The Search (8 page)

One night she had told him, “I don't want to work in the factory for the rest of my days.” Sometimes he felt barren and insecure but knew that he couldn't leave her. Though she had left school she was bright and sharp, and even tried to read some of the books he was reading. One night he had found her turning over the pages of a novel by Faulkner and was frightened by the pathos of the sight, for she was determined that she would read it through to the end. What else was that sickness but love?

They had discussions about whether they should tell his brother what had happened, for a letter from Norman reached Sheila every week. “We won't tell him,” she said, though his own instincts were to do so. She argued that he might do something silly, for after all he was very impulsive. But he who was so severely truthful wanted to tell him no matter what happened. He felt sordid and secretive and defiled. He wondered afterwards whether she was making sure that she would at least keep one or the other. “Eighteen months won't be long,” she said, but at the same time she was making preparations for their wedding after Norman had come out of the Army. She showed him some clothes she had bought and she was also paying for a Hoover and washing machine. Her busy hopefulness was endearing: he felt himself surrendering more and more to her sense of purpose. He gave her money for furniture, in fact he was very generous with his money as if by denuding himself of it he was making a spiritual reparation. Not even his mother knew what was happening. Sometimes he used to think, “Perhaps she will meet someone else and she'll keep the washing machine and the Hoover which she has bought with my money.” And it angered him that he should be so petty.

At night she would sit on the floor in her sister's house (the latter and her husband having gone out for the evening) and look up into his eyes in the light of the fire. There was nothing that he could refuse her and he felt proud that he had managed to ensnare someone who was so pretty and so young and so capable. In fact she was quite beautiful, though her nose was rather large and Caesarian and gave her a Roman appearance. She sometimes said that she would get a nose lift but he thought that she shouldn't in case she lost her look of busy determination. She would ask him what pay he would expect to get as a lecturer when he became one (and she was quite sure that he would).

“What are other lecturers' wives like?” she would ask him.

Trevor looked blankly into Douglas's face.

“The worst was,” he said, “when Norman came home from the Army. He didn't know what had been going on. I can't tell you what Sheila had been saying to him in her letters, she never told me. One night we told him what had happened. He went dead white and then he left and ended up in a pub from which he came home late at night blind drunk.” He paused. “My mother wondered what was wrong with him but I didn't tell her, and in spite of the fact that he was coming home drunk every night of the week I couldn't let Sheila go. I couldn't.”

Sheila had been much stronger than him. “We can't allow this blackmail,” she would say to him. “I'm not a piece of property. I've the right to change my mind if I want.” Trevor thought that at one stage Norman would kill himself. But Sheila was much harder than he was. “He won't do anything of the kind,” she said. What bothered him was that though he could see his brother so acutely in despair he couldn't leave Sheila. There was no chivalry left in his nature: the green cat had eaten all that up. He tried to many times, but couldn't. He had created quarrels, abdicated responsibility for the whole affair, claimed that it was Sheila who had seduced him, that it wasn't his fault, but at the end of the quarrels, when Sheila had threatened to leave both of them he had run after her and begged her forgiveness. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would waken up and feel a huge contempt for himself, as the dawn reddened the curtains.

“He won't speak to me at the factory,” she had told him. “It can't go on much longer.” He thought that the whole thing would affect his results in the examinations but it didn't. He had passed with First Class Honours.

“You have all the luck,” Norman had said to him, his eyes owlish with drink. His mother had objected to Trevor's marrying Sheila as well. “Can't you see? She's ambitious. That's why she left Norman.” One night Norman had punched him in the face and he had accepted the punishment gratefully. His mother and Norman would quarrel and she would say.

“It's time you left here.” She was as determined and strong as Sheila though in a different way. And yet she too was ambitious, had wanted a son who had attended university. The house seethed with unrest. Norman acquired the habit of sitting in front of the television set in such a way that Trevor couldn't see it: he was fertile with irritating tricks. But most of the time he himself had pitied Norman. The latter was one of the paupers of life. And yet he couldn't give up Sheila, and there was no point in doing so since she was determined to marry him and on no account would marry Norman. “It just shows you, all this drunkenness,” she would say. “What would he have been like if I had married him? It's lucky that I found out in time.” The statement seemed to Trevor sublimely irrational and he couldn't understand how Sheila's mind worked; she seemed able to convince herself of anything. It occurred to him that there was no truth in any idea as such: ideas conquer not because of their truth but because of the strength with which they are believed.

“It was me who should have emigrated,” he told Douglas. “But I didn't have the courage. Do you understand?”

Douglas said nothing but lit another cigarette from the previous one and continued to smoke furiously, exhaling ring after grey ring. Trevor watched the frail circles with aesthetic detachment.

“The terrible thing was that I wasn't sure whether she loved me or not. Perhaps she did, does. And yet I haven't phoned her up since you told me about Norman. We married, of course.”

“And?” said Douglas.

“I had to leave her behind, at home, but what is she doing now? I don't know. She keeps saying to me, ‘You should be a professor and why aren't you? You let people walk all over you.' I remember the old places we used to go to when courting. There was one particular hill we used to sit on on the warm days. But she won't go near these places now. In fact one of the reasons why I came out here alone was to see if I could exist separated from her.” He looked at Douglas with a naked defenceless stare. “I don't know what will happen if she leaves me. I don't suppose you have any whisky?” he asked hopefully.

“I'm sorry, it's too expensive. I can give you beer or wine. I don't drink much, as I told you.”

Douglas poured some of the white wine that Trevor had brought into a glass.

