The Last Houseparty, page 17
“But suppose that’s sorted out, and this business with Czechoslovakia, and so on, there’ll be something else, won’t there, and then something else? Professor Blech says war is inevitable. I know Harry thinks so too. A lot of us are half looking forward to it.”
“Then you are half deluded. ‘To turn like swimmers into cleanness leaping,’ is that it? Rupert Brooke was lucky to die as he did before he could see, as I saw, the vileness of that cleanness. And this war will be worse. You are a soldier, Vincent. They have taught you the effects of a gas attack on troops, no doubt. Have they said anything to you about the effects of gas on a civilian population?”
“That’s not really our business, sir.”
“It is our business, every man jack of us. Your mother lives just behind Harrods, I seem to remember?”
Sir Charles, as a friend of the family, may well have been aware of the touchiness of Vincent’s relationship with his mother—the cause, according to Zena at least, of his stammer—but he probably only brought her into the argument to deploy the rhetorician’s trick of particularising the general. Vincent nodded, perhaps a little sullenly, but did not otherwise react.
“That is precisely where the gas canisters would fall,” said Sir Charles. “The Luftwaffe would of course wait for a prevailing south-west wind. No doubt your mother would be out here, in comparative safety, before the attack began. I take her only as an example. There are many, many soldiers whose mothers and wives and children have no such bolt-hole.”
“I meant …”
“You meant that preparations against such an attack are the concern of the civilian authorities, and you take it for granted that they will be effective. It is true that we have a Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence in the new Cabinet—the egregious Inskip. Gas masks are being issued, effective against types of gas developed twenty years ago. But reliable informants inside Germany tell me that new gases have been manufactured which will penetrate the filters of these gas masks, and others which will not even need to be breathed, because they are fatal on mere contact with human skin. So, Vincent, we are faced with these alternatives. Either we must develop counter-measures of the same horror, and then persuade Herr Hitler that we would not hesitate to use them, or else we must arrange matters so that the Luftwaffe does not come. Can you believe, even had we time to catch up in this hellish race, that a nation such as ours, with its sentimental attachment to notions of human decency and the fellowship of man, could be persuaded to embark on the former course? Would you yourself not draw the line before you reached that point?”
“No, sir.”
“No?”
“I don’t see it matters how you k-kill people, if you’re g-going to k-kill them at all.”
“We are talking about the civilian population of great cities.”
“They’re for it anyway, sir, don’t you think?”
Sir Charles accepted the break in the chain of his argument as if it had not happened.
“If there is a war, certainly,” he said. “That is a further reason why there must be no war. The salvation of this nation and empire depends on the avoidance of conflict with Germany, and that in turn depends on our political will. There is no such will, anywhere in the nation. There is no demand for war, no expectation of peace. We are in a general stupor, hypnotised by the approaching monster. We need a voice to wake us, and that voice must be heard in Parliament. For, mark you, under our present leadership the ship of state will not sail gallantly and deliberately into the battle line. It will drift, pilotless, chartless, to all intents unsteered. Our task—mine and my friends’—is to see that that does not happen. The issue is so finely balanced that a very few votes and voices will make the difference. This is a great moment in our history, Vincent. I need young Harry to join me in the effort. He has made it plain to me that he will talk his decision over with you. Earlier I used the image of the primitive tribesman who puts his soul into safe keeping with some rock or tree so that he can walk through the snares of the enchanter unbewitched. I am asking you to release him so that he can join me in my battle. Well?”
“He’ll make up his own mind, sir.”
“Of course he will. But making up one’s mind is a process. One does it in part by converse with friends. What will you say to him?”
“This chap—the one who’s putting up the c-capital—suppose Harry doesn’t like the line you’re taking—in a c-couple of years, I mean …”
Sir Charles sighed.
“The question you are attempting to ask is the oldest in the world,” he said. “It can never be answered because those who ask it mean a different thing from those whom they ask. You wish to know whether, in accepting an arrangement such as I outline, Harry will be subtly compelled to support causes in which he does not believe, to connive in stratagems which he knows to be corrupt, to work with allies who may be vicious, or stupid, or potential traitors to the nation. Whether, in Shakespeare’s phrase, he must subdue his nature to what he works in, like the dyer’s hand. For make no mistake, these are indeed the materials with which he must work. The nature of man, and therefore of politics, decree that it shall be so. But I, in attempting to formulate an answer to your question, am myself asking whether Harry has it in him to become a handler of such dye-stuff. For there is no escaping this, Vincent. The cloth is there, wherewith we must be clothed. There is an end to running naked through the meadows of childhood. The cloth is on the loom, being constantly woven. Every minute of the day, like it or not, the shuttle is rattling between the threads. It must be given its colour. The question is, by whose hand?”
