The Dead Seagull

by George Barker

  As I gazed out of the open window of the train I heard the murmur in the distance and then the rumbled tick-tocking and then the appalling cacophony all around as the approaching train swept up and past us; and intermittently, interrupted by blanks and shadows, I saw my own face flying opposite, transfixed on the train that raced backward to the place I had come from: the mindlessness of those three weeks, that, I concluded, was the moral paralysis; then I had experienced the immense demotion of being a dog.

  * * * *

  Theresa, lying on a coloured blanket in the little garden at the rear of the cottage, looked up slowly as I closed behind me the door that opened into the garden. Her concentration upon the knitting in her fingers had allowed an expression of abstracted dereliction to arise from her unguardedness and to appear in her face; but, as she looked up from her knitting, this expression, slowly, like the permutations of clouds, became one, first, of delighted incredulity and then she smiled and lifted up her left hand towards me. She said nothing. I felt that nothing could so properly express the spell-bound poignancy of our re-union as the silence, the glittering silence, of that meeting. I sat beside her on the blanket and held my arm about her shoulders: she rested her head against my cheek, and, discarding her knitting, locked her fingers in mine. And we watched the clouds, by this time foreshadowing the evening, conduct their chorus of ballet out towards the sea. It was the silence, the silence of the time and the occasion, of the clouds, of the countryside, and, most of all, of our own fulfilment, that overcame me: I lowered my head on my knee and the withheld tear burned in the corner of my eye like a flaring star.

  * * * *

  Was this, O Gabriel, the last that I shall ever know of natural happiness? What were you bearing so everlastingly away, evening that seemed to vanish over the horizon in the instant of my tear; You had taken my innocence. For those first moments, in their ineffable tenderness, blinded all other emotions with their brightness.

  And for the last time, I knew, I felt at one with the world. This is the innocence of the pagan who is not deceiving or being deceived by life, but who is simply welcoming it with a ceremony of appropriate emotions. But the last act of a happy man is to know that he is happy. The sun fell out of the sky into the English Channel. I heard myself speaking from remote distances down corridors that invested my voice with an unrecognisable theatricality.

  “ … delay … the swans … Selfridges … with a walking stick … handed the cheque to me in a quarto envelope and said … ”

  Theresa, the pupils of her eyes enormously enlarged, seemed to be staring at me as one stares at an acrobat performing a dangerous trick, believing but not believing. I must have led her out of the garden into the kitchen, for I see her face, then, smiling in a glaze of pallor like a cracked plate, break and spin away as I heard myself shout, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let’s have tea.”

  And after taking tea in silence she came and stood behind my chair so that her arms fell like a Hawaiian festoon about my neck and her hair flickered, when she lowered her head, at my cheeks. By this time the kitchen had filled with immense shadows, and on a wall, emblazoned in a dazzling brightness, a last hieroglyph of light wrote valedictions. The cups gleamed. I sensed, as one sometimes does in dreams, that an experiential altitude had been reached from which there is nothing to do except cast oneself headlong down. Then her voice took to its wings from that peak and I sat in silence listening.

  “My dear love,” she said, “now that you are home again I wish to say to you the things that my loneliness without you has made clearer to me. Because I love you so much I am tempted to make many demands of you, to insist that you do this or that as I would wish you to do. Oh, how deeply I yearn for your absolute truthfulness, for your wholehearted honesty, for your trustworthiness. If I could I would implant these things within you just as you have planted yourself within me. But I do not love you for what you are, I love you because you are. Loving you, I desire to possess you; and possessing you I desire to make you part of me; and this desire is so strong that if it took a viper to its breast it would change it into a virtue.

  “No, do not interrupt me. I have a sort of second knowledge about you, for we have known each other so well and so happily. I could believe that I feel it when motor cars only just miss running you over in the street. And when you are in the room with me I understand the absurdity of the outer spaces, for then they are empty. When you are not with me I am like them, empty and absurd.

  “I do not want to know why you stayed away, because I think that I already know. I think that I knew this before you had been gone a week. And the first night of this knowledge—you know it was knowledge and not fear or suspicion—I thought that my heart was breaking with every beat. Until, as I seemed to reach the vacuum of anguish, the child inside me kicked and spoke. What it said is what I now say to you. And if, my dear love, you cannot help killing me, I beg you, in the name of my love for you, to kill quickly.”

  Her arms unwound themselves from my shoulders; she lifted her head and moved away. If, unlike Orpheus, I could only turn around and stretch out my arms, would we both be saved?

  But I sat quite still, feeling the moral paralysis overtaking my emotions, my mind and my body. Now, it seemed to say, now if you so little as lift a finger it will be murder. I heard the door close behind her and her step, heavy with burden, die away down the passage that led to the bedroom. And with the dying away of her going I think that my whole past life died within me. I rose from the chair and took up my mackintosh: I do not think that I was visible to the three men I passed on my way to the little pub in the village.

