Oh he couldn’t go on, he couldn’t go on, Wilbur told himself as March passed into a cold, wet April.
And then, at last, two days after Easter, he told himself: he wouldn’t go on.
And taking an atlas off one of the shelves, and opening it at a map of the Southern States, he decided that he would leave Rome.
It was the only thing he could do. To leave this city of his dreams. To leave the enchanted land … He wouldn’t go in a panic, abandoning everything, he thought; and he certainly wouldn’t go without regrets. But go he definitely would; and as soon as was decently possible.
*
His mind made up, he felt, in the days that followed, and for the first time in months, almost at peace. So very much so that he not only permitted himself to start imagining a small white house with wrought-iron balconies somewhere in the old quarter of New Orleans, or Savannah, or Mobile—and how it would look, full of his lifetime’s collection—but also determined to make one last attempt to establish the truth—so far as he himself knew what it was—before he left.
And to this end, one evening a week later, he invited Bernard to dinner alone.
‘Who else is coming?’ the old man barked when he came in the door.
‘No one, Bernard. It’s just you and me tonight.’
‘Oh Christ, you want to have a serious talk with me, don’t you? I can see it in your face.’
‘Yes Bernard, I do.’
‘Oh Christ. What have I done to deserve this?’
‘Quite a lot Bernard. Quite a lot,’ Wilbur smiled—and giving him a drink, sitting him down in a comfortable chair, and ignoring his frequent interruptions, guffaws, sneers and cackles, proceeded to tell him everything that had happened since the morning he had received the letter from the tax-department. He didn’t try to exonerate himself from the blame of Pam and Jim and Betty’s deaths—‘I know I’m responsible‚’ he said—but he did explain that they hadn’t died directly at his hands. It had all been done by magic, he said—a magic that he hadn’t used consciously, and couldn’t, at all, control. ‘I feel guilty. I am guilty,’ he muttered; ‘but what am I to do? What can I do? Well,’ he went on, before Bernard, if he had any intention of doing so, could reply, ‘I’ll tell you. I’ve decided to leave Rome, and go back to the States. Because—and I know you’ll laugh at me for this—I can’t help feeling that Rome itself—for me, anyway—is a magic city. It’s an invention of my imagination. And if I go away—well, I’ll be safe.’
And then he did stop and give Bernard a chance to speak; though for a while his old friend, holding his little white hands together over his hard fat belly, didn’t seem about to. But finally—just as Wilbur was about to go on again—he opened his mouth, sniffed, and, his eyes glistening behind his glasses, said: ‘You’re such an old fool, Wilbur. Really.’ And then he laughed. ‘Magic my ass! Really you’ve lost all your sense of humour. Though I guess under the circumstances—’ he stopped, stood up, and went to pour himself another drink. And then, standing by the table where the bottles stood, and laying a hand on Philip, who was sleeping in a fruit bowl, he turned, and went on, chuckling to himself, ‘Do you think I’m mad? I know you didn’t kill them. Jesus Christ. You, kill anyone? For one thing, I wouldn’t stand for it. I’m a very moral old bugger when I want to be. And for another—well, you just wouldn’t be capable. I must admit, for a second, when Betty died, I had my doubts—but it was only for a second, and just the result of shock. But I was only joking with you, you ninny.’
‘Joking,’ Wilbur whispered, feeling utterly worn out, and too deflated to think clearly.
‘Yes, of course. It was all a big joke. I thought you understood—and were going along with it because it brought in a little bit of cash. But a good joke’s always worth paying for, and after all, you’ve always prided yourself on being the Court Fool, haven’t you? Even Fools have to be paid for their services.’
‘But those letters and cheques you sent me, after Pam died,’ Wilbur mumbled. ‘And those promises of cash you all made me if only I would do away with—’
‘All whimsy, jokes, fantasies. We’re all much too cut off from real life here. It was all a game for us, a dream. And as we have nothing else to believe in, games and dreams are as good as anything else. I dare say we all got a bit carried away, and ended up half believing that we were being serious. But we weren’t, really.’
