‘No. Of course not. Of course he hasn’t!’
Another silence.
‘Florence, you know what I think you should do? I think you should get away for a good holiday. That would shake him up and make him appreciate you. The south of France – there’s the place! Two or three weeks there would do you the power of good. Change of scene, change of air … I am serious. You could do with a break. And it’s quite simple, and very civilised – you take the boat train from Waterloo, pick up the sleeper at Calais and wake up by the Mediterranean. Nice or Menton would be rather better than Cannes. There are some excellent hotels.’
‘Sydney, you know I couldn’t possibly leave him.’
‘Or you might consider a cruise. Last winter I went on a cruise, in the Mediterranean; it was beautiful. Everything is looked after. You don’t have to lift a finger. It’s not as expensive as one might think.’
‘I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Two weeks. A week.’
‘Not even for two days. He would be helpless.’
‘He managed perfectly well in the autumn, didn’t he? How long were you away then?’
My operation, he means. I was away in London for eleven days.
‘I couldn’t.’
‘But you say he is planning to leave you.’
‘Yes. O, I don’t know if it is imminent. I really don’t know, Sydney. I don’t know where I am any longer!’
What is so strange is that all the while I seem to be watching myself. Who is this hysterical creature whispering into the telephone? Yet sometimes I think that if I could only give myself up to hysteria, if I could tear my clothes and scream, and smash a plate or vase, I should feel better, but I have to hold my feelings in check.
‘It’ll pass,’ says Cockerell, in a voice which attempts to reassure me, but which fails to reassure me at all. ‘It’ll pass. You mustn’t worry, Florence; that is the most important thing, believe me. He does love you, you know.’
I hold the ear-piece in my hand and listen to its empty sound, like the end of a breath. Cockerell’s words hang in the air and the whole house seems to be listening. The grandfather clock ticks, the floor shines dully. Do not listen to me! What are you looking at? Get back to work! Go on!
I take to my desk in the drawing room. The maids have lit a fire but the heat seems to be swallowed by the cold and it is difficult to think in such a temperature, just as it is difficult to type when my fingers are frozen. This is the twentieth century! I continue to wear my coat – am I also expected to wear milkman’s mittens?
The day’s correspondence awaits. First, a letter from France: a writer of biography, M. Rollin, requests an interview with him on the subject of his early life. There is not the slightest chance that he would be willing to give such an interview. Another overseas letter, from the United States (clearly written by someone who does not know how old he is, and has no inkling of his views) invites him to give a series of four lectures this coming summer in New York, proposing the following subjects: 1. The future of Christianity in the modern age. 2. The direction of Literature, with particular reference to the ‘new school of poetry’ as represented by T.S. Eliot. 3. Relations between the sexes, specifically relating to the marriage contract. 4. Prospects for world peace. One would have thought, from this, that he was some great seer. What, living here, and never going anywhere, can he possibly know about the prospects for world peace?
An envelope postmarked London contains a typewritten letter, as follows:
My dear Sir,
I hope that you may be able to assist us in clearing up a puzzle which arises out of your excellent novel ‘The Return of the Native’. It concerns a passage in Book IV, Chapter II, in which Clym Yeobright is working as a furze-cutter on Egdon Heath. Therein you write how:
‘The strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down.’
None of the lepidopterists of my acquaintance has been able to identify the species concerned. Some of us believe it must be the Small Copper, others favour the Lulworth Skipper, or the male of the Fox Moth. I myself explored Egdon last summer in the hope of finding the butterfly in question, but without success. Is it, perhaps, some species once found on the Wessex heaths, but no longer present?
If you would settle a matter which has aroused much keen debate, I should be most grateful.
I remain, my dear Sir,
Etc. etc.
Does it matter so much? I feel like saying. Does it matter at all? Children in the slums, children with pinched grey faces, children dressed in rags, huddled, crouched, shivering, children whose parents have died and who in their entire lives have never known the soft touch of a mother’s hand, are at this very moment begging in the streets of our capital city. (Such children haunt and reproach me with their pleading eyes. How I have always longed to help them! How I have longed to sweep them into my arms and to carry them off to some place of safety, a refuge from the storms of life!) Against their plight, what possible excuse can there be for dwelling on the identity of a fictional butterfly? What excuse for a life spent writing novels and poems about the dead?
