Careful.
In the end we had not much to say to each other—should I have given her a stern talking-to, should I have urged her to cheer up and look on the bright side of things?—and after a short while I left, saying I would come again tomorrow. She was still far away in herself or in those far blue hills and I think she hardly noticed my going.
In the corridor I encountered Toby Taggart, loitering uneasily, fidgeting and biting his nails and looking more than ever like a wounded ruminant. ‘Of course,’ he burst out straight off, ‘you’ll think I’m only worried about the shoot.’ Then he looked abashed and set to nibbling again violently at a thumbnail. I could see he was putting off going in to see his fallen star. I told him of how when she had woken up she had smiled at me. He took this with a look of large surprise and, I thought, a trace of reprehension, though whether it was Dawn Devonport’s hardly appropriate smile or my telling him about it that he deplored I could not say. To distract myself in my shaken state—I had a fizzing sensation all over, as if a strong electric current were passing along my nerves—I was thinking what a vast and complicated contraption a hospital is. An endless stream of people kept walking past us, to and fro, nurses in white shoes with squeaky rubber soles, doctors with dangling stethoscopes, dressing-gowned patients cautiously inching along and keeping close to the walls, and those indeterminate busy folk in green smocks, either surgeons or orderlies, I can never tell which. Toby was watching me but when I caught his eye he looked aside quickly. I imagine he was thinking of Cass, who had succeeded where Dawn Devonport had failed. Was he thinking too, guiltily, of how he had sent Billie Stryker to lure her story out of me? He has never let on that he knows about Cass, has never once so much as mentioned her name in my presence. He is a wily fellow, despite the impression he likes to give of being a shambler and dim.
There was a long rectangular window beside us affording a broad view of roofs and sky and those ubiquitous mountains. In the middle distance, among the chimney pots, the November sunlight had picked out something shiny, a sliver of window-glass or a steel cowling, and the thing kept glinting and winking at me with what seemed, in the circumstances, a callous levity. Just to be saying something I asked Toby what he would do now about the film. He shrugged and looked vexed. He said he had not yet told the studio what had happened. There was a great deal of footage already in the can, he would work on that, but of course there was the ending still to be shot. We both nodded, both pursed our lips, both frowned. In the ending as it is written Vander’s girl Cora drowns herself. ‘What do you think?’ Toby asked cautiously and still without looking at me. ‘Should we change it?’
An ancient fellow in a wheelchair was bowled past, white-haired, soldierly, one eye bandaged and the other furiously staring. The wheels of the wheelchair made a smoothly pleasant, viscous whispering on the rubber floor tiles.
My daughter, I said, used to make jokes about killing herself.
Toby nodded absently, as if he were only half listening. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said. I do not know if he was speaking of Cass or of Dawn Devonport. Both, perhaps. I agreed that, yes, it was a shame. He only nodded again. I imagine he was still brooding on that ending. It was a tricky problem for him. Yes, suicide, even if only the attempt of it, does make for awkwardness.
When I got home I went into the living room, to the telephone extension there, and, pausing only to make sure that Lydia was nowhere in earshot, called Billie Stryker and asked if she would come and meet me, straight away. Billie at first sounded unwilling. There was a racket going on behind her; she said it was the television set but I suspect it was that unspeakable husband of hers, berating her—I am sure I recognised the combination of menace and whine that is his characteristic tone. At one point she put her hand over the receiver and shouted angrily at someone, which must have been him. Have I mentioned him before? A frightful fellow—Billie retains even yet a sallow trace of the black eye she had when I first met her. There were more raised voices and again she had to cover the receiver, but in the end, in a hurried whisper, she said that she would come, and hung up.
I tiptoed out to the hall again, listening still for Lydia, and took my hat and coat and gloves and slipped out of the house again as nimble and soft of step as a cat-burglar. In my heart I have always fancied myself a bit of a cad.
It occurs to me that of all the women I have known in my life I know Lydia the least. This is a thought to stop me in my tracks. Can it be the case? Can I have lived all these years with an enigma?—an enigma of my making? Perhaps it is only that, having been for so long in such close proximity to her, I feel I should know her to an extent that is not to be achieved, not by us, that is, not by human beings. Or is it just that I can no longer see her properly, in a proper perspective? Or that we have walked so far together that she has become merged with me, as the shadow of a man walking towards a street light gradually merges with him until it is no longer to be seen? I do not know what she thinks. I used to think I knew, but no more. And how should I? I do not know what anyone thinks; I hardly know what I think myself. Yes, that is it, perhaps, that she has become a part of me, a part of what is the greatest of all my enigmas, namely, myself. We do not fight, any more. We used to have seismic fights, violent, hours-long eruptions that would leave us both shaking, I ashen-faced and Lydia mute and outraged, the tears of fury and frustration spilling down her cheeks like runnels of transparent lava. Cass’s death conferred, I think, a false weight, a false seriousness upon us and our life together. It was as if our daughter by her going had left us some grand task which was beyond our powers but which we kept on aspiring to fulfil, and the constant effort goaded us repeatedly into rage and conflict. The task I suppose was no more and no less than that of continuing to mourn her, without stint or complaint, as fiercely as we had in the first days after she was gone, as we had for weeks, for months, for years, even. To do otherwise, to weaken, to lay down the burden for the merest moment, would be to lose her with a finality that would have seemed more final than death itself. And thus we went on, scratching and tearing at each other, so the tears would not cease nor our ardour grow cool, until we had exhausted ourselves, or got too old, and called an unwilling truce that nowadays is disturbed by no more than an occasional, brief and half-hearted exchange of small-arms fire. So that, I suppose, is why I think I do not know her, have ceased to know her. Quarrelling, for us, was intimacy.