31

‘Your father was here earlier on,’ Tolson said as he watched Leonard moving about the room and taking off his coat. He did it clumsily, hurrying through the narrow spaces between the chairs as if about to go out again, and smiling to himself the whole time.

‘What did he want?’ Leonard said.

‘He started talking about a moth.’ Tolson was very still.

‘A what?’

‘A moth.’

‘But what for? Why was that?’

‘I don’t know.’

For a moment Leonard stood perfectly still, his coat folded neatly over his arm, gazing intently at Tolson’s head. He seemed to become increasingly lost in his thoughts. Then he said hesitantly, ‘But didn’t he mention anything else?’

‘He told me to keep away from you.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You told Blakeley about me coming here tonight,’ Leonard said, growing intenser.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Kathleen told me a remarkable thing tonight. She said her father was in love with you.’

‘Is that it?’

There was now a kind of surly frustration in Tolson’s attitude.

Leonard had begun another elaborate circuit of the room, moving clumsily between the furniture strewn like boulders in the narrow interior, and glancing quickly at Tolson whenever he turned.

‘Yet it seems to explain everything,’ Leonard went on. ‘I mean, about Blakeley. If he feels like that about you. And the way he tries to rationalise it all. All these theories … God. You must have given him hell. You must have made it absolute hell.’

Tolson gave no answer. He didn’t even move. After a moment Leonard began to smile, faintly and remotely, an awkward tension of his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just my nerves. I’m so nervous.’ He shook himself as though to free his body from some invisible restriction. ‘My father shouldn’t have come here. It confuses everything. I mean, has Elizabeth told him something? Did he say anything about her?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll have to find out.’ Leonard suddenly peered round the room, looking for a clock. ‘It won’t take long will it? I’ll have to find out if she’s told him. If she hasn’t then it won’t make any difference. What I mean is, I don’t want people to think that I’ve behaved as I have because of her.’

‘Oh, but then …’ Tolson said, beginning now to edge slowly towards the door. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I shall have to go and see her. I can’t have it hanging over my head like this.’

Tolson watched him carefully. ‘But what makes you think I’ll let you out, Len, now I’ve got you here? I can assure you it wasn’t about Elizabeth that your father came down. He knows nothing about it.’

‘But you’d better let me out. How can we discuss anything … how can anything happen with this hanging over everything?’

Leonard seemed completely confused, wandering aimlessly up and down between the furniture, glancing in every direction as though he expected to find an indication of the time everywhere he looked. He clutched his coat to him with a familiar, wounded gesture.

‘But I’ll come back,’ he said after a while.

‘I’m not bothered whether you will or you won’t. I’m not letting you out. There’s nobody else in the house. Except us. And the kids asleep in the next room. You can see. I’ve organised it, Leonard.’

‘I’d like to ask one question about this,’ Leonard said quietly, with a sudden calmness, as though he’d been anticipating such a threat. ‘If I did submit to you, how exactly do you see me doing it? I mean, physically, what do you imagine I’d do the very moment I gave in?’

Tolson didn’t answer. If anything, he stood more patiently, more firmly, in the doorway.

‘Do you see me lying on the floor, or kneeling down praying to you? I suppose in a way you’d like that. Me kneeling to you, even if it’s only to be like Blakeley, committing some absurd action simply because I’d been told to by you.’

Tolson was moving slowly towards him. Leonard watched him, his right hand buried in the coat which lay neatly over his left arm.

Tolson looked at the coat, then said, ‘Do you still think you’re going, then?’

‘I suppose in your imagination you’ve seen yourself beating me a score of times,’ Leonard went on. ‘Haven’t you gone around the room when you’ve been alone, shadow-boxing? Imagining me as your shadow? Just like Blakeley. Beating me senseless until I realise, I see and I feel who is the stronger. Or am I wrong? Is there some other action I haven’t imagined? Is there an even worse, a grotesquer humiliation that you’ve thought up for me? After all, it isn’t that you want to see me weak within myself, is it? But that you merely want me to acknowledge you. What would be the worst humiliation for me that would acknowledge that?’

‘Go on,’ Tolson said.

‘But just think, Vic. Think. If you told me what particular action you’d imagined.…’ Leonard’s voice had been gradually mounting in excitement and he now seemed momentarily to lose track of his words. ‘If you imagined what action … I was committing at the very moment I submitted I might even begin to wonder whether I could actually do it.’

Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his side, so intense that he leaned over it, to his left. At first he thought Tolson had struck him, for it coincided with a sudden movement of Tolson’s arms, and he flinched, turning quickly away. Then, as though imagining it might have been self-induced, he stood upright with a thoughtful expression. As he straightened his body he saw that Tolson had removed his shirt and was facing him, stripped to the waist.

Only then did he seem to recognise the extreme state of excitement Tolson had been in since he’d come into the room. A wave of horror and surprise swept over his face. He seemed dazed by the sight of Tolson’s body. Tolson was flushed, the redness spreading from his strained face to the thick column of his chest, and he held out his arms as though curving them to contain something he already sensed between them.

‘You can’t get out, Len.’

The coat swung loosely from Leonard’s arm. He rubbed his hand over his face as if agonised at finding his own powerful feelings overhung by an emotion that not only transcended them but which, through his habitual self-absorption, he had completely ignored. It was Tolson now who seemed possessed of every sign of insanity, unfastening the thick belt at his waist and, bowed like some huge segment of bone, tearing off the remainder of his clothes. Leonard gazed at him with a sunken expression of despair.

