6

SHEBAH

If there’s any sense in this, it eludes me. I find myself, almost, yes, almost – carried along by their general attitude of abandonment. They do it all with such an air, with such an absence of shame, with such complacency.

Was there even a feeling of reality in the way they picked me up off the ground this morning?

Do I, as Lily would have it, inhabit another sphere of existence altogether?

I’m sitting here in a garden, not alone for once (surrounded by scum), really very weary. I wish Lily wouldn’t keep throwing me those wan little smiles. I can’t bear her massive insincerity. Like this morning – not one of them daring to say a word to that swine Claude. Here, in all this luxury, to be shot at like an animal, hunted through the grass like some exalted form of game. It’s unbelievable and yet quite comprehensible.

Didn’t I run down Brownlow Hill – poor little me with my violin case under my arm, and all the gentile children calling after me ‘Persecutor of Christ … Killer of Jesus’?

And my poor father ruining his eyes, forever bent over the insides of cheap watches, giving his last crust of bread away to those damned relations of mine. Even cousin Reub wouldn’t believe the callousness that exists. Or am I being too generous on account of the blood link?

They are slaves who fear to speak

For the fallen or the weak,

They are slaves who do not choose

Hatred, suffering or abuse …

Oh my God, have I had my share of all three? The hatred from the women – those jealous, petty female impersonators with their tight calculating little minds and their dependence on men. During the war they hounded me from the Overseas Club – poor little me with my poor weak eyes – and still they were jealous of the way the men swarmed after me – me, with a tumour growing inside me the size of a football. How they begrudged me the solace of admiration. Teaching the men English, with my poor little education (now, which university did you attend?) and so witty and gay, giving them all leaflets for the concerts and shows, and crawling – yes, crawling – back to that concentration camp in Billing Street with Eichmann Hanna waiting for me with his bricks wrapped up in newspaper. And all of them avoiding me in the streets, all – even Reub passing me by without a look, his own blood, and not even a nod of the head, not even the courtesy of an enquiry. Once he was glad enough to acknowledge me, when he was a snotty little boy without an overcoat. ‘My lovely cousin Shebah,’ he would tell all his friends, and ‘Can we come to the Playhouse club and watch you act? May we, please, dear Shebah?’

What money does to people! What effect it has on their ideals, their loyalties! It couldn’t have happened in the old days, it just would not have happened. But now … now they’re all alike.

This lovely house full of marvellous things, rare as peacocks, and Claude throwing his money about on drink and saying he’s penniless, and Norman lying there in a suit that must have cost a fortune, though he said he couldn’t afford to travel here in the train. And Lily supported from first to last by men, however she may deny it, sprawling on the grass with the sole of her shoe worn through, and her skirt held together with a safety pin. We would have been too proud to let the world see our poverty. We would have made something out of nothing and put a bit of lace here and a bit of ribbon there, and still people would have turned their heads to look at us. The hats I made out of bits of curtains and scraps of velvet, and the dresses I made out of oddments, one for every day of the week, and there wasn’t an eye that didn’t hold regard or envy, as I trotted down the street on my dainty little heels. When I tell them, they all say, in that annoyingly insincere way, ‘Oh yes, I can believe it,’ and Victorian Norman turns his head away and I’m supposed not to notice that he’s laughing.

But it’s true. I was unique. I was beautiful. It’s the suffering, the hatred and the abuse that have brought me this low, the aloneness, the rottenness of my relations, the jealousy I’ve encountered everywhere. If I had received one-tenth of their education, their opportunities, what could I not have done with my life, with the brain I have. Lily’s clever. She has a certain quality that I had, that makes people envious, but she uses her mind more cunningly. She wheedles and insinuates, she knows how to make herself indispensable and desirable. I never had her strength though, her sheer animal courage, which does exist, however I may disapprove. To take the risks she does, to go here, there and everywhere and have the house full of people, and to manage to appear so soft and gentle and in need of protection. I’ve told her all this – we even laugh about it. Her in need of protection! There’s not a soul that comes within yards of Lily who doesn’t need protecting from her. That poor man from the College, and that young man from America! Now he needed protecting, even if he was Jewish. She likes Jewish men. She likes all men. There she was inviting him to Sunday lunch served on a medley of cracked plates, and ‘How do I cook this, Shebah?’ and ‘How should I make gravy, Shebah?’ and all coy when he arrives, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Before that it had been science and atoms and explosions and, just like taking off a pair of gloves, it’s medicine and psychology, and books all over the place on schizophrenia, till we were all demented. Now it’s geology and rocks because of poor Edward. He’s completely blinded by her, besotted, quite unable to see her true nature. Not that he isn’t taking full advantage of the situation. Last night at the table he says it’s his birthday, and without a sign of embarrassment he remarks he wants to spend it in bed, and up he gets and off they go – like a pair of animals.

We went for walks along the front at New Brighton, in the wind, in the rain (so beneficial to the complexion) talking, talking about literature, about art, and me in my tight little dress and a piece of fur about my neck, always talking, always walking.

We didn’t go to bed all over the place, we hadn’t the knowledge – we were so gay, so full of life. What they would talk about now if they hadn’t the bed to retire to, God alone knows. Their pathetic bird-droppings of knowledge on books and politics and fashion. Norman with his socialistic outlook, and so concerned about the correct width of his trousers at the calf, and his uncharitable attitude towards me. Oh, I’ve seen him in the kitchen at Morpeth Street, with his face flushed red, watching the girls, and he and Lily looking at one another (God knows what goes on there) and then all of a sudden it’s ‘Good night, all’ and he winds up his clock and goes up to bed without a glance. Sometimes he did walk me home I suppose, though only because Lily told him to, and lately I can hardly bring myself to speak to him. The tickets I scrounged for him for the Film Institute, and the way he said he couldn’t afford them – and that anyway he was too busy.

His mother, poor thing, doesn’t understand him at all. Why should her Norman, with a good home, choose to live in one room in Morpeth Street? ‘His father and I have never interfered with him,’ she told me. ‘He always had strange ideas.’ I could have told her easily enough what sort of ideas he has, though it wouldn’t have done any good. I don’t want to offend him. I have to go somewhere to pass the time.

When I first met Lily I thought she was such a submissive little thing. When it gradually became apparent to me what sort of a life she was leading, and I even went so far as to call her a certain name, she merely disagreed with my choice of words. ‘Tarts get paid for it,’ she said. She didn’t seem put out. For a moment she looked at me and her eyes held a shadow of such suffering that if it had been real, which I doubt, I might have been forced to change my opinion of her. She can look very ugly and she did then; her face was a triangle of bones. Later she cheered up and we sang songs, though she always gets the words wrong – not like me with my tremendous memory – and she begged me to sing ‘The Army of Today’s All Right’.

If I hadn’t started to sing last night I might never have touched that glass case and Claude mightn’t have shot me through the ankle. There’s a moment – as I’ve told them so many times – when everything’s too late. Of course they constantly steal my words and refuse to give me credit for them – like the night Lily, pointing at a photograph of herself and some young man in the catering trade, had the nerve to say, ‘There was a moment, Shebah, when it became too late. It was to have been all happy endings, and Agonistes crowned with flowers’ (whatever that might mean – her quotations are always so wildly inaccurate) ‘but now I weep alone.’ Weep she may have done, but hardly alone. For all that she never took down the photograph from the wall, but left it in its frame alongside the large painting of two young girls wearing white dresses with bows in their hair. Nellie and Doris, Lily called them. She’d found the painting in the basement and she put it in a gilt frame and set a vase of flowers beneath it. All that in a kitchen with the floor riddled with dry rot, or wet rot, and a samovar on the draining board, though God knows the only tea she ever made was in a pan and that stewed over and over till in the end I simply couldn’t taste a normal cup of tea. It’s all so changed since Lily went, though Norman has been surprisingly kind. I used to sit in the basket chair under the picture of the cabin boy with his faded midshipman’s cap, and opposite the painting of Nellie and Doris. Of course I do still sit in the same chair when I visit Norman, but Lily took all the pictures away with her. If she wanted to create an impression, though God knows she could hardly fail to do that, Lily would tell her visitors that she liked to think of Nellie and Doris safely through their dual menopause and dead and buried. ‘It gives, don’t you think’ (a wide, candid smile) ‘such perspective to our lives?’ And they, the fools, just gaped at her and of course came again and again. Had they known, had they dreamt of the way she would dissect them once they’d left, they wouldn’t have thought her quite so innocent, so much the child. There was another photograph, quite small, of her dead father, hung between a Russian farming family and the entry of the Germans into Vienna. Her poor father was such a polite man, and intelligent enough to recognise me as a lady, and there again the general attitude was so bewildering, so eccentric.

