Eyeless In Gaza (5 page)

One, two, three, four – counting each movement of his hand, he began to caress her. The gesture was magical, would transport him, if repeated sufficiently often, beyond the past and the future, beyond right and wrong, into the discrete, the self-sufficient, the atomic present. Particles of thought, desire and feeling moving at random among particles of time, coming
into casual contact and as casually parting. A casino, an asylum, a zoo; but also, in a corner, a library and someone thinking. Someone largely at the mercy of the croupiers, at the mercy of the idiots and the animals; but still irrepressible and indefatigable. Another two or three years and the Elements of Sociology would be finished. In spite of everything; yes, in spite of everything, he thought with a kind of defiant elation, and counted thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . .

HORNS WITH A
frizzle of orange hair between; the pink muzzle lowered enquiringly towards a tiny cup and saucer; eyes expressive of a more than human astonishment.
‘THE OX,'
it was proclaimed in six-inch lettering,
‘THE OX IN THE TEA-CUP.'
The thing was supposed to be a reason for buying beef extract –
was
a reason.

Ox in Cup. The words, the basely comic image, spotted the home counties that summer and autumn like a skin disease. One of a score of nasty and discreditable infections. The train which carried Anthony Beavis into Surrey rolled through mile-long eczemas of vulgarity. Pills, soaps, cough drops and – more glaringly inflamed and scabby than all the rest – beef essence, the cupped ox.

‘Thirty-one . . . thirty-two,' the boy said to himself, and wished he had begun his counting when the train started. Between Waterloo and Clapham Junction there must have been hundreds of oxen. Millions.

Opposite, leaning back in his corner, sat Anthony's father. With his left hand he shaded his eyes. Under the drooping brown moustache his lips moved.

‘Stay for me there,' John Beavis was saying to the person who, behind his closed lids, was sometimes still alive, sometimes the cold, immobile thing of his most recent memories:

There was no immortality, of course. After Darwin, after the Fox Sisters, after John Beavis's own father, the surgeon, how could there be? Beyond that hollow vale there was nothing. But all the same, oh, all the same, stay for me, stay for me, stay, stay!

‘Thirty-three.'

Anthony turned away from the hurrying landscape and was confronted by the spectacle of that hand across the eyes, those moving lips. That he had ever thought of counting the oxen seemed all at once shameful, a betrayal. And Uncle James, at the other end of the seat, with his
Times
– and his face, as he read, twitching every few seconds in sudden spasms of nervousness. He might at least have had the decency not to read it
now
– now, while they were on their way to . . . Anthony refused to say the words; words would make it all so clear, and he didn't want to know too clearly. Reading
The Times
might be shameful; but the other thing was terrible, too terrible to bear thinking about, and yet so terrible that you couldn't help thinking about it.

Anthony looked out of the window again, through tears. The green and golden brightness of St Martin's summer swam in an obscuring iridescence. And suddenly the wheels of the train began to chant articulately. ‘Dead-a-dead-a-dead,' they shouted, ‘dead-a-dead-a-dead . . .' For ever. The tears overflowed, were warm for an instant on his cheeks, then icy cold. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away, wiped
the fog out of his eyes. Luminous under the sun, the world before him was like one vast and intricate jewel. The elms had withered to a pale gold. Huge above the fields, and motionless, they seemed to be meditating in the crystal light of the morning, seemed to be remembering, seemed, for the very brink of dissolution, to be looking back and in a last ecstasy of recollection living over again, concentrated in this shining moment of autumnal time, all the long-drawn triumph of spring and summer.

‘DEAD-A-DEAD,'
in a sudden frenzy yelled the wheels, as the train crossed a bridge,
‘A-DEAD-A-DEAD
!'

Anthony tried not to listen – vainly; then tried to make the wheels say something else. Why shouldn't they say,
To stop the train pull down the chain?
That was what they usually said. With a great effort of concentration he forced them to change their refrain.

‘To stop the train pull down the chain, to stop the train pull down a-dead-a-dead-a-dead . . .' It was no good.

