Causality kills. The wheel is just. I remembered Lizzie’s scream on that day. Perhaps somehow after all I had lost Lizzie because of Titus, because she blamed me, because it was all too much. How tightly it was woven, the web of causes. Lizzie was screaming with pleasure now. Well, she had to survive, we all had to survive. Titus was a stranger who had not sojourned with us long.

We talked for a while, chatting easily as old friends do. Gilbert had a good part in a TV series which seemed likely to run forever. They were going to have the house redecorated. Lizzie had gone back to her part-time hospital job. I was to come to dinner. They said nothing about Hartley and the discreet omission seemed to set the seal upon my separation from them, although it was hard to imagine what they could have said.

I asked the time, took my wrist-watch from my pocket and set it right by Lizzie’s. They said they had to go and I walked them to the car. Lizzie wanted a little hugging scene but I hustled her in with a pat. I think Gilbert wanted to kiss me. I waved them off as if they were the end of something. Then I began to walk along the street in the direction of the church and the road that led up to the bungalows. I had nearly reached the corner when someone behind me touched my shoulder, and I turned, shocked. It was a woman who at first looked quite strange. Then I recognized the shop lady. She had run after me to tell me that she had fresh apricots in stock at last.

As I began to climb the hill I felt very tired and heavy. Perhaps I should have rested for another day after my illness. Perhaps I should not have drunk all that cider. Perhaps Lizzie and Gilbert had drained my strength away into their vitality, their ability to change the world and to survive. They had taken away a piece of me which they would now use for their own purposes. Perhaps I ought to feel glad that other people could thus feed upon my substance.

I felt unprepared and undressed but the hand of inevitability was upon me. This was the meeting from which I would not be put off, begging and pleading for another chance. I felt my heaviness as that of an irresistible crushing weight. Yet I had no clear idea of what I was going to do. There was no blunt instrument and no taxi. But I had come to where I had never been before, the blessed point of sufficient desperation.

I toiled up looking at the gardens and the flowers and the garden gates. I noticed how different each house was from the other. One had an oval of stained glass in the front door, another had a porch with geraniums, another had dormer windows in the attic. I reached the Nibletts blue gate with its irritatingly complicated little latch.

The curtains were partly drawn in the front bedrooms in an unusual way. I rang the ding-dong bell. The sound was different. How soon did I realize that the house was empty? Certainly before I confirmed the fact by peering in through the curtains into the larger bedroom and seeing that all the furniture was gone.

I went back to the front door and, for some reason, tried the bell again several times, listening to it echo in the deserted house.

‘Oh excuse me, were you wanting Mr and Mrs Fitch?’

‘Yes,’ I said to a woman in an apron who was leaning over the fence from the front garden next door.

‘Oh, they’ve gone, emigrated to Australia,’ she told me proudly.

‘I knew they were going, I hoped I’d catch them.’

‘They sold the house. They took their doggie with them. He’ll have to go in quarantine of course.’

‘When did they leave?’

She mentioned a date. The date was, I realized at once, very soon after I had seen them. So they had lied about the date of their departure.

‘I’ve had a postcard,’ said the proud woman. ‘It came this morning. Would you like to see it?’ She had brought it out with her to show me.

I saw, on one side, the Sydney Opera House. Upon the other in Hartley’s hand: Just arrived, I think Sydney is the most beautiful city I have ever seen, we are so happy. Ben and Hartley had both signed.

‘What a lovely card.’ I gave it back to her.

‘Yes, isn’t it, but England’s good enough for me. Are you a relative?’

‘A cousin.’

‘I thought you looked a bit like Mrs Fitch.’

‘Too bad I missed them.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know their address, but there it is, when people are gone they’re gone, isn’t it.’

‘Well, thank you so much.’

‘I expect they’ll write to you.’

‘I expect so. Well, good day.’

She returned to her house and I moved back to the path. The roses were already looking neglected, covered with dead flowers. I noticed an unusual stone lying half covered by the earth and I picked it up. It was the mottled pink stone with the white chequering which I had given to Hartley, and brought back in a plastic bag on that awful day. I put it in my pocket.

I walked round the side of the house into the back garden, and stood on the concrete terrace outside the picture window and peered in. The curtains had been left here too, and pulled across a little, but I could see between them into the empty room. The door was open into the hall and I could see the inside of the front door and a faded place on the wallpaper where the picture of the mediaeval knight had hung. I began to feel a frenzied desire to get into the house. Perhaps Hartley had left me a message, left at least some significant trace of her presence.

The back door was locked and the sitting room windows were securely closed, but a kitchen window moved a little. I fetched a wooden box from the otherwise empty garden shed and stood on it, as Titus had stood in order to look through the hole in the fence. ‘You stood on a box, didn’t you.’ ‘Yes, I stood on a box.’ I eased the window out and got my finger into the crack. Then the window came open, not having been properly latched on the inside, and I was able to swing my leg over. A moment later, panting with emotion, I was standing in the kitchen. A terrible quietness crept in the house.