‘But Betty, when I told her that evening—the evening she died—she was so angry that she whispered when you went out to the bathroom that she never wanted to see me again.’
‘Well, that was just because she had allowed herself to be carried away. She had started to believe it. And suddenly being pulled up like that, having all her fun spoiled, was a shock and humiliation for her. Of course she was furious. I tell you Wilbur, we’re frivolous old people. Only jokes and fun are important to us.’
‘But when they involve death?’
‘Oh that made it all the better. Because it did enable us to carry on with our joke, to pretend that it was something more.’
‘But they died‚’ Wilbur, still dazed, blurted out. ‘They did die. So it wasn’t a joke. And they all died the second they refused to lend me any more money. How do you explain that? No‚’ he said, shaking his head, ‘it wasn’t all a joke. It couldn’t have been. I did kill them.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Bernard snapped, causing Philip to raise his head from the fruit bowl, ‘you didn’t kill them. They killed themselves. Don’t you understand what I’m saying, you old idiot? Here we are, cut off, living this ridiculous boring life of ours that we haven’t got the strength or the energy to change, and with hardly a single point of contact with the outside world—the real world, if you like to call it that. I bet you, even if Pam and Betty and Jim ever read the newspapers, it was only like reading a novel for them. A daily serial. I know it is for me, anyway. Even the stock page in the Herald Tribune. They’re all just fairy figures, that can’t possibly touch us. We were all way beyond that. Nothing could touch us. Nothing. Not inflation, nor depressions, nor unemployment—not even a world war. We’d just have packed up if necessary, and moved on, and shifted our funds wherever they’d be safe, wherever they’d go on growing and growing and growing, wherever they’d be on the winning side. In fact, almost the only contact we had with the real world was through you, for all your nonsense. Even though you probably never realized it, you were almost the only outlet we had to—well, life. You invented life and the world for us. That’s what Fools and so-called artists exist for. You were almost the only thing that kept us, just, tied to sanity. Otherwise we’d all have died, one way or another, years ago. And that’s why, when Pam and Jim and Madam Bartlett did decide to cut you off, they were cutting off their life-line, severing their main artery—or their only artery. So of course they died. They had nothing left to keep them going, either spiritually or physically. There now. So let’s have no more of your vanity. You’ve never killed a soul in your life. And I doubt that you ever could.’
But still Wilbur wasn’t satisfied. ‘But just to tell the truth to Betty,’ he repeated.
‘She didn’t want the truth,’ Bernard screeched. ‘It was enough for them—for us,’ he corrected himself, ‘to believe that you knew it. But they didn’t want to hear it. Why do you think we’ve all stopped you writing for all these years? We didn’t give you money so you could write or paint, as you claimed you wanted to. We gave you money just so you wouldn’t. You were our life-line all right, but we didn’t want you to be strong enough to haul us back to dry land. Just to keep us afloat, just something to hang onto with the promise of safety if we did ever want to be pulled ashore. Now for Christ’s sake stop this, and get into the kitchen and do some cooking.’
As if in a trance, Wilbur stood up, and started shuffling across the floor, staring at his feet in their old white sandals. But before he left the room he paused, and said ‘But I’m still going to leave Rome. I’m still going away.’
‘Over
my dead body,’ Bernard cackled. ‘Over my dead body. Where’ll I go to dinner if you leave? Who’ll keep me amused? You can’t leave Rome. I forbid it.’
‘Oh Bernard,’ Wilbur sighed—and went.
*
He should, he thought, as he ate his dinner and tried to chat to Bernard about this and that, be feeling relieved. And perhaps he was. But there was still something that nagged him—still something that kept the lump of unease, though it had been almost cut out, aching in his brain. There was still one last thing to be settled before he could lean back, and acquit himself, and tell himself that this story was, at last, over. Only, dazed as he was, in a trance as he was, he couldn’t put his finger on it, and even started to suspect, by the time they had finished eating, that maybe he was imagining things, and had so gotten used to that feeling of unease that he was unwilling, now, to relinquish it.
