Raffles
It was on the voyage back from Bremen, a week and a half after my chase had begun, that I began to have my first misgivings. My plans by the time I had boarded that ship back to England were laid out as clearly in my mind as I could at that time lay them. I could speculate and hypothesise further, but it would be to little end. In terms of concrete detail, by the time evening fell on the ship, I had done all that I could do—for the time being. For the time being, there was nothing for me to do but wait.
There are few better places for serious introspection than alone in the middle of the ocean: horizon stretching out to horizon, endless shades of blue from sea to sky, the roar of the waves drowning all external distraction whilst doing little to silence the clamour of one's own thoughts. That boundless vista offers scope for the imagination. It allows the mind to broaden and to clear; the sky after a storm. It offers no place to hide.
Bunny had not agreed to come back to me. He'd agreed only to come with me. And reluctantly, at that. Hesitantly.
Bunny had not agreed to run away to Italy. He had agreed only to join me on a paid-up cruise.
Bunny had, in fact, given me no reason whatsoever to believe that his stance had changed in any way that mattered. Alone on that ship and bound by necessity to, for a moment, stand still, the truths from which I had kept my gaze averted, swarmed. Burning into the merciless, bruising sky I could see the words he had written; within the stage-whispers of the water I could hear the words he had spoken, tolling me back to my sole self:
I can't do this anymore.
I'm tired of this. I'm tired of you.
I don't love you.
I'm not like you.
As the cold waves of the North Sea crashed against the side of the ship, their dark greys and foam whites swallowing up the splendor of the sunset, waves of cold realisation, long held at bay, crashed into my soul. I couldn't steal my way back into Bunny's life. I couldn't buy my way back into Bunny's heart! What had I been thinking? What had I been doing? The last thing I wanted to do was push myself upon him!
You see, I, unlike so many, understand the difference between love and the desire for possession; love is rarer, for one thing—and far, far more dangerous. People aren't jewels to be coveted and stolen. They aren't the family silver to be locked away for fear of being lost, or works of art to be bought and hoarded and secretly admired, jealously guarded like old Debenham had done out in Esher. It was true enough that possession could manifest like love at times, even appearing superficially identical to it in the desire to protect a thing or a person at great personal cost, but it is different. People protect their possessions merely because they view them as theirs; merely because harm to them is akin to property damage.
Was that how I had treated Bunny? As something that belonged to me? A possession to be protected—to be bought? I hated the thought of it.
I stared down at the turbid waters as they roiled far below and, though not usually given to sea-sickness, found myself nauseous. I shut my eyes and gripped the rail of the lower deck. I remember, now—though why the mind holds onto such useless scraps of information I have no idea—just how rough and rusted the metal was against my hands when compared to the railings of the first-class promenade deck I would later come to know better. A chip of rust flaked off beneath the pressure of my palm; when I rolled it between my thumb and forefinger it crumbled and fell away to the sea.
Bunny had never belonged to me. I knew that. Though I called him "my boy", "my dear chap", "my rabbit", I never meant it like that. I never meant to imply that I felt anything akin to ownership of him, that I considered myself at all entitled to him. I never wanted that! Not even when he seemed rather keen on the idea himself, willing as he so often was to turn himself over into my hands. Bunny was always so willing—and yet never willing enough, it seemed, for still I hadn't been content, had I? Still I had wanted more; had wanted him to trust me completely and without question; wanted him to simply cast off his fears upon nothing more than my word, as though that were as simple as taking off one's coat or tossing away one's gloves. As though those thoughts and doubts of his could be plucked out by nothing more than my insistence. As though he were nothing more than a suit to be altered to better fit me.
Bunny wasn't stolen or bought. He wasn't an object to be possessed or protected; he was his own creature, belonging only to himself, and answerable to no one but—just as I was. Just as I had always insisted on being. Anything I had ever claimed of him had been— borrowed. Bunny gave of himself as I had given of myself, and together we had taken of one another what the other was willing to share. If Bunny had withdrawn that share of himself, as was his right to do, was I not bound to respect that? Was it not my duty to step away and stay away?