I thought of Lily that entire fog-wreathed day of her father’s funeral, as I struggled through the streets hardly able to breathe, nearly knocked down by a No. 12 bus, mourning with her, saying a little prayer for the departed. And then to arrive later that night at Morpeth Street only to find the kitchen crowded and Lily with a fur hat on and a blanket and a pair of Wellington boots, behaving as if she was drunk, which she may have been. Not one expression of sorrow, not one tear, not one glance of respect or sympathy, merely an air of hilarity, of thanksgiving. Miss Evans – the hair-removing woman – and myself were the only ones who shed a tear for fathers lost and fathers gone (though hers by the sound of him was no loss to the bogs of Ireland), and I remembered, if indeed I had ever forgotten, how ill I was when my dear father died. They were all laughing, and Lizzie had been attacked coming through the streets, and Norman had given her a sip of brandy (the money they throw about), and Lily told a dreadful story about how her father sometimes hadn’t spoken for months and how the Vicar had said he was a jolly man. She sat there in that fur hat of hers, with lines of dirt about her mouth, drinking stewed tea and loving it all. Because of the fog no one could go home and they all paired off like animals as usual, and I was told to go and lie down on the sofa (Miss Evans for some reason having pressed to take the brass bed), and when I left Lily was lying on a lilo on the kitchen floor in her hat and boots singing, ‘Oh, it’s nice to have a home of your own.’ I don’t mean to be critical – she can be a kind child – but sometimes her callousness is appalling. I won’t say she’s been callous to me, not really, though I daresay she can be behind my back, and having heard her views on all her friends, so-called, I don’t see why I should be exempt, but she does tend to adopt a different attitude in front of different people. Claude for instance seemed to bring out the worst in her. He used to arrive without warning at Morpeth Street – just get into his yellow motor car and drive all those miles and arrive with bottles of this and bottles of that – and for days Lily would be laughing and shouting, altogether too elated. Of course elation is only the extreme end of deep depression, but how she kept going all through the day, what with her job to go to and the telephone ringing, and rifling the gas meters for money to buy eggs and tea, and the nights spent in abandonment, I shall never understand. I came one afternoon, because I was passing the door and wanted to make sure of my appointment with Lily for the evening, and there was Claude in the kitchen, stretched out on my chair with a glass in front of him. He said, ‘Hallo, my dear, you look well’ – me, hardly able to lift my head for the pain and the tragedy of everything, the ignorant swine – and there was this old, old creature with bedroom slippers on its feet, and hands caked with dirt, rocking back and forth like a rag doll. Lily said, ‘Shebah, this is Miss Charters. She’s a friend of mine,’ as if in some way we had something in common. Oh, I felt pity for the poor old thing, so neglected and so idiotic, asking me if my daddy went to sea, but they simply don’t see the difference between my suffering with the brain I’ve got, and these other vermin who barely inhabit the earth. I wish to God I could wallow in my muck and accept all that England has to offer. I did try, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her at all, and afterwards Lily said I had been impolite to Miss Charters, and Claude gave a little high-pitched laugh and began to whistle between his teeth. I can’t afford to be too rude to Lily, but sometimes I would like to tell her dear devoted friends exactly what she thinks of them behind their backs. I know it was kind of Claude to invite me here, even if it was only for target practice, but I’ve done my share of entertaining. I’ve ceaselessly provided them with knowledge. And there was the train fare and peppermints for Julia, and I did sit and pat those damn dogs for half an hour.

It could have been so charming, this weekend, in this ideal setting, the place so beautifully furnished and the pictures everywhere, but almost from the moment we arrived there were undertones and atmospheres and one or other of them would vanish into another room and whisper away, or there would be looks at each other, and those tedious half-finished sentences, like the half of a letter you find in the street, that you can’t make head nor tail of, no matter how you try. It’s as if all this fascination with sex builds a big wall betwixt the devotees and the non-devotees. If you aren’t a participant there’s simply so much that’s incomprehensible. They pretend to be interested in art and politics and books, and they seem to chat quite intelligently for a time, but always, like a maggot eating its way across a particularly decayed and juicy fruit, there’s this sexual business, leaving a small trail of slime, and nothing else seems really to bring them to life. I do see, now that Lily has explained it to me, that it’s not entirely what it seems. Even I can see that their motives are somewhat different, but their impulses all seem to be working in unison, and they all pretend so much to emotions that must surely be real only once, that must be true only the first time, not over and over like a ball unable to stop bouncing.

When we came through the door of the shop yesterday, Claude put his arms round Lily and they clung there among all those breakable things set out on mahogany tables, mouths emitting sucking noises and Julia behind them, so courteous, so well bred. To look at her you would never dream she was a mistress, that she too was indulging so vividly and with such ladylike capability in this orgy of shared eroticism, night after night taking off her spectacles and brushing her hair, and rub-rub-rubbing at those lovely teeth, and after that God knows what madness. The way they all attend to their teeth, as if they were the gates to some sort of parkland. Reub has good teeth, though he speaks with his lips close together, spitting out his facts and figures and percentages, and once when he had the generosity to take me over the road for a cup of coffee, he yawned, and I had a glimpse of the lining of his mouth and his back molars were glittering with gold. I ought to have my teeth attended to, I really ought – but oh, the shame of exposing the private, altogether too intimate cavities of the jaw to some jumped-up little dentist boy, and I can’t quite see myself going round with a mouth full of dentures, artificial snapping like a mad dog, and they would have to be kept decent and cleaned day and night and it’s all too much trouble for poor me. It’s all too loose in there. It’s like a purse with the lining in threads. I’ve seen Lily spewing blood out after she’s cleaned her teeth at night, and mixing stuff in a glass and swilling it round her mouth and tears starting from her eyes.

She does look ill. It’s all this racketing about and not eating properly and rushing from place to place. It’s extraordinary how particular they are about their emotions and their teeth, and yet they simply never eat a decent meal or sleep regularly. Julia did provide a very nice meal for us last night, though it was ruined by conversation. When I think of how my poor mother prepared a meal – such care, such bravery in the face of adversity. Not that she would stoop to cook anything so simple as shepherd’s pie. And the wine Claude kept offering, running like water, and the indiscreet sentences tossed between them …

‘It’s a bloody wonderful life,’ said Norman. He’s right there – it is for him, with his weekly wage and his doting mother.

‘You mean that?’ Claude, the fool, stares entranced as if discovering great wisdom.

‘Yes. Yes, I do. I live, I make love to as many women as possible, I eat well, I climb mountains. I’ve good friends and we had a damn good time all together in Morpeth Street.’

‘I reckon,’ said Claude, for some reason agreeing with Norman, ‘that you’re right. I reckon love-making is about all a man should want. That and drink, eh?’

With a boozy surge of laughter they raised their glasses to be refilled, and listened to his oratory.

‘I reckon that in order for the blood to flow, we must have real stimulation. It’s all right for some people, with their diamond minds …’

‘Oh darling,’ I cried, for who else could Claude have meant but me, staring at me like that with his sweet, crazy eyes, ‘but the rest of us ordinary mortals need something in which to sublimate ourselves – some way in which we can release our inhibitions and return to the soil.’

The words evidently had an effect on Lily’s young man. He stood up calmly and commanded Lily to go to bed with him. There and then, without more ado. Wanted to celebrate his birthday, he said, in the most fitting way. And Lily sitting there with a little satisfied smile as if he were paying her a compliment instead of insulting her. And we were left sitting round the table in the kitchen, talking trivialities and they drinking their wine, and me feeling so weary and far too polite to mention it.

‘Come, come Shebah,’ Claude said, ‘the night is young.’ And I couldn’t disagree with him, being a guest in his house – and anyway I didn’t want to imply that I wasn’t young.

For I am young, far younger than them. I used to sit up all night during the war, in the shelters, and when even that poor refuge was denied me by the attitude of the scum who came there, I would huddle in a blanket on my little divan in my room high above the street, a sort of Jewish barrage balloon, my stomach all swollen with the tumour inside me. I did have my own little room – though I only moved there just for somewhere to put my things, never intending to stop twenty years – with all my books on the shelves, some with inscriptions written just inside the cover in his handwriting. ‘Did you ever have a love affair?’ asked Claude last night. Did I ever have a love affair! You’d think they had a monopoly on love. Maybe not what they would call an affair, though that did happen once, but it was a romantic affair, and it was more than enough for me. How they stand the repeated strain on the nerves, and the intrigue and the heartache I can’t imagine, let alone the echo they must evoke deep within their minds of similar words uttered in similar situations and for similar ends. My affair was so rich in texture, so varied in its detail.

There I sat at a play-reading and the hall was mostly in darkness because that was the way the director of the dramatic society wanted it done, and I was reciting some lines and he heard my voice, and he said to a friend, there and then in the pitch blackness, ‘My God, who’s she? I must know her.’ He had seen me about of course, everybody had, and I was so different and so chic, but we hadn’t actually spoken. After that night he bought me flowers and we sat for hours talking about poetry. He had such a sombre face, a dark face with studious eyes, and so tall and educated. When I think of those things Lily called men who used to court her, that little toad of an American – Joel or Moley or something – and that professor all fourteen stone of fat, or that Billie with his schoolboy face and blubbery eyes – in comparison with him, I smile. She doesn’t know what a man is. And I wouldn’t let him buy me as much as a cup of tea, because I was too proud. The night he introduced me to his wife I was so charming, and she said to him later, ‘I love Shebah. You should love Shebah too. She is so different, so alive.’ Of course all the other hags in the readers’ circle were jealous of me and wouldn’t speak to me. There was a positive gathering up of the folds of the skirts if I came too near, and all the men flocked round me and thought me something I most definitely was not. I wonder what stopped me. I could have been like Lily. God knows I flirted enough. I was so gay, so painfully exhilarated, with those great eyes of mine giving me such hell even then. I was too vain to wear glasses, though I was almost blind. The pain I endured. He thought I was weeping, and observed I was too tender for this world, which in a way I was, though it was mostly my eyes were so damn weak.

I shall never forget the day I came into the club, long after we had severed our association, and the men were sitting by the fire talking and Mr Cohen said, because he knew – they all knew – ‘Isn’t it terrible, Shebah?’ and I said, ‘What?’ and Mr Cohen said, ‘Why, he’s gassed himself, Shebah.’

