Each corridor of trees seemed made to be explored, each green shadow promised mystery. He slid down the smooth grass to the first trunks. The sun’s rays shaded into a submarine twilight. Above his head each leaf was brilliantly depicted, like an image of the piercingly precise birdsong which punctuated the afternoon. On his left a track led deeper. He avoided it: he sought mystery, the fulfilment of adventure. Desiccated leaves cracked underfoot like shells as he strayed to the right. The stout boles closed him in; looking back, he could no longer see his car. This was the only pure aesthetic, the true poetry, he thought. The bird-calls lured him onward. Crushed scents of trampled undergrowth moved with him; he thrust between trunks, cracking strips of bark, wading through tall grass, brushing aside dulled and somnolently nodding flowers. Overhead the branches interlocked and merged; translucent leaves glowed. The birdsong was muffled, suffocating. Derek’s toe plunged into fungoid trumpets. The air swarmed with midges. His feet sank into rotting leaves. It must be time to turn back. Janice would be waiting. He disengaged his sleeve from an outstretched branch, but in the underwater light he could not read his watch. He drove forward blindly, through a solid curtain of leaves, and fell into a clearing.
An insect struggled from the grass before his face, its diaphanous wings rainbowed like a trembling soap-bubble. He scrambled to his feet and saw the tree.
Its roots were clenched, crumbling the earth. From them it swelled, gigantic, to its first thrusting branches, pushing back the trees which encircled the clearing; through its meshed canopy of leaves others could be glimpsed, piled like cloud-banks. Its rich trunk, dark yet warm, stood alone on a mound of autumn built high from the edge of the glade. And from the overwhelming branches fruit depended like solid drops of sap, large as apples, soft and shaped as peaches.
After an age Derek stepped forward. His first gasp still trembled through the glade. Above him banked leaves rustled. A breeze sifted down. A branch shook. And as his hand shot out, a fruit fell on his palm.
It was a ball of pale velvet. He caressed it, searching for a flaw; there was none. It shone against the brown mound. Without thinking, he lifted his hand and bit into the fruit.
Juice coursed from it; he threw back his head and drained the liquid, spilling amber down his chin. In the shade his fingers were sticks of honey. He chewed and categorized. It was useless. He had tasted nothing to compare. Wine, fruit, meat — something of each, yet on another plane, something almost spiritual which was beyond eating, was the sunlight, shade, the open fields, the moment when one is truly alone and yet a part of all. For a moment he wished he could share the tree with someone. Janice. He gulped the fruit.
He rammed the trunk. It stood its ground. He ran to the lowest branch and leapt. The mound obstructed him. He smashed through the screening leaves and tore a limb from the nearest tree, broke back into the clearing and clubbed a branch. Caterpillars dropped on threads and drew themselves up to safety. He clubbed again. Fruit fell, softly swallowed by the mound. He darted to them, caught them up and stuffed his pockets. Around him leaves fell and became the mound, shaping the silence.
A woman was whimpering, sobbing, straining for words. The flat, too twilit yet for light, was full of people, sitting on furniture, leaning, grouped about each other. Hands greeted Derek. “It’s simply that I can’t get interested in a thriller printed in Monotype Bembo,” Graham Fisher said, closing a conversation, and T think Gilbert and Sullivan are the true pop art,” remarked John Williams, abandoning another. The sobbing woman was a record: Luciano Berio’s Visage, before which Alan Price was rapt. Derek looked for Janice: she shone beyond the crowd, her black and blood-red military dress buckled with a medal like an engraved moon, the occasional hint of underskirt, bronze tights, crimson sunset shoes. Smiling, she waved.
“Oh, Jan, let me scribble some sketches,” Derek said. “Cohering the group over there is Graham Fisher — of Identity and Awareness and Ambiguity, of course — restrained by Pat, and trying to get a word in are Norma, our consultant on table manners, and John Brighouse, who’s following Steinbeck from job to job…Then John Williams is the singing solicitor, and backing away from Berio is Alan, poet, critic and transcendentalist — trying to convert Bob Grant to the new music. Bob, together with John and Beryl Stretch here, maintains a certain sanity in these proceedings — Oh, you know them?”