Mr Beavis uncovered his eyes for a moment and looked out of the window. How bright, the autumnal trees! Cruelly bright they would have seemed, insultingly, except for something desperate in their stillness, a certain glassy fragility that, oh! invited disaster, that prophetically announced the coming darkness and the black branches moving in torture among stars, the sleet like arrows along the screaming wind.

Uncle James turned the page of his
Times.
The Ritualists and the Kensitites were at it again, he saw; and was delighted. Let dog eat dog.
‘MR CHAMBERLAIN AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE SCHOOL
.' What was the old devil up to now? Unveiling a tablet to the Old Boys who had been killed in the war. ‘Over one hundred young men went to the front, and twelve of them laid down their lives for the country in South Africa (cheers).' Deluded idiots, thought Uncle James, who had always been passionately a pro-Boer.

Painted, among the real cows in their pasture, the enormous horns, the triangular auburn frizz, the enquiring nostrils, the tea-cup. Anthony shut his eyes against the vision.

‘No, I won't,' he said with all the determination he had previously used against the wheels. He refused to know the horror; he refused to know the ox. But what was the good of refusing? The wheels were still shouting away. And how could he suppress the fact that this ox was the thirty-fourth, on the right, from Clapham Junction? A number is always a number, even on the way to . . . But counting was shameful, counting was like Uncle James's
Times
. Counting was shirking, was betraying. And yet the other thing, the thing they ought to be thinking about, was really too terrible. Too
unnatural
, somehow.

‘Whatever we may have thought, or still think, as to the causes, the necessity, the justice of the war which is now happily at an end, I think that we must all have a feeling of profound satisfaction that when the country called its children to arms, the manhood of the nation leaped to it in response . . .' His face twitching with exasperation, Uncle James put down
The Times
and looked at his watch.

‘Two and a half minutes late,' he said angrily.

‘If only it were a hundred years late,' thought his brother. ‘Or ten years early – no, twelve, thirteen. The first year of our marriage.'

James Beavis looked out of the window. ‘And we're still at least a mile from Lollingdon,' he went on.

As though to a sore, to an aching tooth, his fingers travelled again to the chronometer in his waistcoat pocket. Time for its own sake. Always imperiously time, categorically time – time to look at one's watch and see the time . . .

The wheels spoke more and more slowly, became at last inarticulate. The brakes screamed.

‘Lollingdon, Lollingdon,' the porter called.

But Uncle James was already on the platform. ‘Quick!' he shouted, striding, long-legged, beside the still moving train. His hand went once more to that mystical ulcer for ever gnawing at his consciousness. ‘Quick!'

A sudden resentment stirred in his brother's mind. ‘What does he want me to be quick for?' As if they were in danger of missing something – some pleasure, some precariously brief entertainment.

Anthony climbed down after his father. They walked towards the gate, along a wall of words and pictures.
A GUINEA A BOX AND A BLESSING TO MEN THE PICKWICK THE OWL AND KILLS MOTHS BUGS BEETLES A SPADE A SPADE AND BRANSON'S CAMP COFFEE THE OX IN
 . . . And suddenly here were the horns, the expressive eyes, the cup – the thirty-fifth cup – ‘No, I won't, I won't' – but all the same, the thirty-fifth, the thirty-fifth from Clapham Junction on the right-hand side.

The cab smelt of straw and leather. Of straw and leather and of the year eighty-eight, was it? yes, eighty-eight; that Christmas when they had driven to the Champernownes' dance – he and she and her mother – in the cold, with the sheepskin rug across their knees. And as though by accident (for he had not yet dared to make the gesture deliberately) the back of his hand had brushed against hers; had brushed, as though by accident, had casually rested. Her mother was talking about the difficulty of getting servants – and when you did get them, they didn't know anything, they were lazy. She hadn't moved her hand! Did that mean she didn't mind? He took the risk; his fingers closed over hers. They were disrespectful, her mother went on, they were . . . He felt an answering pressure and, looking up, divined in the darkness that she was smiling at him.

‘Really,' her mother was saying, ‘I don't know what things are coming to nowadays.' And he had seen, by way of silent comment, the mischievous flash of Maisie's teeth; and that
little squeeze of the hand had been deliciously conspiratorial, secret and illicit.

