R.H.I. Page 6

  At this, the lions woke. Did the animals, in fact incapable of speech, capable only of a frustrated roar, represent herself, or a part of herself? When they woke, she woke. She woke to the world’s screaming, the world’s sound.

  23. There had seemed no reason not to invite the soldier back to Jones’s cottage. They sat awkwardly for a few minutes at the wooden table in the kitchen.

  She said, ‘I only have a little bread. I have tea and milk too, if you want. It’s hard to obtain provisions.’

  ‘Provisions!’

  ‘Food.’

  ‘That’s how we talk in the army. It’s not the sort of word that a—’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘I might have said, a lady.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Well, would you like something?’

  ‘Yes, tea. Please. Sorry, I’m not really used to polite company. I’ve spent too much time in the trenches, with soldiers, or alone.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘Something about coming and sitting at a table while someone makes me tea. It sounds silly, but—’

  ‘You seemed confident enough outside.’

  ‘No soldier likes to be in a confined space. Oh, I don’t know if that’s true. But I don’t like it.’

  She said, ‘It’s not my cottage.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know quite what I’m doing here.’

  ‘You don’t!’

  She said, ‘Listen, it’s all right. I invited you in. You don’t have to behave politely. It can be our agreement: be as uncouth as you wish. I can cope.’

  He said, ‘You might regret saying that.’

  ‘Do soldiers really behave so badly?’

  ‘There’s language we wouldn’t use in other company. And—’

  ‘We’re so isolated here. It must be strange for you. You were right in the middle of all that blood. Tell me—’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘But the things you’ve seen!’

  ‘I didn’t want to come back and talk about it.’

  ‘But talking! Isn’t that good?’

  ‘For some kind of recovery?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  After a pause, she said, ‘For a long time I didn’t do anything. The world just went on its way around me. I still feel a little like that. I was nothing in the midst of it. I was pushed around by it. When I started my analysis, it was the first time I had ever done anything.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘And you! You’ve been in the middle of things! You see?’

  ‘Sometimes, being there was not so different from being here. It could be very quiet. It could be frighteningly quiet.’

  ‘Frighteningly—?’

  ‘Because of what might come after the silence.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell you. Of course it was awful. Explosions, being shot at, gas, and deaths. But it’s not any more real; it’s no closer to the centre of things, if that’s what you want. It was an isolated patch of mud, a cold trench. Or some French town when we were on leave.’

  ‘You were close enough to touch—’

  ‘We weren’t close to anything. There wasn’t anything we were close to. The world was passing us by, the same way it was passing you.’

  Why was Joan disappointed? Why did she now look at the soldier for a long moment, trying to detect a sign of concealment? She tried to find something in him, and was sure it was there to be found: some clue. Wasn’t time, the explosion of reality, wasn’t it all there, in this man? Each breath he took bore an audible scar; his lungs, his chest seemed to string out the air, painstakingly weave it and ball it. No, not the air, but something under the air or behind it. Joan listened, without knowing she did so, to his noises. Would she get it out of him? Would she get out of him his soldier’s fear that his defences were himself; that in losing his defences he would dissolve? And what would she need to do to touch this fear, this danger and reality that she hoped he concealed? Here was a problem: wouldn’t she herself need to cross those defences, see beyond them to the emptiness of his damaged lungs, in order to find his fear—and in so doing wouldn’t she prove to be the fear’s fulfilment, and in fact destroy him? There was something complicated and nameless that they both wished for.

  24. When she had gone to see Jones, she hadn’t told her husband. Instead, she fired the governess. It was before her first session with the analyst, not a result of it. The governess was too much Joan herself, or what she might have been. It was all part of some calculation. The reminder, the meeting of eyes when she came to interrupt them in their lessons that morning, only confirmed it. Well, she would find somewhere else to go. It was getting difficult to afford the woman’s pay, and to feed another mouth. But of course she would have to be replaced. But here, again, the meeting of eyes—the woman seemed to fear being let go; she seemed to expect it; she seemed to reflect everything of Joan’s thoughts. But if going to the analyst was, at last, an action, a decision, something she had chosen, this other act, which coincided with it, was no act: she was not the first governess to be let go, and it happened automatically, as if Joan were not in control. Something acted through her. The only thing in the world now was war; it centred the world on itself and worked through Joan with its fury. It worked through Joan’s muscles, tensing and vibrating them, as if they resonated to it. The guns and machinery worked through Joan when she stood in front of the woman, who stood also when Joan entered. No hesitation this time, no standing or leaning by the door; she was propelled onwards towards the governess. Could the girl already be sent to a school? Joan thought of letting go of the housemaid also—but this woman’s wages were less, her eyes always averted. There was nothing of the equal there. No, Joan was the equal of all women! How could she simply fire her daughter’s tutor? Can it be true that other things worked through her?

  ‘I have bad news.’

  Her daughter said, ‘Mother!’

  ‘We have to let you go.’

  ‘Mother!’

  The governess herself said nothing for a second, but her face registered the news with an expression of pain. She was standing opposite Joan.

