Gracie’s father, now. There is a subject for envy. My wire brought him down the following day. Small, muscular, with one of those fine ascetic heads you see in Renaissance frescoes: a helmet of small fine bones, pressing down in planes to the temples. His words were gnarled and twisted, it seemed, by the shelf of pearly false teeth which they had to pass. His first hoarse query as he stepped from the train was, “Is she still fresh?” Walking towards the waiting taxi I explained that she was. Silent he walked beside me, with a queer jauntiness, as if propelled not so much by the movement of his muscles as by an explosion in each foot as it touched the ground. In the taxi he undid his soiled grey muffler, and produced an old tin case with cigarettes in it. We smoked in silence. “I didn’t bring her ma,” he said at last; “she’s queer, you know. Yers, a little queer.”
In the silence of authority we were shown into a little room, where she lay, amused, like some obscene flower dragged out of the underworld.
Her father advanced towards her with a series of noiseless explosions. “I must say,” he observed, “they made a fine job of it. A fine job.” Tap, tap, tap, went his fingernails against the wood. Yes there was no doubt. It was a first-rate job. As if contemplating some definite gesture he turned to me, then stopped and resumed his nonchalant assessment of things. I was somehow afraid he was going to shake hands with me over the body, and compliment me on the fine job I’d made of the whole business. He stared down with his watchful, slightly bloodshot eyes.
But it was when he lifted the sheets, and started to examine her more closely, that a spear entered my left side; there was a quality of curiosity in his pose whose meaning I could not guess, but which made me somehow curious of myself as an interloper, almost as if I were intruding in the unpleasant poignance of a private domestic scene. I turned to the window and lit a cigarette with profound embarrassment. It was all in extremely bad taste—Gracie giving up her ghost so easily, lying there so wan; and this little nut of a man running his blunt workman’s thumbs over her body, as if he were touching marble, considering its smoothness. No movement in the room, but the sea. I was stifling slowly in my own cigarette smoke when he turned and said, with decision, “Well, that’s that.”
If there were any private thoughts locked away in that bony skull of his, I did not get a glimpse of them. For the night he had taken lodgings, he said, in the commercial hotel—the Caledonia stern and wild—which was at the end of the road. Turned on his heel after a civil greeting, and left me staring after him, down the long rain-shining streets. I walked up and down the dark parade until nearly morning, trying to sort out those fragmentary impulses, emotions, which weighed me down, and put a fog across reality. Nothing echoing in my mind but the vast reports of the waves against the concrete, the drizzle of rain on my mouth. And her father? More than ever an enigma: self-contained, airtight, damp-proof; locked in silence under the shabby overcoat and soiled muffler; behind the fine plate of bones in his skull. One could beat against his personality again and again, with a sea of queries, advances, intimacies, and the stability of his position was unaltered. Over and above all this, like the very lunge and swing of the dark sea, there was the sad recognition of my failure to mix the real and the unreal, my failure to make imagination life. It was only then that I could have wept: for myself.
Turning away from the graveside, beginning to walk with that explosive action of his, he said, without any sort of emotion, “Well, what’s done’s done.” But the sigh he fetched from his very lungs expressed something more than he would ever be able to say.
We said good-bye in the sodden square of the town, somehow reluctant to part from each other. He had a train to catch, he said. There was no time even for a drink at the Plough. I think he was afraid of any sort of intimacy. So off he went in his wet muffler towards the station, like a little dancing master.
Retrospect! Retrospect! What a hive of memories I have become. There has been time, in this wilderness, to account for everything: to excuse my shortcomings, to re-enact my failures, to adjust my differences with destiny. Above all to make the great decision. To be or not to be has been the question for too long. I am determined to answer it in the negative.
Walking the streets of Bournemouth I came upon many faces I should know, many places I should remember, many mouldering old houses which my essence visited in the third cosmos. (Metaphysics is the last refuge of the actor.) Trees, shapes, smoke from a cigarette in the dark—strata by strata my memories were laid out across my dead body; wheeling and skirling with anguish like gulls across the nerves. Love me, I whispered, love me and take me from myself. I do not want the gift of freedom—it has become a prison. At night the sea beat like a hammer against my temples. The lights of cars wheeled across the bedroom walls. I had become an inhabitant of a private pandemonium.
