Henry and Cato (37 page)

‘I wonder if Henry has got a mental case on his hands,' Gerda said earlier to Lucius. ‘Oh surely not!' shocked Lucius had replied. ‘Well, it's his business,' said Gerda. She did not really think of Stephanie in this way, but she saw with exasperation the signs of a kind of weakness. Burke, Sandy, had been strong people. She was a strong person herself. How strange it now seemed that she had expected the home-coming Henry to exhibit weakness. He had been such a feeble weakly little boy. Perhaps the desire to expunge this image lay behind his present aggression. Her true strong ones had departed, and she was left with loyal spineless Lucius. With John Forbes, a tough sensible man whom she used to respect, she had quarrelled. And Henry's strength was mustered against her with, she increasingly felt, a kind of virulence which was poisoning her own soul with resentment.

One touching thing about Stephanie, and Gerda was touched, was that Stephanie, perhaps to her own surprise, had accepted Gerda as a mother. And Gerda had played mother. Of course she was able to do so more easily because the relation was temporary. Whether or not the marriage ‘worked' Stephanie would disappear, she would be elsewhere with Henry, in America, gone. Gerda had hated America. It seemed to her raw, ugly, vulgar, frightening, and curiously empty. She would certainly never go there again. She was prepared now to tend Stephanie, but physically she shrunk from her. The moral weakness which Gerda sensed in her future daughter-in-law expressed itself in more corporeal ways. Stephanie had a lazy idle body. Henry had landed himself with a wife who would lie in bed till noon. She smelt of fat flesh and cheap cosmetics. Gerda did not like her attitudes or her underwear. She suspected her of being older than the age she had admitted to Henry. She felt, as a physical aura about this now helpless and pathetic being, a kind of cunning.

Gerda had promptly despaired of using Stephanie to persuade Henry not to sell the house. Stephanie could weep, but she would never persuade Henry of anything. Henry was a force of nature. Gerda recalled with detached amazement how she had once secretly hoped to tame returning Henry, to train him to love her, to be some shadowy feeble inadequate consolation for her loss. She had had, it seemed, some plan of redeeming Henry; but now Henry was clear as being unredeemable and one result of this was that she no longer cared whom he married. She just wished that it was all over and that they were gone. The scene that she loved was already being dismantled, and she was willy-nilly withdrawing her attachment. Bellamy had arranged to work for Mrs Fontenay and John Forbes. In a few weeks time the house would be up for sale.

Gerda stooped and put another log onto the fire. The bare untapestried wall behind her was like a chill opening into the void. She shivered. She was waiting up for Henry not out of anxiety for him but out of a compulsive desire to exhibit her suffering. She pulled the skirt of the blue and green woollen gown back out of the hearth where the hem had become smudged with ashes. She shook it. She thought, even now I am far more beautiful than that girl, I am strong and clean. But what does it matter any more? An owl hooted from the big trees, with a repeated hollow fluting cry. The door opened quietly and bird-headed Rhoda came in, wearing her dark blue dress which looked so much like a uniform yet was not. In reply to her question Gerda said, no, she wanted no coffee, nothing to eat, nothing. She told Rhoda to go to bed. Her gesture of dismissal indicated, in the sign language of two women who had lived together for many years without ever speaking of anything except domestic trivia, her affection for Rhoda. She looked fleetingly into the huge eyes. She had not yet told Rhoda that she would have to go. No one indeed had told Rhoda anything, Gerda did not know whether Rhoda knew that the house was to be sold.

After a few minutes there was a creaking sound and a fumbling noise and Lucius came in, stooping, wearing his dressing-gown.

‘Why are you up?'

‘Gerda, dearest, go to bed, don't grieve over that bad boy.'

‘I hate the sort of words you use.'

‘I'm sorry. Don't grieve.'

‘I'm not grieving.'

‘How was poor Stephanie, did she get off to sleep all right?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you think she's really ill?'

‘I think she's working up for a nervous breakdown, but that's Henry's problem.'

‘Gerda, you mustn't be against that girl because of Henry—'

‘Do you imagine I'm jealous?'

‘Well, it would be understandable—'

‘Sometimes I wonder whether you are just stupid or whether you are really being vindictive. All this is so much larger and more important than anything you seem able to imagine. You have a mean petty imagination. I am not “grieving” over a “bad boy”, I am not “jealous” of that wretched little neurotic girl! You understand nothing.'

