The modern world seemed not to have touched the little close beside the church where Dr. Jackson’s cottage stood amid flagstones and roses. There was neither telephone nor television in his living room, and the worn oriental carpets and antique furniture had an air of unassuming gentility, like the much-loved remnants of a family used to living in far grander places, but now in decline. The genial antiquity of his surroundings was reflected in his manner, and although I admired Bill’s livid truthfulness, I could not help noticing the fact that a person could be as cultured as Bill and yet serene and reconciled. And Dr. Jackson did not hide the cause of his contentment. On the contrary, by assuming Christian faith, he also conveyed it—not as a proselytising doctrine, but as the atmosphere in which he lived and breathed.
Although he did not care for modernists, Dr. Jackson had a rooted love of the art and music that had been modern in his youth—especially of the paintings of Paul Nash and the music of Vaughan Williams. He drew my attention to these things in his usual way, by assuming that I knew them, and referred, shyly but approvingly, to their roots in the landscape. Gradually I acquired from Dr. Jackson something that had no place either in the life of our suburb or in the mind of Bill, which was an idea of England, as a spiritual rather than a geographical location. Into this spiritual niche were slotted, like votive offerings at a shrine, the worn and treasured icons of our spent tradition: the Anglican Church, with its hymns and prayers and liturgies; landscape painting and pastoral music; and the poems and novels of the great Victorians, three of whom—Hardy, Housman, and Hopkins—had a special meaning for him on account of their valedictory sadness. When I entered Dr Jackson’s cottage, and took my place at the old Chappell grand to which he beckoned me with a shy, gentle wave of the hand, I would recall those words from Four Quartets: “History is now and England,” and feel growing in some secret part of me shoots sent out from ancestors long buried and decomposed.
This feeling had taken a new turn, just in the weeks before Bill decided that I must be initiated into Tristan. The cause of this was my first girlfriend, daughter of a bank-manager, whom I had met at an organ recital given by Dr. Jackson in the church. The pews in front of me were empty, although the concert was due to begin. I turned to look at the organ loft, hoping to give a sign of encouragement to Dr. Jackson, and found my eyes captured by a girl in a cream-coloured mackintosh and a loose sky-blue scarf, who sat alone in the pews three rows behind me. She was tall, pretty, with high pale cheeks, primrose-coloured hair and blue eyes that looked from far away. I smiled at her and she smiled back. Thanks to Dr. Jackson I had a few opening gambits. The concert over, I thought it best to go straight for the kill, like Ferdinand in The Tempest: “my prime request / Which I do last pronounce, is, O you wonder! / If you be maid or no?”
She gave her own version of Miranda, with “No wonder Sir, but certainly made for adventure.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. Linda belonged in the normal world, as did I. We walked through the town to her suburban street—like ours except the houses were bigger, with shrub-filled gardens, plane trees, and at the end, bordering the open country, the biggest house of all, which belonged to her parents. She had come down for the summer holidays from a minor public school, and welcomed my attentions, perhaps because they came from someone who could never be “the boyfriend.” When we reached the drive to the posh gabled house that claimed her, she turned with a brief goodbye, which was not especially encouraging. But I was grateful, since I had learned where she lived, and was keen to experiment with my first love-letter, confident that the way to her heart was through writing. These were the seventies, remember. The class system was still in force, and boys from grammar schools were regarded by girls from public schools with a lofty disdain that could be overcome only by talent and bravado.
Actually Linda was drawn to me—not in a big way, but quietly. She replied to my letter by return, and with heart-stopping candour. She liked music up to a point—the point where it became serious. She had read a few books, was considering becoming an intellectual, and was shortly to go up to Oxford to study French. We should be friends, she wrote, and then see what came of it.
