Jackson's Dilemma Page 6

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I shall stay at Penn-would you like to come over for lunch, or well now, for dinner?’

  ‘No, no. I may go to London. Thank you for your visit.’

  Benet drove his car, a rather elderly Rover, back to Penndean. The sunshine, the quietness of the countryside, the beauty of trees and flowers made him ready to weep. He had done nothing for Edward, he had come to him simply to pour out his own anguish. He had so passionately wanted Edward to be, as it were, his son-in-law, as Marian was, as it were, his daughter. Now, it came to him more and more clearly, he had lost both of them, and for ever. And nothing at Penn would ever be the same again.

  When he reached the house he found a car before the front door, Owen’s glossy blue Volvo. As he opened the door he heard voices in the drawing room.

  ‘Oh here he is! Benet, I’m carrying off Mildred - we were waiting for you - where have you been?’

  Owen and Rosalind had emerged into the hall.

  ‘Won’t you stay for lunch,’ said Benet, ‘won’t you stay the night -?’

  ‘Well, no, sorry - we thought you would be going to London, back to -’

  Mildred was coming down the stairs carrying a suitcase.

  ‘Benet dear, will you be all right? Shall we stay? The house is-’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ said Benet. ‘I’ll probably come back to town tomorrow. Let me help you with the luggage.’

  ‘It’s all packed now I think,’ said Owen, taking the case from Mildred. They were anxious to go. Benet followed them out into the sunshine.

  ‘Where’s Tuan?’ said Benet. He had forgotten the young fellow’s existence.

  ‘He ordered a taxi to take him to the station—’

  ‘That’s miles away -- ’

  ‘We offered but he was in a terrible hurry, and we weren’t ready -’

  ‘Well, see you soon - I’m sorry - that you have had this dismal—’

  ‘We are all in the same grief,’ said Mildred. ‘Perhaps we shall suddenly find her running back.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Owen. ‘Thank you, dear Benet, for - well, thank you -’

  Mildred put her suitcase into the boot and after Owen climbed into the big car, she wound down the window. ‘Where’s Rosalind? Yes, the hired car, she’ll drive it back, she’s gone into the house, she wants to stay with you - you can console her better than we can - dear dear Benet -’ She stretched out her hand. Benet kissed it. The big car disappeared among the trees, Mildred’s hand fluttering.

  Benet, returning, found Rosalind sitting on a chair in the hall. He brought up a chair and sat down beside her. He was about to speak, but she spoke first.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I know you didn’t want me to run to see Edward, I oughtn’t to have done - and I couldn’t say anything good to him, I just disturbed him, I’m so sorry, I know I shouldn’t have been - ’

  Benet, who had now recalled his faint annoyance, said, ‘But, dear Rosalind, I didn’t mind your going to see him, why should I. I am sure he was glad to see you, he took you to see the pictures - it was I who interrupted -’

  Rosalind, shaking her head and screwing up her eyes, said, ‘Oh, never mind - Benet, I’m sorry -’

  ‘Won’t you stay here? I’m not going. My dear child, do stay, please.’

  ‘No, no, I know you want to be alone. I want to be alone too. I must go. It is all such a nightmare - ’

  She rose. He wanted to say something loving and consoling, but could not find the words. He said, ‘I will see you very soon. Perhaps you will find her, perhaps she will come to you - she would come to you, not to us - very soon everything may be put together, they will run to each other - it will all be—’

  Rosalind said, ‘No, she will not come, not to any of us ever again, she will never come.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Rosalind - we don’t know—’

  ‘It’s like witchcraft, it’s like being transformed into quite a different thing - or like - like in hell.’

  ‘Won’t you stay with me?’

  ‘No, dear Benet, I want to be alone - I have my things in the hall, and look - Clun has driven the car round.’

  Clun had indeed brought the hired car to the door, and then vanished into the greenery as was his wont. Benet helped her to put her things in, those things which had been so precious yesterday. She got into the car, wound down the window and kissed him hastily. ‘Goodbye, dear dear Benet.’

