Nothing But the Truth

by Sam Lock

  ‘Well, if you don’t know why, or what it is, and if it’s all guesswork, I hardly think it worth talking about. To my mind, you should face troubles only when they come to you – not go looking for them.’

  ‘I think, Edgar,’ said Lilian firmly, ‘that we had better speak no more about this … Now, what about tea? Shall we have it here, out in the garden? Or would you prefer to have it indoors?’

  Edgar Callow looked at his wife in the hope of understanding her ‘condition’, as he had already named it in his mind; but all he could see was that she was in some way not herself, and he felt irritated by it.

  ‘I think we’ll have it indoors,’ he replied a little tetchily, ‘if you don’t mind … I have a book to finish and the wind prevents me from concentrating. Would you like me to go and tell Betty?’

  ‘No, dear – I will. If you would just put away these things for me – this trowel: this basket. Betty must be asleep, or reading, perhaps. You know how she is, once she gets lost in a book. She’s like you, Edgar. She has no room or time for anyone.’

  Edgar Callow smiled.

  ‘Oh, dear, Lilian,’ he said. ‘What you have to put up with, having two readers in the house.’

  ‘Yes. But I do have this,’ said Lilian, speaking of her garden, and as she left her husband to go inside the house to find Betty, and as she looked around her with pride at what she saw as the beauty of such tidiness and order.

  *

  ‘And it is always beautiful here,’ stated Jason, reflecting Lilian’s thoughts about her garden, and as he sat opposite her in a deckchair during his first visit since his accident.

  ‘I never tire of it,’ his mother replied. ‘It is a lot of work; but more than worth it, I think. And I do have Gordon, you know, who now comes here twice a week.’

  Jason gave no reply to this. He was so enjoying himself; just being there – just sitting there, on such a warm September day; and feeling, as he so often did, that the countryside could heal him in some way and give him the rest and comfort that he needed.

  His mother looked at him, as he sat half facing her, quite close to her, and with his features partly in shadow: and with what she now saw as the over-large bulk of his presence seeming almost to threaten her.

  Was this the son she knew? she wondered: the one who had always meant so very much to her, and who had always seemed to match her idea of what a son of hers should be? Why, she asked herself, did he no longer appear to reflect that idea? He had never dressed tidily, but with his being a writer – an artist – she had always accepted, rather than objected to, a degree of slovenliness in his dress. But now, he appeared to her to be too heavily cloaked – too heavily shaded – by the thick tweed jacket he was wearing; and his tie looked as if it had been tugged into position, not tied. Moreover, although his beard looked reasonably trim, she had noticed a curious thrust of hair that appeared to be sprouting from one side of his head, and that made him look unbalanced. And his eyes too looked strange. Not sad; but questioning and turned inwards.

  What bothered her even more were the huge bruise and scar that still showed at one side of his forehead. ‘Have you had some kind of accident?’ she had asked. ‘No,’ he had replied, ‘just a knock’; not nonchalantly exactly, but as if he didn’t wish to say to her what the real cause of it had been. ‘Oh,’ Jason’s mother had then answered, with a puzzled look in her eyes.

  And as she said this, Jason had turned to look at her more directly, and to admire, as he had always done, the clean lines of her fine, near classical features; and knowing that he would always find her hair brushed neatly over her ears, and tied back in a loose bun; and that her skin would be as lightly tanned as it always was – even in winter; and that he would find her pale, grey eyes expressing patience and concern; but with no reflection in them of the turbulence that he was now experiencing in himself.

