Leigh. England dark, neutral-coloured, cloudy, cold. After Greece it seems like undergrowth after a clearing. The sober nonentity of the people, the meticulously detailed domestic routines; life not of essentials, but of superficials. Pleasures hedged in, restrained, half-enjoyed. The antlike busyness and occupation of all English people. No drones, no sun, no love. Here at home the short re-entry into all as it always has been – no warmth in the affection, the sentiment strictly banished, a two days’ ripple of news and interest. I need a wife, a new centre of intimacy, if only to rediscover the heat in love and exercise unused affection.
F (my father) came up to my room this afternoon with a volume of short stories he has written, quite a thick bundle of typescript. Mutual embarrassment. He ran himself right down, dismissed them as self-amusement. I have read some of them. They are better than I thought, but not good enough to publish, although somebody might publish them. The worst ones are in a majority – semi-humorous accounts of village life with a store of antiquated Punch characters. Some of the short stories are quite good, but he has no feel for words, no literary artifice. He should go back to the war.fn1
23 July
Off again tomorrow, to Thouars, then Spain.fn2 I feel I ought to be typewriting, saving money, hammering at the door of the BBC – instead I seem at the moment unable to do anything except keep abreast of travel arrangements, do the daily round. No creation, and all I have written seems green, raw, naïf. Too inturned. I must settle down to a month’s typing when I get back. If I get back. If you travel enough, you must have a smash-up.
25 August
Spain. A strange month, burning hot, black, sad, poignant for me; an experience I would not have missed, for all its bitterness. Now I feel more remote, more isolated than ever. I was bewitched by Monique Baudouin; it was less a holiday in Spain than three weeks helplessly watching around her. At the end, in Spain I could hardly conceal my enchantment. At the real end, when we had parted, I had the most profound attack of sorrow that I have experienced for many years, a catastrophic realization of the utter impossibility of any love between us, and of the ruthlessness of time, of the whole human predicament in terms of my own person. The beauty of animal attachments, the inevitability of death and separation. I feel myself still in a kind of trance, unreal, disoriented; having met her was a glimpse of another world. A chance of complete fulfilment, happiness on my dark earth. I loved not so much what she was, as an ideal I could easily build from her reality. I saw in her a shadow of the perfect woman, and in her youth an image of all that tenderness and spontaneous gaiety my own youth has gone without. Even now, already a fortnight since I last saw her, I think of her a hundred times a day. I can recall all the moments we spent together, her smiles, her moods, her positions, her absences, her movements, the clothes she wore, the atmosphere, everything. Again and again I see things to remind me of her; even the most tenuous associations, recalling her vividly. Often I try to imagine her beside me, smiling at me, talking to me. I fall into day-dreams. But it is not a thing of the flesh; I cannot imagine myself even kissing her. A profound conviction that she is of my spirit, in my spirit. Almost a romantic, platonic idealization, unlike anything I have experienced before. Masochism perhaps. These were and are moments when I enjoyed my sadness, the poignant freshness of certain memories of her. Now I know that a life together would be impossible, dispassionately I feel in her something cool, aloof, nunlike. She has her provincial conventions, is Catholic, has an egoism, an accent, the stereotyped tastes and expectations in love and marriage that I could not satisfy. But in her essence, magic, she is my Gioconda.
To Paris by air. A dehydrated way of travelling; for all the joys of contact with foreign places and foreign people one exchanges a joy in figures. So many miles in so many hours. The modern trend – into the abstract. But I find no glamour in speed, and I do not comprehend distance expressed as a figure. But it was good to be in Paris again, more like a return home than my real home. Almost the first person I met was one of my girl students at Poitiers; all that life came back to me, faintly scented with my own bad conscience. I tried to be affable, and left her as soon as I could. I had to pay 525 francs for a miserable garret, a monstrous price; but I felt extraordinarily happy to be returning to Thouars.
Down by train, through well-remembered countryside to Thouars. I was impatient, eager as a lover, to arrive. Opposite me was a middle-aged Frenchman in a blue beret, who spoke to me in an incomprehensible accent from time to time. Scent of Gauloise, an old woman and her granddaughter eating a picnic lunch; long bread, sausage, ham, apples, voices in the corridor. A surge of love for the French, their country, their way of life, their language. The French are sane egocentrics; their life is balanced; they admit their animality, but without denying spirituality. They live for themselves, but with discretion. They accept foreigners, judge them, do not flatter or damn them. A society of individuals, the golden mean, and the present heirs to ancient Greece. I felt all that in the train, and again and again during the days that followed. The more I travel and live abroad – and England now is a foreign country to me – the more I admire France, and feel that she is my country. Physically and spiritually I feel myself at home in France as nowhere else in the world.
The man opposite talked about Bressuire, his home town. We passed Saumur. I glimpsed a familiar face in the corridor, that of one of the most hideous and disapproving of my last year’s pupils. A tall, Gorgon-faced girl. I could see she was determined to speak to me, and stared out of the window with a fixedness which disconcerted even the homme de Bressuire. I did meet her later, at Thouars, but in a crowd, and I was able to dismiss her with a few ungracious words, remaining true, I feel sure, to the character that now represents me at Poitiers.
Thouars. I walked through the ticket-barrier, and it was as if I had never left there. All the girls were there, André, faces I seemed to have seen only an hour before. Monique shy, Titi charming, André like a genial bear. If anything I was a little sad at the matter-of-factness of it all; I half expected songs, cheers, tears, the emotional town band. But then I liked it; it seemed simpler, more natural, to begin again as if one had never left off. I went off with André to his home, and again felt as if I had not been away. The same table, with fifteen or twenty people sitting down to an excellent meal and liberal wine. The same noisy laughter, business talk, shrewd gossip. The small sisters and the servant at one end. The nephews and brothers and wives and in-laws at the other. André opposite, more ursine than ever, asking me questions about birds and books and life in Greece.
After lunch he took me to see Ginette Poinot in her parents’ furniture-shop. She was so changed that I was for a moment completely confused – more elegant and clipped than ever, perfectly made up, with brilliantly blonde hair done in a new style. I suppose she had dressed up for me, as she knew I was coming. But even so in a year she had blossomed; not last year’s bud at all. She took us through a corridor of bourgeois furniture to a small backroom, and gave us Cointreau. With André there, I did not know what to say. We all felt stilted, embarrassed. There were silences, nervous moments. But I felt at ease, enjoying the moment, her elegance, the little awkwardnesses of our speech. I hoped André might leave us alone. In the end I stood up and said goodbye – all that either of us acknowledged of last year were one or two faint smiles of intelligence. Above all, it seemed to me, she saw that she had surprised me and that pleased her sense of irony.
Away. That first morning, at once, I felt that it was not going to be so memorable as the year before. There were a lot of new people, who instinctively I did not like at first sight. I felt old also, vastly old among the jeunes. Then, that I was there on false pretences, already much-travelled comparatively; that they felt I came only to add a new country to my list. I had lost my novelty, was no longer a toy that amused, but a plaything discarded, no longer inconnu. An impression that lasted more or less throughout the voyage.
We arrived at Bordeaux, had lunch. South from Bordeaux into the Landes, a desert of heath, sand and pine. In the middle of it, we had a puncture. I wandered about alone among the trees. No sign of life anywhere, not even birds. There was plenty of traffic on the road, an artery in a dead limb. The group sat about on the verges, talking. I felt foreign again, and depressed by the landscape. We got off again, behind schedule, and did the most interesting part of the day – the Biarritz coast – in darkness. I remember standing with Monique outside a grocer’s, where we had bought fruit. Already we began to remember the old jokes, to tease; I because it was the only way to approach her and she because she was too kind to refuse to play. I don’t think either of us was amused by it.
The next day, up at dawn and down the coast to Irun. A green coast of capes and bays like Brittany. Over the frontier, policemen wearing black coal-scuttle hats. One of the customs men going off duty absentmindedly took all our papers with him in his car, he had picked up the wrong attaché case. We had a long wait. Standing outside a church, Jouteau chasing Monique. Her eyes when she is being chased: black diamonds.
We moved on to San Sebastián, through green country disfigured by billboards. San Sebastián, a sprawling cosmopolitan station balnéaire, with a crowded beach and busy bay. We went swimming and were stared at by the crowd. Some of the others were sent back by the police for not having sufficiently extensive bathing-costumes. Spanish women in bathing-costumes with modesty skirts and the men in elongated trunks. Spanish middle-class townsmen reminded me continually of giraffes, ostriches. A mental conservatism stiffly upheld and continually outraged.
Lunch in a dark-timbered spacious room; each group around a table. My eyes met those of Monique several times. We had a way of smiling together, half-friendly, half-sarcastic, across rooms, other voices, other happenings. At the end I so wanted to be friendly that my smiles were painfully sour and sarcastic.
The rain stopped after lunch. We went through the deep gorge that is the true entry into Old Castile, on to that high, arid plateau which is an essential clue to Spanish character. I found it a dreadful landscape, without accent, charm or meaning. The whole of northern Spain, from Burgos to Madrid and beyond, is a cultivated desert. A real desert would have pleased me better. We came to Burgos at night and had dinner in a hotel like an English country inn. Begging children at the window. Monique’s eyes again, from another table (a fortnight ago exactly, at this hour of writing, six in the evening, I was sitting beside her somewhere in central France, heading north, conscious only of her, her bent face, her small smile when she was serious).
I went out later with Paul Challet. We walked about a bit, it was cold. We sat at a café and drank cognac. Since André was with his fiancée most of the time, I was often with Paul. At times he irritated me, as all simple, enthusiastic people do. That night at Burgos I was thinking of Monique; the beginning of the torture, wondering where she was when not in sight. Paul has few topics of conversation: photography, speleology, travelling. Poor chap, I realized at the end that he loves Armèle. He was always near her, with a dog-like, apologetic, begging expression on his face. We went back to our pension to sleep. A Balzacian old man with a huge bunch of keys opened the street-door for us; the keyman for the whole street. A Balzacian occupation.
3rd. We started late since Michel Godichon had had his rucksack, with all his belongings in it, stolen. The first of many thefts; almost everywhere we lost things. Stealing seems to be the national sport of Spain; another by-product of Fascism. Rule by force above, and morals disappear below. We had lunch at a small village. I bought a loaf in the bakery with Monique, and shared it with her. The bare fact, but I remember her eyes, her standing behind me at the counter, counting out the money. The smallness of her hand.
After Valladolid the plain continued, but low mountains, blue and gentle, appeared. There were pine-groves with nesting storks, and a clear sunlight feel about the country which made it seem a little like Provence in spring.
We camped that night in a tiny upland village, where we were well-received. Everyone went to the village dance-hall. The whole population seemed to be there. The warmth and the wine excited everyone. Somebody began to play an antique barrel-organ and the villagers danced. Then there was a waltz and the group took the floor. They began normally, but under the eyes of several hundred solemn-faced villagers, the desire to clown was irresistible. They began to dance in an exaggerated fashion, to shout and sing, to jive and jitterbug. At each new tune it became more wild and more ridiculous. Because the villagers did not seem to understand at all, they stared with open mouths, often faintly disapproving. Occasionally a faint smile would cross their faces. It was the traditional countryman’s first visit to the capital. I drank a lot of cognac and watched the surrounding faces. I stood for a time on a window-ledge with Monique, and nearly asked her to dance. But I dance so badly, and already I was certain that I did not want to dance badly with her.
4th. We spent several hours visiting Avila. A cathedral, marred, like all Spanish cathedrals, by the massive choir blanking the nave. Then down to see a monastery on the outskirts of the town. Walking down that road, I showed a newspaper joke to Monique. As she leant over to read it, I think perhaps I began to realize what was happening. At any rate that morning I was watching her all the time, walking beside her whenever I could contrive it. Her slim, willowy walk, swaying, indolent in the heat, always dragging behind, her hair, brushed back from her forehead and tied in a ridiculously large chignon behind, the chignon itself with a red and white scarf elegantly knotted over it, the ends floating behind – a strangely poised head, from all angles. I prayed for her smiles, her laughter, when the scarf danced and the chignon bobbed and her body bent like a wand.
We saw the monastery cloisters, where Torquemada walked,fn3 and the tomb of Don Juan. ‘The Don Juan?’ I asked the guide, but he seemed never to have heard of Mozart and Molière. But in any case I touched his tomb of white marble – and found it exceedingly cold.fn4
After Avila, mountains and thunderstorms. I slept. The Sierra de Guadarrama are not great mountains, but after the monotony of Castile they are pleasant. We came to the Escorial,fn5 a vast barracks overlooking the plain. I was reminded of Versailles, of the austere North. I liked the animation of the great outside court, full of children playing ball, gossiping mothers, tourists, strollers. At the ticket-window I met two Englishmen, small, moustached, dapper and broke. I was happy to be in the group. How I hate nearly all my compatriots! These two were inoffensive enough. I spoke to Monique, in French, to make them feel unhappy. A pretty girl and a foreign language; I had them both ways. I hate guided visits also. Tapestries and royal apartments. The royal catacomb is in such bad taste – marble and gilt, the entrance like that to a restaurant of première classe – that it is at least amusing. A superb El Greco in the art gallery, daemonic and sulphurous, livid. Spain is a Byzantine country; El Greco must have been at home immediately.
