The World in the Evening Read online

  ‘Oh, I will, Stephen dear.’ Sarah took this so earnestly that I felt rather ashamed of myself. ‘Thank you so much for telling me this. I’m afraid I’ve been terribly selfish. I’ve only thought how much I wanted to be near you and help you in this trouble. I should have realized how Gerda would be feeling. You’re such an example to me. Always so thoughtful of others, even when you’re suffering.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said, grinning at my own slyness.

  ‘Still—though I do quite understand, now, why you wanted her to nurse you—I would be so glad if there was something I could do for you.’

  ‘But there is. There’s lots of things.’

  ‘Oh—do tell me!’

  ‘Well, for example—’ I was thinking fast: ‘If you have the time, that is, you could read to me. You know, the newspaper, or a book. Something very long, and classical; that we both ought to have read before, and haven’t.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love that! When shall we start? Today? This afternoon?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Stephen, how very nice! Do you remember how I used to read to you every night in bed, when you were little?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘This’ll be like the old times, won’t it?’

  ‘Sure. Just like the old times.’

  When Sarah had fetched me the extra pillows and left me alone, I lay quietly, smiling to myself for no particular reason. The bedroom no longer seemed strange to me, as it had seemed, a week ago. It was my room, now, and I was going to stay in it for a long while. I felt as if I had been here for years, already. The Heron and the Flamingo, the washstand and the blue wallpaper had become completely reassuring and familiar. I liked them. My bed had been moved over near to the window, so that I could look out. That view—the barn, the orchard, the spring-house and the distant hills—was all of the external world that I was going to see, for the next ten weeks. And it was quite sufficient. I suppose I must be happy, I thought. And I remembered a favourable phrase of Jane’s when she was referring to drunks: ‘he was feeling no pain’.

  When I recovered consciousness at the Hospital—a bump on the head, not very serious, had put me out for, maybe, twenty minutes—I had had, thank Goodness, the presence of mind to realize that they might try to get in touch with Jane. And so, by the time Sarah arrived, I had a speech all ready prepared. Jane mustn’t on any account be told of this, I warned Sarah, or she would come running back here at once. (Would she have? Yes, I had to admit that she almost certainly would.) If Jane came, I hinted, she would want to take me away with her some place and nurse me herself. (This was untrue. Jane hated all kinds of illness, and had an instinctive resentment against sick people, of which she was scarcely even aware. She couldn’t bear to be around them for any length of time. They somehow scared her.) My threat had overcome Sarah’s scruples. She had promised faithfully not to tell Jane—in fact, not to write her at all.

  But the amazing discovery, the miraculous relief of those first forty-eight hours after the accident was that I had very nearly stopped caring about the Jane-situation. Jane had lost her power. She could only get at me through emotions, and my emotions had ceased to function. They had turned themselves into physical sensations. Jealousy was now merely a bad headache; rage was the throbbing of my broken thigh; self-pity was distributed among my various bruises. I had no energy to spare for anything else.

  And even now that my body had almost ceased to hurt at all—even now, I felt differently. Yes, the Jane-situation still existed, and would continue to exist, probably, for a long time. But I could keep it in its place. It wasn’t going to monopolize my attention. There were other situations, other people, in my world. Something basic, I now realized, had happened. The axis of my world had shifted. And it was because of the accident. The accident had had nothing to do with Jane.

  I had lied to Charles Kennedy. Naturally. It was no business of his. But I was grateful to him for asking me those questions, because they had made everything much clearer to me. Now I knew exactly what the accident was all about.

  I knew, now, what Elizabeth had wanted.

  Very well, I told her. You finally succeeded. You stopped me from running any further. It was rough, but I guess you couldn’t have done it any other way, because I refused to listen. But now you’ve got me, and I’m glad you have. I’ll listen to you, now. I’ll try and face up to whatever it is you want me to know. I’m at your disposal. Just tell me what I’m to do next.

  But I knew that, too.

  When Gerda came in with my lunch-tray, I asked her to open my suitcase and give me the file of Elizabeth’s letters.

