The Black Book (11 page)

In the West Norwood Cemetery where she lies, you will see nothing but the bare inscription above her. They would not let me write on the tombstone: Here lies Gracie, who died in 1927.
WITH KNOBS ON.

With the final accurate banality of his class her father ordered the mason to engrave on the expensive marble the immortal jest:
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

We sent her down with an armful of magnificent flowers, as sumptuous as any cinema star's, and this vain promise of memory. What that frail decomposing husk demands from this, my life, is a pound of living flesh. I am paying here, however shyly, in green blood. Of the humorous eternity which stole Gracie to add to its collection let me remind myself walking among the bazaar of white masonry, the many tombs, to the one hideous tomb, garish with cherubs and scrolls: I say over and over again to myself: “The real epitaph is with knobs on.”

But I have anticipated cruelly. One of the unfortunate things about a personal style, a personal journal, is that one assumes one's reader's knowledge of all the facts. A journal, then, if written for oneself, would be all but meaningless to the world; for one turns, not to the spadework, the narrative, but to the most interesting points in it. Look at me. I am in such a hurry to finish the job that I blurt out the end before the beginning. It is going through me at such a pace that I cannot distinguish the various flavours of incident, in their chronological order. (I am a liar. It is artifice which dictates this form to me.) Or the word death, like the word finis. If you began Finis. “She died that I may live etc.” It makes no difference. It makes no difference. If the title-page were Finis she would still exist, amorphous, evocative, musky—a white kelpie luminous on the last page.

(Think of Ion lapsing off the white rock into the sea, which gurgles over her like a solid blue myth. A sheath of water over the hips, the pectorals, the little plantagenet chin. Down, down, turning and bowing among the white chalk of defunct squids and the pedestrian deep water. Ion is death translated in sudden luminous terms by a live myth. Ion is dead, long live the myth. Write a large Finis with the keel of a liner. Ion lives, I say triumphantly, she lives. Here I can put my hands on the warm basalt and feel her breathing grass into my mouth. I am losing the thread.…)

One assumes (if one must resort to ordered sanity) a complete knowledge in the reader, I repeat; and simply supplies a few twirls and flourishes—a cadenza in green—to ensure one's personal fame. All diaries have been written for an audience. For the sake of posterity then, let me add a flower or two to Gracie's public posy. Let me supply a few knobs, in all admitted vanity—which is humility.

There is the business of Clare, who, like Blake's stranger, came and took her with a sigh. Knowing Clare, I can imagine pretty well the form that seduction took. Gin the foundation, romance the actual rubble, and a fine tight cement of flattery and tinsel. How often have I seen the same dreary hook baited for the sentimental miss. Poor fellow, he was unhappy. He was misunderstood. There had been a great tragedy in his life—the expression of which was intensified by the gin and balloons. He would not openly talk about it, even when pressed; but as Gracie once said, “You could see it writ all over him!” Oil say! Under his carefree jazzing, his glittering façade of smile and insinuation, you could see vague hints of this secret misery: like patches of damp on an otherwise white ceiling. Poor Clare! It was love that had done this thing to him. The hang of his blue-black head proclaimed it. Singing as he leaned over his partner, the tears would come into his eyes at the stark pathos of the words, the curdy weeping of the saxophones. “Love,” he sang softly, caressingly, “Love” (with a four-beat rest) “brings out the gipsy in me.” Everything pivoted about love. And Gracie (this is the suburban princess, remember) danced, staring away over his shoulder like a blind cat, knowing only that her breathing was quickened by the pressure of his hand on her backbone.

Sometimes in the spot dances he cupped her breast in his hand and pulled it with sentimental melancholia. The implication being that his own private tragedy made him a trifle abstracted—a remotely romantic playfellow on the lines of Jacques. For Clare even motley was ever so faintly tinged with a fetching misery. A modish melancholy was his evening wear. Gracie was enslaved and enchanted. Several times, a little tipsy after the ball, she allowed Clare to savage her (with sentiment—how else?) in the taxi which my bounty had provided. But all this was mild stuff: a routine performance that everyone expected of him in taxis. She experienced it sedately in the character of almost-a-wife, or married-but-not-churched. It was when he demanded slightly more that the vaguer mists dispersed and left her face to face with the spurious reality which they had manufactured. Here was lerv, after all. And to Gracie Love was the largest and most violent flower of Romance.

Clare, you see, felt after a bit that Gracie ought, by rights, to fall in love with him. It was his trade, was it not? And he ought to fall just a little in love with her—enough to reach the bedroom. This is what produced the mangy pantomime in which the part allotted to me was that of Sir Jasper Maltravers, Bart., who held the mortgage on Grace's little property. My snarls were supposed to echo among their honeyings. It helped Clare no end to have a bona-fide villain for the piece, to set off his own gasconading flourishes. Unfortunately when the time came … but I anticipate.

On the question of loyalties Gracie was fairly strong. It would be unfair to take my money and forsake me for Clare. “Nao, nao. Play the game, I says to myself. Play the game. Gregory's been a chum to you, I says, and don't forget it.” This was nice of her. It was just this self-conscious pinch of honour that complicated the machinery of love enough to make the whole show interesting. When Clare beat the window ledge of the taxi with his fist and snarled that he could not do without her another second, she felt a little numbly afraid. Perhaps (she hardly dared to think it) he might do something rash. He might
do himself in.
And Clare, thoroughly piqued, worked himself up into a rage and began to be scathing. She was gutless, that's what she was. She didn't love him enough. Or did she? Then why wasn't she prepared to forsake all for love? Wasting her life on a little shrimp like Gregory, with no more romance to him than a bulldog … etc. etc. Grace was very miserable. They comforted each other after these outbursts and she began to think that she must really be in love with him. They tried every recipe in the cookery book of emotion. One week Clare would grow a little morsel of honour on his own property, and swear that she must remain true to me, and not give their love another thought. And Grace, mutely nodding her head, would squeeze a few loyal tears from her eyes with difficulty and enjoyment. They emoted frequently together, these little fictions adding a real spice to it all.