On the hill, its garden hidden in spray, was the house in which I lived when I was a child. My mother lives there for eternity among the chipped statuary, the unweeded walks. “Herbert, will you ever sin?” The white round face of the woman above me, and my own voice, “Never, Mother.” She used to say: “We are such friends, aren’t we, my darling? I know every little thought that passes in your head.” From that remark my life begins, a solid unbroken line of dependencies—at home, at school, at the university. Behind the bars, serenely unaware of the flood outside.
Regard me, I used to say to the world, I am the average Englishman. I have never left school and I am proud of it. I carry my virginity and my self-satisfaction on a string round my neck.
Shall I outline it all with introspective precision? I am not a Powys. Shall I explore my garish literary life? Why, I have written disparagingly of Shakespeare in an advanced review—and then returned home to my guardian virgin as the snow and dressed in horn-rimmed spectacles. I have critically disposed of Pascal, Molinos, and Ronsard standing at the bar of a Red Lion Square pub. Once I even lectured on the sexual aberrations of Lawrence to an audience of vipers as learned as myself. In the final audit how heavily will these weigh against me? “You were born to spit on the delicate things,” said Chamberlain once in a fit of fury. And in my little cackle of laughter he added, “Because you have learned how to spit on yourself.”
Alas! in this personal limbo from which I letter out my fragmentary diary, I see that this observation is very just. It is not the world that is poisoned so much as the people in it. It is my world dying because I am dying—of an intolerable brain poisoning. Pity me, etc.
These nights are very long. I sit here in the laboratory which I have made of my ego, and listen for the familiar sounds, once foreign, now local. At two the boilers are stoked. I brew myself tea, light a cigarette, yawn, take a step, remember an anecdote of Lobo’s, and laugh. I am always aware of myself as an actor on an empty stage, his only audience the critical self. I dramatize my least action, make it studied, calm. I have the eternal illusion of being watched; of being visible to an audience before whom I must be careful not to break down. The late trains drizzle outwards across the snowy landscapes, across the hills, the valleys, the dark blue bodies of the counties. I am alone, but no more alone in the spirit than I have ever been. Now that the moon has gone I am able to stand at the window, staring at a star of the third magnitude. I am acting my head off. I chuckle and scratch my head. I lift my cup to my mouth with the air of a dowager. Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. In the corner lies the long svelte horn-gramophone. I select the most moving records of “the master’s” Op. 61 and play them one after another, as fast as the turntable can rotate. The violin scamps like a cat, poops and squalls and gutters. It is a capital joke. “A violin in an empty house, remote in its meditations as a ghost.” That’s what I wrote once. Now it micturates like a wombat, hurtles and squeals, winces and foams. I lie here in the chair, chuckling to myself, and let the discords play upon me like jets from a hose. I revel in the anguish of that quivering fiddle. Metaphorically I spit on Beethoven. Mentally, physically, from my very soul, I spit on his misery. I would li
ke to take up those shelves of folio music, throw them in the grate and piss on them.… When it becomes intolerable I go and look at myself in the mirror. Standing there in my peacock dressing gown, with one of the smashed records in my hand. The revulsion sobers me. I light a cigarette, shrug my shoulders in infinite contempt, and sit down at my desk, to add the paragraph you have just read.
This morning I receive a visit from Perez. He is a little angry with himself for neglecting me. He says he is only just back from the country, which is a lie because he has been back a week. “A woman?” I say to him archly. It is almost our only subject of conversation. He diverts the conversation. Lobo has the flu. He lies in bed all day, like a little black imp, strumming on his big inlaid guitar. Perez is wondering how to condole with me in my sorrow. He is a little disgusted at having to show any sympathy over the loss of someone like Gracie. A little contemptuous, too, of me for getting entangled with such a one. I can see it all written in his eyes. At last he blurts out: “I say, Gregory, I’m sorry to hear …”
“Yes?” I say, demanding my pound of flesh.
“Grade … your wife … I’ve just heard,” he mumbles shamefacedly. “Very sorry for you.”
When he goes, I return to the piano, pour out a glass of sherry, and sit down to Mozart. My fingers ease the chords from the white soft jacks, like heavy bunches of grapes. The music wraps me in its ectoplasm of emotion. Really, if you forgive the precious litotes, I am an executant of no mean calibre. In my imagination the tears are running down my face, on to my fingers, on to the lush ivories. My bowels are running out of me like tap water. I am become a figure of sodden cardboard. The notes rap holes in me, smothering me in bullets of sound. Mozart claws my liver and nibbles my tongue like a woodpecker.…
It is the same when I sit down to write. The submarine profundities of my imagination are suggested by the florid sweep of my pen.