  The car disappeared and he walked slowly back to the house. He thought, they all want to leave me, we shun each other, they think this place is cursed, that could not have happened anywhere else, perhaps it is witchcraft, somehow it is my fault. Oh God. He entered the house and closed the door. He looked at his watch and found to his surprise that it was not yet five o‘clock. Earlier he had told Sylvia to go home, though not before she had laid the table for possible remaining guests. There were none. He made his way to the kitchen, then wandered back to the drawing room. A terrible solitude came over him, he felt he was gasping for breath - how could all these terrible things have happened - and be just beginning - things that affected everyone, and all his fault. He had been so happy, he had believed he was collecting a family. He must do something, he felt like crying and tearing his clothes. Should he go back to Germany? He couldn’t, he had been there too long ago, his sort of life, his long life, had been shattered. He was beginning, something new, something awful, he heard Rosalind’s words, it’s witchcraft, it’s bell.

  He shuffled into his study, he looked at Uncle Tim’s bronze dancing Shiva wildly waving his four arms inside a circle of fire. He looked down at the words he had written the day before yesterday. He sat down.

  In attempting to make some sense of Heidegger’s involvement with the Pre-Socratics one must keep in mind the metaphysical patterns which illustrate connections and identities and show the (apparently) Many as the One. The One (or the Same) is what it is about. The One has various faces or facets, the approach to it being a grouping (or as one might say bodyguard) of concepts with other names. Christianity emphasises the One, but mediates it through the Three, others through the Two. Too much insistence on the One could, by seeming intolerable, generate a mass of sub-concepts and sub-entities. These of course can exist as saints, minor gods, unrelated virtues, and so on. The force that makes the One is (as often or not rightly) resisted. Heidegger wishes to show us the internal relations between the great Greek concepts, and in doing so to sustain and explain his doctrine of Being, which is supported by a similar inner concept ring.

  What on earth does he mean, thought Benet, or what do I mean? I thought it would be an escape - instead I am just involving myself in a dark spider’s web, the web of his mind. And did dear good Célan, they say, visit him in his mountain hut - and Hannah Arendt forgive him - and he dare to take over great Hölderlin, as well as the Greeks? Alas, that awful darkness is there, but for me it is my darkness, it is my neighbour and my heavy chain. I am small and I do not understand. How I wish I had stayed in the light and devoted my life to poetry, not philosophy. I used to write poems when I was young, before I became bemused by that philosophy! And now it is all impossible. Only Tim could hold up a light for me in the dark. And the Greeks, the Greeks, even they are fading away.

  I wonder if I am going mad, thought Benet, as he rose from his desk. What was he to do now? How could he blunder about in this raving mess when this day had produced nothing but horror? He went slowly, heavily, back to the kitchen. He tried to eat an apple. He opened a bottle of red wine and drank some. He sat down and put his head on the table, then raised it again. Was he crazy? Where was Marian now, floating in the Thames, self-destroyed by poison in some shabby London room, where months, perhaps years, could pass before she was discovered? And Edward - what, with all his busy scheming, had he done for Edward now? He got up and went out into the garden. The garden was motionless, even the birds seemed to be silent. He walked as far as his ginkgo tree. He embraced the tree, rolling his forehead upon its
smooth bark. Then he came back to the house and lay down on the sofa in the drawing room and fell asleep. He woke in a haze of misery. The day was going, though it was not dark. Suddenly he decided he must go back to London after all. He hurried about, picking up his coat, and snapping a variety of locks and bolts, and left the house. The Rover was close by under the trees. He got in, and before leaving, laid his head down upon the steering wheel.

  There was a great deal of traffic entering London and the sky was darkening. The final jam made Benet curse. What an idiot he was. Was he to spend all night in the car? At last he reached his house, opened the gates, and drove the Rover in as far as the garage. He closed the gates and walked back to the steps which, nearer to the street, led up to the front door.The house was dark. In the faint summer dusk and the dim light which came in from the road he fumbled cursing with his keys. He very quietly undid two locks and slid in through the door. As he closed the door and reached for the light, another light appeared in a room beyond, then a dark figure appeared in a doorway. Benet turned on the light in the hall.

