29

On the Wednesday afternoon John had several visitors, and as soon as they had gone he immediately set out to search the Place for Leonard. After a while he found him standing at a single unshuttered window of the York Room.

Leonard didn’t turn from the window.

‘You knew they were here?’

‘I saw them come up the drive. And I saw them go down it.’

‘They gave two unusual accounts of your behaviour, at Isabel’s, and at a workman’s club.’

‘Yes.’ Leonard was extremely pale and lifeless. He moved suddenly away from his father and walked across the room, glancing about him as though casually searching for something. ‘Well, is that all they said?’

‘No.’ John paused indecisively by the window. ‘All three now have the idea of disposing of the Place.’

For a while Leonard didn’t answer. He stood by the fireplace gazing up at the relief. Eventually he said, ‘Are they in a position to do that?’

‘Providing they can get the majority of the family to agree with them. And that the trustees raise no objections. I don’t think they’ll have any real trouble.’ After a while he added. ‘It will probably mean the conversion of the Place … or even its demolition.’

‘Its demolition?’ Leonard turned and gazed across the width of the room at him. Then suddenly he stared upwards. ‘How did that get in here?’ he said.

John looked up, and saw nothing but the cellular relief of the ceiling itself. He glanced at Leonard, uncertain whether to treat this as some further eccentricity of his son, one no less peculiar than the scenes which had been described to him by Isabel and Alex a short while before. Yet as he started to speak he saw, hovering in the shadows above their heads, the shape of a large moth. Leonard continued to watch it, his head flung back with a peculiar, static violence. His eyes had rolled back in the shell of his skull with such contortion that it seemed at any moment a cry of pain would escape from his gaping mouth. To John he looked quite insane.

The moth was like a nervous element of the air itself, barely substantial, its flight created from innumerable shattered movements and flecked convulsions. For several seconds it was lost to sight, then a tiny agitation in the corner of the room brought it back once more into focus. Leonard watched it with a kind of snarled intentness, his hands and arms swinging restlessly by his side, as though he scarcely suppressed a desire to leap at the insect and snatch it from its hopeless meanderings through the room.

‘Why, are you hoping to catch it, Leonard?’ John said, as though in some way to divert his attention.

Leonard murmured in his throat and slowly lowered his head. His eyes, from their straining after the elusive shape, were wide as he stared at his father with a lunatic look of abstraction.

‘Whatever was that scene you created at Isabel’s on Sunday?’ his father went on. And as Leonard’s features relaxed to something more recognisable and normal, he added, ‘They apparently included some sacrilegious statements about Christ intended to provoke and upset the Provost, not to mention the other people present.’

‘Was Isabel upset?’

‘Not at your arguments so much, it seems, as at your behaviour.’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t just slightly the arguments? After all, people like their arguments clean and white, and with no blood on.’ Yet even as he said this he waved his hand at his father in a gesture of frustration. ‘But what’s it matter? No doubt she’s right to turn her concern at my ideas into her concern for me. It’s what they’re always doing, isn’t it, father? They’re crying out for a touchstone but the moment it’s there.… Oh, God!’ He clasped his hands to his head with the same impulsiveness with which he might have snatched at the moth. ‘Why do I go on talking like this? All this nonsense. All these stupid aphorisms. Worse. Far worse than Austen. And it all means absolutely nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. It’s just nerves. I’m terribly nervous today.’ He smiled with a sudden and insidious slyness at his father. ‘Have you got the time? Do you know what time it is?’

John watched him a moment, suspecting some sort of ridicule. Then he shook his head. ‘Are you no longer concerned whether we stay here or not?’

Leonard had begun to smile. ‘What is it? Are you beginning to suspect that I don’t understand you?’

‘I don’t know about understand. You don’t even seem to be interested.’

‘But I am interested. After all, I’m part of the thing, aren’t I? All your life you’ve hidden here. Waiting for some sign, some revelation. Yet when it comes, are you sure you’ll be able to recognise it? I mean, what really exhilarated you about the death of the old man was that you thought it was a sign. The moment you throw open the Place, the moment you endow it with all those shady powers of determinism you affect to despise, something terrible occurs, a sign, a message. The old man was simply putting God’s mark on the event: “This is wrong!” It was something sufficient to incur a warning. Isn’t that how you see it?’