‘Don't cry—'

‘I am not crying!'

‘Gerda, forgive me, I know I annoy you sometimes, I can't get anything right, but I do love you, you're all I've got, we will be together in the future, won't we—'

There was a faint distant sound, the sound Gerda had been waiting for.

‘There's the Volvo. It's Henry. Go to bed, Lucius.'

‘Forgive me.'

‘Oh, you stupid
stupid
man. There. Go.'

Lucius padded away. He climbed slowly, laboriously, upstairs to his room. His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him. He had always thought of himself as a muddler, a sufferer, a victim. But what a cosy protected victim he had been. Gerda's irony, her little daily rejection of him, had hurt. But it had existed inside a kind of eternal safety, her continued tolerance and, however attenuated, her continued need. That Gerda really needed her last admirer had been his charter of survival. But now, in crisis, her gaze so easily passed beyond him.

He sat down at his table and drew his paper and pen towards him.
She looks into the mirror and sees her face.
I look into the mirror and see her face. I look into the mirror and see empty space.

Henry came through the front door like a whirlwind. He shut the door, not noisily but abruptly, clattering the latch. The light was on in the hall, and as he strode to the stairs he saw out of the corner of his eye his mother standing in the library doorway. He would have ignored her and gone racing on upstairs had she not said in a low voice ‘Henry!'

He whirled round, paused a moment, then walked to the library door and, passing her, went in.

‘What do you want, Mother? It's late.'

She was staring at him with horror. ‘You've hurt yourself.'

‘Have I?'

‘Your face is all over blood.'

‘It's nothing,' said Henry. ‘I banged my knuckles on a wall, they bled a bit, I must have rubbed my face. It's just a little cut.'

‘Show me. Where are you hurt?'

Henry had wrapped his wounded hand in a handkerchief. He put it behind his back. ‘No.'

‘Henry. Show me.'

‘
No.
'

They faced each other, suddenly raging.

‘Henry—'

‘Go to bed, Mother. How's Stephanie?'

‘I expect she cried herself to sleep all right.'

‘Why were you waiting up for me?'

‘I wasn't waiting up, I was thinking—'

‘Well, I'll leave you to think.'

‘About the cottage at Dimmerstone.'

‘Did you go over and look at it like I asked you to? Giles Gosling says—'

‘I've decided not to live there.'

‘Oh. All right.'

‘I shall live elsewhere. Not here at all. In a flat.'

‘O.K. I thought you wanted a garden.'

‘I'm too old for gardening, as you pointed out yourself. I've decided—'

‘O.K. then. Do as you like. Good night.'

‘Henry, you have—'

‘Oh leave me
alone
!'

He ran from her out of the door and she heard his light footsteps leaping up the stairs.

Gerda stood for a moment gazing at the pale bare cobwebbed wall. Then she turned out the lamps, and the room was in darkness except for the golden jumpy light of the fire. She pushed the fire guard forward into the ashes. Hot tears of rage and fearful misery spilled to her cheeks and fell onto her bosom. She could destroy herself before his eyes and he would not even care.

Upstairs in his bathroom Henry stared at himself in the glass. His face was streaked, almost as if striped, with blood. He turned away and began inspecting his hand. The handkerchief was stuck to the wound, stiff and dark with blood. His whole hand was swollen up to the wrist, hot and throbbing violently. A line of pain lay across it, a fierce probing pain as if nails had been driven through into his palm. Helplessly Henry put his hand under the tap. Hot water gushed over it and the pain stabbed fiercely, raced right up into his armpit. He turned off the tap, sat down on the edge of the bath and began vainly plucking at the handkerchief. It was stuck fast and the pluckings produced more pain. What was he to do? He could not go to bed in this condition. He must find a doctor, be seen to, comforted, looked after. He considered going to Stephanie, but she would be asleep, and besides she would simply be appalled. She would be, in his affliction, sorry for herself.