  ‘Hello, Sir, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course!’ said Benet.

  ‘Have you any news? Miss Rosalind rang me.’

  ‘No!’ said Benet.

  ‘Would you like something to eat or -?’

  ‘No - ’

  ‘Well, goodnight -’

  ‘Goodnight, Jackson.’

  Jackson was his servant.

  TWO

  Owen Silbery was sitting alone in his studio. He had had his dreadful recurring dream. He is buried in sand up to his neck, he cannot move his limbs, the tide is coming in, the tide begins to reach him, the spray touches his face, he screams, he tosses his head back, his only possible movement, no one comes, the water begins to attack his mouth, he swallows the water, it has covered his mouth, he cannot scream any more, it begins to cover his nose ... Owen detested this dream, it made him feel very sick, and it particularly annoyed him because he thought that he hadn’t even really invented it, it was not his dream, hadn’t he seen it in a film a long time ago?

  It was the next day, the day after the terrible one. The busy telephone had produced no news. Owen had, on the previous evening, driven Mildred to her tiny flat (he had given up asking her to let him buy her a larger one). He had then returned to his house in Kensington, and eaten some oddments out of the fridge, and drunk a lot of whisky and seen the news on television and gone to bed, imagining he would not sleep. However he slept. And now there was this unspeakable horror and a sense all around him of chaos and depredation. And they would be speculating about whether the poor girl had committed suicide. Owen himself had often contemplated suicide and possessed the requirements thereof. And did he not, he reflected, as a painter, imagine, create, and gaze upon what was degraded and vile? Of course such things too became his art and thereby transformed, ha ha! He must remember to drink a toast to Otto Dix. He was real. Owen was sitting in his quiet studio looking at a half-painted abstract. He hated the picture. Expressionism,Fauvism, Dada, Cubism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Frightfulnessism. Foutu métier. He leaned forward and scratched the canvas with his fingernail. He was becoming lazy, and with laziness came idleness, agonising, solitude and loss of being. The only person who had really understood him was Uncle Tim - though even he -

  He got up and cleaned the brushes and put them in order and rubbed his hands on a paint rag. He sighed a long familiar sigh. He had silenced his telephones. He moved softly about his studio, pulling up the blinds which had been obscuring some of the windows. The cruel sunlight entered. His studio was spacious, occupying the whole second floor of his house. He had created it long ago when he had had three walls removed and enjoyed for the first time, his own space, his own light. His house was big and tall, bought with his first really big money, a retaliation for his unbearable childhood and the wound about which he never spoke. He kept no servant or cleaner. The plain wooden floor of the studio was kept by Owen extremely clean and tidy. The dining room and sleek kitchen on the ground floor, and the drawing room and ‘study’ on the first floor, were reasonably in order. There was also a basement which had once (before Owen’s reign) housed a maid, and now contained correctly slotted special pictures, together with various machines and things. The third floor began to reveal certain ‘natural’ traits of the present owner, now appearing as the stairs ascended. In one large room there was a huge bed, Owen’s bed, never properly made, but randomly covered at times by a huge red counterpane. This bed sometimes reminded Owen of days gone by, when ladies had regularly come down from the north to pose for him, no questions asked. No doubt their husbands were unemployed or had cleared off and they were supporting numerous children. It was no business of his. Opposite, in rows of cupboards, showing only their colourless sides, were other innumerable undisposed of ordinary pictures. Owen sometimes, now less often, pulled out one at random. Now, having left his studio and climbing up the stairs, he entered this room, searching for something. He pulled it out at last, a portrait he had painted once of Lewen Dunarven. He studied it for some time. He put it back again. Not a good likeness. He came out. He felt tired and wanted to lie down upon his bed. However he decided to go up further and look out of the fifth floor window. The fourth floor here, detained him, consisting of a handsome rarely used guest room and opposite, Owen’s special treat, his dark room, whose walls were covered with very interesting photos, including (among the mild ones) a picture of Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian, mentioned recently by Benet. Mishima had died at his own hand. What monumental courage it must take to slash one’s stomach open, knowing that an instant later a kind friend would remove one’s head. A pity there was no available photo of that.

