'You give me great heart.'
'We may soon be able to prove,' continues Lodge with a collusive twinkle, 'that it is not just Mr Sherlock Holmes who is able to escape evident and apparent death.'
Arthur smiles politely. That fellow is going to dog him to the gates of St Peter, or whatever the equivalent turns out to be in the new realm that is slowly being made palpable.
There is little far niente in Arthur's life. He is not a man to spend a summer's afternoon in a deckchair with a hat pulled down over his face, listening to the bees bothering the lupins. He would make as hopeless an invalid as Touie makes a successful one. His objection to inactivity is not so much moral – in his view, the Devil makes work for hands both idle and occupied – as temperamental. His life contains great bouts of mental activity, followed by great bouts of physical activity; in between he fits his social and family life, both of which he takes at a lick. He even sleeps as if it were part of life's business, rather than an interlude from it.
So he has few means of recourse when the machine overstrains itself. He is incapable of recuperating with an idle fortnight on the Italian lakes, or even a few days in the potting shed. He plunges instead into moods of depression and lassitude, which he seeks to hide from Touie and Jean. He shares them only with the Mam.
She suspects that he is more than usually troubled when he proposes a visit on his own account, rather than as a way of making a rendezvous with Jean. Arthur takes the 10.40 from St Pancras to Leeds. In the luncheon car, he finds himself thinking, as he increasingly does, about his father. He now acknowledges the harshness of his youthful judgement; perhaps age, or fame, has made him more forgiving. Or is it that there are times when Arthur feels on the edge of nervous collapse himself, when it seems that the normal human condition is to be on the edge of nervous collapse, and that it is mere good fortune, or some quirk of breeding, that keeps anyone from falling? Perhaps if he did not have his mother's blood in him, he might go – might already have gone – the way of Charles Doyle. And now Arthur begins to realize something for the first time: that the Mam has never criticized her husband, before or since his death. She does not need to, some might say. But even so: she, who always speaks her mind, has never been heard to say ill of the man who caused her so much embarrassment and suffering.
It is still light when he arrives at Ingleton. In the early evening they climb up through Bryan Waller's woodland and emerge on to the moor, gently scattering a few wild ponies. The large, erect, tweeded son aims words down at the red coat and neat white cap of his sure-footed mother. From time to time she picks up sticks for the fire. He finds this habit of hers vexing – as if he could not afford to buy her a cord of the finest firewood whenever she needs it.
'You see,' he says, 'there is a path here, and over there is Ingleborough, and we know that if we climb Ingleborough we can see across to Morecambe. And there are rivers whose course we can follow, which always flow in the same direction.'
The Mam does not know what to make of these topographical platitudes. They are most unlike Arthur.
'And were we to miss the path and get lost on the Wolds, we could use a compass and a map, which are easily obtainable. And even at night there are stars.'
'That is all true, Arthur.'
'No, it is banal. It is not worth saying.'
'Then tell me what you wish to say.'
'You brought me up,' he replies. 'There was never a son more devoted to his mother. I say that not as self-praise, merely as a statement of fact. You formed me, you gave me my sense of myself, you gave me my pride and what moral faculties I have. And there is still no son more devoted to his mother.
'I grew up surrounded by sisters. Annette, poor dear Annette, God rest her soul. Lottie, Connie, Ida, Dodo. I love them all in their different ways. I know them inside out. As a young man, I was not unfamiliar with female company. I did not debase myself as many another fellow did, but I was neither an ignoramus nor a prude.
'And yet… and yet I have come to think that women – other women – are like distant lands. Except that when I have been to distant lands – out on the veldt in Africa – I have always been able to find my bearings. Perhaps I am not making sense.'
He stops. He needs a reply. 'We are not so distant, Arthur. We are more like a neighbouring county which you have somehow forgotten to explore. And when you do, you are not sure if the place is much more advanced or much more primitive. Oh yes, I know how some men think. And perhaps it is both and perhaps it is neither. So tell me what you wish to say.'
'Jean is struck down with bouts of low spirits. Perhaps that is not the right way to describe them. It is physical – she has migraines – but it is more a kind of moral depression. She behaves, she talks as if she has done some awful thing. I never love her more than at such moments.' He attempts to take a deep breath of Yorkshire air, but it sounds more like a great sigh. 'And then I fall into black moods myself, but I merely loathe and despise myself for them.'
'And at such times no doubt she loves you just as much.'
'I never tell her. Perhaps she guesses. It is not my way.'
'I would not expect otherwise.'
'I think at times I shall run mad.' He says it calmly but bluntly, like a man giving a weather report. After a few paces, she reaches up and slips her arm through his. It is not one of her gestures, and it takes him by surprise.
'Or if not run mad, die of a stroke. Explode like the boiler of a tramp steamer and just sink beneath the waves with all hands.'
The Mam does not answer. It is not necessary to refuse his simile, or even to ask if he has seen a doctor for chest pains.
'When the fit is on me, I doubt everything. I doubt I ever loved Touie. I doubt I love my children. I doubt my literary capability. I doubt Jean loves me.'
This does call for an answer. 'You do not doubt that you love her?'
'That, never. That, never. Which makes it worse. If I could doubt that, then I could doubt everything and sink happily into misery. No, that is always there, it has me in its monster grip.'
'Jean does love you, Arthur. I am quite certain of it. I know her. And I have read her letters that you send.'
'I think she does. I believe she does. How can 1 know she does? That's the question that tears at me when this mood descends. I think it, I believe it, but how can I ever know it? If only I could prove it, if either of us could prove it.'
They stop at a gate, and look down a tufted slope to the roof and chimneys of Masongill.
'But you are certain of your love for her, just as she is certain of her love for you?'
'Yes, but that is one-sided, that is not knowing, that is not proof.'
'Women often prove their love in a way that has been done many times.'
Arthur darts a glance down at his mother; but she is gazing resolutely ahead. All he can see is a curve of bonnet and the tip of her nose.
'But that is not proof either. That is just being desperate for evidence. If I made Jean my mistress it would not be proof that we loved one another.'
'I agree.'
'It might prove the opposite, that we are weakening in our love. It sometimes seems that honour and dishonour lie so close together, closer than I ever imagined.'
'I never taught you that honour was an easy path. What would it be worth if that was the case? And perhaps proof is impossible anyway. Perhaps the best we can manage is thinking and believing. Perhaps we only truly know in the hereafter.'
'Proof normally depends upon action. What is singular and damnable about our situation is that proof depends upon non-action. Our love is something separate, apart from the world, unknown to it. It is invisible, impalpable to the world, yet to me, to us, utterly visible, utterly palpable. It may not exist in a vacuum, but it does exist in a place where the atmosphere is different: lighter or heavier, I am never sure which. And somewhere outside of time. It has always been like this, from the beginning. That is what we immediately recognized. That we have this rare love, which sustains me – us – utterly.'