"Have you— Does Tertia know?"
"No. But one of the attractions of Tertia, for me, was that, if I had told her, she would not have been surprised. It would have been about what she expected." Paul leaned back, tapped a cushion over and over with his fingertips. "Sometimes I could hardly be sure I hadn't told her—she was so entirely convinced of the worst in me."
Perhaps they know the worst about each other: that can be a bond.
"After Victor's death I wanted more than ever to secure myself in the castle. It was a safeguard, the last place anyone would look for a suspect. In the castle, believe me, they look after their own.
It was enough to have seen the way the police fixed on the wrong chap, that morning in my car—the way their eyes lit on the one that looked and spoke the part, and had nothing but his innocence to back him." Paul ceased tapping, and stared at Caro. "But you must have heard some of that at least, from him."
"From him?"
"From Tice."
Water was beating, pouring on the windows. Caro said aloud,
"Oh God." She heard her voice cry out above the storm, "God.
God."
"It was Tice on the bank. Of course it was Tice. You knew it was Tice." An accusation.
"Oh no."
"He must have told you. He had every incentive to tell you."
Paul might have suspected some trick.
Caro pressed her hands together. "No."
Feeling streamed through the room like the high wind, like a banner. The woman was still, but it was as if she writhed.
"That was the first change in the luck. The only one, then.
Driving down to Peverel that day, weeks later, when it was all behind me, and finding Tice there. The first sign that God's sense of humour might extend to me too. Tice standing by the car glaring at me with that cut-up eye, the whole scene re-enacted. I knew I should refer to it right off, our seeing one another at the river, if I was to put it over on him. And I could not. He waited and, because I couldn't mention it, was doubly certain. Christ Almighty, how I hated being in that house with him, sleeping under the same roof. Sharing a bathroom with my nemesis. Everything else had gone right but this one item, which showed there were other factors I couldn't control." Paul looked at Caro's pressed hands. "Then there was you."
He got up and closed the window against the rain. His rising and walking created a new stage. There was alarm for what he would next violate.
Caroline Vail felt an almost physical barrier to recognizing the role of Ted Tice. She, who had spoken to Paul of ignorance, must assess the ignorance in which she had passed passionate years of life.
All pride and presumption, the exaltation of her own beliefs, the wish to be humane, the struggle to do well, were reduced to this: a middle-aged woman wringing her hands and calling on God.
She had wanted knowledge, but not to know this. Knowledge had become a fearful current in which a man might drown.
Paul Ivory was handling the curtain, stretching his arm to the unfamiliar window.
Caro had a revulsion to the presence of Paul in Adam Vail's house.
Recrossing the room, Paul said, "Well?"
"I am thinking how Adam would have hated this."
"I understood he went in for sinners. Or was it only outlaws?"
Even now, in Paul, a flick of self.
"He condemned all forms of violence." A prim epitaph for a defunct clergyman, when in fact the feelings roused in her were animal: these chairs and tables withdrew from Paul, as did the furniture of this woman's memory. Paul had become everything shoddy, derelict; the torn kite unstuck from the sky. He could reduce, reduce, until there was nothing but the equipment of a dubious inn.
And this man's very possessions, for her, had once been radiant.
Paul sat. Drummed with fingers that were stalks or stems: evidence of love. A few months past, in Victoria Square, Caro's eyes had lingered on these hands. She had played, that evening, at being an old woman, knowing, complacent, reconciled. All her beneficent vanity now shrivelled to this.
She said, "Was it for revenge, then, on Ted—that you took up with me?"
"There was that in it, naturally. That I should carry you off while he stood once more impotently watching. Jealousy is in any case an expression of impotence, and his was compounded by the other frustration. There was the vengeance for his having shown up again in that fated way. And a turning of tables on Tertia, too, who had taken to parading her lovers in my face. Just then there was a chap in the Guards who used to spend weekends at the castle, he's dead now, dead long since. There was risk in both these things—in maddening Tice and antagonizing Tertia. And I liked the risk."
