Chapter Three
RETROSPECT
I remember little of the drive to Chelsea, except that the fog became thicker as we approached the river and we had difficulty in finding our destination. Directly I reached the sitting-room, I collapsed on to a sofa and stayed there until I eventually discovered that it was very cold—that the room was indistinguishable from the fog outside—that a radio had been switched on in the flat above.
I rose with difficulty, drew the curtains, turned on the light, then looked round the room which contained nothing that belonged to me. The solid self-satisfied furniture, the solitary etching, the military text-books on the shelves, the encyclopædia in its revolving case were Major Black’s—and all regarded me with resentment. I was an interloper. The war had prisoned me in this flat and, until it ended, here I should remain.
An idea occurred to me and I went into the bedroom, opened the wardrobe and took out the things I had worn in my dream. Perhaps one or other of them would reveal whether I had been out in them last night. I studied in turn the overcoat, scarf, gloves, rubber-soled shoes, but, gradually, the horrible delusion possessed me that I was about to re-enact the dream down to its least detail. Again, I felt like an automaton until, at last, I threw the things aside and returned to the sitting-room.
But there was no evading the facts which confronted me like spectres: Carol had been stabbed; the door of her flat was open; the street door unlocked; no struggle; no robbery. In my dream, all this had been so. In actuality, it had been so. There was only one explanation—one which made me tremble.
I had not dreamed last night, I had walked in my sleep to Carol’s flat.
Do you think I don’t know that any other man would have instantly dismissed that explanation as fantasy? Of course I know it! Whatever the facts were, he would reject that explanation of them. But, for me, it is impossible to reject it.
It is impossible because, as a child, I walked in my sleep, again and again. And in a manner wholly similar to the one in which I went to Carol’s flat in my “dream.”
I must go back to my childhood. I must relive experiences which determined my destiny, as surely as the mould into which molten metal is poured fashions its final shape.
I must go back, and it is difficult to go back. Difficult because, for people over forty, memory is not a road to retrace. It is a hotchpot of the lives one has lived: childhood; the world before 1914; the first great war; the years between the wars; 1939 onwards. These lives have no organic sequence, so there are gaps in memory: misty abysses from which emerge faces forgotten and scenes obliterated—the débris of days, near in time, but, spiritually, far away and long ago. . . .
My parents were unhappy people, though it was not until I went to boarding-school, when I was twelve, that I began to discover the extent and enigmatic nature of their unhappiness. Many things, delightful to me as a child, acquired new emphasis when I reviewed them as a man. The continual travelling all over Europe till I was seven—my parents’ sudden decisions to go here, there, anywhere—their febrile enthusiasms—their childish belief that, henceforth, everything would be entirely different—all became remarkably revealing in retrospect.
The most moving fact about them was their devotion to each other. This devotion—unlike any I have encountered since—was so profound that it isolated them, because others instinctively recognised that here were two beings as mutually dependent, and as remote from humanity, as two lovers marooned on a deserted island. I never knew them spend one day apart and it was not fortuitous that my mother died within a month of my father’s death.
There are people who seem to have come to this world by mistake; people who, no matter how strenuously they struggle to adjust themselves to ordinary existence, remain strangers to it. These are they who, in varying degrees, are “tenants to tragedy”—and encounter it as infallibly as Lear.
Of the two, my father was the more mysterious because his isolation could not be attributed to an external cause, whereas my mother’s was the result of frustrated ambition. She had made a sensational début on the operatic stage—she had beauty—consequently a brilliant career seemed certain, when she became a semi-invalid almost overnight.
Perhaps the most revealing fact about my father, which I learned after his death, is that he asked my mother to marry him immediately after the collapse of her hopes and at the precise moment when others were diplomatically deserting her. This would be understandable if he had been an infatuated well-to-do nonentity, but, actually, he was extraordinarily gifted and could have succeeded in half a dozen different careers, had it not been for the fact that all his gifts were on the circumference of his nature, not at the centre, consequently they lacked vital stimulus. He was a man permanently in search of something which he never found.
There are people about whom a final decision is never reached, and my father was one of them. Sometimes I think he had the temperament of a martyr—a martyr without a creed. Sometimes he seems an artist with every gift, except concentration. And sometimes I am convinced that he and my mother were just a couple of hyper-sensitive nerve-tortured people who ought never to have married—and certainly should not have had a child.
But these retrospective theories become shadowy on the background of the passionate affection which my parents evoked when I was a boy. Our wanderings through Europe were endless enchantment, and even now, city after city, scene after scene, rise before me dowered with that enchantment, until I am overwhelmed with gratitude for memories so magical that they seem half-dream, half-vision.
But I have memories other than these—memories of incidents which hold a content far greater than their setting. . . . An autumn afternoon in Rome. My mother was standing at a window, unaware that I had come in and now stood near the half-open door. Again I see the bewilderment of her expression, the listless droop of the white hands, the luminous black hair, the dark eyes—the resignation shrouding the lonely figure. Again I feel the affection which glowed in me then—the sensation of something rare, remote, mysterious.
. . . A cloudy morning in Florence. We were leaving. The luggage had gone: my mother and I were downstairs, waiting to go to the station. At last she asked me to find out what my father was doing. I ran up the stairs, but stopped when I reached the wide-open door of the sitting-room. He stood, looking in turn at the writing-table, chairs, walls, carpet, as if realising that these had shared a part of his life and that he would never see them again. He gazed, not at a room, but at mystery—the mystery implicit in the simplest events. He seemed to be listening: the clock on the mantelpiece ticked feverishly. I looked at the slender figure; the thick auburn hair; the oval face; the unquiet eyes—the sensitive hands. The silence was part of him. And I had the disturbing sensation that we had not met before—that, when he turned, he would not recognise me. . . .
But the debt of debts which I owe to my father is that he taught me to see. My gift for drawing developed very early—I could draw before I could read—and he fostered this gift with knowledge and imagination. Oddly enough, in view of his inner preoccupations, he belonged to those for whom the visible world exists and, to be with him, was to find the familiar transfigured. Everything suddenly revealed the marvel of its exclusive being, and its mysterious relation to the whole. Simply by his presence, he compelled recognition of the fact that every single moment is a uniquely-occurring, never-returning miracle. I remember a morning with him in a little Italian town, and the swift realisation that once, once only, would this Southern sunlit street present this aspect—that fleet of gossamer clouds; those shadows; that girl at that window; those picturesque loiterers. Once, once only! And, paradoxically, this realisation of the ephemeral revealed the eternal quality of that Southern sunlit street. . . .