  * * * *

  Dark nurse of sleep, star-fingered shepherdess, look in at her window and quieten her restlessness. Is there nothing and no one in her room but the whimpering beast of my infidelity spread over a naked form that is both her dead body and the lineaments of Marsden’s gratified desire? The tighter she closes her eyes the brighter the image of her anguish is. She dreams, perhaps, betrayals of her own, done, in turn, upon me. I can almost pray so.

  * * * *

  In the Goat and Compass a farm hand named Jim brought his pint across to the window where I sat and lowered himself, giving a puff, onto the seat. “Glad to see you again,” he said, “will you have a drink?” Then he saw that I had my glass. We drank in silence for a time. He pulled occasionally at a pipe. He turned his head as a remark occurred to him. “How’s the wife now?” he asked.

  I told him that she was pretty well all right. But from the tone of his question I suspected that his enquiry was more than a casual formality. “Why ‘now’?” I asked him, not expecting a very clear answer.

  “Well,” he pulled slowly at his pipe, “I suppose she hasn’t told you. Trust me to go talking out of turn. It wasn’t nothing to worry much about. She was lying out on the hills. My bitch found her. She said she had a giddy spell, and couldn’t rightly remember what happened. I fetched her home. She was fairly done in. But we gave her a drop o’ whisky in milk, and she perked up. Oh,” he told me, when I asked, “about a week or so back. I wouldn’t take on. I’ve had the cows a-dying on their four legs and when the time comes they drop their calves and they lick ’em and up they get and look around for a bull.”

  I bought more drink. By now Jim seemed a bit the better for it. “And talking about bulls,” he went on, with a face so expressionless that it might have been cut in wood, “that other young lady you had down—the one with the yellow hair—she was a brash one, sir, if I may say so. She comes to me in the shed—you’ll not mind my telling you—I’m there with William, the young brown bull—and she talks to me like this. ‘Jim, tell me, are you frightened of the bull?’ And ‘Jim, tell me, how many cows does he serve?’ She stands in the mud and stares at the bull. William, he doesn’t take kindly to strangers. But she goes up to him and takes his horn in her hand. I tell you I was taken aback a bit. So I take her away from William. ‘But Jim,’ she says, ‘what I’ve always wanted to know is how you geld
’em.’ She asks me do I use scissors or knives or what. And when I tell her, pincers, she says, ‘Pincers. You clip the strings like wire.’ And she walks away from us.” Jim finished off his beer without looking at me to see what effect his story had had upon me: largely, I suppose, because he knew me quite well enough to take my concurrence for granted.

  “Did you like her?” I asked, searching for a meaningless remark.

  He smiled. “She was the prettiest face I ever saw in this valley,” he said, and got more drink from the bar.

  * * * *

  I find continually that, in telling this story, it is not so much a sequence of events that I have to relate, as the evolution of emotions within emotions within events. For it is the emotion engendered by any one event that decides, by a sort of episodic parentage, the nature of the events that will ensue from its existence. The gratified duplicity we feel when we execute our first adept deception is the source of our second and more adept deception. The hedonists in us, O God, will tear us to pieces—and not for their delight, but for our own. And the perplexity in all this complexity is that puzzled suspension of criticism to which unthinking sentimentalists give the term, the love of life. For, in truth, this elaborately complicated machine, the existential engine, in which emotions evolve behaviour which in turn evolves emotions wholly unpredictable from any of their precedents—in which the origin of actions can be simply the passion to encompass their own eventual destruction—this machine, like an engine made of glass, shows us exactly how the rose leaf and the bus ticket we insert at one end, may emerge, after heaven knows what metamorphoses, as history, or the will to power, or the poems of Paul Verlaine at the other.

  * * * *

  The deep sea monsters stir in the abysses of their misery and, clasping their tentacles about each other, copulate without knowing it: thus, in obedience to the laws of zoology, I, no less the son of their ignorance than my son is of my knowledge, stir, so many generations later, and love in the depths of my misery. Sweet Pascal, I think that you were wrong: because we know that we suffer we are, as I see it, lesser than the animals. For the degree of our suffering is the degree of our deviation from the divine will. Every twist of the snake as it kills gesticulates to the glorification of God: does every desire I undergo degrade Him? Physical love is a sin because there, and not in the arguments of atheists, god has been rendered unnecessary: in the centre of the ovum is the atheistical void. To redeem our immersion in this void we are destined to beget a second generation of victims and sufferers. Thus the purpose of the suffering in life is to redeem the blasphemy of having begot it. And the blasphemy of two lovers, at that mutually sufficient moment of consummated love, when god, standing in the corner of the room, knows that, at that kiss, he is unnecessary, this is the blasphemy that drives him, no matter how briefly, out of our house. Not until the soul has divested itself of the love of created things can it aspire to the divine union.

  * * * *

  That night I intended to sleep, as I had done sometimes before, on a makeshift bed in the kitchen. But before I retired, perhaps about midnight, I looked in at Theresa where she lay asleep. No feeling moved me to do so other than an inclination to reassure myself about her simple comforts. I thought that perhaps the clothes might have slipped away from her, or the window need closing.

