I don’t know how long we stayed there, but eventually the policeman went, and the attendant came to let us out. We wanted to see how Charlie was doing, but the attendant would not let us. He drove us out, heedless of our apologies. In the sunlight we felt very stupid and exhausted. As we walked away we could hear the attendant and Charlie greeting each other below the earth. The noise they made was like the beginnings of a water-spout.
Peter was meeting Annabelle for tea, and I went with him. As we walked I asked him, “Do things like that often happen to you?” and he said, “They seem to,” and after a while he added, “They do if you look for them, you know. They seem quite often to happen to me.”
And I suppose they did. Looking back on the days that I spent at this time with Peter and Annabelle and Marius, it seems that something like that was always liable to happen; wherever I went with them the expectation of an extraordinary incident followed us like a ghost, even quite normal occasions being turned by this sense of anticipation into moments of oddity. It was all happy at first, while the laughter of the ghost was a benevolent laughter. It was only later that the ghost, as if in the passing of time he had grown tired of such childishness, became malevolent. It was then, as Alice had said, that life demanded to be taken as a business. But we were all young when I first knew them, and we did not look ahead to the future.
As I walked with Peter I thought of how it seemed that whenever I was in the presence of any of them I ceased to be conscious of myself as an individual and became, for the moment, a working part of the function in which we were engaged. And it was in this guise that the feeling of myself as an individual, as apart from consciousness, became actual. Going up the street through the sunlight I existed as a movement of the passing afternoon, but the existence was a real one, an experience that demanded neither thought nor question, a certainty that was very different from the dreams and self-enquiries of my moods when I was alone. I wondered if this was what Alice had described as fun, but the function of childishness would not have been fun to her. And then there were moments when the oddity was too mysterious for laughter.
Peter led the way into a store in Regent Street, up in a lift to the restaurant where the air was warm and scented, and as I looked around me turning with the heat of the room I saw Annabelle sitting with Marius at a table for four. We went across and sat opposite them, Peter facing Marius and Annabelle facing me, and Peter began telling Marius the story of the man with the iron bars. There was a band playing wearily in the corner, and Peter’s words seemed to swim among the music like a child splashing gaily in an oily sea. Annabelle was not listening to the story, nor to the music, and as I watched her her eyes went down from Peter, down to the table-cloth which was blue and chequered and on which two knives lay, and she took one of the knives in her smaller pointed fingers and spun it, carefully, so that it flashed under the light like a catherine wheel. I was watching her hands and her wrists as they disappeared into the sleeves of her dress, and all the time she was looking downwards so that the lashes of her eyes were visible like fringes against her cheeks. Peter was saying, “A free lavatory, just think of it, a free lavatory,” and Annabelle was leaning forwards with her hair falling down over her forehead and the neck of her dress open slanting against her throat. The warm oily water of the restaurant lapped around us, and Marius was laughing at Peter as he splashed, and Annabelle and I were floating like two bubbles in the sea. As she sat I had the impression that her clothes were quite separate from her, they were drapings of a statue unveiled and alone. At the centre there was darkness, the darkness of a cave: and as the sea broke over her, as the bubbles were devoured, the openings at her wrists and throat were yet caverns which the waves dared not enter, chasms of infinity in which the swimmer might drown. I wished that all might dissolve, become one with the waters; and Peter was saying, “No, not comic, tragic: just think of the tragedy of that poor man’s nose.”
“The irony of it,” Marius said.
“Oh Marius,” Peter said, “what a dreadful joke!”
The sea and Annabelle. Somebody laughed. “I saw Alice the other day,” I said to Marius.
“Oh did you? I wondered which one of us she would continue with.”
“Who is Alice?” Peter said.
“One of your enemies. . ”
“I have no enemies,” Peter said. “Perhaps she is in love with you, Marius.”
“Oh always love. . ” Annabelle began.
“I have only those whom I understand and those whom I don’t understand. Is Alice old?”
“Not very. She is someone who tries to keep one jump ahead of you like an electric hare.” Marius gave a short description of Alice.
“That is what I don’t understand. Isn’t it extraordinary how they behave?”
“This silly ‘they’,” Annabelle said.
“But it means something. ‘They’ are the one-jump-ahead people — the gay, the superficial, the successful. I envy them. They deal exclusively with ambition and seduction.”
“Alice is an oddity,” Marius said.
“I envy them. I understand no one except ourselves. Everyone else I have met belongs to ‘they.’ They think about power, bed, clothes, and servants. Why? One might as well collect matchboxes. They are the army of the great irreligious.”
“Are you religious?” Annabelle said.
“I think about it. I wish I didn’t. I tell you I like these electric hares. Life must be very pleasant for them. But they must be distinguished. It is not good pretending that someone who is obsessed with power and bed and clothes and servants is the same as someone who isn’t. Do you know, they often fly a hundred miles for a game of cards and a thousand for a horse-race?”
“Would you like that?” Annabelle said.
“I should like to enjoy it. I am afraid it would depress me terribly. But I should like to study them, perhaps to get one jump ahead of them. What do they think about in the aeroplane? I should like to ask them that.”
“It is too much of a battle,” Marius said. “A whole-time job.”
“That’s why they do it. They have no other whole-time job. I have never had a job in my life, but I should never have time to play cards.”
“Big battles,” Annabelle said, “and war.”
“Nobody has a whole-time job anymore. Only a few have a whole-time life. The rest have to kill time. Have you ever thought what a good phrase that is — killing time?”
“A frightening one,” Annabelle said.
“Yes. But I should like to meet this Alice. Why not ask her round?”
“She wants to meet you,” I said.
“She does? Perhaps we have a glamour for them too. We will have a battle. Is this the first jump?”
“And who’s the greyhound?” Annabelle said.
“I told you she was in love with Marius.”
“Perhaps she is in love with you,” Marius said.
“With me? How spectacular!”
“No.”
“Oh, well then, how spectacular for you,” Peter said to me.
“I feel quite fond of this Alice,” Annabelle said.