[The Dead House]

Now, as the wind strides with snow and rain from the antarctic desert, let the heart tick out her hours, presenting a blank front to the opaque sky.

And this ruined palace leased for so long to the inestimable Dead, this house of stone in the great marshland of unquiet sleep, overgrown with yellow swamp-flowers and lit by night with the blue flare of ignis fatuus – one need cry no longer for the hand of Christ on the rusted lock or His blazing breast on the empty hearthstone.

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For a guest has entered, making from the stagnant vault a pleasant living- room.

Not this time a crony and jail companion, with whom one could lament a lost fortune, drinking a wine grown over-mellow and observing the acid stains of weather upon the ceiling. But a stranger, a mere girl, bearing it is true that brand on the forehead (no lotion can wholly disguise it) which marks us all; yet one of the youngest of the children of darkness, in her face the glimmer of some incredible other dawn, terrible and clear as a stirring of light to the blind from birth.

Though always behind the customary gestures, pain must be, like the shooting numbness of blood returning in a cramped limb, one can nevertheless extract even from this discomfort a salty flavour. For one is not alone; and hence no longer at the mercy of those unwanted visitors who call by night.

Burying one’s face in her golden hair, or caressing her childish breasts and responsive thighs, one is Antaeus, comforted by the soothing voice of Nature whose maternal arms still embrace those children whom she cannot save.

So – clouded eyes, reddening lips, taut breasts, confining knees, la belle chose itself, lose the discontinuity of the anatomist’s trade for a fluid significance, a common symbolic origin in that inexhaustible spring conveniently typified by – deepsea treasure, the cave of the forty thieves, oases in the desert, or the dark side of the moon – in a word, Woman.

Her shame is evidence that even she, of all creatures most equipped to hide from Heaven’s impassable scrutiny, has not escaped the common blight, the taste of corruption in every food.

But in her continued presence one can find at least some excuse for refurnishing the house.

Kitchen and bedroom first: linoleum and flowered wall-paper; an electric stove and heater; some linen to replace the grimy blankets. As for the other rooms, the most derelict can be boarded up.

That peculiar stone table in the upper room surmounted by two bars of wood set at right-angles, could well be brought down and used as a chopping- block. It is hard to throw away the most useless remnants (nails, bits of bone, wood from old thorn bushes) as one always has a feeling they will come in useful later on.

Since we have set up house together, things have made a permanent change for the better. The place looks much more cheery. All ghosts and odours have been abolished by a liberal use of Dettol. Admittedly the nights are getting longer and the rain more persistent. But we have laid in a good store of tinned food and enough firewood to last us till the Spring – which seems a long time in coming, a phenomenon easily explainable in terms of the activity of sunspots or the inaccuracy of calendars.

1948 (20)

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