The Dead Seagull Read Online Free Page B

“But I have one of my own.”
    *  *  *  *
    “I couldn’t sleep.” Marsden, trailing a long red gown, came in, yawning. “I hate animals,” she announced; “I feel so like them. Let’s have a brilliant conversation. Do I look beautiful?” She postured her dishevelled head, as she sat, up to us. Her gown, lightly tied at the waist, slipped down from her leg. She had swansdown slippers on her brightly pedicured feet.
    “You look entrancing,” Theresa said. “All of you.”
    “Oh dear” Marsden gathered her gown over her breasts. “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go for a swim. Let’s go for a drink. Let’s go for a retreat. I’m going to go out and watch birds.” As she reached the doorway she turned. “But does the cut worm really forgive the plough?” she said in a querulous voice. “I decline to think so.”
    “Hurry up,” Theresa called after her. “We’ll be out on the shore.”
    *  *  *  *
    The sea, without a ripple disturbing the surface, spread out in sheets that glittered in different distances; at this point along the coast half a dozen toothy and saturnine rocks vaulted out of the shadows. The light, angling through clouds, invested everything with an eerie and livid artificiality. It was a landscape—a seascape—of prehistory. At any moment, out of that mud-flatted sea, the first monstrous amoeba might emerge, trailing the whole disastrous and grandiose history of biological life behind it. And I could see there, lying under the still water, the skull of the last of the species, festooned with seaweed—algae in the eyes—the miserable, ignominous necrophilia that will one day end it all. And, intercommunicatory between these two, the first and the last, I saw suspended, glittering, as it were, between the amoeba and the skull, the umbilical of the eternal maternal. Upon this cord, I heard the almighty announce in thunder, I shall hang the world. So that, like a skinned rabbit dangling in a gallows, each of us has, in his time, met his proper fate in this beginning: we have each been born with a rope around our necks. The mother of all living, lariat in hand, will never let us go.
    *  *  *  *
    Half an hour later, when we had gone as far as Theresa felt inclined to go, we turned back towards the cottage. “Marsden has probably fallen asleep by the fire,” Theresa murmured, leaning against my shoulder as we made our way over the shore. Her face had taken on a pallor not entirely tendered by the evening sky.
    I saw shadows standing upon it like the seventy-two effigies of the saints on the front of Salisbury Cathedral. Everyone hath everyone his shade. And among those private shadows, like those rose windows in which the great martyrdoms everlastingly enact themselves, her eyes were bright with adumbrated sacrifices. “What has happened to us?” she said softly, turning her gaze away from me. “Why are we so estranged?” She took my hand in both her own as we walked.
    I answered with deliberate brutality. “It is the child. It feeds off us both. From you it takes calcium and pigmentation. It takes its immortal soul from me. For I swear that mine has been stolen from me. I feel like a person giving a blood transfusion to a planet that was formed by my wish. God knows that you have a greater right to feel as I do—I’m sure that you do—I merely mean that it seems to exact a different kind of expense from me.”
    She stopped by a rock and looked up at me. “This is why I am happy,” she whispered remotely. “I can feel us both alive and united forever inside me. Now there is no escape. It had been written in existence. Nothing that ever was or ever will be can erase it. I have done my duty simply by turning the love I feel inside me into the life I feel inside me.”
    “You’re a good girl,” I said, and smacked her bottom. “We shall be late for tea.”
    It began to drizzle. A mist began a sort of burglarious rifling of the valleys that at irregular intervals