“No, sir, but I think these arguments are wrong. Aeneas was Trojan anyway. And furthermore I would like to ask what kind of Rome would be founded by an Aeneas who could do that kind of thing?”
Collins rubbed his hands with delight and said: “You’re all really excelling yourselves today. Really excelling yourselves. So we arrive at the moral question, the moral origins. Was Rome the kind of place that was corrupted from the beginning? An interesting idea. Very interesting indeed.”
“Surely that’s rather far-fetched, sir,” said Ronny. “The point is that he had to leave because his duty called him. He had to do something. In a way he sacrificed himself as well.”
It was strange to hear Ronny arguing for this side, thought Malcolm, before bursting out:
“Sacrificing himself? How did he sacrifice himself? Read the poetry. It’s smug. He’s smug. He doesn’t care. Setting off for another land over the bodies of those he’s left behind.” A thought seemed to strike him and he added: “Do you know what it is like to be burned?”
“Do you?” said Ronny amusedly.
Malcolm glanced for a moment at Janet.
“No,” he said at last. “But I know that it must be painful.”
“That is why Carthage failed and Rome didn’t,” said Neil quietly. “I mean that people indulged themselves in this way. They burned themselves for love. That is not the behaviour of responsible people.”
“I suppose it is better that they should burn other people. Like the Nazis,” said Malcolm fiercely.
Collins looked at Neil for a moment with a certain sadness and then said:
“Miriam, I believe you were going to say something?”
“Yes, sir. All these arguments are very highfalutin, but the basic fact is that she had thought Aeneas was in love with her and he left her. Then she burned herself. And he slunk away. That’s all.”
“I agree with Miriam, sir,” said Malcolm. “His responsibility was to the individual, not to Rome.”
“Janet?”
“I agree with Ronny, sir. She shouldn’t have burnt herself.”
“Of course,” said Collins, “we don’t find young women burning themselves now, but perhaps that’s because they’re not passionate enough.”
“He wasn’t to know that she was going to burn herself,” said Ronny, squinting thoughtfully through the hot sunshine and stretching his legs out.
“No, that’s true. But what if he had known?”
“I think he should still have gone. One can’t go through life frightened that people will burn themselves on one’s behalf. That wouldn’t be rational.”
“Exactly,” said Malcolm, “life isn’t rational. That’s the whole point. The Romans tried to make life rational but they didn’t succeed.”
“They succeeded for a good number of years, if I remember rightly,” said Ronny with a laugh.
“They were beaten by the irrational in the end.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the Goths.”
Ronny smiled thinly.
“Ah, well,” said Collins quickly, “this is all very interesting but it won’t get us through the Highers all the same. Eh?”
“May I ask, sir, which side are you on yourself?” said Ronny humbly.
“Which side am I on? Well, Malcolm seems to find that line very striking, the line where Dido says that she will hear the news amid the shades. I find Aeneas’ lines also striking. I quote:
“ ‘But the gentle Aeneas though he longs to calm her pain by consolation and dispel her sorrow by persuasion sighing deeply and moved in soul by her strong affection—still he obeys the orders of the gods and returns to the fleet.’
“I find these lines very moving I must confess. They are so typically Roman.”
17
AS THEY WERE all going out the door at the end of the period Janet handed him a book.
“What’s that?” he asked, having forgotten for the moment.
“It’s the Gaelic poetry book,” she said.
Ronny was looking at them quizzically and Janet was looking at Ronny strangely. It was such an odd look that Malcolm was for a moment startled out of his pleasure at receiving the book and the fact that she had remembered at all. He knew by his interception of that look that there was something inconceivably intricate between Ronny and Janet. In the sunlight Ronny looked so handsome and gay, so insouciant, so careless, so negligent, the eyes quizzical, the mouth slightly mocking, the pose that of a kind of Byron. And Janet with her tanned face, a kind of Dido? And then Ronny was gone and where he had been was a shadow moving on. “The news will come to me amid the shades.”
“Was it easy for you to get?” he asked.
“Yes. There was one in the house but I didn’t know. And I never read it.”
“Thank you very much for bringing it. I wondered if you’d remember. You only go home at weekends, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the Hostel like?”
“All right.”
“Do you get out much at nights?”
“At nights.” She looked at him in a startled way. “No, not really.”
“I thought …”
“What did you think?”
“Nothing. It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.” He had thought she would be going with Ronny.
“What does your father do?”
“My father? Oh he’s a painter. Paints houses, not pictures. We are quite poor.”
Curious, this way she had of making his heart turn over when he looked at her. It was something innocent, something casual. He knew she wasn’t intellectual. It was the careless way in which she carried her beauty, as if she were no one special.
“Well,” she said, “that’s the book.” It was as if she were going to say something else and decided against it.
He didn’t want to leave her.
