Part 45 (1/2)
”Something standing for something else.”
”A stand-in.”
”That's movies. Psychology I want. It's a term.”
”Metonomy.”
”Is that it? It sounds Freudian, but not exactly, I don't know, maybe it's Jungian, is that why? Metamorphosis? Anyhow she was working for me, so it gave him this feeling that if he influenced her, he was getting at me-”
”Ius primae noctis,” Enoch said.
”I'm sure that's not it. Look, never mind, will you? It doesn't matter what it's called, it's what happened.”
”What happened was you paid him,” I said, but she did not hesitate.
”We got rid of him. It was a nice little wish-fulfillment thing he was acting out with that girl, a cheeky type anyhow. I don't know how he worked up an image of me out of her, but that's how they do it. There doesn't have to be any moral resemblance, let alone physical. Fetis.h.i.+sm. Her att.i.tude was the world owed her a living. We got rid of them both. The only reason I'm telling you this is to show it wasn't the first time I had to get rid of him. The first time I just came home. Left him. Look, it's what I just said, plain ordinary abandonment. Maybe he would die in the war, maybe he wouldn't. Naturally he survived. That type always does, they're indestructible. In this world the worst always triumph. I could give ninety-three-thousand examples. I don't say I wanted him to die, it was just a bet I had with myself.”
”You ought to quit lying,” Enoch said.
”I'm not lying. It's a fact, why should I want him to die?”
He ignored this. ”After all she's going to him.”
”I know that. I know who she's going to.”
”Then quit lying to her.”
”I'm not lying. You can't contradict one single thing. What happened happened. Now listen. Was it abandonment pure and simple? Was he an out-and-out crook from the first minute?”
”Allegra.”
”Allegra Allegra. Did I run from him the way you rim from a plague? Cholera? Malaria?”
”Allegra,” he said. The name, or his voice giving it out in succession, sounded like an object: a table, a book. ”You don't save anything this way.”
”You think I don't realize? I realize that. What's there to save? How do you think I feel, her getting it like that-the G.o.dd.a.m.n b.l.o.o.d.y way he picked to tell her: that word. I didn't think he'd do it that way. I mean not that word. I thought he'd do it with plenty of embroidery, decent words at least. I thought he'd do it like a lawyer, d.a.m.n it.”
”Credit him for doing it at all, will you? Don't dream,” he said. ”If it had been left to Nick-”
”I don't know, how should I know how Nick would do it? Maybe better, maybe worse. How do I know how he's going to act with her? What I'm getting at is William at least was supposed to make something fancy and legal out of it, not plunk plunk h.e.l.lo you're a so-and-so. He could have said it in a, well I don't know, a figure of speech.”
”There are no figures,” he sighed, ”of speech.”
”Yes there are. Bar sinister, there's one. Hugh taught me that years ago. It was part of a joke once when William came down. To the camp.”
Enoch said, ”Don't you see you don't change things by changing them in your imagination-”
”He didn't have to say issue either. Illegitimate is bad enough, he didn't have to say issue. It sounds like out of a nineteenth-century hospital where the doctors don't wash their hands. Leeches and things. Sores gus.h.i.+ng. A run of bad blood. He doesn't have any imagination, he could have done a fancy legal job, never mind this hacksawing.”
”It's not William's imagination that's at fault,” Enoch said.
”Because he doesn't have any, I just told you.”
”The most ruthless words are the legal ones,” Enoch said, ”they have the vice of accuracy.”
”Now tell me something new. Tell me about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. You think I don't know that? You think I haven't had any experience with legal words? You take a perfectly beautiful word, you give it to a lawyer and it ends up meaning something just the opposite, ugly as sin, oh but terribly exact, you have to walk right down the middle of the white line the pirates draw on the gangplank for you. I've had plenty of experience! You'd think if somebody gave you a trust it would mean they trusted you, but what it really means is they don't, they think you're deaf and blind and don't know the most obvious things about life.”
”Namely,” Enoch said barrenly, ”that in life nothing is obvious.”
