“Gregory,” she said suddenly, “it wouldn’t be fair of me. It wouldn’t be playing the gaime.”
I pooh-poohed this vigorously. “Fair, my dear Grace, what are you talking about?” Getting up I took her arm in order to call her bluff once and for all. I felt a little sick. We walked slowly to the front door of the flat together. She was puzzled by now — and a little afraid. Her arms were cold under the garish sleeves of my kimono. She hung back slightly, hoping I would prevent her from going at the last moment. Really, she began to realize that she didn’t want to go one little bit by now. At the door I released her arm and said: “Quietly, now. Don’t let Morgan or Charles see you, or we’ll have rumours. Good night.” I pushed her gently out, shut the door on her, and switched off the light. Outside the coloured panel of glass I could see her still standing, staring in at me, puzzled, unwilling to go. Then, hugging her cold hands in her armpits, she turned and vanished.
Gone! For a second I was so surprised that I could hardly believe it. She had actually gone. And in my kimono, too — the final cruel touch! Then I was in such a sudden panic and rage that I could have done anything. The names I called her! Enumerating all those sterling qualities in myself that she had spat upon by this outrageous act, I returned to the drawing room and poured myself out a stiff brandy. Someone must be made to pay for all this! Someone must pay! O.K. I sat down to the piano and begun to murder Beethoven.
That night Tarquin called. He had been sitting in the lounge reading the Criterion and waiting for Clare to get to bed safely. He wanted to know why they were so late. Had they got back yet? I told him bitterly, “No.” For a second I was profoundly shy; and then, rallying, I told him, “Yes,” with details. It was his turn to be profoundly shy. His distress accounted for a decanter of brandy. So abject he was, so miserable and hopeless, that I almost began to bless the event which was the cause of it all.
“It’s not that I’m jealous,” he said in one of his rambling attempts to excuse himself. “It isn’t that at all, as you know. Dammit, I’m not a greengrocer. I’ve read Petronius and I agree with every word. One must be free, don’t you think? Yes, I’ll take a small one. No — WOA! Don’t fill it up like that. Where was I? Yes, freedom. I don’t grudge him love, Gregory. I’m as modern as you are. I mean we’re not greengrocers, are we? We’ve read Petronius and we agree with every word. He must be free. It’s his spiritual love I want. Try and understand, Gregory, try and understand. You are so self-contained, you don’t feel these things. I’m more mystical. Try and imagine my loneliness. Since Mother’s death I’ve needed to be looked after. I’ve needed care. I want to be spiritually cherished, that’s it. Spiritually cherished. If only that bloody little gigolo would confide in me …”
(Think of Ion among the deep-water statuary, the hotels of the Greek waters, in the latitude of myth, dabbled by the delicate noses of fishes.) I say to myself, I do not care. I do not care. Let the liners go nosing southward, cutting her in slices. “O God, hear my prayer,” says Tarquin in private. “O Lord, hear my despair. O Lord …” He vomits green like a horse. The piano is playing. The books wink on the wall. Ion is a vase with many dancers. The myth precipitated in milky chalk at the bottom of a beaker. This is the isolation of hemlock. Ion! Ion! I am losing the thread.…
The rest you know.
Here Gregory ends.
Shadows in ink. The hotel with its blue shadows in snow. The convalescent blue of phthisis. Brother, I’ll be that strange composed fellow. In the darkness they hang out Japanese lanterns for the festivals. In the pandemonium of the ballroom the bunting sliding the floor in a long swoon of colour. Antiques gyrating forever, pictured by the mirrors in their gilt scrolls. The jazz band plugging away in the din; and in the barrage of drunkenness our hearts ticking over, squashed upon each other’s in pain. Darkness cut and blanched by the trembling spotlights, seeking the winners. You with the silver mouth and devil’s eyeteeth I could rive; press my arm into the arch of the backbone until the lean breastless body thawed and melted, pouring over me in a wave, like lighted oil on water. I locate this night dimly as the one where Lobo sat out in the rainy gardens, under a striped awning, making Miss Venable weep. Onward. Onward.
It is so silent here at night. This tomb of masonry hems us in, drives us in on ourselves. Ourselves! I am getting a little like Gregory, rolling the heavy chainshot of the ego about with him, prisoner. Here in these metal provinces, we are like dead cats bricked in the Wall of China. The winds turn aside from us in the dead land, the barren latitudes. I tell you the trams plough their furrows every day, but nothing springs from them. The blind men walk two by two at Catford.
Overhead in the darkness the noiseless rain is shining down over the counties. The pavements are thawing back to black asphalt. In this room the madness has set in, goading Lobo to finish the chart. Delicate, the dark gigolo clare treads the mushy street, cloaked and hatted, to a dancing engagement. The heavy signature of the mist glazes the dumb domes of the Crystal Palace: the final assured vulgar mark of Ruskin’s world on history. In Peru they hurry to early mass. The streets are baked. The peasants stand with their lice and sores and almonds in the church doorways. And his girl — ah! his hot little Latin world of little black men. If for a second he could reach her across the chart, across the bottle of ink, across the cockatoo on his pencil-box cigarettes, shopgirls, frost, wind, tram-lines, England — if he could only seize her and escape …
Black Latin Whore! We, sentimental, send our desires to you across the sea like many furling gulls. But after Dover imagination fails. The gulls waver, tremble, fall, are sponged out by the mists.…
In the saloon bar, Connie, the brewer’s widow, awaits Clare. (One of her frilled garters hangs over Lobo’s bed — a gravely humorous present from one libertine to another.)
Connie possesses thighs like milk churns. Her mouth is an old comb full of many sawn-off teeth. Her laughter sets the froth dancing in her moustache. Dancing with Clare she sweats like a sentimental seal under the armpits, pants, moans, a little sentimental when the word love arrives in the tunes. Offer her a beer and she will sit up and bark like a sea lion. You could balance a glass on her nose as she sits there militarily, her behind overlapping the swivel stool. She sits down on her vulva. Watch her now. So. The circular head of the bar stool is applied to her bottom, penetrates the soft swathes of blubber, disappears. Infinite subterranean shuffling. One imagines the warm endless penetration of the padded stool in her viscera. “Jesus, she’s well sprung,” says Perez. Then the springs tighten. Giggling, she is sitting up there on her own neck. Her eyebrows perform gigantic arcs across the night. She is gay ha ha. The tank is full of ha ha. She loves the warm herded smell of males in the saloon, wet overcoats and whiskers, rich smell of steam and underclothes and armpits. She has been married twice. Bar-room gallantries. “Oh, do ’ave another glass of beer, miss.” And the shrill draughts of piss from the urinal which comes in at the swing doors. Men, men, men — how she loves the warm smell of herded males! She could take a man in each arm and slobber on him with that wet mouth of hers. She could slip a thick finger in their flies and tickle them. But Clare? He excites that superficial side of her which wants Romance. Oh! the sleek lateral waves in his hair. Oh! the delicate Levantine manners (how painfully acquired by post and study). Clare sucks little purple cachous that his breath, when he blows it on her, may be nothing less than royal honeydew. All the perfumes of Arabia cannot rinse the gin from it, however. He dances gravely with her, leaning on her whizzing exuberant tits with a sort of locomotive paralysis. Thumping, her great thighs propel them. Vast effort, as if they were dancing under water: spurning the floor, the walls, the band, the rotating glass dome which shivers splinters of prismatic light across the dancers. Gin brings out the pussy in her. Gin, and Clare’s hoarse crooning. He knows the words to all the tunes. His hand is palm outward on her spine, a genteel Edwardianism.