A Little Treachery

9

‘So you left her alone down there, knowing her state? A drawer with knives in it in the next room, sleeping tablets beside her of which she might have taken an overdose. And the garden door a few feet away from her bed, opening straight into the garden, with the stream and ponds – about which she had already spoken to the doctor in desperate style, about which the doctor had warned you. All that was in your knowledge; and then you went away, went upstairs, kept out of hearing. Slept peacefully, did you? Slept, anyway, so you tell us. Were you perhaps “hoping for the best”?’

Catherine answered, ‘Yes, I was.’

‘My question was ambiguous. Did you hope she would take one or another of those means to do away with herself?’

‘How could I ever suppose she would rise from that dreadful stupor?’

Yes, she, too, would resort to ambiguity, while with deep scorn in her heart she listened to her questioners – hypocrites to a man, and from self-interest (for this one would be dismissed from the force, that one struck off the register, all in their several degrees would forfeit the trust of society and come to ruin at a breath of suspicion that they thought otherwise) making pretence that it would not have been the greatest mercy in the world if a mad woman had killed herself. But she looked into their faces in vain for some sign of conscious hypocrisy. Could it possibly be that they were indeed such monstrous materialists, such rank sensualists, so secretly terrified at the thought of their own dissolution, so utterly despairing of a hope of heaven, that they did actually think death was the worst thing?

The words went rattling about her head, hard, tricky questions were thrust forward for her solution, as in some inane radio game. The large-windowed, shabby room to which she had been called seemed too full of light, the cold, pale, empty April sky seemed to press on the panes, sealing out air, like the inflated flank of a balloon.

‘You were fully dressed when you went down the garde?n’

‘I had never undressed.’

‘What made you get up at last? Did you hear the door?’

‘I don’t remember.’

But she did remember. She remembered hearing the door close, creeping out, whispering, ‘Clem!’ down the stairs, and then covering her ears; going into the room with the garden view, and finding that then, when at last she willed to see, she could not; flinging open the window and catching the faint sound of someone breaking through the bushes, and crying out, wild and high, like an abandoned creature, despairingly. She remembered what followed: running, darkness, breathless calling, the rippling of water, icy shocks when she plunged in up to the knees at the edge of the stream, crashing through the sharp sedges of the marshy ground, the beds of rushes shaggily bristling from the hidden pools, where already, between the upright quills, were horizontal knife-like gleams caught from the sky. She remembered blows, cuts, scratches, a sudden threshing of water, the water beaten by great wings, a fearful blow on the face from a swinging bough, a taste of blood thereafter; the processional lights of a train duplicated in the ponds; wounds, wounds and further darkness under trees, all her breath gone with the shock when she plunged in, and then crouching by the masonry rim of the pond where there was sudden depth, and the singing, the pure, gay singing of the birds.

People had heard her cries and were coming to the rescue. Lights jogged hurriedly down the gardens, already half-quenched in the growing daylight. She stood by the pond and cried to them.

They brought her away from there at last, but she would not go with any of them into the cottage, but shut the door in their faces. She sat down, soaked, with chattering teeth, shaking uncontrollably, lancinating pain over her eyes, her hands bleeding. Yet someone, some time afterwards, got in and made her a fire, helped her to change her clothes, bathed her wounds, brought her tea. She had never known who this was. In any case, the blow had almost blinded her.

They went on searching out there in full daylight, and she said despairingly to this person, ‘They’ll find her, won’t they? She won’t do it – I’m sure she will not. She’s too much afraid of physical hurt – believe me, she’s quite abnormally afraid. Oh, why did I call that pack on her? They’re like dogs . . .’ Her helper told her incisively, ‘Of course they’ll find her. Then they’ll take her straight to the hospital. It seems all the formalities were completed yesterday. They were to fetch her today. You remember? – yesterday you arranged everything. You yourself did it.’ ‘Yes!’ she acknowledged.

‘Why didn’t you get help from the cottages?’ they asked her later.

‘I didn’t think of anything but to save her.’

She was incapable of speaking at any length before these questioners, or she would have assured them, pouring out all her terrible scorn of herself into the words, ‘Oh, I would have saved her from drowning with the best of you! – with the best of the pack. I tell you I wanted nothing on earth but to save her, for my own sake. Because I can’t do without her, she’s all I have, all I can ever love properly. Without her I shall be lost. Can’t you see how lost I am, now we’re parted?’

They let her go. And indeed even those who had seen her gaining by her sister’s death were silenced when it was found that the house was hers already and there would have been nothing else to have, for Clem’s pension would have died with her. If there was a sudden space about her and she fancied censorious looks in such eyes as she met, she cared for none of it. She shut the door on everyone, rejected all help, answered no letters, ignoring even a telegram from the hospital telling her to come because Clem had had another stroke. She did not go. She had fallen into an inert, mindless state which was not calm, for it was harassed by nightmares, premonitory agitations.

Then, waking late one morning in the still brightness, she thought someone was crying aloud the name of that dire place where Clem was confined. She realized it was the voice of the cuckoo, its two soft notes sounding like the two long, rounded syllables, each with a double ‘o’ in it, of which that musical name was composed. She got up, suddenly wet to the very scalp in the tepid air. But the once-sweet, magical voice went on, dinning the name into her ears.

