30

As they approached the house Kathleen suddenly said in a very violent tone, ‘Look. Don’t go and see him!’

‘But why? What is this?’

She came close to him as if, in the darkness, to detect the exact nature of his response.

‘Leave him. Don’t go in. It’ll only be some endless talk of Tolson.’

‘But why did you fetch me then? Why did you ask me?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘But isn’t he ill? I mean, isn’t any of it true, what you’ve told me?’

‘Oh, that’s true,’ she said as though now it was of no importance at all. Leonard seemed completely overwhelmed by the change in her; almost a change of character. He thrust his hand deep into his raincoat pocket and for a moment seemed preoccupied with what he had hidden there.

‘Why don’t we go away?’ she added, staring into his face. ‘Somewhere in the open. We could go to the park. It’d be completely empty now. We could go there. And later we could go away together. Don’t you think so?’ She pulled his arm to rouse his attention. They had now stopped outside the house and Leonard was gazing up at the lighted windows. When it seemed he wouldn’t answer, she suddenly said, ‘I mean, can’t you leave Tolson? To my father.’

Leonard had moved back slightly. He was still staring up at the house. Slowly his head turned towards her. His expression was concealed by the dark.

‘You want to go off with me? Go away with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And leave … you know, your children and everything?’

‘Yes.’ Yet her voice sounded drained of all enthusiasm, the thing which a moment before had peculiarly enlivened her. ‘Look. I’ve even got the money. There’s no need for me to go back in the house. We can go now.’ She held something out in her hands to which, however, he gave no attention.

‘And what would all this be for? A sacrifice!’ His voice had mounted with tension. He was trembling.

‘No.…’

‘Is that all you’re doing? Buying me off?’

‘No.’

‘Is this what your father asked you to do?’

‘No. It’s not. It’s just something I’ve thought of now. The money was already in my pocket.…’ Suddenly she swung completely round. It was as if she had sensed someone approaching in the dark. But through the pools of lamplight there was no sign of movement.

‘Can’t you see, my father’s obsessed … with you and Tolson. He’d do anything for both of you.’ Yet she had begun to walk towards the house as though there was now no further purpose in their arguing.

Leonard followed her more slowly. She pushed open the gate and walked up the path. Then, when she reached the door, she turned. ‘Remember, then,’ she said, ‘it’s your decision.’

‘But you shouldn’t force these things on me! You know I couldn’t possibly go away with you. The whole thing’s mad and absurd.’

‘Remember, you’ve decided that we’ll both go in,’ she added as if she hadn’t heard his protest.

It seemed then that Leonard was about to turn and go. He was standing on the steps and, in the darkness, he had turned clumsily. At that moment the door was pulled open from the inside and Blakeley stood there.

‘Oh! It is you,’ he said. ‘I thought I heard your voices.’ And before Leonard could move either way he was almost pulled into the house.

Blakeley was dressed in a neat suit. As Leonard stood blinking in the strong light he noticed first the suit, which he had never seen before, then the blankness of the walls of the living-room. All the photographs had been removed with one exception, that of Blakeley and Kathleen together.

‘He got up half an hour ago,’ Blakeley’s wife said. ‘He reckons that he feels better already.’ And although Blakeley was very much alive, shaking Leonard’s hand and leading him by the arm as though to confirm an intimate friendship, his family was completely subdued. Kathleen, still dressed in her unusually long coat, stood sadly watching Leonard.

The three children had obviously been dressed specially for the occasion and stood shyly in the centre of the room as Leonard was brought in. Even his wife had prepared herself in a bright red dress.

‘Well, how are you?’ Blakeley said, leading Leonard to the nearest of the three children. ‘This is young Mark, here.… Say hello, Mark.’

‘Hello,’ the boy said, then blushed as he held out his hand rather stiffly for Leonard to shake. It was such a small hand that, as it lay in his own for a second, Leonard appeared to stare at it in dismay. The next moment Blakeley said, ‘There, you see what little gentlemen they can be when they try. And this is Colin, the youngest imp. Though he has a very beautiful voice. Say how d’you do, Colin.’

‘How d’you do, Mr. Radcliffe,’ the younger boy said, nodding his head as if he were about to bow.

‘You see, I’ve told them all about you while we were waiting. Though of course, I ought to have introduced the little lady first. This is Ruth.’

