Chapter 10

A month after Matthew’s day with Alan, he and Elizabeth packed a lunch and set out for a long walk over the moors. It was partly a reconnaissance, and partly an attack; Matthew felt that time was running out.

*

She jumped off the grass verge on to the road in front of him, conscious that she’d got him now, for a moment at least. She smiled, so impudently that he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

She dropped her shoulder-bag, and it fell over slowly on to its side.

“Suppose I touched you… what would that mean?” she asked.

“You’d better try it and see.”

She came up close to him and put her hands inside his shirt. She had the impression that his flesh was quivering like a flame; a tense nervous current ran through him into her hand. They smiled at each other, and stood quite still. The air was already warm, though it was only half-past eight in the morning and the dew was still wet on the grass.

“You see what it means?” he said.

She nodded. “Yes –”

“Christ!” he said explosively. “All that and more! Everything and more! I’m in a good, violent, grasping mood this morning, and I’m going to make the most of it. I’ll have another layer of deceit stripped away from the world by this evening – I’m working at it, Liz, I’m working at it!”

He put his hands on her hips and pulled her close to him, and when their bodies met he kissed her tightly until she was breathless. She broke away, laughing, and picked up her shoulder-bag, and they set off again.

*

The sunlight on a wooden telegraph post. It was hard, obsessive, and clear. It had a smell like creosote, and a sound like the faint drone of an insect. He touched it; and the sunlight trapped against his hand had a different quality from that which Elizabeth’s shoulder spread, reflected, on the shady part of her blue dress just above her breast. That was muted and voluptuous, and meaningful; this was precise, glassy and mysterious.

*

“Imagine you’re climbing, quite alone, up high in the mountains, with the snow hard and clear and the sun bright. And you’re full of energy and delight, and you spring from rock to rock like a cat; nothing can bring you down. A stream – an Alpine stream – the spray dashes into the air. Little flowers cling to the rocks. And suddenly with no warning and for no reason, because you’re utterly alone, out of the air itself there comes music – Beethoven or Mozart, the Ninth Symphony or the Jupiter, crashing like thunder, You look around, fearfully, but you’re alone, the mountain is empty but for you, and still the music surges on, louder than ever, and brings you to exultation…

“There, you see! I can imagine that, Liz, I can imagine the condition of exultation. And so why stop for a moment until I’ve brought it about? Where’s the sense in wasting time?”

*

Dod Lane was an arrow-straight pathway that led for miles between the fields and out on to the moors. It was narrow and grassy, between high fragrant hedges over grown with roses and briars, and thick with nettles and cow-parsley. They heard the sound of bees everywhere.

*

Her words on the beach.

“The touch that’ll bring me back to matter again – Matthew, I am spirit, I am not matter! Not matter! I am trapped in the world; I don’t belong here…”

What is the world?

He plucked savagely at a bunch of grass, and put one succulent blade in his mouth and chewed it. The tastes inside it were: sugar-cane, cress, nutmeg, sorrel, lettuce, milk, honeysuckle.

*

In the forefront of Matthew’s mind there was the idea that if he were to submit the world – that is to say the evidence of his senses – to a fierce and rigorous analysis, he would come to the truth about it.

In the back of his mind was the suspicion that he would not.

In between, there were two questions. First, how should he set about it? And second, what was truth in any case?

The second question bothered him more than the first, because it seemed to him that truth was itself a part of the world, visible to his intellect in the same way that the flesh of Elizabeth’s arm was visible to his eyesight.

If that was the case, then the world was irreducible, and analysis would tell him nothing.

But still that question sang: what is it?

His will drove at it like a bull.

*

A gap in the hedge to the left revealed: a wide field of grass and clover, bounded by a hedge at both sides and a wire fence at the far end. It sloped downwards to the bottom of a short, narrow valley. On the other side of the valley there was a field of green wheat, and at the top of the ridge, a house, painted white. The haze of the day made it hard to distinguish the details, and already the air was shimmering with heat. The sky beyond the ridge was a dusty, steely grey-blue, becoming pure and more translucent higher up. He stared at it all, dumbly, and as he looked he became conscious of a clear, thin, high impulse of joy.

Where did that come from?

