The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  Surely the cozy domesticity of the scene before me was my reality now, I thought. Surely I could come to accept it, in any case, as the only reality that mattered; and perhaps if I did so I might find in its warmth a refuge from the pain of recollection. Surely…. But what is the use of my remembering my early hopes of self-delusion? I might have seen safety in self-deception even then, but I was powerless really to overcome my guilt or to forget what I had done. Only years of expert training could show me how to sever myself from my past and to forget even the most rudimentary tools of emotional analysis; and I had had no such training. I was a child, trying in a child’s way to deal with the consequences of actions committed with an adult’s strength. My instincts were to regress: to seek the safety of my earliest world, the world I looked at from my dark corner on that cold evening. I wanted a world of family and familiar faces, of warm conversation beside blazing fires in rooms I had known all my life. I derived comfort from the very presence of childhood figures like Aunt Julia. I needed security and stability and affection, the last of these so badly that even the unthinking devotion of a basset hound could move me.

  I tried not to think of the details of Eric’s death, not to ask myself why I had not confessed to my part in it when I had had the chance. I tried not to think of the Vaugirards’ Christmas: of Eric père and Louise and Sylvie; of the forlorn group which they would make beside the Christmas tree in their narrow, rambling house with its croquet lawn behind. I tried not to think of Eric’s shoes; of the way he had laughed at our long search for a bed in Madame Mocsáry’s apartment; of the woman with the severe nose at Florian’s with whom he had argued. I tried not to think of him playing the piano in the impromptu music room at Sokolska 21; of the way his eyes used to flash when we played together well; of the smell of aftershave and sweat which had lingered in his bedroom at Ella’s. I tried to focus on the group before me, to listen to Aunt Julia’s acerbic wit, to smile at my mother’s irritation when a stray piece of cigar ash found its way onto the carpet. But the room swam before my eyes and all I could hear, listen though I might, was Eric’s voice telling me that he loved me completely; all I could see was his swollen body laid out on the hard ground by the quarry with Dr. Pétin bending over it in tears.

  “My God, the boy’s crying.” It was Julia’s voice that spoke; and it was her thin arms that circled my shoulders; her cracked voice that told me, with a soft sympathy far from her usual tone, that I should get a grip at once and stop being so silly.

  CHAPTER 25

  IDID RECOVER. ONE DOES. And the recovery I made, though never more than partial, was remarkable; I see that now. I see what Sarah did for me; can appreciate the skill with which she taught her chill lessons of self-delusion and deceit. But as I stood with Julia’s arms around me on that cold December night, trying to avoid my parents’ worried eyes, I had no idea what lay before me; no real suspicion of how difficult the path ahead would prove to be. The worries of children never endure; their fleetingness is one of the compensations of childhood. And child that I was, I did not suspect then, as I told my family that I was tired and that they should take no notice of me, that I had been initiated into a harsher world. I did not realize that those few weeks in Prague and France had taken me forever from the cheerful confines of previous feeling; that Ella’s love and Eric’s death had raised me to a colder, more adult plane of experience; that suffering in this new world could be lasting and real. I did not suspect because I had not yet tasted the bitterness of unresolved grief; and my lesson, soon to come, was protracted and painful in a way it has taken me years to forget.

  But the pain of those first weeks could not prolong itself indefinitely; and the fires burned themselves out in the end, as all fires do, though they left smouldering coals which destroyed my hopes of peace. At last the Guildhall term began and I was thrown into a busy round of classes and private practice which took some of the immediacy from my misery, for routine is a great palliative. And in devoted industry I found some relief. I found it too in the comforting presence of people and of places I knew; and so I learned, little by little, to live with what I had done.

  People who think they understand say that life goes on; that time heals. And bland though they are, there is some truth in such platitudes. My life did go on after Eric’s death; without my actively ending it, I suppose, it could not have done otherwise. And slowly I learned to laugh at people’s jokes again; to listen to their troubles; to hear of their loves and their plans with something approaching enthusiasm. I learned to get through the days; and gradually, with time, they became bearable. No more than bearable, I know that now; perhaps I suspected it even then. But I was grateful for the smallest mercies.