And then I did weep, and I don’t care what they thought. I never liked Jewish men. Never. Always the Christian boys. Besides, my poor father would never have been able to give me a dowry, and I hated the idea of being bought. And the Christian men were too stupid except him, though there was probably a touch of the Jew there, with those eyes, and I could never understand women wanting to have children. The responsibility it must entail. The strength it must require. And then there’s always the worry: that time Lily nearly died – though she never told me the full story. How she coped with the worry I’ll never know. And no sooner is she through with that than she meets the American with his stony face and I warned her, because I do have a deep regard for her even if I think her a damn fool. ‘Don’t give yourself to him, darling,’ I warned.

She laughed, with those innocent eyes shining like baubles and said, ‘Why, Shebah, I love him, I love him.’ At least that’s what she called it. There she is asking me round to Sunday dinner and asking me if I’ve brought the black bread and setting out the food on three cracked plates and music on the gramophone and not a mention of Billie and all that love.

Oh no, it’s schizophrenia and the mid-brain and diseases of the kidney from morning till night, and arguments about the medical service both here and on the continent, and such coyness. Though what that American made of it all I don’t know. Thought he was in a typically British household, God help him, and quite bewildered and glassy-eyed – what with Victorian Norman spouting Communism at him, and that dreadful man Rafferty arriving drunk and begging to see Our Kid and telling everyone he’s a navy man, and Claude coming in his frock coat to commit suicide and the Professor breaking his atomic heart on the front step. The American had the cheek to tell me I was completely sane. Poor little me with my tragic life and all the torment of visiting the out-patients’ department every week. ‘Have you ever had a day by the sea?’ he asked me. A day by the sea! The poor fool. Of course Lily made out he was a doctor, but what the hell did he know? Anyway, the atomic professor’s darling books on neutrons were parcelled up, and then we had volumes all over the place on Elation and new approaches to Manic Depressives (God knows, I’ve been one of those for years without having books on it) and case books on Psycho-analysis until no one hardly ever spoke, just came in and sat down and started reading and imagining all sorts of things. Everyone had had such terrible childhoods and no one had experiences any more, only traumas. Not that the American made us very welcome all the time he was around. Just standing, all four feet of him by the sink, with folded arms, the breathing example of an inferiority complex, saying ‘Yeah’ and ‘Nope’ to whatever one said, and no sense of humour at all. Then when he had gone and the light had gone out of Lily’s eyes, she seemed worried again, though of course she’s so deep and it might just have been tiredness.

There’s something wrong now, but I don’t suppose I’ll be permitted to know. If only she knew how trustworthy I am! I did think last night that Claude was going to confide in me, but he didn’t tell me very much. ‘Come, Shebah,’ he says, and I prepared myself for one of his ridiculous conversations which aren’t conversations at all but recitations about his wife leaving him (God knows, one can hardly blame her) and the great glory that is Lily, and a few flatteries thrown at me, just as if I can’t see through him, or any of them. And there was Victorian Norman with his arm round Julia while she washed the dishes.

‘Shall I help you, darling?’ I said, bloody fool that I am, hardly able to stand, and offering to clean their china for them.

‘No, thank you, Shebah,’ Julia says, mouth impeccably shaping her vowels, steam from the bowl blurring her glasses so that I couldn’t see her expression, though I can imagine it. She wanted me out of the way so as to be alone with Norman.

When I used to help at the Overseas Club during the war the rotten women were so jealous of me. All the young men wanted to talk with me, to be with Shebah. ‘Teach us to speak English, Shebah,’ they would say. ‘You speak English so beautifully.’ And those women with their wretched little brains said, ‘No thank you, Shebah, there’s nothing for you to do, we can manage.’ They’re all alike, God forgive them.

So Claude and I go upstairs, under that angel made of wood, into the long living-room, and he puts on the gramophone (how they all dote on noise) and I settle myself on the sofa. There was a little time taken up with those moist dogs and I had to pat them and he kept saying ‘Lie down’ all the time, inciting them to jump around with saliva dripping from their great purple jaws, and I went on laughing and making soothing noises, though really I wanted to scream. After a time he got tired of all that, and they put their noses into the carpet and went off to sleep. ‘Dear Shebah,’ he said, ‘how you observe us all … how wise you are.’ He really is a most interesting man, even if he did shoot me down in the grass. A puckish face, rather creased, and merry eyes and that beard in little curls so that he constantly licks out at tendrils with his tongue, and a small mouth, very pink. How young they all look in spite of their complications. So deeply healthy.

‘What, me?’ I said, because I detest insincere flattery, and he wagged his head, which is a whimsical habit of his, and repeated, ‘How wise you are’, and stares down at my feet. At the end of my legs (oh, my shapely legs that danced so much, that walked so far) I could see my sandals swing above the carpet and my little toes peeping out, and a dab of sealing-wax that was really red nail-varnish blobbing one toe and just visible through my stocking. My pathetic adornments. Reub said it was the harlot in me, the swine.

‘What about you,’ I trilled, ‘with all this beauty round you, and your wonderful knowledge – aren’t you wise?’

Which certainly wasn’t wise of me because it meant Claude could start on about his wife leaving him, etc., etc., but I had to say something. After a while he said, ‘You see, the wise ones are those who no longer fight against life, but accept and observe.’ And he licked at his beard again and pushed at one of the dogs with his foot, though mercifully it remained unconscious. They all say some very clever things and very important things, but their method of delivery is so bad. I keep trying to tell Lily this, but it’s something they can’t understand. Being an actress I say things with conviction. You do have to dramatise when making the profounder statements. Anyway, Claude looks so well fed and so cushioned with grandeur that it’s simply absurd to think of him fighting against anything. What on earth is there for him to object to? If only he had paused or sighed in the appropriate place I would have been more convinced. I know he’s had his troubles, his sufferings, though God knows he’s done it in comfort, in opulence, but the art of conversation is communication, and communication is a thing that must be felt. The spoken word seems to have lost its meaning. With all this television any little chit of a nothing walking the streets can mouth about life and suffering. Take that girl in the Kardomah some months ago, with her hair bleached and frizzed about her ears – quite attractive really, with her smooth little face devoid of expression. I had gone in for a cup of tea (I have to sit somewhere and the G.P.O. was about to close and I was too early for my next appointment and so weary) and there was this common man sitting by the wall, slouched in his chair, with a face stamped with brutality and weakness, such as they all bear marks of now, being kept and housed and fed by England and no need to work at all. I hadn’t been there for more than a few moments and had brought the edge of my cup to my mouth, about to drink, when I saw this lout put two spoons and a knife into the pocket of his jacket. He saw me looking at him and we stared at one another, a quite exquisite second of perception, me with my cup held up and he with his hand curled round the cutlery in his pocket, and all the little cafe sounds about us – hot water rushing out of the urn, the saucers being rattled – and a moment of recognition between this sot and myself. Then he got up, still with his eyes fixed on mine, and in a moment I was standing by the exit with my poor weak arms outstretched, weary as I was. Nobody moved, though people looked up from their crumbling buns. ‘No, you don’t,’ I shouted. ‘Thief, taker of property.’ The fools on the counter just stared at me, lifeless, immobile. ‘He’s put Kardomah cutlery into his pocket, two spoons and a knife – I saw him. Call the manager,’ I shouted. I knew there wasn’t much point in calling the manager, because he was most likely upstairs threshing about among the cardboard boxes and sacks of sugar, commingling with one of the women assistants. The man, the thief, just moved forward and took hold of my arm and thrust me roughly aside, and in a moment he was in the revolving doors and round and out with a damp rush of air into the darkling street. Just went, and nobody came to my assistance. Down went the insensitive heads to the currant scones and the mugs of tea, and this little fool with the dyed and curled hair, as transparent as a piece of glass, said softly in a voice distorted with catarrh, ‘Ah, give him a chance. Aren’t you human?’

Just that. ‘Aren’t you human?’ Had it been reversed, had it been I who had stolen so much as a crust of bread, they would have trampled on me, risen in a pyramid of loathing from the tables and ground me to the floor, called me a dirty Jew, cast me into prison. It was on account of the feeling and the emotion that I put into my accusation that they hated me. They sat with an embarrassment that turned them to stone. It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction. That’s their idea of being human.

Anyway, Claude’s quite wrong. I’ve never stopped fighting. I’ve never accepted so much as a cup of water. I’ve fought all my life for justice and been broken and destroyed in its cause. However, I suppose Claude was meaning to pay me a compliment when he said I was wise, etc., etc., and I couldn’t tell him to go to bloody hell as I would have liked, seeing I was a guest in his house of china, so I contented myself with ‘Oh darling. Me – accepting? How little you know.’ Which of course only made him feel how humble I was, though as usual with all of them I got the impression that he was only half concentrating, that he was waiting or listening for something else. If I wasn’t so subtle I would have decided long ago that they were all deliberately trying to humiliate and torment me, which is true in a way, but really it’s their thoughtlessness and their preoccupation with sex.

To which he replied, fiddling and tugging at his curled beard, ‘Very perceptive, my dear, very perceptive. How little I know! But this I do know. While we have sat on this sofa this five minutes, twelve people somewhere have died of hunger. Died starving.’

I want to scream when they start talking this way. It’s so debasing. Are they talking to me or to themselves? Do I look as if I’m one of the privileged, that they have to relate the statistics of little yellow people clutching rice bowls? It’s not my concern. I have enough to battle with in my own monstrous head without problems of that sort. Not that they do anything about the hungry either. It’s all talk. And if I haven’t starved to death it’s no thanks to anybody but myself. I haven’t been lend-leased or subsidised, and I don’t have the solace of their endless involvements. I’ve had nothing but loneliness and jealousy and ill health. I feel as if I’m constantly struggling under a net cast carelessly by a careless God. I’m the only one I know enmeshed in it, all the others move freely. The appalling thing is that nobody seems aware of my plight.

