‘What?’
‘That you promise to tell me everything about it.’
‘OK.’
‘You promise?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get up, Charles.’
I rose mechanically to my feet. Rosina came round the table and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me. She gave me one of her wet kisses. ‘Well, goodbye, I’ll be back.’
The front door banged again, and a moment later I heard the departing scream of the little red car. For a moment only I hoped that Lizzie might return. Then I thought what luck it was that Lizzie had not come running to me after my first letter.
I went into the next room and tried to light the fire but failed. There was not enough kindling wood. I was feeling thoroughly disturbed by Lizzie’s crying and Rosina’s kiss. I was miserable about Lizzie but in rather a blank way and I was reluctant to think about her. I wanted her sympathy. I was already regretting my thoroughly vulgar conversation with Rosina. It had seemed a smart thing to do at the time, to tell her about Hartley, but now I was filled with forebodings. In effect, I had given Rosina another weapon. Then I began to wonder a little about cousin James and how he had come unstuck. Homosexuality? Or had the army decided that a crazy Buddhist was a bad security risk? My neck was beginning to hurt where Rosina’s red finger nails had reached it. I wanted to take my temperature but could not find the thermometer.
There was no fog now. Twilight had just been overtaken by darkness, and a bright fierce little moon was shining, dimming the stars and pouring metallic brilliance onto the sea and animating the land with the ghostly intent presences of quiet rocks and trees. The sky was a clear blackish-blue, entertaining the abundant light of the moon but unillumined by it. The earth and its objects were a thick fuzzy brown. Shadows were strong, and the brooding identity of everything I passed so powerful that I kept nervously looking back. The silence was vast, different in quality from the foggy silence of the morning, punctured now and then by an owl’s cry or the barking of a distant dog.
I did not go through the village. I walked along the coast road in the direction of the harbour, through the defile which I called ‘the Khyber Pass’, where the big yellow rocks had invaded the land, heaping themselves up against the side of the hill into a lumpy mound in which a narrow cleft had been cut to allow the passage of the road. The rocks in the moonlight were dark brown, but covered with innumerable sparkling points of light where the moon caught the tiny facets of the quartz. I went through the dark cleft and on past the harbour to where, a little way further on, there was a footpath which led up the hill, skirting a wood, and joined the tarmac road where it petered out just beyond the bungalows. All this I had checked in a daylight reconnaissance, when I had also worked out how to get into the garden of Nibletts. This was not difficult, since the lower end of the garden was separated only by a line of posts, joined by slack wire, from the long sloping field, full of gorse bushes and outcrops of rock, which bordered the mounting footpath on the village side. The main drawback to my expedition, apart from the nightmarish possibility of being discovered, was that when it was late enough for me to get into the garden unobserved, it might also be late enough for the married pair to be in bed. There was also of course the possibility that they might be watching television in silence.
I had earlier rejected the idea of spying on Hartley and Ben, not for moral reasons, but because it made me feel sick with emotion and terror. A marriage is so hideously private. Whoever illicitly draws back that curtain may well be stricken, and in some way that he can least foresee, by an avenging deity. Some horrible and quite unexpected revelation could persecute the miscreant henceforth forever with an almost obscene haunting. And I had to struggle here with my own superstitious horror of the married state, that unimaginable condition of intimacy and mutual bondage. However, the logic of the situation now forced this dangerous and distasteful adventure upon me. It was the next step, the attempt to answer the next question. I had to discover, in so far as I could possibly do so, what this marriage was really like and what these two were for each other.
The moon, shining from the sea, was casting the shadows of the wooden posts onto the sloping lawn of Nibletts. The grass looked as if it was covered with frost. I had already discerned, from below, that the curtained ‘picture window’ of the sitting room was glowing with light. I stepped over the slack wire and began to walk very quietly up the lawn in the direction of the house, listening to my practically noiseless footsteps in the already dewy grass, listening to my deep breathing and to the hurtful beating of my heart. In spite of a little rain earlier, the ground was hard after the sunny weather and I did not think I would leave noticeable footprints. At about fifteen yards from the house I stopped. Except for a small vent at the top, the window was closed. The curtains were unlined, and the light within illumined, like stained glass, a bright design of green parrots in a lemon tree. There was a narrow slit in the centre where the curtains failed to meet. I moved again, then listened. There was a sound of voices. Television? Avoiding the dangerous area of the slit, and feeling as if I were about to hurtle into space, I now nerved myself to move steadily, silently, right up to the window and to kneel, touching the brick wall, and then to sit down with my head just below the level of the low sill.
Anticipating encounters with rose bushes, though not foreseeing the dew, I was wearing a mackintosh. The moonlight had showed me the whereabouts of the various flower beds, but as I approached the house I must have been dazzled by the lighted window, or else become blind with fear, since I seemed to have sat down
But the voices continued and now I could hear them quite clearly. How easy it is to spy on unsuspecting people. The experience that followed was so weird, and so literally maddening to me, that I will not attempt to describe my feelings. I will simply, as in a play, give you the dialogue. It will be clear who is speaking.
‘Why did he come here then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You keep saying “I don’t know, I don’t know”, can’t you say anything else, or are you mentally deficient? Of course you know, you must know. Do you think I’m a perfect fool? I’m not that thick.’
‘You don’t believe it-’
‘Don’t believe what?’
‘You don’t believe what you say-’
‘What on earth do you mean, what do you
‘You say you think I knew, but you can’t think that, it’s insane-’
‘So I’m either mad or a liar. Is that it? Is that it?’
‘No, no-’
‘I don’t understand you, you’re babbling. Why did he come here?’
‘I don’t know, it was an accident, it was a chance-’
‘Funny sort of chance. My God, you’re clever, it’s the one bloody thing that would torment me more than anything else. Sometimes I think you want to drive me out of my mind and make me mad enough to-’
‘Darling, dear heart, dear Binkie, please don’t-I’m so sorry oh I’m so sorry-’
‘It’s no use saying that you’re sorry or that you don’t know, that’s all you say over and over again. I’d like to split open your head and find out what you do know. Why don’t you explain at last? Why don’t you admit at last? It’s been going on long enough. It’d be a relief to me if you’d only tell me-’
‘There’s nothing to tell!’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘You did believe it.’
‘I never believed it, I just pretended to, Christ, I wanted to forget, I got tired of living with it all, I got tired of living with your dreams.’
‘There weren’t any dreams.’
‘Oh you bloody-’
‘Don’t tell lies and don’t shout at me either. Oh God, the lies you’ve told me! I’ve lived in a sort of soup of lies
