In retrospect of course Stella blamed herself for not having, and as a matter of course, returned to George soon after the episode of the car in the canal. Indeed shortly after she had (her phrase) ‘put herself under my protection’, I advised her to go back, but she would not. Once she had formally ‘run away’ it became harder and harder to return, her pride had become involved in the matter, speculation about him had become an activity and a pleasure, being in hiding had its charm, and the interval carried an imaginary sense of healing. It must be added to this picture that Stella’s undoubted love contained ingredients of anger and even cruelty and she could not help feeling that by staying mysteriously away she was inflicting some sort of punishment upon George. Ought Stella, as she herself later believed, to have been able to foresee the extremities of which George was capable? (I should say here that George told her everything, every detail of what he had done, and as far as he could why he had done it, during the period of his blindness.) With this question she came running to me. I told her sincerely that I thought the answer was no. Stella was of course, as she came to admit, fascinated by George’s ‘violent tendencies’. But it was part of her theory that these had run their course and that, however oddly George might in the interim behave, he would before long, and harmlessly, return to her to be ‘saved’. In this connection she attached an almost magical significance to the ‘attempted murder’ in the canal, which was supposed to be the significant final crisis or turning point. Herein Stella was perhaps misled by vanity, a simple and ubiquitous failing often overlooked by those who profess to explain the mysteries of human conduct. As for the prediction, I think that homicidal or suicidal acts often depend upon contingent elements too tiny and too sheerly accidental to be discernible by the eye of science. And I have to admit that I myself did not foresee or expect what ultimately happened.
Naturally Stella attaches great significance to the fact that George asked Father Bernard to lead him back to her after he had been struck down on the Common. Since that moment George has never once mentioned Diane. What happened to George’s brain cells in the curious episode of the flying saucer and the sunflower sun remains, in part, to be seen. The brain is a versatile organ and has an amazing capacity to repair damage. I do not, incidentally, hold Dr Roach’s epilepsy theory about George. I also take this opportunity to deny that George has had a lobotomy or any electric shock treatment since John Robert’s death. I also know for a fact that he has not, to use the rather melodramatic expression current in Ennistone, ‘been through the hands of Sir Ivor Sefton’. The mild drugs which he took in the early days of his ‘new life’ have now, according to Stella, been discontinued. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that he is a changed, and still changing man. A stranger, meeting him now for the first time, would find him an ordinary, quiet person. (Not, as Stella put it, ‘weak and pale like a grub in an apple’.) Those who knew ‘the old George’ are amazed at his ‘reform’, though it is still true that none of his old acquaintances feels quite comfortable with him. He is gentle, polite, quietly humorous (though he smiles little), attentive to his wife, interested in the details of everyday existence. He even has a modest social life. What I cannot find out from Stella, perhaps because she is reluctant to find it out herself, is whether there are identifiable tracts of his mind, evidenced by memory or performance, which seem to have been ‘blotted out’. She insists that he seems ‘normal’. Sometimes, however, this unnatural ‘normality’ seems to her ‘too good to be true’ and she wonders if he will one day suddenly attack her with an axe. As the weeks and months go by, this idea occurs to her less and less often. George stays at home and reads a lot. He reads books on art history and even makes notes on them. One day Stella found him looking over his old plays which had evidently not been destroyed after all. He has also taken up bridge again, and goes out with Stella (who is a very good player) to bridge evenings at the Osmores’. He has not been over to Leafy Ridge to visit Brian and Gabriel, but he is polite and amiable to them if they visit Druidsdale, which they rarely do, as they think Stella is not too pleased to see them. Adam and Zed on the other hand are fairly frequent and welcome visitors. George seems to talk a lot to Adam when they are alone together, Stella is not quite sure what about. I lately expressed the hope to Stella that now that life has become (it seems) more predictable she should stop regarding George as a full-time occupation, and consider harnessing her excellent mind to some coherent and developing intellectual study. She says that no doubt she will, but ‘not yet’, that perhaps she will ‘write something’. I am afraid that at present she is more concerned about George’s mind than about her own. I also asked her, recalling a question which I put to her earlier, whether a quiet docile George continues to interest her. She says most emphatically that he does and that she loves him now in a new and better way. She was always possessively watchful, but now seems to me, when I see them together, to be more tender and ‘sentimental’, and in this sense, she is without doubt profitably ‘occupied’ with her husband. I have not inquired about their sex life. Perhaps she is right to see these developments as ‘new and better’, and it may even be that love, that old unpredictable force left out of account by natural science, will actually ‘save’, after all, not only him but her.
I have mentioned the departure of Father Bernard. With this, and in a bizarre way, is to be associated the fate of ‘our own Madame Diane’. As may be imagined, Diane was cast into the deepest grief and indeed despair by George’s sudden and total (and inexplicable) defection. The news that he ‘was ill’ and had definitely returned to his wife flashed quickly round Ennistone, and Diane heard it from several eager sources at the Institute. She had imagined in the extremest detail their new life in Spain. With extra money which he had given her she had bought herself every sort of garment which might be required for life in a hot country and appearances on the beach. She felt for the first time in many years, perhaps ever, almost happy. Now suddenly George had been taken from her as totally as if by death, and she entertained no hope of seeing him again. Her abandonment of hope was impressively rapid and complete. Had she ever really believed in Spain? No doubt like many of those who lead precarious lives she had a good deal of ‘instant desperation’ stored up for dealing promptly with catastrophe, when the worst pain is the continuation of fruitless hope. She considered suicide but turned instead to the priest.
People often take other people’s crises as a symbol for their own, and are guided as by a sign. Several unfortunates known to me decided, after they had become aware of George’s change of being, that it was time for them to change too. Father Bernard was one of these: one who had the additional impetus of extreme shock. With a most inconvenient and unbecoming haste, most disturbing to a hierarchy which had become more used to his eccentricities than he realized, he divested himself of his priestly power. He wrote to his bishop announcing his decision and asking to be immediately laicized, and from one day to the next abruptly ceased conducting church services. He moved out of the Clergy House into a lodging in Burkestown. In doing so he gave away most of his possessions. In this way Hector Gaines acquired a large number of books, some of them quite esoteric, on theological and religious matters, and I acquired the Gandhara Buddha, which is on my desk at this very moment. During this time, conspicuous in his shabby mufti, he went about a lot and talked a lot to the various people who visited him or invited him out of sympathy or curiosity, declaring frequently that he was going to Greece and would end his days as a servant in some remote monastery on Mount Athos. The next news was that he had actually gone and had taken Diane Sedleigh with him.