Authors: Julian Mitchell
At least, that’s what I felt. I’d learnt nothing myself. I was exceptional, perhaps. I hope so.
As I wandered round, one word kept coming back to me, Nicholas’s word. One might as well not be human as surrender it. Responsibility. Responsibility to oneself, one’s feelings, one’s ambitions. And to the feelings and ambitions of others. And being responsible meant one had to care and think. And I found myself caring and thinking, caring very much about Jack, and thinking that if I, and all the others of course, had only been responsible, he would never have been called a bore, never have gone through his agonies about God and woman, he’d have been accepted in the only way a man can be accepted—as another human being, as individual as everyone else, and, under the circumstances, with perhaps much more dignity and responsibility than most. And I felt very ashamed of myself for not growing up.
I don’t have anything to say now, do I, Elaine, but for once I really want to, I wish I was a poet, only a poet could tell you, but I’m not, and I have to sing, like a poet, but the words don’t worry me, the words are all mine, I tickle them along, they are free now, like me, they aren’t money in anyone’s bank, they’re the air we breathe and the bed we lie on, they’re singing away like like telephone-wires, humming the message I want to deliver, our message, at last, not the counters in some game, the symbols of success and knowledge, because I don’t have to have any more knowledge to get me along, it’s like using plates every day of your life and not noticing them, then going into a museum and seeing that plates can be beautiful and decorative and not for eating off at all, if you don’t have to. I’ve eaten off words, Elaine, but now I’m going to look at them, and listen to them, and play with them, and now I want them to set themselves down all anyhow, any crazy way they like, why should I care, we’re all singing, they are like ringing glasses all with different notes, all jangling together, like church bells gone mad, you see, all nonsense, marvellous words, because when I say I love you, those words don’t do anything, do they, they’re like blood, without them we couldn’t begin, but we don’t notice them any more, they tell us the basic facts and leave the rest to us, and we’re using them to sing, Elaine, Elaine, and they don’t have hedges and fences round them any more, not the barbed wire and the fierce Alsatians patrolling inside to keep me out, words like love, and God, and sin, and duty, and morality, and oh, words, words, they sing now, they are free, they are musical wings, they are ours, Elaine, if I was a poet it wouldn’t make any difference, I should manage them better, of course, I should make them ring and sound as they had never sounded
before, I would make them new, give them new meanings, and then you would know, Elaine, but now I can’t do that, and so what, and when you said: ‘Darling, we’ve been mad, ever so mad,’ the words leapt up off the pillow where your head was saying them, they jumped off the bed and switched on the light and did a little dance round the room, and then they picked us up and made us join them, and then off they went, out through the window, they couldn’t contain themselves, could they, oh, Elaine, and I couldn’t, I wanted to shout, I wanted to climb to the highest point in the world and shout out the news like a muezzin in the morning, I wanted the world to know, but I wouldn’t have said anything at all, I should just have given a great laugh, a huge grin, a shattering rumble of laughter, like a great belch or a cannon splitting its sides, and there would have been so many astonished faces, and they would have looked up, and they would have said: ‘Look at that man, he’s laughing,’ and they would have started laughing
themselves,
they wouldn’t have been able to stop, the whole world would have had a fit of the giggles, and then it would have got worse, and better, they’d have stopped giggling and they would have looked at each other with sudden smiles, and they’d have laughed from deep down, from right down there, where the life comes from, from their loins and their places of love, miles down inside them, the laughter would have burst out, convulsing them, overwhelming them, setting their heads spinning with happiness, their eyes like marbles rolling in the sun, sparkling in the gutters, their tears pouring down their cheeks like great transparent pebbles, and falling to the ground and shaking together, because that was all we needed, the great soul-shaking laugh, the laugh of the secret places of love, the bellow from the heart of man, the joyous bellow of love, the goodness and truth of it, oh, I can hardly sit here and write to you, I want to go out and laugh, it’s all too much, too wonderful and good and singing, oh, Elaine, all this from the little blueprint, the faint shadowy lines of ‘I love you’, look what I’ve built, a tower and a man and the world shaking with laughter and love! Oh, Elaine, I didn’t know what I was doing, I don’t understand for a moment, I never shall, I don’t think, I don’t care, what does it matter, how can anyone ever understand, it’s a revelation, a miracle, a great tonguing of men like angels, a
consuming
joy, oh, anything you like to call it, and while it was happening, I was talking to you, and I don’t know what I was saying, I was arguing away, I expect, but my mind was saying to me,
