Richard said: ‘We never thought of it as ‘Dunwich’ exactly when we came for picnics. It was just a decent place to paddle.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed pacifically, ‘and isn’t that just like all historical knowledge? It forces such dreary truths upon one! We were right the first time—it is a good place to paddle …’
‘And nothing more?’
‘Of course not—not if we didn’t happen to know it.’
‘Then what about the bones?’
‘They were just one more thing we didn’t know about.’
‘They must have known, Daddy and Mrs—your mother.’
Mary shrugged and laughed and said: ‘Come on. I’m freezing.’
‘Quenny knew,’ said Richard.
‘He did?’ And then because she did not want their talk to develop into yet more reminiscence she added, ‘Oh, Quentin …’ It was the dismissal of history again as well as a cue to the way they should be behaving.
Richard walked beside her. His hand was on her shoulder. She felt it hardly at all where his palm gripped the padding in her coat, but the tips of his fingers burnt against the softness of her arm. She was silent with sheer unanswerable joy of where they were and how they were, and could scarcely believe it when she heard him proposing a return to the car.
‘We don’t have to see the bones or Dunwich. We can go back up the lane—anywhere. What does it matter!’ He thought she was depressed by the place, and her stillness an expression of her boredom. He never thought that his steadying hand across the rucked dunes existed for her as an embrace.
She listened to him, a little at cross purposes with what he was saying and the reason for him saying it, before realizing with a tiny pang of regret that it did matter—where they went, that is. Dunwich became the city of destiny, even allowing for the fact that barely one brick of it still nudged another. They had come to it and it was for Dunwich to decide their whole new conduct, whether it was to be furtive or revealed; the world faced up to, or the world retreated from. To run away now was unthinkable. What did it matter what degree of mortality surrounded them? It was ridiculous and inconsequential. In Lafney it was the living, at Dunwich, the dead. Given the choice, who is to say that the latter may not prove the least formidable? Her intelligence told her all this, but her stomach revolted against the idea of hanging over the cliff-face and seeing that terrible débris.
The path along the cliff crumbled at every step and grew muddier at every turn. It crept up over her shoes and was so sticky she was obliged to walk with her feet rather apart with a coarse inelegance which made Richard laugh. She managed to laugh as well, but privately she found the wet sludge more nauseating than she could say. Once she floundered helplessly and after that he held her above the waist and she tried not to resent the certain, yet half-conscious exploratory touch of his hand beneath her breast. It was this above all which she despised in herself, the way she flinched at any physical move in this intoxicating new situation. They reached the cliff-top and there it seemed less wintry. What was left of the church lurched towards the sea with an almost voluntary energy from every haggard corbel and chamfered arch. Much of the building was already drowned and the rest must soon follow. The flints would be released at last from their mortar and the facing-stones made smoother than any mason’s shop could ever contrive them. A little cropped meadow covered the cliff, oddly green for January, in fact rather May-ish. There were swags of blackberry and intricate thickets of blackthorn which shook stiffly when the wind passed. A few yards from the church was a single tombstone on which was engraved, very sedately, ‘In loving Memory of Thomas Easey who departed this life August 22nd, 1828. R.I.P.’ A low curtain of cobblestones which had once been the Priory wall ran crazily for many yards to the extreme right and so still afforded a gaunt compound where pigs and poultry might scratch and wallow in safety.
Richard spread his mackintosh on the cliff edge and then himself on top of it. The bones, a long sand-stained layer of them, were about three feet down. They reflected a pale ochrous light and were like a costly filling which had failed to stay the inevitable corruption of the land. Mary crouched at his side and together they looked silently at the poor slender little knuckles of arm and thigh laid low like vanquished sceptres; the scattered reels of the vertebrae from which all meaning had long since been spun and a leaky basket of ribs through which sand and earth trickled remorselessly. Poised on a ledge, a small neat skull fixed its huge gaze upon an austere view.
She drew back when at last she saw this.
‘No—no—I can’t …’
‘At least we’ve seen what we came to see.’
This blunted truth sent her spinning back into her earlier isolation. He laid at her feet with a sprawling, tense grace, with his head dangling above the splitting graves and with a kind of avid stillness. ‘It’s too horrible …’ she protested, ‘too real, too actual. If that is everything, why make any effort … anywhere … Why struggle?’