According to Cockerell, he loves me. Seated at my cold desk, I consider this proposition as calmly as I can. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me. A child’s game. What is certain is that love is more important than anything. I remember so many years ago when I taught in a school and the children with their bright innocent faces eager for knowledge used to flock around me and hang on my every word, and after the lesson had finished I would dismiss them from the class-room and away they would run, so excited. A tousled-haired little boy was a favourite of mine, and one morning I saw him with such a sad face, standing alone in a corner of the playground and I went up to him and asked him what the matter was and why he wasn’t playing with the other boys and girls; and he told me that his mother had died. ‘O, Tommy,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry,’ and I took him in my arms. My heart bled for him. He came from a very poor family, and he always looked half starved, and after lessons ended I asked him if he might not like to walk home with me for tea. He took my hand and we walked home together, like mother and son, and I made him some scones and opened a pot of strawberry jam, and he ate and ate. Perhaps he had never eaten strawberry jam. He was starved of food, but he was (I know) also starved of love, which I should have given him had I been allowed to, but of course it was not possible. Within me there is so much love still waiting to be expressed, I do sincerely believe that.
Some thoughts on the future.
I sit at the breakfast table, buttering a piece of toast, and sipping a cup of coffee. The front door-bell rings urgently. I wait, and it rings again. The maids are so slow! Where are they? Do I have to answer it myself? What are servants for? I rise from the table, go into the hall, but Nellie is hurrying down the stairs – ‘I’ll get it, ma’am’ – and she opens the door on the coal delivery man, his face smudged with coal dust, his hands black. ‘Is the missus in?’ he blurts in a hoarse voice, ‘I need to see the missus. It’s urgent. It’s the master. I needs to see her.’ I step forward. ‘Hallo? Is there something the matter?’ whereupon he delivers his news: ‘Very sorry, ma’am, but it’s the master, ma’am; ’e’s ’ad an accident, ma’am, down the drive, I don’t know ma’am, but I’m greatly a’feard, ma’am –’ – ‘Show me,’ I say, and we run down the drive. The coal-man’s cart and horse, attended by his boy, are waiting by the gate. Nearer them, beneath an enormous branch that must have fallen from one of the pine trees, lies the body of my husband. The main thing, however, is that Wessie is with him, safe, untouched, unhurt. What a relief, what joy! He springs towards me, wagging his tail; I kneel and cuddle him. ‘O, my little boy,’ I say, ‘thank goodness, thank goodness, you have escaped. Don’t be too upset.’ My husband is face down under the pine, with one arm sticking out at an odd angle.
I look up at the coal-man. ‘Can you not lift it, please?’ – ‘No, ma’am. It be far too heavy. Unless you have any ropes or chains?’ I send Nellie for Mr. Caddy, who finds some chains, and the horses are then able to drag the great weight of the branch off my husband’s body. I turn him over. How very dead he looks; his face is blue, and covered in little dents from lying on the gravel. The irony of it – that he should have been killed by one of the trees – does not entirely escape me. His hand holds a letter; he must have been on the way to the post. I put it in my pocket. I know what it is: a letter to her, a love letter. I cradle Wessie indoors. ‘Now it is just you and me, alone together,’ I tell him. ‘Your poor master is dead. Do you understand?’
Night. He gets up to answer a call of nature. Shuffling along the corridor, he becomes confused, stumbles, trips and falls headlong. Disturbed by the noise, I light a candle. His body lies crumpled and still at the foot of the stairs.
Another night. A fire breaks out in the drawing room chimney; it takes hold and spreads along the rafters, the flames curling around each rafter, filling the roof-space. Smoke drifts through the house. Pops and bangs go off like a firework display. We are asleep, however. Look at us, sound asleep, sleeping like babies, he in his bed, I in mine, with the blankets pulled to the chin! Finally the roar of the fire wakes me, but by now my bedroom is thick with smoke. I fumble to the stairs, colliding with the maids, and we flee (as does Wessie) into the cool clear air of the garden. He does not escape. The fire engine with its hose and buckets races up the drive, but far too late; he dies in the inferno and all his papers, including his last poems, his poems to her, are consumed.
