Nicholas Mosley - A Garden of Trees

I thought there was time.

Annabelle looked sad in the rain. “I did not know if you’d come,” I said. Her hair was dripping like seaweed around the white face of a stone. I wondered if she were ill. “You must come in,” I said.

“I got your letter.” She went up the stairs ahead of me. In my room I had put flowers and some candles against the wall. She sat on the bed with her feet turned inwards as if her ankles were broken. She did not take off her coat.

“Why don’t you lie down?” I said. And then, because she did not answer me, “Perhaps you are ill?”

She lay back on the bed. She said, “If I walked now in the streets I could get rid of this child.”

I was lighting the candles. The flames burnt with a vacancy at the centre like a soul. “Is that what you want?” I said.

“I am ill,” she said. “Will you walk with me until it happens?” She spoke to the ceiling where the plaster crumbled. “That is what I meant,” she said.

“That is not what you want,” I said.

“I cannot go through with it, for months I have pretended, I have thought. . but I hate it so much, there is this terrible hate, and that is what makes it impossible. There is a failure too that I cannot bear.”

I sat at the far side of the room so that I should not touch her. “Why do you feel this now?” I said.

“Because what I have lived with is a lie. What I have believed is a lie. It was not you who were the devil to tell me. You were a devil once. Why did you not ask me to marry you?”

“When?”

“That night ten months ago when you left me. Why did you leave me?”

“I will marry you now.”

“I will not marry you with Marius’s child. If I die I will not marry you with that to remind me. Marius is a devil.”

“You are ill, you must stay here. . ”

“I will not marry you now. I will walk in the streets until it is dead and even then I will not marry you. What devil were you to come into our lives and to tell us everything and to leave us? In order that you might return when it was too late and tell us again? Everything I have believed in is a lie. Thank you for telling me that.”

“What is this lie?”

“There is no forgiveness. In their hearts there is no forgiveness. Why do they come fawning round us to talk about it? They do not say what is in their hearts, if they have any hearts, which I do not know if they have. They have charms which they wear on their sleeves like bracelets and inside there is a terrible condemnation or at best a pity that is as cold as ice. Should it not be the other way round, that they wear their ferocity on their sleeves and inside there should be a heart that loves? I cannot forgive what they have done to Peter.”

“What have they done to Peter?”

“They have charmed him and yet they condemn him. Has he told you that they have charmed him? He is now full of some dreadful pride with which he can. . scorn me.” She broke off. “Is that then all it is?”

“What?”

“That I am resentful because Peter has been given the means to scorn me? Oh God, there are motives that are unfathomable.”

“Perhaps Peter has misunderstood. . ”

“Then it is their responsibility. It is for them to explain to him. He thinks they approve of him, and I know, I know what they think. And if it is all charm on the surface and that is what they think of him, then what do they think of me?”

“They love you.”

“They love you and yet they think you dreadful. They call it love. I loved Marius once and that is what I call love. I loved him when he was something, when he was a person, and I am not sorry about the love. I am not sorry about what happened between us. But then he became nothing, and I was nothing too, and so I would not marry him. It was I who would not marry him. When we were both something I would have done, I loved him, I loved this child as it might have grown up with us, and then all life became a dead flat sham with no love no joy and no reality, just yellow smiling faces with nothing underneath. That is what they do to you, they have done it to all of us, they turn into waxworks what they cannot destroy. Have they done it to you?”

I did not answer.

“I will marry no one. I will give myself to nothing to be pitied and condemned. And if they think this about Peter whose sin is so small. . ”

“It is the greatest.”

“Mine is greater. I have got this child. Why do you say that about Peter, and what is this love that smiles on the surface and does not say what is in the heart?”

“What is in the heart is on the surface and it is only in the mind that there is condemnation and pity.”

“I tell you that they have lied to Peter, whether they have lied to him with their hearts or with their minds doesn’t matter, they have lied to him and when he discovers this lie what will he do? I tell you he will kill himself.”

“He will not kill himself.”

“He will, he has used this lie to scorn me, and I have given him this lie, that is why he will kill himself. In all his life up to now he has never scorned me, I could have stopped him before but now I cannot stop him. He is a person who would kill himself for anything, he would kill himself out of despair or out of happiness or out of love or out of hate, he would kill himself because he knows it is the one thing that is irrevocable, because it is the biggest thing he could do and it is the big things that he is involved in. He is the one person in the world who lives always in big things, he is the one person who lives as the moralists tell us to live, as if each action is irrevocable, he is the one person who would kill himself to hell if he thought he deserved it. That is why he is so much greater than anyone, so much more than anyone, why he is so much beyond them, because he does not ask for redemption, he does not desire it, he asks only that he shall be judged for what he has done and that the judgment shall be irrevocable. That is why he will kill himself when he has reached a judgment on himself, because that will be irrevocable.”

“This is nonsense, Annabelle, this is not true. . ”

“You have said that his sin is the greatest, they have charmed you too. All right, you have come to know what I meant that day in the park, and what you know is this, that the great sin is to imagine yourself a god by denying God, and this is what Peter has done all his life. And this is what I have loved him for. This is what I am doing now myself and so long as he loved me I could have stopped him because there were two of us, but now there is only one because they have taught him to scorn me. He thinks I have betrayed him and when he finds out their lie he will kill himself. He will kill himself as an act of a god that makes amends to me. Am I mad then?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That is what gods do, isn’t it? They kill themselves to make amends to those who have suffered for them? Don’t they? Isn’t that what God did and isn’t that what is taken as a sign of a god? Peter will kill himself and they will have made him because it will be they who have betrayed us.”

“There is no betrayal,” I said.

“There is the betrayal of charming him deceitfully. It is my own fault because I made it possible for them, because they have done it to me, because they have made us condemn each other. He is mad now, have you seen him? It is my own fault that he is scorning me. They have given him a pride that he never had before, a pride to be righteous. He excuses himself anything because he thinks he is superior to me. But I love him, I know that I love him, I love him because he has a heart and because he lives on the edge of the sky and has made himself great enough to stand there. If he kills himself I shall love him more and I shall hate everyone else, I shall hate them for ever, I shall hate these priests with the flat sham manners and I shall hate Marius. Marius is a person who has been charmed to death already, who has no heart and desires no soul no existence who is a hard flat cipher against the walls of other men’s eyes, who has destroyed himself so that he is a dust that can settle in heaven. I hate Marius. I loved him when he needed me and now he needs nothing and I hate him. If Peter kills himself I shall hate God.”