Leonard had begun to pace up and down the room as if he had suddenly remembered he had somewhere to go. Only once did he glance up at his father, and then with a look of extreme distaste. The next moment, however, he added, ‘It’s too late for you to give up the Place now. You’ve been offered one sign here, and now you can wait more confidently for the next. And if you’ve hidden yourself away here all your life, until your muscles are too stiff and your bones too corroded to move, why, there’s always your son to rise up in your stead! What has your isolation meant if it can’t be measured in him!’

‘Don’t fight me with this,’ his father said. ‘Don’t force things onto me.’ He looked distractedly about the room, then at the window through which the light was now beginning rapidly to diminish. The shadows of the trees crept into the room, deepening the dusty crevices.

‘No, it’s too late,’ Leonard said. ‘When I told Isabel, she didn’t understand. There’s no choice now, either for you or for me. You’ve made sure of that. That’s one thing you’ve made absolutely sure of.’ Yet as he turned violently towards the door his mother appeared in the opening. Behind her, in the passage outside, was the vague shape of another woman.

‘What? Why has she come here?’ Leonard said, yet so quietly that they scarcely heard. He had stopped in the centre of the room, staring down and moving restlessly from one foot to the other. Then, as the woman came through the door and his mother attempted some sort of introduction, he asked her directly, in a whining voice, ‘What has she come up here for?’ It was Kathleen.

Bowing her head awkwardly towards him she indicated that she wanted to see him alone. They stood there for a moment in silence.

John had begun to move towards the door. As he did so he was attracted by a movement above Kathleen’s head, and looked up to see the moth fluttering from the ceiling. As he was introduced to the visitor he saw the insect settling down, its slooped expanse of wing suddenly still and seemingly pinioned to the wall immediately above the door. Then, for no apparent reason at all, he turned and looked at Leonard with an outright expression of alarm.

Leonard had flushed, in childish embarrassment, grinning suddenly and grotesquely at his father. Then he looked about him, his eyes averted, as if overcome with shame.

The moment was so inexplicable, the silent interchange between father and son, that Kathleen looked about her in confusion, glancing upwards as though she half-sensed its cause located in some object above her head.

John had reached the door. For a moment he still stared at Leonard in alarm. Then, catching his shoulder against the door itself, he swung round, took Stella by the arm, and left the room. It seemed as though he had been flung through the entrance.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kathleen said. ‘I wouldn’t have come unless it was important.’

Leonard shook his head in a mild bewilderment, looking at the empty doorway. For a moment it appeared that he would rush after his father.

‘My father’s ill,’ Kathleen said. ‘I wondered if you would come and see him?’

‘What? But I can’t! What have you come for?’ He lifted his head, listening. His parents’ voices came from a room close by.

Disturbed by their presence, Kathleen came further into the room. ‘He’s ill. He came home ill last Sunday night, and we can’t do anything with him. He wants to see you for some reason, but we can’t let him out of the house. The fact is,’ she added, coming so close to Leonard that instinctively he began moving away, ‘he tried to attack me last night. That’s really why I’ve come.’

‘What?’ Leonard rubbed his face as though since his father’s look he hadn’t understood or heard anything at all. ‘What? What do you mean?’

‘I shouldn’t tell you about this. Because I know he doesn’t want you to know. But he went away for two years. I mean, in prison. And he’s never really recovered from it. From the experience of it.’

She had come so close to him that she was almost touching him, yet appeared to be completely oblivious of his presence, staring at some point just past his shoulder, and talking as though she were reciting certain ideas to herself. Her voice was toneless, as if what she described was almost irrelevant.

‘He’s been in bed the last few days. And last night I was bending over him, arranging the bed clothes, when he pulled a knife out from under the blankets and stuck it in my back.… Oh, I don’t mean that literally,’ she added as she saw Leonard’s response. ‘I mean, it would have stuck in had it been sharp. As it was, it was completely blunt. It’s just an old knife we keep in a drawer for cleaning shoes. He knew it wouldn’t do anything. In fact he hardly pushed it against me at all. Yet he was so serious about it, watching me like mad to see what I would do. My mother’s frantic. We don’t know what to do. She’s frightened that if she tells the doctor he’ll be put away or something. And that’d kill him. And all the time he’s asking to see you, saying he wants to talk to you. My mother thinks if you’ll just go and talk to him, at least he’ll calm down. You see, it’s not my idea at all. I wouldn’t have come here if she hadn’t got on her knees and implored me. Do you understand?’

Leonard listened without moving, staring fixedly at his feet, his hands thrust stiffly down at his sides, a certain rigidity which suggested that the words called up some sort of determination in him.

