The Red Door (78 page)

I say to him in his Heaven: Unfair one, you have betrayed me. You have taken from me not only my gold and my daughter but also my language. You have taken the side of the young and the unjust
and for that you shall surely perish.

And surely I hear him saying: I will resurrect you. I shall perfect you again on my perpetual journey. I shall raise you from the dead again in another guise and you will be better than you ever
were. But nevertheless I hear in his voice a certain dislike, as if he grudges me life, as if I spoil his lucidities.

But if he does not give me his measure of fairness he will have failed and it will destroy him. In another court he will receive his justice. He will die because of his indifference. For he has
taught me to demand the beautiful words, the words that will justify my existence, and I must have them, grey robed as I am in this beautiful place where the single ones confront me from their
singularity and I return to them my fruitful because broken muse.

I am waiting here in the middle of the maze having paid the man his shilling. It took me some time to get to the centre past blind alleys, diversions, past a little capped man
with his son, but always keeping my eye on the white clock at the centre. I know that I am going to die here for there would be no other reason to invite me. And I don’t even know who wrote
the note. It could be my husband, who, continually acting Hamlet, thinks I am Gertrude. On the other hand it could be my son who wants my money. But the handwriting was not theirs. On the other
hand they would be careful to disguise it.

Once he came home from the theatre and stabbed at my then boy friend through the bedroom curtain but Eric was lucky enough to escape unharmed except for a slight abrasion on the right buttock.
My husband later tolerantly told me that he had walked off stage and still found himself in the play walking through the streets, feeling as if he was carrying a rapier at his side. Naturally it
was his mother who destroyed him. She always wanted him to be a girl and brought him up on mirrors and dolls. He is insanely jealous and has never forgiven me for Eric: and Eric hasn’t
either, not with a badge on his right buttock from a phantasmal rapier.

All this hasn’t helped our son much. He is always brooding in a saturnine way, spending enormous amounts of money, driving fast cars towards the sea. My husband tells him that he is
looking for Elsinore but I think he is insecure and is looking for the womb. He hates me as well and thinks me flabby, stupid and insincere. He also doesn’t like his father much and the
feeling is returned.

On the other hand it might be Eric. He might be Eric. He might have taken up with someone else though he is not really the masterful type. I had to make all the running after meeting him at the
party and he is terrified of Richard. He is blonde and wickedly beautiful and he looks sometimes as weak as blancmange.

So at any moment I will see one of these three coming towards me with a sword or a gun. It is interesting to ask myself why I came but there is no reason. Perhaps I want some new sensation?
Perhaps I want to know who is interested enough to send me a note? After all I am not so young as I was: my mirror tells me so. Perhaps the note is in my own handwriting? I could disguise it,
couldn’t I?

It was quite odd about Richard’s walk home through the play. He swore that he saw courtiers standing at bus stops in their reds and yellows like people on playing cards. My son of course
thinks he is mad but who isn’t nowadays? And if he knew what his grandmother had done he would have some pity. But the young have no pity now. They are remorseless and sensation-mongering.
Their favourite painter is Bacon whom my husband likes. He would like to paper the bedroom with him, all those glass cages and soundless screams and popes in their regalia.

Perhaps on the other hand Eric wants to kill me. Perhaps he is so terrified of Richard and what he might do that he has decided to kill me. For I won’t let him go. But that doesn’t
explain why I am here. Why I am here, I think, is because someone has asked me. Someone has enough will-power and decisiveness to ask me to do something. It is as simple as that. I am being offered
a part in the play and this is my audition, in the centre of a maze. I had a curious feeling when coming through the maze as if it were trying to upset the shape of my brain cells. But I defeated
it and here I am staring up at the white clock which hangs like a bubble against the blue sky. I am sitting on a bench waiting, my red gloves obediently beside me hanging down like those of an
exhausted boxer. For we do exhaust ourselves, don’t we? We eat ourselves up.

