by Sam Lock
XII
On the day of Arnold’s funeral, Jason wrote the following entry in his notebook:
‘Today, my landlord, Arnold, is to be buried. Not burned, John told me was the expression Arnold had used. “When I go,” he said, “I want to be buried, not burned. I don’t want to give the Devil ideas.”
‘I like John. In many ways, he seems so much more of a man than I am. More in control of himself and of his life. Arnold’s friend, Lottie, sent up a note, telling me that she was in charge of things – meaning of the funeral, I presumed, and that if I would care to go to it, she was sure that Arnold would be pleased. I’ve sent back a message, saying that I was sorry, but that I didn’t feel quite up to it, having been ill and so forth; and addressed it just to ‘Lottie’, since she’d omitted to give me her surname; and have just slipped it beneath the door of Arnold’s flat.
‘Apart from the fact that I knew Arnold only a little, one reason for my not wanting to go to the funeral is the business of what to wear. Or, rather not what to wear exactly, because the answer to that is an obvious one; but because I would have to change into other clothes than the ones I am wearing at the moment – and have been wearing every day: now, for over a week!
‘Does this worry me? – bother me? This growing tramp-like thing I have of becoming attached to just one particular set of clothes; and wanting to virtually live in them? The answer is, when I think of it, yes; and no when I don’t. Yet I would have quite liked to have been at Arnold’s funeral; partly because of John and Billy; because to me, in my mind, they have become friends, and because I don’t have too many of those these days, having pushed so many away. And as I have just said, I like John. In fact, I admire him. He’s so different from the initial impression I had of him, when I first saw him with Billy on the stairs. As for Billy, he’s more elusive; and if I am to be honest about it, I am not always sure how I should handle the feelings I have about him.
‘Today is also the day that my wife and my two children are leaving my parents’ house in Hampshire, and are returning to Cumbria after their brief holiday: and before the children return to school – or before Tom does, rather, and Sarah goes back to college. I had meant – had fully intended – to ring them while they were there, or to speak to my mother at least. But I couldn’t. For some reason it all seemed too complicated. So I’ll probably ring my mother tomorrow, and ask how it went, and whether they all had a good time – which I am sure they did; for how could they not have, unless they were thinking of me, that is, and my gloomy, shadowy presence had been clouding the bright sunshine of that happy, lovely place?
‘Ah, well. I would be different if I could. If I could find the strength to change; to take another route; the one that they all wish me to take. But search in myself though I do, I cannot find it there. A larger Will – one with a great big capital letter – seems to be so much more powerfully at work in me than the one of my tiny, puny ego. And I have to face this; or I must do my best to face it, at least. I wish it were otherwise; and that is why I see so little of people just now. I don’t want to face the looks of disapproval in their eyes; or the ones of pity and regret. That look is never there when John and Billy call; and certainly not when Joseph does either; which is why they now more or less constitute the entire round of my social world. For most of the time I am alone, and I want to be alone. I am not miserable. Vaguely sad, I suppose; wondering for much of the time why all this has come about; why I should be finding myself in this strange, this curious, situation … That business disturbed me the other night, on my way home: my actually wanting to touch that huge bloodstain on the pavement, half hoping, I have to confess, that it would still be wet, or be moist; and which is why I have written about it here, in this notebook. People – someone – ought to be told; ought to be made aware of this: mostly myself, I suppose.
‘Does it spell danger, I wonder? Am I drifting towards something dark?: towards something evil, perhaps? If I am, I want to keep some kind of tag on it, in the hope (yes, I do have a degree of hope still left in that direction) that such self-consciousness, such self-awareness, might provide me with a turning point somewhere along the line, and that my will (the one with a lower-case letter) will find some new source of strength for bringing things back to order.
