Part 45 (2/2)
”You don't have to justify yourself,” he finished hopelessly.
”I'm not justifying myself. You think I'm justifying myself to bourgeois morality, right? That's what you think? Well I'm not. I say the h.e.l.l with bourgeois morality. I've always felt that way. It's been my position from the beginning.”
”We're not at the beginning any more.”
”Then what are we at? The end? I don't know about you, I'm not at the end of anything. I'm just starting! You think an Emba.s.sy is nothing? Anyhow I'm not justifying myself to bourgeois morality, I'm justifying myself to her.”
”It's all the same,” he said.
”No it's not,” I said.
”There!” said my mother, s.n.a.t.c.hing me for sudden ally. ”See? She's not as shallow as you make her out to be, at least she's capable of understanding what an Emba.s.sy means. Only when the time comes,” she warned me, ”you'd better change your att.i.tude. I'm not a liberal any more, if liberal signifies I have to tolerate gossip. My business is my business, n.o.body else's.” She hardened: ”Respectable boys don't take, out running sores, they don't marry issues, remember that while you're deciding to be so liberal.”
”I'm not respectable enough to decide to be liberal.”
”Oh fine, listen to that! Enoch, you heard that. You heard it for yourself. Where's an att.i.tude like that going to lead?”
”You are whatever your mother wants you to be,” he told me: ”Apparently she wants you to be respectable.”
I laid the bundle of letters on the bed and said nothing.
”I don't want her to be anything,” my mother remonstrated, ”except free. As long as she's free,” she said, but this was mechanical: it was not her thought. Her thought was something else. ”We're free,” she explained. ”Free as kings.”
”An Amba.s.sador,” Enoch observed, ”is not exactly an absolute monarch.”
”I know that,” she said demurely.
”An Amba.s.sador,” Enoch observed again, ”is not exactly left to do as he pleases. Neither is his wife.”
”I know that.”
”Then our freedom, you see, is not what you imagine.”
”Yes it is,” my mother said. ”We're free to take the Emba.s.sy.”
He said slyly, ”You wouldn't trade the Emba.s.sy for Brighton?”
Her gaze floated over me.
”That was fake crying before,” she gave out finally.
”I took it,” Enoch said hollowly, ”for grief.”
But she was swift to pin him: ”Is that why you called it stupid?”
”Fake is stupid,” he blew back at her.
”You didn't know it was fake, it's just that you don't care what I'm feeling,” she complained. ”You don't take me seriously, you're always clowning.”
”I am the grin,” Enoch said, ”in your chagrin.”
”See?”
”I don't like your blasphemy,” he said: ”It's blasphemous to simulate despair. There's plenty of the original in the world.”
”Oh, the world!” she said in the shrill consummation of her disgust.
”You weren't feeling h,” he accused.
”No,” she admitted.
”You didn't feel a thing.”
”It's wrong not to feel a thing, isn't it? I don't feel anything at all about any of that, it's peculiar. It's all gone.”
”Brighton?” he asked.
”Nick,” she heard herself reply.
”Ah,” Enoch said, and sealed in that enclosing syllable their unanimity, self-amazed. It drove a gate against me; wedding-glue had cemented shut the seams at last. I foresaw the Emba.s.sy, a sandstone palace in an alien nation with an iron gate coiling up its scrolled crest through s.h.i.+mmering queer foreign winds, and staves like spears or lances, and myself never in it. I would stay behind, I would never enter. It was Enoch's house, that Emba.s.sy, bought for him by my mother, paid for by my surrender to my father; I would never enter it. I had never entered William's houSe; I foresaw I would never enter Enoch's. Did they pity me, those counterfeit fathers, false Enoch, false William, who gave me for hostage so that my mother in her appet.i.te might take an Emba.s.sy?
I went to pack.
”-Wait a minute, will you?” She stopped me on the way; fatigue narrowed the bone of her nose; her nostrils seemed to waver independent of structure. ”Now listen here, I never told you any lies at all, you follow? I mean look-suppose I'd married Nick, you think I could stay married? To a vagrant, a b.u.m? An out-and-out crook? I would've divorced him in the end anyway, you follow? It comes to the same thing, you see my point?”
But there was power in the room: Enoch exultant under its plume, a crease of elation in either cheek, his forehead heavy, white, s.h.i.+ning with relief. He had her now. She had sloughed off not Brighton (and what was Brighton after all?), but Nick. He had never feared Brighton, he had never feared me: only Nick. And be had her now, and was, as she said, free as a king. He had her. She reminisced for him; she was telling how, the very day she married him under William's high jealous shadow, in the flesh-gleam of William's wife's scorning glovelessness, all the while she was missing Nick. The fractional cut of diffidence she had earlier opened to me left no st.i.tch or ridge or fissure: she was whole, he had her whole.
She missed no one.
To me she said: ”Of course it was a fib-Enoch's saying he didn't have any ambition. He said it the first night we were married, it turned out it was his way of covering up. He always has to cover things up, he's terribly complicated. It's right in his temperament, being negative about things. Negative and proud. The more negative and proud he is the more he's craving something. I ought to know him by now! Take my word for it: he's got a hollow craving in him, more than anyone, more than I have. That's why he's the only person I could have married, logically speaking.”
My stepfather responded to this with an uncommon glimmer of smile. ”Logically speaking,” he began, in a voice so given over to mastery that I was sure he was about to disclose a conspiracy of advice for me to take with me, ”there are neither lies nor fibs. Lies and fibs contradict the truth, and contradictions don't exist in logic”-it was only another conundrum, one of his jokes; he had nothing to tell me. ”And you,” he told my mother, ”crave nothing at all,” which, while never touching himself, penetrated her exactly. She missed no one, she missed nothing.
4.
In that place there was a short tree crouched over its short trunk, not much higher than a bush, and with a full misty mane like a bush, and all its comb of yellow leaf stained through by sunlight, the wide wash of day narrowed gunlike and spat out in points of magnetic s.h.i.+mmer on each tremulous lamina, the whole blown head of it coruscating like a transparent great net of caught fishes: the little caught tree wriggling, and with every wriggle enmes.h.i.+ng itself still more inescapably in its bag of light; every breath it dared to take sluicing it in a supernal flash-tossing itself there, on the edge of the swamp, back and forth, dazzling, darting.
My mother's chauffeur said, ”This looks like it, miss. A bit of dock left here. I was told a bit of old dock,” and put my suitcase-I had taken only one-on a nailed-together pattern of soaked colorless faintly noiseful planks. ”Must've been deeper here once-deep water-if a ferry ran. They must've cut in deep here, for a ferry.”
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