Under the bright light Henry sat there uncomfortably, nursing his hand and wondering what on earth was going to happen to him now. Had he really had any choice in the matter, had he chosen? Of course he had to try to save Cato's life, but was that what he was doing? He could not have ignored the letter, could not have failed to go to the rendezvous. Now he had in his head forever the idea of being ‘listed', the idea that if he were guilty of betrayal, even of failure, he would fear every strange man, every strange sound, for the rest of his life. Running to America would be no good, these people were everywhere. Fear had entered his life and would now be with him for ever. How easy it was for the violent to win. Fear was irresistible, fear was king, he had never really known this before when he had lived free and without it. Even unreasoning fear could cripple a man forever. Perhaps unreasoning fear was worst of all. How here could he calculate, how defend himself in his mind? Perhaps if he went to the police he would survive, but he would never know, never be sure, never stop waiting for the blow. How well he understood now how dictators flourished. The little grain of fear in each life was enough to keep millions quiet. And he remembered a picture of Max's in which a kindly-looking business-like torturer twists the arm of a screaming half-throttled victim while a figure resembling Lenin quietly pulls down the blind against the night. That was what it was like, essentially, in the background, in the end.

But what will happen, he thought, what will they do to poor Cato? If they get the money will they set him free? Will they not rather then kill him? With despair Henry realized he had already passed beyond this stage in the argument. No calculation and no act of Henry's could, in any light by which he could now see, affect Cato's fate one way or the other. Yet was it not for
this
that he had entered this dreadful machine? He was simply caught himself. And recalling the torch-lighted profile of the pretty boy Henry felt a vast miserable anger against Cato for having so stupidly made himself the victim of this vile little rat, the slave no doubt of other rats. Yes, I am simply caught, he thought, nursing the hot throbbing pain of his slashed hand. I will bring them the money, I will have to. But why should they stop there? They will want more, in the end they will want everything, everything I possess, everything my mother possesses. And I will give it to them, simply simply simply because I am afraid.

The darkness was total. Cato's eyes had not ‘got used' to it. Rather they had been filled with it, rinsed with it, so as to feel finally without the capacity of light. He kept his eyes open as he moved in the darkness, out of habit, rather than because they were any sensible help. Other senses however had become more informative and he had now a fairly complete idea of his surroundings. He had spent long periods listening and had twice heard again the strange voices, a murmur as of conversation taking place behind closed doors several rooms away. It still seemed to him, though he could make out no words, that the voices were not talking English. Apart from this there had been no sound except for the very faint noise or vibration which he took to be the underground railway, and an even more faint noise which it seemed to him that he had began to hear as his ears, in the dark, became keener. This was a kind of scraping noise, as of digging happening a long way off. A very distant bulldozer, vibrating in the earth?

Cato had lost all count of time. Some while ago he had lain down on the bed and covered himself with the blanket, thinking he had better rest since there was nothing else to do, not imagining that he would be able to sleep. However he did sleep, and then did not know whether he had done so for minutes or for hours. And he had slept again since then, perhaps because of the drug, or because of some effect of the awful total darkness which seemed to be clouding his mind and taking away his sense of his own identity. He had never before realized how necessary the senses are to the whole business of thinking. Plunged in continuous darkness he felt strangely muddled and had to try hard to keep the most ordinary processes of thought from wandering aside into fantasy. It was not exactly like going mad, it was more like a gentle disintegration of a tentacular thought stuff which had never, it now seemed, had much cohesion, and which now floated quietly away into the dark, into a sightless haze of wavering and dissolving connections.

When Cato felt the strange possibility of such a disintegration he tried with most deliberate will power to arrest it. He had never, he felt, really
experienced
his will in such a positive way before. And it was, to some extent, efficacious. His sense of touch, he found, now became a sort of lifeline of significance. He explored his quarters again and again in the dark, feeling up and down the walls and along the floor. His cell seemed to be impenetrably smooth like a chamber cut out of polished rock. The only irregularity or point of interest, and Cato's fingers dwelt upon this, was the metal piping in the lavatory, which was a little more extensive than had seemed to him on his first inspection. A pipe emerged from the smooth crannyless wall, proceeded a little way, then divided in two at a joint. One section ran downwards and ceased just short of the floor. The other continued, then at another joint turned abruptly upwards and ended in a broken twist about the length of a hand. Fingering this twisted end it occurred to Cato that if he could somehow remove this last section of the pipe he would have a useful tool. He did not think of it as a weapon. He had no clear idea of what he might do with such a tool, but it might be worth possessing. The notion of tapping an SOS message on the pipe which entered the wall had already occurred to him, but with his bare hand he could produce no resonance. After all, pipes went somewhere and might carry a vibration a long way, if he could knock metal against metal. Or he might sometime use his tool to try to prise open the door. But more immediately, the twisted pipe, being the only oddity in the room, attracted Cato's attention because fiddling with it was something to do, a defence against the horrors.