Souls in the Twilight

by Roger Scruton

  It was the kind of remark that students spring on their teachers. But from her lips it sounded like a confession. She looked at Harold as though she had come through to him after weeks of struggle. Her accent was childish, and the pale hands on her lap were the hands of a child.

  “I am not sure I can help.”

  “No. Only, there’s no one else.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  She looked at him as though amazed that he could have any doubts in the matter.

  “Because everyone else is shit,” she said in a whisper.

  Harold looked from the window. In the thin November sunshine, the yellow brick of Haldane College seemed sulphurous, volcanic, as though thrown up by some great eruption. A seagull swooped and hovered high above the inner quadrangle, and he fixed his eyes on it. The girl was tempting him, not with her charms, but with his own self-image. And of all temptations, this was the hardest.

  He thought of Judy, the graduate student whom he had recently married, and how cleverly and cautiously she had trodden around him, overturning nothing, hiding from him, allowing him to stand and breathe, like a lioness tracking her prey, until he had turned at bay and surrendered. Judy had lifted his daily burdens; she had made him appear normal, blameless, entitled to his share of space and time. Confronted by the present emergency, Harold reached out for older and less innocent habits.

  He turned back to the girl, who was still watching with a wide-eyed and helpless gaze. He asked her name.

  “Sarah.”

  “And you are a student here?”

  “Sort of. I mean my boyfriend is. My other name’s Oldcastle. I’m supposed to start next year. Ex-boyfriend, I mean. Things got in the way.”

  She paused for breath and then swallowed. Books, papers, furniture, all fled the space where she sat and her wounded face was framed before him. The pale parted lips sucked on the air and the eyes, like pools, gazed steadily upwards. Not once had she smiled; no signals had escaped her that would permit him to treat her presence as anything less than a catastrophe. “Why me?” he wanted to ask, but the question seemed selfish and trivial.

  He rose from the desk to arrange his books on the shelf behind it. But the row of tired volumes offered no relief. The standard editions, standard critics, set texts and study guides, the bound volumes of Scrutiny, now dumb as a priest with Alzheimer’s—so many ghosts that beckoned from the world of adolescence. He contemplated them with nausea. He felt her eyes on his back, eyes that called for his face as a pool in the dusk calls to the bird that circles it. The cycle of his days, from book-lined room to book-lined room and back again, the anxiety, the sense of waste, of a mission that refuses to crystallize in a coherent goal, of a mistake once made which could not be remedied since it was neither his nor anyone’s, the knowledge that nothing of value could emerge from this life of scholarship, while no course of action seemed possible, save the futile stirring of an anger which he did not deserve or deserved, if at all, only for having stirred it—all this, which he knew, because he had no illusions, was nothing more than the dissatisfaction of the species with the sterile life of Harold Strickland, but which was prompting him always towards the maddest caprice so as to imagine even a last-ditch rescue of God Himself—all this surged in him and would not be denied. He turned and went across to her.

  “And what makes you think that I’m not shit?”

  “I know,” she whispered, “Cos I read your stuff. Death, frinstance, what you wrote.”

  She watched him without moving. The article on death was one of his weekly columns in The Daily Monitor. The columns had created a stir. Some had praised his style, others his range. But none had praised his arguments, certainly none of what he had said about death as the good-natured foe of the welfare state. Who was going to endorse such a reactionary doctrine? Yet here was a girl ready to offer what he secretly sought: not agreement but discipleship. Harold was stunned by the discovery, as though looking in a mirror to confront a face not his own.

  “So how am I to prove that you exist?”

  “Just tell me to go away.”

  Of course, that is what he should do. Wisdom and ambition, the principles that he was given to defending, his marriage, all endorsed Sarah’s plea. It thrilled him to defy so many imperatives, for the sake of a whim.

  He was standing in front of her, his hand on the blue serge jacket that covered her shoulder. The material was coarse, firm, newly woven. She lifted her head slightly, stretching her neck as though expecting him to touch it. Her skin was smooth, unblemished, almost as white as the shirt-collar that lay against it.