He pounced on it immediately. It didn’t stop; so it didn’t belong to him, or else his attention would have obliterated it. And then he recognised it. It was the sound of a cricket; and the recognition didn’t change it either. It was objective, and it was still joy, neither inside him nor outside him. Or rather, both inside or outside.

Two more questions. First, the entity represented by himself and the world must have had a structure such that outside and inside, though seemingly discrete, were (a) connected and (b) interchangeable. So what was that structure?

Second, what was joy?

*

“I didn’t tell you, Liz – maybe I was ashamed of it, I don’t know. But that day when I saw Alan, I felt an immense relief, as if at last I’d found someone stronger than I was. I felt weak, but not resentfully weak – almost grateful… I think what it was, was delight in his strength, just that. Now tell me what I don’t mean by delight in his strength.”

“Delight that he’s strong, because he’s your brother and you’re happy for him,” she said promptly, as if it was a lesson she’d learned. She spoke, in fact, without great interest. The truth was that her own soul was responding, like a harp hung on a tree, to all the eloquent promptings of the day; the sunlight, the scent of wild roses in the hedgerow, the sound of crickets, the stirring of her own blood. Matthew was talking incessantly, gnawing the world like a bone; did he think it would splinter at last in his teeth? But let him talk, because he made her smile; and besides, his teeth were getting sharper all the time. She was discovering, she thought wryly, that her objections to the state of things had been wrongly conceived and wrongly expressed, and that the world and she perhaps had femininity in common.

*

Matthew forced himself forward against it again and again. And the first thing that had to be fixed was time. You cannot take measurements without a constant scale; so he determined to take one second as a measure, and to find what a second contained.

But the act of thinking that made him over-conscious of the measure itself.

They showered on him like leaves. Each one was veined and transparent, like a baby’s hand, like a crystal, like a fish’s egg, like a leaf, like a petal. He moved slowly in the snowstorm of them, and if he closed his hand on one to stare at it, it vanished like a single snowflake, a mirage, a taste, a smile, a ripple in water, a dream. And they drove against him gently in a host, blown into his open eyes and into the hollows of his body.

Elizabeth - now she was clear. They – this blizzard of arbitrary seconds – did not obscure her. She was solid – forceful – alive – there, in front of him. What could eclipse that? Thought, not seconds – attention, not time – greater forcefulness only, and greater life, could hide her. Shadows of expression drifted in her face. Her arms, folded: perhaps he could kiss them, or press his cheek against their softness, the softness of her upper arm, where just below the armpit the flesh of it was pressed outward – no, no, too close. Stand back, then! Stand back and half-close his eyes: but that wouldn’t take into account the dizzying pressure of realising her: she would be reduced to an element in the landscape. So he knew that she was there, but knew it metaphysically. It was the evidence of his senses that was shadowy, dim, and faint, fainter than the ghost of Bishop Berkeley, fainter than silence.

*

“Here, Liz,” he said, “Let me carry the bag for a while. Did we bring any apples?”

“There’s a pound in there,” she said, “four of them.”

“Good, good,” he said vaguely, rummaging in the bag. He found them, and put the bag on his shoulder. He took her hand in his, and walked along taking great bites of the apple and swallowing them quickly.

“You’ll choke,” she, said.

“No, no, no,” he muttered. “Never mind that. Ach” – he had a mouthful of pips; he spat them out, and went on “I’ve never felt so much like a man eating the world. I can see it, but it’s not clear enough. I can hear it, but it’s confused; and I’m not a dog, so I don’t know how to smell it properly, and tasting and touching aren’t up to much… So I have to eat it, to get it inside me and digest it and assimilate it. Words are – words are – insects, death-watch beetles. This is skidding over the surface of it, you see, Liz! It can’t grip, it’s like the boy trying to climb the glass mountain in the fairy tale. But I’ll have it out, I’ll do it in the end… So: Babbling like this and saying the first thing that comes into my head, of course I can’t get at it: it skids and slides and misses… now if I took my time and went at it like a poet, I mean carefully, thoughtfully, choosing the right word and the precise word and nothing but that, I’d get a better grip, and get a little further. But by doing that I’d have to restrict the area I’m working at – do you get it? I’d only clear a little area, and that’s not good enough –” he flung the apple-core over the hedge, as far as he could into the sky, and then let go of her hand and seized a dry stick that lay in the grass, brandishing it like a sword. “That’s not enough! I want it all, all, all of it!”

