Yes. I really insist.
Don't be a fool. I'd enjoy walking.
When he came back from the lavatory a few minutes later, Nunne was returning the phone to its rest. He said: The taxi will be here in a few minutes. It's on my account, so don't pay.
He yawned, then stretched, and looked at himself in the mirror, saying: Hair of a woman and teeth of a lion. One of the beasts in Revelation. Why was I born so ugly?
Sorme sat down and picked up the wine glass
You really are an idiot, Austin.
Nunne reached out, and touched Sorme's hair briefly.
He said:
Dear Gerard.
He picked up the phone again and listened for a moment. He said:
Hello, is that the night porter? Mr Gregory? Ah, this is Mr Nunne speaking. Do you think you could put my car away for me? It's outside now. No, I'm sending a friend down with the key in a few minutes. Thank you. Goodnight.
Sorme said:
By the way, Austin, can you tell me anything about this chap Oliver Glasp?
Nunne lit a cigarette.
What do you want to know?
Well, who is he? He seems very talented.
Do you know his work?
Only the paintings in your flat.
You might like him. Except that he's quite the most quarrelsome person in London. He has no skin.
Has he… any peculiarities?
He's not queer, if that's what you mean. I never enquired into his sex life. He's been in mental homes — tends to fly into sudden rages and throw things. He also has some obsession about pain. It's his favourite word — at least, it was when I knew him. We quarrelled — I couldn't stand his touchiness. At the time, he was trying to be an ascetic — sleeping on the bare wires of his bed and all that…
The phone rang. Nunne said:
That will be your taxi.
Back in his own room, he collected the brandy flask and the glasses, and took them upstairs. The kitchen smelt pleasantly of fruit; a bowl of apples stood on the table.
He felt physically tired, and yet curiously excited. Talking to Nunne had given him an intuition of change. He thought, with sudden complete certainty: I have wasted five years. Stuck in rooms. The world was alive. I have done nothing.
Poor Austin. Sadistic and listless, sensual, caring only about people and places. I am freer than he is; yet for five years I have behaved like a prisoner. Why?
He opened the kitchen window and leaned out. The night air smelt fresh. He felt buoyed up by an intuition of kindness and gratitude. It came again: the sense of life, of London's three millions, of smells in attics and markets.
As he stood there he heard a door close. He turned around and listened; it had been the Frenchman's room. Probably Callet would come up to the kitchen. The idea of conversation gave him no pleasure. He went quietly down the stairs, and back into his own room.
Instead of switching on the light, he crossed the room and opened the window, then climbed out on to the fire escape. He sat there, staring into the darkness, faintly lit by lamps and the neon sign of the cinema. A light came on above him; it was in the kitchen.
Looking up, he could see Callet's shadow move across the glass. He congratulated himself on his foresight. But the light disturbed him; it made him feel as if he was avoiding Callet. After a moment's consideration he went up the fire escape, to the landing outside the old man's room. This was the top of the fire escape. From there, an iron ladder completed the remaining distance to the roof. He pulled at it to test its solidity before grasping the rungs and climbing up. It curved over the parapet, on to the roof.
The parapet was a foot high; it enclosed two sides of the roof, facing north and east. On the west side, only a gutter divided the slates from the drop past five stories to the waste ground between the house and the church. The breeze was cold. He moved round the angle of the roof to shelter from it, then sat cautiously on the slates, his feet braced against the parapet. Towards Camden Town, the lights of the plastics factory that worked all night lit the sky. The exhilaration was still in him, relaxing into a sense of quiet and power. When the sound of a heavy lorry passed on the Kentish Town Road his mind moved ahead of it, through Whetstone and Barnet, to the north. The thoughts were controlled, clear-cut and deliberate. The feeling that drove them seemed to flow steadily and certainly. They moved towards an image of gratitude, of reverence, of affirmation; it became a cathedral, bigger than any known cathedral, symbol of the unseen. He thought: This has taken me five years. A vision of all knowledge, of human achievement in imagination and courage. Not the mystic's vision, but the philosopher's, freed from triviality and immediacy. I am the god who dwelleth in the eye, and I have come to give right and truth to Ra. But how many times? Half a dozen in five years. And now stimulated by a sadistic queer and an infatuated girl. Nunne succeeds where Plotinus failed.
He began to laugh, his back jerking against the slates, his feet braced apart. It made him realise that he was cold. He began to wish that he had thought of bringing an overcoat.
Never make a yogi. Not enough patience. Or need the warmer climates. Intensity of life. Monastery in the Himalayas. An old man stared into the dawn, his face lined with strength of will, unimpressed by the five-thousand- foot drop into the valley. Isaiah or Michelangelo. In tense hands, he holds the world's will, beyond tragedy. A faint pencil line of light along the eastern horizon.
To change. To change. To what?
An image of Caroline came to him, and he felt a momentary distaste. The unseen, the imaginative adventure, was just what she did not represent. Like Kay, the girl from the Slade School, it was an idealism she offended. The warm, predatory body, the desire to be possessed. Her animal vitality conducted the tension away, like an earthing wire.
To change. But no physical change. Only a constant intensity of imagination that would require no cathedral symbol to sustain and remind. Isobel Gowdie, big-breasted farmer's wife, sweating and curving to the indrive of an abstract darkness, the warm secretions flowing to abet the entry of a formless evil. To escape the dullness of a Scottish farm by daylight, the time trap. Symbol of the unseen. The unseen being all you cannot see at the moment. Until the consciousness stretches to embrace all space and history. Osiris openeth the storm cloud in the body of heaven, and is unfettered himself; Horus is made strong happily each day. Why the time trap? Why the enclosure? Invisible bonds, non-existent bonds, bonds that cannot be broken because they are non-existent.
Human beings like blinkered horses.
The cold had penetrated the thin coat and trousers until he felt naked. He stretched and flexed his limbs, then blew into his cupped hands. The iron of the ladder numbed his fingers. He lowered himself back over the parapet, feeling with his feet for the rungs.
Descending, he was afraid of the numbness in his fingers, aware now of the drop to the concrete flags below. He felt relieved as his feet touched the iron platform.
When he switched on the light, he saw that his hands were black with dust. There was a blur of grime on his cheek, where he had raised his hand to touch it. He went up to the kitchen, and found that the kettle was half full of hot water.
After he had washed, he set the alarm for eight o'clock. It was three-thirty. He was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
