Henry and Cato (12 page)

‘Most of them do. I'm eccentric. Written any books?'

‘Books? What are they? Well, I'm writing one. On a painter called Max Beckmann. All right, you've never heard of him. It's called
Screaming or Yawning,
there's an early drawing—never mind. So you're a priest.'

‘You never used to like painting.'

‘I've changed, America has unmade me. Do you think I've got an accent?'

‘An American accent? Well, faintly—'

‘My mother said—Did she reply to your letter?'

‘No, but Lucius did.'

‘Lucius. Christ. Never mind. I hate art actually, I hate all the old grand stuff, so confident, so pleased with itself, Beckmann's the end of it all, when the yawns turn into screams. I like being at the end, the scene of destruction like round the corner here. I'm the hawk watching it all. Cato, I'm so glad I found you, I haven't been able to talk to anybody. I can't tell you how horrible it is at home, it's
horrible.
'

‘Your mother's—grief— yes—'

‘And it's all mixed up with—oh that bloody scrounger Lucius Lamb—and the whole place—it's too big—I've been feeling sick ever since I got back,
sick.
'

‘How long have you been back?'

‘Three days, four days. She keeps watching me to see what I'll do. I think she wants me to go back to America.'

‘That's impossible.'

‘I'm obscene, I'm so alive, and I'm so un-Sandy.'

‘She loves you, she must need you terribly.'

‘Well, that's worse.'

‘Henry—forgive my asking—but how do you really feel—about Sandy?'

Henry was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I feel delighted, absolutely
delighted.
'

‘Henry, you can't—'

‘No priest's stuff, please.'

‘For your own sake and—'

‘How do I know what I feel? I could say that I feel free for the first time in my life, but what the hell would that mean? Of course I'm pleased. But it's not even important. I feel I'm going to explode, there'll be some great conflagration, some great act of destruction. I've killed Sandy. Who shall I do next?'

‘You need time,' said Cato. ‘You're still suffering from shock. There must be so many practical things. And you must comfort your mother, and damn your feelings.'

‘O.K., damn them. But she's not easy to comfort. We can't even talk.'

‘But you will stay here? You could go on teaching—'

‘I'd never get a teaching job here, not a hope in hell, I'm no good. I suppose I could sit in the library at Laxlinden and think. Except that I can't think.'

‘There's your book.'

‘Yes. Except that—really, it's not a book, it's a painter, it's not even a painter, it's a man, and he's dead years ago. I'm nothing.'

‘That's the beginning of wisdom.'

‘Your wisdom, not mine. I'm like the chap in Dostoevsky who said “if there's no God, how can I be a captain?” And I'm not even a captain. But, say, do you really believe in the Resurrection and worship the Virgin Mary? It's like a visit to the past.'

There was a soft sound on the stairs and the door was partially opened. It was Beautiful Joe.

Cato blushed, jumped up. ‘Come in, this is—Come in—This is Joe Beckett, one of my—Joseph Beckett, Mr Marshalson.'

‘Hello, sir,' said Joe, with an air of youthful simplicity and deference.

‘Hello,' said Henry, smiling, appreciating.

Cato had never heard Joe call anyone ‘Sir' before. It was presumably a joke. ‘Joe, could you wait downstairs? Mr Marshalson is just going and—'

‘Certainly, Father.' Joe retired quietly, closing the door after him and padding away down the stairs.

‘It's nice to be back where they're polite,' said Henry. ‘The kids back home are so bloody familiar.'

‘He's not polite. He's going to the devil.'

‘That nice boy? How?'

‘Crime. It's an occupation, it's a world. He's in it already.'

‘But he's so young—'

‘Henry, you know nothing—'

‘I'm fascinated. In America the good guys and the bad guys don't meet socially, at least, not at my level. But you're trying to help him, to save him from—?'

‘Yes, but I can't. Good will is no use here, one would need money. I can't help any of them really.'

‘Money?' said Henry. ‘I can supply that.'

