The Sea, the Sea

Prehistory

THE SEA WHICH LIES BEFORE ME as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.

I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time and although a possible, though not totally reassuring, explanation has occurred to me. Perhaps I shall feel calmer and more clear-headed after yet another interval.

I spoke of a memoir. Is that what this chronicle will prove to be? Time will show. At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier, what a record that would have been! But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but ‘recollection in tranquillity’. To repent of a life of egoism? Not exactly, yet something of the sort. Of course I never said this to the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre. They would never have stopped laughing.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. The end of life is rightly thought of as a period of meditation. Will I be sorry that I did not begin it sooner?

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before. What I wrote before was written in water and deliberately so. This is for permanence, something which cannot help hoping to endure. Yes, already I personify the object, the little book, the libellus, this creature to which I am giving life and which seems at once to have a will of its own. It wants to live, it wants to survive.

I have considered writing a journal, not of happenings for there will be none, but as a record of mingled thoughts and daily observations: ‘my philosophy’, my pensées against a background of simple descriptions of the weather and other natural phenomena. This now seems to me again to be a good idea. The sea. I could fill a volume simply with my word-pictures of it. I would certainly like to write some sustained account of my surroundings, its flora and fauna. This could be of some interest, if I persevered, even though I am no White of Selborne. From my sea-facing window at this moment I can see three different kinds of gulls, swallows, a cormorant, innumerable butterflies drifting about over the flowers which grow miraculously upon my yellow rocks…

I must make no attempt at ‘fine writing’ however, that would be to spoil my enterprise. Besides, I should merely make a fool of myself.

Oh blessed northern sea, a real sea with clean merciful tides, not like the stinking soupy Mediterranean!

They say there are seals here, but I have seen none yet.

Of course there is no need to separate ‘memoir’ from ‘diary’ or ‘philosophical journal’. I can tell you, reader, about my past life and about my ‘world-view’ also, as I ramble along. Why not? It can all come out naturally as I reflect. Thus unanxiously (for am I not now leaving anxiety behind?) I shall discover my ‘literary form’. In any case, why decide now? Later, if I please, I can regard these ramblings as rough notes for a more coherent account. Who knows indeed how interesting I shall find my past life when I begin to tell it? Perhaps I shall bring the story gradually up to date and as it were float my present upon my past?

To repent of egoism: is autobiography the best method? Well, being no philosopher I can only reflect about the world through reflecting about my own adventures in it. And I feel that it is time to think about myself at last. It may seem odd that one who has been described in the popular press as a ‘tyrant’, a ‘tartar’, and (if I recall) a ‘power-crazed monster’ should feel that he has not hitherto done so! But this is the case. I have in fact very little sense of identity.

It is indeed only lately that I have felt this need to write something that is both personal and reflective. In the days when I wrote in water I imagined that the only book I would ever publish would be a cookery book!

I might now introduce myself-to myself, first and foremost, it occurs to me. What an odd discipline autobiography turns out to be. To others, if these words are printed in the not too distant future, there will be in a superficial sense ‘no need of an introduction’, as they say at meetings. How long does mortal fame endure? My kind of fame not very long, but long enough. Yes, yes, I am Charles Arrowby and, as I write this, I am, shall we say, over sixty years of age. I am wifeless, childless, brotherless, sisterless, I am my well-known self, made glittering and brittle by fame. I determined long ago that I would retire from the theatre when I had passed sixty. (‘You will never retire’, Wilfred told me. ‘You will be unable to.’ He was wrong.) In fact I am tired of the theatre, I have had enough. This is what no one who knew me well, not Sidney nor Peregrine nor Fritzie, not Wilfred nor Clement when they were alive, could either foresee or imagine. And it is not just a matter of sagely departing ‘on the crest of the wave’. (How many actors and directors pathetically overstay their welcome.) I am tired of it all. There has been a moral change.

‘All right, go’, they said, ‘but don’t imagine that you can come back.’ I don’t want to come back, thank you! ‘If you stop working and live alone you will go quietly mad.’ (This was Sidney’s contribution.) On the contrary, I feel completely sane and free and happy for the first time in my life!

It is not that I ever came to ‘disapprove’ of the theatre, as my mother, for instance, never ceased to do. I just knew that if I stayed in it any longer I would begin to wilt spiritually, would lose something which had travelled with me patiently so far, but might go away if I did not attend to it at last: something not belonging to the preoccupations of my work, but preciously separate from it. I remember James saying something about people who end their lives in caves. Well, this, here, is my cave. And I have reached it bearing the precious thing that has come with me, as if it were a talisman which I can now unwrap. How grand and pompous this sounds! And yet I confess I scarcely know what I mean. Let us break off these rather ponderous reflections for a while.

The above observations have been written on a sequence of different days, wonderful empty solitary days, such as I remember yearning for, and never quite believing that I wanted so much that I would finally obtain them.

I went swimming again but still cannot discover quite the right place. This morning I simply dived into deep water off the rocks nearest to the house, where they descend almost sheer, yet with folds and ledges enough to make a precarious stairway. My ‘cliff’ I call it, though it is barely twenty feet high at low tide. Of course the water is very cold, but after a few seconds it seems to coat the body in a kind of warm silvery skin, as if one had acquired the scales of a merman. The challenged blood rejoices with a new strength. Yes, this is my natural element. How strange to think that I never saw the sea until I was fourteen.

I am a skilful fearless swimmer and I am not afraid of rough water. Today the sea was gentle compared with antipodean oceans where I have sported like a dolphin. My problem was almost a technical one. Even though the swell was fairly mild I had a ridiculous amount of difficulty getting back onto the rocks again. The ‘cliff’ was a little too steep, the ledges a little too narrow. The gentle waves teased me, lifting me up towards the rock face, then plucking me away. My fingers, questing for a crevice, were again and again pulled off. Becoming tired, I swam around trying other places where the sea was running restlessly in and out, but the difficulty was greater since there was deep water below me and even if the rocks were less sheer they were smoother or slippery with weed and I could not hold on. At last I managed to climb up my cliff, clinging with fingers and toes, then kneeling sideways upon a ledge. When I reached the top and lay panting in the sun I found that my hands and knees were bleeding.

Since my arrival I have had the pleasure of swimming naked. This rocky coast attracts, thank God, no trippers with their ‘kiddies’. There is not a vestige of beastly sand anywhere. I have heard it called an ugly coast. Long may it be deemed so. The rocks, which stretch away in both directions, are not in fact picturesque. They are sandy yellow in colour, covered with crystalline flecks, and are folded into large ungainly incoherent heaps. Below the tide line they are festooned with growths of glistening blistery dark brown seaweed which has a rather unpleasant smell. Up above however, and at close quarters, they afford the clamberer a surprising number of secret joys. There are many V-shaped ravines containing small pools or screes of extremely varied and pretty stones. There are also flowers which contrive somehow to root themselves in crannies: pink thrift and mauve mallow, a sort of white spreading sea campion, a blue-green plant with cabbage-like leaves, and a tiny saxifrage thing with leaves and flowers so small as almost to defeat the naked eye. I must find my magnifying glass and inspect it properly.

A feature of the coastline is that here and there the water has worn the rocks into holes, which I would not dignify with the name of caves, but which, from the swimmer’s-eye-view, present a striking and slightly sinister appearance. At one point, near to my house, the sea has actually composed an arched bridge of rock under which it roars into a deep open steep-sided enclosure beyond. It affords me a curious pleasure to stand upon this bridge and watch the violent forces which the churning waves, advancing or retreating, generate within the confined space of the rocky hole.

Another day has passed since I wrote the above. The weather continues almost perfect. I have received no letters since my arrival, and this does seem rather odd. My ex-secretary, Miss Kaufman, kindly detains the diminishing flow of business mail in London. Well, whom do I want to hear from after all, except Lizzie, and she is probably away on tour?

I have continued to explore the rocks in the direction of my tower. Yes, I am now the owner not only of a house and a lot of rocks, but of a ruined ‘martello’ tower! It is alas only a shell. I would like to restore it and build a spiral staircase and a lofty study room, only contrary to what is commonly believed about me I am not rich. My sea-house took most of my savings. However I have a good pension, thanks to darling Clement’s business sense long ago. I must save up. Near to the tower I found a pleasing piece of archaeology, which is also evidence that I am not the only person to have discovered it difficult to get out of this sea. In a little secret inlet below the tower, and invisible except from directly above, some steps have been cut in the side of the rock, descending into the water, and surmounted with an iron banister. Unfortunately the lower part of the banister is broken away, and the rock face being smooth, the slippery steps are useless, except at high tide, if there is any strong swell. The waves simply pluck one off. It is remarkable how quietly firmly powerful my sportive sea can be! But the idea is clearly excellent. I must have the banister extended; and it occurs to me that a few iron stanchions, let into the face of my ‘cliff’, would provide quite enough hand and foot holds for the climb, in any state of the tide. I must enquire in the village about workmen.

I swam from the ‘tower steps’ at high tide and then lay naked on the grass beside the tower, feeling exceedingly relaxed and happy. The tower, I regret to say, does attract the occasional tourist; but I am loath to put up a notice saying Private. This little lawn is the only piece of grass which I own, except for a small patch directly behind the house. This grass, tormented no doubt by the sea wind, is extremely short, its blades spread out in little circular mats of an almost cactus-like toughness. Pink and white valerian grows round the base of the tower, and a kind of purple flowering thyme mingles with the grass and perches here and there among the rocks on the landward side. I examined this, and also the tiny saxifrage, through my magnifying glass. I wanted to be a botanist when I was ten. My father loved plants, though ignorantly, and we looked at many things together. I wonder what I would have done with my life if I had not been theatre-mad?

Walking back I looked into my various pools. What a remarkable amount of beautiful and curious life they contain. I must buy some books about these matters if I am to become, even to my own modest satisfaction, the Gilbert White of this area. I also picked up a number of pretty stones and carried them to my other lawn. They are smooth, elliptical, lovely to handle. One, a mottled pink, elaborately crossed with white lines, lies before me as I write. My father would have loved this place-I still think of him and miss him.

It is after lunch and I shall now describe the house. For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil. (Really good olive oil is essential, the kind with a taste, I have brought a supply from London.) Green peppers would have been a happy addition only the village shop (about two miles pleasant walk) could not provide them. (No one delivers to far-off Shruff End, so I fetch everything, including milk, from the village.) Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses. Our cheeses are the best in the world. With this feast I drank most of a bottle of Muscadet out of my modest ‘cellar’. I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.

I wonder if I shall ever write my Charles Arrowby Four Minute Cookbook? The ‘four minutes’ of course refer to the active time of preparation, and do not include unsupervised cooking time. I have looked at several so-called ‘short order’ cookery books, but these works tend to deceive, their ‘fifteen minutes’ really in practice means thirty, and they contain instructions such as ‘make a light batter’. The sturdy honest persons to whom my book would be addressed would not necessarily be able to make a light batter or even to know what it was. But they would be hedonists. In food and drink, as in many (not all) other matters, simple joys are best, as any intelligent self-lover knows. Sidney Ashe once offered to initiate me into the pleasures of vintage wine. I refused with scorn. Sidney hates ordinary wine and is unhappy unless he is drinking some expensive stuff with a date on it. Why wantonly destroy one’s palate for cheap wine? (And by that I do not of course mean the brew that tastes of bananas.) One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better. Life in the theatre often precluded serious meals and I have not always in the past been able to eat slowly, but I have certainly learnt how to cook quickly. Of course my methods (especially a liberal use of the tin opener) may scandalize fools, and the various people (mainly the girls: Jeanne, Doris, Rosemary, Lizzie) who urged me to publish my recipes did so with an air of amused condescension. Your name will sell the book, they tactlessly insisted. ‘Charles’s meals are just picnics’, Rita Gibbons once remarked. Yes, good, even great, picnics. And let me say here that of course my guests always sit squarely at tables, never balance plates on their knees, and always have proper table napkins, never paper ones.

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. I wonder whence I derived my felicitous gastronomic intelligence? A thrifty childhood gave me a horror of wasted food. I thoroughly enjoyed the modest fare we had at home. My mother was a ‘good plain cook’, but she lacked the inspired simplicity which is for me the essence of good eating. I think my illumination came, like that of Saint Augustine, from a disgust with excesses. When I was a young director I was idiotic and conventional enough to think that I had to entertain people at well-known restaurants. It gradually became clear to me that guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple joys chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little cold corned beef if desired? And well-made porridge with brown sugar and cream is a dish fit for a king. Even then some people, so sadly corrupt was their taste, took my intelligent hedonism for an affected eccentricity, a mere gimmick. (Wind in the Willows food a journalist called it.) And some were actually offended.

However, it may be that what really made me see through the false mythology of haute cuisine was not so much restaurants as dinner parties. I have long, and usually vainly, tried to persuade my friends not to cook grandly. The waste of time alone is an absurdity; though I suppose it is true that some unfortunate women have nothing to do but cook. There is also the illusion that very elaborate cooking is more ‘creative’ than simple cooking. Of course (let me make it clear) I am not a barbarian. French country food, such as one can still occasionally find in that blessed land, is very good; but its goodness belongs to a tradition and an instinct which cannot be aped. The pretentious English hostess not only mistakes elaboration and ritual for virtue; she is also very often exercising her deluded art for the benefit of those who, though they would certainly not admit it, do not really enjoy food at all. Most of my friends in the theatre were usually so sozzled when they came to eat a serious meal that they had no appetite and in any case scarcely knew what was set before them. Why spend nearly all day preparing food for people who eat it (or rather toy with it and leave it) in this condition? A serious eater is a moderate drinker. Food is also spoilt at dinner parties by enforced conversation. One’s best hope is to get into one of those ‘holes’ where one’s two neighbours are eagerly engaged elsewhere, so that one can concentrate upon one’s plate. No, I am no friend to these ‘formal’ scenes which often have more to do with vanity and prestige and a mistaken sense of social ‘propriety’ than with the true instincts of hospitality. Haute cuisine even inhibits hospitality, since those who cannot or will not practise it hesitate to invite its devotees for fear of seeming rude or a failure. Food is best eaten among friends who are unmoved by such ‘social considerations’, or of course best of all alone. I hate the falsity of ‘grand’ dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.

After this tirade it looks as if the description of the house will have to wait until another day. I might add here that (as will already be evident) I am not a vegetarian. In fact I eat very little meat, and hold in horror the ‘steak house carnivore’. But there are certain items (such as anchovy paste, liver, sausages, fish) which hold as it were strategic positions in my diet, and which I should be sorry to do without; here hedonism triumphs over a peevish baffled moral sense. Perhaps I ought to give up eating meat, but by now, when the argument has gone on so long, I doubt if I ever will.

I will now describe the house. It is called Shruff End. End, yes: it is perched upon a small promontory, not exactly a peninsula, and stands indeed upon the very rocks themselves. What madman built it? The date would be perhaps nineteen ten. But why ‘Shruff’? I have asked two of my (so far) very few local informants, the shop lady and the landlord of the village pub, and they both said, but could give no further account of the matter, that ‘shruff’ means ‘black’. (Shruff: schwarz? most unlikely.) I cannot yet discover anything about the history of the house. I never met the person, described as an old lady, a Mrs Chorney, from whom I bought it. The price was not low, and I was also compelled to purchase the almost worthless furniture and fittings. Considered as a house Shruff End has obvious disadvantages which I was not slow to point out to the house agent. It is mysteriously damp and the situation is exposed and isolated. There is running water and main drainage, thank God (I have lived without these in America), but no electricity and no heating system. Cooking is by calor gas. There are also some oddities of construction which I will describe in due course. The agent, smiling, could see I loved the place and the disadvantages meant nothing. ‘It is unique, sir,’ he said. Yes it is.

The position is inspiring, though as my village ‘neighbours’ take pleasure in telling me, it will be cold and stormy in winter time. Little do they realise how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door! Since I have been here (now a matter of a few weeks) the weather has been quite distressingly calm. Yesterday the sea was so motionlessly smooth that it supported a whole flotilla of blue flies which seemed actually to crawl upon the surface tension. From the upper seaward windows (where I am sitting at this moment) the view is total sea, unless one peers down to glimpse the rocks below. From the lower windows, however, the sea is invisible and one sees only the coastal rocks, elephantine in size and shape, which surround the house. From the back door, which is the door of the kitchen, one emerges onto the little rock-surrounded ‘lawn’ of cactus-grass and thyme. This I shall leave to nature. I am in any case no gardener. (This is the first land which I have ever owned.) Nature, I note, has here provided me with a rocky seat, upon which I put cushions, and a rocky trough beside it, into which I put the pretty stones which I am collecting; so that one can sit upon the seat and examine the stones.

From the front of the house a path leads along a steep-sided rocky causeway, a sort of natural drawbridge, to what is dignified by the name of ‘the coast road’. It is a tarmac road, but the kind where grass tends to grow in the middle. It is, even in May, little frequented by motor cars. I may add here that one of the secrets of my happy life is that I have never made the mistake of learning to drive a car. I have never lacked people, usually women, longing to drive me whithersoever I wanted. Why keep bitches and bark yourself? Below the causeway, on either side, there is a wilderness of small rocks, piled higgledy-piggledy by nature, and not accessible to the sea. This is a less attractive scene and not without a few rusty tins and broken bottles which I must one day climb down and remove. Beyond the road the humpy yellow rocks, some of them extremely large, appear again, here set in wiry springy grass and among innumerable flaring gorse bushes. There are also (placed there by man or nature?) quite a lot of skinny fuchsias and dense veronicas, all in flower, and some kind of rather attractive grey-leaved sage. Beyond this ‘shrubbery’ there is a more barren heathland, covered with gorse and heather, and containing treacherous boggy pools, evil-smelling and full of a virulent green and reddish moss. I have not yet explored this inland country. I am not a ‘great walker’, and I am absorbed and contented by my seaside paradise. Upon this heath, incidentally, and about a mile and a half from Shruff End, is the nearest dwelling, a place called Amorne Farm. From my upstairs front windows I can see their lights at night.

The coast road, if followed to the right, curves round into the next bay, which is invisible from Shruff End territory, except at the tower which stands on the promontory. Here, at a distance of three or four miles, is an establishment called the Raven Hotel about which I have mixed feelings since it is a place of some pretension which attracts tourists. The bay itself is very beautiful, being fringed by rather remarkable, almost spherical boulders. It is known locally as ‘Raven Bay’ after the hotel, though it has some other name, something like ‘Shahore’ in the local dialect. (Shore Bay? Why?) If followed to the left from Shruff End, the coast road passes through a curious narrow defile, which I have nicknamed ‘the Khyber Pass’, where the way has been cut through a big outcrop of rock, which here invades the land to a considerable distance. Beyond this there is a very small stony beach; this is the only beach in the area, since elsewhere, a feature which originally attracted me to this coastline, there is deepish water up against the rocks at any state of the tide. Beyond the beach a footpath leads diagonally to the village which is set a little inland, but if one continues to follow the road one reaches a very pretty little harbour with a magnificently built crooked stone quay, all silted up and entirely abandoned. There used to be fishing boats here, I gather, but these now operate only from further north: I sometimes see them upon my otherwise remarkably empty tract of sea. Beyond the harbour a long and quite broad shelving slope has been cut in the rock to form what is known as ‘the ladies’ bathing place’. I have seen no ladies there, only occasionally a few boys. (The local people hardly ever swim; they seem to regard the activity as a form of madness.) In fact ‘the ladies’ bathing place’ is now so overgrown with slippery brown weed and so strewn with boulders tossed in by the sea that it is scarcely ‘safer’ than anywhere else. The coast road here becomes a track (unfortunately suitable for motor cars) which climbs up into a wild region, which I have not yet had time to explore, where my yellow rocks turn into handsome and quite sizeable cliffs. The tarmac road turns inland to the village and beyond.

