‘“Now you’re free,” the old man answered softly.
‘“And what shall I do with freedom?”
‘The old man smiled.
‘“I told you how you might be free,” he said, “but I can tell nothing to a free man, and you must find your own ways.”
‘“But I’m afraid,” Cain whimpered. “I have nothing, my brother is dead, my life lies about me, broken and dead. Can you not tell me what god would have me do?”
‘The old man raised his eyebrows, and laughed, and asked him if he was blind.
‘“Do you not see who I am?” he cried, chuckling.
‘Cain ran in despair and terror down out of the mountains.’
The wind was rising steadily; it came up the hill and stirred the fretful trees. The stars glimmered, turning through their enormous courses. A hard light filtered through the branches as the moon swung up over the hill.
‘And Cain stole a boat and sailed to an island. There he would sit and do nothing, moving only when the things he had lost and destroyed sent their little creatures to disturb him. He tried to make a pipe from the wild reeds, but he failed. Then he turned to the sand and tried to build something, anything, but it fell asunder in his hands. So he watched the coming and going of the sea, and listened to the days go away, and smelled the winds, and felt the world grow older. And he tasted the bitter fruits of freedom. One day, who should come walking on the beach but the old man from the mountains. He named for Cain those bitter fruits, calling them loss, and dread, and something else for which the only name is wormwood. And then he went away.’
I looked at the still figure before me. Now in the moonlight I could see a little better, but not well enough, no.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Did you like that fairytale?’
There was a short, and, it seemed to me, a thoughtful pause. The figure stirred, and slipped down like liquid shadow to the ground. The voice spoke, indifferent and drowsy.
‘Who have you ever killed?’
‘That I’m not able to tell you,’ I said, and put my head upon the carpet of pine needles.
Time passed.
‘Ah, dear god,’ said I.
So we lay, somewhat together, sighing and shifting, listening to the voices of tree and grass, the whisper of the wind stealthily dismantling the forest floor, the murmur of things, and beyond that, the deeper sounds, the far wild silences and music of the night.
Dark, dark.
Leave this place. Too many fanged and flesh-devouring beasts are slouching through the undergrowth. I have not the courage.
The day was crazed with the wind tearing the rocks and bushes, and the land tormented by a thundering purple sea. The sun was well off the horizon, touching the sky, in spite of the storm, with a brave and delicate blue, the burnt hills with gold. A fine salt spray was threaded in the air. It stung my lips and eyes as I slowly climbed the hill. My skin was suffused with a dry fire, burning yet with the sour dregs of too much alcohol, and the roots of my hair pained me when the wind shook it. I was dressed in faded denim, and the shirt was open at my throat. Sandals bound my dust-soiled feet. I needed a shave. There is nothing else. What my thoughts were is my own affair. As to the method by which I was returned from the holy island to this profane one, I had only vague and dubious recollections.
The house was built into a recess of the hill, so that the rear side of the roof was always shaded, while the front wall blazed in the sunlight with a bluish blinding ferocity. The original had been a two-roomed structure of severe simplicity, but Julian had added to it year by year, and now it clambered up and down the hillface in a confusing jumble of planes and ledges. I stopped by the gate, my hand on the crumbling stone pillar, and took a deep breath to clear the wool from my eyes. Around the corner of one wall, an ear, a ragged curl of hair, and a fat hand holding a cane were visible. I walked toward that corner over the quiet dust. Julian stood there, very still, peering down into the ground at his feet, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke, for the arse of the fat man’s trousers to burst. I think he knew that I was there, watching him. I think he was waiting for me.
‘Good morning,’ I said, but the words did not come out of my mouth. I coughed and tried again, and produced a slightly more successful croak. Julian started melodramatically and turned, a smile already forming on his goatish jowls.
‘Ah, Mr White, you came. How are you? Recovered from last night, eh?’
‘Somewhat.’
‘You shouldn’t drink so much, you know,’ he said roguishly.
We looked at each other for a moment of awkward silence (at least my side of the silence was awkward) and then our gazes slipped elsewhere. Julian cut with his cane three neatly considered lines in the dust beside his malformed foot. He said something, but the wind whirled his words away.
‘What?’ I cried.
‘I said, have you seen my well? I had it dug —’
Another blast of wind severed the sentence. A hole, not more than eighteen inches in diameter, was open in the ground behind him, ringed with a ledge of flat stones. It was down into its depths that he had been peering when I found him. I watched him, wondering if this were another trick to set me up for his mockery, but his eyes were innocent.
‘That’s nice,’ I said.
He nodded complacently.
‘Yes, I’m fascinated by these things.’
There was a sound behind us, and we turned. A slight, pale man in horn-rimmed spectacles stood in the doorway of the villa. He seemed ill at ease, and looked at us with an aggrieved moroseness, as though we had no right to whirl about so suddenly and catch him like that. His neat dark suit (jagged teeth of a frayed trouser cuff clenched on the back of his shoe) Struck an incongruous note against the fierce wind-blasted landscape about him.
‘Ah, Charles,’ said Julian. ‘This is Mr White, the writer I spoke of.’
He turned to me.
‘This is Charles Knight, a fellow-countryman of mine.’
I shook a moist warm hand, while Julian looked from one of us to the other, beaming. He said,
‘Charlie wanted to meet you, didn’t you, Charlie? Charlie is very interested in literature.’
There was the faintest hint of a pause before that last word … at least, there should have been some hesitation. Charlie Knight’s blue jowls registered a further depth of gloom.
‘Yes,’ he moaned. ‘I’m very interested in literature.’
He blinked slowly, sadly, behind the powerful lenses of his spectacles, and heaved a tiny sigh. His voice, vivid and thrilling as a Lancashire smog, was utterly without cadence; the voice of a weary executive contemplating the arrival of his second ulcer. I began to laugh. I could not help it. The scene was ridiculous.
‘Oh,’ I cried, somewhat unsteadily, to stifle the boiling glee, ‘you’re interested in literature?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded slowly. A thought seemed to stir in his brain, for his left eye began to flicker, and a vein ticked in his forehead. I had a vision of him slowly falling to pieces before me, like a clockwork man gone wrong. My hilarity could not be checked. I gave a muffled sneeze of joy.
‘Bless you,’ Charlie murmured absently, and began to turn away. ‘You’ll be on the island for a while, I suppose, Mr White?’
‘Yes indeed.’
‘Ah.’
I glanced at Julian. He stood a step away from us with his hands clasped on his stomach, grinning, in a rapture of delight. I thought he might wink, but instead he swung away across the garden in the wake of his friend. At the gate he halted.
‘Do say hello to Helena,’ he called, waving a hand toward the house.
Then they were gone around a spur of the hill. I stood pulling at my lip, and looked into the well. The water lay ten feet down, like black shining steel. From its surface, my own eyes stared back at me, cold and unwavering, changed by depth into the eyes of some animal. What vengeful urges were stirring in that bile in the bowels of the earth? I shivered. Julian was on my mind. I had never met anyone like him before, and never will again. To be in his presence was to glimpse the infinite possibilities of laughter which the world could offer. He carried always a great cauldron of laughter trapped within him, which at intervals released little jets of merriment. Absurdity was his drug. Whether such a sense of humour was of value, or was anarchic and vicious, that I could not decide. But it occurred to me, standing by the well, that death, death indeed was the great joke which Julian sought. A massive heart attack, I decided, would be the most hilarious thing of all, and Julian would die with laughter bubbling in the blood on his lips. A very pretty notion, but unfortunately mistaken. Julian’s joke of a lifetime was something quite different from death, and I, surprise surprise, was the one who set it up for him.