We went outside into the garden. Colonel Blackthorn shook hands with me. Everybody began to go away. Again I tried to speak to the doctor, but he said he was expected at the hospital. Perhaps he was feeling a bit nervous about that death certificate. Toby rather half-heartedly offered me a lift in his car, but I declined. I think he wanted to be alone too. I walked about for a long time in shabby sad back-streets and lost myself.
I have just found in a drawer in the kitchen the hammer which I was trying to mend on the last evening when James came to Shruff End. He must have taken the precaution of carrying it away with him. I like the kitchen. There is a large dry larder, completely empty when I arrived. There is also a view of Battersea Power Station, which in the evening looks like an Assyrian monument.
I have sold my flat in Shepherds Bush and brought some of the furniture here. I brought back my own stuff from Shruff End, but none of Mrs Chorney’s. I resisted a temptation to keep the art nouveau oval mirror which Rosina broke and which I never had reglazed. I have put most of my things into James’s dressing room. This is now, inside James’s temple, a little Charles shrine. I go there sometimes and sit. My books are still in crates in the hall. My clothes are mostly in suitcases, since I cannot yet bring myself to touch James’s neatly hanging, neatly folded garments. The big wardrobe in his bedroom is like the entrance to another world. I cannot say I feel at home in the flat, but I would not think of living anywhere else. Sometimes it seems incredible that he is not here too. Last night I was so persuaded that he was in the next room that I had to go and look.
I saw Lizzie and Gilbert on Friday, at their maisonette in Golders Green. I visit them now and then and they produce their smelly messes which they have spent all day cooking. Gilbert has now become very successful as the comic hero of that ludicrous interminable television series. He is famous for the first time in his life and people come up and touch him in the street. The critics even compare him with Wilfred Dunning, which is absurd. Lizzie seems happy. She has given up her hospital job and got fatter. They both still talk of how one day they will share a house with me and I will live upstairs and they will live downstairs and be my ‘staff’. We make jokes about this.
Are they beginning to treat me like an elderly invalid? They think James’s flat is an appalling place to live. Of course I never invite them here. I never invite anybody here.
Am I settling into my role as a celibate uncle-priest? Yesterday I took my secretary Miss Kaufman, whom I may not have mentioned before, out to coffee and listened to a tale of woe about her aged mother. Then I took Rosemary Ashe to lunch at a pub and heard all about Sidney and Maybelle. Maybelle is twenty. Rosemary still hopes Sidney may recover. The children are loving Canada. Rosemary thinks they are too philosophical about the divorce. I was glad to find that Rosemary had a very unclear idea about what had happened at Shruff End, and I did not enlighten her. Her information seemed to be that I had been persecuted by some mad village woman and a boy friend of Gilbert’s had been drowned. Fortunately she did not want to discuss my problems.
It is late in the evening in the flat. The Buddhas seem to be looking at me, although I know that beneath their drooping eyelids they do not see the world of appearance. The place is getting rather dusty as I cannot risk having a charwoman. I have done a little superficial dusting but I do not like moving things, some of them are fragile. I am especially careful with that demon-cage up on the bracket! Is the scene beginning to look more and more like a museum as James’s spirit gradually withdraws? The area which I inhabit does not increase. I eat in the kitchen, then scuttle back to this desk in the sitting room. I dress in the hall. I sleep in the larger spare bedroom. Of course I dare not sleep in James’s bed. James’s handsome bedroom is unused and I have closed the door.
At least I have now taken possession of the desk, and collected there my favourites from among the have-worthy jade animals. Weighing down my letters and papers (Miss Kaufman still helps, thank God) are two stones, the mottled pink chequered stone which I gave to Hartley, and the brown stone with the blue lines which I gave to James. I was glad to find that lying here when I arrived. I often handle these stones. I have also propped up two photographs, the one of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle dancing, and a photo of Clement when she was young in the role of Cordelia. I cannot seem to find any suitable pictures of my parents, and of course I have no recent one of James. It is clear that his preparations for his journey were extremely thorough. There were no personal papers to be found in the flat. (I wonder if Colonel Blackthorn removed anything?) There were no interesting relics at all, no old letters, photos, bills. The will was tied up in a slim package together with a statement from his bank about investments. There was no trace of James having dealt with a lawyer. The will was written in his own hand. The two witnesses appeared to be uneducated people. For some time, stupidly, I searched for a hidden letter addressed to me. I even looked into cracks in the wall.
Last night at a little party given by Gilbert and Lizzie I heard that Peregrine is doing well with his theatre in Londonderry and is becoming quite famous as a propagandist for peace in Ireland. Rosina is equally enthusiastic and is rumoured to have become politically conscious and power-mad. Gilbert says Fritzie’s Odyssey is off.
Yes, I go to parties now. I go about in London, I eat and drink and gossip just as if I were an ordinary person. Well, am I not one? I wonder what happened to that precious talisman which I was going to unwrap in a lonely cave beside the sea?
Perhaps it is a sign of age that I am busy all day without really doing anything. This diary has trailed on, it is company for me, an illusion of occupation. I now feel uneasily that before I end it I ought to offer some sort of reflective summing up of-of what? I shrink from this. There is so much pain. I have not recorded the pain.
What an egoist I must seem in the preceding pages. But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason. Thus we must live unless we are saints, and are there any? There are spiritual beings, perhaps James was one, but there are no saints.
Well, I will try to reflect, but not today. When this is all done, will I ever write anything else? The story of Clement? Or that book about the theatre that my friends kindly profess to think so necessary? Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world.
A few letters have arrived for James but they are all from scholars. It appears that my cousin was quite a well-known orientalist who corresponded with learned men all over the world. I have sent the letters on to a man at the British Museum who rang me up asking about the fate of James’s books. I asked the BM man round to look at the books and he came yesterday. When he saw all the stuff in the flat he nearly fainted with emotion and cupidity.