  Soon after Elizabeth’s death, I had begun writing around and collecting her letters from her various correspondents. I had done this because it was one of the routine things you are supposed to do, in such a situation, and because I found it unbearable not to be occupied. When the letters arrived, I began to sort them, arrange them in chronological order and make notes of the cuts which would have to be made when they were published. I kept on at this work, by fits and starts, during the next three years; rather furtively, toward the end, because Jane didn’t like hearing about it. By the time we reached New York, I had sorted two whole files which covered Elizabeth’s childhood and early life, and I left them there, in a safe-deposit box at my bank.

  These were the remainder; they dated from 1926 to 1935, the year of Elizabeth’s death. I had kept meaning to get to work on them; I had tried, over and over again, to make a start in California, but I was never in the mood to do it. I was paralysed by the laziness of my misery.

  Elizabeth had written fewer letters as she got older, and most of them were short. She always wrote them by hand, in her small, clear, rather backward-leaning writing which would climb up the page in sudden spurts of optimism and then falter downward, as if overcome by doubt or fatigue. She often wrote on pages torn from her notebooks, because she had the habit of starting a letter when she found that she was stuck in her work. It was characteristic of her that she never kept to the ruled lines.

  Now, lying with the file resting on my stomach, I drew one of the letters out of it at random. Elizabeth very seldom put a month-date on her letters, much less a year. The most she would write would be ‘Thursday’ or ‘nearly two weeks since our arrival’. I couldn’t date this one, at all, for the moment, but I knew from experience that I should almost certainly be able to place it in its proper chronological order, later—that kind of detective-work was one of my greatest pleasures. It was a very brief note, headed ‘Van Gogh’s Birthday’. (I would have to look that up.)

  ‘We were both wrong about the Donne quotation. It’s:

  Thou art the Proclamation; and I am

  The Trumpet, at whose voice the people came.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be the perfect inscription for a great actress to write on the photograph of herself she was sending to the author of her play? Bernhardt should have quoted it to Rostand, after the first night of L’Aiglon. Oh dear, why didn’t she? Let’s make an anthology, shall we, of the things people ought to have said on famous occasions?’

  I put the letter back and dipped into the file for another. But no—I wouldn’t read any more, now. Sarah would be coming up, soon. And besides, I wanted to anticipate my enjoyment a little, before I began.

  Let’s wait, I told Elizabeth. We’ve got lots of time. We don’t want to spoil it by hurrying. Tomorrow morning, we’ll start.

  2

  THE EARLIEST LETTER in the file was written from London, to Elizabeth’s sister, Cecilia de Limbour. Cecilia, who had married a French consular official, spent most of her life in distant parts of the world. Just then, she was in Uruguay. I didn’t meet her, myself, until several years later, when the Limbours were back in Paris on leave, and then I took an immediate dislike to her. Cecilia was younger than Elizabeth but seemed much older; a bitterly intelligent, plaintive, dried-up little woman whom I suspected of nursing a permanent grudge against Elizabeth’s talent. But Elizabeth was d
evoted to her. Though they saw each other so seldom, Cecilia was one of the very few people to whom she would talk in detail about her work. This certainly wasn’t because Cecilia was particularly responsive or interested; her answering letters were chiefly about the inconveniences and high prices of whatever country she happened to be living in. Elizabeth appeared not to mind that. I think her letters to Cecilia, and to three or four other regular correspondents, really took the place of a journal; they demanded no comment. I was surprised, later, to find that Cecilia had even bothered to keep them. I suppose she was proud of Elizabeth, in her own envious-snobbish way.

  *

  ‘Do forgive me, darling, for this long silence. It’s weeks, now, since I wrote to anyone. This wretched novel—I’m so heavy with it, I feel sometimes as if I could scarcely drag myself upstairs.

  ‘I didn’t want to write, anyhow, until I had something more to report than the usual dullness, frustrations, doubts. Well now at last—though I scarcely dare say it—I think I have. It happened four days ago, and I’m still trembling with excitement.

  ‘I’d picked up that fat ugly Shakespeare—the one from Father’s library—and was sitting with it, not actually reading, just turning the pages like a prayer-wheel, in a kind of trance. Suddenly, I found I’d stopped at that scene in the fourth act of Macbeth (such a noisy play; it’s never been one of my favourites) where Lady Macduff is talking to her little son, just before they’re both murdered. You remember?

