Guilty: The Lost Classic Novel, Page 2

  But nightmare reassumed its ascendancy as he walked straight past as if I had not been there and, closely pursued by my mother, went into the kitchen, thus completing my utter confusion, for I had never seen him in there and hardly thought he knew such a place existed. Should I follow? I had not been told not to. I could tell by their voices that my parents had been caught by one of those sudden emotional storms, always liable to sweep upon grown-up people like typhoons, out of nowhere, strange, frightening, incomprehensible outbursts of love or hate, which seemed to fling them about helpless as battered pieces of wreckage, while I was left out, ignored.

  My one small satisfaction was to know I could watch without being noticed; but I had no sooner entered the kitchen than I’d have given anything to have stayed in the other room. Had it been possible I’d have run away. But now, in true nightmare fashion, I was frozen in immobility, unable to speak or move, forced to witness my own horrific imaginings made real.

  I’d imagined my father mad, and what but madness could now make him snatch the lid off the dustbin (my voice frozen within me, I trembled all over at the thunderous nerve-shattering clang with which it crashed to the floor) and proceed to stuff his beautiful uniform into it, on top of potato peelings, tea leaves and garbage of all descriptions? The bin was already half full. It was not easy to thrust the garments into it; he had to cram them down with both hands, finally setting his foot on the top of the lot, and with evident satisfaction stamping the fine material deep into the squelching, malodorous mess.

  Aghast, I looked at my mother, wordlessly imploring her to stop this madness, or at least to assure me these acts were not as mad as they seemed, appealing to her (as hitherto in every crisis I’d appealed successfully) to save me from this fantastic nightmare. For the first time in my life the assurance wasn’t forthcoming. She neither put an end to the grotesque and frightful scene nor removed me from it. And as I watched her fluttering around, pecking and plucking at him with ineffectual darting motions and thin protesting cries, as flimsy and useless as a bird’s, it gradually dawned on me that, at this moment, she was almost as helpless as I was myself. She was not, as I’d always believed, infallible and omnipotent where I was concerned; there were some situations against which she was powerless to protect me.

  I know one doesn’t grow out of babyhood on a single occasion, but I must have taken a long step forward when I made this shocking discovery. And perhaps the peculiar nightmare quality of the episode has stayed so clear in my memory, with all its crazy detail, because it obscured to some extent the realization that the being upon whom I’d lived till then in total dependence was, after all, only human. Meanwhile, it was the turn of the little boxes which had looked so promising, when viewed as I normally viewed the chance of a present. Throughout my father’s performance, they had been lying disregarded on the dresser beside me. I wished I’d slipped one of them into my pocket, as I easily could have done at any moment up to now, when he gathered them up in his strong sunburned hands, snapped them open one after the other, ripped out the medals embedded within and consigned these, too, to the dustbin.

  I remember our kitchen as rather a dull little room, a drab background across which the decorations flashed, briefly exotic as a shower of meteors, before they slid out of sight with no more fuss and less noise than coins sliding into a purse; far too pretty, I thought, with their rainbow ribbons, to be swallowed by the sordid, dirty grey bin full of disgusting rubbish. Since there was no room left in it for the cases that had contained them, my father threw these on to the floor and dispatched them in the same summary fashion, stamping them into shapelessness and grinding beneath his heel those that resisted destruction.

  It was all over in a moment. The glittering discs and crosses were gone without trace. Nothing was left of that brave display but a few broken scraps of framework and torn shreds of leather and velvet, which he kicked into a corner where they could not be seen. Lifting the fallen lid, he replaced it carefully on the bin, looking around to make sure he’d left no sign of disorder anywhere. Then, satisfied that the room was restored precisely to its original state, he went across to the sink and turned on the tap.

  A child’s time is different from an adult’s, and I seemed to have been locked in nightmare for an eternity. I felt I’d reached the ultimate point of endurance where I must escape or die. Most opportunely, the noise of water rushing out of the tap, that most ordinary of household sounds, came now to the rescue, reasserting the existence of all that was known and familiar in my daily life.

  The exotic, the splendid, the terrifying, the mad had disappeared, snapped back as if on an elastic band to the world of magic, both good and bad, which for me was all the while lying as close behind the common face of appearances. The sight of my father in his old clothes, calmly and thoroughly washing his hands with green Puritan soap, as if he’d never been a hero or fought in a war, reaffirmed the unreality of the magical. Could I have imagined the uniform and the medals? Could I possibly have imagined the whole incident?

  It didn’t seem so very unlikely, for there was not then any hard-and-fast line of division between my two worlds, which at times overlapped in a confusing manner. I thought of the tall, thin man, as substantial as my parents in every detail of his appearance and just as much a reality to me (only differing from other people in his harmless habit of coming through doors without opening them), remembering how bewildered I’d been when I discovered that nobody else could see him. I’d known him for years, and we’d always been on the best of terms till, shortly before my illness, my mother had told me I was getting too old for such fancies. Though she’d spoken kindly, after this I was no longer at ease in my mind about him and wished he would stop coming to see me – but it was impossible to say this to an old friend – as henceforth his visits would have to be kept secret. Later, while I was lying in bed (though I knew I couldn’t be scolded for anything till I was well again), the problem her words had raised weighed so heavily on my sick brain that I used to implore him to go away when he stood looking down at me reproachfully, and afterwards beg her to tell me he hadn’t really been in the room.