Then, just as Bernard pulled back from the table and said he should be going, it came to him, the final question he wanted to ask; the final hurdle that stood between him and total peace.
‘That story you told me about Betty, and her son, and Arthur—that wasn’t true, was it?’ he asked.
‘Of course it was,’ Bernard said, looking irritated. ‘Do you think I’m a liar?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Well then.’
‘But if your story was true, Betty’s—’
‘Was a lie.’
‘Oh,’ Wilbur said—and wondered, wearily, if that, at last, had done it.
ELEVEN
That it hadn’t—though he had already suspected as much—he didn’t discover definitely till next morning.
He had asked Lillian to take an old suitcase out of the bottom of a closet, and start packing a few of his more precious books. (Because he was still determined, whatever Bernard thought, to leave Rome.) The girl had just started, when she called out to him in his study that there was the manuscript of an old novel in the suitcase, and did he want to see it.
‘Yes, dear child. Bring it to me. Is it mine?’
‘Yes,’ Lillian said. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘No,’ Wilbur said; and started, casually, to glance at it. But after he had read the first page of this book he hardly remembered having written, and couldn’t at all remember the story of—it had never been published—he became far less casual; and by the time he had read the second, and then the third and fourth, he started to tremble. And by the time he had finished….
The novel was in four interlocking and inter-echoing parts, and was called Four Children. The first part told of a widowed English woman who, in order to keep her daughter for herself, does everything possible to prevent her from marrying, until the man the girl loves and is loved by—and she herself cares for—is so confused by the web of lies that the mother, with the aid of two evil acquaintances, weaves about him, that he eventually flees; causing, naturally enough, the total alienation of mother and daughter. The second told of a young and shy student (one of the evil acquaintances of the first story, in earlier years), whose wealthy but weak-minded mother is persuaded by an intelligent, over-bearing, but impoverished girl, who is determined to catch a rich husband, that her twenty-year-old son should be ‘brought out’, and therefore sends him off on a sort of Grand Tour with this girl as an escort; which ends with the young man humiliated and lonely, having had the girl’s schemes revealed to him by a—the—meddling English widow and a cruel and bullying man, falling in love with—and of course being rejected by—the cruel bully. The third part told of a Southern lady (the pushy girl of Part Two, who had found her rich husband—who had conveniently dropped dead almost immediately, whereupon she had married again, and had children) whose youngest son, after a traumatic experience with a prostitute, and various dramas with a 45-year-old already retired businessman of sinister reputation, (the shy student, of course) goes mad and gets murdered. And the last part told—as it had to—of a gruff huntin’ and fishin’ type (the disappointed lover of part one, and the cruel bully) who discovers his youngest son, whom he has always wished will grow up to be, unlike himself, an artist, dressed as a confederate soldier and being fed cocaine by a woman he knows (other evil acquaintance of Part One, pushy girl of Part Two, etc.); with the result that the boy, after he has been saved from drug addiction, turns into everything his father hadn’t wished him to be; a dull and dutiful citizen who goes to church every Sunday with his wife and children, and is not only not an artist, but is not even keen on huntin’ and fishin’….
What could it all mean, Wilbur asked himself as he put the manuscript down. What could it mean? That—though he didn’t remember having done so—he had some time in the long distant past, struck by the similarities between his four main characters and his four best friends (there had been differences, however; the English widow had been small and dark, the Southern lady very beautiful with tiny white teeth, the shy student painfully thin, and the cruel hunter and fisher completely without humour) lent them his novel; and they had so appropriated the stories he had woven about them, finding them far more entertaining than the truth, and justifying their petty dislike of each other, that they had finished by believing what they’d read was the truth? Or that he had, extraordinarily, magician that he was, written the truth—with one or two errors in detail—years before he had met either Pam or Jim or Betty or Bernard? Which was why, ironically, when Betty and Bernard had told them their stories, he hadn’t at all believed them…. Oh, he didn’t know, he didn’t know at all. What he did know was that he found, somehow, both theories almost equally frightening; that he had been right to suspect that his lump of unease, in spite of Bernard’s explanations last night, hadn’t been completely eradicated; and finally that, and now without a moment’s delay, he must leave Rome; leave within a month if he could, or even within a week. Leave before it was too late….