Richard found her genuine concern rather enviable. It was the kind of thing he had attempted to feel himself a thousand times, but the genuine emotion had always become adulterated somehow by what he could only call ‘poetry’. Just when he was about to touch on an immediate experience, a sort of literary mattress descended between himself and it, and then what he really felt was something he might just as well have read, often with more profit and less inconvenience. He scrambled to his feet and picked up his coat. To reintroduce the warm, reasonable, living world he took both her hands in his own and kissed her, not on the mouth, but on her brow; a soft, dragging kiss of uttermost tenderness. The wind rushed up and around them, sweeping her skirts strongly against the back of her legs and she was unable to distinguish this embrace from his own, so that she discovered herself suddenly surrounded and hedged about with desire and sweetness. For a tumultuous second they remained standing there with the cold, noisy air swirling Richard’s and her own heavy clothes together like the rumpled finery in a baroque apotheosis. Gulls appeared, thrown up to their peaceful height from some more clamorous squalor on the beach itself. They howled and ranted and injected their own terrible exhilaration into the moment, before they fell back screeching to the sea. Oh Mary thought, closing her eyes, This is all and everything. Lafney is dust and there is dust below us, but this is the rich, the tangible, the living thing! I love him—I love him … But she said nothing, not daring to. Instead, with a tentative restraint which she half-guessed might please him, she drew his head down a little towards her own, then further, so that they laid side by side in a Janus completeness, looking up and down the long grey coast. It was absurd and wonderful. To maintain the nonsense, she moved her hand to the side of his face until she felt his ear, like nervous ice, and at this revelation she was able to tug herself free, pull the edges of her coat over her skirt and laugh happily.
It was then that he bewildered her by a grim gaiety of his own.
‘Do you think it’s very old?’ he asked.
He was looking over the cliff’s edge again, finding nothing there but the ingredients of another sensuous situation.
‘The skull?’ she enquired wonderingly. ‘No, not very. The sea is supposed to have reached the eighteenth century part of the churchyard. His king was probably George the Third.’
‘Or hers——’
‘Yes—or hers.’
‘I think I’ll get it.’
‘What?’
‘I shall be O.K. I shan’t fall,’ he said, mistaking her anxiety. ‘If I do, it’s only loose sand and the worst that can happen is that I shall get into a bit of a mess.’
‘But I don’t want it—it’s a revolting idea.’
‘Why?’ he demanded. He had turned and was looking her full in the face. ‘Why is it revolting?’ And then when she was unable to answer, made all at once silent and wretched by his flippant attitude. ‘It’s macabre, it’s strange—it’s affected if you like; but it’s not revolting.’ He knew he was being unreasonable, that this was only a hi
nt of how he would always repay devotion because devotion for him meant a prison of sorts and that he must have freedom—even freedom from love. Yet he hated himself for hurting her—and then began to hate her for existing to be hurt. All loathing is a trick done with mirrors which must inevitably reflect back to ourselves.
She was terrified and chastened by his unreasonableness. ‘Then don’t fall,’ she advised weakly.
‘No.’
He looked for the moment as if he might apologize or even kiss her. Then, fastening his coat carefully to prevent its catching, he swung his legs over the wet edge of the cliff and lowered his body until his feet came to rest on a little sinking hump of clay bellying out above the sea. Below were the dunes against which the waves slid in coldly unctuous scallops. The gulls were outraged and struck about the sky. The skull was near his knee. He could feel it. Clinging with one hand to a gorse root, he put his hand down and took it. It was like bird’s nesting. He remembered then how his hand would pass lightly over every kind of roughness until, with a faint sensual tremor, his fingers would discover the warm, delicate eggs. Only this time the egg was chilly and unreasonably heavy—it was full of sand. It fell from the grave to his hand easily and once he had moved it so far, he felt bound to accept it as some monstrous award. Getting back wasn’t so easy. He managed to button the skull inside the top of his coat. When at last he gained the neat, grassy headland it was to discover a more recent desolation. Mary had gone. He saw her in the distance, her head jerking and nodding as she stumbled back to the car. He thought, she’s furious. Quite forgetting about the state of the path which was the cause of her flouncing movements.
At that moment he would have tipped the skull back to where it would so soon have fallen, to the lonely beach. Mary’s grief was so evident that the skull became just an enormous reminder of his own selfishness. All at once he loathed it. He took it from his coat with disgust and immediately a quantity of smooth, summery sand poured from it, ritualistically, like the dust from a fissured sermon-glass. With the sand was spilt the horror, and when it was all gone, he felt that what remained described some curious aspect of beauty. The skull was fragile and warm. It was the colour of much-used chessmen and it awarded the January afternoon with a startlingly brash smile from its small, level teeth. The eyes alone maintained their awe. Their darkness was insupportable. He tried to forget this as he hurried back to the Alvis.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he explained. And he was.
‘I was just a bit cold,’ she said defensively. It was the truth; the most awful cold had possessed her for a moment. ‘Where is it? Did you manage to get it …?’
He revealed it casually. ‘The sand has proved quite a reasonable preservative.’ This was an old way-out of his—the endowing of an emotional act-of-the-moment with motive and consideration. ‘I’ll just shove it under the rug at the back.’
‘No—let me …’ She put out her hand, but drew it back at once, although certainly not meaning to flinch. Then she saw that it was quite beautiful, so clean and tidy and really so unsuggestive of misery that it might have been the delicate basis of some work of art that had crumbled away. In this way she could touch it. ‘It’s light—how light!’ she said.
‘It was full of sand which ran out like sugar.’
‘Oh, poor young man!’ she exclaimed, all at once ridiculously happy. ‘Do you think he was a sailor?’
‘Or poor young lady—Do you think she was a tart?’