“Yes, but Matthew –” she didn’t know whether she was amused or distressed. It was childish, to be sure, all this ranting and gesturing, but it didn’t matter, she supposed. Her own happiness was so completely different: all the fierceness had left her, ebbing like a tide… no! It was she who had ebbed, and she was the tide, the world, matter.

*

“Uncle Harry told me something the other night. It was about a vision he’d had. It’s odd, he’s changing, Liz; I notice it every day, you know, he’s getting – I don’t know – frailer and lighter… He hardly bothers to eat anything these days. I wish I’d paid more attention to what he said.”

“I like your Uncle Harry. But what was his vision?”

“It was a bit – incoherent.” He stopped, and frowned. It embarrassed him somehow to talk about the old man, because it made his own shortcomings so vivid by contrast: well, let it. “I can’t really explain it; and I don’t think he could himself, either. He saw God, and everything was shining; but the main thing was his face as he described it – or – no, the atmosphere around him – something like that. He generates goodness, like heat, and it’s just as difficult to talk about. Are things hot because there is heat? Or is there heat because things are hot? Which comes first? It’s the same with his goodness. He’s good, instinctively good all through, so that’s clear; but then he seems to move in this field of goodness, and anybody – any thing, come to that – that’s near him, is affected by it and changes and becomes good too, just as things become hot when they’re near a source of heat… So if you can isolate ‘heat’ and talk about it, you ought to be able to do the same thing with goodness… It’s a physical thing; it’s a property of matter.”

*

After a while he said “Have you seen this well of your father’s?”

“Yes. I’ve been there once or twice with him. It’s not much to look at.”

“Is there a lake near it?”

“Yes, that’s right. Well – it’s not really a lake, it’s not big enough – though it could be; it’s like those ornamental lakes they have in the grounds of stately homes. It’s a bit creepy. It reminds me of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It’s not withered but it’s the same feeling – it’s all lank and muddy and overripe. There’s a little boat on it too, on the other side from the well. I don’t know whose it is. Why? Has he been telling you about it?”

“He told me a little, and then Alan told me something too. I can’t see why it’s so important, but it seems to be; each of them said that it affects you in some way – it makes you see the truth about things. And there was something about a special time of year when it answered questions. Liz: find out from him when it was – what time of year it answered, and we could go and try!”

*

That was one plan. Another was: look for a job in Silminster. And what were they both? Evasions. That was clear, at least; good. But what was on hand now, at the moment, this morning, immediately, was: the world. Get closer, dig deeper, get on with it.

So: things made sounds. Listen to them.

He stood as still as a rock; Elizabeth sat down on the grass and looked at him as he concentrated. He heard, firstly, the crickets, and then, in order of decreasing notice ability: the sound of bees, a lark high overhead, a tractor in a distant field, the ticking of Elizabeth’s watch, and his own heartbeat. And then there were occasional sounds, such as: her hand plucking the grass, the strap of the bag falling off her shoulder, his arms brushing against his sides as he folded them.

He carefully disassociated them from their sources, which is to say from their meanings, and tried to find what meaning, if any, was left to them.

And immediately they took on another series of meanings. Divorced from what they were, they were free to become anything else. Thus the cricket, if he concentrated, became: an iceberg splitting from a glacier; a tree falling; a tiny electrical machine; the flight of a hummingbird, slowed down… no, he thought, those are what it sounds like; what is it?

Because this level was one of images. Below the level of things-being-what-they-were was a level of things-being like-other-things. It was more poetic and fanciful, but only a stage more true. So: strip it away, and dig deeper. What came next?

He still had the stick in his hand. He held it out in front of him and carefully broke it in half, with a dry creaking snap.

The silence before the noise was not a silence but a back ground, like hills, like a landscape. And it bore the marks and signature of what had formed it. Its nature was rolling and gentle, shaped out of breathing and the circulation of the blood and the indistinct murmuring of a million insects. Time eroded it and smoothed its contours down. But to think of it as a landscape was to falsify it, and to stay in the second stage, so: it was not a landscape but a background; and nor was it really a background. It was simply there.

