The Sea, the Sea

Postscript:

THAT NO DOUBT is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after; so I thought I might continue the tale a little longer in the form once again of a diary, though I suppose that, if this is a book, it will have to end, arbitrarily enough no doubt, in quite a short while. In particular I felt I ought to go on so as to describe James’s funeral, although really James’s funeral was such a non-event that there is practically nothing to describe. Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

As I write this it is August, not the yellow Provençal August of the English imagination, but an ordinary cool London August with the wind beating down the Thames at the end of the street. For, yes, I am living in James’s flat. From a legal point of view it is my flat, but of course it remains really James’s. I dare not alter anything, I scarcely dare to move anything. The idols of ‘superstition’ surround me. I have ventured to put some of the odder ‘fetishes’ away in a cupboard, I hope they will not mind, and I took down the glass pendants in the hall because their tinkling disturbed my sleep. But the ornate wooden box with the captive demon inside is still perched on its bracket. (James never denied that there was a demon in it. He merely laughed when I asked him.) The innumerable Buddhas are still in their places, except for one that I gave to Toby Ellesmere because he seemed annoyed at not being mentioned in James’s will. The will left everything to me and, should I predecease him, to the British Buddhist Society. I gave them a Buddha too.

Another peevish shifty letter from the house agent today. Shruff End is up for sale. I never spent another night there after the night of the stars when the seals came in the morning. While sorting out my belongings for removal I stayed at the Raven Hotel. I could see the tower from my bedroom but not the house. No one seems to want to buy the place, perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons. The Arkwrights at Amorne Farm, who have the key, said they would get the roof mended, but according to the agent have not done so. Fortunately I do not need the money urgently since James’s will has left me comfortably off.

I suppose I must describe James’s funeral as I said I was going to. There was something curiously blank about it. I did not have to organize it, thank heaven. It was organized by a Colonel Blackthorn who appeared for this purpose and then vanished. When I got to London on the day after the doctor’s letter I found Colonel Blackthorn and the doctor both actually in James’s flat. The colonel explained that he had organized the funeral (a cremation) because they had been unable to get in touch with me, but that if I wished for something different… I did not. I tried to talk to the doctor but he faded away while Blackthorn was still explaining to me how to get to the crematorium. ‘James’ had already mercifully been removed to the ‘chapel of rest’. I did not visit him.

The cremation took place two days later at one of those huge garden places in north London. There is something comfortlessly empty about a ‘garden of remembrance’ after the loquacious populated feeling of a graveyard. It was a stiff graceless business, rather hurried on by the staff, who kept us waiting outside while the previous ‘customer’ was disposed of. Doubtless the worthy colonel’s despatch in booking our ‘slot’ had been a prudent one. He was there, also the doctor. Toby Ellesmere came and seemed genuinely upset. I had never reflected before (and have not since) upon the nature of his relation with James, but whatever it was I imagine it belonged to the remote past. James and Toby had not only been young soldiers together, they had been school boys together. Perhaps Toby had simply admired him at school; such bonds can be life-long. Four other well-dressed men in smart black suits turned up, I presume they were soldiers. They showed no signs of knowing who I was, and they were unknown to Toby, with whom I exchanged a few words; indeed no one except Toby talked to me at all. The business took minutes. There was no prayer of course, only a little soft listless music and then a standing in silence, which was broken by some official noisily opening the door at the back. I wished then that there could have been a proper ceremony of some sort. But any ritual I could have devised would probably have offended James’s shade. I only wish I had had the wit to demand some decent music to see him off with.

We went outside into the garden. Colonel Blackthorn shook hands with me. Everybody began to go away. Again I tried to speak to the doctor, but he said he was expected at the hospital. Perhaps he was feeling a bit nervous about that death certificate. Toby rather half-heartedly offered me a lift in his car, but I declined. I think he wanted to be alone too. I walked about for a long time in shabby sad back-streets and lost myself.

I have just found in a drawer in the kitchen the hammer which I was trying to mend on the last evening when James came to Shruff End. He must have taken the precaution of carrying it away with him. I like the kitchen. There is a large dry larder, completely empty when I arrived. There is also a view of Battersea Power Station, which in the evening looks like an Assyrian monument.

I have sold my flat in Shepherds Bush and brought some of the furniture here. I brought back my own stuff from Shruff End, but none of Mrs Chorney’s. I resisted a temptation to keep the art nouveau oval mirror which Rosina broke and which I never had reglazed. I have put most of my things into James’s dressing room. This is now, inside James’s temple, a little Charles shrine. I go there sometimes and sit. My books are still in crates in the hall. My clothes are mostly in suitcases, since I cannot yet bring myself to touch James’s neatly hanging, neatly folded garments. The big wardrobe in his bedroom is like the entrance to another world. I cannot say I feel at home in the flat, but I would not think of living anywhere else. Sometimes it seems incredible that he is not here too. Last night I was so persuaded that he was in the next room that I had to go and look.

