‘You must do what you really want, naturally.’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll come. I’d like to come. Yes, I’d like to come. If you promise not to nag –’

  ‘I don’t nag,’ Oliver said, leaving Anna with a momentary feeling that she was still bargaining over something he had long ago bought.

  ‘So that’s settled,’ said Oliver. ‘Good. Good.’

  8

  In the autumn, free from visitors, the sun, and his children, Henry Severell worked hardest. As a young man, he had walked houses in an agony of indecision and procrastination before ever setting pen to paper, so that sometimes he had barely written two or three sentences before dinner, and had then not liked those sentences, which were so disproportionate to the effort put into sitting down to write them and had as often as not crossed them out again. As a young man he had needed sleep, had gone to bed early to make love to Caroline, and had woken heavily and slowly, taking sometimes two hours over it, and several cups of coffee. But now he slept for a bare five hours a night, got up before dawn, or just with it, walked out into the garden and worked for two or three hours before Caroline, admiring and solicitous, brought his breakfast. He would write all morning, spend the afternoon walking, or gardening, and after dinner write again.

  Henry gardening was a very different thing from the suburban Sunday gardener in shirtsleeves, Henry whirling a chopper or spreading manure, Henry with his huge hands measuring and sorting seeds, using his whole body in one small manoeuvre, was to the Sunday gardener what the priest is to the part-time waiter, carrying biscuits and wine. Not that Henry would have liked to see it that way; he felt a sense of community with the Sunday gardeners, he liked to feel clearly human, wheeling pillars of plant pots in his barrow from one side of the garden to the other; he was aware that Oliver would have found him either sublime or ridiculous in his earthy – or less than earthy, since not peasant, not right down to it – ordinariness, and didn’t much care what Oliver thought. This was the pattern of the autumn and winter – barring two or three days of collapse in early February when he would invariably retire to bed with ’flu, hot water bottles, an empty head and an evil temper, to be nursed by Caroline and to lie like a log in a great hairy dressing-gown, shifting himself unhappily, complaining of the heat or the cold, thinking of nothing.

  On the morning when the second letter arrived, Henry was up at four-thirty having forgotten the first letter completely, and before he had lifted his body out of bed, he was gathering himself, concentrating, on what seemed an uninterrupted surge of excitement and interest, towards what he had yesterday been constructing. He looked down on Caroline, sleeping neatly on a frilled pillow, one long hand under her narrow cheek, her hair caught in the ruffled broderie anglaise collar of a Victorian nightgown. She looked tired in her sleep, there were lines round her eyes and mouth that he did not notice in the day; flesh ages so quickly, he thought, she is still comparatively young, and here is all this surface broken up, and won’t ever mend. He bent down and kissed her, with a gentleness at which he had always been adept; she stirred, smiled and brushed him away with a hand.

  He went downstairs and into the hall, where he opened the curtains to let in the grey light, too weak yet to reach the corners, where it seemed to be absorbed and defeated by a dark dust, and moved through, padding quietly into other grey rooms where everything was evanescent, immaterial, in this pale, thin morning light. Furniture and silver were dull, with no light to glow from their polish, they were ghostly presences only, carved refinements of a civilization that here for the moment could not raise itself to life. Henry himself alone had substantial presence, solid amongst his personal effects, like a member of the audience who had wandered by mistake onto an empty set for an elegant domestic comedy and feels that if he blunders in the wrong direction the whole construction – slats, rostra, painted hardboard doors opening on nowhere, wooden chandeliers hung from the lighting bars on string – will fall about his ears leaving nothing to see but the tiled, lavatorial back wall.

  In his study was the flask of coffee Caroline always put out for him, and a bowl of chrysanthemums, on whose crisp, clawed points light and colour were already stirring, white and lemon, cream, butter and bronze, muted but increasing. Henry, though he liked their crispness, and roundness, and the erect way they held themselves, was always uneasy with cut flowers; those were Caroline’s art; he opened the window and went through into the garden.

