The Green Knight (47 page)

Bellamy pulled a huge towel out of the warm intimate cupboard and put it into Peter's hand which was stretched out through the door, ‘Thanks. I won't be a moment.'

Returning toward the bed Bellamy reverently undid the sheet and blankets on one side, folding them neatly back to invite entry. Then yielding to an irrepressible impulse, he climbed onto the bed and lay down and went to sleep.

He awoke, wondering at once how long he had slept. He thought, Clement's waiting downstairs, he'll be furious with me. He next saw Peter standing beside him. His curly hair had resumed its shining brown colour, his eyes glowed, he was smiling. He was wearing some sort of long priestly robe, a black and white kimono, he looked like a king, a god.

Bellamy rolled himself hastily off the bed, and tried to adjust the sheets and blankets. He said at once, ‘I must go now.' He added quickly, ‘I don't have to go, I'll stay with you – '

‘I am perfectly all right, do please go home. Goodbye, and thank you.'

‘We'll be in touch,' said Bellamy. A sudden terror had come to him. Something had
happened.
Was Peter, for some reason, now saying goodbye to him
forever
? Was he no longer needed, did this mean
the end
of Peter in his life?

‘Don't worry about me. I shall sleep well.' Bellamy followed him to the door, trying to think of something more to say.

Peter opened the door. He looked down at Bellamy with his glowing eyes. Then he said in a low voice, ‘
I have remembered it.
' Bellamy went through the door which closed behind him.

 

Clement was not cross with Bellamy. He even indicated a downstairs lavatory for him. Bellamy put on his shoes. They left the house in haste, accidentally banging the front door behind them. For a while Clement drove in silence, frowning. Bellamy kept turning to look at him. He wanted to say many things to Clement but was too tired and confused to decide which ones to say. When he was about to speak Clement spoke.

‘Did you notice anything odd about that house?'

‘No. It's rather grand, isn't it? I'm sorry I kept you waiting. Peter – '

‘That's all right, I spent my time exploring the place. There's something strange about it, indeed distinctly fishy.'

‘What on earth can you mean? I didn't notice anything.'

‘I did as soon as I came in. It smelt strange.'

‘I haven't any sense of smell. I don't know what you're at.'

‘That house has not been inhabited for a long time.'

‘Are you suggesting Peter just broke in – !'

‘I don't know what to suggest. It was just sort of – empty. I madly wanted something to eat, I still do. There was nothing in the larder, nothing in the fridge, no food anywhere. There was nothing lying about in the kitchen, nothing on any surface, nothing to show that anything had been cooked – '

‘Well, it's just been put away – '

‘And it was the same in all the other rooms, everything extremely neat, but no ordinary signs of human habitation. No book lying anywhere, no hat, no gloves, nothing on the floor, no writing paper, no pen, no towel in the kitchen – '

‘No towel – ' Bellamy recalled Peter's request for a towel, which had not struck him at the time as odd. But anyway, why should these things be odd?

‘It's just that the servants – there must be servants – are very meticulous, they keep things very tidy and – '

‘Tidying away all the food? Not a sign of food, not a crumb anywhere. And a more important piece of evidence – '

‘Well perhaps he has several houses, I don't know, why not, it's his business. Or perhaps he'd forgotten where the house was – '

‘Bellamy, do come and stay at my place tonight, you will, won't you – there's so much to say – Don't go back to that ghastly hole – '

‘Sorry, Clement, I must go home. I want to be by myself. Thank you and please don't drive me there, I'll go by tube, I'm sure the trains are still running – '

‘Of course I'll take you there, if you want to go there! Damn, we've been going in the wrong direction!'

‘No, no, please just drop me at the next tube station, I can easily – '

‘I don't know where the next bloody station is, I'll take you back.'

‘No, no, it's miles, Clement, please – oh look there's a taxi, it's just sitting there, I'll get it, do stop, do
please
stop – '

‘Oh all right. Have you got any money?'