‘Good night, Mr. Radcliffe,’ the girl said, staring rigidly at the floor, that part of her forehead which was visible a bright crimson.

‘Oh, we’ve all met before,’ Leonard said, acutely embarrassed in his turn.

‘Did you hear that? Good night, and he’s only just come!’ Blakeley was more than pleased with his young performers. ‘Here you are, you little rabbits. What did I say I’d give you all if you behaved like I said?’ He winked heavily, with a certain grotesqueness at Leonard.

None of them answered, however, but began to look at Leonard with a more open curiosity. ‘Well, what do you think, Mr. Radcliffe?’ Blakeley said. ‘Do you think they deserve anything?’

The children’s expressions turned to looks of appeal, though still slightly intimidated by this elaborate ritual.

‘Well? Do they deserve anything?’ Blakeley repeated, staring still at Leonard.

‘Why … yes!’ Leonard half-smiled, looking down.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes!’ Leonard was completely confused.

Blakeley stooped over them, turning his head momentarily to laugh at Leonard, then kissing the faces of the two boys and the girl with some ceremony. When they laughed, he stood watching them with a kind of mock surprise. Then he took several sweets from his pocket which he distributed equally among them. He kissed them all again, laughing, as if both pleased yet saddened by the little game.

Suddenly he broke off and almost with a premeditated gesture came to take hold of Leonard’s coat. ‘You must take your coat off,’ he said. ‘We’ve got this fire laid just for your benefit. She’s been grumbling at the amount of coal I’ve been stuffing on.’

But as Leonard pulled his raincoat off he twisted awkwardly out of Blakeley’s grasp and, hastily folding the garment, laid it over the arm of the chair where he sat down. After touching the coat a moment he glanced up at Blakeley as though to apologise for his impoliteness.

At first, uncertain how to react, Blakeley stared down rather emptily at his guest, then turned quickly to the children who were beginning to scamper about the room.

‘Now, I’ll have those sweets off you if you’re going to make all that row,’ he said, almost viciously, yet going over to the youngest boy and lifting him down gently from a chair. He smacked him lightly and ruffled his hair, then kissed him on the top of his head. It was done in such a contradictory and vaguely absurd way that Leonard, still watching in some confusion, began to smile. For a brief moment, scarcely a matter of seconds, Blakeley had begun silently to cry, holding the boy’s head gently against his chest.

Then suddenly his wife said, ‘Come on, you lot. Into the scullery if you’re going to play about. We want no noise in here.’ And immediately she began to half-push, half-pull them through the door.

Blakeley watched them go with the same sad reluctance. Then he glanced at the two women.

‘Do you think you could leave us two men alone? I want to talk over a few things with Leonard, and the presence of the opposite sex … well, it makes things a little difficult.’ Despite his calm tone there was an almost hysterical inflexion in his voice, and his wife glanced quickly at Leonard with a mixture of reproach and concern.

‘You mustn’t keep him long,’ she said. ‘Nor get him excited. Whatever he says, he’s just out of bed, and he’s not half as well as he thinks. We’ll be just in the scullery.’

‘Oh, now, get out woman,’ Blakeley said with the same strangled humour. His face was beaded with sweat. ‘Take no notice of them,’ he said to Leonard as they shut the door.

A moment later their voices could be heard over the excited cries of the children.

‘They’ll be all right in there,’ Blakeley went on. ‘There’s a good fire, and that’s where they spend most of their time. We usually keep this room for when we have company.’ He pushed his hands into his trouser-pockets and stood with his back to the fire gazing down paternally at Leonard.

‘They’re a grand lot. A man couldn’t wish for a finer family. I only wish myself that I could do better by them. But there it is.’ He smiled down at him so grotesquely that Leonard looked away. It was as if Blakeley wanted him to recognise this as a performance, and one particularly moving and full of appeal. As he turned his head to find some other focus for his attention, he saw, lying in the corner of the room behind an easy chair, the mask which a few days before he had seen eerily lit on the stage of the working men’s club.

The shock that this gave him was almost immediately followed by a second and more disconcerting discovery. All the time that he’d been sitting in the chair he’d been fingering the object that lay heavily in the pocket of his coat. Looking down now, he saw that he’d pressed the cloth so tightly around the hidden shape that it stood out in clear relief, emphasised by the stained sweat of his hand.