I saw Lizzie and Gilbert on Friday, at their maisonette in Golders Green. I visit them now and then and they produce their smelly messes which they have spent all day cooking. Gilbert has now become very successful as the comic hero of that ludicrous interminable television series. He is famous for the first time in his life and people come up and touch him in the street. The critics even compare him with Wilfred Dunning, which is absurd. Lizzie seems happy. She has given up her hospital job and got fatter. They both still talk of how one day they will share a house with me and I will live upstairs and they will live downstairs and be my ‘staff’. We make jokes about this.

Are they beginning to treat me like an elderly invalid? They think James’s flat is an appalling place to live. Of course I never invite them here. I never invite anybody here.

Am I settling into my role as a celibate uncle-priest? Yesterday I took my secretary Miss Kaufman, whom I may not have mentioned before, out to coffee and listened to a tale of woe about her aged mother. Then I took Rosemary Ashe to lunch at a pub and heard all about Sidney and Maybelle. Maybelle is twenty. Rosemary still hopes Sidney may recover. The children are loving Canada. Rosemary thinks they are too philosophical about the divorce. I was glad to find that Rosemary had a very unclear idea about what had happened at Shruff End, and I did not enlighten her. Her information seemed to be that I had been persecuted by some mad village woman and a boy friend of Gilbert’s had been drowned. Fortunately she did not want to discuss my problems.

It is late in the evening in the flat. The Buddhas seem to be looking at me, although I know that beneath their drooping eyelids they do not see the world of appearance. The place is getting rather dusty as I cannot risk having a charwoman. I have done a little superficial dusting but I do not like moving things, some of them are fragile. I am especially careful with that demon-cage up on the bracket! Is the scene beginning to look more and more like a museum as James’s spirit gradually withdraws? The area which I inhabit does not increase. I eat in the kitchen, then scuttle back to this desk in the sitting room. I dress in the hall. I sleep in the larger spare bedroom. Of course I dare not sleep in James’s bed. James’s handsome bedroom is unused and I have closed the door.

At least I have now taken possession of the desk, and collected there my favourites from among the have-worthy jade animals. Weighing down my letters and papers (Miss Kaufman still helps, thank God) are two stones, the mottled pink chequered stone which I gave to Hartley, and the brown stone with the blue lines which I gave to James. I was glad to find that lying here when I arrived. I often handle these stones. I have also propped up two photographs, the one of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle dancing, and a photo of Clement when she was young in the role of Cordelia. I cannot seem to find any suitable pictures of my parents, and of course I have no recent one of James. It is clear that his preparations for his journey were extremely thorough. There were no personal papers to be found in the flat. (I wonder if Colonel Blackthorn removed anything?) There were no interesting relics at all, no old letters, photos, bills. The will was tied up in a slim package together with a statement from his bank about investments. There was no trace of James having dealt with a lawyer. The will was written in his own hand. The two witnesses appeared to be uneducated people. For some time, stupidly, I searched for a hidden letter addressed to me. I even looked into cracks in the wall.

Last night at a little party given by Gilbert and Lizzie I heard that Peregrine is doing well with his theatre in Londonderry and is becoming quite famous as a propagandist for peace in Ireland. Rosina is equally enthusiastic and is rumoured to have become politically conscious and power-mad. Gilbert says Fritzie’s Odyssey is off.

Yes, I go to parties now. I go about in London, I eat and drink and gossip just as if I were an ordinary person. Well, am I not one? I wonder what happened to that precious talisman which I was going to unwrap in a lonely cave beside the sea?

Perhaps it is a sign of age that I am busy all day without really doing anything. This diary has trailed on, it is company for me, an illusion of occupation. I now feel uneasily that before I end it I ought to offer some sort of reflective summing up of-of what? I shrink from this. There is so much pain. I have not recorded the pain.

What an egoist I must seem in the preceding pages. But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason. Thus we must live unless we are saints, and are there any? There are spiritual beings, perhaps James was one, but there are no saints.

Well, I will try to reflect, but not today. When this is all done, will I ever write anything else? The story of Clement? Or that book about the theatre that my friends kindly profess to think so necessary? Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world.

A few letters have arrived for James but they are all from scholars. It appears that my cousin was quite a well-known orientalist who corresponded with learned men all over the world. I have sent the letters on to a man at the British Museum who rang me up asking about the fate of James’s books. I asked the BM man round to look at the books and he came yesterday. When he saw all the stuff in the flat he nearly fainted with emotion and cupidity.

I cannot think what to do about James’s poems. Yes, James’s POEMS! I think I have not mentioned these before! So James did, in some sense at any rate, do what he said he would do: join the army and become a poet. There, in the otherwise bare top drawer of this desk, they were, and indeed there they are: all neatly typed out and filling several large looseleaf books. A ‘personal relic’ no doubt, but with no directions, no covering letter. Toby Ellesmere, who, as I think I mentioned, is now a publisher, has got wind of their existence and has rung up about them twice. Perhaps James mentioned them to him sometime. He has never seen them, and I have not shown them to him. In fact I cannot bring myself to look at them, even to glance at them, for fear that they should turn out to be embarrassingly bad! I had almost rather destroy them unread.

