I’m not committed actually. At any rate I needn’t be. For years now I’ve had only myself and I must be economical with that self. I can simply say that I hadn’t quite understood what we were talking about when he rings me up. Or I can be up to my neck in work which is always true. I’m rather a cheerful person as long as the minutes of my days buzz at home like well-domesticated bees. When I come and go too much I’m afraid that they may fly away to swarm elsewhere. I think there still are people in Norfolk who tell the bees when the owner of the hive has died, even pin a bit of crape to the hive so the bees can mourn. When they’ve done their mourning they get on with making honey. One only owns the hive I suppose, never really the bees. Not like cattle.
Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business. There are of course many men who walk in safe paths all their lives but they often seem a little apologetic, as if they think themselves not quite honourable. And there are others, quiet men, obscure, ungifted, who yet require satisfaction of some grim thing that ultimately kills them. William G. has found some monster and … What? Almost I think he’s swallowed it. It’s alive and eating inside him, much worse than if it had swallowed him.
There, I’m worrying about him. I’ve breached my privacy badly. There’s not enough of me for that, I have no self to spare. I must keep my bees.
19 William G
Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H. G. Wells’s invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn’t go that far.
It’s been at least twenty-five years since I read Crime and Punishment. Now I’m reading it again. I’d forgotten that when Raskolnikov murdered the old lady pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, he also killed her half-sister Lizaveta. Lizaveta was ‘a soft gentle creature, ready to put up with anything, always willing, willing to do anything.’ When she came back to the flat just after Raskolnikov had killed the old woman he had to kill her as well.
Alyona Ivanovna and Lizaveta always do live together, always die together. You try to kill some aspect of the intolerable and you kill the gentle and the good as well. Over and over. And whoever kills some form of the intolerable becomes himself a manifestation of it, to be killed with his good and gentle by someone else. Two by two up the gangway to the ark. But the waters will never recede.
I’m intolerable. It’s got into me, when I feed me I feed it. There’s only one way to kill it.
The idea of ringing up a van place and hiring a van and driving all those miles is so heavy I can hardly lift my head up. Bloody details. Too heavy. Too much.
20 Neaera H
It was past three in the morning and I was staring into the green murk of Madame Beetle’s tank. The plants are all shrouded in long green webs of algae, there are white and ghostly bits of old meat hanging about blooming with mould, the sides of the tank are very dim. It’s like the setting for a tiny horror film but Madame Beetle doesn’t seem to mind. I can’t think now how it could have occurred to me that I might write a story about her. Who am I to use the mystery of her that way? Her swimming is better than my writing and she doesn’t expect to get paid for it. If someone were to buy me, have me shipped in a tin with air-holes, what would I be a specimen of?
I went to the bookshelves, got The Duchess of Malfi, sat down in my reading chair, turned to the scene where the executioners enter ‘with a coffin, cords, and a bell’. I read the Duchess’s speech:
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and ‘tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways …
While I sat there looking at the lines I drifted out of wakefulness but I wasn’t asleep. I was seeing Breydon Water at low tide, the oyster-catchers on the mussel beds and the water silver in the sunlight. Then it wasn’t low tide any more but high water, green ocean, deep. I was in it swimming, flying, green ocean over me, under me, touching every part of me. And a glimmering white shadow coming up from below. Ah yes, my mind said, the shark’s mouth too is after all a place of rest, they call them requin.
This is not mine, I thought, coming awake again. This is someone else’s ocean, someone else’s shark. I hadn’t asked William G. for his telephone number when I gave him mine. I looked in the directory, not expecting to find it. He probably lived in a bedsitter and the telephone would be in someone else’s name. There were seven William G.s.
It was a quarter to four. I looked at the calendar. Saturday morning. I looked at the telephone. Sometimes when I look at the telephone at that time in the morning it looks as if it just happens to be that shape at that time. I simply didn’t have it in me to make possibly seven calls on the chance of finding him when I felt certain he wasn’t in the directory.
I don’t know how I’d got it into my head that he lived in a bedsitter and not a flat of his own but when I thought of him at home that’s where I saw him. With a very tall brown Victorian wardrobe, a sort of Palaeozoic brown upholstered chair, an indeterminate bed that metamorphosed into an indeterminate couch during the day and wallpaper that baffled the eye. Still he might be one of the seven William G.s. in the directory. I believed it to be a matter of life or death but I couldn’t make myself ring up any of the William G.s. The bookshop is open on Saturday mornings and I should have to wait until 9.30 to find out if he was there or at home.
I sat in my reading chair waiting but nothing came to me. I am not after all a telepath or a clairvoyant. I left the flat and sat in the square resting my mind on the fountain that wasn’t there. The air was heavy and still, the bronze girl would be dim in the bluish light of the street lamps, her bronze would be cool and damp, the fountain jet would be shut off, the pebbles would be glistening with dew. A police constable’s footsteps approached, then the glimmer of his shirt, then the constable, one of the ones I know. They’re used to seeing me about at all hours.
‘Very close, isn’t it,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s very close.’ The constable passed on, the shirt became a glimmer again, the footsteps receded.
I could scarcely sit still. I had one of those thoughts that sometimes come in dreams and put themselves into words that stay in the mind: the backs of things are always connected to the fronts of them. This is the back of the turtle thing, I thought. What? What is it? I had a feeling of dread. The back of the turtle thing was despair. Mine? His? Not mine. My despair has long since been ground up fine and is no more than the daily salt and pepper of my life. Not mine.