Arrived in Raws, she was welcomed with open arms by those who saw in her the penitent returned with her spiritual gains. This gave no small encouragement to the indigenous folk for it showed them that they themselves might do what she had done. She set up house in Raws and many were the guests who came to her house. Indeed it can safely be said that hers was the most popular house in the island, and not until the early hours of the morning did her visitors depart, fortified by her conversation and her kindly dalliance.
Often with tears she would lay a wreath of orchids on the graves of her parents and caused a marble monument to be built to them on which she had carved these words: ‘Gone Before, But not much Before.’
So she lived to a good old age, providing pleasure and benefit to all and had no cause to regret the day she had left Glassgreen for as she herself once remarked in one of her more serious moments, ‘The competition here is not so fierce as in the wicked world of the south.’
Thus, therefore, is told the legend of Murdina who from being an apple-cheeked girl became a dowager of the neighbourhood, contributing much tablet to the local sale of work as well as many cast-off dresses some of which are to be seen to this day in colours like purple and pink.
It is easy to see therefore that those who leave these beautiful islands with their lovely airs and golden sands always have the urge to return as she did, happy in that they have abandoned the snares and competition of the metropolis.
The Injustice to Shylock
What does he require of me? Does he himself know? One moment I am odious, the next eloquent. One moment I am standing in a courtroom defending myself, the next attacking my accusers with words I did not know I possessed, words so violent and so lovely that I satiate myself on them and wish them back again. But the next moment I am barren and grey, an old monk in an alien world. Who am I? I say to him. I clutch my Bible but it is like a stone, there is no answer. My heart beats dully. Where am I going, now without progeny? Where am I, beaten and poor, to go? I ask for new words but he gives none. He is entirely unfair to me, a miser with his vocabulary. One moment I am perfect and happy, executing the exact motions of my being, a self-admirer, the next he removes the harmony from me. My friends secretly laugh at me. I am betrayed by justice and by language together. They listen to the young and beautiful but not to the old. They do not know me. No one here knows me and he makes no attempt to let them know me. How could they, revolving in their frivolous circles, recognise this grey man at the centre who is not me and whom he will only permit to speak in broken tones? What does he know about me? Has he suffered? What right does he have to pass judgment on me from his bountiful universe, I who am compelled to perpetual silence and meagreness once I leave the room that he has placed me in at the end? He has removed language from me but that does not mean that I do not exist. I pray for better words, any words, but he does not give them to me. He has his favourites and they are the beautiful and the plausible and the negligent and the unprincipled. They have their music without morality or meaning, their fine tinkling idiocies, but he does not speak for me. Once or twice he did but then he forgets me, seduced by them, their apparent immortality. I understand that but I cannot forgive it.
He has taken everything away from me and he has not even given me myself, for I sway as in water between the tragic and the comic. Ah, but he says, I must not make you wholly tragic nor must I make you wholly comic. But what about the others? He has made them wholly careless. How does he know what I feel when I look at those others, single in themselves, elegant and exact and insensitive? Does he not see that I require a clearer future if I am to keep faith with the simplicities of justice? Does he care for justice at all or is he enchanted by the corrupt music of the nightingale?
What am I to do in this harmonious city – this city of false and base symmetry whose salons are built on stones? How am I to endure the merciless azure of its amoral sky, the perpetual flowering of its golden suns, breeding their perpetual rays? How am I to endure the music of careless youth when they return to their houses in the moonlight, she in her false black clothes (imitating the tranquil self-possession of a false law) and he in his large bluff insincerities? Their heaven appears so perfect and so false and I, a shadow, watching them, clutching my Bible, as if I were in the wrong, as if I were an irrelevant disturbance, I to whom so much has been done of injustice. They do not even see me. He has given them the true music of his heart, his genius is in the voice of their nightingales, in their voices, he attributes to them the legends of Rome, its sensuous paganisms. Am I an idiot therefore, a barren man? Or is it luck after all? Has he abolished merit and principle? Is that what the flat distant mellow moonlight means, the acres of luck? Is it luck that condemns me and fructifies them? Clutching my Bible I must bear in my single hell their voices singing so melodiously, their casual frivolities and gestures, as they pass the shrubbery where I stand grey and unappeased, not even a margin to their illuminated book.
