He was staggered. He wanted to ask a hundred questions, but he didn’t even know what they were; his first impulse, in the face of this amazing testimony of hers, was to shake it, to question it, to take it to pieces.
“Who was I with?”
“I don’t know; I didn’t recognise the other voice… it was low, and – and – sort of sweet, honey-like, persuasive; but I didn’t hear anything it said clearly, just the tone of it.”
“And what was I saying? I don’t remember a thing of this, Liz, not anything… what did I say?”
She told him as much as she could remember; and as she spoke, he felt the most extraordinary sensation. It was like those hints and half-memories which had plagued him before, but much sharper and more distinct: it was like seeing his own image in a mirror act and move about with a will of its own.
Yes, it
was
he who’d said that, without a doubt. It was coming back now like a dream he’d totally forgotten. He sighed.
“Thank God for that. Even though I seem to be cracked in the head…”
He closed his eyes.
And almost immediately he opened them again, and sprang to his feet. He beat his fist into his palm, and walked rapidly up and down.
“Liz! That room – the one I woke up in!”
She nodded, staring at him intently.
“And Alan’s room – that day I went to see him and we went up to his room, and it seemed familiar, as if I’d seen it a long time ago and forgotten it – it was the same room!”
He put his hands to his head and rocked back and forth, trying desperately to remember.
“It’s coming back, little bits of it; it came on in the train, the headache, I mean, and I remember thinking – wondering if I’d get to Barton in time. And then, at the bus station, waiting for a bus – I lay down on the bench, that’s right – or was that later on? And then going very quickly – almost running – you know in a dream when you’re running, and you can just lift your legs up and seem to glide along without falling? I was going through the streets like that, with someone… I climbed some stairs, too. I’m almost certain about that.”
He sat down beside her, staring out over the grass and seeing nothing.
“Perhaps Alan met you, then,” she said. “Perhaps he saw you were ill, and took you back to his room. And when you woke up in the morning, he’d gone off to work, or something, and you couldn’t remember where you were…”
“He’d have left a note, though, surely…”
“Not necessarily. No, in fact, he wouldn’t, knowing Alan. And when you went there with him – did he seem to expect you to recognise it?”
“I don’t know! Oh, Liz, it’s maddening – but of course I wasn’t looking for it, so he may have done – at any rate, he didn’t say anything.”
They said nothing for a while; and then he lay down again, and put his head in her lap.
“And so if you didn’t do it,” she said, “Alan can’t have done it either. Not if he was there to take you to his room.”
“But the body wasn’t discovered till the next afternoon, though. He’d have had plenty of time to get to Barton, and do it, and go back – or go anywhere in the country, almost – by then. So it could have been him. And whether or not it was him I was talking to in the field, he was certainly in the village the second time. But no: it’s quite impossible. Alan wouldn’t, and that’s that. Quite honestly, I’d suspect your father before Alan.”
She started, and he thought she was going to protest. But she only said: “Yes; yes, I think I would too.”
“It’s strange – you know, it’s no clearer now. The whole thing of morality and the world – it’s just as dark. So –” he sat up, excited – “good! That’s clear, then, I was beginning to wonder if it was only my guilt that was obscuring everything: but it’s not! It’s still there!” He was speaking louder and louder, and Elizabeth moved a little away from him, smiling at his vehemence. He pounded the earth with his fists. “I still don’t know a thing about it! And I can get on with looking; oh, thank God for that! It
is
absolute! The questions are in the world itself, and not in me!”
*
If it happened again, they decided, Elizabeth would watch him to see what he did. And they decided to go to the well, to see whether it illuminated anything.
Matthew felt such an overwhelming rush of love for her, then, that he felt tears come to his eyes. It was the tender erotic feeling of her smile on the beach; and this time he obeyed it, and took her in his arms.
It consisted, first, of strangeness. It was the fact that her body was unknown.
And secondly it was the eagerness, the readiness, with which she responded.
Most of all, however, it was the feeling that they were doing something as impersonal as the wind and the hills. There was absolutely no trace, no shred or shadow, of
personality
in their kisses and the movements of their hands.
