And we had no clothes on. Like the Garden of Eden. And then, out of the blue, down came that dog – and exploded, I tell you, literally exploded.’ She threw out her hands in a violent gesture. ‘Dog’s blood from head to foot. We were drenched – but drenched! In spite of which this imbecile goes and writes me a letter.’ She opened her bag and produced it. ‘Imagining I’d read it, I suppose. As though nothing had happened, as though we were still in the Garden of Eden. I always told him he was a fool.
There!’ She handed the letter to Staithes. ‘You open it and see what the idiot has to say. Something witty, no doubt; something airy and casual; humorously wondering why I took it into my funny little head to go away.’ Then, noticing that Mark was still holding the letter unopened, ‘But why don’t you read it?’ she asked.
‘Do you really want me to?’
‘Of course. Read it aloud. Read it with expression.’ She rolled the r derisively.
‘Very well, then.’ He tore open the envelope and unfolded the thin sheets. ‘“I went to look for you at the hotel,”’ he read out slowly, frowning over the small and hurried script. ‘“You were gone – and it was like a kind of death.”’
‘Ass!’ commented Helen.
‘“It’s probably too late, probably useless; but I feel I must try to tell you in this letter some of the things I meant to say to you, yesterday evening, in words. In one way it’s easier – for I’m inept when it comes to establishing a purely personal contact with another human being. But in another way, it’s much more difficult; for these written words will just be words and no more, will come to you, floating in a void, unsupported, without the life of my physical presence.”’
Helen gave a snort of contemptuous laughter. ‘As though that would have been a recommendation!’ She drank some more wine.
‘“Well, what I wanted to tell you,”’ Staithes read on, ‘“was this: that suddenly (it was like a conversion, like an inspiration) while you were kneeling there yesterday on the roof, after that horrible thing had happened . . .”’
‘He means the dog,’ said Helen. ‘Why can’t he say so?’
‘“. . . suddenly I realized . . .”’ Mark Staithes broke off. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I really can’t go on.’
‘Why not? I insist on your going on,’ she cried excitedly.
He shook his head. ‘I’ve got no right!’
‘But I’ve given you the right.’
‘Yes, I know. But he hasn’t.’
‘What has he got to do with it? Now that I’ve received the letter . . .’
‘But it’s a love-letter.’
‘A love-letter?’ Helen repeated incredulously, then burst out laughing. ‘That’s too good!’ she cried. ‘That’s really sublime! Here, give it to me.’ She snatched the letter out of his hand. ‘Where are we? Ah, here! “. . . kneeling on the roof after that horrible thing had happened, suddenly I realized that I’d been living a kind of outrageous lie towards you!”’
She declaimed the words rhetorically and to the accompaniment of florid gesticulations. ‘“I realized that in spite of all the elaborate pretence that it was just a kind of detached irresponsible amusement, I really loved you.” He really lo-o-oved me,’ she repeated, drawing the word into a grotesque caricature of itself. ‘Isn’t that wonderful? He really lo-o-oved me.’ Then, turning round in her chair, ‘Hugh!’ she called across the room.
‘Helen, be quiet!’
But the desire, the need to consummate the outrage was urgent within her.
She shook off the restraining hand that Staithes had laid on her arm, shouted Hugh’s name again and, when they all turned towards her, ‘I just wanted to tell you he really lo-o-oved me,’ she said, waving the letter.
‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up!’
‘I most certainly won’t shut up,’ she retorted, turning back to Mark. ‘Why shouldn’t I tell Hugh the good news? He’ll be delighted, seeing how much he lo-o-oves me himself. Don’t you, Hughie?’ She swung back again, and her face was flushed and brilliant with excitement. ‘Don’t you?’ Hugh made no answer, but sat there pale and speechless, looking at the floor.
‘Of course you do,’ she answered for him. ‘In spite of all appearances to the contrary. Or rather,’ she emended, uttering a little laugh, ‘in spite of all disappearances – seeing that it was always invisible, that love of yours. Oh yes, Hughie darling, definitely invisible. But still . . . still, in spite of all disappearances to the contrary, you do lo-o-ove me, don’t you? Don’t you?’ she insisted, trying to force him to answer her, ‘don’t you?’
Hugh rose to his feet and, without speaking a word, almost ran out of the room.
