The first words.
The first words.
The whole thing had happened to me before, the same sensations, the same feeling that it could not be true and was true, of vertiginous shock and superficial calm. Coming out of the Randolph in Oxford with two or three other people, walking up to Carfax, a man under the tower selling the Evening News. Standing there, a silly girl saying “Look at Nicholas, he’s pretending he can read.” And I looked up with the death of parents in my face and said “My mother and father.” As if I had just for the first time discovered that such people existed.
The top cutting was from some local newspaper, from the bottom of a column. It said:
Australian air hostess Alison Kelly, 24, was found yesterday lying on her bed in the Russell Square flat they both share by her friend Ann Taylor, also Australian, when she returned from a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon. She was rushed to the Middlesex Hospital but found to be dead on admission. Miss Taylor was treated for shock. Inquest next week.
The second cutting said:
PC Henry Davis told the deputy Holborn coroner on Tuesday how on the evening of Sunday, June 29th, he found a young woman lying on her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets by her side. He had been called by the dead girl’s flat-mate, Australian physiotherapist Ann Taylor, who found the deceased, Alison Kelly, air hostess, aged 24, on her return from a weekend at Stratford-on-Avon.
A verdict of suicide was recorded.
Miss Taylor said that although her friend had been subject to fits of depression and said she could not sleep properly she had had no reason to suppose the deceased was in a suicidal frame of mind. In answer to questions, Miss Taylor said, “My friend was recently depressed because of an unhappy love affaire, but I thought she had got over it.”
Dr. Behrens, the deceased’s doctor, told the coroner that Miss Kelly had led her to believe that it was her work which gave her insomnia. Asked by the coroner whether she normally prescribed such large quantities of tablets, Dr. Behrens replied that she took into account the difficulty the deceased might have in getting to a chemist frequently. She had no reason to suspect suicide.
The coroner stated that two notes found by the police threw no light on the real motive of this tragic business.
The typewritten note was from Ann Taylor.
DEAR NICHOLAS URFE,
The enclosed cuttings will explain why I am writing. I am sorry, it will be a great shock, but I don’t know how else to break it. She was very depressed when she came back from Athens, but she wouldn’t talk about it, so I don’t know whose fault it was. She used to talk a lot about suicide at one time but we always thought it was a joke.
She left this envelope for you. The police opened it. There was no note inside. There was a note for me, but it said nothing—just apologies.
We are all heartbroken about it. I feel I am to blame. Now she is gone we realize what she was. I can’t understand any man not realizing what she really was underneath and not wanting to marry her. But I don’t understand men, I suppose.
Yours very sadly,
P.S. I don’t know if you want to write to her mother. The ashes are being sent home. Her address is—Mrs. Mary Kelly, 19 Liverpool Avenue, Goulburn, N.S.W.
I looked at the airmail envelope. It had my name outside, in Alison’s handwriting. I tipped the contents out on the desk. A tangle of clumsily pressed flowers: two or three violets, some pinks. Two of the pinks were still woven together.
Three weeks.
To my horror I began to cry.
My tears did not last very long. I had no privacy. The bell for class rang, and Demetriades was tapping at my door. I brushed my eyes with the back of my wrist and went and opened it. I was still in pajamas.
“Eh! What are you doing? We are late.”
“I don’t feel very well.”
“You look strange, my dear fellow.” He put on a look of concern.
I turned away. “Just tell the first lot to revise for the exam. And tell the others to do the same.”
“But—”
“Leave me alone, will you?”
“What shall I say?”
“Anything.” I shoved him out.
As soon as the sounds of footsteps and voices had died down and I knew school had begun I pulled on my clothes and went out. I wanted to get away from the school, the village, from Bourani, from everything. I went along the north coast to a deserted cove and sat there on a stone and pulled out the cuttings again and reread them. June 29th. One of the last things she must have done was to post my letter back unopened. Perhaps the last thing. For a moment I felt angry with the other girl; but I remembered her, her flat, prim face, and her kind eyes. She wrote stilted English, but she would never deliberately leave anyone in the lurch; that sort never did. And I knew those two sides of Alison—the hard practical side that misled one into believing she could get over anything; and the other apparently rather histrionic Alison that one could never quite take seriously. In a tragic way these two sides had finally combined: there would have been no fake suicides with her, no swallowing a few tablets when she knew someone would come in an hour’s time. But a weekend to die.
It was not only that I felt guilty of jettisoning Alison. I knew, with one of those secret knowledges that can exist between two people, that her suicide was a direct result of my having told her of my own attempt—I had told it with a curt meiosis that was meant to conceal depths; and she had called my bluff one final time. I don’t think you know what sadness means.
I remembered those hysterical scenes in the Piraeus hotel; that much earlier “suicide note” she had composed, to blackmail me, as I then thought, just before I left London. I thought of her on Parnassus; I thought of her in Russell Square; things she said, she did, she was. And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning… and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant “make love to me”) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as a chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her. In a way her death was the final act of blackmail; but the blackmailed should feel innocent, and I felt guilty. It was as if at this moment, when I most wanted to be clean, I had fallen into the deepest filth; most free for the future, yet most chained to the past.
And Julie; she now became a total necessity.
Not only marriage with her, but confession to her. If she had been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be forgiven by her. Her forgiveness was the only possible justification now. I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me.
Those flowers, those intolerable flowers.
My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all male selfishnesses: to have imposed the role I needed from Alison on her real self. Something far worse than lèse-majesté. Lèse-humanité. What had she said about that muleteer? I felt two packets fond of him.
And one death fond of me.