"Yes."
"You remember that. Experience was insipid without some risk or deception. With you, that changed. Because I had never expected that degree of attachment, to man or woman. That you could arouse it gave you influence, and created one more reason to throw you over that afternoon when Tertia found us in bed—
when I could see my entire construction falling apart."
It was hard to see how Godfrey Locker could have been more brutal.
"That afternoon when we drove off, when we left you at the window, Tertia made me stop the car in the road. We went into the fields and she made me take her there on the ground. Setting her seal on me."
So each of them had gone, that day, from one partner to another.
A chap in the Guards, he's dead now, dead long since.
"After that, I regained control. I worked on my play and it went well. Because of the heightened state I was in, every day was a revelation in what I could handle—I never worked so fast again, or so well." Paul remained interesting to himself. "They're right to keep parrotting that it's my best play, I never had so much feeling to put into anything else. I wanted to fix the Lockers in the world's mind. I know it sounds grotesque, but I wanted the play to be a memorial to—"
He was about to say "Felix."
Quick gesture of erasure. "A monument to Victor. I hadn't loved him, or anybody, then, but I began to see him clearly—poor little rat that never had a chance. He didn't haunt me, and the experience itself was receding, as was the scratched eye of Ted Tice. Victor had died painlessly, without waking, as I'd wished it. Unless you began to wonder about the gushing and roaring, and the choking terror.
The only haunting was done, once in a while, by Godfrey Locker.
I never lost the fear of him, even after the Mullions told me he was dead. Sometimes even now I half-believe he's still alive, and have to calculate that he'd be ninety. He's one of those who can't die.
Like Hitler.
"So it all went right. I knew the play was good, and there was the public success and money and the castle. When you turned up again, I was astonished how I wanted you, because I'd felt no lack.
I thought it would soon wear out, but it worked the other way.
Sometimes I couldn't stand to be away from you, everything else was insufficient. After the first year I began to wonder about divorc-ing Tertia and living with you. That brought its own reaction, since there was your remoteness from the underside of my nature. In that respect your love was disabling, as if you were forcing me to feel shame. When I had other strength, through work or some winning streak, I wanted to use it against you, to show I could withdraw, because otherwise I foresaw I would tell you everything. I'd tell you about Victor's death and put not only my safety but my very nature in your hands."
Lightning was a mad grin in the room, thunder a shudder over all the earth.
"Once again, something happened. One night you told me about Tice's crime, and it took him out of my life at a stroke, because now he could never raise the question of Victor without exposing himself. If his own secret came out, who'd ever employ him again, in his line of work? I wasn't such a fool as to think he'd kept quiet about me out of fear. One thing about vice is that it gives you a nose
—and an eye and an ear—for virtue. How could I work if I'd only
had my own character to go by? The very fact that there was a complex morality in it from Tice's point of view was a further guarantee of security." Paul paused, recovering the narrative from which he had digressed. He said, "You loved me enough, then, to accept anything I'd done, even murder."
"Yes."
"But I knew, since you'd told Tice's story, you'd ultimately tell mine. If I told you about Victor, one day you'd love someone else enough to confide in him."
"So I was doubly punished for that." If it had not been for the incontrovertible fact of Adam Vail, her life might decompose, obscenely, in her mind's eye.
"It was an entirely female thing to do. A timely warning. By then Tertia had caught on to your continued presence in my life, which displeased her most particularly. The length of the association, also, no doubt suggested I might leave her. She wanted the child, to set her stamp on me once more. I was glad enough to have it resolved, in a way—because I knew I couldn't go through with it: love, revelation, metamorphosis." He said this last word sardonically, but meant it. "I'd also taken up again with a boy, in a desultory way, part of the move away from you. The boy was called Valentine—
his mother had been a fan of silent movies. He was passed on to me by an actor who appeared in my first two plays. That's how I came by him—a fox-faced little thing called Valentine."