  Now, in the same way, I longed to call out, ‘None of that really happened, did it?’ But she, as if suddenly tired, had sat down at the scrubbed table, on which she rested her arm, deliberately placing her head upon it as if she’d just decided to take a nap there. Only she never took naps in the daytime; and I knew that, if by some chance she were to do so, it would certainly not be with her head on the kitchen table.

  So the nightmare was still going on, though I could stand no more of it. And when I realized that she was quietly crying this was the last straw. Absolutely at the end of my tether, I lifted up my voice and started to weep aloud, making a lugubrious duet of our mutual grief.

  I don’t remember any more of that day’s events. Curiously, I wasn’t troubled again, at least not consciously, by feeling responsible for my father’s mad actions, and if there were consequences below the surface I failed to recognize them.

  My mother never talked to me about his pacifism, keeping from me all the unpleasant publicity the case attracted. I’ve no doubt she meant to shield me from her own unhappiness by saying nothing, but it might have been better for me if she’d been less restrained, for I couldn’t help being aware of the conflict between them, which changed the whole atmosphere in which we lived. I see now how close to each other they must always have been, so that they were too absorbed in their personal tragedy to consider how lost and bewildered I felt, deprived suddenly of my importance as a part of the family unit – one that was breaking up – both of them too preoccupied to think much about me. But at the time I could not understand their apparent indifference to my feelings. Though there were no arguments in my presence, I’m sure my mother did everything in her power to dissuade my father from his new opinions, making use of every weapon at her command – blandishments, as well as appeals and denunciations. It must have been hard to convince her that he couldn’t
be shaken, but, once she was convinced, the thing obsessed her, and she persuaded herself that he’d disgraced us all. Since her nature was too gentle for bitterness, she lapsed then into a state of aggrieved melancholy, withdrawing into herself more and more, seeing no one, staying indoors and doing all the housework, dismissing the maid we had employed for years. When my father protested that it was too much for her and that there had been no need to get rid of the girl, she replied in terms of veiled reproach, somehow implying, so that even I half understood, that his principles were to blame, as though he’d deliberately imposed on her this penance of drudgery and isolation.

  I was too young to understand what a great trial it must have been for the poor man, who was certainly still devoted to her, or to appreciate the rather touching humility with which he deferred to her in all things apart from his own views, as if trying to compensate for the one unforgivable deviation by waiving his right to assert himself in any other way whatsoever under his own roof. Naturally, I felt hurt because he didn’t concern himself with my upbringing, seeming to take no interest in the, to me, all-important question of my going to school. This had been arranged for the autumn, but was now indefinitely postponed – officially on the grounds that it would be good for me to run wild for a bit after my illness, though I gathered that in some mysterious way his pacifism was responsible for this, too.

  Looking back, I think he must have given his word not to influence me towards his beliefs and scrupulously interpreted this promise as meaning he must have no contact with me at all, since they were so important a part of him as to appear in every action and word. But, as nothing was explained to me at the time, I could hardly fail to resent the fact that he never asked me to be his companion at home or on his long solitary walks, but seemed, indeed, to avoid me altogether.

  Inevitably, I blamed him for the changes that had come about since his return in my mother, to whom I no longer felt close as I’d always done before, and in my surroundings. In these few weeks the whole atmosphere of my home had changed and become sad, silent, secret. My father himself spent most of his time in the little room he used as a study, working for the various organizations which were trying to preserve the precarious peace of that time, whose representatives occasionally came to see him. I can’t imagine my gentle mother refusing to let these people in, so I suppose it was out of consideration for her that he always admitted them personally and later saw them off the premises, thus, in my eyes, investing their comings and goings with a conspiratorial quality that contributed to the general secretiveness.

  It goes without saying that I didn’t actually think in this way. Only, at odd times, while I was in the garden, perhaps, lost in fantasy or playing one of my involved ritual games, the feeling would fall on me like a stone, temporarily crushing imagination and interest – the feeling of the closed box that was my home, to which, ultimately, I must return, in which my parents were shut away from each other and from the world, each in silence and separateness, alone.

  The cottage even began to look secret to me, the half-drawn shades at the upper windows suggesting the oblique glances of partially veiled eyes. And the rooms, now that they saw no more social life, developed a queer private life of their own. Often, when I opened a door, I would get the impression of wild activity just arrested, as though the different objects around me had only that moment dashed back to their usual places, where they were waiting impatiently for my departure, so that they could go on with their own affairs. I used to tell myself that one day I’d find out what they were up to by flinging open the door so suddenly that they’d be caught unawares. But I can’t really have been very curious – or, more probably, I was scared of intruding – as I never did try to take them by surprise. Perhaps it was simply that I didn’t have time, for it was summer, and I was always in a hurry to escape into the open air.

