“It is all dead, do you realize?” Tarquin is standing up over me in the firelight, shouting. The light is twinkling on his palate, on his charred molars. “It has all been used up and died. It’s gone. We can’t get back. Gregory, do you realize? It’s the past now.”
His head is cocked sideways to hear the drums again. Then he is shouting again, in that high voice of his. His nose sticks out like a bandaged thumb. “My God, how seldom we realize time. Do you hear me? Eh? And it’s going through us the whole time. We are running through it without realizing it.” Then once again, whining. “Gregory, where are you going to? Please tell me, eh? I must know. I can’t stay here alone, without someone to confide in. Eh?”
We are sitting in the drawing room among the pile of boxes. All day I have been burning the more expensive of the books in the grate. There is still a stench of pigskin hanging in the air. So much for my buried talent. Let it stay buried. I shall clamp the lid down on it. Tarquin is talking again. Excuse me. I must transcribe what he says for posterity. “Is it something wrong? Couldn’t you confide in me for once? Think of the intimate things I have told you before now. Intimate, intimate things I would not divulge to a soul. Gregory, where are you going? You can’t just leave. Tell me.”
What shall I answer? “I am going, my dear Torquatus, to marry Kate. I am going to become a barmaid’s homely plunger. You would like Kate if you met her. She wears a thick rubber washer on her vagina.” I am chuckling as I write this and read him it, syllable by syllable.
“Oh, do stop fooling now and be serious. You’ve been japing enough this evening. Tell me. Eh?”
“I’ve told you.”
There is a long pause. Count twenty.
“Well if you won’t tell me I’ll sulk.”
“I tell you what. I’ll write it all down as a piece of homely fiction and give it to you to read when I leave. With my address on the bottom left-hand corner, by the impression of my ring. The one with the phallus on it. What do you say to that?”
He has begun playing his Wagner on the piano. A Teutonic wet dream. For a minute I feel I would like to drive this pen into his back as he sits there playing. His lifelessness is such a satire on my own. Then suddenly he moves into a hard glittering travesty of Mozart. An uncut furious diamond, which scratches the windowpanes. Fanny walks along the cliff like a ghost, dressed in gullgrey, from the gullet to the loins. Blown back against her body, the material lies on her, clings and blows about her breasts in relief. She lies there like a stone figure in a forgotten desert, doucely outlined by dunes, Such a tenderness in the loins, such a blindness, is required to recall this in music or green writing. My eyes are lead plummets. There is a glass bridge built all of a sudden in my brain. I tread softly for fear of breaking it. My knees are made of isinglass. I am afraid of her. My blood pours out into the soft sand as I kneel beside her. Hot, hot, like lava between the arches of the pelvis. Tarquin has begun playing the medulla obbligato. I remember the blue cracks in Grade’s rictus. The rigor mortis. Most delectable of laws. We shall all of us have the last laugh. When there is nothing to fill the hole between my burst heart and the nearest star I shall still have the divine gesture, the Epicurean pose.
“This barmaid, is she real?” says Tarquin casually. “Or is it another jape? You seem full of japes. All this book burning. Eh? Give me your books. I’ll sell them and stand Lobo a woman. I’ll buy myself a new hat and some music. Eh?”
“You misunderstand the gesture.”
In the evenings we used to talk together. That means nothing to you? I don’t wonder. It was my world. We used to walk together in holiness, damn your uncomprehending face. If there was any passion in the earth then we exhausted it all. Nothing has remained since then. Mrs. Vengeance used to sing “My soul is like a flow-er.” And we used to sit rapt with our fingers linked, the eyes so frank and green, like the eyes of my rocking horse. Close the finely cut head, delicate as my beautiful rocking horse, with the soft cut-away lips, like twin dolphins.
Where are the snows of yesteryear? Thank you Mrs. Vengeance. That was lovely. But where is Fanny, Gracie, old Fanny …? Grins I suppose. A trio of Cheshire cats. Or all melted into the essential grin? The wizened rictus of Lao Tse gouged on the terrific face of death. I remember suddenly her running towards me in the music, offering her wrists. I was a quivering fiddle until she laid that cool pad of her hand on me and dumbed the strings.
Today I noticed the bald patch spreading. Signs of the times. The spreading baldness in my bloodless scalp like red ink on blotting paper. I have composed my last will and testament. In the mirror my eyes seem to incandesce, turn a cold steely blue. It is like looking down the oiled barrel of a gun.
To the green eyes I offer the nostalgic fit of weeping, a rocking horse, a bundle of flowers, a hymnbook, my seal with dolphins on it, and any of the apocryphal testaments.
He who smiles first, laughs last. Fiat voluntas. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, grin without end. Amen.
“You are unjust,” says Chamberlain, his hair in his eyes, his teeth gleaming. “Passion doesn’t flourish like a potted plant.”
He has heard I am leaving, and in a fit of warmth he has come round to say good-bye. I am furious now because I have told him all about Kate. The little secret over which I have been chuckling and hugging myself for the last few weeks. Under his infectious warmth I found the facts slipping from me.… It was so natural to admit the soft impeachment—for Kate is nothing if not a soft impeachment—that now I am furious. “It’s not passion that interests me,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he says, with a queer quiet humility, utterly unlike him. “I suppose we’re not all alike.” As he leaves he says, a little sentimental, “Drop me a line, will you, if you feel like it?”
