The Haunted Storm Page 19

  Then Alan laughed, and a flood of relief swept over Matthew. Collingwood, dazed, looked around him and tried to collect his wits.

  “Understand now?” Alan said to him.

  “What? Oh, yes, by all means,” said Collingwood. He got shakily to his feet, picked up his briefcase, and said “Yes, of course. Naturally you’re right about it… I shall see to it first thing in the morning. Not to worry. I must go…”

  And he nodded, and said goodnight to them both, and went out hastily.

  Matthew passed his hand over his head.

  “What was that? Magic?”

  “If you like,” said Alan. He sounded indifferent.

  “But why? What was it for?”

  “I was tired.” And in fact for the first time that day he did sound as if the exhaustion was winning. He sat down again and drank what was left in his glass. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “Yes, very – do you want to go out and eat? I’ll buy you a meal.”

  “I’ve got some food here. Bread and cheese all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  Alan went out of the room and came back with a sliced loaf and some butter and cheese. He cut some cheese and put it between two slices of bread without bothering to butter it, and stood at the window eating it. Matthew ate hungrily, and then wrapped the loaf up again.

  “Let’s go out,” said Alan. “It’s stuffy in here.”

  Matthew had no idea of the time. The night was warm and quiet, and the sky was thick with stars. They wandered along until they came to the open space where the fair had been. There was a low pile of concrete pipes by the side of the road, and they sat down. The nearest street-lamp was fifty yards away, and the stars were clear. They heard the whistle of a train in the distance, and the sound of shunting carriages.

  Elizabeth was asleep out there in the darkness… Had she ever been as close to Alan as he felt now? He nearly mentioned her, to see what Alan would say, but refrained.

  “Do you know who you remind me of?” he said after a minute. “Uncle Harry!”

  “Why?” said Alan quietly.

  “There’s something in your nature – it’s total, it’s complete – something like that.”

  Alan said nothing.

  Slowly the warmth of the night entered Matthew, and a calm joy, a sweet energy, began to flow little by little in his heart.

  “It’s sexual, at the soul of it, this universe,” he said, thinking aloud. “That’s the feeling that comes over me now. It’s a gentle sexual anticipation; it’s entirely unfounded, but there it is… what’s the thing that lies at the bottom of it, Alan? What are you pursuing?”

  “Love,” said Alan unexpectedly. “There’s only one name for it. You know by now what I don’t mean by love…” Matthew nodded in the darkness. “But I know all the powers, all the dominions, and this one is love. Love is the only one that goes as far and as deep as this.”

  He paused, and sighed, and went on. “They’ve got it wrong, as usual, the people who tell us what our morals are supposed to be like… we’re supposed to love our fellow men unconditionally, because they’re human beings. That’s supposed to be reason enough. But the only true reason for loving someone, which is because he or she is greater than the rest: that’s not mentioned, as if it’s indecent to be greater than the rest, or to want to be greater. So in human affairs you’re not supposed to love naturally; you’re supposed to love indiscriminately. No-one seems to tell the truth about it; no-one even seems to admit that love isn’t giving at all but a greedy passionate taking, frenzied, like a thief in a bank.

  “And you don’t give money to a poor man because you love him, you give it because poverty’s revolting. You don’t wish a sick man better because you love him, you do it because you can’t love him as he is. If you were truthful about it you’d say that poor people and sick people are disgusting. No, it’s the beautiful and the rich that you love. You love a girl because her beauty is a kind of wealth for you. You love a man of talent because he is greater than others: his life extends further, it’s fuller and more colourful. Love is the survival of the fittest…

  “But not where I am; that’s not the love that drives me now. There are other forms of it too, other dimensions… And what I pursue is love, though it looks like contempt and callousness on earth. It’s not knowledge; it’s not power; it’s not justice, or beauty, or holiness; it’s not humility and it’s not pride, it’s not wisdom and it’s not simplicity; the only name for it is love. And the path I walk on earth is twisted and obscure, but to an angel’s eye, and to mine, it’s straight.”

