everything, the lights went out in my life. I mourned long and miserably for my father. The loss of that dear good man touches me deeply still. And, as if in sympathy, everything else was wrong. I had left Clement and was wretchedly involved with some other ladies; and my professional career had crashed into what appeared to be irrevocable ruin. My mother’s death not long after seemed less an individual event than a sort of doomed extension of the loss of my father. A little later Uncle Abel died. I had long ago stopped caring about him or even thinking about him. I recall that I intended to write to James, but I never wrote. I recall too that I wondered only then how James had felt when his marvellous mother died when he was a boy. I was deep in my own early sorrows at that time, and was not greatly affected by Aunt Estelle’s fate. I somehow never reflected what it might have done to James.
I mentioned just now, and should have named him (his name is Toby Ellesmere), a man who told me about James’s ‘secret missions’ in Tibet. This man, not remarkable in any other way, sometimes brought me news of my cousin. They had been together at school and also in the Green Jackets. Ellesmere became a stock-holder, then a publisher, and also dabbled in theatre matters as an investor and in this context I came across him. Some time just after my ‘bad patch’ we met at a first night party and Ellesmere said, ‘I suppose you know your cousin has become a Buddhist?’ I was fascinated and amazed by this news. I had never connected James with religion. We had both of us acquired that vague English Christianity which disappears in adolescence. My mother, I should say here, did not force her particular evangelical beliefs upon my father and me. Perhaps she realized that ‘it would not do’. However she took it for granted that we were Christians. We attended an Anglican church. Naturally James and I did not discuss religion. If I had considered the matter when we were young I think I would have said that the basic spiritual principle of James’s life was an avoidance of vulgarity. Religion as ‘good form’? One could do worse. I would never have imagined him as an enthusiast in pursuit of the exotic mysteries of the East. How extremely
My surprise soon wore off. What did it mean after all? Obviously James could not believe in the transmigration of souls. When I met my cousin again it was somehow another era in our lives. My father’s death, my period of professional despair, my misadventures in Hollywood, these things were now behind me. I had made peace with Clement. (We were in Japan together.) I was by now a very successful man, in Aunt Estelle’s country a king indeed. I said to James, ‘So you’re a Buddhist, I hear?’ He smiled and said ‘Oh yes!’ in a tone which could mean either ‘Yes’ or ‘What nonsense!’ I dropped the subject. Later on he came to live more permanently in London and to work in the Ministry of Defence, as he still does. His flat in Pimlico is full of Buddhas, but then it is full of all sorts of eastern trash, some of it I daresay Hindu.
James is now a general of course, I forget what kind. I suppose he too has been in a way a successful man. My own feeling that I have ‘won the game’ comes partly from a sense that he has been disappointed by life, whereas I have not.
‘A man would drown there in a second.’
‘Three seconds.’
‘A second.’
‘Three seconds.’
Example of Black Lion conversation and level of debate. The clientele seem to resent the fact that I go swimming in a sea whose killer propensities they are so proud of. Conversations of this sort arise as soon as I appear, not of course addressed to me.
I join in. ‘I’m a strong swimmer.’
‘It’s them that drowns.’
‘You swim bare,’ someone adds.
‘Bare?’
‘You swim bare.’
‘Oh-you mean naked.’ So I am watched.
They look at me with dull silent hostility.
‘Seen any seals?’ Mr Arkwright asks brightly.
‘No, not yet.’
I was sorry to observe, visiting the tower steps this morning, that my curtain ‘rope’ had also somehow come undone and vanished. I swam nevertheless. I think that my muscles are stronger and I am becoming more skilful at climbing out. I always manage to scrape or cut myself however. The yellow rocks, which look so smooth from a distance, have a rough scratchy surface, as if they were closely covered over with millions of tiny sharp broken-off limpet shells. Yesterday I dived from Shruff End ‘cliff’ at high tide and managed to get out all right, though a little anxiety spoilt the swim. I am certainly not going to lose face at the Black Lion by going along to the ‘ladies’ bathing place’!
Today there is a pleasant very light haze over the whole sky, and the sea has a misleadingly docile silvered look, as if the substantial wavelets were determined to stroke the rocks as hard as they could without showing any trace of foam. It is a compact radiant complacent sort of sea, very beautiful. There
How high-flown, almost pompous, I am becoming, now that I am a prose-writer! I know many playwrights who regard continuous prose as a sort of alien language which they could not dream of mastering. I think I may have felt like this myself at one time. And yet look at all the pages I have already covered! I have been looking back over my little sketch of James and it is quite stylish. Is it true however? Well, it is not totally misleading, but it is far too short and ‘smart’. How can one describe real people? James looks, in my description of him, so complete, so hard. I have omitted to say that he has little square teeth and an inane childish grin. Sometimes his mouth hangs vacantly open. He has a hooked nose and a dark complexion. Aunt Estelle was rather dark too. Perhaps she had Red Indian blood?
I must work harder on these portraits. Perhaps that is what this book will turn out to be, simply my life told in a series of portraits of the people I have known. What a funny heterogeneous crew: Clement, Rosina, Wilfred, Sidney, Peregrine, Rita, Fritzie, Jeanne, Al Bull… I must write about Clement. She is the main theme. How mad and bad she became at the end when she had lost her beauty and was losing her wits. And what a bitchy old bore she was, telling the same scandalous obscene stories over and over again. That terrible atmosphere in her flat, the smell of drink, the smell of tears and hysterics. Her deep sonorous drunken voice droned on in endless recrimination. Did I face it well? I think I did. Forgiveness and mercy were so ready to hand as soon as I knew that she was doomed. That sounds cynical. I always loved her; and we were rewarded. At the very end we were both perfect. Poor Clement. That is a dreadful land, old age. I shall soon be entering it myself. Is that why I feel I need Lizzie?
I am writing this the next morning. I was sitting writing the above late last night in my drawing room when something very disconcerting happened. I looked up and was for a moment
I have considered two possible explanations of my apparition. One is that it was simply a reflection of my own face in the blackness of the glass. But (unless I had unconsciously risen?) I was sitting well below the level at which I could have been thus mirrored. Also, the face appeared rather high up in the window, and so (a further thought) must have belonged to a very tall person or to someone standing on something. (Only there is nothing to stand on, since I have moved the folding table in here.) Another theory I shall check tonight. The window that gives onto the sea was uncurtained and there was an almost full moon. Could I have seen the moon reflected in the inner