I found Annabelle climbing into a taxi and I ran up and held the door open while she sat inside looking frightened. I must have appeared rather mad. I stood in the gutter in the flickering light and spoke to her. “Tell me,” I said, “what you said to me this morning, what you said about faith, did you believe it to be true?”
“What?” she said. I repeated the question. The taxi-man was motionless, like a statue. I wanted to giggle. “Of course it is true,” she said.
“Is it true in the way that a person who thinks it untrue is wrong?”
“Of course he is wrong,” she said.
“And is there nothing else but this faith that can make a person true at all?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“And it is something to worry about?”
“Of course it is something to worry about.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” I stepped away.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Please don’t go.”
“There is one more thing,” I said. “Does Father Manners like Peter?”
“Like him? No, I don’t suppose he does. Why?”
“Does he like me?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” But I could see the truth in her eyes. The truth for all of them. “Stay,” she said, “stay, where are you going?”
“You will find out,” I said. I laughed. I was quite mad then. “You will find out when it catches up on you.” I did not know what I was saying.
“Come here,” she said, but I slammed the door, and waved to the taxi-man. He drove off and I ran up the steps into the house.
Inside I waited. Alice was not in the ground floor rooms. For a moment I considered killing myself. As I climbed the stairs I looked down towards the basement and felt rather sick. I had the sensation again that something was going to happen that had happened before. I waited on the landing. Something was going to happen and then I would remember it. The sound of the taxi door when I had slammed it against Annabelle had been like the thud of an axe. Heads were falling, the world of death was intruding, it did not seem that I was responsible for the future or the past.
Alice was lying on her bed in her dressing-gown. It was as if she had not moved since I had left her the day before. The room was scented like a velvet box. Time had stopped, we were into another dimension, our existence was not that of the people we might have remembered ourselves to be. I stood in the doorway and watched her. I wondered if she had been taking drugs. The light was muffled by stained-glass curtains, shedding pools of violet above her head. “Oh darling,” she said.
I went in and sat on the bed. Ghosts, there were nothing but ghosts. The air was thick with them. “Oh darling,” she said.
“Dear darling, darling, talk, yes, will you? Will you sit with me, here it is so terrible, it is the nights that are terrible, what is there to do? I close my eyes and then there is a lurching like a ship, something goes over on to its side and I cannot straighten it, it is like a ship that someone invented which had its inside hung on hinges so that it was supposed not to roll, and when they got it out on to the sea it rolled twice as much, it rolled even when the sea was quite calm, it must have been terrible. Once when I was young my inside was hung on hinges and I tried to kill myself, I rolled little pills out of a bottle and they formed up in a line and they looked at me like cat’s eyes in the darkness, and as I ate them one by one I could feel them in my throat like fingers and they strangled me before I could die. I lurched and I could not keep myself upright, so they could not go down. Dear darling, darling, it is better not to have an inside that swings on hinges and then you roll only when the sea rolls and you do not roll when the sea is calm.
“I am so much in love, it is the heights that are terrible. Dear darling, darling, have you ever been in love? I do not think you have, perhaps you have found the secret of the ship that does not roll, you are so calm, you are the only person I have ever known who is so calm. You can probe about inwards and inwards and you do not feel sick, you do not. . I should like to shake you, I should like to upset you just for once so that you know what it is like, what love is like, you would have pity. I was married once to a man who came and cried each time he was unfaithful, and I hurt him so much that I thought I should kill myself. And then there were men who were not men at all but statues quite hollow who were cast in bronze and they had no inside, no inside to roll, and nothing to feel, and they were terrible to love. I do not think that anyone with an inside is so calm, so calm, but you are, and will you stay, will you stay with me then, will you give up for a little, oh darling what are you thinking of?
“Everything is so old, there is nothing to do about it. All this goes on and on and there is nothing left in the world to worry about. If you would just stay with me you would know and then you would stop probing inwards and inwards and then you would pity. There is nothing that is wrong until you know that everything is wrong, and until you have done something you will never know. Until you have done something wrong you will never have to forgive yourself, and until then you are not human. Until now you are not human, dear darling, darling, and afterwards you will know what humanity is and how it suffers, and when you hate yourself it will be good for you and then you will see. You will see everything in your life and how terrible it is and then you will have to forgive yourself. You will give up and you will be frightened and then you will be human.”
As I lay beside her on the bed I did not move and I did not answer, so she raised herself up on her elbow and leaned across me with one arm stretched on the far side of me to take her weight and I could see her ribs where she breathed, and as she bent down to kiss me I could feel her pressure on my chest like the weight of two soft hands. I put my arms around her and held her and I thought of Annabelle and Marius and how I did not care any more. She moved her body and I could feel nothing but the heaviness of her and the dryness of her mouth and I held her so that she might feel something better. I put my arms beneath her dressing-gown and stroked her, and I did not think it was myself who was lying. Then she lifted her head and pushed her hair back with her hand and she said, “Don’t you love me darling?” and I said, “Yes,” and she went on looking at me with her sick enormous eyes, he dressing-gown was away from her front and from her shoulders and she tried to close it and then she said “It is Marius that I love.” “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I tried to hold her again in my arms but she pushed herself away from me and sat up on the edge of the bed and I thought she was crying. She was searching under the pillow for what I thought was a handkerchief, but it was for a cigarette which she found and I watched her light it. “You’d better go now,” she said. The room seemed to hold me like a bath that has gone cold, and I did not want to get out of it. “Go on,” she said.
Marius came to stay with me. In the mornings he went out early to do the business that still detained him in England, and I had the room to myself in which to work. In the afternoons I usually saw Alice. We sometimes had tea together.
One day when Marius was out Father Jack came to see me. He was an old man, but he climbed the stairs rapidly talking all the time and his small wrinkled face showed no sign of fatigue. He sat down and he did not notice the room at all, it might have been beautiful to him. He said:
“The trouble is that you do not understand the position, you do not understand it at all, you look upon the Church as a team of hospitable cricketers, a home for stray sufferers, an army of thin crusaders doing battle against the flesh. You see some special significance in the numbers that this army contains, in the individual behaviour of some of its members, in the errors that they may make. You talk of this significance as if it affected the function that is proper to an army. It does not. An army has its function no matter what its numbers and its mistakes. You imagine that we are engaged upon some game of tip-and-run with immorality, that we have charms to dispense with pain, that we are fighting for the truth and are concerned about our chances of victory. We are not. What you must realize is this, and this is everything, that whatever war we are fighting it is not one of which the issue is still in doubt. We are not marching towards truth because the truth has been given to us. We do not struggle for victory because the victory has already been won. We know the truth. We enjoy the victory. Our function now, if you like to use these metaphors, is that of a triumphant army in occupation of the world.