like a mother to a fractious child: Come on now, darling, come on, it’s time to get ready, stop playing around, come along, my love, it’s time to go home now, time to put the toys away, to stop all this childish nonsense, you won’t be needing all that any more, come along, there’s something much better for you, it’s waiting for you to stop playing, and I could hear my voice saying: He’s got
something
there, now what is it, it must be something to do with Father Gibbons, and my mind was saying: Listen to him, he goes on like a machine, but we know the answer, don’t we? We have it here, if he’ll only stop talking, and suddenly my mouth stopped and my heart began, does that sound too silly for you, Elaine, is it all right for us to talk like that, but my heart began, and it said: Elaine, and we didn’t have to do anything more, did we, we knew where we were, and all the voices were silent, because the noise of the singing drowned all the speeches. Oh, Elaine, I said that I’m sure I said that, but I didn’t hear myself, I didn’t hear you, and you were so like me, you didn’t ask any questions, you didn’t pretend you didn’t understand, we understood, didn’t we, oh, Elaine, if we always understand, we must, it’s the perfect, the only, the true, the good, it’s you and me, and we aren’t Jack and Elaine, we’re a new person called Elainejack and Jackelaine, and there, there’s a lovely joke the words have played, and I never meant it, really I didn’t, they just came out like that, we shall call our daughter Jacqueline, we must have a daughter to remind ourselves always that we’re not Jack and Elaine, but Jacqueline, you see what happens when you let them sing by themselves, they tell you things you’ve not thought of, they make little jokes, I never knew, Elaine, I’ve never been able to know, I’ve been very strict with my words, I’ve kept them down, I’ve been stern and said: ‘Into the corner, no laughing in class,’ but now it’s holidays for ever for the words, they can play tag all their lives, did you ever play tag, and did you have those counting-games, and the rhymes for picking people out to be It, and I’ve forgotten words could play games like that, lovely
nonsense,
with the finger poking out of the middle at It, and It is our love now, Elaine, don’t you think that’s a nice idea, I feel exalted tonight, though there’s nothing to say, why do I write to you, Elaine, because I shan’t see you till tomorrow, and it’s that already, so why, but I do, I sit in these shabby old rooms, and I’ll still be sitting here next year, but it will have been a year of nonsense, and brilliant sense, how long did it take me to learn, you always knew, I’m sure you did, you knew it would come out all right, you waited
and I worried, and panted along, trying to find the clues, and then I realized, oh so suddenly, there weren’t any clues, no footprints, no broken branches, it was everywhere, you were everywhere, and it was with you, Elaine, and it didn’t have anything to do with Charles and Father Gibbons, and what started it off was Charles, but no more, it was like having all the pieces in a puzzle set in the right order, but they won’t quite fit, and then suddenly seeing it, slipping the last piece in, and the puzzle all fitting together at once, and it’s like doing a puzzle, too, because you can see the end coming you know what the picture’s going to be, but you have to go on, fitting the bits together, to do the thing properly, and that was like me, I knew the answer, but I had to fit all the bits together first, so I went on talking, you see, Elaine, and all the time my mind was saying: Come along home, it’s time to go, leave the puzzle alone, you’ve done it now, you know the answer, but I had to finish it, and then, oh, Elaine, I’m mad this evening, I must be, I’m raving like a lunatic, it’s wonderful, I must be like this for the rest of my life. And what shall I say to Father Gibbons, I don’t know, I shall tell him, I shall try and tell him all about it, but he won’t understand, he’ll say: It’s a sin, and I shall say: No, you’re so wrong, you don’t understand, and he’ll get very angry, and say that it is, and I shall say: No, it’s not, really it’s not, and he’ll think I’ve gone mad, but I haven’t, not really, I’m suddenly sane, and how it happened I don’t know, Elaine, and I shan’t understand, not ever, though I want to, and I think I know, I think it was Charles, with his telling me, I can’t remember what, it seems a year ago at least, it wasn’t at all, how crazy the world is getting, but he said something, about me, I think it was, something about me not daring to be myself, did he say that, hiding, being more
conventional,
he may have said that, I wish I knew, but it doesn’t matter, really, does it, and I was myself when I hit him, that helped, too, quite suddenly I couldn’t do anything at all, and I hit him, and I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to hurt him at all, I just wanted him to stop talking and making things worse, because when you came out with him like that, I suddenly despaired, I thought things would never be right, he couldn’t help it at all, it wasn’t his fault, he was just so much better than me in all the things that count, except one, except your love for me, Elaine, but I couldn’t think of that then, I thought even that might have gone, and I couldn’t bear it, and it wasn’t him I was hitting, it was the whole topsy-turvy world that wouldn’t let me alone to be myself,
