The Book And The Brotherhood

blackness if you follow this book idea I'll go with you – but I must havr some sort of security.'

`You have security! You're Sinclair's sister, you're my closest friend. I love you. What more can I say?'

Rose released him. 'Indeed. What more can you say. And you remember-well, why should you remember. So we'll lien together, or next door, or nearby, and see each other often

`Yes, if you want it.'

`You suggested it.'

`Because I want it.'

`All right then. Now go home. I really am tired.'

`Rose, don't be so -'

`Go now. I'm all right. I'll help you with your book.'

`Goodnight, darling. Don't be angry with me, dearest Rose, I really do love you. I'll make you believe it. We may even go to Venice.'

After he had gone Rose cried quietly, soaking the white handkerchief' and dropping her tears onto the stained rosewood of the table. She thrust the plates away and poured ow some more whisky. Oh the tears she had shed for that man, and they were certainly not yet at an end.

She felt exhausted, aware that something large had happened, but not sure what it was, whether it was something to her advantage, or a terrible mistake, the throwing away of her last card. How impeccably, she felt, she must have behaved all these years, so many of them now, to be thinking of her behaviour tonight as such an outrageous display of emotion! She felt remorseful and ashamed, she had shouted at him, she had said what she thought. She had said that she loved him and that she had got nothing in return, which was not only not true, but definitely not food form. She had seen Gerard wince at her tone and at the crudityof her reformulation. These were old gifts, often privately rehearsed, concerning which she had never, that she could remember, exclaimed so to their inocuous author. What she regretted most bitterly however about the recent scene, and what left her now so limp with apprehension, was that she had actually revealed to Gerard what she had so often thought, that what she wanted from him mwas a promise. What of all things was more likely to alienate him, to make him cau_tious and aloof, than such a claim made upon him by a hysterical woman? It was just what he would dislike most that she had so _thrust against him. Oh how imprudent, how perhaps fatally unwise.

It was true that what had occasioned her indiscretion was Gerard's own suggestion that they should share a house, his use of these words which evoked what, in her modest way, she had always hoped for! He had, more precisely, said live near each other, live next door or share a house, separate flats no doubt, not in each other's pockets. It was she who had then made conditions, demands for 'security', and in a turbulent manner most likely to make him tactfully withdraw. She pictured now the coolly grateful way in which she should have greeted his idea! In any case, the notion of proximity had come up as a matter of convenience, of having one's research assistant close at hand! What on earth would that collaboration, if it came to it, be like^? Would she be capable of such a demanding and such a protracted task? Would she be able to study and understand that difficut book whose 'wrong- headedness' she would hate and fear, settle down to hard and perhaps uncongenial work, living with the continual possibility of disappointing and displeasing Gerard? Suppose she tried it for six months and was then replaced by a competent young woman^? Oh the traps and miseries which dog all human desires for happiness, one ought not to desire it' Now Gerard was excited by the book, it filled him with new life and strength, but later perhaps, defeated by it, unable to write his great 'reply', it might bring him down into humiliation mil despair. She might have to witness that. The whole situadul was fraught with possibilities of new and awful pain, now that she was no longer young and wanted rest and peace. This wish for peace, she realised, had been wafted to her by Reeve an, his children, had come to her at Fettiston, moving towards her, over the moors, out of that quiet well-remembered land- scape. She was, she realised, very much looking forward to i h, cruise! Well, Gerard had given her leave to go. But as she became, if' she became, more involved in his work, more necessary, she would increasingly disappoint her newly discovered Wrilly, who were kind enough to need her, would k bound to neglect them and hurt their feelings by being seen i, be the property of Gerard. But had she not always wanted_.just that, to be the property of Gerard? I am a wretch, she though', I am luckier than almost anyone in the world but I have always made myself discontented by an obsession which I ought long ago to have controlled or banished.

Rose had drunk some more whisky and eaten some more of Annushka's rich plum cake. She had begun to feel she would have to sit up all night in a state of'painful excitement going; over and over these pictures of the recent past and the ricai future. As, to encourage herself to go to bed at last, she kicked off her shoes and undid her stockings she began to think about Crimond. She had wanted the book to be over, to be an ending, something drifting away at last and taking its autlim with it. Now of course, if Gerard was right about it, thew would be reviews, discussions, controversies, photographs of Crimond in the papers, his voice on radio, his face on tide vision. Crimond would be famous. This was something they hail not imagined during that long time when the 'surly dog' had been wandering around somewhere outside in the dark. If only she could believe that there was something which would pass, pass away, like the publication date of the book itself. If only she could believe now, as she believed before, even hours ago, that they, she and Gerard, had really finished with Crimond, that he would become a name of someone who had published a book which no one read or noticed. What was now seeping into her troubled consciousness like a dark dye was the iliought that Crimond could not thus belong to the past. He belonged, perhaps hugely, like his book, to the future. Gerard had said he had no plans to see Crimond. But in the nature of diings, in the nature precisely of his own enterprise,, he would have to. They would be drawn together. At some point, surely, he would long to argue with Crimond, to question, to persuade, to try out his own ideas upon so strong an opponent. Perhaps it was even, half- consciously, the prospect of this combat face to face which was making Gerard so excited and so passionate. Or could she believe that Gerard would cool, see the book as ordinary and his own enthusiasm as a passing mania? Did she want to believe that Gerard would calm down and lose interest and that all that ardour, that great intent, would come to nothing after all?

Rose found that, as she continued slowly to undress, pulled off her brown corduroy dress and her white blouse, she was breathing deeply, almost sighing. She got into her long nightdress, settling it over her raised arms, seeking comfort in the familiar gesture. So there would be a future Crimond. If Gerard wrote, or even began to write, his book, if Rose was helping him, even if she were in any way, even as she had always been, close to him, she was bound to meet Crimond again. As she felt this she began, with the automatic swiftness of thought, to rewrite in her mind the letter of- what was it -apology, retrieval, reconciliation, which she had written to Crimond when he had just left the house on that amazing day after his proposal of marriage. My dear David, please forgive me for my graceless words. Your disclosure took me by surprise. Let me say now how grateful and how moved I am. I ran after you but you had gone. You said that we should meet again. Please let us do so, let us get to know each other. Perhaps I could love you after all. I am mad, thought Rose. Do I not remember how relieved I was, so soon after, that I had not sent that reckless compromising letter, a letter which, however little it said, would have brought Crimond back to me with every expectation? I would have had to send him away a second time, and how painful and significant that second parting would have been for both of us. Even the existence ttf that letter in Crimond's hands would have bound me to him III some sort of terrified servitude as if he were to blackmail me with it. How much I would have feared that Gerard might find out that, however briefly, even for seconds, I had felt like that: So, these are the rights over me which I give to Gerard. But supposing… I assumedyou to be unattainable, perhaps I was wrong Rose, don't be angry with me, please forgive me. Love has to ho awakened, I want to awaken yours. You are capable of loving me. If I had written at once, she thought, I could have got him bay. If I could at least have erased that dreadful impression. By now I it will have digested my arrogant words and decided to hate me. What treatment I gave to that proud man, and how I may yet be made by him to suffer for it.

Those thoughts, condensed into a moment of completi vision, flashed in Rose's mind like some terrifying aerial explosion. She said aloud, 'I don't really think this.' She begant to carry the remains of the supper into the kitchen, throwing away the fragments on the plates, wrapping up the cheese, putting the cake into one tin and the biscuits