“Well,” says Howard pointedly, looking at his watch, “we must talk about it some time.”
“Talk about it now, if you like,” says Phil.
“I mean,” says Howard quite bluntly, “it’s probably time to go, isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” says Phil. “Stay as long as you like. Have an apple. Have two apples. Stay to dinner.”
Howard stares at him, then at Rose. His perspective of them changes as he stares. It’s like one of those cube patterns which pop inside out, from convex to concave, in front of your eyes.
“I see,” he says heavily. “I see. I suppose I’ve been making a fool of myself. I should have guessed that something like this was going on. Well, well, well. I think I’m entitled to feel rather bitter.”
He feels justifiably bitter for some minutes.
The door opens and a boy enters. He has spectacles and stand-up hair, and is trailing a satchel on the floor behind him. “Mum,” he says to Rose, “I had a fight with James Dunn today, and guess who won? Is it teatime yet?”
“Dad,” he says to Phil, “if one side had hydrogen bombs and the other side didn’t, but they had about, say, a trillion ordinary bombs, well, which side would win?”
“Not yet,” says Rose.
“I don’t know,” says Phil.
“Can I watch television?” says the boy.
He goes out, leaving his satchel on the floor. Howard gazes after him, flabbergasted.
“You mean,” says Howard, “you’re married?”
“Didn’t you get an invitation?” asks Phil. “Deckle-edged? With silver bells on the front? About eleven years ago? Don’t say we forgot to send you one.“
“Me!” cries Howard, walking about the upper roof garden of his converted dungeon. “Having an affair with the wife of my oldest friend!”
Felicity, lying back with her eyes closed in the late afternoon sun, smiles.
“I always thought Rose was deeper than you gave her credit for,” she says.
“I knew I knew the house! I knew I knew the telephone number!”
“You are a fool,” says Felicity tenderly.
“But that it should happen to me! This is the kind of situation other people get into!”
“You always underestimate yourself so,” says Felicity. “If other people can get themselves into these situations, so can you.”
He sits down. His elbows rest on his knees. He gazes at the ground.
“You don’t understand,” he groans. “I’ve shouted at her. I’ve burst into tears. Shouted and wept at someone else’s wife!”
She puts her hand on his.
“I knew I wasn’t the only person in the world you’d got the courage to shout at,” she says.
Howard sighs.
“But imagine if Phil came round here and shouted at you,” he says.
She laughs.
“That’s the difference between you,” she says. “He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.”
Howard puts his face in his hands.
“Don’t be silly,” says Felicity. “This is a completely new departure for you. You can’t go on forever just playing with the children and telling self-deprecating stories about yourself at the Chases’ dinner-parties. Just at the moment other men are beginning to wonder if they’ve come to the end of themselves, and if this is all that life has to offer, you discover a complete new range of abilities in yourself. You find you can betray your friends, and suffer, and inflict suffering on others. You’ve unearthed a completely new range of possibilities in your character.”
“That may be true,” says Howard, looking away with tragic restraint. “But there’s much more to it than that. What I feel goes much deeper than that. You don’t understand.”
“You mean,” says Felicity, “it makes you think that this whole society is morally ambiguous. You see that we’re all implicated in deception and betrayal. It’s a real crisis in your life.”
He says nothing.
“I understand you very well, you see,” she says.
“Then why do you let the children leave their bicycles in the cloister?” he shouts. “I’ve told you about it a thousand times.”
~ ~ ~
He turns his back upon the life he has led in this society. Its moral confusion disgusts him.
He resigns from the New Jerusalem. They sell up. They take the children out of school. They will live simply in the country.
The night before they move Howard sits on the terrace looking down upon the city for the last time. The great landscape of lights glitters and shimmers in the warm evening air. The diamond rivers of traffic flow inexhaustibly on. It is no less beautiful to him than on that first night. But now its beauty seems lost and sinister. He is looking at a bewitched forest of crystal trees and jewelled flowers, rooted in black soil, breathing black air.
Somewhere down there his friends are going about their lives, laughing in the blackness. That car there, in the stream of lights flowing along the Parkway — that might be the Waylands. Michael will be driving. “Just tell me who’s likely to be there this evening,” he’s saying. “Just run through their names. Then I’ll be all right.”
“I think Prue said Laurence and Shirley Esplin will be there,” Myra is saying. “Then probably either Charles Aught or Bill Goody, and perhaps Jack and Miriam …”
(But maybe those are the Bernsteins now, in that car there, crossing over the top of the Parkway on the Uptown Expressway, going not to the Chases’ at all, but to the Kessels’….)
“And of course,” adds Myra, as she looks up at the lights on the hills where the Bakers live, “Howard and Felicity.”
“I wonder,” Miriam Bernstein is saying to Jack, craning her head to look up at those same lights, “if Howard and Felicity will be there….”
Howard’s heart goes out to them — to Michael and Myra, to Jack and Miriam, to Roy and Prue — to all of them down there in the glittering darkness. From his great height in the hills he loves them and sorrows for them. For what he understands, and what they apparently do not, or will not, is that the whole lovely complex crystal machine in which they live is built upon suffering and death.
Phil was right: there is no metropolis without provinces, no administrators without administered, no doctors without disease. The flaws which they are building into the system (which even Phil is building into the system) — the endemic morbidity of man and the lethal hostility of his environment — are not incidental but essential. They are the weaknesses which can be exploited to keep men at work producing the goods which this society needs, and to keep them in subjection.
And they are all implicated. They are all working the system. Even if his New Jerusalem were ever built it would be executed and administered by the people in this city. It would be populated by Phil’s creations — patched up and improved a bit, but still the products of this same society.
And he is the only one who can see this! He himself, standing exactly here in the darkness above the city, with the night breeze ruffling his hair. Old Howard Baker, everyone’s friend, the slightly comic figure with the earnest expression on his face leading the way down the street for the rest of his body, the man who innocently believes whatever he is told, and gets everything slightly wrong.
A small noise behind him makes him turn round. Felicity is standing in the doorway of the living-room.
“What is it?” he asks.
“I was just looking at you against the lights of the city,” she says. “You’re very slightly phosphorescent.”