Eyeless In Gaza (6 page)

He had not wanted to know – had done his best not to know, except superficially, as one knows, for example, that thirty-five comes after thirty-four. But this black well was dark with the concentrated horror of death. There was no escape. His sobs broke out uncontrollably.

Mary Amberley, who had been lost in the rapturous contemplation of golden leaves patterned against the pale sky, looked down for a moment at this small creature weeping on another planet, then turned away again.

‘Poor child!' his father said to himself; and then, overbidding as it were, ‘Poor motherless child!' he added deliberately, and was glad (for he wanted to suffer) that the words should cost him so much pain to pronounce. He looked
down at his son, saw the grief-twisted face, the full and sensitive lips so agonizingly hurt, and above this tear-stained distortion the broad high forehead, seemingly unmoved in its smooth purity; saw, and felt his heart wrung with an additional pain.

‘Dear boy!' he said aloud, thinking, as he spoke, how this grief would surely bring them nearer together. It was so difficult somehow with a child – so hard to be natural, to establish a contact. But surely, surely this sadness, and their common memories . . . He squeezed the small hand within his own.

They were at the church door. The well disintegrated.

‘One might be in Tibet,' thought Uncle James as he took off his hat. ‘Why not one's boots as well?'

Inside the church was an ancient darkness, smelly with centuries of rustic piety. Anthony took two breaths of that sweet-stale air, and felt his midriff heave with a qualm of disgust. Fear and misery had already made him swallow his heart; and now this smell, this beastly smell that meant that the place was full of germs. . . . ‘Reeking with germs!' He heard her voice – her voice that always changed when she talked about germs, became different, as though somebody else was speaking. At ordinary times, when she wasn't angry, it sounded so soft and somehow lazy – laughingly lazy, or else tiredly lazy. Germs made it suddenly almost fierce, and at the same time frightened. ‘Always spit when there's a bad smell about,' she had told him. ‘There might be typhoid germs in the air.' His mouth, as he recalled her words, began to water. But how could he spit here, in church? There was nothing to do but swallow his spittle. He shuddered as he did so, with fear and a sickening disgust. And suppose he really should be sick in this stinking place? The apprehension made him feel still sicker. And what did one have to do during the service? He had never been to a funeral before.

James Beavis looked at his watch. In three minutes the hocus-pocus was timed to begin. Why hadn't John insisted on a plain-clothes funeral? It wasn't as if poor Maisie had ever set much store by this kind of thing. A silly little woman; but never religiously silly. Hers had been the plain secular silliness of mere female frivolity. The silliness of reading novels on sofas, alternating with the silliness of tea-parties and picnics and dances. Incredible that John had managed to put up with that kind of foolery – had even seemed to like it! Women crackling like hens round the tea-table. James Beavis frowned with angry contempt. He hated women – was disgusted by them. All those soft bulges of their bodies. Horrible. And the stupidity, the brainlessness. But anyhow, poor Maisie had never been one of the curate-fanciers. It was those awful relations of hers. There were deans in the family – deans and deanesses. John hadn't wanted to offend them. Weak-minded of him. One ought to be offensive on a matter of principle.

The organ played. A little procession of surplices entered through the open door. Some men carried in what seemed a great pile of flowers. There was singing. Then silence. And then, in an extraordinary voice, ‘Now is Christ risen from the dead,' began the clergyman; and went on and on, all about God, and death, and beasts at Ephesus, and the natural body. But Anthony hardly heard, because he could think of nothing except those germs that were still there in spite of the smell of the flowers, and of the spittle that kept flowing into his mouth and that he had to swallow in spite of the typhoid and influenza, and of that horrible sick feeling in his stomach. How long would it last?

‘Like a goat,' James Beavis said to himself as he listened to the intoning from the lectern. He looked again at that young son-in-law of the Champernownes. Anderton, Abdy . . .? What a fine, classical profile!

His brother sat with bent head and a hand across his eyes,
thinking of the ashes in the casket there beneath the flowers – the ashes that had been her body.

