Since writing the above I have noticed several oriental persons hanging around in the streets nearby. I hope they are not the others, who are mistaking me for James? As for that tulpa tribesman, he was certainly an intelligence agent, which was why James was so annoyed that I saw him.
I have just heard the terrible shocking news that Peregrine has been murdered by terrorists in Londonderry. I can hardly believe it. I realize now that I regarded his activities as purely comic. Some men play their whole lives as a comedy. Only death is not comic-but then it is not tragic either. That blank horror touches me again, with a grief that is pure fear, but I know I am not really grieving for Perry but for other deaths, perhaps my own. Poor Perry. He was a brave man. I cannot pretend I ever really loved him, but I do admire him for trying to kill me, and if it hadn’t been for that freak wave he would have succeeded too. That weird vision of James which seemed so important must have been a result of the blow on the head. It was a lucky escape.
There have been a number of tributes to Peregrine from Catholic and Protestant bishops. He is quite a martyr. They are setting up a Peregrine Arbelow Peace Foundation. Rosina, returned from California to bask in the martyr’s glory, is organizing a lot of American money. Lizzie says she heard that Rosina had actually left Perry before his death with no intention of returning, but this may be just malicious gossip.
The shock of Perry’s death has, in a curious way, made me a good deal less certain about James’s. The theory I deployed above remains a good one, extremely plausible. I just feel less inclined to believe it. Perhaps I would prefer to think of him as dead, the spirit that disturbed me for so long at peace at last. There are no mysteries after all. James died of a heart attack. As for the ‘oriental persons’, I realize now that they are simply waiters from an Indian restaurant in the Vauxhall Bridge Road.
No, I do not want to believe that cousin James is alive and well and living in Tibet, any more than I want to believe that Hartley is alive and well and living in Australia; and there are times when I actually feel persuaded that she too has died.
Peregrine opened the door and fell to the ground riddled with bullets. After all, he died a hero with his boots on.
To lunch with Miss Kaufman. Sidney has arrived to talk things over with Rosemary. Rosina has spoken at a meeting in Trafalgar Square. Lizzie and I watch Gilbert on television.
Uncle Abel dancing with Aunt Estelle so lightly touches her hand, so lightly touches her shoulder, as if he were lifting her off the ground simply by the force of his love. They look intently at each other; he protectively, she with absolute trust. Were they waltzing, at that fleeting moment which the camera seized and tossed on into the future? Her feet seem scarcely to touch the dance floor.
My father was something which I was destined never to be: a gentleman. Was Uncle Abel one? Not quite. Was James one? The question is absurd.
James said I was in love with my own youth, not with Hartley. Clement stopped me from finding Hartley. The war destroyed any ordinary world in which I might have married my childhood sweetheart. There were no trains going where she was.
I have just had a drunken evening with Toby Ellesmere and feel rather ashamed of it. Toby said James was ‘a bit potty’ and that he was ‘a sphinx without a secret’. I did not disagree. I even felt some satisfaction in hearing James belittled. Ellesmere still wants those poems but I will not give them up; nor have I looked at them, not at so much as a line. Even if James is the greatest poet of the century he must wait a little longer to be recognized. I think he will have to wait until after I am dead.
James said that I must re-enact my love for Hartley, and that then it would crumble to pieces like something in a fairy tale when the clock strikes twelve. Was it just a necessary charade and is such re-enacted love just a machinery for getting rid of an old resentment? Did I simply want to take her away from Ben, as I had wanted to take Rosina away from Perry? Of course Titus’s death made Hartley impossible for me, that part at least of the cold lesson, the revelation of human vanity, has remained. And am I now actually beginning to wonder how much I really loved her even at the start? The sad fact was that Hartley was not really very intelligent. What a dull humourless pair we seem, looking back, without spirit or style or a sense of fun. All those things were what I learnt from Clement. Did I after all mistake dullness for goodness because my mother hated Aunt Estelle?
Why have I written down these blasphemies all of a sudden? This is late night nonsense.
How long I have put off writing about Hartley, although I have been thinking about her all the time; and perhaps now after all there is little to say. A few days ago, although I did not record it, it suddenly became ‘obvious’ to me that of course the story of going to Australia was simply a hoax. Why had Hartley not told me earlier that she was going to Australia? Because she was not going! Ben invented the plan at the last moment. Was it not very odd to buy a dog just when one was leaving the country? The postcard from Sydney, so promptly produced by the confederate next door, could easily have been faked with the help of an Australian friend. Ben had decided to throw me off the scent for good, even send me off on a wild goose chase to the antipodes, and had then removed his submissive wife to Bournemouth or Lytham-St-Anne’s. They might even, after a while, and having found out from the Arkwrights that I had gone, return to Nibletts. What should I do then? Go back and do some more detective work in the village? Not everyone would lie.
But the impulse to do so has gone. I have battered destructively and in vain upon the mystery of someone else’s life and must cease at last. I later concluded that it really did not matter whether they had gone to Sydney or to Lytham-St-Anne’s. And now the idea of such an elaborate hoax for my benefit simply seems absurd.
When did they decide to go to Australia, if they did? Did Ben really believe that I was Titus’s father? If he did he behaved, for a violent man, with remarkable restraint. He may even have considered me useful as a pretext. Looking back into that causal web, it is just as well I did tell James that I thought Ben had tried to kill me, since this enabled him to perceive my murderous intentions, and thus to decide to make Perry confess. Did I ever really intend to kill Ben? No, those were consolation fantasies. Yet such fantasies too can cause ‘accidents’.
Why did I imagine Hartley was consumed by a death wish? She was a survivor, tough as old boots.
If this diary is ‘waiting’ for some final clarificatory statement which I am to make about Hartley it may have to wait forever. It is not of course a full account of my doings, and events and people unconnected with what went before are omitted from it. I have also omitted the dates from this meditation. Time has passed and it is October, with bright cool sunny days and an intense blue northern sky and scattered flying memories of other autumns. It is mushroom weather, and I have been having feasts of real mushrooms, the big slimy black things, not the little tasteless buttons. Crumpets too have appeared in the shops and already one can look forward to the so familiar London winter, dark afternoons and fogs and the glitter and excitement of Christmas. And however unhappy I am I cannot help responding automatically to these stimuli, as no doubt I did in the past in other unhappy autumns.