The first week of their visit passed uneventfully enough, partly at least because it was too hot for any of them to want to do more than sit in the garden, or walk to and from the village along the back lanes, amongst the dust and hawthorn. They all had a sense that it should be a quiet time, a time for doing nothing and taking stock, too hot to make any effort, yet.
Jeremy alone was energetic; he was at that age; later they all remembered him as an essential part of the good weather and holiday feeling. He was always in and out, hunting partners for tennis or badminton, someone to ride with him or watch him jump or to cycle with him to the open-air swimming pool ten miles away. He was reaching the gawky age; his legs and arms were growing long and spindly, and his voice was very slightly uncertain, but he managed to transform all this, too, into his own precise grace – he was beautifully brown, like an oiled athlete, and never still, so that they always seemed to remember him, moving purposefully and at some distance, his beautiful face shining with excitement and complete attention, his limbs clear and patterned against the sun.
For Margaret he was a symbol of the Severells’ ordered life. For Anna he was the extreme example of the oppressive emptiness of summer at home, but that was not his fault. It was unlikely that Anna would ever – except as a masochistic exercise in deliberate justice – see anything in Jeremy’s favour.
Caroline, on the other hand, was made entirely happy by him. Everything was going very well, better than she could have expected, but there were flaws in a great many of her patterns that might suddenly become apparent. Only the weather and Jeremy were perfect, and she rested on them; she felt that she and God together had stage-managed this display of how things could be, if everyone would innocently enjoy what was provided, and not ask too much. She supposed it would never be the same again – Jeremy could hardly, since he was to start at public school in the autumn, be so unspoiled next year – but she refused to look into that future. She would, whatever happened, always have this to remember.
It was Jeremy himself who came at last to equate this summer with his innocence, in retrospect, and long after the others had all come to see it as something potentially bad, the beginning of the trouble, he, detached from their affairs, continued to look back to it as a perfect time, and twelve as a perfect age, which was possibly not good for him. In the September he went back to school and was seduced; an event which he told himself was perfectly usual, to be taken in his stride, but one which nevertheless led him into a continued attempt to please, or deceive or placate other people, at much closer quarters than he had been used to. This he did not like, quite apart from its incalculable effect on his future; he resented the fact that now he was expected to partake of quarrels and jealousies as well as admiration. He would never, he felt rightly, be free again.
Anna found herself, admittedly, in a different way from what she had expected, an essential part of Caroline’s plans for entertaining the visitors without either disturbing Henry or allowing his dangerous state of mind – which persisted – to become obtrusive. The first evening, after she had been sent to bed, Caroline had a little talk with Oliver, and found him very understanding and ready to meet her more than half-way. Together they perused Anna’s school reports, neatly filed by Caroline since Anna was eleven, and considered Anna’s Advanced Level marks, which had arrived a week or so ago, and in which Anna had shown no interest. They were surprisingly good. ‘No reason there for her running away,’ said Oliver cheerfully. Caroline looked at him repressively; she had consulted him about Anna’s future – Anna’s failings she preferred to keep to herself. Oliver had expressed a desire to see some of Anna’s work, so Caroline had taken him out to the garage, where Anna had left her school books, all anyhow, at the bottom of her trunk. There, in the thick summer evening he had read through her schoolwork – essays, poems, romantic girlish compositions – pressing his lips together over them, and shaking his head wisely, whilst Caroline hovered behind him and grieved over the mess Anna had made of her trunk, letting mud from her hockey boots, and jam, and soapflakes escape indiscriminately into it and collect on the books at the bottom.
‘A nice little mind,’ he said finally. ‘A nice little mind. Not very original, but you can’t expect that, at this stage. I should think we might get her into Oxford, or Cambridge, with a bit of pushing. If you think that’s the right thing.’
‘I don’t know what would be the right thing. There seems to be nothing she’s interested in.’
‘A bit of hard work will likely make her mind up, one way or the other. I’ll give her a few lessons, whilst I’m here, if you like.’
Caroline expressed gratitude, very sincerely. The arrangement had the excellence of keeping Oliver, largely, from any vigorous questioning of Henry, as well as disposing of Anna, both now, and hopefully for the next three years.
The next day there was a scene when Anna, informed of her future, became wild about Oliver’s invasion of her private papers, and burst into tears. Caroline said, ‘Well, if you don’t want people to look at them, you shouldn’t leave them lying about, should you?’ and went away to write for entrance forms to the Oxford and Cambridge colleges recommended by Oliver. Oliver said, ‘Look, Anna, I sympathize even if it was me that did it. But all the same, I think you’d be best to try doing things my way for the next few days. I shan’t be here for long, after all. Now stop crying, and get a pen and some paper, and we’ll find out what you know, and what you’re interested in, and what you’ve got to learn.’
Anna had every intention of refusing to co-operate, but Caroline arranged a card table and two canvas chairs for them on the back lawn, in the half-shadow of the edge of the orchard, and Oliver asked her, patiently, a series of questions and constructed out of her monosyllabic answers a reading list, a syllabus, essay subjects, points for discussion. ‘We shall do very well,’ he said, and Anna, ready to be despondent, found that this was true. He was a very good teacher and she was intelligent enough to be provoked by him; together they hunted through Henry’s books and sent off for others; they spent most of the day working at their table, and in the evenings Oliver drove Anna to write so much that she was no longer self-conscious about writing, but only anxious to produce something in time, which was what he intended. If she sometimes told herself angrily that she had been forced into all this before she had had time to think, she supposed too that she might as well be doing this as anything else, it committed her to nothing, and it was, in spite of Oliver’s prickliness, curiously comforting to have anyone at all so exclusively interested in what she thought or could do. Moreover, it was nice to be placed; to be asked at dinner ‘How’s it going?’ and have an answer anyone could understand; she was someone. Someone who didn’t fit her sense of herself at all corners, admittedly, but that perhaps was something she had no right to mind about, perhaps it was only youth which made one hope to be seen for oneself – who, after all, was not very likeable – all at once. Anna had a horror of being typically young. So she worked, for some days, not unhappily.
