Here I am, I want to say always, take me and rip me open. There is a prize offered to anyone who can find the essential Herbert Gregory, alias Death. These stammerings betray me, but no matter. I am writing for the public of the damned. Let this become a piece of superb cartography. Let me be laid out here in relief, to be pored over by professional students of the soul’s geology. See, strata by strata: the most delicate laminations. Suffering, dear ones, has made me marmoreal. You will find written on me all those symptoms of strain that you can see on the faces of old actors. There is no variation from the magnetic north of artifice. Touch me, there is absolutely no charge. Observe, I am utterly metamorphic, I fall away in long rotten flakes.
Sometimes I imagine that it is not I, not really I, in which I read these symptoms of decay. It is my world dying on me, with me, in me. Strange tunes seem to blow about the snow-lit drawing room these days.
Gracie, when you died, when you really died there overlooking the sea, could you imagine that I, turning from your little pinchedup face with the knowing gamin grin on it, should wring my hands together in an intense grief. Not for you! Not for your dissolution, but for my own? You poor white symptom of my world, did you know that the trite mask of sorrow I wore hid the great merciless fear and rage which your death forced on me? You could not guess that, recoiling from your dead mouth as from a branding iron, I was recoiling from myself — the infinity of empty I’s who had yet time to talk, talking of ordinary things in ordinary places.
No, I say to myself, let her be. Don’t think of her. She is just a pawn in this philosophic game which you are playing and which is going to kill you. Let her be. The accent is not on the commonplace loss of a body, of a laugh about the house, feet on the stairs, warm body in a warm bed; it is the loss of the embryo Gregory which was born in her, and which she took away into death with her. I was with child by her. I was kicking in the womb. What right have you or anyone to judge my sorrow, not for her, but for the irreparable loss of my germ? The real struggle was not between us but in me. Let her be. Death is just one of those mathematical constants whose value we must accept as approximate — to ten places of decimals. She used to say to me, after we were married: “Gregory, we’re not pals very much, are we? I mean we don’t like the same things, do we? I don’t care for a lot of old books like you do, and you don’t care for the pitchers and Gary Cooper and all. Do you? Oi, answer your missis when she talks to you, or I’ll clout you one.”
“No, we don’t very much, do we?”
“Then I tell you what.” That with a serious tone. “If you’ll come to the Pally once a week with me, I’ll read one good book every week and get improvement. I’m not very brainy, but I’m quick on the uptake, aren’t I?”
If I had not been nourishing myself on her, this idea would have sounded less frightening. So we were to establish points of reference between each other? I was to learn the rumba and she help herself to slices of improving Gibbon. Perhaps Voltaire, or Butler. (I would like you to know that I am well-read.)
The charm of these little scraps of gossip is in their completeness. Their completeness of falsehood. The process, alas, is too simple. Take a thought from its context and you can make it mean anything you like. You see, when Gracie married me, it was as if she had died on me. The metamorphosis was alarming. While I had been an equivocal, a rather queer and undependable lover, there was always a pinch of good salt to season the dish. There was always a head chef, in fact — your humble servant. But an economic dependence on a husband to a person like Grace means a complete social independence. She is irresponsible, anchored finally by a strip of printed parchment, and a few lame words mumbled by a bald-headed man. Therefore she is free. It began almost as soon as the wedding guests left: a critical survey of the flat, and a careful enunciation of its limitations. “We’ll get it all fixed up,” she said, “so it’ll look nice and dinky when your friends come. I want to work hard for you, Gregory.” That was how it began. I give you full permission to recognize this as comic relief. There were curious additions to my tasteful set of furniture. Hideous bamboo trolleys, bead curtains. My beautiful sofa was called inelegant; it was suggested that we should have it covered in red damask, with tassels. “We must get the parlour shipshape,” she remarked once or twice, and I recognized a new note in her voice. There was the ring of the Penge matron coming to life in her tones. It is difficult to admit that I began to loathe her. I loathed her because I was in love with the ordinary, uninhibited Grace who was sure of nothing; and who by obedience alone maintained her precarious hold on my affections. As a stranger she was a paragon. As a wife she produced nothing but this crop of warty furniture, a few copybook aphorisms (old-style), and a bad temper in me. If it began with the parlour it could only end with my friends. Tarquin was to be slowly dropped. “He’s a kind of pansy,” she remarked. “I don’t like it. I seen that kind before. He’s a winny.” Next Clare. Not that he was ever a friend of mine. But now that she was a respectable married matron she was angry at the thought of him. She resented him. Lobo and Perez passed muster. Their manners were so lovely. But Clare might yet try and shake the economic stability of marriage by a revival of their great love. He was to be cut dead from the roots.
There were rows, yes. There were great tearings of checkered sofa cushions, wilful smashing of the chinoiseries with which my spouse had lined the bookshelves. But to my horror I found that Gracie was not to be cowed any more. She was a wife, by Jesus Christ, and she was going to give me of her best whether I liked it or not. And all the glorious misunderstandings on which our love had been built now came forward and contributed to the frightful domestic uproars. Trying to explain, with my usual scholarly precision, just what it was she was doing, she would enrage me with a burst of snivelling and the accusation: “You try to make me out a little tart, that’s all. You think I’m not classy enough for your wife because I don’t speak proper. I tell you Gregory, I’m doing me best, aren’t I?” If I pointed out that that was not the point, she would whimper: “You just want a prostitute here to use. You don’t want me to try and give you a home.” Bang! another piece of Tottenham Court Road china. All this was unbearably tragic, unbearably comic. What was really fatal to our relations, however, was the slowly altering cosmography of our social life. There is nothing like pride for giving one the interpretive faculty. I flatter myself I can play the social astrologer as well as anyone — shall we say Proust? The glance, the lift of a forefinger, the attitude before a mirror, the hair-trigger meaning of a word — these constitute the furniture of a world in which I am too much at home. All this, of course, is a pretty way of saying that our marriage was not a success. The enterprise was undertaken as a defence against the rights of an individual. It was to end in estranging me from all those who had backed me up in it. The brightly coloured tesserae which formed the mosaic of our lives — and so on.
In the beginning, let us say, Gracie was an asset to the menagerie. She was amusing because there were no signs of seriousness on my part. She had a certain chic; as, you might say, a pet marmoset might have, if it were worn on the left shoulder of a Charlotte Street genius. It was a case of: “Come along and meet Gregory. He’s so original, my dear. He keeps a performing woman.” Something of that sort. As soon as the maid became a matron the whole angle of vision altered. It was no longer I who was quaint. It was Gracie. I was poor little Gregory. And she herself was not so much quaint as boring and silly. Her affectations, her knowingness, her fatuous little clichés. It was impossible, in fact, for people to come and enjoy my company, without being forced to go through the ultra-suburban palaver which Gracie insisted on.