I was born in the mansion of the virgin in the year that preceded the declaration of the war that ended war. I write this in the year that ends the war that succeeded that war. I speak, therefore, as a person of whose life a third has been spent with violent death about it. This book has as its ulterior objective the effort to console myself and those I love—I mean you—for the insolubility of a problem about which Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in the following terms: “As to other great questions, the question, what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be right than a Blackfoot Indian.”
There is a story to tell, a story that has no place in history and no real claim upon the attention of the Fates. I have a story to relate which proves that Love, with no blood on its knife, does not sleep easily, if it sleeps at all, until every one of its devotees lies dead. The great destroyer. In every bed. In every single bed. In every double bed. No, it is nothing new. It has a more formidable virtue than novelty. It is inevitable. Its virtue is that of the divine volitional victimisation. I warn you that as you lie in your bed and feel the determination of your lover slipping its blade between your ribs, this is the real consummation. “Kill me, kill me,” you murmur. But it always surprises you when you die.
Rising one morning, I perceived that everything had changed. I cannot speak clearly enough; the change in the nature and the face of things, when, that morning, I looked out of my sleep at them, eluded me then, and still just as narrowly eludes me. It comes down, at last, to this: I was afraid.
What does one fear when one awakes in the mornings? Is it the day, with its major
temptations and minor renunciations, its afternoon misdemeanours, the sins that come up sighing out of the twilight, the suicide that smiles down at one from the midday sun, the death of a favourite dog at a quarter-past three, the resolution that will get itself born at an unpropitious conjunction of monsters, stars and houses? Or is it the quite conscious foreknowledge that, every day, like stripping the calendar, we must cumulatively die?
They can so mercilessly and so incontestably out-manoeuvre one, the hours that weigh tons—daily, nightly, devastate the capitals of our faculties.
What war is it we cannot win? Is it the war that we won when we were born; the always precarious victory in between two annihilations; the defeat that, in the end, consoles us with wreaths of suitable flowers.
I say that I awoke and perceived a change. Existence, removing the mask of the common-place from her face, looked in at the window and smiled. I heard the paradoxes at the heart of things hushing themselves out of hysteria into sleep. I went to the window and looked out. I saw Wilhelmina Stitch being torn into pieces by archangels.
Hitherto, Augustine, I have believed in the virtues of love. Over all of the world I sensed its supremely proper benevolence, placing the candles of its illumination in all those rooms and at all those removes where, but for its presence, nothing but the shadows of appearances and disappearances would have depredated upon each other in irreligious irresponsibility.
Hitherto, I say, I have believed in love. I perceived that in the mechanics of the cosmological engines the function of impulse was provided by this love. From the internecine copulation of beasts to the image that reflects itself on the contemplative lake inside the skull of the visionary. This love, happening, as I saw it, between all kinds of things in all kinds of conditions, so that objects in one category could never consider themselves safe from the advance of objects in higher or lower categories—this variegated love validated everything. It moved the sun, the moon, and the other stars. And it was the evolution of this love, compelling all interdependent life to take place, that, seen in retrospect, was the will of God. And the peace that ensued from its fulfilment smiled on the face of the violated girl just as clearly as on the mouth of the intercessional prayer.
One has to speak at some length about oneself. Why? Because everything begins, as it ends, at the egoistic heart. “Man,” I heard the shade of Disraeli interpolate, “is only truly great in his passions.” The passions of the egoistic heart have erected themselves marvellous memorials in places that the admirer can never visit, like the cairn that commemorates Captain Scott at the South Pole. Others, greater than this simple and vainglorious hero, have established their monuments in even remoter regions. Such as Antony who died on the Everest of the sensual, or Abelard who lived a long life in a cave of chastity that he could not abandon. Each of us, I suspect, has his own epitaph to earn, but the life upon which it will stand, this is our own responsibility. The sins that we feed with crumbs and cakes will follow us home; the virtues upon whose tails we failed to place salt will never attend us; the crime done in a hot bed will in turn engender a criminal.
My father, a man of small means who lived in a southern county, had three possessions and he was incontinently fond of each. He loved his mother, his father, and himself. His affection for his two sons, eyeing the advance across a generation, hesitated, shied, and then turned inward upon himself. My brother and I would look back at him, wherever we were, and at all times, in the knowledge that his sympathies were not for us.
He had been a soldier. For several years after the war he continued to use his military prefix of Major. Normally loquacious, he spoke too much of war. And then, one day, he discovered two adolescent strangers in his house, one painting a picture of horses killing each other, and the second, the elder, myself, writing a thesis to disprove the existence of God. Not unkindly he remonstrated with us. Money was short, he explained; and expenses, after the war, exorbitant. If the times had been otherwise he would, he assured us, have been happy to have sent us together to a secondary school in the capital of the county. But, as things were … he left the sentence hanging about in the air and walked slowly from the room. I deduced that he was inviting his sons to get jobs. And the next night, quietly, as though it were an indelicate obligation of the body, he died in his sleep, leaving that unfinished sentence over our heads like an injunction from the hereafter.
My brother, who, because he happened to be a couple of years younger than I, delegated me the decisions that we knew we shared, came, then, to a decision of his own. He decided that he was a painter. And that, as far as my brother is concerned, is that. I see no reason why I should say anything more about him; during the time that intervenes between then, when he decided he was a painter, and now, when I write this, he has simply gone on painting pictures of things that kill each other.
And at this point there is no one left in my story but me and crossed stars.