“I’ve had time to circulate, darling. Anyway, I know John and Beryl from the Playhouse Theatre bar.” Janice turned back to them. “So it’s all over with Frank,” she continued. “He started to bore me. As soon as I get someone I want — ”
“I’ll set out the pate,” Derek said.
“ — I don’t want them anymore. He’d reached the stage of ringing up — “what are you doing to me?” — at two in the morning.”
Bodies passed across the engraved moon. The sobbing voice had found words, but was shouted down by a terrifying male chorus. Derek set plates around the low table like decorations and balanced in the triangles of pate. “A vote of thanks to Jan,” he called through the curlicues of smoke, the floating conversations. The record slowed and clicked silent. “How about John Cage?” Alan called hopefully. “Eat now, think later,” Derek replied and waited while they joined him at the table, trailing conversations.
Janice, John and Beryl sat at the other end from Derek. “I think you’ll like Spain,” Janice said. “Except for the bullfighting. I was the only one in the hotel who wouldn’t go. And of course there’s all these marvellous churches on one side and the beggars on the other. You’re awfully far away, Derek,” she protested.
“Sorry.” He took a bite of pate to link himself with her. Then he stared at the bitten triangle. “My God,” he muttered.
“What’s wrong, isn’t it any good?” asked Janice.
“It’s beautiful, you don’t need me to tell you. It’s just — ” There was no way to put it into words.
“Everyone coming to the Pinter at the Playhouse on Saturday?” John Stretch asked the others.
“I saw it in London,” Derek said, fighting free of some preoccupation. “Magnificently menacing but lacking in cosmic perspective, as you’d say, Graham. I’m staying in on Saturday for Debussy on tv — call round later if you’re free, folks. Listen, Jan, let’s recap on Spain for a minute. Aside from your anti-Catholic point, which we’ll overlook, how do you relate your horror of bullfighting to, say, this pate which you bought? Have you any idea how pate is produced?”
“Come on, Derek, there’s a world of difference. Food is a necessity, but you can’t tell me — ”
“No specific food is necessary, Janice. If you’re going to be true to your dislike of causing suffering then you should turn vegetarian.” He abstractedly bit into the triangle and was again distracted.
“I like that, attacking my pate with your mouth full of it!”
“You know I’m not attacking you personally, darling. As for me — well, of course we Catholics don’t accept that animals feel pain. It would make nonsense of the whole religious analysis of pain.”
“God! Derek, have you ever heard a dog after a car’s had its back legs?” asked Janice furiously. “I think you simply use religion as a shield. If you’re confronted with something frightful you say it’s the will of God. Can’t you act instead of thinking? Substantiate or withdraw!” she cried — a pet phrase and Derek’s favourite: it called to his love of argument.
He put down the gnawed pate; he’d think about that later. “There’s so little one person can do,” he said.
Janice and John Brighouse were dancing to the Rolling Stones; her medal flashed its hieroglyph. The lights were on; Derek, sipping whisky, stared through his reflected face at the spires of Brichester silhouetted on the barred sky. He should have bought Janice a present for her help. Suddenly he thought of the fruit in a paper bag in his car. That first taste of pate — “I’m working on a study of the Jehovah’s Witness morality in Mickey Spillane,” Alan said to someone, and joined Derek. “I’d like to take yo
u up on pain,” he remarked.
“Go ahead.” Derek turned from Janice luminous above Brichester to Janice.
“You look as if you want to dance with her.”
“I can’t.” Each tip of him was an extension of his mind, too sensitive to be forgotten in the gay trance of dancing. “Forget it. What did you want to say?”
“To begin with, that pain is abstract. You can’t feel someone else’s pain, which is why you could eat that pate.”
If he only knew — “I agree with you,” Derek said. “Like the lover overwhelming his suffering beloved with solicitude. Too much sympathy is a reaction against not being able to experience the other’ suffering; it can become irritating for both. For all he knows she’d rather be left alone.”
“Precisely. And conversely you can’t communicate your own suffering; only you can handle it. I’m not at all religious as you know, but to take a mystical line — No, let’s call it intellectual. You talk of experiences — aesthetics and art and so on — but in a sense pain is only another experience. We know we can switch off experiences — you can withdraw intellectually from an experience and it immediately becomes meaningless. Shouldn’t you similarly be able to render pain meaningless?”
