2

The cold came back but the memory of that February afternoon stayed with Benson, haunted his imagination, a lull of warmth and death sealed like a bubble in ice by the return of winter. The elements changed order but were always the same: the sunlit air, the flash of the leap, the guardians in their summer clothes, the premature song of the blackbird, the crash and sprawl. Trapped somewhere among these shifting images, there must be a meaning, as he pointed out to Dolores one dark night in the vicinity of the Anglican cathedral.

“Trouble shrinks a man in some ways, ” he said, “but the capacity for receiving messages is immeasurably increased, if you have the gift at all.”

He felt himself to be a living proof of this. He had always had a delicate sense of correspondence; that is characteristic of the literary mind. But in those days of his affliction, when he felt somehow ambushed by his own past, he saw parallels everywhere. They bred in the silence of his life. This silence too he spoke about to Dolores on that same night. By this time it was early April and he had become a sort of specialist in silence and messages. And in a way he did not for a moment regard as accidental he had found in Dolores the perfect person for this type of conversation because Dolores never spoke and almost never moved.

“That this world is silent, I know,” he said. “We both know it. This is a completely silent world in its essential condition. Sound is transient, sound is a pimple. Silence is the only unity that mortals know. Value judgements have got nothing to do with it, it makes no difference, no essential difference, whether it is a fart or a cantata. This silence has got nothing to do with peace either.”

He peered gesturing through the darkness, opening his mouth softly, reverently, to let out the spirituous heat: he had drunk a fair amount of whisky on his way here. “That would be an elementary blunder,” he said. “By God, I am not capable of it. What I didn’t know is that it can take you over. Silence can take you over. And if it does—” He leaned forward for emphasis, despite the fact that Dolores was not looking at him. “If it does, you won’t know who you are, you might as well be at the bottom of the sea with pearls for eyes. Of course, it isn’t uniform. Well, perhaps in the final terrible phase, but we are not there yet, are we? It can be fine-spun or it can get thicker.”

He could make out little of Dolores but the rigid and melancholy profile – all he ever saw, really: Dolores never turned to look at him and always sat at the extreme limit of the bench, always the same bench, which at least made him easier to locate than Walt or The Pilot, the two others Benson sometimes talked to in the Hope Street area – they were more peripatetic. In the course of his wanderings in this part of the city he had found three human creatures who would listen to him without offering insult or launching into rival monologues of their own.

“Miasmic sometimes,” he said. “I may be dwindling at scalp and scrotum but I have got my powers of observation.”

Not far away voices were raised, a woman’s among them. There was a little group of inebriates sitting together on the ground; Benson could see the pale shapes of their faces. Here and there across the plateau of wasteland there was a sort of broken radiance, wisps and fluffs of light, random spores from the vast floodlit cliffs of the cathedral. This colossal edifice, though several hundred yards away, filled the sky to the west completely, blotted out the stars. Once again, eyeing the monstrous bulk, Benson felt that all in its shadow must have indulgence of a sort, himself, Dolores, the drinkers and all other lurking souls there. A structure so insanely large condoned any excess, any degree of hyperbole or hysteria. Here if anywhere it should be permitted to stalk the stricken creatures and confide in them …

“Or don’t you think so?” he said.

He heard the other give a sudden groaning breath. It was a sound Dolores made from time to time, as if at some stab of physical pain or some painful or oppressive memory. It was because of these sounds of pain, not out of disrespect, that Benson had privately named him Dolores. People have to be named. Sometimes he snuffled up mucus that had slowly gathered in his nostrils. Occasionally there would come the violent scrape of his heels on the ground before him. But he never actually said anything.

“Right then,” Benson said. “Your own body is no barrier to it, get what I mean? Something about you tells me you may have made this discovery already, you are not a novice in the field. We come into this world equipped with a special membrane that separates our own silence from the silence outside. Mine has rotted away, that is the point I’m trying to get across.”

He paused: the other man had made a sudden movement in the dimness; after a moment Benson recognised it for the first move in an unvarying sequence: Dolores was going to light a cigarette.

“Words hold it off,” Benson said. “Words are magic. Talking. Singing. Trying to write. When you were a child you used to sing or whistle when you were scared. You might have thought it was to keep your spirits up, but it was to make a protective screen.” He felt the beginnings of a headache. Suddenly he was weary of his own fluency, his practised, unreliable voice, not sticking anywhere, not really engaged with anything. Wretched spouter. And speechifying to this poor Dolores … Once he had seen him in the daytime, only once, stepping short, arms pressed close to his body, head thrust back on the rigid stalk of his neck, picking his way along Huskisson Street as if it were a minefield.

“No,” he said, “it’s the gaps that are dangerous. You have to act. People talk about self-dramatisation as if it were a fault or an affectation, whereas it’s a matter of life or death. This is acting I’m talking about, the fabricated self, non-authentic behaviour, mauvaise foi. I couldn’t get through without it.”