Where was that house in which I first encountered love? What irresponsible collocation of improbabilities conspired to bring together at the same time and in the same place the victim in his yoke of roses, the goddess with her urgent appetites, and the altar of human sacrifice on which the heart breaks? That meeting of the improbabilities had occurred long, long before I knew it. I met her, in my youth, when she wore a gym slip and long black stockings, carried a pile of exercise books under her left arm, and, being three years older, had not really noticed the precocious boy who, years too soon, carried a sexual fox in his vitals. She was tall and dark, and her eyes had, even then, those depths in which, shadowed, great aspirations, dreams, like white whales, lay, scarcely stirring the surface, thousands of fathoms down. It is too simple. I spent my youth and my adolescence writing about her; we became engaged when I was seventeen; and two years later, on an afternoon in November, we were married.
O nurturing tender Theresa, sweeter than a soft wind over a hurt hand, rise and accuse me. Turn in my wounds like a knife in a grave. Wherever pity is she has an indigenous place, and compassion, seeing her, comes up like a lamb for her administrations. What moved you, Aphrodite with the long legs, to tie yourself to the engine on which my character goes careering to its own destruction? Wherever I arrive I find my life in flames.
Those exquisitely melancholy afternoons of my adolescence, when I used to walk with the abstraction of a somnambulist through the damp avenues of Richmond Park, thinking that life would never happen to me, wondering why the banked fires of my anticipations, burning in my belly worse than raw alcohol, seemed not to show to strangers as I wandered in the gardens. And often it appeared to me, the frustration, in the disguise of an hallucination: looking between the trees that dripped with hanging mist I sometimes saw classical statues take on an instant of life, turning their naked beauty towards me; or I heard a voice speak out of a bush: “Everything will be answered if you will only not look around.” And I have stood waiting, not daring to look behind me, expecting a hand on my shoulder that would tender an apotheosis or an assignation—but there was only the gust of wind and the page of newspaper blowing breezily up and past me like a dirty interjection. Or a bicyclist flashed by, offering possibility until he reached me and decamping with it when he had passed. For I was suffering from a simple but devastating propensity: I was hoping to live.
I cannot say that I knew anything at all about Theresa when we were married: I can only say that I knew nothing about anything.
What can I reply, you admonitory ghosts, to placate your accusations? Why do you so daemoniacally pursue me, I who have wished only to live with you and love you? Who are you, too importunate voices, responding with the condemnation “Guilty!” to all my appeals for help or consolation? Ghosts with your hearts held up like fatal evidence in your hands, you are the loved ones whom we have murdered. Just as, to them, we are among their unforgettable attendants.
We honeymooned in a cottage by the sea; we were almost entirely happy. In the mornings I would walk along the rocky foreshore and then, returning, write for an hour or two. She would do those things about the cottage that our very simple life required should be done. They were not much; not exacting. She, too, would read a lot, or play with the kitten on a couch. But, earlier than our first day of marriage, we were never alone. Between us as we stood and kissed, the homunculus of origin, curled like a caterpillar, quickened. Wherever we were, we were eternally three.
At night, downcast by the side of the bed, she would pray for our forgiveness. I could not understand. I could not bring myself to intercede for exculpation—my bed was made and I would not pray it unmade. I cannot forget how passionate her prayers were at that time—it was as though she knelt just within reach of the feet of the saints, and was silently begging them for their personal attention. Thinly clad in a transparent nightgown, she knelt with her hands crossed over her breasts and her head bent down on the bed. We had both been born and educated in the Roman Church—she wept sometimes, because I could not succeed in praying. Then she would rise from her knees, her eyes bright with restrained tears, and leaning over me, cover my face with her breasts. We were so deeply in love that old Adam slavered when we looked at each other.
And some mornings, in the first winter of our marriage, we would lie late in bed, without breakfast, and talk about the past like a long-united couple. “You were a rather horrible creature,” I hear her whispering, “you were so conceited and so arrogant and so self-centred. And I was so much older than you. But you would never respect it.” And she would look up at me from the enormous depths of her eyes; eyes in which I knew that I should one day see, in the nine-month distance, my own face and nature finally fulfilled.
We had a little money. Not much, but enough to buy food, a few books, a few small pleasures—the cinema, brief visits to London—and I was in expectation of receiving a grant of money from a literary society.
The cottage in which we lived cost virtually nothing—it was remote and in an unfashionable part of the county. The sea dashed its spray on our southern windows and the gulls, on quiet days, strutted about on the whitewashed window sills. We could look out and watch ships crawl across the horizon, taking a whole afternoon for a voyage that, with our eyes, we could cover in an instant.
Or we would walk together over the hills by the sea. And as the gestation made its claim upon her body and upon both our minds, so our talking, as we walked, died away. Often we did not speak for an afternoon or an evening. We could observe on her body the measurable dimensions of sin. O that heavenly hour beside a river in Wiltshire, with the swifts in the clouds and the boys, far off, bathing minutely in the river, when, under the tree of knowledge, hissing with invincibility, the serpent uncoiled from my loins at the injunction of her love! The dominant ovum devours us or destroys itself.
I think that we were like those children of whom one reads in German folk stories—harmless and hand in hand, with flowers in their hair, they wander lost through forests haunted by everlasting presences. The consciousness of natural sin went with us on our walks or stared at us, like an image we dare not look at on the wall, when we sat, seldom talking, by the fire in the evening. The noiseless and overwhelming engines of procreation laboured about us in the room, paralysing us; I had continually the emotions of a person who stands under a dam and watches the walls quake and crack. Looking across at Theresa, I sometimes seemed to see those fissures open in her face through which, at the proper time, the flood of retributory suffering would rush out. Taking her face in my hands I sought to restore it with tenderness or with a kiss. But I knew that I was holding the broken shell in my hands, from which, as I say, at the right season, the proud flesh must come out strutting into the world.