On the Saturday night in question Clare, very drunk, was more importunate, more fetching, more melancholy, more honourable, and more tragic than he had ever been before. He was furious with Gracie. The fact was that he had met a brewer's daughter in the Paul Jones who had invited him to her Brighton villa for the weekend. Now if it had not been for the spurious love between him and Gracie he could have accepted: just popped his partner into the taxi and said good night. Gracie would have jogged home, while he could have taken the wheel of the sports car beside his little financial corner in Pale Ale. It was this Homeric LOVE that mucked everything up. Forced to accompany his Juliet home he was furious. Gracie must pay the damages. Accordingly he raised hell in the taxi and sent the mercury climbing. Grace was persuaded that they could neither of them live another day without crowning their passion. It became imperative to hand me my little piece of suffering.

I was sitting by the fire when Grace came in, tears in her eyes, sniffing mildly. Instinct kept me silent. I pretended to notice nothing. Sitting down in the chair opposite me she said, in a small, creaky voice: “I love 'im, Gregory. Ooo I love 'im.” If her eyes had been less alarmingly blind I might have laughed. Closing Gibbon demurely I switched off the wireless and asked for details, with the familiar sensation of freezing along my abdomen. It was no joke playing a part in Clare's idiotic masque, I realized. So fair and foul a day I have not seen. She told the tale sadly enough. It was when she said, “He says I must go to 'im tonight or it's finish to us,” that I became alarmed. Here was my cue. I could see what was expected of me. Either rage—I could kick her out—or calm husbandly understand. “If you think you love this man, Emily, I shall not stand in your way, but pray to God that this passing infatuation will pass and you be restored to me whole …”

Actually I said casually, “Do you
want
to go?” She didn't really. She only wanted to imagine herself going. Ah! How good to break the tedium of domesticity with a few rows, scares, alarms. Yet my pride demanded an immediate vote of confidence. Silly, but perhaps pardonable. As for Grace, as you know, she was just Plasticine. I could have convinced her in half a minute of the false position she was in. She was simply waiting to see which was the stronger force, ready to be carried away by it. Numb as usual, and a little pleased that for once the elements had decided to break over her head. It was, she felt, in some curious, inexplicable way, tragic.…

Everything would have been perfect if it had not been for my pride. That half-second's pause after I asked whether she really wanted to go was enough to outrage the professional husband in me. I knew of course that she hesitated simply because she
did not know
whether she wanted to go or not. She would never know. But to hang fire on a point like that … Obtusely I said, “Well you must go, of course, if that is the state of affairs.” This, you see, begins my perverse business of torturing myself. “Go on. Change your clothes and run along.” (Why did she not protest?) She sat there with her toes turned in and said nothing. I fiddled in a ladylike way with the fire to restore my nerve. Repeated, “Go on, Grace.” It was a delicious sensation, like standing on the edge of a cliff. Would she, after all, go? By God, she would pay for it if she did! “Get on with it,” I shouted angrily. “Hurry up and change.”

She got up slowly and sniffed her way into the bedroom, a little surprised, I imagine, that things were not turning out as she planned. She must have had a queer sensation of losing control over events. Here was Gregory, after all, acting right out of character. He was neither the jealous husband nor the understanding domestic pal.
What
was he?

She changed into my kimono with the parrots on it and returned to find me sitting in front of the fire, deep in Gibbon. I had taken the opportunity of putting on my skullcap. That, at any rate, gave me a superior monastic mien which always worried her a little; and whenever nervousness over a domestic or foreign crisis seized me, I immediately donned, as they say, my little skullcap. It gave me a sort of fancy-dress confidence in myself.

“Well,” I says to her I says with hearty monastic exuberance, “you're ready, then?”

“Gregory,” she said suddenly, “it wouldn't be fair of me. It wouldn't be playing the gaime.”

I pooh-poohed this vigorously. “Fair, my dear Grace, what are you talking about?” Getting up I took her arm in order to call her bluff once and for all. I felt a little sick. We walked slowly to the front door of the flat together. She was puzzled by now—and a little afraid. Her arms were cold under the garish sleeves of my kimono. She hung back slightly, hoping I would prevent her from going at the last moment. Really, she began to realize that she didn't want to go one little bit by now. At the door I released her arm and said: “Quietly, now. Don't let Morgan or Charles see you, or we'll have rumours. Good night.” I pushed her gently out, shut the door on her, and switched off the light. Outside the coloured panel of glass I could see her still standing, staring in at me, puzzled, unwilling to go. Then, hugging her cold hands in her armpits, she turned and vanished.

Gone!
For a second I was so surprised that I could hardly believe it. She had actually gone. And in
my
kimono, too—the final cruel touch! Then I was in such a sudden panic and rage that I could have done anything. The names I called her! Enumerating all those sterling qualities in myself that she had spat upon by this outrageous act, I returned to the drawing room and poured myself out a stiff brandy. Someone must be made to pay for all this! Someone must pay! O.K. I sat down to the piano and begun to murder Beethoven.

That night Tarquin called. He had been sitting in the lounge reading the
Criterion
and waiting for Clare to get to bed safely. He wanted to know why they were so late. Had they got back yet? I told him bitterly, “No.” For a second I was profoundly shy; and then, rallying, I told him, “Yes,” with details. It was his turn to be profoundly shy. His distress accounted for a decanter of brandy. So abject he was, so miserable and hopeless, that I almost began to bless the event which was the cause of it all.