“Will you go to university, do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I may not be good enough. I may not get enough Highers …”
“Yes, well thank you for the book …” Then casually, half moving away, “I don’t suppose you’d like to come to the cinema with me some night?”
She looked at him for a moment and then said biting her lip:
“I don’t know. I suppose it could be managed. I don’t know.”
It could be managed. His heart leaped with joy. “When?” he said.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know.”
She left and he watched her going. Then he rushed off to the next class all on fire. He would take her to the pictures after all, he would defeat Ronny. She turned the corner in her navy pinafore with the yellow belt.
Let us welcome the morning joyfully and gladly.
Let us welcome the morning.
18
THERE WAS AN attic in the house in which was a window from which Malcolm could see the whole village as if in a panorama. All the fields, all the people working in them, the haystacks, the winding river, the fences, the houses, all these could be seen from the window. Often he would climb up to the attic partly to be private, partly to feel like a hawk gazing over its territory. On hot summer days his nose would twitch with the smell of tar from the roofs of the houses, the rank smell of flowers, the salt of the sea blown in by a breeze.
Years before he had found old books in the attic, for example, a series of Chambers’s Journals printed at Edinburgh in double columns. He had read a lot of the articles. He had also found on old green encyclopaedia. There were rafters from which he could swing and over which he could turn somersaults. In one corner of the attic there was an old box full of old newspapers, old exercise books and old catalogues from J. D. Williams. Sometimes on hot days he would lie on the floor with an old pillow at his head, his legs crossed, looking up at the roof and wishing that there was a window directly above him so that he could look up into the sky. In this confused summer he was going up into the attic more and more. To save appearances he would take Latin books up with him but
as often as not he didn’t read them. On this particular day he had, as well as his Latin books, the Gaelic book of poetry he had got from Janet and the book with the Auden poem in it.
He looked out of the window for a while but there was nothing much to be seen. The sun was blazing down, the sea was calm, the corn was unruffled by any breeze. There didn’t seem to be anyone working anywhere. Now and again he could see Mrs Grant throwing a basin of water on to the grass. The water was almost invisible against the crystal light.
He picked up the Gaelic book and read some of the poems. They seemed to be poems of successful love. The poet’s wife had died and he himself had gone overseas to Australia, an alien country “far from the tall mountains and rivers”. The poet recalled the village in which he had lived for so many years before his wife’s death. He was wishing he might be buried in that village cemetery instead of in hard, dry, strange Australia. He clearly had loved his wife a great deal: he spoke of their children, of whom there were three, and how they were growing up in a strange land “where they never heard the sound of Gaelic”. He wrote of how he and his wife had met in their youth and how they had set up house together and he mentioned the neighbours by name and said that he would never see them again. He wrote of his house in the village becoming overgrown with thistles since no one lived there now. He described his days as a sailor with the moon shining above him as he was perched in the crow’s nest dreaming of home.
The poems appealed to Malcolm in a primitive direct way because of the Gaelic language in which they were written and he responded more to the pathos and to the music than to the quality of the poetry. Even after one reading he could remember snatches of the poetry which penetrated his consciousness without any real attempt to memorise them. The images were few: everything depended on the music Malcolm himself was transported to Australia and to exile. The concept of exile had a great effect on him: in fact it frightened him a little. It was as if the exile to Australia represented other kinds of exile not necessarily geographical. A curious unease grew in him as he read the poems and he couldn’t place its source. The alienness of the landscape seemed to personify some kind of exile in himself, the feeling of being between two worlds. It disturbed him and he was irritated that he couldn’t place it. It wasn’t that he felt apart from the landscape that he could see in front of him: it was his home. It was a natural frame to his life. The people out there were his neighbours. He knew them all intimately. They seemed to triumph with him in his achievement: they seemed to praise him for what he had accomplished. And yet there were uneasinesses.
For instance, in the war there were one or two naval officers in the village. When they came on leave they were always friendly to the ratings and acted with them as they had always done. But the ratings thought of them as slightly different just the same. And yet the officers couldn’t have been nicer. They weren’t really all that high up anyway—just sub-lieutenants. It was this kind of uneasiness which permeated his mind as he brooded on the idea of exile. The fact was that sometimes, though he felt anonymous in the town, he also felt a strain. Things were expected of him. If he faltered, then he would be finished: he would fall down into their loving pity.
A curious situation had developed which showed this strain quite clearly. There was one house in the village which he used to visit in order to listen to the radio. The man in this house was an ex-sailor who had lived with his one sister for a number of years. He had left school at fourteen. He was bluff, red-faced, teasing and difficult. He was continually asking Malcolm questions. In those minutes before Big Ben tolled and the news began he would say to him, “Can you tell me how many herring there are in a cran?” or, “What’s the Gaelic for an Indian summer?” And his face would appear oily and genial above the moustache.