The kitchen was empty, not entirely clean, and a tap dripping. Little rolls of fluff moved around on the floor in the draught from the window. I opened the larder, where there was already a trace of mould on the shelves. I walked about the sitting room and went into the two bedrooms. There was nothing, not a handkerchief, not a pin, no memento of my love. I went into the bathroom and looked at the stain on the bath. Then at last I saw something of interest. Beyond the edge of the linoleum, where it ended against the wall, there was the tiniest line of white. I stooped and pulled. A letter had been hidden, thrust in under the linoleum. I drew it carefully out and looked at it. It was my last letter to Hartley and it was unopened. I inspected it for a moment or two, wondering if it could have been opened and then stuck itself up again as letters sometimes do. But no. It had never been opened at all.

I was about to pocket it but decided not to. I tore it across into four pieces, stuffed it well down into the lavatory pan and pulled the chain. I went back and secured the kitchen window, then let myself out of the front door. The woman next door watched disapprovingly and even opened her front window and stared after me down the hill.

When I had reached the bottom and turned to the right into the village street, I suddenly saw a familiar figure approaching me. I was aware that it was someone I knew and was not pleased to see, just before I recognized it as Freddie Arkwright. Escape was impossible. He had already seen me and was bearing down.

‘Mr Arrowby!’

‘Why, it’s Freddie!’

‘Oh Mr Arrowby, I’m so glad to see you, I’ve kept missing you! I knew you were here. I was down at Whitsun and I hoped I’d see you, what luck to meet you now!’

‘Well, Freddie, it’s been a long time. How are you, what are you up to?’

‘Didn’t Bob tell you? I’m an actor!’

‘An actor? Good for you!’

‘I always wanted to be. That’s why I went after that job with you, but it was like a sort of romance, I didn’t think it would ever come real. And I loved working for you, it was great, all about London, all over the place, we did whizz about, didn’t we? Then when you went away, I thought “Why not?” and then when I got my Equity card, and I wasn’t so young either, somehow it always helped me that I’d worked for you, you always brought me luck, Mr Arrowby. You were so kind to me in those days, you encouraged me so much. “Decide what you want and go for it, Fred, it’s just a matter of will power!” I remember you saying that to me more than once.’

I did not recall saying this nor did it sound like anything which anyone would say more than once, assuming he had ever had the misfortune to say it at all, but I was glad that Freddie had such rosy memories. We walked down as far as the footpath which led to the coast road. ‘My, those were good times, Mr Arrowby, Savoy, Connaught, Ritz, Carlton, you name it, we were there! The old Carlton’s gone of course, but London’s still the best city in the world, and I’ve seen a few now. Paris, Rome, Madrid, I been there on jobs. I was in a film in Dublin a while ago, did we drink!’

‘What’s your stage name?’

‘Oh, I kept my name, Freddie Arkwright, it seemed to be me. Can’t say I’ve ever had any great parts, but I’ve loved every moment. All along of you, you were so kind to me, you encouraged me so much, and then everyone was saying, “Oh, you’re a friend of Charles Arrowby, aren’t you”, well, I wasn’t going to say no and it helped a packet. My, it’s good to see you, Mr Arrowby, and you don’t look a day older. Fancy your coming to live here, I came from here, you know, I was born at Amorne Farm, my uncle and auntie still live there. You’re retired now, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t imagine ever retiring from the theatre. “No people like show people”, you can say that again! But you still come to London, maybe we could get together? I’d love you to meet my friend I live with, Melbourne Pavitt, ever heard of him? No? Well, you will. He’s a stage designer.’

‘I expect we’ll meet again around here-’

‘Sorry, I’ve been talking my head off, why not let’s go to the Black Lion and have drinks on the house?’

‘No, I must hurry back, here’s my turning. It’s been very nice to see you, Freddie, and I’m glad you’re doing so well.’

‘I’ll get my agent to send you some cuttings.’

‘Do that, and the best of luck.’

‘God bless you, Mr Arrowby, and thanks a million.’

I went away down the footpath, waving cordially. I might stride as a demon in the dreams of some, but in the mind of Freddie Arkwright I evidently figured, quite undeservedly, as a beneficent deity.

When I reached the house it was not yet two o’clock. I tried a little cold jellied consommé straight out of the tin, but soon gave that up. I took two aspirins and went upstairs and lay down on my bed and fully expected, as one sometimes does in acute unhappiness and shock, to become quickly unconscious, but instead I drifted away into some sort of hell.

If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.

I could not really think about Hartley, or not yet. The shock had been too great, or I may have been already surreptitiously guarding myself against too much suffering. And it was too as if, with a blandness which belonged to her youth, almost with a gesture, she had stood aside. She was constantly present to me, as if she hummed in my consciousness, but I did not concentrate upon her. I had sometimes felt, in my final struggle with her, that I wanted to rest; and now, quite suddenly, she had made me idle. But into the gap created by the finality of her disappearance came Titus, returning to me for his portion of my guilt and my grief.