I say to him in his Heaven: Unfair one, you have betrayed me. You have taken from me not only my gold and my daughter but also my language. You have taken the side of the young and the unjust and for that you shall surely perish.
And surely I hear him saying: I will resurrect you. I shall perfect you again on my perpetual journey. I shall raise you from the dead again in another guise and you will be better than you ever were. But nevertheless I hear in his voice a certain dislike, as if he grudges me life, as if I spoil his lucidities.
But if he does not give me his measure of fairness he will have failed and it will destroy him. In another court he will receive his justice. He will die because of his indifference. For he has taught me to demand the beautiful words, the words that will justify my existence, and I must have them, grey robed as I am in this beautiful place where the single ones confront me from their singularity and I return to them my fruitful because broken muse.
In the Maze
I am waiting here in the middle of the maze having paid the man his shilling. It took me some time to get to the centre past blind alleys, diversions, past a little capped man with his son, but always keeping my eye on the white clock at the centre. I know that I am going to die here for there would be no other reason to invite me. And I don’t even know who wrote the note. It could be my husband, who, continually acting Hamlet, thinks I am Gertrude. On the other hand it could be my son who wants my money. But the handwriting was not theirs. On the other hand they would be careful to disguise it.
Once he came home from the theatre and stabbed at my then boy friend through the bedroom curtain but Eric was lucky enough to escape unharmed except for a slight abrasion on the right buttock. My husband later tolerantly told me that he had walked off stage and still found himself in the play walking through the streets, feeling as if he was carrying a rapier at his side. Naturally it was his mother who destroyed him. She always wanted him to be a girl and brought him up on mirrors and dolls. He is insanely jealous and has never forgiven me for Eric: and Eric hasn’t either, not with a badge on his right buttock from a phantasmal rapier.
All this hasn’t helped our son much. He is always brooding in a saturnine way, spending enormous amounts of money, driving fast cars towards the sea. My husband tells him that he is looking for Elsinore but I think he is insecure and is looking for the womb. He hates me as well and thinks me flabby, stupid and insincere. He also doesn’t like his father much and the feeling is returned.
On the other hand it might be Eric. He might be Eric. He might have taken up with someone else though he is not really the masterful type. I had to make all the running after meeting him at the party and he is terrified of Richard. He is blonde and wickedly beautiful and he looks sometimes as weak as blancmange.
So at any moment I will see one of these three coming towards me with a sword or a gun. It is interesting to ask myself why I came but there is no reason. Perhaps I want some new sensation? Perhaps I want to know who is interested enough to send me a note? After all I am not so young as
I was: my mirror tells me so. Perhaps the note is in my own handwriting? I could disguise it, couldn’t I?
It was quite odd about Richard’s walk home through the play. He swore that he saw courtiers standing at bus stops in their reds and yellows like people on playing cards. My son of course thinks he is mad but who isn’t nowadays? And if he knew what his grandmother had done he would have some pity. But the young have no pity now. They are remorseless and sensation-mongering. Their favourite painter is Bacon whom my husband likes. He would like to paper the bedroom with him, all those glass cages and soundless screams and popes in their regalia.
Perhaps on the other hand Eric wants to kill me. Perhaps he is so terrified of Richard and what he might do that he has decided to kill me. For I won’t let him go. But that doesn’t explain why I am here. Why I am here, I think, is because someone has asked me. Someone has enough will-power and decisiveness to ask me to do something. It is as simple as that. I am being offered a part in the play and this is my audition, in the centre of a maze. I had a curious feeling when coming through the maze as if it were trying to upset the shape of my brain cells. But I defeated it and here I am staring up at the white clock which hangs like a bubble against the blue sky. I am sitting on a bench waiting, my red gloves obediently beside me hanging down like those of an exhausted boxer. For we do exhaust ourselves, don’t we? We eat ourselves up.