It was sex at the ideogram stage, the paradox stage, underneath the first meaning and the stage of images. There was a storm imprisoned in them, Matthew thought –
– but again, no, he was wrong. The storm was imprisoned in matter itself. That bank, that double ditch, shook and trembled with it – on the edge of it – as completely as he did. And there was no point in denying that the sky did, and the grass, and the folded hills.
He stopped after a minute and lay quiet and still. He had not come to a climax: he had not even entered her. They were still fully clothed.
“I’m
using
you, my Liz,” he said. “I’m not concerned with your pleasure in the least. I’m feeding my will again.”
He sat up and turned to look at her.
“You’ll give in,” she said. “I could make you give in now if I wanted to. I could take my dress off – it wouldn’t take a moment. You think I’m in your power, Matthew, but you’re in mine! That’s the truth of it.”
He shook his head, slowly at first, and then, seeing her smile, with more conviction.
“No, I’m not. You could take everything off and entice me as much as you liked, but I wouldn’t move. No, I wouldn’t. Because I’ve just seen another bit of truth in it; sex is no different from anything else. It’s the world, the same as the grass is; it’s – here goes language again. It’s the same as everything; that’s all I can say. And now that I’ve seen that, and now that I realise it as intensely as I do, you won’t catch me with it.”
He laughed, and much to her own surprise she did too.
“But quite soon,” he said, “I daresay I will give in… Of course I will. Probably today, at that.”
And she laughed again.
“You’re a gross sensualist,” she said. “You want to wallow in every single feeling that comes your way, even the feeling of putting-off and doing-without. It’s a good thing I can see through you.”
He put his hand gently on her stomach, and caressed it under the dress. Was there anything, in truth, that he wouldn’t wallow in, as she put it? Only laziness, and hopelessness, and inefficiency. He kissed her again.
*
Elizabeth was conscious of an oceanic rhythm in her flesh and her soul. It was accelerated, or slowed down, by the appearance of expression in the world.
For instance, Matthew’s face: effort, and power. And her father: knowledge… her father was obscure to her, and ringed by obsessive questions. She knew quite matter-of-factly of his distinct vivid curiosity about her, and knew that it was sexual in origin. She knew it as clearly as she did because he didn’t know it at all, and couldn’t hide it. It was another channel, another river-bed, a creek that the salt world-water flooded when the tide was high. And it was hidden from her mother and hidden from Matthew, too. She guarded it calmly.
She was a landscape, as clear and unequivocal as a painting by Tanguy. The expression of it now was passive, and better so, much better and purer so.
It was expressed in consciousness, by being conscious. She could revel in the nakedness of it, of feeling at one point Matthew’s urgency and self-absorption, at another her father’s world-system erect like a tower, and at another Gwen’s sexual-maternal self-tormenting… They might think that they acted on each other and intermeshed and altered things, but she knew that in between them all, in between each and every organism and structure in the world, her consciousness lay like a fluid light. Nothing touched anything. The uterine medium of her knowledge held them distant from one another, and rapt and unconscious of the fact; and it worked at them endlessly, smoothing, cleaning, bathing and washing them through and through, again and again, on the sandy floor of the world, herself.
This is all new to me, she thought, and yet there’s nothing I remember that wasn’t like this. Holding Matthew’s face in her hands: he was passionate and clear… yes, she could enter that sensation as easily as falling asleep, or waking up. What Matthew was, she loved; she chose to. She was chosen to; it was the same thing. There was no place where she ceased to exist; that was it…
He saw, for he was clairvoyant, and he saw everything. He could see her, now, quite clearly, and see the extent and the depth of her.
A small shock, like a tremor or a ripple, passed through her. The landscape was altered infinitesimally, and settled without a murmur or a breath into its new outline.
*
An afternoon was enough.
