The Dead Seagull (3 page)

I lighted a cigarette and took up again the letter written in a large and careless script—it had something of the air of an edict in the capricious autocracy that condescended to none of the formal gestures of letterwriting. I saw between the lines the flamboyance of an actress perhaps a little too confident of her audience. “It’s an interesting hand,” I remarked, almost for the purpose of eliciting a contradiction. “It invites one to speculate.” And because I had nothing else to say: “Was she with you all the while at the Sacred Heart?”

“The Mother Superior expelled her. She isn’t a Roman Catholic. I forget what she was supposed to have done wrong. It wasn’t important. Her misfortune was always to have a little too much money.”

“What does she do with herself? I suspect she is an actress.”

“Her father sent her around the world with an aunt when she left the convent. I haven’t seen very much of her since then. I shouldn’t think she actually does anything. She used to have literary ambitions, but I imagine they’ve evaporated.”

“Why?”

“Oh, she was an eccentric creature. She’s probably an aeronaut now.”

I detected an inflexion of resentment in Theresa’s tone. “I get impatient with her,” she concluded, “because although the world may be her oyster, it’s mine too.” She began to clear away the breakfast dishes. “Shall we invite her to come? I think that you will find her entertaining. And I should like to see her again.”

*  *  *  *

No matter how I endeavour to disguise it, I am increasingly conscious of what I can only think of as a distance supervening between us. For, as her concern the more intently turns inward towards the child, it turns, necessarily, its face away from me. I see her now as a pregnant mother rather than as a woman pregnant. And the knowledge that my love itself is responsible only renders the paradox the more unbearable. It is not, I repeat, that I am puzzled and frightened and resentful of our love being turned, by a germ in our genetics, to the irreparable personification of original sin. Her fulfilment in the child seems likely to be so perfect that everything else will be forgotten—it is for this simple reason that I cannot help suspecting that the woman exists in a lower category of spiritual consciousness. I wish to god I could be fobbed off from the omnipresence of evil by merely fulfilling my function as a father. But through the body of the suckling mother I know that biological obedience suffuses itself in an absolute benediction. With the sore dug plugging, the bub lugged out of an opening in the smock, the small man sucking, the grunting, the drooping udder, behold the mater amabalis, the virgin with a piglet, the pig with a saviour.

*  *  *  *

That supremely placatory face, with its forehead like the masterpiece of a monumental stonemason, its lips spreading altruisms through which no rain can reach us, its eyes, half opened, enlightening all enigmas, and the altar above the upper lip dedicating this face and all human faces to the communicability of love: this is the face I see behind all faces. And always it wears a gaze of solicitude that seeks to dissolve the plaster masks through which we spy upon it.

I believe that under the plaster cast each one of us is a possible deity and a probable daemon. It is the probable daemon that commonly breaks out of our plaster. For the god will not emerge of his own deliberation—in order to expose him we must shatter ourselves upon him.

*  *  *  *

Therefore women give birth because it might be a god.

*  *  *  *

Now I get drunk every evening. The Goat and Compass, a little pub like a tea-cosy, where the easily consoled keep warm, provides me, also, with easy consolation. But it is a consolation shot through with livid ineffectualities like tiger traps or stage drops. I rehearse conversations, as I sit, in which I render myself incontestably right in desiring that the child should die. Also I get very sick.

In the half darkness as I go home to the cottage a derisive voice points its finger at me out of a cloud and jibbers:
“You
got born!
You
got born!
You
got born!” Not so much in disgust as in resignation I experience the aphrodisiac of the alcohol on my erotic system, and under a hedge, raging in despair, I have taken two million sinners out of my fallibility.

*  *  *  *

Regal Theresa, can you forgive me, now, from wherever you are? My least forgivable infidelities were those with myself. The inhabitants of the heart, these are the inveterate enemies; and of these inhabitants, who except oneself is the principal? What on earth does one do at a crossroad except become two? When the veils are lifted from the truly religious man he will be seen kneeling in the masturbatory attitude of prayer. For he has intercepted the fiendish will of god with his hand in an immaculate contraception.