‘You see, he’s not a violent man at all,’ Kathleen went on. ‘It’s always been as much as one can do to get him to smack one of the children when they’ve done something wrong. And whenever he has brought himself to do it he’s always sat around for hours afterwards brooding about it. To think of him lying there with that thing hidden under the blankets.… And the strange thing is that once he’d done it he began to hold his own side and groan. Just as if he’d stabbed himself. He made such a din about it that my mother tore the clothes back and looked at his side, certain that he’d stuck it in himself. But there wasn’t a mark. Not a scratch. The big baby. As soon as she had looked he started crying in that stupid way he has … well, not stupid. He can’t help it. But ever since then he’s been asking for you.’ She glanced hurriedly at Leonard for the first time, then added, ‘You know … I suppose you realise he gets these attachments for other men. I mean, that’s what lies right at the root of the trouble. He’s in love with Tolson, insanely in love with him. And he can’t do anything about it. But with you.… You see, he’s so jealous of you that it’s killing him. No, I mean that. Because he can’t do anything about it. That’s why he thought if you became interested in me. But …’ She suddenly burst into laughter, looking into Leonard’s face very closely. ‘You see,’ she said sarcastically, ‘he’s dying of love!’

She had stepped back and taken a cigarette from her coat pocket. Leonard watched her lighting it as though, from within the confusion of events, he was trying to recollect whether he had seen her smoking before. He looked at the cigarette acutely, and most intensely of all at that point where it disappeared between her lips. Occasionally they trembled as though she were still suppressing her laughter.

‘But what can I do?’ Leonard said.

‘And there’s another thing,’ she added. ‘He’s absolutely serious when he talks about himself as an artist. He means it. It’s the only justification he finds for all his troubles and his own hellish nature. You mustn’t disabuse him into thinking he’s not one. All these theories he has about things. You see … you must see that it’s just his pathetic attempt to try and fight off this obsession he has for Tolson. He’s just trying to subdue it, that’s all.’

Leonard had begun to watch her suspiciously. The cigarette, which trembled as she spoke, dissolved in a thin wreath of smoke, filtering upwards and towards one end of the room. He suddenly seemed quite shy. ‘I can’t do anything. There’s nothing I can do,’ he said abjectly.

‘Do you know what he once told me?’ Kathleen went on. ‘He once told me that whenever he’d done something on which he felt he could congratulate himself, something in which he had succeeded, he heard a voice whispering in his ear the whole time, “Not enough, not enough … not enough!” That, well, that’s what he’s hearing now as he lies in bed.’ She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and began to examine it closely. ‘He’s so jealous of you he can’t bear not to be with you, not to share all the feelings you have, everything. It’s a sort of love in reverse, isn’t it?’

Leonard began to look around him as though searching for some object he knew to be concealed in the room. He hurried from wall to wall, his momentum gradually increasing and becoming almost frantic. Then, with a sudden wildness, he said, ‘Have you any idea … I mean, do you know what time it is?’ And before she could answer he had hurried to the window and, reaching up with an excessively awkward movement, had released the catch and pulled down the upper half. Immediately a chill of cold air swept through the room. ‘Don’t you think it’s hot in here?’ he said. ‘Look, you go down and wait for me, will you. Let me see now … I won’t be long. There are one or two things. I’ll have to go to my room and get my coat, for one thing.’ He stood watching her, rubbing his hands together with a peculiar violence. ‘Is that all right, I mean?’

‘You’ll come, then?’

‘I haven’t got long. I’d better warn you. I have to go somewhere else. But I can come for a bit. It’s not quite dark yet is it? I mean, it’s not late.’ He smiled at her, then the next moment appeared to forget her completely, striding out of the room with a sudden and extraordinary energy.

Kathleen stood in the silence for a while looking round at the darkening interior. A single and diminishing beam of light streamed through the window. She slowly crossed to it, and stared out through the double panes that now occupied the lower half of the frame.

The view seemed to intimidate her, for she suddenly stepped back. At the same moment something flew up from between her feet. It sprang to the window and beat dully against the glass like a piece of cloth. At first she scarcely recognised the object, frightened more by the agitation of the air itself, drawing her head back in a strange snarl.

Then the moth sprang upwards and was immediately plucked out through the open window. It was caught by the stream of air that swept round the building and was drawn up over the summits of the darkening trees. Glancing round in alarm, she hurried out.

A short while later, after making a brief excuse to Stella, John too left the Place, hurrying down through the estate as night fell, his coat wrapped tightly around him and his face burning with an unusual agitation.