The service was over at last. ‘Thank goodness!' thought Anthony, as he spat surreptitiously into his handkerchief and folded away the germs into his pocket, ‘Thank goodness!' He hadn't been sick. He followed his father to the door and, rapturously, as he stepped out of the twilight, breathed the pure air. The sun was still shining. He looked around and up into the pale sky. Overhead, in the church tower, a sudden outcry of jackdaws was like the noise of a stone flung glancingly on to a frozen pond and skidding away with a reiteration of glassy chinking across the ice.

‘But, Anthony, you mustn't throw stones on the ice,' his mother had called to him. ‘They get frozen in, and then the skaters . . .'

He remembered how she had come swerving round towards him, on one foot – swooping, he had thought, like a sea-gull; all in white: beautiful. And now . . . The tears came into his eyes again. But, oh, why had she insisted on his trying to skate?

‘I don't want to,' he had said; and when she asked why, it had been impossible to explain. He was afraid of being laughed at, of course. People made such fools of themselves. But how could he have told her that? In the end he had cried – in front of everyone. It couldn't have been worse. He had almost hated her that morning. And now she was dead, and up there in the tower the jackdaws were throwing stones on last winter's ice.

They were at the grave-side now. Once more Mr Beavis pressed his son's hand. He was trying to forestall the effect upon the child's mind of these last, most painful moments.

‘Be brave,' he whispered. The advice was tendered as much to himself as to the boy.

Leaning forward, Anthony looked into the hole. It seemed
extraordinarily deep. He shuddered, closed his eyes; and immediately there she was, swooping towards him, white, like a sea-gull, and white again in the satin evening-dress when she came to say good-night before she went out to dinner, with that scent on her as she bent over him in bed, and the coolness of her bare arms. ‘You're like a cat,' she used to say when he rubbed his cheek against her arms. ‘Why don't you purr while you're about it?'

‘Anyhow,' thought Uncle James with satisfaction, ‘he was firm about the cremation.' The Christians had been scored off there. Resurrection of the body, indeed! In
AD
1902!

When his time came, John Beavis was thinking, this was where he would be buried. In this very grave. His ashes next to hers.

The clergyman was talking again in that extraordinary voice. ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secret of our hearts . . .' Anthony opened his eyes. Two men were lowering into the hole a small terra-cotta box, hardly larger than a biscuit tin. The box touched the bottom; the ropes were hauled up.

‘Earth to earth,' bleated the goat-like voice, ‘ashes to ashes.'

‘My ashes to her ashes,' thought John Beavis. ‘Mingled.'

And suddenly he remembered that time in Rome, a year after they were married; those June nights and the fire-flies, under the trees, in the Doria Gardens, like stars gone crazy.

‘Who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto his glorious body . . .'

‘Vile,
vile
?' His very soul protested.

Earth fell, one spadeful, then another. The box was almost covered. It was so small, so dreadfully and unexpectedly tiny . . . the image of that enormous ox, that minute tea-cup, rose to Anthony's imagination. Rose up obscenely and would not be exorcized. The jackdaws cried again in the tower. Like a sea-gull she had swooped towards him, beautiful. But the ox
was still there, still in its tea-cup, still base and detestable; and he himself yet baser, yet more hateful.

John Beavis released the hand he had been holding and, laying his arm round the boy's shoulders, pressed the thin little body against his own – close, close, till he felt in his own flesh the sobs by which it was shaken.

‘Poor child! Poor motherless child!'

‘YOU WOULDN'T DARE,'
Joyce said.

‘I would.'

‘No, you wouldn't.'

‘I tell you I would,' Helen Amberley insisted more emphatically.

Maddeningly sensible. ‘You'd be sent to prison if you were caught,' the elder sister went on. ‘No, not to prison,' she corrected herself. ‘You're too young. You'd be sent to a reformatory.'