The village is called Narrowdean. The old form of the name was Nerodene, and a handsome milestone upon the coast road retains this spelling. The little place consists of a few streets of stone-built cottages, some hillside bungalows and one general shop. I cannot get The Times, or any batteries for my exhausted transistor radio, but this does not worry me too much, nor am I dismayed by the total absence of a butcher’s shop. There is one pub, the Black Lion. The cottages are charming, solidly built in the yellowish local stone, but the only building of any special architectural interest is the church, a fine eighteenth-century structure with a gallery. I am of course not a churchgoer, but I was glad to find that there are services, though only once a month. The church is well kept and regularly provided with flowers. The distant sound of bells which I sometimes hear comes I think from an equally tiny village lying inland beyond Amorne Farm, where the country is gentler and there is grazing for sheep. There is no rectory or manor house in Narrowdean; not that it was ever part of my plan to hobnob with the parson and the squire! I am also glad to intuit that the place is not infested with ‘intellectuals’, a hazard everywhere nowadays. To return to the church, there is a most attractive cimetière marin, which evidences a more spacious past than one would expect this ‘one horse’ village to possess. Many of the tombstones carry carvings of sailing ships, decorative anchors and strangely eloquent whales. Could men have gone whaling from here? One stone in particular attracts me. It bears a beautiful ‘foul anchor’ and the simple inscription: Dummy 1879-1918. This puzzled me until I realized that ‘Dummy’ must have been a deaf and dumb sailor who never managed to achieve any other identity. Poor chap.

Let us now come back again to Shruff End. The façade which looks onto the road is, I suppose, not in itself remarkable, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house is a brick-built ‘double-fronted’ villa with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. The bricks are dark red. It would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb, but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. The back has been horribly ‘pebble-dashed’, no doubt against the weather. An expert could probably date the house from the pale buff-coloured blinds which survive in almost every room, in excellent condition, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and a lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds (expressive word) are drawn down, Shruff End, seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery. While within, the yellow light of the ‘blinded’ room somehow and sadly recalls my childhood, perhaps the atmosphere of my grandfather’s house in Lincolnshire.

The two bay-window rooms I have christened the book room (where I have put my crates of books, still not unpacked) and the dining room, where I store my wine. But I live entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in my bedroom and what I am determined to call my drawing room, and downstairs in the kitchen and a small den next to it which I call ‘the little red room’. Here there is a good fireplace, with traces of a wood fire, and also a decent bamboo table and bamboo arm-chair. The walls have white wooden panels on the lower part, above which they are painted tomato red, an exotic touch not matched elsewhere in the house. The kitchen, with the calor gas stove, is paved with the most enormous slate flags I have ever seen. There is of course no refrigerator, which is dismaying to a fish-eating man. There is a large larder full of woodlice. All the downstairs woodwork tends to be damp. I prised up some linoleum in the hall, and replaced it with a shudder. There was a salty smell. Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house? I suppose I ought to have had a surveyor’s report, but I was in too much of a hurry. There is an old-fashioned mechanical front door bell with a brass handle and a long wire. It rings in the kitchen.

The chief peculiarity of the house, and one for which I can produce no rational explanation, is that on the ground floor and on the first floor there is an inner room. By this I mean that there is, between the front room and the back room, a room which has no external window, but is lit by an internal window giving onto the adjacent seaward room (the drawing room upstairs, the kitchen downstairs). These two funny inner rooms are extremely dark, and entirely empty, except for a large sagging sofa in the downstairs one, and a small table in the upstairs one, where there is also a remarkable decorative cast-iron lamp bracket, the only one in the house. I shall certainly not occupy these rooms; later on, by the removal of walls, they shall enlarge the drawing room and the dining room. The whole house is indeed sparsely furnished. I have introduced very little of my own. (There is only one bed; I am not expecting visitors!) This emptiness suits me; unlike James I am not a collector or clutterer. I am even becoming fond of some of the stuff which I complained so much about having to buy. I am especially attached to a large oval mirror in the hall. Mrs Chorney’s things seem to ‘belong’; it is my own, few in fact, possessions which look out of place. I sold a great many things when I left the big flat in Barnes, and removed most of the remainder to a tiny pied-à-terre in Shepherd’s Bush where I pushed them in anyhow and locked the door. I rather dread going back there. I cannot now think why I bothered to keep a London base at all; my friends told me I ‘must’ have one.

I say ‘my friends’: but how few, as I take stock, they really are after a lifetime in the theatre. How friendly and ‘warm-hearted’ the theatre can seem, what a desolation it can be. The great ones have gone from me: Clement Makin dead, Wilfred Dunning dead, Sidney Ashe gone to Stratford, Ontario, Fritzie Eitel successful and done for in California. A handful remain: Perry, Al, Marcus, Gilbert, what’s left of the girls… I am beginning to ramble. It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.

Still no letters.

The sea is noisier today and the seagulls are crying. I do not really like silence except in the theatre. The sea is agitated, a very dark blue with white crests.

I went out looking for driftwood as far as the little stony beach. The tide was low, so I could not swim off the tower steps, and until I can get some handholds fixed I think I shall shun my ‘cliff’ except in calm weather. I swam at the beach but it was not a success. The pebbles hurt my feet and I had great difficulty in getting out, since the beach shelves and the waves kept tumbling the pebbles down against me. I came back really cold and disgruntled, and forgot the wood which I had collected.

I have now had lunch (lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits: a light Beaujolais) and I feel better. (Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine. I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the apricot is the king of fruit.)

I shall now go and have an afternoon rest.

It is night. Two oil lamps, purring very faintly, shed a calm creamy light upon the scratched and stained surface of what was once a fine rosewood table, the erstwhile property of Mrs Chorney. This is my working table, at the window of the drawing room, though I also use the little folding table, which I have brought in from the ‘inner room’, to lay out books and papers. I have had to shut the window against the moths, huge ones with beige and orange wings, who have been coming in like little helicopters. The lamps, there are four in all, and in good working order, are also Chorneyana. They are handsome old-fashioned things, rather heavy, made of brass with graceful opaque glass shades. I learnt to master oil lamps in the USA, in that hut with Fritzie. Two paraffin heaters downstairs remain, however, a mystery. I must get new ones before chillier nights arrive. Last night was chilly enough. I attempted to light a driftwood fire in the little red room, but the wood was too damp and the chimney smoked.

I think that in winter I shall live downstairs. How I look forward to it. The drawing room is still more of a lookout point than a room. It is dominated by a tall black-painted wooden chimney piece, with a lot of little shelves with little mirrors above them. A collector’s item, no doubt, but it looks a little too like the altar of some weird sect. (It has that oriental vegetable look.)

Before I lit the lamps tonight I spent some time simply gazing out at the moonlight, always an astonishment and a joy to the town-dweller. It is so bright now over the rocks that I could read by it. Only, oddly enough, I note that I have had no impulse to read since I have been here. A good sign. Writing seems to have replaced reading. Yet also, I seem to be constantly putting off the moment when I begin to give a formal account of myself. (‘I was born at the turn of the century in the town of--’ or whatever.) There will be time and motive enough to prose on about my life when I shall have generated as it were a sufficient cloud of reflection. I am still almost shy of my emotions, shy of the terrible strength of certain memories. Simply the tale of my years with Clement could fill a volume.

I am very conscious of the house existing quietly round about me. Parts of it I have colonised, other parts remain obstinately alien and dim. The entrance hall is dark and pointless, except for the presence of the large oval mirror aforementioned. (This handsome object seems to glow with its own light.) I do not altogether like the stairs. (Spirits from the past linger on stairs.) These lead half-way up, via a narrow branching stairway, to a surprisingly large bathroom which faces the road, and from which, behind an odd little door, more steps lead to the attics. The bathroom has some good original tiles representing swans and sinuous lilies. There is a huge much-stained bath on lions’ paws, with excellent enormous brass taps. (There is no system for heating the water however! A hip bath in a downstairs cupboard represents, I suspect, the reality of the situation.) There is also a notice in a continental hand giving useful instructions about how to make the lavatory work. The main staircase turns inward to reach the space of the upper landing. I call this a ‘space’ because it is a rather odd area with an atmosphere all its own. It has the expectant air of a stage set. Sometimes I feel as if I must have seen it long ago in a dream. It is a big windowless oblong, lit during the day through open doors, and adorned, just opposite the ‘inner room’, by a solid oak stand upon which there is a large remarkably hideous green vase, with a thick neck and a scalloped rim and pink roses blistering its bulging sides. I have become very attached to this gross object. Beyond it there is a shallow alcove which looks as if it should contain a statue, but empty resembles a door. After this comes the most fascinating feature of the landing: an archway containing a bead curtain. This curtain is not unlike those which exclude flies from shops in Mediterranean countries. The beads are of wood, painted yellow and black, and they click lightly together as one passes through. After the archway come the doors of my bedroom and drawing room.

It is time for bed. Behind me is the long horizontal window, several feet up in the wall, which gives onto the ‘inner room’. As I rise I am impelled to look towards it, seeing my face reflected in the black glass as in a mirror. I have never suffered from night fears. I was never, that I can recall, afraid of the dark as a child. My mother early impressed upon me that fear of the dark was a superstition from which God-trusting people did not suffer. I hardly needed God to protect me. My parents were an absolute defence against every terror. It is not that I find Shruff End in any way ‘creepy’. It is just that, as it now suddenly occurs to me, this is the first time in my life that I have been really alone at night. My childhood home, theatrical digs in the provinces, London flats, hotels, rented apartments in capital cities: I have always lived in hives, surrounded by human presences behind walls. And even when I lived in that hut (with Fritzie) I was never alone. This is the first house which I have owned and the first genuine solitude which I have inhabited. Is this not what I wanted? Of course the house is full of little creaking straining noises, even on a windless night, any elderly house is, and draughts blow through it from gappy window-frames and ill-fitting doors. So it is that I can imagine, as I lie in bed at night, that I hear soft footsteps in the attics above me or that the bead curtain on the landing is quietly clicking because someone has passed furtively through it.

Perhaps this is a foolish moment, so late at night, to choose to approach the subject, but it has come suddenly and vividly into my head. The reader, if there is one, may wonder why I have not referred again to a ‘horrible experience’ which I suffered here beside the sea but could not bring myself to describe. It might seem by now that I had ‘forgotten’ it; and indeed in an odd way I think I had forgotten it: a tendency which is evidence, perhaps, for one possible view of the phenomenon. Let me now describe what happened.

I was sitting, with this notebook beside me, upon the rocks just above my ‘cliff’, and looking out over the water. The sun was shining, the sea was calm. (As I have described it in the first paragraph of this notebook.) Shortly before this I had been looking intently into a rock pool and watching a remarkably long reddish faintly bristly sea-worm which had wreathed itself into curious coils prior to disappearing into a hole. I sat up, then settled myself facing seaward, blinking in the sun. Then, not at once, but after about two minutes, as my eyes became accustomed to the glare, I saw a monster rising from the waves.

I can describe this in no other way. Out of a perfectly calm empty sea, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile (or less), I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. At first it looked like a black snake, then a long thickening body with a ridgy spiny back followed the elongated neck. There was something which might have been a flipper or perhaps a fin. I could not see the whole of the creature, but the remainder of its body, or perhaps a long tail, disturbed the foaming water round the base of what had now risen from the sea to a height of (as it seemed) twenty or thirty feet. The creature then coiled itself so that the long neck circled twice, bringing the now conspicuous head low down above the surface of the sea. I could see the sky through the coils. I could also see the head with remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake’s head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior. The head and neck glistened with a blue sheen. Then in a moment the whole thing collapsed, the coils fell, the undulating back still broke the water, and then there was nothing but a great foaming swirling pool where the creature had vanished.

The shock and the horror of it were so great that for some time I could not move. I wanted to run away, I feared beyond anything that the animal would reappear closer to land, perhaps rising up at my very feet. But my legs would not function and my heart was beating so violently that any further exertion might have rendered me unconscious. The sea had become calm again and nothing further happened. At last I got up and walked slowly back to the house. I went up the stairs and into the drawing room where I sat for some time just breathing carefully and holding my heart. I could not bear to take my usual place at the window, so I sat at the little table against the wall of the inner room, leaning my head against the wall, and about half an hour later I was able to write down what now appears as the second paragraph in this notebook.

During that time, as I held on to myself and breathed and trembled, I managed gradually to think about what had occurred. Thought, rational thought, which had been utterly routed, returned gradually to my rescue. Something had happened and happenings have explanations. Several possible explanations came before me, and as I began to number and classify and relate them some relief came, and the awful unconceptualized terror receded. It was possible that I had ‘simply’ imagined what I saw. But of course one does not ‘simply’ imagine anything so detailed and dreadful. It later struck me as significant that the creature had appeared at once as utterly frightful, rather than as very surprising or even interesting. I was excessively frightened. I am a moderate drinker and certainly not an unbalanced or crazily ‘imaginative’ person. Another possibility was that I had, again ‘simply’, seen a monster unknown to science. Well, that was just possible. Or: was what I had seen an absolutely enormous eel? Could there be such an eel? Did eels ever rise up out of the sea and wreathe themselves into coils and balance themselves high in the air? I could not think that the thing was an eel, this was impossible. It had a substantial body, I had seen its back. I was quite sure too that I could not have seen a mere eel, however large, as this coiling monstrosity through which I had looked at the sky.

How far off had the animal been and how high above the water had it risen? On further reflection I was not so certain of my first impressions, though I remained sure that I had seen something absolutely remarkable. Explanations in terms of floating seaweed or bobbing driftwood were not to be considered. I explored another possibility. Just before I saw my huge monster I had been closely inspecting, in the rock pool, a little monster, the red bristling worm, whose five or six inches of wriggling body appeared big in the confined space of the pool. Was it possible that through some purely optical mechanism, some unusual trick of the retina, I had ‘thrown’ the image of the worm out onto the surface of the sea? This was an interesting idea but totally implausible, since the red worm bore no resemblance to the bluish-blackish monster, except in so far as both of them had wreathed into coils. Besides, I had never heard of any such retinal ‘cinematography’. I was struck, on reflection, by the fact that I recalled the creature with extreme clarity, the visual impression remained extremely detailed, while at the same time I felt more and more vague about its exact distance away from me.

The solution which I now think to be the most probable, though whether I shall continue to think so remains to be seen, is this, and I record it with a little shame. I am neither a drunkard nor a drug addict. I scarcely ever drink spirits. I have smoked ‘hash’ occasionally in America. However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a ‘bad trip’. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one’s stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. ‘Undetachable, ’ I remember, was a word which somehow ‘came along’ with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course I never took LSD again. I had no further after-effects, and after a while I began mercifully to forget the experience in the quite special way in which one forgets a dream. However: it is possible, perhaps plausible, to conjecture that the sea monster which I ‘saw’ was a hallucination which was also caused by my one foolish experiment with that awful drug.

It is true that the rising coiling monster did not really resemble what I saw on the first occasion, any more than it resembled the red worm in the pool. But the feeling of horror was similar in quality, or at any rate began to seem so very soon after the experience itself. Also, the quality of the tendency to forget also now seems to me to be similar in the two cases. A bad trip can recur in this way, I am told: readers, be warned. However, it must be admitted that as I reflect about it all at this moment, the strongest evidence for this explanation is the total implausibility of all the others.

My heart is beating violently again. I must go to bed. Perhaps I should have waited until tomorrow morning to tell this story. I shall take a sleeping pill.

Two days have passed since I wrote the above. I slept well after writing about my monster and I still think my explanation is the right one. Anyway he recedes and the horror has gone away. Perhaps it did me good to write it all down. I have decided that the ‘footsteps’ in the attics are rats. Another sunny day. Still no letters.

I swam again at the little stony beach and although the sea was fairly calm I had the same irritating difficulty getting out of it. I had to climb a steep bank of tumbling shifting pebbles while each successive wave was submerging me from behind. Swallowed a lot of water and cut my foot. Found my abandoned pile of driftwood and carried it home. Felt very chilled but too tired to organize hip bath, which seems to be made of cast iron. Not worth carrying hot water up to bathroom.

It has occurred to me that if I attached a rope to the iron banister at the tower steps I could use the steps even in rough weather; and if I could find anything to tie it to I could dangle a rope over my ‘cliff’ to help me out of the water there. I must see if the village shop sells rope. I must also find out where I can get more cylinders of calor gas.

My paternal grandfather was a market gardener in Lincolnshire. (There, quite suddenly I have started to write my autobiography, and what a splendid opening sentence! I knew it would happen if I just waited.) He lived in a house called Shaxton. I thought it was very distinguished to have a house with a name. I do not know what my maternal grandfather did, he died when I was a small child. I think he ‘worked in an office’, as indeed my father did too. Doubtless he was some sort of clerk; as indeed my father was too I suppose, though we never used the word ‘clerk’ at home. My paternal grandfather had two sons, Adam and Abel. He never seemed to me to be an imaginative man, but there was some touch of poetry in those names. It was early evident to me that my uncle (Abel) was more loved and more fortunate than my father (Adam). How does a child perceive such things, or rather how is it that they are so perceptible, so obvious, to a child, who perhaps, like a dog, reads signs which have become invisible amid the conventions of the grown-up world, and are thus overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit? I knew that my father, who was slightly the elder of the two, was some sort of luckless failure before I knew what ‘failure’ meant, before I knew anything about money, status, power, fame or any of those coveted prizes whose myriad forms have led me throughout my life that dervish dance which is now, I trust, over. And of course when I say that my dear father was a failure I mean it only in the grossest worldly sense. He was an intelligent good man, pure in heart.

My maternal grandparents lived in Carlisle and I scarcely knew them. My mother’s sisters figured as two pale ‘aunties’, also in Carlisle. My paternal grandmother died young, and in my memories of Shaxton she appears as a photograph. Indeed my grandfather, whom I disliked and feared, appears to me now only as Wellington boots and a loud voice. Adam and Abel crowded my childhood world, dominating it like twin gods. My mother was a separate force, always separate. And then of course there was my cousin James who, like me, was an only child.

The ways of the brothers parted. My father drifted into Warwickshire and worked in ‘local government’. Drifted: I see him on a raft. Uncle Abel became a successful barrister in Lincoln and lived in a house in the country called Ramsdens: another distinguished place with a name. Ramsdens was larger than Shaxton. I still see both those houses in my dreams. Later on the Uncle Abels moved to London, but kept Ramsdens as what they called their ‘country cottage’. Uncle Abel married a rich pretty American girl called Estelle. I remember her being referred to by my mother as an ‘heiress’. My father married my mother who was working as a secretary on a farm. Her name was Marian. He called her ‘Maid Marian’. She was a strict evangelical Christian. My father was a Christian too of course, so was I, so was Uncle Abel until Aunt Estelle took him away into the world of light. I cannot see my mother as a lovely girl, as the Maid Marian of the Warwickshire lanes. I see her face, in my earliest memories, as a mask of anxiety. She was the strong one. My father and I loved and obeyed and comforted each other in secret. Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.