Slowly, hoof after hoof, the old horse drew them; slowly along lanes, into the heart of the great autumnal jewel of gold and crystal; and stopped at last at the very core of it. In the sunshine, the church tower was like grey amber. The clock, James Beavis noticed with annoyance, was slow. They passed under the lych-gate. Startlingly and hideously black, four people were walking up the path in front of them. Two huge women (to Anthony they all seemed giantesses) rose in great inky cones of drapery from the flagstones. With them, still further magnified by their top-hats, went a pair of enormous men.

‘The Champernownes,' said James Beavis; and the syllables of the familiar name were like a sword, yet another sword, in the very quick of his brother's being. ‘The Champernownes and – let's see – what's the name of that young fellow their daughter married? Anstey? Annerley?' He glanced enquiringly at John; but John was staring fixedly in front of him and did not answer.

‘Amersham? Atherton?' James Beavis frowned with irritation. Meticulous, he attached an enormous importance to names and dates and figures; he prided himself on his power to reproduce them correctly. A lapse of memory drove him to fury. ‘Atherton? Anderson?' And what made it more maddening was the fact that the young man was so good-looking, carried himself so well – not in that stupid, stiff, military way, like his father-in-law, the General, but gracefully, easily . . . ‘I shan't know what to call him,' he said to himself; and his right cheek began to twitch, as though some living creature had been confined beneath the skin and were violently struggling to escape.

They walked on. It seemed to Anthony that he had swallowed his heart – swallowed it whole, without chewing.
He felt rather sick, as though he were expecting to be caned.

The black giants halted, turned, and came back to meet them. Hats were raised, hands shaken.

‘And dear little Anthony!' said Lady Champernowne, when at last it was his turn. Impulsively, she bent down and kissed him.

She was fat. Her lips left a disgusting wet place on his cheek. Anthony hated her.

‘Perhaps I ought to kiss him too,' thought Mary Amberley, as she watched her mother. One was expected to do such odd things when one was married. Six months ago, when she was still Mary Champernowne and fresh from school, it would have been unthinkable. But now . . . one never knew. In the end, however, she decided that she wouldn't kiss the boy, it would really be too ridiculous. She pressed his hand without speaking, smiling only from the remote security of her secret happiness. She was nearly five months gone with child, and had lived for these last two or three weeks in a kind of trance of drowsy bliss, inexpressibly delicious. Bliss in a world that had become beautiful and rich and benevolent out of all recognition. The country, as they drove that morning in the gently swaying landau, had been like paradise; and this little plot of green between the golden trees and the tower was Eden itself. Poor Mrs Beavis had died, it was true; so pretty still, so young. How sad that was! But the sadness, somehow, did not touch this secret bliss of hers, remained profoundly irrelevant to it, as though it were the sadness of somebody in another planet.

Anthony looked up for a moment into the smiling face, so bright in its black setting, so luminous with inner peace and happiness, then was overcome with shyness and dropped his eyes.

Fascinated, meanwhile, Roger Amberley observed his father-in-law and wondered how it was possible for anyone to
live so unfailingly in character; how one could contrive to be a real general and at the same time to look and sound so exactly like a general on the musical comedy stage. Even at a funeral, even while he was saying a few well-chosen words to the bereaved husband – pure Grossmith! Under his fine brown moustache his lips twitched irrepressibly.

‘Looks badly cut up,' the General was thinking, as he talked to John Beavis; and felt sorry for the poor fellow, even while he still disliked him. For of course the man was an affected bore and a prig, too clever, but at the same time a fool. Worst of all, not a man's man. Always surrounded by petticoats. Mothers' petticoats, aunts' petticoats, wives' petticoats. A few years in the army would have done him all the good in the world. Still, he did look most horribly cut up. And Maisie had been a sweet little thing. Too good for him, of course . . .

They stood for a moment, then all together slowly moved towards the church. Anthony was in the midst of them, a dwarf among the giants. Their blackness hemmed him in, obscured the sky, eclipsed the amber tower and the trees. He walked as though at the bottom of a moving well. Its black walls rustled all around him. He began to cry.