I shake my head. The steep flight of stairs detains him for a moment. “You’ll change your mind,” he says, “I have a feeling you will. Good-bye.”
Very well, I return to my desk for the final audit. This diary must be finished before I leave.
I am tempted to write a little about my father, about him standing in a trance hour after hour in his workshop, absorbed and selfless as a bobbin in a loom, going through the motions of creation. But there is nothing alive about this retrospect. The illusion, perhaps. But in reality what a terrible galvanic twitching. It is the world’s disease. The balance has been lost which alone makes action live, which alone creates formidable work. Now there is only the illusion of action. Faster, we cry, faster. After a time the illusion of action is lost, the sense is dulled, the last fearful stalemate of the soul sets in. This is the death I am participating in.
Well, everything is in order, or rather disorder. The hall is blocked with trunks. There is not a single artistic or aesthetic object in them, but they seem very full. The hearth is awash with ashes.
Morgan brings my dinner down with the face of a jailor, and then leaves silently, banging the door. I expect Tarquin to call but he does not. Very well. Stone walls do not a prison make, so I shall eat the cold pork, and crack a Pale Ale on the bows of the departing Viking. Yet, I protest, this place has the atmosphere of a slaughterhouse. This is my wedding breakfast. After it they will come in with their hands behind their backs, shamefaced, like butchers, in their uniforms and tell me to stand up and turn round. I shall feel my arms pinioned. Weeping with relief, I shall allow them to lead me out, a passive sheep, into the little adjacent shed, where IT stands. There I shall be washed in the blood of the Lamb, choked, and given the long clean drop, footfirst, into the absolute. Let them cut out my blackened tongue, and my charred liver, and pickle them for the Museum. Let me tell you a little about Kate, as soberly as fits a condemned man. Firstly, I am very happy. I have poured out my decisions like small change, and selected one clean new sixpence. Kate is the lousiest, tightest, dumbest and most devaluated sixpence that ever came from the mint. Let me not affect this bitterness. It is not real.
When I think about Kate I am as dumb and passive a
s a bullock. It is the only solution really, the only way out. In Bournemouth, walking the streets, while the rain prolonged the lights and houses, the whole shape of my future rose up and choked me. In the municipal library I found myself all of a sudden sitting with a book on oceanography open in front of me. I was looking for the Logos. The face of the squid attracted me. Later, in a cosy little bar parlour the face of Kate was the face of the same squid I had seen on the title-page of the tome.
We got into conversation in quite a classy way. She trod on my foot and said she was sorry. I knocked her glass against her teeth and said I was sorry. “We seem to be in a proper pickle tonight,” she observed. When I agreed she went on to make sundry trite observations about the weather, etc. “Are you staying long?” she asked. “Down here for a spree?” I explained that I was down here with a dead wife, and was immediately taken in hand. I was mothered. It was tedious but pleasant. Being a widow she felt herself competent to deal with a strong man’s grief. We went to cinemas together, flirted mildly too. This, she gave me to understand, was what all widowers did. They felt so lonely. She was a knowing little thing. “Don’t you worry, chicken,” she said, patting my thigh, “I won’t snatch you.”
“Don’t call me chicken.”
“Okay, chicken.”
She knew all about men. Her husband had been one. But her honour would not stoop to mere bawdry out of wedlock, “’ere,” she said modishly, knocking my hand away. “Lay off that mucking about. I’m not one of those.”
“Oh, but you are, Katie. You are a proper one. I have never seen such a one in my life.” She could never make out whether I was sneering at her or not. However, it seemed unlikely to her way of thinking. It was just my way, she used to titter. I liked to have her on. Dilating those hard eyes of hers she would put her face close to mine and titter. Immediately the humorous squid would come to life in her.
Do you find Kate a bit of a puzzle? Here, I put her photograph before you. A trim little craft with that predatory squid’s jowls. Brass wouldn’t melt in her mouth. You can see at a glance that here is someone who knows right from wrong. You are still puzzled? I will explain. I chose Gracie, because she was, as women go, extraordinary. With Kate, I employed the method so much in vogue with the writers of best sellers. I chose her because she was the most ordinary person I could find. If I had not met her I should have had to go into a bank. Kate is the sanctuary which I have been wanting for so long. When I saw the little house, with its cheap and hideous furniture, the linoleum floors, the garish cushions, I said to myself: I am home at last. Sitting in my slippers under a steel engraving of Holman Hunt, feeling the damp sprouts of flame from the gas fire warm my trouser legs, I said to myself: This is my sanctuary. Hereafter I shall bury myself beside the wireless, behind a paper. Kate shall minister to my soul with a meat and two veg, and leave me to my private battle with God. This is deadly true. Kate is the monastery in which I am about to be interned. I have nothing to say to her, nothing in common with her. I have given up all those childish nostrums and charms with which I hoped to find salvation for so long. Hush, I say to myself, from now on I am going to lie in secrecy. A prediluvial secrecy. No demands will be made of me in this private madhouse. Kate’s husband gave her so little that she expects nothing from me. An orgasm, for instance. She does not know what that is, has never experienced it. I will take good care that she never does. She has a deep-seated nervous grudge against men, the dirty brutes. This will ensure the sacred void between our stars. She lies under one with that white, painful, Christian face of hers, and puts up with the more loathsome side of the business with the air of a real stoic. It does my heart good to see it. I need fear no intrusions, no wringing of hands or bowels.