I soon discovered that music and literature were of questionable significance to her. Far more important was the Christian religion. She had been brought up and confirmed in the Anglican Church. But religion had happened later, in the form of a vision. She was preparing for bed one evening—it was the Easter holidays, she had just returned in high spirits to the sunny house at the end of Condale Close, her two older brothers were playing billiards in the room below, the exhilarating comforts of childhood were spread around—when an angel appeared. She was forbidden to see him, except from the corner of her eye; but he spoke to her, and as he spoke she glimpsed through the golden radiance an astonishing expanse of nakedness. His words were obscure, and although she tried hard to concentrate, she understood only that she must pray in church and live in charity towards those less fortunate than herself—which meant just about everybody. The angel vanished, and she lay on her bed in tears of joy.
Of course, the immediate effect of this vision had worn off by the time I met Linda, who was, as I said, a more or less normal suburban eighteen-year-old, apart from her habit of praying in church and visiting old ladies on their death-beds. But it had fortified her music-hall virginity. Philip Larkin was wrong. Sex hadn’t begun in our suburb even in 1975, though rumours were rife. Linda’s kisses were fresh, eager, and yet abruptly curtailed at the moment of passion. They tasted of sea-side and tea-time and were about as daring as a sneaked cigarette. Nevertheless, they made a hole in my emotions that took a long time to fill. Thanks to Linda I sometimes went to church, to sit among the sparse and ageing population, watching her slender form as she stepped sedate and joyful like a bride towards the altar. During the communion Dr. Jackson would improvise on the stopped diapason, around squishy chords lifted from the English water-cress school—Finzi, Warlock, and John Ireland trickled into the depths of my being, and made there a pool of unshed tears.
I had not told Bill of my feelings for Linda, nor of my interest in the church. Beside the absolute and ascetic standard that he set, they both seemed disreputable. I had come across references to Wagner’s Tristan, so I knew that it dealt with sexual love. But I was appalled at the thought of discussing such a thing with Bill. Astonished as I had been to discover that I was normal in that department, I could not believe such a thing of Bill. He had been blown by an inner explosion high above the realm of human contact, and was perched on the branch of some blighted oak-tree, forever immune to temptation, watching and disdaining all.
I spent that morning alone, taking a bus to the village of Etticombe, which stood on a tree-covered rise above quilted pasture-land, a Disneyland model of old England on the doorstep of the London sprawl. It was a cloudless day, with a slight breath of autumn, soon warmed away by the sun. I sat beneath an ancient yew in the churchyard, idly surveying the graves of people who had died in ages when the good died young, and the bad survived them by a year or two. I listened to wrens and warblers, to the sounds of insects about their late summer business, and to the hourly strokes of a cracked old bell in the lichen-covered tower of stone behind me. I watched old ladies come and go in their flowery dresses, and exchanged courtesies across a fence with an ageing shire horse. I read from a book of Hardy’s poems; every now and then my thoughts would turn to Linda, and a deep delicious melancholy would invade me—a yearning for vanished things, and for a purity that was mocked by the world.
Bill, I knew, would never have countenanced such feelings. He recognized only one mortal sin, which was sentimentality—the pretended love of useful fictions. He justified his indifference to politics in this way. The nationalist dreams of Enoch Powell, the Labour Party’s icon of the working class, the high-flown rhetoric of the Trades Union Congress, and the loyal toasts of the Tories: in each of them he discerned the same disqualifying stigma. All were riddled with sentimental pretence
, and Bill would dismiss any reference to them with an angry wave of the hand. For me, however, they had begun to acquire a coating of antique gold. They were bits of the great jigsaw puzzle of England. I was beginning to put the puzzle together, from those small but potent clues that Dr. Jackson and Linda, in their different ways, provided. I had come across Ruskin and William Morris, and felt drawn to a kind of Christianised socialism that endowed even the Labour Government of Mr. Wilson with an air of ancestral legitimacy. Three years later, when I had left for Cambridge, and the grammar school to which I owed my chances was destroyed, I began to have my doubts about socialism. But by then I had withdrawn from the world, and was as remote from politics as Bill.