5th. In the morning we washed at a well in the garden of a doctor’s house near by. I liked to watch the girls washing and often arranged my time so as to coincide with theirs. I am not so hypocritical as to pretend it was not partly sexual curiosity. But mainly it was a sexless, aesthetic pleasure. They were like cats, feline, licking and dabbing at themselves with their flannels. They would unbutton their pyjama-jackets, uncover their shoulders, sometimes take off the jackets and stand in their brassières, pink silk on their white skin. One girl, especially, Geneviève Boinot, very small, delicately contrived, and a coquette, was especially delightful at her toilet – exactly like a serious kitten, and aware of her charms, since she was to take her time, which coincided usually with the maximum in the number of washing males. Neither she nor the others ever seemed to wash themselves briskly, with plenty of water and suds – always small pats and rubs, and dabs.
Monique, every morning, in pale blue pyjamas, with her initials on the pocket, her red scarf around her throat, walking seriously to wash.
To Madrid. An airy, modern city at first sight, full of rich buildings, flower-beds, fountains, tree-shadowed boulevards. Well-watered and Parisian. And without interest.
We passed into the Prado. A supermuseum, a museum cream-cake, too rich to be digested. I rushed from Velasquez to El Greco to Goya, then to the Flemish School, then to the Italian, then back to the Flamands, because they were so remarkable. Velasquez, I suspect, is a superb bore who discovered a pose and an expression. Goya astounded me by his technique – I had not realized his miraculous facility, his daring, his speed of stroke. A greater artist than either El Greco or Velasquez. A great spirit – daemonic and socialist. A defender of the poor. The intense indignation, the emotion, of the Firing-Squad, a chef d’oeuvre. The deliciously cruel satire of his academic portraits, brutes in finery. Then there is a superlative room of Flemish masterpieces, and the most extraordinary of all to me – Baldung Grien’s two pictures – The Three Graces and The Three Deaths. The latter especially I find a profound and terrifyingly exact symbolization of the human predicament.fn6 The expression in the girl’s face is that of all deep loves of life, all sensualists and knowing death certainly. She has understood the problem, found the answer, but still cannot believe its inexorable cruelty. Time and Age – death are at her shoulders now and till the end. The brilliant light, the superficial realism and the underlying hallucinatory unreality give this picture unbelievable force. It burns, freezes, like a red-hot poker or bucket of icy water. It seems to me so little religious, so pessimistically materialist, that it might have been painted in the 1920s. An epochless picture. Black simplicity.
(A childish obsession with time. It is past midnight now, very early Monday morning, as I write. A fortnight ago she was sleeping in my arms, against me, as we ran through the night. I feel her still and the sorrow, acute as ever. I almost wish we had been killed together, at that moment when we were perhaps closest.)
André, Paul, Claudine and I went and had lunch in a snack-bar. I did not often enjoy being with them, a stolid trio, who avoided the jeunes. Claudine is a kind of universal mother, a Girl Guide-schoolmistress née, with sad spaniel-eyes and (one feels) a vast stock of unspoken prejudices. A strange wife for André. After lunch we walked towards the zoo, through a deserted park. It was hot and I felt profoundly sleepy. When we sat down to drink something, I dropped off to sleep almost at once, in the chair. We found the others – those who were not sleeping the night at Madrid – sitting on a grassy bank outside the Prado. I went and sat with the girls and they asked me about Greece. I spoke French badly, as I do sometimes. Not a question of will – one is in form, one is out. I heard my faults in pronunciation, my grammar faults, almost as if I was somebody else. Sometimes it is the opposite, and I admire my own fluency and accuracy.
We set off to find a camp near Madrid. I felt happy, since only half the group were there, and they the ones I liked best, the simpler, greener half. We bought food and a bottle of muscat in a small town, and camped on the way to Navalcamero, in a wide, dry river-bed, with a bridge alongside, that rumbled and swayed whenever a lorry or car crossed over. There was a pool fed by a little stream, deliciously cool at dusk. We swam. Nanni’s demureness in a swimming-costume; a beautiful figure, a young Venus de Milo. I hunted frogs with André. Later the others played word-games. André and Claudine had gone off alone. I lay outside their circle, felt bitterly alone, unloved, out of the game. There was a forest of stars above. I listened to their voices, for her voice especially, and in the end went off alone to bed.
6th. Morning swim. Icy-cold and wonderful. Monique in a yellow woollen costume, a thin, lithe body, breasts like apples. We waited by the roadside for the others to come with the ‘car’ from Madrid. Monique sitting by a tree, writing in her notebook. It used to intrigue me, to watch her writing – some of it was diary, but sometimes she seemed to me to write in verse. I asked her once, and she laughed, and seemed embarrassed. Everyone speaks of her as intelligent, the young female genius of Thouars. She got her bachot at the earliest possible age,fn7 and is apparently a renowned worker. She has a serious will, a maturity which contrasts perfectly with her lighter side, her gaiety and exuberance.
To Toledo, an old, dense city on a hill, as Spanish as Madrid is un-Spanish. Narrow streets, patios, grilles – not yet Andalusian, but halfway there. The cathedral is magnificent, in spite of its ornaments. We wandered about, visited the house of El Greco – which reminded me for some reason of Shakespeare’s house at Stratford – an Elizabethan atmosphere.
We had lunch in a backstreet restaurant, a truly Spanish meal which dragged on half the afternoon, interminably. Service in Spain is a miracle of tardiness. Everything seems to have to be brought, cooked, allowed to cool, before it can be served. Meanwhile we drink enormously, sadly aware that it is too hot to make a scene, and that in any case one can only sleep in the afternoon. That afternoon we did walk, when it was still too hot to be out-of-doors. Burning cobbles, strips of shade. One dreams of water, lime-juice, iced wine, beer, breezes, the sea. Only dust and brilliant light. I felt anxious to be with the others, the jeunes. We older ones have travelled too much, no longer feel the foreign glamour. But with them, the jeunes, one felt again that lovely thrill of foreignness, being abroad and seeing new things, the essence of travel.
They were all in the main square, I remember, drinking lemonades. I found Monique, and felt relaxed again. If she was alone, in the group, I was all right. But when she was not there, or away with somebody else, I was unhappy, anxious, dry – un jaloux. It was at Toledo that I felt myself torn between Nanni and Monique. There is a kind of coupling process in a group of young people. Young stags circling young hinds; a psychological circling. I could see the others being caught up in it – the girls with psychological downcast eyes and little flashes of looks, laughter, the men strutting, associating, trumpeting. The atmosphere is difficult. The couples in the group already in love make love all the time; are always together, kiss in their seat, disappear together. The others, out in the cold, have, from this point of view, a frozen look. For the jeunes the voyage is also a voyage in the borderland of love. Mlle de Scudéry’s Carte du Tendre, where one leaves the village of Nouvelle Amitié and has all the sentiments between Haine and Amour before one.fn8 I was torn between two places. Nanni – on the foothills, pleasant enough, even beautiful – though her expression has something sulky, wilfully feminine, in it. A moody girl, a lover of dancing, gaiety, life; not self-sufficient, needing to be amused. Monique – in the mountains, remote, but far lovelier, with a profound smiling beauty and moments of austerity. Unattainable, but nearer heaven; and, except in moments of solitude, in the end I did not hesitate. I do not think Nanni would have been difficult at one point, whereas I knew Monique was never even distantly possible. Nanni represented a compromise, Monique an ideal. I shall forget the one, but never the other.
Monique’s two extremes: an implike mischievousness, half her age, and an acrid silence, a complete inner withdrawal, twice her age. But nothing with her is fixed; all her moods are unstable. An iridescent temperament.
7th. We drove round the hills surrounding Toledo the next morning – the agglomeration of houses enchanted the others. More used to the white of Greece, I found it dirty, tarnished, sad. The gorge, with the muddy Tagus at the bottom, must have influenced El Greco. A city of the damned, a purgatorial landscape. Over an old bridge into the city again. I took two photos and managed to include Monique in both. In fact this time I only took photos that included her.
8th. A long day in the coach. In the morning I sat next to Monique, who was in the corner. She had another soupirant, a cousin of André’s, a pleasant young simpleton, younger than she, who followed her everywhere, an image of my own libido. I stole his place from him to be next to her; after that he always suspected me. We came to the Sierra Morena, majestic country after the plains. The coach stopped several times, and the others got out. Normally I enjoyed the halts, but now I wanted to stay next to Monique. I found a praying mantis and frightened her with it. She pulled out her notebook and wrote something in it with an enigmatic smile. It looked like poetry. I asked her.
‘C’est pour moi. Personne d’autre ne le comprendra.’ And she put it away in her canvas bag. An old smoke-blue bag with a faintly Assyrian man’s head and a girl’s head embroidered on it in red and yellow silk thread, with her initials, MB. I remember we had just come to a village where we were going to eat. She saw me looking at it and suddenly said, ‘C’est moi et mon Jules.’ It was like a sudden precipice. ‘Tiens,’ she went on. ‘Je vais vous montrer sa photo. Vous m’en direz quelque chose de gentil, hein?’ She delved in her sac and produced a minute photo of a dark-haired young man. At a loss, I said, ‘Il a l’air très sérieux.’ And a little later, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il fait, comme métier?’
‘Il est dans la marine.’
Nanni said something I did not catch properly, something about him being very strong-willed, and Monique said yes.
That she should have an accepted boyfriend shocked me. She always seemed so withdrawn, remote. Now I saw a reason why. I felt sad, but relieved; at least there was no cause for jealousy in the group. But later I learned that she had a brother, and I wondered if it was him. By ‘mon Jules’ I thought at first that she meant ‘my boyfriend’, the slang meaning of ‘Jules’. But perhaps her brother’s name was Jules. I could have asked, but preferred to remain uncertain. At the time I thought that it was a hint to me that she was not free. I still don’t know, and often wonder. It was not like her to talk about herself. Discretion is one of her charms.
We had lunch in a small bistro in the village, the usual four of us together. I ate many green olives and grew intolerably melancholy. There was a drunkard at the next table and I felt like joining him. I could not shake off the impression that I had been warned off. We set off again in intense heat to find a place for the siesta. By the Guadalquivir – a brown, sluggishly rolling wide river. In the drenching heat we collapsed and undressed beneath a shady copse of aspens. The girls collected branches and lay on them. Nanni asleep, her full, graceful body like a sleeping Greek goddess. Perhaps it was because of the ‘new’ Monique, perhaps because of the green and white patterned bathing costume moulding the venereal lines of her body, but I decided to go for her.
Later we swam or waded in mud and café au lait till the middle of the stream where a strong current had scoured the mud away. When I was swimming somebody called out from the bank that I had had my photo in a Spanish newspaper. I laughed and swam further out and was swept away in the current down to the shallows where Jacotte was standing.
Jacotte, a strange girl. A tomboy, a nurse, a mother-cum-lover. A pretty face, an excellent figure, yet sexless. She gave herself a little way to everyone, sitting on their knees, her arms around them, tutoyant them; at first I thought she was a nymphomaniac. Perhaps she was, but an unvicious one. A strong, variable voice, a mimic, with a meridional accent. A commonsensical, shrewd, golden-hearted girl, adept with men; as if love was her favourite game but only a game. I carried her piggy-back over the mud ashore, pretending to drop her, laughing. But I find the sentimental condition of camaraderie difficult to maintain; French young people do it without difficulty. It is, in fact, physical closeness without sentiment; semi-naked play and no sex. From it one moves to sex without sentiment; and the death of love. A modern tendency; the abolition of the passions. But I, a renegade Puritan-Protestant, shall never feel at home in that brilliant world of sex and friendship without the shadows of love.
The photo was indistinct. I stood before the coach outside the Prado; the others were a little envious. I felt smugly proud, and went back into the water, to be with Nanni. She swam the breast-stroke, with her hair tied up and her head high out of the water. We rushed together down to the shallows and I took her hand to help her across the rapids ashore; and felt ten times more sexually excited at the touch of her hand than at the thighs of Jacotte around my neck. There were many peasant-women to watch us dress; in rags, with outstretched hands, and carrying rickety babies.
