The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (12 page)

All at once Clare put down the teapot and said: 'I think that handkerchief had wanted to go with him, I've a great mind to take that hint. '

'Don't be silly,' said Mr Sheldon.

'Why not?' she asked.

If you mean that you want to catch the same train,' began Miss Pratt...

'Why not,' Clare repeated. 'I have forty minutes in which to do it. I'll dash to my place, pack a thing or two, bolt into a taxi...

And she did it. What happened at Victoria is not known, but an hour or so later she rang up Sheldon who had gone home, and told him with a rather pathetic little laugh that Sebastian had not even wanted her to stay on the plaform until his train left. I have a very definite vision somehow of her arriving there, with her bag, her lips ready to part in a humorous smile, her dim eyes peering through the windows of the train, looking for him, then finding him, or perhaps he saw her first.... 'Hullo, here I am,' she must have said brightly, a little too brightly perhaps...

He wrote to her, a few days later, to tell her that the place was very pleasant and that he felt remarkably well. Then there was a silence, and only when Clare had sent an anxious telegram did a card arrive with the information that he was curtailing his stay at Blauberg and would spend a week in Paris before coming home.

Towards the end of that week he rang me up and we dined together at a Russian restaurant. I had not seen him since '1924 and this was 1929. He looked worn and ill, and owing to his pallor seemed unshaven although he had just been to the barber. There was a boil at the back of his neck patched up with pink plaster.

After he had asked me a few questions about myself, we both found it a strain to carry on the conversation. I asked him what had become of the nice girl with whom I had seen him last time. 'What girl?' he asked. 'Oh, Clare. Yes, she's all right. We're sort of married.'

'You look a bit seedy,' I said.

'And I don't give a damn if I do. Will you have "pelmenies" now?'

'Fancy your still remembering what they taste like,' I said.

'Why shouldn't I?' he said drily.

We ate in silence for some minutes. Then we had coffee.

'What did you say the place was called? Blauberg?'

'Yes, Blauberg.'

'Was it nice there?'

'It depends on what you call nice,' he said and his jaw-muscles moved as he scrunched a yawn. 'Sorry,' he said, 'I hope I get some sleep in the train.'

He suddenly fumbled at my wrist.

'Half past eight,' I replied.

'I've got to telephone,' he muttered and strode across the restaurant with his napkin in his hand. Five minutes later he was back with the napkin half-stuffed into his coat-pocket. I pulled it out.

'Look here,' he said, 'I'm dreadfully sorry, I must be going. I forgot I had an appointment.'

'It has always distressed me', writes Sebastian Knight in
Lost Property,
'that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries, who bring them their food and check their overcoats and push doors open for them. I once reminded a businessman with whom I had lunched a few weeks before, that the woman who had handed us our hats had had cotton wool in her ears. He looked puzzled and said he hadn't been aware of there having been any woman at all.... A person who fails to notice a taxi-driver's hare-lip because he is in a hurry to get somewhere, is to me a monomaniac. I have often felt as if I were sitting among blind men and madmen, when I thought that I was the only one in the crowd to wonder about the chocolate-girl's slight, very slight limp.'

As we left the restaurant and were making our way towards the taxi-rank, a bleary-eyed old man wetted his thumb and offered Sebastian or me or both, one of the printed advertisements he was distributing. Neither of us took it, both looked straight ahead, sullen dreamers ignoring the offer. 'Well, good-bye,' I said to Sebastian, as he beckoned to a cab.

'Come and see me one day in London,' he said and glanced over his shoulder. 'Wait a1minute,' he added, 'this won't do. I have cut a beggar....' He left me and presently returned, a small sheet of paper in his hand. He read it carefully before throwing it away.

'Want a lift?' he asked.

I felt he was madly anxious to get rid of me.

'No, thanks,' I said. I did not catch the address he gave to the chauffeur, but I recall his telling him to go fast.

When he returned to London.... No, the thread of the narrative breaks off and I must ask others to tie up the threads again.

Did Clare notice at once that something had happened? Did she suspect at once what that something was? Shall we try to guess what she asked Sebastian, and what he answered, and what she said then? I think we will not.... Sheldon saw them soon after Sebastian's return and found that Sebastian looked queer. But he had looked queer before, too...

'Presently it began to worry me,' said Mr Sheldon. He met Clare alone and asked her whether she thought Sebastian was all right. 'Sebastian?' said Clare with a slow dreadful smile, 'Sebastian has gone mad. Quite mad,' she repeated, widely opening her pale eyes.

'He has stopped talking to me,' she added in a small voice.

Then Sheldon saw Sebastian and asked him what was amiss.

'Is it any of your business?' inquired Sebastian with a kind of wretched coolness.

'I like Clare,' said Sheldon, 'and I want to know why she walks about like a lost soul.' (She would come to Sebastian every day and sit in odd comers where she never used to sit. She brought sweets sometimes or a tie for Sebastian. The sweets remained uneaten and the tie hung lifelessly on the back of a chair. She seemed to pass through Sebastian like a ghost. Then she would fade away as silently as she had come.)

'Well,' said Sheldon, 'out with it, man. What have you done to her?'

Sheldon learnt nothing from him whatsoever. What he did learn was from Clare herself; and this amounted to very little. After his return to London Sebastian had been getting letters in Russian from a woman he had met at Blauberg. She had been living at the same hotel as he. Nothing else was known.

Six weeks later (in September 1929) Sebastian left England again and was absent until January of the following year. Nobody knew where he had been. Sheldon suggested it might have been Italy 'because lovers usually go there'. He did not cling to his suggestion.

