The Dead Seagull

THE DEAD SEAGULL

by

George Barker

London: John Lehmann

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1
950
 BY JOHN LEHMANN LTD

6
HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON W.C.2

Table Of Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

Dedicated
to
Michael and Didy Asquith

I WAS BORN IN THE MANSION OF THE VIRGIN in the year that preceded the declaration of the war that ended war. I write this in the year that ends the war that succeeded that war. I speak, therefore, as a person of whose life a third has been spent with violent death about it. This book has as its ulterior objective the effort to console myself and those I love—I mean you—for the insolubility of a problem about which Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in the following terms: “As to other great questions, the question, what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be right than a Blackfoot Indian.”

*  *  *  *

There is a story to tell, a story that has no place in history and no real claim upon the attention of the Fates. I have a story to relate which proves that Love, with no blood on its knife, does not sleep easily, if it sleeps at all, until every one of its devotees lies dead. The great destroyer. In every bed. In every single bed. In every double bed. No, it is nothing new. It has a more formidable virtue than novelty. It is inevitable. Its virtue is that of the divine volitional victimisation. I warn you that as you lie in your bed and feel the determination of your lover slipping its blade between your ribs, this is the real consummation. “Kill me, kill me,” you murmur. But it always surprises you when you die.

*  *  *  *

Rising one morning, I perceived that everything had changed. I cannot speak clearly enough; the change in the nature and the face of things, when, that morning, I looked out of my sleep at them, eluded me then, and still just as narrowly eludes me. It comes down, at last, to this: I was afraid.

What does one fear when one awakes in the mornings? Is it the day, with its major temptations and minor renunciations, its afternoon misdemeanours, the sins that come up sighing out of the twilight, the suicide that smiles down at one from the midday sun, the death of a favourite dog at a quarter-past three, the resolution that will get itself born at an unpropitious conjunction of monsters, stars and houses? Or is it the quite conscious foreknowledge that, everyday, like stripping the calendar, we must cumulatively die?

They can so mercilessly and so incontestably out-manoeuvre one, the hours that weigh tons— daily, nightly, devastate the capitals of our faculties.

What war is it we cannot win? Is it the war that we won when we were born; the always precarious victory in between two annihilations; the defeat that, in the end, consoles us with wreaths of suitable flowers.

*  *  *  *

I say that I awoke and perceived a change. Existence, removing the mask of the common-place from her face, looked in at the window and smiled. I heard the paradoxes at the heart of things hushing themselves out of hysteria into sleep. I went to the window and looked out. I saw Wilhelmina Stitch being torn into pieces by archangels.

*  *  *  *

Hitherto, Augustine, I have believed in the virtues of love. Over all of the world I sensed its supremely proper benevolence, placing the candles of its illumination in all those rooms and at all those removes where, but for its presence, nothing but the shadows of appearances and disappearances would have depredated upon each other in irreligious irresponsibility.

Hitherto, I say, I have believed in love. I perceived that in the mechanics of the cosmological engines the function of impulse was provided by this love. From the internecine copulation of beasts to the image that reflects itself on the contemplative lake inside the skull of the visionary. This love, happening, as I saw it, between all kinds of things in all kinds of conditions, so that objects in one category could never consider themselves safe from the advance of objects in higher or lower categories—this variegated love validated everything. It moved the sun, the moon, and the other stars. And it was the evolution of this love, compelling all interdependent life to take place, that, seen in retrospect, was the will of God. And the peace that ensued from its fulfilment smiled on the face of the violated girl just as clearly as on the mouth of the intercessional prayer.

*  *  *  *

One has to speak at some length about oneself. Why? Because everything begins, as it ends, at the egoistic heart. “Man,” I heard the shade of Disraeli interpolate, “is only truly great in his passions.” The passions of the egoistic heart have erected themselves marvellous memorials in places that the admirer can never visit, like the cairn that commemorates Captain Scott at the South Pole. Others, greater than this simple and vainglorious hero, have established their monuments in even remoter regions. Such as Antony who died on the Everest of the sensual, or Abelard who lived a long life in a cave of chastity that he could not abandon. Each of us, I suspect, has his own epitaph to earn, but the life upon which it will stand, this is our own responsibility. The sins that we feed with crumbs and cakes will follow us home; the virtues upon whose tails we failed to place salt will never attend us; the crime done in a hot bed will in turn engender a criminal.

*  *  *  *

My father, a man of small means who lived in a southern county, had three possessions and he was incontinently fond of each. He loved his mother, his father, and himself. His affection for his two sons, eyeing the advance across a generation, hesitated, shied, and then turned inward upon himself. My brother and I would look back at him, wherever we were, and at all times, in the knowledge that his sympathies were not for us.