I hadn't respected Bunny. I hadn't respected his decision to leave, and I hadn't respected his wish that I stay away from him. I had allowed my own unhappiness and my own fervent hopes to cloud my vision: in the desert of my life, forlorn, I had chased a mirage, unblinking. Time and again, and then worse than ever, I had misled Bunny in the name of protecting him. I had intruded where I had been uninvited, suffocated and imposed upon him, guarded him as jealously as any gaoler might. I was becoming the very thing I had always despised. And I'd invited him to run away with me—!
I'd behaved unforgivably. Ungentlemanly. Unsportingly.
Villainously.
...Naturally.
With grim heart and jaw hard set, I opened my eyes and stared out once more across the cold and uncaring North Sea, before turning away and returning to my cramped, third-class quarters, booked for prudence's sake under an assumed name. Booked under all manner of assumptions.
I had played the villain sure enough—but I'd be damned if I couldn't switch roles mid-Act. I could be better. I had to be better.
But I couldn't stop the play now that it had started: turning back wasn't an option. Turning back is never an option; to believe anything other is nothing more than futile self deception. You can't change what has been done, you can only make the best of it and carry on. You can only ever move forward. I had invited Bunny to come to Italy with me, and I had set in motion my plans to steal the pearl. That much was done , begun, and I would finish what I'd started. In any case, I had to do something—I had to help him somehow. I could no more have left Bunny to rot in the hole he was in than I could fly or breathe underwater. After all I had done, it was the least I could do.
I was only thankful that my letter, that ridiculous letter, effusively lyrical as it had been, had predominantly focused upon the restorative qualities of an extended holiday. Everything else, thanks to the florid fluidity of verse and superfluous poetic quotations, had been vague enough, I hoped, for Bunny to miss the real heart of it—or at least vague enough to lend me some plausible deniability if it came to it. If anything else bled through the ink, spilling from my heart in inferences and allusions, I could only hope that Bunny would chalk it up to my pretentious poetic aspirations, rather than to the truth. And, after all, it had ended on notes of pragmatism rather than poesy; the last word is always the one which leaves the most lasting impression. As far as I recall, mine had been some prosaic anecdote on how I'd talked my way into getting us cheaper fares, and some useless details on how well the ship I'd chosen was provisioned. One would be hard pressed to get less romantic than that.
I sat back on the hard bed in my darkened berth and ran a hand over my eyes, resisting the temptation to sink into black despair, knowing well enough that if I allowed myself that particular luxury just then, I would never come back out of it. Bunny was his own man and he had forged off on his own path without me; there was no use in dwelling on it. It was what it was; I could do nothing about it. I would do nothing about it. To do anything about it would be to offer Bunny the worst of disrespects, the most loathsome of betrayals—and to cast aside my own pride most pathetically. I was better than that.
I ran a practical inventory in my mind. None of my plans had to change—none of the plans which did not circle selfishly around my own graceless heart. I could still go for the pearl, I could still sell it—and Bunny could come with me or not. If he seemed disinclined to cut our trip short, I could sell fishing to him as some sort of new health fad from the continent: good for the body, good for the spirit, and especially good for the purse when we hauled up one particular unexpected prize. It might appear a strange proposition at first, I thought, but I'd proposed stranger to Bunny in the past, and despite any misgivings he might have had at the outset, at the scratch he'd always proven an intrepid enough adventurer. Admittedly things had changed since, and I knew I might well find him less willing than he'd once have been to wander with me from the beaten path, but Bunny was still Bunny, wasn't he? And even if he was no longer the Bunny I once knew, his coming with me was only one option of many, I thought. He needn't feel under any obligation to join me on my piscary expedition; I would make that plain to him when I raised the question. He needn't come at all, if he didn't want.
