The Good Apprentice Read online

  ‘Yes, I mostly have. They make no difference.’

  ‘And if you don’t mind, I’d like to see one of Mrs Wilsden’s letters, if you get another one, I think you said you’d destroyed them all.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get another one! She’s an artist. She keeps saying the same thing without repeating herself. She must enjoy writing those letters.’

  ‘It’s a form of mourning, it will pass, deep grief is like a compulsive song.’

  ‘That’s what everyone says to me about my thing, it will pass. But it won’t. It’s gone on so long. I’d have to be another person. What’s wrong with me is me. I’m done for. You know how if an aeroplane engine stalls at a certain moment it can’t rise, it must crash by its own weight, no power can raise it, it’s just a heavy dead thing bound to fall back to earth. My engines have failed, I’m falling, I’ve got to fall, I’ve no energy left, one way or another I’m done for.’

  ‘You can talk. You are full of interesting images.’

  ‘That’s because I’m usirig your energy,’ said Edward. ‘When I leave you I’ll be back in that black machine. I’m in it now, all this talk is automatic, it’s hysterical, you are producing it. I’m not mentally ill I’m spiritually ill, I never knew what that meant before. It’s the fact, the fact I have to live with, what happened, what I did. People say, “you have to live with something”, but I can’t live with this, I can only die with it, except that I don’t die. I wake every day in torment, my whole body glows with pain as if I were being electrocuted, only I can’t die.’

  ‘Go on, while your eloquence lasts.’

  ‘I’m frightened of everything, I’m frightened of police and doctors, I’m even frightened of you. You won’t let them give me electric shocks, will you?’

  ‘There’s no question of that. There isn’t any “them”. There’s only me.’

  ‘They could get at me all the same. You know I never told anyone this, I told lies at the inquest. I said Mark had some of the stuff and took it of his own accord. That wasn’t true. I gave it to him, I put it in a sandwich. I deceived him, he didn’t know he was taking it, he would never have done it knowingly, he hated drugs, he kept trying to make me stop. Mrs Wilsden guessed that of course. That’s one of the things she goes on about. Do you think I should go and tell the coroner?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Thomas.

  ‘I’m glad I’ve told you anyway. I know anything I say to you is secret. I’m glad I’ve said it aloud.’

  ‘One must have things to hang onto. Truth matters.’

  ‘I’ve lost touch with truth.’

  ‘No, you haven’t, you’ve just demonstrated that. Your idea of losing the truth is simply an illusion. Unhappy people console themselves with lies, then feel that everything is falsified — ’

  ‘That’s me. I’m deprived of every possibility of acting rightly or doing any good. It’s a system of grief, every grief I’ve ever had enters into this grief and augments it. There’s no cure for remorse like I feel. I haven’t any foothold. It’s like trying to add up figures in a dream. You imagine I can think, I can’t. You appeal to my intellect, it isn’t there.’

  ‘Ofcourse it’s there, don’t utter blatant lies. Just try to sort the stuffout a bit, get hold of a few concepts. You were glad you told me about something which troubled your conscience. You have a conscience. You can make distinctions. You spoke of grief just now, and remorse. Can you put those things in any sort of order? What’s in the centre of it all? Don’t answer at once, just try to think.’

  Edward, sitting in an armchair opposite to Thomas’s desk, thought, ‘Oh well — what I’ve just said — it doesn’t help to say the obvious — just what happened and how to unhappen it — what a terrible thing I did — and Mark, whom I love — being — gone — ’

  ‘That’s a lot of matter. Go on trying. You used the word “love”. You can’t unhappen what has happened. Mark is dead and the dead have to be loved in a special way which has to be learnt. And your “terrible thing” is full of things which need to be separated out — ’

  ‘God, do you want a list!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m marked, I’m branded, people can see it, everyone stares at me in the street. I haven’t any real being left, it’s all scratched and scraped away, people shudder away from me, I stink of misery and evil. When I was coming here I saw Meredith come out of the house, and he pretended not to see me and crossed the road, he couldn’t stand the sight of me, that hurt me so much. It’s the shame, the loss of honour, that can never come back. I’m ruined and blackened forever, and I’m so young. And it does connect with unhappening. If only I hadn’t locked the door, if only I hadn’t left him — oh what’s the use — I’m not worthy to live — I’m so weary of grieving and trying to cry — all I want is to be walled up in a stone cell and starve and become a little dried up animal and die.’ As he said this Edward opened his eyes wide and smiled, the weird uncanny gloating smile which had so much appalled Stuart.

