Point Counter Point, Page 48

  Philip made no protest.

  ‘What I wanted to entrust to you dyah boy,’ Mr. Quarles went on, ‘was a collection of more intimate fragments. Reflections on life, records of pahsonal expyahriences. Things like that.’

  Philip nodded. ‘I see.’

  ‘I’ve been jotting them down for a long time past,’ said Mr. Quarles. ‘Memories and Reflections of Fifty Yahs—that might be a good title. There’s a lot in my notebooks. And these last days I’ve been recording on this.’ He tapped the dictaphone. ‘When one’s ill, you know, one thinks a lot.’ He sighed. ‘Syahriously.’

  ‘Of course,’ Philip agreed.

  ‘If you’d care to listen…’ he indicated the dictaphone.

  Philip nodded. Mr. Quarles prepared the machine. ‘It’ll give you an idyah of the kind of thing. Thoughts and memories. Hyah.’ He pushed the machine across the table and, pushing, sent a piece of paper fluttering to the ground. It lay there on the carpet, chequered, a puzzle. ‘This is where you listen.’

  Philip listened. After a moment of scratchy roaring, the Punch and Judy parody of his father’s voice said, ‘The key to the problem of sex:—passion is sacred, a manifestation of the divinitah.’ And then, without stop or transition, but in a slightly different tone: ‘The wahrst thing about politics is the frivolitah of politicians. Meeting Asquith one evening at dinner, I forget now where, I took the opportunitah of ahrging on him the necessitah of abolishing capital punishment. One of the most syahrious questions of modern life. But he myahrly suggested that we should go and play bridge. Unit of measure seven letters long: Verchok. Fastidious men do not live in pigsties, nor can they long remain in politics or business. There are nature’s Greeks and nature’s Mrs. Grundies. I never shared the mob’s high opinion of Lloyd George. Every man is born with a natural right to be happy; but what ferocious repression when anybody tried to claim his right! Brazilian stork, six letters: jabiru. True greatness is invarsely proportional to myahr immediate success. Ah, hyah you…!’ The scratchy roar supervened.

  ‘Yes, I see the style of the thing,’ said Philip, looking up. ‘How does one stop this affair? Ah, that’s it.’ He stopped it.

  ‘So many thoughts occur to me as I lie hyah,’ said Mr. Quarles, aimed upwards, as though speaking against aircraft. ‘Such a wealth! I could never record them all but for the machine. It’s wonderful. Ryahly wonderful! ‘

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  Elinor had had time to telegraph from Euston. On her arrival, she found the car waiting for her at the station. ‘How is he?’ she asked the chauffeur. But Paxton was vague, didn’t rightly know. Privately, he thought it was one of these ridiculous fusses about nothing, such as the rich are always making, particularly where their children are concerned. They drove up to Gattenden and the landscape of the Chilterns in the ripe evening light was so serenely beautiful, that Elinor began to feel less anxious and even half wished that she had stayed till the last train. She would have been able in that case to see Webley. But hadn’t she decided that she was really almost glad not to be seeing him? One can be glad and sorry at the same time. Passing the north entrance to the Park, she had a glimpse through the bars of Lord Gattenden’s bath-chair standing just inside the gate. The ass had stopped and was eating grass at the side of the road, the reins hung loose and the marquess was too deeply absorbed in a thick red morocco quarto to be able to think of driving. The car hurried on; but that second’s glimpse of the old man sitting with his book behind the grey donkey, as she had so often seen him sitting and reading; that brief revelation of life living itself regularly, unvaryingly in the same old familiar way, was as reassuring as the calm loveliness of beech-trees and bracken, of greengolden foreground and violet distances.

  And there at last was the Hall! The old house seemed to doze in the westering sun like a basking animal; you could almost fancy that it purred. And the lawn was like the most expensive green velvet; and in the windless air the huge Wellingtonia had all the dignified gravity of an old gentleman who sits down to meditate after an enormous meal. There could be nothing much wrong here. She jumped out of the car and ran straight upstairs to the nursery. Phil was lying in bed, quite still and with closed eyes. Miss Fulkes, who was sitting beside him, turned as she entered, rose and came to meet her. One glance at her face was enough to convince Elinor that the blue and golden tranquillity of the landscape, the dozing house, the marquess and his ass had been lying comforters. ‘All’s well,’ they had seemed to say. ‘Everything’s going on as usual.’ But Miss Fulkes looked pale and frightened, as though she had seen a ghost.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Elinor whispered with a sudden return of all her anxiety, and before Miss Fulkes had time to answer, ‘Is he asleep?’ she added. If he were asleep, she was thinking, it was a good sign; he looked as though he were asleep.

