by Sam Lock
‘And I love you,’ said Billy.
But if John and Billy’s night was one of pleasure, the opposite was the case in the house of Jason’s parents; for much to everyone’s surprise, his father suffered a relapse, and a doctor had to be called during the night. The morning found some improvement, however, and it seemed that the crisis had quickly passed.
‘Edgar,’ Lilian said to her husband quietly, as he lay next to her, and as the first glimmer of daylight showed beneath the hems of the bedroom’s closely-drawn curtains.
‘Yes, dear?’ Edgar replied.
‘How are you feeling? Better?’
‘Oh, much. A lot. I’ve slept. And sleep always does the trick – doesn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s a great healer. Do you need anything? A hot drink? Some water?’
‘No, dear. I don’t think so. I am very comfortable – here, with you … Did Jason call last night?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. He didn’t.’
‘So we still haven’t heard from him.’
‘No.’
‘And it’s almost Christmas.’
‘And it’s almost Christmas – yes. But he’ll ring today, I am sure. If not, I’ll ring him.’
‘Yes, of course. I doubt that there is anything to worry about, Lilian. No news is good news, as they say.’
‘Yes. That is the saying – isn’t it?’ replied Lilian, as she climbed out of bed to slip on a warm dressing-gown; then crossed the room to draw back the curtains, and to reveal a clear, pale winter sky, with the sun just rising above the bare trees of the orchard … “Bare trees that glitter near the sky,” she said to her husband. ‘Do you remember them, Edgar – those words: a poem we used to recite? … “The sea’s first miracle of blue – bare trees that glitter near the sky?”
‘Oh – yes. I do. How lovely.’
‘Beautiful – yes,’ said Lilian, peering out of the window, ‘– and our robin is there, you know. Always hopeful. Always cheerful.’
‘Which is what we must be,’ said Edgar.
‘Which is what we must be,’ responded Lilian, as she drew her dressing-gown around her and returned to her husband’s side.
*
‘It’s quite a nice morning, Mother,’ said Gillian, as she brought her mother’s breakfast into her bedroom on a tray.
‘Is it?’ asked her mother, showing no real interest.
‘Yes. There is even some sun … Look. You can see it reflected in the lake.’
‘I can’t from here,’ her mother replied. ‘I can never see the water from my bed.’
‘Oh, what a pity. It’s really beautiful. Somehow I think that the countryside is at its best in winter – don’t you?’
‘Not if there’s ice and snow,’ said Gillian’s mother.
‘Well, there’s none of that, this morning,’ said Gillian. ‘It’s almost springlike.’
‘Spring is a long way off, Gillian. You shouldn’t be thinking of it – and I hate the winter, as you know.’
‘I can’t think why, Mother. The house is warm. You are very comfortable here. The walls are solid.’
‘Yes, well. We built them – didn’t we? Your father and myself. Made them purposefully thick against the weather.’
‘And very sensible too,’ said Gillian, knowing that she would win no positive response from her mother that morning. ‘Yes,’ she repeated, ‘very sensible,’ as she picked up a pair of her mother’s stockings. ‘Do these need washing?’ she asked.
‘Oh – yes,’ her mother replied, glancing at her daughter in a sly manner, in order to avoid thanking her for her help in such things.
‘Well, I’ll get it done then. I’ll put them in with the children’s things: none of which need boiling.’
Her mother said no more. She simply picked up a newspaper that Gillian had brought in to her on the tray and poured herself a cup of tea. And as she flicked through the pages of the paper, and as she took a first careful sip from her breakfast-cup, her daughter wagged her head in an expression of exasperation, then walked out of the room.
In London, in Chelsea, the morning was even brighter than in the country – than in either Hampshire or the Lake District, and Lady Cynthia, who disliked sleeping with her bedroom curtains fully closed, woke to a shaft of sunlight falling upon the head of her sleeping lover; who always looked so vulnerable, she thought, when beside her and asleep; and quite the opposite of the sharp, defensive man that he appeared as during the daytime.
