A Garden of Trees (36 page)

The people of London like ants on a mound of dust. O world, world, flat round shapeless shape, be loved or not loved but do not ask for everything. Suffer us to have the illusion that we are beyond you. Perhaps after all we can fly.

Peter did not do anything. He was looking at his toes in the evening sun.

O God, God, to destroy those spaces you must destroy time. Let us go back and begin again and then this will not have happened. This is what you have promised, what you have told us is possible. It is only that I must remember, and there is something I must do.

I thought:—Perhaps we must all become again as children. Was it not this that we were told?

A sky of violet and an earth of grey and ourselves in between them. Once we were part of them, we spread veins to enclose us, around us and the universe there was a body that was whole. There is nothing new, it is just what is old that has been forgotten. You can always go back, that is what I have known is true, when the car is running downhill there are always trees on the roadside. The trees are all the same, it is only one tree that is needed. We have looked for something permanent, but a moment will do. A tree is eternity. There would be moments if I could remember them. I remembered an evening with the square huge and moonlit when a statue stood folded like the wings of a bird.

Looking downwards, to the ground, I saw Marius step out of the entrance to the building and walk sedately into the middle of the road. He gazed on either side of him and circled slowly like a weathercock. I dared make no sound. He was a tiny figure distorted by the distance. Then he stood still, facing the building, and looked up, and saw us.

We were the three corners of a triangle. I had an extraordinary desire to jump myself. Marius stood with the traffic running past him. I wanted to jump so that there would be communication between the sky and the world. The white light waited. Then Marius raised his arms and shouted, “Peter, Peter, there are always shooting stars!”

His voice came to us clearly as an echo from stone. There were so many memories. Salvation, I thought, and the catching of grapefruits. “Throw him your tennis ball,” I said.

For a while Peter made no move. The spaces were between us. Then he picked up the ball in one hand and the racquet in the other and he threw the ball up into the air and lashed at it with the racquet and the ball shot away into the sky like a star. “He will never catch it,” he said.

“He will,” I said.

Marius began to run. I had never seen him run before. He ran fast and steadily through the raging traffic with a car hooting and skidding at him his long legs wandering a bicyclist lurching and a crowd turned to watch. By the side of the road he stopped, beneath a tree. There he stood while the ball fell for millions and millions of years and then he leaned backwards with his hands clasped in front of him and the ball bounced against a branch of the tree and he caught it as if he were making love.

“There!” I said.

Marius held the ball up so that it was whiter than the evening. There were no more spaces. Then he put the ball in his pocket, turned, and walked away from us. We watched him grow smaller and smaller until he disappeared behind the trees. It was the last time that I saw him in England.

“Romps!” Peter said. “They are still a credible concept.” He had stuck his feet out straight in front of him and was smiling at his knees. “But I am facing the wrong way,” he said. He swung his legs over the parapet and waited there, still smiling. Then he stood up and walked across the roof. He did not look at me. I saw him go through the door and down the steps into the building. He never saw Marius again. I looked down from my height upon the old iron of the world and felt tired. I remembered Annabelle.

21

On the landing I met Alice. “You?” I said. “Marius telephoned me,” she said. Father Jack opened the door to us and she went through with the furious assurance of a professional. Father Jack was making enquiring faces so I told him, “She is a nurse.”

Peter was not there. Alice had gone through to the bedroom. We could hear her talking to Annabelle. When she came back Father Jack said, “Can I be of any assistance, nurse?”

“I'm not a nurse,” Alice said.

She rang up for a doctor. She took everything into her hands. She appeared to be in a rage that made all other efforts seem trivial. I knew that at the moment there was nothing more to be done about Annabelle.

“Can I help, Alice?”

“By keeping out of the way,” she said.

I could not bear to stay with Father Jack. In his presence I felt an irritation that drowned even my anxiety about Annabelle. I went out into the street to recover my anxiety.

Once before I had stood on the steps of a doorway and there had been nowhere I had wanted to go. Then I had gone nowhere. Now, in the same situation, I chose to go to the right, and went.

The rage that was in Alice seemed to have entered into me. I found, with surprise, that I did not recover my anxiety. I continued to be irritated by the image of Father Jack, by thoughts of the scene in which I had just taken part, by memories of absurdity that seemed to stretch through the whole of my life. I felt as if I dragged behind me a string of tin cans that clattered against my ankles;—cans of falseness and sentimentality and the dregs of everything trivial. There were also, on another string, a trail of responsibilities—the pain of Annabelle, the insanity of Peter, the waste which was myself. It was this that was uppermost, the knowledge of waste. And yet I felt no emotion about it except a determination that it should stop. I jerked savagely at my memory so that the tin cans rattled.

Passing on the corner an old man selling evening papers I saw upon his placard the latest reminder of disaster. I bought a paper and read it as I walked. There was the inevitable news of misery and madness and the fiddling of politicians in the face of death. I found with less surprise that this did not worry me either. I stopped, so that the cans should not divert me, and tried to think what was happening.

Annabelle was ill and I did not worry. The world was dying and I did not worry. What would happen would happen anyway. What would happen had happened already. This was not important. What was important was the condition in which I would see what would happen anyway. What was important was what I did. I walked again and my tin cans rattled and I cursed them. I stopped.

Nothing mattered. Once we had had the fact of freedom without searching for the illusion of it, and then we had found the illusion and lost the fact. Now we had neither fact nor illusion. We had lost all powers. We simply had, at every moment, a choice. A choice that was given, to the right or to the left, like in a maze. We were at the centre, and the object was to get out. The maze was there, mankind was there, there was no question of freedom. One walked, and there were a million junctions, and every time one must choose. One did not know if one chose right or wrong, if one went outwards or inwards, it was only true that one went. Freedom was choosing right and death was choosing wrong, but one did not know until the end where one had gone. So it did not matter. Where one goes one would have gone anyway. I walked, and my tin cans tripped me, and I laughed.