As he spoke Sir Charles turned and stretched his own hand forward, pale in the shadowy light, the long fingers slightly crooked to hold an invisible sphere. At the same time his marred but formidable head stared directly at Vincent, riddling him with his gaze. Vincent gazed back, unanswering, not apparently seeing Sir Charles, still the cadet on parade enduring the onslaught of words as if he were a thing as insensate as the butt of the rifle round which his left hand curls. At last Sir Charles turned away to face once more along the frontage of the house.
“Look,” he said quietly. “There she is again.”
Now Vincent responded, turning his head also. The terrace was barred with strong light streaming from the open doors and windows of the morning room, but the shutters of the Great Hall were closed, as were those of the rooms beyond the dance floor. The noise that emanated in music and chatter from the dance seemed integral with the electric light, so that the moon and the line of pale lamps along the balustrade became by contrast the markers of realms of silence. Two-thirds of the way up the tower that shouldered out at the far end of the frontage appeared another such realm, a faint window, the feebleness of whose illumination made it seem yet more peaceful than the silences of either lamp or moon. In its rectangle, standing presumably on the thick inner sill, was the silhouette of the child. Vincent gazed at the shape, perhaps not even seeing it, his personality having undergone that change, that apparent gathering together and focusing of energies, with which he tended to confront mechanical problems.
“Well, Vincent,” said Sir Charles. “I can only ask you to do your best for Harry.”
4
What was the event—what is any event—actually like? The form of the question, the need to use a word such as “like”, suggests the difficulty of exact answer. In the succeeding seconds the event has begun its new existence as a memory of the participants, and thus become something different. That memory, should the participants choose to summon it up, will each time have undergone both diminutions and additions, and should they attempt to speak of it must now endure wrenching transformations, not merely because of the inadequacies of language, but because it must be reorganised into probably false coherences in order to be sayable at all. In something the same way the sleeping mind perceives images, static or brief spasms of action, while another part of what we are forced to think of as the same mind attempts to improvise a plot, or story-line, in which these images will more or less make sense. The dual process is the dream, but on waking this dream can only be recalled by the secondary element, the story-line, and the primary images which were the heart of the dream will have to be demoted into incidents, or mere frills and curlicues of the fancy, irrelevant to the basic architecture of plot—a plot that never existed in its own right. There are monsters in our museums, skeletons pieced together and given plaster flesh and painted skin and then taken by visitors for accurate portrayals of the creatures that paddled the ancient swamps, until some maverick palaeontologist reinterprets the crushed and exiguous fossil-finds and one of the monsters discovers that it was never that shape at all.
And what if memory fails—is overlaid perhaps by other and more potent memories or else, as in this case, is almost immediately blanked out by the trauma of the event itself? The event still occurred. The tree did fall in the desert, though there was no one to see or hear it. And there are still fossils in the mind, though even more exiguous. For memory is not a single store. Parts of both body and mind possess autonomous resources of recall, so that the tongue, and not the mouth, appears to remember of its own accord that last mouthful of coffee left somewhere about the house undrunk in its mug. Remaining with these separate oral memories, take the case of a thirteen-year-old girl at a bleakly jolly boarding school, towards the end of the war. Since, in theory, a woman’s main task in wartime is to bind up the wounds of heroes (other resources for hero-comfort not being teachable at such establishments) the girls have lessons in first aid. They are shown how, and then set to bandage each other’s arms or legs. The trained nurse who has given the demonstration has made it so quick and easy, the roll of bandage unwinding from her hand to wrap crooks and curves and hollows smooth as snowfall, but the girls soon discover how different is the practice of life from any demonstration. Strange loops and loosenings beset them, ends that unwind as fast as the opposite ends wind up. Two hands are not enough to control these writhings, so mouths come unhygienically into play.
A hand rises.
“Please, miss—something’s wrong with Sally.”
The voice is half alarmed, half amused by an event dramatic enough to provide an afternoon’s gossip and guesswork. Something is indeed wrong with Sally. Bandagers stop their weaving, wounded sit up to crane, nurse and class mistress wade through them to the child who is kneeling, upright, pale, unaware, shuddering as a nun might in her cell, pierced in the midst of prayer by the longed-for but still terrible visitation.
Sally wakes in the sick bay, knowing nothing since the moment of kneeling to bandage Louisa’s ankle. A letter from her dead stepfather is in the headmistress’s confidential file, explaining that owing to an unfortunate occurrence in Sally’s past care may need to be exercised in certain circumstances. Her friends are therefore instructed not to talk, either to her or to each other, about the episode—thus effectively extending its gossip value to almost a week. But Sally herself, in any case always a slightly isolated child, appears untouched by her new interestingness. Her central mind, that which seems to her to be the real and only Sally, has no communication with the small autonomous province of mouth-memory, despite that province’s power at a particular stimulus—the dry, dust-like, flavourless presence of cloth on lips and tongue—to put the whole empire of body and mind into trance.
One may be tempted to dig where such an unusual fossil has protruded from the strata. For one reason or another one may become obsessed with a need to know the true configuration of the monster. Some years later Sally Quintain sits in the visitor’s chair of a leather-smelling office and listens to a fat, bald man talking in a foreign accent. She is very pale, but not as chalk-white as she was when she lay in trance on the couch beneath the window, and her features declare her true age, just over twenty-one, though half an hour ago they had reverted to the almost boneless softness of a child’s.
