The Green Knight (74 page)

And so, thought Clement, we betray him, we explain him away, we do not want to think about him or puzzle about him or try to make out what he was in himself. Bellamy thinks he is an angel, and I am glad he thinks so, that may preserve him for a while in some form of being. But for the rest of us he is an embarrassment, as if something huge and strange has shot up in our midst and we simply cannot conceptualise it and so we imagine that it isn't there, like the New Zealand natives who could not conceptualise Captain Cook's ship and simply ignored it. Perhaps we are surrounded with such beings, heavenly or demonic, for whom we have no concepts and who are therefore invisible. We may indeed diminish Peter and make him into a mere nightmare or a retired butcher – but really he is something alien and terrifying. After all, the Green Knight came out from some other form of being, weird and un-Christian, not like Arthur's knights. But he was noble and he knew what justice was – and perhaps justice is greater than the Grail. Lucas came to understand him, and indeed they understood each other, it was as if they were bound together. Peter saved my life, he gave his own life for mine. And Clement recalled vividly, as he was destined to continue to do, their first tragic meeting – and with it the image of Lucas and Peter, after Lucas's ordeal and after Clement had fainted, the two sorcerers, delighted with each other, dancing together like goats in a love-scene. Now he remembered suddenly, as something indissolubly connected, Peter saying, his last words spoken to him: ‘Look after your brother.' These words had impressed Clement deeply, inscribed upon his heart. Well, he thought, I tried to look after him, but it wasn't possible. Did I ever really try? Then for the first, but not for the last time, it occurred to him: perhaps these words can
refer to the future
. And he thought, I shall go on blindly and secretly jumbling all these things together and making no sense of them as long as I live. Maybe every human creature carries some such inescapable burden. That is being human. A very weird affair.

Clement pulled Louise to her feet and led her to the window. Low down above the sea, the sky was filled with large majestic clouds, rounded like piles of bubbles, moving in slow procession, pure white above, golden below. The sea, a pallid glitter at the horizon, nearer where the forms of the waves were discernible a darkening grey, crested with flutters of foam as it neared the shore and hurled itself choking among the rocks.

 

‘Look, Louise, the sea, and all your birds, the cormorants flying in formation, and the black-headed gulls, and the oystercatchers and the terns, and there is a heron flying back inland. And there is Moy among the rocks, you can see her blue dress, she is looking into a pool, and there, just coming over the hill, is Bellamy, and Anax running in front of him toward the house – '

Louise, holding Clement's hand, surveyed the scene. ‘Yes, yes – all the same I'm worried about Moy.'

‘Perhaps we should get her a cat?'

‘No, she loved Tibellina so much, I don't think any other cat would do. And I'm worried about Sefton and Harvey.'

‘They promised they'd wait a year before getting married. They will wait a year, and they will get married.
They're
all right.'

‘Yes. But I made them promise. That may not have been wise.'

‘I told them it was an ordeal! That amused them, they are so romantic – and they are so much in love, they know
that
doesn't matter, they are for eternity.'

‘I hope nothing awful will happen to them in Italy. I wonder where they are now, at this very moment.'

 

 

 

 

At this very moment Sefton and Harvey were on the bridge, the long high famous bridge which so many persons, including some distinguished ones, had committed suicide by leaping from. The sun was shining from a cloudless sky upon the deep valley, the slopes densely covered with cypresses and umbrella pines, the dark awful chasm, the glimpse far on of the river and the ruined Roman bridge. The immobility, the silence, the solitude. The two observers were alone on the bridge. Harvey had informed Sefton (who knew all this already) about its date, its suicides, the town, its duomo, its handsome square, its war damage and its connection with Crivelli. They had reached the town by a linkage of buses that morning, established themselves at a hotel, and then come straight to the bridge. As for the promise to delay their own marriage for a year, they gave it readily. (A ruling about chastity would have been another matter.) They were so intensely happy with each other, what after all was a year in the eternity of their love. They were also very satisfied with the acquisition of Clement. Sefton had worried very much about Louise's particular grief about Aleph, into which Sefton saw more deeply than others. Sefton had her own grief about Aleph and her own anxiety about Moy. She had had discussions with Harvey about Moy, and they had decided henceforth, tactfully, to
look after
Moy. It almost began to seem then that Moy was their child. Other children they talked of too.