The air was thick with evening when they began to make their way home. On the right, in a mass of scarlet, crimson, and salmon-pink, the sun was setting; and possibly because of this concentration of redness in the upper atmosphere, the warmer layers of air below and the gradually-forming mist along the surface of the fields and valleys were tinted with a lush, thrilling green, its complement. It was so thick that it could hardly be accounted for by the chlorophyll in the plants alone; it was ethereal, and seemed to subsist in the molecules of the air itself as much as in the leaves and shoots that sprouted from the ground.
They walked along, their bodies close to one another, occasionally touching or stopping to kiss. She had gone to sleep earlier on, and had woken up to see him staring at her calmly like a Sphinx. The sexual current between them was barely contained. She had turned over on to her back, slipping her dress off her shoulders and down around her waist, aware of her power. She had rejoiced to see him quiver. His expression had not changed at once: but gradually he seemed to go pale, and the quality of intentness in it changed from being unconscious to being conscious, awake, and striving. She was just a little disconcerted; because instead of making him vivid and animal-like, the reaction she expected, it had the effect of making him appear more and more abstracted and in the end unreal, like a saint in an icon. She’d thought that no-one could match Alan for coldness. But his younger brother would overtake him, in the end; he was still growing, and he would not stop. And then the air felt chilly on her skin, and she did the dress up… She’d wait until he was ready.
An afternoon of it was enough for him. The world was now feverish, languid, and voluptuous. He saw something stirring on a head of cow-parsley, and stopped to look. A pair of slim copper-coloured beetles were performing with pain-evoking slowness their clumsy ritual of love. And its nature, or its meaning – which is to say its effect on him – was that of mist or a veil.
But that was the nature of everything; he knew that well enough. And he knew, now, that mist was meant to be dispersed, veils to be rent… But tear them away, and you found another mystery at the heart of it, a greater mystery than the veil and the glorious atmospheric colourings of the mist.
Suddenly a spasm of sheer disgust shook him bodily. Alan was right. The surface of the world, and the intricate tracery of relationships and delicate meanings that enmeshed it through and through, even the subtle exotic beauty of the sky and the fields were – there was only one word for it – vulgar.
And the poetic level underneath, the level of correspondences and representations and images and symbols, was even more vulgar and twice as deceitful, because it pretended to provide a universal truth, and a world-wide sense of order and harmony; but it was a network of lies, one leading into the other, melting and coalescing and forming mazes and systems of quicksands and disappearing pathways.
As for the ultimate level (no! that was not true either: rather, the furthest he could reach), that –
meant
nothing…
He slowed his pace gradually and came without realising it to a halt. And a dialogue ran within him:
(Do you expect it to mean anything?)
No; I
demand
that it does.
(You’ll have to invent it, then).
No. There is a meaning, and I’ll find it.
(But you can’t even describe it; and better men than you have looked in vain).
I shall find it.
(No, no; for the world is beautiful. Isn’t that enough? You’ll relish it at last, and grow sick of the struggle…And look, now, Elizabeth is getting cold, you’re keeping her waiting…)
To hell with her; and the world is never beautiful. It’s a lie; and I relish it less and less. I shall pierce it to the heart, and break the window, and get out.
(That’s a childish dream, a fantasy, a romantic longing; come back to the world, and back to love. Love is real and important; it’s adult and responsible. There’s the real challenge: take love, and make of it a great thing, a marvellous and lasting paradise… take what’s in the world, and make that immortal!)
It would be immortal corruption and the eternal chatter of apes. It would be a sublimity of untruth and a paradise of leering decay –
(What of the murdered children? And the Jews? What of the suffering of all the innocent people in the world? The tears of that girl in the wood ran down over her cheeks in floods, and wet the murderer’s hands. And when he lifted them to his face in horror they were wet with tears from wrist to fingertip, and the cuffs of his shirt were wet. Tears, tears; and how can your pride and your dreams alleviate them? Dry one tear on a girl’s cheek, or calm the panic in one child’s heart, and that will be enough to live for).
“Matthew,” she said, taking him gently by the arm, “you’re frightening me, looking like that. Come now, love, it’s getting cold. It’s a long way to go yet.”