‘Do you want some supper, Henry?’
‘Thanks, I don’t mind.’
‘It’s only left-overs, I’m afraid.’
‘Left-overs of that meal would grace a prince’s table,’ he said, and added, ‘Thanks. For the lunch, I mean.’
‘Was it all right?’
‘Spot on.’
He smiled at me and, incredibly, I caught myself wanting to love him—to go to him that moment and kiss and caress him. The attraction of the doomed, I thought, trying to disgust myself, to shake off this extraordinary feeling. You don’t really find him physically attractive, what you feel this moment is an unworthy mixture of pity and morbidity, not flattering to him really. But I went into the kitchen and stood there for a moment, quite shaken by something very much like desire, and unable to pull myself away from it by any kind of crisp rationalisations.
However, by the time I’d hashed up some supper for us it had faded almost into total quiescence, only interfering subtly with my actions. For instance, I wanted to lay a rather special sort of table in the dining-room with candles and so on but I stopped myself, of course, and instead threw a few bits of china and cutlery onto the kitchen table. I went too far the other way, and made it all too casual and sloppy, which drew a faintly caustic remark from Henry about eating al fresco. I mollified him by opening a bottle of his favourite lager which I always kept handy in the fridge, and we had a pleasant enough supper. During it Henry talked about his father and Joanna and how it never failed to strike him as rather unnatural that their marriage appeared so successful.
‘It’s not only the age thing, it’s her being so delicate and him so—well, gross.’ I said he wasn’t gross at all, but very spare and trim for a man of his age, but Henry said, ‘Not physically. I mean coarse, really. When you think of them in bed it’s like thinking about a butterfly and a gorilla.’ We munched in silence for a bit and then I said, ‘Do you think about it often?’ And he said, in what seemed to be a non-sequitur, ‘I’m quite a normal chap, you know, whatever Dorothy may have told you to the contrary.’
It took me a moment to digest this, and still I had to be very cautious.
‘Dottie hasn’t told me anything.’
He looked up at me over a forkful of food and a sudden piercing silence fell which seemed to make a buzzing in my ears, like a silent echo of my own lie. ‘I think she has,’ he said at last.
He went on eating, but more slowly, frowning slightly, bent over his plate, putting the food into his mouth deliberately and washing every third mouthful down with a gulp of beer. I had a sense of something—it came over me, as it had earlier; the way he moved, the way he ate, calmly and deliberately. And yet … he did this every day in his flat, quite alone, with no one for company and no distractions, this and a thousand other little everyday actions … did he perform every one of them in awareness of the shadow? Could there be such a thing as an automatic action when one knows how near death is? Surely he must look at his very hands performing the movements of lifting the fork, cutting the meat, and feel a coldness of anticipation come over him as he imagined them lying rubbery, icy and abandoned, at his sides, in such a little while? Didn’t the food curdle in his stomach as he thought that his body was so close to corruption? ‘This sensible warm motion cease on a sudden …’ Yes, that was what the ordinary simple mechanics of life were—warm, sensible, unutterably pleasant and comfortable, no, comforting, and to think—to be forced to think imminently of that all coming to a stop—what would it do, what new patterns of thought would it overlay upon everything one did?
I stared at him with a pity that was so deep it was almost revulsion. I, too, suddenly saw him in a new way; his death was so sure, so close, that it was almost as if he had no life even now, as if he were a monstrous doll going through the motions of life; for just as a disease is not a disease if you have the cure, so life, suddenly and horribly, did not seem to be life when its term was near and known. Fear of the unknown is part of disease; and joy of the unknown—of the unknown length of time ahead—is an integral and necessary part of life. Life without that is death begun early. And at that, I began to understand Dottie’s philosophy, if one can call it that, of the backward shadow, the thief that destroys by reaching behind it, which deguts the present from the future. For loneliness, too, is like an illness; and it’s not true loneliness if you know, or can even hope, that it will have an end. Missing someone who is going to come back is not loneliness. And if one knew, knew beyond doubt, that one’s loneliness was going to last forever, if it was beyond hope of remedy, that would surely be the same kind of death-in-life which Henry was living through moment by moment …
‘How do you bear it!’
