Danby switched on the light. The big lower room of the printing works, musty with mingled smells of ink and paper and years-old papery debris, looked desolate, untidy, cluttered, cold, caught off its guard, and yet peculiarly immobile and suddenly attentive, against the line of black uncurtained windows. It always looked very odd without the bustle of people and the clattering noise. It was nearly five o’clock in the morning.
Danby began to cross the room. On the way he paused beside the old Albion press which had arrived the day before from the art school. The cast iron was dulled and a little rusty. It needed paint, oil, love. Even in its humbled disused con dition it was a thing of strength and beauty. Cope, London.1827. He caressed the big iron flower which served as a counterweight, and when he swung the bar the press moved easily, silently, with quiet power. He left it and went on across the room.
At the far side a door led out onto a flight of stone steps. The steps led down onto a diminutive wharf, now disused, from which an iron ladder led on down into the river, or at low tide to the muddy banks of the Thames. Danby unlocked the door and opened it and looked out. He could now see a very faint suggestion of light in the sky, a grey dimness contrasting with the thicker black below. He tried to make out the outline of the power station chimneys opposite but could not find them. Two or three lighted windows on the other side of the water distracted his eye, and he thought for a moment about Bruno, although he knew that Stadium Street could not be seen from the printing works. The surface of the river seemed now to be becoming visible. Or perhaps it was an illusion. Perhaps too there was a faint rivery sound, or perhaps just a steady murmuring in his ears. There was a smooth cool smell of mud and water. It was still a little time to low tide.
Danby stepped back inside and looked at his watch. He took off his mackintosh, shivered, and put it back on again. The cold air was making his bruised shoulder ache. He went over to the little rickety wooden office which jutted out like a hut into the main room, and switched on the light inside it. The office, which was used by Danby and Gaskin, was untidy, the desk piled with letters, some still unopened. Danby had been un able to work himself and unable to delegate his duties. The walls were papered with old handbills, announcing sales and theatrical performances of sixty years ago. Danby opened the cupboard and poured himself out a glass of neat whisky. He was feeling ridiculously nervous.
He had accepted Will Boase’s absurd challenge to a duel for reasons which had seemed compelling at the time, but which were now by no means quite so clear. Of course he knew that the “duel” would be a farce, something staged by the twins with theatre pistols loaded with blanks, and designed to confuse and humiliate him. Nevertheless it now seemed like a frightening trial, something unforeseeable and violent, a happening in which he would have to play a rapid and impromptu role, and in which he might find it difficult to act resolutely and impossible to act with dignity. He felt that he had delivered himself entirely into the hands of hostile men.
Yet such a handing of himself over had been what at first he had thought that he wanted. He had wanted to become the victim of a violent event. He had been arrested by the word “punish” which Will had used in his letter, and it had seemed to Danby that the twins, whom he now connected together into one agency, were the instruments of a fate, directed against him, and yet indubitably his. The idea of the duel was the idea of an ending, a fake ending of course, as Danby vaguely knew, but at any rate such a sort of forced small catastrophe as might symbolize the closing of an era.
He knew that Lisa had gone away. He had gone round to Kempsford Gardens and Diana had shown him the empty room. Diana said that she had gone abroad, for good. Danby did not ask for details. He did not suppose that she had gone abroad alone. He had stood silently with Diana in the empty room. Only after he had departed did he realize that Diana now seemed to know about him and Lisa. Miles must have told her. He went to the office the next day and the next day. He tended Bruno as usual, coming back to feed him at lunchtime. Nigel, after an absence of three days, returned and resumed his ministry. Only now Nigel was a hostile presence, a thin sardonic judging angel. Danby spoke to him awkwardly, apologetically, and shrank away from his smile. Adelaide had packed her belongings in several suitcases, which she had to unpack every day to find things she needed. She had announced her intention of going but had not yet gone. She spent most of every day away from the house. The kitchen was filled with dirty crockery and decaying food. Danby held a used plate under the hot tap every time he had to feed Bruno. He took his own meals in pubs.
