by Tim Jeal
I owe you so many apologies that I don’t know where to begin. I should have loved to have written a beautifully spontaneous letter. But circumstances have made this impossible; instead I give you cameos about funny foreigners … sickening.
I am sorry, terribly sorry. I married him because I felt certain I could never be happy with you and I knew that you would be unhappy because of my unhappiness. Why does this sound so ghastly? I look back over these words and wonder how I can write with such detachment about something that at the time almost tore out my heart. Then I could have written pages of self-justification. Now it’s all irrelevant. I should have had the courage to have seen you years ago.
Do you remember the long silences after we’d made love? I would open my eyes and look at your face, at the almost unearthly expression of impersonal happiness. I was always so much more conscious, so much more liable to ask you if you loved me. You treated these questions almost as an interruption of an isolated happiness that would go on whether I was there or not. I remember your saying goodbye to me at Euston one week when I was going to see my aunt in Yorkshire. We were to be separated for two weeks. I remember my misery. You asked me if I knew Brutus’s parting speech to Cassius (or vice versa). Told me a story about an old man who went mad in a train. No tender words of parting. Perhaps you couldn’t bear the reality of parting. I only know that everything you did was so contrived. Even your silences seemed to have some logic. Everything had a reason. But you came back and I now know that you acted as you did simply to try and keep me. I don’t suppose your illusions about love have survived. Mine certainly haven’t. Habit is the best destroyer of all. Clothes to be bought for Andrew before term starts, food to be got in for supper. Mark likes broccoli and cauliflower. He hates cabbage. He has two spoonfuls of sugar in coffee and none in tea. Perhaps because I married Mark you were able to go on loving me without familiarity breeding indifference. Perhaps you went on thinking of me as a creation of your mind rather than a reality. The precious pearl never to be yours. Forgive my amateur psychology.
Andrew’s staying with my mother. He thinks Daddy’s on holiday to make his leg better. Pathetic. I couldn’t even tell him the truth before rushing abroad to try to sort myself out away from present complications. At first I felt bitterly annoyed about the approaches made to you. You see Mark has given me enough money to enable Andrew and I to live more comfortably than we did before he left. So really I’m not a candidate for Christmas Day in the Workhouse. I could go on quite happily alone. Suitors might even come to tea and I could slap their hands away when they tried anything on the sofa. Did Mark tell you that I had an affair with a schoolmaster? He was younger than me and probably more intelligent. He could be very funny. There just seem to be times when laughing isn’t enough. And then all those wounded looks he gave me.
While I’ve been writing this I’ve often thought that I’ve been writing to a stranger. And yet you came back after ten years. I have this feeling that the wheel has come full circle. That there are you and here am I. That I tried to escape you and that I failed because it was inevitable. I feel that the clock has been put back, that it is possible to begin where we stopped. I want to see you again, Harry. I came when you asked me. If what I’ve been saying sounds grotesque and impossible, it may be because I hardly know what I am asking and do not dare ask openly. If you hate me you could still see me again. Take me away for the weekend for old time’s sake, sleep with me, call me a slut and leave me. I owe it to you. don’t I? When I finish this I won’t be able to re-read it. There’ll be so many things I never wanted to say, like the sentence about going away together.
When I get home and tell Andrew that Mark has gone, perhaps he’ll cry or maybe he’ll just look at me and say nothing. Do you remember before you went to France how you jokingly wondered what would have become of us both in ten years? Now we know. If only new-formula something could get rid of all the dirty marks and deep dis colorations of the past.
I want to try, Harry. Try and think how hard it is for me to say this. Don’t act out of pride or resentment. Our lives are too entwined to sever unthinkingly. I know how difficult it will be for you to answer. We are what we are now, not what we have been.
Dinah.