I am doing the post in the drawing room when Nellie bursts in – ‘Mrs. Hardy! Ma’am! Come quick!’ – and I follow her up the stairs to the study. He is slumped in his chair, his head to one side, the pen dangling from his fingers. The long-awaited event has at last occurred. ‘Nellie,’ I say, very decisively (I know my lines off pat, having rehearsed them in my head so many times), ‘we must call a doctor. We must telephone Dr. Gowring.’ – ‘O, ma’am!’ she gives a wail, ‘is he –?’ – ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am afraid so. Go and telephone, would you please?’ and she runs for the telephone. (It occurs to me that this is the true purpose of the telephone, one which we have all known from the very beginning, this moment for which the telephone, in its long silences, has been waiting: to notify the world of his death.) In her absence, I gather together every one of the shameful poems that he has written to Gertrude Bugler, and in front of his dull eyes I tear them up, over and over and over. Yes, I have destroyed them; they are no more! I scatter them like confetti, and an extraordinary wave of elation begins to rise within me. He is dead at last! I want to crow in triumph. Such elation inevitably brings into being a contrary wave, one of guilt and sorrow, but it remains true that my life can now begin again. (Will it be like that, I wonder? A sudden collapse, without warning? Or will it rather be a slow decline, lasting for many more years? How long do I have to wait?)
In all the years that I have lived here we have had the same gardener, Mr. Caddy, good old faithful Mr. Caddy. Where is he now, this winter’s day? Hard at work? I think not. Red-faced, breathing heavily, trousers around his boots, in the small lean-to privy which he has erected beside his wood-shed? Possibly. But no: Mr. Caddy is where he spends half his time, in the wood-shed itself – I push open the door and catch him by a paraffin stove, smoking a pipe and studying the newspaper. ‘Mr. Caddy!’ He starts to his feet and takes the pipe from his mouth. ‘Ma’am.’ – ‘Mr. Caddy, are you very busy?’ (An ironical question: look at him! Pipe! Newspaper! And a mug of tea! Is this what we pay him for? To sit and smoke tobacco and read?) He tells me that he is about to sharpen the knives. When, I wonder to myself, in an hour or so? He drinks; I am sure of it; you can smell it on his breath, above the waft of the pipe and the paraffin. It would not surprise me if the tea were laced with something stronger. But as I talk to him I am not paying that much attention; I am looking, rather, at the array of tools on the wood-shed wall. The rake and fork, the spade and saw, the hoe and hatchet, hanging side by side. The big axe, its wooden handle leaning at an angle. They are what I am looking at; yes. ‘Thank you, Mr. Caddy,’ I say in a satisfied tone, and I leave him no doubt somewhat mystified as to the reason for my little visit.
Night comes. I steal from my bedroom. With a coat pulled over my night-dress, I inch open the back door and creep into the moonlit garden. The key gleams in my hand. I slide it into the lock and it turns easily, with the faintest scratching sound. Once inside the wood-shed, I lift the axe. The handle may be four feet long and the head heavy as a rock, but I am strong as a man, strong as Hercules. Watch now in the moonlight as I carry the axe towards the black trees. In the muddle of moonlight and grey shadow I select the tallest of all the pines and, with perfect balance, lift the axe, and swing through the dark air. Despite its weight it feels as light as a dream, but the thud of the blade striking the wood is real enough. Birds, roosting in the branches, clatter into the night. I swing and swing again, in whirling movements. How easily the blade sinks into the flesh! He says that trees feel pain, that trees suffer; I beg to differ. This tree, I say as I swing, this pine tree, this tree is an inanimate object which does not possess a central nervous system and therefore is unable to experience sensation in any form whatever. This tree (and I swing once more, with the ease of a practised wood-man, and without the slightest moral qualm) is a member of the vegetable kingdom; this tree cannot feel. I, on the other hand, am a human being: I feel! I speak! I cry! I suffer! Do not ignore me! This is how I feel! Hear my anguish: I am a human being! The tree sways, hanging by a sinew; I give a last chop and stand back to watch it fall. As it does so, blood erupts from the inside of its trunk and sprays me in a crimson cloud. I do not care. I rejoice in this tree’s death.
The night has gone; an angry dawn is breaking in the eastern sky. I look up; he is at his bedroom window, staring at the fallen tree, blood dripping from its stump. I hold up my crimson hands. ‘Heartless man!’ I shout. ‘Look what I have done! Behold! It is you who have driven me to this, with your poems to her! Do you understand now?’