“What shall we christen it? We ought to make up our minds.” Theresa looked across from the bed upon which she lay resting and put down the book that she could no longer read.
“I thought you had decided yourself.” I went and sat beside her on the bed. “I don’t know why—I thought you must have made a choice—it is a simple matter to decide. Shall we christen it with the name that we both know is right?”
She smiled a little sadly and said: “I refuse to call the baby ‘it’ any longer. From now on he is Sebastian.”
“I saw our lives, two naked and childish forms, huddled together for warmth in a dark corner of the palace of human existence. We waited for an angel to cry to us, ‘Waifs, it is time for you to come home.’ Uncomprehending we saw about us the happily damned indulging in happiness and damnation. Monsters got born, lived, flourished, and died, and no one recognised that they were monsters. Over our heads great ecclesiastics and equally great statesmen forfeited the future to the expediential present. Athletes of unparalleled prowess demonstrated the pointlessness of progress. A comedian wrote: ‘They cut down elms to build asylums for people driven mad by the cutting down of elms.’ Categories jostled and jigsawed about our heads in a sort of seasick anarchy. Only two things remained constant: the anguish of being and the anaesthesia of the kiss.” I wrote this at that time.
Then the spring arrived; it brought a sensation of relief and amelioration. The bright light, touching her face as she lay carelessly sleeping on a yellow pillow, seemed to invest her features with an external smile. Her dark hair leaped about in what appeared to be an orgy of immobility. I saw, not for the first time, that her beauty—the imitation of the image—brought upon itself the responsibility of sin. Such beauty imperiously demands its own destruction. Love, the double fury, engendering the exhaustion of itself, passes, at its climax, into death. Just as the spring engenders summer and then dies of its own excess into the autumn and the winter. The fulfilment of love is death, no matter how long the corpse goes on walking.
I confess that in those early days of my marriage I was not unduly curious about her sensibilities; for there seemed to be none. Perhaps I should put it another way: I remember no occasions on which our natures conflicted. It may have been by reason of the simplicity of the life we lived: it gave, after all, few opportunities for differences of feelings or opinion. And, again, we had, as children, played together; as adolescents we had held hands in cinemas; we had, without ever deliberately seeking to know each other, nevertheless learned, in simply being together, that with the other each was happy. We had, as they say, things in common: what these things were it is easy to say: they were our lives.
There was a week when I was ill—every so often my throat had a habit of turning septic—and I lay for days in bed dreaming of fizzy drinks I dare not swallow or of peremptory operations that would put an end to the discomfort. From the bed I could look out of the window and watch the sea’s procession—I remember a small trawler far out, that, in the windless day, carried above itself a decoration of smoke shaped like nothing so much as a cornucopia and suddenly I was lost to the whole world. It was on other stars that people sat down in restaurants, or played ping pong, or risked their wages on thorough-bred horses, or died, or overthrew governments. I was in a tower of septic poisoning. The sea and the ship might have been painted on the window—silent, not really changing.
Then the door of the bedroom opened and Theresa came in noiselessly. “Are you awake?” she whispered. I opened my eyes. “I’ve brought someone to see you. He was the only person I could find that I thought you might like to see. He is a priest. He was walking along the shore. Shall I bring him in?”
“A priest; but I’m not going to die.”
“I could bring you flowers, or sweets, or grapes,” she said lightly. “Instead I bring you a friend, and what do you do?”
It is perfectly apparent to me that this state of quiet cannot continue for long. Too many emotions—fear, anticipation, love—exercise their stronger stresses upon us. All the while we live like two people who share an unmentionable secret, each suspecting the other of an incapacity to bear it much longer. Sometimes it seems that she hates the unborn child and hates me also; her virtue was her only garment and now she is naked to the worst winds of all the worlds. I think she sees her virginity with its face turned away weeping in every corner. The torn lips of the hymen hymenaeus need more than the lascivious hand of a lover to heal them.
There are so many necessary sins that never-the-less can never be forgiven. Who shall forgive the virgin mother for sacrificing her virginity and her self-love? Who shall forgive the infant for being? Let us utter a holy No to that greatest of all duties, the homicidality of love. Not all of those whom the destructive god visits can bring themselves to look upon the massacres that ensue. Bald tobacconist in Tooting High Street, I no less than the angel with the gold pen have seen that bed in the back room where three corpses lie under the sheets. The girl in a blue dress whose hope died when you last saw her on a Saturday evening, the mother who died when you pulled out the umbilical like a telephone wire, severing all communications, and the wife who had died under your infinitesimal infidelities. The desire of the whole is death where the pursuit of the whole is love.
There is really so little to say of these months that preceded the summer when the child was born. I could almost wish that something had happened to us that, by no matter how twisted a rendering, could now be understood as a kind of foreboding. Or again, it may be that such omens were present but that, at the time, I had no eye for them. I saw a dog run over by an omnibus. I recall only that as it lay spread out like a torn oil painting on the road, I marvelled at the brilliant crimsons and the mauves and the blues of its shattered physiology. All it was, as it lay, could have been put together by a child with a paint box. What had the faithful eye and the affectionate tongue or the attendant allegiance or the courage to do with the colourful mess in the middle of the road? I know only one thing: it had obeyed its greatest master.
No, destiny visited us in even more oblique disguises. On an April afternoon we walked in fields; Theresa, in a bright frock with a studded belt, and large, by this time, with child, but perfectly capable, went in happy spirits. “Let’s walk the whole afternoon,” she said; “we can take tea at a village on the way home.”
