But for someone?
For no one.
I sat on the divan and he on his high stool by the bench.
I’ve shocked you, he said.
I was warned.
By aunt?
Yes.
He turned and very slowly, very carefully, poured the coffee into the cups.
He said, all my life I’ve had to have women. They’ve mostly brought me unhappiness. The most has been brought by the relationships that were supposed to be pure and noble. There — he pointed at a photo of his two sons — that’s the fine fruit of a noble relationship.
I went and got my coffee and leant against the bench, away from him.
Robert’s only four years younger than you are now, he said. Don’t drink it yet. Let the grounds settle.
He didn’t seem at ease. As if he had to talk. Be on the defensive. Disillusion me and get my sympathy at the same time.
He said, lust is simple. You reach an understanding at once. You both want to get into bed or one of you doesn’t. But love. The women I’ve loved have always told me I’m selfish. It’s what makes them love me. And then be disgusted with me. Do you know what they always think is selfishness? He was scraping the glue away from a broken Chinese blue-and-white bowl he’d bought in the Portobello Road, and repaired, two fiendishly excited horsemen chasing a timid little fallow-deer. Very short-fingered, sure hands. Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way — they don’t mind that. It even excites them. But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way.
It was as if I was another man.
People like your bloody aunt think I’m a cynic, a wrecker of homes. A rake. I’ve never seduced a woman in my life. I like bed, I like the female body, I like the way even the shallowest of women become beautiful when their clothes are off and they think they’re taking a profound and wicked step. They always do, the first time. Do you know what is almost extinct in your sex?
He looked sideways at me, so I shook my head.
Innocence. The one time you see it is when a woman takes her clothes off and cannot look you in the eyes (as I couldn’t then). Just that first Botticelli moment of the first time of her taking her clothes off. Soon shrivels. The old Eve takes over. The strumpet. Exit Anadyomene.
Who’s she? I asked.
He explained. I was thinking, I shouldn’t let him talk like this, he’s drawing a net round me. I didn’t think it, I felt it.
He said, I’ve met dozens of women and girls like you. Some I’ve known well, some I’ve seduced against their better nature and my better nature, two I’ve even married. Some I’ve hardly known at all, just stood beside them at an exhibition, in the Tube, wherever.
After a while he said, you’ve read Jung?
No, I said.
He’s given your species of the sex a name. Not that it helps. The disease is just as bad.
Tell me the name, I said.
He said, you don’t tell diseases their names.
Then there was a strange silence, as if we’d come to a full stop, as if he’d expected me to react in some other way. Be more angry or shocked, perhaps. I was shocked and angry afterwards (in a peculiar way). But I’m glad I didn’t run away. It was one of those evenings when one grows up. I suddenly knew I had either to behave like a shocked girl who had still been at school that time the year before; or like an adult.
You’re a weird kid, he said at last.
Old-fashioned, I said.
You’d be a bloody bore if you weren’t so pretty.
Thank you.
I didn’t really expect you to go to bed with me, he said.
I know, I said.
He gave me a long look. Then he changed, he got out the chess-board and we played chess and he let me beat him. He wouldn’t admit it, but I am sure he did. We hardly said anything, we seemed to communicate through the chessmen, there was something very symbolic about my winning. That he wished me to feel. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know whether it was that he wanted me to see my “virtue” triumphed over his “vice,” or something subtler, that sometimes losing is winning.
The next time I went he gave me a drawing he had done. It was of the vriki and the two cups on the bench. Beautifully drawn, absolutely simple, absolutely without fuss or nervousness, absolutely free of that clever art-student look the drawings of simple objects I do have.
Just the two cups and the little copper vriki and his hand. Or a hand. Lying by one of the cups, like a plaster cast. On the back he wrote, Aprus, and the date. And then, pour “une” princesse lointaine. The “une” was very heavily underlined.
I wanted to go on about Toinette. But I’m too tired. I want to smoke when I write, and it makes the air so stuffy.
October 29th
(Morning.) He’s gone into? Lewes.