Danby felt very sorry about Adelaide. What had seemed so natural and simple and pleasant while it was going on nicely now seemed much more like a crime. He could not work out quite why it was a crime. It was not what Adelaide said, about his not wanting to marry her because he thought her inferior. He did not, he believed, think her inferior. He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way. He would not have married Linda either. Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved. Perhaps it was that of allowing someone to be committed, to be utterly bound, for the sake of a second-rate kind of loving. It was not that it was a casual loving exactly. It had its own kind of reality, it was domestic, it belonged, like some humble house spirit, to the house at Stadium Street, to the kitchen and bedrooms there. Yet it was after all a poor weak thing, instantly broken at the touch of what now seemed to Danby to be the re-entry into his life of a reality which he had shamefully forgotten.
Yet which was the reality? He told himself sometimes that Lisa was, must be, a dream figure, an apparition, and that as time went on he would more and more realize this, until it would seem to him in the end that he had never really met her and that she had never really existed at all. He had become momentarily insane because of a girl who resembled Gwen, a serious intense girl with a dark wig of hair and a thinking mouth whom he had seen about half a dozen times in his life. He had become insane because she had suddenly reminded him of what it had been like, of what he had been like, of how he had been made to be, so long ago during his marriage. Lisa was just an angel of memory, a reminder of loss.
Yet he knew really that she was not simply an apparition. She was not Gwen come back from the dead. She was very different from Gwen. And he was very different from Gwen’s husband. He was an older fatter more drunken man than the one whom Gwen had so unaccountably loved. But he was also perhaps, and this intimation somehow entered into the deepest part of Danby’s pain, a wiser man. The years had brought him something which, potentially at least, was good. That obscure small good seemed to suffer and ache inside him as he thought vaguely but intensely about all the might-have-beens of a quite other life with Lisa. It seemed to him that in spite of his casual mode of being and his bad behaviour to Adelaide and his general willingness to play the fool, he had found something in the world, some little grain of understanding which that glimpse of Lisa had made suddenly luminous and alive. He felt obscurely the dividedness of his being, the extent of what was gross, the littleness and value of what was not. But these thoughts, when they came, were never entirely clear to him, and he spent most of his days in a coma of misery, thinking about Lisa and the other man, inducing physical pains of yearning and jealousy which made him gasp, and putting off the attempt to pull himself together.
The prospect of the crazy “duel” had been, to his desperate mood, almost a relief. It had seemed the image of something destructive and mad, and also of something appropriate and necessary. The aching and deprived heart yearns for necessity. Danby would have been glad to be arrested, imprisoned, scourged, judged. Now in his dreams, in some huge echoing courtroom, a woman’s voice rehearsed misdoings which dated back to his earliest childhood. Anything which could show his present situation as inevitable would have been an alleviation of his pain. It was not enough that his rational mind could display to him the utter improbability of his success. It was its im possibility that he needed to have the proof of. As it was, the torment of accidents continued. If only he had met her earlier, if only there were not this other man, if only she had not seen him kissing Diana, if only he were the different and better per son which it seemed to him he might easily be. He had accepted and even welcomed the idea of the duel because it seemed somehow to belong to the other order of things, the legal, the necessary.
But now, shivering in the cold cramped little office underneath the electric light, with all the familiar things looking alienated and eerie, the craziness of the plan took on a different and more sinister air. From the moment of the tapping on the window and the receipt of Will’s pompous letter, Danby had thought of nothing but himself. He had thought of the encounter in relation to himself, as something that he was going to bring about or do. He had not thought of Will except as of a blind agency destined somehow to act upon him. Now, as he poured himself out another glass of whisky, he thought about Will more carefully. He really knew very little about him. The one thing which he certainly knew about Will was the degree of his hatred. But how exactly would that hatred make him behave? Will had loved Adelaide since they were children. He had thought of her as ever the pure sweet maid who was somehow reserved for him. This much Danby had gathered from Adelaide’s tearful outpourings after the delivery of the letter. How would Will feel towards a man who had casually, unseriously, seduced this dream woman, and what fate would he deem appropriate for such a man? That Will intended in some way to humiliate him
