After that they talked about Lisa. Diana told him about their childhood and what Lisa had been like then. She found some old photographs and showed them to Miles. They talked about their marriage and why it had happened and what it was like. “I coaxed you into love, Miles. It was not like Parvati, not like Lisa.”
”You coaxed me back to life. Perhaps only you could have done it.” They talked of Miles’s loves and whether he had really loved Lisa from long ago and whether he would have married her if he had met her first. They talked in quiet voices like two very old people talking about things that had happened long ago in the distant past. It was then that Miles began to notice that some change had come about, that the world looked quite different, that it had been turned inside out.
The pain was not less. Or perhaps it must have become less since he could behave normally, eat meals and go back to the office. It was as if the pain remained there but he had grown larger all round it and could contain it more easily. It no longer bent and racked his body. He carried it inside himself gently, almost gingerly, as if it were a precious egg. He sat very upright in the tube train, sat quietly at his desk in the office, nursing his pain, letting his body hold it carefully, lightly. He thought a great deal about Parvati and a great deal about Lisa. Their shades travelled with him wherever he went. And he experienced his loss as if it were one loss, blankly and without consolation, and his eyes seemed to open upon it, wider and wider, as he stared at what had happened and nursed the great egg of pain inside him.
During this time he often heard Diana telling him to leave her and to go to Lisa. He heard her words, to which he gave no reply except to smile and shake his head. The words had no connection now with practice or with the everyday pat tern of his life. He knew now that Lisa was an impossibility and had to be an impossibility. That was indeed her role, her task, her service to him. He would never cease to love her. But he felt that he would probably never meet her again. She was dedicated, separated, withdrawn forever beyond a grille, behind a curtain. And he would worship her cold virtue until he could see her no longer. He recalled the superb negativity of her last appearance. “No talk.”
”Will you write to me?”
”No.” Indeed in his thought she was already changing. The girl whom he had known for so many years, the sick girl, the deprived one, the silent one, was already being obscured by something else. A tall cold angel, chilly and strong as a steel shaft, seemed to be materializing, never more to leave his side. The angel of death, perhaps of Parvati’s death.
Of course Miles knew what was going to happen next. He smiled his secret smile, he smiled alone, and he smiled at Diana, smiled through Diana, as she urged him that it was not too late to go to Lisa. He was in no hurry now, for he was in the hands of another power. On warm sunny spring evenings he sat in the little summerhouse, disregarding Diana’s anxiety about its being damp. When the weather was cold or rainy he sat at his study window watching the fast grey clouds falling down over the top of the Earls Court Exhibition Hall. When it grew dark he sat there in the darkness and looked out into the red glowing London sky. His thoughts became vague, floating, warm. They began to disintegrate as the darkness be low them stirred and shifted. They began to fall apart into images.
Miles started writing poetry. He wrote easily. Huge chunks, great complicated pieces, arrived complete. Images fluttered about him, practically blinding him with their multiplicity. There is a grace of certainty about being in love. There is a grace of certainty in art, but it is very rare. Miles felt it now as he heard in poetry for the first time his own voice speaking and not that of another. And he knew that the moment had come at last when he could with humility call himself a poet. He had waited long enough and he had tried to wait faithfully. Yet it seemed to him now that he had simply not known how to wait, and that his attempts to prepare himself for the great service into which he was now entered had all been mistaken ones. He had strained and pulled and scratched fretfully at the surfaces of life, while the great other watched and smiled. What had availed him now, what had bundled him through the barrier into the real world, this Miles knew too, but now that his life’s work had begun he averted his gaze. And more deeply and calmly he knew that when the frenzy left him-for it could not last forever-he would be left with all the tools of his trade.
Diana and Miles had begun to walk back through the cemetery, with their arms round each other’s waists. They walked very slowly, like an old couple. The evening sun shone upon the shining arches of the new grass and a rich smell of wet earth floated in the warm air. The avenue of lime trees was misted with young leaves.
Diana said, “I think you ought to have an electric fire in the summerhouse. It wouldn’t be too difficult to arrange.”
”Warm days are coming now.”
”Yes, but it is damp in there. And if we made it really warm you could work there in the winter too.”
”I should like that. Especially if it snowed!”
”Especially if it snowed. I’d have to make the whole place completely draught-proof of course. What’s the name of that stuff that you put round the doors and windows to seal them?”
”I can’t remember.”
”I’ll ask the ironmonger tomorrow.”
30
Adelaide’s tears dropped into the open drawer, making damp spots on the pink and blue jumble of her underwear. They fell, as she straightened up, onto the sleeve of her new black suit, which was made of a corduroy so fine that it carried a grey surface haze like shot silk. She smudged the tears away with her hand, hoping that they would not make a mark upon the corduroy. She peered at herself in the dressing-table mirror. The hotel room did not provide a long glass. The frilly white blouse, also new, seemed to be the wrong size after all. She had bought it in a hurry. The frills refused to emerge elegantly at the neck of the jacket but remained crushed and jumbled inside, and if she tried to pull them out the blouse came adrift at the waist. But it was too late to do anything about that now, or about the blue necklace of Venetian beads which just did not look right on top of the blouse. She should have realized it was the wrong length. She took off the neck lace and dropped it into her suitcase. Then she adjusted the mirror, stood back, and began cautiously to mount on a chair. By this method she could see the reflection of her lower half, see the black cord skirt, the invisible nylon stockings, and the black patent-leather shoes with the steel buckle. Well, she thought, I certainly look right for a funeral.
She got down again very carefully. Adelaide was always afraid of falling and felt giddy standing on a chair. She picked up her little black velvet hat and began to dust it, holding it well away from herself, and leaning forward a little so that the tears should fall onto the floor and not onto her suit or hat. How is it possible, thought Adelaide, to go on crying for such a long time, one would think that the supply would run out. Where do they come from, these tears? She pictured a great lachrymose reservoir, the tears of a lifetime: and at the thought of how many she would still without doubt have to shed, the flowing stream redoubled. I’ve cried so much lately, it’ll damage my eyes, she thought, it’ll alter my appearance permanently. I really must stop, but how? She studied her face in the mirror. Her eyes were puckered and oozing and surrounded by great red circles of swollen skin. Her whole face was red and swollen and hot, its surface shiny with dried and half-dried tears. God, I look terrible, thought Adelaide. How can I put any make-up onto that?
She began to comb her hair, dropping the little balls of loose hair at intervals into the hotel wastepaper basket. Her hair seemed to be coming out more than usual. It was not the right colour either. She had had to go to a strange hairdresser’s and the girl had tinted it to a much lighter brown. She wondered how noticeable this was. She had not yet got used to having short hair and got a shock from her looking glass every morning. The great length of cut hair travelled with her. The hairdresser had offered to buy it, but Adelaide could not con sent to this, although the weird severed object caused her horror. She patted her new head. She had hoped that short hair would make her look younger. Now she thought it just made her look blowsy and untidy. She could not decide whether to push the short light-brown locks back behind her ears or to let them hang. They looked wrong either way. Perhaps it had been an awful mistake to have her hair cut off. But she knew perfectly well why she had done it.