Twenty-three
As I looked at the once-familiar handwriting I still felt no recognisable emotion except sickness. It was certainly a clever and well-balanced letter. Her calmness in the face of desertion was admirable. Her anger at her husband’s and mother’s efforts to beg for her was also praiseworthy. How right she was to suppose that neither of our sets of illusions about love had survived. How right to say this before making any appeal for reconciliation. Then the realistic note about being all right financially. Finally the more flowing prose of the appeal with its touches of idealism. I didn’t write at once. I put it off day after day. Now that I had her letter I knew what was expected. There could be no more surprises. I was safe. I thought less about her. Now I found that I could read easily and with interest. I developed an interest in medieval history and spent various afternoons in museums. I started to go to the theatre again. I invited my cousins to stay for several days. We went to places of historic interest such as Knole and Hatfield. My feeling of emptiness decreased as my sense of freedom grew. Soon it would be spring. On another occasion I went to see my mother, who confessed that she had not seen me so cheerful for a long time. Was it, she asked slyly, a girl? At the office I devoted myself with greater enthusiasm to our transfer of interests. Yet there were moments of doubt. Spring might be coming soon and so might summer, but just as inevitably winter would follow. The seasons would merge, become years. Time, scientists may assure me, is merely a subjective illusion. Perhaps the only clock is the gradual decay of our bodies. Time may remain, but we go. And our going is as a rule gradual and all the more painful because it is gradual. We measure our years with the seasons that I am told will seem shorter. In old age I have heard that the simple things are more important and more lovely. Now, in my moments of doubt I found it hard to believe that the feel of the sun on my skin, and the beautiful furniture in stately homes would carry me on, even through the accelerating path of time. The visits of cousins and friends would lose their novelty, medieval history would not retain its quaint charm. Even my freedom from my life’s obsession would lead me back to the initial emptiness that I had felt when it had ceased to exist.
Experience has to be shared. We know this from the first faltering efforts at speech. A bus passes and the child says: ‘Bus, bus.’ Then the reassuring affirmation: ‘That’s right.’ And it goes on when we are older. After the difficult film or play the delicate testing. ‘What did you think of that?’ And cautiously we unfold our opinions as we gauge our companion’s feelings. We need reassuring and correcting; a man completely alone ceases to exist. Material solidity too is an illusion and purely subjective. For we can change our world by changing our view of it. My world changed with my love for Dinah and again it changed when that love ceased to exist. A pub is one place for the man who has just married and a different place for the man who has lost a mother. We can go to other places and our world comes with us in our heads, just as our possessions come in our packing cases. It wasn’t entirely true that I didn’t answer Dinah at once because there could be no more surprises. It was part of the truth. A single piece of the puzzle. The puzzle is what has happened to me, the store of memories. The infinite variety of sights and experiences that have told me that I am alone. When I was younger my loneliness was possible, for then I had hope, ridiculous as that seems now.
Look at a city at dusk in early winter when the sinking sun makes a mockery of the squalor of railway sidings and factory chimneys. For the rising smoke and the slate grey of the rows of roofs are momentarily warmed by its dying reds and pinks. Slowly as the darkness deepens and the light in the west fades the lights come on. The man in the train sees them as he speeds away from the woman he loves, the pilot sees them as he prepares to land, the park-keeper lo
oks at them through the trees as he rides his bicycle searching for couples in the bushes. And then perhaps fog forms and the figures in the streets hurry home. Hurry to homes where tables are laid for supper, where a fire is burning, a wife is waiting. In September the corpse of summer is still warm. Through the window in front of me, as I write, I see the lights in the flats opposite and sense that winter is coming with its colder rain, its bitter winds and clinging fogs. My mother gave me a night-light when darkness came earlier. It is never easy to go into the dark alone. This too was partly why I did not write. Why I was afraid to reject the only person in my life.
Then there was Andrew.
