‘Don’t say that, Brian, I know other people do, but you mustn’t, please -’
‘Sorry, you’re right, don’t cry, for God’s sake what are you crying about?’
Tears, the tears that came so easily, had risen into Gabriel’s eyes. Her happiness was so terribly haunted by fears, images of loss, terrible images, mad images. If Rufus had lived he would have been Adam’s age. She had developed a fantasy that George would kill Zed. Then that he would kill Adam.
Brian did not know what she was thinking (for of course she did not divulge such insane notions) but he knew the sort of things she was thinking. He patted her wet hand on which tears had fallen. ‘There now, there now. It isn’t Rufus, you know. George was a little horror when he was a boy.’
‘I expect you were too.’
‘He enjoyed drowning those kittens.’
‘Don’t tell me that story!’
‘Well, they had to be drowned. Don’t cry about it.’
‘I still think Professor Rozanov might help him,’ said Gabriel, drying her tears. ‘You didn’t really mean what you said about Rozanov to Father Bernard?’
‘No, of course not. I meant it for your creepy friend!’
‘I don’t think he came about George at all, he came about Rozanov.’
‘Makes a change.’
‘George respects Professor Rozanov, he’d pay attention to him. After all, he went all the way to America to see him that time.’
‘Whatever happened on that occasion,’ said Brian, ‘it was certainly not a success. George may have admired Rozanov at one time, but I doubt if he cares a fig for him now. The trouble with George is he gets away with things. He’s popular because people like horrible men. Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. Who’s our most loved king? Henry the Eighth. If only George could get into really serious trouble it might sober him up. Or if everyone ganged up against him and did something, not just gratifying their malice by talking, I think George ought to be lynched. And he will be lynched one day if he goes on. There’s collective responsibility for you.’
‘No,’ said Gabriel, ‘no.’ And ‘Oh dear — ’ She often said that. One of these awful fantasies had taken hold of her. How could George bear to see Adam growing up? To banish it she breathed deeply, breathing in some absolutely quiet air which she knew was really everywhere, but which she only experienced at these moments of refuge. But fear too was in the quiet air. She hoped Adam could not read her mind. He had said to her once, ‘You mustn’t protect me against the sad things.’
She said now, ‘Do you think Adam might be a vet when he grows up, or a naturalist? He cares so much about animals.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Brian. ‘He’s not interested in details, he would never do a botanical or anatomical drawing. This animal thing, it’s different - it’s part of something else - sort of sentimental - well, no, symbolic rather - like a sort of funny little religion — ’ He could not explain, though he felt and saw what he meant. It was all somehow part of Adam’s changeling quality, his strangeness and absoluteness as a boy; and Brian could not imagine Adam grown up and did not want to picture him as a deep-voiced youth with a hairy chest and a sex life. Perhaps he could not imagine the future because the future did not exist. And Adam was not growing. Would his son live on as a dwarf with a child’s mind? And here his deep confused thoughts were perhaps reaching out and touching the deep confused thoughts of his wife.
‘It’ll be good to see Tom again,’ said Gabriel. ‘He hardly ever comes now. Do you think he’s avoiding George - or Alex?’
‘Young chaps avoid possessive mothers.’
‘I think he sheered off because George was jealous.’
‘Because Alex is so attached to Tom? Poor deprived old George. Here we go again. Let’s go to bed.’ Brian stood up. He said, ‘Tom - yes - Tom - he’s happy.’
And you are not, thought Gabriel sadly.
They went to bed.
Brian and Gabriel McCaffrey had known each other forever; they went to the same Friends’ Meeting House, to the same children’s parties, then to the same dances. Brian, growing up, was handsome, a young Viking. Gabriel fell in love. Later Brian did too. He disliked forward sexy girls. Gabriel was pretty, quiet, shy, hiding behind her floppy hair. She peered admiringly at Brian. Brian was a sober and serious-minded young man. He wanted a loyal truthful gentle wife and an open peaceful simple mode of existence. Time proved he had chosen well. Gabriel and Brian continued to love each other although in many ways they belonged to different human tribes.