The horrors of remorse abound in unfulfilled conditionals. I could not abate the proliferation of sturdy visions of happiness which knew not of their own futility. I would take Titus to London, he would go to acting school, he would come bounding in to see me with his friends, I would take him for long wonderful holidays, I would love him and look after him. Why had I not seen at once that this, the possession of Titus, my anxious fumbling responsible fatherhood of him, was somehow the point, the pure gift, that which the gods had really sent me, along with so much irrelevant packaging? That was what I should have grasped, that and not the chimera. I recalled Rosina’s prophetic words about Titus: he too will prove a dream child, he will fade away and vanish. Why had I not seized him and made a reality between us, given him my whole attention and taken him away from the ruthless unchilding sea? Of course Gilbert and the others would have laughed their cynical laughs, but they would have been wrong. The sacred relation of paternity can come into being, even as strangely as that, and holy moral bonds would have made me Titus’s protector, his mentor, his servant, with no demands made for myself. Perhaps this was an ideal picture. I might have been tyrannical, I might have been jealous, but I can recognize an absolute when I see one and I would have kept faith with Titus. But amid these thoughts as they rambled on there was always the picture, with its bright sea-light, of Titus lying dead, limp, dripping, with his half-open eyes and the hare-scar upon his lip.

I experienced his eternal absence as something almost impossible to comprehend. He had been with me such a short time; and he had come to me as to his death, as to his executioner. By what strange path of accidents, alive with so many other possibilities, had he made his way to the base of that sheer rock where he had tried again and again to pull himself out of the moving teasing killing sea? I ought to have warned him, I ought never to have dived in with him on that first day; I had destroyed him because I so rejoiced in his youth and because I had to pretend to be young too. He died because he trusted me. My vanity destroyed him. It is a matter of causality. The payment for faults is automatic. I relaxed my hold and he lay dead. Such thoughts as these carried me at last into a wretched comatose slumber; and when I awoke I had forgotten that Hartley was gone and I started at once on my old activity of planning what I would do to get her back.

My watch had stopped again, but the sky had an evening look with a lot of orange clouds pierced by holes of very cold very pale blue. I went downstairs and made some tea and then began drinking wine. I began to think about Hartley but cautiously, as if trying out the thoughts to see whether they would drive me mad with pain. They had to be thought, I had to take it in. I had seen the empty house, the postcard from Sydney. I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone’s uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?

It began to grow dark and I lit the lamp. I closed the window to keep the moths out. It dawned on me with a vague wonderment that it had not at any point occurred to me to take a plane to Sydney. I could not remember whether Ben had said they would be living in Sydney, but Australia was not all that large and I had friends there who would be delighted to join a hunt for a girl. I could search, enquire, advertise. It would be an occupation. But it was somehow clear that I would not do so, I had given up. Follow her humbly at a distance, simply keep letting her know that I was still there? How like a frightful ghost I might become then. No, I had given up and, as it now seemed, I had done so prophetically just before her awful final flight. Why, after that unspeakable tea party, had I simply sat around waiting, imagining she would ring up? Did I really think she would ring up? Did I really imagine that she would leap, at the last moment, down into my boat? Surely I must have known by then that she was incapable of leaping. And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two. If only Hartley had been my sister, I could have looked after her so happily and cared for her so tenderly.

I could not decide to eat anything. I had no desire for food or any sense that I would ever want to eat again. I went upstairs at last feeling drunk and sick. The bead curtain was jangling in some sea wind which was getting in somehow. There was a small moon racing through ragged clouds and the speed of it made me feel giddy. Perhaps she had to love Ben, hers was a loving nature and she had no alternative, no other possible object. She had wanted to love Titus but Ben had destroyed her love for Titus and in doing so destroyed her. What I had seen was a shell, a husk, a dead woman, a dead thing. Yet this was just the thing which I had so dearly wished to inhabit, to reanimate, to cherish. I took three sleeping pills. As I was falling asleep I wondered, why did she keep the letter, even though she did not read it? Why did she put the stone in the garden where I would be sure to see it? Were these, after all, hopeful signs?

I woke rather late the next morning and established from the telephone that it was nine thirty. I had a headache. I went into the kitchen and fell over the hip bath which was still standing there half full of water. I managed to empty the bath, half over the slates and half onto the lawn, and to put it back under the stairs. I tried to eat some biscuits but they had become soft and curiously wet. There was no bread and no butter and no milk. In any case I was not hungry. I thought of going shopping but I was not sure what day it was. I thought I heard distant church bells, so it might be Sunday. In a rather abstract way I wondered if I should not go to London. However I had no particular motive for going there. There was no one I wanted to see and nothing I wanted to do.

I walked out to the road to look at the weather. It was warmer and more blue. I noticed some letters in Gilbert’s clever basket. The strike or holiday or whatever it was was evidently over. Of course there was no letter from Hartley, but there was one from Lizzie. I took the letters into the little red room and sat at the table.

