CHAPTER XVIII

Last Entry—In Full

GRAHAM KNOWS. EVERYTHING. What he hadn’t guessed, I told him. He came into the study a couple of nights ago and said, “You’re my real father, aren’t you?” I admitted it, I asked him how he had found out. It seems he’s been talking to some woman in Poplar or Millwall (what was he doing there, anyway?) who was a friend of Millie. That started him putting two and two together, for he’d somehow found out about those letters Millie wrote to me.

He accused me of murdering her. I told him this was nonsense. He proceeded to give me, in his cold way, a very highly-coloured account of his mother’s last days. I did not let him see that every word was like a knife twisting in a wound. If only he had felt the horror of what he was relating, I should have broken down and implored him for forgiveness. But he was telling it all as a person tells a friend some malicious thing that has been said about the latter—with intent to discomfort, to note and enjoy the discomfiture. So my pride forbade me to indulge his curiosity and malice by breaking down under them.

Forbade me also to take refuge behind Janet. Poor upright possessive Janet—it is she who was the real villain of the piece, intercepting and hiding those letters Millie wrote me at the last. I could never forgive her for it.

And I was all the more implacable to Janet—I can confess it now—because I had an intuition, when the letters with my money orders for Millie began to be returned through the post with “not known at this address” scrawled upon them, that Millie would be writing to me direct. Yes, I had a faint suspicion that Janet was hiding something from me—her behaviour to me had changed—she never could dissemble. And for a while I let it pass, covertly relieved that I need not open up again the whole wretched, glorious affair of Millie.

But I said nothing of this to Graham. It would have been squalid beyond all words to use Janet’s conduct as an excuse or palliative for my own.

Perhaps I should have denied at the start that I am Graham’s father? I wish I could deny it. I hardly dare contemplate the sort of person I must be to have produced the person Graham is: Millie was a heart of gold: all Graham’s dreadful traits must be inherited from me.

I was prepared to love him for Millie’s sake, to show him every indulgence; but what a strain he has put on my good intentions. He’d only been here a few months when he started pilfering in the home. And then that shocking business for which he was sacked from his school—that should have opened my eyes to his real nature, but I still refused to believe that a child of Millie’s could be irredeemably bad. I put it down to the hell he’d been through after she died.

Well, yes, and I have liked him too—for his independence, his intransigence, the momentary gleams of charm which remind me of Millie, above all for his quick wits, his brains. James and Becky are worthy characters, no doubt, but they bore me: Harold I find an almost meaningless nonentity. Graham at least has never bored me.

Now that my hours, as they say, are numbered (for I do not make the mistake of not taking Graham seriously), I begin to see my life as a sort of inferior Greek tragedy, full of ifs and if-nots and heavy ironies. The hamartia, the fatal flaw in myself which caused me to seduce Millie—from this everything has flowed. If I had not done so, Graham would not have been born, and Millie might still be alive. If Graham had not been born, there would have been no letters for Janet to intercept. If Janet had not then discovered about Millie, the last year of our marriage would not have been such as to erase all our previous life together and to alienate James and Becky from me: they have never forgiven me for their mother’s death. And if Janet had not died when she did, I doubt if Becky would have taken up with that mountebank Barn, or Harold married a nymphomaniac: fundamentally, these were gestures made against me, gestures of would-be emancipation.

Yes, but wasn’t my affair with Millie such a gesture—the last wild fling of a family man, a middle-aged doctor, against the cramping restrictions of home and profession?

No, it was not only that. It was more than an “affair”—I see it now, I knew it then, as the first time in my life I had acted purely on impulse, whole-heartedly, without calculation or self-regard. From the moment Millie came into my surgery, in the late autumn of 1939, I was possessed by her, I did not care what happened to me, my reputation, my family, so long as I had her love. The risks we took!—they make my blood run cold now: but, like a soldier who does not care whether or not he is killed, I bore a charmed life. We were never found out.