I was utterly horrified in the kitchen this morning to see what I took to be a grotesquely huge fat fleshy spider emerging from the larder. It turned out to be a most engaging toad. I caught him easily and carried him across the wood to the mossy boggy pools beyond the rocks. Here he ambled away. How can such gentle defenceless animals survive? I lingered for a little while after the toad had gone, and looked at the red-tufted mosses and the flowers, mare’s tails which I remember from my youth, and that weird yellow flower that catches flies. Heather grows upon the higher ground inland, towards Amorne Farm. I was told by the house agent that there are orchids in the vicinity, but I have seen none. Perhaps they are as legendary as the seals.

Later on I went into the village to buy deep-freeze kipper fillets (the poor man’s smoked salmon). Of course it is quite impossible to buy fresh fish here, as all the villagers tell me with pride. I also made some rather inconclusive enquiries about a laundry. So far I have washed everything myself, including the sheets which I lay out to dry upon the lawn. Perhaps I will continue to do this; there is a remarkable satisfaction in the performance of these simple tasks. I forgot to record that I have found a second shop in the village, a sort of ironmonger’s, in the row of cottages behind the pub. It calls itself the Fishermen’s Stores and no doubt did once sell gear to the fishermen. This place, I discovered this morning, supplies paraffin and calor gas. I also purchased from them some candles, a new oil lamp and a length of rope. Carrying these trophies I dropped into the Black Lion on the way home. The bar there falls silent when I enter and bursts into raucous chatter when I leave, but I propose to make a habit of coming nonetheless. The mild hostility of the villagers does not worry me. Of course, thanks to television, they know who I am. But they have been at pains to exhibit indifference, and indeed, in all their worthy simplicity, they may even be indifferent. For them I am perhaps something ‘unreal’, touched by the unreality of the medium itself. No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.

For lunch I ate the kipper fillets rapidly unfrozen in boiling water (the sun had done most of the work) garnished with lemon juice, oil, and a light sprinkling of dry herbs. Kipper fillets are arguably better than smoked salmon unless the latter is very good. With these, fried tinned new potatoes. (No real new potatoes yet.) Potatoes are for me a treat dish, not a dull everyday chaperon. Then Welsh rarebit and hot beetroot. The shop sliced bread is less than great, but all right toasted, with good salty New Zealand butter. Fortunately I like a wide variety of those crackly Scandinavian biscuits which are supposed to make you thin. (Of course they do not. If you are destined to be fat, food makes you fat. But I have never had a weight problem.) Now that I own land I must have a herb garden. A supply of fresh herbs has always been a problem of my life as an enlightened eater. (Of course the notion of growing herbs never entered my head as a child in my parents’ garden: I suspect children cannot understand food.) But where am I to put it? I hesitate to dig up either of my little lawns, and anyway they are rather too close to the sea. If I were to make myself a secret allotment on the other side of the road, would some peasant or animal rob it? I must reflect on these things: happy and innocent reflections, so unlike the agonizings of the past!

After lunch I cut off a length of my rope and tied it onto the iron banister at the tower steps, and now it trails handily into the sea, moving darkened in the waves. I have knotted the seaward end for easier grasp. I have had less success with the ‘cliff’ for the simple reason that there is nothing here to attach the rope to. The rocks are too humpy and smooth, and the rope is not long enough to reach the house. Buy a longer piece and attach it to the kitchen door or to the post at the bottom of the stairs, and haul the long wet end into the kitchen every night? These problems too are not without interest. The rope itself is beautiful stuff, lightly burnished and smelling like retsina. I am told it is made locally.

I spent part of the afternoon lying upon my rock ‘bridge’, between the house and the tower, and watching the waves coming flying through beneath me and killing themselves in fits of rage in the deep enclosed rocky area on the inland side. The sight of the rushing foaming water made me feel, after a while, almost light-headed, as if I might have become giddy and fallen in. Most enjoyable. I am a bit dismayed however to find, from studying the picture postcards in the shop, that my bridge and its whirlpool are well-known local features. Fortunately the cards seemed rather old and crumpled, and I bought up the entire stock for less than a pound. I want no trippers here seeking for a ‘beauty spot’. In fact the ‘bridge’ is nothing much, just a hump of rock with a hole in it and an open pit beyond. At certain states of the tide the water, forcing itself through, produces a loud hollow report; I hope this does not draw attention to the place. I learnt from the cards that the enclosed whirlpool is called ‘Minn’s cauldron’. I asked the shop lady who Minn was, but she did not know.

Statements made by distant church bells remind me it is Sunday. Today the sky has become cloudy. I have been watching the clouds and it occurs to me that I have never done this in my life before, simply sit and watch clouds. As a child I would have been far too anxious to ‘waste time’ in this way. And my mother would have stopped me. As I write this I am sitting on my plot of grass behind the house where I have put a chair, cushions, rugs. It is evening. Thick lumpy slate-blue clouds, their bulges lit up to a lighter blue, move slowly across a sky of muddy and yet brilliant gold, a sort of dulled gilt effect. At the horizon there is a light glittering slightly jagged silver line, like modern jewellery. Beneath it the sea is a live choppy lyrical goldeny-brown, jumping with white flecks. The air is warm. Another happy day. (‘Whatever will you do down there?’ they asked.)

In a quiet surreptitious way I am feeling very pleased with myself.

Another day. I have decided not to put dates as they break up the sense of a continuous meditation. I have been rereading the opening pages of my autobiography! How full, for me at any rate, of frightful resonance those statements are which I have made, with such an odd and sudden air of authority, about my childhood. I had never thought of myself as being that much interested. I had intended to write about Clement. Do I really want to describe my childhood?

I have not swum today. I went to the tower steps in the afternoon intending to swim but found to my annoyance that the rope which I had fixed to the banister had somehow become untied and floated away. I am not very good at knots. In any case, that rope is perhaps too thick to knot easily. It occurs to me that a long piece of nylon cloth might be more serviceable.

Felt a little depressed but was cheered up by supper: spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (Basil is of course the king of herbs.) Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill. Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in. With these a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef. (Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.) I drank a bottle of retsina in honour of the undeserving rope.

It is now late at night and I am sitting upstairs, with one of my old oil lamps and the new lamp. The new one gives a less beautiful light but it is easier to carry. I must get more of these lamps, though I suppose I shall never be able to dispense with candles. Mrs Chorney left me about a dozen candlesticks, handy though not things of beauty, and I have placed these, complete with candles and matches, at strategic positions throughout the house. The smell of the new lamp reminds me of Fritzie. I shall now continue my autobiography.

I was born at Stratford-upon-Avon. Or to be exact, near it, or to be more exact, in the Forest of Arden. I grew up in leafy central England, as far as it is possible to be in this island from the sea. I did not see the sea until I was fourteen. Of course I owe my whole life to Shakespeare. If I had not lived close to a great theatre, indeed close to that great theatre, I would never have managed to see any plays. My parents never went to the theatre, my mother positively disapproved of it. There was little enough spare money for ‘going out’ anywhere, and we never went out. I did not go to a restaurant until after I left school. I did not enter a hotel till later still. For holidays we went to Shaxton, or to Ramsdens or to the farm where my mother had worked as a secretary. I would never have gone to a theatre at all if it had not been that Shakespeare was ‘work’. A master at the school was Shakespeare-mad. That man too made my life. His name was Mr McDowell. We went to the plays often, we saw everything. Sometimes Mr McDowell paid for me. And of course we acted plays too. Mr McDowell was stage-struck, an actor manqué. I became his stage-struck pet. (It was he who took me and some other boys to the sea in Wales for a week. I think this was one of the most important and happy weeks I have ever spent. ‘Happy’ hardly expresses it. I was nearly insane with joy the whole time.) My mother accepted the theatre-going because it was ‘part of my school work’. I even cunningly pretended that I did not really enjoy it: it was just necessary for my exam. Wicked lying little boy. I was in heaven. My father knew, but we would never have confessed to each other that we were deceiving my mother.

My father was a quiet bookish man and somehow the gentlest being I have ever encountered. I do not mean he was timid, though I suppose he was timid. He had a positive moral quality of gentleness. I can picture him now so clearly, bending down with his perpetual nervous smile to pick up a spider on a piece of paper and put it carefully out of the window or into some corner of the house where it would not be disturbed. I was his comrade, his reading companion, possibly the only person with whom he ever had a serious conversation. I always felt that we were in the same boat, adventuring along together. We read the same books and discussed them: children’s books, adventure stories, then novels, history, biography, poetry, Shakespeare. We enjoyed and craved for each other’s company. What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them. I remember feeling in later life that no one else ever knew how good my father was; I doubt if even my mother knew. Of course I loved my mother too, but she had a hard line in her where my father had none. She believed in a just God. Perhaps this belief supported her through what may have proved a somewhat disappointing life.

The trouble with my parents, at least from my point of view, was that they did not want to go anywhere or do anything. My mother disapproved of going anywhere or doing anything, partly because this involved spending money, and partly because of the worldly vanities which any such removal might lead us to encounter. My father did not want to go anywhere or do anything, partly because my mother was against it, and partly because of his timidity and a certain indolence of character. I may have made it sound as if my father was a sad man but this was not so. He understood the pleasures of the simple life and how to look forward to little treats. He did his dull office work diligently I am sure, and did odd jobs about the house with zeal. He enjoyed his reading which, when he was not partaking in my education, tended to be novels and adventure stories. I can remember him, when he was fatally ill, reading Treasure Island with a magnifying glass. He loved and cherished my mother and me. And there his world ended. He was not interested in politics or travel or any form of entertainment, or even any form of art other than literature. He had no friends (except me). It may be mentioned that he liked his brother Abel, though just how much I was never sure. He never entirely got on with my cousin James because he saw him as a rival to me. Aunt Estelle embarrassed him. My mother detested the lot of them, but behaved very well in spite of it.

I went into the theatre of course because of Shakespeare. Those who knew me in later years as a Shakespeare director often did not realize how absolutely this god had directed me from the very first. I had of course other motives. From the guileless simplicity of my parents’ life, from the immobility and quietness of my home, I fled to the trickery and magic of art. I craved glitter, movement, acrobatics, noise. I became an expert on flying machines, I arranged fights, I always took, as my critics said, an almost childish, almost excessive delight in the technical trickery of the theatre. I also took up acting, and was conscious of this too from the beginning, because I wanted to have fun myself and to procure some for my father. I doubt if he possessed the concept, or ever managed to acquire it later under my eager guidance. In having fun myself I have throughout my life been fairly consistently successful. I was much less successful in persuading my parents to enjoy themselves. Eventually I took them to Paris, to Venice, to Athens. They were always thoroughly uneasy and longing to get home, though I think it may later have given them some satisfaction to think that they had been to these places. They really wanted to remain always in their own house and their own garden. There are such people.

I was a docile quiet loving child; but I knew that a great fight was coming and I wanted to win it, and win it quickly. I did both. When I was seventeen my father wanted me to go to the university. My mother did too, though she feared the expense. Instead I went to an acting school in London. (I obtained a scholarship. Mr McDowell had not laboured in vain.) One of the saddest things in my life was crossing my dear father in this. But I could not wait. My mother was appalled. She thought that the theatre was an abode of sin. (She was right.) And she thought that I would never succeed and would return home starving. (She despised people who could not earn their living.) Here she was not right; and at least, as the years went by, she could not help respecting my ability to make money. The theatre then and thenceforth became my home; I even spent the war acting, since a patch on the lung, which cleared up soon after, kept me out of the armed forces. I was rather sorry about this later on.

‘Mr Arkwright, do you ever see any very large eels in this vicinity? ’

Direct speech. I record what I said this morning in the Black Lion, where I was buying some of the local cider. The cider is unfortunately too sweet; and I shall before long have exhausted the modest supply of wine which I brought with me. The Black Lion has of course never heard of wine; but the intelligent shop lady tells me that the Raven Hotel sells ‘real wine’.

The Black Lion landlord’s name, Arkwright, disturbs me with memories of a chauffeur of that name whom I once had when I was a grandee, and who regarded me with rancorous hatred. The relation between the chauffeur and the chauffeured can be curiously intense. Black Lion Arkwright is in fact fairly disturbing in his own right. He is a big fellow with long black hair and black whiskers, like a sort of Victorian cad. He leads the bar in the game of embarrassing me. He now analyses my question. Eels? Large? Very large? Vicinity? ‘Do you mean on land?’ he asks. ‘He means worms’, says one of the clients. The clients are almost always the same, retired farm labourers I imagine. No women of course. ‘I mean eels in the sea.’ All shake their heads gloomily. ‘Wouldn’t see them in the sea, would you, they’d be under water,’ someone offers. Someone else adds darkly, ‘Eels is no good.’ The question drops. I return home carrying pointless cider purchased out of politeness.

I have had one success however. The little upstairs room facing the road (on the ‘inner room’ and drawing room side) sported a pair of stout cotton curtains. (I should add that the corresponding front window on the other side is that of the bathroom.) I have cut one of these curtains down the middle, knotted the two ends, and tied this ‘rope’ onto the iron banister at the steps, thereby enabling myself to have an excellent swim this morning at low tide, even though the sea was choppy. Lunch: frankfurters with scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and a slight touch of garlic, then shop treacle tart squeezed with lemon juice and covered with yoghurt and thick cream. I drank some of the cider just to spite it. After lunch I started to make a border round my lawn with the pretty stones which I have collected. I cannot decide whether or not it looks ridiculous. A rather cloudy day and a cool breeze, with a strange coffee-coloured light over the sea. Towards evening, the usual cloud-show. Great cliffs and headlands of light golden-brown cloud build up to majestic heights, with a froth of pure gold clinging to their huge sides. I tried to light a fire of driftwood in the little red room but the chimney smoked again.

I have been cleaning and tidying up the house. What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.) I swept the hall and stairs. I washed the big slate flagstones in the kitchen (very rewarding). I also washed the big ugly vase on the landing and polished the battered rosewood table (it was grateful). I started to dust the drawing room chimney piece but some spirit that dwelt therein resisted me. And I have now been polishing the big oval mirror in the hall (which I think I mentioned before). This fine thing (date eighteen ninety?) is perhaps the best ‘piece’ in the house. The glass is bevelled and somewhat spotted but remarkably luminous and silvery, so that the mirror seems like a source of light. The frame is made of a dullish grey metal (pewter?) and represents a sort of swirling garland of leaves and branches and berries. Metal polish brought a little more luminosity and detail into this metal vegetation. A lot of dirt certainly came off on the cloth. Since I have just spent a little while gazing at myself in this mirror it is perhaps time to attempt to describe my appearance.

This may seem superfluous. Yes, of course, I have been a much photographed man. But the camera has never been entirely my friend. (How fortunate that I never wanted to be a film star.) Let me describe the real me. I am slim and of medium build. I have an oval face with a short straight nose and thin lips and a uniformly fair fine complexion which is given to blushing. If annoyed or affronted I blush scarlet. This habit, which used to worry me, later became a kind of trade mark; and when I became known in my profession as a ‘tartar’ it was inadvertently useful in frightening people. My eyes are a rather pale chilly blue; I wear small oval rimless spectacles for reading. I have light rather colourless straight fair hair, not worn long. This, never brilliant, fades and dims, but does not go grey. I have decided not to dye it. (A few years ago when my hair began to recede I enlisted the aid of science, with entirely satisfactory results.) I should say that what the camera fails to catch is the fine almost girlish texture of my, of course clean shaven, face, and its somewhat ironical and wily expression. (Not to beat about the bush, it is a clever face.) Photographers can too easily make one look a fool. I often think I resemble my father, and yet he looked both gentle and simple, whereas I look neither.

To bed early with a hot water bottle. Very tired.

I think it is not going to be too easy to write about the theatre. Perhaps my reflections on that vast subject will make another book. I had better get straight on to Clement Makin. After all, it is for Clement that I am here. This was her country, she grew up on this lonely coast. We never visited it. Was I superstitious? Her Ultima Thule bided its hour.

Clement was my first mistress. When we met I was twenty, she was thirty-nine (or said she was). Partly because of someone I had loved and lost, and partly because of my puritan upbringing, I remained virgin until Clement swooped like an eagle. Was she a great actress? Yes, I think so. Of course women act all the time. It is easier to judge a man. (Wilfred for instance.) I shall have to talk a bit about the theatre simply to give Clement her context, to dress the scene for her to sweep upon. She was not like what people thought; neither her fans nor her foes did her justice and she had her lion’s share of both. She always fought mercilessly for those she loved, and then she became totally immoral; she lied and cheated for them, she trampled upon rights and upon hearts. She loved me and I am quite prepared to admit that as it happened she made me; though I would have made myself anyway. God rest her restless soul.

Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage, and why the theatre is always popular and indeed why it exists: why it is like life, and it is like life even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts. Even a middling novelist can tell quite a lot of truth. His humble medium is on the side of truth. Whereas the theatre, even at its most ‘realistic’, is connected with the level at which, and the methods by which, we tell our everyday lies. This is the sense in which ‘ordinary’ theatre resembles life, and dramatists are disgraceful liars unless they are very good. On the other hand, in a purely formal sense the theatre is the nearest to poetry of all the arts. I used to think that if I could have been a poet I would never have bothered with the theatre at all, but of course this was nonsense. What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world. The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. Art’s relation with its client is here at its closest and most immediate. In other arts we can blame the client: he is stupid, unsophisticated, inattentive, dull. But the theatre must, if need be, stoop-and stoop-until it attains that direct, that universal communication which other artists can afford to seek more deviously and at their ease. Hence the assault, the noise, the characteristic impatience. All this was part of my revenge.

How vulgar, how almost cruel it all was; I gloatingly savour now that I am absolutely out of it at last, now that I can sit in the sun and look at the calm quiet sea. This solitude and quiet after all that babble, after all that garish row, a deep undynamic stillness so unlike the fine dramatic silences of the theatre: Tempest scene two, or the entry of Peter Pan. So unlike too the strange familiar and yet exciting hush of an empty theatre. Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate. How I enjoyed rending expectant silences with noise, noise as structure, noise as colour. (I once directed a thriller which began with a long silence and then a scream. That sound became famous.) Yet, or perhaps consequently, I do not care greatly for music. Noise yes, music no. I admire the intricate and essentially silent musical drama of ballet, but opera I detest. Clement used to say this was a case of envy. I must admit I envy Wagner.

The theatre is a place of obsession. It is not a soft dreamland. Unemployment, poverty, disappointment, racking indecision (take this now and miss that later) grind reality into one’s face; and, as in family life, one soon learns the narrow limitations of the human soul. Yet obsession is what it is all about. All good dramatists and directors and most (not all) good actors are obsessed men. Only geniuses like Shakespeare conceal the fact, or rather change it into something spiritual. And obsession drives to hard work. I myself have always worked (and worked others) like a demon. My mother’s training made me a compulsive worker. She was never idle and she did not tolerate idleness in others. My father enjoyed a certain amount of fixing and mending, but he would have liked to sit sometimes quite vacantly and watch the world drift by, only he was never allowed to. My mother was not ambitious for him in a worldly sense-she scorned the successful world of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle, though I think that the prospect of it always hurt her in some obscure way. She simply wanted my father to be always usefully employed. (Fortunately discussing books with me counted as useful.) She did not profess to understand his office work, she showed no curiosity about it and I suspect she had no idea what he did. She organized him at home. She also organized me, but this was easy because I was only too ready to be obsessively industrious. Journalists have often asked me how it was that I first started to write plays. I did not, as has been unkindly suggested, turn to writing out of disappointment with my career as an actor. I started to write when I was still quite young because I could not bear to waste time when I was unemployed. I early saw the demoralization of so many of my out-of-work companions. ‘Resting’ is one of the least restful periods of an actor’s life. Those times were also, of course, my university. I read and I wrote and I taught myself my trade.