“It’s an interesting point.” The record halted: “Bah, pas encore plus de Pierres qui Roulent!” Bob Grant protested. “And yet — ” Derek continued — “let’s not underestimate sympathy. There could be situations where someone else might be the only salvation.”
“Doesn’t anyone want to stay for a slice of Penderecki’s St Luke Passion?” Derek suggested. But coats were being held and donned; buses, trains were waiting; everyone was leaving.
A light rain pricked the hot air. Derek and Janice ran beneath a coat to his car. “Only the bourgeois care about getting wet,” called Graham, answered by Pat: “Graham, don’t be pretentious!”
Ahead John Stretch’s car pulled out, sluicing the rain from its roof. Alan climbed into the back of Derek’s car. “Hello, darling, I hope you enjoyed the party?” Janice asked. Derek followed John’s blurred tail-light through the sprinkled mist to the Lower Brichester bus terminus. He was glad she’d liked the party; it had been hers as much as his. “Jan, if you find a paper bag on the window-ledge,” he said, “it’s for you.”
“Aren’t you sweet! What is it?” In the mirror he saw her hand, groping against headlights. Paper rustled. “All that’s in here,” she said, “is a gooey mess I’ve just put my hand in.”
“Jan, I’m awfully sorry. It was something special, really. It must have gone bad.”
“That’s a bit lowbrow for you, Derek, surely,” Alan said, “practical joking?”
A whistle blew. Couples parted and ran to their buses. Two policemen watched a loud crowd stamp upstairs. Janice and Alan turned up their collars against the gusts of drizzle. “There’s a fantastic Hogarth-atmospheric pie-stall specially for you near here, Alan. I’ll probably see you at the weekend,” Derek said. “I’ve taken the week off from the library to enjoy my flat.”
“I don’t think I’d like to live alone for ever,” Janice said.
Friday. The morning after. It was late; the curtains swayed in sunlight. Derek felt as muffled as the music from the radio in the flat above. He padded through his flat, gathering the scattered records — Berio, the Rolling Stones, the unplayed Penderecki — and shelved them; then he blotted out the brass band overhead with Dylan: “All I really want to do — is baby be friends with you.” Undigested fragments of the party returned to him. The bag of fruit bruised as flesh. The pate. He wasn’t yet ready to think. He filled his bath, spied on by Picasso’s eyes; through the ceiling came the calls of marriage. He balled his pyjamas; later to the laundry. Lying in the bath, waiting for his thoughts to form, he watched the water dull, turn grey. Poor wife upstairs, washing her husband’s clothes. How displeasing the body was, how unaesthetic; that was why Derek didn’t think he’d ever marry — the daily stains were something to be concealed in shame. He picked up the soap. He hoped Janice hadn’t thought the bag of rotting fruit had been a joke —
When he’d taken his first bite of pate the taste had been that of the fruit, of the sunlight. Astonished, he might have mused for hours; but he’d set the miracle aside for conversation. Just a powerful aftertaste, he’d thought. But not so: subsequent tastes had been the pate, transformed into the fruit. He couldn’t question; he’d accepted. Something had entered and elevated him. Why hadn’t he been able to communicate the experience? No matter; now it was part of him. And if Janice had been right about the suffering of animals — Of course she hadn’t, but he could bypass moral doubts; there was now no argument against becoming vegetarian. No longer need he take hours over cooking. There was only so much time in this world, time to read the Dali he’d bought months ago, to read The Golden Bough, of which he’d once said: “Any rational Catholic should be capable of reading Frazer.” He rose wet from the bath, dried, dressed and went into the kitchen.
A boiled egg to begin with. The water churned and bubbled. Derek’s tongue was thick with last night’s whisky. He enthroned the egg within its cup. Folding a sandwich, he chewed.
The taste was there, but disappointing. Still, he thought, it must be the hangover. One would scarcely appreciate a sunset with a hangover. Unless the effect was wearing off. He’d collect more fruit later, more than he needed for himself. But first, the Brichester Herald and the Times.
The last few lines of sunlit rain lashed across the windscreen and were split into component drops. On an impulse he turned left toward Graham’s and Pat’s bungalow beyond Brichester, the children Mark and Baby Jane, to talk of his experience. But the bungalow was silent, shining; Graham must be at a librarian’s conference, Pat and the children would be shopping. Baulked, he aimed for Goats-wood, for the lay-by.
