The Dead Seagull (7 page)

*  *  *  *

That night I intended to sleep, as I had done sometimes before, on a makeshift bed in the kitchen. But before I retired, perhaps about midnight, I looked in at Theresa where she lay asleep. No feeling moved me to do so other than an inclination to reassure myself about her simple comforts. I thought that perhaps the clothes might have slipped away from her, or the window need closing.

In the darkness, half lighted by the moon and a few stars, the bedroom seemed, at first, to be empty. I could feel the cold fright seize me for an instant: she has gone away. And then I saw that the emptiness was merely an illusion of lights and shadows. She lay sleeping tenderly at a diagonal across the bed, her face paler than in the day.

I moved across in silence and knelt by the side of the bed. The clock went on whispering near my ear. “Oh, my dear love,” I thought with horror then, “if she should die!” And I laid my head on her breast, but she did not waken.

In the morning, when she was still asleep, I came round from a sort of uneasy aphasia; I found myself lying on the floor by the bed. It was a cold morning, and my back ached. I made coffee and brought it into her. She opened her eyes with a smile that almost immediately disintegrated into grief as she looked up at me. For a time she stared at me with a sort of barefaced unhappiness full of accusations and questions. Then, putting up her bare arms, she held me almost desperately to her and I took her close as she wept inconsolably over my heart.

*  *  *  *

Do I expect Marsden to stay away? I hope and expect that my sudden abandonment of her yesterday morning has hurt her overvulnerable pride so badly that she may. But I do not expect a peace of any duration; she will come down, I know, in a cloud of magnificent indignation and—what? It will merely conceal her singlepurposed pursuit of the prey. I love her because she is an animal as incapable of sin as a tigress. She has no soul. I see in her not the misery of man separated from his creator but the defiance of the beast who cannot envisage god. Nor does this militant amorality, which I see in even the most modest as certainly as in the most immodest of her traits, drive me, consistently away from her. For I am as often fascinated by her ruthless egomania as I am by the egomania of the bird or the political pride of great nations. And I see in her selfishness, further, the state of grace worn naturally by us all before the Fall, when the nude mother, with her puzzle of children about her, walked over the fields, unaware that she was again pregnant, unable to recall any events that might have given origin to her babies, conscious only of the sun, the earth, the satisfaction of the body and an incomprehensible tenderness towards these children. Unable to recall any events that might have given origin to her babies for the ineffable reason that sexual love, to the truly innocent, to the truly innocent in a state of grace, must be as naturally virtuous as any other of the bodily obligations, and therefore indistinguishable from them. Without the inherent and inherited magnification of original sin, we live in a world where a sneeze and an orgasm hold meaningless candles to each other, and illuminate nothing.

*  *  *  *

And the purpose of my story is to reveal that this is possible.

*  *  *  *

I could, if I were to distort the characters and the events of my account, and especially if I were to vitiate the spiritual aura worn by these happenings—and by all happenings—and by these three people—as well as by all others—if I were to twist this spiritual halo only a little out of its shape into a perfect circle, my story would resemble a morality, and the characters could be understood, allegorically, in a greater significance. Then I should put before you the bright and the dark, the humility and the pride, the kingdom and the cloud, the innocence of guilt and the guilt of innocence, the dove and the serpent, all those symbols of spiritual antithesis in which the duality of human nature expresses its consciousness of moral war. This is the war between the beast, innocent of all its crimes by reason of its ignorance, and the dove of exculpations and repentances, sufferings and charities—the bird of knowledge. Whomever the beast lacerates, it is, always, the dove who bleeds. Whenever the beast tears, it is, always, the dove who accepts the guilt and the responsibility. For we know only too well what we do, no matter how desperately the beast, fulminating with perfectly legitimate disclaimers, drives us to do it.

*  *  *  *

Huge, by now, in her chair, Theresa, later the same morning, seemed anxious to talk. Continually I saw questions and judgements die away as soon as they formed themselves clearly in her mind or rose to her lips. But for a reason that I suspect was at its heart a fear of being misunderstood, she succeeded in saying nothing for a long time. Sitting quietly, as we were, I feel again the foreboding and the apprehension of those moments that took hours to expire and those hours that took perplexities to die. And then, unable to bear the anticipation longer, I spoke: “Theresa,” I heard myself saying slowly, “have I truly estranged myself from you? I know that I have, but I cannot resign myself to it. There are so many questions and so few answers. What I wish above everything at this moment is that I could save myself the pain of seeing the pain on your face. I do not even know whether I am capable of answering your hardest questions truthfully. If you ask me to hurt you by speaking what you fear is the truth, how can I speak it? I do not know the truth.”

