VI
Tea was a reasonable meal, with a real human being at it, the doctor having come over from Starn to attend to Picus’s health. Carston held his attention, improvising brilliantly on aspects of his native land, wondering if he could interpret Scylla’s cordiality into the beginnings of desire. Quick work, he knew, but life in the infernal stillness was going at a pace that had New York beat. It became the doctor’s turn to talk. Carston noticed how they played in turns, the second guest after the first. “Pass the buns,” said Felix. That was the cue. Carston listened to stories of medical practice in a remote district; after a time to an accompaniment he did not at first locate. Later that it was Picus ringing with a spoon on his medicine glass.
The doctor said:
“I don’t wonder you two left Tollerdown. It’s a cheerless place at best. I only knew it in winter, going out there to deliver the shepherd’s wife. So I think of it as the darkest place that exists.”
Scylla answered: “I know. Even now when it is burnt white. I think of it the only time I was there in winter, in a storm. Wind roaring over the flint-crop and snow whirling. Lying an instant and vanishing.”
Ross said: “Be prepared for lambing—You hear them mewing in the dark, and see a light in a wooden box on wheels, and out comes a shepherd, with his hands covered with blood.”
The doctor said:
“Show me the cup you got out of the well.” And when he had looked at it: “The luck of the country’s with you. I’m glad to find a few Roman pots. It isn’t glass at all, too heavy. I think it’s jade. It may have been set once. I tell you, it might have been the cup of a chalice.” Intelligent interest. Carston felt quite friendly now towards the thing. The others were giving polite attention. Five people at once thinking about a spear. No, six. He was.
“One has time to remember things, shooting about this country in a Ford. Do you know it makes me think of what I remember of the cup of the Sanc-Grail?”
Picus said, meekly: “What was that?”
Carston thought: How was that camp, or wasn’t it? Would one of them pick up the challenge? Of course, it was a challenge. Ross said: “That’s a long story,” but Scylla leaned forward, excited, and said: “The best way to get that story out is for everyone to say what he thinks or feels or remembers. The Freud game really. Start, Felix!”
“Tennyson,” said Felix.
“Oh, my dear,” said Clarence, “those awful pre-Raphaelite pictures put me off it long ago.”
Ross said: “A mass said at Corbenic.”
“Wagner,” said the doctor.
“A girl carrying it,” said Carston, staring at Scylla and trying to play.
Scylla said: “Quod inferius, sicut superius est.”
Picus said: “You haven’t told me much.”
“Second round,” said Scylla—“people enlarge on what they said before.”
“I said Tennyson,” said Felix, “because I hate the Celtic Twilight. And nearly all its works. I hate it because it’s a false way of telling about something that exists. No, a messy way. Responsible for the world’s worst art. Now and then it nearly comes off. Milton left it alone, and I don’t blame him. Tennyson made it idiotic with his temperance knights. Fixed it, too, enough for parody. Killed the unstated thing which I don’t mind telling you scares me.”
Clarence said: “I agree with Felix. I can’t stand bad drawing.”
Ross said: “At Corbenic, wherever that was, there was a different mass. It may have been the real thing.”
The doctor said: “Parsival is like a great religious service to me.”
Carston, embarrassed at his turn coming, saw their pained faces. He said: “I supposed the girl who carried it was the female spirit of life.”
Scylla said: “I quote again: ‘Here lies the Woodpecker who was Zeus.’ ”
“Thank you,” said Picus.
Later, Carston asked her to take him for a walk. The doctor went with them to the gate, and she asked him what he thought about Picus’s health.
“Everything is wrong, and nothing,” he said.—“I don’t mean by that that he invents it. His aches and pains are a mask that conceals something. What that is, I’ve never been able to find out—”
“Does Clarence know?”
“I shouldn’t care myself to know too much about Picus. Despair’s a bad bedfellow.”
Scylla said: “We know what despair is.” As if she were saying that she knew how to take a temperature. Carston went with her down the wood to the sea. Twenty-four hours before he had been alone with her for the first time. Alone with her the second time, he was almost in pain because he wished to use the moment, and did not know how. The more he planned the less he’d be able to do, who had rarely failed with women. Now the sun struck aslant, the light-chequers broadened into patches. It was damp and delicious. The evening birds were tuning up. A little sympathy is generally judicious.
“I took a walk this morning with your brother. He seemed troubled by what you found yesterday. Even now, after the talk at tea, I’m not clear what it is all about.”
Not a hint of his sex had crossed her mind. An American boy, very polished and friendly. No reason not to tell him anything there was to tell.
For the third time Carston heard the sentence: “That’s a long story. You must help me to explain.”
He answered: “You said two things at tea. The Latin bit, which means, I think, that the things underneath are the same as the things on top. And something I don’t get at all: ‘Here lies the Woodpecker who was Zeus.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Then you said another thing—you said that you all knew what despair is. How can that be true?”
