Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [160]
These unguarded negatives broke the control which he had struggled to maintain by an appearance of reporting on facts. ‘She died without me,’ he said, and his voice broke on it. He saw the artist make a sudden movement, as if to rise and come towards him. He said quickly, ‘You would serve me best by staying as you are. I do not know why, for the life of me, but I am set on speaking to you as I have spoke to no one else, and I need a distance between us if I am to get through to the end.’
For some moments, however, he was obliged to remain silent, checking the tears that had threatened him at Delblanc’s impulse to kindness. The hardest part still lay before him. Below the acknowledgement of blame, below the self-reproach, at the deepest level of confession, lay the words that would express the shame of what had been done to him. It was characteristic of Paris that he should seek a way to it through argument. ‘You quoted Pascal just now,’ he said. “ ‘Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence.” Delblanc, no latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice. Publishing seditious material is a felony in our law. Before I began my prison sentence, they set me twelve hours in the pillory. In our enlightened land, for publishing the view that the earth is older than six thousand years, and thus contradicting Revelation, I was chained by the legs to a post, my head and hands were stuck through a board and clamped there and I was left to the mercies of the crowd for a night on the market square of Norwich. Pilloried alongside with me there was a man who had been convicted of sodomy. Fortunate for me, because he diverted the wrath of the mob and so I was saved from injury at their hands. He was stoned by the whores of the town. In the morning, when they came for us, he was insensible – I do not know to this day whether he lived or died.’
Paris’s voice was unhesitating now; the droning fluency of nightmare had descended on him. As he spoke he had the sense of a steady seepage of filth and blood, a stain that spread with his words in this quiet room, with no check to him in Delblanc’s motionless figure or the hideous silence of the governor, and only the distant booming of the sea for admonition. The festering restraint of months fell away from him and the agony of his humiliation returned, licensed, almost welcomed, that crouching, ludicrous, beast-like posture, the terrible exposure of the naked face and head, detached from the rest of the body, offered like a pumpkin at a fair for the crowd to shy at, the hanging head and meek hands of the sodomist, his face and hair all pulped and bloody, like a burst pumpkin, lolling there, still unable to retract his head from his tormentors, his pleading mercy made indistinct by the blood that had filled his mouth …
He checked himself at last and a deep gasp like a sob broke from him. ‘Legitimate means of livelihood? The face of truth that cannot be denied? I wanted to look them in the face, when they came to release me in the morning. I had prepared myself. But I could not stand upright, I was led away crouching still, with back bent like some submissive animal. And yet I came here. I knew what it is to be shackled and derided and still I came. How can that be forgiven?’
Another groan came from him. Humiliation almost worse than that grey morning’s, the knowledge of his folly, to think that despair can exonerate, that the desire of death can remove the burden of conscience … ‘And it is not even true,’ he said turning half blindly and moving to the window as if for some refuge in the night outside. ‘It was not true then and is not now.’
The moon was high and clear of cloud, astoundingly radiant, eclipsing the stars. Moonlight gleamed in a sheet of silver over the marshes and flats of mud they had crossed to come here, so cluttered and tawdry by day, all unified and resplendent now as if lying under some momentary