In fact, I realised, I needn't even ask it of him. Bunny might prefer to stay behind—he probably would prefer it. He might, I thought, be more than willing to bid me adieu and leave me to go on my merry way alone. Wasn't that precisely what he had been trying to do until I'd shoved my nose back in where it was unwanted? All Bunny expected, all he had agreed to, was a cruise around the Med., nothing more. Certainly not taking up a damned fishing schooner with me! Even raising the matter with him would, I realised, be a devilishly selfish act on my part, for of course it would put him in a deucedly awkward position. He'd feel obligated to say yes; I was, after all, paying for the lot. It would never have been a free choice on his part; our leverages were unequal. Had they always been?
I hadn't been considering him at all when I'd made those plans; I'd been thinking only of myself and of the game. What an idiot I felt in that moment, in that bunk, on that ship, in the darkness of that consuming night, as I watched the perfume dreams I had been batting for sail past and take out the wicket behind me. Of course Bunny would never have happily agreed to taking a fishing boat with me, not under any pretense! And if I did manage to convince him, I should only manage to do so under a pretense, I thought; a fact which only made my plan all the blacker, and all the more stupid. What a fool I had become—what fools love makes of us! What a fool I'd allowed him to make of me.
Well, this way would be better, I told myself, in the long run—or easier, at least. This way Bunny needn't know the money had ever come from me. He would never need to have the slightest inkling about the pearl, or of my hand in either taking it or passing its rewards on to him. He wouldn't need to know anything. I could fake some documents, invent some far-off Manders kinsman who could conveniently die and leave Bunny fifty-thousand pounds in his will; what could be neater? My plan would be all the better the further removed it was from Bunny. And Bunny would be all the better off the further removed he was from me.
The sun had by then drowned in dark waters, and dusk had long since given way to night. I leaned over the railings of the lower deck, having taken flight once more from the claustrophobia of my cramped berth, wanting to smoke a Sullivan without leaving traces of that first-rate brand in a third-class cabin. I remember thinking, as the smoke from my cigarette reached out to the lonely moon, caught fast between the pitiless blackness of sky and sea, that I would be better off alone, too. I didn't need Bunny. I didn't need anyone. Other people only complicated matters, if you let them in; if you didn't always keep them at a controllable distance; if you allowed your heart to have a say in decisions over which the head ought to reign alone as tyrant. People were to be used, just as they used you—or as they would use you if given half the chance. That was the social bargain, wasn't it? That was the deal everyone else struck.
Even Bunny had only used me. He had only come to me on that first night, on the Ides of March all those years ago, for money. Not for me, not for friendship—for money. Who's to say that wasn't why he had stayed, I wondered? I don't love you anymore, if I ever truly did. And that day in Thames Ditton, that evening, that good-by, had he not only warmed to the idea of a trip abroad once I had offered to pay? I'm not like you. Bunny didn't care for me. Bunny only wanted me when he was broke.
I threw the stub of my cigarette into the ocean and stalked back to my cabin, not waiting to watch as the tiny red spark was swallowed by the infinite ocean ink. I lay down on the cot; briefly considered taking a sleeping pill to ease my rest; decided against it. Clearly my senses had been dulled quite enough these past years without further medicating them away. It was long since past time I woke up.
Bunny didn't want me. Bunny wasn't like me. He never did. He never had been. I repeated the words to myself over and again, letting them scratch at the insides of me as a grain of sand scratches at the oyster, building a resistance to the irritation, forming around it a pearl within which I might seal away all those reckless hopes I had so foolishly allowed to carry me away.
The worst part was I had trusted him—almost completely. I hadn't meant to, but he'd worn me down, the fervor of his loyalty and the relentlessness of his love (if that, I wondered bitterly, was what it had been) a four-year long siege against my lifetime of experience and better judgement. I'd put up a good fight, but time and again Bunny had proven himself, had proven his words in action, and his actions in words. Bunny was the one bowler who could bowl me out. If I took my eye off the ball for even a second, there he'd be, scoring over after maiden over with his courage, his wit, his compassion, his fire, the irresistible pull of his guileless charm. What irony—I was the rabbit to my Bunny! I had let him set me on the back foot, thought myself good enough to play against him in bad light, on an unfavourable wicket, on an uneven pitch. The odds had all been in his favour from the outset, and yet still I stepped up to the crease, so eager had I been to play the game.
