‘It’s usually failure, isn’t it? — a deep sense of that in oneself.’
‘Why? — since you aren’t. Not conventionally —’
But he didn’t answer, so caught was he in the excitement of his words — words, for that moment, exactly mirroring and releasing his obsession.
‘One wants to see someone else’s success, don’t you see? — where you have failed. If love is not mutual, then certainly the punishment will be. I know all that dreary business of destruction. It’s not as if I didn’t know what it was.’ He turned away — almost shouting, shaking, maddened like a rejected lover.
‘But you don’t know where it began — why it’s there? I’m sure a psychi —’
‘Of course he would,’ Guy came back vehemently. ‘He could tell me at once — what I know myself. And together we’d paper the whole thing over for a while with convenient friendly words. But how do you cure it? I don’t think you do. I don’t really think one can. And do you know why? Because you are not to be cured of your pleasure. One forgets that — that it isn’t finally a pain.’
‘Pleasure unto destruction, though, which is the same thing.’
‘The ideal combination, isn’t it? What I’ve been looking for all along.’
‘Of course — if you don’t want the help: there isn’t any. That’s an intellectual decision, I didn’t think you lacked that ability.’
‘I’ve made that decision many times — only to find it overridden.’
We both drank heavily from our glasses, both shaken now. I well understood his sense of incurability, the weight of guilt he carried from something far back: something he said he knew about. What was it?
‘What was it?’ I asked, the two of us passing the heavy double hall doors, drawing near the fire again. ‘Where do you drag up all this sense of failure from? As a child?’
‘I was happy then. Or reasonably. Never remember thinking myself unduly unhappy, anyway. No, it was marriage I think. Marrying the wrong person — or for the wrong reasons; both of us. Somebody else might have stood my failings better — or needed to depend on me more deeply; someone not so full of life — so many lives — as she is. You see, I was too taken with her ease of living, far too much, her natural capacity for everything now. I started to bear down on her for that — a net on a butterfly. I suppose I should have had a duller marriage, something cosy. I couldn’t understand her — her volatile — well, a sort of secret energy in her life, a sheer determination to be happy, to rise above. There always seemed something hidden in her happiness, some reason for it that wasn’t me, and which I had to find out about.’
‘And then you found it was another man?’
He nodded. ‘And still I wasn’t satisfied.’
‘There were others?’
‘None that I ever found out about. But by then one imagined there were. One always imagined there was something else with her — because one felt it: a thought, a secret, a man — it didn’t matter what. But whatever it was I never felt completely alone with her — you know, possessing each other fully. Always something between us.’
He hadn’t been wrecked entirely on the shoals of his own obsessions, I thought. He was right: there had always been ‘something’ between them: her Marxism, not just a lover — her politics which he pretended to be ignorant of. Yet, if he had read those African detective reports properly, how could he have been? — their political discussions about China and Nyerere’s autonomous communes. That was the thing that had surely destroyed their marriage as much as anything, which he must have known about, but wasn’t telling.
But what about her? With such beliefs why had she married him, why had she led him on, lied to him? Why take up with this pillar of the establishment, this man of property and capital? Why should a woman searching for revolution fall in with a man dedicated to preventing it — a British Intelligence officer? She must have had some guilt too and for the first time I felt sympathy for her husband. What had her marriage been for her? — a way of extracting secret information from him, a liaison of sheer political convenience?
Suddenly, for all her charming energy, her happy commitments to life, I found it easy to dislike her. And I did so for a moment, thought her a proper bitch, before I realised I might not be justified, that I didn’t really know. After all, why shouldn’t she have loved him to begin with, whatever the difference of their political beliefs? She had the capacity for love as well as social theory; why shouldn’t she be given the benefit of the doubt?
We had come back to the fire. He took a coloured spill from the mantelpiece, bent down and lit it from the smouldering logs. He didn’t smoke. She used them, with her long thin silver-ringed cigarettes.
‘In the beginning,’ I asked, ‘was it all right? What happened?’
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, calmer now, dousing the spill. ‘Oh, yes. Twelve years ago. My family were farming in Northern Rhodesia; in the beginning it was fine.’
‘What was she doing out there?’
‘Teaching. In an American Mission school in the Highlands. Quite near us.’
‘Mission school?’
‘Well, it was some Quaker foundation, actually. American-backed. No proselytising. Self-help, all that. She’d taken a degree at the American University in Beirut where her father worked. But she didn’t much like the school. She was just leaving when I met her.’
‘How?’
‘Horses.’ He laughed, a little quick, snorting laugh. ‘My parents ran a riding school as a sideline. She came to ride. It’s really too much, isn’t it? The Quaker girl, the mission school, a lot of piccaninnies; then the Big House, the young master, riding together — the colonial highlands, the huge skies, sundowners on cane chairs, flame trees over the verandah and a lot of decent old black retainers moving at the double. God, it had everything for Woman’s Own. Absolutely everything. But it worked.’ He stood up from the fire, his face and voice easier now, the light thin body of a man hopefully passing into a period of convalescence after a bad illness.
‘A romantic novel. That’s exactly what it was to begin with. And I suppose that was wrong too. We didn’t think. We didn’t have to. It was a perfectly mindless, completely happy time. All of it. And you know — I was wrong: it did work then — the reciprocal thing. There were no doubts. Once I understood her unhappiness she came to me completely. That’s very much part of the romantic thing too, isn’t it? — coming to someone in the rebound, finding each other through that.’
‘The rebound? I didn’t know.’
‘Another drink before they come down? I think that must be Harold.’ I heard a door open upstairs above the stairway; and then closing: a strange sound like a bellows sighing.
‘Yes,’ he said, as if he’d told me before. ‘Some student infatuation in Beirut. One of her professors. Nothing to it. He was much older. But one’s very hurt at that stage. Very easily. It means a lot. She’d gone and buried herself in Rhodesia. No — we were very happy. That fellow made us very happy — some Armenian-American: brought us together; she needed me then.’
He went to the drinks table again. And I thought, well, I’d been wrong about that: she hadn’t married him for any bad reason. She had loved him.
And then, thinking of this correspondence, and the weeks before in London in Graham’s apartment where I’d read it, I remembered briefly all the work I’d done at the same time on Graham’s dossier, his curriculum vitae, the reports and transcripts which Croxley and his men had extracted from him.