34. As my journey into the Proustian labyrinth continued...
The thirty-fourth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero has a vision of the Travelling Companion on Brighton Beach.
As my journey into the Proustian labyrinth continued, the occasional signs of light steadily increased in frequency and brightness…
Through our ‘conversations’, I came to understand something of the difficulties my father had faced, the velleity that had blighted his life, the gradual erosion of hope he had suffered. The pain of acting in good faith when everyone else seemed intent on doing just the opposite, the frustration of trying to balance the pure desires of the heart with the petty demands of the workaday world. These things became clearer to me. I began to see beyond my own youthful idiocies to the inevitable disappointments that accrue with the passing of time.
Similarly, by attending to the homilies of the Travelling Companion, I started to realise that love was much more than simple self-fulfilment or delight in one’s own existence and satisfaction, and much more to do with a delight in the existence and satisfaction of others, a happy participation in their fulfilment, their joy. It took me an age to appreciate my own culpability in everything that had happened between us, but over those months of deep and sustained reading, I came to terms with what was really a failure of loving on my part, an inability to contend with the troubling antinomies of love, to find a way to love both her and my father at the same time, to apply this love in the right and proper way in each instance, and to love myself as well.
When I look back now, I suppose this rejection of love was also a rejection of the grief that comes with it; which is a strange place to find oneself if you think about it, as if we get to a juncture where the quotidian fluff of human reality trumps our childhood intuitions, and we find ourselves forgetting them in favour of worrying about our career prospects or the state of our bank balance. We must be braver. There is nothing to fear in loving and grieving, which are two sides of the same coin. If we’re lucky, we realise this at some point in our lives, and are able to reconfigure each of them into the essential effort to remember what we once knew instinctively. The suffering that attends us during in this period is perhaps only the necessary penance of creatures who have forgotten their place. Again, I’m drawn to the word ‘purgatory’, which is a difficult place to be, but one that doesn’t preclude the possibility of entering heaven.
It was, I think, a few months after this that I travelled down to Brighton to see some old university friends for the weekend. This was the first occasion I’d been strong enough to visit the Travelling Companion’s new home, so afraid was I of running into her; or worse still, of having to face her new lover in the flesh. Brighton was small, and I knew the chances were high. That Saturday was full of booze and boyish bravura, such that for a few hours at least, my troubles seemed to have melted away. In spite of my fears and precarious mental state, I’d managed to put her out of my mind, to quiet her voice. It was only later that night, as a sudden storm swept off the sea, and I lay awake listening to the violent wind and waves outside, that the despair returned with a new and terrible virulence, perhaps because I knew she was so near.
In the darkness of an unfamiliar room, a pulsing parade of faces drifted through the gap between mind and eye. Naturally, hers was among them, although struggling to fully form itself. I suddenly realised that I’d half forgotten what she looked like. Distraught, I tried in vain to recall the vision, but the image remained unstable, fragmented, morphing into a sequence of grotesque countenances that rose up for a few seconds then shifted into forms more benign, angelic even, twisting this way and that, before becoming demonic once again.
Suddenly, from outside, the thunder spoke in a series of loud crunches, before several flashes of lightning rolled back the blackness in fugitive bursts of energy, giving momentary life to the strange objects that furnished the spare bedroom in which I was staying. I thought of the Narrator struggling to settle in his Balbec hotel, aware that habit had had no time to impose its devious peace on my brain. I imagined Swann standing alone, lashed by rain on the other side of the Channel. And I thought of my father, who would wake me whenever storms like this one hit our little town, so that we could witness the spectacle of nature’s casual puissance together.
After a few minutes, I clambered out of the bed and walked over to the window, pulling back the curtains, so that I might get a better view, urged on by my father’s voice, which had piped up in response to the storm and the happy memory it had prompted. Beyond the pillars of electric light that marked the long stretch of the promenade, was the kind of unfathomable darkness that only Conrad could describe or Caravaggio could paint. I stared into it unbelievingly, for one minute, two minutes, three, confounded and lost, until this seductive nothingness was punctuated again by a great bolt of lightning, which came out of nowhere and brought fleeting form to the black-smoke clouds and angry expanse of sea below.
I’m not sure how long I remained standing there, caught between the darkness and the light, but at some point, I noticed a solitary figure in the distance, walking along the pavement, gradually gaining in size and definition as what turned out to be a woman came nearer. I could see that she was slender and that her hair was black, but couldn’t make out her face, which was turned toward the water, staring out into that same deep darkness. She seemed oblivious to the storm and a little unsteady on her feet, which may have been due to her heels, or alcohol, or both. I followed her closely with my eyes as she passed by and then stopped, clutching the railing with her pale hands.