It was not politics that focussed my thoughts on that morning. For several weeks the dual force of Dr. Jackson and Linda had worked inextricably on my emotions, in a way that I can only describe as “pastoral.” Around, above, and beneath me I sensed the presence of the believing dead, to whom I was tied by a religion that I had never adopted but which I could not discard. In the little church at Etticombe, with its smell of damp plaster, late summer roses, and polished brass, its pews hung with embroidered knee rests, and its altar neatly decked with wildflowers, I could feel the power of Eliot’s lines:
You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
And I wanted, in a curious way, to understand and accept that potent “has been.” I wanted to pass through the Anglican faith, to understand its living history, to accept and tolerate and then reject it, not with an oafish gesture of dismissal, but sadly and lingeringly, as one says farewell to an ailing parent before crossing the seas. And this curious desire was mingled in my imagination with the fresh smell of Linda’s face, with the modal harmonies of English music, and with the quiet nave of Etticombe church, where the light slid down on dusty beams to lie in pools on the floor.
To purge these useless feelings it would have been enough to take a bus-journey in the opposite direction, to the new shopping centre on the by-pass, to the streets of Croydon which ran like roaring gullies between sheer-faced office-blocks, to the endless, senseless, lifeless miles of houses just like ours. But first love is selective, and my first love was neither Linda nor Bill nor Dr. Jackson, but England—not the England of suburbs, TV dinners, and motorways, but the great spiritual fact whose outline I tried to guess from the fragments I had assembled, and which could be glimpsed from time to time like Linda’s angel, out of the corner of your eye, and in these special places where history flickers for a moment like a guttering candle.
I took the afternoon bus back to our suburb in a state of calm exaltation. I had formed the intention—quite crazy in the circumstances, but arising with a kind of logic from my elegy in a country churchyard—to marry Linda. Not yet, of course, not immediately. But some time in the not too distant future, when we had been through university, and I had become a famous writer or composer or something of the sort, and she had matured to the point of seeing that nothing less than that would do. I had earmarked a property in Etticombe, a brick and timber cottage with a thatched roof and a “for sale” notice jabbed into the greensward outside. Into this toy-town bower I planned to lead her, to live cut off from the world but nevertheless together, with the same pure habits as Dr. Jackson, only with thoughts and feelings wilder than the wildest of Bill’s. All that remained was to gain Linda’s consent, and with that end in view I made at once for the house in Condale Close—to which, by the way, I had never been invited—not wishing to diminish my resolve with anything so vulgar as a phone call.
Linda herself came to the door, dressed in a forget-me-not blouse and white trousers, telephone in one hand, receiver in the other, the cord trailing from polished and wax-scented darkness. She looked at me as though I were a visitor from the Gestapo, and then stepped quickly backwards, holding her hand over the mouthpiece and saying “wait a moment.” I stood on the doorstep, and heard her say in urgent tones that she could not talk and would explain everything later. And then she came out to me, her face troubled and annoyed. I tried to hold on to my great decision, but it fled like a dream before the daylight, and I followed her in silence as she headed past me for the street.
“What’s up?” she said at last.
“Oh, I’ve been thinking, that’s all.”
What was the use of culture, when it could provide no better words than those?
“What exactly?”
Linda’s breeding was expressed in everything she said and did. As she strode on her long legs towards our usual footpath, which ambled beside cornfields to suburban streets like hers, she was setting the pace for me, physically, emotionally, and morally. I could see in her bothered features how small a consideration she could afford to me, how much the idea of a good marriage to a conventional man had been tacitly assumed in all her dealings, and how little hope I had of deflecting her from the course that had been instilled from birth. I answered her question, but in a small, dispirited voice that was bound to repel her.
“I’ve been thinking that we can’t just go on, seeing each other, doing things together, and all that. I mean, we should consider the future.”
She shot a bright sudden glance in my direction.