Scylla said: “Well, I take it that we have to know everything about being lost.”
Lost. He did not get that. If ever there existed a group sure of themselves. He mentioned it.
“Swank,” she said, “and instinct. To cover quite intolerable pain. You see we know between us pretty well all there is to know. That’s why we rag all the time. To keep things clean, and because it’s the only gentlemanly thing to do. We have our jokes, our senses, and our moments of illumination which always take a turn for the worse. See? We live fast and are always having adventures, adventures which are like patterns of another adventure going on somewhere else all the time. A very different sort of affair, a state suggested if you like in a good work of art. The things down here seem hints of it, but there is nothing to make us sure that it is a reality. Let alone that it is worth what it costs us. Quite the contrary. We get into trouble over it, it runs after us, runs away from us, runs away with us, makes fun of us and fools of us. Because of it we have no money, and the wrong lovers, and our instinct for power is starved. For we come of families which have never been without power before. And the name for all this is our subconscious minds. And between Freud and Aquinas, I’ve managed to tell you about it completely wrong. For another of its names is intellectual beauty, and another, the peace of God.”
“D’you believe in God?”
“I don’t know. All we do know is what happens to faith based on catch-as-catch-can visions.”
“Weren’t all religions based on that?”
“They were, and look at them! But now you see why we felt we were being laughed at, dangerously, when we lifted that cup out of a well on the point of a spear?”
Carston pulled himself together. “What did you mean by the other thing: ‘Here lies the Woodpecker who was Zeus’?”
“A little poetry, a little witchery, a little joke. It’s the same thing as I said before. Now I’ll tell you something worse than what I said before.
“Along with faith fit for people like us, and good taste which are where morals end, there is no goodwill left anywhere in the world. Which started to go first, or if they all went together, or which pushed the other out, I don’t know. I’ve an idea that something else, a principal we haven’t named yet, got rid of the lot.”
Beginnings for an erotic conversation.
A turn of exasperation seized him. She was leaning on the red arm of a pine tree which stood by itself outside the wood, a crooked blue mushroom moulded by the wind. The scent from its cap mixed with the smell of wind off the tide-stripped rocks.
“Now you see why that cup upset Felix? If it is anything, it is only a Celtic mass-cup. And that, perhaps, is not certain. I don’t think you do see. As Felix would say: ‘I don’t blame you.’ But an American poet said: ‘Memory, you have the key.’ ”
“I have no memories,” said Carston.
“We are all wishing we hadn’t; because memory produces imagination, and imagination is a state by itself. Memory was the Muses’ mother, and the muses are nine names of the imagination. I told you you’d see some fun. Now I must go over to the coastguards and order a car. We want to take you somewhere tomorrow. See the thunder clouds banking up? I must get back before the rain.”
Carston thought: Getting rid of me. In an instant she would be off like a hare. He said:
“Stay a minute. Maybe it’s because I have no memories, but I don’t see where the fun comes in.”
“Don’t you call it fun to watch how violently, strangely and in character people will behave? Watch Ross, watch Clarence. Watch me.” He was watching her. Green, pointed feet in plaited shoes, bare arms, pointed breasts under a dress full of air. Blow away the morning dew. That was remembering something. Like open fir-cones dipped in fire and cream, the thunderclouds were piling up the sky. Mounting the hills, a wing of them rising out of the sea. Inshore, a breath of wind clashed the pine needles.
Another memory.
Love only me.
Donna Lombarda.
Love only me.
Love only me. Because the tune was what the needles brushed out, and the words the wish that made his body ache.
“Can I come with you?”
She looked at him candidly. She wanted to be alone. “I must go to the farm as well; I do the housekeeping at this time. It’s a hot flat walk. The others have gone down to the rocks to fetch a driftwood log. If you liked to help them to get it up. It’s bleached white, and when it burns it will go up in blue and green sparks.” He saw that there was something pathetic in the way they made a game of their poverty.
“I’ll go to them,” he said, “but you haven’t explained what the American poet meant when he said that memory had the key?” She had moved away from him.
“He said:
Mount. …
Put your shoes at the door,
Sleep, prepare for life.
And called it: The last twist of the knife. Adieu.”
The log, as he expected, was large and most unwilling to be moved; the cliff-path more a gesture in broken clay than an ascent.
He saw her in his mind, dew blowing away over burnt, empty grass towards a formidable other world, its edges drawn in fire, the thunderclouds now halfway across the sky.
Before dinner, he remembered the library, the middle room of the house. Alone there, he looked for something, not Tennyson, to enlighten him. He found a book, and sat in a window with it. Presently he noticed the entrance, one after the other, of Clarence, Felix, and Ross, and that they all went, reticently but eventually, to the same gap in the shelves.