Once when that landlord of mine, the Panzer man in the tennis pumps, had thrown bricks at me, I ran out screaming into the road. ‘Help, murder,’ I shouted. People passed by on foot with shut faces, and people went past in the glass cabins of their cars, eyes unseeing, and no one lifted a finger of surprise. The landlord came down the steps with his bicycle under his arm and propped it against the railings while he fixed his cycle clips round the frayed bottoms of his trousers. He mounted his machine, and the white tennis shoes, black laces dangling, trod round and round on the pedals and carried him out of sight. He, of course, had his own sedatives, his rotten Irish Catholic candle-lighting, and his paid women who came nightly, spiking up the uncarpeted stairs in their high-heeled shoes, their very breathing sulphurous with corruption. But I have nothing, no compensations, no curtain of deceit to hide myself from myself – only my poor brain endlessly facing itself. Claude’s remark was only to be expected, because they always make such comments, so I shouldn’t have felt so irritated, so exhausted with bitterness. Knowing so much, my bitterness can only be self-directed, there being nobody worthier to receive it. I had to sit there nodding agreement, rolling my eyes while the blood pounded in my head. There was a small silence in which the record ended. Lily used to have a gramophone in the kitchen, and two records which she played every evening. The battery on my nerves was simply frightful. It’s not that I can’t enjoy music – who better? – but my appointments were for communication, as I used to tell her, not to have to shout my thoughts above a cyclone of violins. I didn’t want Claude to put on another orchestral work, so I said as quickly as I could before he noticed the silence, ‘Do you think, Claude darling, that Edward is right for her?’

Then he said a most extraordinary thing. I suppose it was only extraordinary in that there’s so much I’m never told. It’s like trying to complete a jigsaw. They toss me all the edges but never the most vital pieces in the centre.

‘It’s not a question of rightness, Shebah. He’s needed very much. And I reckon in some ways he’ll do.’

‘What do you mean – needed?’ I hate begging them for explanations, but I was so taken by surprise.

‘Well …’ He pursed up his little wet mouth and let his chin rest on his chest so that his face was mostly beard and there were plumes of auburn hair springing out of his scalp. Then up comes his head and he puts a large hand on my black-skirted knee and stares at me intently. Really quite dramatic, considering what they’re usually like. ‘Don’t we all need someone, or something?’ he says, the fool, the sly antique dealer, talking to me as if I worked in a factory or was one of those ignorant little things he picks up in his yellow van. They do belittle my intelligence so. He meant of course something different, but until Lily actually confides in me, or until the faint rumours begin to circulate, I’ll never know. Which left me in pain again. Suffocating pain, because I have no outlet for my passion, and the less I can project my passion into words, the more I sense the threat of nothingness. And then he began to talk about the glory that is Lily, which was interesting in one way and not entirely drivel. He said, ‘Of us all, Lily needs nobody. I say this guardedly. The rest of us can find our little treadwheel and go round and round, because basically all we care about is stupefying ourselves. Intensity of life can be found equally well in business or in drink.’

Here I said sharply, because I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, ‘And the so-called loving you all indulge in?’

Here his eyes flickered – once, twice – beneath lids tinted pink. He removed his hand from my knee and commenced to tug at his beard worriedly. ‘No, no, Shebah, that’s something quite different. We none of us indulge, as you call it, for the reasons you believe. Some for loneliness, some for forgetfulness, some because they are endlessly chosen.’ The skin of his face wasn’t after all so very young, so extremely healthy. ‘But, you see, Lily has chosen life. She’s the self-creator of her own struggling, her own griefs, her own happiness. She endures self-loss only to fling herself triumphantly back into an emotional battle to regain herself. She won’t, she can’t – seeing she’s the only contestant – give in. That’s the glory of her.’

Well, I couldn’t laugh out loud in his face, and I hadn’t the energy to start a futile discussion, so again I nodded my poor aching head, and he seemed satisfied and with a little sigh, whether real or assumed, stood up and went downstairs trailing his hand on the surface of the wall.

The rubbish they talk. Lily has chosen life. She’s the self-creator. It’s almost as if he thought Lily religious. Of course she’s a Catholic, or was, though that was probably a decision taken on impulse. All that business of riding on a tram up or down a hill to a convent in the mist, and joining the nuns at prayer, and letting salt tears run down her cheeks. How her senses must have grovelled before the little lighted candles and the rising voices, really not unlike Blackpool during the illuminations, and the incense burning, and imagining herself in ecstasy and full of divine grace. Her whole existence is a catalogue of sensual indulgences. She’s never self-created anything, only gone blindly into any situation that presented itself. I was there that night the Billie man called on some pretext. I was sitting in the kitchen by appointment and long before his knock came she confided that somebody might arrive – no one of any importance she stressed, purely a matter of business – but would I mind going upstairs and resting on the bed in the bathroom for a little time, should a visitor come. And before she would open the door to him I was bundled upstairs with all my parcels and my carrier bag, still holding a plate of stew in my hand and hardly able to see in the badly-lit hall. I could hear voices, and then there was some banging and then there was silence. I stayed up there as long as I could, as long as was humanly possible, what with the cold and all the insane people rushing in to use the lavatory and their crazy comments, and when I did go back into the kitchen, the panel under the sink was open and there was water all over the floor and on the floor amid the potato peelings and the swillage, grovelled Lily and her Billie – what an absurd concatenation. Such a different Lily from the one half an hour before, eyes shining, mouth curved in a tender smile, really very pretty, with her skirt marked and stained with tea leaves, and he the great fool, red in the face and a piece of sticking plaster stuck on his dimpled chin. I never liked Billie. When he had gone she sat with her face in her hands, in the midst of all that mess, rocking backwards and forwards. ‘I love him,’ she said, though she wasn’t telling me, ‘I love him, I love him.’ Since that time she’s jumped on the same chair quite a few times and repeated the same sentiments, only about different people. The fact that she emerges triumphantly, as Claude describes it, out of all these situations, isn’t courage but luck. Supreme good fortune. And the opportunities she has had! I sat there last night quite alone, and only a few yards away lay Lily with her latest lover, adrift in each other’s arms. God knows what passes through her mind at such moments. There was never anywhere I could go. I couldn’t get up from the table and announce I was spending a birthday in bed; I possessed no friends who openly encouraged me.

I went all the way to London so many years ago, by coach, with Monica Sidlow (she hated me too, with her over-active glands, which deposited fat all over her hips and thighs) and we stayed at some theatrical boarding house for one night, before she went on to Paris. What a sight she looked, pouring water into a basin, great arms a-flurry with flesh, and the short muscular legs bare and pallid under the laced camisole. I could have gone to Paris with her, only even then there didn’t seem any difference – Paris, London, all one – I had to take myself with me wherever I went. My love, my married man with the grey calm eyes and the wife who had after all told him to adore me, was coming down by car to fetch me. When he did come I stood as if facing an army, a whole regiment of enemies with loaded guns pointing at my breast, with a fearful excitement building up inside me, and I shouted, ‘Don’t dare touch me,’ so violently that people in the street turned to look at us.

And he, one long grenadier, his noble face white in the hurrying street, said – pleaded – entreated, ‘What do you want, Shebah? For God’s sake, what do you want?’

He had a coat (he always dressed most beautifully) made of some dark textured cloth, and the fingers of his right hand touched the lapels nervously, while he stood looking at me. I said, still shouting, ‘Nothing, nothing from you,’ and he turned away and walked very slowly back to his big green car, and I didn’t wait to see him drive away, but buttoned up my little black gloves and pushed the fur of my collar higher around my ears and trotted as fast as my legs would carry me into the unknown crowds. For a time my exultation was so magnificent that I could have walked all day, but gradually the feeling left me and my mouth became dry, and I was after all alone, having accomplished a gesture of nothingness. Why, I ask myself, did I behave like that? Of course I did want something from him; I suppose I was in love with him. Of course he wasn’t mine, he did belong to his wife, and in those days that counted for much, but it wasn’t entirely that. Perhaps it’s because I’m bigger than anyone I’ve ever met. There’s so much of me that there’s no room for transference. Perhaps it’s the Jewish wandering element in me. A wanderer over the face of the earth. As a baby, a tiny Hebrew-nosed infant, with weak eyes closed shut, my mother carried me across Russia. And what hell she went through with my father’s relations! Always walking, always on the move. Even now I can’t keep still, I have to keep going, even if it’s only round and round the blackened streets of the town. I could never tell Lily (because though she might be moved by its symbolic beauty at the time of telling, later she would repeat it to all and sundry, and distort its meaning beyond recall), but it is his coat I remember now more than his face. His lovely dark majestic coat. I’m truly the self-creator of my own struggles. Impulsive it may appear, but underneath there’s an inflexible will that guides my destiny. That’s my great glory – damn, damn them.

I wondered last night what was up between Norman and Julia. She seems very sweet – but you never know, and Norman is capable of anything. Lily has told me that Norman is the only man she has ever met who wanted sex for the real reason, what she calls the biological urge. Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe it was Norman she was talking about when she said he’d use a keyhole if it was handy. If she told Claude that, it’s a wonder he left Julia alone with Norman, though perhaps Claude wouldn’t mind. They’re all so deep. Why now, should he shoot me this morning? I don’t get the impression, though I could be wrong, that Claude has an inflexible will that rules his existence. And if he has, it wouldn’t seem enough reason to aim a gun at poor me with my countless torments, and pull the trigger. I haven’t done him so much harm, and if I have it was his fault forcing me to drink, though if I hadn’t drunk I would have wept.