‘Yes. Well, I think so – '

‘Here, take this note.'

‘Thank you – I'll – ' Bellamy jumped out. Waving he entered the taxi.

Bellamy was sorry to hurt Clement's feelings, but he so
intensely
wanted to be alone where he could confront the awful cacophony of his own feelings. A terrible thought had come to him. Peter had
twice
said, ‘I shall sleep well.' Could that mean that he intended this very night to commit suicide? His wonderful saying, ‘I have remembered it' – just that could be the very motive for suicide. Should Bellamy tell the taxi to go back? Then he realised that he had no idea where Peter's house was.

 

Clement drove the Rolls very fast through the now empty streets. He felt savagely miserable. He was extremely angry with Bellamy who had, when Clement
needed
him, refused to be with him. This night, this particular night, he wanted Bellamy to be with him. He feared to be alone with his thoughts.

So, his mystery play, which he had been so certain that he could direct and control had turned into something awful, something
newly
awful, some new
happening
which seemed like a horrible repetition of the first one. Clement could not stop believing that
Lucas had done it all
. Why had he, Clement, allowed himself to become a pawn in that vile contest between those two hateful enchanters? Confound both of them! Why had he imagined that he had to
protect
Lucas? He must have been mad. Why had he
forgiven
Lucas, if that was what he had done? He had been almost magicked into believing that Lucas had never intended to kill him at all. Why had he hung around Lucas, wished to see him when he was back? He was behaving
just as he had done as a child.
Lucas had treated him abominably when they were children, he had pinched him, punched him, put terrifying curses on him, battered his legs in the compulsory game of ‘Dogs', lied about him to their mother, knowing all the time that Clement would never accuse him, never complain. When Lucas had disappeared after the court case, Clement had been sick with anxiety! Why had he not rejoiced, thinking ‘perhaps the bloody man has killed himself and I shall be free of him at last'? But no, he could
never
have thought that. And now he had set up the ‘second event' almost frivolously. If he had not taken it over Lucas and Peter might simply have forgotten the idea. Well, they had both seemed to want it, even Bellamy saw a point in it. But of course Bellamy was waiting for a miracle, for the appearance of an angel or something! Clement should simply have let the whole thing alone. He had stupidly been unable to resist a little drama, ‘an evening in the theatre'. He had taken up Peter's words, ‘a mystery play', but really he had thought of it as a farce. He had composed those ridiculous speeches, and even uttered them, with some sort of genuine passion (but then when is an actor genuine?), while imagining that people might actually start to giggle. Surely Lucas had treated it ironically, as if he were enjoying what he had called ‘a charade'. Had Clement imagined that he could somehow
cure
them all by creating something
absurd
? Salvation by the absurd. A conjuring trick by Clement Graffe. Of course theatre is a kind of hypnosis. Clement had certainly, and instinctively, used that form of its power when, with grandiose rhetoric, almost with sincerity, he had exhorted Mir to ‘intensify' his mental state and ‘break through the cloud which obscures what he wants to remember'. Evidently Mir had succeeded in intensifying his state to a degree which deprived him of consciousness. For a moment Clement thought he had been struck by lightning. Perhaps he
had
been? What is it like when someone is struck by lightning? Was there not a lightning flash? There had been a great light and some noise. Had he begun to fall before or after the flash? Bellamy had spoken of something falling out of the sky. The whole idea of a ‘re-enactment' had been
mad,
it had been for all of them a ghastly
ordeal,
which could do no good and could do a great deal of harm. How much harm, eddying outward in fateful circles, Clement was beginning to foresee. He could still feel the grasp of Mir's strong hand upon his neck. And then this evening, taking Mir back to that weird uninhabited house, it was like a bad dream. Suddenly Clement recalled something which he had been about to tell Bellamy, only Bellamy had interrupted him. In that whole tidiedup empty-smelling place he had observed, fallen down beside the refrigerator, one piece of out-of-place disorder. It was a copy of an evening paper. Clement had picked it up. It bore a date in early July.