He had been a soldier. For several years after the war he continued to use his military prefix of Major. Normally loquacious, he spoke too much of war. And then, one day, he discovered two adolescent strangers in his house, one painting a picture of horses killing each other, and the second, the elder, myself, writing a thesis to disprove the existence of God. Not unkindly he remonstrated with us. Money was short, he explained; and expenses, after the war, exorbitant. If the times had been otherwise he would, he assured us, have been happy to have sent us together to a secondary school in the capital of the county. But, as things were
 
… he left the sentence hanging about in the air and walked slowly from the room. I deduced that he was inviting his sons to get jobs. And the next night, quietly, as though it were an indelicate obligation of the body, he died in his sleep, leaving that unfinished sentence over our heads like an injunction from the hereafter.

*  *  *  *

My brother, who, because he happened to be a couple of years younger than I, delegated me the decisions that we knew we shared, came, then, to a decision of his own. He decided that he was a painter. And that, as far as my brother is concerned, is that. I see no reason why I should say anything more about him; during the time that intervenes between then, when he decided he was a painter, and now, when I write this, he has simply gone on painting pictures of things that kill each other.

And at this point there is no one left in my story but me and crossed stars.

*  *  *  *

Where was that house in which I first encountered love? What irresponsible collocation of improbabilities conspired to bring together at the same time and in the same place the victim in his yoke of roses, the goddess with her urgent appetites, and the altar of human sacrifice on which the heart breaks? That meeting of the improbabilities had occurred long, long before I knew it. I met her, in my youth, when she wore a gym slip and long black stockings, carried a pile of exercise books under her left arm, and, being three years older, had not really noticed the precocious boy who, years too soon, carried a sexual fox in his vitals. She was tall and dark, and her eyes had, even then, those depths in which, shadowed, great aspirations, dreams, like white whales, lay, scarcely stirring the surface, thousands of fathoms down. It is too simple. I spent my youth and my adolescence writing about her; we became engaged when I was seventeen; and two years later, on an afternoon in November, we were married.

*  *  *  *

O nurturing tender Theresa, sweeter than a soft wind over a hurt hand, rise and accuse me. Turn in my wounds like a knife in a grave. Wherever pity is she has an indigenous place, and compassion, seeing her, comes up like a lamb for her administrations. What moved you, Aphrodite with the long legs, to tie yourself to the engine on which my character goes careering to its own destruction? Wherever I arrive I find my life in flames.

Those exquisitely melancholy afternoons of my adolescence, when I used to walk with the abstraction of a somnambulist through the damp avenues of Richmond Park, thinking that life would never happen to me, wondering why the banked fires of my anticipations, burning in my belly worse than raw alcohol, seemed not to show to strangers as I wandered in the gardens. And often it appeared to me, the frustration, in the disguise of an hallucination: looking between the trees that dripped with hanging mist I sometimes saw classical statues take on an instant of life, turning their naked beauty towards me; or I heard a voice speak out of a bush: “Everything will be answered if you will only not look around.” And I have stood waiting, not daring to look behind me, expecting a hand on my shoulder that would tender an apotheosis or an assignation—but there was only the gust of wind and the page of newspaper blowing breezily up and past me like a dirty interjection. Or a bicyclist flashed by, offering possibility until he reached me and decamping with it when he had passed. For I was suffering from a simple but devastating propensity: I was hoping to live.

*  *  *  *

I cannot say that I knew anything at all about Theresa when we were married: I can only say that I knew nothing about anything.

*  *  *  *

What can I reply, you admonitory ghosts, to placate your accusations? Why do you so daemonaically pursue me, I who have wished only to live with you and love you? Who are you, too importunate voices, responding with the condemnation “Guilty!” to all my appeals for help or consolation? Ghosts with your hearts held up like fatal evidence in your hands, you are the loved ones whom we have murdered. Just as, to them, we are among their unforgettable attendants.

*  *  *  *

We honeymooned in a cottage by the sea; we were almost entirely happy. In the mornings I would walk along the rocky foreshore and then, returning, write for an hour or two. She would do those things about the cottage that our very simple life required should be done. They were not much; not exacting. She, too, would read a lot, or play with the kitten on a couch. But, earlier than our first day of marriage, we were never alone. Between us as we stood and kissed, the homunculus of origin, curled like a caterpillar, quickened. Wherever we were, we were eternally three.

*  *  *  *

At night, downcast by the side of the bed, she would pray for our forgiveness. I could not understand. I could not bring myself to intercede for exculpation—my bed was made and I would not pray it unmade. I cannot forget how passionate her prayers were at that time—it was as though she knelt just within reach of the feet of the saints, and was silently begging them for their personal attention. Thinly clad in a transparent nightgown, she knelt with her hands crossed over her breasts and her head bent down on the bed. We had both been born and educated in the Roman Church—she wept sometimes, because I could not succeed in praying. Then she would rise from her knees, her eyes bright with restrained tears, and leaning over me, cover my face with her breasts. We were so deeply in love that old Adam slavered when we looked at each other.