And the snap of the stick came on to it like an ideogram. It emerged forcefully out of the not-silence and printed itself on time. Almost immediately its print faded, blurred, and vanished, but –

– to go back: it brought echoes with it. And these echoes formed around it like ripples, like subsidiary ideograms, each encased in its own silence. They bore the same relation to it as an ox-bow lake bears to a river on level ground.

And it was abrupt and sketchy, but extraordinarily whole and complete. A paradox, naturally.

Its meanings: (1) The snapping of a stick (2) A vague and tumultuous swell of images and parallels and similarities, surging and subsiding; the poetic waters under the earth (3) The paradox. Itself / nothing. Clear/ obscure. Full / empty. Blurred / sharp. A thing / not a thing. It is this / what is it?

It is what its meaning is; and what is that?

It is the case, it is the world; and what is it?

Language turned on itself in Matthew’s head and cheerfully swallowed its tail, like Ourobouros, the worm of the world. He had a feeling that it was laughing at him; but no, it was only Elizabeth.

*

So language didn’t come all the way with you. Its buoyancy was such that at some point it counteracted your movement downwards, and hindered you; and at that point you had to abandon it, and carry on alone.

But language was: a tool; a weapon; a searchlight; a map; a compass; a net; a trap; an instrument for ascertaining what it was that you had caught; and a basket to bring it back in.

So whatever it was that you met, saw, felt, grappled with, understood, defeated, captured, killed, ate, dissected, analysed, – had to be left there; and you had to come back speechless, and stupefied.

Matthew eyed this problem coldly for a good five minutes, while Elizabeth lay on her back in the sun.

He saw it as the world throwing him back, as glass throws back a bird trapped in a room and struggling to get out through a window. But the bird struggles to get through because it sees daylight on the other side; so was there some interior sense of his which saw an analogous daylight on the other side of the world?

All that he could say, at the end of his cursory survey of the question, was that it did not seem unlikely.

He wiped his forehead; he was sweating. He threw himself full length on the grass beside her, and sighed deeply, with a mixture of happiness and apprehension.

*

They ate their lunch high up on the moors. Just under the crest of a broad hill that lay off to the left of the track there was the outline in the grass of an ancient earthwork, the bank and the double ditch eroded now and scarcely visible in the enveloping grass. They sat in the middle of it; they could see nothing around them but the sky. Elizabeth had some sun-tan lotion with her, and she rubbed it on to her face and arms.

*

“Liz,” he said after they had eaten and lain back in the sun for a while, “tell me what you’re thinking these days. It’s been so long since – since I had any idea what you were thinking about… You’ve been changing, I can tell that, though. Tell me what you’re thinking now.”

“I feel as if I’m transparent. I don’t need to talk, because I feel as if you can see right down inside me, as far as I go… I’m as clear as water, clean water. And it’s strange… but this is a sexual feeling, you see. It’s as if I’ve been half male for a long time – well, all my life – I mean I had the fierceness and hardness of a man, I was active and I lived in the intellect and not in the emotions; but that’s gone now, it’s just melted away and I’m feminine, female. That’s what’s been happening.”

“And Liz, do you know, on the beach I didn’t know whether you were a boy or a girl! Only at moments, like when I first saw you there.”

“Oh, Matthew don’t misunderstand, will you – but that pact we made; it was the male part of me that made it. That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

They both fell silent for a few moments. Then she went on:

“I was afraid to say, really, because I didn’t know what your – well, I didn’t know – well, what your instinct was, really…”

He laughed gently. “Did you think I was homosexual?”

“No, no! Of course not. But you might not have wanted me, not sexually, I mean.”

“Of course I did. But in some way – then – it had to be withheld. It’s as if my will lived off tension, sexual tension in particular, and if I evoked sexual tension on purpose, then my will would grow. And I think it does. But then it turns on itself after a while; it starts to eat you, instead, and you have to give it its head.”

“And has it got to that stage yet?”