Tomorrow I will go unto my father, by the four-fourteen. I will be met at the station. I can see it all, I can taste the manna in my mouth. The smoky little road with the hoops of iron round their dreary hutches. Home! The segment of sopping grass outside the greenhouse. The one sick dwarf apple. We shall sit down in the kitchen by the range and eat dinner together—she very wise and skittish and hard as a bell. And with our knives shall we scrape the rich brown dripping from the pudding basin, and smear it on our bread.
“Everything fair and square,” is her motto. She is a great believer in the equality of the sexes. She shall pay for herself wherever she goes, even at the cinema.
There will never be any question of personalities, because she is too much of a lady. I shall never be lonely because there will be no relief from loneliness. Chamberlain used to say: “Let us have more of the metaphysical beast, Gregory. Come on, gird up the loins of anger.” I am weary of the cult of bowel worship. Weary, utterly weary and sick from my very soul. All these pious resolutions have bled themselves empty in me. If there were an organized religion which were strong enough to grip me I would welcome it. There is something in me, I know, that must be chipped away, like dead mastoid. But I shall not bother to fight for it. The struggle is too hideous, the inner extraction of dead selves, like giant festering molars, is too too painful. Let be, and suffer the disease to run its course. From now on my hands are folded across my breast. Let the grass grow under my tongue, between my teeth, let the scabs form on my eyeballs, let the buboes burst between my toes, I shall not lift a finger.
This is the going down towards the tomb. The weather has been, on the whole, very fair. There is a slight belt of pressure settled round the south coast of Ireland, but who cares about that? Fair to fine is the general forecast, with slight local showers, and sensational fluctuations of bullion. The pork trade is doing well. The ductless glands are in training earlier this year, under a new coach. Their time from Hammersmith to Putney is already doubled. It is hoped that they will carry off the Ashes this year without any difficulty. At a twelfth reading, the bill for the distribution of more milk to pregnant members of Parliament was carried by a majority of twelve. Mr. Baldwin concurred. Altogether the outlook is magnificent for the coming year, with a definite promise of worse to follow. Stocks are falling owing to a recent eruption of Mount Rothermere, but hopes are rising. Recent excavations in Fleet Street have been suspended owing to a discharge of speckled venom. However, business proceeds as usual, with slight tremors.
Lobo is having a terrible time, they tell me. He is in love, and is finding it painful. While he was abroad he met a German girl, a pneumatic Teuton frau, of the love me or leave me breed, who held him down with her thumb and gave him something to think about. He spends all night weeping for his sins. “I have not been an angel,” he says, rolling his sore, swollen eyes. He is in two minds about cutting himself. He wants to marry her, but how can he? Such a foul, leprous little whoremonger as he is—can he marry a fine pure seafaring blonde? If she found out about him she would go into a monastery. And then he would have to go into a monastery too to equalize things. And if he does marry her, how can he keep away from prostitutes and enthusiastic amateurs? They are in his blood. “I am a dirty leetle leecher,” he says wildly, beating his thigh. “I was a pure Catholic once until that woman got me. Since then I have been thirsty … like thirst, you understand?” I understand. She taught him many peculiar refinements, did his friendly widow. She used to say, “Better to keep the shoes on when you do it. It is better shoes and long black stockings.”
From my present sumptuous boredom I sit and laugh at Lobo through the bars. What a droll little ape. I can no longer even be amused by his antics. Tarquin can be funny when he squalls and whines, but Lobo—no, I have put away my microscope for good.
I can hear the train wheels beating their rhythmic revolutions in my head as I write. The four-fourteen carrying me homeward to the slippers, the gas fire, the paper, the dripping, the text on the wall. And Kate waiting for me, trim and cheaply scented in her Marks & Spencer knickers. Done up in coloured crinkles for me like a cheap cake of aromatic soap. We shall stand together before the deputy of God, and partake of a manly little service for the connubial felicities to be legalized. Dear Kate
, like a canvas doll in bed with a white stoic face, whetting the appetites of cruelty in her brand-new hubby. And all these acres of tragic struggles, of boredoms, despairs, delusions, will fall from me as I enter my prison. The ubiety of God. The fantastic zero to which I shall reduce the terms of living and so find happiness. The slow gradual ascent into silence, into dumbness. Why do we fear the modern world? Why are we afraid of becoming insects? I can imagine no lovelier goal. The streets of Paradise are not more lovely than the highways of the ant heap. I shall become a white ant, God willing. I shall have my swink to me reserved and nothing else. Let the hive take my responsibilities. I am weary of them.
The Black Book Page 21