He stood before the forest. Transmuted by the rain, the twigs were strands of steel, melting brightly, dripping. Ahead a path plunged; the tree stood somewhere to the right. He’d collect fruit for Janice and make sure they were sound. He trod through the drenched grass; branches wept on him. Ahead the depths glittered like jewelled shadow. Trunks forced diversions. Somewhere birds fluttered and complained. Deep in the labyrinth he stopped, struck off to the left toward a looming bole, halted, retraced his tracks. He’d tied no thread to twigs. He threshed onward; his legs were soaked. Another distant trunk betrayed its promise. He pressed toward a filtered fan of sunlight, which withdrew as he approached. A screen of leaves before him seemed secretive; parted, it revealed only vistas of dim branches. At last he turned, beat back twined foliage, emerged onto the road and walked back to his car. Perhaps another day. Next time he’d draw a map.
A storm massed overhead. Suffocated by the thick air and by the stench of damp leaves, Derek felt a little sick. He decided on a meal; not his own — he’d find a restaurant to calm his stomach. He drove toward Brichester. Above the dull hills streaks of light broke free and were suppressed. As he passed his flat two windows in the strip lit up; his own was dark. He thought of Janice.
In the rain the multi-coloured signs of Brichester varied rhythmically, like kinetic art. Passing the pillars of the Art Gallery, Derek saw the poster of an exhibition; he’d take a look and then eat in the coffee bar.
On the walls colours pulsed like blood; blocks of red leapt forward and sprang back to give place to the blue; monochrome spirals spun and drew him in; perspectives changed, constructions flaunted their impossibility. His faint nausea whirled. Resonating footsteps led him down the corridor to the coffee bar. Colours marched by, meaningless. As he reached the bar he was attacked by a blast of heat and coffee. He bought a cup and sandwiches. Searching for a seat among the jagged sculptures, he came upon Alan Price, writing at a table.
“A new poem?” Derek asked. Then he saw that Alan was completing a crossword. “Shades of Janice,” he remarked.
“This is hers. She left a few minutes ago for somewhere. She’s attractive, isn’t she?”
“Y
es, very.” Derek couldn’t concentrate; he felt faint.
Around him the muted conversations were receding. He stared at his plate. His stomach was beyond control. He stood up carefully. “If you can eat this for me, go ahead,” he said, steadying himself with a chair. “The best thing I can do is to lie down.”
Next morning he couldn’t face food. During the night he’d been troubled by gulps of some taste he hadn’t been able to place. Perhaps he hadn’t brushed his teeth. The weakness in his stomach trembled through his limbs. He hadn’t been to the doctor for years; he hadn’t felt the need. Now he felt incapable of coping without help. He struggled to the car, wearily cleaned the speckled windscreen, and drove slowly to the surgery on the edge of Brichester.
He should have brought something to read; he had no urge to study Woman’s Own or Beano, nor yet the Daily Mirror. Opposite him a toothless woman mouthed silently, stretching threads of saliva; usually he’d have felt sympathy, but suffering had dulled his responses. Children ran about the waiting-room, frequently brought to heel and screaming, soon released to chase once more, knocking against Derek’s brain. Derek read the National Health posters, distracted by the choreography of raised heads each time the surgery bell shrilled. Two hours later, he reached Dr Love.
“Well, well, well, Derek, isn’t it? What seems to be the trouble?” The doctor filled his swivel chair; in the mirror his grey cupola of hair betrayed its careful brushing.
“I seem to have acquired an upset stomach.” Once exposed to the air, Derek’s prepared phrase disintegrated.
“Dear, dear, I see, yes. And have you eaten anything that’s disagreed with you?”
“Not that I can think of. Well, I did eat some fruit.” Immediately Derek regretted saying so; it couldn’t be the fruit, and he could scarcely describe his experience in the woods.
“Ah, is that right, now? And what kind of fruit was that?”
Derek searched; he might as well be pretentious. “Lychees, actually.” Dr Love raised his eyebrows. “It’s a kind of Chinese dessert, like — well, I don’t know — ” Derek trailed off.
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