The blood rushed up to Helen's face. ‘You and your reformatories!' she said in a tone that was meant to be contemptuous, but that trembled with irrepressible anger. That reformatory was a personal affront. Prison was terrible; so terrible that there was something fine about it. (She had visited Chillon, had crossed the Bridge of Sighs.) But a reformatory – no! that was utterly ignoble. A reformatory was on the same level as a public lavatory or a station on the District Railway. ‘Reformatories!' she repeated. It was typical of Joyce to think of reformatories. She always dragged anything amusing and adventurous down into the mud. And what made it so much
worse, she was generally quite right in doing so: the mud was facts, the mud was common sense. ‘You think I wouldn't dare to do it, because
you
wouldn't dare,' Helen went on. ‘Well, I
shall
do it. Just to show you. I shall steal something from every shop we go to. Every one. So there.'

Joyce began to feel seriously alarmed. She glanced questioningly at her sister. A profile, pale now and rigid, the chin defiantly lifted, was all that Helen would let her see. ‘Now, look here,' she began severely.

‘I'm not listening,' said Helen, speaking straight ahead into impersonal space.

‘Don't be a little fool!'

There was no answer. The profile might have been that of a young queen on a coin. They turned into the Gloucester Road and walked towards the shops.

But suppose the wretched girl really meant what she said? Joyce changed her strategy. ‘Of course I know you dare,' she said conciliatorily. There was no answer. ‘I'm not doubting it for a moment.' She turned again towards Helen; but the profile continued to stare ahead with eyes unwaveringly averted. The grocer's was at the next corner, not twenty yards away. There was no time to lose. Joyce swallowed what remained of her pride. ‘Now, look here, Helen,' she said, and her tone was appealing, she was throwing herself on her sister's generosity. ‘I do wish you wouldn't.' In her fancy she saw the whole deplorable scene. Helen caught red-handed; the indignant shopkeeper, talking louder and louder; her own attempts at explanation and excuse made unavailing by the other's intolerable behaviour. For, of course, Helen would just stand there, in silence, not uttering a word of self-justification or regret, calm and contemptuously smiling, as though she were a superior being and everybody else just dirt. Which would enrage the shopkeeper still more. Until at last he'd send for a policeman. And then . . . But what would Colin think when he
heard of it? His future sister-in-law arrested for stealing! He might break off the engagement. ‘Oh, please, don't do it,' she begged; ‘please!' But she might as well have begged the image of King George on a half-crown to turn round and wink at her. Pale, determined, a young queen minted in silver, Helen kept on. ‘Please!' Joyce repeated, almost tearfully. The thought that she might lose Colin was a torture. ‘Please!' But the smell of groceries was already in her nostrils; they were on the very threshold. She caught her sister by the sleeve; but Helen shook her off and marched straight in. With a sinking of the heart, Joyce followed as though to her execution. The young man at the cheese and bacon counter smiled welcomingly as they came in. In her effort to avert suspicion, to propitiate in advance his inevitable indignation, Joyce smiled back with an effusive friendliness. No, that was overdoing it. She readjusted her face. Calm; easy; perfectly the lady, but at the same time affable; affable and (what was that word?), oh yes,
gracious
– like Queen Alexandra. Graciously she followed Helen across the shop. But why, she was thinking, why had she ever broached the subject of crime? Why, knowing Helen, had she been mad enough to argue that, if one were properly brought up, one simply couldn't be a criminal? It was obvious what Helen's response would be to
that.
She had simply asked for it.

It was to the younger sister that their mother had given the shopping list. ‘Because she's almost as much of a scatterbrain as I am,' Mrs Amberley had explained, with that touch of complacency that always annoyed Joyce so much. People had no right to boast about their faults. ‘It'll teach her to be a good housekeeper – God help her!' she added with a little snort of laughter.

Standing at the counter, Helen unfolded the paper, read, and then, very haughtily and without a smile, as though she were giving orders to a slave, ‘Coffee first of all,' she said to the assistant. ‘Two pounds – the two-and-fourpenny mixture.'

The girl, it was evident, was offended by Helen's tone and feudal manner. Joyce felt it her duty to beam at her with a double, compensatory graciousness.

‘Do try to behave a little more civilly,' she whispered when the girl had gone for the coffee.

Helen preserved her silence, but with an effort. Civil, indeed! To this horrible little creature who squinted and didn't wash enough under the arms? Oh, how she loathed all ugliness and deformity and uncleanliness! Loathed and detested . . .