In the Middle of the Wood (21 page)

“I don't care,” said Ronny. “I'll go there but I won't take my pills.” It seemed to him that Ronny symbolized all those men of free spirit by which the human race had been impelled up the shaky ladder of evolution from the rank green nameless grass.

“The old men are funny,” said Ronny. “I like them.”

When Linda came to visit him he told her about this. She looked at him with large dry eyes as if she were stunned.

“What are you talking about?”

“I know what I'm talking about. I haven't suffered enough yet. You started me on the road but I must go further along it.”

“I started you on it?”

“Yes. With your drama. I wish you would come out into the open.”

She was wearing her red velvet suit and looked neat and desirable. He regarded her with hopeless longing. She had brought sweets and oranges. He showed her the first verse of a poem he had written.

He saw the tears springing to her eyes. Oh, how clever she was, what duplicity she had.

“You must know an engineer as well,” he said. “He has done something to the phone.”

Through the window he could see Heydrich and the handicapped girl strolling among the autumn leaves hand in hand. Heydrich tall and blonde talking to her in an animated manner.

“What kind of tree is that?” he asked Linda, pointing out to the lawn. The tree leaned like a cherry tree towards the ground with its umbrella of pink petals.

“I don't know. I haven't seen one like that before.” Heydrich and the girl passed under the splendid heart-breaking tree.

“The man there thinks he is Heydrich,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Apart from that he's okay. Of course he's an actor. He's trained for the part. I must say he's very good.”

For a moment there, there was a gap and he saw through it, and the gap closed again,

“The psychologist says you may not be long in here. Maybe another two weeks.”

“I know I'll be here a long time,” said Ralph. “I know I'll be here forever.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The logic of the plot demands it.”

“What plot?”

“The plot has an invincible rightness. I've been caught in my own plot. My stepfather saw to that. And there's a boy here exactly like me. And a man who gave away his property just like King Lear. He's trying to be a writer too. And his wife mixes up his notes. There are too many things. …” He rubbed his head. “The comprehensive power of the plot. Sometimes I feel as if I'm inside a machine.”

“You know I love you,” said Linda tearfully. “You know there is no one else but you. You know that, don't you?” Her voice echoed mockingly as if from the inside of a cave.

“So you say.”

“But it's true. I've always loved you.”

“Why should you love me? I can't see why you should. There's no reason for it.”

“Of course there's no reason for it. That's what you don't understand. That is what love is.”

“Love!”

“It's caring for someone. Surely you can see that. I care for you. I don't want to see you like this.” And she cried again, trembling and shaking. But he regarded her with a cold eye. Who could believe anything that anyone said. In the last analysis everyone was out for himself. All the ethical systems that had ever been woven like a spurious tapestry were a lot of crap: tiny men with tiny teeth had nibbled and nibbled till they had climbed the ladder from which they could see whole landscapes. The world was an eternal spy story with double agents, triple agents, secret scripts. A man must always look over his shoulder to check if he was being followed. Even the most innocent spectator, that one lounging by the lamp-post, was part of the plot.

“If you could only come straight out with it,” he said. “Admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That you've found someone else. It would be much simpler. That psychologist. You've said you always wanted to be a nurse. That you never liked being a secretary. That you didn't think it was useful.”

“But … what psychologist? Who are you talking about?”

“The Irish one. The one who came to see me first. I suppose you could call him handsome. Perhaps even charming. He's certainly handsomer than the taxi driver. And something as complicated as this would require a psychologist. Then again your mother was a nurse. Perhaps there's a secret union which looks after its own. Look, how do we know what happens in hospitals? They've got the power of life and death over their patients. They can kill them, sign certificates. Hospitals are secret closed societies. The word goes out. This fellow is making a nuisance of himself. Let's get rid of him.”

She stared at him in astonishment as if the fertility of his imagination had stunned her. In her infernal reds, in which fires were burning, he saw the glow of the tree behind her. Petals lay on the ground below it. Everything was burning away, but was it being resurrected?

He saw a police car swing up the drive and draw up at the door of the bad wards.

A nurse swirling a red and navy-blue cloak passed like a foreign exotic bird along the pathway.

“Maybe you can't help what you're doing,” he said. “Maybe none of us can.”

“I shan't be able to come tomorrow,” Linda said tiredly. “I'll come the day after that. It's a long drive and mother isn't well.”

“I'm sure she isn't.”

“She isn't. She doesn't know what is happening. She doesn't understand.”

“But I do,” said Ralph proudly. “I understand.”

“My mother likes you.”

“No, she doesn't. She doesn't understand what I do. She wishes you had married someone else. She has the old-fashioned idea that writing isn't work, not like nursing. It's not respectable.”

“Well, you've got to make allowances for that.”

“Why should I be making allowances all the time?”

“I don't know. I make allowances too,” said Linda. “We all have to make allowances. That among other things is what marriage is.”

Like Dante I must enter the final circle, he thought. I must burn there and find out about the fire and the mad shadows. That is what the Inferno is, the seethe of lost egos burning in their pain.

“Do you remember Mrs Hunter?” said Linda briskly. “She phoned Annie Macleod and asked her who had hired Judas to betray Christ. Would you believe that?”

“And who did?”

“What?”

“Who did hire him? She has a point there. She's no fool.”

Linda ignored this comment and proceeded. “And Mary Mason has a black baby. Her husband is a black doctor in Liverpool, I think it is.”

