Did I push the car or did I just imagine that I pushed it? George had reached the canal, the place beside the iron Foot-bridge. He had already forgotten (though he would remember later) his humiliation at the Slipper House. Clouds of emotion which had hung about this place were there waiting for him; undiminished, they engulfed him in their stupefying fumes. He had been away, he had had to come back, it was all as before. What on earth happened, thought George, what did I do, what am I? It had been raining on that night; he remembered the rain surging to and fro on the windscreen and the way the yellow lights on the quay got mixed up with the rain. He remembered the cruel bumping of the fast-driven car upon the cobbles. He had turned the steering wheel and the car had plunged into the canal. He saw again the wet white top of the car looking so odd just above the dark disturbed waters whose waves were breaking against it. Somewhere in the sequence of events or dream events were his hands, slipping a little, spread out upon the rainy back window of the car and the slithering of his braced feet upon the stones. He seemed to recall now that he had moved his hands lower down to get a better leverage. Then he had fallen. If he fell, did that prove that he had pushed the car? He looked down at the square unevenly tilting granite cobbles and at the edge of the canal, all glittering with tiny sparks in the lamplight. He felt the cobbles springily with his feet, shifting back and forth and trying to remember.
The warm summer night was soft and quiet, and the three-quarter moon rising over the dark countryside beyond the wasteland made a private silver brilliance in the sky which seemed, as George stood under the yellow lamps, very remote from the earth. Beyond the iron bridge the fretty outline of the gas works rose in moon- Illumined silhouette. The lamplight showed a lurid green haze upon the quayside where tufts of grass were growing between the stones. Here Ennistone was asleep. There were no lights showing across the canal beyond the empty ragged rubbishy vegetation, which could not be called a field, which separated the canal from the houses. On this side, behind railings, a maze of partly derelict ‘light industry’ yards and sheds and one-storey brick buildings divided the canal from the road (known as ‘the Commercial Road’) which led toward Victoria Park. A dog was barking.
George closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly and deeply. That awful giddiness was coming upon him, that physically announced loss of identity, a most intense sense of his body, of its bulky heavy solidity and of his various views of it, combined with the absolute disappearance of its inhabitant. This suddenly painful body-presence produced a kind of seasickness and a heavy metaphysical ache. He thought, hold on, it will pass. Then somewhere inside the sick weight where he no longer was came the thought, where is Stella, where is she? He thought, I know, but I’ve forgotten. She isn’t dead, that’s certain. Surely I know where she is? But she’s there in the form of a black hole, like not finding a word. I can’t remember anything about her, what happened to her after this, where she was, where she went. Fancy not knowing. I must find out, I must ask somebody. Perhaps it’s drink, I’m drinking more than I used to.
Did I push the car, he wondered as the giddiness receded. If I could only start up some sort of memory. He began weaving about on the cobbles, moving his hands, moving his feet, miming turning the car, stopping the car (did he stop it?), getting out of the car, coming round behind the car and pushing it with his hands spread out like stars. If he now imagined them ‘like stars’, did that mean that he had actually seen them like that as they slipped and strained upon the window? Or had he in a fantasy seen them ‘like stars’? Could he not hang on to something here as a clue? But the clue slipped away and returned him to a futile empty helpless feeling of blankness. If only someone else could tell him. If only there had been a witness. But surely there had been a witness, and he had even recognized the witness? But this idea too dissolved in his mind and disappeared.
He thought, I’m in a bad way, I must ask people, seek for help. I’ll go to John Robert. He must receive me in the end. This formulation gave comfort. He thought, I’ll write him a letter, I’ll explain everything. That’s what I’ll do, a letter will explain it all. He can’t really be so cruel, he hasn’t understood, it’s a mistake. I’ll write him a good letter, a clear honest letter, he’ll respect that. Then he’ll see me and be kind to me and oh how my heart will be relieved. Hope came back to George like a genial light of an opening door, quietly dispelling the dark and giving him back himself. Now there was a future. He felt gentle, intelligible, whole. He breathed calmly. He thought, that is how it will be. It will be all right. And I will be all right, I will be better. I’ll go home now and sleep. He began to walk along the quay in the direction of Druidsdale.
Stationed in different hiding-places, four persons were watching George. Valerie had gone through a gate into a factory yard and was watching him through the railings. Diane was on the quay behind a big elder bush which was growing between the stones. Father Bernard was a little way behind Diane, relying on a curve in the quay for shelter, and peeping and peering so as to keep both Diane and beyond her George in view. I had made a circuit, since I knew what George’s objective was, by the Commercial Road and had come out on the quay beyond the iron bridge, where I had mounted on top of a pile of household junk which someone had illicitly dumped. From here I could see George clearly and also command a view of my fellow watchers.
The evening had no dramatic climax, it faded away rather into a kind of melancholy elegiac peace. From my vantage point, lying concealed behind a crest of old mattresses, I could see, for she was close to me, Valerie Cossom’s grave beautiful face, looking with such sadness and such anxiety toward George as he performed on the quayside what must have seemed to her mad unintelligible antics. (I had of course realized at once that George was re-enacting his drama.) And I thought how fortunate George was to be loved by this beautiful intelligent girl, and how little his ‘fortune’ was worth to him. More distantly I could discern poor Diane uncomfortably crouched between her bushy tree and the railings and beyond the dark shape of Father Bernard, his long skirt swinging as he bobbed to and fro, looking, then hiding. There was something ridiculous in the scene, and yet something moving too. We had all presumably come to ‘look after’ George, though Father Bernard had also doubtless come to protect Diane. The idea that George might suddenly hurl himself into the canal, simply as a crazy act of violence, was certainly in my mind. I did not see him as about to commit suicide. (In any case no Ennistonian would choose to attempt death by drowning.) I was relieved when George turned away from the fatal place and began to tramp off home. The crisis appeared to be over. (I may say that I discussed this scene much later with two of the participants.) As George passed her, Diane crouched down into a little dark ball behind her tree. It is just possible that George saw her and ignored her. Father Bernard, in absurd haste, squeezed himself back through a gap in the railings. Valerie, safe where she was, did not move. I could not help wanting to laugh as I saw the scene dissolve.
Father Bernard emerged and helped Diane out from behind the tree. He put his arm round her and led her away. Valerie, coming through the gate on to the quay, now saw the other two and watched them depart. Then she turned the other way and walked past my place of concealment. I saw her face as she passed. She wore a strange expression, very sad, weary, grave, even stern, and yet with a twist in the mouth which was almost like a smile, though it might have presaged tears. It struck me at the time that this expression very well expressed what, at the end, the very end, if that can be imagined, someone, perhaps God, might feel about George.