Dark Entries Page 13

  Through that unexpected consortium of rain, fog, and wind which is the characteristic climate of Merseyside, Carfax watched the fifteen-foot liver birds on top of the great building recede into the driving cloud which is their element. Mythical, yet, in the case of at least one specimen, to be seen stuffed in a Liverpool public building, these creatures ride the seldom-abating storm like human hopes. He remembered that fifteen years ago he had hastened third-class to Liverpool in pursuit of a beautiful vaudeville actress then appearing in that city at the Shakespeare. Passion, he seemed to recall, was then something unable to be left with his cheap synthetic suitcase in the station cloak-room. The boat was beginning to roll to an extent which many of his neighbours seemed to think disagreeable; and Carfax wondered whether unhappiness or nausea tended the faster to produce the other.

  By the time they were nearing the Bar Light, terminus of the long double series of buoys which leads vessels from Liverpool towards the fathomless submarine canyon lying concealed north and south down the middle of the Irish Sea, Carfax had discovered the bow of the boat to be uninhabitably gale-swept and also lacking in seats; astern he found the best place which offered, and, sinking into his overcoat, watched the crew as the lightship was passed heave overboard the ‘fish’ on the end of a line which, turning in the water, records on a dial the distance travelled. It was cold and damp, but not intolerable, or, at least, not physically so. Carfax wondered what a real storm was like: being swept overboard by a wave, seeing a whole life as a vision to be clutched lest worse befall, watching wet clothes being dried before an almost soaked out fire; or the boredom of life in an open boat with strangers, ships’ biscuit accompanying horrible corned beef as a diet, the lack of interest among friends who would have to hear the story for unavoidable social and practical reasons.

  As England receded, however, into a memory of ill-painted buildings and a line of unhappy faces taken off their guard on the underground railways, Carfax to his surprise began to notice signs suggesting that his fellow voyagers considered the weather to be improving. A speck of glowing ash blew on his face from a newly lighted cigarette; deck chairs began to be dragged clatteringly over his feet from the heap; from across the boat a hot smell reached him of fish and chips and greasy Liverpool Echo; a portable wireless began to thrum and pound, its operator varying popular tunes of the type Carfax himself had composed for small sums of money in earlier days, with violent unaimed thrusts into ‘the ether’, explorations generally ending in an echo of lowest-common-denominator fundamentalism.

  ‘She has no idea how plain she is and of course you can’t tell her,’ observed a conspicuously unattractive woman of about forty-five to a replica of herself.

  ‘Communism gives the workers something to work for,’ vehemently asserted a man in a raincoat. His wispy, colourless hair appeared on his prematurely obtruding scalp-line like the last vegetation in the dust bowl.

  ‘So I said I’d give it to her if she promised to have it dyed green,’ remarked a round matron to her bored and miserable-looking husband.

  ‘If you’ll bring in the orders, I’ll look after production. You can leave that to me. I know how to handle the ruddy Government.’

  ‘In the end I had to drag the clothes off her, and she tried to turn quite nasty.’ The speaker looked away from the other man, and laughed gloatingly before resuming his former confidential mutter.

  ‘There’s no hope for the world but a big revival of real Christianity,’ said the serious-minded, rather important-looking man. He was apparently addressing a large popular audience. ‘Real Christianity,’ he said again with emphasis.

  ‘Look Roland! A porpoise!’ said a woman of thirty to her offspring, in the tone of one anxious to guide rather than dominate the child’s formative years.

  Soon the bell sounded for first luncheon and the group of passengers round Carfax began to break up, some going below, others opening ill-made packages and trying to shield the contents from dispersal in the gusty wind. The gulls, which would have followed the boat round the world were she aiming that far, drew nearer and flew more urgently over the deck. Carfax recalled that fragment of the great and beautiful Sappho according to which the souls of the dead become white gulls in slow flight before a high cliff in the bright sun. He recalled how he had walked one sunny day along Freshwater Down and thought his own soul took flight and drifted warm and lazy and for ever. Wandering along those white and removed cliffs, he had remembered Wagner’s inscription on a copy of the Pastoral Symphony presented to Baron von Keudell: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.’

