Accident, page 5
For elevenses the dons meet in a room like an Aberystwyth boarding house. We shoot into it like balls on a pin table. We bounce to different comers, centrifugally. We put our papers up. Everyone has a paper. We wrap our minds in it like old fish.
The Provost of St. Mark’s is an ex-diplomat who had been ambassador in, say, Rome, and who was elected as a compromise between two candidates more suitable. A tall bald man with hooded eyes who listens to you in a sort of trance and then comes to with a jerk and a comment of no relevance. He stands in front of the empty fireplace with his fingers on his hips pointing downwards. In front of him are a dozen huge men like schoolboys.
He said “Stephen! Recovered? From your rite of spring?”
I took ten seconds to get this. The day before, with Anna and William, I had fallen into the river.
I laughed.
I sometimes thought of murdering the Provost. Why dons write detective stories.
Tommy Parker said “Von Graz is quite a dish.”
I could get my own back on Tommy Parker. His name would come up for some administrative post, and I would vote against him.
Arthurson said “What was the temperature?”
The Provost said “Do you know the story of Provost Jones and the punt pole?”
We rustled our papers. Leaves in a dead autumn.
The Provost said “Oh surely—”
Provost Jones was a mythical figure who had been head of college two or three incarnations ago. He had been a character, an old man like a monkey, whom everyone loved and mocked.
“Provost Jones was out punting one day with his good lady …”
I had been in the boat with William and Anna when we had come to the island. I had tried to climb out on to a tree. The tree was difficult because the trunk was so broad. I could hardly get my arms around it. I had been holding on to it like a bear. I had fallen in. I had had to walk back along the High Street.
“… and left him behind, as was inevitable, on the punt-pole …”
The trouble with murder was not clues, but conscience. The Provost was a smooth phallic man who if you topped him would grow again like a space-carrot. Once when I was young I had had an affair with his daughter. She had been a dark girl called Francesca, who had rushed about with her eyes half closed as if in a sort of panic. She had told me that once, when she was fifteen, her father had made a pass at her in the bath. He had been sitting on the lavatory.
“… and Provost Jones said ‘A direct refutation of Darwin’.”
I said to Tommy Parker “What was that?”
Tommy Parker said “Direct refutation of Darwin.”
A tall, vegetable figure. Diplomat. The dark girl in despair, running, running. Or had she imagined it?
I could not see the point of the Provost’s story. Provost Jones had been left on the punt pole. Darwin.
That morning we went to yet another room, a dining room, to have a committee. We had then committees once a fortnight during term, to discuss college business. Moving in single file down stone corridors, I thought—I will go to some primitive country and work there with my hands. A white house with fruit trees. We were all on the edge of some universal catastrophe. Devils coming down with their horns. The committee would be endless.
My daughter, Clarissa.
Leather chairs scratched round the edges with iron files.
I thought—I am becoming ill.
The Provost knocked on the table. We were about to enjoy this. At the time of the revolution we ticked off names to be guillotined. This was our routine. Money and power.
I thought—A lot of dons get ill around forty. Their great minds tick over like Big Ben. Then the whole works suddenly flips over, an arm gone berserk, the weights in free fall to the basement. Holding a toe. Screaming.
The Provost was making a speech.
I thought—I will remember this room. When I am one of the inmates. Dead. Or buried. The Provost, Tommy Parker, Arthurson and myself. We will not be dug up for two thousand years.
IV
14.
The side of my house that faces towards the village is bordered by a stone wall within which is a garden of rose-beds and a lawn. I had planted roses with their lovely names—Madame Laparrière, Marcelle Gret, Mary Wheatcroft—digging, spreading the roots out, treading the earth. In the winter there had been cold and the grit of bone: I had been a soldier in my loose overcoat and the barbed wire. I had worked in no-man’s land till the lights came on; asked what am I doing, why I am doing it. Going into the house to wife, children, fire, boots, hearthrug.
Then in the spring there had been the first purple shoots from the sticks so slight a razor might cut them. I moved over the earth with a hoe like Adam in tears. Doing some penance for what he did not know, had never asked for.