Margaret had been so determined to enjoy herself that it was unjust that she should suffer as she did from the heat, but it was unfortunately true that a more usual English summer would have suited her much better. She protected herself with oils and lotions, Ambre Solaire, lanoline and large hats, but even so her skin cracked and flaked, and her hair came out and became brittle at the ends. She was slowed down by the heat, saw everything fuzzy at the edges, and had a feeling that she was constantly distracted from the importances around her by some physical discomfort or other – burns on her shoulders, eyestrain, rubbed ankles under sandal straps in the heat.
She dealt gallantly enough with these irritations, and told Caroline several times that this was the happiest summer of her marriage, but she felt she was missing something, and later went over and over the whole time in her mind, imparting significance at last to most of the conversations and incidents which had taken place, and to several which had not. One thing was certain. Oliver was happy, and the Severells had accepted him entirely. He was even relaxed enough to explain to Margaret, after they had retired, his theories about the deficiencies in Anna’s upbringing, and not to complain when she came and sat with him for a few moments during the lessons, when she was not helping Caroline in the kitchen. She could not help being a little jealous of the trouble he was taking over the development of Anna’s mind, where he had never found it necessary to pay any attention to her own, but she cured this by taking a part in the refurbishing of Anna on her own account. She made her one or two presents of lipsticks and stockings and one day, when it was slightly cooler and when Oliver had given Anna the afternoon off – ‘to digest George Eliot’ – she consulted Caroline and drove Anna into the market town to buy her a grey striped skirt in silky cotton, two shirts, some mascara, and a straight, cream coloured, sophisticated little dress, which Anna carried home herself, put in the wardrobe, and never wore.
There was also, of course, Henry. Henry was not behaving well, although perhaps only Caroline, watching him apprehensively, and exerting great self-control over not confiding her anxiety to anyone else, was constantly aware of this. It was not the sun which troubled him. He liked sun, responded to heat like a salamander, or any other cold-blooded creature, moving and walking more violently as the temperature increased. He had often thought of moving to the Mediterranean, or to Mexico, he would say, if it were not so obvious that Caroline could be happy nowhere but in England. Nor was it the Cannings, although it was certain that he found their presence an irritant – when Caroline asked, tentatively, if he would mind if their stay was extended, Oliver was being so much help with Anna, he said, ‘What does it matter?’ glared at her, and swung wildly into the study.
Inside the study, paper was piling up untidily; he had begun to sleep very little, and would leap out of bed in the middle of the night, to make monosyllabic notes on the backs of envelopes on his chest of drawers or in his pockets. All these, too, found their way into the study, and lay in groups across the carpet and over the desk. Nobody touched anything, that was understood. He was once or twice very rude to Oliver, who mistakenly asked what he was doing; Caroline had to explain that he was under great stress, he did most of his ‘creative’ work in the summer, and this year it was proving difficult. Oliver said that he understood, of course, but Caroline felt that he would have respected Henry more if he could have behaved normally at meals; anyone would.
Not, Caroline came to know, that he was working, even on the Analysis of Romanticism, for much of the time. His restlessness increased out of all proportion, and he became obviously odd. He would stand up, silently, in the middle of meals, and rush into the garden; he rarely answered when spoken to, and was seen, once or twice, climbing up and down the stairs, five and six times, three steps at a time, soundlessly, looking as though he needed some much more violent physical activity. From the garden the others could see him, for increasing lengths of time, striding up and down the terrace outside his study, his shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, his hair like a white fire in the sun. Occasionally he made uneasy sallies into the garden, skirting the tutorial card table at a distance, and staring so intently at the two dark faces bent over it that they could not tell whether he saw them, or through them, or nothing. ‘Genius at work,’ Oliver murmured once, dryly, as the huge figure turned and disappeared rapidly into the study. Anna was embarrassed for him; whatever he was, it was certainly in bad taste to look so flamboyantly like the poet in the grip of the divine madness – and, she thought, considering his usual gentleness, it was not even true. He was giving Oliver the wrong impression, and she did not know how to set about removing it.
One morning, when the air had been so long saturated with heat and light that it had seemed impossible that it should become brighter, or more burning, Caroline came in from her inspection of the garden and the greenhouses to tell Margaret, who was waiting for her in the kitchen, that it was two degrees hotter than yesterday, the highest yet that summer. Margaret said that she could hardly believe it, and sighed. Caroline betrayed for the first time a certain sense of strain.
‘One begins to wait, in spite of oneself,’ she said. ‘Of course, one knows it’s all so unlikely, one shouldn’t wish away a day of it, one should merely bask and bask. But – I suppose one is so English – one can’t help saying to oneself that it must break, that today or tomorrow there will be a thunderstorm, which I hate, and everything will be levelled, and another branch will surely break off the acacia. It’s a bit silly worrying, when there’s no sign of it, but I do, and there it is.’
‘It does seem very heavy,’ Margaret said. It was not one of her good days, and the news that it was to be hotter than ever made it no better. Oliver, who had been, whilst they stayed there, quite remarkably loving and excitable – ‘Come here, Maggie,’ he would say night after night, and grin, ‘while we needn’t huddle under blankets’ – had last night been distracted and turned away from her; so that morning Margaret was prey again to all the pricks and anxieties she had come with. Love exposes one so, she thought, one is so dependent on it, and maybe one will never be intimate enough not to care if anything – she didn’t specify – goes a bit wrong. I can see one could be, she thought vaguely.