*  *  *  *

Yesterday Marsden Forsden stepped down out of a Venetian ceiling into our hospitality. She is, certainly, a great beauty. Theresa was delighted. I left them together as soon as the three of us got home from the station. They cooed and chirruped and sniggered and smiled, quite undisguisedly elated at seeing each other again. Leaning their heads together over the small tea table, I thought, when I returned from a walk, how ravishing a picture they composed: the gold hair falling around the architectural face of the one who at that moment held her hand with seeming unconsciousness beneath her left breast, glittering and pink, winged cherubs in the air about her head; and the dark coiled mass of Theresa’s curls coming down over her shoulders like Monica’s modesty, failing to hide the big belly and the big breasts, shadows and muted instruments about her, the gracious leaning of her head forward and to one side over the tea table bringing the bright and the dark heads together in an intermingling of auras. I could have wished, they seemed so full of symbols, that at that moment there was no one else in the whole world: for it would still have been full.

“Come and take some tea,” Theresa said. “We were talking about you.”

“Don’t stop now. It’s plainly the subject he’s most entertained by.” Marsden, smiling, opened her eyes a little wider so that the remark masqueraded as flattery.

“My conversation can’t possibly compete with so much beauty,” I said shortly.

“More. And thicker. With a cherry on the top.” Marsden licked the back of a spoon rather like a big brindled cat licking its forepaw. She appeared perfectly at her ease; I had a disquieting feeling that I was the only person in the room not intimately familiar with the other two. Theresa, seeming to sense that I was slightly at a loss, said: “Marsden knows you very much better than you suspect. She’s been a fan of yours for months. She read your book.”

“It’s my misfortune,” I said. “I just can’t keep my mouth shut about myself. Sometimes it’s very embarrassing. What a tiresome turn the conversation has taken. Let’s talk about Marsden.”

Theresa looked with solicitude across the table. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.” Marsden handed me a cigarette.

“You two milkmaids with your buckets full make me feel angry. I have the sensation that the schoolboys have when they see their superiors not going to school. I resent the fact,” I said with an amusement I could not conceal, “that women grow old quicker than men.”

“Grow up, you mean,” Marsden said.

“I do not mean grow up. Women never grow up. They remain children playing with dolls all their life long. Only the dolls become more and more expensive until finally they refuse to play with any but those that have cost them their virtue and their vanity.”

“Is he always like this?” Marsden asked Theresa.

“Yes, I am,” I said; “you’ll find me down at the pub. I wish you’d both come. I’ll be more sociable then. I got out of the wrong bed this morning.”

*  *  *  *

“You must be nicer to Marsden,” Theresa said one afternoon when her friend was sleeping, “because if you aren’t she’ll fall in love with you.

“I should think she falls in love without any provocation. Say every Wednesday. I wonder whose mistress she is.”

“You mustn’t say things like that. You don’t really dislike her. I’m not sure that you’re not simply envious of whoever she’s chosen to fall in love with.” She came and looked up at me with an expression of amusement that did not conceal a degree of real concern. “Are you?”

“I think she’s a very desirable residence,” I said, taking her hands. “But I have one of my own.”

*  *  *  *

“I couldn’t sleep.” Marsden, trailing a long red gown, came in, yawning. “I hate animals,” she announced; “I feel so like them. Let’s have a brilliant conversation. Do I look beautiful?” She postured her dishevelled head, as she sat, up to us. Her gown, lightly tied at the waist, slipped down from her leg. She had swansdown slippers on her brightly pedicured feet.

“You look entrancing,” Theresa said. “All of you.”

“Oh dear” Marsden gathered her gown over her breasts. “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go for a swim. Let’s go for a drink. Let’s go for a retreat. I’m going to go out and watch birds.” As she reached the doorway she turned. “But does the cut worm really forgive the plough?” she said in a querulous voice. “I decline to think so.”

“Hurry up,” Theresa called after her. “We’ll be out on the shore.”