  He was silent for a moment or two.

  “And that’s the truth of it,” he went on, “that’s the truth of all I know. You’d better go now, or you’ll miss your bus back. Give my regards to Harry, if he remembers me. Good night, Matthew.”

  Matthew stood up, and they shook hands. Alan’s face was in shadow.

  “Goodnight, Alan,” he said. “I’ll see you again.”

  He walked away slowly, towards the centre of the city and the bus station, and hoped no-one would look at him in the street; because he was at a loss to account for the emotions in his heart, and he knew they were reflected in his face.

  Chapter 10

  A month after Matthew’s day with Alan, he and Elizabeth packed a lunch and set out for a long walk over the moors. It was partly a reconnaissance, and partly an attack; Matthew felt that time was running out.

  *

  She jumped off the grass verge on to the road in front of him, conscious that she’d got him now, for a moment at least. She smiled, so impudently that he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  She dropped her shoulder-bag, and it fell over slowly on to its side.

  “Suppose I touched you… what would that mean?” she asked.

  “You’d better try it and see.”

  She came up close to him and put her hands inside his shirt. She had the impression that his flesh was quivering like a flame; a tense nervous current ran through him into her hand. They smiled at each other, and stood quite still. The air was already warm, though it was only half-past eight in the morning and the dew was still wet on the grass.

  “You see what it means?” he said.

  She nodded. “Yes –”

  “Christ!” he said explosively. “All that and more! Everything and more! I’m in a good, violent, grasping mood this morning, and I’m going to make the most of it. I’ll have another layer of deceit stripped away from the world by this evening – I’m working at it, Liz, I’m working at it!”

  He put his hands on her hips and pulled her close to him, and when their bodies met he kissed her tightly until she was breathless. She broke away, laughing, and picked up her shoulder-bag, and they set off again.

  *

  The sunlight on a wooden telegraph post. It was hard, obsessive, and clear. It had a smell like creosote, and a sound like the faint drone of an insect. He touched it; and the sunlight trapped against his hand had a different quality from that which Elizabeth’s shoulder spread, reflected, on the shady part of her blue dress just above her breast. That was muted and voluptuous, and meaningful; this was precise, glassy and mysterious.

  *

  “Imagine you’re climbing, quite alone, up high in the mountains, with the snow hard and clear and the sun bright. And you’re full of energy and delight, and you spring from rock to rock like a cat; nothing can bring you down. A stream – an Alpine stream – the spray dashes into the air. Little flowers cling to the rocks. And suddenly with no warning and for no reason, because you’re utterly alone, out of the air itself there comes music – Beethoven or Mozart, the Ninth Symphony or the Jupiter, crashing like thunder, You look around, fearfully, but you’re alone, the mountain is empty but for you, and still the music surges on, louder than ever, and brings you to exultation…

  “There, you see! I can imagine that, Liz, I can imagine the condition of exultation. And so why stop for a moment until I’ve brou
ght it about? Where’s the sense in wasting time?”

  *

  Dod Lane was an arrow-straight pathway that led for miles between the fields and out on to the moors. It was narrow and grassy, between high fragrant hedges over grown with roses and briars, and thick with nettles and cow-parsley. They heard the sound of bees everywhere.

  *

  Her words on the beach.

  “The touch that’ll bring me back to matter again – Matthew, I am spirit, I am not matter! Not matter! I am trapped in the world; I don’t belong here…”

  What is the world?

  He plucked savagely at a bunch of grass, and put one succulent blade in his mouth and chewed it. The tastes inside it were: sugar-cane, cress, nutmeg, sorrel, lettuce, milk, honeysuckle.

  *

  In the forefront of Matthew’s mind there was the idea that if he were to submit the world – that is to say the evidence of his senses – to a fierce and rigorous analysis, he would come to the truth about it.

