‘You have none. Yours are illusions.’
‘You think that women — ’
‘Oh don’t, women’s problems are so boring, they even bore women.’
‘When you get those letters — ’
‘Oh damn the letters. It’s no fun, I can tell you, being the local âme damnée. What’s the matter with you, kid? You seem nervy today.’
‘Nervy! God!’
Diane wanted to cry, but she knew that George hated tears. Curled into a little black ball like a disturbed spider, she tucked her black-stockinged feet in and fingered the jagged metal necklace which they laughingly called her ‘slave’s collar’.
‘When is Stella coming home?’ she asked.
‘Buzz buzz. Hickory Dickory Dock.’
‘I suppose she is coming home?’
‘You dream that one day she won’t. You dream that she will get fed up and leave me one day. That day will never come. Stella will never leave me. She will cling to me with the little steel claws of her love until violent death ensues for her or for me.’
‘Violent death?’
‘All death is violent.’
‘I’ve stopped expecting her to leave you.’
‘Stella would like me in a wheel chair and her pushing it.’
‘Do you really think — ’
‘Oh shut up about her, I told you to, didn’t I? Say something interesting, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Let’s go to France, I’ve never been out of England, let’s go to that hotel in Paris, the one you mentioned, where you used to go as a student, I always remember that hotel, I think of it in the night — ’
‘Well, don’t. You’ll never go there. Forget it.’
‘Oh do sit down, darling, wild beastie, stop walking like that, stop padding and pacing, you make me want to scream, come and hold my hand. I’m full of darkness today.’
‘I’m always full of darkness.’
Westwold, where Diane’s flat was situated, is a ‘mixed’ area of small shops and modest suburban houses and cottages, tucked in between the river Enn and the railway, with Druidsdale on one side and Burkestown on the other. The railway, I should explain, passes beneath the common in a long tunnel, another feat of Victorian engineering. It emerges on the Burkestown side of Ennistone where the railway station is situated, most inconveniently for the inhabitants of Victoria Park, whose ancestors insisted on this remote siting. Westwold, together with the part of Burkestown round St Olaf’s Church (fourteenth century, Low Church of England), contains some of the oldest houses in Ennistone, none unfortunately of any size or interest. There is also a pub called the Three Blind Mice. Diane’s flat was not far from here in a quiet street of two-storey terraced houses, above a small Irish-linen shop where an elderly man quietly unfolded large white towels for infrequent customers.
The area in which George was now walking was cluttered up not only by Diane’s clothes, her ‘corsets’ and things which he was treading on, but also by her possessions, little things bought to console her, stools, baskets, plants, a leather elephant, a yellow china umbrella-stand full of walking-sticks, a rack for shaggy magazines, objects which filled the interstices between the larger articles of furniture. Among the latter was an upright piano with an inlaid floral pattern and brass candle-holders. Diane, who could not play, had bought it cheap for the use of some hypothetical pianist client. She had pictured a tender scene, candle-lit. (There were occasional tender scenes.) But no piano player had come and the piano was, even to her ear when she idly strummed it, patently in need of tuning. The top of the piano was crowded with small objects, miniature dolls, bits of china, toy animals. ‘These are your children,’ one of her clients once told her, ‘you express your frustrated maternal feelings by taking pity on these bits of junk in shops!’ The speaker had a wife and four fine children, Diane saw them at the Baths. After he went away she cried for a long time.
George brought a chair near to the sofa and sat and held her hand, facetiously at first, then seriously. George was wondering whether it mattered that the priest had (had he?) seen him pushing the car. Not that he imagined that the priest would tell the police or say anything which George could not safely deny. What troubled George was the bond which had now come into being between him and the priest. He had sometimes felt that the priest was ‘after him’, though in just what way was never clear. All sorts of baneful and inauspicious bonds joined George to the people who surrounded him; almost any incident could make a bond, create an enemy. These bonds were the cords with which people tried to tie him down, to net him as a quarry to be killed. He was the doomed maypole round which people danced to truss him as a victim. The priest, as witness, was but one more symptom of the mounting crisis in George’s life; of course George’s life had always been in crisis, in the sort of crisis where ordinary morality is felt to be abrogated, as it is in wartime. But now he felt at moments that it was the lutte finale.
He looked down at Diane’s little nicotine-brown hand, like a child’s hand with tiny bitten finger-nails. He lifted it and smelt it, then kissed it and continued absently to hold it.
‘What is it?’ said Diane. ‘Is it Professor Rozanov?’
George had briefly mentioned his teacher’s return, Diane was guessing.
George did not answer this, but said, ‘You spend time gossiping at the Baths, you hear what people say. Who will he come to?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who are his friends here?’
‘What about N?’
‘He quarrelled with N.’
‘William Eastcote?’ (This was Bill the Lizard, Brian’s godfather and the man who saw the flying saucer.)
‘He’s about that age, he’s the sort of person Rozanov might tolerate — ’
‘Is Rozanov as old as that?’ said Diane.
‘That’s not old.’ George let go of her hand. ‘What made you think of Eastcote?’
‘Someone said he’d had a letter from Professor Rozanov.’
‘Well, keep your ears open, kid, watch and pray.’
George’s face in repose had a calm benevolent expression. His ceaseless troubles had not yet made marks upon that bland surface. He had the darker brown hair of the McCaffreys (the Stillowens were blonds) which he wore cut short and sleek in an old-fashioned mode. (It was even rumoured that he used hair oil.) He was taller than Brian but not as tall as Tom. He had been slim but was now heavier. He had fine wide-apart brown eyes, which could suddenly narrow, but his ‘cat-look’, unlike Alex’s, was amused and quizzical. His face was rather round, his nose was rather short, and he had small square separated teeth set on a wide arc, giving his face a boyish frank look when he smiled. He wore light grey check suits with waistcoats, and was often to be seen (as he was now) wearing the shiny-backed waistcoat without the jacket. It was this habit which prompted people to say he looked like a snooker player. A remark made by Brian that ‘bar billiards’ was George’s game manifested more malice than insight and reinforced in Brian’s critics the view that Brian was something of a blunt instrument. George was not a frequenter of bars and there was something at least superficially stylish about him. He had been a graceful cricketer when young.
George, more than most people, lived by an idea of himself which was in some ways significantly at odds with reality. To say he was a narcissist was to say little. We are mostly narcissists, and only in a few, not always with felicitous results, is narcissism overcome (broken, crushed, annihilated, nothing less will serve) by religious discipline or psycho-analysis. George was an accomplished narcissist, an expert and dedicated liver of the double life, and this in a way which was not always to his discredit. That is, he was in some respects, though not in others, not as bad as he pretended to be, or as he really believed himself to be. Herein perhaps he intuitively practised that sort of protective coloration which consists in sincerely (or ‘sincerely’, sincerity being an ambiguous concept) giving one’s faults pejorative names which conceal the yet more awful nature of what is named. All of which goes to show that it is difficult to analyse human frailty, and certainly difficult to analyse George’s.