Henry and Cato (51 page)

‘Darling, do leave that scar alone.'

‘Henry, listen to the cuckoo.'

‘Bugger that bird.'

‘Henry—'

‘I must go and see the borough engineer.'

‘Henry—'

‘Well, get on with it.'

‘I think I'm pregnant.'

‘Oh
no
!
Oh God
!'

‘Would you like the walnut cake?'

‘No thanks, just the anchovy toast.'

Bird-headed Rhoda set the tray down on the quilt in front of Lucius and departed.

Lucius felt a little light-headed, giddy. He thought, something odd has just happened. Then he thought what it was. He had understood what Rhoda said. How strange, after all these years. Had he just gradually come to it by listening to her talk? Or was she now speaking more distinctly? Or what? Whatever it was, he had certainly understood her today. And he had understood her yesterday too, he had had a conversation with her about crumpets.

Lucius lay there in bed touching these ideas vaguely, not really thinking. He felt so formidably tired. Still, he felt best at tea time. The mornings were hell. Hot Indian tea and anchovy toast do concentrate the mind. Thank God there are still some enjoyments left.

The afternoon sun was shining into his room revealing the dust on top of the chest of drawers where his things lay in a muddle. A brush which his mother had given him when he went to college. A comb full of strands of silver hair. Two ties, still knotted. Money. Cuff links. Dust. He had never had a woman to tidy up for him.

His mouth was hurting, his back was hurting, there was a sort of hollow in the centre of him where a drum was beating solemnly as if for the dénouement of some rite. His breath came fast. They had all forgotten him. No one noticed now that he stayed all the time in his room, no one asked him to come down to watch the television any more. Rhoda fed him as one might feed an old pet in a cage. No, all this was unjust and wrong. They did come to see him, they did suggest that it was such a nice day he ought to go out for a walk. They were kind to him. Only he was invisible to them because they were happy. Colette, her face glowing with a dewy light, her eyes vague with joy, was the very presence of youth, the perfect presence of that which sometimes seemed to Lucius as he lay there to be the most precious thing of all, better than virtue or wisdom or art, simply youth and beauty, the healthy human animal, mature and utterly unspoilt, the body, the mind pure and clean in the only way after all in which such merits are ever really acquired, not by dirty old men in caves, but simply by unsullied unpuzzled nature.

Henry was happy too in his secretive way, never admitting it, his dark eyes glowing like stars, his curly hair electric with force. He and Colette ran about a lot and shouted like children. Lucius could hear the regular thud as they leapt the steps from the front door. Gerda was more dignified, trying to conceal her satisfaction at the success of her schemes. When John Forbes came to the house, which was every day now, she either did not mention it to Lucius, or she described his visit as a surprise. She always gave a harmless reason for his coming, that is a reason other than his desire to see her. She looked much younger and had bought a lot of new clothes. Suddenly with a man in the house she was back again in the land of her youth, in the land proper to her own being. She too glowed. Lucius lay in bed or sat in his dressing gown at the table and listened to Henry's maniac laughter and to the deep authoritative boom of John Forbes's voice.

So I am not a man in the house, he thought. No. Henry was not a man either, but then Henry was an elf and would survive elvishly. I used to imagine that I was Tiresias, thought Lucius, but the mantic power was never given. I could have won Gerda, after Burke died, even after Sandy died, if I had been an ordinary man with ordinary selfish appetites and will. I did want her and love her, I do want her and love her, but she can see that I'm a ghost and she rightly prefers flesh and blood. It isn't goodness, this lack of grasp, I used to think that it was. I am simply one of those who have not and from whom will be taken away even that which they have.