My intention is always to become the very paper on which I write. Alas! the rhythm is sadly uneven. My brain, like an engine, gives the first tug, which communicates a series of bangs to the carriages. Bang, bang, bang—all the way down the line. My teeth chatter, and my vertebrae clang together. Very slowly and stiffly we are off, puff, puff, puff. The nib squeaks at every level crossing. I am in mortal terror of a collision. All the signals are dead against me.… Pity me, etc.
However, it is not for long now. The decision has been made. I sit here on this final Monday morning of the world, with my pen in my hand, and contemplate those infinities of feeling which I would like to express. There is nothing in the Lamentations of Jeremy to touch the terrible thin squealing which I would like to rise from this paper and stifle you. This thin, astringent script of mine—let it be poured into your ears, most delectable of corrosives, until your brains turn green, cancerous, nitric.…
Per fretrum febris—by these straits to die! There is nothing here that is more than marginal. Here, take me, and rip me to pieces. Undress me, coat, waistcoat, vest, pants—stratum by stratum. I am again standing naked in front of the mirror, puzzled by the obstructing flesh. The great problem is how to get at the organic root of the trouble. How to locate and diagnose. There, I spread out my genealogical chart before you. The family tree must bear some traces of the ancestral pollution. The paper is black with little monkey-like gregories, climbing from the square loins of their parents. On top of one another like acrobats, the high ones crushing down the lower ones into history. On stepping-stones of our dead selves, etc. Does this bore you? Then join me in a bowl of sherry and some lascivious drawings. Put on some jazz. Let us embrace one another. Let us dice with my false teeth.… Tarquin has started a novel about the life of Jesus. He is excited by his own fertility. He comes down and reads me what he has written. “I’ve made him turn into a woman,” he giggles. “You know the bit in the garden? She is there weeping on the ground. She is so delicate and trembling that John’s bowels are moved. He goes up behind her, not quite knowing what he is doing. She is quite broken and limp, like a smashed bird. Eh? Is that a good touch? Like a smashed bird. Without knowing he puts his hand inside her robe and feels the great heavy lobes of breasts. Lobes, Gregory. Lobes! He turns her over and deflowers her as she lies there weeping and imploring him not to. Eh? Very softly and heavily he enters. Eh? Like Lady Chatterley. John mounting the spouse of Zion, while she weeps over the fallen cities? My God, don’t you think there’s passion in it? John entering the dead bird like a slow heavy battleship? Eh? And all the terrible and agonizing misery of her soul, her tears and all that, turn into the most excruciating, tortured, terrible, blasphemous, piercing delight?” He is trembling all over and biting his nails. Then we both begin to cackle; we are consumed; we lie there and howl until we are nearly sick. The tears are pouring down his face.…
Abstractedly, on the drawing-room carpet, I create the wilderness, the deserts, the stone crop, the thorn. Infinities away I see myself, bloody-footed, stumbling along under the sun. Tarquin is talking, whining, protesting. I could lift my glass and throw the sherry into his white, hairless face. “It is not sex,” he is repeating over and over again, half to himself. “It’s something to do with me.…” It is a monologue to which I am supposed to be attending. His eyes are full of tears. He coughs over the drink and swallows. The music suffocates me. The bow is fiddling across my very nerves. What a terrible ointment for the tears in my womb!
“It’s not sex,” he says, larghetto. The ache of the strings sends little shooting pains through my teeth. The clarinet. The delicate variation. O the bassoon as mellow as port, cherries, cigars, mahogany, black bile. “For a long time I thought it was. But it only disgusts me—even with him. Listen, we borrowed Durrell’s car and went out of London. Imagine us locked in the back seat, O Christ, buggering each other like a couple of billy goats. I thought my heart was broken. I was sick and sick. That’s what gave me the idea to write all this about Jesus.”
A violin in an empty house, remote in its meditations as a ghost. Such a quiet solo voice speaking to creation. It could only come out of a madhouse. The quiet pouring of the selfless action. The scissors snipping away the threads of the brain, quietly, quietly, in secret. And then this music settling like white-hot steel into the mould of my ears, stiffening, gleaming. The variations shuffled coldly out, like a pack of blue and silver cards. A pack of aces. Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly? The responsive medulla quaking like a custard. O God, there are no tears for this madness, but dry eyes, dry tongue, dry throat, parched scrotum.