*
As I think of my childhood I think of Andrew’s. My self-indulgence, my fears, my loneliness are not mine alone. When I was ten I was sent away to school just like him. That distant world where Christian names do not exist. Where pleasure was being left alone because a sore throat let one out of games. I remember sitting in a comfortable chair with my feet up in front of a fire, reading a book, just hearing the thin shouts of the others out on the football field. I shut my eyes and the red-black warmth of my closed lids made the shouts more distant as I began to doze. How protective the hollow of my bed used to be, even if at seven the bell for cold showers would mean the start of another day of supervision. The agony of going back to school. I remember that too. Once I was ill and my mother came on the train with me. Two hours more of holidays. But in the end I was alone in the taxi driving through the gates, past the lodge. Everybody else would be unpacked and settled in. Then there were the inevitable questions: ‘Did you sham?’ I bet you weren’t really ill.’ So often we are coming or going, meeting or leaving, travelling on buses, planes, in cars or ships to places that we may not wish to go to. Like lovers for ever re-enacting a last kiss. Everybody watches the clock. As I look at my watch and the imperceptible movement of the hands I know that I cannot live as I have done. I can get up and pour a drink. I can walk down the road. The hands still move imperceptibly. There will be fog tonight. And summer too is a time when the intimacy of warm evenings exercises its own exclusion as subtle as the smell of lilacs and laburnums. A time when the sun strikes shafts of light through the curtains of a darkened room, when the sound of a piano is heard from across the street. The dust on the pavements, the haze as it shimmers on the roads, and then the heavier air as evening comes. The evenings that used to be so long. Once I walked into central London slowly. I went to see a prostitute, my first and last. She spoke to me in French. Perhaps she really was French. I sat in a waiting room with several other men. It was rather like a visit to the dentist, except there weren’t any magazines. And when I got into her room, she was douching out her last customer’s offering and I’d never felt less like it. But she led me to a basin and undid my trousers and washed me. Before I took down my trousers properly I asked her in pidgin French which part of France she came from. Anything to make the contact more real. She was almost fifty, but she used her tongue so well. She had the money before we started. Afterwards I offered her a cigarette and she took it but put it away. She washed me again. There were two new faces in the waiting room when I came out. I was there for twenty minutes and in the street the air was as heavy and the sky as bright and I had bitten a little out of one evening. And tomorrow? Of course I was afraid to write that letter.
I see the hotel bedrooms I have stayed in on business. The small towels, the new soap, the mirror inside the shiny wardrobe door, the neatness of the counterpane, the mattress that isn’t quite right. But the sheets are cold and newly laundered. How many times have I said, as I walked in the morning to my appointment, as I passed the proud and dirty municipal buildings in the city centre, yes, I could live here with her. She was the wire that tightened everything, that held the days together, that linked my meaningless journeys and meetings, that excused my indiscretions. And now?
I used to live so directly from moment to moment before I knew Dinah. Now I can again think of those days more clearly and remember more. I recall the reality of humiliation. When I was eight I wore trousers that had no fly buttons. I was playing with some boys in the village near my aunt’s house. We were playing ducks and drakes on the pond and my stones refused to skim. They told me I would learn one day and then one of them noticed that my trousers had no fly buttons. Perhaps even very little boys’ trousers have fly buttons now. I was cruel to insects, got overexcited in hide-and-seek, compared genitals with a small girl. An ordinary childhood, but very real. Then, like all children, I was unaware of time. I did not ask my parents unusual questions about who made God and what electricity was made of. I accepted almost everything and was content that the sun revolved around me. One day I might be an admiral or a general and because I did not know and because I was a child and would never, as it seemed, have to pay the whole fare for a railway journey, I did not care. Then was the time when possibilities were limitless, the doors so many that it was impossible to think of opening any. Only when there are no uncertainties should one be afraid, only when the last sharp pang of fluttering anticipation has gone for ever. If only I had never attempted to predict. There were many reasons why I waited so long before writing to Dinah. I have given some of them … themes as ordinary as childhood fears and passing time, and isolation, and predicting the future.