A sunset ride to Cordoba, grey in my memory, though there were no clouds. We camped by a little town, on the banks of the Guadalquivir still, at a place where there was a strangely isolated aqueduct or bridge, many arches leading nowhere. When we first arrived in the town there was a religious procession, endless acolytes and stooges. The Virgin was guarded by four soldiers carrying rifles; her smile above the barrels and black jackboots was ironic, I fancied. The curé followed, a tall, worldly-looking man, with a pompous little army officer beside him who kept on changing his white gloves from hand to hand. No longer Trône et Autel; Mitrailleuse et Autel.fn9 Paul and I decided to have dinner in the village, and walked down a rough road. There were many stars, and I sang softly. I knew the others were behind us and suggested that we waited. I knew Monique and Nanni were with them. When they came close, I started to whine in Spanish, like a beggar. Walking beside them in darkness; Monique seemed more friendly than usual. Nanni sulky. And walking between them, I felt irresistibly drawn towards Monique, in spite of what I had learned that morning. We went to two restaurants, but they charged ridiculous prices. A frustrating hour searching for food. Paul and I bought wine and cheese and melon, and picnicked while the others ate their meal. Monique by Claude; I began to feel increasingly jealous of him. Thunder in May.
I went a little mad that night; perhaps the wine. The village was full, fiesta, and there was a small fair. I got Monique and Geneviève on the merry-go-round, a ramshackle thing that had to be pushed by hand. I suddenly felt happy and very excited, and started to poop-poop and dance and stand on the tiny horse’s back like an equestrienne. Then I pushed the merry-go-round on and on while the proprietor tried to stop it. Then to the swings, where I swung with Nanni and then with Monique, wildly, poop-pooping and the others resting with open mouths by the rail. Then to a dwarf train-track. They wouldn’t let me drive, but I collected all the tickets from the Spanish passengers and distributed them among the group, so then they could have two rides. Unfortunately the real collector came and the Spaniards started to shout, but they all saw the joke in the end. We set off through a tunnel where there was a ghost. I tried to snatch his broom the first time round, failed, and the second time jumped off on top of him. A terrified small boy. I jumped off and on the train, poop-pooped, every so often sat beside Monique, saw a kind of frightened admiration in her eyes, and did something else ridiculous – I suppose all I did was only an orchid I wanted to give her, something exotic, highly coloured. In the end I ran up a ladder and danced on the roof of the central kiosk. Came down, and was just about to jump through the door when I saw something terrible. Two naked children huddled together in a corner; thin, filthy, on a piece of sacking. Incredibly, in all that din around them, they were asleep. I saw the proprietor outside, a small, sallow, sad-eyed man in a stained suit. ‘Yours?’ I asked. He nodded. I gave him a cigarette, wished I had some money. I felt suddenly cold, frozen, old; the incident shocked, astounded me. I went up to Monique (Why? To show her my tender heart, my change of mood. But also because she was intelligent, was the only one there whom I felt might understand) and made her come and look at them. Her face slowly upturned to mine, one of her Madonna looks, a pure heart’s pure compassion. She said something inaudible, and I followed her out. I remember walking home with Monique and a group, sad and sleepy, but faintly thrilled with my exploit.
9th. In the morning, a headache. I sat before my tent, and heard the others telling all those who had not been at the fair about what I had done. Laughter, as warm as the sun on my back. I went for a swim, and afterwards unsuccessfully hunted a tree-lizard with André.
We went to Cordoba. It was Sunday, very hot. We visited the Mosque, a classical garden of beautiful pillars and arches.fn10 More than all the architectural beauty, I was impressed by a rough little cross scratched on the marble wall by the nails of an ancient Christian prisoner. The Arabs kept him chained up there for ten years, and all he did was to scratch this cross with his fingernails. It is difficult to imagine the Kafkaesque horror of such a punishment.
An afternoon journey to Seville, in great heat. I sat opposite Nanni and Monique, in the back holding the door open for air. Monique in the briefest of geranium-red corduroy shorts, and an unbuttoned sleeveless blouse; but something boyish, virginal in her. Nanni in brown shorts, fuller legs, and a blue and white check shirt. We stopped to look at a large flock of storks, a hundred or more, that flew up and wheeled all around us. My own shorts, white legs, not masculine enough, not virile. City legs.
Seville after dark; Monique cold, beside me in the corner, wearing her red jumper and my green and yellow square; holding her throat and looking out. She had a bad throat, stirred up protective instincts.
We drove about Seville meaninglessly, hungry, with two or three factions arguing about what we should do. In the end it was decided to go and spend the night at a neighbouring village.
The village street was full, a crowd of strollers. They all gathered round the coach, a sea of calling faces. When we got out, most of us in shorts, the excitement was intense. We were surrounded, pressed against, stared at like visitors from another planet. We bought some food in the centre of the village, and went back to the coach to eat it. The crowd grew and grew. We met Monique and Geneviève almost in tears. They had been hustled and gaped into a state near hysteria. Titi had had her off-the-shoulder blouse pulled up by the women. We had a meal at a café table, almost unable to move. When we left, there were stares and catcalls. It was like leaving a den of wild animals, and as near a riot as I have experienced. An incredible savagery of curiosity, a naiveté and hostility to foreigners. One side of Andalusia. The group were furious, as excited as the Spaniards, everybody talking at once, the girls hysterical, the men (as always after the event) ready to casser la gueule of every Spaniard in Spain. Paul and I looked at each other, and grinned quietly.
10th. Everybody washed at a fountain in the famous central courtyard. Monique in blue pyjamas, small brown face, laughing, at her most Red Indian. To Seville. I did not like Seville; it is not romantic, but a modern city built around an old quarter; in an ugly plain and too touristic. We split up in the main square; I hated that splitting into our own small groups. It meant that I lost both Nanni and Monique. Nanni, I felt, could see, was linking up with Jouteau. Also, in towns, the group was absorbed, at its worst, in a way shown up as provincial; they seemed to me unnatural, not themselves, straining to be modern, chasing a chimera. I liked it best in the country, alone, on an island, as it were. The city was the future; dispersal, separation, oblivion.
In the morning we saw the cathedral, which gives a colossal illusion of vastness. It seemed to me far and away the largest building I had ever entered. We mounted the Giralda tower, looked down on Seville.fn11 It is not impressive – a large, sprawling, grey and white city in a tired plain. Later to the Alcazar.fn12 A guide took us round the palace, stopping at every picture and telling us who it was – he must have been a monarchist. Art and history did not seem to interest him, for he told us nothing about the rooms and furniture – just royal names and relationships. In the Arab part he was more normal. I like the small grace, the gazelle-like quality in Moorish art, an immensity of slender detail. Something austere and reserved, inhuman in it. A décor for houris, in a vacuum, a creation that no one will ever look at. We went out in the great garden, tired, wandered among the fountains and the green lawns. André deliberately soaked himself under a gardener’s hose. I was wearing my new trousers for the first time and split them trying to catch a frog in a lily-pond. We sat in the shade, let evening grow.
Some of us went to see some flamenco dancing. Monique in a blue, red, green tartan dress, and a white collar. I walked alone beside them, happy again to know her close. But the evening was sour; Monique felt ill and said she was going back to the hotel. Consternation in several hearts. But Michel took her arm and she went along. I bought two bunches of jasmine from one of the ubiquitous juvenile jasmine-sellers, and gave one each to Monique and Geneviève. In their hair, over the ears, ephemerals. We crossed the Guadalquivir, and came to an open-air nightclub – a commercial atmosphere, a dance-floor, surrounding tables.
Atmosphere apart, the dancing was magnificient. The most primitive dancing in Europe – with all the tenseness of an erection, the women titivating. The shadow of the penis everywhere. In the male dancing an anger, a fury, a defiance – a constant trampling and stamping, on the edge of savage excess. The women completely women, more sexual than if they were naked. The ballroom dancing that went on between the spasms of the professionals seemed insipid and ridiculous. The wonderful rhythms achieved by handclapping – there were three men and five girls – and the eight of them at the climaxes clapped in an intensely exciting series of cross-rhythms. I wandered round the dressing-rooms when they were off-stage – supple, vital women, and proud, arched men, like D. H. Lawrence ideal men and women. Strange and sad that he never touched Spain. I stood on a bench at the back, beside Monique, when they danced, too conscious of her to watch them properly. We left early, all disappointed, tired. A walk back under the stars. Paul seemed to me bouncy, platitudinous, solid as rubber. I walked alone. Monique also seemed sad; but the Godichon brothers started to clown, and she started to giggle, a schoolgirl, at her least endearing for me. Claude took her arm, she was suddenly gay. I felt blue to the core, imagining that her Jules was there, his arm around her, almost wanting it, anything rather than this uncertainty. But then she was sad, withdrawn again. All beautiful women can change their moods in five seconds.
Another nuance of indigo over me was Nanni, that evening with Jouteau, dancing closely to him, and left behind at the nightclub with him; the Carte du Tendre; all roads blocked.
11th. A morning alone. I did not regret it. For a moment I was tired of the group, of the long grey vista between myself and Monique. I wandered about in the old quarter, which I found by chance, and which seemed doubly beautiful for being so unexpected. Here, in the narrow streets, the white walls and black grilles, the flashes of foliage, the clean grey shadows, I found the Seville of my anticipation. This is all one needs to see – architecturally – at Seville. One would do best to come, spend an hour in the old quarter, and leave. I was reminded of Oxford – still heart in the maelstrom. I bought some peaches and walked along eating them. It was midday, and I began to feel lonely again. I thought I would find someone in the gardens of the Alcazar. Sure enough, and my heart leapt, I found Paul with Monique and her group. I offered to lead them round the old quarter, and waited for them in a little garden by the cathedral, while they climbed the tower. I wrote a poem there about Monique, the first of a series. ‘Bewitched by the world’s most hopeless love’. A sonnet in fifteen minutes; I felt happy, and talked to a precocious little hotel tout, who spoke both English and French well.
We wandered back into the modern city, through streets under high awnings; bought fruit and sat at a café. I manoeuvered myself next to Monique, and felt happy again. Bought her an ice later in a confectioner’s, and heard a little dryness in her thanks. Tendresse se revèle. Whenever that happens, I see myself distorted – a grotesque master fawning on a fairy princess. La Belle et la Bête. But in this case la Belle and the wicked witch are one and the same person.
The coach was late picking us up, and we sat for two hours on the steps of an open house, waiting. The only seat was right in front, a good seat and one saw well, but Nanni and Monique were at the back and I did not enjoy the ride to Rota. We passed through Jerez, where I learnt, from an English-speaking importer, that sweet sherry is an English bastard. The Spaniard takes it dry. I tasted a very fine dry Amontillado. The main street pavements seemed lined with tables. I noticed that everybody drank coffee, in spite of it being aperitif hour. A prosperous place, to judge by the men’s suits, and their sneers at my shorts. Monique was late when we left; running, panting, schoolgirl again in her exertion.
Over a desert to Rota, arriving at night. We went down the coast a little to an isolated bar among pine-covered sand-dunes. We walked a little way over the railway track to the edge of a low bluff, with sands and the sea below, the full moon on the water and the lights of Cadiz to the south. I was delighted to get back to the sea again. I never feel so free inland; on the edge of the sea one begins to escape.
We camped along the cliff-edge; I had a shock, seeing Monique and Claude standing together on a hillock, talking. Suddenly they came together, for a moment, just as if she had leant forward and kissed him. But it was moonlight and I could not be sure. I heard their low voices, and then they disappeared abruptly towards the trees. I had a violent attack of jealousy and, after a moment, followed them. But they had disappeared. I walked about aimlessly, hoping to see them with the others. Only they were missing. A few minutes later I saw Monique carrying a load of wood. I calmed down, but remembered the first shock.
12th. Morning swim, wide sands, wet, inciting one to leap, stand on one’s hands, run. I ran, and crouched under the cliff to relieve myself. In the distance were some fishermen on the sand, hauling on lines. I felt fit, exuberant, and faintly excited at the thought of going to Africa. Strange how the moments one spends on a lavatory seat, or crouched somewhere, are often moments of slight anticipation, a kind of happy pause before action. Also one is obliged willy-nilly to consider one’s animality. An excellent daily psychological discipline.
To Algeciras – a desert of saltings, guts, canals, mudbeds, wide horizons. Into the mountains, burnt dry, intensely hot.
Gibraltar, a surge of nationalism in me; jokes about ‘la vieille Angleterre’; Jouteau began to sing ‘God Save the King’, others joined in. A huge grey-white rock-whale, a stone ship, standing over Spain. But the isthmus, the umbilical cord; geography lasts longer than frontiers.
Algeciras, blinding heat. We had a bad meal in a tourist restaurant; the steak was tainted. An altercation with the ‘patron’; I refused to pay, and felt ill and irritable. I hate terminus towns, endports. We were late for the Tangiers boat and had to run down the burning quays to get aboard in time. But aboard and away, with the sea blue and breezy, running away from the burning south, with Gibraltar crouched on our left and Africa’s blue mountains ahead, I felt better. Most of the others felt ill, which pleased me. It was almost calm. We turned south-eastwards, went between mountains and tides and dancing wavelets, a little white-tipped. M at the boat-deck after-rail corner, looking at the sea with intense seriousness, away from the others, I thought because it was the first time she had seen it, or possibly that she was simply sick. Forward, where the tide-races met, queer swirling currents and cross-seas, we saw many dolphins; at one time there were a dozen or more rushing and surging and leaping just ahead of the ship’s bows. I could watch them endlessly, creatures without any personality, spirits of speed, springing up and gliding swiftly on just above the wavetops. Excited cries whenever they appeared.