She sounded so childlike, so inadvertently nervous, that he could not help smiling; and suddenly a wave of excitement and tenderness mingled rose in his heart, and he leant across and kissed her. She responded warmly, and they lay side by side, with her head on his shoulder.

“And I think I might have been wrong about matter and spirit… you remember what I said on the beach? I didn’t know whether I hated it, matter, or yearned for it. But all at once about a month ago it all began to change. I think it had something to do with my mother; and it’s something to do with the summer as well, and with – everything. It is everything. It just fell into place. Or as if I’d been giving the world artificial respiration, and labouring at it for years, and been on the point of giving up when the whole thing just – started… breathing, all by itself at last, and I could rest. And it’s still only struggling, really, it’s only half-alive as yet, but it’s started at least, and I feel as if it were my child, my flesh, sometimes.”

He kissed her gently again, on the eyes and the cheeks. He smelt the sun-tan lotion on her face, and underneath it he smelt the scent of her flesh, hot and obscure; and then he buried his face in the thick grass beside her head, and smelt the sweetness of it and that of the cool brown earth. And the structure of smelling was the same as that of sound, with the same paradox at the heart of it. And Elizabeth?

Yes, she was right.

There was a nerve of happiness throbbing now in his breast, like the eternal cricket. And when he tried to press closer and look at it, it threw him back as enigmatically as everything else did; and so did the deep green of the grass, and the blue sky.

*

The sun-covered hillside was thronged with ghosts. Matthew sat on the shallow bank of the earthwork and looked at them; they moved indistinctly all around him. The air of the place, the air of the whole world, was rich enough to support not only the living but also the dead, and those that had no life at all yet, if only they printed themselves on it with sufficient force.

The force needed was equal to that which the tiniest midge exerted to stay in the air. A butterfly had a hundred times as much, and a lark, a thousand. There was a butterfly near him now, a cabbage-white, its negligent, graceful flight tracing in the air the outline of a piece of ruffled lace. Matthew sat absolutely still; once he brushed the sweat off his forehead.

*

“Matthew,” she said uneasily, after sometime had passed; “I don’t know whether I ought to think – but I can’t help it – supposing Alan was the murderer?”

“Do you think he could be?” he said carefully. “What makes you think that?” His heart was beating fast.

“He was in the village the night the second girl was murdered. He came to see my father. And he left before it happened. I know, because we met daddy on the way back from the rehearsal, and only a few minutes later we saw the police on their way there…”

“But why Alan? Christ, he wouldn’t do that, you know he wouldn’t; for God’s sake! I could have done it just as easily –” he spoke abruptly and passionately. The doubt and torment of weeks was in his voice. Liz knew nothing of it, nothing, and he had meant to tell her nothing. He doubted whether he’d be able to stop himself now. “You see, I was there too, Liz. You know they held a dance that night in the youth club; well, I went there with Robert Parrish, from the farm, and I had my headache –”

He stopped; it was agony to hear himself blurting it out like this, angry and confused. She began to say something, but he held his hand up to silence her.

“I fainted, you see, outside the dance, and when I came to I was right up at the other end of the field. I could have killed her. I could have done it so easily. And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that I did.

“And the first murder happened on the night I arrived in Silminster; and I had the headache then, as well, and I couldn’t come on to Barton as I’d planned; and I suppose I found my way to a boarding-house and got a room, because that’s where I woke up in the morning, and I couldn’t remember a single thing about it… I could have come to Barton in the evening, without knowing it, and killed her, and then gone back; and thinking about it’s made me half mad…”

“Why haven’t you said about it before?” she sat up, and put her hand on his cheek. “But I’ll tell you something. Oh, if only I’d told you when I wanted to, the very next day… yes, I know you were there in the field that night, because I heard you! I know you didn’t murder her, Matthew, because – it was right down near the bottom of the field. You see, Mrs. Ryder offered mummy and me a lift home from the W.I. hall, but we said we’d walk; and we’d just got to that part of the field that’s opposite the youth club, right down the end of the field, and we heard you, and someone else, and you were talking, behind the hedge but – yes – the point is that while you were talking, or just a second afterwards while you were still there, we heard the girl screaming, as – oh, it’s horrible! – as she was being murdered. And then we heard footsteps, as if you were running up in that direction. But it’s such a long way up – it’s about five or six hundred yards… But you see, you didn’t do it! You’ve got an alibi, Matthew, and a witness! “

He was staggered. He wanted to ask a hundred questions, but he didn’t even know what they were; his first impulse, in the face of this amazing testimony of hers, was to shake it, to question it, to take it to pieces.