The lanes, with the flowering bushes fermenting along the banks, led us down from the hills. Sometimes a gold-tipped tree hung its head over like a lachrymal woman looking down into water. The weather, that afternoon, was perfect. It was quite warm enough for summer clothes.
I held her hand and looked often at her; she would seem almost to smile but say nothing. She was full of her possessions; the day, the excursion, the embryo, the love, the husband, the vernal equinox of life, a pretty dress, a lipstick that made her mouth into a dragonfly alighting on her face. I thought that she had never been so beautiful as that afternoon; her pregnancy became her as it became those medieval women who so admired its lines that they wore gowns to give the belly a false size.
But before long she grew tired. She sat down on the bank by the side of the road and half laughing said: “I shall have to live here. I can’t move a foot.” I took her to the rear of the hedge, away from the road, and she rested in my arms. The white blossom was all about us. She gathered my hands to her breasts. It seemed to me that the whole world had gone procreant around my head. I could feel the reproduction of the species conducting itself in an orgy of imperious urgency inside every corpuscle of my blood. The pulse in my wrist leaped up like a line of lambs; the love had run loose throughout my vegetation, the banishment from paradise flashed between us, but we were beyond it. I took her, and, as I possessed her, out of the blossom, a yard or two at one side, I saw the most concupiscent face in the world, contracted with vicarious satisfaction, watching us as we lay.
You are the first of my ghosts, you collision and collusion between the ovum and the sperm, you bullying embryo whom only the will of god wanted born, you stalked up and down the bed of our passion like a sentinel to see that we did not escape from you. I could watch myself staring at the big belly where my son was housed; I could examine the exact evolution of the jealousy that slowly soured into resentment and poisoned into positive hate. I saw my son pawing at me from the bulge and the bilge of his mother like a frog in an anthropologist’s jar, grinning with gratification, because it might be our Darwinian progenitor. I saw the contemplation of Theresa introvert itself, seeking, among the rocks of her own and her infant’s body, for the dove of individuality that must soon inhabit her child. Her curiosity, however, provides her with no answers. I am still the only victim for her virtues to revive. And, above everything else, the formidable knowledge that I have invented an instrument that can manufacture evil of its own volition: just as, of my own volition, I manufactured it. O God, who did this, you, or I?
Lucky dog, lying dead as paper on the road, what insoluble enigmas passed over your head! Whatever you did, the killing, the coupling, the chasing, the cringing, it was all the same— “this creature hath a purpose and its eye is bright with it”—you were the explorer of the experientially expedient. Whatever was, was right. In your world everything was necessarily best—down to the anatomical Picasso your death stretched on macadam. Let the over-vulnerable biped continue to sweat and whine about its conditions. Every dog has its day.
I had, one night in April, not many days after the event of the face in the hedge, a dream that took away some of the obscurity with which my feelings increasingly obfuscated themselves. In the day, everywhere I went I saw, with a kind of suppressed delectation, the figure of the child burning, it seemed, to ashes in the air. I saw this image in the broad daylight—it would appear, a tiny unnoticeable martyrdom, hanging in the branches of trees, or depicted in advertisements on the sides of buses; or in those happenings we witness in clouds. But the dream I experienced, this was an altogether different matter. It illuminated my jealousy of the child and of the mother; it equally illuminated the continual sense of my inadequacy and my unworthiness; it illuminated my positively Albigensian attitude to the viciousness of human reproduction. I simply dreamed that I had become hermaphrodite.
Yesterday Theresa received by the morning post a letter from a schoolgirl friend of hers with the improbable name of Marsden Forsden. Fairly automatically I assumed—I suppose from the association of the first syllable—that the school-girl friend was a young man—and then, without real reflection, I realised that it must be a girl.
“Who is she? What does she want?”
Theresa gave me the letter. “She was to have been married on the same day that we were,” she said. “She would like to pay us a visit.”
“What happened? Why didn’t she get married?” I opened one of my own letters.
“She probably didn’t want to. She ran away.”
I saw that, in spite of herself, Theresa wanted to speak about her friend. “It’s curious that you have never met her,” she said. “But she was one of those people one likes to keep away from one’s home, or one’s—what shall I call you?—one’s more valuable possessions. She has a gift of knocking things over with her intensity. She is almost the most beautiful person I have ever seen.”
I lighted a cigarette and took up again the letter written in a large and careless script—it had something of the air of an edict in the capricious autocracy that condescended to none of the formal gestures of letterwriting. I saw between the lines the flamboyance of an actress perhaps a little too confident of her audience. “It’s an interesting hand,” I remarked, almost for the purpose of eliciting a contradiction. “It invites one to speculate.” And because I had nothing else to say: “Was she with you all the while at the Sacred Heart?”
“The Mother Superior expelled her. She isn’t a Roman Catholic. I forget what she was supposed to have done wrong. It wasn’t important. Her misfortune was always to have a little too much money.”
“What does she do with herself? I suspect she is an actress.”
“Her father sent her around the world with an aunt when she left the convent. I haven’t seen very much of her since then. I shouldn’t think she actually does anything. She used to have literary ambitions, but I imagine they’ve evaporated.”
“Why?”
“Oh, she was an eccentric creature. She’s probably an aeronaut now.”
I detected an inflexion of resentment in Theresa’s tone. “I get impatient with her,” she concluded, “because although the world may be her oyster, it’s mine too.” She began to clear away the breakfast dishes. “Shall we invite her to come? I think that you will find her entertaining. And I should like to see her again.”