I decided that I would wear my lemon suit, the one I used to wear when I was young. So that if it is Richard he will enter that world again. On the other hand if it is Eric it will be a joke at
his expense. If it is my son – our son – let him stab quickly. I feel guilty towards him for I have given him nothing. And neither has Richard. He is wandering about on the face of the
earth, driving from here to there without reason, looking for the sea.

It’s quite calm here. The sunlight is falling helplessly around me. I am helpless inside it. My lemon dress composes a painting. I attract the light and shade towards me. I compose it.
There is no one else in the maze. I hear no one outside it though there were some idiots there some time ago laughing and playing tricks on each other. I could hear their voices echoing. They
seemed to belong to another world, perhaps the real world, but if so why should their voices sound so hollow? They didn’t find the maze difficult. That is what is so extraordinary about
them.

I should like to have powder and lipstick with me and a small table so that in all this azure I could arrange myself. But that of course is impossible. Everything is impossible in this fifth
rate country composed of ice and suicide. To which character should I give my signature? And even now is Richard striding towards me, paranoically angry, cloak flying? He always has this irritating
habit of looking white-faced. Eric bites his nails.

In any case I did not recognise the handwriting on the note. Perhaps it’s a joke? I don’t know.

Listen. I can hear footsteps. His mother was a hellish woman. She destroyed him utterly. He was never any good to me, no wonder I took Eric. He is a lesbian, I think. The footsteps are coming
closer. Soon they will be here. I can hear him trying to find his way about, hesitating. Of course he was always hesitant. He is turning. He is stopping. He is thinking. He has found the way. My
heart is beating and I am waiting for him, my legs crossed. He is standing in front of me. I rise. I hold my powder compact in my hand. I reach out towards him. I know he is going to kill me.
‘Gertrude,’ I cry. He raises his hand. His lips are red with lipstick, his lined face looks vaguely into mine as into a mirror. I hate her. She destroyed me. I am a fragment in her
mirror. It is better to lie down here in the middle of the maze under the clock’s ticking. But I strike first. She falls. I walk out. So that is why I kept this appointment. So that is why I
am wearing not lemon but black. The whore betrayed me. So that is why I hear cheering as I leave the maze. The idiotic groundlings are throwing their apple cores away and the earth is green again.
I feel the swish of the velvet and the rapier at my side. I shall walk towards the rocks. I shall drive towards the sea. I shall hear again the sound of the sea.

She is sitting beside me wearing a pair of lilac gloves, and the reason for that of course is that her left hand is unringed. I can’t remember where we met (I think it
was probably in a pub) but in any case I am drunk though that does not prevent the operation of the sleepless crystal of my mind. There is a large hearth in the room and also a large dog which is
mercilessly crunching bones under the wooden table. She is wearing tall leather boots. There are lines round her eyes.

She has a mother, so she tells me, ancient and tyrannical, who is at this moment lying asleep in her queenly rigid bed like one of those classical marbly women from Racine’s plays. I know
it is because of her that she has not married. She is telling me the story of her life and I seem to have heard it before over and over in some other place at some other time, and in any case I am
drunk. I was drunk when I walked with her here under the autumnal stars past red kiosks and letter boxes with their slitted mouths.

The dog is crunching bones in the corner.

The old woman is presumably asleep in her white classical bed. The stars do not know our ruins and our pains. The darkness slowly crunches them.

I propose to myself a future. I shall say I will marry her but only on one condition, that she leaves behind her the old woman to whom she is bound by veins and bones, resignation and
despair.

I see in front of me clearly the battle being waged, the house emptying itself of her, the roots being torn up, the steady crunching, the moans, the cries.

I shall propose to her a vision of freedom, the two of us together radiant among white cookers, classical curtains, carelessnesses and affluences, no ancestral mournings, all the ceilings
innocent and new. I shall advance these ideas out of eloquence for at least I have that. She will lay her head on my shoulder (she is doing it now), I am aware of her flesh, she of mine. We are
like children in a story of Hans Anderson, blue boots, red cheeks, but no grannies. And the barenesses of autumn.