‘Whatever, I now know that I can never be the things that I thought I could be. Of that, I am now sure. Having exposed a lie one cannot retell it; and I cannot possibly relive the lie of my previous existence, disturbing though the present one that I am encountering seems to be. Do I still laugh? Yes, sometimes, is the answer to that; when Joseph talks to me, for example, and goes on about the things that he does. Do I cry? No – quite definitely not – never. Do I love? Yes, I think I do – just a little. I still love my parents in a way: still love Betty. Still love my food too, alas – although that is a negative form of loving. But as for my wife, Jill, and as for my children – well, I feel fondness for them, yes; a real concern, in that I desire them to be well, to be happy; for the children to get on in life; for Jill to remarry, if she wants to, after the divorce, which I hope will be through soon. But not love. To say I feel a real love for them would be a lie, however much the reading of it here might offend whoever reads it.
‘The point is, that writers are meant to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but it; which perhaps is why I am in the mess I am in today. Or is it? Ah – that is the big question, isn’t it?: the sixty-four dollar one, as an American I knew in the war used to say. Are we what we are because of what we were? Are all our troubles of our own making? Somehow, I think not.
‘May the gods bless you, Arnold, if they are lowering you into your grave just now, and if they are throwing a handful of dust on top of you. “Bon Voyage” – wherever it is you might be off to. Did they allow you to keep your hairpiece on, I wonder, when they placed you in your coffin? Did they allow you your usual splash of cologne behind your ears? (Why you didn’t use a better-smelling one, I shall never understand.) A dusting of powder on your cheek; even a dab of rouge; to make you look your best? I shall miss you, Arnold; surprising though it is to find myself saying that. And so will your friends. Tears were shed on your behalf the morning you were found – by Billy. And real tears they were too: not the collective, conventional kind. The tears of one individual for another …
‘Well, there will be few of those for me, I suspect, when my time comes. Somehow, I doubt that anyone will think that I have been worth them; or will have deserved them.’
At the foot of the page, Jason had added to the above piece of writing, this note – a kind of postscript; which said:
‘I have been reading through this notebook; all that I have set down in it so far, and have come across something I wrote after my last visit to my parents. “The blood I fear to spill,” I said, “and that I might yet have to spill, would poison and pollute that lovely world.”
What blood? I ask; and why the word blood at all? My heart quakes at the idea that I should have used it, because I have read in Proust, who has wise thoughts about so many things, that although there are words we use that appear to lie, they in fact announce an approaching reality [mais quelquefois l’avenir habite en nous sans que nous le sachions, et nos paroles qui croient mentir dessinent une réalité prochaine].’
Soon after she had returned with her children to Cumbria, Jill was being questioned by her mother about their visit to the Callows.
‘So it went well,’ was her mother’s opening remark; said with some tension in her voice, that seemed to suggest a half hidden hope that her daughter’s reply would be a negative one.
‘Yes, it did,’ said Jill with her usual smile. ‘Very. The Callows are nice people.’
‘You have told me that before, Gillian. A lot of people are said to be that. But what did you do? If you did anything at all, that is.’
‘Well, you are right about that, Mother. We didn’t do very much – or I didn’t. The children went for long walks – sometimes with Mr Callow. A
nd one day we did go out. To Chawton; where Jane Austen lived and wrote. And that was lovely.’
‘Oh, Jane Austen,’ Jill’s mother replied with a shudder. ‘Her trouble was that she never married. A touchy old spinster is what she was; and her books reek of it, it seems to me.’
‘She was hardly old, Mother. And I think her books are full of love: for people. A very realistic love; but love all the same.’
‘Well, I don’t see it; but we’ve never agreed over our reading – have we, Gillian? You dislike Scott, for instance, and Kipling; both of whom are authors I admire … Did Jason ring while you were there, by the way? Or even call to see you at the house? – though I somehow doubt the latter.’
‘He did neither, Mother. He neither came to the house nor spoke to us on the telephone.’
‘You mean, you heard nothing from him whatsoever while you were there?’
‘No, Mother.’
‘Well, what sort of man is he, then? Who can’t even ring and speak to his own children, when they are staying at his parents’ house? He must have known that they would have liked to have heard from him: would have expected it, in fact.’
‘Yes, it’s true. But he didn’t ring – no. Perhaps he was too shy to do so; or too timid.’
