It was now almost three days since Stella had been rushed to a hospital within an hour of taking the valium; the tablets had been drawn from her stomach in the nick of time before they had penetrated the bloodstream.
“She’s still flat on her back staring at the ceiling,” said Sebastian in a curious voice. Was it muffled remorse, muffled self-pity, that struck an echo in Mary’s heart? “Asking to see me and you all the time …”
I can’t bear to visit … Mary thought but she remained silent. They were now in the kitchen and she was rummaging in a bag of potatoes, carrots and greens. “I’ve bought some ham,” she said. Sebastian watched her, unseeingly it seemed, as she extracted the vegetables and peeled them swiftly. “I may be late tomorrow, Sebastian. Can you cope?”
“Of course I can cope,” said Sebastian. “I’m not a bloody child.”
“Not a child,” said Mary. “And yet I arrived last night to find you sitting like wood in the darkness without a light on in the entire house. Oh Sebastian, sometimes I feel we’re children playing, all of us, at being mature.” She was astonished she had said so much. It was the shadow of recent events speaking in her.
“Speak for yourself,” said Sebastian. He extracted the letter from his breast pocket.
Oh not that again, thought Mary. You’ve read it to me at least a dozen times. But she listened patiently nevertheless.
“Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John.”
Mary’s eyes looked back to Stella’s through Sebastian’s as he finished the letter and looked at her with a shadow on his face that seemed to mirror all three. His eyes were deceptively open but their threaded look, threaded faces, disconcerted her. Were they kind, universal eyes or cruel, universal eyes that she and Stella shared with him? Whose eyes was she seeing? What a question to ask silently of “eyes” she thought she knew that suddenly mirrored the veiled darkness of the community of the world as if one of John’s imaginary trains flashed through a darkened, urban landscape, lights on darkened stations in an unreal pool of place, an unreality all the more disturbing in that it had been created by oneself, though how or why one could scarcely tell, Mary felt.
Why did Stella’s note written in a moment of helplessness, a moment of suicidal depression, enter him (penetrate his bloodstream) like a transfusion of pride? Did pride spring from the helplessness of others masquerading as perverse love for one’s accomplishments, for one’s apparent strength? She must ask Father Marsden. He was the only one who knew of the perversity, yet mystery of love.
Two
Sebastian was incapable of killing a fly, Mary knew. Violence saturated magazines and films but it left him drained. It left him in need of perverse affection. To strike a blow was to confess to his debilitation and need. Mary had witnessed some of the pathetic, yet shocking, scenes between Sebastian and Stella, and sometimes she dreamt she could see the epic devil of divine need of attention in his eyes when he and Stella quarrelled until Mary was enveloped in their claustrophobia. Claustrophobia was descent into the womb, into the devil’s foetal gun or foetal knife that needs to kill another it loves in the mother of space. Needs me! thought Mary. Needs the same woman broken into wife and sister. If Stella dies, something in me dreams that it needs to die to find another route back to life.
The devil’s need of affection and attention came to a sudden, ironic climax in Stella’s attempted or staged suicide after an unhappy quarrel. Then it was that the devil popped out of Sebastian’s eyes and became absolutely real. He came upon Stella’s letter half an hour after she had taken the pills, she was lying curled into a ball in bed, John was asleep, Mary was at her mother’s. All Sebastian had to do to achieve his wife’s death was nothing, the simplest thing in the world. Leave her alone. Go for a long walk. Do nothing.
“Instead he rushed from the house,” Mary told Father Marsden, “as if the devil were at his backside, phoned for an ambulance and sat with Stella on the way to the hospital after asking a neighbour to keep an eye on John.”
“Ah,” said Father Marsden, “nothing surprising in that, my dear Mary. Your brother was possessed by the angel of need he himself invoked. Death is like birth; it is landslide one invokes to make oneself into a loved giant as one runs to meet it and to stay it.
“Sebastian’s hell is to be possessed by the angel of perverse need of love he invoked in wishing his wife dead. One man’s greedy or murderous wish for love touches us all — the ramifications are infinite. Self-created universe. Self-created limbo. When his wish was answered, his legs multiplied. They turned into the wheels of an ambulance, they became proud of themselves, obsessed with the riddle of love that motivates many a hospital founded by repentant millionaires. It’s an old story, old as daemons and gods we have forgotten.”
“Oh! I hadn’t realized …” said Mary.
“Realized what?”
“Why, that Sebastian may yet turn into a good man, even a god; he may become the founder of paradise.”
Father Marsden laughed with (rather than at) his student. The annunciation of humour was as unconscious of parody of the sacred as the birth of charity was sometimes unconscious of the devil of guilt. They sprang from uncanny remorse, uncanny hope, and comedy of everlasting spirit. In Mary’s naïveté, Marsden knew, lay the grain of uncanny hope in a bewildered world, the grain of ambivalent paradise in every loved giant.
It was eleven on that third evening since Stella’s attempted suicide that Mary and Sebastian turned in after “looking at the news”: President Reagan speaking of his budget, food kitchens in famine-stricken Ethiopia and the fossil-television bodies of starving children, reports of a mysterious light in the sky that American military personnel had first interpreted as an atomic trial in South Africa until they came to identify it, though still uncertain, with a passing meteorite, scenes of coffins of victims of a fire borne to their grave in Dublin, Ireland …
A time of fires, a time of famine, thought Mary, as she undressed. Within the past week or so one had been inundated by fires. There had been a fire in New Cross Road, London, where a birthday party was being held, resulting in the death of thirteen young West Indians. There had been the Dublin inferno, a dance hall on fire. Another blaze had consumed a hotel in the gamblers’ paradise of America, Las Vegas….
Mary gently lifted the covers and slipped in beside Sebastian. It was habit with them from early childhood into adolescence to sleep side by side on occasion, sometimes once or twice a month when they were adult. Stella was startled at first when she married Sebastian but accepted it as one accepts the gravity of innocence and as a natural, however bizarre, regression into the womb of space. She was two years older than they, thirty-five to their twin thirty-three. Their naked bodies did not touch. Mary’s was as smooth as silk, Sebastian’s roughened in places from the labouring jobs he occasionally did, digging trenches, brick-laying, hospital portering, shirt-less in many weathers of body and hollow mind. He had had a tough time since he had lost his job as an electrician in 1978. He had worked for broken stretches since then within which he would collapse like a marionette and subsist on the dole for staccato — apparently gestating — periods during which he fought with the need for attention to restore his self-respect. He fought within a darkness ignited by ambivalent love, ambivalent hatred of Stella and Mary. (Sebastian scarcely uttered a word about this — he had little vocabulary with which to do so — but Mary was convinced that this interpretation of his behaviour gave “meaning” to his “meaningless” lusts, “meaningless” hatreds. Who could know better than she the transparent polarization of kith and kin, yet twin, married bodies, they inhabited?)