  ‘Your unconscious mind is having a festival,’ said Thomas, who had seen such smiles before. ‘You’re sure you don’t want to see a priest? It’s always worth wondering whether the remnants of your religion could help. A priest could hear your confession and absolve you. These are rites which need not depend on dogma.’

  ‘No, no priest. So you want me to specialise in feeling guilty?’

  ‘You could put it so! There’s got to be some point in all this mess of miseries where something creative could come about. You keep harping on the “terrible thing”, and the “fact” and “what happened”, but at the same time you keep spending your energy and your resentment in imagining it hasn’t happened. Your feeling of guilt, if you can isolate it, can provide the place, and the “style” if I may put it so, by which you can get it into your mind and your heart that it has happened — and start from there. That place, if you can attend to it, can change the atmosphere, give you more air and light. Loving Mark could be something positive, only it’s no good loving him still alive. And you might think about answering Mrs Wilsden, compose a letter.’

  ‘Thomas,’ said Edward, ‘you haven’t understood, I haven’t got the strength, all this stuff of yours just sounds like poetry, it doesn’t connect with anything I could do or even imagine. I’m sure you’re being ingenious and clever and trying to stir me and appeal to me and so on, and I’m very grateful, but it’s no use, I haven’t any imagination left. I’ve even lost all my sexual feelings. Stuart says he’s given up sex, but he’s absolutely bulging with it. I think I’ve had sex permanently taken from me. All my ordinary fantasy life has gone, or rather it’s just gone into that. I can’t do the complicated little things you’re parading before me, distinguishing this from that and holding onto the other, I can’t. Of course I want to be forgiven, which seems an awful cheat, but no one can. A priest can’t, Mrs Wilsden can’t, even if she wanted to which she doesn’t, she wants to torture me to death. And I am being tortured to death, I torture myself, I suffer so much, I couldn’t suffer more, but if I could suffer more I would — ’

  ‘I don’t think I can forgive you,’ said Thomas. ‘There’s something else I can do, but not that. We need priests, we miss them and will miss them more, we miss their power. There will be different priests in the future, different vocations. We shall have to reinvent God, those without justification will have to invent him.’

  ‘Those without justification will not have the energy,’ said Edward, ‘they won’t have spirit enough. I am spiritless. God is the invention of happy innocent people. We know there is no God, or whatever God-substitute sentimental asses like Stuart like to slobber over. Oh how you make me talk. Perhaps I’ll hate you for it afterwards.’

  ‘No you won’t, dear Edward.’

  ‘All right, but even you can’t see what it’s like, this fruitless searing burning hell at every conscious moment, it’s misery crystallised as pure fear, because it will be worse later, like someone waiting his turn to be tortured. Ha
rry says it’s irrational, and Stuart says I’m making it an end in itself, and it’s true sometimes I can’t even see Mark, he’s just a name, as if I’ve thrown him away, as if I couldn’t remember why I’m in hell, perhaps that’s part of the punishment, to be in hell and not even to know why, but I am there, and I shall die of it.’

  ‘You are dying of it,’ said Thomas, ‘I mean you are spiritually dying. You said earlier you would have to change yourself into another person. You are doing that, and it’s very painful. You say you suffer and can’t remember why. The whole of creation suffers in that way, it groans and travails together. You are consciously partaking in that suffering.’

  ‘The whole of creation is innocent, as far as I’m concerned, I forgive it, everything except me.’

  ‘So you think you’re alone in hell?’