It occurs to me that the only lines of poetry I ever heard James quoting, and he quoted them often, were Whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not!

Of course this chattering diary is a façade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretences are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

I have had another letter from Angie, sending another photo and repeating her kind offer.

Gradually autumn is taking charge of London. It is remarkable how early it seems to arrive. The leaves of the plane trees, yellow and red and brightly spotted, appear like little messages stuck upon the damp pavements. Cox’s Orange Pippins are to be found in the shops. I am storing them on the top shelf of my larder. I walk down the street to the embankment every morning and evening and see the turbulent skies over the august towers of Battersea Power Station, and the eternal drama of the Thames rising and falling. I wait. Peregrine is to receive some sort of award for his services to peace. Rosina has gone to America on a job. I have had lunch with Rosemary, with Miss Kaufman, with poor old Fabian, with a frenetic young actor called Erasmus Blick. Of course I have not troubled to record that I am constantly badgered by theatre people to return to the old game. When will they realize I am not interested? I have silenced my telephone with a screw of paper. I have not entered a theatre, even to see Mr Blick’s new Hamlet, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread.

Yes, I wonder if I shall ever write that book about Clement? It is as if this book has taken up forever the space which I might have given to her. How unjust this seems now. Clement was the reality of my life, its bread and its wine. She made me, she invented me, she created me, she was my university, my partner, my teacher, my mother, later my child, my soul’s mate, my absolute mistress. She, and not Hartley, was the reason why I never married. She was certainly the reason why I did not seek and find Hartley at a time when it might have been quite easy to do so. Why did I not try harder, longer? Clement stopped me. In memory I have extended the time of my frantic craving for the vanished Hartley well on into Clement’s regime, but the memory must be misleading. How could Clement not have cured me? Clement when I first met her was a dazzling figure, beautiful and clever and at the top of her fame; and still young, though I thought of her as old. I was twenty. She was thirty-nine, forty. My God, she was younger than Lizzie is now. When I first met her I was a green awkward ignorant graceless boy, it is a miracle that she ever looked at me. Later on, I treated her coldly, her possessiveness irritated me, I found her love a nuisance. I went away, she went away, yet I always came back and she always came back. We never really got lost, and at the end when she was dying I drove all the others out.

Clement was a long time dying. They had the headlines set up in type for weeks. I lay on the bed beside her and stroked her face, which had become, just very lately, so much more wrinkled with pain and fear. My fingers can still remember those soft wrinkles and the tears that quietly filled them. She said she wanted to die in a storm of noise and for days we had the hi-fi turned up playing Wagner and we drank whisky and together we waited. It was the strangest waiting I ever remember for it was and it was not waiting. There was a sort of intense timelessness in the way in which we kept each other company. Our fear divided us, her fear, my fear, of the event: two different sharp fears which we had to overcome by a constant force of mutual attention, laying our hands upon each other’s hearts. We became tired and we turned off the noise and we wept and still we waited. My God, Clement’s tears, how much I had seen of them before and how much they had sickened me. Now I felt they would make a saint of me, and perhaps for a month they almost did. In the end she died when I was asleep. Every morning I had thought I might find her dead, but had then seen her breathing, the little rhythmic rising and falling of the bedclothes that covered her body which had become so shrunken and small. Then one day there was no movement and I saw her eyes open and her face changed.

That time of attentive mourning for her death was quite unlike the black blank horror of the thing itself. We had mourned together, trying to soothe each other’s pain. But that shared pain was so much less than the torment of her vanishing, the terrible lived time of her eternal absence. How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

I did not intend to write about Clement’s death. I have made myself wretched by doing so and am still haunted by it although several days have passed. Of course I recovered from that bereavement, probably quite quickly. She left me her money, but in the end there was nothing but debts.

Since silencing my telephone I have received fewer invitations. In any case I think people have got over the excitement of my return to London. Just lately I have been spending my evenings at home drinking wine and listening to music, almost any music, on the radio. I have a record player, but it was broken in the move. I cook myself a supper of rice or lentils or spiced cabbage. I eat Cox’s Orange Pippins and go to bed early quite drunk. I don’t think I have the makings of an alcoholic. I have a pain in my chest, but I think this is just something to do with Clement.

I wonder if James was mad? I have found myself thinking this for the first time. Would not this hypothesis explain many things? For instance his illusion that he lifted me up out of that whirlpool by some sort of abnormal power? But wait a moment, was not that my illusion? Perhaps I am mad? I am certainly drunk and I was dozing just now. It is later than my bed time. The Buddhas close in. To bed, to bed.