  Before, my home had been a warm, happy place where I loved to be. But now I was always slightly uneasy indoors. It was a little frightening to think of my father being there all the time, so close, but invisible, unapproachable, like God. And my mother’s silence made me uncomfortable, too. She spoke very little to me these days, and when I chattered as usual seemed not to hear, going about her perpetual cleaning with a shadowy withdrawn face, as if dedicated to cleanliness and to nothing else in the world. Though she always cared meticulously for my bodily needs, and even made an occasional effort to play with me, I couldn’t help being aware that she had begun to live somewhere else and gave nothing of herself to anyone any more, not even to me. I soon got used to her endless washing and dusting and polishing, as I did to the tears that so often came into her eyes for no evident reason. I ceased to be affected by them, or so I thought, and would pretend not to notice that she was crying. All the same, I identified her continuous incomprehensible grief with all that confused and troubled me in my changed background, and when I thought of home now, I thought of her gliding soundlessly about her work in the shadows, like a dim tearful ghost.

  Whenever I could, I tried to escape this dismal atmosphere by rushing out of doors; but the feeling would still be there, inescapable, ready to drop on me at any moment, crushing out any natural impulse of playfulness I might have had, so that I didn’t know what to do with myself, didn’t know how to get through the long hours. Because in the autumn I was neither to go back to the village school I’d been attending nor to a new school, and because nothing else had been settled about me, I felt utterly lost, stranded in a sort of limbo between my future and past.

  I can still recall the queer, empty sensation of having run down like a clock that needs winding; a sensation with which I wandered about, listlessly, aimlessly, in the warm, humid, overcast weather, all the time vaguely expectant, always hoping for someone to take charge of me, wind me up and set me going again – though when this actually happened I was quite unprepared. How gladly I’d have welcomed my tall thin friend, who had clearly taken offence at being asked to go, for he never appeared, even though I made the round of our former meeting places each day.

  In an attempt to anchor myself somewhere, I took to going to the paddock adjoining the school where we used to play in the afternoons. Now it was holiday time, but a few children lived there all the year round. Known to the rest of us as ‘the orphans’ – not contemptuously but in self-defence – these boarders formed a powerful union, secret society or exclusive club, from which others were for ever barred. By climbing the steep bank from the lane and crawling through the hedge I could lie in the tall weeds and grass on the other side without danger of being seen, enviously watching the orphans’ noisy games, storing up the sound of their laughter and cheerful talk as a kind of insurance against the silence and solitude in which I passed my own days, dreaming that I was one of them, admitted to their lively, carefree companionship.

  It would have been a very simple and natural thing, it seems now, for me to have revealed myself to my exschoolmates and turned the dream into reality. But it never occurred to me then. Nor was it because of the orphans’ exclusiveness that the thought of approaching them didn’t enter my head. At this impressionable age I’d already been so affected by the changed atmosphere in which I lived that the idea of playing with other children seemed quite unreal, something only possible in imagination – in fact, I half suspected the orphans of belonging to the same unmentionable category as the tall, thin man.

  For this reason I concealed my trips to the paddock, preparing an alternative story as an alibi, in case my mother, in one of her unpredictable fits of noticing me, should ask, out of a sense of duty, what I’d been doing. I never dawdled in the vicinity either, though the chances of being seen and recognized were extremely slight – too slight to worry me, when, having crept through the hedge, I caught sight one day of the delicate, feathery fern-like leaves and pinkish stems of a certain plant the village people called the ‘headache plant’, which always fascinated me on account of its name and the odd medicinal smell of its crushed leaves.

  The
re was just room for me to balance between the hedge and the six-foot drop to the lane. By leaning over precariously, I managed to grasp a handful of the faintly hairy leaves, crushing them in the process, so that I only had to take up a more secure position before I inhaled, closing my eyes as I did so the better to appreciate the mysterious bitter scent. Perhaps I hadn’t recovered entirely from the aftereffects of my illness, for, as I remember that peculiar odour, it seemed to contain an indescribable heavy languor, some fever quality of these interminable sultry days, of summer drowsiness turned ominous by the unfulfilled threat of thunder.

  To the observer, of whose approach I wasn’t as yet aware, I must have looked a queer little image, perched up on the bank with my hands full of headache plant and my eyes shut tight. A slight sound made me open them hurriedly, and there, to my surprise, was a great black car bearing down upon me, rolling downhill almost silently, filling almost the whole width of the lane.

  I knew the car at once, for it was often to be seen outside our front door. But it didn’t occur to me to wave to the occupant or to make any sign of recognition – not because I was surly or shy, but simply because I’d got so accustomed to being alone and unnoticed that I felt rather as though I were invisible. I was quite unprepared for the great black beetle of a thing to stop just below me and for the driver to put his head out of the window and invite me to jump in. It was more a command than an invitation, I thought, having long ago classified him as one of the order-givers of the world, pre-destined to command the obedience of his fellow men.