  ‘You want to interest me, to make me think of other people, but I don’t want to be cured and have it all turned into cheerfulness and commonsense by your magic. Your magic isn’t strong enough to overcome what I have, it’s weak, it’s a failing torch. I am permanently damaged.’

  ‘I’m not offering you cheerfulness and commonsense. And of course, don’t worry, you are permanently damaged and you won’t be cured.’

  ‘I thought you were trying to cure me.’

  ‘Well, I am, but not as you imagine, I’m much more ambitious than that. You will always carry this pain inside you. Many people carry such pains. But it will not always be like this.’

  ‘All right, I’m changing, but not in a good way, there is no good way, that’s what I’ve discovered. It’s not like being — like being a chrysalis — it’s the opposite, it’s the chrysalis story run backwards. I used to have coloured wings and fly. Now I am black and I lie on the ground and quiver. Soon the earth will begin to cover me and I shall become Cold and be buried and rot.’

  ‘Yes, yes, a good image. Now listen to me. You are undergoing by accident and by your own fault a spiritual journey which many would consciously purchase at a great price, but cannot buy. Your picture of yourself, your self-illusion, is in process of being broken. This places you in an unusual position, very close to the truth, and that proximity is part of your pain. You say you have no energy, that you are using mine, it isn’t so. Your unconscious mind rejoices in the defeat of your proud ego, its malicious pleasure floods you with demonic energy, which you use up in futile exercises of resentment and anger and hate. What I called your eloquence, your flow of imagery, is a symptom of your condition. You hate your damaged self and feel you cannot live with it, yet you desperately cherish it at the same time. You describe your grief as a system. Indeed it is, a defensive system of mutually supporting falsehoods instinctively produced to defend your old egoistic self-image which you cannot bear to lose, you cannot bear its death which seems so like your own. Your endless talk of dying is a substitute for the real needful death, the death of your illusions. Your “death” is a pretend death, simply the false notion that somehow, without effort, all your troubles could vanish. This is where you are, and here a religious believer would pray, and you must try to find your own equivalent of prayer. The word “will” rarely describes anything perceptible, but an act of will is needed here, an act of well-intentioned concentration. You, in your thought, in your deepest heart, must check the misuse of your powers, must redirect that strange energy which, although it is so ambiguous, is god-given, given to you by the dark gods. I’m not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it truthfully. Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to its survival as a successful liar. Recognise lies and reject them at every point. You want to unhappen what has happened, you feel anger and hate at what prevents this, and which you see as the cause of your “loss of honour”. These old deep “natural” desires appear to you to be irresistible. Check them, see them to be illusions and lies. Move beyond them into an open and quiet area which you will find to be an entirely new place. You have never been in such a place before and the person who is there is a new person. You say you live in pain. Let it be the pain of the death of the old false self, and the life-movement of the new real truthful self. We are all wrapped in silky layers of illusion which we instinctively feel to be necessary to our existence. Often these illusions are harmless, in the sense that we can still go on being reasonably good and reasonably happy. Sometimes, because of a catastrophe, a bereavement or some total loss of self-esteem, our falsehoods become pernicious, and we are forced to choose between some painful recognition of truth and an ever more frenzied and aggressive manufacturing of lies. I am suggesting to you that you become aware of your situation and set yourself to will and to pray. Don’t hope for anything except the truth, to see guilt and grief in their own being. Live at peace with despair. Live quietly with your sense of guilt, and with the event and its consequences. Sit beside it, as it were, and regard the frightful wound to your self-esteem as the removal of deep illusions which existed before and which this chance has torn. If you keep checking any lie and resisting the anger which deforms the world you will gradually realise that the poor old wounded self, with its furious whining and its hatred of itself and everything else, is not you at all. That self is dying, but another self is watching it die. And gradually you will feed your life-energy, that which the gods send us for better or for worse, animating your newly made self and no longer that gesticulating puppet you once thought was you. Listen Edward — I’m not suggesting something crazy like instant sanctity! I’m suggesting what is in an immediate sense your salvation. I want you to make a good job of this, and you can. You will never efface the experience of the “terrible thing”, you will never entirely “recover”. Yet also you will partly forget it, you may think of it every day but not all day. What I call your salvation you will be much more likely to forget about as the natural ego grows again. Yet if you even partly achieve it, that too will travel with you as evidence of the power of the spirit in the healing of the soul, when with a good will you turn toward truth and whatever light you know, and simply stop that energetic production of illusions which seems at the moment to be your only life force. You keep repeating that you are in hell. It’s not a place for souls to stay in, it’s bad for them. You are able to get out. If you make even the faintest serious effort you will sense the life of the new being that you can become.’

