oh the intervals of time the oiled oceans patent leather jungles glass mountains white airports streamlined nembutal the audience is coming back too soon as always the sweat doesn’t dry discovering motives don’t you realize he is as he is because he’s arterio-sclerotic I’ve worked it out everybody is clever today
CURTAIN UP or would be if there was
so why not cut Cordelia Mitty yes we’ll cut her at future performances LILAC KING (yawning smiling) all these daughters bore the pants their lives are one long menopause it’s my fool-son I’ll choose to lie with in my coffin as if DOROTHY CORNWALL will allow I am the one must kill our fool-brother-son-king silence in the total audience then FOOL oh Dorothy yours is the kindness which exchanges cap for crown and incidentally pray you undo this button a great roaring of participation DOROTHY CORNWALL oh oh buttons are obscene (silence ALL as she uproots penis) PLASTICINE KING then I am free if only you take my tongue too and perhaps uvula for good measure no more an actor AUDIENCE surges down aisles meeting WHOLE CAST halfway to become involved with one another when finished return C. to stamp KING into coffin.
The LILAC OTHER has evaporated in the sun which burns too bright.
‘Sir Basil Hunter!’
‘Yairs. Yes?’
‘We’re landing in fifteen minutes.’
‘For God’s sake, where?’
‘Amsterdam.’ Like all air hostesses she is smiling for an invalid, in this case, an unsavoury old man.
‘Well, wasn’t it a short hop!’ Still the FOOL.
He must tie his tie, button his collar. If he hadn’t more than undone it: he had torn the damn button off.
Compose a wire then, to the Jacka, if he could get his tongue round the significant word, (FOOL: You can’t throw a stroke at my age, can you? FOOL’S RATIONAL SISTER: Don’t be silly! Young children are known to have had them.)
If dreams were reality you mightn’t have done a murder, slept with your sister, or contemplated what amounts to professional suicide, (MITTY JACKA: You ought to realize by now — if you are in any way creative — that the creative act remains the great suicide risk.)
The dreams oh the wet between the legs.
Persuade this vivandiere to remember charity and bring out another little bottle of Scotch.
Arnold Wyburd almost never left his office later than five-thirty p.m. Unless the traffic was exceptionally hostile to the Wyburd schedule he could expect to open his front door at six o’clock. After hanging his bound Homburg on the topheavy mahogany stand he would check his time with the grandfather clock at the end of the hall. The grandfather, Bill Hunter’s carriage clock at the office, and his own gold repeater with blue-enamelled figures and hands, were synchronized. It gave him a sense of security, not only to keep in step with time, but to keep time in step. Tonight he saw on consulting with the grandfather that somebody was five minutes out.
He had developed the habit of making a slight pfiffing noise when faced with irritations or shortcomings. He made it now.
Lal called from the living-room, ‘Is that you, Arnold?’ as she always did, and it was never anybody else.
She had on her glasses. They looked too big and heavy for her face. The girls brought the children’s socks for her to mend, and she was peering at a sock she was darning.
‘You’ll ruin your eyesight,’ he warned, though both had realized long ago it was impossible to improve each other.
He switched the light on. She was vain about her darning: doesn’t it remind you of petit point? she liked to ask and offer it as proof. Now the light showed she was smiling at the darning egg.
He bent and kissed her on the bony structure of the forehead, avoiding the finely quilted cheek; to kiss her on the cheek at that hour would have been going too far.
‘I think I shall retire,’ he told her.
‘Oh dear, have you a cold?’
‘No. From the office.’
She did not answer. She sighed. She had heard it before.
He poured himself his evening whiskey, rather more than usual, and swamped it in case Lal should notice. Not that she would have disapproved: he was his own sternest judge, and this was a day when recurring thoughts made him the object of his deepest disapproval. To make matters worse, he could tell from her frown and the pleating of her lips, above and below, Lal would have liked to comfort him.
‘On Thursday next,’ he informed her, ‘the auctioneers will take care of the furniture at Moreton Drive. The house itself can be offered for sale.’
‘Is it so long?’ Long or short, Mrs Wyburd could not have reckoned; she only knew their life was no longer disrupted by commands and tempests. (‘She did bully you, you’ve got to admit!’ she had once dared remark, and as soon wished she had not.)
The solicitor went upstairs to what they called his study. At least he kept some of his law books there, and on a Sunday afternoon, would sit down to answer any letters his wife could not be expected to tackle. Otherwise the room was not much used, though he liked to shut himself up in it briefly on returning from the office: so as not to be disturbed, was the explanation he might have given if he had been asked for one; there was a clock too, which required his attention.
Tonight after checking the clock against his gold repeater Arnold Wyburd went to the bookcase and took out Halsbury Vol XV. His bearing was so stiff (he could almost hear his bones cracking) his manner so deliberate, anybody watching might have suspected a long contemplated, dishonest move.
It was, in fact, dishonest: one of his two memorable dishonesties.
When he had found what he wanted by exploring the space behind the books, he sat awhile at his desk, beside the lamp with the green porcelain shade inherited from a great-uncle on his mother’s side. He did not feel less guilty, but more resigned to dishonesty, when at last he began to chafe, to revive, the jewel he was holding in his hand.
Finally he looked at his sapphire. He invoked the star hidden in it.
He fitted the live sapphire on to the little finger of his left hand, above the flat blue, formal signet he had worn since his twenty-first. The sapphire glowed painfully.
His eyes, normally pale and reserved, snapped and glittered. Caged in the ribs from which he had only once escaped, his breathing had become a torment: more so, the eye of the sapphire, with its bars, or cross, of recurring light.
He could hardly bear to look at it. He closed his eyes, preferring to experience through memory the invitation to drunkenness the nipples tasting unexpectedly of rubber the drops of moisture as flesh was translated into light air nothing all. Perhaps this was what others know as ‘poetry’ and which, he would have had to confess, he was unable to recognize on the page.
He was shocked to hear footsteps on the stairs. He dropped the ring, which rolled where? under the desk? some-where.
‘Arnold?’
His dear wife; temporarily blinded, he would not be able to face her.
‘You’re not brooding?’ she asked.
‘Yes!’
She withdrew as though she had been burnt.
When he had got on his knees and found it, he returned the sapphire to the bookcase, ramming Halsbury Vol XV into the void where his jewel would continue smouldering.