Some of the group, led by Paul, wanted to go to Rabat, instead of resting at Tangiers. Monique was undecided, and I was jumping about internally, trying to discover what she would do. Paul wanted me to come. By this time I knew that I would do whatever M did. When we landed, she came to me and asked me if I was going. She had decided not to; I felt overjoyed as all the rest of her group were going; but short-lived joy, they found visas were necessary, and nobody went.
We came in closer to Spanish Morocco, a hint of wave-mountains, grey, blue, with white villages here and there. The Atlantic wind was cool, salt-laden. Tangiers took shape, a city of tall large blocks, an American-looking city, soft and luxurious in the setting sun. Landing, Arabs, a jumble of languages. A huge man in a red fez and a blue cloak. We were taken by a contact of someone to a camping-site outside the city. It was night, a city of limousines and neon lights. Where we camped, in the middle of a sand-dune, there was nothing, except for a few houses and shops on a nearby road. We bought some food from a shy, soft-spoken Arab shopkeeper, and ate it out on the dunes. It was cool after Spain, a night full of stars. M was not there, but N sat alone; I felt a new interest in her. Jouteau had stayed in Tangiers, in a hotel. We walked down towards the beach, but Paul was there to join us. We strolled a long way along the smooth sands, with all the multicoloured lights of the bay of Tangiers before us. I wanted to have her alone, and I ignored Paul. She walked between us and we exchanged platitudes. Before we went to bed, we did something that was to have unpleasant consequences – took Laffont’s hat from his tent. A strange desire to hurt and annoy him. Later we slept together, the three of us, on the sand. So near and yet so far.
13th. We went on a tour of Tangiers, of the Arab quarter. Western Tangiers is full of luxury shops, chromium and plate-glass and office blocks and flat-blocks and rich hotels, the streets full of tarts of all nationalities and purposes. The poor and the rich, the donkey and the limousine. The Arab quarter is more interesting, involved, hidden, shuttered. Groups of women in white sitting along the steps, along the foot of shady walls. An animated, jostling market. Everywhere I was conscious of an independence, a faint dry contempt for sightseers. Outside the quarter, in European surroundings, the Arab seems deferential. But here, or away from the city, he shows no sign of inferiority. It is insufferable that one should expect them to look inferior, but one does; the British Imperial heritage.
All through that morning intensely conscious of M – following her, hanging back if she was behind, watching her secretly, not happy unless I knew she was close, in my sight and hearing. From then on the holiday was less a holiday in Spain as time with or without Monique.
We walked back to a hotel by the beach for lunch. I sat next to N, to her faint – as I saw – regret. She kept on looking round at Jouteau, sitting at another table. Afterwards with M and N and Geneviève and Jouteau to have an ice-cream. An awkward little group, as if I had come too far out in the open over M, shown too much preference. M was serious, disinclined to laugh. I felt ill at ease, embarrassed. We joined the others to go up Mont Tanger, a little outside the city. N decided not to go. As Jouteau had just before said he was not going, I realized that N was definitely lost. I felt sad and bitter, a mood augmented by the fact that I went to the Mont alone in a taxi. Each taxi held six people, and it so happened that I was the odd one out. Pure chance, but it seemed to me symbolical of my position in the group, unattached, not very much liked, almost unwanted. I have a disposition that is completely absorbed by personal relationships if I am with friends or in a group. That is why I travel best alone – with no group to obsess me. To leave the group was not enough – once entered in it, I could leave it without regret. In this case I exaggerated my position ridiculously, out of an innate morbidity. But all the time at Tangiers I felt that things were going wrong with regard to myself and the others. I was jealous of Jouteau and N. With Monique I felt grotesque, a Caliban to her Miranda. Yet every time she was with me, I felt I had to clown, to tease, to do my tricks – a state I hated, and to which only a Monique could have reconciled me.
A sad day; one gay passage in the morning when I walked beside Monique on the way in to Tangiers. Then André, the chauffeur, tough and usually oblivious to everyone else, remarked on her. ‘Elle n’est pas mal, la petite.’ From him, that meant a book of poems. He seemed a little surprised; I understood; she grows on you; profound beauty, like all other things profound, needs to be known. To myself I called her chignonette. Her supple willowy walk, a classical movement, upright but full of grace; her chignon floating behind her, balancing, giving her her individual, unique outline. Monique.
But a sad day, thirteenth day; when the voyage seemed tasteless, and my sorrows – as indeed they were – final.
14th. Up at dawn, along the sands into Tangiers, to catch our boat. I felt happy to be going, that the group would have to spend the day together. Alfred chased me over the sand, crying wildly, clutching at my orange sleeping-sack. We walked near Monique, chased around her. Perhaps I wanted to seem young, to dwarf that six or seven years between us.
Back to Algeciras. On the boat I wanted to sit near her; even manoeuvered myself to be sitting opposite to where she was writing a letter. But she looked up, saw me, and moved away. Because of me? For that one moment, I imagined myself avoided, and drowned my regrets in a letter home. I think she was in one of her moods, restless, changeable. Everyone was subdued, the going north again, the beginning of the end.
Algeciras and blazing heat; southern Spain is a furnace in mid-August. We drove up the coast to Malaga, sweaty and uncomfortable, longing for a swim, but the puritan Richard insisted that we keep to the ‘schedule’.
We camped for the night by the sea at Torremolinos. A sense of relief at having arrived. The sea was warm, the Mediterranean again, with a sandy steeply-shelving beach. Along the strand were erected bamboo beach-huts, which gave a strangely Polynesian air to the landscape.
Changing in the coach; Monique at her most playful; five minutes of teasing her, being teased back. Her nose crinkles and her eyes flash when she pretends to be angry and she punches with a quick bend and downward movement of her arm, comically ineffectual. Or again when she is amused in spite of herself, her reluctant smile contradicting her still complaining and teasing voice. ‘Je ne vous parle plus. Vous êtes dégoutant.’ Her lips outraged, the ‘plus’ accented and high-pitched as if her voice would break with indignation, and her eyes mischievously crow-footed with laughter. I accused her of standing outside the coach so that she could see the men undress and dress. Counter-accusations, punches, indiscreet comments. I call her ‘la Bedouine’ to annoy her.
15th. Up early, for a swim. Up to the town for breakfast, a brandy and soda and a kilo of muscat grapes. The kilos of muscats I must have eaten – an incomparable hot weather fruit, the antithesis of dust.
To Malaga, a few miles away. It was Saturday, the beginning of the summer fiesta, the city crowded. Malaga left no distinct impression on me compared to Seville or Cordoba. A wide shady boulevard leading to the Plaza de Toros, an insignificant main square with a crowded, obscure quarter behind it. We wanted to see the bullfight, but the tickets were too dear for most of the ‘jeunes’, Monique, I saw to my sorrow, among them. It meant an afternoon, no doubt another evening, without her.
We waited about for the tickets, and l’affaire Laffont rose to an ugly little crux. At last he had realized that his hat had been stolen not by a Tangiers thief, but by one of us. He began to complain about the bad spirit, the lack of camaraderie, until someone produced the hat, a crumpled shadow of its former self, and threw it at him. But that only egged him on to further recriminations. Unfortunately there was an element of truth in all he said, and the joke had been kept too long, gone bad. He kept on saying, ‘C’est hideux.’ ‘Hideux’ became the ‘parrot-word’ of the rest of the holiday. But when I told him he was making a fuss about nothing, he shouted, ‘Maybe you do things like that in England, but in France we don’t like it.’ I felt a sudden simultaneous spurt of guilt and anger. He had accused me of taking the hat – which was more or less true – and dragged nationalities into it. I leant forward and pulled down the hat (which he was now wearing) sharply over his eyes, and said angrily, ‘You be careful what you say. I didn’t take your hat. I know who did, but it wasn’t me, so shut up.’ This incident rankled with me, because I felt that Laffont was right. And N knew perfectly well that I had taken it. Although everyone said afterwards that he was wrong, I think many of them secretly agreed with Laffont – rightly. And they did not like the strong-arm much. I shook hands with him at once, but Laffont will hate me to the end of his life. Although he is stupid enough to discover hate, not for Christian reasons, but diplomatically, by sheer pomposity. If I became famous, I am sure he would go around saying that we were once great friends, and talk himself into believing it.
At the garage where we left the coach, there was a Spaniard who spoke English well, a perfume representative, very polite and gentlemanly and hard to shake off. He took us to a restaurant. I walked with him just behind Monique, talking in English. For a moment she looked round at me – the only time I have ever felt that she admired me. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ I said dryly, ‘I speak it just like a native.’ She gave one of her shy small-girl smiles, slightly puzzled. I tried to get him to say something about the Franco regime, but he said everything was all right. He did not sound so much scared to speak, as indifferent. He took us to a little wineshop with some excellent Malaga, a brown wine, sweet and fruity, with an exotic flavour of apricots. A meal in a little backstreet restaurant – I was beside Monique, a position difficult to maintain. I preferred to face her opposite, where I could watch her every movement. Beside her, I felt I had to talk, and that was difficult. I could never make my French clear enough for her to understand; other people would understand, but not Monique. She would frown wistfully, and say, ‘Je ne comprends jamais ce que vous dîtes.’ This used to make me seem more nervous every time I opened my mouth to her. She had decided that I was incomprehensible, and never really tried to understand. At the end I talked more slowly with her, and she understood better. During that meal, she seemed determined not to understand. I felt that I was making a fool of myself. On the walls opposite, against the ceiling there hung a mirror tilted so that one could see down on to the table. Monique kept looking at this mirror and smiling. Sometimes it was at me, sometimes at other people. But I was too short-sighted to see which way her eyes were looking. I could only see that she was smiling, and so I smiled back. Once or twice I realized too late that the smile was for someone else. Once I saw Titi looking at me, a little drily, dispassionately, glimpsing something in my smile. Halfway through the meal, somebody came in late, and Monique jumped up to give him her seat. Half her generosity (she will help anyone at any time), half her moodiness, her need of change. In the coach she was always the first to offer her seat to anyone standing, the first to give help, the most dutiful, Madonna-like.
We took a fiacre to the Plaza de Toros. Crowds of people, animation, a converging on the high-walled colosseum. All one’s Roman ancestry is stirred. We found our way up the stairs, feeling like actors backstage, making for an entrance. We surveyed on the second balcony, in blazing sunlight, dense, packed circles of animation. Although we had come an hour early, it seemed that there were no more free places. But we pushed along to a standing place at the rail, crowded together, stunned by the roar of voices. It reminded one of the ancient Elizabethan theatre, the Globe style. The Spaniards around us would have been more at home in a Tudor pit than Englishmen. Slowly the seats in the shade filled up; black and white mantillas, sun-glasses and rich dresses in the flower-and-flag-bedecked presidential box, a small segment of extreme luxury. We were parched in the hot sun and watched the lorry spraying the sand with water, turning it from pale to rich ochre. At last, the hour, a roar, and the slow strut of the personae across the sun into the shadow under the box.
Silence, the bull-door opens, an empty arena; a tense pause; a murmur, a shout, and the black bull trots angrily, pugnaciously into the eyes of all Malaga.
Bullfighting fires me every time that I see it – the spectacle, the beauty, the symbolism vastly outweigh the cruelty to the animal. It is less sadism that makes the audience so tense, so savage, at the climaxes, as the universal duel with death. Few people go in the hope of seeing a man killed or gored; it is the gamble, the risk, that one man accepts on behalf of all mankind – a fight against fate. When the bull dies, humanity has triumphed. In no sport is the issue so clear, the play so close to reality.
It is primitive, barbaric even; but I welcome it as a missing ingredient in the frozen modern man; the man who is all psychology, all mind, and not at all animal, the unbalanced twentieth-century ghostman. A dram of liquor on a Welsh Sunday. The last fight was superb, heightened by the comparative mediocrity of the others. Ordonez, a tall, slim young man, who had already won the best ovation for his first bull, apparently decided to try and win out the day. The bull was active, full of fight. Ordonez began a wonderful series of faenas, every cape-pass perfectly executed, the bull dancing and lunging around his upright, swirling figure. There were one or two swift successions of passes when the bull seemed mystified by the cape, unable to best it. At each pass the crowd gasped louder, until Ordonez consummated one final masterpiece and, flowing his cape behind him, walked away in a thunder of applause. But the thunder went to his head, and at the height of his triumph he risked too much. The brilliance flashed into horror; one moment he was standing with the cape, the next moment in mid-air on the bull’s tossing head, falling on the ground, the cape yards away, the bull with its head crushing down on him. The whole arena cried, was silent, everybody stood. A rush of the other matadors to aid him. The bull turned away.