  “I can’t prove your existence. Only you can do that.”

  She did not respond, but merely continued to stare up at him.

  “But maybe there’s something else. Something more concrete, some problem in particular.”

  He laughed inwardly at his own words. All problems are concrete, but it is the fate of adolescence to dress them in abstraction, so that the week’s rent, the blocked drain, the failed date, the angry parent, the bad trip, the hangover, or the unfinished essay become proof of the boundless futility of existence, and the imminent ending of the world.

  “There’s lots of them I can’t say so I’ve written them down, things gone wrong. Heaps of. You can read them.”

  Ignoring the hand on her lapel, she leaned quickly forward and opened the strings of the kit-bag. It contained books, papers, two apples and a crumpled shirt. She fished a brown envelope from the muddle and held it out to him. He took it from her and went back to the desk.

  Inside were three sheets of white paper, covered in italic writing that leaned forward, then backward, as though blown about by the wind. She watched motionless as he read.

  I was properly brought up; two parents, sister, older brother, dad at work, Roman Catholic, meat and two veg, grammar school, we even had Greek. This was in Norfolk, King’s Lynn, miles from anywhere, and the sea each morning, with its breeze and clouds. Then mum died, just like that, stiff under the clothes-line when I came home from school, with Dad’s dungarees fanning her body like a bird. I didn’t cry. I didn’t run for the ambulance or the priest. I just went indoors and ate the cake she had left on the table. I loved her cakes, and this was the last one. There was nothing I could do in any case, since I was to blame for her death. That was how I saw it. The next day I tried to join her, but they rescued me with stomach pumps. I’m telling you this because you’ll understand. Nobody understood before—not even Emily, my little sister. She told me I was seeking attention, that I was too selfish to see there was nothing special about my grief, compared with her grief, or Dad’s or Richard’s. I guess she was right. Except that I was to blame. But how could I explain that?

  Then I started having these revelations. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in God—not anymore. But he kept talking to me—rousing himself from his nonexistence all heavy with sleep, and confiding in me. He had a scheme for his resurrection, and I was to play an important part. Not spreading the gospel or anything; just living a pure life, and atoning for what I’d done. Then, by a miracle, things would make sense again. I imagined him being reborn in a corner of my room, among the sneakers and gum-boots. He would be yellow and shrivelled at first, with half-closed eyes like a Chinaman. But then he would grow to fill the house.

  Dad started bringing this woman home. Her name was Lisa and she smelt of roses and sweat. Mum had brought us up on Mozart and Schubert. But now he sat in the living room listening to Petula Clark and Frank Sinatra, holding hands with this moron in crinoline. God told me not to talk to them. I stayed upstairs, reading and learning Arabic. Emily brought me my meals, and this bloke from school would visit me, though I didn’t let him get very far. Only he was Lebanese, and told me about his country and the situation of the Christians there. That was why I was learning Arabic. I wanted to understand this strange thing—this bearing witness in the land of Christ. A vision came one day and it helped me. I saw a rocky hillside with scr
ubby trees and a few goats and on the summit a square stone church with a few stone buildings scattered around it. Everything was bathed in a yellow light, and a figure stood in the porch of the church with his arms outstretched. He wore long blue priestly robes, and blood was pouring from a wound in his chest. He was asking me to come to him. All of a sudden, life had meaning again. I had been singled out as a person whose life was worth risking. I know you will understand this. You wrote something once which really struck me. You said that life has meaning only to the one who is prepared to give it away, and for no other reason than that it has been asked for. That made sense of so many things for me. When I look at my age-group, I see that nobody could possibly ask of them the slightest sacrifice, and certainly not that one. Not because they are determined to hang on to what they have, but because they have nothing to give. Giving is foreign to them, a thing of the past, like fox-trots, tea-parties and the Book of Common Prayer. (How do I know about these things? Because of you.)

