Politics, so far as Beatrice was concerned, was one of the careers open to men: no more and no less. (She saw Laura’s devotion to politics as proof of her heartlessness.) She was interested in the stories and characters of Greek mythology—but not in history. She knew nothing of the fate of the Amaxosa. When people spoke, as they did continually in Musgrave Road, Durban, or at the Royal Hotel, of the ‘treachery of the Boers’ and the ‘Boer atrocities’, she had the impression that everyone was waiting their opportunity to compete, like singers at an audition, in saying the necessary phrases with their own individual gestures and signs of emotion. The competition never ended so long as there was a second person present. Other subjects included The Empire, The Character of the Kaffir, The Qualities of The British Soldier, The Role of the Missionary. She never questioned the assumptions which underlay the phrases. Both assumptions and competition bored her. She acquired the habit of appearing to listen whilst studying the speaker’s fingers, or looking out of the window or wondering what she herself would be doing in half an hour. Thus her time and her attention were frequently unoccupied. And this is what led to her disturbance, to the possibility of the sub-continent haunting her.
Precisely because she lacked the protection of ready-made generalizations and judgements, because she allowed her thoughts to wander aimlessly, because she lacked what all administrators and troops oppressing another nation must always maintain—a sense of duty without end, she began to feel, between the interstices of formal social convention, the violence of the hatred, the violence of what would be avenged.
In Pietermaritzburg she saw a loyal Dutchman (loyal to the Queen) beating his kaffir servant. As he beat him he made a noise in his throat like a laugh. His mouth was open and his tongue was between his teeth. His passion was such that he did not wish to stop until he had annihilated the body he was beating: yet however hard he beat it, he could not annihilate it. From this arose the necessity of his cry which resembled a laugh. His expression was like that of a small child deliberately shitting himself. The servant, absolutely silent, hunched himself against the blows.
Sometimes in the way an African ran she saw the defiance of all his race.
She could not explain her feelings to herself. There is an historical equivalent to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious. Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by that world-view. ‘Mysteries’ grow up within or around the ideological system. Eventually these mysteries destroy it by providing the basis for a new world-view. Medieval witchcraft, for example, may be seen in this light.
A moment’s introspection shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the total human situation. In certain respects we are likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves. Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now be alien to us. They will change our unformulated experience beyond our recognition. As we have changed Beatrice’s.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
She sat down cross-legged on the rug by her bed to examine the wasp bite on her instep. There was still a pink circle, the size of a halfpenny; but her foot was no longer swollen. Her foot lay on her hand as though it were a dog’s head, whose gaze was concentrated upon the door. Abruptly unbuttoning her wrap and pulling her nightdress up over her knees, she lifted her foot and, bending her head forward, placed the foot behind her neck. The hair that fell over it felt cool. She tried to straighten her back as far as she could. After a while she lowered her head, lifted her foot down and sat cross-legged, smiling.
I see a horse and trap drawn up by the front door of the farmhouse. In it is a man in black with a bowler hat. He is portly and unaccountably comic. The horse is black and so too is the trap except for its white trimming. I am looking down on the horse and trap and the man who is so comically correct and regular, from the window of Beatrice’s room.
On the table between the window and the large four-poster bed is the vase of white lilac. The smell of it is the only element that I can reconstruct with certainty.
She must be thirty-six. Her hair, usually combed up into a chignon, is loose around her shoulders. She wears an embroidered wrap. The embroidered leaves mount to her shoulder. She is standing in bare feet.
The boy enters and informs her that the papers for the man in the trap were the correct ones.
He is fifteen: taller than Beatrice, dark-haired, large-nosed but with delicate hands, scarcely larger than hers. In the relation between his head and shoulders there is something of his father—a kind of lunging assurance.
Beatrice lifts an arm towards him and opens her hand.
Pushing the door shut behind him, he goes towards her and takes her hand.
She, by turning their hands, ensures that they both look out of the window. At the sight of the man in black on the point of leaving they begin to laugh.
When they laugh they swing back the arms of their held hands and this swinging moves them away from the window towards the bed.
They sit on the edge of the bed before they stop laughing.
Slowly they lie back until their heads touch the counterpane. In this movement backwards she slightly anticipates him.
They are aware of a taste of sweetness in their throats. (A sweetness not unlike that to be tasted in a sweet grape). The sweetness itself is not extreme but the experience of tasting it is. It is comparable with the experience of acute pain. But whereas pain closes anticipation of everything except the return of the past before the pain existed, what is now desired has never existed.
From the moment he entered the room it has been as though the sequence of their actions constituted a single act, a single stroke.
Beatrice puts her hand to the back of his head to move him closer towards her.
Beneath her wrap Beatrice’s skin is softer than anything he has previously imagined. He has thought of softness as a quality belonging either to something small and concentrated (like a peach) or else to something extensive but thin (like milk). Her softness belongs to a body which has substance and seems very large. Not large relative to him, but large relative to anything else he now perceives. This magnification of her body is partly the result of proximity and focus but also of the sense of touch superseding that of sight. She is no longer contained within any contour, she is continuous surface.
He bends his head to kiss her breast and take the nipple in his mouth. His awareness of what he is doing certifies the death of his childhood. This awareness is inseparable from a sensation and a taste in his mouth. The sensation is of a morsel, alive, unaccountably half-detached from the roundness of the breast—as though it were on a stalk. The taste is so associated with the texture and substance of the morsel and with its temperature, that it will be hard ever to define it in other terms. It is a little similar to the taste of the whitish juice in the stem of a certain kind of grass. He is aware that henceforth both sensation and taste are acquirable on his own initiative. Her breasts propose his independence. He buries his face between them.