Since there has been quite a lot of uninformed and not always unmalicious speculation on the subject let me now say something about my plays. They were always intended to be ephemeral, rather like pantomimes in fact; and they existed only in my direction of them. I never let anyone else touch them. Unless one is very talented indeed there is no resting place between the naive and the ironic; and the nemesis of irony is absurdity. I knew my limitations. The plays were also said to be only vehicles for Wilfred Dunning. Why ‘only’? Wilfred was a great actor. They do not make them like Wilfred any more. He started his career in the old Music Hall in the Edgware Road. He could stand motionless, not moving an eyelid, and make a theatre rock with prolonged laughter. Then he would blink and set them off again. Such power can be almost uncanny: the mystery of the human body, the human face. Wilfred had a face which glowed with spirit; he also had, with the possible exception of Peregrine Arbelow, the largest face I have ever seen. It is true that he was in a sense the only begetter of my work as a dramatist, and when he died I stopped writing. I can say without regret that my plays belong to the past and I bequeath them to no one. They were magical delusions, fireworks. Only this which I write now is, or foreshadows, what I wish to leave behind me as a lasting memorial. Someone once said that I ought to have been a choreographer and I understood the comment. People were surprised that I was so popular in Japan. But I knew why, and the Japanese knew.

Though described as an ‘experimentalist’ I am a firm friend of the proscenium arch. I am in favour of illusion, not of alienation. I detest the endless fidgeting on the surrounded stage which dissolves the clarity of events. Equally I abhor the nonsense of ‘audience participation’. Riots and other communal activities may have their value but must not be confused with dramatic art. Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present. It is a factitious present because it lacks the free aura of personal reflection and contains its own secret limits and conclusions. Thus life is comic, but though it may be terrible it is not tragic: tragedy belongs to the cunning of the stage. Of course most theatre is gross ephemeral rot; and only plays by great poets can be read, except as directors’ notes. I say ‘great poets’ but I suppose I really mean Shakespeare. It is a paradox that the most essentially frivolous and rootless of all the serious arts has produced the greatest of all writers. That Shakespeare was quite different from the others, not just primus inter pares but totally different in quality, was something which I discovered entirely by myself when I was still at school; and on this secret was I nourished. There are no other plays on paper, unless one counts the Greek plays. I cannot read Greek, and James tells me these are untranslatable. After looking at a number of translations I am sure he is right.

Of course the theatre is essentially a place of hopes and disappointments and in its cyclical life one lives out in a more vivid way the cyclical patterns of the ordinary world. The thrill of a new play, the shock of a flop, the weariness of a long run, the homeless feeling when it ends: perpetual construction followed by perpetual destruction. It is to do with endings, with partings, with packings up and dismantlings and the disbanding of family groups. All this makes theatre people into nomads, or rather into the separated members of some sort of monastic order where certain natural feelings (the desire for permanence for instance) have to be suppressed. We have the ‘heartlessness’ of monks; and in this respect we suffer the changes characteristic of ordinary life with a difference, in a sublimated symbolic way. As actor, director and playwright I have of course had my full share of disappointments, of lost time and lost ways. My ‘successful’ career contains many failures, many dead ends. All my plays flopped on Broadway for instance. I failed as an actor, I ceased as a playwright. Only my fame as a director has covered up these facts.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely then I must be the most corrupt of men. A theatre director is a dictator. (If he is not, he is not doing his job.) I fostered my reputation for ruthlessness, it was extremely useful. Actors expected tears and nervous prostration when I was around. Most of them loved it; they are masochists as well as narcissists. I well remember Gilbert Opian hysterical and enjoying every moment. Of course the girls wept all the time. (When, advanced in my career, I directed Clement, we both wept. My God, how we fought!) I was always merciless to drunks, and this did strain my relations with Peregrine Arbelow, even before the Rosina business. Perry is an Irish drunk, the worst kind. Wilfred drank like a fish, but it never showed on stage. Christ, I miss him.

I liked that handy picture of myself as a ‘tartar’. Other publicized conceptions of me have been uglier and more misleading. I never used my power to haul girls into bed. Of course the theatre is all that my mother thought and a great deal that the poor dear could not have conceived of. Yet also it must be remembered that the theatre is a profession and many perfectly ‘typical’ actors are middle-aged men who are regularly supplied with work and who live faithfully with wives and families in suburbs. Such persons are the backbone of the trade. Of course the theatre is sex, sex, sex, but how much does the subject-matter affect the professional? My mother was upset at the thought of my ‘acting bad people’, because she thought this would corrupt me. (In fact, except in school plays, she hardly ever saw me act.) I wonder if such corruption ever occurs? The question is worth asking. To some extent one has to ‘identify’ with villains in order to portray them, but there are limits to this identification partly because wickedness is so specialized. (Every actor has a level at which he cannot portray character. He may operate above it or below it.) And we are masked figures; ideally the masks barely touch us. (Such is my view, with which some fools will differ.) I recall a story of an old actor asked to portray an old man, who said with dismay, ‘But I’ve never played an old man!’ That was professionalism.

But to return to myself. I daresay, an unfashionable thing to say nowadays, I am not ‘very highly sexed’. I can live perfectly well without ‘sexual relations’. Some observers have even thought I must be homosexual because I did not have perpetual mistresses! I hate mess. Perhaps my morally hygienic mother somehow taught me to. And I have never liked the complicit male world of foul-mouthed talk and bawdy. Of course I have had not a few love affairs. But I never bribed a woman into bed. Someone (Rosina) once said, ‘You care about the theatre more than you care about women’ and it was true. I never (except for once when I was young) seriously considered marriage. I loved once (the same once) absolutely. Then there was Clement, eternal wonderful unclassifiable Clement. And I have been ‘madly infatuated’. And there have been, oh such sweet girls. But I am not a womanizer. I have always been a dedicated professional. I was in this respect harsh with myself as well as with others. Silly messy love affairs, especially within a closed group, interfere with serious work. I am very prone to jealousy myself, and I have mixed with very jealous people. Envy has always troubled me less. Crippling envy can be a terrible disability in the theatre, and I early realized that to overcome it was a prerequisite of success.

Was I sorry that I never became a first-rate actor? How often I have been asked that question! Well, of course. Directors always envy actors and I suspect that almost every great director would secretly prefer to be a great actor. Some people held the view that a more successful acting career awaited me in films and television and they tried to lure me in; but in spite of many amusing excursions I never cared much for these media. I always felt real drama belonged to the live theatre. I had my ambitions, especially of course in Shakespeare; but I always funked Lear and the less said about my Hamlet the better. I think I was a good Prospero, that time when Lizzie was Ariel. That was my last great part, and now so long ago. After that I laid a certain vanity aside. Vanity receives such a battering in the theatre, one would imagine that it would tend to vanish, but most actors manage to retain theirs: not only as an occupational ailment, but perhaps actually as a necessary instrument of survival. Genuine generous admiration, and there is plenty of it, always helps and heals. I looked at the good actors and the great actors, at Wilfred, at Sidney Ashe, at Marcus Henty (also one of Clement’s lovers), at Fabian Ginsberg, even at Perry, even at Al. And, as an actor, I quietly took a backseat. This was easier to do by then as I was fully absorbed in directing. I amused myself and the public by playing tiny parts in my own productions and once nearly stole the show as Jacob in The Seagull.

Well, well, I seem to be writing everything down all at once in a sort of jumble. Perhaps I should indeed regard this diary as rough notes. I shall resist, for the present at any rate, the temptation to reminisce about my productions. I am known as a Shakespeare man but of course I have tried my hand at everything; you name it, I did it. And so-enough of boasting. These ramblings were to introduce Clement Makin. But poor Clement can wait, indeed she cannot choose but wait. That great battle of wills is finished forever. And I sit here and wonder at myself. Have I abjured that magic, drowned my book? Forgiven my enemies? The surrender of power, the final change of magic into spirit? Time will show.

Something rather odd and distressing has just occurred. I wrote the above sitting outside on my lawn on my stone seat beside my trough of stones. As the morning sun became hot I decided to go inside and fetch my sun hat. I have a slight headache, possibly I need new glasses. I went into the house and up the stairs, blinking in the comparative gloom, and when I reached the upper landing I was at once aware that something had happened, although I could not understand what. Then I realized that my lovely big ugly vase was gone from its pedestal. It had fallen onto the floor and was broken into a great many pieces. But how? The pedestal is perfectly steady and has not moved. There has been no wind, the bead curtain is motionless. Perhaps I shifted the vase very slightly when I dusted it yesterday? Or has there been an earth tremor? I am reluctant to think that I am to blame and I am sure I am not. I liked the poor ugly thing, it was like an old dog. I picked up the pieces thinking vaguely of mending it, but of course that would be impossible. How can it have jumped off its stand? I am totally puzzled.

‘But all your letters are in the dog kennel, Mr Arrowby.’

I had broken down at last and asked at the Post Office. I say broken down, not so much because I was thereby losing face with the village (though that too was in my mind) as because I was losing face with myself. Why should I now need letters or miss them or pine for them or be surprised if nobody wrote to me? I had already arranged with Miss Kaufman for business letters to be kept in London. Only letters from friends were to be sent on. And as I was explaining to myself, really I have no friends. But there was one letter which I was interested in having, which at least I was expecting. However, let us return for the moment to this dog kennel.

‘Dog kennel?’ I said to the Post Office lady. (She is the sister of the shop lady, the Post Office being part of the shop.)

‘Yes, the stone dog kennel just before you go across to your house. Mrs Chorney always had her letters put in there.’

This object, at the road end of the causeway, pointed out to me by the house agent as the boundary of my land, I had of course noticed but not investigated. It was quite big and had indeed the form of a dog kennel, but one which in my opinion would be suitable only for a stone dog. I imagine it had originally had some other purpose, though I cannot think what.

I protested. How was I to know? Was I supposed to guess? Why had someone not told me? Why did the postman not notice that no letters had been picked up? What happened when it rained? And so on.

The Post Office lady repeated with dignity that Mrs Chorney had always had her mail in the dog kennel, that it saved the postman a walk, that he could not be expected to peer inside to see if letters had gone, and anyhow I might be away. And so on.

I bought some frozen coley (much better than cod) and hurried home. Yes, the letter I was waiting for, together with various other missives, was in the dog kennel (which would be swimming with water in rainy weather) and I carried the lot into the house.

The letter I wanted was from Lizzie Scherer, and when I transcribe it it will become clear in what respect I have been less than frank with this diary. In fact I have been disinclined to discuss Lizzie earlier because I was not sure what I felt about something which I had recently done about her. Not that I was upset or anxious. When I came here I decided that I would never be anxious any more about personal relations; such anxiety is too often a form of vanity. What I had done was to send Lizzie a letter which constituted a-what?-a sort of test, or game, or gamble. A serious game. I had always played serious games with Lizzie. Did I regret sending the letter? Do I, will I, regret it? Well, a word first perhaps about the girl herself.

Clement Makin was, or was nearly, a great actress. Lizzie Scherer is, at the other end of the scale, very nearly not an actress at all. In so far as Lizzie was ever successful I made her so. I stretched her beyond her limits; and I may as well confess now that I took trouble with Lizzie because, in a way, I loved her. I say ‘in a way’ not only because I have only really loved once (and Lizzie was not it), but also because I found it surprisingly easy to leave her when the time came. I was never ‘mad’ about Lizzie, as I have occasionally been about other women (Rosina, Jeanne). I cared for her in a quiet rather dreamy way which was perhaps unique in my life. But I left her. She loved me far more intensely. For Lizzie I was it.

Lizzie is Scottish, half Sephardi Jew. Although she has the most adorable breasts of any woman I ever made love to, she is not really beautiful, and never was even when she was young, but she has charm. This ‘fetching’ charm, and her youth while it lasted, took her a little way in the theatre. She was a hard worker and had a kind of steady Scottish reliability which always helped. Her appearance is not easy to describe. She has a large wide brow and a strong attractive profile. (One can fall in love with a profile.) The line of her brow runs down in a smooth line curve into a smallish pretty nose which speeds forward at the world without quite turning up. Then there is a straight line to a firm chin wherein there is the faintest dimple. Her lips are firm too, not full but well moulded and sensitively textured. (How different individual lips are.) Nature not art has painted them an attractive terracotta-pink. Her upper lip is long and beautifully indented. (Is there any language in which there is a word for that tender runnel that joins the mouth and the nose?) One would call hers a clever face if it were not for a kind of childish timidity which hangs about it. I suspect that this gentle pleading diffidence is Lizzie’s charm. Her eyes are a light dewy brown; when I kissed her how those pale eyes flashed! She is short-sighted and tends to peer. (As Peregrine once said, very few pretty women can see anything, since vanity precludes glasses.) She has almost invisible orange eyebrows which she never, under my regime, tampered with. Her complexion is healthy, rosy, rather shiny. She wears very little make-up and lacks (perhaps makes a point of lacking) the wonderful artificiality of many theatre ladies, their enamelled lacquered surfaces. This artificiality of course attracts. It attracted me. I like art in a woman’s looks, though I do not necessarily want to see all the working. Lizzie’s hair, now tinted, is a cinnamon brown, of the hyacinthine variety and copious. (It is a bit fuzzy and grows more in screwy tendrills than in curls.) When she is happy her face is conspicuously radiant and merry. (At her best on the stage, her face could make audiences sigh with pleasure.) She is still quite good-looking, though she has allowed herself to become untidy and out of condition. Any drama school teaches physical discipline; acting is a physical discipline. The ladies of the theatre tend to keep themselves sleek and youthful, and this Lizzie has failed to do. Nor was she ever smart. (I am not indifferent to the unique pleasure afforded by a smart woman.) And with advancing years she has, not to put too fine a point upon it, got fat. My God, she must now be getting on for fifty.

Well, here, retrieved from the dog kennel, is Lizzie’s letter, which will be to some extent self-explanatory.

My dear, your beautiful generous letter has come, but I don’t understand it. Perhaps I don’t want to understand it. It is enough to have it. When I saw your writing I felt faint with joy and fear. But why fear? What have I ever done to you, except love you? When I read your letter I cried and cried. I wonder if you know how long it is since you wrote me anything better than a postcard? I almost feel as if I simply want to be happy ever after because you have written to me, and not to have to think about your letter or to answer it. For now I am falling into anxiety and dread.

What do you want, Charles? Oh, you are so present to my mind as I write. But you have always been present to my mind ever since I first loved you, you live in my mind. Something about your letter that made me especially glad is that you do not doubt that I still love you. ‘Still’ hardly has meaning here. My love for you exists in a sort of eternal present, it almost is the meaning of time. I don’t protest too much. Such love can live with despair, with quietness, with resignation, with ordinariness and tiredness and silence. I love you, Charles, and I will love you till I die, and you can put that away in your heart and be utterly certain of it.

Your letter is so cool, purposely cool and full of jokes. (All that about wanting a ‘nurse’!) All right, you would like to see me, why not, we are old friends. But these two particular old friends cannot just say ‘hello’, at least this one cannot. I look at your letter and I try to read between the lines. What is between the lines? I feel I am supposed to guess your mood. Oh God, your mood. Do you want me to drop in for a short love affair? Please excuse these awful words, but you have put me in an awful situation. Perhaps your letter means very little and I am imagining things. Perhaps you yourself do not know what you mean, and don’t care. That would be like you too. Forgive me.

Listen, Charles. I have said I am grateful and I am. For years and years, as you know, I would have married you if you had crooked your finger. And I proposed to you every day when we were together! I know this letter of yours now is of course not about marriage. But what is it about? A weekend visit? You don’t say that you love me. Do you want to experiment now that you have time on your hands? Charles, I want to live, I want to survive, I don’t want to be driven mad a second time. When I consider it all now I’m just afraid to come near you. You would have to convince me and I suspect you can’t. You once said yourself, how much A loves B shows, like your slip showing. We haven’t met for more than a year, the last time was that luncheon for Sidney Ashe and how intensely I looked forward to it and you scarcely spoke to me! Then I wanted to leave with you in that taxi and you suddenly asked Nell Pickering to come too. (You’ve probably forgotten.) You haven’t communicated with me since. You haven’t telephoned or sent a line although you know I would be wild with joy to hear from you. You don’t even know where I live, you had to send the letter care of my agent! All this is evidence, Charles. And now suddenly, you write this funny ambiguous letter. It’s just an idea you’ve had, there’s something sort of abstract about it. You’ve probably thought better of it already.

If I came to see you like you want, just coming because you feel in the mood to see me, to sort of try my company again, I would fall straight back into the old madness. I don’t mean that I ever really got over it, but I’ve lived, I’ve managed, I’ve even put some sort of order into my life at last. I’ve had long enough, after all, since you left me! You never fully knew how mad I was in those days. I didn’t want to hurt you by showing you my pain by way of revenge. All the time we were together I knew every minute, every second, that it would end. You told me often enough! But somehow (I was that mad) I embraced the suffering, if I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. I wonder if you’ve ever loved anyone like that? Maybe you only understood it on the stage. (I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, ‘Don’t touch each other!’) You kept saying there was this great love when you were young, but I think that was just to console me for your not loving me enough. Anyway you didn’t love me enough, and now-I don’t believe in miracles.

Charles, I’ve been in hell and I’ve come out of it and I don’t want to go there again. Jealousy is hell and I’m not cured. Suppose I come to you, with all that old love-and you smile and stroll away? You’re free, your letter made that clear all right. Forgive me, but you know how people talk, everybody tells everybody everything, and I still keep meeting girls I didn’t even know you knew who say they’ve had romances with you, they may be lying of course. You know you can’t keep your hands off women, and I’m not young and beautiful any more, and you like chasing what isn’t easy to get, you don’t want to stay with anyone, in the end you drop everyone! You once said getting married was like buying a doll, which shows what you think of marriage. And I don’t believe you’ve really retired, Gilbert said it was like God retiring, you’re too restless. You made me act, you made everyone act, you’re like a very good dancer, you make other people dance but it’s got to be with you. You don’t respect people as people, you don’t see them, you’re not really a teacher, you’re a sort of rapacious magician. How can I imagine that all this could stop? Do you want me as a sort of patient friend, a chaperon with knitting, a calm wise older woman, a sort of retired senior wife to whom you can complain about the others? It wouldn’t work, Charles. I’m not calm and wise. I’d want everything. You could still have children. I remember you saying more than once how much you wanted a son. You could still have a son, only I couldn’t bear him. Oh Charles, Charles, why didn’t you marry me long ago, I loved you so much. I love you so much-only I can’t put my head into that noose. My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace.

