Too late hee would the paine asswage,
And to thick shadowes does retire;
About with him hee beares the rage,
And in his tainted blood the fire.
The selfe-banished
Edmund Waller (1606–1687)
LOVE IS VIOLENCE. She said that. Violence and love: linked together as through some diseased organic tissue.
Love is torment. Love is emotional incontinence. We seek desperately to suffer, she said, because love without suffering is love without ecstasy. And for ecstasy we’ll do anything. To experience that extreme friction of the senses, to arrive at that moment when all the faculties are heightened; for that—we’ll willingly seek to be violated, to meet any of love’s rough demands.
Isn’t it telling, she said, that un-neurotic love—the love of the sane and level-headed man—is seldom, if ever, celebrated? Think Lancelot and Guinevere. Think Abelard and Heloise. To prove her point she’d read to him out loud passages from her favourite poems. Tales of forbidden love, fatal love, unrequited love.
He adored it when she did that. It took him back to those early, early years when his mother read poetry to him at bedtime. Not nursery-rhyme books. Not Jack and Jill went up the hill, but real, grown-up books. How important it made him feel: almost as if he was his mother’s confidant. And what a privilege to drift to sleep, teased by intriguing thoughts he did not fully comprehend.
His mother preferred the work of the Metaphysical poets: that clubby, elite group of men who wrote for each other’s intellectual gratification and who lived in a time of plague and war and instability. She taught him to appreciate poetry in which love and carnal desire exist in a world shadowed by death and corruption; by fleabites and maggots; carcasses, dissections, fever, palsy, quicksilver sweat, and bracelets of bright hair about the bone.
Violence is love. Didn’t he, through violence, make the ultimate sacrifice? Wasn’t there something heroic in an act which terminated so abruptly the cancer of obsession?
But he was concerned about his compulsion to return to Alette’s house again and again. It was going to get him into trouble. That night, when he heard the key scrape in the lock, he had had just enough time to slip into the kitchen and close the door. He had been confused by his brief glimpse of a tall, slim, female figure in the doorway, but then he noticed the suitcase and he knew it had to be Isa. Or rather Isabelle, as Alette always insisted. She must have just arrived from the airport. What he would have done if she had decided to explore the kitchen first, he did not know.
In the end it had been quite easy to slip out unseen. And later he had watched her through the window. He had relished her unselfconscious vulnerability: the vulnerability of a woman who was being observed without her knowledge.
He hadn’t expected it to be so thrilling, finally, to talk to her. Face-to-face, he was able to see a lost look in her eyes. She had lovely eyes. She wasn’t a beauty, not like Alette, but there was something at the corner of her mouth—something sad and soft—which touched him.
Still, he was not happy that she was living in Alette’s house. And sooner, rather than later, he would have to find out why she was staying on.