"I remember him." A bubbling radiator, and the boy eating grapes.
"God knows where he is now."
I was glad enough to have it resolved. God knows where he is now. Caro's crossed bare legs were slipping off one another in a confluence of sweat and skin lotion and the dankness created by the storm. Sweat ran, breath rose and fell. In a cotton dress, the animal flutter of a heart.
"It is tempting, now, to plead my youth. But in any case I'm not pleading. And the capacity for excitement in such an experience was not something I expected, even then, to outgrow."
There were those who enlisted Death on their side, as stimulus or instrument: Paul, Dora, Charlotte Vail.
"The compulsion to tell was something quite arbitrary, alien, that came on me with Felix's trouble. That is something you can't foretell—that a state of mind will overtake you like an event. The confessory mood has an urgency not necessarily related to repent-ance—it may be a wish to implicate others. Ideally, one should confess to one's worst enemy, I suppose, since only he can truly give absolution. That would be Tice, in the present case." Paul said,
"Otherwise, there is the sense of being weakened. Just as I felt empowered by Victor's death, the act of imparting it, now, to you, is a loss of strength, indecent as the crime." There was this overwhelming self in Paul, that his very sins were impressive to him. At that moment he felt nothing for Caro, who had received his necessary admission as she had once received his love, making no use of the authority it gave.
Paul said, "What I can't believe is that Tice never spoke of it to you. Seeing you turn to me—and with that weapon to his hand. It's inconceivable. Anyone else would have told."
"Yes. No." Adam Vail might not.
"As it is, his silence makes him supreme. Silence tends to do that anyway, and this is an extreme case. A dated nobility"—Paul could still surprise with the precision of a word—"you might read of but can't believe in. I'd forgotten it was supposed to exist."
It was Tice on the bank, of course it was Tice. Caro could not assimilate Ted's role, or a terror of it. A dreaded circumstance, still to be resolved, on which the mind could scarcely bear to touch. Yet what could injure Edmund Tice, who was now supreme?
Unless it was herself she feared for. Knowledge had not finished with her yet.
"Barely credible," Paul said. "The self-command."
"Which leads to sovereign power."
He looked with some curiosity. "His ascendancy has come twenty years too late." He got up, took his jacket from the chair.
"By now his own offence is very like virtue. That happens to any humane action, if you wait long enough. My trespasses, on the other hand, are only compounded with time and concealment."
Speaking of himself at length had revived Paul's conviction of an importance from which Ted Tice must not detract. Exhausting his theme, he renewed his energies.
Until this day they might have imagined that, left alone in a room, they would embrace out of fateful continuity, as in a play, or fall in with some other dramatic suggestion. But such imitations had become unthinkable; and no truth would rise, in words, that had not already been outdone. Deprived of inarticulate possibilities
—of weeping, or making love—neither knew how to conclude.
Drawing on his jacket, Paul was suggesting they reclaim their social selves. "You're to be in England in September?" His tone was ready ta disavow what had taken place. His stare would dissolve the listening woman in the chair.
"On my way to Sweden."
"As of now," he said, "I cannot see ahead." He doubted he would wish to see Caro again in all his life. "You'll be staying with your sister?" It was remarkable how he could recover and clothe himself, in a jacket and normality, even now.
Caro saw him to the door. Following the storm, a sickly warmth; a humid sun pearling a film of gasoline on the steaming street.
Rain-water swirled in sluggish gutters, redepositing rubbish. As much as might be hoped for on a day when none could look for cleansing or refreshment, and in a place that seemed, itself, a sullen challenge to the elements.
"Caro, good-bye."