“The trauma is evidently very deep,” says Dr Fettil. “I woke you deliberately. I would not recommend proceeding further by hypnosis. You have a very deep-seated trauma which you are anxious to conceal.”
“I’m not! I want to know.”
“That is superficial. I cannot by hypnosis force you to go against your fundamental inclinations. The proper way to proceed is to embark on a course of analysis, to enable you to recognise and come to terms with the nature of this trauma.”
“How long would that take?”
“It is impossible to say.”
“Guess.”
“Well, between one and three years.”
“I only want to know what happened. I don’t want to change myself or anything. I’m perfectly happy with myself as I am.”
“If you know what happened you will change yourself.”
“But … Didn’t I say anything? I feel as though I’d been through a mangle.”
“You told me about a dream.”
“Ah … the bear?”
“Yes.”
“What did I say? Listen, I know I have that dream, about once a month. I wake up sweating, absolutely rigid, but I can never remember what it was that frightened me. I used to shout out about a bear when I was small. Oh, come on. I’m paying you a lot of money. You might at least tell me my own dreams.”
Dr Fettil nods stolidly and consults his note-pad.
“You are in a cave by the sea,” he says. “You are lying on the sand and looking at the ripple-shadows on the roof. The Captain has left you, saying he will come back soon. Clearly the Captain is your father.”
“I don’t think I want explanations for the moment. Just the dream.”
“Very well. You lie for a long time in this cave, telling yourself how happy you are. After a while you are lying the other way round, and aware that the end of the cave is dark. You try to see the end wall, and you realise that the cave is much deeper than you thought. You become afraid of the darkness. You try to move, but you cannot. You are clutching your doll, but she puts her head into your mouth, so that you are unable to call out. A bear comes out of the darkness, standing on its hind legs. A black bear with a white head. It leans over you. Its head is a cauliflower. It puts up its hands and starts to remove its head.”
“I told you that?” whispers Sally.
“Yes. That is all, apart from some moanings and struggles.”
“I wasn’t going to believe you, you know … The Captain … He comes out of a book … There was water under trees somewhere, and light being thrown up … Yes, that’s when I wake up. It’s quite an ordinary nightmare until I see the cauliflower. He’s going to show me something underneath.”
“Miss Quintain, the nature of this dream and your own reaction to it reveals a serious and deep-seated trauma. Once more …”
“Do you think it’s connected with the other thing that happened? It might come from before, you know. My mother says I’ve always had nightmares, ever since I was tiny.”
“I cannot say without further analysis. The trauma itself may well pre-date that also. Your father …”
“No. I don’t want to know about any of that. It’s what happened outside me I want to know about, for purely practical reasons, not what happened inside me. I may be wrong, but …”
“You are wrong.”
“I’m sorry. Actually you’ve been quite a help. It won’t be money down the drain.”
“If you decide to proceed no further I propose to waive my fee.”
“Oh, no. Really, you mustn’t. I did tell you what I wanted and you agreed.”
“I have not supplied what you wanted.”
Sally, very pale still, smiles.
“But you’ve given me something else almost as good,” she says. “I’m going to teach myself to wake up as soon as I realise the Captain’s gone.”
“You will only push the trauma still deeper.”
“The deeper the better.”
IX
The sound of footsteps converged on the dark and winding stair, Miss Quintain climbing from the courtyard, Mr Mason coming carefully down from the clock room. There was no question of passing, so she turned into the chamber where the weights hung and waited. Only one weight in fact dangled there, nine feet up. The others were stacked against the far wall, and over them the bob of the pendulum swung to and fro on its fourteen-foot rod. Its tock filled the room, a steady beat every two seconds.
“Isn’t it marvellous to hear it going!” said Miss Quintain as Mr Mason stepped into the room. He looked pleased but did not smile. His gaze seemed to fluster her slightly, as though accusing her of entering his domain unasked. Indeed, when he spoke his words made it clear that he had deliberately descended to prevent her entering the upper sanctum, though at the same time he supplied a perfectly acceptable overt reason for this.
“Heard you coming,” he said. “Didn’t want to trouble you to climb all the way.”
“You shouldn’t have bothered. I’m perfectly spry,” she said.
Still, there was something not quite settled about her demeanour. Of course it could have been that this was normal, among people with whom she was familiar. The tightness, precision, control, were reserved for confrontations with strangers, and the relationship with Mr Mason was felt to have progressed beyond that. Alternatively she was discovering, as the weeks went by, something particular to that relationship and was not yet sure how to come to terms with it. He waited.
“I’ve got something I’d like you to read,” she said. “It’s rather long, but … it does tell you a bit about the fire, which might be a help, but that’s not really … You see, I want to have a talk with you, but I’d like you to read this first. It’s only fair. Do you mind?”