He saw Blakeley change his position several times as he continued talking to him with the same absurd affability. And when, some moments later, he heard Blakeley say, ‘Of course, Kathleen will have told you about the unfortunate incident last night,’ he suddenly realised that throughout these preoccupied and numbed moments he had been answering Blakeley and even asking him questions. It was only then, in fact, that he became alarmed as to whether Blakeley had seen the shape unmistakably outlined within the smooth texture of the coat.

‘I don’t really understand it myself,’ Blakeley went on, looking thoughtfully over Leonard’s head. ‘What did you think to the show last Sunday? They said somebody had been overcome by the heat. The next thing I discover, it was you! Your uncle Austen came to see me afterwards. It was he who told me … and said that you’d gone. He’d come to watch me apparently. Fancy that! After all this time!’

Leonard’s gaze had returned to the mask. Turned on its side, its features had a heavy look of defeat, even of death; apart from the chair there was nothing else close to the mask. From this angle he could see something of its blank interior, and several tapes that were evidently used to secure it to Blakeley’s head.

‘Did you send Kathleen to fetch me?’ Leonard suddenly asked.

Blakeley moved away from the fire. He was sweating now as though he had deliberately exposed himself to the heat. He sat down in the chair facing Leonard, so that they were separated by the length of the hearth.

‘You’re going to see Tolson tonight,’ he said with such a peculiar inflexion it was impossible to decide whether it were a question, a statement, or a command.

Leonard had lifted his raincoat and, somewhat clumsily, refolded it more loosely over the arm of the chair.

‘Did he tell you that? He said he’d tell no one,’ he replied: though with no sense of alarm, but rather a perturbed expression as though the significance of his remark somehow eluded him.

‘Oh, he told me all right. Me, and no one else, I should imagine.’ Blakeley, with a certain nervousness, yawned, then swept his arm round as if to dismiss the whole subject now that he’d introduced it.

‘But what has it to do with my coming here?’ Leonard seemed unable to concentrate, or even to follow what had been said. The children were suddenly quiet in the next room.

‘As I told you when I saw you a few days ago,’ Blakeley said, crossing his legs as though he were about to introduce a business proposition, ‘I’ve come to the point where I’ve got to make an absolute decision about something.’ Yet despite the formality of tone he watched Leonard with an almost hysterical pleading of his eyes, staring at him as if only by this fixity of vision could he keep any control over his feelings.

‘A decision about what?’

‘Have you ever thought if everyone at some point in their lives, either out of their own volition as it were, or at the insistence of something from outside, had to make a decision about the actual value that their individual life had … at some point they had actually to decide whether their life was worth all the expense, emotional, material, and otherwise … all the expense not only of their own suffering and enjoyments but of what they put other people to in order to stay alive – how many of them would answer “Yes”? And how many of them would answer “No” simply out of fear of the consequences?’

He obviously expected no answer to such a hypothetical proposition. It seemed, in fact, that he had prepared this speech beforehand, even to the careful enunciation of the words, so that he paused occasionally as though trying to recollect what came next. It wasn’t the exact, practical thing he wanted to ask Leonard and he continued to stare at him with the same demanding expression.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘most people aren’t capable of asking the question, or even of formulating it, let alone honestly deciding.’

‘But why d’you ask such an absurd thing?’ Leonard said, looking about him distractedly, yet his gaze persistently reverting to the mask facing him in the corner of the room. ‘And what’s the use of that sort of decision, even if you make it?’ He looked swiftly from Blakeley himself to the discarded object as though suspecting it had been left in that position on purpose.

‘You mean if I make it? For me? Well, it’s purely a question of honesty. Isn’t that it? The majority of people might go on living their lives because they have neither the courage nor the means to measure its significance or its meaning, but for me such a thing has become intolerable. No. That’s too pompous, isn’t it? I should say, a life which doesn’t involve that sort of decision is completely and absolutely meaningless to me.’

Leonard was silent. Throughout this speech he had been glancing repeatedly at the clock which stood on the mantelpiece over the fire. He seemed in fact only gradually to become aware that Blakeley had stopped speaking at all. He looked up at him slowly.

‘What is it you want me to say?’ he asked, leaning nervously forward in his chair, his right hand spread over the coat beside him. ‘You can’t possibly expect me to answer something like this. So why do you ask me?’