TWELVE
He and Lillian and Aida spent the next four days in a state of hysteria. Packing cases were brought and laden with books. Boxes of every shape and size were procured and stuffed with ornaments and treasures. Paintings were taken down and removed from their stretchers. Piles of old clothes were sent to a refugee relief organization. Plants and flowers were given to friends. Enquiries were made as to the cost of putting furniture in storage. Letters were written to the landlord and the telephone company and the electricity company. Cards were sent out—bright little yellow cards; five hundred of them for a start—to places all over the world, announcing that Wilbur George was leaving Rome, and would get in touch with his friends just as soon as he had an address where he could be contacted. Day and night they worked, the three of them, Aida bursting into tears every now and then, and not at all calmed by the fact that Wilbur promised her a whole year’s salary in lieu of proper notice, along with whatever severance pay she was entitled to by law.
‘But where will I find someone else like you, Signor Wilbur,’ she wailed; and Wilbur couldn’t even try to tell her.
However, at the end of four days it was almost all done. Everything that was going to be sent was packed and ready; everything that was going to be given away and hadn’t been collected was labelled and set aside. The only things that hadn’t been done in fact were these: first, no destination had been decided on for the packing cases and boxes that were to be sent; second, no actual arrangements had been made for their sending, nor for the storing of the furniture; third, no tickets had been bought; for either Wilbur or Philip; and fourth, and finally, no money had been obtained, or even asked for by Wilbur, that would enable these last, and unfinished details, to be settled. And without money….
He did his accounts once, twice, three times. He sent Lillian round to all the various film offices who owed him for translations. He estimated the maximum possible amount he might get for his furniture, if he sold it rather than stored it. He even went through his paintings to see if there were any he’d be able to sell immediately.
But it was hopeless. With the best will in the world, and lookin
g on the very brightest of sides, all the conceivable funds he could lay his hands on still wouldn’t even cover the year’s salary he had promised to Aida, let alone what he owed to Lillian, and would have to pay the removal men, shipping companies and storage people.
And so, he realized, as he sat in the ruins of his wonderland, there was nothing for it; he would have to ask, for one last time, for a loan. And quite a large loan. At least ten thousand dollars. And who else could he possibly ask but Bernard….
Except that Bernard, whom he hadn’t seen during these four hectic days—putting him off with stories of not being well, of having to go out himself, of having to finish a particular translation—didn’t want him to leave….
It was all so ridiculous, he told himself as he got up now and paced, alone—Lillian and Aida had finally gone home—through the jumbled, disordered, carpetless rooms, stooping every now and then to pick up a feather from the floor, or a broken bead, or to trace a pattern in some gold dust that had spilled. To be so near, to be so absolutely ready for flight; to be sitting in the plane with the doors closed; and then to be told, ‘We’re sorry, but we haven’t any fuel….’
He had to leave, he moaned to Philip, who, with all the turmoil, was almost more distraught than himself, and spent the whole time walking up and down, making funny little croaks and squeaks, and spraying all the packing cases. He had to—if only because having, with such insane speed, destroyed the home that it had taken him so long to create, he couldn’t, now, even if he’d wanted to, put it together again. It was gone, the magic land, for ever. For not only were the actual trappings all torn down, but the spirit itself of the place had been dismantled. And without the spirit….
At seven o’clock he called Bernard, and asking him if he was free, told him to come over.
‘I’ve been so busy I can’t cook,’ he said. ‘But we can have a drink here, and then go out somewhere.’
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