‘And the garden needs rain,’ Caroline went on. ‘Jeremy has been very good with the sprinkler, and you and I have carried enough cans of water, goodness knows, but it’ll have been a losing battle if it doesn’t rain soon …’ She faded into silence, and for some moments they were both peacefully busy with dishes, and the preparation of lunch. Then Caroline said idly, ‘I expect it would be better for you if it were cooler, too. You still don’t look very well. I meant to give you a complete rest, but we don’t seem to have done you as much good as I’d hoped.’
‘Oh, you have,’ Margaret protested, feeling herself more unwell and worn as she said it. ‘Really. Just being here doing things like – like cooking and cleaning and oh, how can I say?’ Her voice rose, almost strident, ‘I’ll explain – in London, I go about doing this and that, pushing a carpet sweeper, arranging cushions, and it all seems so trivial, I think I shall go on doing this until I’m dead, and what shall I have been?’
‘I think of it as an art of living,’ Caroline said, ‘and somebody must do these things.’
‘I know,’ Margaret agreed hurriedly. ‘Here it is like that, I’ve noticed. That’s why I – I mean, here it’s for someone. Henry, and Anna, and Jeremy, here it’s real, because it’s for them – but if it’s not wanted, and one still has to spend one’s life on it –? You know,’ she said, the whole thing rising at her from where she hid and nurtured it, ‘sometimes I think Oliver would have been better off if he’d not got married at all – he doesn’t seem to want –’ she hesitated – ‘to know anyone at all –’
She had said too much, too loudly, she saw, as Caroline regarded her silently, a slight crease of concern between her brows. She finished, limply – ‘I’m terrified of going back to London.’
For a moment they faced each other across Caroline’s scrubbed white table, Margaret with her whole face, pitiful and vulnerable, taut in an appeal which she had not the strength to deny. What Caroline thought it was impossible to tell; she stood for some time, her hands pressed into the table, quite quietly, then she lifted her head, possibly to speak, and Henry, coming in behind her, cut short the conversation which had never begun and caught for himself over his wife’s shoulder the full force of Margaret’s desperate look. ‘I knew that –’ he thought to himself with satisfaction. ‘I wonder precisely what –?’ He put the thought away for later, only half-consciously, and coughed. Margaret made a half-successful attempt to collect herself – she drew into herself, pulling her arms nervously round herself under her breasts, pushing her shoulders out over them, drawing her face into further creases as though covering hastily what had been indecently exposed. But her gaze remained in all its urgency fixed on Henry’s face.
‘What do you want?’ said Caroline.
‘Nothing,’ said Henry. ‘In particular.’ He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and then reached up, hooked his hands onto the ledge above the door, and stretched. Margaret watched him, fascinated. The movement elongated him incredibly – he seemed suddenly, in his bright white shirt, several sizes too large for the room, which was spacious as kitchens go, and unusually airy. He might pull it apart, just pull it apart, she thought fleetingly. Caroline began to separate eggs, cracking them into unbelievably even halves, sliding the gold, round and elastic, from shell to shell, whilst the white hung, heavy, translucent, in thick sheets, and blobbed suddenly into her basin. Caroline sliced it off with the edge of the shell, knocked the next egg against the basin, and said severely, ‘You ate no breakfast.’
‘Didn’t want it.’
Caroline was silent for a moment, probing the egg shells with her fingers, breaking, separating. Then she transferred the whites of the eggs to a rosebudded meat dish and slapped at them tidily, with a palette knife.
‘I’m making you lemon meringue,’ she said, ‘for lunch.’
Henry hung crucified from the door ledge and did not reply. He wondered what precise horror Margaret had been about to communicate, and studied her for a moment as he might have studied a plant that was drooping for no apparent reason. Margaret could not bear his look; she decided he knew everything and could see everything – his resemblance to the church god of her childhood was remarkable – and was offering her an infinite wisdom which she wasn’t capable of accepting. She thought, how important Henry makes everything, and turned her gaze to the rising peaks of foam on Caroline’s plate. Something is going to happen, she thought, and was carried away in anticipation. Henry was so splendid, whatever happened must be splendid too.
Henry began to walk round the kitchen, looking into cupboards, turning over spoons, banging against a stool. Caroline asked, ‘Please, if you don’t want anything, go away? You’re so distracting –’
Henry went round the table again and ended at the back door, his hand on the latch.
‘Where are you going?’ said Caroline, so sharply that Margaret looked at her in surprise.
‘Out,’ said Henry. ‘You know.’
‘Lunch,’ said Caroline imperiously, but with an undertone of defeat, ‘will be at one.’
‘Don’t wait for me,’ he said very vaguely, ‘I might not –’
‘Please take a hat, at least –’
‘I haven’t got one,’ Henry said, opening the door fully so that the heat advanced into the room. ‘I lost it. Don’t you remember?’
‘You’ll get sunstroke.’
‘I know,’ said Henry. He edged his large form round the door. ‘I know.’ The door closed behind him.
Caroline sat down at the table and put her head in her hands. Margaret stood in silence for a moment and then asked, ‘Where has he gone?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Caroline. She stood up and began to put her pie together. ‘It’s not the first time. He just goes off. I’ve given up interfering. He seems to need it. Sometimes it’s only a day or two. The worst time it was four and a half weeks. He’s always exhausted when he comes home. One can’t help worrying – he – he isn’t quite himself at these times. And it can be so inconvenient for everyone else. I’m sorry it happened whilst you were here. If he has really gone, that is.’ She thought, crossly, it will mean finding a tactful way of telling Oliver and the more I satisfy Oliver the angrier Henry will be when he finds out what I’ve told him when he gets back. He doesn’t think of these things. She finished, ‘I may be quite wrong, of course. He may turn up quite naturally for lunch, or for tea, perhaps. We’ll have to wait and see.’