My dear, I am unhappy about our meeting. You were generous and sweet but I wish I had seen you alone. All that laughing was somehow awful. What were you really thinking? I feel I am somehow in the wrong, but you must put me in the right. Love me, Charles, love me enough. Since your letter I have been reliving my love for you like an inoculation, not to be ‘cured’, never that, but so that I can love you properly at last, and not just be stupidly ‘in love’. Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now, Charles, no more mean possessive passions and scheming. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Please, my darling.

Lizzie.

P.S. Come and see us soon in London.

What a touching letter, ending with an invitation from ‘us’! And ‘I am in the wrong but you must put me in the right.’ Typical Lizzie. I opened another letter. It was from Rosemary Ashe.

Dearest Charles,

This is just to bring you the sad news that Sidney and I have split up. He wants a divorce. We are being peaceful about it all for the sake of the children and they don’t seem to mind too much. It’s a younger actress of course, our occupational hazard-that, and the transatlantic atmosphere which seems to have driven Sidney mad. Perhaps it’s temporary, I haven’t given up hope, only hoping is so painful. I’m coming home and I long to see you. May I visit you in your lovely peaceful house by the sea? That’s just what I need.

Much love,

Rosemary.

So much for the ideal marriage. I had better start polishing up my celibate uncle role. I opened another letter and for some time could not think who it was from, even though I could easily read the signature, Angela Godwin.

Dear Charles,

Listen, it’s me. And listen carefully. You don’t have to put up with the old ones, why should you? Maybe you thought you couldn’t get a young one? But you don’t look your age, you know. You don’t have to have old bags like Lizzie Scherer and Rosina Vamburgh, why should you when you can have ME? I do rather like Rosina, though, at least she’s clever, and things are decenter at home since Pam went so don’t think I regard you as an escape route, I don’t! I’ve been thinking a lot these last months and I think I’ve changed a lot and come to terms with myself at last. I’ve been thinking about my identity. I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with my life, not acting, so you needn’t think I’m after that either! I’m good at maths and I think I may become a physicist, I’m doing the Cambridge exam in the autumn. Anyhow I shall jolly well be somebody. The reason for this letter? I have had an idea of genius. That night you came to see Peregrine I was (of course) listening at the door and I heard him say how you wanted a son, or maybe you said it, I forget, but anyway it stayed in my mind. Now comes the idea. Why shouldn’t I give you one? He could be yours, I wouldn’t want to hog him. I mean I’d visit him and that. I don’t see myself tied with a child just yet, we could have a nurse. Besides I shall be jolly busy at Cambridge. And of course I’m not proposing marriage.

I think I shall marry much later on or not at all. But why not simply have what you want? People don’t enough, which is what is the matter with our civilization, I don’t mean like people starving, but like not having the courage to grab their heart’s desire even when it’s in front of their noses. About me, I am seventeen, and in perfect health. I’m a virgin and I want someone special to take me over that border, you in fact. I enclose a photograph, and you can see how I have changed. What about it, Charles? I am serious. Not least in saying that I love you, and am if and when you want me yours,

Angela Godwin.

I pulled the photograph out of the envelope and inspected a coloured picture of a rather pretty intelligent-looking girl with large eyes and a bright tender diffident unformed face. I crumpled this missive up and thrust it into the soft ash of the woodfire. There were various other letters, but I felt I had had enough of letters for the moment.

I went out to see what the horrible sea was up to. It was calm and slippery, sliding in among the rocks like oil. I went as far as Minn’s cauldron and stood on the bridge. The tide was going out and the cauldron was emptying in a whirling gushing frenzy of hasty bubbling waters whose white flux was absorbed by the calmer sea beyond. I looked down. How deep it was, how steep and smooth the sides. Surely no power on earth could have got me out of that hole. Yet I had got out, I was alive, and poor swimming holidaying Titus was dead. I went on over the rocks as far as the tower and climbed down to the steps. The sleek water was rising and falling, but not too violently, the tide was right, the iron banister reaching down as far as the waves. I felt in my body, as if scarcely yet in my mind, a flicker of life, the old familiar semi-sexual twitch of fear, such as I used to feel on those high diving boards in California or before plunging into lethally cold waters off Ireland.

Trembling with emotion I tore my clothes off and walked into the sea. The cold shock, then the warmth, then the strong gentle lifting motion of the quiet waves reminded me terribly of happiness. I swam about feeling the loneliness of the sea and that particular sensation which I now identified as a sense of death which it seemed to have always carried into my heart. Not that I then wished to die or thought that I might drown. My strong limbs responded to the moving water, my breath came easily, the sky was blue above me and the sun was everywhere, and I watched the near horizon of the approaching waves, their tops a little whipped by the breeze, and they were strong and gentle. They toyed with me. I swam and floated until I began to feel cold; then I climbed out and returned naked to the house carrying my clothes.