Foolish.
It was dangerous to love something so much. One should never stake so much on one thing; never allow anything to become so irreplaceably precious. There's too much risk in it. Too many opportunities for things to go wrong. Too many ways that you can lose—and further promises of loss even in winning. I knew that—I knew it—and yet still I'd allowed it to happen. Bunny had made me doubt myself; he'd made me believe in him. We had been friends, we had been lovers, we had been partners in crime—and that tripartite rope, woven of those three threads, had turned into something far stronger and far more binding than any one of its constituent parts. They had made a rope which tied me far tighter than I'd realised. Time and again I had stolen back the keys to my life, and time and again they ended up back in Bunny's breast-pocket. I would lock him out and leave, only to find him still and always waiting for me when I returned, rope in hand. I suppose I had begun to expect he always would.
Still, Bunny's apostasy had not left me entirely bereft. It had, in fact, handed me an idea still deserving of quite serious consideration: Bunny had gone straight . He'd turned pi'. He had turned his back on the criminal life, and in doing so he had set an example to which I knew I ought to pay heed. Though his attempt at walking the nobler path had, in my view, proven entirely unsatisfactory—and had he stubbornly carried on as he had begun I don't doubt it would have killed him— that wasn't a fault in the concept, only in the execution. That was only because Bunny—rash, impulsive, heedless Bunny—couldn't plan for nuts.
But I could.
Common knowledge associates piety with poverty. In truth the opposite is true: it's far easier to be righteous when you're rich. If one planned properly, if one set out on that pious path with pockets filled, I saw no reason why the honest life couldn't be both a long and merry one. Bunny was martyring himself to a cause for which he need not be a martyr; if I lent him a penny sourced by my sword, the world would be his oyster. A life could be good in all ways, and a man could walk with light steps without first lightening his purse. Saintliness isn't only found in suffering, and even the worst of men could repent.
Morally, ideologically, potentially, there was no reason why a man who had always danced on the black squares of life mightn't hop, mid pirouette, to the white. Bunny was living proof of exactly that, even if he wasn't the best of dancers. And I myself had long since said that once I'd made my pile I'd chuck up crime for good. Where once those words had been frivolous, they then became sincere. I came to believe I could do just that, that I wanted to do just that—and that I wanted it even without Bunny at my side. I wanted it for its own sake—for my own sake.
With or without the hope of Bunny's return, it was still true that my life as it was had become unsatisfactory, and the challenge of honesty was not lessened by way of meeting it on one's own. I wanted to prove, even if only to myself, that I was capable of batting where I once had bowled; that I might play for the other side; that I might, in fact, give up the game entirely. I wanted to climb out of Avernus; to return, like Orpheus, from the Underworld, unharmed, and once more embrace the land of the living and the untold adventures it surely held. And, unlike that great hero of old, I wouldn't make the mistake of looking back.
I disembarked the ship as soon as it docked in Southampton. I debated booking into an hotel—I had only three days before I (and Bunny along with me) was due to leave for Italy from that very same port; by the very same ship, no less. It would have made far more sense for me to simply stay put and save the train fare and hours travelling back through Waterloo, but something in me was fighting against that; some gut instinct to which I felt inclined to listen. I rationalised the irrational by telling myself that if I went back to London for a few days, I could ensure everything was in order before my longer trip. I could pick up that grey suit which so suited me and which I, in my haste, had neglected to pack. I could return the rough disguise, under which I had sailed, to my Chelsea studio and tie up that potential loose end. I could show my face in town, and give my rooms one final once over to ensure all was in order before leaving for—well, who knew how long.
...And, of course, I could check to see whether Bunny had replied to my German missives. That was, I think, in spite of everything, my main motivation. All that way, just on the off-chance of a word from him. All that way, simply to see whether the long-lost Eurydice was following in my wake.
Back to London I went.
