Henry and Cato (3 page)

‘He's not such a young man. And he wasn't very gentle to you in New York.'

‘He was jealous.'

‘Oh don't talk such rubbish. I should have gone to Sperriton. I see that now. I ought to have seen how he lived.'

‘He didn't want you to.'

‘You persuaded me not to go.'

‘I didn't! I never persuaded you of anything!'

‘ I wonder if he was living with a woman. Perhaps he'll announce that he's married.'

‘Perhaps he will.'

‘You're not being very helpful. You'd better go to bed.'

‘I am a bit tired.'

‘You're looking cross-eyed. It's the whisky. Must you have another? You know what it costs now.'

‘I wasn't going to have another.'

‘I don't know how I shall live through this next week till he comes.'

‘You'll live. Only do stop speculating, no wonder I'm crosseyed.'

‘Which bedroom should we put him in?'

‘His own, of course.'

‘It's so small.'

‘If he doesn't like it he can move. After all he owns the place now!'

‘I think I'll put him in the cherry blossom room. The radiator still works in there. And Queen Anne's not heated. Oh Rhoda, thank you, dear—'

Bird-headed Rhoda, the maid, had come in soft-footed and without knocking, as she had used to do when she carried in the oil lamps, in the days before electricity came to the Hall. She moved across the room in her ambiguous uniform and reached high up with her gloved hands to check the windows, her nightly task, to see if they were securely fastened. Company or no company, she came always at the same hour and never knocked.

‘Rhoda, I think we'll put Mr Henry in the cherry blossom room.'

Rhoda replied.

‘He isn't coming for a week, you know.'

Rhoda replied.

‘Well, make it up in the cherry blossom room, and make sure the radiator's working. Good night, Rhoda.'

The door closed.

‘What did she say?' said Lucius.

Rhoda, who had an impediment in her speech, was comprehensible only to Gerda.

‘She says she's already made up Henry's bed in his old room.'

Lucius had taken the opportunity to rise. ‘I think I'll be off to bed now, darling, I'm flaked.'

‘I wonder if I ought to—'

‘Oh do stop wondering. It doesn't matter, the details don't matter. Henry will only want one thing when he arrives here.'

‘What?'

‘Your love.'

There was a silence. Gerda, on Rhoda's entrance, had stopped pacing and now stood at the chimney piece, one hand touching the warm burnished wood of the superstructure. A sudden flicker revealed her face and Lucius saw tears.

‘Oh darling—'

‘How can you be so cruel.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Go to bed.'

‘Gerda, don't be angry with me, you know I won't sleep if you've been angry with me. I never sleep if—'

‘I'm not angry. Just go away. It's late.'

‘Forgive me, darling Gerda, don't stay up and—I know what you—do go to bed now, dear—'

‘Yes, yes. Good night.'

‘Don't cry.'

‘Good night.'

Lucius went upstairs slowly, as he had used to do holding his candle in the old days, in Burke's time, when he had been a guest at the Hall. Well, was he not still a guest at the Hall? A little breathless after the climb he went on over creaking boards to his bedroom. This large room, which was also his study, occupied a corner on the second floor, on the drawing-room side of the house, with a view one way towards the lake, and the other towards the grove of beeches which were always called ‘the big trees'. The room was rather bare as Lucius, who had lived in tiny rooms most of his life, liked to emphasize its barn-like size. He liked to feel himself loose, lost somehow in the room, wandering. The cushions on the big divan bed were a recent concession to Gerda's desire to prettify. Sometimes Rhoda put flowers in the room. Tonight upon the carved oak chest of drawers was a brown jar full of bluebells. The window, which he now closed, had let in the cold earth-smelling April air. The radiator was not working, only with so much else amiss Lucius had not liked to mention it. His bed had been neatly undone and turned down by Rhoda, as it had been every night for years, but there was no hot water bottle. Hot water bottles were not issued after the end of March.