I hadn’t meant to ask, or to say a word. The words burst out of me as one might be unable to prevent oneself asking a miracle-worker how his miracles were done. For I was certain that I myself would go mad if I were living in Henry’s situation, and yet, here he was, sitting in front of me, eating his dinner—there he had been, all day, entertaining his father, enjoying his little moment of triumph, worrying because he had not been entirely entitled to it … normally. Normally! ‘I’m quite a normal chap you know …’ But how, how, how? And so, out of my uncontrollable admiration and bewilderment, the words came out.
He finished eating, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and sat back. ‘How do I bear it,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Well, thanks for asking. I think myself it’s pretty remarkable how I do bear it. Perhaps it helps that I’ve always been rather phlegmatic, I suppose you’d say. But it’s hard, and it’s hard not to show that it’s hard. One sometimes longs to talk about it. Like telling war stories. If one were really grown-up, really brave, one wouldn’t need to. I despise myself for wanting to, because I’m afraid that what I really want is—people’s pity. I have such a lot for myself, you see, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. And yet of course at the same time pity is the last thing on earth that I want. Because what I can see now in your eyes, Jane, it just—makes it more real, easier to believe. You’re looking at me as if I were a corpse already! The only really good moments, of course, are when I stop believing it. Like today, while we were sitting at that tea-place, and the three of you were looking at me, you, Dorothy and Jo, three attractive women, and for a long moment while I was drinking my tea I forgot. I just thought how pleasant it was to be sitting like that being stared at by the three of you and that after all I must have something …’ He laughed aloud. ‘Silly, isn’t it! You were all staring at me thinking “Poor old Henry, he’s going to croak” and I’d forgotten and thought you were all under my spell … My God!’ he cried out suddenly, and I was struck by an unnamable fear that something, some long-held control, was going to break, and that then whatever tremendous force lay behind it would overwhelm me. ‘What a fool I’ve been! The time, the chances I’ve wasted! That’s the very worst thing about it. Thinking of all you’ve missed. Do you know that in the whole of my life I’ve only had three women? And one of them was a tart. And the other two didn’t matter, they weren’t anything, just stupid creatures I fell in with and did it with because they seemed to expect it … But nothing real, nothing proper! Jo wouldn’t, and with Dorothy it’s me that won’t. My Christ that’s hard work if you like, that’s something to be proud of, not taking her, putting her first. I must stop, I must shut up! Talking will take all the good out of it. But you don’t know how I want her! I never wanted anyone like that, and there she is, there she is …’ He put up both hands and covered—not his eyes as I expected, but his mouth, as if to stem the flood of revelation which seemed to be frightening him as much as it was me. He bent his head low over the table till I could only see the top of it, his ‘funny hair’ as Dottie used to call it, little sandy waves running across from his neat parting, unmoved by his emotion, as orderly as something machine-made … so typical of him outwardly, the order, the almost rigid calm, while at the same time—under those trim flat waves, behind that sedate waistcoat—violence, fragility, morta
lity. My hands reached out. He brought both his down like clamps dropping, clutching my wrists, and I could feel the deep inner trembling. He held me like that for a minute, still staring down at the table and then he said harshly, ‘You won’t go to New York and leave her, will you? I want your absolute promise that you won’t go.’
I didn’t answer. I don’t think I really registered until afterwards what he had said. I was still half inside his skin, feeling his fear and his courage battling; the very walls of him shook with the force of it. He looked up at me and repeated: ‘Jane! You’ve got to promise me you’ll be here to look after her!’ And all I did was to get up somehow and go round the table and stand as close to him as I could get. He looked at me for a moment very austerely, then a sudden expression of intense surprise came over his face as if he felt something twist inside him, something totally unexpected beginning to get a grip on him. And abruptly he took hold of me, clenching his fists on the clothes at my waist, and put his face against me.