‘It will have to be reasonably romantic if it’s to come with us in the car—either that or something purely scientific. We could say he was Edward-something and that he went twice round the Cape before dying of love for an Ipswich no-good. Why it’s as plain as the—’ She stopped abruptly. It was a mistake to play up to a false situation, or to other people’s sense of exaggeration. People always knew when one forced oneself along in their own particular brand of facetiousness and it never came off. The better one did it, the more care the imitated one took to hide his awareness of it. It was so flattering. And there was the extra felicity of hearing the imitator do quite badly what one did extraordinarily well oneself. This was Richard’s kind of nonsense. Coming from him it would have been acceptable. She watched rather sadly as he placed the reason for it in a corner of the back seat and threw a fold of the Inverness rug over it. Sliding across into the driving-seat, she revved the engine busily.
It was getting dark when they came to the purple rift of lane which cut across the main road like a transept and he said, surprisingly, ‘Right.’ More surprisingly still, she tugged the wheel and went right. And when he said, ‘Stop—Mary … will you ..?’ she did this too, only with a kind of bewilderment which sent the car rocking against the verge.
As he kissed her, with an efficiency she had not suspected and now could hardly bear, she thought, I won’t—I won’t! This is the worst thing I have ever done, this making plain of my needs, this exposure of them—She wanted to fight back against such a disturbing new enemy. Everything in her nature told her that if she did—and overcame there would be peace once more. Order and design, her ease and her awful tranquillity. Instead of this strength, however, there was a delicious ease of body in direct conflict with her mind, so strong in fact, as to master thought; to subdue it, even efface it. He was selfish because he was young (ten years younger, she thought—or almost) and he would destroy her contentment (and that was the lowest estimate at which she could assess her happiness) and she would now be wretched and miraculously happy in alarming succession; but wretched mostly. Worse, people would witness her destruction because she could never hide it; her mother would treat it cruelly, because she would be frightened and would dread losing her. It would have to be something to do with him, she considered, some failing which would be intolerable to her and revealed suddenly, that could effect her release. Nothing within herself could save her. If only some vulgarity could be found to repel her—something equivalent to the outrageousness of a face-slap which follows up an hysterical collapse! But there was nothing present which she did not long for, nothing to make her drag herself free from the whole idea of love—not even the conviction she held that Richard did not yet love her. He wanted her and idiotically enough, this made her glad. Like somebody from whom a deeply personal experience is being extracted by subtle questions, or a patient who must submit to a great pain or die, she withdrew her imagination from the vaster issue and took refuge in immediate trivia. First in Richard himself. His hair, which looked so fine and soft, was hot and coarse, she discovered, and his face was unexpectedly firm and cool against her own. It felt like fruit. Then the car gadgets—the brake rubbed shiny by all those stops and starts, the silver flower-holder caught against the windscreen by its sucker—it used to flaunt a carnation in her father’s day; now it was full of matchsticks … Moths, petals, white scraps of those old carnations were coming towards her now, whirling and twirling sadly. She watched them gently, saw them withering against the windows, saw them die, before she interpreted them correctly as a few soft stars of early snow. Night swelled the conifers and laid a bloom on the tarmac. An owl, hustling into action, was caught with threatening fidelity in the side-lights before the forest swallowed it in its maw.
‘Richard … my dearest …’
‘You mustn’t speak—you don’t have to, you know.’
‘Because of waking you up?’ she asked quietly. His extraordinary stillness hung over them both like an enchantment. After the adroit, sensual way in which he had kissed her, he was lying in her arms like a child.
‘You’ll come to Copdock?’ he asked.
She smiled in the cold darkness. ‘I might—but only on speech-days.’
He sat up abruptly and sighed. ‘Well you can’t say that a little silence isn’t a novelty in our case?’
‘Ours—?’
He saw his mistake, but was bound to explain.
‘Quentin’s, mine.’
‘I wonder why you should imagine yourselves so much alike—you’re
not really, you know.’ Then, when he didn’t answer, ‘You’ll be off pretty early tomorrow—?’
‘First train; the eight-seventeen.’
The everyday world rushed in on her. ‘If we’re sensible—’ she began. It was a plunge at rationality, yet the words died the second she uttered them, they dropped about her clumsily, calamitously, even. She thought of the future. The word ‘prudence’ entered her head and she was ashamed to find herself contemplating it with contemptuous amusement. Ashamed because she was being derisive about an aspect of her nature all too familiar to her. Prudence was like fear, she thought. If you were born with it, you don’t get rid of it in a hurry. It was essential to her whole peace at Meridian that nothing was said, nothing observed. Her mother would be the first to concoct some kind of pity if she found out, and that would be intolerable. He must be silent. She demanded it with a little desperate glance, because how could she possibly say it! But she needn’t have worried. Both Quentin and Richard were naturally furtive, even Edwina only getting as much of their lives as they thought possible for her. Neither of them liked to think that he deceived. It was all a matter of not saying. It was an option of shadows and cheerfulness, or of clarity and pain. Stella alone was crystal. She evoked the image of a full-length glass in which was reflected the unanswerable conduct of a hockey captain.
A Treasonable Growth Page 10