Whether Sebastian had some final explanation with Clare, or whether he left a letter for her when he departed, is not clear. She wandered away as quietly as she had come. She changed her lodgings: they were too close to Sebastian's flat. On a certain gloomy November day Miss Pratt met her in the fog on her way home from a life-insurance office where she had found work. After that, the two girls saw each other fairly often, but Sebastian's name was seldom mentioned. Five years later, Clare married.

Lost Property
which Sebastian had begun at that time appears as a kind of halt in his literary journey of discovery: a summing up, a counting of the things and souls lost on the way, a setting of bearings; the clinking sound of unsaddled horses browsing in the dark; the glow of a camp fire; stars overhead. There is in it a short chapter dealing with an aeroplane crash (the pilot and all the passengers but one were killed); the survivor, an elderly Englishman, was discovered by a farmer some way from the place of the accident, sitting on a stone. He sat huddled up — the picture of misery and pain. 'Are you badly hurt?' asked the farmer. 'No,' answered the Englishman, 'toothache. I've had it all the way.' Half a dozen letters were found scattered in a field: remnants of the air-mail bag. Two of these were business letters of great importance; a third was addressed to a woman, but began: 'Dear Mr Mortimer, in reply to yours of the 6th inst...' and dealt with the placing of an order; a fourth was a birthday greeting; a fifth was the letter of a spy with its steely secret hidden in a haystack of idle prattle; and the last was an envelope directed to a firm of traders with the wrong letter inside, a love letter. 'This will smart, my poor love. Our picnic is finished; the dark road is bumpy and the smallest child in the car is about to be sick. A cheap fool would tell you: you must be brave. But then, anything I might tell you in the way of support or consolation is sure to be milk-puddingy — you know what I mean. You always knew what I meant. Life with you was lovely — and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink "v" in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering "l". Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist.... This is all poetry. I am lying to you. Lily-livered. There can be nothing more cowardly than a poet beating about the bush. I think you have guessed how things stand: the damned formula of "another woman". I am desperately unhappy with her — here is one thing which is true. And I think there is nothing much more to be said about that side of the business.

'I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear race, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say "two" I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

'Good-bye, my poor love. I shall never forget you and never replace you. It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love, and that this other passion is but a comedy of the flesh. All is flesh and all is purity. But one thing is certain: I have been happy with you and now I am miserable with another. And so life will go on. I shall joke with the chaps at the office and enjoy my dinners (until I get dyspepsia), and read novels, and write verse, and keep an eye on the stocks — and generally behave as I have always behaved. But that does not mean that I shall be happy without you.... Every small thing which will remind me of you — the look of disapproval about the furniture in the rooms where you have patted cushions and spoken to the poker, every small thing which we have descried together — will always seem to me one half of a shell, one half of a penny, with the other half kept by you. Good-bye. Go away, go away. Don't write. Marry Charlie or any other good man with a pipe in his teeth. Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This blot is not due to a tear. My fountain-pen has broken down and I am using a filthy pen in this filthy hotel room. The heat is terrific and I have not been able to clinch the business I was supposed to bring "to a satisfactory close", as that ass Mortimer says. I think you have got a book or two of mine — but that is not really important.
Please,
don't write. L.'

If we abstract from this fictitious letter everything that is personal to its supposed author, I believe that there is much in it that may have been felt by Sebastian, or even written by him, to Clare. He had a queer habit of endowing even his most grotesque characters with this or that idea, or impression, or desire which he himself might have toyed with. His hero's letter may possibly have been a kind of code in which he expressed a few truths about his relations with Clare. But I fail to name any other author who made use of his art in such a baffling manner — baffling to me who might desire to see the real man behind the author. The light of personal truth is hard Jo perceive in the shimmer of an imaginary nature, but what is still harder to understand is the amazing fact that a man writing of things which he really felt at the time of writing, could have had the power to create simultaneously — and out of the very things which distressed his mind — a fictitious and faintly absurd character.

Sebastian returned to London in the beginning of 1930 and took to his bed after a very bad heart attack. Somehow or other he managed to go on with the writing of
Lost Property:
his easiest book, I think. Now, it ought to be understood in connexion with what follows that Clare had been solely responsible for the managing of his literary affairs. After her departure, these soon became wildly entangled. In many cases Sebastian had not the vaguest idea how things stood and what his exact relations with this or that publisher were. He was so muddled, so utterly incompetent, so hopelessly incapable of remembering a single name or address, or the place where he put things, that now he got into the most absurd predicaments. Curiously enough, Clare's girlish forgetfulness had been replaced by a perfect clarity and steadiness of purpose when handling Sebastian's affairs; but now it all went amuck. He had never learnt to use a typewriter and was much too nervous to begin now.
The Funny Mountain
was published simultaneously in two American magazines, and Sebastian was at a loss to remember how he had managed to sell it to two different people. Then there was a complicated affair with a man who wanted to make a film of
Success
and who had paid Sebastian in advance (without his noticing it, so absent-mindedly did he read letters) for a shortened and 'intensified' version, which Sebastian never even dreamt of making.
The Prismatic Bezel
was in the market again, but Sebastian hardly knew of it. Invitations were not even answered; Telephone numbers proved delusions, and the harassing search for the envelope where he had scrawled this or that number exhausted him more than the writing of a chapter. And then — his mind was elsewhere, following in the tracks of an absent mistress, waiting for her call — and presently the call would come, or he himself could stand the suspense no longer, and there he would be as Roy Carswell had once seen him: a gaunt man in a greatcoat and bedroom slippers getting into a Pullman car.