Lucius sat down on the bed. He would have liked some Bach now, only it was too late. Why had that particular remark made Gerda cry? He would never understand her. His awful mistake, never to have forced her into bed. Did it matter now? He knew that her unspeakable terrible grief at Sandy's death was still there, hidden from him now as at first it could not be. He had thought at first that she would die of grief, die of shock, die screaming in a frenzy of bereavement such as he had never witnessed or imagined. He shuddered at the memory. But with the fearsome strength that was in her she had collected herself and retired into an almost equally terrible concealment. Avoiding him, she walked the empty rooms of the house every day, he heard her slow rather heavy tread. She sometimes wept, but would dismiss him if she could not control herself at once. She lived in private with her own horror. She was a remarkable woman.

When he was young, romantic Lucius had thought of himself as a solitary. Real loneliness was different. No, he and Gerda were not a bit like man and wife, he could not partake of her woe and she knew nothing of his soul. Their talk did not contain the affectionate nonsensical rubble which pads out the conversation of true couples. The formality, which had seemed at first like a kind of old-fashioned grace, an affectionate respect which she extended, an expression even of the admiration which she had once felt for him, now seemed cold, sometimes almost desperate, a barrier. Yet there they very much were. Of course she needed him, she needed him as an admirer, perhaps the last one, someone who valued her in the old way. She needed him, unless the horror should now place her beyond such needs. He was the prisoner of a woman's vanity. If it were not for her he might have become a great man.

Lucius thrust one foot under the bed and winkled out the suitcase which contained the secret whisky bottle to which he occasionally resorted. He filled the glass on the bedside table. It was quite easy to remove the bottles from the cellar only getting rid of them later was something of a problem. Did Odysseus get drunk on Calypso's island? When would his travels begin again, did he want them to begin, was it not too late for travelling? He took out his teeth and laid them on the table and felt his face subside gratefully into the face of an old man. He drank the whisky. His teeth grinned at him. Could art still console? Mozart had left him long ago but Bach was still around. He only cared for endless music now, formless all form, motionless all motion, innocent of drama and history and romance. Gerda, who hated music, would only allow him to play it very softly. He had stopped writing his book, but he had started writing poetry again. He still wrote newspaper reviews for pocket money, only now editors were less interested. Surely there was still power somewhere, that significant power which he had once felt inside the Communist party. One by one the philosophies had failed him. Is that all? he had felt as he mastered them. He was a creative person, a writer, an artist still, with fewer brain cells but with much more wisdom. Of course he was restless, of course he twitched with frustrated energy. He would become old and wild and lustful, but not yet. Lucius's back was still hurting and he had a pain in his chest. He finished the whisky and undressed and got into bed and turned out the light. The usual awful melancholy followed. He could hear an owl hooting in the big trees. He wished he was not always young again in his dreams, it made waking up so sad. Henry had been very unkind to him in New York. He had had a way of life with Sandy. Lucius had been grateful for Sandy's total lack of interest in Lucius's life, in the justification of Lucius's life, in the question of why Lucius was there at all. Had this blandness been assumed? Lucius thought not. Big red-haired philistine Sandy simply did not care. Gerda saw Sandy as some sort of hero, but really Sandy was just a big calm relaxed man, unlike dark manic Henry. Lucius had never seen Sandy as either an obstacle or a critic. Semi-educated Sandy only cared, and amateurishly at that, about machines. Gerda ran the Hall, it was her house. Of course Sandy's death had been a terrible shock, but Lucius did not feel bereaved. He could not think about Sandy now, Sandy was over. He thought about the future and it was a vibrating darkness. He felt fear. He fell asleep and dreamed that he was twenty-five again and everybody loved him.

An hour later Gerda was still sitting beside the library fire in a small armchair pulled up so close that her little velvet slippers were right among the ashes. The fire had died down, there were no flames now, only a parade of red sparks upon a blackened log. The log subsided with a sigh and the sparks vanished.