  He poked with a stick amongst the vegetables, shovelled some coke into the greenhouse boiler, and turned over several half shells of grapefruit, which were arranged regularly, smooth, acid yellow growths, like exotic fungi, amongst the knobbed and branching and disorderly sprouts; inside one of these he found three slugs, one huge black one, ribbed and glittering with silver slime, and two smaller ones, pearly and soft. He looked at them for some time, learning off the pattern of the ribbing, and the precise way the lower surface of the little ones shrank and frilled when they were touched. Then he put them and their yellow hutch absent-mindedly back where he had found it. He was not very good at killing things, when it came to it. This was another thing about his ‘imitation’ earthiness which he knew Oliver would have despised and mocked. Oliver would also have said that if Henry was not going to kill the slugs he should further have put them where no one else would, and may well have been right.

  Henry went into the greenhouse, tapped the thermometer, wandered up and down between the hothouse plants, in the heavy, musty tomato smell, and spent some time looking down into the trumpet of a gloxinia, one of the deepest black purple ones, until his consciousness switched and he was folded and furled in a deep purple, slightly furry umbrella, and thinking back and out about the lost Tyrian purple, the shells, the mourning robes, the thistle, so regularly palisadoed about with purple of the royal colour, and Aldous Huxley’s remarks about the substitute visionary experience involved in the filming on wide screens of bright flowers quivering and unfurling; Henry liked these, they were a confirmation of his own lack of sense of proportion, they had tremendous power in the magnification, a nasturtium was yards and yards of yellow silk flame, the colour was a whole passion, and men might well learn to see violently and stay awake, through these. Caroline, on the other hand, thought them vulgar. She couldn’t explain why, she had said, she just thought them vulgar. What she spoke in her careful flower arrangements was a restrained language of small spaces, which Henry could only interpret intermittently and not in her terms. If Caroline had put his purple flower out on his desk she would have seen it, clearly shaped from some distance; she would never have let it for a moment swallow her. Henry put it down again, on a tray of others; it glowed at him for a moment, and then its power was retired, and it retreated. He ducked under something climbing and hanging, gathered a green tomato, and went out again, down into the orchard; the dew had been heavy and he left a trail of long dark crushed marks.

  In the orchard the tall dying grasses brushed against him, wetting him. At the hedge, he paused and looked outside, over the field of stubble at the hill; as he watched, the sun came up behind it, the grey light wavered and thinned and began to shine, running along the stiff gold tubes of the stubble, catching a glitter here and there, and Henry saw that the whole of the field and the hedge where he was were alive and gently moving with the long bright filaments blown in the aerial dispersal of spiderlings. They were netted now, criss-cross, in the stubble, they were festooned and stretched from twig to twig of the hedge, giving it the insubstantial swaying brightness of a balloon about to take off. The dew was caught in bright drops on them, and as the new light swelled larger and more golden, they shone and glittered along every wet length of them so that everything was soft silver and gold; it was a field of light. Henry looked, quite passively, only looked; then he thought how many more times he was likely to see the sun come up and was possessed by such a happiness that he trembled for it. He turned and came back through the orchard, walking light and free, with a sense that the garden opened out from him on all sides into light; he had been possessed by this peace for so long now, that he thought of this as his condition, and rested on it.

  He settled then at his desk, with his coffee, in the quiet house. He went through notebooks, settling his mind: he had never been able to cure himself of indiscriminate jottings, but it had taken him much longer to learn to read what he had jotted and he now made a point of it. He had meant from time to time to become organized, had bought filing cabinets and card indexes, but it was no good. The jottings proliferated outside the system, and the effort of organization seemed to have been expended once for all, on the structure of the work, which he had, it seemed, to carry in his head.

  At that time he was revising, which he liked; he was a man who had to rewrite, seven or eight times, everything he wrote, and was happiest with the later versions, where he could see, and take pleasure in sharpening and improving, a shape. The earlier versions were too much like creating his own basic clay or metal to work with, and he wrote them with a sort of hatred. It seemed always too much, at that stage; a too heavy, brightly coloured mass which he could never hammer out thinly enough and he would struggle with this intractable first stuff for months, finding that what he wrote excluded what he had meant to write, and distorted what he would write next, and feeling all the time a nearly irresistible desire to get up, go away, postpone or abandon the whole business, so that every word was ground out only because he promised himself it was the last for that time … and yet, when he came to the end, he found he had been powerless to go and saw himself like Samson, at once tearing up pillars and at the same time, for a dizzily prolonged moment, putting out all his power to hold on his own shoulders the swaying structure which would, if it fell, engulf him with it. There was a time when he had almost had to let go, but not now – the moment grew longer and longer, the balance endured, and he was able to ignore, most of the time, his fear of failure of power.