He didn’t move or speak, but I felt such a pressure of silent anguish in him that I had a spasm of terror that he would somehow burst through my fingers, that he would lie in a moment or two like a blown tyre, in broken chunks round my feet. I felt more for him in that dreadful moment than I’d ever felt for anyone in my life, more than for Toby, even more than for David, who might one day—God forbid—need help as terribly and ask for it as silently and rawly, and then turn away with a wrenching, sobbing groan because neither I nor anyone else could give it to him.
I took him in my arms as well as I could—poor, stiff, defenceless, terrified, admirable man. His hands, so male and protective and capable, now kept clenching and opening, clutching at me as if he were plummetting through emptiness, and I felt my heart break. I’d have given anything—my body first of all—to help him, and I tried to let him feel that; but I think he was beyond understanding anything so earthy and ordinary as the offer of what is, after all, the most basic life-thing. A little while before, he had needed this, he was within reach of its help; but now he had gone beyond it. He didn’t need or recognise any of the more refined feelings or desires; the one great lust which was firing and rending him was the final one, the violent, passionate, undefeatable will for life itself.
Everything changed for me in those extraordinary moments. I felt myself expanding inside, as if the wind of Henry’s suffering were blowing my soul up like a shrunken rubber balloon. I felt that, till then, I’d known nothing, seen nothing and been nothing—I had hardly scratched the surface of life. Perhaps—is such a mammoth irony possible?—one never does taste life until death is closing in. Henry has been dead now for five years, and inevitably I’ve forgotten many things about him, including his face (incredibly, no photograph of him seems to exist). But his hands at that moment I can remember precisely, down to the last hair, the last small callous beside one flat, practical thumb-nail. And I remember the weave of his jacket across the shoulders, the sandy bristles on his neck, the wet feeling of his tears through my shirt. Exactly, I remember them. And when I do, I feel myself beginning to cry as one only cries for a dead person whom one deeply loved, and loved with a special intensity. When I think of him now, and of Toby, both lost to me, I think perhaps I loved Henry more; certainly the pain of remembering and longing for him is just as acute. Perhaps it’s because I loved him better; nothing ever spoilt it until his death. But then, with Henry things were relatively simple.
For a long time after the tears stopped he just sat there, passive and exhausted, his head on his arms on the table, with me touching him fearfully here and there—I couldn’t bring myself to stroke or kiss him; I didn’t know what to do with him. I loved him and pitied him so much that my skull ached and my skin crawled; I was afraid to look at him, afraid he would be ashamed to look at me. But after a long time he slowly and stiffly sat up, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, and then got awkwardly to his feet, leaning against the table. There was a great emptiness in the air between us, the emptiness of a question—what could we say now, what could we do—what could we even safely feel? He stared at the black window and I sat down limply, worn out and still aching from that moment of sudden growth. And so we stayed, still and apart, until the knocking began.
Henry turned, and our eyes met for the first time—for the very first time, it seemed to me. The looks we exchanged simply said, ‘Who’s that?’ and ‘I don’t know.’ But with that much said, our eyes clung together, fascinated by the depths each saw in the other’s, now that we were truly friends.
More knocking came, heavy and urgent. Henry, suddenly calm and controlled, came across to me and gave me his hand to help me up. We stood for a moment, facing each other, close together, and he held my hand very lightly and we stared at each other; the kisses I had for him then, and which he knew about although I kept them back, were the same sort that I gave to David.
The knocking stopped for a moment, then began again. Henry dropped my hand. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. When he walked away from me, I was left there, staring at the wall. Something tremendous had happened to me. I didn’t know what it was then. I recall a pang of guilt that had some connection with Dottie, so perhaps, in the bewildered aftermath of that emotional explosion, I was confused enough to wonder fearfully if I were in love. But I need not have worried. It was love all right, but not—if only she had realised it!—of a kind which threatened Dottie. It was something right outside the experience of both of us, unfortunately. It seems to me now incredibly sad that she and I, who could have sworn that the word ‘friendship’ applied to us, didn’t know the real meaning of the word, at least not until later. Friendship, like other kinds of love, has to be tested in the fire. Henry’s and mine was born in it.