  In the darkness, half lighted by the moon and a few stars, the bedroom seemed, at first, to be empty. I could feel the cold fright seize me for an instant: she has gone away. And then I saw that the emptiness was merely an illusion of lights and shadows. She lay sleeping tenderly at a diagonal across the bed, her face paler than in the day.

  I moved across in silence and knelt by the side of the bed. The clock went on whispering near my ear. “Oh, my dear love,” I thought with horror then, “if she should die!” And I laid my head on her breast, but she did not waken.

  In the morning, when she was still asleep, I came round from a sort of uneasy aphasia; I found myself lying on the floor by the bed. It was a cold morning, and my back ached. I made coffee and brought it into her. She opened her eyes with a smile that almost immediately disintegrated into grief as she looked up at me. For a time she stared at me with a sort of barefaced unhappiness full of accusations and questions. Then, putting up her bare arms, she held me almost desperately to her and I took her close as she wept inconsolably over my heart.

  * * * *

  Do I expect Marsden to stay away? I hope and expect that my sudden abandonment of her yesterday morning has hurt her overvulnerable pride so badly that she may. But I do not expect a peace of any duration; she will come down, I know, in a cloud of magnificent indignation and—what? It will merely conceal her singlepurposed pursuit of the prey. I love her because she is an animal as incapable of sin as a tigress. She has no soul. I see in her not the misery of man separated from his creator but the defiance of the beast who cannot envisage god. Nor does this militant amorality, which I see in even the most modest as certainly as in the most immodest of her traits, drive me, consistently away from her. For I am as often fascinated by her ruthless egomania as I am by the egomania of the bird or the political pride of great nations. And I see in her selfishness, further, the state of grace worn naturally by us all before the Fall, when the nude mother, with her puzzle of children about her, walked over the fields, unaware that she was again pregnant, unable to recall any events that might have given origin to her babies, conscious only of the sun, the earth, the satisfaction of the body and an incomprehensible tenderness towards these children. Unable to recall any events that might have given origin to her babies for the ineffable reason that sexual love, to the truly innocent, to the truly innocent in a state of grace, must be as naturally virtuous as any other of the bodily obligations, and therefore indistinguishable from them. Without the inherent and inherited magnification of original sin, we live in a world where a sneeze and an orgasm hold meaningless candles to each other, and illuminate nothing.

  * * * *

  And the purpose of my story is to reveal that this is possible.

  * * * *

  I could, if I were to distort the characters and the events of my account, and especially if I were to vitiate the spiritual aura worn by these happenings—and by all happenings—and by these three people—as well as by all others—if I were to twist this spiritual halo only a little out of its shape into a perfect circle, my story would resemble a morality, and the characters could be understood, allegorically, in a greater significance. Then I should put before you the bright and the dark, the humility and the pride, the kingdom and the cloud, the innocence of guilt and the guilt of innocence, the dove and the serpent, all those symbols of spiritual antithesis in which the duality of human nature expresses its consciousness of moral war. This is the war between the beast, innocent of all its crimes by reason of its ignorance, and the dove of exculpations and repentances, sufferings and charities—the bird of knowledge. Whomever the beast lacerates, it is, always, the dove who bleeds. Whenever the beast tears, it is, always, the dove who accepts the guilt and the responsibility. For we know only too well what we do, no matter how desperately the beast, fulminating with perfectly legitimate disclaimers, drives us to do it.

  * * * *

  Huge, by now, in her chair, Theresa, later the same morning, seemed anxious to talk. Continually I saw questions and judgements die away as soon as they formed themselves clearly in her mind or rose to her lips. But for a reason that I suspect was at its heart a fear of being misunderstood, she succeeded in saying nothing for a long time. Sitting quietly, as we were, I feel again the foreboding and the apprehension of those moments that took hours to expire and those hours that took perplexities to die. And then, unable to bear the anticipation longer, I spoke: “Theresa,” I heard myself saying slowly, “have I truly estranged myself from you? I know that I have, but I cannot resign myself to it. There are so many questions and so few answers. What I wish above everything at this moment is that I could save myself the pain of seeing the pain
on your face. I do not even know whether I am capable of answering your hardest questions truthfully. If you ask me to hurt you by speaking what you fear is the truth, how can I speak it? I do not know the truth.”

  “Do you truly love Marsden?” she said remotely, before I could continue. She raised her hand to her lips as though to imprison the question that had escaped forever. “No, no, no,” she cried, covering her face with her hands, “I beg you not to answer.” Her body shook in a convulsion of grief. “Not now, not now.” She, avoided my touch as I sought to console her. “Oh God!” she whispered, and her eyeballs rolled upward into her skull, her hand, as she wiped away tears with a handkerchief, fell at the side of her chair, and she fainted.

  * * * *

  “I’m perfectly all right.” She smiled a little wanly, when she had revived.

  “We must go away. Now! Today!” I exclaimed. “We must go away.” And in an access of pity and resolution I kissed her hands.

  “Yes, yes,” she scarcely breathed, “we must go away.”