Sarah Caudwell - The Sibyl in Her Grave

It was one of the plants that Reg and Griselda rescued from the physic garden at the Rectory. About a week after my Virgil frontispiece disappeared I went out late at night and dug it up by the roots: I had read in some learned journal or other an article about the death of Socrates, which mentioned that the root is the most poisonous part. The writer was a scholar of considerable eminence — I am sure that he can be relied on. I ground it up into a powder and prepared a decoction in the way he described. I had begun by meaning to take the poison straightaway, but found when I had made it that I felt better and no longer wanted to. I put it in a bottle with an airtight stopper and hid it away in a cupboard in my bedroom, taking great comfort from the thought that it was there if I needed it.

But please understand that even then it was your presence, not Derek’s absence, which had made my life seem insupportable. By the time I knew him, you had already begun to make me feel a little desperate; you brought me presents that I did not want and you could not afford; you insisted on doing things for me which I would much rather have done for myself; you praised me in immoderate and embarrassing terms for qualities I do not have and achievements of which you are no judge. In return, you seemed to feel entitled to make demands on my time and emotional energy more absolute and more implacable than a newborn baby could reasonably make of its mother. Where I went, you followed; I could not go out without meeting you; I could not stay at home without your ringing my doorbell. I could see neither how to endure nor how to escape your endless, stifling thereness.

And then there was Derek and life became bearable again. Oh, more than bearable — golden, delightful, like the first day of spring after a long, dark winter, full of laughter and pleasure. I thought that I had never been so happy, not even when I was very young. I almost imagined that God was rewarding me for being patient with you and I thought how generous it was, when all I had prayed for was a little peace and privacy.

It ended, as you know, very painfully for me, but I have no wish to say any more about that.

While I was grieving for my loss and had no strength to protect myself, nor any consciousness of the need to do so, you somehow took possession of my life. It became an accepted thing that I was a kind of invalid and you were looking after me. You cooked and cleaned and shopped for me; you even did something you called looking after my garden — oh, my poor garden. You stayed with me all day from morning till night to make sure that I should not be lonely — though you quickly made other visitors feel that they had stayed inconsiderately long.

And I only wanted you to go away.

The more I was with you, the more I longed for Derek. I regretted bitterly the letter I had written him; I wished that I’d pretended not to know who had taken the frontispiece. I no longer cared if he was a thief, a liar and insincere in his affection for me; I would rather have lived in a world of absolute illusion than one from which irony and elegance had so utterly perished.

I still felt that I ought to try not to hurt your feelings. My life became a series of tactful excuses. I said that I had lost my appetite, rather than admit that the food you cooked disgusted me; that I was too tired to sit up in the evening, rather than let you see how weary I was of your company; that I was too unwell to go out, when the only way I could avoid you was to stay at home and pretend not to hear the doorbell.

But when the effort became too much and I began to say things that were unkind, quite seriously unkind, I found that it made no difference. You understood, you said, that it was “the pain talking.” By defining me as ill, you somehow managed to convert everything I said into its opposite; you construed expressions of anger as signs of affection; you translated every plea for solitude into an appeal for company.

I became more and more unkind to you — I said things more wounding than I had ever imagined saying to anyone. I told you that your conversation bored me, that your voice set my teeth on edge, that I found you personally distasteful. You cried; but you did not go away — this, it seemed, was your idea of friendship.

And something horrible began to happen to me.

Though I know all too well that I am often less thoughtful, less generous, less actively kind than I ought to be, I have always believed myself incapable of deliberate cruelty; I found it incomprehensible that anyone could take pleasure in causing pain. But now I began to find that I enjoyed hurting you; when I said something particularly wounding, I no longer felt remorse but a kind of loathsome satisfaction. Sometimes the desire even to hurt you physically was so powerful that I trembled with the effort of resisting it. I no longer found it extraordinary that people might take pleasure in tormenting a child or a helpless animal: I saw that they were merely like me and moved by the same impulse.

And if this impulse was simply a part of human nature, I wondered if it was also a part of the nature of God. I had from time to time, of course, the usual doubts about the existence of God, especially as I could never really solve the problem of why, if He exists, He should allow the innocent to suffer; but I had never doubted that if He existed, He was benevolent. But it now occurred to me that perhaps He enjoyed our suffering — that perhaps, indeed, He had created us for that purpose — it would explain everything. I thought that if I believed this I would not wish to go on living.

But until last night I never dreamt of killing you.

No, that’s not true. I did dream of it, every night, and by means far more painful and violent than poison. But in my waking hours I knew that it was out of the question: you meant well and were doing your best and it was not your fault that I had become a monster. If death was the only solution, I quite accepted that it must be mine, not yours.

Until last night.

How did you ever come to let me find the frontispiece? You thought, I suppose, that it was quite cleverly hidden in the middle of the pile of old newspapers that you keep to line the floor of the aviary. But did you really imagine, even though only an edge of it was showing, that I would not see and recognise a thing I had so much loved and valued? And why hide it at all? Why not merely destroy it? Surely not because it was beautiful? You knew, I suppose, that it was worth money — was it merely its commercial value that saved it from destruction?

Perhaps a psychoanalyst would say that when you left me alone there, in that hideous black drawing room, you subconsciously wanted me to find it. But even so, with what motive? From a sense of guilt, or one of triumph?

I hardly understood at first what it meant to find it there. And yet after a few moments I saw how easy it must have been for you — a question merely of leaving my back door unlocked when you put out the rubbish that morning. You would have known how unlikely I was to notice. And that night creeping back into the house in the darkness, while Derek and I were already in bed upstairs—

I felt sick at the thought of it — at that moment, it would have been physically impossible for me to speak to you. I took the frontispiece and left, leaving you still busy in your kitchen with whatever nauseating beverage you were preparing for me as yet a further symbol of your devotion and concern.

And now I do not see why I should die rather than you. You have taken from me the thing that I held most dear; you have stolen all the hope and pleasure from my life; you have made me hate God. You are destroying me by inches like some horrible disease — why should I not defend myself?

By the time you read this you will have eaten, I suppose, at least half of the chocolates I am giving you for Christmas. I think it is safe to tell you that they are poisoned. I spent what remained of the night filling and refilling my fountain pen, as if with ink, from the little bottle of hemlock and carefully discharging it into the base of each chocolate. I did it, I think I may say, quite neatly — I am sure you will not notice anything odd about them.