After our little discussion last night Claude was downstairs quite a while. It was almost pleasant sitting there among all those marvellous bits and pieces. I was slightly anxious in case the dogs woke up and started their antics, but I sat very still with my hands folded, and when Claude came back up the stairs with Norman and Julia (both very elated and gay) he shouted out, ‘Ho, my dear, you look like an African carving … better have a drink.’ Norman was laughing a great deal and wriggling about in his clothes and blowing his nose over and over into a spotless handkerchief. The noise he made.

‘We’re going to sing “Happy Birthday” to the loved ones,’ shouted Claude, filling up glasses on the piano top.

So we all trooped to the door and down two little steps and stood outside another door, very old, with a great iron hinge (everything’s too perfect) and Claude started up the chorus. We made a great volume of sound, but I’m not so unobservant as not to notice how close Victorian Norman was standing to Julia, and how his fingers kept digging into her neck, and all the time shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Happy Birthday, dear Edward.’ It was very stimulating. Even I felt slightly absorbed, because it was an absorbing thing to do, disturbing them like that.

Behind the door I could hear Lily laughing. Of course she had to laugh just to show there was no ill-feeling, and Claude put his hand on the latch of the door and would have gone in, only Julia said protestingly, ‘No, Claude, no,’ and we all went back into the other room still singing. It was so simple to have another drink; I felt through drink that I might be more included, not so dreadfully impaled upon my own character and personality.

‘Why don’t you sing Lily’s song?’ said Norman, damn him, hunching his narrow shoulders and walking rapidly up and down the room. So I did. Heaven knows I’ve sung it often enough in the past. I sang it because I like to have a rousing chorus, though I think to Lily it represented a kind of comfort to the heart. Years ago Lily invited me round for the evening of the Day of Atonement. It wasn’t my usual appointment night, but she said come round anyway, because she can be kind, and all my people had deserted me, and it was a time of great sadness for me. When I went into the kitchen there were candles, and hanging from the ceiling a gaudy red star made out of shiny paper, a Christmas decoration, and I felt like saying ‘I’m a Jew, not a Communist’, and on the table plates with little rolls of bread on them with scraps of sardines inside, and a gherkin on a saucer. On the draining board there was a bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine. So typical to have spent so much on drink and so little on food!

‘Oh darling,’ I said, ‘why the celebration?’ All my people were fasting and praying that night, but she just smiled and said, ‘Happy birthday, Shebah’ (what fools they all are), and I put my bundles down on the green velvet chair, absolutely mesmerised by that great shining scarlet star, hanging on a thread of cotton from a hook in the stained ceiling. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ she told me, leading me up the hall and into the living-room. There on the purple sofa, reading a book, was Claude with a thin emaciated face, appearing almost holy. Of course I knew he’d been sick, but I’d thought he was in some sort of mental home, and he said, quite unlike himself, ‘Hallo, Shebah’, and gravely regarded me out of saintly eyes. He looked as if he were some figure on a tomb, with his two little feet neatly together and his beard in a little point, and a gown in neat folds about his body. It was all so unexpected. People kept arriving and bringing things, chocolate raisins and bottles of wine and a bag of nuts, and them all wishing me happy birthday in that insane way and getting very drunk.

We had to stay in the kitchen on account of Claude needing peace and quiet, but one or other of us would trip along every now and then to the cool of his lying-in room, and we all thought how changed he was, how like St Sebastian, St Joseph or Christ, all except Lily who refused to comment, just went on drinking wine and talking to her American by the sink. He stood with his arms folded, hardly uttering a word. Poor devil, arrested against the draining board, subjugated to Lily and ten thousand dreams of American superiority tinkling invisible to ruin among the debris in the sink. He wouldn’t go and see Claude at all. Once when Lily was about to take some bread to Claude, he said in that inhuman drawl, ‘I reckon he’s had enough attention’, and she ate the roll herself. Of course she does adopt this complacent feminine attitude with all her lovers, which may fool them but hardly fools me. Victorian Norman was on the floor, almost under the table with Lizzie’s friend Patricia, whispering into her ear with the perspiration running down his face. Lizzie was sitting on her boy-friend’s knee, really a very sweet girl, though just like all of them. And Lily so fond of her, which is strange because she’s quite pretty, and in the end I expect she’ll do Lily down. They all do. I never liked Lizzie’s boy-friend, not a nice man, almost dreadful but saved by a sense of humour, always more than ready to insult me. He sang ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ in a trained voice, shifting his eyes from side to side throughout, a cup of whisky clasped in his hand. Then I sang ‘Let’s Start All Over Again’, and they clapped and made loud noises of appreciation, all except the American Statue of Liberty, who gazed coldly at us out of sloe-shaped eyes, dry as prunes. Of course he was Jewish. Little Lizzie went in to see Claude and was away rather a long time and the boy-friend padded along the hall to fetch her. Voices were raised in anger. Then they both returned, he with a face suffused with annoyance, saying Claude wasn’t all that sick, and she patting his crimson cheeks mouthing ‘There, there’, as if comforting a child. They all have so much physical contact. Hours went by in a rustle of undeciphered murmurings, a tracery of fingers endlessly stroking heads of hair, a dozen licentious violet mouths pursed up to imprint kisses on each other. Winding together, all of them, even poor saintly Claude new to his mortification, touching, clinging, reaching. How apart I sat, how alien. They all live coupled lives and I alone am singular, isolated. Of course the Professor when he was visiting Lily didn’t maul her in front of me, but then he was too bewildered. He used to come sometimes for lunch and coincide with the policeman. No one ever explained why the policeman called. Surely not him as well! He used to chain his cycle to the railings outside, and Norman said we should be thankful he wasn’t in the mounted division. The Professor sat locked in a prison of detachment. His vast body overlapped his upright chair. Only his eyes remained alert, dismayed, drowned in their own philandering. He accepted his mug of stewed tea with disbelief, while Lily, supreme in her slum kitchen, hummed for my benefit something from Gilbert and Sullivan. She always has a line of song for every occasion, sung badly of course, but comical. She told me that the day she was born, her moment of entry into life, the Bolton Borough Band were on the wireless and a Mr Gearn was giving a euphonium solo. All lies but very interesting. And she said miles away, under the earth in the Llay Main Colliery in Wales, a boy was working, and just as her mother shuddered in the final birth pangs, a piece of steel flew out of a wedge and opened this particular boy’s jugular vein, so that he expired on the instant. I suppose it’s possible. She asked me when I was born. She was bored, because for once there were no men calling and though she pretends to be cultural she has no consistency, and we sat hunched over that blue oilcloth on the table and she wrote things down on a scrap of paper. She’s so convincing that I did begin to tremble slightly with a kind of excitement, as if there would really be some clue as to why my life has been one of such suffering and torment. I was a bit wary at first of giving the true year of my birth. It sounded so ancient, so pre-existent – October 29th, 1899. I flounced a little and evaded her question but finally she made me tell her and I regretted it immediately, because I’m sure she’s told everybody. I don’t know why she makes me tell her things. God knows, no one else would even dare to ask. Anyway, she wrote down the date and then counted on her fingers (there seem such gaps in her education) and looked up knowingly, ‘Ah that’s interesting. Three nines are most interesting …’ What rubbish. ‘Why, darling?’ I said, humouring her, but all the same there was a little bead of terror and delight rolling through my bloodstream. ‘Well, it leaves 18 and 2, which makes 20.’ At least she added it up correctly. ‘So take 20 from the three nines, or 27, and what have we?’ she asked. ‘We’ve seven left,’ I said, while her pencil went on doodling across the paper. She was drawing a great clump of flowers in and out of all the dates.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘At seven years of age there was a great change in your life, and one that influenced you throughout the years that followed.’ Of course I must have told her at some time how my poor father left London and came to the north just before my seventh birthday, and how I went to the Hebrew school, and how I felt I was forever doomed to unhappiness. That was the year I knew I was unique and singled out for some great destiny. Of course I never imagined just what kind of destiny. I thought it was something glorious, something miraculous. I didn’t dream that greatness was a word that could be equally well applied to states of poverty and misery. However, I said, ‘Go on, darling, that’s clever,’ though clever it was not.

‘What hour were you born?’ she asked, staring at me as if she believed I was mesmerised by her. I can never tell if she’s acting or not. ‘In the afternoon,’ I said, though God knows if I was correct. Who the bloody hell cares now – certainly not my poor dear mother, gone beyond recall. There I was, an orphan, for all I had been born of parents in 1899, talking such rubbish with a chit of a girl whose egotism is only exceeded by mine.

‘Well,’ she went on, ‘let me see.’ And there was a little silence during which I may have laughed scornfully though now I can’t remember. ‘Right,’ she said quite loudly, and sat up straight and laid her pencil down on the piece of paper. ‘At the moment of near birth two cousins chose to marry not far from your home. An Albert Cohen and a Georgina Goldberg. They stood in the Empress Rooms at the Kensington Palace Hotel and were married by the Rabbi and two assistants. At the Lyceum, Henry Irving was applying powder to his brow during the matinee interval of Robespierre. At the Shaftesbury Theatre the stage was being swept for the evening performance of the Belle of New York. The Boers had been bombarding Mafeking for two hours, and would continue to do so for another two, managing to kill one dog, breed unknown. The dear Queen went out for a drive with Princess Henry of Battenberg, and remarked that the weather was mild. General Harrison, ex-president of the U.S.A., stood on the deck of the steamer St Paul, bound for New York, waving a little square of white handkerchief. His wife remained below. At the precise moment you slid with curled palms on to the cotton sheets of your mother’s delivery bed, Prince Frederick Augustus of Saxony fell from his horse and sustained a slight fracture of the skull.’