No matter how I endeavour to disguise it, I am increasingly conscious of what I can only think of as a distance supervening between us. For, as her concern the more intently turns inward towards the child, it turns, necessarily, its face away from me. I see her now as a pregnant mother rather than as a woman pregnant.
And the knowledge that my love itself is responsible only renders the paradox the more unbearable. It is not, I repeat, that I am puzzled and frightened and resentful of our love being turned, by a germ in our genetics, to the irreparable personification of original sin. Her fulfilment in the child seems likely to be so perfect that everything else will be forgotten—it is for this simple reason that I cannot help suspecting that the woman exists in a lower category of spiritual consciousness. I wish to god I could be fobbed off from the omnipresence of evil by merely fulfilling my function as a father. But through the body of the suckling mother I know that biological obedience suffuses itself in an absolute benediction. With the sore dug plugging, the bub lugged out of an opening in the smock, the small man sucking, the grunting, the drooping udder, behold the mater amabilis, the virgin with a piglet, the pig with a saviour.
That supremely placatory face, with its forehead like the masterpiece of a monumental stonemason, its lips spreading altruisms through which no rain can reach us, its eyes, half opened, enlightening all enigmas, and the altar above the upper lip dedicating this face and all human faces to the communicability of love: this is the face I see behind all faces. And always it wears a gaze of solicitude that seeks to dissolve the plaster masks through which we spy upon it.
I believe that under the plaster cast each one of us is a possible deity and a probable daemon. It is the probable daemon that commonly breaks out of our plaster. For the god will not emerge of his own deliberation—in order to expose him we must shatter ourselves upon him.
Therefore women give birth because it might be a god.
Now I get drunk every evening. The Goat and Compass, a little pub like a tea-cosy, where the easily consoled keep warm, provides me, also, with easy consolation. But it is a consolation shot through with livid ineffectualities like tiger traps or stage drops. I rehearse conversations, as I sit, in which I render myself incontestably right in desiring that the child should die. Also I get very sick.
In the half darkness as I go home to the cottage a derisive voice points its finger at me out of a cloud and jibbers: “You got born! You got born! You got born!” Not so much in disgust as in resignation I experience the aphrodisiac of the alcohol on my erotic system, and under a hedge, raging in despair, I have taken two million sinners out of my fallibility.
Regal Theresa, can you forgive me, now, from wherever you are? My least forgivable infidelities were those with myself. The inhabitants of the heart, these are the inveterate enemies; and of these inhabitants, who except oneself is the principal: What on earth does one do at a crossroad except become two? When the veils are lifted from the truly religious man he will be seen kneeling in the masturbatory attitude of prayer. For he has intercepted the fiendish will of god with his hand in an immaculate contraception.
Yesterday Marsden Forsden stepped down out of a Venetian ceiling into our hospitality. She is, certainly, a great beauty. Theresa was delighted. I left them together as soon as the three of us got home from the station. They cooed and chirruped and sniggered and smiled, quite undisguisedly elated at seeing each other again. Leaning their heads together over the small tea table, I thought, when I returned from a walk, how ravishing a picture they composed: the gold hair falling around the architectural face of the one who at that moment held her hand with seeming unconsciousness beneath her left breast, glittering and pink, winged cherubs in the air about her head; and the dark coiled mass of Theresa’s curls coming down over her shoulders like Monica’s modesty, failing to hide the big belly and the big breasts, shadows and muted instruments about her, the gracious leaning of her head forward and to one side over the tea table bringing the bright and the dark heads together in an intermingling of auras. I could have wished, they seemed so full of symbols, that at that moment there was no one else in the whole world: for it would still have been full.
“Come and take some tea,” Theresa said. “We were talking about you.”
“Don’t stop now. It’s plainly the subject he’s most entertained by.” Marsden, smiling, opened her eyes a little wider so that the remark masqueraded as flattery.
“My conversation can’t possibly compete with so much beauty,” I said shortly.
“More. And thicker. With a cherry on the top.” Marsden licked the back of a spoon rather like a big brindled cat licking its forepaw. She appeared perfectly at her ease; I had a disquieting feeling that I was the only person in the room not intimately familiar with the other two. Theresa, seeming to sense that I was slightly at a loss, said: “Marsden knows you very much better than you suspect. She’s been a fan of yours for months. She read your book.”
“It’s my misfortune,” I said. “I just can’t keep my mouth shut about myself. Sometimes it’s very embarrassing. What a tiresome turn the conversation has taken. Let’s talk about Marsden.”
Theresa looked with solicitude across the table. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know.” Marsden handed me a cigarette.
“You two milkmaids with your buckets full make me feel angry. I have the sensation that the schoolboys have when they see their superiors not going to school. I resent the fact,” I said with an amusement I could not conceal, “that women grow old quicker than men.”
“Grow up, you mean,” Marsden said.
“I do not mean grow up. Women never grow up. They remain children playing with dolls all their life long. Only the dolls become more and more expensive until finally they refuse to play with any but those that have cost them their virtue and their vanity.”
“Is he always like this?” Marsden asked Theresa.
“Yes, I am,” I said; “you’ll find me down at the pub. I wish you’d both come. I’ll be more sociable then. I got out of the wrong bed this morning.”
“You must be nicer to Marsden,” Theresa said one afternoon when her friend was sleeping, “because if you aren’t she’ll fall in love with you.”
“I should think she falls in love without any provocation. Say every Wednesday. I wonder whose mistress she is.”
“You mustn’t say things like that. You don’t really dislike her. I’m not sure that you’re not simply envious of whoever she’s chosen to fall in love with.” She came and looked up at me with an expression of amusement that did not conceal a degree of real concern. “Are you?”