‘Shy! Timid! Of his own wife? Of his own children? His own son and daughter? What nonsense that is, Gillian. Who ever heard of a father being too shy to telephone? It seems to me that something must be wrong. Does he have other interests, Gillian – that you know of, but haven’t yet told me about?’
‘Interests, Mother? Do you mean –?’
‘Other women? Yes. Does he? Is there someone else that he is spending time with? That is usually the reason for men being negligent.’
‘No, Mother, I am sure. There is no one. It is very likely that the mere idea of speaking to us upsets him. After all, he sees very little of us. Nothing of me, in fact; and the children only seldom.’
‘Seldom! It is almost a year since that happened, Gillian. This really is most strange.’
‘I admit that it is, Mother. I am aware of it.’
‘Did his parents speak of him: say anything: ask questions?’
‘Mrs Callow said she was worried, Mother; concerned. She said she thought Jason might be ill.’
‘Good gracious! What with?’
‘She didn’t know. Not physically, she thought; but mentally, perhaps.’
‘Mentally?’
‘Yes.’
‘But –’
‘But what, Mother?’
‘Well, I don’t quite know what to say. I’ve never known anyone who was that. Has he seen a doctor – or whoever one sees for such things?’
‘I don’t know, Mother. I don’t think so.’
‘Well, perhaps you should act, Gillian: do something. Write and ask if it’s true, perhaps.’
‘Oh, no, Mother! I don’t think that I –’
Gillians voice faded away to silence; and feeling agitated, she rose to leave the room. ‘Excuse me, Mother’, she said ‘There are things that have to be seen to for supper; and the children will be home soon.’
Her mother looked at her; for once showing some real concern; as if, all of a sudden, something had touched her and affected her in a way that she was unused to. As if the idea of mental illness was something she had always kept at bay, as a concept to be feared.
‘Gillian!’ she called out, after her daughter had left her.
‘Yes, Mother?’ Jill called in reply.
‘Oh, nothing,’ her mother said, as she fiddled with her beads, and as her eyes dashed to and fro, watching the dancing flames of the fire. ‘It’s nothing, dear,’ she added. ‘It will keep until tomorrow.’
The next day, Jill received this letter from Jason:
Dear Jill,
I’m feeling horribly guilty about not having telephoned when you were in Hampshire. I meant to, but for some reason didn’t – couldn’t. So do please forgive me, and ask the children to do the same; and tell them that I’ll have them down here in a while – once I am through this moment, which is a difficult one. At least you will be pleased to hear that I am writing. Not a book, but just thoughts – mostly about myself. Something I’ve never done.
Take care; and do buy yourself and the children something with the enclosed.
Jason
P.S. My regards please to your mother.
The day before this letter arrived, which was the day on which it had been written and then posted, the world had seemed to Jason to be a dark and sorry place. He had attempted to voice his troubles, by going into them in his notebook; but for once, no words would form that were of value, and he had ended by deleting the entire entry; scribbling vigorously across it in large letters, ‘I consider this to be rubbish.’ And it had made Jason realise that he had come to some great obstacle of the mind: one that would be too difficult for him to surmount or to overcome; and that he really had no choice but to retreat from it and do nothing. Which was something easier said than done, of course, since to do nothing is something at which Westerners aren’t skilled. And Jason knew only too well what danger there could be in such moments of inaction, when he could so easily become a victim of the listlessness from which he suffered.
And so, on account of the new consciousness that had become rooted in his mind, and that had been initiated, as he believed, by the purchasing of his new notebooks, he decided that he would attempt to stave off the danger he felt was threatening him, by doing something he had thought of doing, but that as yet he had not done; which was to consult the Chinese Book of Changes, or the I Ching, as it is also called, in the hope that its powers of wisdom and guidance would provide him with advice.
He knew little about the book, and had bought a copy of it only a few weeks before, having been given what had amounted to more or less a lecture about it from Joseph.
