but I kept them locked in me, and after all the time had come to remind him, to bring him to the proof. But I didn’t remind him. He was totally beyond my range at last: my body and mind, all known, loved once and offered back to him, anachronistic weapons. ‘Rickie, help me …’ He knew I was saying that and he wouldn’t hear. The coward … But even from the last ditch, from my contempt for him, he cut me off. He was a coward, but not a coward then. His shut eyes seemed to hold authority. He had decided to resign without consulting me, he was not ashamed of it. He stopped me dead in my tracks.
Did he? Did he? Was it something deliberate—a choice a person capable of love might make? A person of integrity, one become wholly responsible, within his limits, in the realm of moral action? A person who had begun to face, before I had truly begun to in spite of all my fine words and gestures, the lifelong consequences of a choice that, once made, is made to be adhered to with no soft option, not even a dying grace-note to echo on in the ensuing void? Or was it merely that he had become indifferent?
No, not indifferent I know, because—I know. To resign, to be indifferent, are not synonymous. On the other hand, not to resign, to remain predatory, are also not synonymous … And why accord such honour or what is, after all, a self-defensive impoverishment of self? I hadn’t resigned, that’s all; obviously not, because I felt, suddenly, an escape of pure pity for his shoulders, for his stance by the window, for his looking so dully down, then all around the vacancy: look, stance of the disinherited. So I knew I was connected still; a posthumous nerve, but irreducible, intact survival. So then I was able to say: ‘It’s all right, Rickie.’ I think that’s what I said; meaning … oh, many things. He let his eyes come to rest on me at last; they didn’t brighten, but he smiled faintly. Eyes of that blue are the most vulnerable: in anger, pain, grief, sickness, the pigment drains away. His had become wall eyes … not quite that … transparent. A ghost gaze rested on me. So then we left the room. He went ahead of me. He had a way of running downstairs that always gave me pleasure because it made me see him as a schoolboy, practising to bring it to a fine art: an unbroken skidding run from top to bottom of the staircase, back straight, knees and ankles loose. He had charming hangovers of this sort from boyhood: accomplishments, tricks he had never quite put away. It’s an upper-class thing: ways they invented in youth of playing with their ease of mind and body, decorating bored leisure with a flourish. He did it now, and it struck me with a pang that what I witnessed was a man dividing: a schoolboy giving me the slip went hurrying down ahead, improving his technique; abandoning upstairs a stock-still man with heavy shoulders. In the void of this split husk he left me cancelled … I wonder if he went on practising in Montagu Square … here in this house … at the Admiralty in 1944, with death running downstairs after him, as Madeleine had described tonight. Picked up unconscious at the bottom, rushed to hospital, a burst duodenal ulcer, too late, a few hours later he was dead.
On the pavement we hesitated, pausing for a final check-up, making sure that nothing had been left undone. It was a tepid washed-out June evening, grey, steamy after a day of thunder showers; the air was penetrated with the smell of exhausted strawberries and pinks and stocks from a barrow on the corner. The person who strummed every evening upon a twanging piano in a house across the road was playing scales. A group of children burst out of the alley-way behind us, dragging an orange box screwed to a pair of rusty iron wheels. In it sat two tiny Negro children, twins, boy and girl, in magenta flannel jackets. Their faces, black, tender, designed in harmony with the skull’s perfect globe, had an extraordinary abstract dignity. They tore
Did he? Did he? Was it something deliberate—a choice a person capable of love might make? A person of integrity, one become wholly responsible, within his limits, in the realm of moral action? A person who had begun to face, before I had truly begun to in spite of all my fine words and gestures, the lifelong consequences of a choice that, once made, is made to be adhered to with no soft option, not even a dying grace-note to echo on in the ensuing void? Or was it merely that he had become indifferent?
No, not indifferent I know, because—I know. To resign, to be indifferent, are not synonymous. On the other hand, not to resign, to remain predatory, are also not synonymous … And why accord such honour or what is, after all, a self-defensive impoverishment of self? I hadn’t resigned, that’s all; obviously not, because I felt, suddenly, an escape of pure pity for his shoulders, for his stance by the window, for his looking so dully down, then all around the vacancy: look, stance of the disinherited. So I knew I was connected still; a posthumous nerve, but irreducible, intact survival. So then I was able to say: ‘It’s all right, Rickie.’ I think that’s what I said; meaning … oh, many things. He let his eyes come to rest on me at last; they didn’t brighten, but he smiled faintly. Eyes of that blue are the most vulnerable: in anger, pain, grief, sickness, the pigment drains away. His had become wall eyes … not quite that … transparent. A ghost gaze rested on me. So then we left the room. He went ahead of me. He had a way of running downstairs that always gave me pleasure because it made me see him as a schoolboy, practising to bring it to a fine art: an unbroken skidding run from top to bottom of the staircase, back straight, knees and ankles loose. He had charming hangovers of this sort from boyhood: accomplishments, tricks he had never quite put away. It’s an upper-class thing: ways they invented in youth of playing with their ease of mind and body, decorating bored leisure with a flourish. He did it now, and it struck me with a pang that what I witnessed was a man dividing: a schoolboy giving me the slip went hurrying down ahead, improving his technique; abandoning upstairs a stock-still man with heavy shoulders. In the void of this split husk he left me cancelled … I wonder if he went on practising in Montagu Square … here in this house … at the Admiralty in 1944, with death running downstairs after him, as Madeleine had described tonight. Picked up unconscious at the bottom, rushed to hospital, a burst duodenal ulcer, too late, a few hours later he was dead.
On the pavement we hesitated, pausing for a final check-up, making sure that nothing had been left undone. It was a tepid washed-out June evening, grey, steamy after a day of thunder showers; the air was penetrated with the smell of exhausted strawberries and pinks and stocks from a barrow on the corner. The person who strummed every evening upon a twanging piano in a house across the road was playing scales. A group of children burst out of the alley-way behind us, dragging an orange box screwed to a pair of rusty iron wheels. In it sat two tiny Negro children, twins, boy and girl, in magenta flannel jackets. Their faces, black, tender, designed in harmony with the skull’s perfect globe, had an extraordinary abstract dignity. They tore
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