Picus
On the same night Picus went out, also alone and in a clearing among trees. English yews, black and untidy with their shoots that are never young, a yard of rusty twig, old as a house-high lime or beech.
The space was diversified with the stone boxes of a country churchyard. Dressed for Piccadilly, Picus was lying face-down on his mother’s grave, on turf not dew-sown, but rain-sodden, overlooked by a sugar-white marble angel carrying an urn. He was telling the stalks and the worms and a snail how he loved her, and resented her death, and was troubled by its mystery.
“Pretty mother, why did you do it?”
“Why did that tart matter?”
“What did you want me to do?”
“Why do I hate all women?”
Once Nanna had made him ill when he had heard her say: “What did Mrs. Tracy mean by drowning herself with Mr. Picus a boy, and his father taking his child to the inquest and saying it was suicide?”
And Scylla’s answer: “People went in for sensibilities then.” Blaming his mother. Now he’d see if she had any. He grasped the turf mound and tried to shake it. Get mother out and make her tell him what had really happened and that he must never make anyone suffer as she had suffered. That was like his father and he must never be like his father—The marble parody of a nymph went on offering him an urn. He tried to see if the lid would come off, but it was all in one meanly designed, badly chiselled piece. His father with his impeccable taste had stuck it up on purpose. Fattened on his son’s hatred. Had used the cup to make him wicked. To lose him the people who comforted him. Would go on living forever. The wires of the rust tin flower-box caught his cuff. Rain water in it, and no flowers. Can’t go daisy-hunting at midnight in the rain. That’s all mother had, an empty tin box with the rain in it and no flowers. He did not count his six feet of young man flung there.
“You’d no business to go off and leave me like that. Gives me nothing to do but want you back. Just for a minute to tell me something: put kick into me again. Mummy, don’t you see: you gave the old boy the game? You were so much prettier: might have stayed and seen me through. Now you’ve made me be a bitch.”
He sat there weeping and considering how he had been a bitch and couldn’t stop. Didn’t know how to find old Clarence and Scylla again and love them and see that they loved him. Clarence now. One of his suspicions was that the change in Clarence was his fault. Why wasn’t it entirely the man’s own fault if he chose to go gaga and mope about like a frustrated hen? Funny. They used to call Clarence a bit too handsome, like a super-chorus-boy. Now you might say like a butler with a past. Tell him that. Now Felix beginning to act like a toad. Good old Carston. And great Ross. Hats off to Ross, doing nothing at all but what he had to. He remembered their old conviction that Ross had some sort of stable tip in invisible affairs. “Won’t tell. Says we can look at his pictures.”
“We should have been all right together, Scylla and I, and now the sight of her scares me stiff. Lovely and witty, and decent and passionate and kind. There’s a figure that stands sentinel before her. I can’t see its face. Not a chap you’d care to meet. If I looked at him, he’d go.”
“These things matter a devil of a lot, and they don’t matter at all.”
“Scylla’s a darling. Want my Scylla.”
“Mother, why can’t I have Scylla?”
The angel went on holding the urn. He kicked the turf till a sod tore off. A glowworm turned its back on him. By infinite degrees the green gem moved off.
“And for half a minute I thought that cup had come to light us up a bit.” He whistled “Waiting for the Moon to Rise.”
“And it was the old man after all!”
“And Carston shan’t have Scylla if he does call the old man’s bluff.”
He had the usual difficulty in extracting the glowworm from the grass.
“Go and light up mummy’s tomb.” He stuck it round the knob of the urn, where it fell off. He kicked the muffled earth that squelched, the tears pouring down, till he found a cache of pebbles under his heel and pelted the marble female in the thick dark, and then he had another idea, and with a handful in his pocket went across, round and over the graves, to a low, unlighted house, and tossed them up against a window. A head poked out:
“What’s that?”
“Me.”
“Come in, my dear boy, come in.” An old man in a nightshirt opened his front-door and let him in.