“Do you truly love Marsden?” she said remotely, before I could continue. She raised her hand to her lips as though to imprison the question that had escaped forever. “No, no, no,” she cried, covering her face with her hands, “I beg you not to answer.” Her body shook in a convulsion of grief. “Not now, not now.” She, avoided my touch as I sought to console her. “Oh God!” she whispered, and her eyeballs rolled upward into her skull, her hand, as she wiped away tears with a handkerchief, fell at the side of her chair, and she fainted.

*  *  *  *

“I’m perfectly all right.” She smiled a little wanly, when she had revived.

“We must go away. Now! Today!” I exclaimed. “We must go away.” And in an access of pity and resolution I kissed her hands.

“Yes, yes,” she scarcely breathed, “we must go away.”

*  *  *  *

Who has seen tomorrow; It is Medusa. Then I foresaw all the things that, worming and writhing on the face of the future, compelled me, by the laws of self-destruction, to accomplish them. That night a great storm, to be remembered in those parts for years, took hold of the coast and shook it like a blanket. The sea, just before the storm broke, lay coiled in glassy masses that heaved in disunion against each other. It looked as though it had multiplied its weight with darkness. Panicky gusts of wind hurried about the hills, searching, as it might be, for some shelter. And in the woodwork of the cottage a groaning arose from unaccustomed stresses. The sky showered livid gashes of brightness as though it had split. Electricity, like a cat, hissed and spat in the first fall of rain. And then the structure of the sky collapsed, and the storm fell down upon us.

Theresa came and sat closely beside me. I found that I could not bring myself to look, even out of the corner of my eye, towards the window and the sea: for it seemed to me that the great waves were parading themselves like lunatics across it, grinning in the glass. The uproar became a pandemonium of hissing and wailing and howling. Every object in the south joined in the orgy.

I held Theresa to me, for the thunder unnerved her. At each explosion she shivered; and the lightning, flickering about the room like a poltergeist, made her bow her head and close her eyes with a gasp.

Then, with a clatter of glass, the body of a bird, driven through the window, span, shedding feathers, at our feet. Theresa cried out. The wind charged through the broken window. Feathers swept about in tiny frenzies. The dead bird, its breast torn and bleeding, clutched with its wings and claws at Theresa’s feet.

She sat, transfixed, staring down at the death at her feet.

“Look at the window,” she said. “Marsden is there.”

The seaward door flew open as the lock turned. The bird came to a moment of galvanic life as the new drive of wind lifted it. Standing in the open door, the great sea waves tossing behind her, and the wind making wings of her hair, Marsden walked down out of the storm.

Perhaps because she had expected this exact advent, Theresa continued to stare at the corpse of the bird. She made no effort to rid her feet of it, as though it were fastened to her with an inseparable tie. I understood for a nightmarish instant that it was the corpse of the bird that I was married to, and Theresa, immobile in the chair, its appendage.

Marsden herself seemed aware of the unreality of her sudden appearance out of the storm. She looked distraught and exhausted. The door banged behind her. Her eyes were red and excited. She had not spoken. And then, drawn by a sort of unnatural compulsion, Marsden and I turned our eyes upon Theresa.

She had gathered the dislocated bird up in her arms and risen from the chair. Like a sleepwalker she turned towards the door that gave on to the bedroom. And in a soft voice that came to us beneath the hullabaloo of the winds rather than above it, she said: “I think that my child is going to be born.”

At that instant a whole catastrophe of thunder shook the cottage. I sprang to Theresa and carried her, with Marsden doing what she could to help, into the bedroom. She rested there, breathing, now, quietly, with her eyes closed. Coldly Marsden said: “Go and get a doctor.” Theresa opened her eyes. “It is no use,” she whispered. “He is too far away and the time is too near.”

“Look after her,” I called backward to Marsden, and, fighting with the wind, made my way down the road. Here there was a public telephone. The wires, providentially, had not yet been torn down. I begged the doctor, who lived some eighteen miles away, to come to Theresa. He told me in a tart voice that I had summoned him out of bed. I entreated him. He said that he would try. “You may not know it,” he remarked, “but there is a hurricane on over here.”