Ordonez lies still, then moves. His head crouches on the sand. A helper tries to raise him. Ordonez sits up, pushes him away savagely, tries to stand up, falls on one knee. There is a great tear inside his thigh. Everybody helps him to his feet, he can hardly walk. They try and lead him to the barricade. He begins to swear, refuses to move and calls for his cape and killing-sword. They are reluctant to bring them to him. He is sobbing with pain and rage and disappointment, his face contorted. But he dominates the whole arena; the sword and the cape are brought. He arranges them, shakes off his supporters, and tries to walk towards the bull, almost falls. The other matadors come forward again, try to lead him away. Ordonez spits out something, gestures them all ways, stands there sweeping them away, leaving him alone once more with the bull. The bull moves in, lunges. Three perfect passes, stiff, with a little limp as he turns to meet the charging head each time. The bull stands, uncertain. Ordonez closes, shakes the cape. The bull stands still, almost amazed. Ordonez drops the cape, stands before the massive head, six feet from it. Suddenly throws the cape away, turns his back on the bull, and kneels, facing the presidential box, with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back.
An unforgettable moment; a shiver of silent admiration ran through me, ran through all the crowd – not so much in the loudness of the cry we gave, but in the quality of it. Twenty seconds later when he stood up, the bull stock-still, thunder-struck, there was a gargantuan storm of applause, a shower of hats, an enormous murmur all around.
Slowly Ordonez prepared for the moment of truth – aligned, painfully bent his knee, thrust – and the bull moved, so that the sword stuck for a moment, truth sprang out as the animal trotted away to another part of the arena. Ordonez limped quickly after it, cursing the other matadors who were trying to dissuade him once more. I was watching his face, twisted with agony, each time he made a step. Not once did he look at, or feel, his wound. He took up his stance again, aligned his sword, slowly, implacably, as if not even death could stop him from killing this bull. He plunged forward, almost deliberately on to the horns and struck right home. A few seconds later the bull was dead.
He got a tremendous ovation – a thousand hats, scarves, cigarettes, everything. And it is only now, a month later, that I can realize it was only a man killing an animal. At the time it seemed to me the greatest exhibition of human bravery I had ever seen. Yet only a man risking his life for mere entertainment – trapeze artists do the same. It seems it was the hottest day for many years. ‘Que calor!’ ‘Que calor!’ Everyone said, ‘Que calor!’ We walked slowly down dark narrow sidestreets, trying to find the restaurant where we had had lunch. At last we did, and the others, but I felt too hot to eat. Most of us sat in the ante-room, exhausted, wordless. I went out twice to drink beer. But however much we drank, ten minutes later one was thirsty again. Monique was there, with Claude, and wearily I noticed their new intimacy. The English-speaking Spaniard was there, but I had not the energy to talk with him. I gave Monique my parasol hat. ‘Pas mal, hein, pour deux pesetes,’ I said, anxious to show that the gift was not serious. She laughed, tried it on, pulled a face, and five minutes after she had gone to eat, I found it crumpled behind a chair. I got tired of waiting for the meal to finish, and went with Paul and the English-speaking Spaniard to the fair. We passed a family sitting behind a garage – the owners apparently – in their best clothes, taking the air, and clapping two small girls in Andalusian dresses, who danced together exquisitely, their contrasts, their feet, their swirling red-spotted long white dresses all in symphony on the narrow pavement, under a streetlight. The fair was very large, a multitude of lights, an illuminated chandelier with hundreds of stalls and amusement booths, dance-floors, ghost-rides, valleys of love and all the rest. A cacophony of cheap music, tango, sambas, paso dobles; a vast throng, with jingling fiacres forcing a slow way through. The night and stars invisible. So different from the little fair near Cordoba. I looked for the others, but they were swallowed up in the vastness of the chandelier. Paul and the Spaniard and I fired at the shooting-booths, threw quoits. I won a cheap little statuette of the Virgin. There was a choice, but I chose Mary for Monique. At once I began to think of some teasing way of presenting it, rehearsing words, ridiculous phrases in my mouth. The Spaniard left us. Paul and I wandered back through the fair, I sad, remote, missing the others. We ran back to the main square for the rendezvous. Monique was there, alone; outside the coach. I made my speech and presentation. And I gave her the statuette. She was in a playful mood, laughed. She was sitting next to Claude. He had his arm around her shoulder. Happily Geneviève was on his knees. He spent all the time trying to make love to them both at the same time. Geneviève seemed to want it, Monique not, although she never seemed annoyed by his touches. He was always catching hands, pressing thighs and arms, squeezing shoulders. No more than camaraderie, but irritating to me. Debasing the coinage of love.
We camped some miles from Malaga. Halfway up into the sierra. I laid out my sack under an olive-tree, close to the Monique group. I had to spy on them, to see how the land lay. They always slept together, touching, and I wanted to know the relative position of Claude and Monique, especially when Geneviève moved away from them, and said ‘Goodnight’ in a piqued voice. There was a moon caught in the olive-branches overhead. For a while I watched it, sat up to see if I could distinguish how close they were, could not, lay back again, found an indigo sadness in the sky, and almost at once slept.
16th. Up at dawn. Dawn in hill country, in mountains, is always a splendid hour. I climbed a little nearby hill and looked down at Malaga far below. I remember that morning very well, the blue-green air, the coolness after the burning plain. Above all, because Monique sat beside me. For a time she stood, then somebody said, ‘There’s a place beside John,’ and she came and sat there. I purred, between the magnificent landscape and her presence, like a cream-fed cat. I tried to talk seriously with her, but it was difficult. I was nervous, trying to be interesting, amusing. She was sleepy, not bored, but uninterested. I asked her if she had left school.
‘Oui.’
‘Do you work at home?’
‘No, I work in a laboratory.’
‘In a laboratory!’
‘Oui, je fais des analyses!’ Her black eyes looked at me sideways, almost with hostility. Of all the careers I might have imagined for her, that was the last.
‘What kind of analysis?’
‘Everything … not always very nice things.’ And her eyes smiled for a moment.
‘Vous chassez les baccilles, alors?’
‘Oui, les baccilles.’
‘C’est intéressant?’
‘Oui. Ça m’intéresse.’
‘The laboratory is big?’
‘No. Not big.’
And so on.
She always has a short, precise way of answering questions, very seriously, intelligently, taking the question exactly at its own value, as if it were written on paper, part of a form, ignoring all the irrelevant contexts. I suddenly saw her in a new light, the working-girl scientist, in a white smock, bent over a microscope handing in curt reports to a bespectacled chief analyst: almost a nunlike existence, disinfected, hyper-strict.
‘How long a holiday do you get?’ I asked.
‘Just these three weeks,’ she answered.
I suddenly felt a fool, a drone, an insipid sentimental schoolmaster, an old doddering man beside this slim, young nineteen-year-old scientist. I ceased to talk with her, bitter that she asked me no questions, but stared impassively, drily out of the window. In her withdrawn moments, she was very remote. Was that her charm for me? Her complete sincerity with her own emotions. When she was gay, she was transparently gay, completely gay; when she was sad, serious. She made no concessions to the general mood, to what might have been expected of her. I have seen her coax out of her seriousness, her slow smiles, the awakening smiles of someone who has been genuinely asleep. None of the damned artificialities that clog the usual calculating feminine psychology.
We stopped at a point high above the valleys to look back over the Malaga plain; already a heat mist was draining the more distant colours. Monique got out before me and went to Claude, who took her by the shoulders and gently shook her. She shook herself free, but gently also, and began to laugh with Geneviève. It was not so much a love jealousy I felt with Claude – he loved Monique, but I could see that she did not love him in return. But together in their small group they were not bored. They laughed, danced a long time. I watched the three of them walk away to a better vantage point, felt bitterly bitter. I deliberately hung back when it was time to move off again, almost hoping that Claude would sit beside her, and give my resentment some real ground. But she was alone in the seat and Claude elsewhere. I sat down silently beside her. A little later she began to nod, to fall asleep, only to wake up every five seconds with the wheels’ jolting. Lost again, no longer proud, I waited my chance. When she looked up after a particularly heavy jolt, I said gently, ‘Sleep here … on my shoulder … if you’d like.’ She had her small-girlish look, hesitant, faintly beseeching.
‘Ça ne vous gênerait pas?’
I shrugged. ‘Je n’ai pas sommeil. Allez-y.’
She tilted towards me, leant her head on my shoulder. A flash of intense, astoundingly intense happiness swept through me. She relaxed a little, more closely against me.
‘Ça va?’
‘Oui, c’est confortable.’
Then she was silent and myself very happy; I had never done anything but touch her hand before. Now to know her weight, the feel of her, her solidity – a new dimension. Her head, her hair brushing my cheek. Paul went past, looked at me strangely, almost with jealousy, I thought. And I looked back without smiling, perhaps a little vauntingly, bantam on the dungheap for this one small incident.
Michel behind me turned and laughed. ‘Ah, ah, c’est comme ça que ça commence.’
Titi also. ‘Ah, oui.’
I saw Claude out of the corner of my eye, a little silent.
But it did not last long, the coach stopped by a well so that we could wash and shave. Then when we were all there, with the usual clatter and scent of soap, I suddenly realized that Monique was not there; and a second later that Claude was also missing. I finished shaving, raced back to the coach: no sign of anyone. I looked around and saw no one and a thousand places to be concealed. I opened the coach door, sadly, entered, and there she was, fast asleep, stretched out on the wide back seat, her head on her arms, her shoulders high, her hip upstanding, small-waisted and the slim line of her long legs. She had some strange natural grace; lying down, she was a sleeping goddess, wonderfully moulded, relaxed, herself.
Again when we went on she came back to her old seat, and I sat beside her. For a time she was animated, talking with everybody except me, then sleepy again and my heart sang, as she looked without a smile, a little sideways at my shoulder. I patted again and she leant sideways.
‘Ça ne vous gêne pas?’
‘Pas du tout.’
But once again I was fated. The engine began to cough, to knock whenever we had to mount a hill. For a time we jogged spasmodically on, then there were a series of terrible knocks and the coach stopped. Although we did not know it then, it was really the end of the holiday.
The chauffeurs poked about while we stood around. About quarter of a mile away we could see a village. A landscape of scrubby stubble-fields, dry hills and valleys, and to the north the central range of the sierra, a high jagged line. André the chauffeur came out from under, serious-faced. ‘C’est pour deux heures, au moins.’ Part of the universal gear was broken and would certainly be irreplaceable in the village, even if a garage existed. We trooped off towards the houses. The village was large, almost a small town, called Colmanar, an agglomeration of white sun-scorched houses. The village street was away downhill, framing a superb view of the blue and grey mountains ahead. The first houses turned out to be two cafés. We went into the second, out to the back where there were tables under the vine-covered trellis-roof. We ordered coffee; Paul bought a tin of peaches. Claude sat next to Monique, holding her hand, his arm on her shoulder. She was laughing, leaning towards him. Someone ran in and said that the Mass was just starting. They all jumped up, the Catholics. Claude took Monique’s hand and led her out. Paul also went, and I was left alone.
Two of the blackshirt boys came in. There were two or three of them who always wore black shirts, nonentities. They wanted to go for a walk, see ‘le gibier du pays’. We went on a little safari, myself leading, up a hill out of the village, through sparse olive-orchards, down to a valley overgrown with prickly pears. I felt farouche, an immense desire to be alone. They talked about nothing endlessly, two black parrots. At one they started talking about lunch. I told them to go back, that I wanted no food. As soon as they were out of sight I climbed up a little valley towards some tree-tops. There was a trickle of water by the path and a cool fern-surrounded well. Higher I came to a small copse, and then another, so green and shady that one might have been in England. There were many birds and no men. I sat by a little well, out of the sun, and felt unutterably sad. I admitted to myself for the first time that I had fallen in love with M; and fully admitted the other bitter realization that she had no interest in me at all. Normally these two factors interact – one realizes the impossibility at once, and accordingly a kind of self-pride stops one from falling further. But M had slipped through in some mysterious way, taken my heart almost before I knew it, and now was walking away with it – walking away for ever and not even knowing what she had done. In that bosquet, I felt very remote from the group, from all life and all commitments, and understood the psychology of the melancholy anchorite. That hour in the copse was a kind of initiation. I saw that I should get nothing but unhappiness by following M, that the rest of the holiday would inevitably for me be of a sourness and bitterness that would spoil all my past feelings about the group. It was not quite so; but that morning I went back wide-eyed into my own small tragedy, purified as always by a stay in the wilderness.
When I got back, I ate some grapes and joined the others, who were sleeping and lying under the trees by the roadside. M and her group were not there, but I felt too hot and too tired, too immured to worry. The villagers stood in the road above and stared at us. A crippled, trembling beggar came to each of us in turn. His thanks were so humble and profuse that to give him money was not charity, but self-esteem bought cheap.