Moving thus, alternately walking and stopping, laughing and cursing, in the manner of a man with his feet in a sack, I found myself at the entrance to a large hotel. I went in, so that I could rest, and I observed the world that I hated. Upon the walls and the chairs the upholstery bulged with the fatness of fruit gone rotten in a warehouse; and the people, taking their cue from the decorations, paraded faces like wax apples, clothes like banana skins, buttons and brooches like cloves in a suet pudding. Old men were like slugs, young tufts like caterpillars, and the dried hobbled women like sticks of liquorice. I sat down and watched them. I thought, These are the godless people I have to love, the ugly people who are beautiful. And then I remembered my own trail of garbage, my feet in the sack.

I thought—It is easy to love the horror and the suffering, it is easy to think beautiful the child with cancer and the hangman's rope, but it is not easy to adore this rottenness. This smell has nothing to do with eternity.

Eternity. If life is a maze and time is a moving staircase then you can run against the moving staircase, that is the easiest thing in the world, you can go back, you can begin again, you can undo what you have done, every action of the present can wipe out consequences of the past and once the consequences have gone then the actions of the past do not exist. You can absolve wrong choices, creating your own absolutions. I am responsible for everything that I have done in the whole of my life, I am responsible for the causes of what I have done and the consequences, I am responsible for the death of Marius's wife, for the loneliness of Peter, for the pain of Annabelle. If what I have done has been in honour of this responsibility—if the pain is lessened, the loneliness gone, the death made beautiful—then I have created my own absolution. But I have not. The past is around my ankles, my feet in the sack. Whatever I have done my feet are still hobbled. What is time?

I am responsible for not only what has affected me, I am responsible for everything that has happened in every part of the world for ever. Whatever I have done this is what I cannot alter. Whatever I do I cannot move. The maze is around me and I cannot move. What is time?

It is necessary that I move. It is necessary that I get rid of this garbage. It is necessary that I love. And then I thought, What have Annabelle and I to do with time?

What if Annabelle should die?

Thus, in the hall of the great hotel, among the perfumes and the cigars and the odourless flowers, I answered the question. It was necessary that Annabelle should live. If Annabelle died in the night, of her illness, it was still necessary that she should live. The first time that I saw her two years ago, when I talked with her and gave her up, when I held her last night and was terrified, it was absolutely necessary that these moments should live. And they did, that was what love meant, it was irrefutable. Annabelle would live because that is what love meant, and time was eternity.

And if time is eternity then you cannot go back, you cannot undo what you have done, your mistakes are always with you. You can only move by asking for an absolution which is beyond you. Eternity is beyond you, and this is what makes nothing matter and then when you have realized this, it makes everything matter. This is not a paradox. Things are on different planes, the part and the whole, what becomes and what is completed, the maze as you see it from within and the maze as it exists from without. The part on its own does not matter because it is helpless. The whole on its own does not matter because it is finished. What does matter is the relationship between the part and the whole. What is important is what you do in relation to the whole. And this relationship is possible because eternity exists, there is the possibility of apprehending it because what is becoming is part of it. There is to every man, either in the sky or in the heart, or somewhere between them, a reflection of the whole. There is a periscope to eternity. It is possible to outwit the helplessness of the part, to achieve the whole by mirrors. The mirrors have been given.

And then, beginning to walk, you find you can walk freely. When love is honoured there is absolution, when nothing seems to matter it is possible to decide what matters, when there is a glimpse of eternity there is guidance through the maze. At once, in a double stroke, the past is cut loose and a thread is given to the future. You walk, thus, leaving the refuse behind you: you go, step by step, and there are stars to guide you. The stars are there, as light, between the world and eternity. With mirrors you can see them, above the dark walls of the maze. There is everything to be done and all life is a learning: the mirrors of the heart have to be focused to the sky. There are instructions for this, to be read most carefully. I will read them. But now, at the centre, at the beginning, I can walk. Aware of the end, the outside, a step can be taken. It is love that has turned me, the beginning and the end. There are things to be done. And finally, in the hotel, among the scented wreaths dissimulating corpses, I looked round, curiously, for the last time, and thought—All right you goats, be Gods and Goddesses.

I rang up Alice. “How is she?” I said.

“You keep away,” Alice said.

“I know,” I said.

“It was bad enough with that blasted priest.”

“I know,” I said. “I'm sorry. But how is Annabelle?”

“I don't know,” Alice said. “Is her father in Paris?”

“Yes.”

“And her mother?”

“Her mother is away.”

“Has she got any relations beside that blasted brother?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Does she want relations?”

“No,” Alice said. “No, she doesn't.”

“Thank you, Alice. I really want to thank you.”

“She's all right,” Alice said.

“She's sure to be all right. You ring up again in the morning.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Alice, you have been right all the time.”

“In the morning,” Alice said.

Around the grass of the square there had been erected a small wire fence to discourage trespassers. I stepped over it and took my seat beneath the statue. This was a familiar place, as well as being one from which I could intercept Peter. I looked up and saw a light in the window which I thought was Annabelle's. I prepared for the night.

It was now quite dark. I hummed a tune. It was funny, I thought, this finding oneself at the centre. The night made a noise as if the world were humming. It was funny the way things returned to their beginnings just as I had returned to sit beneath the statue. A drunk man passed: we exchanged salutations. There was no regret, since excursions could not be avoided, and everything happened over and over again. It was possible, I believed, that everything could be dealt with better each time it arrived.