But they both knew that Henry would not come back, for lunch or for tea. For some time they contemplated him, imagining him something monstrous, hardly human, in retreat towards something towards which they had neither the power nor the wish to follow him. They were unsettled – a masculine imperative had stalked across their horizon and opened up distances they found daunting, let in an air they shivered at. But they both collected themselves well enough, quite soon, and went back to their doings as though Henry’s shadow had cast even on the rejected lemon pie an extra significance.
Caroline thought of how she must cope with Oliver, slowly taking pleasure in her imagined approaches, and at a greater distance of what she would say to Henry, and how she would arrange for him when he came back. Whilst Margaret was suddenly released into a whole new way of looking; to see Oliver in terms of Henry’s passage through to the unknown was to have quite a different perspective from Oliver’s friends’ wives’ disapproval of her for not holding him, and him for the way in which he neglected to inform her of where he was going, and when, let alone why. Caroline had said, ‘He seems to need it,’ and did not, as far as she could see, feel herself rejected on that account.
So they cut radishes into roses, and tomatoes into water lilies, and arranged them carefully on ice. Henry did not come back to lunch, and the roses were eaten, except for the stalks, and the ice melted over lunch in the garden into a puddle slightly pink with tomato juice. There would be more to do, however, tomorrow. As Caroline had said, someone must do these things. Or so it was assumed.
In the garden, Oliver said, ‘I like that skirt. And the lipstick. And your hair like that. I’m glad to see I didn’t offend you enough for you to stick to the jeans out of perversity.’
Anna thought, I wish he didn’t think he had to talk about it all the same, smoothed her hands over the stripes, and said flatly, ‘Aunt Margaret gave it to me. It’s nice isn’t it? I expect mother got onto her. I expect she said, “Can’t you take Anna into town and make her buy some decent clothes? She won’t listen to her mother, but she might listen to you. She admires you.”’ The reproduction of Caroline’s inflections was exact, the more because Anna added no comment, no intonation of her own.
Oliver asked, ‘And do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Admire my wife?’
‘Of course I do.’ Anna looked up at him, surprised, through her newly blackened eyelashes, and pursed her newly pink mouth. ‘Anybody would. She understands such a lot. It’s just the right skirt. I think it looks like somebody’s skirt and not somebody’s daughter’s skirt, you know, not chosen for somebody, not off a shelf saying age group fourteen to seventeen, or Teen styles or anything else awful or girlish.’
‘It looks like you,’ Oliver said with heavy gallantry.
Anna grinned at him. ‘Oh no it doesn’t, it looks good and anonymous, that’s why I like it. I’d hate to be conspicuous.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, because –’
‘When you go to Cambridge, I expect you’ll think differently. Most of the girls there seem to be very conspicuous. They get spoiled, I’m afraid.’
‘Perhaps I might,’ Anna agreed, without enthusiasm. ‘But I shan’t get in, so it’s not worth bothering.’
‘You should, if you try. You’re quite clever enough. Not that clever, of course – the dons won’t fall on your neck, and say, “Please accept a major scholarship, Miss Severell.” But you should manage a place, if you behave sensibly. Besides, you’re Henry Severell’s daughter.’
‘That’s nice for me,’ said Anna, ‘that that should make a difference.’
Oliver was prevented from replying by the arrival of Henry himself, who came rapidly across the lawn and stood over them slightly flushed, balanced enormously on his toes as though he was about to set off at a lumbering run for the orchard. Oliver lit a cigarette and Anna bent her head to stare at the ice cube filming slowly into her glass of thick, sugary, home-made lemonade. Henry’s mood impressed itself slowly, on Anna at least. There was general unease; partly because they had been caught out considering Henry as a problem and here he was, large and human, partly because it became more and more apparent that Henry was alive with some urgency which he was going to make no attempt to communicate. He said, once or twice, ‘Well –’ and once, ‘I see you’re busy?’ and looked fiercely down on Anna, who would not meet his eyes. Oliver said, ‘We’re getting along quite well; Anna has a very good mind. I’m very pleased.’
‘Good,’ said Henry absently, not attending. Anna was annoyed to see Oliver ruffled on her behalf; anyone with a little tact could have seen that it was not the moment to present anything to Henry, it wasn’t fair to judge him – or by implication, herself, and what she could usually rely on him to care about – by his present mood. He was so much more than usually elsewhere. It shone on him.
‘I think you must arrange more teaching for Anna after I’ve left,’ Oliver went on. ‘She still needs guidance and someone to read essays, that’s natural. You could advertise for a tutor, unless you know anyone. Do you?’
Henry blinked at him, studied him for a moment with infinite arrogance and then slid his eyes away again, to the hills over the hedge.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I think I must go. Please excuse me.’
Oliver offered to speak again, and Anna kicked his shin, sharply, under the table. Oliver swallowed, leaned down, and mumbled.
Anna said in her mind: go if you’re going, don’t stand here and drive me mad. Henry, as though suddenly released by what had been holding him over them, broke away and strode, nearly at a run, through the trees and out, and onto the hill at the other side, looking splendid, magnificent, hair and beard and shirt shining, and also slightly silly, with a touch of the large man hurrying for the bus. This last cut him off from them more finally than his splendour could have done alone; he looked very lonely, very much an object, as he began to climb up amongst bracken on the other side.
