A Little Treachery

36

Simon was gone, and she forgot about him, and all else, for just at that time Clem died. Without further suffering, she fell dead.

But fifteen years had been the minimum sentence on which Catherine’s mind had dwelt, the rock on which it had struck and fixed, and lay grinding; fifteen years, as if she had heard it pronounced by some infallible authority; and this although she had known, far better than any of those who had presumed to instruct her, that in Clem the disease was raging on another course.

She had seen Clem laid on the bed; she herself had had to deal with all the affairs of death, she had written the letters, held business communications, and was facing the many ugly material facts of her own position which had resulted. But a few weeks later there came the lull which falls when the last of the letters has been answered and the legal proceedings have dropped off into the usual long slumber.

And then, in this threatening silence, a heavy perturbation, a sense of things done and kept out of her sight, took possession of her.

She looked back, and the grave seemed like a dream, the flowers pearled all over with the misty rain, the reiterated words, ‘in loving memory’, crying achingly from the white cards, the shadowy mourners – all seemed like a crafty dream. Someone had held her arm – Margaret Forrester. Now she knew why Margaret was weeping so bitterly. Not for Clem’s death. For no friend would weep for the death of the mad, no friend would mourn them.

So she woke one morning to the memory of the cuckoo’s voice, in a sombre state of dual-mindedness, knowing all this, knowing of the grave, yet filled with a monstrous suspicion that Clem had been seized again and these ceremonies and legal-seeming transactions were all part of a plot – a plot to remove Clem from her, to take her out of her hands for ever and return her to that place.

It began again. But now the journeys were made all by night, such was the new ruling; long, black journeys, with the low lights of the special bus turned down on a mourning crew. There was the well-known company, creatures, all of them, whom she had met before, years and years ago: the one with the bolting eyes of nervous disease, and those with the nervous tricks which made them socially impossible, and the jolly ones (ancient carnival masks brought out again in the sickly light), the ones who chattered and made a weekly outing of it, a club jaunt, an opportunity for sociability, who greeted old friends heartily and took a gossip’s interest in new faces, and the beaten, apathetic ones, and those who sat grimly silent, eating out their hearts with rage, and the humble fool, quite sunk in imbecile resignation, who told you with a sort of meek pride that she had made that journey for fifteen years.

But, as she was not mad, she could rationalize no further. All through this strange aberration, the view, the figures in her thoughts, had seemed unsteady, as if faintly doubled. She had been conscious all through that her thoughts were partnered, delusion and reality standing side by side, with the doubt as to which was which growing always fainter. The night journeys ceased.

One day she went to look at the grave, which they said was Clem’s, and stood gazing for some while at the raw patch in the trampled grass. Someone had laid a few flowers there, which the past rain had succoured. She did not touch anything, and came home full of unutterably heavy but sane thoughts. She had merely felt, what so many have felt, standing beside a grave, ‘Safe. Freed.’ But her feeling was dull, commonplace.

And why would the deep pain for Clem not abate?

To those flowers which had been brought belatedly to the grave there was a card attached bearing a name which she had last seen eighteen months ago, in connection with great bitterness; and later, when she was home, she thought of it again and after some search found a letter which she had received at that time, at the crisis of the tragedy, and had thrust away, never properly absorbed.

Now at last she read it with full attention.

It was from one called Irene, a friend of Clem’s schooldays and girlhood: a friendship which had fallen into a slow and natural decline through years of separation and through the usual divergence of interests in people long parted. So, at least, it had appeared to Clem, for so Catherine had heard her speak of it: as something vaguely saddening, but inevitable and no one’s fault.

But the friend, it seemed, perhaps from long brooding, had come to other conclusions.

At the darkest hour, as if a further turn of the screw had been thought necessary, this long and cruel letter had been dropped through the door; and Catherine would always remember standing there, laboriously trying to absorb the sense of it, and then turning and tremulously attempting, again and again, to tuck the letter away in some crevice among the pigeon-holes where there was manifestly no room for it, and at last thrusting it away somewhere, anywhere, so that it was out of her sight.

‘I’m not writing you a letter of condolence, Catherine, not writing to give you comfort –’

It accused her, of course, it was the old accusation over again, the sentence upon her secretly pronounced by all Clem’s friends and now put into harsh words, an explicit charge that she had ruined Clem’s life: that she had separated her from her friends, that by refusing to meet these friends, whom she could not endure, she had forced Clem to shut the door to them; that in her neurotic restlessness she had driven the clinging, home-loving Clem from one spot to another, from one cold, strange place to another, so that her contacts had become progressively shallower and she had at last lost the power of putting down roots at all; until finally – ‘It was for you, it was for your sake, it was at your instigation, that she at last in despair buried herself where you are now.