  My practice room at the Guildhall, a tatty little space that held no memories, became the center of my life; and as I talk I see again its cheaply varnished upright piano; the lime linoleum of its small square floor; the steel music stand that stood beside its dirty windows of frosted glass. I remember the mustiness of its smell; the cigarette burns on its small table; the faded prints of original scores and Viennese waltzers which were all that enlivened its four brown walls. Nothing could have been further from the splendors of Madame Mocsáry’s apartment, that is certain; but I rejoiced in the anonymity of its ugliness. In Room 32 I was safe, you see; and I spent many hours playing in it, undisturbed and alone.

  My violin was my chief comfort in those dark days. And sometimes, when I played, Eric faded from my mind as the music filled it; sometimes, for an hour or two, seldom longer, I was free from the memory of what I had done to him. But I could never be so for long. My guilt always returned; and with it came the sound of my friend’s laugh and the sightless gaze of his open eyes as his body was laid out by the quarry. For weeks such sights never left my mind, whichever way I looked for distraction. But it was when I did not play that Eric was with me most frequently: a haunting presence with wild hair and dull eyes; a silent apparition with words of love on his lips. He lived in my dreams and sleep ceased to be a refuge; instead it became a frightening cacophony of sight and sound and smell, of tears and yells and long, steep falls into darkness. I began to lie awake in bed, willing the morning to come; telling myself that nothing is ever so awful by daylight; that even Eric’s laugh would not outlast the coming of morning and the chasing of the shadows. With no one to confide in I was alone. And I learned the hard truth that isolation has little to do with the number of people who fill your days; that solitude follows you everywhere; that the mind itself is our keenest jailer.

  I did not see Ella, though I read of her in the newspapers and magazines which chronicled her return to England a week after my own; and with disgust I saw the lurid headlines which screamed stories of insanity above close-up photographs of her white face, pale with exhaustion, as she walked out of customs at Heathrow. I read the florid stories of the Harcourt curse; read also how it had claimed a new victim, a young and promising French pianist, one of the family’s guests at their “picturesque villa in northwestern France.”

  On such nonsense does the popular imagination feed.

  On such nonsense did my imagination feed too, in a way; for such drivel was the only contact I allowed myself with Ella over the three years of my study at the Guildhall, a time I filled with the intense work that is, for some, one of the by-products of loneliness. She wrote to me, of course: long, frightened letters that grew more frightened as the weeks turned to months and I left each one unanswered, some unopened even. I missed her; of course I missed her; and with a kind of wrenching sorrow. More than once I nearly wrote. But my conscience would not allow me to see Ella; and the greater my desire for her, the more important it became for me to deny myself the comfort of her presence in my life. I had not been punished for my role in Eric’s death, you see. Punishment was impossible without the confession I dared not make. And I yearned for punishment; for in its absence my guilt could only increase. I longed for some way to expiate my crime; to purge myself through suffering; and Ella w
as my chief privation.

  Gradually her letters stopped; and my life, devoted more and more to music and to the playing of my violin, continued without any concrete reminders of our love. The days merged into one another and I passed through them all, trying not to think, working hard to resist a secret voice which told me that my silence was cruel, that the fragile woman whose photograph I saw in the papers did not deserve to be severed so completely from my life, a life in which she had shared so briefly but so fully. Thinking of it now I can see that my treatment of Ella was cruel, that without adding to my own guilt—or to hers—I might have written, at least. And though perhaps it would have been wrong for me to tell her that her image haunted my dreams still, that no day went past without me thinking of her ringing laugh or of the softness of her touch, I might have said that I grieved for her, that I mourned for her, too.