Thinking further about James something obvious has only just occurred to me. He is not dead at all, he has simply gone underground! The whole charade was organized by the intelligence service! I was too upset at the time to see how extremely fishy it all was. I never saw James’s body. By the time I arrived the mysterious Colonel Blackthorn was already in charge and the ‘body’ had been removed. I never even discovered who was supposed to have identified it. The extremely shifty Indian doctor was obviously also in the pay of British Intelligence. His letter was a masterpiece of bafflement. I was so confused and impressed by it, I was unable to reflect on the extreme oddness of what was going on. James was in perfect health when I last saw him. The notion of his killing himself by will power was just as absurd as the idea of his walking on the water. It occurs to me that I have never found his passport in the flat. Where is my cousin now? Not in purgatory or nirvana, but seated upon an army-issue yak, proceeding to a snowy rendezvous with some slit-eyed informer!

Since writing the above I have noticed several oriental persons hanging around in the streets nearby. I hope they are not the others, who are mistaking me for James? As for that tulpa tribesman, he was certainly an intelligence agent, which was why James was so annoyed that I saw him.

I have just heard the terrible shocking news that Peregrine has been murdered by terrorists in Londonderry. I can hardly believe it. I realize now that I regarded his activities as purely comic. Some men play their whole lives as a comedy. Only death is not comic-but then it is not tragic either. That blank horror touches me again, with a grief that is pure fear, but I know I am not really grieving for Perry but for other deaths, perhaps my own. Poor Perry. He was a brave man. I cannot pretend I ever really loved him, but I do admire him for trying to kill me, and if it hadn’t been for that freak wave he would have succeeded too. That weird vision of James which seemed so important must have been a result of the blow on the head. It was a lucky escape.

There have been a number of tributes to Peregrine from Catholic and Protestant bishops. He is quite a martyr. They are setting up a Peregrine Arbelow Peace Foundation. Rosina, returned from California to bask in the martyr’s glory, is organizing a lot of American money. Lizzie says she heard that Rosina had actually left Perry before his death with no intention of returning, but this may be just malicious gossip.

The shock of Perry’s death has, in a curious way, made me a good deal less certain about James’s. The theory I deployed above remains a good one, extremely plausible. I just feel less inclined to believe it. Perhaps I would prefer to think of him as dead, the spirit that disturbed me for so long at peace at last. There are no mysteries after all. James died of a heart attack. As for the ‘oriental persons’, I realize now that they are simply waiters from an Indian restaurant in the Vauxhall Bridge Road.

No, I do not want to believe that cousin James is alive and well and living in Tibet, any more than I want to believe that Hartley is alive and well and living in Australia; and there are times when I actually feel persuaded that she too has died.

Peregrine opened the door and fell to the ground riddled with bullets. After all, he died a hero with his boots on.

To lunch with Miss Kaufman. Sidney has arrived to talk things over with Rosemary. Rosina has spoken at a meeting in Trafalgar Square. Lizzie and I watch Gilbert on television.

Uncle Abel dancing with Aunt Estelle so lightly touches her hand, so lightly touches her shoulder, as if he were lifting her off the ground simply by the force of his love. They look intently at each other; he protectively, she with absolute trust. Were they waltzing, at that fleeting moment which the camera seized and tossed on into the future? Her feet seem scarcely to touch the dance floor.

My father was something which I was destined never to be: a gentleman. Was Uncle Abel one? Not quite. Was James one? The question is absurd.

James said I was in love with my own youth, not with Hartley. Clement stopped me from finding Hartley. The war destroyed any ordinary world in which I might have married my childhood sweetheart. There were no trains going where she was.

I have just had a drunken evening with Toby Ellesmere and feel rather ashamed of it. Toby said James was ‘a bit potty’ and that he was ‘a sphinx without a secret’. I did not disagree. I even felt some satisfaction in hearing James belittled. Ellesmere still wants those poems but I will not give them up; nor have I looked at them, not at so much as a line. Even if James is the greatest poet of the century he must wait a little longer to be recognized. I think he will have to wait until after I am dead.

James said that I must re-enact my love for Hartley, and that then it would crumble to pieces like something in a fairy tale when the clock strikes twelve. Was it just a necessary charade and is such re-enacted love just a machinery for getting rid of an old resentment? Did I simply want to take her away from Ben, as I had wanted to take Rosina away from Perry? Of course Titus’s death made Hartley impossible for me, that part at least of the cold lesson, the revelation of human vanity, has remained. And am I now actually beginning to wonder how much I really loved her even at the start? The sad fact was that Hartley was not really very intelligent. What a dull humourless pair we seem, looking back, without spirit or style or a sense of fun. All those things were what I learnt from Clement. Did I after all mistake dullness for goodness because my mother hated Aunt Estelle?

Why have I written down these blasphemies all of a sudden? This is late night nonsense.

