The rain had come down as the woman predicted. Sheets of it! The earth turned to mud, bushes thrashed, trees swam in subaqueous gloom, the din on the roof of my motel cabin was deafening. So that I did not hear the tapping at first, and was startled when I glanced up out of the pool of lamplight to see framed in the dark of the window, and wordlessly signalling, like a man going down for the third time, the woman's husband, George. I hurried to the door to let him in but he refused to come further than the verandah. He stood there barefoot, his waterproof streaming.
“I jus’ slipped out,” he told me, "while she's sleeping. I wanted t’ tell you a few things.” He set his lamp down on the boards.
“But you must come in,” I said. “Come in and have a drink.”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said very solemnly. “No I won't, if it's all the same.” He looked past me into the lighted room with its twin chenille bedspreads, its TV set, the hinged desk-lamp. “I'm too muddy.”
He was, but I guessed there was another and deeper reason. It represented too clearly, that room, the world I had come from, a world of slick surfaces and streamlining, of appliances, of power, that threatened him, as it threatened the woman too at the very moment of her reaching out for it.
“I'll stay out ‘ere, if you don't mind.”
So our conversation took place with the rain cascading from the guttering just a few feet away and in such a roaring that he could barely be heard.
He began to unbutton his cape. “I jus’ wanted,” he repeated, "t’ tell you a few things.” He paused, his thumb and forefinger dealing awkwardly with a stud.
“Like — like them people she thinks ‘ave been makin’ enquiries about ‘er. Over the years like. Well, I made ‘em up.” He looked powerfully ashamed, standing barefoot with the streaming cape on his shoulders and his brow in a furrow. “I wanted t’ tell you that right off like. T’ get things straight.” He met my eyes and did not look away. I turned up the collar of my gown, though it wasn't at all cold, and nodded; an inadequate representative, if that is what he needed, of the forces of truth. In other circumstances I might have got out of my embarrassment by doing a little dance. But he wasn't the man for that sort of thing, and at that moment I wasn't either.
“Y’ see,” he said, "I didn’ want t’ lose ‘er. I didn’ intend no harm. I wanted ‘er t’ think she needed me. I don't reckon it'll make all that much difference, will it? I mean, you'll still do what she wants.”
“I don't know. I don't know what she wants.”
“Oh, she wants people t’ know at last. Who she is.” He shook his head at some further view of his own that he did not articulate, though he wrestled with it. “I suppose it means she'll go back, eh? To them others.”
Which others? Who could he mean? Who did he think was out there — out where? — that she could go back to? Didn't he realise that sixty years had slipped by, in which day by day a quite different story had been unfolding, in the papers and out of them, that involved millions and was still not finished and held us all in its powerful suspense?
He began to button the cape again, which was easier to deal with than silence; then said firmly: "I'm a truthful man for the most part, I reckon I can claim that. On'y — I didn't want t’ lose ‘er. She's a wonderful woman. You don't know! We've been happy together, even she'd say that. I tried t’ make ‘er happy and I've been happy meself No regrets, no regrets at all! There hasn’ been a cross word between us in all the years. That ought t’ count for somethin'. When I first met ‘er, y’ know, she was just a girl — that light and small I was scared of even brushin’ against ‘er. I was a carter then, and she was workin’ f ‘ rich people, out at Vaucluse. We used t’ talk after work, and one night she told me the whole thing. I never knew such a world existed. She wanted t’ get away where they wouldn’ be on to ‘er, so we just kep’ movin’ till we holed up here.” He looked again, with a furrowing of his brow, at his own view of the thing. “I better be gettin’ back,” he said, "before she wakes up an’ starts wor-ryin’ where I am. She does worry, y’ know. She was sleepin’ when I left. Knocked out.” There was another silence. Then he put his hand out, as he had earlier in the day, and we shook.
“You do believe ‘er, don't you?” he said, holding my hand in his giant grasp. “It'd be best if you did, whatever it costs. She wants t’ be known at last. But it's up to you. You just do whatever you reckon is the right thing. For all concerned.”
He broke his grip, took up the hurricane-lamp, and with a curt little nod went down into the rain, leaning heavily into the wall of it, and I watched the light, and the play of it on his cape, till it flickered out among the trees. Holding my dressing gown about me, though it wasn't at all cold, I turned towards the empty room, its welcoming light and warmth, and was unwilling for a moment to go in. The sky roared, the big trees rocked and swayed, the water came sluicing down. The truth is that I have a great fear these days of being alone.
But this is Mrs. Judge's story, not mine — or it is the man's. He after all was the first of her believers, and has spent fifty years keeping faith with his convictions and translating them, even in minor dishonesty, into the dailyness of living. Of everything I had heard it was this that most touched me: the vision of what a man might, after all, make of his life in the way of ordinary but honourable commitment, and the plainness with which he might present himself and say, This is what I have given my life to. This is what I am. If I hadn't been convinced by the woman's claim, her passionate certainty that she was something other than what she seemed, I must have been by his steadier one that he was, even in her shadow, himself.
Compared with his part in all this my own is trivial. I am the messenger, the narrator; and if the narrator too needs to be convinced of the truth of what he is telling, it isn't the same as laying his life down and presenting that as the measure of his belief. The scepticism of my colleagues, a flicker of irony on the lips of even the most straight-faced listener — that is all I will have to bear. I see already how the improbable side of my nature (how does a man become improbable, even to himself?) will immediately declare itself as with a twitch of an imaginary cloak I clap my hands, flourish my fingers in the air, and present out of my own longing for the extraordinary (that is how they will put it) a small, dark, barefoot woman in floral, the daughter of Alicia Vale. “But she was perfect!" (They will be telling the story to others now, in a crowded bar, or over lobster shells at a business lunch, embellishing a little as all story-tellers do.) "She couldn't have been more appropriate if he'd invented her. But then he did, didn't he? He must have!”
Oh yes, she is appropriate all right, our Mrs. Judge. Too appropriate. She puts me to the test — not of belief but of the courage to come out at last from behind my clown's make-up, my simpering and sliding and dancing on the spot, to tell her story and give myself away.
The stories we tell betray us, they become our own. We go on living in them, we go on living outside them. The Bloody Sergeant comes on, announces that a battle has been won, bleeds a little, and after twenty rugged lines retires into oblivion. But what he has been called upon to tell has to be lived with and carried through a lifetime, out there in the dark. His own end comes later and is another story. Which another man must tell.
A Medium
When i was eleven I took violin lessons once a week from a Miss Katie McIntyre, always so called to distinguish her from Miss Pearl, her sister, who taught piano and accompanied us at exams.