Tolson stood firmly against the closed door, breathless as though at the climax of a massive physical event. Yet he went on slowly declaring, in a peculiar frustration of his own, ‘You see. You see. You see …’ calming a moment as if to judge the effect on Leonard, then adding, ‘How are you going to get out now?’

He seemed half-frightened by his emotion, looking at Leonard for some sort of relief or explanation, or help.

‘Tell me … why don’t you start crying?’ he said with strange apprehension. ‘Shall I tell you what I want you to do? What I want you to do the very moment you give in? That question you were so keen to play around with.’

He was peering at Leonard with a hopeless violence, leaning forward slightly as though at any moment he might fall under the single pressure of his feelings. His voice was choked.

‘No,’ Leonard said in a hardly audible voice.

Tolson’s hand fell to that part of his body which seemed to torment and mesmerise Leonard the most. ‘Well? What theory are you going to make up about that?’

He had begun to move forward, still remaining, however, in the path of the door.

‘Look. Look! Don’t be frightened. If you want to know what famous action you’ll be doing at the very moment you submit … here, this is it. This!’

Yet despite the threat of his body he looked at Leonard despairingly. It was an anxious, pleading gesture with which he caught hold of him, tearing the raincoat from his arm and pressing him backwards. He pinioned his arms, staring at him with a harrowed fascination.

‘Why! Aren’t you going to fight?’ he said with the same frozen look of demand. Suddenly he thrust a leg behind Leonard and forced him over. ‘Do you think if I let you go now you’d keep your promise and come back?’

Leonard had begun to struggle. The immediate effect was to encourage Tolson into forcing him down on his back. Then he dropped onto Leonard, sitting astride his chest. With his knees he fastened Leonard’s arms to the floor.

‘It’d be better if you did fight,’ Tolson said despairingly. ‘Don’t think.… Don’t think I’m playing with you.’

He fitted a hand round Leonard’s neck, almost carelessly, lifting his head up a moment and peering madly into his face, then suddenly he crashed it down on the floor.

Leonard turned white as the blood shrank from his face, his head twisting as though trying to escape the smell of Tolson’s body. Tolson had now pulled himself onto his chest, his thighs cushioning Leonard’s chin. He leaned hard down on the body beneath him; then, clasping Leonard’s hair in one hand, he took hold of his nose with the other so that Leonard’s mouth slowly opened for breath. Between his lips he pressed the swollen mound of flesh.

The muscles round Tolson’s neck and shoulders burst out from their bony supports, his arms curved down to hold the nose and the lever of the lower jaw. He was a contained muscle of maddened energy, almost insensible it seemed, his body raised then pressing forward like some prodigious growth unfolding from the floor of the room. He bowed forward, stooped, in an epileptic gesture of benediction, holding beneath him his frantic sacrifice.

Suddenly, he flung Leonard’s head from him, banging it back against the floor to hold it like a ball between his thighs. Slowly he drew his body upright, his head upraised and turning slightly to one side, his eyes closed. Then, as though succumbing to some final assault, he drew himself back and slowly, staggering for a moment, pushed himself up to his feet. He leaned heavily against a chair.

Leonard had turned and was staring up at the red figure, a giant flame in this perspective flung up from the floor. His hands, numbed and indecisive, moved slowly. They rose clumsily, searching his face until they came to rest either side, holding his cheeks. His mouth, still open, glistening, appeared to be soundlessly screaming. Then he rolled on his side, coughed and vomited a small pool onto the carpet.

Tolson stood watching him with a dazed expression, frowning. He rubbed a hand over his eyes, stooping slightly at the same time as though to examine something caught between his fingers. As Leonard rose to his knees, he watched his laborious struggle to regain his balance.

‘What is it?’ Tolson said. ‘What is it?’ Then crying out, ‘What is it!’ He had caught Leonard by his jacket, half-turning him, and gripping his arms.

Leonard stumbled, falling against the wall. Then he stood upright. His face was distorted, and yet he was peculiarly calm. When eventually he looked at Tolson, seeing him across the room like someone for whom unsuccessfully he had been searching for a long time, it was with a broken smile, shy and vaguely beseeching. He seemed completely helpless.

Confronted by such a vulnerable expression, Tolson turned abjectly away. As if broken in every limb he began slowly to pull on his clothes. Occasionally he glanced up at Leonard who still watched him with such a simplicity of expression that Tolson turned away with a sound of despair.

Leonard went over to his coat where Tolson had previously flung it and, stooping to relieve a prolonged bout of coughing, eventually picked it up. He allowed it to sway a moment before slowly arranging it over his arm.

After a while Tolson said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I shall have to go and see. I shall have to see Elizabeth. You don’t understand.’

He spoke so harshly, with such a grotesque deepening of his voice, that Tolson looked at him in surprise. It seemed like some monstrous imitation of a voice projected from a body substantially larger than Leonard’s. As he saw the alarming intensity of Leonard’s face Tolson blushed and, very slowly, began to smile.

‘You don’t understand,’ Leonard went on. ‘If my father thought I’d acted out of revenge, something that he’d understand, then I’d never have any peace. The whole thing … there mustn’t be any confusion.’ Yet Leonard had begun to look about him with increasing bewilderment.

‘But what are you talking about? What act?’ Tolson said, his looks changing with a kind of ponderous relief. It was as if nothing had occurred.

‘I shall have to go,’ Leonard said despairingly.

The next moment, with a cry of vexation, he swung round and flung himself at the door. He wrenched it open and hurried out, his limbs wildly unco-ordinated, so that he stumbled heavily down the stairs. Several times he glanced back, as though under the impression that he was being followed.