*  *  *  *

The sea, without a ripple disturbing the surface, spread out in sheets that glittered in different distances; at this point along the coast half a dozen toothy and saturnine rocks vaulted out of the shadows. The light, angling through clouds, invested everything with an eerie and livid artificiality. It was a landscape—a seascape—of prehistory. At any moment, out of that mud-flatted sea, the first monstrous amoeba might emerge, trailing the whole disastrous and grandiose history of biological life behind it. And I could see there, lying under the still water, the skull of the last of the species, festooned with seaweed—algae in the eyes—the miserable, ignominous necrophilia that will one day end it all. And, intercommunicatory between these two, the first and the last, I saw suspended, glittering, as it were, between the amoeba and the skull, the umbilical of the eternal maternal. Upon this cord, I heard the almighty announce in thunder, I shall hang the world. So that, like a skinned rabbit dangling in a gallows, each of us has, in his time, met his proper fate in this beginning: we have each been born with a rope around our necks. The mother of all living, lariat in hand, will never let us go.

*  *  *  *

Half an hour later, when we had gone as far as Theresa felt inclined to go, we turned back towards the cottage. “Marsden has probably fallen asleep by the fire,” Theresa murmured, leaning against my shoulder as we made our way over the shore. Her face had taken on a pallor not entirely tendered by the evening sky.

I saw shadows standing upon it like the seventy-two effigies of the saints on the front of Salisbury Cathedral. Everyone hath everyone his shade. And among those private shadows, like those rose windows in which the great martyrdoms everlastingly enact themselves, her eyes were bright with adumbrated sacrifices. “What has happened to us?” she said softly, turning her gaze away from me. “Why are we so estranged?” She took my hand in both her own as we walked.

I answered with deliberate brutality. “It is the child. It feeds off us both. From you it takes calcium and pigmentation. It takes its immortal soul from me. For I swear that mine has been stolen from me. I feel like a person giving a blood transfusion to a planet that was formed by my wish. God knows that you have a greater right to feel as I do—I’m sure that you do—I merely mean that it seems to exact a different kind of expense from me.”

She stopped by a rock and looked up at me. “This is why I am happy,” she whispered remotely. “I can feel us both alive and united forever inside me. Now there is no escape. It had been written in existence. Nothing that ever was or ever will be can erase it. I have done my duty simply by turning the love I feel inside me into the life I feel inside me.”

“You’re a good girl,” I said, and smacked her bottom. “We shall be late for tea.”

It began to drizzle. A mist began a sort of burglarious rifling of the valleys that at irregular intervals ran up the littoral. I saw it, with a fascinated revulsion, feeling among the indentations for all the world like the educated fingers of the lover worming among the mounds and through the bushes of a dozen hills of Venus. We sheltered, for a few moments, in a cave under the hills. But the rain persisted. We hurried home. When we got there Marsden had disappeared.

*  *  *  *

The mutes! The incommunicable mutes! How, jostling, they crowd each other out in a cosmic blind man’s bluff, the blanketing emotions wrapping everyone from the tip to the toe. Cocooned. Marooned. Was there ever anyone who really understood why anyone else ever felt anything? No, for the epidermis that isolates each one within himself acts also as our shell. The invulnerable individuality, like a palace revolution, takes place behind doors that its own nature must keep closed. Sometimes a hand with a flag waves at a window, but soon disappears—an altruistic action has been assassinated. Nor could it ever have succeeded. The window faces on an internal courtyard where the nature of the individual executes its insurrectionists. Here the pities and the sympathies and the generosities and the abnegations die. Every man is tyrant to his virtues. The good does not ensue from what we do—it escapes from what we are.

Do I ever know what legitimate emotions conduct their comi-tragedies and their tragicomedies behind the curtains of Theresa’s character? When I look into her devoted eyes does she ever detect the vitriol-thrower who at such moments darts into any of the recesses inside my mind? Has she ever, leaning over me loving, sensed the appalling perversions of sexual desire committing themselves upon her in my heart of hearts? And does she suffer these pleasures in her own turn? This is simply the loving soul rising up in protest against the natural decencies. For deep inside each of us we know precisely whom we wish to kill—it is the one who, because we love, kills us. The commandment Thou shalt not kill carries with it the concomitant Thou shalt not love.