  But it is easy to wish that one had acted differently once the time for action is passed; it is easy to wonder and to hope for what might have been. Hindsight is notorious for its clarity, I know that; but I have no use for it. The fact is that I did not write. And my silence grew also from the fact that secretly I blamed Ella for Eric’s death more than I blamed my own naïveté, which was the true culprit. It was easier and more comfortable for me to see the root of my sin in another; to think that I had been corrupted; that I was a victim, though even I could not pretend to be a guiltless one. Lacking the insight to see the insecurity behind Ella’s cruelty, distracted by my struggles to understand my own, I oscillated in my judgment of her, unable to condemn or to forgive completely, eager only (and sometimes despite myself) for a reunion which my conscience would not grant. I wanted to see her too badly, you see; I needed her too much. And the absence of such comfort, I thought, was the least I owed to Eric.

  Perhaps death will give me knowledge as well as judgment; perhaps it will reunite me with those I have loved in a way in which I never can be on earth. Perhaps … But I am rambling again. I must go on, for it is evening now. I must not be distracted by the metaphor of this darkening room and the frail old man who sits in it, alone. My sun has set; it set years ago. I have grown to be comfortable with that fact. Now I must press on. I must not move until everything has been said. One night has passed since Sarah’s death; another must not be allowed to do so or I shall lose all resolve. This is no time to stop.

  I was alone in those years after Eric’s death; and without the support which only Ella could have given, the knowledge of what I had done made me secretive. Over my years at the Guildhall I learned to disguise how I felt, to shield my unhappiness from the concerned inquiries of my friends and my family; and as I learned to do this better I became more adept at deceiving myself. True, I did not become as proficient as I would years later, when Sarah’s example had shown me the means to self-deception with such unspoken clarity; but I made a valiant effort, and with that I had to be content. Try as I might, though, I could not escape one frightening truth: that human nature needs a punishment to fit its crimes. And I came to writhe under the very absence of hardship in my life; to see in every kind word and happy coincidence a reproach which could not be silenced. Separation from Ella would not suffice as my only punishment; and with no recriminating words to hurt me, deprived of the catharsis of confession, there was nowhere for my guilt to turn but in on itself. So I devised self-inflicted privations—food I liked; certain pieces of music; access to my violin—all the while knowing that they were not enough, that they never could be enough.

  Frenzied in my guilt, I came increasingly to think that any joy, any satisfaction I might derive from my life or my art, was tainted by what I had done to Eric; that I owed it to him to turn my back on all which might please me, to renounce my chance of happiness since it was I who had made him renounce his. I thought that I was worthless; and I could not enjoy any feeling higher than that of earnest drudgery without thinking that I was cheating Eric further of what might have been his. I had already taken too much of what belonged by rights to another, you see; I had taken, or helped to take, that most vital and short-lived possession: life. And I dared not allow myself any pleasures save those my playing gave me, worried as I was that weakness then would lose me the last vestiges of my once prized self-respect. Frightened to confess and thus to obtain punishment from others, frightened too of remaining unpunished forever, I sought to punish myself; and in the private paying of my penance I was careful to allow myself no slack. I was a hard taskmaster, and therein lay my only relief.

  But nature was too strong for me in the end; and the harder I tried the more I learned that the human spirit cannot quite be silenced, even by the sternest, most implacable foe; that I was not equal, at the last, to ridding myself entirely of my own humanity. Ella had forced me to live, you see; more than that, she had made me alive to the possibilities of life; and such knowledge is impossible to forget, however good one’s intentions may be. Mine were very good, you may be sure of that; but they failed because I tried to drive all passion from me with an ardor which was passionate in its determination: passionate and thus self-defeating even at the peak of its power. Again and again I tried; again and again I did not succeed. And slowly I came to realize, with the certainty of repeated demonstration, that what I had done to Eric had made a numb and senseless life impossible for me; that my crime and subsequent grief had given me resources of experience and sensation which most people never accumulate in a lifetime of sober contentment.