The sea had restored my hunger and when it seemed to be lunch time I heated up the remains of the consommé and opened a tin of frankfurters and a tin of sauerkraut. I half decided to go to London tomorrow. I half thought of telephoning James who might after all still be around, and I got as far as looking up his number and writing it down on the pad beside the telephone. I half intended to ring up the taxi man to ask him to take me to the early train. Though the sun was warm, I was a bit chilled after the swim and I put on the white Irish jersey. I got out a suitcase and began to pack up a few clothes. I even went into the book room to find a book to read on the journey. It occurred to me that although my plan for my retirement had included a regime of reading I had not opened a book since I arrived at Shruff End. I turned the books over. James had inspected them, Titus had slept on them. I needed something a bit lurid and absorbing. It was a moment even for pornography, only I cannot really stand pornography. I eventually chose The Wings of the Dove, another story of death and moral smash-up.

The day seemed to be passing, the evening was arriving, and I had not telephoned either James or the taxi man. I decided it was too late to decide to go early in the morning. I would ring the taxi man tomorrow and take the later train. What I would do when I got to London I did not consider. Arrange my flat, order curtains? Such things belonged to another world. Although the evening was warm I lit the fire for company in the little red room, thus consuming Rosemary’s and Angie’s letters and the photo of the intelligent diffident girl. I took my supper in to the fireside and sat for a while trying to start reading The Wings of the Dove, but its marvellous magisterial beginning failed to grab me. It was still daylight and I could see without the lamp. I sat for a while with glazed eyes, listening to the stomp of the sea and the beating of my heart. I began to feel slightly sleepy or comatose. That swim had certainly done something to me. I thought about Titus. Then I began to think about myself as a drowned man and I remembered how I had slept, on the night of my resurrection from Minn’s cauldron, upon the floor in this room, in front of the glowing fire, wondering gratefully why I was still alive. And I seemed to see myself lying there, moving my limbs gently in the warmth to make certain that I was whole.

My eyelids drooped a little and then I very clearly saw something concerning which I was not afterwards able to say whether it was a hallucination or a memory image. It certainly presented itself to me, quite suddenly, as a memory. I had been vaguely, driftingly, thinking of that awful fall into the churning pit of water, my ‘knowledge’ of my death, the way the water showed green above me even in the dim light. Then I remembered that, just before my head cracked against the rock and the blackness came upon me, I had seen something else. I had seen a strange small head near to mine, terrible teeth, a black arched neck. The monstrous sea serpent had actually been in the cauldron with me.

I opened my eyes wide and, now panting and with a violently pounding heart, looked around me. All was as usual, the fire blazing, the scattering of unopened letters upon the table, my half-drunk glass of wine. I was sure I had not been asleep. I had simply remembered something which I had for some reason totally forgotten. This was indeed the forgetting which the doctor had said I must expect, the result of the concussion, where memory traces are lost. But now I could recall the black coiling thing, very close, reared over me and quite unmistakable in the dim light, its head and neck for a moment outlined against the sky. I saw in memory its green luminous eyes. The sight had lasted for seconds, perhaps a second, but it had been clear and not to be doubted. Then after that second had come the blow on the head.

But no, there was something else to remember, something else had happened just before I lost consciousness. But what, what? Trembling with excitement and fear I sat holding my head and tormenting my memory. There was something there waiting agonizingly to be remembered, something very important and extraordinary, waiting just outside my range of vision, waiting for me to grasp it, only I could not. I groaned aloud, I got up and walked into the kitchen and back, I drank a little more wine, I closed my eyes, I opened them. I watched my mind, as if hardly daring to touch it in case it should shift or harden and destroy some perhaps momentary proximity. But the hidden thing would not come; and I had a terrified sense that if I did not catch it now it would disappear forever, sinking into the deep total darkness of the unconscious. Just now, for perhaps the last time, it heaved to touch the surface.

After a while I gave up straining, though I still hoped that the final, the somehow essential, memory would suddenly come. I sat down again at the table and began thinking about the sea serpent and going back over my earlier theories concerning LSD. I tried to remember whether I had felt the coiling creature as well as seen it. I had a memory vision of the animal but none of my state of mind at the time, although I could remember my ‘drowning’ thoughts when I was under the wave. I thought of going out to inspect the cauldron in case this would help my memory, but now it was almost dark and I dared not. I felt frightened, then positively shaken by death fear. I tried to light the lamp but for some reason could not. I lit several candles, then went and locked the front door and the back door and returned to the little red room.

As I came back into the room I saw almost straight ahead of me, as if my eyes had suddenly been switched onto a new narrow wavelength, a crack in the white wooden panelling, just below the top where, a few feet from the ground, the panelling ended in a small ledge. There were quite a lot of cracks between the panels, some of them partially covered by the paint. This crack was quite short, about six inches long, and there was something in it: something white which stuck out a little way. Suddenly breathless, giddy with memory, I went across the room and pulled out a piece of paper. It was the piece of paper upon which, when I awoke in the night after being ‘drowned’, I had written down that very important thing which I was on no account to forget. Even as I held the paper in my hand I could not remember what it was that I had written, though I at once assumed that it had to do with the sea serpent. I unfolded the paper, and what I read was this.