So, throughout many weeks, the artful bird kept up its abominable cry.

There were distractions, but all were terrifying. Her own position, when at last glanced at, was seen to be impossible. She had that roof over her head which was Clem’s last gift to her, and it was much. But without the means to keep anything going, either the house or herself, it looked as if she could but starve under it. So, the end of her resources being already in sight, she was driven to apply to the relevant court for some minute means of maintenance out of her sister’s income. It was granted. Her case was considered, she was judged; the cold, grudging legal pronouncement allowed her that alleviation temporarily. A sponger, a hanger-on – she was branded. Yet was she really such – she who had always done all the domestic work of their household in exchange for food and lodging, while Clem had never had to soil her hands at home? Always weakly, and then with health utterly lost under the emotional strain of their mother’s illness, she had not seemed able to order her life otherwise. But she could not deny it; she was ‘totally without means’, she was ‘dependent on her sister’, ‘her sister had kept her’. These were the facts.

It did not matter. Lies, cruel verdicts, crazy misunderstandings, humiliations without end – none added very materially to a load already so fearfully beyond her strength.

For it had all begun again: the disorder, the uncertainty, the ravaged, provisional life, the fevers, the enervations of waiting, that imbecile treadmill to and fro between the house and the hospital, to and fro, which in itself makes the performer feel as if his brain is losing all power of concentration except on the one thing.

How long could she go on like this? Must she continue, like an automaton drawn by compulsions, to go punctually in and out of the little scarred door on the hammering road, getting always wilder in the brain, more and more derelict in appearance, more and more distracted, consumed by endless grief, till her own mind went? More and more enraged by the cruelty of heaven, the immeasurable injustice of that ‘twice – twice in a lifetime’, the crazing effect of which it seemed impossible to express to any fellow-creatures.

There was only one thing to do: to come in quickly, to shut doors and windows, to stuff one’s ears, to plunge into imaginative, creative work, to hear and see nothing beyond that, to acknowledge no summons, no calls upon one, to keep hidden, to lose oneself in imagined worlds. For all outside was hell.

But it could not be done, for there was ‘business’ to be dealt with, those grim mysteries which she had never had to attempt to grasp and now never could; there was Clem to be dealt with.

It was as well that many hours were spent perforce in the open air, in making those random hackings and weak proddings at the smothered earth by which she sought to delay the revolt of the wilderness. Having thrown away almost the last of her money, during those delirious months before the end, upon perfectly futile preparations for the making of a garden, she was now condemned, in the most ironical fashion, to labour at it all by herself in an attempt to prevent its total relapse; a gigantic toil, work fit for a navvy. For she still held in mind a picture of Clem’s face at her first sight of their garden, heart-stricken; and if Clem’s eyes would never look on it again, yet some grain of hope there must have been, that she worked on. Struggling there for hours at a time, soaked with sweat, terribly strained about the back and arms, she felt powerless as an insect in that monstrous green world.

Neighbours, seeing her labouring thus, like a lunatic, viewed her with scoffing amazement. ‘Ah, I see your tennis-lawn looks as if it’s going native again. I was thinking of getting out my flannels, but I doubt it’ll be necessary.’ To such sallies was she constantly treated across the garden-plots. She kept her head down, so as to avoid catching their eyes. She moved like the lost one at the last. Only sometimes she would find herself standing still, gazing blankly up at the house, as if smitten with idiocy. Never had Clem come home, in the old days, and failed to call cheerfully from window or door.

Yet even this was perhaps better than brooding in the house.

This second winter she did not go out for pleasure, nor to escape, for there was no longer any hope of it. Her excursions were all enforced. Apart from these, she did not venture beyond her own boundaries. Sometimes, ceasing her mad labours, she would go down to the bottom of the garden, where she was concealed from neighbourly eyes, for a few minutes’ respite.

Whenever the rain ceased, the mist rose, the valley steamed. Under screen of one such white and blinded day towards the end of the winter, she loitered at the foot of the garden amongst the great mat of vegetation which even in its decay still smothered the earth. Everything dripped, rotted, was studded with drops. All the wreckage of autumn was still there. The shocks of grass lay this way and that, and within their troughs the small, black, leathery leaves of the willows were disposed in shoals. Tall stalks, rigid and brown, leaned at all angles, with umbels from which the seeds had dropped withered and shrunken to a spidery delicacy. Rosy and rotting apples still nested in the grass. Some were eaten to shells; others, concealed, burst underfoot, crunching unpleasantly. The little stream ran swiftly, its waters dull and dark, carrying a flotilla of bubbles with bleared, white surfaces, which marked the racing pace of the current. The mist hid the hills. The ash tree on the opposite bank imposed its splendid, looped, cursive design on a wall of whiteness; its thick, sparse branches seemed to droop of their own weight and hung down motionless, with a look of being drawn with a full brush in a grey, watery medium. The blind air was silent. No bird raised a cry.

There she stood leadenly, weighted to the earth, with the memory of that hideous Judas scene in the obdurate wilderness, hearing the hunt draw near.