“I think she’s a very desirable residence,” I said, taking her hands. “But I have one of my own.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” Marsden, trailing a long red gown, came in, yawning. “I hate animals,” she announced; “I feel so like them. Let’s have a brilliant conversation. Do I look beautiful?” She postured her dishevelled head, as she sat, up to us. Her gown, lightly tied at the waist, slipped down from her leg. She had swansdown slippers on her brightly pedicured feet.
“You look entrancing,” Theresa said. “All of you.”
“Oh dear.” Marsden gathered her gown over her breasts. “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go for a swim. Let’s go for a drink. Let’s go for a retreat. I’m going to go out and watch birds.” As she reached the doorway she turned. “But does the cut worm really forgive the plough?” she said in a querulous voice. “I decline to think so.”
“Hurry up,” Theresa called after her. “We’ll be out on the shore.”
The sea, without a ripple disturbing the surface, spread out in sheets that glittered in different distances; at this point along the coast half a dozen toothy and saturnine rocks vaulted out of the shadows. The light, angling through clouds, invested everything with an eerie and livid artificiality. It was a landscape—a seascape—of prehistory. At any moment, out of that mud-flatted sea, the first monstrous amoeba might emerge, trailing the whole disastrous and grandiose history of biological life behind it. And I could see there, lying under the still water, the skull of the last of the species, festooned with seaweed—algae in the eyes—the miserable, ignominious necrophilia that will one day end it all. And, intercommunicatory between these two, the first and the last, I saw suspended, glittering, as it were, between the amoeba and the skull, the umbilical of the eternal maternal. Upon this cord, I heard the almighty announce in thunder, I shall hang the world. So that, like a skinned rabbit dangling in a gallows, each of us has, in his time, met his proper fate in this beginning: we have each been born with a rope around our necks. The mother of all living, lariat in hand, will never let us go.
Half an hour later, when we had gone as far as Theresa felt inclined to go, we turned back towards the cottage. “Marsden has probably fallen asleep by the fire,” Theresa murmured, leaning against my shoulder as we made our way over the shore. Her face had taken on a pallor not entirely tendered by the evening sky. I saw shadows standing upon it like the seventy-two effigies of the saints on the front of Salisbury Cathedral. Everyone hath everyone his shade. And among those private shadows, like those rose windows in which the great martyrdoms everlastingly enact themselves, her eyes were bright with adumbrated sacrifices. “What has happened to us?” she said softly, turning her gaze away from me. “Why are we so estranged?” She took my hand in both her own as we walked.
I answered with deliberate brutality. “It is the child. It feeds off us both. From you it takes calcium and pigmentation. It takes its immortal soul from me. For I swear that mine has been stolen from me. I feel like a person giving a blood transfusion to a planet that was formed by my wish. God knows that you have a greater right to feel as I do—I’m sure that you do—I merely mean that it seems to exact a different kind of expense from me.”
She stopped by a rock and looked up at me. “This is why I am happy,” she whispered remotely. “I can feel us both alive and united forever inside me. Now there is no escape. It had been written in existence. Nothing that ever was or ever will be can erase it. I have done my duty simply by turning the love I feel inside me into the life I feel inside me.”
“You’re a good girl,” I said, and smacked her bottom. “We shall be late for tea.”
It began to drizzle. A mist began a sort of burglarious rifling of the valleys that at irregular intervals ran up the littoral. I saw it, with a fascinated revulsion, feeling among the indentations for all the world like the educated fingers of the lover worming among the mounds and through the bushes of a dozen hills of Venus. We sheltered, for a few moments, in a cave under the hills. But the rain persisted. We hurried home. When we got there Marsden had disappeared.
The mutes! The incommunicable mutes! How, jostling, they crowd each other out in a cosmic blind man’s bluff, the blanketing emotions wrapping everyone from the tip to the toe. Cocooned. Marooned. Was there ever anyone who really understood why anyone else ever felt anything: No, for the epidermis that isolates each one within himself acts also as our shell. The invulnerable individuality, like a palace revolution, takes place behind doors that its own nature must keep closed. Sometimes a hand with a flag waves at a window, but soon disappears—an altruistic action has been assassinated. Nor could it ever have succeeded. The window faces on an internal courtyard where the nature of the individual executes its insurrectionists. Here the pities and the sympathies and the generosities and the abnegations die. Every man is tyrant to his virtues. The good does not ensue from what we do—it escapes from what we are.
Do I ever know what legitimate emotions conduct their comi-tragedies and their tragi-comedies behind the curtains of Theresa’s character? When I look into her devoted eyes does she ever detect the vitriol-thrower who at such moments darts into any of the recesses inside my mind? Has she ever, leaning over me loving, sensed the appalling perversions of sexual desire committing themselves upon her in my heart of hearts? And does she suffer these pleasures in her own turn: This is simply the loving soul rising up in protest against the natural decencies. For deep inside each of us we know precisely whom we wish to kill—it is the one who, because we love, kills us. The commandment Thou shalt not kill carries with it the concomitant Thou shalt not love.