And there is something else I must tell you. I am living with Gilbert Opian. You obviously didn’t know or you’d have mentioned it in the letter. I know you made me promise to let you know if I ever settled down permanently with anyone. (I was so hurt when Rita Gibbons told me you’d made her promise that too. I didn’t tell her about my promise. She says she doesn’t regard hers as binding because it was given under duress.) I didn’t tell you about Gilbert because I’m not living like that with him, I mean we’re not lovers, of course not, Gilbert hasn’t suddenly become heterosexual. We just love each other and care for each other and we share a house and, Charles, I have been happy for the first time in my life. This is the most creative thing I’ve ever done, far more than acting. I was living like this when we met at Sidney’s lunch and I would have told you then if you’d shown any interest and really asked! And, Charles, I’ve left the theatre and I feel so much better. Honestly the theatre was always a torment for me. I only shone for you, and when you left me I faded! (I was never much good anyhow!) When I look back and see what a miserable stupid anxious messy existence I led over years and years I can’t think how I tolerated it. I was perfectly capable of being happy but somehow I always managed not to be! Men were always being beastly to me. Gilbert is so different. Don’t sneer at this. I’ve been bullied by bloody men all my life. Now I have a decent orderly cheerful existence. I’m even useful! I work part time in a hospital office. I’m learning to paint and I write children’s stories (none published yet). You may think this sounds pathetic, but for me it’s happiness and freedom. And Gilbert is happy too. He’s stopped fretting about being unsuccessful and not being a star. He can get some small parts and he works a bit on TV. We’re not rich, but we can earn money and look after each other. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older. Gilbert’s given up ‘hunting’, he says all he ever wanted was love and he’s got mine. It’s all somehow suddenly simple and innocent. (It seems to me now we were all brainwashed about ‘sex’!) Please understand, dear dear Charles, and do not be angry. You know (and I won’t go on about this because it used to annoy you) how much Gilbert loves you too. Really he worships you. But he’s so frightened now. He says you’ll come with a troika and carry me off to the gipsies. (I suppose that’s a quotation, you always said I read nothing but Shakespeare and then only my own part!) He is frightened of you still, and so am I. The habit of obeying you is strong in both of us! Don’t use your power to hurt us. You could put the most terrible pressure on us, only don’t do it. Be generous, dear heart. You could drive us both mad. We’ve come a long road to solving our problems, and if some people think it’s a funny solution that’s just because they lack imagination and intelligence. And you lack neither.

Charles, I don’t want to see you now, yet. I’d simply succumb. I’ve got to recover from your letter. Please write and say you are not angry. When I am calmer let’s meet, and you must come here and see Gilbert too. There must be a way. Your letter has made an aching emptiness and a need and I shall not be the same. But I am happy here and Gilbert needs me and we have this house (it’s half a house actually) which we have made together, and if I left him it would be a terrible smash-up for both of us, we’d be in pieces. (Anyway I don’t know what you want-and whatever it was you may not want it now. Oh God.) Gilbert says you must in the end receive us as if we were your children. Oh Charles, I am amazed at the strength of those forces which I commanded to sleep. It is all there still, all my old love for you. Somehow, let us not waste love, it is rare enough. You have thought of me, you have written to me, so sweetly, so generously. Can we not love each other and see each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear, now that we are growing old? I do so want us to love each other, but not in a way that would destroy me. I’ve felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love! You feel you can compel the beloved, but it’s an illusion! I am crying as I write this. Please write at once, and say that we can meet later, in a little while, and that you won’t stop loving me. Somehow don’t lose that love, the love, whatever it may be, that made you write that letter. And we will look at each other.

Always yours-

Lizzie.

I have been sitting for some time in the little red room, where I have at last lit a successful fire. The chimney seems to have got over its smoking fit. Perhaps it was just that the wood was too wet?

I have read Lizzie’s letter through twice. Of course it is a silly inconsistent woman’s letter, half saying the opposite of what it is trying to say. Lizzie cannot quite refrain from offering herself. And of course she does, in answer to my deliberately cool missive, protest too much. A cleverer woman might have replied coolly and let me read between the lines. A cleverer woman, or a less sincere one. Lizzie’s letter has its own little attempts at ambiguity, but they are transparent. Poor Lizzie. I cannot take the stuff about Gilbert Opian too seriously, though I do feel cross with her for not having told me and I feel she has broken her promise. Besides, what are their relations? Lizzie’s proximity is surely enough, even now, to convert any man to heterosexuality. (Her breasts are enough.) Do they drink cocoa together in their dressing gowns? The whole thing is rather horrid. Of course Gilbert is nothing, he is a man of twigs, I could crush him with one hand and take Lizzie with the other. I certainly cannot envisage any platonic love trio. From the date of Lizzie’s letter it appears to have been in the dog kennel for well over a week. On reflection this seems to be no bad thing. If I had received it at once I might have been tempted to write an ill-tempered or facetious reply by return of post. As it is, she has had a silence to reflect upon. It may be best to prolong the silence.

However, to repeat Lizzie’s own perfectly reasonable question, what do I want? Oh why do women take everything so intensely and make such a fuss! Why do they always demand definitions, explanations! There are in fact some quite shrewd guesses in her letter, and the quiet outburst of resentment has not escaped me. Those wounding and not wholly unjust observations have doubtless been stored up for a long time! Perhaps I do want a sort of retired part-time ‘senior wife’ figure, like an ageing ex-concubine in a harem who has become a friend: a companion who is taken for granted, to whom one is close, but not committed except by bonds of friendship? (This need not preclude occasional love-making. In fact the harem situation would suit me down to the ground.) Why can’t Lizzie be intelligent enough to understand? My letter said nothing about time and space, I simply thought of her and wanted to see her. But then she will start asking absolute questions. An ‘experiment’? Yes, why not? She knows how I hate exhibitions of emotion, but she pours it all out all the same. She ‘wants everything’, does she. Well, she can’t have it; and that doubtless is that.

I feel no jealousy of Gilbert, but I feel a sort of envy of him! He is the clever one. He has got simple Lizzie as his sweet affectionate housekeeper; and meanwhile I very much doubt whether he has given up ‘hunting’. I must confess I still have feelings of ownership about Lizzie. She has ‘lasted’ in my mind. Yet, she is quite right, loving shows like one’s slip showing, as I once said to her when her slip was showing! (How these girls do treasure up one’s words.) I have neglected her, I have even been cruel, though that could be called a sign of love and the neglect a sign of trust. I do in fact recall the business of the taxi after Sidney’s luncheon. I saw that Lizzie was scheming to leave with me. But at the last moment I quite deliberately brought Nell Pickering along too. Nell is the new musical comedy star, with whom I had been flirting all through lunch. Nell is twenty-two. (I wouldn’t mind having her in my harem.) Poor Lizzie. What made me suddenly write that teasing semi-serious letter to her I wonder? Some fear of loneliness and death which has come to me out of the sea?

Since the subject of Lizzie Scherer has come up I may as well give some further account of her. I began to love Lizzie after I realized how much she loved me. As does sometimes happen, her love impressed me, then attracted me. I was directing a season of Shakespeare. She fell in love with me during Romeo and Juliet, she revealed her love during Twelfth Night, we got to know each other during A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then (but that was later) I began to love her during The Tempest, and (but that was later still) I left her during Measure for Measure (when Aloysius Bull was playing the Duke). I recall very clearly that occasion when I first realized that Lizzie loved me. She was playing Viola. (This was during Lizzie’s brief ‘shining period’, her annus mirabilis.) It was the production in which Wilfred Dunning, who usually played Sir Toby Belch, suddenly insisted on playing Malvolio. At least, he did not insist, I let him. It was a marvel but it wrecked the production. Lizzie and I were alone in a rather draughty church hall which for some reason was all we could get at that moment to rehearse in. It was a winter’s evening and I remember the place as being lit with gas. Lizzie (now in Act two, Scene four) got as far as ‘she never told her love’. Then she stopped and seemed to choke and uttered no more. I thought at first that this was her own extremely effective idea of how to speak the speech, and I waited for her to go on. She gazed at me. Then huge glistening tears rose into her eyes. When I realized what the matter was I began to laugh and laugh and laugh, and after a bit Lizzie laughed, laughing and crying helplessly. And I loved her for that laughter too. She was a good girl. She is a good girl.

I somehow always picture Lizzie in breeches. She first won a little fame as principal boy in small provincial pantomimes. She was very slim in those days and rather boyish in appearance and used to stride around in boots and cut her hair very short. Her great ambition, never realized, was to play Peter Pan. She was (briefly) quite serviceable as Shakespeare’s transvestite girls. (Sidney later directed her as Rosalind.) I made her into an adorable Viola, but her greatest success in that historic season was as Puck. (In Romeo and Juliet she was a mute lady. I forget who played Juliet, except that she was no good.) I was touched by her love and by her superb obedience, but I was tied up with Rosina at the time and I saw Lizzie as a wispish enchanting rather infantile sprite. Every time I met her I laughed and then she laughed too. We used to laugh at each other across restaurants and suddenly and mysteriously during rehearsals. I did not need to be told how much she loved me, though she never, even on the first occasion, said anything about it. I thought that was stylish of her. Throughout the Dream her radiant gaze rested on me, her will touched my will and trembled. She understood and obeyed, and although (as she told me later) she knew about Rosina, she existed in a sort of heaven of suffering which I must confess gave me some gratification. Perhaps this gratification was a prophetic gleam from the love I was later to feel for her. And by then I was getting thoroughly tired of Rosina. In that production of the Dream Al Bull (a most uneven actor) played Oberon rather boorishly, and I regretted not taking the part myself. Lizzie’s cup would then have been full and running over! It was at the end of that season that I went to America, and there followed the horrible interlude in Hollywood and the first debacle with Fritzie Eitel. I think I went to Hollywood partly to escape from Rosina: in any case I escaped. Rosina thought I left her because of Lizzie, but this was not so.

When I came back to England again there was suddenly an interval of peace and an atmosphere of restored innocence and joy. It was summer. I was on good terms with Clement who had one of her silly young men at the time. I felt, after the horrors of California, free and happy. I wanted to get back to Shakespeare after the muck I had been wading through in America. A fly-by-night American director called Isaiah Mommsen let me play Prospero. It was the last substantial part I ever played. Lizzie was Ariel. She was the most spiritual, most curiously accurate Ariel I ever saw. Her love for me made her so, and in the midst of all that magic made me love her. Oddly, I felt then, and the feeling remains with me, that I loved her as if she were my son. She often called herself my page. She had a pretty little singing voice and I can still hear the thin true tone of her Full Fathom Five. How now, after all these years, my tricksy spirit. I remember that she once played Cherubino in an amateur production of Figaro, and I think this tiny success was one of the things she valued most. Damn, it has just occurred to me that Gilbert Opian probably regards her as a boy!

My love for Lizzie was somehow an innocent love. (God, what messes I got into with Rita and Rosina and Jeanne and Doris and the rest.) The innocence was Lizzie’s pure gift. Her love was so scrupulous, so intelligent. She never used her power to lay upon me the lightest of moral bonds. The reader will say, but the bonds were there! Well, yes, and yet some grace born of Lizzie’s selflessness seemed almost to abolish them and we lived in the golden world. Of course she never reproached me. It was as if she positively did not want me to feel any sense of duty towards her, but wanted me simply to use her for my happiness. Written so, this sounds crude. But as we lived it, it was the profoundest humblest tact on her part, and on mine a love that was composed of gentle gratitude. We were gentle with each other.

And yet of course it was also at the same time a scene of carnage. (Why do I so much enjoy writing this down?) I told her from the start that I had no conception of marrying her. Was it blind stupid hope nevertheless which made her so infinitely kind to me? An ungrateful thought: I am sure she had no hope. I told her that the affair was temporary, that my love for her was temporary, and doubtless her love for me was temporary. I spoke of mortality and the fragile and shadowy nature of human arrangements and the jumbled unreality of human minds, while her large light brown eyes spoke to me of the eternal. She said, I want to be perfect for you so that you can leave me without pain, and this perfect expression of love simply irritated me. She said, I will wait forever, although I know… I am not… waiting for… anything. What a love duet, and how much I enjoyed it although in her suffering I suffered a little too. Certainly she concealed her pain as much as she could; but towards the end it was impossible. She cried before me with wide open eyes, not staunching the tears. Her tears fell on my sleeve, on my hand like storm rain. And when at last I told her to go she went like a shadow, with silent swift obedience. After that I went on my second visit to Japan. The taste of sake still makes me remember Lizzie’s tears.

She never prospered in the theatre after I went away. (All the ladies went downhill after I left them, except Rosina. Clement of course I never really left, even when we both had other lovers, which was rather horrid for the other lovers.) Two years after Lizzie’s apotheosis as Ariel they were asking, whatever happened to Lizzie Scherer? I was so grateful to her, and this alone has made her ‘last’ in my mind. The dear girl never made me feel guilty! A light of courage and truth shines on her in my memory. She is possibly the only woman (with one exception) who never lied to me. And the remembrance of her sufferings often filled me with a kind of tender joy, whereas when I think of the sufferings of other women I tend to feel indifference, even annoyance.

I wanted a wife once when I was young, but the girl fled. Since then I have never really seriously thought of marriage. My observation of the state never made me fancy it. The only happily married couples I know at all well are my Cambridge friends Victor and Julia Banstead, and, in the theatre, Sidney and Rosemary Ashe; and even they, who knows… People are so secretive. I might also count Will and Adelaide Boase, but they only survive because she gives in all the time, which I suppose is one method. What suits me best is the drama of separation, of looking forward to assignations and rendezvous. I cannot prefer the awful eternal presence of marriage to the magic of meetings and partings. I do not even care for sharing a bed, and I rarely want to spend the whole night with a woman I have made love to. In the morning she looks to me like a whore. Marriage is a sort of brainwashing which breaks the mind into the acceptance of so many horrors. How untidy and ugly and charmless married people often let themselves become without even noticing it. I sometimes reflect on these horrors simply in order to delight myself by thinking how I have escaped them!

In this respect Clement understood me perfectly, perhaps because she was always so excessively conscious of being ‘old enough to be my mother’. How often, glowing with that famous beauty and charm which she retained for so long, she battered me with that phrase! We knew that we would never marry and we knew that we would make each other suffer, yet we schemed for our happiness, we really used our joint intelligence on that problem. Of course in a way it was a hopeless case, but it was a hopeless case which marvellously lasted for the rest of Clement’s life, so I did not do too badly by that wonderful maddening woman. Was I a little cruel to her, never quite saying how much I loved her, always trying to keep her ‘on the hop’, puzzled, baffled, at a disadvantage? Perhaps. I was afraid of being ‘swallowed’. I went away, I came back, I went away again. She was not alone either. She was always beset. I was never terribly jealous, except perhaps for a short while of Marcus, because I had such a close connection with Clement, just as if (though I never used these words to her) she were indeed my mother! She became very irritable and possessive in the last years; and she went on so touchingly trying to please me. She could not stop flirting. When she was ill she became rather hideous towards the end and had to be lied to about her appearance. She lost her figure and went about in corduroy trousers and a baggy jacket. She looked like an old bachelor with drink stains and snuff all down her clothes. Yet still she would spend an hour a day ‘doing her face’. Perhaps that is the last pleasure which a woman leaves. No, I never considered marriage. That first girl made all the rest seem shoddy. Or perhaps it was just the comparison with Shakespeare’s heroines.

I am writing this after dinner. For dinner I had an egg poached in hot scrambled egg, then the coley braised with onions and lightly dusted with curry powder, and served with a little tomato ketchup and mustard. (Only a fool despises tomato ketchup.) Then a heavenly rice pudding. It is fairly easy to make very good rice pudding, but how often do you meet one? I drank half a bottle of Meursault to salute the coley. I am running out of wine.

Lizzie, yes. She has stayed the course. I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one inexplicably and yet certainly loves A and is indifferent to B. I was at ease with Lizzie, her gentle clever teasing made me feel free. Yes, the final question is, how much does one crave for someone’s company; that is more radical, it matters more than passion or admiration or ‘love’. And am I wondering who will cherish me when I am old and frightened? On the whole I am rather relieved that her letter can be taken as a simple negative. No more anxieties and decisions. I shall let the matter drift. As for Gilbert, that water fly, he is not near my conscience. I rather wonder at Lizzie’s touching belief in him. It is true that I could put a most terrible pressure upon both of them, but of course I shall not. No doubt I have done enough damage by simply reminding poor Lizzie of my existence!

‘Do you know what a poltergeist is, Mr Arkwright?’

Mr Arkwright allows a scornful interval to pass, while he slowly mops the counter. His silence does not connote hesitation. ‘Yes, sir.’ The ‘sir’ is sarcastic, not respectful.

‘Did you ever hear that there was one at Shruff End?’

‘No, sir.’

‘A what? What did he say?’ asks one of the clients.

‘A poltergeist’, says Mr Arkwright. ‘It’s a-sort of a-’

He cannot quite say, so I come in. ‘It’s a kind of a ghost that breaks things.’

‘A ghost-?’ There is a significant silence.

‘You never heard tell that Shruff End was haunted?’

‘Any house might be haunted,’ someone volunteers.

‘Mrs Chorney haunted it,’ someone else says.

‘She looked like a-like a-’ The simile remains elusive. I leave the matter there.

My question to Mr Arkwright was not prompted solely by the fate of my ugly vase. Something rather frightful happened last night. I was wakened at about five-thirty, as it turned out, by a most fearful shattering crash down below. It was already daylight, but the hall and stairs are dark so I lit a candle. I went down, thoroughly frightened, I must confess, and found that the big oval mirror in the hall had fallen to the ground. The glass was shattered into tiny pieces. What is odd is that both the wire at the back of the mirror and the nail, which remained in the wall, appeared to be intact. I was so appalled and upset I did not stop to investigate properly, and I was afraid that my candle would go out. There was a surprisingly strong draught. I returned promptly to bed. This morning I rather stupidly pulled the nail out of the wall and threw it away without inspecting it properly. Of course the nail must have been gradually bent by the weight of the mirror until the wire slipped over the end. I feel curiously unwilling to reflect about the matter in detail. I am very sorry about the mirror. The frame is undamaged and it can be reglazed, but the original glass was mysteriously silvery and beautiful. It took me some time to get to sleep after the crash, and I left my candle burning in the dawn light. When at last I fell asleep I dreamt that Mrs Chorney had come out through a door in the alcove to ask me what I was doing in her house. She looked like a-

Searching for a place to plant my herb garden I have found some clumps of excellent young nettles on the other side of the road. I also managed to buy some fresh home-made scones in the village this morning. Some splendid local lady occasionally sells these through the shop. I am told she makes bread too, and I have ordered some. For lunch I ate rashers of cold sugared bacon and poached egg on nettles. (Cook the nettles like spinach. I usually make them into a sort of purée with lentils.) After that I feasted on the scones with butter and raspberry jam. I drank the local cider and tried to like it. The wine problem is still on the horizon.

I have found a few more letters in my dog kennel. They seem to arrive rather irregularly, and I have never yet seen the postman. No word from Lizzie. There is a missive from my cousin James which I shall record. It is characteristic.