  Could he speak to her, he wondered, about the change that was now taking place in his life?; and about the growing pressure he felt to abandon all self-discipline: to break free of the ties he had made over the years; of all the limits he had defined; and of all the restrictions that had checked him for so long? Could she – would she understand, that he had reached some kind of crisis-point of the mind? Or should he speak to his father about it? Would a few words with him offer the strength he felt so in need of? Their relationship had never been a really close one. The one he had had with his mother had been the dominant one of his life. She had been so much his guide, his mentor, his confidante, and had encouraged him to write as he grew older and then eventually to wed. And when he had been left such a generous sum of money by his grandfather, it was his mother’s suggestion that he should retire from the teaching post he had held since leaving the army, in order to devote himself to writing. For she imagined that that is what she would have done herself, had she been in Jason’s position. Not because she had ambitions in that direction – in the one of writing, that is – and that she was projecting onto Jason. For although she did like books and words, it was not in the way that Betty did; or that her husband did, for that matter; who seemed to be perpetually engrossed in literature of one kind or another; and most of which was concerned with scientific subjects, since that was the world that interested him the most.

  Would his father be more objective, Jason wondered – more detached? Should he ask to see him alone, for once; in his study, perhaps, where he spent so much of his time? Or would his father simply reject him? – tell him to pull himself together?: unlikely though that seemed, since it was what his father was always being told to do himself, by the two women in the house. When he forgot things, for example (such as to button up his trousers), or when he seemed to be too lost in his thoughts, and not responding to questions that had been put to him. ‘Oh, Edgar,’ his wife would sometimes say to him with a light laugh, when she felt that he had abandoned her (perhaps regarding some domestic issue that had to be settled) ‘I do wish that you would pull yourself together.’

  Or should he say nothing to either of them? Could this be something that he was meant to keep to himself; and must not speak about, and must only write about in his notebooks? Was this, in other words, something that would be beyond his parents’ understanding, and with which neither of them could cope? He certainly didn’t see them as being the cause of his condition: didn’t blame them, in the way that so many blame their parents for their troubles. At least he was wise enough to have realised that his troubles were his own – truly his own; and that nothing that had been done, or that had been said to him in childhood, could be named as being the root cause of his dilemma – which, as he now saw it (and as he was now able to see quite vividly) was the one of whether or not he might be capable of reconstructing his identity; or whether to do that, in view of the encounters it entailed – the self-encounters, that is – might be beyond him; and that what he might be forced to do, would be to accept the strictures of the life he had already formed. Accept his work, its method; accept the general shallow cleverness of his writing: accept his loneliness, his pain, his separation from his children and his wife – that he knew must soon lead to a divorce; and by some sheer effort of the will (for he knew that that is what it would require of him) attempt to maintain the mask that he had constructed for himself, and behind which he had always lived.

  ‘You do know that they are coming here, don’t you, Jason?’ his mother had then asked, breaking the silence between them, that had been formed by Jason’s ruminative thoughts. ‘The children, I mean. And that Jill is coming with them?’

  Jason looked at his mother as if he hadn’t heard what she had said, and she felt embarrassed by it.

  ‘Jill did tell you,’ she added nervously, ‘didn’t she, Jason? … She is in touch with you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jason replied. ‘She did. She is.’

  ‘Well,’ his mother said, trying to assume an air of natural cheerfulness, ‘it will be nice to see them again … Jill too … She tells me that she is looking forward to it.’ />
  ‘And so she should be,’ answered Jason, in the curiously pompous manner that he would adopt from time to time. ‘Shouldn’t she?’ he then added, smiling, almost laughing to himself, as if the subject might be too much for him; and as he looked around him at the beauty of the garden, and at the dreamy, dark facade of the house; and then at Betty, who had just come out to join them, and who was carrying a newspaper in her hand.

  ‘I thought you might like to see the paper,’ she said to Jason, offering it to him. ‘Not that there’s much in it,’ she remarked, as if for her there never was; and expressing the disdain she felt for the world of daily news and gossip; as opposed to the fictional one that she so enjoyed, and that so inspired her; and in which she always felt herself to be so naturally at home.