  His drifting thoughts returned to the gulls shrieking and bickering above him: fierce and free and white and light and doomed. ‘The pathetic fallacy!’ he thought. He was seated facing directly astern, with his back against the cabinwork. ‘Sentimentality!’ He squirmed in his seat and his eyes settled upon his shoes, their high polish discoloured by Liverpool weather.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ enquired a voice.

  A woman had risen from the seat round the corner of the cabin, where before he had distantly observed her reading, and was standing before him. The book was held upside down in her hand. Carfax recognised it as a volume in the Collected Translations of Voltaire.

  ‘I’m feeling hungry,’ she remarked in a tone so matter-of-fact and commonplace that Carfax ever afterwards wondered whether she had indeed uttered the earlier surprising question: also whether he himself had indeed spoken his thought aloud. ‘Could you possibly remember me till I come back?’ She removed a stout oilskin coat, placing it on her seat. She was wearing a jacket and trousers, and a simple white shirt. Her head was bare and the fingers holding the book were long and white.

  ‘I shan’t forget you,’ said Carfax, not quite certain whether the situation required him to rise to his feet. Moreover, was not the other’s tone a little peremptory?

  ‘Thank you for your memory.’

  She disappeared.

  Men are divided into those who know they find women too attractive for their peace of mind or happiness to be long continued; and those who know they would be happier if only they could come to some sort of terms with the intransigent and rather trivial opposite sex. Carfax, who, upon medical advice, was virtually in flight, came, it will be gathered, into the former category. Finished with women, almost with the world (for he had very nearly decided to resign his position at the Foreign Office), and afflicted for several months now with a loss of appetite so complete and protracted that he was beginning to fear it would be permanent, he reflected with weary bitterness upon his folly and weakness as, ignoring his promise about the seat, he descended the steps to the ship’s dining saloon.

  She was seated at a long table by herself in the half-filled saloon. Grease-spotted stewards sidled rapidly up and down with small portions of half-cold mutton. She had removed her jacket and her smooth light hair lay upon the shoulders of her close-fitting shirt, giving an effect at once remote and elegant.

  She greeted the entrance of Carfax and his request to be allowed to join her without the slightest feeling for or against becoming apparent to him. Neither felt impelled to admit cognisance of the several quite empty tables near them; but their conversation throughout the meal was more desultory and broken by longer, more unstrained pauses than is usual between strangers. They consumed a bottle of claret and, when coffee came, were quiet and smiling. She produced some Turkish cigarettes in a rather large gold case.

  ‘Do you know the Island very well?’ enquired Carfax.

  ‘Better than anybody,’ she replied unemphatically.

  ‘I wonder if you could recommend a good hotel? I am told there are no visitors at this time of year so that one can get in anywhere. I thought I’d have a look round before settling where to stay, but perhaps you could advise me?’

  ‘Advice is always dangerous.’

  Propelled by the steady breeze of agreeable impulse, Carfax became confidential, as a man does upon his first luncheon with a woman who
pleases him.

  ‘I have been very ill.’ The breeze of impulse slackened suddenly: then resumed. ‘I have been ordered a long holiday. My doctor suggested the Island.’

  ‘That’s what comes of living too long among strangers.’ He looked up. But her concern seemed real. ‘If you’ve been ill I think you’d really better come and stay at Fleet.’ Then after a pause too brief for Carfax to reply, she continued: ‘The weather on the Island’s irresponsible at this time of the year and there’s nothing whatever you can do about it. If you’ve been ill you won’t want to spend all your time in a hotel lounge. You’d become neurotic – like the rest.’

  Carfax winced.

  ‘So stay with me instead. Fleet is a big house and you’ll never see me if you don’t want to.’

  Carfax’s thoughts were racing, and his spine muscles were stiff and painful. Normally a man of second, third, and fourth thoughts, he, like all habitual vacillators, varied vacillation with occasional gross precipitancy. When decision is required, reflection avails only a few.