I imagined that solitude would instruct me, but when have I ever had real solitude? What an easy life I have had, he thought, and how fast it has fled away. I still feel that I am young and beautiful, that I haven't aged really. Age is something far far away in the future. People have always protected me and looked after me and I have felt it right that they should. I haven't ever suffered and struggled the way ordinary people do. I could not have done it and I can't think how they do it! I always knew I was special. I was always waiting for something for which I had to sit, as it were, in a comfortable anteroom. Perhaps I was waiting for Gerda. Only now at last I know, perhaps I have only just found out, last week or yesterday, that she is lost to me. There was an intimacy, and a kind of nervous loving, only it lacked the coarseness of real life. Now she will despise me and pity me and I shall gradually become a burden to her. Can I ever make friends with Henry? No.

Of course, he thought, I wasn't just waiting for Gerda. I was waiting for that great work of art which was always there hidden behind the veil, my own great work of genius. And now it's too late. All these feeble verses with which I've been covering the paper are just a substitute for the long hard struggle of real art, for the serious effort which I shall never make now. Only I've got to go on believing in them, I've got to go on deceiving myself into writing, if I stop writing I shall die. It's funny, he thought, I did imagine that I could change my life, that I could go back to the literary pubs and sit there writing poetry on beer-stained tables and being a mystery to the young. Could I have done that? Perhaps it would have been better after all if Henry had stripped me and turned me out into the world like a starving dog.

How terribly tired I feel, thought Lucius, even though I have been lying in bed all day. The sun is shining. I must get up. Perhaps I'll put some music on, though it makes me feel so terribly sad now. I wish I wanted a drink, but I don't. I must pretend that there has been a day, that there has been some activity, before the night comes. And then oh God let the sleeping pills work. A hell of sleeplessness now threatened every dark: a hell which he attempted to forget by day and which he could not picture. It was as if by night he became another person. Sleepless he wept sometimes with incoherent grief like a doomed child.

Up we get, he thought, pushing his messy tray, with slopped tea and toast crusts, away across the counterpane. Why was it now so bloody hard to get out of bed? He must be anaemic or something. He ought to visit the doctor, only nobody had thought to suggest it.

He sat up and manoeuvred his legs over the edge of the bed. His protruding legs were thin and white, covered with a mass of large blue veins. He looked down at his bare knobbly feet, then held his head hard. Intense giddiness had come upon him like a gust of violent wind. The ceiling became black and descended. He reached his hand out for the bed post which was moving rapidly past him. A frightful pain filled the void where the great drum had been beating.

A while later Lucius became conscious that he was now lying on the floor. After a good deal of thought he managed, by some kind of mental rather than physical effort, to sit up, leaning against the chair beside his table. His right hand functioned all right, but his left was without power. So was his left leg, his left shoulder. His left eye. Lucius experimented with his face. He knew it was different. A pain in the back of his neck was forcing his head forward. He sat quietly for some time breathing gently and considering himself. After a while he felt as if he were asking for something, requiring something, asking somebody for something. What was it that he so much wanted now, perhaps the only thing? Something like justice, only certainly not that. Not love. All the words seemed to have left their things and to be flying about free in his mind. If he could only find the right word. What was it? Courage, he thought. Yes, courage.

Very slowly he reached up to the table and pulled his pad of paper and his pen off onto the floor, onto the dusty familiar carpet. He had never sat on the floor like this before. He looked at the carpet how worn it was, how threadbare and old. It had been a good carpet once. He carefully took up his pen, balancing it awkwardly between his fingers. Was this the way fingers held a pen? He wanted to see if he could still write. The pad was steady against the leg of the table. In a strange scrawling hand he slowly wrote:

So many dawns I was blind to.
Now the illumination of night
Comes to me too late, O great teacher.

John Forbes was in bed with Dame Patricia Raven.

‘What I just can't understand,' said John, ‘is why he wrote those awful crawling letters. Imagine writing to your sister and asking her to give herself up to a gang of thugs.'

‘Only there wasn't a gang.'

‘He didn't know that, he still doesn't know it.'

‘He thought you'd prevent her from coming.'

‘He should have known her better. She would have run through a fire to get to Cato once he'd summoned her like that. She's the heroic one.'

‘The young knight, you said.'