I shall speak of affection, an island of two people without footprints. Attracted by my vision she will fight for her own survival, tear the furniture up by the black roots, excavate and wash
her ravaged psychic landscape, hanging it up on ropes between poles. She will be standing outside a church on a windy day watching herself in angel white and carrying red roses, the photographer
kneeling and firing at her. All shall be calm, the honeymoon in a hotel entirely new and fresh.

Ah, how well I can speak, though the crystal is always listening to myself speaking, watching her listening, aware of innocences gone sour, of vulnerabilities, of desert places veined with
blue.

The dog is crunching the bones under the table.

The sky bears its brown fruit.

The fireplace is huge and draughty. It is very silent in the lounge except for the white bubble of the electric clock whose tick one can very faintly hear.

I propose such a pure world as she has thought (and I too) has gone forever. We will be together, unaffected by ironies in a house new as a bone. The wardrobes will be our own, the tables our
own, the chairs our own and they will exist in such a lyrical light, unaffected by the past, the ‘things in themselves’ without fingerprints. She will arrive there, a psychic conqueror,
a new woman, she will stand upright as in the Sunday Supplements assessing furniture and carpets. I shall be the one on whom she leans. I shall exist for her in a green field.

(In fact as I think these thoughts, or at least as the crystal thinks them, I am myself almost persuaded in such a possibility, such a universe.)

I propose again that when she has seen all this, when she has apparently entered the promised land, cleared of the lumber of ancestry, when she has fought her way into the imagined Eden as
innocent as an advertisement, when she is standing easy and ungloved and new by the cooker on which she will willingly cook all my meals, I shall disappear at that very moment, I shall withdraw
into the world which I knew before I ever met her, before I proposed these things, the ambiguous world in which I usually live.

And yet why do I feel all this, why do I have these thoughts, why does the crystal send out these terrible rays so that even now as I place my hand as if by accident on her knee and then on her
crossed thighs, I look down barbaric vistas? Why will the crystal emanations never cease? So that as I look at her I think of myself looking at her and I hear the large dog crunching the bones
under the table (ancestral and scarred), I see the furniture closing on those innocences. I see the wardrobes and chairs taking over mastery as if we were involved in a war with them. And it is not
because I am drunk. Not at all. I am sober at the very heart of me. The crystal never gets drunk. It is not appearance, it is the thing in itself. The crystal, tired of ennui, wishes to play. It
wishes to play games. It wishes to make faces, to dance, to be gay in a cold way. It wishes not to be itself, and yet it cannot unwish its own existence.

She is leaning towards me. I hear the ancestral voices. I wish to love her. Perhaps I shall. Perhaps I shall be permitted. Perhaps the pathos will allow it.

Perhaps if I should look just once into eyes that are different from mine, that do not reflect me, I shall not hear the eternal crunching. I shall not see the autumn stars which are so naked and
so old! Perhaps the crystal shall cease transmitting, shall lie down at last with its own bone, if only I look into those eyes, if only I lose myself.

Let me look.

Ah!

He stood on the railway-station platform at midnight waiting for the train.

Every night he came and waited for it, or rather waited for it to stop. Every night the train sped past with lighted carriages in which he saw as in a series of moving paintings dramatic events
framed – a murder, a wedding, a transaction. But the train did not stop and he had to wait till the night became the reasonable day and the day gloomed into night again. But he suffered over
and over the pain of being separated from the illuminated events, their joy or terror.

Sometimes under the booming roof he would hear a voice which said: ‘This train will stop at Belsen and at Auschwitz, at Friedsville and Pascaiville. Passengers will leave their luggage at
the office where it says
KRAUT
in block letters.’

Visions came to him of a garden in which he had once worked, in the grounds of a huge castle. Under the trees he would frolic with Marguerite, who had long since left, high-heeled, with a
transistor that played incessantly in her left hand. Chewing gum, she swayed to the music. Where was she now? He imagined that she was a dancer somewhere or a striptease artist in some sleazy club.
Anyway, she had left no address when she set out into the wide world with painted toe-nails, indomitable heart-shaped face and her transistor.