‘God, he moves fast,’ said Oliver, and for some time they were both still, watching him. Then Oliver said, ‘What was all that about? Have you done something to annoy him?’
‘Of course not. It’s not like that at all.’
‘What was wrong with him, then?’
‘Nothing,’ said Anna.
‘He was upset,’ Oliver persisted. ‘Where did he go?’
‘How should I know?’ Anna cried, angry. She could see the white light of his hair still, bobbing and gleaming into the distance, cold and bright amongst all the soft gold and rust of the bracken, and she was overcome with her own limitations; it was terrible not to know, to have no idea what he went for, what he thought; she wept to herself, I would give anything to be like that, if I knew what like that was. How can one sit here, just the same, when there’s anyone alive who finds anything as tremendously important as he finds climbing that hill?
She said repressively, ‘He gets like this. He just goes off. We’ve given up paying any attention any more.’ She managed to convey that to pay any attention was in slightly bad taste. She said, ‘I expect he wants to get away and think.’ Think, she told herself, was a poor word for it, whatever it was, but how could one find a better, when one knew so little, could follow him in imagination only far enough to stick fast at a consciousness of one’s own inability to follow further? The patch of white that was Henry glittered on a ridge for a moment, and then seemed to rise into the air, before plunging into a dip out of sight. Oliver, disconcertingly, picked up her thought, standing up uneasily and staring after Henry, as though he too found it fleetingly irksome and inadequate to be still here.
‘I wonder what about? Or for that matter, how. I find it daunting, don’t you, to read his things and think that never now, however hard I tried, could I ever produce anything like that – not only because one hasn’t his command of language, but because one hasn’t the experience, one doesn’t know where he starts from, except by guessing from what he writes. It’s nowhere I’ve ever been. I’m not sure it’s a legitimate place for most people to go, or to be preoccupied with. But one can’t keep away from it, or at least I can’t. It’s the fascination of what’s alien, I suppose – there’s lots of good stuff written that I don’t find alien – stuff one hasn’t produced oneself, but quite easily might have, you know. Stuff one takes possession of when one’s reading it, and feels one has a right to criticize the direction of, with authority, if it goes wrong. But not him. I have a constant struggle to read him, and I always feel he’s battered me into agreement. I accept his view because he knows, not because I know. And I tease myself sometimes with wondering how he gets it, what sort of processes. He doesn’t give much away, does he? How does he work?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Anna. Something in her voice caught Oliver’s attention; he turned back from the hill, and looked at her closely.
‘You don’t seem to like to talk about him,’ he said sharply.
‘I haven’t really got anything to tell you about him.’
‘There’s no need to give me the unwanted newspaper reporter treatment,’ Oliver said. ‘I don’t want “Henry Severell – the Inside Story. By his Daughter”. I want to know what you think.’
‘That’s the same thing, really, isn’t it? Anyway, I don’t, very much.’
‘Which means you do, all the time, and aren’t going to be caught admitting it,’ Oliver finished, friendly and accusing. Anna was washed by a wave of that useless anger which catches us when someone makes what appears to be a profound psychological criticism of us, which, although we have considered it carefully and objectively ourselves, and believe it, in what seems a balanced way, to be untrue as it is stated, we cannot protest against, since the protest must only confirm the critic’s belief in his own perspicacity. Besides, she had been asked too often about Henry already. It was an unfortunate truth that at the point when people thought they knew her more than superficially – girls at school, the English mistress, even, once, surprisingly, Michael – they asked her about Henry. And me, she thought, who am I?
Oliver said, ‘I can see it can’t be very pleasant for you, living under his shadow. Great men are always hard on the next generation. And genius is unfortunately very selfish; I suppose you’re so organized round him that you don’t have much time to see who you are or where you are yourself. It’s not the sort of thing he’d notice, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m away at school,’ Anna pointed out wearily, ‘a lot of the time. And I don’t want to be noticed, any more than I am. I’m all right.’
‘You didn’t seem to like school very much, either, did you? I’ve been thinking about this since I came here, and it seems to me you don’t see – or don’t want to see – the dangers. You’ve got to be honest with yourself, more than most people, or you’ll just be submerged. And that’d be a waste.’
Anna winced, and said nothing.
‘There’s your father. Not a normal father – how often does he talk to you, or take you out, or notice your clothes? And at the same time he pursues a way of life that’s impossible for most people, and as far as I can see enjoys it more than most people enjoy most lives – well, you’re not going to be like that, let’s face it, and it seems to me you’d better cut away from it or you’ll never find what you can be like. No, don’t argue with me, yet –’
‘I was going to say, he does – he did – talk to me.’
‘I know you must believe that. I haven’t seen him, while I’ve been here. Then there’s your mother. She thinks he comes first. She thinks you should think so, too. He’s a trust. Isn’t it so? And she doesn’t like you.’ Anna winced again; Oliver had a habit of making short statements as though they were absolute truths and excluded any other view of things, which she thought must be wrong, things were surely more complex than that. And yet, perhaps she was so put out, just because they were the best approximate truths. At that moment it seemed obvious – and wounding – that her mother simply disliked her. It was just that one didn’t think about these things because – like all other girls – one wanted things normal, parents who didn’t stand out, but automatically cared for one, like anyone else’s. Why does he want to do this to me? she asked herself, in pain.
‘I don’t know why she doesn’t like you,’ the thin voice went on. ‘You do your best to annoy her but I’m not sure which is cause and which effect, and I keep an open mind. Anyway, you’ve less defences, and suffer more. Your brother seems to have his own means of getting loved in this barren situation; that may be his weakness yet, I don’t know. I’m not concerned with him at the moment. Now, unfortunately, you’re financially so situated that you don’t have to get out, ever, in any way. There’s nothing to stop you just rotting here, in this garden, admiring genius for the rest of your life, is there? Ostensibly waiting to get married, I suppose. I think highly enough of you to think you can make more of yourself than just a wife, in any case. If only you showed any sign of wanting to.’