  He accepted quietly and gratefully.

  He paid the bill and they ascended. She drew on her heavy oilskin coat again and they went forward. As they neared the Island, she stood beside him in the bows of the boat, naming to him the mountains, the castles, the steep-sided narrow creeks, the mansions of the great and rich gleaming like palaces of glass in the now bright sun. Round the Island the water was clear and deep, she said; the air clean and strong. She stood there like a pre-Homeric goddess, or Greta Garbo in Anna Christie; her oilskin glistening, her hair streaming, her eyes shining, her voice soft but unfailingly distinct: unforgettable. Grief in Carfax began unobserved to shrink and slumber.

  Upon the quay, among the mail vans and relatives and few loitering holidaymakers, an expensive car awaited them, attended by a plain but efficient young woman in chauffeur’s uniform, who drove like the wind but with the reliability which can only come from a vocation for the work. As they sped through the streets of the capital and beneath the park walls of the mansions encircling it, Carfax felt himself succumbing to the rapture of swift but secure motion. Suddenly, in a minute or two at the most, like great doors opening, his mind relaxed. He became aware of himself for the first time in many months or years. He lost himself and entrancing happiness chilled him like the creeping bursting dawn.

  ‘Do you recall Johnson’s definition of happiness? “Driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman alongside.”’

  ‘Johnson was afraid. Like all mortals.’

  ‘Are you never afraid?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She sighed. ‘I am not immortal.’

  ‘Are you quite sure you’re not?’ She looked at him. ‘Immortals have no names, or names that no man or woman may utter. Have you a name?’

  ‘I have three names, but you may not utter them. You will hate them all. They are hideous commonplace names of schoolgirls and young brides, and elderly lonely pensioners, and pure women in books. Godparents’ names. Goodly names. Useful names which people in shops can spell. I will not tell you what they are. But I will write them down for you.’ She opened the volume of Voltaire and beneath the legend FINIS wrote her names on the tailpiece.

  The car had been ascending a mountain road, swift as a motor race. Her pencil tailed off down the page as they bumped over the uneven surface. It dropped to the floor. A strong invisible wind poured through the right-hand window as the car reached the ridge. It ruffled Carfax’s hair as he stooped to recover her pencil.

  ‘For me,’ he said, looking away from her and out at the treeless, houseless, sea-bound plateau, ‘you are someone quite different. I shall call you Ariel.’

  She could hardly have heard him as he gazed into the unceasing wind flooding through the open window of her car.

  ‘Is the Island uninhabited?’ he asked after ten more minutes without sign of smoke or chimney. ‘Or, rather, do all the Islanders live in the capital?’

  ‘Only visitors live in the capital,’ she answered smiling. Then suddenly she pointed through the window to the sky: ‘Look! Geese!’ she cried. He could see nothing; nor did the wind or the sound of the car permit of the possibility that the distinctive sound of geese in flight could reach his ears. But Ariel appeared transported with joy. ‘How wonderful! The geese have waited to welcome me!’ she cried. ‘To welcome us!’ she added, with apology light and heart-warming in her tone. She seized Carfax’s arm. ‘The geese are the true aboriginals of the Island,’ she said in mock seriousness. ‘But the visitors come to paint them and catalogue them and protect them, so not many come back now.’

  ‘The white settlers set traps for the native people of Tasmania and soon had them exterminated,’ remarked Carfax.

  ‘But the white settlers themselves then fell into the traps,’ she replied softly. ‘That is why the visitors have to huddle together in the capital. That is why the rest of the Island seems to you uninhabited. You see? Not a building in sight.’

  But as she spoke the hills opened and Carfax saw Fleet for the first time.