‘She was my great friend, my friend from childhood,’ the letter hysterically cried at this point. ‘She was my first love. It was a sound, happy friendship which should have endured all our lives, but you separated us, you separated us, the friendship was wrecked by you, like all her friendships – you, who have never had a friend yourself – and no more devastating comment on your character can be made than to say you never had a friend. Oh, but, yes, you had one. You had Clem. She was the unhappy exception. And to her you clung, like the poisonous ivy, and fastened on her for good and all – a life-sentence for her. And she all the while smothering secret terror lest you should go the way of your mother, and for that reason, not because she loved you, pampering you with that pathetic folly, lost to common sense! You precious creature, do you flatter yourself she loved you? Do you call that love which is nothing but duty and pity, yes, and fear? Many, many times we told her that she must shake you off, but she fell into a weak fright at the bare thought of it, so enslaved to you she was, and she struggled on under her cross and burden, picking every stone out of your path. Now you have lost her, you have lost your prop and stay – and I don’t offer you condolences, Catherine, for you always wished to be alone and now you are alone.’

The charge, then, was no light one, nothing less than murder. Clem had collapsed at last under the merciless neighbouring jar and grind of Catherine’s personality.

But, Irene, a sick personality!

Oh, she could have answered the charge, if it had mattered now. She could have said that Irene had forgotten one thing in her long diatribe so given over to condemnation – that an insurmountable dread of one’s fellow-beings and a helpless inability to make contact with them do not afflict a mind in health. She could have pointed to the apparition of the goblin and mentioned as a commonplace which no one should need to be told, that such abortions always have a tragic sensitivity – tragic, too, for all around them, for it so often leads to the atrophy of normal feeling and thus to the woe of others.

Well, what was the truth?

She might sit there till it was dark, listening to the gale pressing on the panes, so high and steady that it sounded like the continuous, hollow roar of a train in a tunnel; she might rise up, curse herself aloud, weep, cry Clem’s name again and again, beg her forgiveness, weep and weep, going up and down through the house, unable to keep still for very torment, as she had done, ah, how many times since Clem’s ruin, sometimes half the night, crying, pressing her head to the wall, stretching up her hands, making again and again the involuntary motion, the instinctive, imploring gesture of the drowning – yet still deny it, still see that she could answer the charge quite honestly and effectively, if she could but give words to the truth, the simple, subtle truth known only to herself and Clem. Still she had that plea which must be allowed, because it was the invisible reality, ‘Nevertheless, I love her!’ Still she could say, ‘Neither my wickedness nor Clem’s weakness, but the thing which bound us together – that was our ruin. Who was responsible for that?’

But the judgement day which had dragged on for years was now nearly over. She awaited the verdict, hardly caring.

It had grown so late, so early, that in the hollow depth of the bad spot no light showed, no feature was visible, only its black rim at the hilltops. Stars were overhead. It was nearly morning. When she opened the window, holding hard to the casement, the great flight of air felt dry and scouring. She shut the window, heard the clock chime below with its friendly voice. ‘But now she sleeps.’

Not another tear of hers would fall. No, there is no virtue in uncritical wallowing in self-abasement. One should not give way to wild excesses of remorse, since self-condemnation can be fully as dishonest as self-excuse.

The next day, Mrs Stewart made one of her routine visits, pushing in, as she so often did nowadays, without waiting for an invitation, yet, oddly enough, not altogether against Catherine’s wishes, for the woman diverted her to some extent from her troubles. Then, on a strange, perhaps ironical impulse, Catherine put the letter into her hand.

Mrs Stewart was not shocked. She took it all in with the cool, business-like interest of an expert, a veteran in the confessional, and, her jealousy being aroused as by a rival fault-finder of different persuasions, she was inclined to quarrel with the writer, whom she pronounced hysterical, and thus to take Catherine’s part up to a point.

Then she concluded, ‘Look no further for a reason as to why it was done. You needed correction. Evidently nothing short of your sister’s suffering would have roused you. You needed that to bring you to your senses. You may object that God would hardly bring about your salvation at your sister’s expense, so to speak, but it’s not for you to question God’s dealings with your sister. That’s between Him and her. . . . Now, why don’t you turn to the Church? Your spiritual director would explain everything to you. For of course you are in a state of total darkness. Well, think it over.’ And she took her leave very well satisfied with the progress that was being made.

Catherine no longer attempted to shut her door to this woman for whose company she began to have a mischievous appetite, whose impertinent catechisms and homilies had been somewhat redeemed from the first by the austere, simple-minded manner in which they were spoken. At least there was no crass and insolent discounting of the spiritual, as with her late mentors. They were both harsh and ravaged people, each in her own way, and could both hear home truths and take them without flinching, still less collapsing. And if Catherine’s fortitude came from previous deep self-awareness, so that nothing bad said of her could ever take her by surprise, and Mrs Stewart’s merely from natural toughness, this did not spoil the game.

Then at length Catherine said to herself that this game was like the last, this vain play with the wiles of conversion, and that her own malice, and the food offered her, so earthy and discredited, all belonged to that black regency under which the poor bird falls with broken wing into the wood, not killed.