  Sirrah, your father’s dead:

  And what will you do now? How will you live?

  As birds do, mother.

  What, with worms and flies?

  With what I get, I mean; and so do they.

  ‘Cecilia, I can’t possibly describe to you the extraordinary shock of revelation I had, at that moment. I must have read those lines dozens of times before, and I’ve seen the play on the stage, twice. But now they seemed completely new—a personal message, telling me what my story is essentially about. Everything has to be related to these two central figures, the mother and the boy. The mother, so utterly, angrily alone with her tragedy—nobody else understands it, and it cuts her off, even, from her own son. She sits watching him, sadly, quite objectively, almost with a kind of mocking hostility. She longs to break down the barrier between them, to get through to him and make him share what she feels, somehow, even if she has to hurt him. And the boy, absorbed in his play, answers her probing, teasing questions with that strange obstinate inner certainty that children sometimes have. You try to warn them about life, all its pain, its cruelty—and they simply won’t believe you. They refuse to be intimidated. They’re so absurdly, idiotically, heartbreakingly confident. You’re sure they’re wrong—they must be—and yet, you wonder uneasily, are they? Can they conceivably know something you don’t? It baffles you.

  ‘As Birds Do, Mother. That’s to be my title. Try repeating it over to yourself. At first, you won’t like it. I didn’t. But it has forced itself upon me. Because it says exactly what I want this book of mine to say. The older generation still sitting under the shadow of the past war—disillusioned, bereaved, resentful—and watching this new generation at play. Trying, desperately, to warn it of its doom, the doom of its dead fathers, and being answered with this absurd heartbreaking innocent-cynical confidence of the young people today. Jazz, Dadaism, flappers, cocktails, night-clubs—that’s what they all mean. “I can look after myself. As birds do, mother. I’ll be all right. Why can’t you leave me alone? Je m’en fiche. What do I care what happens to me, anyway?” That’s the tone of voice I have to catch. That’s what my character, the young man Adrian, has to feel, and be.

  ‘As you see, I’m making the Macbeth scene mean something it actually doesn’t. (One always seems to do that, with Shakespeare.) Macduff, of course, isn’t really dead; but that’s beside the point, for my purposes. Adrian’s father is dead. Adrian isn’t denying that, but he revolts nevertheless against his mother’s cult of her grief. What he says to her in effect, is: “Stop torturing me with these terrible lamentations. Either die with him or live without him, but don’t keep trying to drag me into your wretched half-world of mourning. I won’t share it with you. I have my own life. If I make a mess of it, it shall be my mess. I reject all your warnings, prophecies and omens of doom. I refuse to be intimidated by the past. The past proves nothing. Put it in a glass case and treasure it, if you like. It doesn’t concern me.”

  ‘Enough of this, for the moment. I must do a lot more thinking before I can go into details—

  ‘I’m really very glad I left Italy, very content to be back here, in this flat. The bedroom’s no more than a cupboard, and the water-heater for the bath is a monster of violence and caprice; but I love my sitting-room. It looks out over Regent’s Park; such a beautiful, calm, classically autumnal view, lit by pale lemon-yellow sunshine. London is the perfect autumn city. You feel no sadness, here, that the year is passing. And the winter will be mild and snug, one long teatime, as it were, in front of the toast-making, story-telling fire. Only, I hope there’ll be no wind—my chimney smokes!

  ‘A most charming person has moved into the downstairs flat. A middle-fortyish little woman, brisk and bright, and so good. Yesterday was frosty, and she said: “This weather should encourage us to be very active.” She certainly is. She darts about like a bright-eyed mouse, feeding the poor and attending welfare committees; a regular mouse-saint. She’s an American Quaker—very Early American. You imagine her hurrying eagerly ashore off the Mayflower and kneeling at once on the beach to give thanks for having been led safely “through the watery maze”. We became acquainted over the problem of the milkman’s unpunctuality, and now I see her nearly every day. She abounds in recipes and household hints, and she talks and talks — chiefly about a young man whom she calls her nephew; though they aren’t really related, she’s careful to explain. He seems to be such a paragon of every known virtue that I quite dread his arrival here from abroad, next Wednesday.’