That night was Nanni’s night. After dinner she announced that she was going to get drunk on Malaga. We were all sitting round a large table and she sat there smiling like a virgin endlessly tired of her virginity; and drank glass after glass of Malaga. I went and filled her glass at the bar once or twice and put more than a dash of cognac to pep up the process. Everyone began to tease her, make her see double, rock the table, miscount the glasses she had had. Her eyes began to cloud, and she talked in a loud voice unusual for her, but she held it admirably. Jouteau watched with a little smile that held no amusement. He seemed jealous of me because I led the teasing. She must have had ten or twelve glasses, the best part of a bottle, when we decided to go down to the village swing – five or six of us. The main street was crowded, and we had the same effect as the Pied Piper of Hamelin. First of all children, then youths, then everybody, laughing and shouting and jostling behind us. I took Nanni on the swing – a sea of faces, tipping and tilting. She began to croon with pleasure. The crowd got more and more excited, and the swing-man with them, until I began to feel extremely scared, as we threatened to go right round the top. The whole frame trembled and lurched at each new plunge. Nanni screamed with excitement. I made noises and tried not to imagine what would happen if we were flung or crashed to the concrete ground below. We stopped in the end, but Nanni wanted to go on and I had to experience the whole ordeal again.
The crowd became uncontrollable. We walked back towards the café singing arm in arm, dancing, with a mad crowd of villagers, several hundred strong, behind us. They began to jostle and pinch and punch us – all in good fun, but it began to get a little rough. There were little groups running and shouting in all directions. All men except for the children. I began to tire of the tumult and hubbub and went to the back, where I could walk unnoticed. Suddenly, abruptly, there was silence, and four policemen came up the centre of the road. Magically the crowd melted away. A plump little man in a smart grey suit introduced himself: he was the local magistrate and apologized for the uproar. Exchange of civilities – Jouteau began to talk law with him. I sat down on a nearby wall, tired out. Nanni came and flopped beside me, took my hand and leant against me, soft and yielding. I could have led her away perhaps, felt very tempted to do so. But some inner pride stopped me, the thought of her dancing with Jouteau. To have her, but not when she was tipsy, so we sat there without talking. Jouteau kept on looking round at us. He had that nervous half-smile, and I knew he was scared of me, hated me. Or does one hate a rival? Rather the choice, all that tends towards a rival in the loved woman.
Mostly out of spite I took Nanni away to have a drink. Jouteau came soon afterwards, stood behind us with his half-smile. Paul seemed determined also to be spiteful and suggested we all sleep together. We climbed up the hill opposite the restaurant to where Jouteau had pitched his tent. I was very conscious of Nanni’s softness and warmth, her laughter and slow voice. A brilliant moon. We came on the tent under an olive-tree, then the first lightning for tomorrow’s thunder. The sides had been slashed in several places by a razor-blade. We undressed, got into our sleeping-sacks. Nanni slept right up against Jouteau’s tent. When I turned back from driving away the circle of spectators we had attracted, I saw that she had slipped her hand under his tent flap inside. I knew a spasm of jealousy and laid awake staring at the brilliant moon. My ears wide open for the smallest sound of a whisper or movement. There was none. Paul, with delightful obtuseness, was sleeping so close to Nanni that he could have touched her. Poor Jouteau, he must have been furious, although from my point of view he had the last laugh, and I lay awake for a little time unable not to spy, as the night before.
17th. A sad lunch. News had come that the broken part could not be replaced for several days. M and Titi were ill with food-poisoning, someone else had a fever, short temper, fatigue, disintegration. The heat was appalling also.
A tired, dispiriting evening; general depression, not shared by myself. I drank a little. They sang, but without Monique and Titi it lacked vigour, was sad. Some sad madrigal by de Lassus. Everyone slept together, under a huge old walnut-tree, on a downhill slope out of sight of the road. I slept apart from the others a little, smugly congratulating myself on my position, calculated to avoid the early morning sun. Thirty sleep-sacks stretched out in the moonlight. Murmurs a while, then silence.
18th. The sun had woken up the others, as I had foretold. But I did not foretell that they would come all around me and chatter like magpies. Every so often, someone would say, ‘Regardez John qui dort, c’est dégoutant,’ and I would groan, grunt, grumble. Drowsy, drowned in their voices. I liked it. We lay about under the tree, insulting each other, and feeling ill, till nearly ten. Every so often grunting herds of russet pigs would trot past, only kept away by heavy clods of earth.
Paul and I went to the fountain to wash. A sorry sight when we left it, the clear water cloudy with soap and the edges with suds. But it was delicious to wash in the little pool, in icy water, with the bare burnt hillsides all around me. I caught an enormous toad, which pissed prodigiously, and carried it back in my soapbag to the café, where it was viewed with general disgust.
Lunch under the walnut. I wanted to be at the café, near M. But a little later she came alone to sleep. Asleep, lying down, she always seemed so young and slim, nymphlike. She went away when Anique came, talking in her hard, shrill voice incessantly. I saw her lie down under an olive some way away. And could not resist going there myself some little while later, when another girl had already joined her. We lay there in silence. I can remember that hard earth, the heat and olive-branches, and her body in her tartan dress, her head on her right arm; on a cold dark September night. Oh for that sun, sunfever. Time and sun.
When she went back to the others I followed, saw jealously how Claude played with her, with his arm around her shoulder. But more than ever I felt sure she did not love him. An aloof indifference.
At six, an indignant meeting, led by Jouteau and myself. Richard and Laffont had gone off to Granada by bus. They were the leaders, and the group felt that they had not done their duty, arranged other transport, as they should. It was decided to re-elect André. Much the best thing, as he is respected, and a natural leader. We spent frustrating hours in the village trying to hire a lorry to take us to the nearest railway station. Everything seemed hopeless, but in the end a lorry-driver was found.
A scramble and midnight packing. We only had two or three hours’ sleep. There was a little rain, and the others ran to the coach. But I slept on under the walnut.
19th. The driver woke me at three. Chaos in the road. The lorry, a very small one, was backed up to the broken-down coach – everybody apathetic, undecided. I suddenly felt a surge of energy, that bounce and drive I sometimes get when everyone else is exhausted – because, perhaps. I pushed them about, got them to hurry, loaded the lorry with all our gear, made them get in, and put up the tailboard.
A wonderful night voyage through the sierras to Loja. Brilliant starlight, large mountain shapes, velvet peaks. The lorry rushed on, drove uphill, swung round bends. I sat on the tailboard, wide-awake, strong, balanced, while the others slept on each other’s shoulders, collapsed. Dawn came and the mountains grew grey, took shape, towered over us. M suddenly felt sick and came and sat beside me at the tailboard. Her knee pressed hard against mine, her head in her hands, melancholy, sweetness for me. I wanted to put my arm around her, comfort her. Too soon, with the sun just risen, we got to the station at Loja, the line running at the feet of some small hills. Coffee and cakes there. Our train came, with wide carriages, and long wood seats, no parois.fn13 I felt very sleepy, the others suddenly alive and gay – they started to sing. The long carriage was full of Spanish peasants. Jouteau started to take a hat round, as a joke, talking like a flower-day champion to each passenger in turn. Without understanding a word of what he was saying, they began to laugh. Even more miraculous, and to our vast delight, most of them gave a little money. A wave of old spirit came over us; gaiety, absurdity, the group against the outside world.
At Granada we went to see about a camping-place. A busy, modern city, outside its monuments. In the end we found a cheap boarding-house in the ugly quarter near to the station, four to a room, but at least a roof. I had the city blues again, knew we would split into our little parties, and I not be with M.
I went off with Claudine to see the Alhambra. Far and away the holiest building I saw in Spain, and for me one of the supreme masterpieces of European architecture. To go with Chartres, and the Parthenon. There is in the Alhambra an atmosphere of serenity, of grace, of shade and discreet silences, which is overwhelmingly beautiful.fn14 Each room, each court, each pool, colonnade, fountain has a subtle air of mystery, an aristocratic enigma. This is the oriental paradise, the Persian park of wonders, the Old Man of the Mountain’s hidden valley. Everywhere one glimpses the Ionian spirit of ancient Greece, delicate, smiling, faintly exotic and barbaric, feminine, above all graceful and profoundly enigmatic. The smile of the Caryatids of the great Erechtheion porch,fn15 the Da Vinci heads, the Gioconda strain in world art; one of the loveliest and most mystical of all the attitudes to the universe. Something Chinese also; silences and silent pools, peace and resignation, erotic sensations. The fountains work feebly in the Alhambra now; a pity, since the fountain is an important part of the architecture, animating, focusing, the environment. I felt very sad, very moved by the passed holiness of that palace. Related it to my own life, and the absence of Monique, and then suddenly realized that she was of the same nature as the palace, as the Erechtheion girls, the Gioconda–St Anne strain.
We waited outside for the others. I had glimpsed Titi in the distance, hoped M would be with her. But they must have left by some other route. I sat with the others in the dark, a little away from them, feeling very surly, melancholy and ripe for a poem. On the theme of:
She was not there, she was not there,
Not there in the palace this evening
But the palace was there, and she was
The palace.
I walked back with the others angrily, farouche. Jouteau had appeared and gone off with Nanni. I do not believe I have ever suffered so acutely for the absence of someone I loved. That, and a recurrent awareness that I should never see her in the Alhambra, never go there again with her, the old agonizing complex.
20th. A day at Granada, happy enough. It started well, when I woke, and saw Monique in her blue pyjamas, standing at her window, sewing. I blew her a kiss with a faun’s grin, saw her laugh, return it, both grin and kiss.fn16
But later she was gone, and I felt miserable again. I had a shower and breakfast, found myself alone with two nondescripts, hastily left them. Walked into town alone. Then all went well. I went into the Cathedral and there at once was Monique and her group. We went round the Cathedral together. I felt old in that young party. Noticed their ignorance, their bad taste (not hers; she rarely ventures an opinion, seems not to know art yet), their silliness. And always watching her, watching her. The three of them, Claude, Geneviève and Monique, always together, whispering, touching. He would be restless until he had them both in caressing range.
We had lunch together. I avoided Monique’s eyes, tried to seem normal. She seemed specially aloof, to my joy, with Claude. He seemed worried by it, kept trying to make her laugh, warm her. I wonder now if it was because I was there, and she was being kind to me. But the more she withdrew, the more I admired her. All beautiful women, like all good mountains, are difficult to approach, and both when approached never wholly show themselves except in glimpses. The secret of charm of secrecy. To hold back, keep mysteries, not as an obvious mystification, but discreetly, with taste. In her case it is natural, subconscious, as it must be to have full charm. Full charm I shall never have.
Back with them, back to the pension for news of the coach. This evening perhaps, definitely tomorrow morning.
We went back into Granada, shopping; again I stayed with Monique, unable to let her out of my sight. We came to a mantilla shop, and I found a pretty one at a cheap price. She stood beside me, feeling it, serious. She wanted one for her mother. I agreed to let her have it. ‘Mais non, John, vous êtes le premier …’ She turned over the pile wistfully; picked up that best one, and suddenly put it on.
Just for one second she attained a supreme beauty, a second which flashed right through me. The shop was a little dark, the mantilla black lace with small embroidered flowers. It framed her oval face, beautified it, accented that strange Madonna quality in her. Her head was tilted a little, she looked at me with a faint enigmatic smile, merely perhaps to ask me if it suited her. But her expression was so soft, so sweet, so tender, so mysterious that my own expression must have seemed strange, for she turned away and quickly took it off. Again that St Anne strain, this time unmistakably. The most wonderful expression a woman can achieve.
Back at the pension, a minor tragedy. Monique had lost her purse with all her money. I was amused by the general concern among the men and the indifference of the women. ‘She’s always losing things,’ said one of them. ‘Not a chance of getting it back,’ said another. But the men – myself not least – were full of advice, hope, possibilities. As for Monique, she wore that wistful little half-ashamed smile of the girl who has suddenly collapsed from a woman back to a schoolgirl – that smile, with a wry little touch of amusement at herself. When everyone else had gone to her, I found her sitting on a bench, still wistful. I talked with her for a moment, even suggested she came out on the patio. She said she could not sleep, was wide-awake. I felt vastly tempted to sit beside her, talk, comfort; and knew that if I did the game would be up. I could control my speech, but not my eyes. The only way I could talk to her was by averting my eyes, and over a long period that would seem strange. So I left her. Five minutes later, returned; but the corridor was empty. She had gone to bed, and I slept alone on the patio.
21st. We woke at dawn, waited outside a café for the coach to come. Rather tired, forlorn, tense at the prospect – it had been decided to drive non-stop to Thouars. A minimum of sleep, snatched meals, and no tourism. The coach came, and the scattered group met.
We loaded our bags, and set off, singing for a while, exuberantly on the move again. But those three days were unreal, lived in a feverish dream, out of the dry passionate heart of Andalusia to the melancholy of Thouars. For some reason I felt the transition through those three days much more acutely than I had flying from Athens to London earlier, but had time to appreciate it.