‘Fred-er-ick,’ she cooed to him softly, knowing that he liked to be wakened gradually.
‘Fred-er-ick,’ she repeated, blowing gently into his hair and one of his ears, ‘it’s seven-thirty, you know; and you said you needed to be off early.’
‘I what?’ Captain Smythe answered, only half awake.
‘You said you wanted to get away early, my love, and it’s already half past seven.’
‘Oh! My God – yes,’ he said, now turning onto his back, and as his plans for the day found their way into his mind.
‘Well – shouldn’t you get up?’ said Lady Cynthia, kissing him lightly upon the nose, ‘and shave before breakfast?’
‘Not just yet,’ her lover replied with a grin; his teeth, yellowed by smoking, showing beneath the bristles of his moustache; just one more cuddle – eh? A little romp before I go?’ To which request Lady Cynthia graciously gave in, happy, as she always was, to be playful in her lover’s arms; and thankful that the day could begin in such a manner, before they had breakfast, and before the inevitable farewells from her bedroom window as she saw the Captain off in his car.
Jason’s sleep had been untroubled and unbroken; and he awoke to the day feeling refreshed; his mind quickly filling with memories of the previous night, and of Darren’s unexpected visit.
He was still fully dressed, and felt a need to go quickly to the bathroom, where, as he swilled his face, he caught sight of himself in the mirror.
Was he a coward? he asked himself. Was there some truth in that? He stared deeply into his reflected eyes to find that they stared back at him with an untrembling calm. Was he still frightened? Still running away from himself? Still burying his head in sand?
He could hardly think so, for now he felt so sure that he knew himself better than he had ever done: that, even though the entries in his notebook had as yet been few, they had given him a new view of himself – an honest view: that he had at last approached something of a truth about himself: that his story – his ‘real’ story, as he thought of it – was an odd and unconventional one; and of a man of some intelligence who had been travelling on the wrong train, and along what had always been the wrong track.
The winter sun was sending silver-gilt beams of light into his rooms; and as he returned to his bedroom, he crossed to its window to look down at the garden below.
It was as shapeless and disordered as ever. Nothing had changed. The broken urn still lay across one of its pathways. The weeds, now lessened by winter, still pushed their way between the cracks in the garden’s paths; and the now leafless briars and brambles still spilled unchecked across the tops of the garden’s walls – beyond which, looking towards the south, he could see the embankment and the river, which, with the tide being high, stretched in a level grey towards Battersea, where a set of barges tethered together made their slow progress upstream; and where a police-boat swiftly passed them, its lights still on, in spite of the sun being up, and with its small white prow sending quick wavelike movements towards the shore.
On the opposite side of the river, a man was walking a dog; his steady rhythm showing that it was something he did each day and probably at the same time; and Jason wondered how long it might be that he had followed this routine. For how many years? – and for how long might he go on following it in the future?
Life goes on, he thought; is still going on; will go on going on – for each of us, until the end.
‘There’s one funeral you’re sure to be at,’ he heard Betty’s voice say, as he had heard
it said so many times, ‘and that’s your own’; at which he smiled, thinking to himself how fond of her he was, and of how, in a way, she had been a kind of mother to him. A very different one to his real mother – to Lilian: for Betty had provided him with a certain weight, a certain earthiness, that his own mother had lacked, and he felt glad of it.
Turning from the window, Jason moved to the chest at the foot of his bed, where the one notebook he had used lay open; and picking it up, he fingered through its pages, reminding himself of the things that he had said in it. Then, quite irrationally, he decided that he would open the chest, and that he would then hide the notebook beneath whatever there might be stored in it: which he quickly did. Then he closed the chest and turned its key in its lock; then withdrew the key and crossed to slip it into a small, china vase that stood on a shelf close to his alarm clock.