  In the back of his mind was the suspicion that he would not.

  In between, there were two questions. First, how should he set about it? And second, what was truth in any case?

  The second question bothered him more than the first, because it seemed to him that truth was itself a part of the world, visible to his intellect in the same way that the flesh of Elizabeth’s arm was visible to his eyesight.

  If that was the case, then the world was irreducible, and analysis would tell him nothing.

  But still that question sang: what is it?

  His will drove at it like a bull.

  *

  A gap in the hedge to the left revealed: a wide field of grass and clover, bounded by a hedge at both sides and a wire fence at the far end. It sloped downwards to the bottom of a short, narrow valley. On the other side of the valley there was a field of green wheat, and at the top of the ridge, a house, painted white. The haze of the day made it hard to distinguish the details, and already the air was shimmering with heat. The sky beyond the ridge was a dusty, steely grey-blue, becoming pure and more translucent higher up. He stared at it all, dumbly, and as he looked he became conscious of a clear, thin, high impulse of joy.

  Where did that come from?

  He pounced on it immediately. It didn’t stop; so it didn’t belong to him, or else his attention would have obliterated it. And then he recognised it. It was the sound of a cricket; and the recognition didn’t change it either. It was objective, and it was still joy, neither inside him nor outside him. Or rather, both inside or outside.

  Two more questions. First, the entity represented by himself and the world must have had a structure such that outside and inside, though seemingly discrete, were (a) connected and (b) interchangeable. So what was that structure?

  Second, what was joy?

  *

  “I didn’t tell you, Liz – maybe I was ashamed of it, I don’t know. But that day when I saw Alan, I felt an immense relief, as if at last I’d found someone stronger than I was. I felt weak, but not resentfully weak – almost grateful… I think what it was, was delight in his strength, just that. Now tell me what I don’t mean by delight in his strength.”

  “Delight that he’s strong, because he’s your brother and you’re happy for him,” she said promptly, as if it was a lesson she’d learned. She spoke, in fact, without great interest. The truth was that her own soul was responding, like a harp hung on a tree, to all the eloquent promptings of the day; the sunlight, the scent of wild roses in the hedgerow, the sound of crickets, the stirring of her own blood. Matthew was talking incessantly, gnawing the world like a bone; did he think it would splinter at last in his teeth? But let him talk, because he made her smile; and besides, his teeth were getting sharper all the time. She was discovering, she thought wryly, that her objections to the state of things had been wrongly conceived and wrongly expressed, and that the world and she perhaps had femininity in common.

  *

  Matthew forced himself forward against it again and again. And the first thing that had to be fixed was time. You cannot take measurements without a constant scale; so he determined to take one second as a measure, and to find what a second contained.

  But the act of thinking that made him over-conscious of the measure itself.

  They showered on him like leaves. Each one was veined and transparent, like a baby’s hand, like a crystal, like a fish’s egg, like a leaf, like a petal. He moved slowly in the snowstorm of them, and if he closed his hand on one to stare at it, it vanished like a single snowflake, a mirage, a taste, a smile, a ripple in water, a dream. And they drove against him gently in a host, blown into his open eyes and into the hollows of his body.

  Elizabeth - now she was clear. They – this blizzard of arbitrary seconds – did not obscure her. She was solid – forceful – alive – there, in front of him. What could eclipse that? Thought, not seconds – attention, not time – greater forcefulness only, and greater life, could hide her. Shadows of expression drifted in her face. Her arms, folded: perhaps he could kiss them, or press his cheek against their softness, the softness of her upper arm, where just below the armpit the flesh of it was pressed outward – no, no, too close. Stand back, then! Stand back and half-close his eyes: but that wouldn’t take into account the dizzying pressure of realising her: she would be reduced to an element in the landscape. So he knew that she was there, but knew it metaphysically. It was the evidence of his senses that was shadowy, dim, and faint, fainter than the ghost of Bishop Berkeley, fainter than silence.