Malcolm was jolted out of the neat rigours of geometry into this world of miscellaneous knowledge which to him didn’t seem so important but to his host was an infallible method of testing a man’s intellectual worth. If he didn’t know the Gaelic for an Indian summer he was labelled for life. ‘Ah, he’s clever enough in the books but he didn’t know the Gaelic for an Indian summer. What are they teaching them at that school that they’ve never heard of Indian summers there?’
Sometimes other people would say: “I was good at arithmetic when I was at school but I couldn’t stay because I had to go out to work. It’s different for you nowadays.”
He felt these remarks increasingly as a burden. And sometimes too he began to feel guilty. Was he himself, after all, one of the lucky ones? What about all those poor submerged people all down the centuries—not just his own father and grandfather—but those millions since the history of the world began—had they all lived and died in order that he might write M.A. after his name? It is true that very often he didn’t think as consciously as this, if ever, but at the same time uneasinesses were preying on his mind, eating away like a river niggling at its banks.
Yet, of course, the village was not a place of sadness: it was in fact a very happy place. All sorts of songs were written and sung, poking good humoured fun at people, or telling comic stories like, for instance, the one about the man who had bought a cow and on the way home with her had sold her to someone else along the road at a profit. The villagers admired this enterprise but thought it funny.
He picked up the other book, with the Auden poem, gently, frightened in case there were TB germs. It was the first time he had ever borrowed a book from Dicky since he had got TB and he was afraid. Everyone knew what TB was like and what it could do to one, and there was no cure for it, either. He felt the book surrounded by a screen of germs, all hostile, ready to spring up at him into the air, to go straight down his throat and destroy him in obscure anonymous battles.
He opened the window as far as it could go and leaned out, holding the book before him in the blaze of sunshine, imagining that the heat of the sun would destroy the germs. As he was holding the book out he could see his mother below, stretching up to place some washing on the line, watched quizzically by one immobile cow. Her meagre body arched upwards, the slightly rebellious blue and white clothes curving from their geometrical lines. Between her teeth were a clutch of pegs. One by one she took the pegs from her mouth and pegged the clothes to the line firmly. It was strange to be looking down at her like this without her knowing that she was being seen. In some curious way it made her seem like an object, or an animal moving with a purpose of its own but an alien one. The pegging of the clothes on the line appeared for a moment like the purposeful activity of an animal, say, building its nest or fortifying its lair, and this was all the more appropriate as a paradigm since he couldn’t see her face, only her back and her hands grained by innumerable washings, red as the claws of a crab. Her hands didn’t seem to belong to anyone he knew as they busied themselves with the pegs. Her head, seen from an unfamiliar angle with the coiled greying hair, also seemed not to belong to her. But what intrigued him was the curiously remote way in which he saw her and the curiously remote, purposeful way in which she did things in that silence. It was like watching a scientific experiment.
Where was Janet just now? he wondered. Unnerved by the sensation of dizziness that overwhelmed him when he thought of her, he almost dropped the book on to his mother’s coiled head. He thought of how her bare legs looked when he saw her standing by the dappled wall that bounded the school. Then a strange sensation came to him. It was as if the school changed to his village school and she was sitting in one of the cramped seats he had seen when he was with Dell, looking through the window. She was looking out at him almost sadly, as if he had put her there and she couldn’t get out. Her legs were turning dark and hairy and when he looked at her face it wasn’t Janet at all, it was Sheila, and she was looking down at the floor which had turned into a draughtsboard.
He turned his eyes back to the book, holding it slightly away from him and repeating some of the verses to himself:
Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head
A
nd easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I’m led
Through the night’s delights and the day’s impressions,
Pass the tall tenements and the trees in the wood;
Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe
And the Danube flood.
(The sixteen skies of Europe. What did that mean?)
*
Summoned by such a music from our time,
Such images to audience come
As vanity cannot dispel nor bless:
Hunger and love in their variations
Grouped invalids watching the flight of the birds
And single assassins.
*
Certain it became while we were still incomplete
There were certain prizes for which we would never compete;
A choice was killed by every childish illness,
The boiling tears among the hothouse plants,
The rigid promise fractured in the garden,
And the long aunts.
And every day there bolted from the field
Desires to which we could not yield;
Fewer and clearer grew the plans,
Schemes for a life and sketches for a hatred,
And early among my interesting scrawls
Appeared your portrait.
*
Be deaf too, standing uncertain now,
A pine tree shadow across your brow,
To what I hear and wish I did not;
The voice of love saying, lightly, brightly—
‘Be Lubbe, Be Hitler, but be my good
Daily, nightly.’
Who was Lubbe anyway? He thought about the argument in class and himself accusing James of being a Fascist. The idea of saying to James: “Be Lubbe, be Hitler, but be my good, daily, nightly,” made him laugh out loud but there was no one to hear him. He practically rolled out of the window thinking of saying to little James: “Be Lubbe, be Hitler, but be my good, daily, nightly.”
The Last Summer Page 9