I still denied her claim that I should pity Andrew’s future tears. Andrew is my child only in the most abstract way. I never announced my pride with notices in the smarter papers, or waited with other fathers in the anteroom of a maternity ward. I never brought her flowers as she lay between clean sheets and never told her that she looked radiant. What was his pram like? Did it have a fringed sunshade in summer? Did it roll opulently on well-oiled springs? My parenthood was by proxy. How did his personality grow from the first inarticulate sounds to ordered speech? What colour was his coat in winter? I used to wear a corduroy cap. I imagined how we might have watched trains together, how I might have eased his pram over the edges of pavements, pushed him through parks, sailed boats on lakes with him. Shared his anxiety in case the wind dropped and they became becalmed. I could have looked at the delicacy of his skin, the colour of his eyes, their depths, felt the warmth of his small hand in mine. Kissed him good night, read to him, helped him build dams and castles by the sea, bought him model racing cars. Nothing connects me to him except our blood. And yet.
*
I used to amuse myself in trains and pubs or shops by guessing what people did. I’d neatly catalogue them and send them home to precisely the jobs and houses I’d made for them. Now I no longer play games in the streets and in the shops. People frighten me in numbers. They frighten me because of the multitude of their separate lives and circumstances. Each with his or her circle of friends, his or her neighbourhood, pastime, pleasure, vice. Now each assessment of somebody else turns my eye back to myself. Who would swap their life for mine What have I got now?
And once I had asked myself this question; I asked it again and again. And my answers made me delay answering her letter.
This evening, as on all other evenings, there will be men, sitting in the smoke-filled air of thousands of cinemas, watching a pair of huge heads moving slowly and inexorably towards each other for the kiss that has been inevitable since the start of the film. And perhaps the owner of the feminine head, that is big enough to swallow several members of the audience without difficulty, perhaps the owner of this head is fluffily feminine and wears fluffily feminine underwear and talks baby-talk when drinking champagne. Her thoughts will be as fluffy as her underwear and as feathery light and her body is soft as her power to resist is soft. Her breath is sweet, she is easily frightened. Poor thing, she is rather out of favour now. It is still possible to see her in revivals in suburban cinemas. There are many other feminine heads and bodies tonight. The harsh cruel temptress who knows how to shoot as well as her lover and carries cyanide in her handbag and her heart. Her clothes are as crisp as her speech and her mind. She is not easily frightened
or tamed. She is often unattainable. Some would rather see the more rustic peasant girl with her large hips and thighs, her heavy breasts. She may be taken on the ground, even on rainy days, on the straw of a barn floor or behind a hedge. She is uninhibited and ‘natural’, there is a medieval bawdiness about her. She goes well with flagons of beer and hunks of meat. Far removed is the girl with high cheekbones and dark eyes that seem to be as old as the mysterious history of woman. She is cultured and quiet, her voice is low. Her sad remoteness is the sadness of wisdom and knowledge. Her expression is her eyes and the way she moves, swims, dances; always with grace. All of them have been seen and wanted and possessed. And perhaps when they have been possessed they have been discarded and another takes the vacant place in the realm of the impossible heart’s desire.
I am not speaking with scorn, for I made Dinah a figure in celluloid, an inhabitant of my mind. And my eyes were opened to her separate existence, to the things I did not know, and did not want to know, and when that happened I thought that I would reject her.
After she deceived me I still had something — my anger. It was an ever-present reminder that I was alive, it gave me my only purpose: never to return to her, to root her out of my mind utterly. While my anger lasted I was warmed by a satisfying pride in being alone. Each day away from her was like a victory. Later, as my anger lessened, I thought of living with her solely to punish her. I imagined myself a living memorial to the harm she had done me, my every look would hold reproach, my every action bring revenge. If I tortured myself, too, what did that matter? The self-inflicted penance of her company might even keep alive my anger. Yet nothing could do that. I realised this as I looked at my watch, as I thought of the next meal, the next job, the next day. And when my anger died I had nothing but the certainty that I would reject you, Dinah. When this happened I was lost. I have read that primitive peoples believe that a man can lose his soul. With the loss of his soul goes the loss of identity, the loss of existence. I am not drawing a self-pitying parallel, I am stating a fact. A man in isolation does not exist. My heart beats, but it is not my real heart.