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘It’s become difficult to keep you. I’m sorry. The war …’

  But the woman didn’t seem to be pained below the surface of her face. She stood still, as erect as ever; her eyes met Joan’s even more firmly, and her wince faded. There was even something of a shrug to her. Was the woman proud of her simple life? Joan left—she found herself outside the room, as if she had never been in it. In this way one moment of time seems to disappear, its only evidence in the subtle messages of clocks’ hands.

  She mentioned the governess’s departure to Evelyn later, almost by way of light conversation. It was as if she had orchestrated the two events (the doctor, the governess) concurrently so that the one would provide cover for the other. But why would the appointment she had made with Jones need to be covered up?

  Evelyn said, ‘But Diana loves her, and … ?’

  ‘We can’t afford her.’

  ‘Of course we can. Things aren’t so desperate as that.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think—I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s not too late to tell her she can stay—’

  ‘I went to them the other day and they were singing the most ridiculous French song. I don’t know what she’s teaching her. She seems sloppy, or disorganised. She can’t always quite remember what she’s taught.’

  ‘She seems very good to me.’

  ‘You don’t talk with her every day.’

  ‘You haven’t said any of this before.’

  ‘I’m saying it now.’

  ‘Are you sure she needs to go?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Well …’ Evelyn was looking at her with something that could have been concern. His ‘well’ was a relu
ctant agreement, a concession, but one made for the wrong reasons. Their deal, their entanglement, surfaced again in his look—it was a look that gave out indulgences and administered things. He was, again, pure lawyer, incapable of error. However, none of this made Joan angry. Instead, it was an awareness that stayed somewhere out of her consciousness, and was tied to the awareness that her own reasons were wrong, that she had told, quite explicitly, lies, and that she didn’t quite know why herself. Here she was without a guide in life’s untamed jungle, etc. Here she was, horse seemingly in control of rider, etc.

  And the horse, this ‘unconscious’, was it somewhere deep inside her, a secret, a part of her? Or, would a better metaphor for her lack of control be something not inside her, but external: the amber she was encased in? This amber was the amber of history, something that preserves but colours what it encases, something that fills every crevice, something through which it is impossible to touch the object. Why else has Joan seemed to us so passive, so constrained, so distant and incapable of action, as if she were hardly a person at all? For us, here, now, perhaps this is only a difficulty of perspective. For us, there is the fact that she did this or that, all in the past and set once and for all, so how can she really ‘do’ anything? Isn’t she swept along, every word comfortably in its historical place, set firm in the invisible record? But of course, we ourselves are inside our own history, one reflected back to us on television screens. How often are we ourselves the actors in the world reflected to us? Was time and history the amber that constrained and preserved Joan for the future, at the same time as it was the horse that dragged her onwards? And what kind of question is that?

  Something complicated was happening. While Joan sat across from the soldier in Jones’s cottage, she mentioned her first ever ‘act’, her first ever decision: going to see the analyst. The act was, for her (as for us) already, when she mentioned it two years later, contained and set in time’s impermeable substance, history—so how could it still be an act? It was for her already part of an inevitable sequence, stuck irrevocably in the past, and could be an act only insofar as it broke from time and became ‘now’.

  And yes, hadn’t it done that? The very decision to invite the soldier into Jones’s cottage repeated something, broke through the two years since. Now as she sat opposite the soldier, she was repeating, in some way, her decision to see Jones—the two times became one, and the distance to the past collapsed. That night, two years ago and now, Evelyn had held her as if concerned, at a slight distance, clearly wondering at her impetuous behaviour in firing the governess. But where was the cause for concern? She, for her part, became aware, again, of his body, its warmth. She moved a little closer to him so that she could feel his breath on her. It was only a few minutes after their conversation. It cemented something in her, a charge, so that later, having preserved this charge low in her torso, she went across to his bed and pulled at his nightshirt. She had a hand on his back. Evelyn—he was all consideration and reaction and judgement, adjusting his face. But now, he adjusted it to a smile, gave the smile room to play on him as he looked down his nose from his lying position to where she sat and ran her hands on him. Not a grin but a smile that raised his face up. All this was part of the decision, seeing Jones, firing the governess, and (two years later and now) sitting across from the soldier (whom she had invited in, and who believed Evelyn to be dead). Then Evelyn’s smile became a silent syllable (‘Oh!’). This was her way to stop her husband from being the lawyer. She herself had the slightly parted lips, the serious expression of intent, of sex, that was no expression but rather an indication of other, more important things (she had a hand on his penis). All this as, two years later and now, she sat opposite the soldier; all this, and even as she sat with the soldier she was possibly unaware of Jones himself (around whom all of this revolved) coming south on his motorcycle, approaching. She leant down to him, touched his now bare chest with her lips. She didn’t think, What else is going on? He moved to let her into the bed, with him. He pulled also at the gown she had on, parting its front. Then, starting with the flesh at her lower belly, then with her breasts, her body touched his.

