said, «Is this it?» Without entering she thrust a hand round the door.
Francis took the bottle. «Oh that stuff-That's not-«Ambulance coming,» called Arnold.
«She can't do herself much harm with that. Need to take an awful lot. It makes one sick actually, that was why-«Priscilla, do stop crying. You'll be all right.»
«Leave me alone!»
«Keep her warm,» said Francis.
«Leave me alone, I hate you all.»
«She isn't herself,» I said.
«Get her into bed properly, snuggle down a bit,» said Francis.
«I'll make some tea,» said Rachel.
They retired and the door shut. I tried again to pull the bedclothes back, but Priscilla was sitting on them.
She jumped up, savagely pulled the blankets back, then crashed onto the bed. She pulled the clothes violently over her, hiding her head. I could hear her mumbling underneath, «Ashamed, oh ashamed-Showing me to all those people-I want to die, I want to die-« She began sobbing.
I sat down beside her and looked at my watch. It was after twelve. No one had thought to pull the curtains back and the room was still twilit. There was a horrible smell. I patted the heaving mass of blankets. Only a little of her hair was visible, with a dirty line of grey at the roots of the gold. Her hair was dry and brittle, more like some synthetic fibre than like human hair. I felt disgust and helpless pity and a prowling desire to vomit. I sat for a time patting her with the awkward ineffectual gesture of a small child trying to pat an animal. I could not make out what forms I was touching. I wondered if I should firmly pull off the covers and take her hand, but when I plucked at the blankets she burrowed deeper and even her hair disappeared.
Rachel called, «The ambulance has come.»
I said to Francis, «Could you deal with this?» I went out into the hall, past where Francis was talking to the ambulance men, and went into the sitting-room.
Julian, looking like one of my pieces of china, was back in her place by the display cabinet. Rachel was lying sprawled in an armchair with a rather odd smile on her face. Rachel said, «She'll be all right?»
«Yes.»
Julian said, «Bradley, I wonder if I could buy this off you?»
«What?»
«This little thing. I wonder if I could buy it? Would you sell it to me?»
Rachel said, «Julian, don't be so tiresome.»
Julian was holding in her hand one of the little Chinese bronzes, a piece which I had had for many years. A water buffalo with lowered head and exquisitely wrinkled neck bears upon his back an aristocratic lady of delicate loveliness with a many-folded dress and high elaborate hair.
«I wonder if-?»
Rachel said, «Julian, you can't ask people to sell you their belongings!»
«Keep it, keep it,» I said.
«Bradley, you mustn't let her-«No, I'll buy it-«
«Of course you can't buy it! Keep it!» I sat down. «Where's Arnold?»
«Oh thank you! Why, here's a letter addressed to Dad, and one for me. May I take them?»
«Yes, yes. Where's Arnold?»
«He's gone to the pub,» said Rachel, smiling a little more broadly.
«She felt it wasn't quite the moment,» said Julian.
«Who felt?»
«He's gone to the pub with Christian.»
«With Christian?»
«Your ex-wife arrived,» said Rachel, smiling. «Arnold explained that your sister had just attempted suicide. Your ex-wife felt it was not the moment for a reunion. She retired from the scene and Arnold escorted her. I don't know where to exactly. 'To the pub' were 1r his words.»
My mother was very important to me. I loved her, but always with a kind of anguish. I feared loss and death to an extent I think unusual in a child. Later I sensed with profound distress the hopeless lack of understanding which existed between my parents. They could not «see» each other at all. My father, with whom I increasingly identified myself, was nervous, timid, upright, conventional and quite without the grosser forms of vanity. He avoided crossing my mother, but he patently disapproved of her «worldliness» and detested the «social scene» into which she and Priscilla were constantly attempting to penetrate. His dislike of this «scene» was also compounded with a simple sense of inadequacy. He was afraid of making some undignified mistake, revelatory of lack of education, such as the mispronunciation of some well-known name. I shared, as I grew up, my father's disapproval and his anxiety. One reason perhaps why I so passionately desired education for myself was that I saw how unhappy the lack of it had made him. I felt for my misguided mother pain and shame which did not diminish but qualified my love. I was mortally afraid of anyone seeing her as absurd or pathetic, a defeated snob. And later still, after her death, I transferred many of these feelings to Priscilla.
It was the day after her exploit with the sleeping pills. The ambulance had taken her to the hospital from which she had been discharged on the same afternoon. She was brought back to my flat and went to bed. She was still in bed, in my bed, the time being about ten-thirty in the morning. The sun was shining. The Post Office Tower glittered with newly minted detail.
I had of course failed to find Arnold and Christian. Looking for someone is, as psychologists have observed, perceptually peculiar, in that the world is suddenly organized as a basis upon which the absence of what is sought is bodied forth in a ghostly manner. The familiar streets about my house, never fully to recover from this haunting, were filled with non-apparitions of the pair, fleeing, laughing, mocking, overwhelmingly real and yet invisible. Other pairs simulated them and made them vanish, the air was smoky with them. But it was too good a joke, too good a coup, for Arnold to risk my spoiling its perfection. By now they were somewhere else, not in the Fitzroy or the Marquis or the Wheatsheaf or the Black Horse, but somewhere else: and the white ghosts of them blew into my eyes, like white petals, like white flakes of paint, like the scraps of paper which the hieratic boy had cast out upon the river of the roadway, images of beauty and cruelty and fear.
Lying horribly awake that night I decided that the matter of Christian and Arnold was simple. It had to be simple: it was either simplicity or insanity. If Arnold «made friends» with Christian I would simply drop him. In spite of having solved this problem I could not sleep, however. I kept following series of coloured images which, like the compartments of a swing door, simply led me round and landed me back again in the aching wide-awake world. When I slept at last I was humiliated in my dreams.
«Well, why did you rush away in such a hurry? If, as you say, you decided ages ago to leave Roger, why didn't you pack a suitcase and go off in a taxi some morning when he was at the office, in an orderly manner?»
«I don't think one leaves one's husband like that,» said Priscilla.
«That's how sensible girls leave their husbands.»
The telephone rings.
«Hello, Pearson. Hartbourne here.»
«Oh, hello-«
«I wondered if we could have lunch on Tuesday.»
«Sorry, I'm not sure, my sister's here-I'll ring you back-Tuesday? My whole concept of the future had crumpled.
Through the open door of the bedroom as I laid the phone to rest I could see Priscilla wearing my red-and- white striped pyjamas, flopped in a deliberately uncomfortable position, her arms spread wide like a puppet, still steadily crying. The horror of the world seen without charm. Priscilla's woebegone tearful face was crumpled and old. Had she ever really resembled my mother? Two hard deep lines ran down on either side of her blubbering mouth. Beyond the runnels of the tears the dry yellow make-up revealed the enlarged pores of her skin. She had not washed since her arrival.
«Oh Priscilla, stop it, do. Try to be a bit brave at least.»
«I know I've lost my looks-«As if that mattered!»
«So you think I look horrible, you think-«I don't! Please, Priscilla-«Roger hated the sight of me, he said so.