By the dying fire that same evening, with the rain a sort of susurrus outside the window, and the sound of the sea increasing, Theresa and I sat, listening to the gramophone. (We are fortunate in sharing a taste for Scarlatti.) She had sewing on her knees; occasionally she added a few stitches, but for the most part leaned back in her chair with her eyes focused beyond the ceiling. She seemed rather tired. Neither of us had any notion of Marsden’s whereabouts: her cases, with dresses and jewels and brassieres and stockings spilling out of them, lay about her room in a sort of indecently intimate disorder. On the floor, under the window, a handful of bright books fell lop-sidedly against each other—she must have felt a disinclination to put them on the bookshelves, three-quarters empty, that ran along one wall. A dozen or so Mexican cigarettes had spilled about the room. On the mantelpiece, under the mirror, an assortment of innumerable cosmetics glittered in bottles and phials with inscribed silver stoppers. By them lay two paper-covered pamphlets, one entitled The Wild Flowers of the Netherlands, and the other, How to Sin in San Francisco. We looked around—it occurred to Theresa that Marsden might quite possibly have left a message—and it was only too likely that, if she had done so, it would have been left in her room. But there was no note. She had simply vanished.
About midnight I had fallen almost asleep when there were voices calling outside and a light knocking on the door. Marsden hissed, “Theresa! Theresa!” through the letterbox. Theresa, asleep, did not wake. I went to the door.
She was leaning forward shaking the rain from her hair; the light from the lamp in the hall caught it; she unspangled gold all about her. “Thank God I left my stockings off,” she exclaimed, stepping inside. “Come in, Theo,” she said, extending a hand behind her towards the darkness.
A small, rather broad-chested man of some fifty years, wearing a pair of corduroy trousers and a thin dark shirt open down to his waist, stepped in behind her. The rain hung in the hairs of his exposed chest and dripped from a large pair of eyebrows. He had a cunning look that might have been given to his face by an over aquiline nose and small eyes set closely together. He wore his hair in a long fringe that came straight down from the crown of his head, like a Japanese boy’s. “This is Jean Theokopolos.” Marsden introduced us. He took her by the arm as he bowed very slightly to me.
“You must need a drink,” I said. “Theresa was sleeping, but she’ll be delighted to see you. We thought that you had left.”
Theresa, excusing herself, retired to bed soon after she had been introduced to Theokopolos. I went to the kitchen and brought out the half bottle of whisky I happened to have there.
“Thank you, no,” Theokopolos said; “I cannot bring myself to drink hard spirits. If you have any wines I adore wine. I adore Mediterranean wine. I find,” he continued, looking straight at me as I tried to apologise, “that I accrue a whole architecture of mauve satisfaction when I drink wine.” He held his hands to the fire.
“From white wine?”
“We’re awfully tired,” Marsden interrupted. “Do you mind very much if we go to bed?” She looked up through a hanging coil of her hair. Her expression combined impertinence, challenge, nervousness, uncertainty. Her dress had been torn at the collar.
“You must be exhausted. I’m going to read a little. I could wish, for your sake, Theokopolos, that the bed was larger. But it’s the only one we have.”
Marsden, with her shoes in her hand, led him out of the room. She turned, as they left, and, looking brazenly across at me, exclaimed: “Well, it all depends on the plough.”
Theokopolos, who left yesterday after staying for three days, turned out to be an artist. He was also a raconteur whose stories, related in highly eccentric but carefully memorised idioms, delighted us at first, but soon, after the second or third repetition, lost the brilliant extemporised felicity that at first we found irresistible. Marsden, who had obviously listened to all the anecdotes of his repertoire often before, still hung over his conversation—his monologue—with an attention I finally thought transparent. And, suddenly in the middle of a monologue, he would break off, seize Marsden in his arms, and sweep her into a violent exhibition of dancing about the room. Crushing each other together, they spun and whirled, or, halting in an instant, stamped their feet in a rhythm I assumed might be negroid. Then they would toss their heads like trotting horses and spring away from each other, crying out. Marsden, her eyes abstracted and glowing, her feet parted and her knees slightly bent, would imitate the coupling of the species; Theokopolos, a yard or so away from her, would respond with the ferocity of an ageing eroto-maniac. Sooner or later one of us would start the gramophone playing; then they repeated the dances. Until, finally, after an exceptionally violent leap from which he could not recover his balance, Theokopolos sprained his wrist. But Marsden, galvanic as a visionary in a trance, stepped her way with the fastidiousness of a chicken around the table. She shuddered and put her hands up to her breasts.
“I think Theokopolos has had an accident,” I said to no one in particular.
“I have,” he muttered. “My wrist is broken. I slipped.”
Theresa tells me that when she asked Marsden why we had not been forewarned of Theokopolos’s arrival, Marsden declined to do anything but sulk. I suspect, myself, that she felt determined and guilty—determined that Theokopolos should come, and guilty because, in order to bring his visit about without any question, she had to resort to an accomplished fact. And, as I see it, such an admission could never be extorted from her—she is like the women in Baudelaire who want to be violated because they are proud. However, by the time Theokopolos had been thoroughly exhausted of his stories, and as a direct consequence of a violent row between them—it ended with Theokopolos, whom I had not thought physically capable of the feat, picking an hysterical and kicking Marsden up in his arms and carrying her, agitating just enough not to fall from his arms, into the bedroom—as a consequence of this simple consummation Marsden virtually dismissed Theokopolos from her presence. “You know where I am,” he said to her with a sort of tolerant anticipation; “it’s still the studio.” And with his shirt still open down the front and half the fly-buttons of his trousers unfastened, he walked out with the gait of a ballet dancer incognito. I found both embarrassing and entertaining their practice of displaying the most intimate disagreements in what I suppose would in these circumstances constitute the public. I feel that one of my most obscure perversions has been fortuitously pandered to by them. They behave as though someone were constantly watching them through an expensive keyhole.
