CHAPTER I

Last Entry—In Part

. . . SO THERE IT is. He intends to kill me. And I must let him kill me. I’ve slept on it, and that is my conclusion. I owe it to him—or rather, to her.

I hope, when the time comes (to-night? to-morrow? next week?), I shall have the resolution not to resist—life-and-death scuffles are so ignominious. But shall I? Interesting. Mind over matter; and in my experience matter wins every time.

It all depends how, I dare say. Poison? Enough lethal drugs in the dispensary to put down half my patients. No doubt he’d like to see me expire—justice must be seen to be done—an eye for an eye—that’s our Jewish blood. But, since he does not know that I intend to go like a lamb to the slaughter, he’d be afraid of my denouncing him in extremis.

What then? Bullet, knife, strangling, gas, blunt instrument, a strong push into the river? There are so many possibilities I must be on my guard not to guard against.

Knowing him, I know it will be something cold and cunning. Yes, and apt—the punishment fitting the crime: the emotionally retarded, immaturable sort of mind works in that sort of adolescent symbolism. Crude. The poetry of the primitive, the poetic justice of the child.

Oh, my child, our child.

Should I appeal to him, not to his heart—he has none now, where I am concerned—but to his self-interest? It would be total humiliation; but worse, a humiliation in vain, for he is implacable. It’s not merely what he said. It’s how he said it, how he looked: I am not the best diagnostician in S.E. London for nothing, I have always known mortal illness when I saw it—a man’s death first lifting up its little worm’s head within him; and now I know the look of a man set upon another’s death—the look which only his victim sees, and which so many victims fail to recognise.

Self-interest! He has only one self-interest now. A monomania. To destroy me. Let him.

Thou shalt not be killed, but needs’t not strive

Officiously to stay alive.

Yes, that’s all very amusing and intrepid. But the morality of it? Do I consider it a good thing, in the interests of justice—personal justice as between him and me—to let him become, through my own passivity, a murderer? Ought I not to protect him from himself by protecting myself from him? A nice point in ethics.

If one believed in the soul, in eternal damnation, there would be no problem. But I do not.

If I loved him, love might tell me the right answer. But evidently I do not: it’s what he represents for me—there’s the bond, the beautiful, ingrown, paralysing bond.

Anyway, how the devil should I protect myself against him? I can’t wear armour all day and have every meal analysed before I eat it!

How Janet would have revelled in this situation, with her Wee Free sense of sin and retribution! Cast thy haggis upon the waters, etc. No, I should not be mocking at poor Janet—after all, I’m half Scottish myself. And she did her best; brought me all that money and gave me children and made an excellent housekeeper.

Let me face it, there’s an ineradicable streak of cheapness in me. Men at the point of death shouldn’t indulge their levity.

I wonder what they’ll do with the money when I’m dead. James will save it, Harold squander it; Becky will marry that worthless little buffoon: and Graham?—how would he use it? They should each get £30,000 after death-duties are paid, and that’s not counting my life assurance policies—another £8,000 to split up between them. Unless . . .

Good God, yes, that’s it! Forestall him. If I died before he could kill me—why didn’t that occur to me?—it would solve the whole problem. Justice would be done without making him a murderer. The high old Roman way out of trouble. Fall on one’s sword—only I haven’t got a sword, and if I had I’m so light I should probably bounce off the point. Petronius then. The hedonist’s method. Euthanasia. Yes, that’s the answer.

But don’t think of it in terms of expiation. It is simply to save him—I mean, to pacify her shade. Expiation is a meaningless concept, socially, however necessary it may be for the individual’s peace of mind. . . .