Island - Aldous Huxley [50]
“What did you expect?”
“Precisely that.”
“Then why on earth…?”
Will gave her one of his flayed smiles and shrugged his shoulders. “As a matter of scientific interest. I was an entomologist investigating the sex life of the phantom maggot.”
“After which, I suppose, everything seemed even more unreal.”
“Even more,” he agreed, “if that was possible.”
“But what brought on the maggots in the first place?”
“Well, to begin with,” he answered, “I was my parents’ son. By Bully Boozer out of Christian Martyr. And on top of being my parents’ son,” he went on after a little pause, “I was my aunt Mary’s nephew.”
“What did your aunt Mary have to do with it?”
“She was the only person I ever loved, and when I was sixteen she got cancer. Off with the right breast; then, a year later, off with the left. And after that nine months of X rays and radiation sickness. Then it got into the liver, and that was the end. I was there from start to finish. For a boy in his teens it was a liberal education—but liberal.”
“In what?” Susila asked.
“In Pure and Applied Pointlessness. And a few weeks after the close of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public course. World War II. Followed by the nonstop refresher course of Cold War I. And all this time I’d been wanting to be a poet and finding out that I simply don’t have what it takes. And then, after the war, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but try to write something decent—good prose at least, seeing that it couldn’t be good poetry. But I’d reckoned without those darling parents of mine. By the time he died, in January of ’forty-six, my father had got rid of all the little money our family had inherited and by the time she was blessedly a widow, my mother was crippled with arthritis and had to be supported. So there I was in Fleet Street, supporting her with an ease and a success that were completely humiliating.”
“Why humiliating?”
“Wouldn’t you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery? I was a success because I was so irremediably second-rate.”
“And the net result of it all was maggots?”
He nodded. “Not even real maggots: phantom maggots. And here’s where Molly came into the picture. I met her at a high-class maggot party in Bloomsbury. We were introduced, we made some politely inane conversation about nonobjective painting. Not wanting to see any more maggots, I didn’t look at her; but she must have been looking at me. Molly had very pale gray-blue eyes,” he added parenthetically, “eyes that saw everything—she was incredibly observant, but observed without malice or censoriousness, seeing the evil, if it was there, but never condemning it, just feeling enormously sorry for the person who was under compulsion to think those thoughts and do that odious kind of thing. Well, as I say, she must have been looking at me while we talked; for suddenly she asked me why I was so sad. I’d had a couple of drinks and there was nothing impertinent or offensive about the way she asked the question; so I told her about the maggots. ‘And you’re one of them,’ I finished up, and for the first time I looked at her. ‘A blue-eyed maggot with a face like one of the holy women in attendance at a Flemish crucifixion.’”
“Was she flattered?”
“I think so. She’d stopped being a Catholic; but she still had a certain