Paul took the subway at Seventy-seventh Street. In the train the hot air was substantial, the stench tangible. Streaked and scrawled, the walls gave way to rubber flooring that had been intermittently savaged. Shaped seats of a defaced plastic, hard as iron, confronted one another in long penitential rows. Underfoot, cigarette butts, smeared wrappings, the sports page crumpled on the rictus of a wealthy athlete. A beer can rolled from side to rocking side, the train careening, shrieking, racketing. Unable to reach a strap, Paul was supported on the denim flanks of three unsmiling girls. At the level of his eyes there were ranged the coloured imperatives of advertising: "Come to Where the Flavor Is," "Give to the College of Your Choice."
Everyone is thinking, a bit of danger. One of these sullen, standing men might present his own imperatives, Give me the bag, the wallet, the watch. Everyone has a bad complexion, acne, a rash; or a worn, unsupple skin, as if they had been down here too long.
Pouches of bad air below the eyes. In this place, as in any hell, none has the advantage: briefcases give neither pathos nor immunity; a jewelled ornament is a target.
At Eighty-sixth Street, a withered woman in red flowers pushed aboard with surprising force. The doors closed, but the train remained stationary: an endurance test during which no one so much as sighed. A boy and girl, Puerto Rican, clung to a stained pole and shifted gum to kiss. Into the foul air, a loudspeaker gave out sound that was a shower of molten sparks from a blow torch. When the train started up, there was no murmur of surprise or relief. These might have been the founders of a new race that disdained expression and was indifferent to cruelty or compassion, or their own dis-ease. If, here among them, Paul fell dead on the dirty floor, he would be no more than an obstacle to the exit. Similarly, no value was attached to his remaining, though sickened, on his feet.
A boy with frizzed head, like a small tree, got up from his seat: his arm a branch that reached, through interlacing limbs, to touch Paul's shoulder.
"Have a seat, Pop." This boy, being mortal, grinned around the car. He could not help his better nature, or his worse. And had not ceased to crack a double-jointed thumb.
Paul slid into place. Aware of an unaccountable exception, but incapable of thanks.
In her house, Caroline Vail was opening the letter, in purple ink and an unfamiliar hand, from Ireland.
"Without wishing to disturb your peaceful existence, I feel you will want to know of Dora's trouble, or plight. . . . "
Grace said, "She loses the sense of time."
Grace and Caro were
driving, in Grace's little car, to visit Charmian Thrale. Christian had had his way, and his mother was in a place, for old people, called Oak Dene, or Forest Manor, or Park View.
"One moment she remembers the boys' birthdays, everything.
The next, she imagines Chris and I are newly married." The car turned in between brick gateposts. "They say it's circulation."
Parched grass was dying, in the dry, exceptional September.
The directress of the institution was something more than capable. Tall, grey, reticent, she maintained a sensible distance and would not accept Caroline Vail's affinity, even by a glance. If you once got into that, there'd be no end to it. Caro was a sister again, walking with Grace down a tiled corridor: they were two women doing womanly things. It was a relief, occasionally, to appear conventional, blameless; even to the cool eye of a grey headmistress
—in this case, of a finishing school.
These two had walked by the salt sea after school. Now it was mortality that expanded, an immensity, at their side.
Grace said, "You'd think they'd find some way to disguise that disinfectant."
Charmian Thrale was in a section reserved for ambulatory residents. The floor matron was brittle, corseted, a wooden barque enclosed in an iron hull. She said it meant everything to have visitors. They were shown to a tiny bedroom where Charmian sat in a chintz chair, hands extended on arm-rests. Her hair was white and scant, her huge eyes scarcely blue; her body fleshless, a mere coat-hanger for cotton sleeves and shoulders, the neck a wire hook for the dandelion head.
The window gave onto a vegetable patch tended by the active inmates. There was a hard, ugly plant in a pot on the inside sill. The mirrored door of a wardrobe hung open. On the bedside table, a wedding photograph of Grace and Christian. Beside bottles of pills, there was a small stick, tipped with soiled cotton, of the kind used to clean out ears. On the bed, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles lay beside a book.
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