Brian, unlike his father and grandfather whose relation to Quakerism had been merely sentimental, took religion seriously. He may have been influenced in this by his ‘godfather’, William Eastcote (popularly known as ‘Bill the Lizard’), a very devout person and pillar of the Meeting, and a cousin of the well-known philanthropist Milton Eastcote. The Eastcotes were a wealthy family (also originally ‘in trade’) and William retired early from a career at the bar to devote himself, like his cousin, to good works. Brian, with Gabriel and Adam, went to Meeting every Sunday. He did not believe in God, but the Ennistone Friends were not anxious about this matter. The Mystery of God was one with the Inner Light of the Soul, and the illumined Way was the Good Life, where truthful vision spontaneously prompted virtuous desire. Herein lay the perfect simplicity of duty. Brian pictured himself as austere and pure in heart. He wanted to live the Good Life with his wife and his son, but he found this difficult. He also wanted to do some great thing in the world. (Gabriel had believed in Brian’s great thing.) But now it was clear he would not. He worked on the Ennistone Town Council in the education department.
Brian found the Good Life difficult for simple but deep reasons. He was selfish. He did what he wanted and Gabriel did what he wanted too. This had gone on so long that Brian imagined (wrongly, as it happened) that Gabriel had ceased to notice it. Gabriel wanted to travel. Brian hated travel, he wanted to stay at home and read. They stayed at home and read. Gabriel wanted to entertain. Brian thought social life was insincere. They did not entertain. Brian ate fast, Gabriel ate slow. Meals ended when Brian had finished. Brian was often irritable, sometimes angry, and (but this more rarely) if he was very displeased he withdrew himself from Gabriel. This sulky withdrawal, the result simply of his own ill-temper, he felt as a black iron pain, an experience of hell, yet he could not inhibit this form of violence. He did not display anger to Adam, but felt in his relation to his son a terrible vague inadequacy, a sheer awkward embarrassed clumsiness which distorted communication. Sometimes it seemed to him that Adam understood this and came to him with deliberate olive branches, little touching reassuring gestures of affection, which Brian found himself accepting gracelessly as if he were being condescended to. Brian lusted after other women to an extent which would have amazed Gabriel had she known about it, but this aspect of his frailty he was able to keep strictly under control. Some said there was a George inside Brian waiting to be let out, but so far there had been no manifestation of this hypothetical presence.
Gabriel was aware of her grievances without being obsessed by them. Her chief grievance, apart from Brian’s selfishness to which she quietly gave in, forgiving though not forgetting, was that she had never studied anything and at the age of thirty-four knew nothing. Brian had studied sociology at the University of Essex. Gabriel, after a year at secretarial college, had begun to think she might after all go to a university when she was overtaken by marriage. Now who and what was she? Brian’s wife, Adam’s mother. When she compared herself with Stella or Alex she felt unreal. She was a ‘poor Bowcock’, one of the muddled ones who had no grasp on life. Her father, a municipal engineer in South London, was dead. She had got on well with her mother and her brother but they had gone painlessly to Canada when her brother married and it did not even matter to her now that they detested Brian. Gabriel knew that a certain kind of self-satisfaction was essential to her and she was determined not to become a discontented woman. She made her home her fortress where she was secure and content to be invisible. She was not out in the open, battle-scarred and unhoused like Stella and George whose adventures appalled and fascinated her. She was not like them. When in the early morning she let the cold clear water run and filled the kettle to make tea, she felt innocent and fresh. One of the qualities of her interior castle she had acquired from Adam - a sort of animism whereby everything, not only the flies which had to be caught and let out of windows, the wood lice which had to be tenderly liberated into the garden, the spiders which were to be respected in their corners, but also the knives and forks and spoons and cups and plates and jugs, and shoes, and poor socks that had no partners, and buttons which might become uncherished and lost, had all a life and being of their own, and friendliness and rights. All these became an extension of her existence as they were an extension of his and in this common being, as in a vulnerable extended body, she secretly mingled with her son.