They had walked across the bridge to the far side and were looking down at the trees below, the rounded green balls of the pines, and the elegant darker green spears of the cypresses which seemed almost black in the fading afternoon light. They had been discussing suicide, why on earth people did it and how they did it. This was a subject which always made Sefton think about Lucas. She had made the connection, instinctively, when first occasionally, then more often, she came to him for tutorials. Studying her teacher she discerned something extreme to which she could not easily give a name, something ruthless or reckless, something desperate. Of course she heard him much spoken of, but when her opinion was asked she had little to say. Very early in her dealing with him she grasped what was required of her. She was to sit quietly, to listen attentively, when asked a question to answer carefully, not to say anything hasty, vague or muddled, but to give a clear and definite reply, daring, if need be, to be in the wrong. When, in speaking to her, Lucas paused, Sefton was to intuit whether this pause was an interval in his thinking or an invitation to her to speak. When castigated (for a ‘howler' or evident stupidity or failure to do her ‘prep') she was not to exclaim ‘So sorry!' or ‘Oh dear!', but simply to lower her head slightly. No laughing was to occur, and of course no chat or general or personal remarks before, after, or during the session. An ironical remark by Lucas, if not a reproof, might elicit a faint smile. An equally brief smile might appear at departure, not arrival. When coming and when going Sefton bowed and Lucas nodded. During this period between them, that is on her side, a vast absolutely secret structure of unspoken emotion and repressed joy and fear had come into being. Herein Sefton had built up a picture of Lucas's character, or part of his character, a profound part. About his sex life, if any, she did not reflect. Not that she assumed there was none, but it was not her business. She felt a deep sorrow, a deep wound within him. When he had said to her, at the end of their last meeting, ‘I shall be going away for a time,' she instantly conjectured that he might mean that he was going to kill himself. But she spoke of this to no one. She treasured, and would always treasure, the only endearment she had ever received from him. ‘Goodbye, dear Sefton.'

The swift paths of thought had, in a few seconds, led Sefton far away from the bridge, away from Harvey, into the now so utterly intensified and unfathomable mystery of Lucas. She was looking away back across the bridge where still no one had appeared to join them. She became aware of a movement beside her, a shadow fell. She turned sharply. Harvey was above her with one knee upon the parapet. For a black moment she thought that he was going over the edge. He drew up the other knee, and pressing upon the parapet with his right hand, stood up. Sefton remained perfectly still, not uttering a sound. He began to walk. She watched paralysed, icy. Then she began to walk, at his slow pace, about ten paces behind him, so as not to be visible from the corner of his eye. About the middle of the bridge he stopped for a moment, put a foot forward, then hesitated. Sefton stood still, aware of her open mouth, her trembling, the violence of her heart. He continued to walk, slowly. She followed. Time passed. The pines and cypresses on the far side, which had been invisible, came slowly into view. She thought, or remembered later thinking, he will fall at the last moment,
he will not be able to get down, he will fall
. The woodland came closer, the terrible presence of the chasm receded, the end of the bridge was in view. At last, though still before him, the trees were nearer. When he reached the end of the parapet he stopped. Sefton moved forward, taking long quiet strides, then began to run. As she reached him he bent his knees and put one hand on the parapet. She thought he was going to spring; but he sat, and then slithered down the wall into her arms. They walked in silence off the bridge, onto the path which led back into the town. There was a seat. They sat down. Sefton leaned forward, holding her head in her hands.

‘Sefton, I'm sorry, don't be cross with me – '

Sefton lifted her head, now pressing her hands to her tearful eyes. ‘Never, never, never do anything like that again!'

‘Of course I won't, there isn't anything like that to do anyway. You're not going to faint, are you?'