I didn’t laugh. How could I? It might be true. She has such a fertile imagination.

‘Oh darling,’ I said. ‘Darling, what if it were true?’

‘Well, it is,’ she asserted. ‘Oh yes, and here’s a very strange thing. Someone far away in Bohemia or Moravia’ (I’m quite sure she had been reading a book on the period) ‘was writing a letter to the newspapers saying he was disturbed by the growing amount of anti-semitism. Now if that’s not an omen, what is?’

I wrote it all down in my notebook in shorthand – what she’d told me. I felt quite unwell. Almost as if I’d been present at my own beginnings and if I’d only had the knowledge or the strength I could have cried out ‘No, not now – later. Don’t give birth to me now, it’s not fair.’ It isn’t fair. I shouldn’t have been born then. I still have it all in my notebook though I can’t read my own writing. She seemed to know a lot more about when I was born than about when she was born. Except the text from the Bible on her day was ‘And God saw everything he had made and behold it was good’. She wouldn’t tell me what my text was. Maybe she genuinely didn’t know, but it still worries me, not knowing and thinking that maybe she knows, and it might be much more enlightening than all that rubbish about the General with his handkerchief, and Augustus falling off his horse.

I asked Claude last night if Lily had ever told him about the day he was born, but he was too distracted, too depressed suddenly to concentrate on anything poor little me had to say. ‘Have another drink,’ he said, pouring out more of the dreadful stuff and encouraging me to sing again. He began to walk restlessly about the room and put on a record whose words I couldn’t catch – except for something like ‘Who’s as blue as me, ba-a-by?’ My head really was tormenting me: eyes smarting, heart swelling up and up like a brown paper bag – the agony before it splits. I turned my back on them all, hoping they would at least have the decency to notice I was suffering. I felt so light-headed. There’s such a bundle of me always, nothing like the real me at all (though it’s only to be expected that I should be all swollen and gorged after an operation such as I had) and I might almost be in disguise. I do wonder who those stubby little feet belong to, and what trick of the light makes my hair look like Flanders wire, and why my teeth have all rotted away, because inside I’m just as I always was – a trim little figure, not thin ever, but firm and shapely and such beautiful glossy hair, and such an air about me of gaiety and flirtatiousness and womanly warmth.

‘What’s up, Shebah?’ asked Victorian Norman, from somewhere. Don’t think I couldn’t guess how his hand, hidden from view, was caressing the neck – such a ladylike column of a neck – of Julia. Maybe Claude knew it too.

‘Don’t you bloody well know?’ I shouted, because I don’t have to be polite to Norman. Friends we are. Friends! Lily did a painting last winter of the three of us sitting on the sofa, with the paraffin lamp dangling just above my head. Why she had to put that in I can’t imagine, though there may be some symbolism. It was very clever, the painting, because though she couldn’t have intended to capture it quite so subtly, we all looked so joined together by blobs of paint, so chummily bunched together, and yet on each of the three faces (though it doesn’t look in the least like me – and why she had to paint those scarves round my head I don’t know) there was such a look of distaste, such enmity in spite of the friendly grouping. And that’s how we are really. I despise this so-called friendship, and I despise Victorian Norman and his disrespect, and I despise Lily for her so-called kindness, because she never stops picking my brains and taking the credit for it. They are all headed for disaster and they all approach it with such overwhelming ennui and lassitude. It hardly matters where I’m heading or in what frame of mind, seeing I was born in 1899 and have received nothing but blows on the head ever since. Claude came round the back of my chair and peered into my face. ‘Go away,’ I said, flapping at him with my handkerchief, sniffing and yet still smiling, though there was a little gust of irritation beginning to eddy upwards.

‘Ah, my love,’ he crooned, the lying swine, squatting at my feet. Behind us no doubt Norman and Julia were quite at liberty to do exactly as they wanted.

‘An excess of secretion from the lachrymal gland flowing on to the cheek as tears,’ said Claude, quite insane, while I dabbed at my poor weak eyes, and all the gay cheekiness evaporated slowly, and I felt so angry and so weary. I wanted to hit him. I don’t utterly dislike Claude. He can be kind.

‘You’re all such fools,’ I said. I can’t remember exactly what I said, though I could have bitten my tongue in two afterwards, with regret. I must have said that Lily really thought him a bloody fool and that she only continued the friendship for all the outings it afforded her and the free drink, and a lot about Norman being after Julia and how Lily was encouraging him. And after all that, after speaking so indiscreetly and with such malice, though it was the truth, he said so calmly, still sitting at my feet with his fingers playing with his beard, ‘Very probably, Shebah, very probably.’ I can’t help myself, I don’t want to be disloyal, though God knows they all crucify me ten times a day, but I get so irritated and my words are only a form of vomit. I have no control and no ease till the last little morsel of half-digested hatred is spat into their faces. I sat feeling dreadfully weak then and ashamed. Suddenly two tears welled up in Claude’s eyes and spilled, without breaking, on to his shirt. I could have died. I couldn’t tell him it was excess secretion from his lachrymal gland or whatever, and I couldn’t erase what I had said, but fortunately nothing followed the two tears. His eyes dried up, and behind us there were scuffling noises and the voice on the record stopped asking ‘Who’s as blue as me, ba-a-by?’ though I might have told him.

‘Get up, Shebah,’ Claude said, ‘come and look out of the window and smell the air.’ He pulled me up out of the chair quite gently, though for all I know it might have been then, in that singular moment, that he decided to shoot me when he got the opportunity. Norman and Julia were no longer in the room. I was quite startled. He didn’t seem to notice – just took hold of my hand and drew me to the window and began clearing the objects from the sill and putting them on the gramophone lid: a little white figure with a parasol and a large silver tea pot and an orange candlestick with a small stuffed bird sitting within its centre cup. The little bird rolled on to the floor when he moved the candlestick and I picked it up for him – such a soft-textured creature with glass eyes sewn into the down on either side of its pointed beak. We leaned together on the wide sill overlooking the little yard and the garden beyond. ‘Aaah,’ I said, taking only little snapping gulps and wishing I could unsay all I had said a moment ago. ‘Aaaah,’ he breathed, inhaling the cold air and swelling his huge chest. The light from the room shone right on to a tree below and made its leaves so green, so lovely. The wistaria curled over the sill we leaned on, and Claude played with its leaves as if they were an extension of his beard. I was worried about Norman and Julia. I hoped they weren’t out there in the grass beyond the light. I didn’t want Claude to be made more unhappy, though maybe I don’t understand any of them. I asked Claude about Lily, tentatively this time. I really didn’t want to do any more harm. ‘Do you think she loves Edward?’ I said, and it was difficult for me, because I had spoken so slightingly about love.

‘Not yet,’ he said, and turned to look at me, half his face in shadow, and one eye in utter darkness. ‘There will,’ he continued, and God knows what he meant, and probably it was all words, ‘be a worse agony yet to come.’

‘But why, darling, why?’

‘I can’t tell you, Shebah. I only know it to be true. Lily will fall, and Billie will be as nothing.’

‘Oh yes, darling,’ I said, ‘that was dreadful. Poor darling Lily.’ And I meant it. I do mean it. She was unhappy – so excited about Billie coming home and so hopeful for the future and we all stayed away deliberately, and then I met Norman in the street and he said, ‘Haven’t you heard? Lily is very ill, and Billie is gone.’ Of course I don’t know what happened, even now, but I did hear she tried to kill herself. It’s hard to be certain about Lily. It’s so short a time ago, and yet here she is seemingly none the worse for it and with another devoted lover already breathing her name as if she were a goddess. Nothing seems to check her or break her growth. Any setbacks only serve to accelerate her progress.

‘Yes, dreadful,’ said Claude.

I did feel it was real for a moment. Of course sitting here now with them all sprawled out on the grass it doesn’t seem dreadful at all. They’re so resilient. But the air last night, so chill, so cool, and the quiet room so filled with treasures, and the wine inside me and my guilt, and the memory of those two realistic, unchangeable tears that had spilled so terribly from Claude’s eyes, made everything seem truly without hope. And I almost – yes, almost – felt I’d crossed the gulf that separated them from me, because for once I hadn’t merely shared and sympathised with their general suffering but had in some way contributed to it. It did occur to me then that it was this factor, this tangling and goading that went on between them, that united them so strongly. They are all partial fashioners of each other’s despair, a touch here, a deceit there, words spoken out of turn, hypocrisies, insincerities, insanities binding them like glue and making them in the end indestructible.

I was so busy last night thinking these thoughts, which are all so much damn rubbish, and worrying my head for answers, that I didn’t realise Claude too had left the room. Without him at the window it was just another window and I felt cold, so I put all the things back on the ledge and the little brown bird, which reminded me of a song, and I hummed the tune and felt quite clear-headed.

All through the night there’s a little brown bird singing,
Singing in the hush of the darkness and the dew …

Propped against the wall was a painting of a nude woman with long hair, and a little dog snuffling in her lap. A very golden painting, though my eyes are half useless. I had to bend down to look at it closely and I half fell over, which made me laugh, and there I was sprawled on the carpet laughing and one of the dogs woke up and pushed its nose into my chest. Really very like the painting. Though the days when I loll about without my clothes are long since past. Not that they ever began. I didn’t want Claude to think there was an atmosphere, so I began to sing ‘Let’s Start All Over Again’. I felt the more noise I made and the more gaiety there seemed to be distilled, the quicker the sadness would evaporate. And I didn’t want anyone to think I was listening to conversations, though everything was very still, and I didn’t care to think what Victorian Norman was about.