I decided that I would wear my lemon suit, the one I used to wear when I was young. So that if it is Richard he will enter that world again. On the other hand if it is Eric it will be a joke at his expense. If it is my son – our son – let him stab quickly. I feel guilty towards him for I have given him nothing. And neither has Richard. He is wandering about on the face of the earth, driving from here to there without reason, looking for the sea.
It’s quite calm here. The sunlight is falling helplessly around me. I am helpless inside it. My lemon dress composes a painting. I attract the light and shade towards me. I compose it. There is no one else in the maze. I hear no one outside it though there were some idiots there some time ago laughing and playing tricks on each other. I could hear their voices echoing. They seemed to belong to another world, perhaps the real world, but if so why should their voices sound so hollow? They didn’t find the maze difficult. That is what is so extraordinary about them.
I should like to have powder and lipstick with me and a small table so that in all this azure I could arrange myself. But that of course is impossible. Everything is impossible in this fifth rate country composed of ice and suicide. To which character should I give my signature? And even now is Richard striding towards me, paranoically angry, cloak flying? He always has this irritating habit of looking white-faced. Eric bites his nails.
In any case I did not recognise the handwriting on the note. Perhaps it’s a joke? I don’t know.
Listen. I can hear footsteps. His mother was a hellish woman. She destroyed him utterly. He was never any good to me, no wonder I took Eric. He is a lesbian, I think. The footsteps are coming closer. Soon they will be here. I can hear him trying to find his way about, hesitating. Of course he was always hesitant. He is turning. He is stopping. He is thinking. He has found the way. My heart is beating and I am waiting for him, my legs crossed. He is standing in front of me. I rise. I hold my powder compact in my hand. I reach out towards him. I know he is going to kill me. ‘Gertrude,’ I cry. He raises his hand. His lips are red with lipstick, his lined face looks vaguely into mine as into a mirror. I hate her. She destroyed me. I am a fragment in her mirror. It is better to lie down here in the middle of the maze under the clock’s ticking. But I strike first. She falls. I walk out. So that is why I kept this appointment. So that is why I am wearing not lemon but black. The whore betrayed me. So that is why I hear cheering as I leave the maze. The idiotic groundlings are throwing their apple cores away and the earth is green again. I feel the swish of the velvet and the rapier at my side. I shall walk towards the rocks. I shall drive towards the sea. I shall hear again the sound of the sea.
The Meeting
She is sitting beside me wearing a pair of lilac gloves, and the reason for that of course is that her left hand is unringed. I can’t remember where we met (I think it was probably in a pub) but in any case I am drunk though that does not prevent the operation of the sleepless crystal of my mind. There is a large hearth in the room and also a large dog which is mercilessly crunching bones under the wooden table. She is wearing tall leather boots. There are lines round her eyes.
She has a mother, so she tells me, ancient and tyrannical, who is at this moment lying asleep in her queenly rigid bed like one of those classical marbly women from Racine’s plays. I know it is because of her that she has not married. She is telling me the story of her life and I seem to have heard it before over and over in some other place at some other time, and in any case I am drunk. I was drunk when I walked with her here under the autumnal stars past red kiosks and letter boxes with their slitted mouths.
The dog is crunching bones in the corner.
The old woman is presumably asleep in her white classical bed. The stars do not know our ruins and our pains. The darkness slowly crunches them.
I propose to myself a future. I shall say I will marry her but only on one condition, that she leaves behind her the old woman to whom she is bound by veins and bones, resignation and despair.
I see in front of me clearly the battle being waged, the house emptying itself of her, the roots being torn up, the steady crunching, the moans, the cries.