The knocker was a policeman who had come to tell us that the post office was on fire and that the fire was threatening to spread to our shop. Dottie, warned by some sixth sense—I wondered why it had not functioned with respect to Henry—that something menaced her treasures, was already dressing, white-faced and jittering, when I rushed up the stairs to call her. With Henry already in the police-car, and Dottie half-way out to join him, I hesitated about leaving David alone. But he never woke in the night and the emergency was so great that I had to leave him. It was a ridiculously, an outrageously wrong decision, I should have stayed, but luck was with me in this at least. When we returned, hours later, he was just as I had left him.
We drove at what seemed a fantastic speed back over the pitted roads to the village. The whole place was awake; we could see the glow from the far end of the High Street, and the crowd, like clotted flies on blood, against it. Dottie was out of the car before it had stopped and was forcing her way through, threshing and hitting out like a madwoman. I didn’t see her again for some time. The fire-engine from the neighbouring town must have had a break-down because it had still not arrived; the post office was well alight, and in fact the roof fell in just as we got there, sending up a vast curling blast of smoke and sparks and a deep, baying grunt from the crowd as if from a blow in the stomach. As the people in front pressed backwards, the policeman, Henry and I managed to wriggle through to the front. There was a wide open space between the crowd and the shop, but even so their faces were infernally lit up like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, with gaping holes for mouths and the effect of their hair being ablaze. The sparks and bits of burning wood were raining down on the roof of our shop, which was separated from the post office by the narrowest of passages.
The policeman was shouting to another, who was ineffectually standing in front of the crowd, ‘Have you got them out?’ I thought he must mean all Dottie’s beautiful things, some of which I could see in the darkened window when the glare was not reflected on it; the heat was ferocious, and I shielded my face, feeling Henry close beside me; I was quite quiet inside. Then the other policeman said, ‘Yes, they’re both out,’ and I suddenly knew he meant the Stephenses. He went on shouting: ‘The old boy started it, of course … dotty—I always said he shou
ld be put away—’ Just then some other part of the house’s interior fell in, and the increased blast of heat sent us all cowering a pace backwards.
I looked round for Dottie, and spotted the two old people. They were in the centre of a little knot in the crowd rather thicker than the main body of it. I sidled over towards them, trying to protect that side of my face from the heat. Mr. Stephens was sitting in the road on a chair from somewhere; a rug had been thrown over him and he was staring blankly at the inferno he had caused, only his hands twitching and dancing like two rabid animals on his knees. His wife was beside him, gripping his shoulders. Unlike his, her face as she looked at the burning building was alive and full of horror and shock. Neighbours were clustered round, some obviously trying to urge them to come away, but they remained there, caught and ossified, as it were, by the awfulness of the scene. They both wore nightclothes with coats on top; her hair was all undone and wild and her face was black with smuts. Shock and the violent glaring light had wiped away the lines of age for the moment; she looked like a grubby, horrified little girl in her nightgown.
Suddenly she seemed to come to herself a little, and began to turn her head this way and that, looking for something in a dazed sort of way. She saw me, her eyes slid past then snapped back. ‘Jane!’ she screamed out. ‘Jane!’ The crowd moved to let me get to her side, and she clutched my arm, shaking me and saying something that, because of the general hubbub, I couldn’t hear at first. But then she put her mouth to my ear and shouted: ‘Mufferpaws! Where’s Muffer! He’s not in there, is he?’ I shouted to one of the bystanders, ‘Where’s their cat?’ Nobody knew. The old woman clutched me with both hands and began to cry. All at once she looked old again, the illusion of childishness was gone and she looked old and ugly with rage and pain. ‘If he’s killed my cat, I won’t forgive him! I won’t forgive him this time!’ Then she actually turned on the old man, sitting there helplessly, and screamed at him, ‘I told you to leave the matches alone! Now see what you’ve done, you old villain, you’ve been and killed my Muffer, I shan’t overlook it this time, not this time I won’t! You’ll see!’
The Backward Shadow Page 22