‘Hugh!’ Caldwell shouted after him, ‘Hugh!’ There was no answer. Caldwell looked round at the others. ‘I think perhaps one ought to see that he’s all right,’ he said, with the maternal solicitude of a publisher who sees a first-rate literary property rushing perhaps towards suicide. ‘One never knows.’ And jumping up he hurried after Hugh. The door slammed.
There was a moment’s silence. Then, startlingly, Helen broke into laughter. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Herr Giesebrecht,’ she said turning to the young German. ‘It’s just a little bit of English family life. Die Familie im Wohnzimmer, as we used to learn at school. Was tut die Mutter? Die Mutter spielt Klavier. Und was tut der Vater? Der Vater sitzt in einem Lehnstuhl und raucht seine Pfeife. Just that, Herr Giesebrecht, no more. Just a typical bourgeois family.’
‘Bourgeois,’ the young man repeated, and nodded gravely. ‘You say better than you know.’
‘Do I?’
‘You are a wictim,’ he went on, very slowly, and separating word from word, ‘a wictim of capitalist society. It is full of wices . . .’
Helen threw back her head and laughed again more loudly than before; then, controlling herself with an effort, ‘You mustn’t think I’m laughing at you,’ she gasped. ‘I think you’re being sweet to me – extraordinarily decent. And probably you’re quite right about capitalist society. Only somehow at this particular moment – I don’t know why – it seemed rather . . . rather . . .’ The laughter broke out once more. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘We must be going,’ said Mark, and rose from his chair. The young German also got up and came across the room towards them. ‘Good-night, Helen.’
‘Good-night, Mark. Good-night, Mr Giesebrecht. Come and see me again, will you? I’ll behave better next time.’
He returned her smile and bowed. ‘I will come whenever you wish,’ he said.
CHAPTER XXII
December 8th 1926
MARK LIVED IN a dingy house off the Fulham Road. Dark, brown brick with terra-cotta trimmings; and, within, patterned linoleum; bits of red Axminster carpet; wallpapers of ochre sprinkled with bunches of cornflowers, of green, with crimson roses; fumed oak chairs and tables; rep curtains; bamboo stands supporting glazed blue pots. The hideousness, Anthony reflected, was so complete, so absolutely unrelieved, that it could only have been intentional. Mark must deliberately have chosen the ugliest surroundings he could find. To punish himself, no doubt – but why, for what offence?
‘Some beer?’
Anthony nodded.
The other opened a bottle, filled a single glass; but himself did not drink.
‘You still play, I see,’ said Anthony, pointing in the direction of the upright piano.
‘A little,’ Mark had to admit. ‘It’s a consolation.’
The fact that the Matthew Passion, for example, the Hammerklavier Sonata, had had human authors was a source of hope. It was just conceivable that humanity might some day and somehow be made a little more John-Sebastian-like. If there were no Well-Tempered Clavichord, why should one bother even to wish for revolutionary change?
‘Turning one kind of common humanity into common humanity of a slightly different kind – well, if that’s all that revolution can do, the game isn’t worth the candle.’
Anthony protested. For a sociologist it was the most fascinating of all games.
‘To watch or to play?’
‘To watch, of course.’
A spectacle bottomlessly comic in its grotesqueness, endlessly varied. But looking closely, one could detect the uniformities under the diversity, the fixed rules of the endlessly shifting game.
‘A revolution to transform common humanity into common humanity of another variety. You find it horrifying. But that’s just what I’d like to live long enough to see. Theory being put to the test of practice. To detect, after your catastrophic reform of everything, the same old uniformities working themselves out in a slightly different way – I can’t imagine anything more satisfying. Like logically inferring the existence of a new planet and then discovering it with the telescope. As for producing more John Sebastians . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You might as well imagine that revolution will increase the number of Siamese twins.’
That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to common-place people is high; in reality, very low.
‘Books are opium,’ said Mark.
‘Precisely. That’s why it’s doubtful if there’ll ever be such a thing as proletarian literature. Even proletarian books will deal with exceptional proletarians. And exceptional proletarians are no more proletarian than exceptional bourgeois are bourgeois. Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth. Hence those geniuses of fiction, those leaders and dukes and millionaires. People who are completely conditioned by circumstances – one can be desperately