How long I have put off writing about Hartley, although I have been thinking about her all the time; and perhaps now after all there is little to say. A few days ago, although I did not record it, it suddenly became ‘obvious’ to me that of course the story of going to Australia was simply a hoax. Why had Hartley not told me earlier that she was going to Australia? Because she was not going! Ben invented the plan at the last moment. Was it not very odd to buy a dog just when one was leaving the country? The postcard from Sydney, so promptly produced by the confederate next door, could easily have been faked with the help of an Australian friend. Ben had decided to throw me off the scent for good, even send me off on a wild goose chase to the antipodes, and had then removed his submissive wife to Bournemouth or Lytham-St-Anne’s. They might even, after a while, and having found out from the Arkwrights that I had gone, return to Nibletts. What should I do then? Go back and do some more detective work in the village? Not everyone would lie.

But the impulse to do so has gone. I have battered destructively and in vain upon the mystery of someone else’s life and must cease at last. I later concluded that it really did not matter whether they had gone to Sydney or to Lytham-St-Anne’s. And now the idea of such an elaborate hoax for my benefit simply seems absurd.

When did they decide to go to Australia, if they did? Did Ben really believe that I was Titus’s father? If he did he behaved, for a violent man, with remarkable restraint. He may even have considered me useful as a pretext. Looking back into that causal web, it is just as well I did tell James that I thought Ben had tried to kill me, since this enabled him to perceive my murderous intentions, and thus to decide to make Perry confess. Did I ever really intend to kill Ben? No, those were consolation fantasies. Yet such fantasies too can cause ‘accidents’.

Why did I imagine Hartley was consumed by a death wish? She was a survivor, tough as old boots.

If this diary is ‘waiting’ for some final clarificatory statement which I am to make about Hartley it may have to wait forever. It is not of course a full account of my doings, and events and people unconnected with what went before are omitted from it. I have also omitted the dates from this meditation. Time has passed and it is October, with bright cool sunny days and an intense blue northern sky and scattered flying memories of other autumns. It is mushroom weather, and I have been having feasts of real mushrooms, the big slimy black things, not the little tasteless buttons. Crumpets too have appeared in the shops and already one can look forward to the so familiar London winter, dark afternoons and fogs and the glitter and excitement of Christmas. And however unhappy I am I cannot help responding automatically to these stimuli, as no doubt I did in the past in other unhappy autumns.

Since writing that stuff about Clement I have been missing her. Odd that one can identify a pain as ‘missing so and so’. I keep seeing Clement in the street when I am on a bus, on an escalator going up when I am going down, jumping into a taxi and disappearing. Perhaps it will be like this in bardo. My God, if she is there, what a time she will be having! Talk of attachments, Clement had enough torment in her head to last ten thousand years.

Of course I do not believe in those ‘blasphemies’ which I wrote earlier.

When did I begin to relax my hold upon Hartley, or rather upon her image, her double, the Hartley of my mind? Have I relaxed my hold, did it happen before, or is it only happening now, when I can look back over the summer and see my acts and thoughts as those of a madman? I remember Rosina saying to me that her desire for me was made of jealousy, resentment, anger, not love. Was the same true of my desire for Hartley? Was the aim of the whole operation, the whole obsession, that I should be able in the end to see her as a harpy, a semi-conscious trouble-making sorceress, unworthy of my devotion, and whom I would cast off with a relieved disgust? James said I would come to see her as a wicked enchantress and then I would forgive her. But would not forgiving her finally defeat the purpose of this psychological game I have been playing with myself? Have I indeed relived my love simply in order to explain to myself that it was a false love, compounded of resentment stored from long ago and the present promptings of mad possessive jealousy? Was I so resentful long ago? I cannot remember. Hartley said, so strangely, that she had to think of me as hating her in order to reduce the attractive power of my image. Now as I think about it all, trying in vain swoops to recover the far past, it seems to me that perhaps what I felt about Hartley then, at any rate after I had been captured by Clement, was a kind of guilt that I was not suffering enough, not seeking her earnestly enough. Damn it, I was in love with Clement, I must have been, though I tormented her by denying it! Was it possible that, by then, I was relieved that I could not find Hartley? I have no diary to tell me and even if I had I might not believe it. I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.

Whatever the cause, it is now clear that something is over. My new, my second love for her, my second ‘innings’, seemed at its height a thing sublime, even without illusion, when I had seen her as so pitiful, so broken, and yet as something which I could cherish, something which I could hold and be held by, and which would be a source of light even if I were to lose her utterly, as I have indeed lost her utterly. What has become of that light now? It has gone and was at best a flickering flame seen in a marsh, and my great ‘illumination’ a kind of nonsense. She is gone, she is nothing, for me she no longer exists, and after all I fought for a phantom Helen. On n’aime qu’une fois, la première. What a lot of folly I have run through in aid of that stupid gallicism!