  25. The route is familiar to Jones—through villages, and rolling countryside. In this place (and, to be fair, on the motorcycle) he feels a freedom that London can never offer, perhaps a touch of the feeling of his Wales, if tamer and more ‘English’. Here, he doesn’t feel out of place; here, his voice can carry. Well, it doesn’t really carry—it’s too soft, pulling people closer rather than announcing itself to a room. But now the motorcycle’s noise is his voice, and it chafes at the hills’ contours as if polishing them. He thinks of phrases like ‘the machine between my legs’, but only to avoid really thinking them. Knowingly he makes such phrases harmless—it’s one of his ‘solutions’ to things, of which he is proud. By riding here, he is taking himself both away from himself and towards himself; he interposes himself between himself and himself and, simply with his bulk, his presence, keeps himself separate. That’s just about meaningless, but it’s the sort of thing he thinks to himself. The day is high and peaceful, light, white with touches of grey that dissolve into brilliance, a flat veined layer of cloud, fine lines here and there whose contours conform to those of the land below: green, churches and so forth, the odd castle or, really, ruin. Actually it might be said that Jones doesn’t know what he’s doing. There is a reason, somewhere, to ride south to where Joan is staying in his cottage, but it gets tangled in an array of later ‘justifications’: constructions, the work of (or behind) thought, the sort of thing that also happens in dreams. The cottage can be quiet; he’ll surprise her, a small part of her cure. But it won’t be therapeutic—what she needs mostly is quiet, so he’ll do what he can to ease her stay, maybe bring her something if she needs it: it can be hard to obtain provisions. He’ll drop in for the shortest time, a simple visit, passing, on the way elsewhere—what she needs is not to be disturbed, not to see another human being.

  So, then, he lets the engine idle then stop and the machine glide to a halt. He doesn’t want to announce his presence: he pushes it a little way, still some distance from the front door, then shrugs—to whom?—and leaves it by a stone wall. There is really no one, only quiet, that sky, and maybe the odd plane somewhere up there. He laughs to himself. Why? There’s an immediacy today, but that’s probably not the reason; there’s a taste on the air. Everything, Jones half thinks to himself, is as it should be—everything is in its right place. Does this assessment leave out one thing: himself? He’s present only as a shadow on the dirt road, or not present at all (depending on which way he faces). For a moment he is nothing more than a consciousness, seeing but unseen, approving, taking the measure of the world; and because he is able to take its measure, outside of it, he sees it whole, sees its shapes and colours, maybe even discerns its meanings. He puts off, for this moment, the task of attaching words to things. Words are held back, building up impatiently for a flood of naming. He likes that he can hold it back; the control gives him pleasure; he tightens it, and the pleasure is heightened by the anticipation of the further pleasure of the flood itself.

  When it comes, however, it comes too soon, spoiling things: the word ‘stick’ breaks out and brings other words with it (similar words, opposite words, words for things of stick-like shape, a whole messy accumulation that sticks and won’t be shaken loose). A man’s stick. The offending item is leaning against the frame of the front door. The man himself is nowhere to be seen. What kind of man walks with a stick? Someone older, or sickly—and Jones thinks immediately of Joan’s father, about whom he has heard so much in the sessions. Joan’s father was a sick man, his castration too evident for all to see, and isn’t Joan’s problem mostly this: that she wants to give the man (her father) his lost—er. It is leaning on the door frame and stops Jones in his tracks. He notices how lightly he has been walking—sneaking, even. No, no, the word ‘sneaking’ never enters his consciousness. Why would Jones ‘sneak’? But with the dis
covery of the stick, he also discovers himself—or, that is to say, the world around him suddenly contains him. Is Joan here? Has she taken to carrying a man’s stick? Otherwise, whose is it? All this somewhere below the surface, a flicker on the now stationary Jones’s face.

  When he moves again, after a second or two, he walks even more quietly. It is already a quiet day, and Jones doesn’t want to break that. At the same time, the day’s quiet has, in other ways, been broken. Will he knock at the door? Look in the window? Without meaning to, he looks in the window and for a second sees Joan, seated, framed in the door that leads from the front room to the kitchen; she has a hand on her face, pushing up towards her ear, then smoothing her skin, her hair, over her ear, down onto her neck, which bends to one side. Jones is caught by the sight, then closes his eyes. Joan is talking with someone. She stands and moves towards the man, touches him. Jones opens his eyes again, laughs at himself, but nonetheless turns away, and begins to walk. He had meant to surprise her, alone, not with company. All the same, he can continue his ride. He can walk back to the motorcycle and take it, off towards the coast. His composure is hardly broken; there is no incident, or what small, unexpected thing there was (the stick) is soon back in its place, and the world is once more together. Why disturb Joan and her guest? A man with a stick! Joan talking with him. Jones out, on a ride, leaving them be. Yes.

  Had Jones mentioned that he might come out and visit her today? She heard the motorcycle, faintly, since in fact she was waiting for it. But she may have been mistaken (though we have evidence that she wasn’t). What would Jones have made of this man opposite her? She would have liked to bring him into the conversation. What would it have meant, with her analyst here? Yes, sometimes she saw Jones socially too, but this, now, was something different: the soldier wasn’t exactly ‘social’.

  He was saying, ‘The war, being in it, terrified me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But not the way you might think. Well, yes, the way you might think, but other ways as well.’