He heard the spurt of the match, saw the lowered face, curiously meek in the brief flare of light. He averted his gaze quickly. Someone is looking after Dolores, he reminded himself, to reduce the discomfort of his compassion. Dolores doesn’t smell, Dolores has a warm-looking coat on. He is clean-shaven. Someone, somewhere, is washing his socks, cooking his dinners. Devoted mother? She makes sure he is wrapped up warmly when he comes out to sit here on his accustomed bench. A simple, god-fearing woman, she cannot understand why he should want to spend hours alone in the dark, why he should need to hold himself so rigidly and fearfully against dissolution, making no sound but snuffles and groans. No, she accepts, she does not question. One of the humble of the earth. Always in an apron. Dark-haired, a care-worn face, beautiful luminous eyes … No, it is his sister. Big-boned and gaunt, passionate, rather ungainly, incestuous mole on her cheek. She worships him. No …

“My life seems to have lost all direction,” he said. “In small things as in great I am not aware of any operation of the will, any progression. One minute I might be sitting down, the next I am standing or walking. There is no sense in my mind of an interval between those two states, no moment of purpose or decision.”

The drinkers had lit a fire; he could see the movements of the flames. That would bring the police on them sooner or later. When he had started coming here it was January and still very cold. There had been quite a few fires at that time, in different parts; plenty of firewood then, sections of old fencing lying around and planks from sheds, left over from a building scheme on the wasteland above Duke Street. The work had ceased abruptly and had not been resumed and perhaps never would be, a situation common enough in these days of abandoned projects, derelict enterprises, boarded-up ambitions. Only the name of the contractor was left: Bentcock – mocking with its suggestion of poor performance the failure of any erection to materialise on the site. Homeless people used the wood for fires until in their own good time the police got together, came in some force and made them put the fires out.

Benson glanced up to where the remote battlements of the cathedral, escaping from the spent rays of the floodlights, merged into the night sky. He wanted to tell Dolores the story of the owl, which also involved a fire, but for some reason hesitated. “If I could sleep,” he said. “But I won’t take pills. Or if I could find a reason for what has happened to me. I still take notes. More than ever. I was always a great note-taker and researcher. Diligent Benson. Well, you have to be if you want to write historical novels. I have been reading about the Liverpool slave-trade for two years now. That was to have been my next subject. Perhaps I have told you this before? It was because of that I came to this city in the first place, three years ago now. You know, local archives, get the feel of the place. That was three years ago. I keep scrapbooks too, I am an inveterate scrapbook man. I have them going back to the last war. I thought they’d be useful – you have to know your own times, don’t you? But the effect of looking through them now is appalling – a sort of thickening silence, like, I don’t know, like shreds of death falling on you, death flakes. I know that’s an ugly word.”

He paused and at once Dolores uttered a series of groaning breaths, as if he had been politely suppressing them until the interval. “Yes,” Benson said, “you have been through the mill yourself, you know how things are. Diligent note-taker and researcher, scrapbook compiler extraordinaire, that is Benson. It isn’t loss of faith in words. Words are magic. It isn’t on the plane of ideas at all. More like an illness of some kind, something I contracted long ago. It has been lying dormant, chooses this time to come out. And in late career, when this happens in late career, I will be sixty-four next birthday, yes, I know I’ve told you this before, but bear with me, you worry that death will intervene. It would be just a slightly deeper stage of paralysis. You can’t help it, you can’t help worrying.”

In spite of the whisky, in spite of his attempts to maintain a sort of facetious formality of speech, Benson found that his throat had tightened painfully. “I am getting lachrymose,” he said. “What makes the whole thing deeply ironical is that I am also Clive Benson, Literary Consultant. Yes, I know I’ve told you this before. I advertise or used to. My name is up, outside the door. I comment on style and technique. I advise my clients on all aspects of fiction writing, I give practical hints on marketing. In rigor mortis myself, I tell them to loosen up. Through locked jaws I shrewdly analyse. I only have five clients left. I think you’ll admit that the situation has a certain terrible beauty about it. But it is a tribulation of spirit to me and it is often quite impossible to get any money out of people, especially these days. Funds are low. I live from hand to mouth. My marriage broke up some years ago. You can’t tell living people from people in books, she said to me. My wife, that is. She had a burnished look that day, the day she told me she was leaving. I wasn’t expecting it. You don’t know the difference, she said. I am flesh and blood, not someone in the book. You have taken my life, she said. She looked somehow lustrous, but not from triumph. She looked like a character in a book. Now, on top of everything else, my libido has been affected. I don’t feel sexual desire when I am with someone, only when I am on my own. There’s a certain dangerous beauty about that too. I don’t sleep well and things get jumbled up together. Now trouble of this order makes a man sensitive to omens and I am convinced, as sure as I am sitting here, that this business of the owl means something. The beetle too.”

And so it was that Benson finally began to tell Dolores the story of the owl and the beetle. He didn’t tell the whole story on that occasion and in fact Dolores never heard it all. Nobody did. It was told in bits and pieces to a number of people, most of them complete strangers. But that he might have found a Muse that night he mentioned to nobody.