“That's why when you phoned I didn't know what to do. I remember the day he left. He had been talking about emigrating for a while and I was only half listening. It came as a complete surprise when he said that he would be leaving on a particular day: he had secretly arranged his passport and everything. I don't want you there, he said, not any of you. Not even my mother. But we went just the same and we arrived at the pier just as the ship was leaving. There was a piper from the factory there, a fellow drinker he had become friendly with. Norman was wearing a kilt and making an exhibition of himself. I think he was drunk. The ship sailed away and I went into a pub and bought myself a drink.”

“And you never heard from him since?”

“He did write once or twice but only to his mother. He said things were going well with him. But he had no trade, you see. I don't know how they accepted him without a trade. He had only been working in a clock-making factory, as I told you. I came back drunk that day and Sheila was furious. ‘I hope you're not going the same way as your brother,” she said. I stood looking at her and I thought, ‘What have I done?' It was as if once my brother had gone there was no need for me to be with her any more. Maybe deep down I wanted to take her away from him for the sake of that itself.
Who can understand the human mind? To take everything away from him so that he would be a beggar. Maybe I was punishing him. Do you think that's possible?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes.”

Trevor drained the wine and shifted restlessly in his chair. “Of course we were always fighting when we were young. I have to try and tell you about Sheila. It's important.

“It turned out that she didn't love me at all. I think I can say that. She only wanted to get out of the house she was in. There were another three unmarried sisters and they quarrelled all the time. It was like a house full of cats, they fought and scratched each other without mercy. She told me that she knew that Norman wouldn't marry for years. She told me that the factory was so boring that I couldn't imagine what it was like. And then again she thought that she would marry into a world where she would meet a lot of interesting people. In fact most of them are quiet and silent and immersed in their own projects, and they don't speak much to anyone. I brought a friend of mine to see her one night. He's a French lecturer and talked a great deal about existentialism. ‘What a bore,' she said.” Trevor stared dully ahead of him. “Do you understand what I'm saying?” he said. “It was all such a mess, such a tangle. And yet I was helpless.”

There was a long silence and then Douglas said, “I have no wife or child. I can't afford them.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me. I have no family.”

“But …”

“I simply told you that because you sounded so sure of yourself. On the radio.”

“Oh. And did you ever meet my brother then?”

“Of course I did. I met him in a cheap lodging house. He was an alcoholic.”

Trevor nearly said to him, “Why are you calling him an alcoholic when you said before that it is a simplistic label?”

“He told me that story,” said Douglas, “or at least his own version of it. But he didn't know it as it really was. I can see that now. He was very embittered.”

“But do you know where he is now?”

“No. That was years and years ago. It must have been fifteen years ago. No, perhaps ten. He had started to drink. That was in Queensland.”

“But you said it was Sydney.”

“No, it wasn't in Sydney.”

“I see. And what about those books he was supposed to read?”

“He never read a book as far as I know. He looked sick.”

“Sick?”

“Yes, he looked very sick. And then one day I heard your voice on the radio. I don't know who hit you on the head, by the way. It must have been that fellow Morton who saw a chance of getting money because you looked so green.”

“I see,” said Trevor. He felt as if he was rising and falling on a sea that was bitterly salt.

“Do you know anything about him now?”

“Not a thing.”

“But why …” And his voice trailed away.

“I told you. You sounded so cocky.”

The two of them, himself and Norman, were walking through a wood. He himself hid behind a tree and waited for his brother to try and find him. His name echoed among the trees which were dappled with sunlight. His brother was shouting that he was lost and he himself was smiling secretly. And now Douglas was doing the same thing to him.

“And your book? Are you writing a book?”

“Oh that part is true. I'm writing a book about a child murderer. You see, people label him as a child murderer, and they don't understand what the man is really like, what forces him to do the things that he does. He doesn't want to be a child murderer, of course he doesn't. But some of us don't want to be plumbers, though society forces us. I have invented a psychiatric detective. He saves him from himself and shows him what has happened to him. Do you understand?”

Douglas gazed at him piercingly with mocking eyes.

Trevor tried to put the pieces together with what was left of his mind. “So you saw him fifteen or ten years ago. You can't be more accurate than that. And you haven't seen him since. So he might be dead for all you know.”

“That's about the size of it. What are you going to do now?”

The eager eyes fastened themselves on Trevor.

“Are you going to look for him?”

“What?”

“I said are you going to look for him?”

Trevor stared unseeingly ahead of him. “I don't know. I would have to get a job somewhere and stay in Australia. I don't know whether they would let me do that. I'm supposed to be going home shortly. I have my air ticket.”

Douglas didn't say anything but watched him all the time. Norman might be lying dead somewhere. On the other hand he might be waiting for his brother to come and rescue him.

“One might think,” he said with pedantic precision, “that there's a justice in the world which finds one out.” He rose to his feet swaying.

“I should like a taxi,” he said with drunken dignity.

“I'll phone for one. I don't have a phone here. I'll have to go outside,” said Douglas.

“I see,” said Trevor. “So that is why you didn't answer when I phoned.”

It seemed to him now that he was like his brother, that like his brother he had set off to Australia not knowing where he was going, and that he had ended up confused and impotent. A bell clanged with finality in his head. “I don't know,” Trevor repeated. He truly didn't know. It would all be decided for him as all this had been decided for him, that a girl called Sheila had been waiting for him, that a man called Douglas should be waiting for him here, that beneath the apparent success of his life these submarine monsters had been quietly lying in ambush. It seemed to him that he was walking unsteadily down steps into a deep, dark basement.

“I don't know,” he repeated, “what I'm going to do. All I want at the moment is a taxi.”