‘No, no, I didn't mean—'

‘Of course you didn't, but why not? Now that it's come up it's obvious. My dear Cato, I'm so impressed by this scene, no I'm not being sarcastic, I mean this place, this frightful little room with the broken window, your poverty, your, if I may say so, perfectly filthy old cassock, what you're trying to do for these people. I want to help you. You're leaving this set-up, perhaps you'll have another one like it. Couldn't I come and work with you? Why not? Would God mind?'

Cato's eyes widened for a moment. Then he laughed.

‘God wouldn't mind. But you'd hate it. It's nasty. The people are often nasty. Or else they're boring. Do you really want to go visiting old age pensioners?'

‘I've never tried. I've taught pretty boring pupils in my time. I think you do these people an injustice—'

‘Yes, of course. But the work is tough and—'

‘Isn't that spiritual pride? Couldn't I do what you do?'

‘I don't do it.'

‘But you—Oh, I see, God does it.'

‘No, I didn't mean that. Maybe I just need a break.'

‘Sure—But aren't you going to have another Mission?'

‘We—we can't get another house—we got this one—'

‘I'll buy you a house. Cato, I'm
serious.
'

‘It isn't only that—I'm not sure what I—'

‘Of course I don't believe in God, but it's so nice that you do! I can't tell you—oh I can't tell you—how awful—how sort of unlivable—everything is now—like a great black wall in front of me—Something's got to go smash—Oh all right, all right, you want me to go. I've got to go anyway. I'll tell you these horrors another time. Will you be home?'

‘No, not—'

‘Well, I'll come here again, or find out where you are. I must fly now to catch that train. Do think about what I said, and we'll make a plan.'

Henry whisked out of the room and down the stairs. It had grown dark. Cato pulled the curtains and turned on the light. He had deliberately put in a weak bulb and the room was dim. Beautiful Joe had materialized noiselessly.

‘Who was that chap?'

‘A rich man,' said Cato.

‘Is he a queer?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘He gave me quite a look. I'd like to be fancied by a rich queer. I can't stand queers though. Hitler was right to kill the queers and the gipsies. A gipsy woman just stopped me in the street selling heather. I spat right in her face. Did she curse!'

‘I wish you could learn kindness,' said Cato.

‘Gipsies look dirty. And she put her hand on my arm. I can't stand being touched.'

‘I wish I could teach you.'

‘You do.' The boy sat down on the chair, Cato stood. ‘You do teach me. But I've had such a rotten life. People like me are a
problem.
'

‘You haven't had a rotten life,' said Cato. ‘I wish you'd speak the truth, you're quite intelligent enough to be able to. You did well at school. You've got an educated mother and a decent home—'

‘You mean it was clean. All you saw was the table cloth. I was butchered. Life is a dumdum bullet. That's another pop song I'm going to write.'

‘Why don't you go on learning, get trained, get clever, that's the way to make money and be famous if that's what you want!'

‘You're trying to con me, Father, they all do. We've had all this before. You don't understand. I'd end up in the machine shop like the rest of them.'

‘Well, there's nothing wrong with the machine shop, it's better than being in prison.'

‘Who said anything about prison? You take me so serious. You're doing your thing, why can't I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it. That's religion, isn't it?'

‘Why not try religion, then.'

‘I've had it all my life, Father, priests were beating me when I was six, I've been looking at Christ on the cross since I could see—and it's a terrible thing to look at if you think of it, the nails and all that blood. If a gang done that they'd get ten years even if the bugger survived.'

‘Joe, don't pretend that you don't understand. You may be closer to Christ than I am. Anyway why speak of distances when we're all a million miles from God.'

‘There, you've said it, Father. A million miles. A million million. So what is a man to do? You've got to fight for yourself, like fighting is self-expression. You got to have scars like real fighters have. He had scars, didn't He? You should have heard the nuns going on, it made you sick.'