  It was with this knowledge, and its consequences for my guilt, that I grappled as I worked with the furious energy of frenzied confinement. My soul—which is what I will call it until someone proposes a better word—was resisting its imprisonment, I see that now; I understand that it was struggling for release. And as my playing was its only avenue of escape, its only way to the lighter air of a world beyond my sorrow, it came out in my work with a focused intensity which is denied to happier minds. Slowly I came to realize that the extremes of joy and pain to which I had been exposed, first by Ella and then by Eric, had informed my art and had taken my talent to the threshold of genius; and such knowledge sickened me.

  I do not use words like “genius” lightly; that last phrase, for example, is not my own but Michael Fullerton’s; and it is from the headline of a review he wrote of the first concert I played after leaving the Guildhall. I have it somewhere in here, part of a neat bundle of reviews tied years ago by Sarah’s tireless fingers. But there is no point in finding it or the others with it; they all say much the same thing. I need no reminding of my career; or of how much I came to dislike adulation when I received it, how much I fought against the knowledge that my music had a power which I alone could not have given it. I came to be scared of the origins of that power. Now I am less so. Time has calmed me; and it is right that I should acknowledge the debt I owe to my dead friend; right that I should admit to myself that art, though not always born of suffering, can be; and that mine was.

  It requires the peace of age to admit certain things; to state them out loud. And it is only now, now that I have nothing left to prove (to myself or to anyone else) that I can give Ella’s love and Eric’s death the credit for my musical success. It was love which first tempted me from the shallows and which taught me to swim alone, I can see that now; and it was the part I played in my best friend’s death which so nearly made me drown. It is to these two experiences that I owe the riches of my later musicality. Left to myself I would have been technically impressive, nothing more; for I would not willingly have exchanged the shallows of my own mind for the waves in which I later floundered. It was Ella who threw me into the sea of life; it was she with whom I might have swum, out of my depth though I was. But I did not swim; and when Sarah offered me her hand I was only too willing to be pulled back to safety; only too relieved to regain once more the sight, if not the touch, of dry land. But my security was won at a price; and from that moment on my inspiration grew less urgent, less compelling; and I myself became less of a musician. My talent, as one o
f the reviews in the bundle will tell you, lay in the public translation of private passion. My only personal contribution to my art was the craft which allowed its expression; and beyond that the feeling was not mine, or at least it was not mine alone. It is something of a release to be able to say that at last.

  CHAPTER 26

  IGRADUATED FROM THE GUILDHALL in the summer I turned twenty-five; and my next concert, as I have said, was reviewed by Michael Fullerton with much enthusiasm in The Times. I keep his review in my desk drawer, for sentimental reasons, I suppose; and I cannot help but look at the photograph that accompanies it, a severe but dramatic shot of me standing on the stage of the Albert Hall, tiers of empty boxes rising above me and beyond the frame. I am simply dressed, for I have been rehearsing; and although I am holding my violin as if about to play, my face is tense and slightly stern.

  It is a face much more recognizably my own than the one which belongs to the boy who first met Ella, who first saw her youthful form as she sat alone on that sunny bench in the park. Only three years separate the faces, it’s true; but people can change, even in so short a time, and I had changed. Staring at my image now, the face seems older than its twenty-five years: there are lines where there used to be none; the eyes are narrower; the lips thinner; the cheekbones more pronounced. My hair was still long, of course, for my agent thought that long hair increased my stage presence and enhanced what she called my “romantic appeal.” But save the severity of my haircut now—for flowing locks do not survive middle age with dignity—I am little changed from the man who stares at me from the newspaper on my lap. Of course the passing of the years has heightened the signs of age, which is a difference between us; and naturally his lines have become my wrinkles. But I share a look with my twenty-five-year-old self which was unknown to me at twenty-two. It is a sad look; hard and reserved: a look which softens now, as then, only when I play. I was resigned at twenty-five, resigned to the sorrows of life; and I can see the resignation in my eyes.