because I’ve always known that I could be myself and beat
everyone,
if only I could get through, I could walk without shame and worry, if only I could get through, and I was all bogged down, and I didn’t know why, I’ve always felt slightly, just slightly, ashamed with people like Charles, because they have so many things they don’t understand, I’ve known you loved me, but it must have been much easier to marry someone like him than someone like me, he’s so lazily correct in everything, so widely, what’s the word, dance, words, dance, oh, they’re all away playing hopscotch, cultured, perhaps that’s the word, he has the air of being
cultivated,
that’s better, he’s been grown on the best piece of garden, with the richest dung and the best fertilizers, he’s been weeded, been tied up with sticks, to grow straight, he’s a fine blossom from the finest garden in England, and I’m not, I’m the sort that grew from an odd seed sown near the coal-hole, oh, a joke of a sort there, not very funny, an odd seed which grew without anyone noticing it very much, no one to tie it up to a stick, and then they did notice, they said: He’ll never be as good as the ones we’ve cared for, not the ones we’ve nursed from the beginning, but he’ll do as a nice piece of contrasting background, for the star attraction, and all this is absurd, really, but you see what I mean, Elaine, and, anyway, I wanted to say that flowers, me and Charles, are just as good as each other, it depends how you judge them, the more exotic the less likely to last, the more leaf the less blossom perhaps, I don’t know, I’m not a gardener, but the standard for flowers has been fixed, and if someone comes along and says: No, I don’t like these great big blooms at all, they’re horrid, I don’t care how much they have been fertilized and hybridized, how many generations of nurserymen have worked to produce them, give me the small natural flower any day, if someone came along and said that, there’d be a rumpus, and he’d be asked to leave the Royal
Horticultural
Hall, and please not to say things like that again, or he’ll be had up for libel against the great body of industrious and patriotic flower-growers of the country, who have put a great deal of hard work into producing big blossoms, and they won’t have it called pointless and the blossoms ugly by anyone, and now go home and think about it, and you will soon, I am sure, come to the correct conclusion, which is, Big Blossoms are Best and Most British, do you see, Elaine, do you see, and I could never be like Charles, you can’t train a man to act like him unless you get him very young, and put him through the right schools and the right
regiments and the right colleges at the right universities, and I could never be like him, and he doesn’t really understand why not, he thinks everyone is basically like him, and that’s true, but he thinks they all assume the same things, too, which isn’t, all I can be, could be, could have been, is what he accused me of, accepting, being glad to pick up the crumbs of social recognition that came my way, being patronized, and all the more because I loved you, and you, for some extraordinary reason, loved me too, and that made it all the more tempting to ape the manners, without ever being able to do more than ape, but being accepted because of you, Elaine, and the more I think about it, the more intolerable it would have been, but it won’t be like that, not now, Charles didn’t know it, but he made me see where the last piece went in the jigsaw, and I suddenly saw how it all came out, and suddenly saw all the business I’d been through, trying to be as good as Father Gibbons, trying to accept your Church, when it’s nothing to do with me at all, Oh I believe in God, I suppose, in a something somewhere, but vaguely, very vaguely, I always have, that was why it was so easy for Father Gibbons to get me, I had a natural, a muddled, belief he could work on, enough for him to construct a weighty theology and his own morality, but nothing to do with me, ever, all that superstructure, I just had a basic belief, and I still have it, he hasn’t driven it out, it’s not got much to do with Christ, in fact I don’t think I’ll ever go to church again, unless you want me to, for our wedding, I suppose, and for things like that, but nothing else, my God is quite different, he’s the man who suddenly makes the whole world laugh, my God doesn’t believe in original sin, he thinks original sin is all nonsense, he wants people to be happy, he doesn’t exist in landscapes or beautiful pictures or
anything,
either, I’m not a pantheist, he’s just a feeling you get
sometimes,
a feeling that it doesn’t matter what happens, be happy, if you possibly can, and if you can’t, be yourself and see what happens, live, that’s what my God says, you can’t be yourself and be unhappy all the time, and you can’t be unhappy all the time and be yourself, he wants us to be, goodness, Elaine, I’m writing a sermon, he wants us to exist for each other all night, oh dear, I meant all right, but both, oh yes, he wants us to be happy together, I don’t think he likes hermits much, he thinks hermits are rather sad and failed human beings, but then my God is only just coming through to me, and at the moment his doctrine is terribly vague, as vague as my belief, and it certainly won’t stand up to Father