Having done that, he found that he then entered an almost trance-like state of mind, and realised that he was looking at the various objects in the room – a chair, his bed, his shirts, his articles of underwear that were strewn here and there – with a curious objectivity. All seemed to be defined with a hard, cold clarity; as if each of them had been drawn by a firm hand upon thickish sheets of paper, and as if he was noting and recording it in detail.
From his bedroom he passed into the living room where Darren had sat the previous night, and where, in his imagination, he could see with equal clarity the dagger Darren had produced, and of which he had claimed to be fond.
He saw Darren handling it; heard his voice: reminded himself of how unreal it had all seemed at the time, and thought how unreal it still seemed now.
Then he saw Darren at the door as he left, felt the pressure of his hand upon his own; pressing it, stroking it. And then the final image of Darren, with his coat collar turned up and drawing it closely around his neck as he went walking off into the night.
Now, he no longer pondered upon the meaning of Darren’s visit. He accepted it as having been a part of his life; as being something that had happened to him, and that had been meant to happen – as we are obliged to do with all experience.
By this time, Lady Cynthia and Captain Smythe had finished their breakfast, which Lady Cynthia always insisted that they have in bed upon a large, silver tray; and which she partly enjoyed because she could then linger on and watch her lover as he dressed – admiring the smart, military fashion in which he would slip his braces over his shoulders, having first stuffed his shirt-tails into his trousers; and then, leaning forward slightly, how he would do up, with equal precision, the buttons of his flies – and then, in one swift movement, pass a hand across his moustache.
‘Frederick,’ she said, as he slipped on a boldly checked waistcoat, and then did up the buttons of that, ‘I do love you, you know.’
‘And I do you, my dear,’ he answered, without turning to look at her, ‘my God I do.’
‘Well – shall I see you tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘Tomorrow?’ he replied, ‘Yes, perhaps. I’m not sure. I’ll ring. But the day after, certainly … Now,’ he added, ‘I must be off. Duty calls … I’ve my mind upon a car I’ve seen in Greenwich – a real beauty: and you know how I am, once I am set upon such things.’
‘Of course, dear,’ Lady Cynthia answered generously. ‘You and your cars’; with which she let out an engaging ripple of laughter, that seemed full of light and sunshine; as was her room, with the large bowlful of roses that Captain Smythe had brought her the day before, standing upon her dressing-table; surrounded by her assortment of silver-backed hairbrushes, together with the framed photograph of her late husband that appeared to preside over the room.
‘Well, I’ll see you off from the window,’ said Lady Cynthia, ‘as usual.’
‘As you always do,’ said Captain Smythe, with a sudden look of real affection, and crossing to Lady Cynthia’s side of the bed to give her a farewell kiss.
‘And you will ring,’ said Lady Cynthia.
‘I’ll ring,’ he answered. ‘I can’t say quite when – but I’ll ring.’
Unaware that his mental rhythms has begun to accelerate, Jason was now moving swiftly from room to room; inspecting each of them carefully; and seeming to fix them even more permanently in his mind. Then, all of a sudden he collapsed into a chair and wept. Not because he was feeling sorry for himself, but because the tension in him had broken and had given him a feeling of release.
The relaxation provided by this brought many reflections into is mind. He saw quick pictures of his childhood; of himself playing with Jeremy by the river beyond the orchard of his parent’s house in Hampshire. He saw pictures of his first meeting with Jill, which had been a chance one, when they were both extremely young; neither of them realising that they were later to re-meet and become drawn to each other. He saw his children, Tom and Sarah, when they were small, and remembered how attractive they had been and were still. He saw Betty’s plump figure, stooping in the kitchen to store away the various pots of jam that she would make each year, having labelled each with sticky labels, and having covered their tops with a circle of greaseproof paper and then a larger one in linen. He saw his friend, Joseph, when he too was young, and they had first met and argued in a bar on the Fulham Road; and recalled how bright and alive he had appeared to be; remembering his curiosity of mind, the vibrancy of his physical energy and presence. He also remembered Arnold, and how strange he had seemed, when he had first gone to rent the suite of rooms in which he had lived for the past three years. He saw John and Billy on the stairs before they came to know him, in their neat suits and their neatly knotted ties, and the way in which they would lower their eyes whenever he passed, and would murmur ‘good evening’ or ‘goodnight’. He saw his father and mother, not as they were then, but as they had been some twenty years previously: saw his father’s bespectacled eyes, always peering, always questioning: saw his slightly stooping, wiry frame: saw his mother’s fine, near-classical features, with her hair already drawn back into a bun, and her gentle, understanding smile, that expressed the reasonableness of her nature. He saw so many things of the past: so many images of people, places, things – memories of which came flooding back to him; until, eventually, his weeping ceased – and, feeling tired by the release that he had been given, he decided to lie down again upon his bed: which he then did; still with his shoes on, and lying stretched out upon his back, and with his hands clasped behind his head.