Anna stirred in her chair.
‘What is it?’
‘I think you make – clearer issues of things – than there are. I don’t really feel like – like you think I feel.’ Oddly, what most stung was Oliver’s conviction that she would never be like Henry, would always be second rate, for that was what it came to. It was not so certain, there was her event still in the future, there were things she could be – under Henry’s shadow or not – that were not so dry, and grindingly achieved as what Oliver seemed to be thinking of. She was aware of more than he thought, but the awareness was difficult enough to hold on to, with Oliver as he was, looking intently into her face.
He asked, ‘Do you read his novels?’
‘Of course,’ said Anna, watching him note the discomfort she could not conceal. She had in fact read Henry’s novels, each of them, once and no more, as quickly as possible, partly out of a feeling which Oliver would presumably have understood, that in some way to study them too closely would be to submerge. And she had had, until very recently, the child’s irrational fear that the parent may be exposing himself, making a fool of himself in public. And lastly, which was presumably behind Oliver’s asking, she was clever enough, and perhaps enough like Henry, to distinguish some of his raw material in what he made of it, and she did not like the idea of having a father who was in secret so detached, so merciless a watching intelligence. If it was in one’s mind, it made it impossible to approach him naturally as a father. But it was not, she thought against Oliver, very often in her mind, she had deliberately forsworn close acquaintance with the work, whereas she had lived with the man – since he came back from the war – long enough to be able to ignore the writer in the father, surely? It was not as though Henry saw himself in any way as a great man. He was mild and gentle, and friendly, when not preoccupied. Oliver himself brought out the worst in him, but one could hardly say that; it would be rude.
‘The important thing is to be honest with yourself. You mustn’t deal with being neglected by pretending you’re not – you can mind as much as you like, but you mustn’t for a moment pretend that things are going to be any different, because they aren’t. There are other standards besides his, and you’ve got to set your own, within your own limits. And you mustn’t expect anything of him – beyond the start he’s given you, and his company isn’t all bad, enough of it must be a stimulus I wouldn’t go without – but you mustn’t expect what he can’t give, interest in what you can do, or even natural curiosity. Most children are their parents’ future, but he’s his own, and it puts you out of place. But you mustn’t mind – you’re Anna, not Henry Severell’s daughter. And you must live your life.’
Anna could find nothing to say except a reiterated protest that it wasn’t true. Henry was better to her than that.
She said, ‘You frighten me.’
‘I will do, because you’ve refused to think. But you must think soon and you’ll see I’m right. Do you try to write?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
‘But what must I do?’ Anna asked, mesmerized by Oliver’s fierce face, and the harsh little lecturing voice, into accepting his view for a moment absolutely.
‘At the moment, get into university. Then you’ll be with other people who know what the real world is like and are making choices like the one you’ll have to make. Just break away, then you’ll know.’
Anna bent her head over her books.
‘I don’t like the idea of just abandoning everything. I don’t think one can, as simply as that.’
‘Oh yes, one can. If one tries. Now this morning, I thought we’d cope with Matthew Arnold …’
Henry came over the hill into the sun. The descent was steeper than the ascent had been; the valley was rounded, on the upper slopes bracken and some stones, in the bowl trees, mostly beech, a quick leaping river, divided again and again by large boulders, crossed in one place by a wooden bridge with a handrail, and, on the other side of the trees, slopes of thick gorse bushes, butter yellow, and more bracken. There was a boy on the bridge watching the water. He was camping with a friend, in the next valley, and had quarrelled with him, as two people alone on holiday together are apt to do, so he was watching the water rather sulkily, wishing he had something better to do, or that he had not come at all. The first edge of the bowl was almost vertical, ten feet or so of rock, tufted with wiry grass. Henry appeared on the top so rapidly and so suddenly that the boy had hardly time to take him in, a huge figure with flailing arms against the sky, before he was over. The boy made an involuntary movement to warn him – which at that distance was useless – of the drop. But unlike the philosopher, Henry was not swallowed for presumption; he came down, on a difficult stone, on one foot, balanced all his huge weight on it for a moment, swinging his arms wildly with all the power in them to keep a balance which it suddenly seemed impossible he should lose, took off in a huge leap, and was down the hill again like some enormous animal, an ancient white bull, in full charge.
He had his head down like the bull, and, with the curling mass of his beard and hair obscuring his face from this angle altogether, presented something of the same solid, blind, purposeful front. His speed, or some earlier gesture, had whipped up his hair into two great curved peaks, not unlike horns, which added to the illusion, and the whole of him, silver hair and white garment – his shirt was outside his trousers now, like a tabard – shone in some strange way, with a white glitter, as though he was giving off a concentrated light of his own and not merely the refracted light of the still sun over the hill.
What unnerved the boy was the directness of his progress. As he had come over the hill, so he continued, in a straight line, going over the hillocks, and through gorse bushes, clattering stones out of his way down the hillside. As he came down, in what seemed only a few moments, but must, even at Henry’s speed, have been much longer, towards the river, the boy moved aside altogether, pressing himself against a tree for protection. He felt sick with unreasonable fear; either the man would come near him, or he would break his neck in the river, which was here quite wide. It was not full – the summer had been too dry – so the channel between its banks was unusually deep, and the stones were sharp, and glossy with bright olive green moss. Henry came down, still even in the shadow, shining, ignored the bridge, stepped, wide and lightly, one stride into the river, and one, from the same foot on the slimy stone, apparently effortless stride up onto the far bank, shook himself and went on out into the sun again and up onto the further hill.