From Grenada north-east to Baza, with the snow-peaked Sierra Nevada majestically massive on our right. Arid country, eroded soil. We passed several termite villages, the houses hacked in the hillock-sides. Outer ant-shaped hillocks, troglodytic openings. On and on all through the day, the country blurred in memory, sometimes singing, usually silent, a hot monotony. We stopped for a while to eat prickly pears; nothing very marvellous in them, a sweet insipidity, and pomegranate pips, and devilish hairs. I skinned myself badly and got the hairs in my lips. Monique was there and tried to pull them out. Her small cool fingertips on my lips, like a nurse, deft, impersonal.
To Alicante at dusk. We stopped by a crowded beach, and changed into swimming-costumes in the coach; much stared at by the Spanish passers-by. The sea was unbelievably warm, like tepid tea. I swam out between two piers, and looked up at the rocky hill overlooking the town in the last faint touch of daylight. After dinner we set off again into the night and for me two or three hours of happiness. M was beside me in the back seat, between me and young Brosset, André’s cousin. We rushed down the dark road, rows of black heads nodding together, only the high shoulders of the chauffeur alert and awake.
‘Je peux dormir sur ton épaule, John. Ça ne vous gêne pas?’
I felt excellent. Claude was opposite, jeune Brosset sulky in his corner. Poor jeune, he was hopelessly in calf-love with her, following her everywhere, standing by her seat for hours, pathetically eager to catch her smiles. She was briskly cool with him, never encouraging him, never cheaply dismaying, petulant. One of her mysteries – how she managed to be so sweet, so understanding, with everybody, and how she remained so aloof, secret, unattainable, if one tried to approach her. The perfect sister, mother, comrade, and all the lover in her locked away, but with hints of felicity quite out of the modern world.
The slumber was not too comfortable, so I patted my lap. She leant across and rested her head there, her body twisted sideways, an extraordinary position in which she always seemed able to go to sleep. I felt her head, her shoulder on my thighs, her small, compact body against mine. My left hand supported her head, my right rested on her hip. The darkness, the rushing onwards. Very gently the pressure of her body increased. She slept, relaxed, slumped on me. My hand shifted lightly, each new touch of her body an inspiration to me. It was as if I was trying to draw her into me, absorb her through my fingers. It was very hot, a sticky torrid heat which made the clothes cling, and the bodies were animal, in heat. I felt all the bitter-sweetness in the beautiful transient. Her small, hot body on my thighs, the hidden mistress in her, the darkness. Night lights flashed past occasionally, so that I saw her closed eyes, the long lashes on her cheek, the red scarf over her chignon, her little breasts obscurely outlined, her slim bare arms. Became excited out of myself, married her then, since never any time elsewhere, astonished, ashamed, and profoundly disturbed. She slept on unaware of all this, and I felt as if I was betrayed by my own body – the Greek horse, enchanted, under some spell of her, had there made me blind to all the dangers. I almost for a moment believed myself spelled. We stopped for a moment, and I walked away in a kind of tumult. But when we climbed back in, she leant sideways again, and I knew the same golden ray, the same massed black storm clouds coming, and sat there in the night, intensely aware, aware of each short second of her breathing, of her.
We camped somewhere near Valencia. She got out of the coach and disappeared with Claude into the darkness. But soon came back with news of a place to sleep. She went with him, I believe, to set me upright, not foster my illusions.
The others slept, but I went down over some small dunes to the sea – a roaring line of waves, line after line of combers, a swish of shingle, and the hissing backwash. I stood there, lost in the sea, then undressed and waded in up to my waist. It was luke-warm and extraordinarily rough, a passionate Spanish sea.
22nd. To Barcelona. To begin with, seat-squabbling. Everyone wants a good seat, and tempers were under the surface. And several of us wanted to be near Monique. For the first few miles we were at opposite ends of the car, and I had an egg flip for breakfast out of spite. Got back before the others, and chose the seat behind Monique. So passed the day in comparative peace.
In the morning, I watched her combing out her long hair, down to the middle of her back, almost black, luxuriant, silky. It framed her face, gave her a Red Indian look; a beautiful wild deer-girl look, her eyes and brown face under the frame of her hair. One of her exquisite secret moments. She is coquettish, very careful with her hair, constantly touching it, retying her red chignon-scarf. A characteristic pose, head half down, her busy hands elegantly raised behind her head, her elbows like wings.
North, north, north. At Tortosa, near dark, to buy provisions. I had no money left. M at the fountain. I splashed her, her mock anger. I suddenly found my hat had gone, suspected M or possibly a village boy, but because of what I had done to Laffont did not dare say anything. The biter bit. It later appeared on my seat, and M confessed. That morning, to my delight, she for some reason quarrelled with Claude. She appeared hurt about something. He had probably gone too far; a Breton, gaillard,fn17 and unimaginative.
Tarragona. Grapes and cheese and the famous wine, which I thought no better than that we had had elsewhere. M and Geneviève were at the same restaurant, at another table, nibbling at ice-creams and talking in animated low tones. I felt happy about Claude’s disgrace, all the more since he was leaving M the next day.
For the night voyage, M slept in the same seat as Geneviève. I was not happy, nor unhappy. We went through Barcelona, a blaze of lights, the great modern city. Stood for a moment at the harbour’s edge, under the black outline of the model of Christopher Columbus’s ship,fn18 stared at the crowds for a moment, went on. We stopped to sleep about two, on a deserted beach, with the sea in our ears, and many stars.
23rd and 24th. Up at dawn again. M coming up from the beach with her blanket draped round her shoulders, her hair down, a squaw Venus, advancing down the road towards me. A divinity, even at that hour.
Le Port Bou – frontier formalities, and an exhausted sadness. Spain and sun all behind us – winter ahead. To Perpignan, happier since once more she was beside me, by chance, and we said nothing important, because I was too full of questions to speak.
She slept again, on my lap. I held her there, my face impassive, knowing this would be the last time, the last chance. Her small, piquant face with its pale brown skin, its sleeping eyes, the little mole above her lip like a strangely placed beauty spot. Her hair brushed back so strongly, straightly, into the red scarf and chignon. Her small, firm body, her breathing. All too soon we came to Perpignan, and I prayed desperately that time would stop, or we pass through. But I had to wake her, grip her shoulder, shake her.
Perpignan, roads I have travelled before. An ugly town, but an old friend. I recognized the familiar landmarks, the Castillet, a patisserie I used to go to.fn19 We had lunch, Paul and I and Monique’s group in a backstreet restaurant. Shaving at a washbasin, watching the others sitting around the table, seeing if they were leaving me a place near her. I was opposite. Spoke little, did not look at her unless I had to, saw Claude trying to warm her. She was pleasant, but cool with him.
To Narbonne. Etangs, banal meridional plains. Claude said goodbye to us all. M was asleep. The coach stopped at the station, we all got out. M still asleep. ‘Wake her,’ said somebody. ‘No, don’t bother. It doesn’t matter,’ said Claude, poor chap; though he will forget her long before me. But she came out, rubbing her eyes, smiling shyly at him, shaking his hand. Group photographs, last goodbyes. The holiday was over.
On inexorably towards Carcassonne. Monique on her own, with an empty place beside her. Brosset jeune eyed me. ‘Il y a une place à côté de Monique, John, si tu n’es pas confortable là.’ He wanted it himself, I could see; was testing me. ‘Je veux bien,’ I said, shrugging and inwardly dancing, and went and sat beside her. The most overt ‘move’ I had made. She must have realized the situation. It was a cloudy evening, sombre country on the way to Cahors. For a time we said nothing, she with her cold, dispassionate face looking out of the window, myself stealing glances sideways at her.
I asked her about work. ‘Il faut que je travaille demain.’ We knew we would be travelling through the night, not at Thouars till eight in the morning. I marvelled at her toughness, felt brutally disillusioned by life taking this fairy and making her work to a laboratory routine, clock in at nine, come what may. I asked her more about her job, and got her to talk a little more warmly. Wished the group could come to England. This was the last year, though. I was silent and she spoke my thoughts. ‘On ne se verra jamais, John.’ She meant by ‘se’ – everyone – but it was for me only relevant to ourselves, and she said it so casually, dispassionately that it almost slapped me over the face. As if to say, ‘You see, I don’t care a damn really.’ I hoped she might fall asleep, but she remained awake, sad.
We got a picnic supper at some small town at dusk. M was gayer, laughed when I made some joke. But I left her alone, too timid to advance at such a late hour.
We set off again. I had imagined spending that night beside her, having her sleep against me. But she sat now with Geneviève, opposite my seat, and I was with Alfred, least wanted at that moment. But he got up to go and sit with someone in the back, and the place was empty. I saw Monique nodding, her head back, and every few minutes looking up, wearily out of the window. I sat wide-awake, staring into the darkness, aware of the situation and the hopelessness. Suddenly her voice. ‘John, John’ – leaning across Geneviève to speak to me. My dry mouth. She smiled the smallest amount. ‘Je ne peux pas dormir ici. Ça ne vous gêne pas?’ She was standing, I was standing to let her pass into the window seat. She slipped sideways at once into my arms, relaxed against me. I was drowned with happiness, a thousand times more happiness than embracing a naked G had ever given me.
I still cannot quite account for that sudden move of hers. For comfort? Or charity, since I cannot believe she had not guessed that I loved her. A moment of tenderness. Yet normally she never gave herself like that to anyone. I wondered if it was a sign to me, some hint.
Headlights flashed past us. I did not sleep, but nursed her body. She slept, heavily against me. At one place – Cahors – we got out for a minute, and when we went back I went in the window seat and let her rest in my arms, against my breast, holding all of her. I let my head bow, felt my head rest on hers. Our fingers touched, soon interlaced, but there was no pressure. For a time we changed, and I rested against her shoulder, but she seemed so slight, so fragile, that I was afraid to relax and let myself sleep. I tried sleeping with my head on her thighs, but that was no better. I was too alive to her, in any case, to think of sleep, and soon let her sleep in my arms again. She will never know – or will she, did she? – the fire she put into me, the happiness bestowed, by that one small whim, that coming across to me.
I knew then that I had for a moment known true love. I have never before felt myself capable of anything to keep a love. I would have done anything to prolong that night, given all my life to be petrified at that one point. Could have given all of myself without reserve or cynicism to her.
At Perigueux Françoise Brosset’s young man left us. Françoise kissed him, and began to cry. Monique led her back inside and sat down with her, her arms around her. I could have cried myself. By a dreadful irony, the fat coarse Anique came and asked if the seat was free. ‘Oui, oui,’ said Monique, behind. ‘Allez-y. J’ai assez dormi. Vraiment.’ So the monster plumped down beside me. A little later, I looked round at Monique. She was sitting very upright, the sobbing Françoise on her shoulder, with remote eyes that looked at me almost without recognition; a woman comforting a woman’s trouble, full of a noble compassion, the Madonna. I felt no longer jealous, now bitter, but sad. There is a wonderful nun in her, beyond analysis. The exalted, regal compassion of Notre Dame.
The rest, hell. I dozed, was cold. It rained continuously. Anique kept leaning against me, but I leant away from her. Through Poitiers, old memories, a grey wet dawn. I was suddenly gripped by stomach pains, a sharp attack of dysentery. The last hour or so was an agony for me, my mind and body fighting the grips that racked my intestines. The others sang. I saw Monique in the back, and an empty place beside her, but could not move. When we got to Thouars, I had to run for André’s house, and even then all but arrived too late. A ridiculous, disgusting irony in things.
Fifteen minutes later, weak but relieved, I went back to the square to say goodbye. Catalpas and cold grey houses with light grey shutters. A few parents, a damp, cloudy sky and a pile of jetsam on the ground. I sorted out my belongings, and stood there sadly, shaking hands. When it came to Monique, her eyes met without teasing, with a smile – liking and friendship and sorrow at parting on her side, sweet and sincere and all I could expect. I nearly said something foolish – perhaps should have done. She climbed in the coach with some of the others, to go to her home on the other side of Thouars. I stood there with Paul, not watching anything else but her face through the window, looking back at us, sadly, gently. I blew her a kiss, she blew it back, waved and was gone.
I plunged into a sea of melancholy. Went back to André’s, shaved and washed, packed up my things. I was anchorless, stagnant, all will, all hope gone in one breath; unable to get any way in again, wanting to fade out of the picture. I walked down to the station – a cold, grey day – and suddenly saw a notice on a door – Laboratoire Analytique – an ugly little house with a black brick wall, upright windows. Where she worked. On the way back from the station, I lingered, loitered there, in the faintest hope that she might be inside, see me, or be met by me as she came. Seeing that squat, grey building seemed too unbearably poignant. I walked back to André’s drowned in misery.
Paul took me home with him to Cholet, some sixty miles away.fn20 For once, his enthusiasm and earthiness soothed me, lulled me, and I was clinging to any link with Thouars, with her. Even now, I think of the comb I use as that which I bought at Thouars on the day I saw her last.
A quick lunch in Paul’s flower-surrounded house, then to the train, a slow, springless, start-stopping French provincial train. It rained, grey clouds, small woods and poplars.