  *

  “Here, Liz,” he said, “Let me carry the bag for a while. Did we bring any apples?”

  “There’s a pound in there,” she said, “four of them.”

  “Good, good,” he said vaguely, rummaging in the bag. He found them, and put the bag on his shoulder. He took her hand in his, and walked along taking great bites of the apple and swallowing them quickly.

  “You’ll choke,” she, said.

  “No, no, no,” he muttered. “Never mind that. Ach” – he had a mouthful of pips; he spat them out, and went on “I’ve never felt so much like a man eating the world. I can see it, but it’s not clear enough. I can hear it, but it’s confused; and I’m not a dog, so I don’t know how to smell it properly, and tasting and touching aren’t up to much… So I have to eat it, to get it inside me and digest it and assimilate it. Words are – words are – insects, death-watch beetles. This is skidding over the surface of it, you see, Liz! It can’t grip, it’s like the boy trying to climb the glass mountain in the fairy tale. But I’ll have it out, I’ll do it in the end… So: Babbling like this and saying the first thing that comes into my head, of course I can’t get at it: it skids and slides and misses… now if I took my time and went at it like a poet, I mean carefully, thoughtfully, choosing the right word and the precise word and nothing but that, I’d get a better grip, and get a little further. But by doing that I’d have to restrict the area I’m working at – do you get it? I’d only clear a little area, and that’s not good enough –” he flung the apple-core over the hedge, as far as he could into the sky, and then let go of her hand and seized a dry stick that lay in the grass, brandishing it like a sword. “That’s not enough! I want it all, all, all of it!”

  “Yes, but Matthew –” she didn’t know whether she was amused or distressed. It was childish, to be sure, all this ranting and gesturing, but it didn’t matter, she supposed. Her own happiness was so completely different: all the fierceness had left her, ebbing like a tide… no! It was she who had ebbed, and she was the tide, the world, matter.

  *

  “Uncle Harry told me something the other night. It was about a vision he’d had. It’s odd, he’s changing, Liz; I notice it every day, you know, he’s getting – I don’t know – frailer and lighter… He hardly bothers to eat anything these days. I wish I’d paid more attention to what he said.”

  “I like your Uncle Harry. But what was his vision?”

  “It was a bit �
�� incoherent.” He stopped, and frowned. It embarrassed him somehow to talk about the old man, because it made his own shortcomings so vivid by contrast: well, let it. “I can’t really explain it; and I don’t think he could himself, either. He saw God, and everything was shining; but the main thing was his face as he described it – or – no, the atmosphere around him – something like that. He generates goodness, like heat, and it’s just as difficult to talk about. Are things hot because there is heat? Or is there heat because things are hot? Which comes first? It’s the same with his goodness. He’s good, instinctively good all through, so that’s clear; but then he seems to move in this field of goodness, and anybody – any thing, come to that – that’s near him, is affected by it and changes and becomes good too, just as things become hot when they’re near a source of heat… So if you can isolate ‘heat’ and talk about it, you ought to be able to do the same thing with goodness… It’s a physical thing; it’s a property of matter.”

  *

  After a while he said “Have you seen this well of your father’s?”

  “Yes. I’ve been there once or twice with him. It’s not much to look at.”

  “Is there a lake near it?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Well – it’s not really a lake, it’s not big enough – though it could be; it’s like those ornamental lakes they have in the grounds of stately homes. It’s a bit creepy. It reminds me of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It’s not withered but it’s the same feeling – it’s all lank and muddy and overripe. There’s a little boat on it too, on the other side from the well. I don’t know whose it is. Why? Has he been telling you about it?”

  “He told me a little, and then Alan told me something too. I can’t see why it’s so important, but it seems to be; each of them said that it affects you in some way – it makes you see the truth about things. And there was something about a special time of year when it answered questions. Liz: find out from him when it was – what time of year it answered, and we could go and try!”