In the summer the leaves and buds came and the weeds that I destroyed, a scavenger on hands and knees pulling at soft stalks and bodies. Throwing them into some communal grave, a charnel house.
At this side of my house beyond the grey stone wall is a footpath which is the quickest way to the village. When I am gardening I do not want to be seen. I get into the shadow of the wall, pale rough stones laid flat with earth, and watch the bees with antennae like pianos. Footsteps from the other side come up from the village.
Bees look for honey from wisps of moss. Touch of aubretia.
Footsteps stop. Someone sneezes just above me.
I do not enter much into village life. The village is a group of cottages round the pub and church in the hollow. Sometimes the vicar comes up the path to have a talk with me, his head and shoulders moving above the wall like a target on a funfair shooting range.
A sneeze again. A laugh. I am crouching on my knees in the shadow.
“Hullo, Stephen, Stephen, what are you doing?” Very quietly.
“Hullo Vicar!”
“Getting out more now in the summer?”
Caught in the light of a flare. No fly buttons.
“I wonder, Stephen, if you could do something …”
No.
“Of course!”
“Read the lessons in church on Sunday.”
The vicar has a huge dead face gone absolutely white, rather beautiful. Somewhere soft blue eyes with pain spilled over them.
“I’m sorry, I think we’ve got people coming.”
“I wish you would, it’d be a great favour.”
His church is grey stone with a squat tower. The people who go are from the few big houses round about. The village stays away and makes up stories about him.
“I’ll see.”
“I’d be so grateful!”
Supposed to have seduced someone in the Sunday school. Accused of inhuman treatment of cats.
“Our people may not be coming until lunch.”
“I’ll ring you. Have you got a Bible?”
“I think so.”
“Jolly good!”
What had gone wrong? A good man.
“Well!” he jumped.
The awful cold church in the dark.
He said ‘ I suppose I couldn’t persuade you, Stephen, to come on the council?”
I said “I don’t really believe.”
He said “I sometimes wonder if that matters.”
“So do I.” I laughed.
The good brown earth in my hands. Once this would have been a thing of tension; bells and music. Now we act it all so slowly. The camera stays for minutes on a close-up. Speaks for itself. Silence. Time running out.
I think I am only writing this because of that permanent point in time where Anna lies with her hair out, one arm raised, on the four-poster in our spare room. Her skirt like a bell and her legs parallel. Myself like mad Fuseli, dark face and rolling eyes somewhere above her.
I am looking back on all this not to explain it, nor describe it, but to say what it means. Incomprehensible. But what else? Choices.
Anna with her white dresses and green jerseys and tartan skirts. She was never beautiful. We were fascinated because of that nothingness about her, so that we could put anything we liked on to her. William had said—What do you make of her? Charlie said—What was she like? We questioned each other—out of interest. There was something we each wanted. Moments took on a particular meaning.
Myself like Othello, standing above Desdemona.
At what point did the course of events go wrong? In my room in front of the bookcase, in the punt, in the hot grass with the reek of pollen. In the corridors of William’s house.
An accident is different from reality.
Rosalind foreshadowed it. Pregnant women and lunatics and gypsies.
Anna lying in the bed after William’s death. My wife Rosalind lying there in summer. But she had to fight in a limited area of her own. Not prevent it.
“Darling—”
“Yes?”
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to rest. You can hear everything in the front of the house.”
On the four-poster. The curtains drawn. A blanket.
“Beloved—”
“Yes?”
“I’ve asked some people over on Sunday.”
No answer. I stood at the foot of the bed.
“Darling—”
“Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
She stirred. The edge of a blanket over her mouth. Going puffy round the eyes and temples.
“I’m all right. Who are they?”
“Well William, who you know.”
“Yes.”
“And this Anna von Graz.”
Silence again. I leaned and pulled the blanket down from her mouth. Her face from a distant country.
I said “Only for lunch, we can go out if you like, or I’ll help with the cooking.”
She said “It’s not the cooking.”
I said “What is it then?”
One of the children began to cry in the garden. She lifted her head. To the smell of water.
I said “Don’t pay attention!”
She said “I feel so awful.”
I thought—One day I may leave her. Perhaps she will die.