‘You are – I don't know what you are – '

‘A wicked monster. I'm sorry!'

‘Did you plan it beforehand?'

‘No. I imagined it beforehand. But I didn't intend to do it till I did it, and then I
had
to.'

‘You didn't have to because Bellamy dared you. And now to impress me – '

‘It was rather to impress myself. It was a kind of homeopathy.'

‘You jumped down. You must have hurt your foot again.'

‘You held me, it didn't knock the ground, it's been getting better and better. I felt if I did this it would complete the cure.'

‘You are
mad
. You nearly destroyed yourself and me.'

‘You know – I've only just thought – if I hadn't taken Bellamy's dare I would have been in Florence all that time, and I might never have discovered you – '

‘Oh shut up. Let's get away from here.'

They walked back slowly arm-in-arm. ‘There won't be a
passeggiata
, I'm afraid, not in this weather, but we can sit in the café and admire the square. You do forgive me?'

‘I'll think it over!'

But Harvey was wrong, there was a
passeggiata.
The people of the little town were walking together, round and round the square. Quickly, his arm round Sefton's waist, he pulled her into the slow crowd. They moved slowly, as in a march, as if in a great demonstration or a religious procession, carried along by the flow of people, by their physical pressure, pushed, brushed, gently jostled. There was a soft murmur of voices, like distant birds, like the sound of silence. Some resolute stalwarts walking in the opposed direction stared, smiled, sleeves brushed sleeves, hands brushed hands. Beautiful faces appeared, joyful faces, inquisitive faces, friendly faces, dejected bitter faces, faces like masks with round empty mouths and eyes. Harvey held Sefton closely to him, his thigh against her thigh, as if their adjacent legs had grown together. Harvey had cut his curling yellowish hair a little shorter, Sefton had grown her wild reddish hair a little longer. She was almost as tall as Harvey. They felt that they resembled each other, they were twins, as, crushed together, they turned and gazed into each other's faces, their lips parted in a dazed smile of joy. Some Germans, sitting in the café, voted them the handsomest couple.

Moy had secretly carried with her, in a large bag in Clement's car, the big conical stone with the golden lichen runes upon it. As soon as she had heard that Bellamy had not sold his cottage and that she was to go and stay there with Clement and Louise, she had planned to have another try, perhaps a last try, to bring the lichen stone back to its place on the hillside beside its friend the rock from which she had so unkindly separated it. She had lately, just before the news about their visit to the cottage, had a dream about the stone, that it had escaped from the room and was walking down the stairs, that she had followed it and found it scratching at the front door. She had opened the front door and watched it walk away down the street. After that, in her dream, she had terribly regretted letting it go out alone into the streets of London, and had run out trying to find it, running to and fro through all the nearby streets in vain.

Clement and Louise had gone on saying to Moy and to each other how very much she was going to enjoy being beside the sea. She was given the pretty attic room with the loveliest view. She had rocks to climb on, pools to investigate, stones to pick up. There might even, she was told, be seals. All this, thought Clement and Louise, and Bellamy, would divert her mind from recent shocks and sorrows. However, it was not so. Of course she did climb over the rocks and look at the tiny creatures racing about and hiding in the pools. She also looked at the stones, but so far (Bellamy noticed this) had not picked up any to bring into the house. The presence of so many things which ought to have delighted her and been her friends brought home to Moy how little delight she could now feel and how alienated she now was from all the beings to which she had once felt so close. She had already noticed before leaving home that the curious powers which had once alarmed her had now been withdrawn. The stones in her bedroom no longer moved, there were no more rebellions, or things coming obediently to her hand. They lay now inert, her things, no longer related to her by mysterious ties. Moy connected the fading of her fey powers with something natural in her growing up. She was not surprised. But she was also distressed, even frightened, by the loss of contact with innumerable entities whose relationship with her she had taken for granted. Perhaps this ‘dead' feeling was also brought on by an intensification of her old secret sorrow. Perhaps one day this sorrow might end. But she did not think it would end or see how it could end.