  I finished school that year, and had decided on Haldane College, because you were there. Richard had already gone to Oxford, and Dad was going to be married to Lisa. Emily was waitressing and got herself pregnant by one of the cooks. I had to leave home, and the easiest way was university. But first, I must go to Lebanon. It was decided for me in big gothic letters, on a bright blue sky. Then this other bloke I’d met at a party wrote to me, and said he was going to study at Haldane and had got himself a flat. He asked me to share with him, and it seemed like a good idea. A step on the way. I did some waitressing over the summer, saved enough for a few months in London, and came to live with him. He was my boyfriend for a bit. I had no courage for anything else. I began hanging around the college and the libraries, and everything became a mess. Jim—that was his name—began to disgust me with his stupid music and his spoiled ways, lying in bed all day with those earphones on his head, sponging off his friends, not interested even in studying, and so often rude as they all were about you. I had to leave, and I felt my weakness. But there was no one to talk to, and I began to regret that I’d put off Haldane until next year.

  Then a new vision came. That vision was you. Jim took tapes of your lectures and brought them home; I began to follow them. I read the texts, and they sounded in your voice in my mind. At last I knew what poetry was about. And there was such a strength and conviction in your words—it all seemed to matter so much to you. If you are reading this, then it is because I have plucked up the courage to give it to you. God knows what will happen now. Perhaps you will tell me to go away. That would be best. Only I had to see you.

  Harold raised his eyes from the page and tried to smile at her. But he managed only a clenching of the brow. Sarah leaned backwards so that her head touched the wall, and her neck stretched to its full extent, like the white neck of a swan in flight. She was holding her breath, and her cheeks were pale.

  “You should have come to see me before. It would have made things easier.”

  “Only everything went wrong and I couldn’t make up my mind because of this vision thing which always got in the way and now you hate me.”

  She did not move or take her eyes from his as he came across to her. When he lifted the hand from her lap, it was cold and limp.

  “I’ve done it with only ever one other person,” she said, as he bent towards her, “and that was although I never really chose him—Jim.”

  Her pale parted lips were as cool as her hand, and she received his kiss as though drinking from a fountain and quenching her thirst. With closed eyes and limp body, she slid from the chair to the carpet, lifting her hands to his neck and pulling him down on top of her.

  Each day, Sarah would be waiting for him. Each day, she would sit in his office in a posture of absolute obedience, sometimes reading, sometimes writing a letter which she would leave on his desk as she left. Their love-making was silent, but with a childlike eagerness, and afterwards she would look at him with a startled expression, as though waking from a dream.

  She seemed to expect nothing, and this nothing began to be everything to him. His evenings with Judy were full of plans and schemes. He would apply for the Chair at Glasgow, where they could live near her parents and where she could resume work on her doctorate on the literary essays of John Stuart Mill. They would buy a second home in the Hebrides, where he could study through the summer and write. But no sooner did Sarah enter his office than all such plans and schemes would fade away. What should have been a disaster soon became a comfort, and during the quiet hours at his desk, with her canine presence undisturbed and undisturbing in the corner which he kept for her, he felt at ease with himself, relieved of every mask and costume that the world required. He may not have proved Sarah’s existence, but she had certainly proved his.

  He arranged for her to enrol as his student; he gave her money, though not much since she had the art of living frugally. And together they read the books that most appealed to her—Kafka, Musil, Rilke and Proust. She spoke little, and always in a syntactical muddle that she would ingenuously unscramble with her clear, startled eyes. If she had anything important to say, it would come to him as a letter, written in the same serious and laconic style, and left on his desk or in his pigeon-hole.

