O God, send at least the dogs, he prayed, turning it into a kind of Greek invocation as he was not a believer, and no doubt because of his blasphemy against reality, the dogs failed to come.
Instead, the mortals went.
“The Brothers Brown!” Johnny snort-laughed.
“If they ever existed,” the woman replied dreamily.
Then she shuddered.
“What’s wrong?” Johnny asked.
“A smell of full grease-trap,” the woman answered in her hoarse voice. “There are times when you come too close to the beginning. You feel you might be starting all over again.”
At once they were laughing the possibility off, together with anything rancid. They were passing through to the lime-coloured light of the front garden, where the woman’s body revived. The mere thought of their nakedness together gave Waldo Brown the gooseflesh, whether from disgust or envy he couldn’t have told. But his mouth, he realized, was hanging open. Like a dirty old man dribbling in a train. Whereas Johnny Haynes was the elderly man, asking for trouble of the lime-coloured woman, wife or whore, who was going to give him syph or a stroke.
Anyway, they were going out the gate. Most indecently the light was showing them up, demolishing the woman’s flimsy dress, as the member of parliament passed his hand over, and round, and under her buttocks, which she allowed to lie there a moment, in the dish where those lime-coloured fruits had too obviously lain before.
More than anything else these dubious overtures, such an assault on his privacy, made Waldo realize the need to protect that part of him where nobody had ever been, the most secret, virgin heart of all the labyrinth. He began very seriously indeed to consider moving his private papers — the fragment of Tiresias a Youngish Man, the poems, the essays, most of which were still unpublished — out of the locked drawer in his desk to more of a hiding place, somewhere equal in subtlety to the papers it was expected to hide. Locks were too easily picked. He himself had succeeded in raping his desk, as an experiment, with one of the hairpins left by Mother. Arthur was far from dishonest, but had the kind of buffalo mind which could not restrain itself from lumbering into other people’s thoughts. How much easier, more open to violation, the papers. So it became imperative at last. To find some secret, yet subtly casual, cache.
In the end he decided on an old dress-box of Mother’s, lying in the dust and dead moths on top of the wardrobe, in the narrow room originally theirs and finally hers. Choked by quince trees, the window hardly responded to light, unless the highest blaze of summer. A scent of deliquescent quinces was married to the other smell, of damp. The old David Jones dress box lay in innocence beyond suspicion. Heavy though, for its innocence. Waldo discovered when he took it down some article which had been put away and forgotten, something more esoteric than could have come from a department store.
It turned out to be one of Mother’s old dresses shuddering stiffly awkwardly through his fingers, and the scales of the nacreous fan flopping floorwards. He would have to investigate. Afterwards. Arthur was out roaming with the dogs. Waldo almost skipped to transfer the papers, so easily contained: his handwriting was noted for its neatness and compression — in fact he was often complimented.
Then, as though the transfer of the papers had been too simple on an evening set aside for subtlety, he remembered the old dress. He stooped to pick up the little fan. One of the ribbons connecting the nacreous blades must have snapped in the fall. The open fan hung lopsided, gap-fingered. But glittering.
In the premature obscurity which quince branches were forcing on the room Waldo fetched and lit a lamp, the better to look at what he had found. Rust had printed on the dress a gratuitous pattern of hooks and eyes. Not noticeably incongruous. Age had reconciled their clusters with the icy satin and shower of glass which swirled through his fingers creating a draught. It was a dress for those great occasions of which few are worthy. He need not mention names, but he could see her two selves gathered on the half-landing at the elbow in the great staircase, designed by special cunning to withstand the stress of masonry and nerves. Standing as she had never stood in fact, because, although memory is the glacier in which the past is preserved, memory is also licensed to improve on life. So he became slightly drunk with the colours he lit on entering. How his heart contracted inside the blue, reverberating ice, at the little pizzicato of the iridescent fan as it cut compliments to size and order. Disorderly in habit, because the years had gradually frayed her, Mother kept what he liked to think of as a sense of moral proportion. Which he had inherited together with her eyes. There were those who considered the eyes too pale, too cold, without realizing that to pick too deeply in the ice of memory is to blench.
Merely by flashing his inherited eyes he could still impress his own reflexion in the glass — or ice.
Mother had died, hadn’t she? while leaving him, he saw, standing halfway down the stairs, to receive the guests, the whole rout of brocaded ghosts and fleshly devils, with Crankshaw and O’Connell bringing up the rear. Encased in ice, trumpeting with bugles, he might almost have faced the Saportas, moustache answering moustache.
When his heart crashed. So it literally seemed. He was left holding the fragments in front of the mirror. Then went out to see. A lamp he had disarranged on the shelf in taking the one for his own use had tumbled off. He kicked at the pieces. And went back.
To the great dress. Obsessed by it. Possessed. His breath went with him, through the tunnel along which he might have been running. Whereas he was again standing. Frozen by what he was about to undertake. His heart groaned, but settled back as soon as he began to wrench off his things, compelled. You could only call them things, the disguise he had chosen to hide the brilliant truth. The pathetic respect people had always paid him — Miss Glasson, Cornelius, Parslow, Mrs Poulter — and would continue to pay his wits and his familiar shell. As opposed to a shuddering of ice, or marrow of memory.
When he was finally and fully arranged, bony, palpitating, plucked, it was no longer Waldo Brown, in spite of the birthmark above his left collarbone. Slowly the salt-cellars filled with icy sweat, his ribs shivery as satin, a tinkle of glass beads silenced the silence. Then Memory herself seated herself in her chair, tilting it as far back as it would go, and tilted, and tilted, in front of the glass. Memory peered through the slats of the squint-eyed fan, between the nacreous refractions. If she herself was momentarily eclipsed, you expected to sacrifice something for such a remarkable increase in vision. In radiance, and splendour. All great occasions streamed up the gothick stair to kiss the rings of Memory, which she held out stiff, and watched the sycophantic lips cut open, teeth knocking, on cabuchons and carved ice. She could afford to breathe indulgently, magnificent down to the last hair in her moustache, and allowing for the spectacles.
When Waldo Brown overheard: “Scruff! Come here, Runt! Runty? Silly old cunt!”
Arthur’s obscene voice laughing over fat words and private jokes with dogs.
As the situation splintered in his spectacles Waldo was appalled. The chair-legs were tottering under him. Exposed by décolletage, his arms were turning stringy. The liquid ice trickled through his shrinking veins. Shame and terror threatened the satiny lap, under a rustle of beads. Each separate hair of him, public to private, and most private of all the moustache, was wilting back to where it lay normally.
Was he caught? Breathe a thought, even, and it becomes public property.
Only the elasticity of desperation got him out of the wretched dress and into respectability. His things.
When Waldo came out carrying under his arm the ball of some article, Arthur said, so ingratiating: