Henry and Cato Read Online Free Page B

herself and retired into an almost equally terrible concealment. Avoiding him, she walked the empty rooms of the house every day, he heard her slow rather heavy tread. She sometimes wept, but would dismiss him if she could not control herself at once. She lived in private with her own horror. She was a remarkable woman.
    When he was young, romantic Lucius had thought of himself as a solitary. Real loneliness was different. No, he and Gerda were not a bit like man and wife, he could not partake of her woe and she knew nothing of his soul. Their talk did not contain the affectionate nonsensical rubble which pads out the conversation of true couples. The formality, which had seemed at first like a kind of old-fashioned grace, an affectionate respect which she extended, an expression even of the admiration which she had once felt for him, now seemed cold, sometimes almost desperate, a barrier. Yet there they very much were. Of course she needed him, she needed him as an admirer, perhaps the last one, someone who valued her in the old way. She needed him, unless the horror should now place her beyond such needs. He was the prisoner of a woman’s vanity. If it were not for her he might have become a great man.
    Lucius thrust one foot under the bed and winkled out the suitcase which contained the secret whisky bottle to which he occasionally resorted. He filled the glass on the bedside table. It was quite easy to remove the bottles from the cellar only getting rid of them later was something of a problem. Did Odysseus get drunk on Calypso’s island? When would his travels begin again, did he want them to begin, was it not too late for travelling? He took out his teeth and laid them on the table and felt his face subside gratefully into the face of an old man. He drank the whisky. His teeth grinned at him. Could art still console? Mozart had left him long ago but Bach was still around. He only cared for endless music now, formless all form, motionless all motion, innocent of drama and history and romance. Gerda, who hated music, would only allow him to play it very softly. He had stopped writing his book, but he had started writing poetry again. He still wrote newspaper reviews for pocket money, only now editors were less interested. Surely there was still power somewhere, that significant power which he had once felt inside the Communist party. One by one the philosophies had failed him. Is that all? he had felt as he mastered them. He was a creative person, a writer, an artist still, with fewer brain cells but with much more wisdom. Of course he was restless, of course he twitched with frustrated energy. He would become old and wild and lustful, but not yet. Lucius’s back was still hurting and he had a pain in his chest. He finished the whisky and undressed and got into bed and turned out the light. The usual awful melancholy followed. He could hear an owl hooting in the big trees. He wished he was not always young again in his dreams, it made waking up so sad. Henry had been very unkind to him in New York. He had had a way of life with Sandy. Lucius had been grateful for Sandy’s total lack of interest in Lucius’s life, in the justification of Lucius’s life, in the question of why Lucius was there at all. Had this blandness been assumed? Lucius thought not. Big red-haired philistine Sandy simply did not care. Gerda saw Sandy as some sort of hero, but really Sandy was just a big calm relaxed man, unlike dark manic Henry. Lucius had never seen Sandy as either an obstacle or a critic. Semi-educated Sandy only cared, and amateurishly at that, about machines. Gerda ran the Hall, it was her house. Of course Sandy’s death had been a terrible shock, but Lucius did not feel bereaved. He could not think about Sandy now, Sandy was over. He thought about the future and it was a vibrating darkness. He felt fear. He fell asleep and dreamed that he was twenty-five again and everybody loved him.
    An hour later Gerda