  They studied Arabic together, for one little plan remained in her head, which was to visit Lebanon, and to do something for the Christians there. Although the visions no longer came to her, Sarah regarded them as absolutely binding. And because of a peculiar and fateful train of events which he had disregarded at the time, but which now came to seem like a destiny, Harold concurred in her plan. Three weeks before meeting her, he had received, thanks to his weekly column, a letter from Nabil Abu Tariq, a Lebanese businessman in London, asking him to report on the civil war that had spread from the Palestinian camps around Beirut. The letter had referred to the lies that had been written in the Western press, representing the Christians as fascist war-lords, and the Muslims and Palestinians as innocent victims of a conspiracy funded by the Western powers. The writer appealed to Harold to visit the country, and to use his column to tell the truth. He decided that he would do as he was asked, and set aside a week in the Christmas vacation to accomplish it. When he finally called on Nabil Abu Tariq to make the arrangements, it was with Sarah in tow as his “research assistant.”

  They were shown by a shy Filipino maid into the long drawing room of a Mayfair flat. Through the tall Victorian windows, the November sun cast the shadows of plane trees, which were shaking themselves free of their leaves and baring themselves to the cold. Abu Tariq sat amid silk cushions on a low divan, staring down the length of a long powder-blue carpet towards the door through which they came. He wore a dark suit and bright red Turkish slippers of padded velvet. In his right hand was a large cigar, and he purposefully raised it to his fat lips as they entered, as though to register his unconcern. He peered at them through the screen of smoke from dark, puffy eyes, and his tanned cranium caught the light from the sloping sun and glistened beneath the strands of oily black hair like a pool of fire. Slowly, Pasha-like, he raised himself and came towards them. His handshake was limp and sweaty, and he stared at Sarah as if evaluating a piece of merchandise.

  “You do me a great honour,” he said, in a monotone.

  “The honour is ours,” Harold returned, with a self-consciously foreign smile.

  Abu Tariq indicated the vast low armchairs that faced the divan and clapped his hands as they sat. Coffee was set before them, with a tray of sweet cakes.

  “Your time, I know, is precious,” their host continued, as he settled on to his throne. “I shall, therefore, come straight to the point.”

  He gestured to the cakes with a wide swing of the arm, as though to gather them up and sweep them into the mouths of his guests.

  “What you read about my country in the Western press are lies. I am sure you know this. Hundreds of communities—Christian, Shi’ite and Druze, whose conscience has made them anathema to Islamic orthodoxy—have sheltered from genoci
de in our mountains, and we, the Maronites, have accepted our historical mission, which is to live with these refugees on terms. That is not how your journalists see matters. To them, we are the overlords who exploit the poor Muslim masses while living in luxury in the fleshpots of Beirut. We have been allies of the West for centuries, an outpost of Christian civilisation in the midst of lawlessness and terror, and we depend on you for protection. But your journalists are destroying our credibility. Soon, no Western government will wish to intervene on our behalf. The Palestinians are creating havoc in both town and country; and the Syrians have now invaded, using our feeble attempts to defend ourselves as their excuse. And still, your journalists pour scorn on us, laughing at our humiliation from the comfort of the Commodore Hotel—a hotel, I should add, that is owned by Palestinians, and which offers every conceivable form of hospitality to these obliging guests, just so long as they write what they are told. That is why we are appealing to you.”

  Abu Tariq puffed on his cigar and looked at Harold. The orbs of his eyes sank behind their pouches like setting moons, and his nostrils flared slightly as he released the cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. Harold nodded and made his face look eager and serious, as though he believed what he heard and was determined to help. Already his heart was torn in just the way that it was torn by all the things that mattered. The cause of Christendom was all-important to him only because he knew that it was lost. And as Abu Tariq continued his speech, with words which had the liturgical quality that comes from the fact that no one who utters them can quite believe in their truth, he stood somewhere outside himself, looking down on the room in which he sat with his trusting slave, encouraging yet another person to trust in him. The sight fascinated and appalled him, and he followed the conversation as though he himself had scripted it, and was now toying with the uncorrected proofs.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Harold was saying, and he glanced across to the chair where Sarah had thrown herself down like a rag-doll, with her soft white hands by her sides.