  On the fifth floor, which covered the whole area, Odradek, pet of Kafka, reigned. Everywhere senseless, nameless and timeless entities lay in piles, cardboard boxes, containing unconnected unnameable things lay piled one on another, heavy soiled garments, long ago devoured by moths, innumerable old books, no doubt of great value, kicked to pieces, ancient letters some unopened, broken china, broken glass, ancient newspapers, collections of stones - Owen picked his way to the window and looked out. Below him, stretching away, there were green gardens, filled with bushes and tall trees and backs and fronts of houses, beyond him and above him was the blue enormous sky and just below it, London.

  Owen turned away with a sigh, kicked some entities aside, and reached the door. He slowly descended the stairs as far as the reasonably tidy drawing room upon the first floor. There was a large mirror above the fireplace. He looked at himself in the mirror. His copious hair, which had been genuinely very dark, almost black, was now successfully dyed completely black. He had put on weight. Did anyone notice? It didn’t matter. His aggressive profile remained the same. Uncle Tim had once likened him to a toad, a particular toad in the garden at Penndean. Owen liked toads. He went to the telephone and released it. Almost instantly it rang. It was Mildred.

  ‘Oh, Owen - have you heard anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ve been in touch with the police. You haven’t thought of anything?’

  ‘Thought? No.’

  ‘You know Benet came back late last night. Has he rung you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you out?’

  ‘I turned the phone off.’

  ‘Of course, you were working. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I come and see you? I won’t stay long.’

  ‘Mildred, just fuck off please.’

  He put the telephone down and switched it off again. He sat down in one of the deep armchairs and covered his face with his hands.

  Benet was standing upon the doorstep of a large house near Sloane Square, which was very familiar to him, though he had not visited it for a long time. He was disturbed to notice how anxious he now was, as a mass of memories crowded upon him. He straightened his tie and smoothed down his ruffled red-brown hair. He rang the bell. The bell was famili
ar. He waited.

  The door opened. Anna Dunarven appeared instantly, smiling.

  ‘Oh Benet, I’m so glad to see you! We had no time to talk properly down there, come in, come in, what’s the news of Marian?’

  ‘No news, alas, not yet. Anna, forgive me for coming suddenly like this, I ought to have written, I couldn’t find your telephone number and - ’

  ‘Yes, yes, I changed it, I should have given it to you, anyway here you are, follow me, you know the way of course, everything is the same, isn’t that strange!’

  He followed her into the memorable drawing room, he saw the sun shining upon the garden, they stood together by the window.

  ‘Those trees have grown.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought at once when I came back. They’ve kept it all very well, haven’t they. This room is all the same, except I’ve moved things about a bit.’

  ‘I see the old elephant is in his place on the mantelpiece.’

  ‘Yes, would you believe it, they had put him away in a cupboard, I had to search for him! How you all must miss Uncle Tim.’

  ‘We do. We’ve been missing you too.’

  ‘Oh Benet, you are just the same, your hair stands on end so thick and red and ruffled, like it used to, not a bit of grey, you are so handsome and your eyes - your eyes are so blue -’

  Anna threw her arms round Benet’s neck, he felt her hair warm upon his cheek, he put his arm around her waist. They released each other. They had known each other for a long time, in fact Benet claimed to have introduced Anna, then twenty, to Lewen Dunarven, then thirty. He had met and known them both separately in London, Anna as a friend of Elizabeth Loxon, who was a friend of Mildred, and Lewen as a frequenter of the British Library. He had also sorted things out for Anna after Lewen, a distinguished Irish scholar, had so unexpectedly died. He had known Anna’s mother, who had died in France after Anna’s departure there ‘for ever’. The boy, now nine, or was it ten, years old, had never known his father.