‘I’ve been going into it,’ Joseph had informed Jason one day, ‘just to see if there’s anything in it. Throwing the coins. Asking it questions.’ And his conclusion had been that there was something ‘bloody well uncanny about it … Of course, its language is odd,’ he had said, ‘curious. Or it is to me. Saying things like ten dozen pairs of tortoises cannot oppose this, and stuff like that. But you’ve got to think of it, I suppose, as answering you not so much in riddles as in images … Whatever,’ he had said, ‘you mustn’t ask it vague, general questions about the state of the universe – that kind of thing. Always practical questions. Always about some action you wish to take, or that you don’t wish to take, if that is how you are really feeling about it. It’s about deeds, or so I gather; not ideas; built upon centuries of experience.’
And he had then explained to Jason in detail the method used for consulting the book. ‘Forget yarrow sticks,’ he had said, ‘which is what it says you should use. Just use coins instead. Any three: of the same size and the same weight.’ And he had then shown Jason what he must do in order to construct the two trigrams, as they are called, which constitute the particular variants of yin and yang – the opposites of the feminine and the masculine – upon which the book is based.
‘Write your question down,’ he had said, ‘then sit facing north – I think that is what it says it has to be – and then throw the coins. Six times. Three heads make up a nine; and three tails a six; and anything else, of course, makes either a seven or an eight. This combination of numbers will then give you the chapter you have to look up – to get your answer, that is. If you get one,’ he had added with a laugh, ‘because you don’t always, you know. Bloody subtle it is. If you ask the book something daft; something silly, I mean; it’ll tell you that it doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and will order you to consult the book again.’
So with this in mind, Jason approached the I Ching with caution, and in a sober manner: telling himself that he mustn’t toy with it, or see it as being some form of mental trickery that might be used for purposes of diversion; and reminding himself, with all the deliberation that he could muster, o
f the dire need he had just then of some form of spiritual guidance; and of a kind that would be derived by many from their religion; or from the act of praying, perhaps; or today, possibly, from spending time with their analyst.
During the three years that he had been on his own – since Jill and the children had left him – it seemed as if all the energy of Jason’s life had been directed towards this point; the one at which he had now arrived; and with what he saw as some huge mental barrier ahead of him, too thick for him to penetrate, too high for him to scale. But as he soon discovered, the difficulty proved to be that he was unable to formulate a question that he might put to the I Ching. Joseph had told him emphatically that it had to be practical questions, relating to deeds, so he could hardly ask it questions of a purely prophetic nature. ‘It’s not an oracle, exactly,’ Joseph had said to him. And yet that was precisely what he felt a need of: some voice that would speak to him from the beyond; that would give him the relief of knowing what fate had lying in store for him. ‘What I want to know,’ he whispered, then half shouted, ‘or what I think I want to know, is – whether –’
But here Jason paused, sensing that he was hovering on the brink of something so dark, something so dangerous, that everything in his conscious nature went against it. Yet the opposite side of him seemed to be attracting him towards it.
‘Yes!’ Jason now shouted – almost screamed, in fact; as he rose abruptly to his feet; and as he began to pace about the room, ‘is whether I am wanting, needing, to kill! … Someone: something: myself perhaps!’
This scene took place at dead of night, when Jason was alone in the house – or he was as far as he could tell, since the ground floor of the building was lived in by an elderly couple who had a private entrance of their own, and who never used the main entrance-hall and staircase. So he certainly felt alone, with Arnold no longer there, and with his apartment dark and empty. What Jason wasn’t at all conscious of, however, was how powerful the rant of his voice could be, and he was astonished when his scream – for it had been nothing less than that – drew the attention of neighbours, and a few lights appeared in the windows of houses beyond the garden. In one of them, a bald-headed, pot-bellied man, with curious, frightened eyes, was drawing on a striped, silk dressing-gown; and in another, a pale, thin woman, with a knot of frizzy, unruly grey hair, stood staring into the darkness, wondering what the cause of the shriek she had heard had been. Then her eyes found the lighted windows of Jason’s rooms, and the sight of Jason himself, pacing restlessly to and fro; and glancing out of the windows as he passed: scowling: wanting to shout across at her in the night that she should be minding her own business.