Marsden burst into the small room in which I was writing, and, throwing herself triumphantly into a chair, announced: “Theresa says you can take me to the Black Rocks. Now. This moment. Hurry. I want to go.” She sprang up and planted her feet apart; with her hands on her hips she looked down at me boldly. She had mended the collar of her pretty milkmaid frock, and wore sandals and her hair tied up like an onion on the top of her head. As I admired her, she arched her arm slowly over her head like a carrier of baskets, drew one foot up to her knee and spun in a pirouette—crying out, “Come. Come. Come,” she rushed from the room. If it were not all so deliberately calculated it would entrance me. As it is, I tend to resent the ineffectuality of her coquetry. With a book in my pocket I followed her soon. She was in the garden gathering flowers for Theresa. “I’ll give them to her,” I said, and took the handful of bright blossoms from her. “Yes, do,” she said softly, looking out to sea. “She’s resting in her room.”
We had not gone far over the hills when she flung herself down on the turf. “Come and talk to me.” She held her hand towards me. “I simply could not believe it,” she murmured, “when I learned that Theresa was married to you.”
“Why not? Is it so unlikely?”
“I have had hundreds of dreams about you. It was your book. When I read it I sat down and wrote one exactly like it. I told Theresa. About the dreams. I went to dozens of parties simply in order to meet you. Oh, why”—she shook her head so wildly that her hair fell and whipped about her face—“why, why, why, were you never there!” And in a seizure of petulance she rolled over on her belly and turned her face away. As she turned, her hand caught a flounce of her frock and the action of her body drew the skirt away from her thighs. She was naked except for her frock. She lay there without moving. I experienced the same sort of hypnotised revulsion that I imagine might have excited me if I had awakened and found a mermaid in bed beside me. Suddenly she sprang to her feet. As she did so she seized my hand and gathered it to her bosom. “How fascinating,” she murmured, “you haven’t even kissed me.”
I said, “That’s easy,” and did so.
“Come and watch me swim,” she said, and led me by the hand down to the shore. Then she slipped her frock off her shoulders, and, with her sandals still on her feet, fled naked, a mythological image of gold and pink with flowers in its hair, into the cold waves.
Theresa looks on with her huge ecclesiastical eyes and occasionally smiles from between the green leaves of her fruition. It cannot be more than a matter of nine or ten weeks before the infant Sebastian steps weeping into the world.
Perpetually she sits in a big chair, her hands folded over her son, her vision wandering among day dreams of the future. She is like a person, who, rather than waiting to give birth, is waiting to be born. I think that there in the stomach of the pregnant a nine-month phoenix dies to give us life. Every day deprives her a little of her own life, as it adds its quorum to the embryo. For her the events of the world in general and even of our own lives in the particular, concern her less and less. She smiles with a sort of remote concurrence in everything as it happens. She retires to bed leaving Marsden and me together in the evenings: it is the behaviour of a somnambulist or of a victress bearing away her prize in an amnesia of gratification. Then Marsden, dressed only in her loose dressing-gown, comes across and squats at my feet in front of the fire. Hugging her bare knees she says abstractedly: “Talk to me.” And gazing at me with dazzling directness she takes my hand and draws it under the gown to her breast.
This morning, without warning while I was out, she stuffed everything she possessed into her cases and left for London. Theresa had not yet risen. Written in the large careless hand-script I now recognised almost too easily I found a word scrawled on the last page of my notebook: “Come.” It was signed with the symbol of a heart.
Walking along the shore, I came upon a dead seagull; it spread its wings out, as it lay in a pool, like the imperial eagle of an insignia. Around it, reflected in the shallow water, clouds passed almost imperceptibly; a clot of blood, where a wound had killed it, exuded discolouration into the clouds. Its open eyes, scarcely below the surface, stared, dislocated, into non-existent distances; the webbed feet, like closed parasols, travestied their departed function. Tar coagulated the feathers of the breast and, a little late, cauterised the wound. I remembered the dead dog in the road, and I saw the parallel of my wife’s virtues. I looked down at the seagull, and, almost unconsciously, laid my hand on the breast in which the symbol of the heart had broken.
Gull the bitch.
If only I could capitulate entirely to experience! What obstinate reserves in my nature withhold me from the crimes I commit by omission? One is too proud to give oneself to sins that could never, no matter how delectable, rival in salaciousness the sin of voluptuous self-love. I can spread my seed in a dozen fields. Damnation will accord me the trumpet and the red carpet and the roll of drums. When every corner-boy, as Auden says, consciously sins because God enjoys forgiving him, it is then time for one of us to rehabilitate the dignity of the unforgivable.
I see her face, gazing up out of the catastrophe destiny prepares for her, turn to me in guilt and self-accusation. “I burn,” she murmurs, “because I love too much.” The gods crumble under the stress of our adoration, just as too intense a dark creates illusory stars.
I have been asked to take personal receipt of the grant of money given me by the literary society in London.
O providence, providence, where is it that you so smugly lie, the strings of things dangling in your supercilious hands, half an eye cocked to keep you a little amused at our frantically useless antics? Where is your boss, you female manager, the magnitude of whose responsibilities conceals the irresponsibility with which you fail to fulfil them. What laws, my god, govern this frivolous sister who walks about the world slinging flame, seed and disaster out of the inexhaustible basket of possibility? What am I armed with, Eros, save only the toy water pistol of my will?
I see her, now, standing sadly in the door of my memory, as, that morning, I saw her, no less sadly, standing by a window, one hand half lifted in a wave of farewell, as I went down the road toward the station. She wore a long dress, and in her other hand clasped a household fork; I could almost hear her repeating softly to herself with every step I took in the opposite direction: “Now I am not really alone any more.” There was even the embryo of a smile on her mouth.