I kept remembering something Lily had said about Miss Evans, the hair-remover – how she’d gone into her son’s room and found a used ‘conservative’ on the mantelpiece. At the time they all laughed themselves silly over it and I thought they were mad, but I can see now that it’s somewhat humorous, though perhaps with spending so much time together, I mean a whole weekend like this, I’m becoming as obsessed as the rest of them. Not that I know for sure what those things look like, though in that house when Eichmann Hanna was bringing his women in every night there were some disgusting things thrown down the toilet. The extremes there are in living. Flushing the toilet in that evil-smelling little cubicle and through the broken pane of glass, one star, six-pointed and diamond-white, a million light years away, still giving forth such a pure and crystal memory above my weary head.

I got up off the floor and peeped out of the window into Claude’s garden, but I couldn’t see anything but a multitude of leaves, and while I was looking Claude himself came back into the room, as noiselessly as he had left. I did feel better, more naturally gay, and he looked gayer too, more calm, and his eyes though still half barbarous, smiled at me. He is a barbarous man despite his preoccupation with glass and china and everything fragile: a primitive man, half covered in hair, moving about the bejewelled room, humming softly, picking things up continually, searching with his hands among the pictures and the ornaments for yet more packets of cigarettes and more bottles of wine. Save for the absence of wings he looked like a great furred bee. There was still no sign of Julia and I thought I had better sing again to make things easier. At that moment, Lily, in a pink-striped nightgown, almost jumped into the room on top of me, with Norman behind her.

‘Oh darling, darling,’ I cried, because there was no sign of Edward, and Claude had talked about a worse agony to come, but she certainly didn’t look agonised – in fact rather peaceful and rosy in that striped nightgown. You can never be sure though, for the lighting is so poor and my eyes are so weak, and she might have been upset. She told me that she just felt like a cigarette and wasn’t tired and that he, Edward, was asleep. They just don’t seem to need sleep. Not tired after a whole day of talking and travelling and drinking! And the emotional energy she must have expended during the last hour or so. I simply haven’t had enough of that sort of experience to know where their energy comes from. Lily says it’s because she re-charges herself through her emotional life. I just don’t know. Every day I undergo a thousand emotional scenes and yet I never cease to have a feeling of weariness and inertia. Norman and she used to argue about it for hours until my head throbbed. She said it was the way in which energy was directed that determined whether one was refreshed or not. She said that energy was nothing but the instinctual power of sex, which could be sublimated into other useful activities like bathing a baby or painting a picture, but that sooner or later the sublimations would gradually lead to a mood of tiredness. Norman said it was all rubbish, that it was a question of the food we eat, the amount of protein in the diet. I do feel Norman could be right, though I despise him so, and he certainly has never bothered to sublimate himself, not for one day. Lily never used to express herself so clinically until that American came along with his terrible theories. I always knew I was an hysteric, that I had an unstable temperament, thank God, of which I was quite aware before she got hold of all those books on neuroses, but she did tell me that the word hysteria came from the Greek for uterus. It’s all so fantastic, so unbelievable, so unpoetic. That little star that shone through the broken pane of glass in that rotting house was unbelievable too, but so pure, so grandly scientific and cosmic, but all this other business is so bound up with bowels and tumours and unpleasant things – and I ought to know, because when I had my operation they removed almost everything, including my hysteria too most likely. It did use to be different. There was another mode of living, of courtship; even if I myself have never experienced it, it does exist. People had houses and gave dances and hung little lanterns in trees, and fragrance billowed outwards when the waltzing began. Lily could never compete in such circumstances. She admits the possibility of a relationship with a man would cause her acute embarrassment if she couldn’t interpret it physically. She never walks anywhere. Apart from going up and down the escalators in Lewis’s she never takes any exercise. To be fair, there was a time when she and Norman, after midnight, would run twice round the Cathedral, but that was nothing but eccentricity.

Ah, the walking I did. My feet were so tantalisingly small, my hair so satisfactorily thick, a great bunch of it hanging down my back. Walking along the promenade, a group of us chattering away, and always such heroic sunsets, and later, a single star coming out and the wind beginning to blow more strongly as I craned my head backwards and stared upwards out of weak eyes. Then suddenly, like a firework display, the whole sky would be encrusted with planets and globes and stars, and the moon, perfectly round, would rise above the black, oily river. I won’t say it was all beautiful. Some of my so-called friends were dreadful fools. Their banality robbed my heart of heights of happiness. There were times when I felt oppressed by a sense of omission, a feeling that I was utterly alone, that the words I mouthed continually were words behind glass and nobody could grasp their meaning – at least not the fools I knew. They made me feel weary all right. Some time I must ask somebody who knows about these things. I never fail to be surprised when I read that great people, great artists, feel exactly as I do. But nobody I actually meet or attempt to communicate with ever feels a damn thing. Perhaps Lily does a little, when she’s in a serious frame of mind – between men. While I was curious last night as to why she wasn’t safely tucked up with Edward, I was really more anxious about her and Claude being together. All those deplorable things I had told him. And he really did seem a shade aloof with her. Oh, he smiled and gave her a cigarette and some more to drink, but he went over at once to talk to Norman and left her sitting alone in the armchair. Julia came out of the bedroom, though I can’t remember her going in, and I tried to talk to her. I held her hand for a moment, and it was dry and burning. I said how much Lily admired Claude (I was lying) and how they understood one another so well.

‘Yes, they do, Shebah,’ – such a polite little voice, though it’s only the way Julia shapes her vowels so beautifully – and I began to fear lest I was doing more damage. She is his mistress, and the relationship between Claude and Lily is rather strange, and maybe Julia is distrustful anyway. So I just gabbled on, audacious as ever, allowing my voice to become a little more contralto, thinking what the hell did it matter anyway, as in a very few hours I would be banished from this silver and china room and forgotten in my own hovel. Lily sat quite still with her eyes closed and a glass in her hand and a meaningless little smile curving her mouth. God knows what she was smiling at. Yet I did have a vague sorrowful emotion in my heart. If I have a heart. Other people of my age (no, I can’t bear it) have hearts that split and wheeze and thunder, necessitating long weeks in bed and an enormous amount of attention. Tender mauve grapes arrive hourly and are placed in colourful heaps on the bedside table. Bunches of daffodils, invalid yellow, are stuck in vases on the window ledges. I can’t stand the anguish of being without an ailing heart. That that too should be denied me! One day without preliminaries the beating will just stop, the blood stop flowing. No one will guess, let alone enquire. I shall lie frozen for ten days without a heartbeat in an empty house. The forlornness of it!

I half expected Edward to run in and pick up Lily without a word and carry her away, and I told Julia as much, but she said she thought he was probably fast asleep, as if she knew out of her own experience that this would be the case. Such a nice girl and very well mannered. We talked about the theatre and about her job before she met Claude, and about Claude’s improved health – mental, that is – though as far as I can see he’s still raving, and about the dogs and the names of all the animals’ relations and how when they are in pup you leave them quite alone (I’d leave them alone at all times) and about Lily. Not very much about Lily – only she did let slip that Billie had actually come here one Sunday when Lily was staying for a couple of days. It was only a matter of weeks ago, and Lily and he had gone into another room to discuss things.

‘What things, darling?’ I said.