  The next day, now back in London, Jason made this entry in his notebook:

  ‘I was yesterday at my parents’. There for a two-day visit, and not having seen them for some time. I wish I could have stayed longer. The peace, the calm – the splendid order of the place: and my father hiding behind his spectacles and dear old Betty and her books. All so healing – so refreshing; were it not for the creeping fear I felt when there that the blood I fear to spill, and that the gods forbid I might yet have to spill, would so poison and pollute that lovely world. And it – what is happening to me – has nothing to do with them, with my parents. Of that I am certain. Perhaps my mother did project upon me too much when I was small; and certainly more than she did upon Jeremy; who always seemed to fight her and reject her. And perhaps, for a while, she did attempt to use me as some kind of object of her desire. But then, don’t all mothers do that? If not with every child, then at least with one, or with some of their children? And don’t all children know the power there can be in that? The power it gives them, I mean, over their parents; and which a great many of them use, as I did, artfully, and with skill: to further themselves; to gain advantages; prolong security: draw energy – knowing, if they are truly honest (and I have always done my best to be that in this matter) that later, as they grew up and out of childhood, they would need to break the ties that have been formed by that projection: and that to describe all this as being a fault of their parents is wrong. It is a fault if you like of them both – of both parent and child: a shared one: and one for which they must both be held responsible.

  ‘Certainly, those are the feelings I have regarding my relationship with my mother. I know I am not the son that she believed me to be; and that I cannot – could never – be that. And I know too that I have done my best to tell her that this is so, and to help her see and accept it – as I think all children have a need to do, gradually, over the years. But what I do feel concerned about is the fault, or flaw, that there seems to be in myself. Not a fault or flaw of a moral kind. No one could have done more than I have done to live a decent life: to do all the ‘right’, all the accepted things: to have been a good soldier during the war: a good father to my children; a good husband to my wife. No, the fault I speak about, and that I feel a need to write about is similar to ones in geological affairs: the fault of an earth structure, for example – or of a rock structure, rather – which means that there is an inherent weakness in it: one not showing, but lying beneath the surface, and by means of which volcanic eruptions can occur.

  ‘This is what I should have faced in myself a long time ago, but have avoided all my life: that I am an imperfect being: that I am a marred or damaged one; and that there are within me, hidden desires, hidden drives that – oh, I don’t know how to speak of them! Not yet. I cannot say; cannot yet write of them, however much I may want to; may feel a need to do. Perhaps later I will. Perhaps in a while I shall be able to. For the moment, I am too tired – too exhausted by these encounters, and can say, can write, no more.

  ‘I do not believe in a God; or not in any God that is personified by religion. Not in a Heavenly Father, I mean, or a Holy Ghost, or a Heavenly Son (yet please take note of my use of capital letters, which just shows how I was brought up!). No, the only God I know of seems a stumbling, clumsy, imperfect thing; incapable, it would appear, of getting things right: full of mistakes, accidents, errors; making so much of what he, or she, had created dependent upon mere chance.

  ‘So if I choose to rail against all that, am I wrong? Is the anger I feel irreligious? Somehow, I do not think so.’

  During the next few days, Jason felt a little relieved of the pressures that had been bothering him – or that had been threatening him, rather, for such was the intensity of the emotion they could arouse; and he half believed that the various notes he had been setting down, and in which he had voiced a few of his troubles, had in some way cured him. For he now no longer gave in to them when he found himself not wanting to answer his telephone. And if he found himself wandering the streets at all, without knowing exactly why, it would never last for very long, and it certainly happened a lot less often than it had done.

  However, if Jason’s life was calmer and quieter for a while, and if he gained some much needed relief from that, it was a relief that proved to be only a temporary one, alas. For within days the tensions in him returned, that made him feel so unwell and insecure; and he was again forced to confront the mirror and the monster that he had seen there and had recognised; and which, if he was to be truthful, he knew had been there always; had always lurked beneath the surface of his orderly, daytime world.

