"In the garden they howled, they lifted their voices and howled with hunger and desolation."
Over his desk the little print of the photograph of Randolph Ash's death mask was ambiguous. You could read it either way; as though you were looking into a hollow mould, as though the planes of the cheeks and forehead, the blank eyes and the broad brow were sculpted and looking out. You were inside-behind those closed eyes like an actor, masked: you were outside, looking at closure, if not finality. The frontispiece of his book was a photograph of Ash on his death-bed, the abundant white hair, the look of fatigue caught at a transient moment between the semblance of life and the set of death. These dead men, and Manet's wary, intelligent sensualist and Watts's prophet were all one-though also they were Manet and Watts -and the words too were one, the tree, the woman, the water, the grass, the snake and the golden apples. He had always seen these aspects as part of himself, of Roland Mitchell, he had lived with them. He remembered talking to Maud about modern theories of the incoherent self, which was made up of conflicting systems of beliefs, desires, languages and molecules. All and none of these were Ash and yet he knew, if he did not encompass, Ash. He touched the letters, which Ash had touched, over which Ash's hand had moved, urgent and tentative, reforming and rejecting his own words. He looked at the still fiery traces of the poem.
What Ash said-not to him specifically, there was no privileged communication, though it was he who happened to be there, at that time, to understand it-was that the lists were the important thing, the words that named things, the language of poetry.
He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.
He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.
He felt hugely hungry. On the way to fetch himself a tin of sweetcorn he heard the cats again, crying, scraping at his door. He found a heap of tins of pilchards and sardines-he and Val had lived frugally, these were a staple. He opened one of these and put it into a saucer, put it down inside the entrance to the flat and opened the door. Faces looked up at him, triangular sleek black faces, golden-eyed, owlish whiskered faces, tiger-striped, a smoke-grey kitten and a heavy orange Tom. He put down his saucer and called, as he had heard the old woman call. For a moment they hesitated there, heads on one side, and he watched their nostrils spread and snuff the oil on the air. Then they came past him in a rush, on their bellies, and the food was gone, two heads, snatching and gulping, a battle of legs and sinuous bodies, a long cry of the disappointed. He opened more tins, and put down a row of saucers. Soft feet hurried down the area steps, white needle teeth tore at the fish flesh, satisfied fur coiled and purred around his ankles, setting off little electric sparks. He watched them. Fifteen cats. They looked up at him, clear green glass eyes, tawny eyes, yellow and amber eyes, their pupils narrowing to slits in the light of his hall.
He thought there was no reason why he should not go out into the garden. He went back through the basement, pursued by several padding beasts, and pulled open the forbidden bolts, against the grittiness of the rust. He had to move heaps of papers away from the door. (Val had said they were a fire hazard.) The central lock was a Yale, which he turned, propping the door open. The night air came in, cold and damp and earthy, and the cats came out with him, running ahead. He went up the stone steps, and round the wall, beyond the extent of his confined view, and stood in the narrow garden, under the trees.
It had been a wet October; the lawn was covered with damp leaves, although some of the trees were still green. They held up their complicated arms, black against the pink haze of street lighting which lay over, rather than mixing with, the black of the space beyond. In his imagination, when he could not get into the garden, it had seemed a large space of breathing leaves and real earth. Now he was out, it seemed smaller, but still mysterious, because of the earth, in which things were growing. He could see the espaliered peaches on the red bricks of the serpentining wall, which had once bounded General Fairfax's Putney estate. He walked over and touched the wall, the baked bricks put up sturdily then, and still solid now. Andrew Marvell had been Fairfax 's secretary and had written poems in Fairfax 's gardens.
Roland was not sure why he felt so happy. Was it the letters, was it Ash's poem, was it the opening of his future, was it simply being alone, which was something he needed ferociously from time to time and lately had missed?
He walked along the path, inside the wall, to the end of the garden, where a couple of fruit trees obscured the view of the garden beyond. He looked back at the gaunt house, across the lawn. The cats were coming after him. Their snaking bodies wove in and out of the shadows of the trees on the grass, now glossy in the light, now velvet black in the dark. Their eyes shone fitfully and intermittently, hollow reddish balls, with a bluish spark at the centre, green-streaked curves on the dark that glittered and were gone. He was so pleased to see them, he stood with a silly smile on his face. He thought of the years of their dank smell, the dripping cave he had lived in, and felt, now he was going-for that was certain, he was going away-simply friendly towards them. Tomorrow he would have to think how to arrange for their survival. Tonight, he began to think of words, words came from some well in him, lists of words that arranged themselves into poems, "The Death Mask,”
“The Fairfax Wall,”
“A Number of Cats." He could hear, or feel, or even almost see, the patterns made by a voice he didn't yet know, but which was his own. The poems were not careful observations, nor yet incantations, nor yet reflections on life and death, though they had elements of all these. He added another, "Cats' Cradle," as he saw he had things to say which he could say about the way shapes came and made themselves. Tomorrow he would buy a new notebook and write them down. Tonight he would write down enough, the mnemonics.
He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.
Chapter 27
In certain moods we eat our lives away
In fast successive greed; we must have more
Although that more depletes our little stock
Of time and peace remaining. We are driven
By endings as by hunger. We must know
How it comes out, the shape o' the whole, the thread
Whose links are weak or solid, intricate
Or boldly welded in great clumsy loops
Of primitive workmanship. We feel our way
Along the links and we cannot let go
Of this bright chain of curiosity
Which is become our fetter. So it drags
Us through our time-"And then, and then, and then, "
Towards our figured consummation.
And we must have the knife, the dart, the noose,
The last embrace, the golden wedding ring
The trump of battle or the deathbed rasp