‘But what sort of responsibility do you think a man owes to his family? I mean, how much are they his, and how much are they something separate from him?’ Blakeley continued.

‘But you don’t want me to answer these questions at all, do you?’ Leonard said in a sudden agony of frustration and contempt, and for a moment seemed about to get up, glancing at the clock and laying both hands on the arms either side of him.

‘I do. I need to know. But I realise that this manner of mine puts you off. My self-consciousness. Perhaps you should be a bit more generous. Perhaps you’re forgetting I was once a workman. All this questioning, this talking about what I feel, well all that’s something I’ve had to learn about. I know I express it poorly. But I’ve had to teach myself how to put these things into words that somebody like you might understand.’ He looked accusingly at Leonard, his head swaying slightly from side to side as he insisted on his intentions. ‘You see, all this questioning, this self-doubt, if you can call it that. It comes from me having such acute feelings about life, knowing and feeling things that don’t bother most people at all. Or perhaps they do. I don’t know.… But what I’m trying to say is that, however depressed or upset I get, there’s a part of me that remains separate. A part that just watches me being depressed. It’s as if I don’t really take part in my depression. As though, because I can watch my feelings, that somehow, they’re valueless … synthetic, put on. Though I know they’re not.… It’s hellish. Hellish … watching your own suffering to such an extent that you begin to suspect that it’s not really suffering at all.’

He was now sweating profusely, and even leaning towards the fire as if deliberately aggravating his discomfort. Yet all the while his eyes never left Leonard’s own increasingly distracted face.

‘I mean, it was a blunt knife last night,’ he went on, drinking in the heat it seemed as he spoke. ‘Perhaps I knew it was blunt. But recently I’ve been feeling an overwhelming desire to see whether the separate, detached part of me would still be there even if I did the most terrible thing I could imagine.’

He watched now with raised eyebrows as though enquiring of Leonard the significance of what he was saying. Then he added, ‘But even when I struck her with the knife – and I didn’t know whether it would go in her, blunt as it was – there was still this separate feeling. As if I were only watching myself do it. That it wasn’t really me at all. It’s incredible. There’s a part of me that’s completely unaffected by what I am or what I do. And it’s that part of me I think that makes me an artist.’

Leonard had fallen back in the chair, stifled and exhausted by Blakeley’s persistence. It was as if, out of Leonard’s own distress, he were describing an incident which hadn’t yet taken place. A strange feeling of inevitability compressed the room itself so that it seemed a tiny cube occupied hugely by their two figures.

‘It leads to another thing as well,’ Blakeley went on as though Leonard’s exhaustion were something that had to be pursued ruthlessly, for its own sake. ‘I mean, could this separate thing watch itself being destroyed, do you think? Suppose I’d turned the knife on myself, would that part of me which watches still go on watching or would something unusual, something unique happen? Would that part of me actually step in and do something? Commit itself?’

His eyes followed every stress and movement of Leonard’s face, and greedily, with a voracious intentness. ‘Is it that part of you that’s called the soul? And when you die, or when you’re dead, is it still separate, and can even leave you? Or leave its body. Do you think that’s what Christ meant by the spirit, by His ascension?’

‘What do you mean when you say this “thing” may step in and do something unusual?’ Leonard said. The question itself caused him to strain forward in the chair, yet with an expression of bewilderment, of despair.

‘But did I say that?’ Blakeley asked with an even greater eagerness. ‘Are you sure I said that? I think you’re twisting my words … or shaping them to some intention you have in your own mind.’

It was a look of triumph with which he devoured Leonard. He watched him with a kind of passionate ferocity for a short while, then added, ‘Perhaps, then, you think that there’s a point at which this separate thing can be made to act?’

He seemed completely fascinated by the effect this had upon Leonard: in some way it seemed to mark the success of all his efforts to express something of his sensations. His head still swayed slightly from side to side. Leonard seemed mesmerised by the motion, his eyes following Blakeley’s with a look of helpless appeal.

‘Can it be forced to act, this uncommitted, this separate thing?’ Blakeley insisted.