It took me a surprisingly long time to work out who it was; or, at least, who I thought it was. Only when she turned her head to the left and I saw her profile, did I become convinced it was the Travelling Companion, which sent my stomach into sudden paroxysms of terror and excitement. Was it really her? I couldn’t move, as if suddenly thrown into suspended animation, a body inhibited by a mind processing a multitude of conflicting emotions all at once. I felt like a confused child, confronted by the strange and contrary magnificence that the world presents to newly opened eyes. The face (or at least, the side of it), which I had been trying to recall just moments before, was now before me and even more beautiful than I remembered. The intervening years had instilled a certain nobility, hollowing out the cheeks a little, which gave the impression of pushing the nose further forward, like some elegant bird, her pale skin made to shine against the deep black of the hair behind it. In the rain, the effect was even more devastating; she seemed at once to both absorb and repel all that nature was throwing at her, immune to it because she was so clearly bound up within it, both in the storm and of the storm. More like a statue, she stood there, perfectly still, despite being buffeted by the wind, looking to the east, and lost in fateful contemplation, like Andromeda awaiting Cetus.
After a few more minutes, she turned her head away again, which, rendering her face invisible once more, felt like some terrible rebuke. What had I become since she took a different path? Full of rage and jealousy, sound and fury, like an idiot, bereft of love and illiterate in respect to the sovereignty of others, I’d lately latched on to new bodies in meaningless acts of revenge; followed images of failing virtue; denied the possibility of joy in favour of unrighteous anger; and dulled my pain with an ocean of booze. During the fallout, I’d made her a Medusa, catalysing my love for her into hate, and destroying myself with visions of her betrayal. I never once thought about her suffering, her needs, her dreams, or about my complicity in what happened to us; and I lost sight of all the good that she had given me. It was true that time (and Proust) had begun to hammer away at all this lunacy, but it wasn’t until I saw the face of that dark figure in the storm that I confronted the truth of my dismal response to our situation and felt the immemorial power of what love was and might one day be again.
As I stood there, looking down at her, still with her back to me, fixed on the timeless sea, I became conscious of my own face mirrored in the glass of the window, flecked with rivulets of rain, some of which I realised after a short while, were in fact a reflection of the tears which had sprung from my eyes. Suddenly, she turned, revealing for the first time her full countenance, which was that much more captivating than the mere moiety I’d seen until now, that I could hardly bring myself to look at it. She appeared to be looking up in my direction, perhaps aware that someone was lurking in the darkness; and those eyes, bright and proud, seemed to burn right through me.
In response, I turned away and withdrew a few steps, for fear of being seen, but each time I glanced back, she remained staring up at me. After a while, she pushed her hands through her hair, so that her face was fully exposed to the torrents of water that fell upon it, her pale beauty caught in the electric light, picked out against the black sea beyond, and further gilded by the flurries of lightning that illumined the sky from one side of the world to the other. Was it really her, or simply the ghost who’d been with me so long, cast by my mind into the world, a voice made manifest, animated by the powerful forces at work within the atmosphere? I couldn’t be sure.
And amid this indecision, this potent indeterminacy, the full force of my shame broke over me, and I realised that I’d cleaved to bitterness and recrimination for too long, despite suffering no great attack from her, no wanton outrage, simply the rightful assertion of her independence, her spirit. Repentant, I looked down to where she was standing in the hope of receiving some sign of forgiveness. I felt certain that she was looking directly at me; that she was in fact beckoning me toward her. Then, for a moment, I heard her voice again, wishing me sanity, peace, and happiness, asking me to step out into the rain, into the storm, into the watery world outside the window.
Finally, I pulled myself away, threw on some clothes, and rushed out of the flat, down the stairs, and onto the street. Buffeted by the wind, I crossed the road and staggered to the railings where I’d seen her standing only moments before. I was already soddened, as if I were nothing more than a fugitive wave which had emerged for the briefest of moments and then collapsed back in on itself, a quintessence of wetness. I knew that the weight of this water was the weight of my grief, my guilt, my pain, my jealousy, and I felt a sudden and great sense of relief at understanding this, as it was simultaneously washed away. More than that, I wanted her to know I knew this. But when I looked around, up and down the glistering road, I could see that I was alone. My battered heart beat fast in my chest, and feeling the urgent need to explain this epiphany to whomever it was that had inspired it, I ran frantically, first one way, then the other, but the entire seafront was deserted; nothing but the skeletal remains of the West Pier, barely visible, and the dark water heaving onto the beach, dragging the pebbles back into its liquid depths.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.