The boy looked involuntarily up the valley towards where Henry had come from, to see what had been driving him, but the valley was clear and empty under the sun, and nothing monstrous, nor even human, appeared on the skyline. So he turned back to Henry and watched him make his way, with no diminution of speed, towards the next ridge.
Henry was afraid of the thing towards which he was driving himself; it was partly that he was driving, not only that he was driven. In a sense, now, he knew enough about his present state of mind to be able to predict what would be the outcome of his walking. In a sense, too, he could control it, and knew why he must walk as he did, and how far he could go. But more powerfully, it was all new every time he set out, it was all to be learned, to be undergone again, and from his present, still fairly rational state, it seemed terrible. He would, quite consciously, have liked to be able to abandon the whole undertaking and go quietly home to his work, but what came first was to walk, it did not matter how far, to walk until he was exhausted, and at that time he felt himself inexhaustible.
What he called, liking the precise medical metaphor, his attacks of vision, had come upon him very gradually, only becoming really nasty when he was about Anna’s age. At first it had been only an inexplicable attentiveness, a tightening of sight, a thing seen suddenly and remembered as a visual touchstone, a tree like a branched and burning candlestick, with flame upon flame of leaping green light. But once, in the main street of the small county town where he had lived as a boy, the thing had shaken and changed him, and the pattern had been set. There had been first the visual insistence – hard outlines, the lines on the pavement suddenly slicing and dangerous, the salmon pinks and dull brick reds of the housefronts suddenly thickened and glaring to the point of suffocation. There had been no pleasure in seeing, then, largely he thought, now, because he did not know what was happening, and fought it, was most unhelpfully afraid. After the sight changed, there had been as now a sudden bewildering access of strength pumped up from inside him, so that, as now, he had lengthened his stride, and pushed things, which, in this case on the crowded market street, happened to be people – out of his way, thinking in confusion that he could like Samson rip up the gas lamps by their roots to part them more effectively.
Over the years, he had learned to come to terms with these attacks. He recognized the symptoms earlier – noticed a quickening of sight he could not have been alive to when younger; light in his own green glass paperweight had warned him this time, weeks ago, it had been dangerously beautiful, disproportionately important. When it came to him, now, he had to stop writing in the end, he could not attend to anything as long drawn out and demanding as that; he went back to his study of the visionaries, finding all their sentences, all their descriptions of the indescribable, equally, in some curious way, an inspiration and an invitation. Later, when he was an artist again, he found parts of Blake banal and some of Coleridge’s notes meaningless, but at the time everything connected, all meanings were a network, and his coming experience the master-knot. He thought a great deal about this, having accepted it almost immediately as the most important area of his life. He knew already before the war that his visionary moments were a direct source of power and that his only way to make a statement as high and as demanding was to write a very violent, stylized action, remote on the whole from the way most people lived, most of the time, which should rarefy, or concentrate what he knew to the bright intensity with which he knew it. But before the war he had not quite known how; the prison camp had taught him that.
He never, curiously, attempted to write anything other than novels – it may have been that his extreme shyness needed the distance of the dramatic form before he could speak at all. His thought formed itself around whole men, whole actions; it was epic; his own solitary experiences were not, and he always knew it, raw material.
On leaving Cambridge he wrote a countryman’s novel, after Hardy, not unsuccessfully, published it, and then found a way out which for a time satisfied him, and wrote elegantly, very much in the manner of the early E. M. Forster, parables on the power of the earth, using the comparatively neutral machinery, which had now, at least for most of his readers, only a literary life – peasants, dryads, Apollo, Dionysus, Pan. But his work, though now admired, was in a strait jacket, it was bursting at the seams, and he was conscious of it.
It was from the land that his strength came, but at that time he could not cope with England as a setting or a symbol. He admired, but could not share, the Bloomsbury novelists’ faraway, gentlemanly, aeroplane view of their country and its society, as some kind of an informing presence. He was not, in spite of Oliver’s view of him, enough of a gentleman to find any inherent value in it; he did not want to write about a society, and yet found it difficult to extricate himself from it. This was behind his move to Japan, where he taught English in a university, and wrote his Japanese novels, a study of the exile of a general to a rocky island, the story confined entirely to his struggle for survival, one or two bold fables about the spiritual discipline of the monks and soldiers, studies of crises, not of conscience, but of consciousness.
He came back to England before the war, and was sent East again by the army, because of his knowledge of Japanese; this was not much use to them as it turned out, since he was almost immediately taken prisoner. He survived imprisonment better than most – he was very strong – and now never mentioned what he had experienced. But he had learned something; it was after that that he wrote the two novels that drew Oliver’s attention to him; war epics that Oliver did not hesitate to call works of art and tragic.
He had always had a curious, geometrical visual memory, whole areas of things seen fined down to one visual symbol. Now, as he came up through the hundreds of bright yellow lights of the gorse, he saw, superimposed on the dignified English sun, which sailed like a dignified English angel, splendid and calm and powerful on the clear blue, that other angrier copper circle, dancing furiously on a sky so petrol-dark with heat that it seemed stormy where it was not, and saw both as the orifice of a cone, in the centre of which he walked, here on crushed bracken and crumbled turf, there, delirious with dysentery, backwards and forwards in the beam of the sun’s searchlight, across the terra cotta dust of the compound. And to see them together was to strengthen both. He walked more and more quickly, using all his body. If he kept still at this time, or tried to look, it would all be too much for him.