Thus the morning passes, which is a comfort, for imagine what it would be like if time were to stop like an unwound clock and we were all trapped in a morning without an end, repeating the same meaningless gestures. I know this is not so since the hands on the grandfather clock continue to move, but the impression of paralysis remains. Something must happen to change things, which is why I again lift the receiver and place a call to my sister Eva in London. I am not optimistic that this will help; never before have I tried confiding in Eva on such a personal matter, and I am sure that, like Cockerell, she will jump to the conclusion that my nerves are behind it all. She asks me what is wrong. O, my sister! Where should I begin? I begin with a succinct summary of the situation. I am forty-six years old. I am not in good health. I live in a dark house with an old man, my husband, who is planning to betray me by eloping with a married woman one third his age. All this I deliver in a strained whisper. I cannot talk too loudly because of the servants.
‘Florrie, aren’t you making a mountain out of a molehill? It’s not as if he and she could … without being indelicate, he is too old, surely, to manage anything in the bedroom department. He could not actually be unfaithful to you.’ I do not reply. ‘Or am I wrong?’ I do not reply. ‘And when she is only twenty-odd years old – you know Florrie – it is just a fancy – a speculation! Maybe he thinks he would like to elope with her, but I promise you, she’s never going to elope with him. Not in a month of Sundays.’
Into my mind there comes a picture of them together on the sofa, his hand like a reptile’s claw on her bare leg. Grotesque! Loathsome! My legs begin to buckle; I slide my head against the wall. Eva does not understand, just as Cockerell did not understand. We are talking about love, my sister! We are talking about the heart, and there he is unfaithful to me, for in his heart he is eloping with he
r, that is the only truth that matters! I begin to hiss into the mouth-piece.
‘My life here is intolerable. It is miserable. I live in silence. I am going mad.’
‘If it is so intolerable, Florrie, there is the obvious solution. You should leave him.’
I gasp. ‘Eva! Don’t talk like that!’
‘Why? It’s true!’
‘The operator may be listening!’
‘You are ridiculous, Florrie. No one is listening. You don’t need to divorce him, although lots of people are divorced nowadays. You can simply leave him. Pack your bags, catch a train. Come and stay here, at least for a while, until you feel better.’
‘Eva, I can’t leave him,’ I say quickly. ‘I can’t! If I leave, she will move into the house. The next day! I know she will!’
‘She has a husband! She has a baby! O, Florrie, Florrie.’
Both of us draw breath.
‘I am sorry,’ I say quietly. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘I’m sorry too. You shouldn’t have married him. What on earth did you think it would be like? An old man? What did you expect?’
‘That is no help. Eva, that is no help at all. What is the use of asking me that? You know why I married him.’
‘Florrie, I have never known why you married him. But he is old; he can’t live much longer.’
Everywhere in this house there are presences. The walls seem to close in, shrinking the space inside my head. I feel as small as a hazel-nut. I go up to bed. I lie with hands by my side, ankles together, unable to move, like an Egyptian mummy in the British Museum, a dried-up cocoon swinging in dead air, beyond the reach of time.
There is no sound, but ten feet away, through the study door, he is thinking only of her. I know this. His mind is occupied with her; like a genie it is shaping itself to her voluptuous shape, leaving no room for me. I survive in a crevice barely able to breathe, I am a rose dying in the shadows of his thoughts. All I ever wanted was to be loved, and indeed that is why I married him, Eva; to answer your question, I loved him, and was in no doubt about it, and yet there are other answers, among them that I did not like the hustle and bustle of London and thought the countryside a green peaceful place, a place in which happiness might be found more easily than in London, and that I was flattered that he asked me, for no one had ever asked me before, and that at the age of thirty-five I was afraid that no one would ever ask me again, and that I was doubly flattered to be asked by such a great writer. I had, in my mind, the romantic image of helping him. Perhaps at this point I should admit that, even when he was so old, I hoped I might bear his child, something the first wife had failed to do. The lack of a child is the true source of his melancholy, I said to myself; it is the gap in his life that I as a young woman will help him fill. I shall help him to be happy, and thereby achieve happiness myself. Our child will be the sign of our love for each other, and so back it comes to love, that most precious of human emotions. Can a tree feel love?
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