magnet to me, and now I’m getting old I don’t care what people think or how much they snub me, it’s always worth trying, I only wish I’d been more forward when I was young. You know how I feel about you, all right you hate that bit, you despise it, it disgusts you, though actually anybody’s lucky to be loved by anybody and ought to be grateful, well anyway as I haven’t a job at present I thought I’d come and see you and maybe you would let me stay for a while and be useful, I can’t bear being alone at home without her where everything reminds me-’
‘Useful?’
‘Yes, I could cook or clean up, do odd jobs, why not? I’ve always felt I ought to belong to somebody, I mean really legally as a sort of possession, just a chattel, not anything troublesome, not with
‘Do you want to be my house-serf?’
‘Yes, please, guv’nor. I’ll live in that dog kennel if you like.’
‘OK, you’re engaged.’
Thus began an odd little period of my life to which strangely enough I look back with a certain sad nostalgia, perhaps simply because it was such a dead calm before such a terrible storm. I even became rather fond of Gilbert in his role as serf. In the past, although his servility had inhibited my regard, yet his devotion to me had proved that he had some sound ideas. And he was, even at this stage, useful; later on he was essential. My standard of living rose. Gilbert cleaned the house, he even got the stains off the bath. I let him cook in a style which was a compromise between his own and mine. I could not bring him up to my level of simplicity and it would have been cruelty to attempt it. Grilled sardines on toast and bananas and cream were not Gilbert’s idea of a good lunch, and equally I had no use for his thick over-rich Gallic messes. We ate exquisitely dressed green salads and new potatoes, a favourite dish of mine. (The shop now had lettuces and young spuds.) I let him concoct vegetarian soups and stews and I taught him to make fritters in the Japanese style, which he was at once able to do better than me. I also let him bake cakes. He shopped for me in the village and fetched Spanish wine from the Raven Hotel, where he amused himself by posing as my butler. At night he slept on the big broken-bellied sofa in the middle room downstairs, among the driftwood. The sofa was damp, but I let him have the hot water bottle.
I swam every day, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the rain, and began to feel soaked in the sea as if it were penetrating my skin. When the sun shone I spent time out on the rocks. Gilbert kept watch over the front door and went out to look for letters, only no one called and Hartley did not write. I returned to my obsessive task of collecting stones, picking them out of tide-washed crannies and rock pools and carrying them back to the lawn, where Gilbert helped me with my border round the edge of the grass. The stones, so close-textured, so variously decorated, so individual, so handy, pleased me as if they were a small harmless tribe which I had discovered. Some of them were beautiful with a simple wit beyond that of any artist: light grey with thin pink traceries, black with elaborate white crosses, brown with purple ellipses, spotted and blotched and striped, and their exquisitely smooth forms lightly dinted and creased by the millennial work of the sea. More and more of them now found their way into the house, to lie upon the rosewood table or on my bedroom window ledge.
Gilbert would have liked to collect stones too, and to pick flowers, but as soon as he ventured onto the rocks in his leather-soled London shoes he immediately fell. He bought some plimsolls at the Fishermen’s Stores, but still tumbled. He never, of course, ventured into the sea. However he sawed wood and carried it into the house and this activity, which he felt to be in some way symbolic, gave him much satisfaction. He continued to be busy all day long with self-invented serf activities. He washed the bead curtain with Vim, making it shine and removing the slightly sticky filthy surface to which I had become accustomed. Thus, for a brief time, we lived together, each absorbed in his own illusions, and together we regressed into a life of primal simplicity and almost fetishistic private obsession.
When I grew tired of hunting for stones I used to sit for long periods upon the rocky archway bridge beneath which the angry tide raced in and out of Minn’s cauldron, dangling my bare feet over the edge and letting them bathe in the flying rainbow of the spray. It gave me a gloomy fatalistic pleasure to observe the waves, as they rushed into that deep and mysteriously smooth round hole, destroy themselves in a boiling fury of opposing waters and frenzied creaming foam. Then when the tide was receding the cauldron became an equally furious sucking whirlpool as the water churned itself into a circling froth in its desperate haste to escape through the narrow outlet under the arch, and as it met head-on the whipping power of the sea wind. The wind blew continually during those days and when it was strong the waves slapped the rocks and wailed and sucked in and out of the crannies with a noise which in my tense fretful state I was beginning to find tiring. I would never have imagined that I would dislike the sound of the sea, but sometimes, and especially at night, it was a burden to the spirit.
In the evenings I sat beside the wood fire in the little red room. Sometimes Gilbert sat in the kitchen, enjoying himself being a servant. (I suspect he would have liked to dress as a housemaid, but was right in assuming that this would not please me.) Sometimes he sat with me, in silence like a dog, gazing at me and rolling his eyes about in that disconcerting manner. Sometimes we talked a little. In the lamplight now and then he came to look uncannily like Wilfred Dunning, a resemblance of course created by Gilbert’s unconscious acquisition of his hero’s facial mannerisms. Yet to my vulnerable attentive nerves, it seemed more than that, something more like a real visitation. If so, it did Gilbert credit that he should be the vehicle. We talked about the past, about Wilfred and Clement and the old days. A shared past, that is something. And I thought about Clement. In a way, if there were justice, it was Clement who spanned my life and made me, and about whom this book should be written. But in such matters there is no justice, or rather justice is cruel.
‘Charles, darling.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t mind my asking? Did you really love Clement or was it just that Clement loved you? People often wondered.’
‘Of course I loved Clement.’
Well, I came to love her. Did I love her at first? I loved her beauty, her fame, her talent, her flattery, her help. Would I have found Hartley if I had not become Clement’s possession? Clement stretched over the years, she was the one permanent thing, only removed by death. I had been her boy lover, her creation, her business partner, the nearest thing she ever had to a husband, finally her middle-aged never-estranged son. The transformation of my love for Clement, its metamorphoses, had been one of the main tasks and achievements of my life: that love which so often almost failed but never quite failed. Would I ever sit by the fire with Hartley and tell her about Clement? Would she understand, would she want to know? How important it seems to continue one’s life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorializing one’s loves.
‘Charles.’
‘Yes.’
‘I heard something funny in the pub today.’
‘Oh.’
‘That chauffeur you had, Freddie Arkwright, he’s the brother of the pub man, he’s coming to stay at Whitsun.’
‘Oh.’ Shame, guilt, another demon trail.
‘Funny isn’t it, the way people come back into one’s life.’
‘Yes.’
‘Charles, darling.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you lived with Lizzie I could be the butler. Would you like a drink?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Mind if I do? I wish I could give up drink, it’s a symbol of depravity, a proof that one’s a slave. Being in love, that’s another slavery, stupid when you come to think of it, mad really. You make another person into God. That can’t be right. Thank heavens I’m out of that trap. Real love is free and sane. Obsession, romance, does one grow out of them? Lizzie and I used to talk about that. Real love is like in a marriage when the glamour is gone. Or love when you’re older, like love I feel for you, darling, only you don’t want to know. It’s good to feel how different it is from the old craving. Not exactly that I don’t want anything for myself, but going that way. Love. God, how often we uttered that word in the theatre and how little we ever thought about it.’
‘Freddie’s coming to stay at the pub?’