Ginettefn21 was waiting for me at Paris – how I viewed the prospect of seeing her only with disgust. All of me went back to Thouars, was being wrenched away, my body torn in two. For an hour I was at grips with time, saw time’s savagery as I have never seen it before. The impossibility of ever achieving Monique, the going-away, the constant departure. I sat there, unable to read, unable to sleep, only to cry silently.
This year it was not the group, but Monique. All that I liked best in them, all that I like best in France, was in her. This year she was a young woman, not last year’s mischievous, wayward schoolgirl. Everything green and expectant in her, her swift moods, her laughter, gloom, gaiety, seriousness, April Monique – all that still sobs in the transient.
I have wallowed in the melancholy, idealized her, not talked of her faults, the practical things that would make me less romantic around her. But she touched the romantic spring in me, and that’s well hidden. Right through the armour.
Fear of the transitory, ecstasy in it, is the oldest, truest suffering. A Roman road, forever straight. The landscapes change, but not the direction. What I felt in that little train to Angers, every lover has felt and every poet felt. Still a valid thing to express.
She made me a Romantic.
Made me examine my nationality till I see that France is my native country.
The sadness soon of sadness fading.
That tingling, ecstatic greenness when her voice leapt at the highpoint of a song.
Roy Christy, a friend of Denys Sharrocks, and a new candidate for Spetsai. With a trim beard, wrinkled eyes, a wife and child. A lower middle-class intellectual; but seriously a writer, it seems. Two works written. I had a feeling of superiority – something about him molelike, industrious, unimaginative. No holy fire.fn22
17 September
Leigh. Animal talk. How I hate the way my mother mothers the dog and the bird and even the goldfish. Bright baby talk, as if they were human. A gross lack of proportion. I would kill a thousand budgerigars to set one wild sparrow free. This morning also, an indignant letter about the cruelty of bullfighting in the Daily Telegraph – British sportsmanship and all the rest of it. ‘We hope Englishmen will refuse to support this barbaric spectacle,’ and so on. That puritanical tight-lipped urge to interfere. Of course it is cruel. But so is life in Spain. No account taken of man’s part, the terrible risks, the savage poetry, the magnificence of wasted blood. A luxury civilization can well afford. Only people who live out of the sun, in the universal suburbia of modern England, could bleat so insipidly.
The intellectual Oxford accent – my own voice. I hate the colourless aristocracy of that voice, those sounds. Love more and more the provincial, the strange, the sincere. A voice should have colour, not academic euphony.
A bitter little argument with Father about America. He shouted angrily against the NS and N attitude to the USA.fn23 We began to disagree violently. As a boy he used to crush me by his methods of argument – red herrings, sophisms, a pugnacious, positive certainty in all he said. Shades of a prosecuting counsel manqué. Now I can see all the non-sequiturs and angry changes of subject when he is cornered. I try and talk coldly, lucidly, objectively, on one point. He talks emotionally about several.
‘I think America’s wonderful,’ he said, ‘wonderful, and do you know why? Because she’s top dog.’
‘I don’t see that that follows necessarily.’
‘Of course it does. Everything that’s top dog is wonderful. It must be, to get top dog.’
‘I suppose Hitler was wonderful in 1940–41. He was top dog then.’
‘But he wasn’t top dog then. We weren’t beaten.’
‘Then America’s not top dog today. Russia isn’t beaten.’
‘Well, I’d damn well like to know who controls the Western world, if America doesn’t.’
So on and so on, hopping from one untenable position to another. Ten minutes later he was denying that he had even said all that is top dog is wonderful. I compared Greece and Rome, likened them to Europe and N. America. But he hardly listened, and went on about America and her money. ‘If you’ve got the money, you’ve got everything. Nobody else matters. Where would Europe be without America? Nowhere. Europe’s gutless, decadent, finished with.’ He gets this from misinterpreting Toynbee.fn24 Nonsense about every new age being a better age because it is new.
But the reference to Europe flicked me on the raw. The European civilizations have been as great as anything the American or Asian eras are likely to produce. A filthy intellectual treachery to his continent. It made me so angry that I did not speak and listened to him racing off on wilder and wilder tangents, with M putting in her appalling little clichés – ‘Of course, it’s Russia against America now’ – every few minutes. He reads nothing but philosophy and logic and seems to have learnt nothing from them. More pitiful I find the money complex: that all that is gold must glitter. A personal worry, complex and repression, which he allows to taint his universal views.
I heard a broadcast the other day by the best contemporary English madrigalist. A flawless, heartless performance, as dry and hollow as an old bone. I compared it with the green sincerity of the Thouarsaises. We are beginning to be dazzled by execution, rate technique above all other interpreters’ virtues. I saw Cosi Fan Tutti in Paris, perfectly performed, on the highest level of competence, yet with not one moment of fire, real interpretive warmth. And a ballet performance here in Southend which was good enough, without any faults – and without any virtues. It is not only that the public want the big names with the big tricks, but the critics judge everything by the way the tricks are performed. Too much entertainment today is machine-crude, everywhere. More and more it is the warmth and the sincerity that engage me. I prefer amateurs, in the true sense, clumsily on fire to experts coldly perfect.
That is why I like jazz, New Orleans jazz, and all real folk music and folk art. Nowadays the experts seem to save their fire up for first nights and festivals; elsewhere they coast along. (A point for the film – only one effort needed, so burn in it.)
I have these days a sincerity complex. Trying to strip all the poses away, with myself and with others. It seems to me that I penetrate people, see through and into them, can analyse them exactly, know them better in the secret round than they know themselves. The appalling hypocrisy everywhere existent, rampant in the Anglo-Saxon psychology. I feel like a single upright figure in a multitude of fetish-worshipping carpet-creepers. Only the odd individuality impresses me.
Roy Christy impresses me a little. I spent a night with him at his mews flat at Hampton Court. A bearded, shrewd, jovial personality, very sincere and serious in his literary ambitions. He spoke vigorously, with a slight Lancashire accent; an intelligent, poor but happy man, whom I could not quite penetrate (and therefore liked). I read fragments of his novel, matter-of-fact and almost naïf. I was reminded of D. H. Lawrence, the Lawrence of Sons and Lovers, the industrial North. What I do not like in Northcountrymen is their quietness their lack of ostentation and fire – DHL is not typical with his fire – their drab mousiness and their tired domestic voices. Denys Sharrocks has it a little, and Christy as well, although they are both almost origin-free intellectuals.
I envied him his courage in changing careers in mid-stream; and his first horse, architecture, he rode very well; and now enters literature without a penny. And his wife, a matter-of-fact classless modern girl, tall, pretty and well-dressed, who had stuck by him and encouraged him to find himself.fn25
There was some embarrassment over money. God, how I wish one could treat money and love without feeling embarrassed. But I shall not be able to meet him again without remembering he owes me five shillings. While I was there, he showed me some of Denys Sharrocks’ poems, written during the war. Unmusical, complex (and at one reading, almost meaningless) little bits of emotional experience. Denys will never come to anything. He has read too much; could be an erudite critic. Christy seems to read very little. ‘Distracts me from writing,’ he says. Time I read little also; knowing now all the major bones in the literary skeleton.
Parents on holiday in Suffolk; house to myself; a delicious sense of freedom, meals when I liked, bed when I liked, noisy jazz records at midnight. I revelled in it, and did nothing except revise a few old poems. I am getting more and more temperamental about being in the mood for writing. A matter not of willpower, but coaxing whatever one has of genius. Talent? Damn talent.
fn1 JF’s father had on a previous occasion shown his son a novel he had written based on his experiences during the First World War.
fn2 JF was going to join the same ‘famille Thouarsaise’ group of young students with whom he had travelled to Switzerland, the Tyrol and Bavaria the previous year.
fn3 The Convent of Santo Tomás. Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98), the archinquisitor, is buried in the sacristy.
fn4 This tomb belongs not to the Don Juan, but Prince Juan (1478–97), the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella.
fn5 The huge fortress, monastery and palace built by Philip II (1527–98) about fifty kilometres north-west of Madrid.
fn6 JF is thinking of The Three Ages of Man (1539): behind the naked figure of a young woman stands the old woman she will become, and then Death holding an hour glass. Hans Baldung (1484/5–1545) trained with Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg. ‘Grien’ was a nickname probably indicating his preference for the colour green.
fn7 The word bachot is colloquial for ‘baccalauréat’, the French school-leaving examination leading to university entrance.
fn8 In her novel Clélie (1654) Madeleine de Scudéry (1608–1701) created an allegorical ‘Map of Love’, which described the route from ‘Nouvelle Amitié’ (New Friendship) to ‘Love’, which de Scudéry termed ‘Le Tendre’. The traveller would pass through such hamlets as Tendresse or Constante Amitié, but, if he lost his way, would risk stumbling upon such dangers as the cliffs of Orgueil (Pride) or the Mer d’Inimitié (Sea of Enmity).
fn9 ‘No longer “Throne and Altar”; “Machine-gun and altar”.’ With the Concordat of Bologna in 1515, François I reached an agreement with the Pope – which would last until the French Revolution – giving the French crown almost complete control over the disposal of the higher positions in the French Catholic Church.
fn10 Cordoba Cathedral, known as La Mezquita (‘The Mosque’), was originally the great mosque of the Ommayyad caliphs. It began to be built after the Moors entered Cordoba in the eighth century.
fn11 Seville Cathedral is the largest Gothic structure in the world. It was built between 1402 and 1506 on the site of a twelfth-century mosque. The Giralda tower, nearly a hundred metres high, was originally the mosque’s minaret.
fn12 Incorporating fragments from earlier Moorish buildings, the Alcazar palace was built by Pedro I in the fourteenth century.
fn13 Partitions.
fn14 Situated on a high plateau overlooking Granada, the Alhambra complex contains a number of palaces built by a succession of Moorish rulers. Although it was begun in the fourteenth century by Ibn el-Ahmar, the founder of the Nasrite dynasty, most of what can be seen today was built by Yusuf I (1334–54) and Mohammed V (1354–91). With its honeycomb cupolas, horseshoe arches and delicate tracery, it brings to mind the sort of palace a Sultan might build in an Arabian Nights tale.
fn15 The Caryatids are the stone maidens who support the porch at the west end of the Erectheion temple on the Acropolis.
fn16 The glimpse of Monique occasioned this poem:
I blew her a kiss with a faun’s grin
Saw her laugh, return both grin and kiss
Across the sunlit morning yard.
Her bent head at the window,
Sewing, and I in the shade not yet risen,
Full of sleep, still star-enchanted,
Watching her fingers pull their threads,
Arched in sunlight. She sat on the sill
In her blue pyjamas, and I in the patio
Not yet risen, caught in her sewing,
Her gaiety, grace and greenness,
Weighing that one second’s lipsent kiss
Against the limitless whole of eternity.
En pension, Granada, 20 September 1952
fn17 Forward.
fn18 A full-size replica of the Santa Maria is moored in the fourteenth-century Royal Shipyards at Barcelona, now part of the Maritime Museum. It was from Barcelona that Columbus set off on his famous trip when he discovered America.
fn19 Perpignan is just a few kilometres to the north of Collioure, where JF stayed in the summer of 1948. See introduction here.
fn20 Cholet is actually about fifty kilometres to the north-west of Thouars.
fn21 i.e. Ginette Marcailloux.
fn22 Roy Christy, born in 1920, had been senior to Sharrocks at the King George V Grammar School, Southport, and then attended Liverpool University, where the two became friends. He graduated from Liverpool in architecture and joined the staff of the Kingston College of Art and Architecture in 1948. At about the same time he divorced his first wife, Marie Wright, a fellow student at Liverpool whom he had married three years previously. In 1950 he married Elizabeth Whitton, whom he had met in Kingston. They had a child, Anna, in the November of that year but the added responsibility did not prevent him from giving up his architectural practice with the aim of becoming a novelist. Of a romantic, extrovert temperament, ‘he lived under the illusion,’ in the words of JF, ‘that he was D. H. Lawrence’. This being so, Sharrocks’s stories of life on a Greek island contained an obvious romantic appeal for Christy, who felt that here was the place to provide him with literary inspiration. He applied for a vacant teaching post and, with letters of support to the school’s governors from both Sharrocks and JF, got the job.
fn23 The New Statesman and Nation was critical of both the USA’s free market policies and her increasingly hostile attitude towards the Soviet Union, which the magazine feared would provoke war.
fn24 In his twelve-volume work A Study of History Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), a hugely influential figure of the time, had put forward the view that Western civilization was in a process of decline, which only a re-awakening of spiritual and religious values could reverse.
fn25 Elizabeth Christy had been born in Walsall, near Birmingham, on 7 October 1925. Her father, Edgar Whitton, was an electrician, and her mother Doris (née Culm) was the daughter of a shaving brush manufacturer and had worked as a book-keeper. A sister, Joanne, would be born in 1940.