  Edward, who had listened to Thomas’s long speech with attention, said quickly, ‘Thanks, I know you’re trying to impress me and persuade me, I know you’re trying something on. I know it’s stupid and bad to be so terribly unhappy and full of what you call illusions, but there’s nothing I can do about it. One thing’s missing in your awfully poetic picture, and that’s the motive. I haven’t got the motive, that’s what’s missing from your plan for my salvation. Oh God, I feel so tired.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Thomas. ‘Let’s knock off for a bit.’ He stood up and stretched his arms out sideways and wriggled his shoulders.

  There was a shock in the room like the twang of a bow string. Edward, to whom his surroundings had become invisible, so great had been his concentration upon the argument he had been having with Thomas, and his resistance to the force of Thomas’s will, now saw the scene, the books, the sunlight upon the figured carpet, a picture of a mill by Midge’s father, Cleve Warriston, Thomas stretching, now ruffling his tidy grey hair, then removing his glasses and cleaning them. Edward sighed and pulled himself up from the armchair. He went to the window and gazed vaguely at a prunus tree coming pinkly into flower and some mauve and white crocuses growing in a semicircle round a stone lion’s head set in the brick wall. He touched the thick white paint of the window frame and thrust his fingers through the polished brass ring which served to lift the sash. Thomas watched him.

  Edward said, ‘I remember now, I dreamt last night that there was a beautiful enormous butterfly in my room and I was trying to open the window to let it out only I couldn’t. Then it lighted on my hand and I could feel it biting my hand with its little teeth. Then
I shook my hand gently to make it fly. Only it didn’t fly. It just fell down onto the floor with a thud and lay there dead.’

  ‘Psyche is a butterfly,’ murmured Thomas. ‘She is loved by Eros.’

  Edward had just recalled that the sash window in his lodgings had had a brass ring just like this one. He hastily withdrew his hand.

  Thomas said, ‘That room, that room where it happened. You might go back and look at it.’

  ‘You must be a thought-reader, I was just thinking about that room. I couldn’t go back there. Is that supposed to be therapy? I’d run mad and jump out of the window. Anyhow I’m going to go away for a while.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Edward, who had been pressing his forehead against the glass, drew away, tucking back his long lock of dark hair. He was taller than Thomas and seemed to have become, in the last weeks, exceedingly thin. His long neck protruded forward skinnily from the open collar of his crumpled blue shirt. He picked his way bird-like back to his chair, avoiding piles of books on the floor, sat on the arm of the chair, rose and went behind it, leaning to rest his hands on the back. He did not answer Thomas’s question. ‘Something very strange happened yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘You seem surprised that anything else can happen to me. So am I. I never really told you why I left Mark that night and didn’t get back sooner.’

  ‘You said someone rang up — ’

  ‘Yes, it was a girl. I made love to her, we got straight into bed, that was what delayed me.’

  ‘I see.’ Thomas, who had been back at his desk, got up and roamed to the bookshelves, examining the books. ‘And this girl, do you love her?’

  ‘No, I hate her, she made me a murderer, she’s part of the conspiracy. All right, that’s a wrong way to put it, what you’d call a lie.’

  ‘It’s not just called a lie, it is a lie. Anyway, what happened yesterday?’

  ‘I went to a seance.’

  ‘How does the girl come in?’