Charlie had often enjoyed listening to his father talking about these things. Taken together, these anecdotes of his father and those Charlie had garnered for himself had formed a sort of composite picture of his father for him, had provided a fixed point from which to see him and understand him. But listening to his father as he died had pulled the pin away on that image, had somehow shattered it. Now when he drew these thoughts from his memory it was like picking bits of shrapnel from himself. Their familiar composition had been destroyed in the explosive experience of sitting in that death-room with his father. They had shifted into unfamiliar positions, no longer rested comfortably in his mind but rubbed and irritated there, barking against each thought, suppurating in his subconscious. Their former levity and ease of acceptance were the very things that made them seem alien now that their coherence had given way to a tunnel of doubt, to the dark hole blown in them by his father’s death. It was this dark void that Charlie was aware of facing him when he thought of his father’s life. It was this void he was concerned to penetrate, to follow wherever it led.
Did his father’s suffering have no meaning? It could have no meaning if everything else was to continue exactly as it had done. Was it simply to be accepted with the reflection that this was the way things were? Did a man’s life mean so little that it was not even to be acknowledged? A man had been destroyed through no fault of his own. He had been made to believe devoutly in his own worthlessness, in his personal failure, and he had been made to believe in it simply because he could not conform to the rules which had been set for him. Because he could not succeed in terms which were not his terms at all, the only terms allowed him had been those of utter failure. If this injustice was final, if nothing could be done to right it, then nothing was meaningful, nothing was worth while. Was that truly all there was to life, circuitous conversations, the fragments of gossip chapped into a pallid fleeting flame, people dying word by word, aimlessly, casually, in communal loneliness, while the canary chirped, and more coal was needed for the fire, and someone went out to the van for the wafers? Was there nothing more dynamic than this to connect those two images that haunted Charlies’ imagination: the image of one man peeled of flesh and illusions, a skeleton of bitter hopelessness, lying in a lonely room; and the image of two people somewhere in another room living in quiet content? For he knew that for anything to matter these two images must be made to meet, must fuse to one.
For anything to be worth while, for all of their lives to have any meaning, there must be something more to connect those two images than casual trivia. Their lives were somehow insufficient. Something different was needed, something that would acknowledge what had happened and transform their trivial lives into an expression of it.
Somehow, he did not know how, it had to happen. And it had to happen through him. For where else had his father’s suffering been registered except in himself? The mourners had come and gone, the obsequies were said and there had been no attempt to recognize the injustice his father had suffered. It might as well have been buried with him except that it had transmigrated to Charlie, now lived pent up in him as it had dwelt unrealized in his father. Only he could bring it into being.
He felt himself vaguely dangerous with its potential. As yet he could form no intention. The feeling was too vast and amorphous to admit of anything as finite as an aim.
He felt unknowingly that still desolation that each feels at some times in his life when he turns from pretending, evades the eyes of others and meets himself. It is as if you have passed through one of the strange concyclic circles of living, one of the secret doorways of the self, moss-grown with trivia so that the legend on the lintel is concealed and the chiselled enduring arch is hidden totally under the personal excrescences of your life so that you do not realize that this is a door through which all men must pass, a door made for all men to come to, mortared out of what all men are, and through which they may pass only one at a time. It may be much later before you realize that you are in a new place, have passed through many gates, and are come nearer to the final door behind which you wait with cup or knife to greet yourself. But from time to time in the press of hurrying intentions and talking friends and intermingling ambitions you glimpse yourself alone, fleshed in a private mystery, set out on a lonely road that none can travel with you. It is the same for all and different for each. In railway waiting-rooms, on late last buses, playing with their children, walking in the street, men find again the knowledge that was lost, hear news, come home to themselves alone. Commitments, demands, intentions, turn, grow, enfold, shut out the light, break suddenly and show, back-turned and deaf to your cries, the distant self, whose face you will only find at the final door. Voices of friend, brother, lover, call, here, there, near, far, this way, that, and suddenly fall silent. And you’re alone, where one footstep makes thunder in the dark.
Chapter 7
MRS WHITMORE GLIMPSED HERSELF IN THE FULL-LENGTH mirror as she passed. She paused automatically, making the ritual gestures of arranging her hair while at the same time being careful not to disturb its lacquered elegance. She noticed a wrinkle in her stocking that was like an omen of age. Putting down the small folder she was carrying, she eased up her dress, held it with her elbows, deftly damped her fingertips, and smoothed her left leg back to nylon youth. She shimmied her dress back into order, strafed herself with a last expert glance, and was about to turn away when she suddenly stopped, staring.
Something about herself arrested her, something indefinable. It was a feeling comparable to knowing that there was something fractionally out of place in her appearance. But she knew that her make-up was immaculate, her clothes in good taste, her jewellery in keeping. Her eyes looked back at her, echoing their own question. Slowly, faced with herself, she came to face the feeling. It had been with her for some time now, prowling the edges of her consciousness, as if waiting for her to admit it. Doing her household duties, she had sensed its presence on the other side of each activity, and she had kept it at bay with preoccupation. But it haunted the small, still moments of her daily life like a patient ghost that longed to be incarnated. It constantly threatened to intrude more positively into her awareness. It was like something she had neglected to do or had mislaid, or like an unlatched window rattling quietly in the night. She might refuse to acknowledge it or to do anything about it, but she could not dismiss it.
Now, sensing its imminence again, she wavered on the verge of trying to force it into consciousness, to see if she could exorcize the ghost by giving it flesh. But she was a little frightened of admitting it fully to herself because she knew that the substance of its shadow derived somehow from a lack in her life, and she dreaded the extent to which its acknowledgement might undermine her security. And yet, how could anything undermine her security? What was there that she lacked? She looked around the well-furnished bedroom, dwelling on the rich curtains, the plush carpet, the expensive furniture that reflected the light in polished patches. This was hers. And Peter’s. This was their house. A bungalow. Her mind inventoried its rooms smugly, emphasizing special features as if for an advertisement, refrigerator, stainless steel sink-unit, garage with room for two cars. She was very fortunate. Peter was good to her. What cause did she have to feel dissatisfied? One closed door away, Peter was sitting in the lounge, talking with Raymond and Eleanor, their guests. What was there to trouble her? Unless it was the past.
She shied away from the thought. She had got over everything by now, she told herself. She had known that there were things she would miss terribly. She had known she would have to adjust. And she had adjusted. She had lived with herself for a long time by compromise, by a tacit and gentle self-deception, the studied exclusion of certain thoughts. She knew that you could only gain certain things by forfeiting others, that, where the achievement of one desire precluded another, you had to choose, that to possess was to relinquish. That had been her lesson, a hard lesson. Surely she had learned it by now. She had thought she had. She had tried, certainly. She owed Peter such an effort. It seemed unjust that old longings she had ascetically starved to death should resurrect their hunger in her heart. After so long. After so very long.
Yet something