All this has made me a little sombre, a little lunatic, to be with you again at last, shut up together in this moving shell of steel. There is an edge on laughter, or even the common topics. I am a little proud of my control. Soon I shall say something, and you will begin to tell me everything — the whole quavering saga of your life — the life which has just begun. You will begin asking those insane questions, where have I been, what have I done, what have I seen, why do I look at you like that, where will this all end? If I am honest with you now, if I give the impression of sincerity, it is because I want something. Inside I am weeping for my generation. I am devising in my mind a legend to convey the madness which created us in crookedness, in dislocation, in tort. We are a generation enwombed. A stillbirth. Like blind puppies we are seeking the way back to the womb, we are trying to wipe away the knowledge of our stillbirth, by a new, a more glorious, more pristine event. We have been expelled from the uterus blind and marrowless, and we grovel back towards it in a hysterical regression of panic. Look, I am burrowing in your lap with my mouth, like an animal. I am hammering down the doors of the womb. Screaming to get back. I would gather myself up like a snail and crawl back miraculously if I could, stuff myself up to your gullet for safety, anywhere, anyhow. This is at least honest. Do not accuse me. When I go mad, and rip the clothes off your trembling body, when I bite your nipples and groan, it is this expiatory half-death I am consummating. It is so necessary and so poignant to fuck you like that, when you are like a tumbled featherbed; when your mouth is clammy with stars, and your soft cunt breathing its velvet, musky pollen over the earth. Then even the trees, the hills, the towns, seem thrown into soft, perfectly defined focus for me. I am absolved. I have thrown up a support trench: a wall of the womb stands between me and the world. Let them probe, let them probe. Let them sound the walls of the belly, let them switch a searchlight on the vagina, I am secure. All my savagery, all my gust, has been thrown down in a little parcel of seed, emptied into this yawning throat of silk. Now I have recovered my control, I am masterful as a bantam, I am cruel. I am the monster you told me about. Very well. Turn your head away. I stand among the trees in my shirt, and smoke. I abhor you because you do not understand my weakness, though you see its symptom. Then you will turn with those stupid, uncomprehending eyes, and say why did I do this, what made me do that, etc. Your mouth hanging open on its hinges, your face shining with sweat and spittle and tears. I shake you off masterfully, disgusted by my love for you. I am hungry I tell you. Yes, when I act in this heartless way it is because I want to make use of you — or because it is teatime. Choose for yourself. Yes, if I have not given you syphilis it is a miracle. In the car I suddenly catch sight of that geological hammer. You brought it with you to do some fieldwork? I am laughing now as if my mind would snap. The whole country is waiting to be tapped with it, sounded for depths! Fieldwork! My humour is restored immediately, I am guiltless, free, the best of friends. And this puzzles you. You cannot make it out. There is not an atomic trace of the monster in me — not a trace. You try to hold out, be severe, austere, reserved, sulky, but I am infecting you, I am permeating you. I lean down over you, and in a breath I fill every artery in your body with psalms. We are shaken with a fit of hysterical weeping. The car wobbles from side to side. The country swings up and down among your breasts with magnificent lamentation. We are so happy that tears are running down our faces. You are given utterly now, captured and trodden and submissive, and if my hands would stop trembling I would light you a cigarette, I would talk sombrely; I would hang on your mouth like a broken jawbone … What a thin border between love and murder!
We slide off the arterial by Banbury, and down the gravel lanes, infinitely serpentine and bumpy. The avenue of chestnuts hides the old mill. A hunchback bridge in red stone. Lolling over, as the springs toss noiselessly, we can hear the clean thumping of the millwheel, sinking to a bass hubbub, and then gone, switched off, snuffed. We do not speak any more except by the language of action. The hedges are alive with insects, and visible drafts of honeysuckle.
The car becomes all of a sudden a gauche relic of another world. A preglacial monstrosity with its sweaty stink of petrol, and hot injections of oil on air so pure. We ditch it in a gravel pit and run out together, hand in hand, spontaneously, down the slopes past the Duke of Cumberland. Yes, downhill in a kind of hectic nympholepsy, the grass snapping at our ankles, the clouds deafening us, and the distant cathedral spire swimming up as if to impale us. The seven winds drummed while we were coming. Now they are silent. Our ears are alert, twisted into little helices of attention, but the valley offers no sound. It lies there like a toy.
We are transfigured, burst open and relieved. We have penetrated the outpost and entered into the novelty of Tarquin’s vivid death. It is hard to believe, so I do not mention it. If you can understand the fable that this country is creating around us without drawing on false sentiment, you are to be congratulated. For we have become suddenly heraldic here, where the sunshine plays like august lions and the river rides like a clean collar among the parklands. A hectic post-existence, say, in the ballet of countryside, among the Georgian houses weathered to blood, myopic peacocks, dirigible napery of floccus. It is when I think of what the result was that I am disgusted by the energy we spent, the passion, the tears — to produce this music, which he plays to us one winter evening. Tarquin throwing himself into an interesting attitude, holding the sign manual of death in his fingers.
To England should have been an abstract of all the hours we spent together in elegy. In a decorated world, confused by banality, by tears and recriminations, they should still put forth an image in the music: as faded photos, or pressed leaves in a book, can surprise by their evocations.
That night, huddled by the fire, listening to the tone poem, its melodic squirts, its lapses into pathos, I realized that he had not managed to translate his legend of death. The death under the shield had become the death of a Wagnerian swan: a romantic confection — the one thing he was trying not to do. The piano was full of galvanic ballerinas, falling in splashes of fluffy extinction around him. The swan with the goitre singing Wagner, its arse keeping time, its mouth full of toothpaste. But the real — death if you like (these abstractions bore me), the doom which he saw settling down over England, which we smelled out and reported true for him — that he has missed. I suppose he will never be able to create it, because he is too much a part of that declension himself. And dead men tell no tales. But when I see the material, the rough slag lying ready to hand, the exploded components of a world gathered ready for the artist — then I am ashamed. If there were not other things to be done, I would try myself. Sheerly punctilio, as it were, dedicated to a rape under a cherry tree and the smell of sperm; and that incomprehension in your eyes. Magic, you say, it was magical? The past is always magical. Store me the images in a velvet casket among the letters with ribbon round them. If I began would you hold the bucket under my head for the vomit of Englishry — the images?
When the children are silent I sit and brood over the crude magma which we wasted on Tarquin. The manufacture of death, if you please, with a few chromatic runs and tremors. If I could write I would gather a mouthful of bone-dry fiddles harsh as scrannel, and out of their monotonous algebra construct a theme. A dry contrapuntal rasping of marsh toads. Nothing should escape, nothing. Every wrinkle of the motor cortex translated into this withered, picric, asp-dry fiddling; every convolution of the brain fibrous with music …