I was embarrassed, and didn’t want to remind her of his death, because she knew very well where he was. I stood still and said nothing.
She eventually let go: ‘He’s in Heaven, that’s where he is!’
There was nothing Nellie wanted more than to follow him. When death takes someone for no reason, in a situation other than war or battle, it often kills the will to resist a similar fate in those close by. Yet Nellie was allowed to live on into old age, and had no other child.
I wondered why Howard ran into the road to be maimed and killed, what he was running towards or escaping from. Maybe Christ did take him to his bosom, as Nellie liked to think, meaning as far as I was concerned that it was pure senseless chance. Burton felt the echo of his own dead son, stood up even straighter when the shock began to gnaw and it was seen in his face as one more blow against the family.
Nellie made me feel helpless, so I stopped being sorry and avoided her in that ruthless way children have when they are afraid. It wasn’t my fault Howard had died, and I couldn’t bear to have his mother wonder why I was alive and he was dead. I’m sure she never thought this, for her soul was good, but I felt it myself. In any case, she did not believe he was finally dead. He was in Heaven, and had been taken away for a while — forty-five years to be exact.
The Burtons felt that, because she was a Catholic, she brought colour into their lives and gave them something to talk about. There was always a need to get off the eternal subject of their father; and godless people such as Burton are tolerant enough of those who have a religion to look up to, as long as it is not the one they were born with and feel guilty at not showing respect for. It is one step up the ladder from sloth to myth.
There was no doubt that Oswald loved Nellie all his life and pitied her more than he did himself for the tragedy she’d been forced to share. She was ill and partially paralysed for her last dozen years, and Oswald was a strong man who generously wore himself out nursing, lifting, doing everything for her. Over seventy years old, he fell dead from a heart attack one morning. He had meticulously prepared his garden for the spring planting of vegetables, and all the seeds for it were laid out by the back step of his prefab at Bilborough. Nellie lived two more years, and left a thousand pounds to the church.
It seems centuries since I saw them, almost as if what occurred never happened, events slung up from the great unconscious into a spreading and ramifying dream that for once I can remember. Burton lost another grandson called Phillip, the youngest child of Edith, who at the age of five fell into a canal and was drowned. He slipped in quietly one winter’s morning, and his friends of the same age ran away frightened, not telling about it till they were questioned in the evening.
It is bound to be little else but death and turmoil in a backward scoop to the jungle of where one came from. Death is rolling towards everyone underfoot. I am deceived at the solid feel of the earth — which is waiting to pull me like a trapped fox into its soil. Death is the final black clapper of life, and maybe it doesn’t bother me because I can’t bear to think about it. It might also be that those who see death as the end are the ones who fear it most.
As for calling that dreamlike far-back zone — in which the first-seen people of my life appeared — a jungle, it certainly was exactly the opposite of a desert, due to its green richness and many traps, and its instilling of lifelong love. Those whom I knew so well are part of my corporate identity. Such mixing creates the mystery that makes every soul unique, and safe beyond the deathly probing of sociological scholarship. They are the segments that fix the truth of anyone, and it can be done in no other way.
When that line of thick forest is stabilized at my back, the way will be clear before me. Seed from its trees will drift off and fertilize the plain in front, so that my heart will burst when I cross it. One does not exist unless the heart is full. One crumbles into dust, and that is the only real death.
26
I suppose I was born into the world wanting to love my parents. I knew my father wouldn’t like my mother to be seen talking with somebody else, and realized how silent I had to keep about her conversations with the lorry-driver by the rammel-tips. It was difficult to look my father in the eye, and when he hit her for what I knew to be true I had reason to hate him for the rest of his life, though a few days later I had forgotten all about it.
It taught me to keep a secret and initiated me into the feat of being able to prevent ice from melting in the middle of a fire. I developed cunning and deceit, though it might have come later, or started much earlier. Still, I couldn’t hold it against her for doing it on my father, if that is what happened, for whoever lived with him had to survive, and that was a fact.
When a little truth has been found there is no reason to condemn people. They existed and did what they did only so that one day I would be able to find the truth. How else can you look at it if you are continually fighting against falsehoods in yourself?
The liars who run society can condemn people. Let the judges and magistrates go rotten with injustice and iniquity. Those who seek after truth have no right to condemn, while those who think they have found it do little else. Perhaps those who search for the truth lack the courage or are too lazy to condemn. One small truth leads to another, and once it begins there is no stopping. It is difficult to say whether seeking after truth is a self-abuse of the spirit, or a holy flight of fancy that grows into a way of life — which is something to be prevented at all costs.
But nothing is too painful if it can be remembered. Memories have already been screened and released in the pit of the mind before they are splashed on to the brain with such force that they cry out to you, and make you cry out when you feel them. They are sent as the only signposts to truth, and to remind you that truth is still possible. If you ignore them they go away either gracefully or with flesh in their mouths, but they always return in another form, at another time, behind another picture, possibly more acceptable, yet maybe with even sharper teeth.
Memories are part of yourself and, peaceful or not, your eternal friends, for if they lead you to some sort of truth it is only with the object of completing your wholeness, the humanity that will protect you against the world while at the same time making you more vulnerable to yourself.
I used to believe that as far as getting at the truth was concerned my subconscious could be relied on, but now I know that such a way is not for me. Waiting year after year for the subconscious to spew out its truth is a negative attitude that has to be overcome by a deliberate and forceful attempt to get at the truth in other ways, for the subconscious can be just as big a liar as the most wordy politician.
At the same time the subconscious should be held in awe and respect. It has power, its own rights, an entire republic. Through it a man is capable of doing evil if he recognizes what his subconscious is prompting him to do yet tells those around him that he intends to act otherwise — and even persuades himself of it. Under the machinations of self-control he hides the progress of what destiny intends for him.
In other words he is able to let his subconscious do its subterranean work at the rate it will be most effective and deadly, in the way primal human matter works out its own evolutionary role. Having mastered patience and wisdom, he may decide to let it go into evil instead of good, becoming sly and full of such self-control that it is nothing more than perversity and malice.
Once the subconscious gets you in its power it is impossible to escape, or to disown it if it threatens you with harm, or to save those whom you ought to love. An intelligent man can thus be taken over by a wolf. He perceives everything but is controlled by the mechanism of an animal, and has no defence against it.