“Who was I with?”

“I don’t know; I didn’t recognise the other voice… it was low, and – and – sort of sweet, honey-like, persuasive; but I didn’t hear anything it said clearly, just the tone of it.”

“And what was I saying? I don’t remember a thing of this, Liz, not anything… what did I say?”

She told him as much as she could remember; and as she spoke, he felt the most extraordinary sensation. It was like those hints and half-memories which had plagued him before, but much sharper and more distinct: it was like seeing his own image in a mirror act and move about with a will of its own.

Yes, it was he who’d said that, without a doubt. It was coming back now like a dream he’d totally forgotten. He sighed.

“Thank God for that. Even though I seem to be cracked in the head…”

He closed his eyes.

And almost immediately he opened them again, and sprang to his feet. He beat his fist into his palm, and walked rapidly up and down.

“Liz! That room – the one I woke up in!”

She nodded, staring at him intently.

“And Alan’s room – that day I went to see him and we went up to his room, and it seemed familiar, as if I’d seen it a long time ago and forgotten it – it was the same room!”

He put his hands to his head and rocked back and forth, trying desperately to remember.

“It’s coming back, little bits of it; it came on in the train, the headache, I mean, and I remember thinking – wondering if I’d get to Barton in time. And then, at the bus station, waiting for a bus – I lay down on the bench, that’s right – or was that later on? And then going very quickly – almost running – you know in a dream when you’re running, and you can just lift your legs up and seem to glide along without falling? I was going through the streets like that, with someone… I climbed some stairs, too. I’m almost certain about that.”

He sat down beside her, staring out over the grass and seeing nothing.

“Perhaps Alan met you, then,” she said. “Perhaps he saw you were ill, and took you back to his room. And when you woke up in the morning, he’d gone off to work, or something, and you couldn’t remember where you were…”

“He’d have left a note, though, surely…”

“Not necessarily. No, in fact, he wouldn’t, knowing Alan. And when you went there with him – did he seem to expect you to recognise it?”

“I don’t know! Oh, Liz, it’s maddening – but of course I wasn’t looking for it, so he may have done – at any rate, he didn’t say anything.”

They said nothing for a while; and then he lay down again, and put his head in her lap.

“And so if you didn’t do it,” she said, “Alan can’t have done it either. Not if he was there to take you to his room.”

“But the body wasn’t discovered till the next afternoon, though. He’d have had plenty of time to get to Barton, and do it, and go back – or go anywhere in the country, almost – by then. So it could have been him. And whether or not it was him I was talking to in the field, he was certainly in the village the second time. But no: it’s quite impossible. Alan wouldn’t, and that’s that. Quite honestly, I’d suspect your father before Alan.”

She started, and he thought she was going to protest. But she only said: “Yes; yes, I think I would too.”

“It’s strange – you know, it’s no clearer now. The whole thing of morality and the world – it’s just as dark. So –” he sat up, excited – “good! That’s clear, then, I was beginning to wonder if it was only my guilt that was obscuring everything: but it’s not! It’s still there!” He was speaking louder and louder, and Elizabeth moved a little away from him, smiling at his vehemence. He pounded the earth with his fists. “I still don’t know a thing about it! And I can get on with looking; oh, thank God for that! It is absolute! The questions are in the world itself, and not in me!”

*

If it happened again, they decided, Elizabeth would watch him to see what he did. And they decided to go to the well, to see whether it illuminated anything.

Matthew felt such an overwhelming rush of love for her, then, that he felt tears come to his eyes. It was the tender erotic feeling of her smile on the beach; and this time he obeyed it, and took her in his arms.

It consisted, first, of strangeness. It was the fact that her body was unknown.

And secondly it was the eagerness, the readiness, with which she responded.

Most of all, however, it was the feeling that they were doing something as impersonal as the wind and the hills. There was absolutely no trace, no shred or shadow, of personality in their kisses and the movements of their hands.

