The Book And The Brotherhood

`I haven't said it for years.'

`All right, we've never played the husband and wife game which you call real. That hasn't stopped us from loving each other absolutely -'

''Absolutely'?!'

`I'm sorry, everything I say now must seem gross and stupid, it's part of how things have totally changed that I can't speak to you properly. But you understand -'

`You expect me to understand you so perfectly and love you so much that I won't mind your going to another man, and for the second time!'

`I'm sorry, my darling, I'm so so sorry. I know this wound won't heal. But this has to be. And – this doesn't make it any better for you – it isn't, for me, really anything to do with the future – the future doesn't in that sense exist one way or the other.'

`You leave the future to me, now that you've utterly desolated and defiled it. But you will have to live your own foul enslaved future day by day and minute by minute – quite apart from anything else, your stupidity amazes me.' Duncan, with some difficulty, hauled himself up out of his armchair. `Everything about this infatuation, everything that I imagine about you and Crimond being together, fills me with loathing and horror and disgust.'

`I'm sorry. It's terrible. It's carnage, it's the slaughterhouse. I'm sorry.' She opened the door. 'Look – do stop drinking – don't take to drink now, cut it down a bit.'

Duncan said nothing, he moved away towards the window, turning his back on her. jean watched him for a moment, looking at his broad back and hunched shoulders and pendant shirt. Then she left the room and closed the door. She ran to her bedroom and began cramming things into a suitcase in desperate haste. She slipped out of the kimono and stepped into a skirt. She made up her face carefully, simply. Her face with Duncan had been stern and calm, the face of what had to be. Now in the mirror she saw a mad scattered convulsed face.

All the time, as she packed and dressed and dealt with her face, she was shuddering and trembling, her lower jaw moving compulsively, a faint growling in her throat. She put on her

coat, found her handbag, stood still for a moment controlling breath. Then walked out to the front door and out of the flat.

Duncan, who had been looking down through the leafy hoanches of the tall plane trees at the garden in the square, heard the soft click of the closing door and turned round. He oaw on the carpet the dusty discarded slippers and picked them up. He did not want to be moved by them either to anger or to tears, and he dropped them into a waste paper basket will went through into his bedroom. He and Jean occupied separate rooms now. Not that that had any great significance in the huge peculiar apparatus of their marriage, their unity, their love, which had lasted so long and survived so much and was now perhaps finally over. Something cosmic and crucial had occurred, his whole body knew it and he panted for breath. It had happened again, the impossible, the unbelievly had occurred, it had happened again. Why had he not wept, screamed, fallen to his knees, beseeched, raged, seized Iran by the throat? He had coldly despaired. Hope would have been death by torture. He had never for a moment conjectured that Jean might be mistaken, never conceived of paying: 'It's all in your mind, if you turn up he'll be dismayed imd embarrassed.' He entirely believed that in all that long night they had not exchanged a word. That bore the unmistakable mark of Crimond's style. Duncan knew that Crimond now expected her to come with the same certainty that she had in coming.

It was in the despair and the finality that he sought refuge. He could not have endured speculation. The suddenness of the thing made it now seem so like death. Jean's abrupt vanishing, the unspeakable reappearance of Crimond, the dreadful fall into the river. It was all one absolute cosmic universal smash. How wrong Jean had been to imagine that he would now telephone the others. He felt at that moment that in losing her he had forfeited all his relation to the world, and had no desire left for any human contact. He supposed that later he would be discredited in front of his friends, humiliated and disgraced, ashamed of this second defeat, of the fatal ^`bungling' of which his wife had accused him. Now his misery made no account of shame. Of course, he would 'take her back' if she came, but she would not come, would not want to return to what was left of him after this laceration. She would have to assume that he hated her. If Crimond ditched her, whether this happened tomorrow or years from now, she would go right away into an aloneness and a freedom which she had perhaps yearned for during all the time when she had put so much energy into keeping faith with Duncan and with her idea of their mutual love. She would go away and work and think, take counsel with her powerful father in America, discover some world to conquer, go to India or Africa, run some large enterprise, use up elsewhere all that restless clever power which, as his wife, she had wasted on happiness. Yes, they had done it for happiness, and_.jean might be right to see this as weakness.

Of course she had, as Jean Cambus, done all kinds of things, but not the one great thing of which Jean Kowitz had dreamed. She had been a secretary to an M P, edited a magazine, served on numerous committees, written a book on feminism. As a diplomatic wife she had run a house and servants and a whole busy social world which was also a valuable information service. She would have been an excellent diplomat herself, and no doubt imagined how she might, had things been otherwise, have been by now an ambassador, a minister, the editor of The Times. How could she not now, he thought, whatever happened about Crimond, be ready to bolt for freedom? Perhaps Crimond would prove to be a steppingstone? Would it comfort him to think so? He groaned, feeling, smelling, as it came bubbling to the surface, all that old murderous jealousy and hate which had been packed away, a dangerous atomic capsule, submerged for so long in the darkest sea caverns of his mind. It had been easy then, in the harrim, which had now, declared as such, begun already to be part of history, to reflect in a lofty way upon the unworthiness ,of jealousy, its senselessness and lack of'substance. Within the last twelve hours an era had ended and could already be seen, tifirn and complete. Jealousy now was his teacher and in its fight lie saw the truth, that Jean really loved Crimond with an extreme love, a love as absolute as death, and in comparison with which her freedom was as nothing. She would, if he would have her, indeed be Crimond's slave; and in this context, in this picture, she had not exaggerated in speaking of thyapproach to him as something mortally dangerous. What a futile mess it had all been, all the striving of his life, rvcrything he had done and hoped for. Now she was being Mivrn, and by Crimond himself, a second chance. For Duncan did not doubt for a moment that Crimond had come to the dance in order to appropriate her.

It had all started a long time ago. Jean denied (but how could he be sure, how could she be sure?) that she had loved Crimond then, when they were all young together, when Sinclair Curtland had been the one who had taken her to dances, when they had all been so hopeful and so free. Of course Crimond impressed her, he impressed them all, he perhaps even more than Gerard was the one of whom everything was expected. How little they had done, all of them, any of them, compared with the marvels which they had then hoped and intended! Crimond had failed too, at any rate had not yet succeeded. They had, at a certain period, all talked too much about Crimond, partly because he was the only one of their group who retained the extreme left-wing idealism which they had once shared. Something happened to them all when Sinclair was killed. He was the golden boy, the youngest, the pet, the jester, loved by Gerard who was (since Crimond somehow clearly was not) the `leader'; only of course there was no leader since they were all such remarkable individuals and thought so well of themselves! After Sinclair died they seenwil for a while to scatter, their opinions changed, they were busy with new careers, with travel, with searches for partners Duncan and Robin lingered in Oxford for a while, but then came to London, Robin to University College Hospital, Duncan to the Foreign Office. Time passed, and Duncan married Jean and spoke to her of happiness, being so entirely happy himself at possessing this beautiful admired woman whom he had quietly adored during years when she was so much in the company of others. Crimond was becoming a well-known figure in left-wing politics, a respected, or notorious, theorist, a writer of 'controversial' books, a candidate for parliamem. He was, and had since remained, the most famous member of their original set. Crimond came of, and boasted of, modest origins, born in a village in Galloway, son of a postman. He made sure that he was not to be regarded as a pampered cloistered intellectual. Jean, whose opinions were now perceptibly to the left of Duncan's, was for a time a declared supporter of Crimond and even became one of his research assistants. She wrote a pamphlet for him on the position of women in the Trade Unions. When he contested a parliamentary seat (unsuccessfully) she was secretary to his agent. Something must have started then,