He parked the Rolls near his flat and went up in the lift. He entered the flat and turned on every light. He took off his overcoat and dropped it by the door. The flat was cold, the heating was out of order again. He noticed with surprise the early picture by Moy which had hung for a long time in the bedroom, but which, for some reason, he had lately moved to the sitting-room. In vivid crayon it represented a child's head, round and pale with large blue eyes, rising above a mass of flowers, perhaps lilies, while in the background a white pillar with a white ball upon it, standing upon a green line, suggested that the child was floating in a pool. He thought, the white ball is the moon, which her head is reflecting, and she is
drowning.
Why didn't I see this before? He picked up two letters which were lying on the floor. One was from his agent, the other from the little theatre in which he was supposed to be taking an interest. Both requested him to telephone. He dropped them in the wastepaper basket and turned on the electric fire. He saw his muddy footprints upon the kazakh rug. He took off his shoes and threw the rug away into a corner of the room. He sat down beside the fire. Suddenly something occurred to him.
The baseball bat.
What had happened to it? He leapt up and discovered his overcoat lying in a heap. He shook it and searched it. It wasn't there. He fruitlessly and stupidly searched the flat. When had he last had it? Lucas had asked him about it when they were waiting in the car. Clement had said that it was in the inside pocket of his coat. He remembered putting his hand in and touching it. What happened to it afterwards? He had not thought of it again till now. It must have fallen out, dropped out somehow in the disorder of the event, and be lying there in
that place,
constituting some final awful
piece of evidence.
Or – had Lucas picked it up, or even removed it somehow from Clement's coat? He now recalled that on the ‘first occasion' Lucas had taken away his wallet. And now – was it possible that Lucas, in that darkness, had actually
struck Peter again
? Clement wailed and bit his hands. Should he not now,
must
he not now, go out and
search
for it? He thought, I can kill myself, I can always kill myself. He decided that nothing could be done until the morning. The morning – oh how he dreaded it! He took several sleeping-pills and went to bed, but it was long before his terrible thoughts allowed him to sleep.

 

 

The morning came. Bellamy, who had expected to stay awake all night thinking, had in fact, after falling exhausted into his bed, slept soundly. The room was cold, a damp patch had developed over the window, he put all available blankets on top of the bed, together with all his clothes, except for his underclothes which he wore underneath his pyjamas. As he woke up, rising through a dream, his first thought was of Father Damien's letter. He particularly remembered, and repeated to himself, the words: Do not seek for God outside your own soul. He seemed to wake with those words upon his lips. And then for a short time lay, suddenly suspended, in some warm fluid, which was indeed God, the perfect love of God. But then he thought, surely God is not in my soul, I am in God's soul, or rather I am in the womb of God. Why did I never realise this before?

He was thoroughly awakened by shouting in the street. Someone banged on his window. He sat up. He thought at once, but there is no more Father Damien and no more God. He was aware of someone who was trying to reach him through a cloud. Could it be Magnus Blake? Then he remembered what had happened on the previous day. He uttered a sob. He got up and dressed quickly. He must go
at once
to Peter.
Why had he ever left him
? He could so easily have
hidden himself in the house.
Why did that obvious idea not occur to him? He could have stayed there all night, watching over Peter, he could have
saved Peter from suicide.
He must leave
at once.
But then he realised he had no idea where Peter lived, he had no notion even of the part of London, carried in cars he had paid no attention. Perhaps he would
never find Peter again.
He thought, I'll go to The Castle, perhaps the landlord knows. But perhaps if he does, Peter has told him not to tell. Then he thought, Clement must know, he must remember. But suppose he has forgotten? Bellamy pulled on his coat and ran out of the house to the nearest telephone box. It had been vandalised. He ran about looking for another one. When at last he found one he rang Clement's number but there was no answer. He continued to wander about, looking for telephone boxes, agitating his arms and talking to himself.