My dear Charles,

I understand that you have purchased a house by the seaside. Does this mean that you have given up your theatrical activities? If so it must be a relief no longer to have to do hurried work with a ‘deadline’ in mind. I trust, in any case, that you are having a well-earned rest in your marine abode, that your ‘things’ have found satisfactory perches, and that you have a pleasant kitchen wherein to practise your brand of gastronomic mysticism! Have you retained your London flat? I confess I set you down as a dedicated Londoner, so this defection is surprising. I wonder if you have a sea view? The sea is always a refreshment to the spirit, it is good to see the horizon as a clean line. I could do with some ‘ozone’ myself. The weather in London is intolerably hot and the temperature seems to increase the traffic noise. Perhaps there is some physical cause for this connected with sound waves? I expect you are doing a lot of bathing. I always think of you as a fanatical swimming man. Pray let me hear from you in due course and if you are in town we might have a drink. I hope you are happily ‘settled in’ and on good terms with your house. I was interested in its curious name. With usual cordial wishes.

Yours,

James.

James’s letters to me contrive to be slightly patronizing, as if he were an elder brother, not a younger cousin; indeed they sometimes achieve that well-meaning almost parental stiffness which makes one’s own doings seem so puerile. At the same time, these letters, of which I regularly receive two or three a year, always seem to me to combine a dull formality with the faintest touch of madness.

Perhaps at this point I had better offer some longer and more frank account of my cousin. It is not that James has ever been much of an actor in my life, nor do I anticipate that he will ever now become one. We have steadily seen less of each other over the last twenty years, and lately, although he has been stationed in London, we have scarcely met at all. The reference in his letter to ‘having a drink’ is of course just an empty politesse. I have rarely introduced James to my friends (I always kept him well away from the girls), nor has he introduced me to his, if he has any. (I wonder how he heard about my ‘seaside house’? That too must be in the newspapers, alas. Is publicity to plague me even here?) No, cousin James has never been an important or active figure in the ordinary transactions of my life. His importance lies entirely in my mind.

We rarely meet, but when we do we tread upon a ground which is deep and old. We are both only children, the sons of brothers close in age (Uncle Abel was slightly younger than my father) who had no other siblings. Though we rarely reminisce, the fact remains that our childhood memories are a common stock which we share with no one else. There are those who, even if valued, remain sinister witnesses from the past. James is for me such a witness. It is not even clear whether we like each other. If I were told today that James was dead my first emotion might be pleasurable; though how much does this prove? Cousinage, dangereux voisinage had a quite special meaning in our case. I see I have used the past tense; and really, when I reflect, I see how much all this now belongs to the past: only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time. As the years have rolled I have had less and less difficulty in resisting an image of James as a menacing figure. One day a friend (it was Wilfred), meeting him by accident, said, ‘What a disappointed man your cousin seems to be.’ A light broke, and I felt better at once.

When I was young I could never decide whether James was real and I was unreal, or vice versa. Somehow it was clear we could not both be real; one of us must inhabit the real world, the other one the world of shadows. James always had a sort of beastly invulnerability. Well, it goes right back to the start. As I have explained, I was early aware, through the sort of psychological osmosis of which children are so capable, that Uncle Abel had made a more ‘advantageous’ marriage than my father, and that in the mysterious pecking-order hierarchy of life the Abel Arrowbys ranked above the Adam Arrowbys. My mother was very conscious of this, and I am certain struggled in the depths of her religious soul ‘not to mind’. (She had a special way of emphasizing the word ‘heiress’ when she spoke of Aunt Estelle.) My father, I really believe, did not mind at all, except for my sake. I remember his once saying, in such an odd almost humble sort of voice, ‘I’m so sorry you can’t have a pony, like James…’ I loved my father so intensely at that moment and was at the same time conscious (I was ten, twelve?) that I could not express my love, and that perhaps he did not know of it, how much it was. Did he ever know?

As far as the material things of life were concerned the families certainly had different fates. James was the proud possessor of the above-mentioned pony, indeed of a series of such animals, and generally lived in what I thought of as a pony-owning style. And how I suffered from those bloody ponies! When I visited Ramsdens James sometimes offered me a ride, and Uncle Abel (also a horseman) wanted to take me out on a leading rein. Although passionately anxious to ride I always, out of pride and with a feigned indifference, refused; and to this day I have never sat on a horse. A perhaps more important, though not more burning, occasion of envy was continental travel. The Abel Arrowbys went abroad almost every school holiday. They drove all over Europe. (We of course had no car.) They went to America to stay with Aunt Estelle’s ‘folks’, about whom I was careful to know as little as possible. I did not leave England until I went to Paris with Clement after the war. It was not only their ponies and their wide-ranging motor cars that I envied here, it was their enterprise. Uncle Abel was an arranger, an adventurer, an inventor, even a hedonist. My dear good father was none of these things. My uncle and aunt never invited me to join them on those wonderful journeys. It only much later occurred to me, and the idea entered my mind like a dart (I daresay it is still sticking in there somewhere), that they did not ask me because James vetoed it!

As I said, the situation worried my father, I think, only on my behalf. It worried me on my behalf too, but also and quite separately on his. I resented, for him, his deprived status. I felt, for him, the chagrin which his generous and sweet nature did not feel for himself. And in doing this I was aware, even as a child, that I thereby showed myself to be his moral inferior. Although I had such a happy home and such loving parents, I could not help bitterly coveting things which at the same time, as I looked at my father, I despised. I could not help regarding Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle as glamorous almost godlike beings in comparison with whom my own parents seemed insignificant and dull. I could not help seeing them, in that comparison, as failures. While at the same time I also knew that my father was a virtuous and unworldly man, whereas Uncle Abel, who was so stylish, was an ordinary average completely selfish person. I do not of course imply that my uncle was a ‘cad’ or a ‘bounder’, he certainly was not. He loved his beautiful wife and, as far as I know, was faithful to her. He was, as far as I know, an affectionate and responsible father. I am sure he was honest and conscientious in his work and in his finances, in fact a model citizen. But he was an ordinary self-centred go-getter, an ordinary sensualist. Whereas my father, although perhaps nobody ever knew this except my mother and me, was something quite else, something special.

None of this stopped me from rather worshipping Uncle Abel and dancing around him like a pleased dog. At least I did so when I was a young child. Later, because of James, I was slightly more dignified and aloof. Was my father sometimes hurt because I found Uncle Abel so picturesque? Perhaps. This thought saddens me now as I write with a special piercing sadness. He did not care about the worldly goods, but, though he never showed it, he might have felt sorry, again for my sake, that he was so much less of a ‘figure’. My mother may have intuited some such regret in him (or perhaps to her he expressed it) and this may have contributed to the irritability which she could not always suppress when the Abel Arrowbys were mentioned, or especially when they had lately been with us on a visit. They did not in fact visit us very often, since my mother felt that we could not ‘entertain’ them in sufficient style, and would embarrass them, when they did come, with aggressive apologies concerning our humbler way of life. We, I should add, lived upon a housing estate where loneliness was combined with lack of privacy. My visits to stone-built tree-surrounded Ramsdens were usually made alone, because of my mother’s horror of being under her brother-in-law’s roof, and my father’s horror of being under any roof except his own.

I must now, in mentioning my mother, speak of Aunt Estelle. She was, as I have said, an American, though where exactly she hailed from I do not remember to have discovered; America was a big vague concept to me then. Nor do I know where or how my uncle met her. She certainly represented to me some general idea of America: freedom, gaiety, noise. Where Aunt Estelle was there was laughter, jazz music, and (how shocking) alcohol. This again might give the wrong impression. I am speaking of a child’s dream. Aunt Estelle was no ‘drinker’ and her ‘wildness’ was the merest good spirits: health, youth, beauty, money. She had the instinctive generosity of the thoroughly lucky person. She was, in a vague way, demonstratively affectionate to me when I was a child. My undemonstrative mother watched these perhaps meaningless effusions coldly, but they moved me. Aunt Estelle had a pretty little singing voice and used to chant the songs of the first war and the latest romantic song-hits. (Roses of Picardy, Tiptoe through the Tulips, Oh So Blue, Me and Jane in a Plane, and other classics of that sort.) I remember once when she came one night at Ramsdens to ‘settle me down’, her singing a song to the effect that there ain’t no sense sitting on the fence all by yourself in the moonlight. I found this very droll and made the mistake of trying to amuse my parents by repeating it. (It ain’t no fun sitting ’neath the trees, giving yourself a hug and giving yourself a squeeze.) It is probably in some way because of Aunt Estelle that the human voice singing has always upset me with a deep and almost frightening emotion. There is something strange and awful about the distorted open mouths of singers, especially women, the wet white teeth, the moist red interior. Altogether my aunt was for me a symbolic figure, a modern figure, even a futuristic figure, a sort of prophetic lure into my own future. She lived in a land which I was determined to find and to conquer for myself. And in a way I did, but by the time I was king there she was already dead; and it seems strange to think that we never really knew each other, never really talked to each other at all. How easily, later on, we could have bridged the years and how much we would have enjoyed each other’s company. I mentioned her occasionally to Clement who said she was the only one of my relations she would have liked to meet. (My parents of course never met Clement, since it would have made them very unhappy to know that I was living openly with a woman twice my age; but I could have introduced her to my aunt.) When Aunt Estelle was killed in a motor accident when I was sixteen I was less upset than I expected. I had other troubles by then. But it is sad to think that, although she was so kind to me in her absent-minded way, she probably never thought of me except as James’s awkward boorish undistinguished little cousin. She was a marvel to me, a portent. Sorting out oddments at Shruff End two days ago I came across a photograph of her. I could not find one of my mother.

My mother did not exactly dislike Aunt Estelle, nor violently disapprove of her, though she shuddered at the noise and the drink; and she was not exactly envious because she did not want the worldly things that pleased Aunt Estelle. She was just thoroughly depressed by her existence and cast into the gloom and irritation which I mentioned earlier by her visits. It may be that my uncle and aunt thought that my upbringing was too strict. Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as ‘prisoners’. It is conceivable that clever Uncle Abel and liberated Aunt Estelle actually pitied my father and myself, and blamed my mother for what they regarded as a repressive regime. If my mother suspected the existence of such judgments she must have felt pain and resentment; and this resentment may even have had the effect of making her still stricter with us. It is also possible that, divining my childish fantasies concerning that ‘America’ which Aunt Estelle represented to me, she felt jealous. Much later I wondered if she imagined that my father was attracted by his vivacious sister-in-law. In fact I am sure that he had no deep feelings of any sort about Aunt Estelle, except again in relation to me, and that my mother must have known this. (How egoistic I sound as I describe myself as the centre of my parents’ world. But I was the centre of their world.) In the end I ceased looking forward to Aunt Estelle’s visits, although they always excited me when they happened, because they made my mother so depressed and cross. Our house was always somehow spoilt by these visits, and took a little time to recover. As the Abel Arrowby Rolls-Royce was finally waved away down the street, my mother would fall silent, answer in monosyllables, while my father and I tiptoed about, avoiding each other’s eyes.

I was happy at school, but there were no close friendships, no dramas there, no dearly beloved schoolmasters, though some influential ones, such as Mr McDowell. My aunt and uncle loomed as large significant romantic figures, focuses of obscure emotion, in a childhood which was in a way curiously empty. Yet also they were remote, a little hazy, a little cloudy, partly of course because they were only marginally interested in me. I never felt that they really saw me or even looked at me much. With cousin James it was far otherwise. Silently, James and I, from earliest moments, were acutely, suspiciously, constantly aware of each other. We watched each other; and by a mute instinct kept this close mutual attention largely secret from our parents. I cannot say that we feared each other; the fear was all mine, and was a fear not exactly of James but of something that James stood for. (This something was I suppose my prophetic veiled conception of my own life as a failure, as a total disaster.) But we lived, in relation to each other, in a cloud of discomfort and anxiety. All this of course in silence. We never spoke of this strange tension between us; perhaps we would not have been able to find words for it. And I doubt if our parents had any idea of it. Even my father, who knew that I envied James, had no conception of this.

As I have indicated, part of my unease about my cousin consisted in a fear that he would succeed in life and I would fail. That, on top of the ponies, would have been too much. It is scarcely possible to say how far my ‘will to power’ was inspired by a deep original intent to outshine James and to impress him. I do not think that James felt any special desire to impress me, or perhaps he knew that he did not have to try. He had all the advantages. He received, and this is where I really began to grind my teeth, a better education than I did. I went to the local grammar school (a dull decent school, now defunct), James went to Winchester. (Perhaps this was a mixed blessing. In a way he never recovered. They say they rarely do.) I got myself a reasonably sound education, and especially I got Shakespeare. But James, it seemed to me then, was learning everything. He knew Latin and Greek and several modern languages, I had only a little French and less Latin. He knew about painting and regularly visited art galleries in Europe and America. He chatted familiarly of foreign places. He was good at mathematics, he won prizes for history. He wrote poetry which was published in the school magazine. He shone; and although he was not at all boastful, I increasingly felt myself, and was made to feel, a provincial barbarian when I was with James. I felt a gap between us widen, and that gap, as I more intelligently surveyed it, began to fill me with despair. Clearly, my cousin was destined for success and I for failure. I wonder how much my father understood of all this?

Rereading these paragraphs I feel again that I am giving the wrong impression. What a difficult form autobiography is proving to be! The chagrin, the ferocious ambition which James, I am sure quite unconsciously, prompted in me was something which came about gradually and raged intermittently. When we were younger, and even when we were older, James and I played together as ordinary boys play. I had few friends, partly because my mother did not want to invite other children to the house. (I did not mind. I did not like other children very much.) And if James had friends he kept them away from me. So we played alone with each other, watching each other, but not always as crammed with consciousness as the above description might seem to imply. Even in ordinary play however some effortless superiority of James’s would tend to emerge. He knew far more than I did about birds and flowers, and was very good at climbing trees. (As a small child I remember his most seriously attempting to learn to fly!) He could find his way across country like a fox. He had a sort of uncanny instinct about things and places. When the ball got lost it was always James who found it; and he once instantly recovered an old toy aeroplane of mine simply on the basis of my having told him I had lost it.

When I was causing misery to my parents by learning the histrionic arts in London, James was being a golden boy at Oxford where he studied history. At this time I lost touch with him; I did not crave further news of his triumphs and quite positively did not want to know what cousin James was up to. Whatever it was he never finished it because the war arrived. He joined something called the Rifle Corps, later called the Green Jackets, and thus began, though I think he did not realize it at the time, a lifetime as a soldier. Indeed it is now hard for me to think of James at all except as a soldier. He had quite an interesting war, while I was going round in buses playing Shakespeare to coal-miners. After a while I heard he was in India, at Dehra Dun. I had my own problems, notably first love and its after-effects, then the opening skirmishes in my long war with Clement. I heard the outlines of James’s adventures later. He climbed various mountains. He became interested in Tibet, learnt Tibetan, and was constantly disappearing over the border on his pony. (All that early training must have come in useful.) Then he was sent on some embassy or embassies to some nearby Tibetan ruler about something to do with German prisoners of war. He had a picturesque time, but I think he never saw any real action. I was always afraid of hearing he had won the V.C. Of course I have never doubted that he is, in a sense in which I am not, a brave man.

My parents were very surprised when it turned out after the war that James had decided to become a professional soldier. They said that Uncle Abel was disappointed by the decision. Uncle Abel saw James as prime minister. (Aunt Estelle was dead by then.) I felt obscurely cheered because I intuited that James had taken a wrong turning. I was by then just beginning to do well in the theatre, my ‘will to power’ was bringing in results, and Clement was in my life like a sort of travelling carnival. So cousin James was to be a soldier. Uncle Abel said that it was only temporary and he was doing it so as to have more time to write poetry. My mother said that Uncle Abel was whistling in the dark. It did not seem to occur to any of us then that the army too is, and traditionally, a road to power and glory.

I saw a little of James after the war in that rather moving time of the reunion of survivors, but then he vanished again. He was always vanishing. He came back from India and was posted to Germany. Then he was in England again at the Staff College, then back to India. Someone told me later that he was sent on a secret mission into Tibet to investigate Soviet activity there. Of course James never told me anything about his work. I knew minimally of his travels because, with increasing regularity, he sent me picture postcards at Christmas and on my birthday. I paid him no such attentions, but if he wrote me a letter I always sent a brief reply. His letters were usually dull, always uninformative. Then he turned up in London just after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. I never saw him, before or since, display so much emotion. This was clearly for him a personal tragedy. He exclaimed bitterly about the stupidity of those who had failed to see that China, not Russia, was the real menace. But what grieved him was not this ignoring of (perhaps his own) good advice so much as the destruction of something he loved. This emotion was soon muted and he never spoke of the matter to me again.

The next postcard I received was from Singapore, and the next letter, also from Singapore, was a condolence on my father’s death. (I wonder how he knew?) After that I lost sight of James because for a time I lost sight of everything, the lights went out in my life. I mourned long and miserably for my father. The loss of that dear good man touches me deeply still. And, as if in sympathy, everything else was wrong. I had left Clement and was wretchedly involved with some other ladies; and my professional career had crashed into what appeared to be irrevocable ruin. My mother’s death not long after seemed less an individual event than a sort of doomed extension of the loss of my father. A little later Uncle Abel died. I had long ago stopped caring about him or even thinking about him. I recall that I intended to write to James, but I never wrote. I recall too that I wondered only then how James had felt when his marvellous mother died when he was a boy. I was deep in my own early sorrows at that time, and was not greatly affected by Aunt Estelle’s fate. I somehow never reflected what it might have done to James.

I mentioned just now, and should have named him (his name is Toby Ellesmere), a man who told me about James’s ‘secret missions’ in Tibet. This man, not remarkable in any other way, sometimes brought me news of my cousin. They had been together at school and also in the Green Jackets. Ellesmere became a stock-holder, then a publisher, and also dabbled in theatre matters as an investor and in this context I came across him. Some time just after my ‘bad patch’ we met at a first night party and Ellesmere said, ‘I suppose you know your cousin has become a Buddhist?’ I was fascinated and amazed by this news. I had never connected James with religion. We had both of us acquired that vague English Christianity which disappears in adolescence. My mother, I should say here, did not force her particular evangelical beliefs upon my father and me. Perhaps she realized that ‘it would not do’. However she took it for granted that we were Christians. We attended an Anglican church. Naturally James and I did not discuss religion. If I had considered the matter when we were young I think I would have said that the basic spiritual principle of James’s life was an avoidance of vulgarity. Religion as ‘good form’? One could do worse. I would never have imagined him as an enthusiast in pursuit of the exotic mysteries of the East. How extremely odd!

My surprise soon wore off. What did it mean after all? Obviously James could not believe in the transmigration of souls. When I met my cousin again it was somehow another era in our lives. My father’s death, my period of professional despair, my misadventures in Hollywood, these things were now behind me. I had made peace with Clement. (We were in Japan together.) I was by now a very successful man, in Aunt Estelle’s country a king indeed. I said to James, ‘So you’re a Buddhist, I hear?’ He smiled and said ‘Oh yes!’ in a tone which could mean either ‘Yes’ or ‘What nonsense!’ I dropped the subject. Later on he came to live more permanently in London and to work in the Ministry of Defence, as he still does. His flat in Pimlico is full of Buddhas, but then it is full of all sorts of eastern trash, some of it I daresay Hindu.

James is now a general of course, I forget what kind. I suppose he too has been in a way a successful man. My own feeling that I have ‘won the game’ comes partly from a sense that he has been disappointed by life, whereas I have not.