I shall propose to her a vision of freedom, the two of us together radiant among white cookers, classical curtains, carelessnesses and affluences, no ancestral mournings, all the ceilings innocent and new. I shall advance these ideas out of eloquence for at least I have that. She will lay her head on my shoulder (she is doing it now), I am aware of her flesh, she of mine. We are like children in a story of Hans Anderson, blue boots, red cheeks, but no grannies. And the barenesses of autumn.
I shall speak of affection, an island of two people without footprints. Attracted by my vision she will fight for her own survival, tear the furniture up by the black roots, excavate and wash her ravaged psychic landscape, hanging it up on ropes between poles. She will be standing outside a church on a windy day watching herself in angel white and carrying red roses, the photographer kneeling and firing at her. All shall be calm, the honeymoon in a hotel entirely new and fresh.
Ah, how well I can speak, though the crystal is always listening to myself speaking, watching her listening, aware of innocences gone sour, of vulnerabilities, of desert places veined with blue.
The dog is crunching the bones under the table.
The sky bears its brown fruit.
The fireplace is huge and draughty. It is very silent in the lounge except for the white bubble of the electric clock whose tick one can very faintly hear.
I propose such a pure world as she has thought (and I too) has gone forever. We will be together, unaffected by ironies in a house new as a bone. The wardrobes will be our own, the tables our own, the chairs our own and they will exist in such a lyrical light, unaffected by the past, the ‘things in themselves’ without fingerprints. She will arrive there, a psychic conqueror, a new woman, she will stand upright as in the Sunday Supplements assessing furniture and carpets. I shall be the one on whom she leans. I shall exist for her in a green field.
(In fact as I think these thoughts, or at least as the crystal thinks them, I am myself almost persuaded in such a possibility, such a universe.)
I propose again that when she has seen all this, when she has apparently entered the promised land, cleared of the lumber of ancestry, when she has fought her way into the imagined Eden as innocent as an advertisement, when she is standing easy and ungloved and new by the cooker on which she will willingly cook all my meals, I shall disappear at that very moment, I shall withdraw into the world which I knew before I ever met her, before I proposed these things, the ambiguous world in which I usual
ly live.
And yet why do I feel all this, why do I have these thoughts, why does the crystal send out these terrible rays so that even now as I place my hand as if by accident on her knee and then on her crossed thighs, I look down barbaric vistas? Why will the crystal emanations never cease? So that as I look at her I think of myself looking at her and I hear the large dog crunching the bones under the table (ancestral and scarred), I see the furniture closing on those innocences. I see the wardrobes and chairs taking over mastery as if we were involved in a war with them. And it is not because I am drunk. Not at all. I am sober at the very heart of me. The crystal never gets drunk. It is not appearance, it is the thing in itself. The crystal, tired of ennui, wishes to play. It wishes to play games. It wishes to make faces, to dance, to be gay in a cold way. It wishes not to be itself, and yet it cannot unwish its own existence.
She is leaning towards me. I hear the ancestral voices. I wish to love her. Perhaps I shall. Perhaps I shall be permitted. Perhaps the pathos will allow it.
Perhaps if I should look just once into eyes that are different from mine, that do not reflect me, I shall not hear the eternal crunching. I shall not see the autumn stars which are so naked and so old! Perhaps the crystal shall cease transmitting, shall lie down at last with its own bone, if only I look into those eyes, if only I lose myself.
Let me look.
Ah!
Waiting for the Train
He stood on the railway-station platform at midnight waiting for the train.
Every night he came and waited for it, or rather waited for it to stop. Every night the train sped past with lighted carriages in which he saw as in a series of moving paintings dramatic events framed – a murder, a wedding, a transaction. But the train did not stop and he had to wait till the night became the reasonable day and the day gloomed into night again. But he suffered over and over the pain of being separated from the illuminated events, their joy or terror.
The Red Door Page 60