“I had a dream last night.” Larghetto. The long curving planes of wormwood, gall, spikes in the liver. “I was in a butcher’s shop. Quite naked, my dear. My scrotum was a yellow leather bag. The kind of moneybag the rich merchant wore in his belt. You know. You’ve seen the medieval pictures. Well, it was tied round the mouth with tape. I undid it and looked inside, and it was full of little parched brown seeds. Before I had time to do it up I was picked up and slapped on the counter, with a sickening thud. And all the seeds fell out and rained down on the floor. I got such a fright that when I woke up I thought for a moment I had wet the bed.”
The family tree hangs on the wall beside the wrestlers. My poor aunt Jane owned a bloody nevus. Henry, the third cousin who had made a packet out of estate, was a little berry of a man, with peachdown chops, and patches of fluff behind his ears. His waistcoat would swing open like a door and show you that he was worked by a clock. Tick, tock, tick, tock … His face was a relic of the Sung dynasty. Such a delicate green patina! My mother wore him round her throat. Tick, tock, tick, tock, the white pulse that Henry had given her.
Old Fanny walking the streets of Bournemouth; and young Fanny who killed me on the Black Rock, above Brighton. God, the soft lips and hair and hands. So delicate were our first inexpert attempts at love. Gather her up in the palms of your hands, softly so the powder won’t scale, and feel her flutter. Those queer green stone eyes, like a foal. And the warm loose mouth. The leaning body on the long fine legs, so elegant and insec
ure like a foal. The long pointed breasts that swung hard against you as the sea birds flew out of her hair, softly whewing, and the tide came licking up over loins. Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things. My face taken up softly between mountains and the cold iceberg coming down upon it, melting in my mouth and nostrils. “Herbert, are you telling a lie?”
“No, Mother.” Mother of God, Mother of Misery, Mother of Jesus, Mother of Man. Aphrodite on the rolling brown horse, triumphant, with the menstrual blood flowing in a wave to her ankles. Old Fanny, with the permanganate bowl, and the store of old soiled rags. “Herbert, will you serve God?” Softly with the white throat beating over the hymnbook, tick, tock, tick, tock, the white pulse Henry had given her. Can I have fallen in steam from between these loins? Cattle breathe on my face, and her breath is more delectable than the cattle, I will not betray her. Save me, seize me, open me, have me. I am a gift that nobody wants. Lesbia, let me be your sparrow.
Very well then, I give in. It is no good trying to conceal it. I am afraid of these simple things, the lusting, the crying out in the night, the blood and the whipcracks, the ring of money, the seed vomiting, the child, the lamb, the eagle, the leper—I am afraid of them all. I am afraid of the great, the terrible simple things.
Old Fanny used to say in her hoarse crazy way: “What’s to be ashamed of, young master? Blushing because of my blood? Bless you, we all have blood.” And the too elegant and deadly Rachel: “You’re undersexed, my dear. It interests most men.” You could almost picture her sealed in a glass case in Tottenham Court Road, while the whole world watched her change them. I quiver like a struck ship when I face these things. Fanny, too, had blood. It was the rule. Newt’s blood. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarquin did too. But the bowl of permanganate sails up and takes me by the throat. “Herbert, praise the Lord.” “To Him be all honour and glory, Mother.” Chip, chip, chip. My father at work in his apron, hewing out the cornices on the tombstones. Tock, tock, tock, and the fine stone slipping away under the steel. He has made three tombstones, the biggest for himself (In Memoriam), the next biggest for her (tick, tock, tick, tock, the white pulse Henry had given her), and the smallest (Hic Jacet). It never occurred to him that I might grow up. In the greenhouse, secretly as a leopard, he sits and plays Mozart, among the ferns, potted plants, arabesques, and fossils. I shall never meet him again. The terrible plangence of those chords reaches out at me, ten sentimental white carrots of my mother. O God, I am empty inside like the first chaos. My gestures are carried away over the grey sea by the gulls. Fanny and my mother and the ten sentimental carrots laid in my memory to desiccate and powder slowly, and give off this strange nostalgic aroma. My life is unwinding itself inside me like an empty spool. I have become a disc not played. The lid is closed, but I rotate forever in darkness. Fanny, I need nothing but your moth’s face, your furry eyebrows, your devil’s quivering like a pigeon held against the breast. You belong to the picture book, to the gibbous moon, to the tombs, to the pack of knaves. The bowl of your face became the bowl of the sky. There was a psalm due to you, but sitting at my mother’s knee, pale domestic, regimental in my starched collar, I could not make it.