I must write this down quickly as evidence, since I am beginning to forget it even as I write. James saved me. He somehow came down right into the water. He put his hands under my armpits and I felt myself coming up as if I were in a lift. I saw him against the sheer side of the rock leaning down to me, and then I rose up and he held me against his body and we came up together. But he was not standing on anything. One moment he was against the rock as if he were clinging onto it like a bat. Then he was simply standing on the water. And then

Here the writing ended, trailing away into illegible scrawls. I sat at the table gasping and I read the thing through several times, and then the dark thing that had been touching the surface of my mind broke through and I found I could remember the scene. This memory was not like my memory of the serpent. It was like my memory of Lizzie singing or of Titus lying dead, except that it was a memory of an impossibility.

I could now recall perfectly clearly what I had tried to express by saying that he was against the sheer rock ‘like a bat’ and that I came up ‘as in a lift’. It was after the green wave had broken over me and I remember my head came above the surface and I was spewing water from my mouth and trying to shout. Then I saw James already half-way down the rock, sort of kneeling against the side of it, and coming down like some animal. The bat image was not quite right, he might have been more like a lizard, but the point was that he was not climbing down with footholds and handholds like a man, he was creeping down on the smooth surface like some sort of beast. I remember trying to reach out a hand towards him, but the water was in total control of my body and hurling me about like a cork. I had in any case swallowed so much I was nearly at the end of breathing and struggling. I particularly recall that James at that moment looked like a drowned man himself, soaked with water, the leaping sea streaming down from off his head. In so far as I had any thought then I seem to recapture a sense of: so James is drowning too. Only somehow this was not a despairing thought. Then James, as he crept right down into the churning whirlpool, detached himself from the rock like a caterpillar. There was an effect as of something sticky and adhesive deliberately unsticking itself. He did not take the hand which I was trying to reach out to him, but leaned down over me and got his hands under my armpits, as I described in the writing. I could now recall the feel of his hands as he touched me, and then the extraordinary sensation which I described as rising ‘in a lift’. I could not remember being pulled or dragged up, there was no sense of effort. I rose up until my head was level with James’s head and my body pressed against his body. I remember a sense of warmth, and also that it was at that moment that I lost consciousness.

But then was I not knocked on the head, and did I not suffer from concussion? I touched the back of my head and felt a distinct and still rather tender bump there. Of course I could have knocked my head earlier without being made unconscious. And when did I see the serpent, if I saw the serpent? And did James see the serpent too? And why did my little piece of mnemonic writing contain no reference to the serpent? And what had I just been going to say when the writing ended? Of course if I struck my head on the rock just after seeing the serpent I could have already forgotten about it when I came to write, even though I could still remember James’s rescue. And why had I then forgotten that too, and why should I suddenly remember it now?

I leapt up in a state of the greatest excitement. My memory of James’s exploit was certainly no hallucination. After all, how had I got out of that churning death pit? Only today I had concluded, looking at it, that no human force could have raised me nor could the waves possibly have lifted me to the top of the rock. My cousin had rescued me by the exercise of those powers which he had so casually spoken of as ‘tricks’. I thought again about the story of the sherpa whom James had intended to preserve by such ‘trickery’. Had I then doubted James’s reference to ‘increase of bodily heat by mental concentration’? I had scarcely reflected on the matter. The story could be seen in quite an ordinary light. Two men cling together for warmth in a tent, in a bag, in the snow, and one dies. What touched and interested me was that, whatever it was that James thought he was going to do, he had failed. As for the claim itself, it did not now seem to me too incredible that some weird eastern ascetic could learn to control his body temperature. But to creep down a sheer rock and stand upon, or (as I now recalled it) just below the surface of, raging waves, and raise a man weighing eleven stone upwards for a matter of sixteen to twenty feet simply by placing one’s hands in his armpits: that was a rather different task for the credulity of a sceptical westerner. Yet I remembered it. And there was also the evidence of the writing. And something very odd had certainly happened.

I sat down again at my table, trying to breathe regularly, and at the idea that my cousin had used some strange power which he possessed to save my life I was suddenly filled with the most piercing pure and tender joy, as if the sky had opened and a stream of white light had descended. I felt like Danae. When, after my last talk with James, I had felt myself at the start of a new and more open relationship with him, that had been the merest prophetic glimmer of what I felt now. I also thought, in a curious ridiculous way, what fun! And I recalled James’s saying, ‘What larks we had!’ And I wanted to thank him and in doing so to laugh.

I looked at my watch. It was only just after eleven o’clock, still not too late to telephone. I ran out to the book room, carrying a candle and choking and exclaiming with emotion. I dialled James’s number. I had no idea what I was going to say to him. I thought, I must remember to ask him whether he saw the sea serpent. The telephone began to ring, and as it rang and rang my excitement turned to disappointment. Perhaps he had already gone to Tibet? Or was he perhaps simply out for the evening, dining at some club with some soldier? My God, how little I knew about his life. I decided to telephone him again in the morning, and then to get away to London.