What has changed things, simply the relentless movement of time, which so quietly and automatically changes all things? I wrote earlier that Titus’s death had ‘spoilt’ Hartley, spoilt her just by her survival of him. Yes, but it was not that I somehow blamed her for it. Rather there was some sort of demonic filth which had gradually corroded everything, and which seemed to come, without her fault, from her, so that for her sake, for my sake, we had to part eternally. And I seem to see her now, forever disfigured by that filth, untidy, frowzy, dirty, old. How cruel and unjust. Without her fault. The only fault which I can at all measure is my own. I let loose my own demons, not least the sea serpent of jealousy. But now my brave faith which said ‘Whatever she is like, it is her that I love’, has failed and gone, and all has faded into triviality and self-regarding indifference; and I know that quietly I belittle her, as almost every human being intentionally belittles every other one. Even the few whom we genuinely adore we have to belittle secretly now and then, as Toby and I had to belittle James, just to feed the healthy appetite of our wondrously necessary egos.

But of course the pain remains and will remain. We are conditioned beings who salivate when the bell rings. This sheer conditioning is another of our most characteristic dooms. Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world. Whenever I hear a dog barking I see again Hartley’s face as I last saw it, all wrinkled up with pain, then going strangely blank. Just as, whenever I hear the music of Wagner I remember Clement dying and weeping over her own death. In hell or in purgatory there would be no need of other or more elaborate tortures.

A busy week. Had lunch with Miss Kaufman and arranged for her mother to be packed off to a comfortable and expensive ‘twilight home’. I am to pay the bills, it appears. Am I becoming saintly after all? Had a drink with Rosina. She is thinking of entering politics. She says it is so easy to influence people by making speeches. Saw Aloysius Bull and Will Boase. They want me to join their new company. Refused. Went to private view of Doris’s awful paintings. Lunch with Rosemary, who says the Maybelle business may be blowing over. Got another letter from Angie. To Cambridge to visit the Bansteads, and see them showing off their happy successful marriage and their handsome clever children. Dinner with Lizzie and Gilbert. Gilbert is nominated ‘show business personality of the year’. We talked of Wilfred, and Gilbert was becomingly modest, or affected to be.

I must speak of Lizzie. I have been unjust to her in the preceding pages. However, I have kept her letters to me, and the keeping of a letter is always significant. (Why on earth did Hartley keep my last letter but not read it? I suppose she just had to dispose of it quickly. A long letter cannot always be rapidly destroyed, as I have found out in my time.) I have reread Lizzie’s letters, the ones recorded above. At the time they seemed to me to be mere out-pourings of self-deceiving nonsense. Now they seem rather touching, even wise. (Am I, for the first time since Clement, feeling short of admirers?) Since Gilbert became so busy and famous I have been seeing a little more of Lizzie by herself. I now have lunch with her regularly and have at last persuaded her not to cook. This, in almost any friendship, is a very important step. We are quiet and cheerful together. We laugh and joke a lot, we discuss nothing serious, and it may be that Lizzie’s eloquence rings more in my mind than it does in hers.

My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace. If I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. Receive us now as if we were your children. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, Charles, love me enough.

There is no doubt that Lizzie and Gilbert are indeed happy together as she said, and I did not believe, in her first letter. ‘It’s all suddenly simple and innocent.’ His fame makes no difference to that. It creates chances for me to see her alone and I think this pleases him. His TV success has led to other triumphs. He was away for some time in September at the Edinburgh Festival, where Al Bull directed him in a new play. Buoyed up by the love of the British public he is a good deal less frightened of me than he used to be. So is Lizzie. Is the Lion becoming old and clawless? However that may be, I notice that without any effort, without anything being said, without personal discussion of any kind, without there being any question of sexual relations, Lizzie has become what she once was and what she said she desired to be, my child, my page, my son. So at least one person in this story has got what she wanted.

Lizzie was terrified to come back to me in case her love should make her my slave. She was afraid of that dreadful tormenting dependence of one human consciousness upon another. Am I sorry that that fear has left her? There is a wicked tyrant in me that is. How did Lizzie manage it? Perhaps she too had to re-enact her love, to suffer it all over again, in order to transform it. Only she seems to have succeeded whereas I have failed; she has perfected her love, I have simply destroyed mine. Was I the destined trial that was to purify her power to love? The speculation is rather too sublime! Perhaps the horrors of the summer simply snapped some thread, Lizzie grew tired. We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate. My relation with Lizzie seems to have been so saved, by some grace, without my merit, without my will. I think we are both tired, and glad to rest in each other’s company.

We touch and kiss, there is no urge for more. As I said at the start, I am, unlike the modern hero, not highly sexed! I can do without it, I am doing without it, I feel fine without it. Looking back, I must make a confession which would indeed shame the modern hero. I have not had all that many love affairs, and the women I pursued successfully did not always please me in bed. Of course there have been exceptions: Clement, who taught me. Jeanne. What would it have been like with Hartley?