‘Yes. Oh God, I can't get over it. Any sort of ordinary manliness, the most ordinary sort of decency and courage, should have stopped Cato from writing those letters, should simply have stopped him in his tracks.'

‘I suppose it didn't seem too bad to write to Henry about the ransom. After all it was only money and Henry has plenty. Then when he started writing the letters it was easier to go on. And he was hungry and confused—'

‘I wouldn't have started.'

‘One could be very frightened in such a situation, threatened with a knife—'

‘By a puny boy.'

‘A violent person has psychological power. He can frighten the non-violent just by his will. This is a very dreadful fact.'

‘He can frighten sheep. I would have been so bloody angry. I'd have gone berserk. I can't forgive Cato for taking it lying down, for not being aggressive. All right, you'll say it's better not to be aggressive—'

‘I wasn't going to say that. But it may be more prudent. I hope no one kidnaps you. You would get yourself murdered.'

‘It might be better to be dead than living with some memories.'

‘Oh, come—'

‘And the crazy awful thing about the whole business is that if he'd acted bravely and fought the boy the whole hoax would have collapsed at once. The boy must have been amazed, he probably started it half as a joke! And then suddenly there were thousands of pounds and a girl offering herself— I must say I blame Henry too.'

‘I think everyone acted fairly reasonably. It was a very obscure situation and evil confuses people. Joe might have killed Cato if Cato had fought.'

‘Cato was led like a lamb to the slaughter. If only he'd punched the boy's face at the beginning he wouldn't have had to smash his skull at the end. There's a sort of feebleness in the modern young. With some of them it's vicious idleness and something for nothing, with others it's just an inability to resist evil.'

‘Gentleness perhaps. Cato is non-violent. Colette is far more violent than he is.'

‘Yes, at least she fought.'

‘Anyway it's done now and Cato's got to live with it and anything we can do to help him to recover—'

‘Oh he'll be all right. He'll go back to God. That bloody religion is so debilitating. Pat, darling, what have I done to deserve such children? Cato a Roman Catholic and Colette married to Henry Marshalson!'

‘She seems very happy.'

‘She could have had that clever young architect, Giles Gosling, he was mad about her.'

‘I thought you were so pleased with Henry's building plans.'

‘They're my building plans. Henry and Colette are just playing at it.'

‘Well, I think Henry's a poppet.'

‘Pat—!'

‘I'm getting up.'

‘I bore you.'

‘Not exactly, but you understand so little.' Patricia rolled out, stood up. She had been a flaming redhead when she was young. Now her abundant hair had faded to a still radiant speckled sandy ginger. Her skin was very pale and her eyes too were a pale blue. She had an air of innocence which could change imperceptibly into an air of fearful candid intelligence as she gazed with those lucid pale eyes. She frightened people. Her clear face was marked only by a faint puckered tiredness upon the brow. Now, dressed in a light brown Indian robe, she smoked a cigar. John Forbes watched her.

‘John, I must tell you something.'

‘What?'

‘I'm going to have someone here to share the flat.'

‘No! Not a man?'

‘No, no, a girl.'

‘Oh hell. But what about me? I've got to be able to come here.'

‘Things will be so different.'

‘Oh no, Pat, don't be obscene. I must be able to come. Who is this girl anyway?'

‘Miriam Shippel.'

‘God, not the girl who writes those books?'

‘Yes.'

‘But, Pat, you can't, you must keep times for me—'

‘I'm going to retire and work in the Labour Party. Miriam is going to be a candidate. We're going into politics. I'm tired of just fuming and writing letters to
The Times.
'

‘Pat, you aren't serious—I mean, you're not—ending this?'

‘Well, it'll have to end, John, when Miriam's here. Don't take on. You know how I've always felt, how it's always been.'

‘You've hated it.'

‘You know I haven't! But I've done it out of love and friendship—'

‘I like “love and friendship”!'

‘I've done it to please you, since there wasn't any reason not to. Now there'll be a reason. Sorry.'

‘Pat, you know I've got to have someone—'

‘Of course you have, dear.'