‘Oh, but it’s an artificial separation,’ Leonard said, talking more as though to himself, Blakeley leaning forward suddenly to catch his words. ‘It shouldn’t be apart. It shouldn’t be separate. It’s what you’ve forced yourself into feeling. Why should it be separate? Just think, if it were as much a part of the body as anything else, as the muscle itself, and acted with the body, with the muscle, and was indivisible from it. What if they were so close, so intimate, so much the one thing that they could never be separated?’

Leonard had stood up, and almost immediately he bent down and picked up his coat and began hastily to pull it on. It swayed heavily behind him. ‘But that isn’t the way the world’s organised itself, is it? That’s not the way things really happen.… But just think what if this separate thing were in one man, and the body, the acting part in another? What if these two qualities were typified ideally in two separate men? Then, just imagine … just imagine the unholy encounter of two such people!’

Yet having expressed this idea he seemed as confused and as bewildered as ever, glancing round the room suddenly as if uncertain of where he actually was.

‘I don’t know why I agreed to come … here,’ he said, speaking now with the same formality as Blakeley himself, and frowning as if the light pained his eyes. He began to rub his arms as though cold, but his face was flushed and sweaty with the heat of the room.

Within himself an even stranger confusion had arisen. As he began to move towards the door he suffered the momentary sensation that he and Blakeley were pressed into the shape of one man. Then, almost immediately he had the impression that Blakeley was standing there with his face pulled open by that peculiar soundless crying, and that his body was swaying as though he were trying to speak. But when, with his hand on the door, he glanced back into the room he saw that Blakeley was in fact still seated in his chair and was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t interpret. The moment passed extremely slowly. Although there was no movement of Blakeley’s face, its look seemed to change from second to second, one emotion fading rapidly into another, his eyes dark with condemnation and anger, then luminously alive with some sort of happiness and relief. Leonard felt himself to be in a state of unusual detachment, as if he’d been absorbed by the air and, in this suspended awareness, was walking over to Blakeley and exchanging positions with him, even passing him as he in turn walked over to the door.

In this extraordinary confusion of his senses it seemed that he was trying to overlook something which, at that moment, he felt unable to face. It was like pressing down on a stone which he knew at any moment he would have to lift in order to extract whatever was underneath. It was from within this confused struggle that he endured the sensation of passing and re-passing Blakeley in the centre of the room, as though they performed a stiff and angular dance like two dolls along a single and unvarying line of movement. Yet he was still able to reach out his hand and touch the door. The sole spectator of this extraordinary display was the mask lying in the corner, its massive and inarticulate features lit with a desolate and helpless smile. Even as he saw it he was aware of Blakeley talking, the word ‘Tolson’ repeated several times then, like a voice breaking through an awakening ‘… the right thing to do. I don’t know.’ He saw the fading stream of Blakeley’s histrionic gestures, and then his voice again, ‘… can be only two sorts of people: the divine idiot and the professional clown.’

‘Ah, and which are you?’ Blakeley said so sharply that Leonard was disconcerted to discover that it was his own voice he had been listening to.

By various gestures and a more relaxed manner Blakeley was now trying to make light of everything that had happened, as if to insist that, after all, it had only been a performance on both their parts. Smiling, and with the same affability with which he had greeted Leonard on entering the room, he now began to follow him to the door.

‘I’m glad you came, Leonard. I’m glad you were able to come. When I knew you were going to see Tolson tonight I just had to see you first. Do you understand? Just to see you. I suppose Kathleen made up some cock-and-bull story. But the fact is I just wanted to see you.’ He ran his hand across Leonard’s shoulder and, momentarily, down his side. ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you. I feel, well, you know, that we’re sharing things. We’re closer together. Don’t you think so? If you hadn’t have come, God, it would have been terrible. Now, of course … Now, of course, everything’s resolved. It’s all very clear.’

He seemed very pleased and, in response to such sociable gestures, Leonard said with a sudden laugh, ‘Do you know, I’ve suddenly got an insatiable desire to write something, or to draw!’ He laughed more loudly, and thrust his right hand down into his raincoat pocket. With his other hand he opened the door. ‘To draw something!’ he laughed.

Standing in the narrow hallway was Kathleen and, behind her, Blakeley’s family. They regarded Leonard with serious, mildly surprised, expressions. The next moment he swung away unsmiling, and as though embarrassed.

It was only after hurrying down to the gate and out onto the road that he called out any sort of farewell.