  He found the house hard to place architecturally. Like Inigo Jones’s Parliament House in Edinburgh, it was probably older than it looked – possibly much older, for Carfax recollected that he had no knowledge of Island buildings. On the other hand, it might have been a supremely accomplished modern pastiche, weathered to an aspect of misleading age by the Island storms. But a pastiche of what? Of a most beautiful small mansion of the eighteenth century Carfax decided: perhaps the early eighteenth century . . . In any case such speculation was subordinated to wonder at the skill with which the lovely house had been placed in hiding from the world. Carfax had visited Compton Wynyates and marvelled there at the faintly similar effect to that now before him; but the concealment of Fleet was supreme and final, a wonder of imagination and ingenuity, an echo from the deep unconscious.

  ‘How glorious to live there!’ Carfax cried with a schoolboy enthusiasm he had never noticed in himself before.

  She smiled serenely at him and began to push stray corners of her shirt into the top of her trousers, preparatory to alighting.

  ‘I have never seen anything one half so lovely.’

  The car sped up a beautifully firm, even, yellow drive, the gravel rustling sensuously beneath the wheels. Flat, tight lawns called to the spirit on either side and Carfax visualised peacocks. Above the front door something had once been carved, a date, a monogram, a crest, a rebus; but crumbling age or crumbling modern stonemasonry, one or the other, had rendered it now unintelligible. The door was opened by a maid in an elegant grey silk dress. Ariel was momentarily stretching herself upon the step, her oilskin coat a heap at her feet. She was still smiling her small, serene smile. She looked a wonderful quiet happiness.

  ‘Welcome to Fleet!’ she said, something in the intonation at once masking and mocking the conventionality of the words.

  ‘Welcome home, madam,’ said the grey-clad maid.

  *

  Carfax’s first impression was that the house was full of people. He then perceived that the effect came from several mirrors which reflected and counter-reflected their three figures. These mirrors were not many; but the skilful placing of them gave an effect of magnitude and mystery apparently aided by the construction of the house. Apartments of the most various shapes and sizes led into one another in all directions without doors; and as no two apartments seemed to be decorated alike, the mirrors set up a chiaroscuro of reflections co-existent with but apparently independent of the rich and bewildering chiaroscuro of the apartments themselves. Carfax found he could seldom certainly identify the origin of any particular reflection; and was perpetually troubled by the apparent existence of two separate houses within the space rightly occupied by one. Each room, considered by itself, was perfectly proportioned and exquisitely decorated; but when much of the whole was seen at once, the mind tended slightly to waver and check.

  The staircase, which rose before him, passed from side to side of its well, dividing and reuniting a
t frequent alternate landings: the perfect miniature of a grand staircase on which a duchess receives her guests. Carfax followed the grey-clad maid to his room. As he ascended, he noticed that the constructional principle followed on the ground floor was repeated on the floors above: the same interconnecting undoored rooms, each room different in size, shape, and colour; the same mirrors. The effect was slightly vertiginous: Carfax thought of the three-dimensional chess his divinity tutor had tried to interest him in at Oxford. Also he noticed the stair carpet. A long yellow snake extended its length down the centre of the wide, deep green; the coils of the snake varied in relation to their background, and Carfax, who tended to the obsessive, found himself watching for particular variations to repeat themselves. His room seemed to be on the top floor of the house but he failed to detect a single indisputable repetition in the pattern of the carpet.

  At the top of the house the rooms were no longer interconnected and without doors, but the disposition of rooms and corridors was still mysterious and complicated.

  The room he had been given was unexpectedly conventional. A white panelled door was set in red-blue wallpaper. A big, old-fashioned brass bedstead, rather French and ornate, set the tone of the furniture: heavy, formerly expensive, never perhaps in the best of taste; very unlike the rest of the house, he thought. The grey-clad maid set down his bag, remarked: ‘Tea will be downstairs, sir, when you are ready,’ and departed. Carfax crossed to the window and looked out.

  Outside was the same empty moorland of the drive in the car, running down to the same clear sea. As they had approached the house, Carfax had considered it to lie in a large dell almost surrounded by fairly high, steep hills. The beautiful wide, empty view now stretched before him, was intoxicating and magnificent; but he found himself completely at a loss to explain whence had come his former strong impression that the house lay uniquely concealed from all the world.