  Was he more ape than man? Jason asked himself, as his dark, questioning eyes found their counterpoints in the mirror. Had the hair on his chest and shoulders grown thicker in recent years? Was the new heaviness of his flesh, that made him want to be wrapped in coats and scarves when he went out, in what was still quite warm, late-summer weather, an expression of that blocked, closed area of his mind that could still not face the truth of what he was; or of what he might be; and that he had somehow managed, over the years, to resist confronting?

  ‘I think I’ll give myself a drink,’ Jason would often tell himself, in such moments of self-confrontation; ‘and then go out to have something to eat, perhaps’ – thinking where he might go to spoil himself; to find some particular dish that might be a favourite of his; or where he knew the wine would be good, or the waiters and waitresses polite; and summoning up all the defences he could muster to protect himself; sometimes muttering to himself (as he was changing to go out, perhaps) that he really ought to speak to his wife, or to Tom and Sarah, his children; both of which were things that he seldom actually did, since he usually left it to his wife to take the initiative in the exchanges they were still having; and then leaving his rooms in a hurried, furtive manner; not bothering to look around him as he left, in order to be sure that the windows were closed, or that all the taps had been turned off; and pulling his door to behind him with a slam – so that Arnold, whose ears were attuned to all the noises of the house, would say to Lottie, if she was with him, ‘There he goes, Lottie – our mystery man. I wonder who he’s got going out with him tonight? … Well, it’s not going to be me, darling – is it? That’s for sure. In fact, I can’t think when it was that I last went out with a man. Not that I feel at all sorry for myself, you know; not when I’ve got friends like you, dear; and like John and Billy. And we do have our fun at times, don’t we, Lottie dear? Our little chats; our little gossips. We do still have our moments, Lottie – don’t we?’

  And in response to which, one can imagine how Lottie might answer him with one of her hard, lustrous smiles: then say, ‘But I still don’t like the look of that man, you know.’

  ‘Oh! Don’t you?’ one can hear Arnold reply.

  ‘No, Arnold, I don’t. He’s not my type. I dislike men who are secretive. I don’t care for the dark, brooding kind: the Mr Rochesters of this world. I never have.’

  ‘Oh dear, Lottie,’ Arnold might then have answered with a chuckle, ‘what do you like, I wonder? Do we have to find you a Nordic airline pilot, or something? Someone blond, clean-limbed, clean-shaven?

  ‘Could be,’ Lotti
e might then have said to him in return, and speaking ambiguously; because she had chosen to guard, even from him, a secret she kept strictly to herself; which was that as far as that sort of thing was concerned – meaning, her taste in sexual partners – what she really liked was not men, but going to bed with women.

  PART THREE

  X

  There can be little that is light or humorous in the next few pages of this novel, since there can be nothing in them of Arnold and his world, or of the world of Betty and her books. For we must now move north to Cumbria and its Lake District, and to the house of Jason’s mother-in-law; a tall, stern, dry-skinned widow, who was now in her mid-sixties, and who lived with her daughter, Gillian (or Jill, as she was more often called, and by almost everyone but her mother); as well as with Tom and Sarah, her two grandchildren, who had been out all day on their bicycles, and who, having so tired themselves, and having hurriedly eaten their supper, had suddenly taken themselves off to bed.

  ‘There, Mother. Peace and quiet for once,’ said Gillian with a smile, looking up from a crossword-puzzle she had been studying.

  ‘Yes. They do stay up rather late,’ answered her mother, not smiling in return, and stifling any twinge of conscience she might have regarding her daughter’s need of affection. ‘I wish they would tire themselves more often.’

  ‘I know. But they are in their teens, Mother,’ Gillian answered defensively.

  ‘Yes. I am aware of that,’ said her mother, tugging at one of her earlobes, which was a habit of hers; then fingering the string of cut-glass beads she was wearing, the hard glitter of which found a reflection in her eyes. ‘Nonetheless, they are still children, Gillian. You are forgetting that, I think.’

  ‘Not when they are in need of something!’ Gillian answered, now with a laugh, and still in the hope that she might provoke at least a smile from her mother in return.