«I wonder if-?»
Rachel said, «Julian, you can't ask people to sell you their belongings!»
«Keep it, keep it,» I said.
«Bradley, you mustn't let her-«No, I'll buy it-«
«Of course you can't buy it! Keep it!» I sat down. «Where's Arnold?»
«Oh thank you! Why, here's a letter addressed to Dad, and one for me. May I take them?»
«Yes, yes. Where's Arnold?»
«He's gone to the pub,» said Rachel, smiling a little more broadly.
«She felt it wasn't quite the moment,» said Julian.
«Who felt?»
«He's gone to the pub with Christian.»
«With Christian?»
«Your ex-wife arrived,» said Rachel, smiling. «Arnold explained that your sister had just attempted suicide. Your ex-wife felt it was not the moment for a reunion. She retired from the scene and Arnold escorted her. I don't know where to exactly. 'To the pub' were 1r his words.»
My mother was very important to me. I loved her, but always with a kind of anguish. I feared loss and death to an extent I think unusual in a child. Later I sensed with profound distress the hopeless lack of understanding which existed between my parents. They could not «see» each other at all. My father, with whom I increasingly identified myself, was nervous, timid, upright, conventional and quite without the grosser forms of vanity. He avoided crossing my mother, but he patently disapproved of her «worldliness» and detested the «social scene» into which she and Priscilla were constantly attempting to penetrate. His dislike of this «scene» was also compounded with a simple sense of inadequacy. He was afraid of making some undignified mistake, revelatory of lack of education, such as the mispronunciation of some well-known name. I shared, as I grew up, my father's disapproval and his anxiety. One reason perhaps why I so passionately desired education for myself was that I saw how unhappy the lack of it had made him. I felt for my misguided mother pain and shame which did not diminish but qualified my love. I was mortally afraid of anyone seeing her as absurd or pathetic, a defeated snob. And later still, after her death, I transferred many of these feelings to Priscilla.
It was the day after her exploit with the sleeping pills. The ambulance had taken her to the hospital from which she had been discharged on the same afternoon. She was brought back to my flat and went to bed. She was still in bed, in my bed, the time being about ten-thirty in the morning. The sun was shining. The Post Office Tower glittered with newly minted detail.
I had of course failed to find Arnold and Christian. Looking for someone is, as psychologists have observed, perceptually peculiar, in that the world is suddenly organized as a basis upon which the absence of what is sought is bodied forth in a ghostly manner. The familiar streets about my house, never fully to recover from this haunting, were filled with non-apparitions of the pair, fleeing, laughing, mocking, overwhelmingly real and yet invisible. Other pairs simulated them and made them vanish, the air was smoky with them. But it was too good a joke, too good a coup, for Arnold to risk my spoiling its perfection. By now they were somewhere else, not in the Fitzroy or the Marquis or the Wheatsheaf or the Black Horse, but somewhere else: and the white ghosts of them blew into my eyes, like white petals, like white flakes of paint, like the scraps of paper which the hieratic boy had cast out upon the river of the roadway, images of beauty and cruelty and fear.
Lying horribly awake that night I decided that the matter of Christian and Arnold was simple. It had to be simple: it was either simplicity or insanity. If Arnold «made friends» with Christian I would simply drop him. In spite of having solved this problem I could not sleep, however. I kept following series of coloured images which, like the compartments of a swing door, simply led me round and landed me back again in the aching wide-awake world. When I slept at last I was humiliated in my dreams.
«Well, why did you rush away in such a hurry? If, as you say, you decided ages ago to leave Roger, why didn't you pack a suitcase and go off in a taxi some morning when he was at the office, in an orderly manner?»
«I don't think one leaves one's husband like that,» said Priscilla.
«That's how sensible girls leave their husbands.»
The telephone rings.
«Hello, Pearson. Hartbourne here.»
«Oh, hello-«
«I wondered if we could have lunch on Tuesday.»
«Sorry, I'm not sure, my sister's here-I'll ring you back-Tuesday? My whole concept of the future had crumpled.
Through the open door of the bedroom as I laid the phone to rest I could see Priscilla wearing my red-and-white striped pyjamas, flopped in a deliberately uncomfortable position, her arms spread wide like a puppet, still steadily crying. The horror of the world seen without charm. Priscilla's woebegone tearful face was crumpled and old. Had she ever really resembled my mother? Two hard deep lines ran down on either side of her blubbering mouth. Beyond the runnels of the tears the dry yellow make-up revealed the enlarged pores of her skin. She had not washed since her arrival.
«Oh Priscilla, stop it, do. Try to be a bit brave at least.»
«I know I've lost my looks-«As if that mattered!»
«So you think I look horrible, you think-«I don't! Please, Priscilla-«Roger hated the sight of me, he said so. And I used to cry in front of him, I'd sit and cry for hours with sheer misery, sitting there in front of him, and he'd just go on reading the paper.»
«That's just nonsense, Priscilla.»> «Oh Bradley, if only we hadn't killed that child-She had already been onto this subject at some length.
«Oh Bradley, if only we'd kept the child-But how was I to know I wouldn't be able to have another one? That child, that one child, to think that it existed, it cried out for life, and we killed it deliberately. It was all Roger's fault, he insisted that we get rid of it, he didn't want to marry me, we killed it, the special one, the only one, my dear little child-«Oh do stop, Priscilla. It would be well over twenty now and on drugs, the bane of your life.» I have never desired children myself and can scarcely understand this desire in others.
«Twenty-a grown-up son-someone to love-to look after me-Oh Bradley, you don't know how I have yearned day and night for that child. He would have made all the difference to Roger and me. I think Roger began to hate me when he found I couldn't have children. And it was all his fault anyway. He found that rotten doctor. Oh it's so unjust, so unjust-«
«Of course it's unjust. Life is unjust. Do stop whingeing and try to be practical. You can't stay here. I can't support you. Anyway I'm going away.»
«I'll get a job.»
«Priscilla, be realistic, who would employ you?»
«I'll have to.»
«You're a woman over fifty, with no education and no skill. You're unemployable.»
«You're so unkind-«
The telephone rings again.
The oily ingratiating tones of Mr. Francis Marloe.
«Oh Brad, please forgive me, but I thought I'd just give a tinkle to ask how Priscilla is.»
«Oh good. Oh Brad, I just thought I'd tell you the hospital psych said better not leave her alone, you know.»
«Rachel told me yesterday.»
«I don't want to know things like that.»
«You and Dad made me feel so ashamed and inferior in the old days, you were both so cruel to me and Mum, Mum was so unhappy-«
«Either you must return to Roger or you must make some definite financial arrangement with him. It's nothing to do with me. You've got to face up to things.
«Bradley, please, will you go and see Roger-?»
«No, I will not!»
«Oh God, if only I'd taken my jewels with me, they mean so much to me, I saved up to buy them, and the mink stole. And there's two silver goblets on my dressing table and a little box made of malachite-«