Ah, a charmed life indeed. That young girl from the slums—what a flower she was! what passion and grace and sweet responsiveness! What a devotion behind it! No, I am not romanticising her. That incredible summer, picking her up at our secret rendezvous, driving out to our pub in Kent, when the baby had started and I knew the blitzes would soon begin—a time of irresponsibility for me, of the desperate, utter happiness which one only wrings out to the last drop because one knows how transient it must be.

Since then I have never lived, never really lived only stayed alive.

And when I told her she must go out of London, for the baby’s sake and her own, before the blitzes began, oh the heart-rending docility and the absolute faith in me which she showed then! Some tears, but not a word of reproach. Not a hint (how many women could have resisted it?) that perhaps I was getting tired of her or using her own welfare as an excuse for ending something that endangered my career.

So she went away; and then she went on the streets and got ill and died—anything rather than be an encumbrance to me. Oh God! There should be a God to reward her. And I tried to forget her, playing the little hero amongst the bombs and the conflagrations. I just wanted to be dead. A charmed life again, though. Only twenty years ago.

What would my other children think if they knew all this? Would they revise their opinions about the cynical, worldly old martinet they take their father to be? Probably not. Their imaginations are incapable of stretching beyond the point of seeing it as the squalid, clandestine infatuation of a man at the dangerous age for an enticing young bitch.

If Graham could convince me that he has a heart—not like his mother’s, that would be too much to ask—but one capable of an infatuation for something outside himself, I would not mind so much. If he could be possessed by something, as I was possessed by her, and risk everything for it: something positive, not this cold and vicious obsession with getting his own back: then there might be hope for him, and if he killed me, I should not have died in vain. But this feeling for his mother he has worked up—I just don’t believe in it. He’s out for Number One every time: it’s himself, not Millie, that makes him vindictive.

Of course, I’ve been blind. I’ve distorted my vision by trying to see Millie in him, recreate her through him. Otherwise, I’d have recognised the psychopath years ago. Too late now.

Lounging in that chair, his legs over the arm of it, watching me writhe in my very soul when he told me all about his mother’s last days—how he enjoyed it, the young brute! And then the threats: not open, but devious, allusive, the torturer’s cat-and-mouse game. Not blackmail, I’ll give him that. No suggestion of your money or your reputation. I found the melodrama palling on me pretty quickly, and asked him point-blank, “Is your intention to murder me, then?” He pursed his little mouth in that calculating, savouring way, and replied, “You don’t deserve to live, do you? You can’t want to live, after what I’ve told you. Well, I don’t think you have much longer to live—Father.” Then he smiled at me and went out.

What am I to do? Too tired to write more now, let alone see my way straight. I’ll write some more to-morrow perhaps. If I am alive to-morrow. . . .

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. 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 difficulties. 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.

Nothing, nothing can redress what happened to Millie. The squalor, the hæmorrhages, the appeals I never answered. Her despair, her death, for me they blot out forty years of good work. Crowds will flock to my funeral. They’ll eulogise the good physician. They’ll not know I was dead years before they put me in the ground.

Tired, tired. Can’t write much more. Wonder what Strangeways and Miss Massinger made of it all at dinner last night. I must do it soon. But I’m too tired to kill myself to-night. I suspect it may need more resolution than I’d thought.

Millie, Millie. First seen sitting on that wooden bench in a row of patients. Heart-shaped face. Slender, golden: a daffodil—common and unique. The sweetness. The trust, the absolute trust. Betrayed. An old man’s quavering, mawkish sentimentality. How Graham would jeer at it!

Nevertheless, Millie my only love, those brief months of ours were the one time when, outside my work, I have lived fully, positively, with all of myself, because I was totally involved in you. If that was an illusion, it’s worth a lifetime of sanity.

But I sent you away—from the best, least selfish of motives—but it meant slowly waking up, no, slowly returning into the sleep of habit, convention, self-regard. So I dwindled back to “normal,” shrank back again within the limits of what life had made me and people expected of me.

It was your nature, my love, to accept and to forgive. If you were alive, I would not even have to ask your forgiveness. But you are dead, and myself I cannot forgive. . . .