But she was evasive, perhaps she really didn’t know, and then she made the observation that Billie appeared to be charming but evidently wasn’t. I didn’t tell her what I thought of Billie, the rotten swine, talking to me as if I was nobody, always glad to see the back of me, when I had more right, more need to be there, than he had. Grudging me a couple of hours in a damp eroded kitchen. I hadn’t a large flat to return to, or two devoted parents, or friends and relations sending parcels once a month regularly as clockwork, with home-made plum cake and tins of tobacco, a new pair of socks – just as if he hadn’t a large enough salary to buy his own. Why is it that those in receipt of more than their fair share of the vanities of life can’t bear the very poor even a tiny allotment of comfort? When he went away and I used to stay sometimes at Lily’s overnight, in that vast sinful brass bed, with all those poor stuffed animals staring with pebble eyes from each corner of the room, and Victorian Norman banging up and down stairs all night, I used to get such pleasure from thrusting my fist backwards through the head bars of the bed and knocking the photograph of Billie from its nail on the wall. Lily would mutter from the sofa under the mound of duffel coats and curtains that served her as bedding, ‘What’s up, Shebah?’ and I would reply, ‘Oh God, I don’t know, the whole place is like Grand Central Station,’ and think of Billie face downwards with his well-shaped nose full of dust, under the bed on which so many nights he must have lain supreme. I didn’t really want to stay overnight at Lily’s. There were so many things I ought to have done, my bit offish to be placed in salted water, my body to attend to, my eye drops, but it was all too much to cope with, and it was always so cold, or snowing or blowing a gale, and Lily would say so enticingly, with such warmth, ‘No, Shebah, dear Shebah, do stay. You can’t go back there.’ And of course latterly it was just impossible to return there, even to think about it. The house was empty, and Eichmann Hanna had been removed by the authorities and everything was falling apart and the gas was cut off and the electricity cut off, and the dust and the dirt blew heedlessly up and down the stairs. There was water pouring through the roof and snow beginning to pile up in the hall. I ask you, what human being could live like that – persecuted by day and by night by all the alarms of a battlefield? They just wouldn’t believe me when I told them what it was like. And then one night Norman walked me home and I couldn’t open the door, and finally when we did enter and Norman shone his torch, there was sheet ice from vestibule to roof, a stairway of glass, and icicles hanging in petrified ribbons from the rotting banisters. Norman made a little noise, an intake of air, almost a sound of admiration. He stood playing his torch on the whole glacial scene. ‘The mind boggles,’ he said at last, and took me back to Lily. After that they were kind to me and I did stay for a longish time, but gradually there was a new dimension – or rather an old familiar dimension – of impatience, and then sly hints, and then they began to talk about Rooms to Let in front of me, so that I went out one morning and knocked at the first door that took my demented fancy and rented a room for the following Monday. I did think that their humanity would have made them pause and see how impossible it was for me to go on alone, but then Lily was leaving and Norman was going to take over the ground floor, and no one mentioned the idea of me living in Norman’s old room, and how could I ask them? How could I, choking as I was? So I just moved into another little hovel and left all my books and my records and my bits and pieces to rot in that refrigerator along the road. Of course it did thaw out eventually, but I hadn’t the heart to go back and see all my belongings stained and obliterated and his inscriptions in my books washed out by nature’s superhuman tears. Once I had gone from Lily’s, removed so to speak from the necessity of having my suffering smelling to heaven right under their noses, they were good to me again. My appointments continued as before, and since Lily was recovering from the traumatic experience of Billie’s return and sudden departure, we weren’t disturbed. There was a difference of course. She seemed very withdrawn and would tell me nothing, absolutely nothing, about why she’d been ill and what had occurred. I had thought she was staying with her mother, and then one night I called round to ask Norman if there was any news and there was Lily passing down the hall, all skin and bone and eyes glittering and a mouth closed in a tight line as if she never intended to speak again. I was so taken aback I said, ‘Oh darling, I had no idea, just pretend I’m not here,’ and she walked on down the hall and shut the door behind her. I found myself hovering like a moth in the dim hall, not knowing what to do. Norman was no help, he was going out somewhere or other and no, he couldn’t talk and no, I shouldn’t stay, and yes, Lily was best left alone, till he almost forced me out of the house into the street and walked off whistling towards the bus stop. A few days later she did send me a little note asking me to call, and though she wasn’t her old self (like now) she was grateful for my company. Of course I was hurt she wouldn’t, couldn’t, take me into her confidence. It had something to do with sweets, though whether she was alluding to the Sweetness of Life or merely to Quality Street, I’ve never fathomed. I did so want to understand what had happened to her. Now I realise it was just like everything else – no reason, no depth, meaningless. All that she would say to me were some lines from Dover Beach (inaccurate, I’m sure):

Ah love, let us be true to one another,

For the world that seems to loll before us

Like a land of dreams hath neither hope,

Nor peace, nor certitude, but yelps of pain …

repeating the lines over and over like an evocation for help – though how a schoolmaster could understand Lily and her emotional difficulties, I fail to see. Sometimes a spasm of pain would seize her face, already beginning not to show the bones so prominently, and then she would stew up more tea and busy herself doing something practical. She did seem to be off men for the time being, but then she was packing up, and every time I came to see her there were fresh clues to her impending departure. Pictures would be gone from the room, a perfect square of dust outlining their old place on the wall. A stuffed animal sat on a chair in the hall and books in bundles began to climb up the stairs. In the bathroom, furniture appeared, freshly painted and covered over with newspaper. The moose which had pointed its antlers above the brass bed lay in the bath, the black tip of its snout resting pensively on the chipped enamel. The Christmas ball that had hung round its neck for years lay in splinters upon the torn lino. It was like visiting a graveyard; the whole house began to assume an air of memory and dedication to the past. Norman walked in and out silently. Flowers died in vases, the vases were removed and packed away and the flowers stayed propped up against the wall, cinnamon-brown with decay. It was a relief when it ended, when she left on the train for her worse agony to come, as Claude would have it. It was a relief to think that finally my peace, my certitude, my Friday night had seeped away like water down a drain, leaving only debris behind. But then, after all, I found she hadn’t abandoned me. Victorian Norman has taken up, like a ritual handed down by his fathers, the ceremony of my Friday night. It’s kind or it’s cruel. I can’t decide.

I was just about to tell Julia last night about a play I had been in, when she said she ought to put the kettle on, though that was a lie because I never saw a bloody cup of tea till this morning. When I turned to look at Lily there was only Victorian Norman sitting in an armchair, legs crossed. No sign of Lily, no sign of Claude. Gone like the dear dead days beyond recall. There was no use asking Norman for an explanation, so we just looked across the carpet at each other, him in his armchair and me on the sofa, heads sunk on our respective breasts, eyeing each other if not with affection, at any rate with understanding. ‘Ho, ho, my love,’ he said insanely, wobbling his foot in its splendour of shiny leather. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply. He laughed and closed his eyes and leaned his head back. Not an unpleasant face really, taking it all in all: perhaps a slight reflection of everyday life, of present-day life. I could just see him pleading for an embrace, mouth gently pursed. Not from me, naturally, but from some cool, efficient girl like Julia. Where have the men gone, I wonder? The splendid army captains in their peaked caps with their reckless ways? Norman might have been the hero in some pre-war musical, with his foppish hair and his brows arching up like two wings and his well-kept hands folded delicately on his lap. Not that he’s good-looking by any means. Pathetic, rather. Hardly more than a child.

Norman began to snore. With each reverberation his upper lip trembled. A fly landed on his forehead and he woke and sat up and asked me, ‘Where’s Julia, Shebah?’

‘She’s putting the kettle on, darling,’ I answered, noting the little dab of spittle at the corner of his mouth. My eyes seemed to be seeing far more clearly than usual. The leg of the piano, the one nearest to me, was shaped like the calf of a ballet dancer. Footless, it pirouetted and bulged with muscle.

‘What’s up, old girl?’ Norman said.

Inconceivable he should be talking to me. Old girl of mine, he might have sung, old pal of mine, I’m weary and lonely, it’s true. Before I could reply he stood and stretched himself and went downstairs. Like a stage direction for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Edward entered the room in pyjamas, the hem of his dressing-gown dragging across the carpet. Where do they get all this clothing from, I wonder? He looked out of the window and then went into the bathroom. I heard water gurgling into the basin. When he came out he was smoking a cigarette. He flicked a little mound of ash tidily into the hearth and went to stand at the window. He cleared his throat.

‘Do you know where Lily is?’ he asked.

‘God knows,’ I cried. ‘Leaping from bed to bed, no doubt.’ I hadn’t really expected to say that – the words just shot out.

‘A lovely night,’ he said, after a moment. He had his back to me.

‘Yes, dear, a lovely night for some,’ I said.

Such children in their observations, their ability to be articulate about the obvious. I felt overdressed not being in night attire. The door downstairs opened. The alarm bell shattered the room. With a faint hum of irritation the fly rose in the air and spun under the ceiling. With a sense of purpose, God bless him, Edward went to the head of the stairs and stood with folded arms. A sob, or perhaps a laugh, from half-way down, and then Lily with chilled shoulders and remote face appeared like an apparition. Edward went into the guest-room and Lily followed. Pretend I’m not here, I might have said. There was no need, she wasn’t aware of me. The most disheartening thing about all this coming and going and change your partners and weekends in the country, is that there’s no one, no one at all, to whom I can unfold this tale in all its magnitude. I simply wouldn’t be believed. Or comprehended. It would be casting pearls before swine. I suppose I might drop to my friend, Mrs Malvolio, that I spent the weekend in an antique shop – the marvels hanging on the walls, the dear blue china plates rolling round the shelves. The praying angel would be appreciated. But can I possibly repeat that most of the guests spent half the night wandering about in night attire, that the host let fall two oval tears upon his checked shirt? Not to mention that before the night ended a hundred pounds of damage had been done, and that at dawn a bullet, whining like a bee, sped to my palpitating flesh.

No sooner had Lily and Edward removed themselves than Claude arrived half-way up the stairs, unclothed it seemed. The bare breasts came into view, nipples like raisins embedded in the white flesh.

‘Claude, darling,’ I screamed, not that I truly cared whether the whole damn lot of them ran round stark naked.

‘It’s all right, my love, I have my lower garments.’

He had been attending to his roses outside, he explained. Julia and Norman (where had they been?) lay down behind the sofa and began to pluck at a harp that lay on its side. I did think foolishly that she was waiting for the kettle to boil, otherwise I should have gone to bed. I can’t allow myself to dwell on what happened later. Those little broken figures and the pieces of glass lying on the carpet. It was an accident. I’m not usually accident-prone, or predisposed to being clumsy. With what shame and remorse, with burning face and throbbing head, I retired to bed.

‘Good night, darlings. Oh, darling.’

‘Good night, my love.’

‘Good night, Shebah.’

‘Sleep well, my dove.’

I didn’t really sleep. I was too confused. This morning, at least before my accident (as it’s been described), Claude was very kind, very generous. Without suspicion, trustingly, I rose and cleaned my face and went out into the garden among the roses and the trees. Edward’s head wavered between two branches and a cloud of leaves. A bird sang and the sun shone palely overhead. When I was shot I distinctly heard Victorian Norman laughing. God forgive him.

It’s been quite an interesting two days. I feel a little guilty that I didn’t talk more to Edward. I seem to remember Lily telling me that I should say nice things about her to him. I imagine Claude said enough nice things for all of us. Nobody said anything nice about me, and I was fired upon at close range. Not such a surprising occasion after all. Have I not been reviled, cursed, wounded, all my life? Did not Prince Augustus of Saxony sustain a fracture of the skull the moment I was born?

The monotony of it all. While they lie indolent in the sun, assured of their worse agonies to come, I wait with closed eyes. For something, someone … for two great and gentle hands to lift me from my cross … for anything …