Lizzie and I never speak of James and somehow this does not seem to matter. It is as if the fact that he knew her had been blotted out of both our memories. All the same, and in a sense which is perhaps harmless, James has divided me from Lizzie, he has castrated our relationship. Perhaps this is precisely the unmerited grace, the source of our peace? The demons detailed to disturb our friendship have all been killed. I do not miss them. Sometimes when Lizzie and I smile quietly at each other I wonder if she is thinking just the same thing.

I have had a recurrence of the chest pain which I first experienced on the day when I tried to have a bath in the kitchen at Shruff End. I saw my doctor but he says it is simply caused by ‘viruses’.

Sometimes I sit and wonder whom I should leave my money to. Perhaps I had better start giving it away now. I have sent a cheque to the Buddhist Society and another to the Arbelow Peace Foundation, and will shortly amaze young Erasmus Blick, who is getting married, by my generosity. His Hamlet is still running, I still haven’t seen it. I imagine I shall leave all the oriental stuff to the British Museum, in fact they can have the books now. And I shall leave James’s poems to Toby. Why this anxiety to tidy up? Do I imagine I am going to die soon? Not really-yet it is as if that fall into the sea did damage me after all, not with body damage but with some sort of soul damage. Perhaps James died of soul damage? I am perfectly healthy and do not feel that I am becoming an ‘elderly party’, but I notice that people are beginning to treat me as if I were one, and this must be a reflection of my own sense of myself. They give me presents, potted plants and tins of jellied chicken, and ask me if I am all right. Am I all right? Rosemary has given me some pottery soup bowls.

Last night someone on a BBC quiz did not know who I was.

I must have been a bit under the weather yesterday when I wrote the above. In fact I was feeling a bit queasy after attending a so-called college ‘feast’ in Oxford. I must not give my money away too quickly when I am in moods like that. However I have told the British Museum that they can have the books now. I suppose that is right, though there is a kind of impiety involved in letting any of James’s stuff go away. Do I then suppose he is likely to come back at any moment?

As I write I am touching with my other hand the brown stone with the blue lines on it which James selected from my collection at Shruff End. It was on the desk when I came here and perhaps he handled it a lot, so touching it is a bit like touching his hand (what sentimental nonsense). I hold the stone and play with a kind of emotion which I keep at bay. Loving people, isn’t that an attachment? I do not want to suffer fruitlessly. I feel regret, remorse, that I never got to know him better. We were never really friends and I spent a lot of my life stupidly envying him, nervously watching him, and exerting myself in a competition which he probably never knew existed. In so far as he did not succeed I was glad, and I valued my own success because it seemed that I outshone him. My awareness of him was fear, anxiety, envy, desire to impress. Could such an awareness contain or compose love? We missed each other because of lack of confidence, courage, generosity, because of misplaced dignity and English taciturnity. I feel now as if something of me went with James’s death, like part of a bridge carried away in a flood.

A completely new view of Hartley’s second defection, and indeed of her first, has just occurred to me. I think something like it was suggested to me by James. When Hartley said she had to ‘protect herself’ by thinking I hated her and blamed her, she added that she ‘always felt guilty’. When she said she had to feel sure it was all over and to ‘make it dead in her mind’, I imagined that this angry hostile image of me was designed to numb her old love and the attraction which I might still exercise, because such an attraction would be too painful for her to live with. But perhaps the fundamental bond was not love at all, but guilt? Obsessive guilt can survive through the years and animate the ghost of the offended one. Could such guilt even simulate a buried love? Perhaps Hartley herself, in that long interim, did not know what it was that she was so painfully feeling about me. It must have been a terrible and a difficult action to escape from me, to betray our unseparated lives and our devoted vows. ‘I had to go like that, it was the only way, it wasn’t easy.’ Had the shock of that betrayal gone on reverberating in her mind, like the original explosion of the universe? While there was no occasion to define it, how could she know exactly what she felt, whether it was shock, or guilt, or love?

Then I reappeared and made it, quite suddenly, abundantly clear to her that I did not hate her or blame her, that I had gone on loving her without resentment. Her first feeling was one of gratitude, and with this relief came a sense of a love revived. Perhaps this was what she felt on the night when she came to me about Titus. As I learnt in the case of myself and Peregrine, one often feels guilt not because one has sinned but because one has been accused! The withdrawal of the imagined accusation caused Hartley to feel gratitude, affection, at first. But as the guilt, and the vibrating explosive intensity which it had brought into our relationship, began to fade, the more deeply buried reality of her feelings for me became apparent. After all, it had been very hard to leave me and she must have had very compelling motives. It had required great courage to run away to her auntie at Stoke-on-Trent. Why did she go? Because I was in love and she was not; because she simply did not like me enough, because I was too selfish, too dominating, as she put it ‘so sort of bossy’. I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all. After her liberation from the tie of guilt, that old saving resentment returned to her, she regained that sheer basic indifference to my company which in the past had enabled her to go away, and take her hopes for life elsewhere. And perhaps in that elsewhere she had soon met with a sexual awakening which I had been unable to give her.