And it was then that the sense of some great action came to him; the feeling that something was about to take hold of him and drive him to do he knew not what. How it came to him he couldn’t tell, but the sense of it happening was clear and sure and firm in his mind and his intelligence rose to meet it; so that he no longer felt nervous and afraid, in the way that he had so often done when he had had similar experiences in the past. The fight had at last gone out of him. He felt almost a sense of grandeur about the moment; as if his story – the one that he had so ardently been seeking – was about to arrive at its conclusion. Indeed, he experienced something close to joy, a kind of happiness: a sense of order and rightness. ‘Thy will be done,’ were words that came to him; and something Joseph would often say when speaking about the I Ching – words in which he so delighted – ‘Fate comes when it will and thus we are ready.’
For a while, Jason remained on his bed without moving; during which time the sunshine had increased in strength and had filled his rooms with a great flood of light. He could hear birds singing in the garden, glad that the winter should have withdrawn its icy fingers, and that there was no threat of frost or snow that might deprive them of their nourishment.
From the river, he could hear the faint sound of a tug chugging away, the low throb of its engine just reaching him, setting a steady rhythm in his mind, and reminding him that the life of the city was continuing. Soon, he thought, he would hear noises in the street; of milk being delivered, perhaps – which were sounds with which he was familiar – and it suddenly occurred to him that he too
must be up and be going, in much the same way that a man rises from his bed and hurries off to work. ‘Ah – well,’ he muttered to himself, ‘what will be will be’ – words that helped to define what he was feeling, and that served, at the same time, as some kind of protection against it as well. And with that, he got up from his bed; quickly found his overcoat (which, as he quite often did, he had thrown across his bed, rather than hang in one of his cupboards) and, putting it on, decided to go and take what he thought of as one last look at himself. ‘Before what?’ he asked. ‘Before I go,’ his mind replied, and seeming to provide him with an answer.
In the mirror, he saw his face yet again, now unmarked by trouble and free, it appeared, of all care – and he smiled at himself and flicked his fingers at his image; his dark eyes looking back at him without movement.
Then, at last, the action took hold of him, and submitting to it willingly, he strode out of the room.
Once he had reached the hallway at the foot of the staircase, Jason paused and stood still; his eyes concentrating upon the bolted door ahead of him. Then he crossed to unbolt the door and to open it.
The street outside was empty and the early morning sunshine was falling upon the row of houses that stood facing him – where, looking up, he saw the veiled figure of Lady Cynthia behind the gauze of her bedroom curtains, waiting to wave goodbye to her lover as he sped past on the way to Greenwich. And as Jason saw her, she saw him – and retreated a little; perhaps because she was made shy by being seen and because of what she was doing.
And it was then that Jason heard and recognised the sound of Captain Smythe’s car, that had been parked in a street nearby. He knew the sound of it well; knew it was the Captain leaving early; and he knew as well that in a second or two the car would turn the corner and pass in front of his door: and – because he had seen it arrive and depart so often – he also knew that it would be travelling at quite a speed.
And it was as that last thought came into his mind, that he knew the moment for which he had been seeking had arrived; that he had at last been given the chance to free himself from all the tension he had suffered and so bring his story to an end.