Ralph thought of the house surrounded by its gravel. It seemed to him that the ferns and grasses were rising up to swallow him. Once he had been hacking at ferns when his glasses, which he kept in his top jacket pocket, fell into the greenery. Blindly he had searched for them but couldn't find them. Such a failed scholar among famished nature he was. There was some deep meaning in the incident. Nature which he had seen by means of his glasses now became a blur as he thrust his arms into the luxuriant greenery, which had closed over them. Sometimes he had felt the vegetation was devouring even his manuscripts, turning them first green and then brown. And on rainy days he watched the water pour into the brimming barrel which stood under the rone. Another day he had seen two rabbits playing in the garden. No, he said to them, this is not an Irish missal, the real weasel is waiting for you. Even now he is feeling his way towards you, he is preparing his dance of luminous rings.

“Is there anything you want me to bring you?” said Linda.

“No, nothing. There is a man in here who's writing a history of the world. An amateur. A fool. He walks about all the time, he can't sit still. And he wears bedroom slippers. He's expecting his wife to bring him books and notes but of course she won't.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you think he's here? She didn't care about his book. God knows what will happen to his notes while he's away from home.”

“Ralph,” said Linda tenderly.

“What?”

“Come back to me.”

He turned his face away from her towards the two lunatics with their wheelbarrow.

There was a silence and then Linda said, “I'll have to go.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to come to the car?”

“I don't know if I'm allowed out.”

“Give me a wave then.”

He didn't speak. She kissed him lightly on the lips and then left. She waved to him but he gazed back at her stonily. She seemed to be smaller than usual as she entered the car. So the strain was getting through to her. This huge plot took a lot of thinking out, no wonder she was tired. There must even be a place for the feeding rabbits and the tenuous redbreast on the branch. The car turned away in a shower of pebbles and then she was gone. The car was red as an expiring ember. Oh God, when would there be an end to this? To cut cleanly away from the world, that was what he should do. Only he didn't have the courage.

The compulsory discussions were unstructured. Sometimes someone might make a complaint, at other times there might be a general statement which would generate a debate. The scientist of whom Hugh had spoken was a tall man with a goatee beard who gave the appearance of being at home where he was, intelligent, egotistic. Hugh was there of course as was the handicapped girl, Heydrich, Lady Macbeth, and the disguised psychologist: and others. The scientist got on to the topic of the soul. Suddenly Ralph burst out impatiently, “Are we talking of the soul or of consciousness?
Consciousness is what differentiates us from the animals. We carry mirrors about with us. Some time or another the leap was made, and man could see doubly, he could act and watch what he was doing at the same time.”

“But surely the soul is different from that,” said the scientist.

An old man with a trembling head and a trembling hand said, “Plato thinks so at any rate. He talks of the soul. Not that I can remember the exact words but I can recall doing some Greek at school.”

Lady Macbeth stared dully ahead of her and so did the man whom Ralph had seen on his first day pacing up and down like a metronome.

The lady psychologist glanced rapidly at each person in turn, while another lady doctor, younger, took notes in her book.

“I'm not sure that we can equate the soul with consciousness,” said the scientist, putting his pipe down on the seat beside him and stretching out his legs. “The soul is a theological thing surely …”

“It is a question of mirrors,” said Ralph, speaking smoothly and with certainty. “One particular day man had consciousness. He called this the soul, or whatever the word was at the time. He knew that he inhabited his body like an animal but he also sensed that he had this other thing as well, by means of which he could study himself from the outside, as if he were an object. I'm not saying that he thought all this out, he sensed it. The episode in the Garden of Eden is a method of mythologizing consciousness. At first man was totally in harmony with his surroundings, later he felt himself separated from them. He wore a fig leaf but when he took the fig leaf away he discovered shame and self-consciousness.”

“I still think,” said the scientist, “that the soul is different from consciousness. The soul is supposed to be eternal, consciousness isn't. That's the difference surely.”

“I agree,” said the man with the trembling head. “Consciousness doesn't last forever. The soul is the image of God in us. Isn't that what it is supposed to be?”

The handicapped girl turned away impatiently as if she were tired of this long boring discussion. Lady Macbeth didn't change the expression on her face which was entirely dull. The metronomic man lit a cigarette and studied it speculatively. The disguised psychologist had a fixed smile on his face: he was hiding behind two other people.

“The soul is said to be eternal,” said Ralph. “Of course it's meant to be eternal but that's like saying to the poor that there is a heaven. They have to have their beads of eternal glass. They are like Indians, natives. But surely we don't need to pay any attention to that.”

“Why not?” said the lady psychologist, pointing at him with a long pencil which she held in her right hand. Her white hair was arranged in ridges and waves, her bright intelligent eyes were fixed on him.

“Why not? There is no proof of its existence.”

“Neither is there of many other things that we accept.”

“Look,” said Ralph, “look at your bookshelves. They are full of books about metaphysics but what single
fact
have they uncovered equivalent to the fact that the walls of this room are painted green.”

“That is another question,” said the lady psychologist. “Whether the walls of this room are green or not.”

“It's a fact different from the fact of the soul.”

“But what about love, its eternity?” said the psychologist. “When it is said that two souls meet.”

“Love? That is an affair of mirrors as well. The lover sees himself in the loved one. Love is an illusion like the soul.” It was Ralph now who felt masterful. He felt that his mind moved more quickly than that of the psychologist's, or the scientist's. He felt that he was becoming master even in this place and laughed inwardly. To be avid for power even here. What a joke. The man with the trembling head who knew some Greek, who was he? He had the curious antique manners of an outdated gentleman, tentative and frail.

The handicapped girl scratched her head, another girl beside her, thin as a rake, yawned. These discussions were revolving boxes: there was no secret inside them.

“I don't agree with you about love,” said the psychologist. “That it is an affair of mirrors as you put it. Do you think man is a machine?”