”I hate that word.”
”Obvious?” he guessed. ”Nothing? Life?”
”Oh stop. Imagination. d.a.m.n it, what do you think we're talking about? You don't listen to me. You listen for a minute and then you quip and then you don't listen. I listen at least. You were just telling me you don't change things if you imagine you're changing them, true?-so then please explain how we happened to give her twelve safe years, you said it yourself, you said twelve safe years, and didn't we change things by letting her imagine something that-well, that divorce business, say. It changed things for her, didn't it? It kept her free all that time, right? And the whole thing was imagination, right?”
”Al-leg-ra,” he enunciated with drained patient tonelessness.
”You want to make me hate my own name, Enoch? Say leg like that again and I'll kick you with it.”
”Don't feed her fairy tales.”
”What fairy tales? What fairy tales? He didn't come sucking around that Anneke ten years after? He didn't get stuck for the whole war over there? Look, I don't remember any hordes of lawyers and bankers and ex-Youth Leaders running around in circles trying to find him and get him out, do you?”
”I think,” Enoch said, ”she should read now.”
”Read what? Enoch, you're crazy. What she should do is pack,” my mother argued. ”I've had Janet standing by for days just for that, every grip in the house wide open, there's not an article of hers that isn't ironed and ready. She doesn't have to do anything but point a fingernail at what she wants to take, and that's too much for her ... as it is she reads more than what any sane person would call normal. Before you got home she was reading newspapers like a fanatic. Mental health columns, everything.”
”She should read,” he repeated, ”history. Here,” he told me, ”third drawer down, compartment in the back: a little history of Abandonment: cardboard box with foolish stripes all over it, the whole thing holographic and incredibly ancient, you can't miss it,” and held up the key to his desk, a short bra.s.s bar crowned at one end, club-footed at the other, and, it turned out, body-warm. He had been fondling it inside his pocket all the while.
”What are you up to?” my mother asked; already it was a plaint of denial. ”What are you giving her?”
”h.e.l.l,” he answered, a noun, and tossed the key for me to catch; it came winking down near my shoe, attached in flight to its little ring, and displaced in me, even before I bent to take it from the carpet, a ferocious image. ”She's ent.i.tled to it same as anyone,” Enoch said, while I dived and tapped yellow metal teeth: the touch of points restored me to shock, as though this room were that old other room where my mother had locked me into freedom, naked as birth, and really as though this small sweated key from Enoch's hand, tinkling along its ring, could c.h.i.n.k out reluctant contemplations-a blue bicycle cradled in a hedge shaped like a duck, able to rattle, doomed to clatter and chime, a belfry of mobile violence, each wheel-hoop a spinning coin great as a gong; and the key itself indistinguishable from that old rusted giant which had lain like an icon in my mother's palm, cold as cash.
3.
So I found her letters, and read them through against the scratch of her long argument, and was soon done with them (having skipped the philosophy parts), and knew as little of Brighton as they gave-my mother meanwhile protesting, declaring she had never seen them in her life before, calling them phony contrivances, calling them forgeries, denying her own handwriting, blaming me for looting, for snooping, for attacking her privacy, for crus.h.i.+ng the box, for stealing the key, for misunderstanding her feelings, for being unable to conceive of the nature of Brighton, or the nature of those old early days, or the nature of Nick, or the nature of Enoch, whom, she ended, she could easily have had arrested for burglary.
But she was watching me with eager looks: ”Now you see how it was! Exactly what I said. He was swallowed up right into the middle of the war. So I left him. The chronology doesn't matter. Who left who doesn't matter. The main thing is I didn't marry him. I couldn't, not with the war. Otherwise I would have. I would have, Enoch knows that. But I had to leave without him, on account of the war.”
”Hear it,” Enoch said, ”how the maze of pride writhes around a new corner. Let it go, Allegra. Drop it. Let it stand. You don't need to try this-”
”Try what? Try what?” she appealed. ”I said just exactly what happened. I said abandonment.”