The storm beat furiously in the telephone booth. “Blast your soul,” I cried, “come over!” And I rushed back to the cottage.

*  *  *  *

Oh how the sea mourned and groaned against the wall! I thought of the whales giving birth, in a bath of blood, thousands of fathoms down in the darkness and thousands of miles away. Do they know what function they are fulfilling with their pangs? Will their gigantic paroxysms redeem themselves in the flow of milk from the mother to its young? Was she wasted, the big cow who could not deliver it, and whose corpse rolled away, bruising itself on rocks at the bottom of the sea; I mourn this moment for her wherever she lies rotting.

The storm, for an hour, subsided. Marsden, with a grey and tired face, sat by the side of Theresa’s bed. She looked like a person who has wrestled with their own angel and been defeated. We sat waiting for an immortality to step into the room. Then, from the other side of the bedroom, to which she had retreated, Marsden lifted her hand and pointed to the bed. “Look,” she whispered in horror.

The red lips were drawn back across the teeth, the face clawed, for a moment, at life; the eyes seemed to vault in their sockets, and Theresa screamed, “Oh, I have split in two!”

*  *  *  *

When the doctor eventually arrived, the child had been delivered. I said the child had been delivered; but I am wrong. It was not a child, it was a corpse.

*  *  *  *

The doctor left as the cocks began to crow and the sun came up behind the cottage. “She will rest,” he said, “but she’s very weak and I must call again this afternoon. I will tell you”—he took me by the arm—“that I don’t very much like the look of things. She has an unusually weak heart. Be careful.” He took his leave with a sort of encouraging half smile.

Marsden stood in the door of the bedroom watching me show the doctor out. When I turned to her I saw that her face was disfigured with several streaks of blood, drawn across it, seemingly, by her tired hand. She leaned against the frame of the door and whispered to me. I suspected, for a moment, that she was in tears. I took her face in my hands and saw that instead of tears her eyes were alive and livid with sexual desire. She pressed her breasts against me and darted her open mouth over mine. I smelt the puerperal and the aphrodisiacal. “Come,” she murmured, “you’re tired. It’s time for bed.”

*  *  *  *

But I could not sleep. Leaving her coiled in smiles and sighs on the couch, I went down to the seashore. I found that I was carrying the body of the dead bird in my hand. I flung it far out into the flat shallows. The rippled splash, caught by the early sun, opened in a wound of roses and lips. The dead bird disappeared. I turned and went heavily back into the house. They were both sleeping.

*  *  *  *

Surely I do not need to offer explanations? The paraphernalia of circumstances, like penitentiaries in which the poor and the aged wait to die, concern us only insofar as people suffer within them. It is the grief and the splendour, not the time and the place, that go on. But the credentials, the elucidations, the addresses at which destiny has called on any given day—these particulars remain the concern of the police and the recording angel. I am concerning myself with the cause of the crime.

Thus it is when we consider the promises unfulfilled, the necessary declarations never spoken, the projects unattempted, the revelations obscured, the cities still unspoliated, the valuable monsters still at liberty—when we consider the multiplicity of our omissions, then all the crimes in the calendar and on the index become instantly possible for any one of us.

The death of my son who never breathed, spoke, it seemed to me, in the vocabulary of response; I knew that in answer to a solicitation of my being so passionate and so profound that I could never have uttered it in language, he had bowed his head and concurred and walked away. And what I had done with a desire of the body I had undone with a spiritual rejection, with a denial as the cock crew. The voice of the cock was the voice of Saint Thomas Aquinas intoning out of a cloud: “But it is best never to have been born.” At this the congregation of my body—the imagination in its sanctum, the heart in its big bed, the rational faculty in its tall tower of ivory and glass, the passions in their trick-lock cages—they lowered their heads and sighed in absolute acquiescence. “Lucky dog, lucky dog,” they murmured. And, seeking for the tears of her relief, I turned my gaze to the dying mother on her bed, since she was now going home. I looked to see her face illuminated by the approach of the sacred negation. I followed her wandering in the wilderness of her expended anguish, praying, as I believed she prayed, for the moment when she became a mirage and the wilderness a discarded illusion.