‘Your wishes are unimportant, they are ephemeral, you are young, your interest is not deep, your pain will be brief. Better not a step further. For me this is - not a tragedy - life is not tragic - It is a catastrophe - perhaps it is a merciful one.’
‘You’re only interested in your catastrophe.’
‘Yes.’
‘But I do love you, I want to help you, to save you.’
‘Young girls always see themselves as saviours, but it is the one role which they cannot play.’
‘Don’t generalize. I can. Why not let me try?’
‘Because I don’t want to be hurt by you any more.’
‘Oh, that’s so cruel, so awful.’
‘And so unfair, as you said before.’
‘I can love you and look after you and make you happy, and we can be friends now, like you said you always really wanted.’
‘No. You refuse to see how impossibly painful, for a hundred reasons, I would find that situation.’
‘Yes, I do refuse! Oh, we keep going in circles.’
‘Let us stop talking. It is dawn. The birds are singing. We have talked all night.’
‘It’s nearly midsummer, there is no night, we haven’t talked for long, I can’t stop talking, I can’t sleep. You were afraid I would run away. Now I am afraid you will run away.’
It was early on Sunday morning, though as Hattie said, morning was early. A blackbird was singing in the apple tree at number sixteen Hare Lane. John Robert rose stiffly and pulled one of the curtains back a little, letting a deadly breath of blank clear dawn light into the lamp-lit room. Hattie shuddered and moaned. She said, ‘I was so happy at the Slipper House with Pearl. You’ve taken Pearl away from me. And now you’re taking everything else away.’
Hattie had given John Robert ‘the day’ he had asked for, Friday. But on that morning, after his outburst, they had not really talked. Both were terrified and anxious to draw back. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and she, ‘It’s all right.’
John Robert’s mumbling ‘explanation’, his ‘apology’ turned into a long review of their meetings and their memories in which they both took refuge. During these reminiscences, which to a listener might have sounded like the talk of friends, they eyed each other like antagonists waiting to fight, while both were ferociously thinking. Their two intent faces even showed, during this time, a marked resemblance as they inwardly concentrated upon what had happened, and what was going to happen. They assessed, they reflected, they planned. In the afternoon (after they had distractedly played with some bread and cheese for lunch) Hattie said she was tired and had a headache and wanted to lie down, and they parted with relief. She lay on her bed stiff and alert. Now it was he who moved and sighed and she who listened. In the evening they reminisced again, less randomly, more carefully, it was as if they had to go through all those memories, like a kind of litany, before they could, cautiously approaching themselves to the present moment, engage. They discussed and argued warily, even sparring a little, declaring they would go to bed early (which they did), postponing the glimpsed frightfulness of a further clarification. Hattie asked questions about her mother, about her mother’s childhood, and talked a little about her father. They discussed Margot, talking almost pointlessly at last to tire themselves out. That night, on going to bed, Hattie very silently bolted her bedroom door.
She awoke next morning from hideous dreams to intense urgent miserable fear and guilt about Pearl. After promising John Robert faithfully that she would come back, she ran to the Slipper House and found that Pearl had gone. She returned in tears. John Robert looked at her silently with his terrible eyes. By now existence in the little house, eating and drinking and moving and going to the lavatory, going up and down the stairs, standing up and sitting down, had become a sort of nightmarish pattern as for people in a prison. Sometimes, to relieve Hattie of his presence, John Robert went out into the garden and stood there under the apple tree like a big stricken animal, while Hattie, like an image in a doll’s house, looked at him out of different windows. Neither of them could suggest going anywhere or doing anything, nor could they, though they tried, resume the conversation of yesterday. At last, out of his silence and her recurrent tears, the real talk, the awful talk, began to arise, and everything that had most terrified Hattie in her intense thinking and her stiff alert lying began to come about.
She stared at the terrible dawn light and felt it turning her face to stone.
‘I don’t want to stop until we’ve got somewhere, made some sense of it, established something, reached a point from which we can start again.’
‘We shall never start again. When we stop this conversation we must not start it again ever.’
‘Please, please don’t say things like that. Why do you have to make such a tragedy of it all? Treat it as a problem. Problems have solutions.’
‘A great philosopher said that if the answer can’t be put into words neither can the question.’
‘But the answer can be.’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘You have a duty to me. Isn’t that what’s most important, what cuts through everything else?’
‘I had a duty. I failed. Duty is over.’
‘Duty is never over. Because you said what you said you now have a duty not to make me terribly unhappy about it. Please make it all easier, make it less awful, think of me. You felt like that when I was younger because we couldn’t communicate. You think it’s worse now I’ve grown up, but it isn’t, it’s better because we can talk about it, we can be friends.’
‘We can never be friends.’
‘Oh stop it, don’t say that! Is it your book, you feel in despair about your book so you want to destroy everything here too, pull it all to pieces, is that it?’
‘Don’t be foolish, you know nothing about my book.’
‘Can’t you be reasonable, can’t you be ordinary, can’t we get back to - well, not to where we were before, we can never be there, but— ’
‘If I had behaved properly, naturally, to you as a child I would not have built up this — ’
‘We’ve said all that - but isn’t it now just as if you had - haven’t you just - by this sudden - thing - made it as it would have been - haven’t you changed the past?’
‘That’s impossible, that’s sacrilege, one dies for that.’
‘No. You’ve done it, you’ve leapt the gap, oh let me persuade you, don’t you see, we’re together, as loving relations, as loving friends, as family - you’ve made us come close.’
‘It’s not like that, Hattie, and cannot be. I ought to stop this conversation but I cannot bear to, I wish it could go on forever, it’s agony but what will come after will be worse. It’s wicked to talk to you like this because it’s an image of things which are unspeakable and impossible, and that is why I want to prolong it - oh the pain — ’
‘Don’t suffer so, I can’t bear it, try not to — ’
‘I appal you. I revolt you physically.’
‘No.’
‘I did yesterday, or whenever it was, I’ve lost track of time.’
‘Yesterday was a long time ago. I don’t feel like that about you at all. I feel quite differently - I’ve - I’ve discovered you.’
‘You mean it’s an exciting situation, an exciting talk.’
‘No!’
‘Oh wicked, wicked, the pain of it.’
‘You gave me a shock, a surprise, but that’s over now. I’ve lived - it’s as if I’ve lived all these years, lived them in peace, lived them with you, and - oh - happily - that was what was happening when you were talking about the past.’
‘You are making up false fantasies. You are using your intelligence. But your intelligence is not enough. Your being so intelligent is another - twist - but all that is past now, it is over. This is a conversation between two ghosts.’