  But Miss Fulkes shook her head. The gesture was superfluous. For the question was hardly out of Elinor’s mouth, when the child made a sudden spasmodic movement under the sheets. His face contracted with pain. He uttered a little whimpering moan.

  ‘His head hurts him so much,’ said Miss Fulkes. There was a look of terror and misery in her eyes.

  ‘Go and have a rest,’ said Elinor.

  Miss Fulkes hesitated, shook her head. ‘I’d like to be useful…’

  Elinor insisted. ‘You’ll be more useful when you’ve rested….’ She saw Miss Fulkes’s lips trembling, her eyes growing suddenly bright with tears.

  ‘Go along,’ she said and pressed her arm consolingly.

  Miss Fulkes obeyed with a sudden alacrity. She was afraid that she might start crying before she got to her room.

  Elinor sat down by the bed. She took the little hand that lay on the turned-back sheet, she passed her fingers through the child’s pale hair caressingly, soothingly. ‘Sleep,’ she whispered, as her fingers caressed him, ‘sleep, sleep.’ But the child still stirred uneasily; and every now and then his face was distorted with sudden pain; he shook his head, as though trying to shake off the thing that was hurting him, he uttered his little whimpering moan. And bending over him, Elinor felt as though her heart were being crushed within her breast, as though a hand were at her throat, choking her.

  ‘My darling,’ she said beseechingly, imploring him not to suffer, ‘my darling.’

  And she pressed the small hand more tightly, she let her palm rest more heavily on his hot forehead, as if to stifle the pain or at least to steady the shuddering little body against its attacks. And all her will commanded the pain to cease under her fingers, to come out of him—out of him, through her fingers, into her own body. But still he fidgeted restlessly in his bed, turning his head from one side to the other, now drawing up his legs, now straightening them out with a sharp spasmodic kick under the sheets. And still the pain returned, stabbing; and the face made its grimace of agony, the parted lips gave utterance to the little whimpering cry, again and again. She stroked his lorehead, she whispered tender words. And that was all she could do. The sense of her helplessness suffocated her. At her throat and heart the invisible hands tightened their grip.

  ‘How do you find him?’ asked Mrs. Bidlake, when her daughter came down.

  Elinor did not answer, but turned away her face. The question had brought the tears rushing into her eyes. Mrs. Bidlake put her arms round her and kissed her. Elinor hid her face against her mother’s shoulder. ‘You must be strong,’ she kept saying to herself. ‘You mustn’t cry, mustn’t break down. Be strong. To help him.’ Her mother held her more closely. The physical contact comforted her, gave her the strength for which she was praying. She made an effort of will and with a deep intaken breath swallowed down the sobs in her throat. She looked up at her mother and gratefully smiled. Her lips still trembled a little; but the will had conquered.

  ‘I’m stupid,’ she said apologetically. ‘I couldn’t help it. It’s so horrible to see him suffer. Helplessly. It’s dreadful. Even if one knows that it’ll be all right in the end.’

  Mrs. Bidlak
e sighed. ‘Dreadful,’ she echoed,’dreadful,’ and closed her eyes in a meditative perplexity. There was a silence. ‘By the way,’ she went on, opening them again to look at her daughter, ‘I think you ought to keep an eye on Miss Fulkes. I don’t know whether her influence is always entirely good.’

  ‘Miss Fulkes’s influence?’ said Elinor, opening her eyes in astonishment. ‘But she’s the nicest, the most conscientious…’

  ‘Oh, not that, not that!’ said Mrs. Bidlake hastily. ‘Her artistic influence, I mean. When I went up to see Phil the day before yesterday I found her showing him such dreadfully vulgar pictures of a dog.’

  ‘Bonzo?’ suggested Elinor.

  Her mother nodded. ‘Yes, Bonzo.’ She pronounced the word with a certain distaste. ‘If he wants pictures of animals, there are such excellent reproductions of Persian miniatures at the British Museum. It’s so easy to spoil a child’s taste…. But Elinor! My dear!’