He came over the next hill, and down into a further valley; here there was a road, and a high, pale stone wall, the boundary of someone’s large estate. It was getting later, but there were still hills in the distance, which still shone.
He took the road for a short way; it was tar spread and was alive in the heat, seething and bursting here and there, with every now and then a little hiss, where a bubble rose, rounded, burst, and sank again. Where the dust was not on the tar, at the edges off the road, this was lined and crossed with light, which moved with it, like pale little snakes along its molten surface. Henry didn’t like the road; it reminded him irritatingly, in spite of its emptiness, of Oliver’s view of his world as a picture, sandwiched into a frame of man-made tidinesses, which wouldn’t do, and besides, walking was too easy, the only battle was with the sucking of the tar. So he crossed, put one hand up to the top of the wall, jumped, hung for a moment from one arm, and pulled himself up slowly, straddled the wall for a moment, and was down in a ride, with empty country in front for miles, and a gentle slope, and more hills in the distance, towards which he set out, through bracken and turf, and clumps of trees. He flexed himself to see if the climb had tired him at all, apparently it had not. But there was sweat on his hair and beard, and his shirt was damp and less bright than it had been; there was less of him in some way, already, than when he had set out.
When evening came altogether he was miles away, and unrecognizable. There had been water in his way, more than a pond, less than a lake, through which he had gone, wading across most of the way, half swimming for a short time in the middle, having a struggle at the far end with long clinging green weeds, which wrapped themselves round him and were dragged up from the water bottom sucking and protesting, bringing with them clouds of fine black mud, so that now he was streaked with green slime, and stained, hands, beard, shirt, trousers, unevenly black, green, grey, the black coating cracking as it dried along his fingers and wrists. His progress was very audible, but he was less visible, almost, except for the white top of his head, as though he had deliberately camouflaged himself. He had looked back at the water, across whose flat, white, reflecting surface the ribbons and arrows of his track were spreading and disappearing, slipping against reeds and making an infinitesimal sound as they rolled and died. As he looked, the sun died from it, so that the white mirror grew dark and deep, and suddenly very cold; the sky went blue and deeper blue and then dusky grey. Henry came into a land which had been laid waste – the bracken was broken and tangled, the ground was flat, torn up, pitted here and there and heaped into unnatural piles of raw, orange grey, clay earth, crossed again and again by huge machine tracks. It was forestry that had been done there, he saw – great boles of trees lay all at angles to each other, very dead, their roots, bushed and dried, hanging sadly in air, their length ending abruptly in a pyramid of sawn, clear wood, coming to a point, like bloodless amputated wounds. Things were still growing on them, thick moss, grey and yellow, and bright green lichens, picking up the first light of the moon already, which was nevertheless, in that devastation, a cold light. Perspective deserted him; the rifts and furrows in these dead skins opened at him like pits; he began to run, in his wet shoes, wildly, between them – these he could not go over – afraid now in earnest not of this dark, but of another. The worst thing, he had always known, would be if the vision went black on him, if outlines shouted at him, not with importance, not with something that was too much for him, but with the other thing, the knowledge of nothing, which was always present enough, a warning, just over the edge of the height he constantly walked.
But he came to a track between high banks, on whose top there were tall trees, standing black, but with the moon on their leaves, and at the end of the track he was suddenly in fields in moonlight, fields heavy with hay, smelling warm even in the cold night, fields soft green, and pale gold surrounded by trees.
Henry went along, in the shadows, and the hay moved, in the light, in the square of open land, this way and that, falling heavily against itself and sighing, changing colour from grey, to straw, to gold, to glass as it swayed. He had the illusion that there were walkers with him, who went directly across the bright land, pearl grey figures, who strode taller than men, and gave off their own soft light. They went ahead of him; he could not count them; and rose over a hedge; he climbed a gate and found himself in much more open country, walking on bright spikes of stubble, amongst corn that had been already harvested, and they marched ahead of him, in line, between the stooks, leaving, it seemed, trails and threads of white light like nets over the heads of corn, or like snail tracks, wherever they had passed or touched.
Henry went after them, walking steadily, calmer now the sun was off him, feeling himself very peaceful, in a dream. He was a grotesque figure, if there had been anyone to see, with his thick white cap of hair, and rivulets of mud drying spikily over the rest of him, and green weed caught in his trousers, taking its watery bright colour momentarily under the moon. He thought, amongst the sheaves, which in some lights were almost bodiless, cages for light, of Joseph; the stars were up now, like lights off metal. How arrogant it was, and how organized, he thought, and how he would hate to be placed in that way, with the sun and the moon and the stars and the clear sheaves flopping down so submissively, so politely in front of him. What a responsibility, what an impediment, to have the world so neatly pointing out one’s position in relation to other people. Joseph was always right, too, the baker, the butler, Pharaoh, his family, Potiphar’s wife, the sun and the moon and the sheaves, they all meant what he said, and pointed his moral, and showed that his way was best. Maybe one could find out that kind of thing, if that kind of thing was what one wanted to find out. Henry gave up thinking about Joseph; prophecy was not his country; he liked the sheaves as they were, leaning away from him, holding their own shapes, their own tension, giving off their own light, nothing to do with him. It was more likely that he would lie down by them and never get up again than that they would come out of their shapes in the field and flop in front of his human path. If they did, he would be, quite intolerably, not alone. And would therefore not know; he would be too busy.
The land was flatter now, uplands, airy; there was a lump of a hill on his right, covered with beautifully compact little round bushes, rich amber, touched red by the moon, but the moon poured a path in front of him, along the stubble, and he went that way, the impulse to climb having left him for the time. Behind him, he left a trail of black dust: he could not begin to predict, still, how much longer he must go on.