Toinette.
It was a month after the evening of the record. I ought to have guessed, she had been purring over me for days, giving me arch looks. I thought it was something to do with Piers. And then one evening I rang the bell and then I noticed the lock was up, so I pushed the door open and looked up the stairs, at the same time as Toinette looked down round the door. And we were looking at each other. After a moment she came out on the landing and she was dressing. She didn’t say anything, she just gestured me to come up and into the studio and what was worst, I was red, and she was not. She was just amused.
Don’t look so shocked, she said. He’ll be back in a minute. He’s just gone out for… but I never heard what it was, because I went.
I’ve never really analyzed why I was so angry and so shocked and so hurt. Donald, Piers, David, everyone knows she lives in London as she lived in Stockholm — she’s told me herself, they’ve told me. And G.P. had told me what he was like.
It was not just jealousy. It was that someone like G.P. could be so close to someone like her — someone so real and someone so shallow, so phoney, so loose. But why should he have considered me at all? There’s not a single reason.
He’s twenty-one years older than I am. Nine years younger than D.
For days afterwards it wasn’t G.P. I was disgusted with, but myself. At my narrow-mindedness. I forced myself to meet, to listen to Toinette. She didn’t crow at all. I think that must have been G.P.’s doing. He ordered her not to.
She went back the next day. She said it was to say she was sorry. And (her words), “It just happened.”
I was so jealous. They made me feel older than they were. They were like naughty children. Happy-with-a-secret. Then that I was frigid. I couldn’t bear to see G.P. In the end, it must have been a week later, he rang me up again one evening at Caroline’s. He didn’t sound guilty. I said I was too busy to see him. I wouldn’t go round that evening, no. If he had pressed, I would have refused. But he seemed to be about to ring off, and I said I’d go round the next day. I so wanted him to know I was hurt. You can’t be hurt over a telephone.
Caroline said, I think you’re seeing too much of him.
I said, he’s having an affaire with that Swedish girl.
We even had a talk about it. I was very fair. I defended him. But in bed I lay and accused him to myself. For hours.
The first thing he said the next day was (no pretending) — has she been a bitch to you?
I said, no. Not at all. Then, as if I didn’t care, why should she?
He smiled. I know what you’re feeling, he seemed to say. It made me want to slap his face. I couldn’t look as if I didn’t care, which made it worse.
He said, men are vile.
I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.
That is true, he said. And there was silence. I wished I hadn’t come, I wished I’d cut him out of my life. I looked at the bedroom door. It was ajar, I could see the end of the bed.
I said, I’m not able to put life in compartments yet. That’s all.
Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I’ve more knowledge of life than you, I’ve lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what’s trivial and what’s important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don’t want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I’m not a good man. Perhaps morally I’m younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
He was only saying what I felt. I was stiff and he was supple, and it ought to be the other way round. The fault all mine. But I kept on thinking, he took me to the concert, and he came back here to her. I remembered times when I rang the bell and there had been no answer. I see now it was all sexual jealousy, but then it seemed a betrayal of principles. (I still don’t know — it’s all muddled in my mind. I can’t judge.)
I said, I’d like to hear Ravi Shankar. I couldn’t say, I forgive you.
So we listened to that. Then played chess. And he beat me. No reference to Toinette, except at the very end, on the stairs, when he said, it’s all over now.
I didn’t say anything.
She only did it for fun, he said.
But it was never the same. It was a sort of truce. I saw him a few times more, but never alone, I wrote him two letters when I was in Spain, and he sent a postcard back. I saw him once at the beginning of this month. But I’ll write about that another time. And I’ll write about the strange talk I had with the Nielsen woman.
Something Toinette said. She said, he talked about his boys and I felt so sorry for him. How they used to ask him not to go to their posh prep school, but to meet them in the town. Ashamed to have him seen. How Robert (at Marl-borough) patronizes him now.
He never talked to me about them. Perhaps he secretly thinks I belong to the same world.
A little middle-class boarding-school prig.