I said “I’ll put them off.” Beneath the canopy of the four-poster.
She said “No don’t put them off.”
“I don’t like you in this room. It’s not like you.”
“You will look after me?”
“Of course I’ll look after you.”
“I sometimes feel you may—” She was crying.
“What?”
What was in our minds? What put things in our minds; dreams; experience.
“You may just go off—”
“And leave you?” I laughed.
“Yes.”
I put my hand against hers. Stroked it. I said “You know what this is, just the baby.”
She said “But you won’t will you?”
I said “Of course I won’t!”
She put an arm up and held me. How odd my voice had been.
She said “Good.”
The children were in the garden. The curtains were drawn in the afternoon. I was impatient.
15.
On the very few occasions we go to church we move around our house beforehand as if packing for a visit—trying to remember socks, hair-combs, coats, money; Alexander sad and underprivileged as an orphan, Clarissa laced up in boots and bonnet. We move out of the door like ducks, half running down the path in front of the house towards the squat tower and the graves. This does not mean anything; a cold wind in a still sky and smell of the dark. Ghosts like bats hang in the entrance. In a roar of silence a man in a black suit steps sedately from my schooldays. Stone, dust, memory. A tinkle of laughter shut out by walls. Alexander in his thin coat staring into past and future. Clarissa an adolescent about to be touched by God. Rosalind with a handkerchief round her head like someone who works with her heart, her hands.
Matins in church goes so slowly that it seems to be moving backwards. The mouths of singers open and shut behind a note with the note in the air Eke chewing gum. There seems to be a hurricane against us making our flesh numb. The organist is deaf and lip-reads the vicar in a small mirror which swings. The vicar sways backwards and forwards to the mirror. There is a sort of panic, as if the boredom might send us mad. I think—What can I think about? Someone under torture; not knowing about prayer.
William would be starting off with Anna dressed in white. William had an old black car. Anna with one foot in the door like an advertisement for sweets. William’s soft aristocratic face dissolving in a headwind. Scarfs and streamers behind it, a fast road by the edge of the sea.
Once when Rosalind and I had not long been married (my memory had to fill this gap in the church; this panic) our friends would drive up to our house on Sunday mornings and there would be this crunch of wheels on the gravel and a climbing out of a car with the doors open on each side like wings; lovers with sad furious faces and their girls behind dark glasses. People fell into love in those days as into a sort of pit, their arms up. Rosalind and I would wait for them on the lawn watching them as if they walked round the world in opposite directions. This was the middle time of love: when we had got what we wanted but it was a drug we could not stop.
In church attention wanders like a mouse beneath pews. Someone walks to the lectern: myself. A fine deep voice: not myself.
Sometimes in those days when we were first married I would play a vicarious role in the love affairs of our friends, sitting with one leg over the arm of a chair and blinking, picking a piece of wool off the leg of my trouser, listening to the stories that people told me of love and misery, of beauty and black light, of betrayal and adoring and despair. I was good at listening; a happily married man with my fine wise head and my background of crumbling walls and grey stone buildings. Sometimes I would move slowly myself towards one of those cars parked on the gravel with their doors open each side like wings (power is evil, we have no excuses) and I would step in, closing the door, a girl on the seat beside me, a white dress and behind dark glasses. I would sit with my hands on the steering wheel and say— But what did you expect? The car with its bonnet, power, riding, the wheels cantering at comers. I would say—That’s what life’s like. We would drive to a hill where the wind blew, the flint and the rock and the birds screaming.
In the church I had been reading the lesson again. I could remember nothing of what I had been saying.
There was one particular friend of mine in those days (not long ago, five or six years, but a different world) who was called Angus MacSomething-or-other and who was important to me in that not only was he a great friend but he had a succession of girls that he brought to us moving in and out of the front seat of his two-seater car—girls with long bare arms and dark glasses and white dresses—girls which I would sometimes take over from him, temporarily, Angus MacSomething-or-other being exhausted with so much love. I remember this age with nostalgia because in fact it did not exist; I had known it before I was married but then from the inside, nothing true about it, but only afterwards when I was free making it a dream and thus desiring it: the dream of girls and men on mythical lawns and cars in sunlight. Angus MacSomething-or-other was a procureur for my imagination; I fell in love with these girls, the whole species of them with whom I had always been in love, but not now, with my wife Rosalind. I have always been and am only in love with my wife Rosalind.