  So he revised, with the secret smile Anna so disliked, for some hours, and was pleased with what he did. When Caroline came in with his breakfast and the second letter, lying innocently beside his plate, he was too preoccupied to notice it, and only looked up at Caroline from a long distance, snorted and waved her to put the tray on his desk beside him. Caroline stood for some moments, out of curiosity, having recognized the handwriting, but Henry made no move to open the letter.

  It was some time later that Henry reached out for his coffee and brushed against the letter. He opened it absent-mindedly, and was then reminded by the thick deckled paper and the agitated sprawling writing of the first letter, which had come two days ago and which, he now saw guiltily, he had contrived to forget. He looked at the beginning of this one – ‘Dearest Henry, Please write to me, please come, please understand –’ and put it down again. The letter brought a breath of sick air into his morning; he was reluctant to touch it. He thought for a moment and then spent some time searching through drawers and papers for the other letter, beginning in unlikely places and finding it at last in his letter rack. His coffee was cold. He could not bring himself to reread the first letter either, and put it therefore on top of the second, pressing the thick folds of both together with his green paperweight, keeping them down, burying them. For some time he stared out of his window, cupping his beard in one hand. Then he went through into the kitchen, where Caroline was rolling out pastry on a cool, rose-veined marble slab.

  She was singing to herself, withdrawn. When alone she had a private life in which she sang Mozart at Glyndebourne; each morning, over the cooking or the dishes, she would re-enact her triumph, from the arrival of the elegant audience, to whose dresses she added a new rose, a new shawl, every day, to the final aria and rapt silence which followed it. She was not too pleased to be called back from her stage, and would not be interrupted in mid phrase. She motioned to Henry to be silent, and sang calmly and tunefully to the end of her passage, whilst he paced the kitchen from door to door, and then she made him a little inclination of the head, as though he should applaud, and said, ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. That is, I don’t know if I ought to tell you.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Would you say I was kind?’

  ‘Kind?’ said Caroline. ‘I wouldn’t say you were cruel.’ Henry looked at her sharply. ‘Only not cruel? You mean, too lazy to do much harm, except perhaps by default. So, not a support to the weak, a shoulder to lean on, a very present help in trouble, the man to whom complete strangers offer their worries in trains – “Excuse me, sir, you’ll understand, you’ve got a kind face”? – That’s what they do say, but should they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Caroline with some firmness.

  ‘Maybe it’s only the size of my shoulders. Or the big soft woolly beard –’

  ‘Like God the Father,’ Caroline said, dabbing lard in little pearly knobs onto her creamy round of paste, turning this on the soft pink of the marble.

  ‘But I’m not.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Then, why?’

  ‘People think,’ Caroline said carefully, ‘that because you spend your time writing about people with insight or whatever the word is, that perhaps you care about them, or understand them –’