I went back into the kitchen and unlocked and opened the back door. The cold fear which I had felt earlier had entirely gone. I went out onto the lawn. The house had been dark and cool, but there was plenty of light outside and the air was warmer. I decided to sleep out, and I went and collected some cushions from the book room and brought blankets and a pillow down from upstairs. I climbed over to the place beside the sea where I had slept on the previous occasion and laid out my bed. Then I went back towards the house where the candles made a friendly glow in the window of the little red room. The sky, though dim and faded, was still light enough to prevent the stars, except for the evening star which shone out jagged and enormous. The low and sinking half moon was cheese-pale.

I went into the little red room where the candles, as on an altar, flanked my wine glass and the almost empty bottle. I poured out the rest of the wine and sat and reflected. I tried to recall more things. I was sure that none of the others had noticed anything odd. Peregrine said he had pushed me and walked on. He was very drunk and may genuinely not have known exactly what happened. By the time there was a general alarm I was already lying on top of the rock with James trying to revive me. I had not questioned James properly because he had become ill immediately afterwards, he had had some sort of collapse and retired to bed. Why was he so exhausted? Because of what he had endured in rescuing me, the physical and mental energy which he had expended in that unimaginable descent. I recalled his words about ‘those things that people do, they can be jolly tiring’. No wonder James was knocked out and seemed to have lost his grip. But then… ‘I relaxed my hold on him, I lost my grip.’ Whom had James been speaking of as I fell asleep that night, his sherpa or perhaps… Titus? How was it that Titus had come to me just then? Why had James so pointedly asked for Titus’s name? A name is a road. And why had Titus said that he had seen James ‘in a dream’? James had always been the finder of lost things. Had he stretched out some tentacle of his mind and found Titus and brought him here and kept him as it were under his care upon a binding thread, a thread of attention which was broken when James became so strangely ill after I had been lifted from the sea? James’s reaction to Titus’s death had been ‘it ought not to have happened’, almost as if he felt that it was his own fault. But then if it was his fault it was my fault. There is a relentless causality of sin and in a way Titus died because, all those years ago, I had taken Rosina away from Peregrine. And of course my vanity had killed Titus just as James’s vanity had killed the sherpa. In each case our weakness had destroyed the thing we loved. And now I remembered something else which James had said. White magic is black magic. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. Had one of these demons, with whose help James had saved me, taken advantage of James’s collapse to seize Titus and crash his young head against the rock?

These thoughts were so mad and their implications so hideously frightening that I decided I must stop thinking and try to sleep. I felt that in spite of everything, I should sleep well. I wanted most intensely to talk to James about all these things, or, supposing he had already left, to write to him. But how could I find his address, would he have an address? I really knew nobody who knew him except Toby Ellesmere, and Toby often seemed entirely mystified or ignorant about James’s doings and his way of life. Could I go to some army headquarters or to the Ministry of Defence and ask? Of course they would ‘know nothing’.

I had finished the wine and the fire had sunk into a pile of ash dully smudged with red. I sighed deeply as I thought of all the years I had wasted when James and I might have been friends, instead of just awkward embarrassed relatives or something almost more like enemies. I reached out to the table and began pushing the pile of unopened letters about to see if I recognized any of the writings. Of course there was nothing from James, I would have spotted that at once. There might be one from Sidney telling his side of the ‘young actress’ story. I noticed, because its appearance caught my eye, a letter with a London postmark addressed to Mr C. Arrowby, in the hand of a writer who was clearly not quite at home with Roman letters. In a tired idle curiousity I drew it towards me and opened it. It was dated two days ago and it ran as follows:

Dear Mr Arrowby,

I have to be the bearer of sad news, I am sorry. I cannot find you in the telephone. But you are at liberty to make telephone to me at the number given on the paper. My sad news is this, your cousin Mr James Arrowby has just died. I am his doctor. He left me a note that you are his cousin and his heir and that I should myself inform you of his decease. So I do this. I want also to tell something to you alone. Mr Arrowby died in much quietness. He telephoned me to come to him and was already dead when I arrived, and he had left the door open. He was sitting in his chair smiling. I must tell you this. By an accident that is no accident I came to him as his doctor. I am Indian, I come from Dehra Dun. When I first met Mr Arrowby I at once recognized him as one who knows many things. Perhaps you will understand. I had some prophetic thought about him, and when I came to him I saw what had been. In northern India I have known such deaths, and I tell it to you so that you need not be sorry too much. Mr Arrowby died in happiness achieving all. I have written for cause of death on the certificate ‘heart failure’, but it was not so. There are some who can freely choose their moment of death and without violence to the body can by simple will power die. It was so with him. I looked upon him with reverence and bowed before him. He has gone quietly and by the force of his own thought was consciousness extinguished. Thus it is good to go. Believe me, Sir, he was an enlightened one.