It was sex at the ideogram stage, the paradox stage, underneath the first meaning and the stage of images. There was a storm imprisoned in them, Matthew thought –

– but again, no, he was wrong. The storm was imprisoned in matter itself. That bank, that double ditch, shook and trembled with it – on the edge of it – as completely as he did. And there was no point in denying that the sky did, and the grass, and the folded hills.

He stopped after a minute and lay quiet and still. He had not come to a climax: he had not even entered her. They were still fully clothed.

“I’m using you, my Liz,” he said. “I’m not concerned with your pleasure in the least. I’m feeding my will again.”

He sat up and turned to look at her.

“You’ll give in,” she said. “I could make you give in now if I wanted to. I could take my dress off – it wouldn’t take a moment. You think I’m in your power, Matthew, but you’re in mine! That’s the truth of it.”

He shook his head, slowly at first, and then, seeing her smile, with more conviction.

“No, I’m not. You could take everything off and entice me as much as you liked, but I wouldn’t move. No, I wouldn’t. Because I’ve just seen another bit of truth in it; sex is no different from anything else. It’s the world, the same as the grass is; it’s – here goes language again. It’s the same as everything; that’s all I can say. And now that I’ve seen that, and now that I realise it as intensely as I do, you won’t catch me with it.”

He laughed, and much to her own surprise she did too.

“But quite soon,” he said, “I daresay I will give in… Of course I will. Probably today, at that.”

And she laughed again.

“You’re a gross sensualist,” she said. “You want to wallow in every single feeling that comes your way, even the feeling of putting-off and doing-without. It’s a good thing I can see through you.”

He put his hand gently on her stomach, and caressed it under the dress. Was there anything, in truth, that he wouldn’t wallow in, as she put it? Only laziness, and hopelessness, and inefficiency. He kissed her again.

*

Elizabeth was conscious of an oceanic rhythm in her flesh and her soul. It was accelerated, or slowed down, by the appearance of expression in the world.

For instance, Matthew’s face: effort, and power. And her father: knowledge… her father was obscure to her, and ringed by obsessive questions. She knew quite matter-of-factly of his distinct vivid curiosity about her, and knew that it was sexual in origin. She knew it as clearly as she did because he didn’t know it at all, and couldn’t hide it. It was another channel, another river-bed, a creek that the salt world-water flooded when the tide was high. And it was hidden from her mother and hidden from Matthew, too. She guarded it calmly.

She was a landscape, as clear and unequivocal as a painting by Tanguy. The expression of it now was passive, and better so, much better and purer so.

It was expressed in consciousness, by being conscious. She could revel in the nakedness of it, of feeling at one point Matthew’s urgency and self-absorption, at another her father’s world-system erect like a tower, and at another Gwen’s sexual-maternal self-tormenting… They might think that they acted on each other and intermeshed and altered things, but she knew that in between them all, in between each and every organism and structure in the world, her consciousness lay like a fluid light. Nothing touched anything. The uterine medium of her knowledge held them distant from one another, and rapt and unconscious of the fact; and it worked at them endlessly, smoothing, cleaning, bathing and washing them through and through, again and again, on the sandy floor of the world, herself.

This is all new to me, she thought, and yet there’s nothing I remember that wasn’t like this. Holding Matthew’s face in her hands: he was passionate and clear… yes, she could enter that sensation as easily as falling asleep, or waking up. What Matthew was, she loved; she chose to. She was chosen to; it was the same thing. There was no place where she ceased to exist; that was it…

He saw, for he was clairvoyant, and he saw everything. He could see her, now, quite clearly, and see the extent and the depth of her.

A small shock, like a tremor or a ripple, passed through her. The landscape was altered infinitesimally, and settled without a murmur or a breath into its new outline.

*

An afternoon was enough.

The air was thick with evening when they began to make their way home. On the right, in a mass of scarlet, crimson, and salmon-pink, the sun was setting; and possibly because of this concentration of redness in the upper atmosphere, the warmer layers of air below and the gradually-forming mist along the surface of the fields and valleys were tinted with a lush, thrilling green, its complement. It was so thick that it could hardly be accounted for by the chlorophyll in the plants alone; it was ethereal, and seemed to subsist in the molecules of the air itself as much as in the leaves and shoots that sprouted from the ground.