  Suddenly and uncontrollably, Elinor had begun to laugh. To laugh and to cry, uncontrollably. Grief alone she had been able to master. But grief allied with Bonzo was irresistible. Something broke inside her and she found herself sobbing with a violent, painful and hysterical laughter.

  Mrs. Bidlake helplessly patted her shoulder. ‘My dear,’ she kept repeating. ‘Elinor!’

  Roused from uneasy and nightmarish dozing, John Bidlake shouted furiously from the library. ‘Stop that cackling,’ commanded the angry-plaintive voice. ‘For God’s sake.’

  But Elinor could not stop.

  ‘Screaming like parrots,’ John Bidlake went on muttering to himself.

  ‘Some idiotic joke. When one isn’t well…’

  ‘Now, for God’s sake,’ said Spandrell roughly, ‘pull yourself together.’

  Illidge pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; he was afraid of being sick. ‘I think I’ll lie down for a moment,’ he whispered. But when he tried to walk, it was as though his legs were dead under him. It might have been a paralytic who dragged himself to the sofa.

  ‘What you need is a mouthful of spirits,’ said Spandrell. He crossed the room. A bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard, and from the kitchen he returned with glasses. He poured out two fingers of the spirit. ‘Here. Drink this.’ Illidge took and sipped. ‘One would think we were crossing the Channel,’ Spandrell went on with ferocious mockery, as he helped himself to brandy. ‘Study in green and ginger—that’s how Whistler would have described you now. Apple-green. Moss-green.’

  Illidge looked at him for a moment, then turned away, unable to face the steady glance of those contemptuous grey eyes. He had never felt such hatred as he now felt for Spandrell.

  ‘Not to say frog-green, slime-green, scum-green,’ the other went on.

  ‘Oh shut up!’ cried Illidge in a voice that had recovered some of its resonance and hardly wavered. Spandrell’s mockery had steadied his nerves. Hate, like brandy, is a stimulant. He took another burning gulp. There was a silence.

  ‘When you feel like it,’ said Spandrell, putting down his emptied glass, ‘you can come and help me clear up.’ He rose and walked round the screen, out of sight.

  Everard Webley’s body was lying where it had fallen, on its side, with the arms reaching out across the floor. The chloroform-soaked handkerchief still covered the face. Spandrell bent down and twitched it away. The temple which had been struck was against the floor; seen from above the face seemed unwounded.

  His hands in his pockets, Spandrell stood looking down at the body.

  ‘Five minutes ago,’ he said to himself, formulating his thoughts in words, that his realization of their significance might be the more complete, ‘five minutes ago, it was alive, it had a soul. Alive,’ he repeated and balancing himself unsteadily on one leg, with the other foot he touched the dead cheek, he pushed forward the ear and let it flick back again. ‘A soul.’ And for a moment he allowed some of his weight to rest on what had been Everard Webley’s face. ‘He withdrew his foot; the print of it remained, dust-grey, on the white skin. ‘Trampling on a dead face,’ he said to himself. Why had he done it? ‘Trampling.’ He raised his foot again and pressed his heel into the socket of the eye, gently, tentatively, as though experimenting with outrage. ‘Like grapes,’ he thought. ‘Trampling wine out of the grapes.’ It was in his power to trample this thing into a pulp., But he had done enough. Symbolically, he had trodden out the essential horror from his murder; it flowed from under his trampling feet. The essential horror? But it was more stupid and disgusting, than horrible. Pushing the toe of his boot under the chin, he rolled the head over until the face was looking up, open-mouthed and with half-shut eyes, at the ceiling. Above and behind the left eye was a huge red contusion. There were trickles of blood on the left cheek, already dry, and where the forehead had rested on the floor, a little pool—hardly even a pool—a smear.

  ‘Incredibly little blood,’ said Spandrell aloud.

  At the sound of his calm voice Illidge violently started.

  Spandrell withdrew his supporting foot. The dead face fell back with a little thump on to its side.

  ‘It’s a complete justification for Bishop Odo’s mace,’ he went on dispassionately. That he should find himself recalling, at this of all moments, the comical prancings of that conscientious churchman in the Bayeux tapestry—that too was part of the essential horror. The frivolousness of the human mind! The wandering irrelevance! Evil might have a certain dignity. But silliness…

  Illidge heard him walk into the kitchen. There was the gradually sharpening note of water running into a pail. The tap was turned off; there were foot-falls; the bucket was set down with a metallic clink.