I will be at your service at the telephone number. With obedient wishes, I am yours truly,

P. R. Tsang.

I read the letter through twice and a terrible cold quietness fell upon me and I sat like a statue motionless for a long time. It did not occur to me to wonder if the strange letter was a hoax or a mistake. I had no doubt that James had gone. He had gone quietly; with just a little gentle pressure of his mind upon his body he had made the restless flickering consciousness cease forever. I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move. And I felt an odd new sensation which it took me a little time to recognize as loneliness. Without James I was at last alone. How very much I had somehow relied upon his presence in the world, almost as if he had been my twin brother and not my cousin.

I saw from my watch that it was nearly midnight. I would indeed go to London tomorrow. And I wondered with helpless sad confusion what had happened, what had they done with him? Was James still sitting there in his chair, dead and smiling his inane smile?

I got up to go to bed and then remembered that I had made my couch out on the rocks. I decided to go to it. Outside the night was warm and had darkened just enough to show a scattering of stars and the faint smudgy arch of the Milky Way. There was a diffused lightness in the sky however, and I recalled that it must be, give or take a day or two, midsummer. I was able to find my way not too dangerously over the rocks which I now knew so well, though at one point my foot slipped into a pool. The water in the pool was warm. I found my hard bed and lay on it in shirt and trousers, just taking off my shoes. I propped my head so that I could look at the horizon which was marked by a dark line and a silver line. The water lapped below me like ripples against a slowly moving boat.

Why had James gone, why had he decided to go now? Was there any immediate reason, such as I could understand, or was it all part of some big wheeling pattern of my cousin’s existence of which I could perceive nothing? All sorts of crazy hypotheses kept coming into my head. Was it something to do with Lizzie? Impossible. Or with Titus? Was he perhaps filled with remorse about Titus, imagining himself responsible for that death? Here I even began to conjecture that James really had known Titus earlier, was perhaps himself the mysterious person who had taught Titus those little airs and graces and given him the copy of Dante’s poems. But this was inconceivable, such a deception not to be seriously imagined. And as I lay there looking at the sky above the sea I saw a golden satellite begin its slow careful journey over the arch of the heavens, and it looked like a calm travelling soul. James had said he was going on a journey. Death was the journey. It was his last ‘trick’.

No, I could not attach this ‘casting off’ to any ordinary or present cause. James’s decision belonged to a different pattern of being, to some quite other history of spiritual adventure and misadventure. Whatever ‘flaw’ had led, as James saw it, to his sherpa’s death belonged, it might be, to some more general condition. Religion is power, it must be, and yet that is its bane. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. Perhaps James wanted simply to lay down the burden of a mysticism that had gone wrong, a spirituality which had somehow degenerated into magic. Had he been overwhelmed with disgust because he had had to use his ‘power’ to save my life, was that the last straw, and was it really all my fault after all? Had I proved to be, in the end, a thankless burden and a dangerous attachment? Here, and sadly, I understood the possible meaning of James’s last visit, James had come to make his peace with me, but it was for his sake, not for mine, in order to break a bond, not to perfect it. He knew it was our last talk, and that was why he was so relaxed, so open, so unprecedentedly frank and gentle. He came, not with any ordinary desire for reconciliation, but in order to rid himself of a last irritating preoccupation. Anxiety or guilt about his wretched cousin might cloud the conditions of the perfect departure upon which he had perhaps long been bent.

How did it go off, that severance, I wondered. Had he responded to the vision of ‘all reality’ which comes at the moment of death and by which one must instantly profit? Had he gone eagerly to that rendezvous and was he now, in what strange heaven of release, ‘set free’, whatever that might mean? Or else, aching and weak like the shade of Achilles, shut in some purgatory to expiate sins which I could not even imagine? Was he now wandering in a dark monster-ridden bardo, encountering simulacra of people he had once known and being frightened by demons? For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause. How did one get out of bardo? I could not remember what James had told me. Why had I never asked him to explain? Would he meet me there, in the shape of some persistent horror, a foul phantom me, the creation of his mind? If so I prayed that when he achieved his liberation he might not forget me but come, in pity and in compassion, to know the truth. Whatever that might mean.

As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.

I woke up and it was dawn. The billion stars had gone and the sky was a bland misty very light blue, a huge uniform over-arching cool yet muted brightness, the sun not yet risen. The rocks were clearly revealed, still indefinably colourless. The sea was utterly calm, glossy, grey, without even ripples, marked only by the thinnest palest line at the horizon. There was a complete yet somehow conscious silence, as if the travelling planet were noiselessly breathing. I remembered that James was dead. Who is one’s first love? Who indeed.

I pulled myself up, knelt, and began to shake my blankets and my pillow which were wet with dew. Then I heard, odd and frightening in that total stillness, a sound coming from the water, a sudden and quite loud splashing, as if something just below the rock were about to emerge, and crawl out perhaps onto the land. I had a moment of sheer fear as I turned and leaned towards the sea edge. Then I saw below me, their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward, four seals, swimming so close to the rock that I could almost have touched them. I looked down at their pointed noses only a few feet below, their dripping whiskers, their bright inquisitive round eyes, and the lithe and glossy grace of their wet backs. They curved and played a while, gulping and gurgling a little, looking up at me all the time. And as I watched their play I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me.