But these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel ‘I shall never know’.

The people from the British Museum have come and removed all the oriental books. They looked longingly at the other stuff. One even wanted to examine the demon-casket, but I ran forward with a cry. James’s other books, which now conspicuously remain, are mainly history, and poetry in European languages. (I cannot find the works of Milarepa. Is he an Italian poet?) No novels. I have unpacked some of my own books, but they have an unhappy frivolous look and will never fill those empty spaces. Will the place be gradually dismantled, like Aladdin’s palace?

A letter from Jeanne who wants me to visit her in Iran where her husband, a Kurd or something, is some sort of princeling. I may yet be the victim of a crime passionnel.

Shruff End has been sold at last, thank God, to a Dr and Mrs Schwarzkopf. I hope they will have better luck than I did with whatever it is there.

The latest gossip about Rosina is that she is living in a canyon in Los Angeles with a woman psychiatrist. I hear that idiot Will Boase has been knighted. I never coveted such ‘honours’, I am glad to say.

I dreamt last night that Hartley was dead, that she was drowned.

Another letter from Angie.

I have talked with Lizzie about Hartley and though nothing important was said my heart feels eased, as if it has been gently prised open. I accused Hartley of being a ‘fantasist’, or perhaps that was Titus’s word, but what a ‘fantasist’ I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place. But what strikes me now is that at some point, in order to ease things for myself, I decided, almost surreptitiously, to regard her as a liar. In order to release myself from the burden of my tormented attachment I began, with the half-conscious cunning so characteristic of the self-protective human ego, to see her as a poor hysterical shrew; and this debased pity, which I tried to imagine was some kind of spiritual compassion, was the half-way house to my escape. I could not bear the spectacle of that whimpering captive victim in that awful windowless room which I still see in nightmares. My love’s imagination gave up the real Hartley and consoled itself with high abstract ideas of blindly ‘accepting it all’. That was the exit.

Lizzie said when we talked, ‘Of course a marriage can look terrible but be perfectly all right.’ Yes, yes. But had I not evidence? Of course I never told Lizzie about my eavesdropping, and how I heard Hartley saying again and again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Ben never settled down in civilian life. He got a medal for killing a lot of men in a prison camp in the Ardennes. There was talk of unnecessary brutality. Some people are better at killing than others. Hartley said she had lied about Ben’s violence, but perhaps that was a lie, uttered out of loyalty, out of irrational fear? Can one not recognize the smell of fear? Where can such speculations lead and under what light can they even attempt to be just? The door is closed against the imagination of love. The fallibility of memory and its feeble range make perfect reconciliations impossible. But there is no doubt that Hartley was afflicted, and no doubt that she did, as I thought at first, sometimes feel sorry that she had lost me. She came to me, she ran to me, that was no dream. That was no phantom that I embraced on that night. And on that night she said that she loved me. My idea of her return to an ‘original resentment’ is too ingenious. One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless or unworthy. My pity for her need not be a device or an impertinence, it can survive after all as a blank ignorant quiet unpossessive souvenir, not now a major part of my life, but a persisting one. The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is the final forgiveness that James spoke of.

Last night I dreamt I heard a boy’s voice singing Eravamo tredici. When I awoke I still seemed to hear that ridiculous pima-poma-pima-poma chorus still ringing in the flat. How differently I would feel about all these possessions if Titus were still alive. Unpacking some more of my books I came across his de luxe edition of Dante’s love poems.

What innumerable chains of fatal causes one’s vanity, one’s jealousy, one’s cupidity, one’s cowardice have laid upon the earth to be traps for others. It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another. Perhaps in a way James and I had the same problem?

I keep trying to remember things which James said, but I seem to be forgetting them at an unusual rate. The flat looks dreary without his books. I think it is going to be rather cold here in the winter. Already the days are blank and yellow. I must try to learn how to raise my bodily temperature by mental concentration!

I have been to my doctor again and he can still find nothing wrong with me. I was beginning to wonder whether all this ‘wisdom’ was a preliminary to physical collapse! It has been raining all day and I have stayed at home. On my present stores of rice and lentils and Cox’s Orange Pippins I could last the winter. I am still silencing the telephone bell. Am I after all alone now, as I intended to be, and without attachments? Is history over?

Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.

It is very foggy today. The other side of the Thames was invisible when I went down this morning. The cold weather is making me feel better. The shops are already preparing for Christmas. I walked to Piccadilly and bought a lot of cheese. Came back to find a long effusive cable from Fritzie, who is on his way to London. He wants me to direct something he calls ‘neo-ballet’. The Odyssey is on again.

Took Miss Kaufman to Hamlet and enjoyed it. Have had a very tempting invitation to Japan.

Decided to release the telephone bell and instantly Angie was on the line. Arranged to have lunch with her on Friday.

Fritzie arrives tomorrow.

Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one’s first love?

My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?