‘A man would drown there in a second.’

‘Three seconds.’

‘A second.’

‘Three seconds.’

Example of Black Lion conversation and level of debate. The clientele seem to resent the fact that I go swimming in a sea whose killer propensities they are so proud of. Conversations of this sort arise as soon as I appear, not of course addressed to me.

I join in. ‘I’m a strong swimmer.’

‘It’s them that drowns.’

‘You swim bare,’ someone adds.

‘Bare?’

‘You swim bare.’

‘Oh-you mean naked.’ So I am watched.

They look at me with dull silent hostility.

‘Seen any seals?’ Mr Arkwright asks brightly.

‘No, not yet.’

I was sorry to observe, visiting the tower steps this morning, that my curtain ‘rope’ had also somehow come undone and vanished. I swam nevertheless. I think that my muscles are stronger and I am becoming more skilful at climbing out. I always manage to scrape or cut myself however. The yellow rocks, which look so smooth from a distance, have a rough scratchy surface, as if they were closely covered over with millions of tiny sharp broken-off limpet shells. Yesterday I dived from Shruff End ‘cliff’ at high tide and managed to get out all right, though a little anxiety spoilt the swim. I am certainly not going to lose face at the Black Lion by going along to the ‘ladies’ bathing place’!

Today there is a pleasant very light haze over the whole sky, and the sea has a misleadingly docile silvered look, as if the substantial wavelets were determined to stroke the rocks as hard as they could without showing any trace of foam. It is a compact radiant complacent sort of sea, very beautiful. There ought to be seals, the waves themselves are almost seals today, but still I scan the water in vain with my long-distance glasses. Enormous yellow-beaked gulls perch on the rocks and stare at me with brilliant glass eyes. A shadow-cormorant skims the glycerine sea. The rocks are thronged with butterflies. The temperature remains high. I wash my clothes and dry them on the lawn. I have been swimming every day and feel very fit and salty. Still no move from Lizzie, but I am not worried. I feel happy in my silence. If the gods have some treat in store for Lizzie and me, good. If not, also good. I feel innocent and free. Perhaps it is all that swimming.

How high-flown, almost pompous, I am becoming, now that I am a prose-writer! I know many playwrights who regard continuous prose as a sort of alien language which they could not dream of mastering. I think I may have felt like this myself at one time. And yet look at all the pages I have already covered! I have been looking back over my little sketch of James and it is quite stylish. Is it true however? Well, it is not totally misleading, but it is far too short and ‘smart’. How can one describe real people? James looks, in my description of him, so complete, so hard. I have omitted to say that he has little square teeth and an inane childish grin. Sometimes his mouth hangs vacantly open. He has a hooked nose and a dark complexion. Aunt Estelle was rather dark too. Perhaps she had Red Indian blood?

I must work harder on these portraits. Perhaps that is what this book will turn out to be, simply my life told in a series of portraits of the people I have known. What a funny heterogeneous crew: Clement, Rosina, Wilfred, Sidney, Peregrine, Rita, Fritzie, Jeanne, Al Bull… I must write about Clement. She is the main theme. How mad and bad she became at the end when she had lost her beauty and was losing her wits. And what a bitchy old bore she was, telling the same scandalous obscene stories over and over again. That terrible atmosphere in her flat, the smell of drink, the smell of tears and hysterics. Her deep sonorous drunken voice droned on in endless recrimination. Did I face it well? I think I did. Forgiveness and mercy were so ready to hand as soon as I knew that she was doomed. That sounds cynical. I always loved her; and we were rewarded. At the very end we were both perfect. Poor Clement. That is a dreadful land, old age. I shall soon be entering it myself. Is that why I feel I need Lizzie?

I am writing this the next morning. I was sitting writing the above late last night in my drawing room when something very disconcerting happened. I looked up and was for a moment perfectly sure that I saw a face looking at me through the glass of the inner room. I sat absolutely still, paralysed by sheer terror. The vision was only momentary but, although I cannot now describe the face, very definite. Perhaps it is significant that I cannot remember the face? After an interval of course I got up to investigate. The new oil lamp is easy to carry so I was not reduced to peering about with a candle. And of course there was nothing to be seen. I even walked round the house. I felt, I must confess, very odd. I went, with a sort of deliberate slowness, up the stairs to bed and took a sleeping pill. I thought I heard the bead curtain clinking in the night, but that is a natural phenomenon. A little wind has arisen today and the sea is blue and white again.

I have considered two possible explanations of my apparition. One is that it was simply a reflection of my own face in the blackness of the glass. But (unless I had unconsciously risen?) I was sitting well below the level at which I could have been thus mirrored. Also, the face appeared rather high up in the window, and so (a further thought) must have belonged to a very tall person or to someone standing on something. (Only there is nothing to stand on, since I have moved the folding table in here.) Another theory I shall check tonight. The window that gives onto the sea was uncurtained and there was an almost full moon. Could I have seen the moon reflected in the inner glass?

‘Everything is full of gods’, cousin James once said, quoting somebody. Perhaps I have been surrounded by little gods and spirits all my life, only the magic of the theatre exorcized or absorbed them? Theatre people are notoriously superstitious. Now we are all alone together! Well, I have never gone in for persecution mania and do not propose to start now.

I must soon go over to the Raven Hotel to get some more wine. I think I will stop talking about ghosts and monsters in the Black Lion.

Decided not to swim today.

I have been out shopping. The shop keeps promising lettuce but so far has had none. No fresh fish of course. I found some more letters in my stone dog kennel. Nothing from Lizzie. A communication from Peregrine Arbelow however. For lunch made my heavenly vegetarian stew of onions, carrots, tomatoes, bran, lentils, pearl barley, vegetable protein, brown sugar and olive oil. (The vegetable protein I brought with me from London.) I add a little lemon juice just before eating. With that (it is very light) a baked potato with cream cheese. Then Battenberg roll and prunes. (Carefully cooked prunes are delicious. Drain and add lemon juice or a dash of orange flower water, never cream.) If any one wonders at the absence of ‘eating’ apples from my diet let me explain that this is one case where I have spoilt my palate with an aristocratic taste. I can eat only Cox’s Orange Pippins, and am in mourning applewise from April to October.

I will transcribe as an introduction to him, Peregrine’s letter.

Charles, how are you getting on? We are all consumed with curiosity. No one admits to having been invited. But don’t you miss us terribly? Perhaps you have sneaked back to live secretly in your new flat, not answering the phone and going out at night? Someone said your house was on a lonely wave-washed promontory but that can’t be true. I see you in a cosy marine bungalow on the sea front. After all, how could you live without your liquidizer? I couldn’t bear it if you had really changed your life. That is something which I have always wanted to do but never could and never will. I shall die with my boots off, the bastard I have ever been. I have been drinking for a week after returning from hell, alias Belfast. Civilization is terrible, but don’t imagine that you can ever escape it, Charles. I want to know what you are doing. And don’t imagine that you can ever hide from me, I am your shadow. I think I shall come down and see you at Whitsun. (Someone dared me to and you know I can’t resist dares.) Various people would send their love if they knew I was writing, but of course it isn’t love, it’s insolent curiosity. Few are worthy of you, Charles. Is the undersigned one? Time will show. Shall I come and bring my swimming trunks? I haven’t swum since our epic days in Santa Monica. Another theory is that you are not in England at all but gone to Spain with a girl. To disprove which you must write. Your shadow salutes you.

Peregrine.

It is after lunch (it is perfectly true that I miss my liquidizer) and I am sitting at my upstairs seaward window. It is cloudy and the sea is a choppy dark blue-grey, an aggressive and unpleasant colour. The seagulls are holding a wake. The house feels damp. Perhaps I am still depressed by last night’s experience, which was of course a simple visual illusion. (However I will check about the moon.) And at least I can write ‘depressed’ and not ‘afraid’. There is nothing to be afraid of.

Perhaps I shall make some notes for a character sketch of Peregrine. This will involve writing something about Rosina, and I would rather forget that lady. Well, autobiography cannot be self-indulgent fun all of the time.

Peregrine (he detests being called ‘Perry’ as much as I detest being called ‘Charlie’; only people who do not know me call me ‘Charlie’) is one of those who have a strong concept of the life they want to lead and the role they want to play and lead it and play it at the expense of everyone, especially their nearest and dearest. And the odd thing is that such people can in a sense be wrong, can as it were miscast themselves, and yet battle on successfully to the end, partly because their ‘victims’ prefer a definite simple impression to the pains of critical thought. Peregrine, although in many ways a gentle kind man, has cast himself as a noisy bear. This ‘role-playing’ makes him stupidly careless of making enemies. Whereas I think it shows a lack of professional skill to make unnecessary enemies in the theatre, or indeed in life. Peregrine is always blundering along. He lacks the meticulous quality of the true artist. I always had to terrorize him to get him onto the stage sober. He has the makings of a fine actor, only he is too damn conceited and casual, there is a sort of slapdash Irishry about him, he has too many off-days.

Peregrine is an Ulster Catholic who started out as a medical student at Queen’s University, Belfast, and then ran away to the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He hates Ireland as only the Irish can hate it. He early abandoned religion for Marxism, then abandoned Marxism. I first saw him as the Playboy (he was slim in those far-off days) and coveted his talents at once. He is now, since he parted professional company with me some years ago, going to seed as a fat charming television villain. He knows what I think of his career. But we remain friends; and this in spite of the fact that I stole his wife. He has married again, equally disastrously, an ex-actress called Pamela Hackett, who has a little daughter by her earlier awful marriage to ‘Ginger’ Godwin. (Ah, where is he now?) Why do people ever marry?

Yes, well, I shall have to talk about Rosina and maybe it will do me some good to write it all down. Not that I could write it all down if I wrote volumes. Rosina was a huge phenomenon. She was already married to Perry when I first encountered her. They met in America in some interval after I had first spotted him at the Gate. I was still fairly young though becoming known as a playwright and as a director. Some further time must then have passed (how I wish I had kept a diary), since I started to pursue Rosina after a period when I had again been living with Clement. What a lot of energy in my life I have spent escaping from women. Rita Gibbons comes into that story too, so perhaps it was later still. Clement tolerated Rita and Lizzie and Jeanne but she detested Rosina. Of course I lied to Clement (she lied to me) but various people made a point of keeping her informed.

Rosina is of course Rosina Vamburgh, and is probably the most famous person in this book, after me. Her real name, which she keeps secret, is Jones (or Davis or Williams or Rees or something) and she is Welsh, with a French Canadian grandmother. I was never ‘in love’ with Rosina. I would like to reserve that phrase to describe the one single occasion when I loved a woman absolutely. (Not dear Clement of course.) But I was certainly mad about Rosina. (Moreover, when a beautiful witty woman is passionate about you you cannot but feel that she has the root of the matter in her.) I am not sure whether she was ‘in love’ with me. A furious mutual desire for possession dominated the whole affair while it lasted. At one stage she certainly wanted to marry me, whereas I never had the slightest intention of marrying her. I simply wanted her, and the satisfaction of this want involved detaching her permanently from her husband. Clement, when younger, was probably the most beautiful woman I ever knew. But Rosina is the most stylish, the most gorgeously adorably artificial. There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She has a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.

She was (and is) a good actress and a very intelligent woman. (These qualities do not always go together.) She had a mixture of Celtic and Gallic good looks, with blue eyes and wiry dark hair and a big moist sensual mouth. God, how different kisses are. Lizzie’s kisses were dry and chaste yet clinging. Rosina’s kisses were those of a tigress. Rosina had the fierce charm of the rather nasty girl in the fairy-tale who fails to get the prince, but is more interesting than the girl who does, and has better lines too. She was a good comic actress and excelled in rubbishy Restoration Comedy, a genre I have never cared for. She made a memorable Hedda Gabler, and a rather touching Natalia Petrovna in A Month in the Country. Unfortunately she was never able to play Honor Klein. When I worked with her I used to cast her against her type; I often did this successfully with actors. She was surprisingly good as La Présidente in Sidney’s adaptation of Liaisons Dangereuses. I never let her play Lady Macbeth but Isaiah Mommsen did much later on and it was a disaster. After I left her Rosina lost her way for some time in silly films and television. I was glad. After I left her I no longer wanted to see her name in lights in Shaftesbury Avenue, nor did I care to know who directed her. La jalousie naît avec l’amour, mais ne meurt pas toujours avec lui.

The interval between possession and hell was short though I admit it was wonderful. Rosina was one of those women who believe that ‘a good row clears the air’. In my experience a good row not only does not clear the air but can land you with a lifelong enemy. Rows in the theatre can be terrible and I avoided them. Rosina more than once called me a coward for this. She liked rows, any rows, and she believed in loving by rowing. I began to grow tired. The golden bridge for the departing lover I have always, I hope, provided when it became necessary. Rosina, when she saw me cooling, had no such merciful contraption ready. She clung closer and closer and screamed louder and louder. She was always insanely given to jealousy, even more than I was. How very much jealousy, the spectacle of it, the suffering of it, has been a feature of my whole life. I think now of something so different but equally awful, my mother’s silence after the departures of Aunt Estelle.

In the end we both became half mad. I remember my cousin James quoting some philosopher as saying that ‘it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger’. Rosina and I reached a state (though I would not have described it as a rational one) where we definitely preferred the former. I remember Rosina once hurling herself downstairs in a fit of rage. On several occasions I was quite ready for her to jump out of an upstairs window and rather hoped that she would. I came to feel, perhaps I always felt, again in the words of some Frenchman: elle n’a qu’une faute, elle est insupportable. Sometimes even now I wake up in the middle of the night and think, at any rate thank God that woman has gone out of my life. Of course when I left her she never went back to Peregrine.

I was intensely grateful to Perry, and indeed admired him, for the way he behaved. Cynics said he was glad to have Rosina taken off his hands. I knew better, he suffered. I am sure that he and Rosina had lived in a perpetual state of war, but many not unhappy couples do so. I think he loved her, though he probably came, as I did, to find her simply impossible. So there may well have been an element of profound relief in having the problem removed without his will. Later, he went out of his way to make quite a show of masculine solidarity. He remains very attached to me, and I value this. One result of his truly remarkable generosity and kindness was that although I saw objectively that I had behaved badly, I felt practically no guilt. This was because Perry never reproached me. Just as, on the other hand, I have always felt guilty about my chauffeur Freddie Arkwright because he once flew at me, and not because I had occasioned his resentment by keeping him waiting hungry for hours while I was guzzling at the Connaught Hotel. Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.

I have been out picking flowers upon my rocks! I collected a fine mixed bunch of valerian and thrift and white sea campion. The campion has a very strong sweet smell. I cannot stop collecting stones, and the trough is overflowing even though I have put some of the best ones into my lawn border. This border looks a little ‘quaint’, I will have to see how I like it when it is finished. It is a good way to display the stones, but will the earth discolour their undersides?

This morning I swam in the rain from the stony beach. The beach is about a mile from the house on the village side, so I took bathing trunks, but did not don them as there was no one there. The rain had a quieting effect on the sea, making it smooth and pitted, almost oily. I had no difficulty getting out. I collected more stones. Then I went home and sat naked in the warmish rain on Minn’s bridge and watched the glossy water running into the deep enclosure. Even on a calm day it runs in and out like a tidal wave.

I was unable last night to check my theory that my ghostly ‘face’ was a reflection of the moon, since the sky was cloudy. But I feel sure now that it was an optical illusion and needs no further explanation. I occupied the little red room in the evening and lit the fire there. The chimney smoked again, perhaps because of the direction of the wind. As I rescued a spider running upon a half-burning piece of wood I remembered my father. Since I came here I have lived with naked flames for the first time for some years. Clement always loved an open fire. What a strange process burning is. How utterly and sort of calmly it transforms things, it is so clean, as clean as death. (Shall I be cremated? Who will arrange it? Let me not think of death.) So far I have been keeping my wood in the larder, only there is not enough space and the floor is curiously damp. I might make the downstairs inner room into a fuel store. The driftwood is so beautiful, smoothed by the sea and blanched to a pale grey colour, it seems a shame to burn it. I set several pieces aside and admired the grain. Perhaps I shall make a collection of driftwood ‘sculpture’.

It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves. Thank heavens I have had no more such hallucinations, and the extent to which I have forgotten what I saw persuades me that it was indeed an after-effect of that drug which I so foolishly took. Or did I really ‘see’ anything which needs even this much of an explanation? I keep a careful watch upon the flattened rainy sea but no great coiling form comes rising up! (No seals either.) It did, oddly enough, occur to me afterwards to reflect upon what the Black Lion yokels said about ‘worms’. ‘Worm’ is an old word for dragon. Well, this is getting a little too picturesque: dragons, poltergeists, faces at windows! And how restless this rain makes me feel.

I reread my pieces about James and Peregrine and was quite moved by them. Of course they are just sketches and need to be written in more detail before they become really truthful and ‘lifelike’. It has only just now occurred to me that really I could write all sorts of fantastic nonsense about my life in these memoirs and everybody would believe it! Such is human credulity, the power of the printed word, and of any well-known ‘name’ or ‘show business personality’. Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!

Since I started writing this ‘book’ or whatever it is I have felt as if I were walking about in a dark cavern where there are various ‘lights’, made perhaps by shafts or apertures which reach the outside world. (What a gloomy image of my mind, but I do not mean it in a gloomy sense.) There is among those lights one great light towards which I have been half consciously wending my way. It may be a great ‘mouth’ opening to the daylight, or it may be a hole through which fires emerge from the centre of the earth. And am I still unsure which it is, and must I now approach in order to find out? This image has come to me so suddenly, I am not sure what to make of it.

When I decided to write about myself of course the question arose: am I then to write about Hartley? Of course, I thought, I must write about Hartley, since that is the most important thing in my life. And yet how can I, what style can I adopt or master worthy of such a sacred tale, and would not the attempt to relive those events upset me to some intolerable degree? Or would it be simply a sacrilege? Or suppose I were to get the wrong tone, making the marvellous merely grotesque? It might be better to tell my life without mentioning Hartley, even though this omission would amount to a gross lie. Can one, in such a self-portrait, omit something which affected one’s whole being and which one has thought of every day of one’s life? ‘Every day’ exaggerates, but not much. I do not need to ‘recall’ Hartley, she is here. She is my end and my beginning, she is alpha and omega.

I thought it better to draw a veil over this question, which was starting to worry me too much. I decided simply to write and to see if I could somehow approach, or find that I had approached, the vast subject of Hartley. And, just as I found myself unexpectedly and spontaneously writing ‘My paternal grandfather was a market gardener in Lincolnshire’, so now I find that, wandering in my cavern, I have in fact come near to the great light-source and am ready to speak about my first love. But what can I say? I feel just as suddenly tongue-tied. My first love, and also my only love. All the best, even Clement, have been shadows by comparison. The necessity of this seems, in my own case, so great that I find it hard to imagine that it is not so with everyone. On n’aime qu’une fois, la première.

Her name was Mary Hartley Smith. How quickly, readily I write it down. Yet my heart beats fast too. Oh my God. Mary Hartley Smith.