‘I wish at least you'd get a job, and then—'

‘You got to be joking! Can you see me working for a master, honest, can you? I got to be free, it's my nature. Anyway what's the use? A lot of bloody money-grubbing bosses. The upper class are all right, it's the middle class that are hell, they're materialists. Look at Lawrence of Arabia. This society's rotten, it isn't going to last much longer. It's all right for you, you're different, you're special, you got nothing. But most people are shits. I'm telling you and I know. The lies they tell, they even tell lies to you, God if I started to say all the lies I've heard people telling you—'

Cato looked down in the dim light at the brightly self-conscious face, the eyes flickering behind the glinting hexagonal glasses. Beautiful Joe never looked wholly serious. The long dry intelligent mouth quivered at the corners with awareness and suppressed amusement. Joe had combed his straight hair carefully, probably as he came up the stairs, and it swung, silky, neat and brilliant. Touchable.

‘Oh, I know,' said Cato, ‘I know.' He moved away.

‘Don't be angry with me, Father, don't be sort of cold, because I go on so. You do still pray for me, don't you.'

‘Of course.'

‘I tried to pray last night. Honest I did. I knelt down and I spoke to God like He was my best friend. I said, God, why did You make me if I was to be frustrated?'

‘Listen,' said Cato, ‘if I could organize an expensive education for you, would you take it?'

There was a silence, Beautiful Joe, staring, jutting his jaw and pulling down his lower lip with one finger. ‘What do you mean “expensive”? You mean sort of like Eton College?'

‘No. I mean a crammer, a tutor, people to teach you specially, and you'd be financially supported while you were learning.'

‘You mean given money?'

‘Yes, like a grant. You could have a nice room, money, teachers, but not like school, you'd be quite free. Then maybe university—'

‘You know, Father,' said Joe, ‘You're a cunning one. You're quite a villain yourself in your own way. I don't want anything like that. I just want you to love me and care for me. That's all that's needed, Father. You will, won't you? Won't you? Won't you?'

The chief reason why Hannibal succeeded in performing miracles of military organization was that he was a monster of cruelty. Henry remembered having been told that at school, and having been impressed by it, some time after he had irrevocably identified himself with the Carthaginian general. He had an instinctive identification with heroes beginning with H. Homer. Hannibal. Hobbes. Hume. Hamlet. Hitler. What a crew. Only his own name seemed empty, a sort of un-name, another cause for resentment, unredeemed by kings. And of course the letter H itself was an un-letter, a mere breath, a nothing, an identityless changeling rendered by a G in Russian. Gamlet, Gitler, Genry. H, an open receptacle, a standing emptiness, equally good or bad either way up.

Henry was standing in the ballroom. It was late afternoon after tea. Henry had not attended tea but he had smelt that special smell of toast and groaned. The room, its fine parquet floor, laid down by Henry's grandfather, dusty and unpolished, was empty of furniture except for a group of chairs at one end. Those chairs, Henry saw, were all broken, perhaps discarded, perhaps awaiting renovation: old sagging armchairs with their seats upon the floor, upright chairs lacking a leg, tilting over at crazy angles. A subject for Max in drypoint. Maimed chairs. The space. The terrible space. Henry shivered. When he was a small child his angry father had thrust him into the ballroom one afternoon and locked the door. Tearful Henry had buzzed in the empty room like a hysterical fly, that sunlighted space more terrible than any dark cupboard.

He moved to the tall northern window and looked across the terrace and the lawn towards the conifers and the edge of the birch wood. The sun was weakly shining. The daffodils were over. It had not rained for two days. Bellamy, seated upon a yellow motor mower, was carefully and slowly proceeding along the edge of the longer grass. Only now he saw that it was not Bellamy, it was his mother, dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy trousers. She seemed to turn her head towards him, then look away. Yesterday, outside, he had seen his mother watching him from the drawing-room windows as he was returning from the greenhouse. He had visited the orchard, the tennis courts, the walled garden. He needed to visit everything, to tell everything the news, to reassure himself that he had tasted every memory, sprung every booby trap that the past had left for him. He had been to Dimmerstone and stood with glazed eyes beside the low wall of the churchyard. He had thought of his father there more than Sandy. Or perhaps already these two sad images were joining hands. Sandy was more suddenly present in the warm greenhouse where the smell of some aromatic herb made Henry close his eyes in sudden pain. He came running back and saw the watching figure of his mother. As he drew near she faded and vanished like a ghost. Now he, a ghost, was watching her.