  ‘Luckily,’ Spandrell went on, in comment on his last remark. ‘Or else I don’t know what we should have done about the mess.’

  Illidge listened with a strained and horrified attention to the sounds that came to him from the other side of the screen. A limp and meaty thud; was that an arm lifted and dropped? The sibilant sliding of a soft and heavy object across the floor. Then the splash of water, the homely noise of scrubbing. And at these sounds, so incomparably more horrible, more profoundly significant than any words, however brutal, however calmly cynical, that Spandrell could say, he felt a recrudesence of that sinking, that heart-fluttering faintness of the first minutes, when the dead man was lying there, still twitching, at his feet. He remembered, he lived over again those moments of breathless and sick anticipation before the horrible event. The noise of the car backing down the street; the gritty scrape of feet on the doorstep, and then the knock, and then a long, long silence of heart-beats and visceral creepings and imaginative forebodings, of justifying thoughts of revolution and the future, justifying hatred of oppression and the vileness of wealth. And at the same time ridiculous, incongruous recollections, as he crouched behind the screen, of those childish games of hide-and-seek on school-treat days, among the gorse and juniper bushes of the common. ‘One, two, three…’; the seekers covered their faces and began to count their hundred, aloud; the hiders scattered. You thrust yourself into a prickly bush, you lay in the bracken. Then came the shout of ‘ninety-nine, a hundred, Cooee!’; and the seekers were off, were after you. And the excitement was so painfully intense, as you crouched or squatted in your lair, peeping, listening for a chance to make a bolt for Home, that you felt an almost irrepressible desire to’do something,’ though something had been done, behind the junipers, only five minutes before. Absurd memories! And because absurd, dreadful! For the hundredth time he felt in his pocket to make sure that the bottle of chloroform was still there and safely corked. The second knock startlingly resounded and, with it, the whistle and that humorous call (you could hear, from the tone of his voice, that he was smiling) of ‘Friend!’ Behind his screen Midge had shuddered. ‘Friend!’ And remembering now, he shuddered again, more violently, with all the shame and horror and humiliation which he had had no time then to feel. No time; for before his mind could realize all the implications upon implications of that laughing call,
the door had creaked on its hinges, there was the noise of feet on the boards, and Webley was shouting Elinor’s name. (Illidge suddenly found himself wondering if he had been in love with her.) ‘Elinor!’ There followed a silence; Webley had seen the note. Illidge had heard his breathing, only a foot or two away, on the other side of the screen. And then there was the rustle of a quick movement, the beginning of an exclamation and that sudden dry concussion, like the noise of a slap, but duller, deader and at the same time much louder. There followed a fraction of a second’s silence, then the noise of falling—not a single sound, but a series of noises spread over an appreciable period of time; the bony collapse of the knees, the scrape of shoes sliding away across the polished floor, the muffled thud of the body and arms, and the sharp hard rap of the head against the boards. ‘Quick!’ had come the sound of Spandrell’s voice, and he had darted out of his hidingplace. ‘Chloroform.’ Obediently, he had soaked the handkerchief, he had spread it over the twitching face….He shuddered again, he took another sip of brandy.

  The sound of scrubbing was succeeded by the squelch of a wetted cloth.

  ‘There,’ said Spandrell, appearing round the screen. He was drying his hands on a duster. ‘And how’s the invalid?’ he added in the parody of a bedside manner, smiling ironically.

  Illidge averted his face. The hatred flared up in him, expelling for the moment every other emotion. ‘I’m all right,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Just taking it easy while I do the dirty work. Is that it?’ Spandrell threw the duster on to a chair and began to turn down his shirt cuffs.

  In two hours the muscles of the heart contract and relax, contract again and relax only eight thousand times. The earth travels less than an eighth of a million miles along its orbit. And the prickly pear has had time to invade only another hundred acres of Australian territory. Two hours are as nothing. The time to listen to the Ninth Symphony and a couple of the posthumous quartets, to fly from London to Paris, to transfer a luncheon from the stomach to the small intestine, to read Macbeth, to die of snake bite or earn one-and-eightpence as a charwoman. No more. But to Illidge, as he sat waiting, with the dead body lying there behind the screen, waiting for the darkness, they seemed unending.