That is the heading of the story then. But really I cannot tell the story. I will write some notes for the story and perhaps never tell it. Or indeed it may be untellable, since there are hardly any ‘events’ in it, only feelings, the feelings of a child, of a youth, of a young man, nebulous and holy and stronger than anything in the whole of life. I can scarcely remember a time when I did not know Hartley. I went to a school for boys only, but the girls’ school was nearby next door and we saw the girls all the time. As there were a lot of Marys around in those days she was always known as ‘Hartley’ and that was somehow very much her name. We paired off early on, but merrily, childishly, and without any deep shaking emotions, as far as I can remember, in those earliest days. When we were about twelve the emotions began. They puzzled us, amazed us. They shook us as terriers shake rats. To say we were ‘in love’, that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain?

It is odd that I now write down (and will not change) the word ‘pain’, for of course what it was was pure joy. Perhaps the point is that whatever it was it was extreme and pure. (I am told that a blindfolded man cannot distinguish severe burning from severe freezing.) Or perhaps at that age emotions tend to be felt as pains because they are not lightened by reflection. Everything becomes dread and fear, and the more wonderful and the more joyful, the more dread and the more fear. But let me repeat that this was not reflection, not thought. I did not harbour intelligent doubts about whether Hartley would go on loving me, naturally I knew that she was mine forever. But as we closed our eyes upon tears of joy there was cosmic dread.

Of course, and instinctively, we kept it all a secret. Our schoolfellows had got used to our playful friendship. Now we lay low, we were casual, we had secret meeting places. All this, as I say, was instinctive, never discussed or decided. We had to hide the precious thing in case it was hurt, derided, damaged or offended in some way. My parents vaguely knew Hartley of course, but she hardly ever came to the house, because of their almost morbid dislike of visitors, and also because I never suggested it. They did not suspect my special interest in her because they regarded me then as much too young to have special interests. Her parents, equally vaguely aware of me, were equally uninterested, except that I think they rather disliked me. She had an elder brother who despised us both. Our world was sealed and secret. Parents would be duly informed later on when we got married; for of course we were going to marry when we were eighteen. (We were the same age.) There were many caresses, but we did not make love. Remember, this was long ago.

I must try to describe Hartley. Oh, my darling, how clearly I can see you now. Surely this is perception, not imagination. The light in the cavern is daylight, not fire. Perhaps it is the only true light in my life, the light that reveals the truth. No wonder I feared to lose the light and to be left in the darkness forever. All a child’s blind fear was there, the fear that my mother so early inspired in me: the kiss withheld, the candle taken. Hartley, my Hartley. Yes, I see her clearly, jumping over a rope, higher and higher it was raised, Hartley still flew over, the watchers sighing each time with sympathetic relief; and I hugging my heart in secret pride. She was the champion jumper of the school, of many schools, the champion runner, Hartley always first, and I cheering with the rest and laughing with secret joy. Hartley, in a breathless stillness, crouched upon a parallel bar, her bare thighs gleaming. The games master spoke of the Olympics.

Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire… We went up for confirmation together, to receive the divine blessing upon our love. I remember Hartley singing in church, her bright innocent lovely face raised up to the light, to God, towards the joy which belonged to her and which she must have. We talked a lot about religion (we talked a lot about everything), and we felt that we were dedicated people who would be protected by love. We experienced our innocence and we did not think it would be difficult to be good. I can remember Hartley’s marvellous laugh, but not that we teased each other much or were always making jokes. Ours was a solemn holy happiness, and we shunned the coarser talk of our schoolfellows. I think we had little curiosity about sex. We were one, and only that mattered. We lived in paradise. We fled on bicycles to lie in buttercup fields, beside railway bridges, near canals, in waste land awaiting housing estates. Ours was already a suburban countryside, but it was as lovely and significant to us as the Garden of Eden. She was not an intellectual or bookish girl, she had the wisdom of the innocents and we conversed as angels. She was at home in time and space.

I can see her smiling at me now. She was beautiful but with a secret beauty. She was not one of the ‘pretty girls’ of the school. Sometimes her face looked heavy, almost dour, and when she cried she looked like the pig-baby in Alice. She was very pale, and people sometimes thought she looked ill, although she was so strong and so healthy. Her face was rather round and white and her eyes gazed out with such a fey puzzled look, like a young savage. She had dark blue eyes which seemed to be violet when you were not looking at them. Her pupils were often dilated so that her eyes became almost black. She had very fine straight fair hair in a long bob. Her lips were pale and always cold; and when, with my eyes closing, I touched them so childishly with mine, a cold force pierced me like a spear, such as a pilgrim might feel when he knelt and touched some holy life-renewing stone. Her body was passive to my embraces, but her spirit glowed to me with a cold fire. Her beautiful shoulders, her long legs, were pale too and seemed cold. I never saw her entirely undressed. She was slim, very slim, leggy and clean, and so strong. She never hugged me, but sometimes, rigidly, she held my arms, leaving great bruises. Her secret violet eyes did not close when I moved to kiss her. They stared with that strange puzzlement which was at the same time passion. Those quiet, silent, almost stiff embraces were the most passionate that I ever knew. And we were chaste, and respected each other absolutely and worshipped each other chastely. And that was passion and that was love of a purity which can never come again and which I am sure rarely exists in the world at all. Those memories are more radiant to me than any work of art, more vivid and precious than Shakespeare or Piero della Francesca. There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change and is still and ever with Hartley, in that good place where we once were.

Having written this much what can I say now? I could go on and on simply describing Hartley. But it is becoming too painful. I lost her, the jewel of the world. And it remains a mystery to me to this day how that came about: a mystery concerning a young girl’s soul and her life-vision. I feared so many things, that she would die, or I would die, that we would be somehow cursed for being too happy; but I did not, at any rate in a conscious way, fear and envisage that which actually happened. Or were all my fears really of that, only that was too terrible to bring to consciousness? Extreme love must bring terror with it, and great terror, like some kinds of prayer which lean upon the omniscience of the Almighty, has a vast unlimited all-embracing compass. So perhaps I did fear that too. I must have cried in my incoherent heart: and that, let not that happen either, even though that seemed inconceivable.

Let me try and put it down simply, and it is of course very simple. Hartley decided, when the time came, that she did not want to marry me. It was impossible to find out exactly why. I was too smashed by misery to think clearly, to question intelligently. She was confused, evasive, perhaps out of some desire to spare me pain, perhaps simply because of her own misery, perhaps because of some indecision which I stupidly failed to discern. She said certain terribly memorable things. But were these the ‘reasons’? Everything she said she seemed to efface afterwards in a fit of crying. We had said long ago that we would marry when we were eighteen, when we were grown up. How passionately, amid those mysterious, evasive, effacing tears, I cried out to her that I would wait, I would never hurry her. Was it a young girl’s fear? I would respect it, she should do as she would so long as she left us our precious future, with which we had lived for so long. Our marriage was a fixed and certain mark, and I only feared that I might die before I reached it. I went to London to the drama school with this fixed mark before me. We had still not told our parents. Perhaps this was my mistake? I was afraid of my mother’s disapproval, of her opposition. She might say we were too young. I did not want, yet, to mar our happiness with parental rows, though we had so often said that we would outface any row. But if our parents had known and had agreed, or if we had done battle for our love, the very publicity of the plan would have made it more binding, more real. It would certainly have changed the atmosphere of our little paradise. Did I fear just this change, and did I lose her because I was a coward? Oh, what mistake did I make? What happened when I went to London, what went on in her mind? She had agreed, she had understood. Of course there was a separation, but I wrote every day. I came for weekends, she seemed unchanged. Then one day she told me…

We had bicycled down to the canal, a way we often went. Our bicycles lay embraced together, as they always did, in the long grass beside the towing path. We walked on, looking at familiar things, dear things which we had made our own. It was autumn time. There were a lot of butterflies. Butterflies still remind me of those terrible minutes. She started to cry. ‘I can’t go on, I can’t go on, I can’t marry you.’ ‘We wouldn’t make each other happy.’ ‘You wouldn’t stay with me, you’d go away, you wouldn’t be faithful.’ ‘Yes, I love you but I can’t trust, I can’t see.’ We were both demented with grief, and we cried out to each other in our grief. In despair, in death-fear, I raved, ‘At least we’ll be friends, forever, we can’t leave each other, we can’t lose each other, it’s impossible, I should die.’ She shook her head, weeping, ‘You know we can’t be friends now.’ I can see her eyes glaring, her mouth, wet with her tears, jerking. I never understood how she was able to be so strong. Did she mean what she said or did the words conceal other words which she dared not say? Why had she changed her mind? I asked her and asked her, why did she think I would not be faithful, why did she think we would not be happy, why could she no longer trust the future? ‘I can’t go on with it, I just can’t.’ Had someone lied about me? Surely she could not be jealous about my life in London where I did nothing but think about her! (Clement of course was hidden in the future.) Had she met someone else? No, no, no, she said, and then she just repeated her terrible incomprehensible words. Yes, she was very strong. And she escaped.

I had to go back to London. After a day or two I could not believe in the possibility of anything so dreadful. I wrote to her commandingly, understandingly, confidently. I cancelled everything and ran back. I saw her again, and there was the same scene, and again. Then suddenly she was gone. I called at her house. Her parents, her brother, looked at me with hostility. She had gone to stay with friends, they did not know the address. I called again the next week. Then I got a letter from her mother saying that Hartley did not want to see me and asking me not to pester them. I searched, I asked, I watched. How in the twentieth century can people just vanish, why is there not a register one can consult, a department one can write to? I spent my holidays on detective work. None of our school friends knew where she was. I put a notice in the local paper. I visited every place she had mentioned, everyone who had known her well. I wrote dozens of letters. Much later of course it was clear to me that she could only have escaped by running, by vanishing.

Some time during this period her parents left the district, then I got a curt letter from her mother, giving no address, and saying that Hartley was married. I did not believe her. The parents were liars, a sinister influence, they hated me because Hartley loved me. I went on searching, I went on waiting. I felt that there must be some particular special cause for her flight, and that time would remove the cause and make things as they were. I conducted myself in such a wild crazy manner that quite a lot of people came to know about my love, and I became quite famous as a mad lover. By then I wanted to advertise my plight, since someone might then bring me news. And someone did. Mr McDowell wrote to me and said that it was true, Hartley was married. I believed him. He gave no details (perhaps he feared I might commit some act of violence) and I asked for none. He said in his letter, ‘You must simply accept that she does not want you, that she loves someone else. With this no man can argue.’

Of course I ‘recovered’ in a sense. I worked. I met Clement Makin and let her kidnap me. I told her the whole story, I think the first time I met her. I never told my parents, and I believe they never knew. They were such simple unsuspicious people and they never met anybody. Clement nursed me, she nursed my jealousy, it was a great ‘topic’ between us for a while. She rather enjoyed it all, she felt she was curing me and I let her think so, but she was mistaken. The wound was too deep and now it was infected by the raging bitterness of jealousy. That awful leprosy came into my life when I read Mr McDowell’s letter, and has never left it since. ‘She does not want you, she loves someone else.’ When I was searching for her I was bemused by hope. I constantly forgave her in my heart, and this constantly renewed act of forgiveness brought me comfort. I felt that she must somehow know how I suffered, and that the antennae of my thought must touch her. But I always thought of her as alone. After I really understood that she was married I did not hate her, but the demon of jealousy befouled the past and left my mind no place to rest. Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

Hartley made a permanent metaphysical crisis of my life by refusing me for moral reasons. Did this lead me to make immorality my mask? Such pompous speculations are of course a kind of nonsense and I surprise myself by writing them down. What were Hartley’s ‘reasons’? I shall never know. It is possible that some demonic sense of a surrender of innocence entered into my affair with Clement, as if I were saying to Hartley: You did not trust me. Well, I will show you, now and forever after, how right you were! Perhaps all my love affairs have been vicious attempts to show Hartley that she was right after all. But she was only right because she left me. You die at heart from a withdrawal of love. My mother’s threats of such a withdrawal made me utterly vulnerable to Hartley’s crime. Hartley destroyed my innocence, she and the demon of jealousy. She made me faithless. But with her I would have been faithful, with her my whole life would have been different, less rootless, less empty. Do I then think my life has been empty, my life? A ridiculous judgment! Could Hartley really have thought the youth that I then was ‘a worldly man’? If so she was more like my mother than I ever suspected. She made me a worldly man by rejecting me, that failure ruined me morally. Did she think I would be ‘lost’ in the theatre? She never said that. It was her rejection that made me lose my way. Would I have been faithful? How could I not have been, if she had lived with me, sewed for me, cooked for me. We would have become one, and the holiness of marriage would have been our safety and our home forever. She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked un-fissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.

Much later on it was a little as if the past had recovered. The past can recover. I saw again, far away like a dulled yet glowing painting of Adam and Eve upon an old fresco, two innocent beings bathed in a clear light. She became my Beatrice. As I went on, all the goodness of my life seemed to reside there with her. Goodness-or was it just a very special blend of innocence and chaste passion? I have been able to write about her as she then was, and I am deeply glad to find that I can do it. There is that faint smell of fire and brimstone when something of the past comes tearing to the surface vivid and complete. Of course the whole of my life has been a tissue of memories of Hartley. But earlier on I think I could not have written these things down; or admitted that, in her despite and in mine, that ancient love is somehow still alive. Of course I never saw her again. In the years to come I thanked God that the demon of jealousy itself had warned me not to find out any details, the suffering would have been too great, and I never even knew her married name. I stopped searching; I did not want to know where she was dragging out her obscure existence. I did not want my circling thought to have names and places to feed upon. But it pleased me to think of her life as dull. And then when I became well known and my name was often in the papers, it pleased me to imagine that she felt terrible secret pangs of remorse and regret, and that a bitter worm gnawed her as painfully as it has gnawed me. She threw away her happiness when she threw away mine. I would have made her a queen in this world.

Ever since those terrible days I have feared the possibility of an overwhelmingly powerful pain-source in my life, and I have nursed myself so as not to suffer too much. Possibly this is the deep reason why I have not married. What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not. There are such chasms of might-have-beens in any human life. When I was confirmed I was determined to be good forever, and I still feel a ghostly illusion that I could have been. The image of Hartley changed in my mind from fiery pain to sadness, but never became blank. And in a way I did keep on searching for her, only it was a different and quite involuntary kind of search, a sort of dream-search. It was as if in my persisting memory of her I seemed to ‘body her forth’, the ways she moved, the ways she walked, as if a physical scheme of her being kept me always company. And so, and especially as the pain faded, I kept ‘seeing’ her, seeing shadow forms of her imposed upon quite different women; her shoulders, her hair, her walk, her puzzled fey expression. I still sometimes see these shadows. I saw one lately upon an old woman in the village, a transient look of her head placed like a mask upon somebody entirely different. Once or twice in London, long ago, I even followed these ghosts, not because I thought they were she, but simply to torment myself, to punish myself for still remembering.

A little while ago the thought came to me that she was dead. That strange pallor, those dilated pupils: perhaps these were presages of disease, of some quiet killer biding its time? Perhaps really she had died long ago when I was still young? In a way I would be glad to know that she was dead. What would my love for her do then? Would it peacefully die too, or be transformed into something selfless and innocent? Would jealousy, the jealousy which has burned even in these pages, leave me at last, and the smell of fire and brimstone fade away?

Even now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.

I ate three oranges at eleven o’clock this morning. Oranges should be eaten in solitude and as a treat when one is feeling hungry. They are too messy and overwhelming to form part of an ordinary meal. I should say here that I am not a breakfast eater though I respect those who are. I breakfast on delicious Indian tea. Coffee and China tea are intolerable at breakfast time, and, for me, coffee unless it is very good and made by somebody else is pretty intolerable at any time. It seems to me an inconvenient and much overrated drink, but this I will admit to be a matter of personal taste. (Whereas other views which I hold on the subject of food approximate to absolute truths.) I do not normally eat at breakfast time since even half a slice of buttered toast can induce an inconvenient degree of hunger, and eating too much breakfast is a thoroughly bad start to the day. I am however not at all averse to elevenses which can come in great variety. There are, as indicated above, moments for oranges. There are also moments for chilled port and plum cake.

The orange feast did not dim my appetite for lunch, which consisted of fish cakes with hot Indian pickle and a salad of grated carrot, radishes, watercress and bean shoots. (I went through a period of grated carrot with everything, but recovered.) Then cherry cake with ice cream. I had mixed feelings about ice cream until I realized that it must always be eaten with a cake or tart, never with fruit alone. By itself it is of course pointless, even if stuffed with nuts or other rubbish. And by ‘ice cream’ I mean the creamy vanilla sort. ‘Flavoured’ ice cream is as repugnant to the purist as ‘flavoured’ yoghurt. Nor have I ever been able to see the raison d’être of the so-called ‘water ice’, which transforms itself offensively on the tongue from a searing lump of hard frozen material into a mouthful of equally tasteless water. I am grieved that my lack of a refrigerator involves me in a marginal waste of food. My refrigeratorless mother never wasted a crumb. Everything not consumed lived to fight another day. How we loved her bread puddings!

I have reread what I wrote about Hartley and feel moved simply by the fact that I was able to write it. It is but a shadowy tribute; if I can bear to write more on the subject I may try to improve it. How strange memory is. Since I wrote, so many more pictures of her, stored up in the dense darkness of my mind, have become available. Her long legs bicycling, her bare dusty feet in sandals. Her lithe movement from crouching to standing, balanced upon the parallel bar in the gym display. The feel of her strong hands through my shirt, holding on to my shoulders. We did not caress each other in an immodest way. Our burning youth was docile to the chivalry of a pure passion. We were prepared to wait. Alas and alas. Never so pure and gentle, never so intense did it come to me after, that absolute and holy yearning of one human body and soul for another. But reading my story I feel again the terrible mystery of it. When did she start to turn away? Did she deceive me? Oh why did it happen?

I have spent the afternoon tidying the house. I carried two dustbins to the end of the causeway-I note with displeasure that the dustmen last time let some rubbish fall down onto the rocks below. I have had to climb down and collect it. I cleaned the kitchen and washed the huge black slates of the floor. They are worthy of a cathedral. A man came to deliver calor gas cylinders, rather to my surprise. (I had mentioned the matter in the Fishermen’s Stores.) I must remember to enquire if they can supply a calor gas fridge. The remainder of the ice cream has melted. My larder is still damp. I have lit a fire in the little red room and left the downstairs doors open. I moved quite a lot of wood into the downstairs inner room where I hope it will get dry. I am getting used to the smell of wood smoke which now pervades the house.

It has stopped raining and the sun is shining, but over most of the sea the sky is a thick leaden grey. The sunny golden rocks stand out against that dark background. What a paradise, I shall never tire of this sea and this sky. If I could only carry a chair and table over the rocks to the tower I could sit and write there with the view of Raven Bay. I must go out and study my rock pools while this intense light lasts. I think I am becoming more observant-I lately noticed a colony of delightful very small crabs, like little transparent yellow grapes, and some ferocious-looking tiny fish with whiskers which resemble miniature coelacanths.

I feel calmer now already about Hartley, as if the thought of her has been somehow mercifully absorbed into the sane open air of my home. This is indeed a test of my new environment. (‘You’ll go mad with loneliness and boredom’, they said!) All my instincts were right.

I would like to tell all these things to someone, perhaps to Lizzie. I left in store with that first love so much of my innocence and gentleness which I later destroyed and denied, and which is yet now perhaps at last available again. Can a woman’s ghost, after so many years, open the doors of the heart?