They walked along, their bodies close to one another, occasionally touching or stopping to kiss. She had gone to sleep earlier on, and had woken up to see him staring at her calmly like a Sphinx. The sexual current between them was barely contained. She had turned over on to her back, slipping her dress off her shoulders and down around her waist, aware of her power. She had rejoiced to see him quiver. His expression had not changed at once: but gradually he seemed to go pale, and the quality of intentness in it changed from being unconscious to being conscious, awake, and striving. She was just a little disconcerted; because instead of making him vivid and animal-like, the reaction she expected, it had the effect of making him appear more and more abstracted and in the end unreal, like a saint in an icon. She’d thought that no-one could match Alan for coldness. But his younger brother would overtake him, in the end; he was still growing, and he would not stop. And then the air felt chilly on her skin, and she did the dress up… She’d wait until he was ready.

An afternoon of it was enough for him. The world was now feverish, languid, and voluptuous. He saw something stirring on a head of cow-parsley, and stopped to look. A pair of slim copper-coloured beetles were performing with pain-evoking slowness their clumsy ritual of love. And its nature, or its meaning – which is to say its effect on him – was that of mist or a veil.

But that was the nature of everything; he knew that well enough. And he knew, now, that mist was meant to be dispersed, veils to be rent… But tear them away, and you found another mystery at the heart of it, a greater mystery than the veil and the glorious atmospheric colourings of the mist.

Suddenly a spasm of sheer disgust shook him bodily. Alan was right. The surface of the world, and the intricate tracery of relationships and delicate meanings that enmeshed it through and through, even the subtle exotic beauty of the sky and the fields were – there was only one word for it – vulgar.

And the poetic level underneath, the level of correspondences and representations and images and symbols, was even more vulgar and twice as deceitful, because it pretended to provide a universal truth, and a world-wide sense of order and harmony; but it was a network of lies, one leading into the other, melting and coalescing and forming mazes and systems of quicksands and disappearing pathways.

As for the ultimate level (no! that was not true either: rather, the furthest he could reach), that – meant nothing…

He slowed his pace gradually and came without realising it to a halt. And a dialogue ran within him:

(Do you expect it to mean anything?)

No; I demand that it does.

(You’ll have to invent it, then).

No. There is a meaning, and I’ll find it.

(But you can’t even describe it; and better men than you have looked in vain).

I shall find it.

(No, no; for the world is beautiful. Isn’t that enough? You’ll relish it at last, and grow sick of the struggle…And look, now, Elizabeth is getting cold, you’re keeping her waiting…)

To hell with her; and the world is never beautiful. It’s a lie; and I relish it less and less. I shall pierce it to the heart, and break the window, and get out.

(That’s a childish dream, a fantasy, a romantic longing; come back to the world, and back to love. Love is real and important; it’s adult and responsible. There’s the real challenge: take love, and make of it a great thing, a marvellous and lasting paradise… take what’s in the world, and make that immortal!)

It would be immortal corruption and the eternal chatter of apes. It would be a sublimity of untruth and a paradise of leering decay –

(What of the murdered children? And the Jews? What of the suffering of all the innocent people in the world? The tears of that girl in the wood ran down over her cheeks in floods, and wet the murderer’s hands. And when he lifted them to his face in horror they were wet with tears from wrist to fingertip, and the cuffs of his shirt were wet. Tears, tears; and how can your pride and your dreams alleviate them? Dry one tear on a girl’s cheek, or calm the panic in one child’s heart, and that will be enough to live for).

“Matthew,” she said, taking him gently by the arm, “you’re frightening me, looking like that. Come now, love, it’s getting cold. It’s a long way to go yet.”

*

He said nothing, but followed her blindly, numbed. Nothing was solved; nothing was clear.

The first stars of the night were out, glittering softly in the broad velvety sky.

He felt hungry and tired. Overcome by some strong emotion, he put his head on Elizabeth’s shoulder and held her tightly.

 

They said goodnight and parted in the village. There was one thing left to try, but not much time; he was growing impatient, he’d had enough.