She still bombards the room with the particles of her anxiety that spiral at high velocity round the lightning zig-zag of her magnetic field, her eyes trying to intercept the pain behind two starless coalsacks which, however radiate no interest, and remain obstinately fixed on the long habit of professionally asking what did he say?
— Oh, the usual, bed-getting phrases. Then I had a baby.
— Really.
— We have two boys. At boarding school.
— He never mentions them.
— No. Oh, he likes them well enough. He spent most of their childhood destroying their confidence as he destroyed mine. I don’t know what he wants from people, the genius he hasn’t got, I suppose, and yet the moment anyone shows the slightest individuality he can’t stand it. The elder, called after you incidentally, has taken up the guitar. Not very well. The other, well, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t come –
— I meant, what did he say when you said that? About serenity.
— Oh. Yes. He said: that kind of serenity can soon develop into a form of anaesthetism. The complacency of it struck me dumb.
— What? … did … you say?
— The com–
— No. No. The boy.
— I called him after you, Larry.
— Larry. Of course. Yes. I see.
— What do you see, Larry?
— What have you done to my daughter, Elizabeth?
— Larry! I took her in. During your illness. I didn’t tell you the other day because — well, I thought you knew and besides we had other — Larry, I looked after her, I loved her. She has all the charm, the intelligence, the poise that I –
— All right, all right. Who cares. The young must learn and all that. But I wish, I wish, she hadn’t come to your house, Elizabeth. Stanley’s house.
— Does it, matter so very much?
— No. Nothing matters, if it comes to that, as someone or other said. Oh yes. My lawyer. But we must run some sort of show, as he also said. To keep going at all. Lawyers, yes. I must see my lawyer about getting that thing back, preventing –
— What thing, Larry?
— That tape, you dolt … What did you think I meant, good God I can’t get through to anyone. I told you, do I have to spell it out?
— Yes, please.
— Your best friend, the great Tell-Star –
— Oh, that. Forgive me, Larry, but I –
— Yes, I know, you have your own problems and I ought to listen to them. But I’ve given up my trade. I’ve given up exchanging the intense confessions of people with cleft palates for a few comforting names. You can’t get rid of things just by giving them names.
— But Larry I didn’t come here as a patient.
— What … did you come as then?
— You invited me to lunch, remember?
— Oh yes. How many millions of light years ago did I offer that cosy lunch filled with trivial talk of other people’s affairs and things like that?
— I begin to see what Brenda meant.
— You do. Good.
— Well, it doesn’t matter, Larry, if you –
— Elizabeth, can’t I get it into your head that something has happened since then, and that it does matter, to me, at any rate, and that if you love me, loved me once as you said, whatever you meant by that, it should matter to you too, and that you said you’d help me, help me to get it back.
— You mean … the … tape?
— Good girl.
— How can I, Larry. Telford and I –
— So. You planned it. Planned it together.
— No, of course not.
— Elizabeth, I talked to him half the night, incoherently, he admitted that himself. I talked as one talks to a friend, or if you like as patients talk to me. I don’t remember what I said. If I knew I wouldn’t mind so much perhaps. But I don’t know and I must. It doesn’t belong to him, or even to me, probably. I can’t let him use it –
— appropriate it.
— Yes, appropriate it, distort it, misrepresent people who have trusted me, people I work with, live with –
— love.
— Oh, love! Love has nothing to do with it. A thing for squares to spin in circles as my daughter puts it. I don’t love anyone, you should know that.
— Like Stanley.
— Yes, yes. Like Stanley, if you like. But unlike long-sighted Stanley who cuts my wife dead pretending not to see her, I don’t want it to show. Out of a different kind of cowardice.
— Unless on the contrary you don’t want the real thing to show. The love. That you remembered perhaps.
— Real thing! I tell you I remember nothing. What do you mean? Have you heard the tape? What did I say? Tell me. Tell me. What did I say?
— Let go of me, Larry, let go.
— I thought I’d find you both here. Good, how very right.
— Oh, Telford, you know better than to think that.
— Me, think? Never. How do you feel, Larry? You had me quite worried the way you left at dawn, and in that state. My God, you look washed up.
— We haven’t slept together if you mean that and we have no intention of doing so.
— Come, come, I never sugg–
— Telford, don’t say come-come like that.
— I didn’t mean to upset you, Larry. But I have my job to do just as you have yours.
— I don’t.
— This idea really excited me. And the tape sounds terrific, Larry, even uncut and incoherent.
— Except for the last sentence.
— I forget –
— We haven’t come to it yet, Tell-Star. Nothing makes sense until the last sentence.
— What exactly do you mean by that?
— There goes the scalpel. How did it feel exactly and what did the fat woman say. But you really want to know, don’t you, Tell-Star, you show no mere idly prying curiosity, like Stanley. You ask all the wrong questions, and so of course, get all the wrong answers. You start with nothing, go on as if you had something and in no time at all you have eternity or thereabouts. Have you got your mechanical ears with you, Tell-Star? Don’t you want to record my posthumous views on pettiness and moral cowardice in the elementary courtesies due to man from man, and to woman from man too, when they have exploited each other like things, courtesies which require not only words, Tell-Star, the human prerogative man most fears, but gestures and a smile perhaps, no, you smile first, Something, to pierce through the resistance you call matter which radiation needs to propagate itself but which deflects the light waves travelling through it and upsets the definition? Or have you corked your ears, your inner and your outer ears, living as we all do in a transparent bowl of anti-matter through which no waves can travel?
— Larry, calm down. Don’t make such a thing of it. I think I’d better go.
— Yes, go, Tell-Star, go. I’ll see you through my lawyer’s transparency in future. I have my rights, you know. I won’t allow –
— But of course, Larry, you do as –
— you to make any film, why, what will you use, illusions, tricks, and stand-ins, and yourself, Tell-Star, don’t forget yourself, you have a star-role in the ridiculous story of my death and amazing recovery. But you must fade yourself out, Really, before the last sentence. Because reality doesn’t lie in you after all, or in anyone. I could float off now on my freedom, out of my bondage, my responsibility to Something if any, after all I didn’t choose the way, I wanted only opaqueness, nothingness, I didn’t order these complexities, these secret laws I’ve never heard of and break even in obeying them. I kept my promise and my words rebound against me. But nobody will understand a thing you say, Tell-Star, or see, or hear, you’ll speak, like me, through a cleft palate, say gug-gug query what exactly do you mean by that comment nothing, nothing at all or something repeat –