  At the time of this letter—the first week of November 1926—I was still over in Germany. About a month earlier, I had written to Sarah, telling her I was planning to return home and asking her to find us a place to live, in London. This was why Sarah had rented the flat.

  Sarah had begun writing me at once about her upstair neighbour, whom, at first, she called ‘Miss Wrydale’; how kind she was, how helpful with the milkman, and how much she was looking forward to meeting me. When I learned that this was the Elizabeth Rydal whose stories I’d read in the London Mercury, I was interested, but not unduly excited. Sarah’s letters gave me the impression that Elizabeth was quite elderly and a great chatterbox. I pictured her in loose garments, with coils of unhealthy dull grey hair and arty beads. Sarah described her as ‘sophisticated’; which would merely mean, I scornfully decided, that she smoked. Perfumed Turkish cigarettes, no doubt; in a long jade holder.

  I was in a thoroughly scornful mood, at that time, because I was convinced that I’d seen through everything. I’d investigated every kind of pleasure, vice, shame and mental anguish, and found them all greatly overrated. The poets—except for T. S. Eliot—had lied: they pretended life was exciting. I now knew that it wasn’t. The only valid emotion was boredom (or ennui, as I preferred to call it). I was twenty-two years old; and I had made this discovery during the five months—they seemed like five centuries—since I left Cambridge.

  In the first term of my last year up at the University, I’d made friends with a young American named Warren Geiger, who was a post-graduate student from Yale. I was drawn to him at once, by his brash cocky manner and boundless self-confidence, so different from the prim British caution of the intellectuals I’d been going around with. I don’t know why Warren liked me; perhaps simply because I was so shy and shockable, and so ready to believe every word he told me. Also, of course, I had plenty of money and was always eagerly ready to stand drinks. It was only after I’d met Warren that I began drinking regularly; before that, I’d been almost teetota
l, except at college feasts and old boys’ suppers, when I invariably got sick. But my stomach soon strengthened with practice.

  Warren was an inexhaustible storyteller. He told me stories of New York and Chicago, full of gangsters, bootleggers, speakeasies, show-girls and petting-parties, and I could never hear enough of them. They made me feel a sort of second-hand homesickness for my nearly-forgotten native land. If Warren had wanted to return to the States after leaving Cambridge, I would certainly have gone with him.

  But Warren yearned to get back to Paris, which he regarded reverently as the erotic capital of the world. (I found out, later, that he’d only been there once, for less than a week.) ‘Till you’ve laid a French girl,’ he told me solemnly, ‘you’re just plain ignorant, that’s all. These English dames, they can’t teach a fellow anything. They don’t have any temperament.’ I would nod wisely, but with an uneasy feeling that English dames were quite as much as I could handle, for the present. I had an awful long way to catch up. I wasn’t nearly ready to graduate yet.

  Until Warren had undertaken my education, I’d had very little sex-experience of any kind. There had been a couple of scared, hasty acts with other boys at school. There was a girl from Girton I used to invite to tea in my rooms, whom I managed to kiss a few times while our chaperone was busy next door, boiling the kettle. And then there were the town girls you took out on summer nights, in punts on the Cam. They giggled and screamed and were so silly they seemed half-witted. Until you touched them. Then they turned suddenly shrewd and grudging and ladylike. There were some men who could deal with this (or so they claimed) by extreme firmness. But I lacked the necessary conviction.

  Warren was contemptuous of Cambridge as a hunting-ground; instead, he used to take me up to London. This was better, certainly; you could be sure of results. But Jermyn Street on a wet night was dreary and sinister, and so were the dirty little hotels near Charing Cross where we went with the girls. I always felt like a criminal with the police hot on my trail, and it was only Warren’s encouragement that kept me going. According to him, the girl he was with invariably preferred me. (Mine obviously didn’t.) ‘You know something?’ he’d tell me, as we were returning to Cambridge on the train next morning. ‘That cute little brunette said she thought you must be an artist, you had such beautiful hands. Jesus! Can you beat that? Honestly, Steve, you’ve got what it takes. Trust Uncle Warren. Believe me, kid, I’m going to raise you to be a regular Don Ju-ann.’