“I’ve been thinking the same,” she said.
The expression of annoyance had disappeared, and she strode with a remote smile on her lips, a smile that was not for me. We were not in the habit of touching; nevertheless, I could sense that she was taking special care to avoid my hand as it swung beside her.
“So how do you see things?” I asked.
“Me? I think we should just be friends. I’m off to Oxford, you will be another term at least at school, and we don’t want any difficulties.”
“So there’s someone else,” I said. It was not that I drew this conclusion; on the contrary, I was rapidly assessing the evidence with a view to refuting it. But I had seen a way to dramatize my predicament. The pathos of faithful love in the face of rejection was sure to move her, just as it moved me, who had invented the role. I would stir the waters of her being with my wounded devotion, and those clear blue eyes would be troubled for me. This role-playing was supposed to be the final proof of love. Linda was not one to fall for it.
“There’s always someone else.”
“Not in my case,” I said proudly.
“There’s always going to be, until the crucial point, when the mind is made up.”
“Well, that’s what I’m saying. I’ve reached that point. My mind is made up.”
I hesitated, shifting words about in my thoughts, suddenly aware of the ridiculous sound of “marriage” on the lips of a seventeen-year old. From the calm breeze-stroked landscape of my imagined England, the slender transparency of Linda was suddenly deleted.
“Then that makes two of us,” she said.
And it seemed better to me, too, that this attempt at love had failed. I could nurse my sadness and my jealousy, and press them into the roots of my being. My all-pervasive sense of loss now had a personal meaning.
It was mid-afternoon when I parted from Linda, she walking briskly towards the town, no doubt to offer a prayer of gratitude, I limping homewards. Tears, such as they were, had dried on my cheeks long before I passed Bill’s house, and when I saw him standing in the window, and realized that his parents would not yet be home, I decided to visit him. As I walked up the gravel path to the front door, he watched me with an air of astonishment, as though I were returning from the dead. It was a long time before he came to the door.
“To look at people and doubt that they are apes,” he said; “even here, in this shit-house—how is it possible?”
It was not a promising start.
“Sorry I didn’t make it for Tristan,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. “I had a few problems.”
He laughed his soft, sad, humourless laugh and walked back into
the house. I followed uninvited, and watched him beating the air in the living room, not looking at me, but chuckling to himself and addressing the furniture with lunatic stares. Maybe I didn’t need such a sight, but it held me riveted. Bill’s crises had the appearance of a victory for mind over matter—mind long-suffering and cruelly imprisoned, bursting asunder the fetters of flesh. In fact they were the opposite, but that was something that I understood only much later.
“What are you doing to me, Michael?”
The words shocked and frightened me. In all my dealings with Bill, it had never occurred to me that he could feel anything towards me, other than a desire to pass on his knowledge.
“Like I said, I’m sorry.”
“Yes, but you’re happy. You’ve got everything you want, me included.”
“Happy?” I said. “What on earth do you mean?”
I was out of my depth here, and a storm was breaking on the near horizon.
“Happiness means looking in the mirror and not taking fright,” Bill said. “It is also an extremely vulgar condition, which you should study to avoid.”
“But I do avoid it. Today, for instance, I threw away my chances with the only girl I... the only... well, with my girlfriend sort of.”
“With my girlfriend sort of,” Bill said mockingly. “I knew it. The same old disease. Girlfriend!”
I tried to feel offended, but Bill became suddenly pitiable in his loneliness, moving with ever slower steps around the room, shielding his head with his hands, and bowing beneath the thing that pecked at his shining cranium. I wanted to explain about my elegiac grief, which would surely demonstrate that I stood side by side with him in the scheme of things. But I had no words, and stood mutely amid the hideous furnishings like a new arrival at a dog’s home. Bill’s gyrations ceased entirely, and with a sigh, he fell face down on to the sofa, and slid to his knees on the floor.
Souls in the Twilight Page 12