  ‘But I don’t?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Caroline, looking up at him. ‘It isn’t at all the same, is it? It’s a bit silly of them to think it is – I mean, they’ve only got to read your books to see that you’re not even that kind of writer – you like crises, and things that blow up and moments of truth – you don’t like people. You’re never kind to your characters, or sympathize with them, or excuse them, and make them human.’ She began to divide her paste, running over it with a fluted cutting wheel on a little handle, not looking up. She had, she thought, a shrewd idea of what was in the letter, but was reluctant to mention it until he did. She said carefully, ‘If anyone is asking you to do anything you don’t want to, you are not to. You haven’t time, it isn’t fair to ask you. People,’ she went on, probing, ‘won’t grow up and accept life as it is. They can’t cope with the fact that marriage can be boring, that it isn’t all love and companionship, it can’t be, not if a man is worth anything. They get bored, they say they aren’t fulfilled and shout for help. They should learn to sacrifice themselves. Where would you be, for instance, if I was always trying to talk to you, or “fulfilling myself” instead of coping with the bank and the grocer and the telephone? I don’t suppose I find these any more fulfilling than anyone else might. But they have to be dealt with.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry vaguely, irritated by this concept of sacrifice which had been obtruded before; he believed that it was not enough to live a life for someone else, and he didn’t want to take Caroline’s; he was nevertheless uncomfortably aware that he had accepted, so far, the sacrifice as it had been offered. He would not be answerable, he thought, for the burial of her talent, and was about to tell her so, distracted for a moment from his problem, until he saw that she was waiting for and looking beyond some such uncomprehending male reaction. He turned uneasily, not having found whatever reassurance he might have been looking for, and went back, finally, to read the second letter.

  It was shorter than the first, but they were both very long. It was difficult for some time to see what they were about, or what he was asked to do. It was to be gathered that Oliver had left, or was about to leave Margaret, and that she was begging Henry to come to her, or to Oliver, and stop him. The anguish was apparent, the writing was driven and there was little punctuation. The letter assumed, as far as he could make out, that some promise of a terrible and intimate nature had passed between Margaret and himself on the cliff-top, during the picnic two summers ago. From various references to his own ‘strong hands’ and ‘gentleness’, he made out that Margaret believed that the incident had amounted to a love scene of some kind. It was not only this, however; the appeal was also to his eminence. ‘You’re the only human being he has any respect for,’ recurred several times, and ‘you’re so much wiser and more understanding than the rest of us, you know what to do’. Interspersed with this were apparently pointless accounts of household tasks, carried out in solitude. ‘Today I filled a bucket and washed the lavatory with a brush and put some Harpic in and then I emptied the bucket and polished the table, Oliver had spilt some bacon fat when he was last home, not that he ever stays long now, I forgot to buy any butter and have to eat margarine, not that Oliver would notice, he doesn’t care what he eats at all, but one feels one is slipping, one ought to keep up, Henry, I want my life I want my life, I have a right to a life, if you don’t come and tell me what to do I shall put an end to myself, I mean that, you might think I wouldn’t because I’m scared of pain, well I am, but I’ve got some pills that just put you to sleep and kill you, Amytal, they’re called, I saw a case in the newspapers, it isn’t that I want to die, Henry, really I want a life, I want my life, I always used to think I had a life to live, but I’ve gone wrong and if you can’t put me right no one can. I may as well die just for sheer tiredness, I mean that, I love him so much but what good is love if it just turns back on you, I’m getting old, Henry, there are all sorts of things I shall never have again and I want my life before I’m dead, I want something to matter, today the milkman only left two pints and I’d expressly asked for three, I thought I could make a caramel creme for Oliver if by any chance he came back tonight but he hasn’t and if you don’t come I shall kill myself, when he does come anyway, he …’ Here followed a detailed account of sexual sadistic practices attributed to Oliver.

  Henry was alarmed. He did not know what to make of these references. Margaret was obviously confused in her mind about his behaviour and intentions. On the other hand, the descriptions were embarrassingly full and graphic. He did not know how well she could invent such things if she had not experienced them. Nor did he know how seriously to take the mention of suicide. That too was obviously thought out and had been brooded over; it was more than just a vague threat. Henry turned the pages of the letters over again and thought that they and Caroline’s resignation came to a horrid whole in his mind. He did not like even this tentative identification of himself with Oliver, but it persisted and would not be shaken. He saw other people suddenly, life after life, occupied with margarine and the milkman, pastry and the telephone, elevating these from nothing into Christian sacrifice or causes for suicide and symbols of the failure of love, and he was ashamed and afraid. Caroline’s attempt to dissuade him from ministering to what she had brought herself to consider Margaret’s weakness gave him finally the impetus in the other direction. He must try and help, however unqualified. He would find it easier to work if he could dispose of these appeals from those who did not see what he saw. He hoped it was not only that.