But I fell in love with these girls for what they were not; for the dream, the unattainable. This is why most people fall in love; some sort of opposites in some ground in the unconscious. I remember then this crunch of gravel and the arrival of the car and the walk across the lawn; Angus MacSomething-or-other lonely as the man in the cigarette advertisement hitching up his trousers in the long and dusty street; myself ready to listen with one leg over the arm of a chair and blinking and picking at the sunlight. I listened to the stories which were always the same stories from the beginning of the world: once upon a time there were the sun and the summer trees and then transfiguration and then suicide.
The vicar leaned forwards and orated like the hanged man on the hook. One day someone would cut him loose and he would swing in the pulpit like a crane and be hurled into the furnace.
One day, I remembered, we went with Angus MacSomething-or-other to a party at a huge house some twenty miles from Oxford; a party to be written up like disasters in the glossy magazines, men suspended in their dinner jackets and women stretched on steps like at Odessa. Angus this time had brought with him a big red-haired girl something quite new in racial memory; more powerful than usual, more wicked; having been driven from Oxford in Angus’s fast car, herself a Ferrari. Angus had followed behind somewhere hitching up his cigarettes and lonely trousers. We were at this party on a lawn, by a marquee, in the bright summer darkness. Angus and his girl had been quarrelling all the way from Oxford; they were so much in love. I have to keep on saying this. He had hit her on the arm and bruised her. I remember this scene very well, the girl coming through the pillars and the dinner jackets and saying—Take me away—to me, which is what I had expected. I had one leg over a balustrade. How do we remember? Myself straightening my tie, my hair, going into that calm with the wind pulling me. Running behind it with all sails in the slipstream; the big red-haired girl ahead of me and me about to overtake her on the straight. Moving past the marquee lit with Chinese lanterns and going towards a lake, the road by the sea. Angus MacSomething-or-other standing behind on the shore. The scum and the scream of gulls. Lord Ullen’s daughter.
We remember in envy, not regret; what we are now (in church, a row, a happy family) needing the past for its colour, tolerance. We know all this. The dangerous men are those with no memory; the ancient babies. Wisdom is a bit of cloth with the warp and woof breaking. The dust settling in the air; the people below choking.
Somewhere near the edge of the lake of this particular party there was an artificial grotto where in the eighteenth century tired business men had done black magic; as it were a club with cold buffet and the Financial Times in the comer, but nowadays done up with waxwork witches which people paid two-and-six to see on Sundays. For the night of the party this was lit with hellish cellophane to attract the guests; which it did not, there being too much of it outside with the smoke and the hideous wigs and harpies; except for the red-haired girl and 1, who wanted somewhere to sit down, even the bench in front of the stewing pot of Miss Perkins the witch from Oldham. I mean this literally. We were in a grotto where people had once done black magic, and which now was on view as a party attraction. We read on a printed notice in front of the tableau of Miss Perkins that she had done things with pins and potions to people in the seventeenth century; until she had been caught, and split up the middle on an upturned axe. Such is love. Perhaps they had really tried to be sophisticated in those days, sitting round the board room table and ringing up for call-girls. I was cold, my arm round the waist of the big red-haired girl beside me, cutting the comers a bit, helped by the general air of filth and loneliness. I thought—We have our moments. There were a few other waxworks round the grotto, a hangman, a draw-and-quarterer or two, some victims with blood on their noses. I said to the big red-haired girl—You are in love? She said, rattling off like a funicular—1 had heard this before. Funiculi Funicula. You don’t do this because you like it, you do it because you have to. A moral position. I began embracing the big red-haired girl, a complex position like Rodin’s kiss. The walls of the grotto seemed to be made of razors. I got a further grip on her and we began to float, sad steamers hooting, the bar and the wine-dark waves. This was the usual thing of course; when I say I talked to them of their life and loves I do not mean I talked to them of their life and loves. This is a universal disgust; a catastrophe.