Gertrude had thought: if he had really cared about me he would have seen to it that I went to bed instead of leaving me here. He would have waited like a dog. He thinks only of himself. But this was just a mechanical thought, the kind of thought that came every day. She had forgotten about Lucius, forgotten about their conversation, which although it reflected some of her deep concerns had been merely a way of prolonging his presence, of using it up. She would not appeal to him, and she so feared to be alone.

The house had changed. It had lived with Burke's life and with Sandy's life, and before Burke and before Sandy it had cast its ray upon Gerda's childhood. Living nearby, she had loved the house before she had loved her husband; and when she came to it from her humbler home as a bride of nineteen it had seemed a symbol of eternity. The house had been her education and her profession, and the men, Burke's widowed father, Burke, Sandy, had made it her shrine. But now, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she and the house were strangers. No one really cared about Sandy's death, even the house did not care. It had its own purposes and its own future. Gerda had looked at her letters of condolence and seen a heap of bones. She had been an only child, so had Burke. Burke's relations in the north were only concerned about their chances of a legacy. Her own relations in London, whom she never saw, had envied her grand marriage and were pleased at her misfortune. Her neighbours, Mrs Fontenay at the Grange, the curate Mr Westgate, the architect Giles Gosling, even the Forbeses, were not sincere. The only person who was really sad was the old rector, now retired, and he was thinking of his own death and not of Sandy's. Gerda had set herself apart and was now an exile in her own home. Her wandering feet roused echoes which she had never heard before.

But it was not even of this that she was thinking as she went up the dim staircase and darkened the long landing behind her. Nor would she think at all of changeling Henry. The thought of Henry was like a door which instantly snapped open showing her beyond the hospital bed with Sandy lying there as she had last seen him, as she had insisted upon seeing him. And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.

At about the hour when Cato Forbes was walking to and fro on Hungerford Bridge and Henry Marshalson was awakening from his first sleep on the jumbo jet high above the Atlantic and Gerda Marshalson and Lucius Lamb were in conference in the library of Laxlinden Hall, John Forbes was sitting beside the big stove in his slate-flagged kitchen, re-reading a letter which he had received from his daughter Colette. The letter ran as follows.

Dearest Dad,

I think I must give up the college, I can save the fees for the term if I leave now, I just asked the office. I kept trying to tell you but you wouldn't listen and when we argue you always muddle me and I don't say what I think, please please forgive me. It is quite clear to me now, I have thought it over sincerely and I just don't feel that my studies are relevant to anything worth while. I talked to Mr Tindall and he agreed, I think he heaved a sigh of relief! I feel I have been deceiving myself and deceiving you and passing myself off as something I am not. Please understand me, Dad, I've always wanted so much to please you, perhaps too much! I forced myself against my nature, and that can't be right, can it. I feel very unhappy about it all. I feel I am a failure, but it is better to stop now and not waste your money any more. I think I never told you how unhappy I was all last year, I am not up to it. It has needed some nerve to be honest with myself and come through to this truth, though I know you will be hurt. At home when you say you must
try
I say yes I will try, but I've felt so wretched about it. You must think I'm spineless, but please please don't be angry. I have faced up to it and now I know myself, like you were always quoting about Socrates. I want so much to come home. Please don't try to telephone me, they can't get me anyway, the hostel phone is out of order, and please don't send a telegram or write, there won't be time, just try to understand and don't think it's a tragedy, it's not the end of the world! I'll find my way in life but it must be
my
way. I have tried your way, truly I have. There are all kinds of growing up and getting educated which are not academic kinds. One has got to feel free to become oneself. I can learn things, but not in this way. I feel what I am doing now just lacks relevance, for me anyhow. You know I'm not just a ‘silly girl' like the ones you despise. Please see I have to do my thing—and I don't mean that in a silly way either. Make things easy for me. I could only explain this in a letter. I do rather dread coming home. I'm so terribly sorry I cost so much money for nothing, I want not to cost any more. I'll get a job soon, only don't be angry. I'll pack my stuff and it can be picked up later. I'll be home in a few days, I'll let you know when. Dear Daddy, much much love to you from your loving