‘You must make them your constant study,’ Stella said. ‘They’re frightfully sexual.’
‘I’ve often thought,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said, ‘that Jack and Jill are the most obscene couple in literature.’
‘I don’t know,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘I’ve read that most of them were made up in the eighteenth century and were about real people.’
‘It’s the meaningless ones that are fascinating,’ Stella said.
Throughout this I was aware of Lord Stockwell gazing at me. From time to time I looked at him: his big sallow face, small disturbed eyes below a large rectangular forehead. He didn’t react to my own gaze. He continued to stare at me, his left hand moving steadily from his side plate to his mouth. He was like a man eating nuts; he was in fact picking up minute pieces of bread crust and carrying them to his mouth; but the gesture was large. I accepted his scrutiny, thought about my father and my childhood and all those books and rhymes I had missed. It was more than wine and my own sense of release. The evening, I say, was being conducted in an unfamiliar mode.
He spoke again only when the women had left the room. Then at least he had something to do. He offered brandy, which he did not drink himself; he offered cigars, which no one smoked. He continued to eat bread crumbs.
I said, ‘I never knew that you met my father.’
‘I met him twice.’
I knew so little of my father; I had wished to know so little. Now there was something in Lord Stockwell’s voice which told me that a show of embarrassment on my part would be out of place.
He said, ‘The second time I met him he had given up politics. He had a little hut by the sea. Crown land, oddly enough. He had given up politics, but there was a little queue of people waiting to see him. He asked me what I wanted. I couldn’t tell him. He said, “All right, you just sit yourself down there.” I sat myself down in a corner. It was very moving. These simple people came and told their troubles. The usual sort of thing. Job, sickness, death. While they were talking he was always doing something else. But at the end he would always speak a word or two, sometimes a sentence. It was marvellous. And sitting down, witnessing this, you felt immensely comforted. I couldn’t leave.’
‘Most extraordinary,’ the small man said.
I felt uncomfortable. I asked, ‘What sort of thing did he say?’
Lord Stockwell’s forehead twitched, as his daughter’s had done. ‘Certain things are simple, banal. Some people make you live them, though.’ He smiled; it did not become him. ‘It’s like the Highway Code. No good until you are on the road. Then it’s a little bit more than logic.’ He was disappointed in me; that I could feel.
I tried to look solemn. I said, ‘I saw little of my father in those days.’
‘Naturally. I will tell you something else about him. The second time I saw him he was just wearing a yellow dhoti. His chest was bare. His skin had a shine.’
We sat in silence for a little. The conversation turned to other things. I excused myself and went to the lavatory. I thought I was going to be sick. But it was just a momentary faintness. In that small room, coming to myself again, I could have wept for my solitude.
Just before I left Lady Stella said, ‘Just a minute.’ She ran out of the room and returned with The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. ‘Have a look at this. I would like to know what you think.’ I made some objection to taking the book; my stay was short and it might be difficult to return it. She said, ‘Are you very busy? Couldn’t you return it tomorrow or the day after?’ It was not at all what I was expecting. I was tremendously flattered. A link with the past, with the city of magical light. We agreed on lunch. She had a flat of her own; she gave me the telephone number.
I walked back to the hotel. I smelled the cold sooty air. The sky was low; for just a little way above street level there was light, from street lamps and shop windows. The city was as if canopied; I had no feeling of being exposed. Around me the sky glowed. Well, it probably glowed in Isabella too, for different reasons. It was past midnight. In the past to which my present mood was linked the city would have been still at such an hour; now the streets hummed with motorcars whose red tail-lights were like warnings in the dark. It made no difference.
Holding The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, oddly solid and scholarly in its bulk and feel, I entered the fairyland of the hotel. I had a hot bath; and, sipping the hot milk which awaited me every evening in a vacuum flask, I began to read. I read, as I had been directed, as a child. It was no effort. Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer. My mood was soft. And soon I was saddened, but pleasurably, not only by the loss, in this roaring red city, of village greens and riders on horseback and milkmaids and fairs and eggs in baskets and journeys by country folk to London town, but also by that limpid, direct vision of the world, neither of which had been mine, neither vision, of delight, nor world, of order.
But when they are clean.
And fit to be seen,
She’ll dress like a lady,
And dance on the green.
‘Winnie the Pooh?’ I said, passing the book back. ‘I’ve often seen it in bookshops and I’ve often seen it referred to. But I must confess I’ve never read it. I suppose the title has always put me off.’
‘Ther Pooh,’ Stella said.
‘Ther Pooh?’
‘Don’t you understand? I see this is something else I’ll have to read to you.’ She sat up and pulled the sheet above her breasts. ‘Are you ready? Then I’ll begin.’
The delegation had gone back to Isabella. I stayed on in London. I no longer seek to explain; I merely record. For eight days, during which whatever reputation I had left was being destroyed, I stayed on in London, held by what I had detected in Stella’s manner at our first meeting. Frenzy was what I had first thought it to be; and frenzy it was, of a sort. It was a capacity for delight, such as I had found in Sandra, but without Sandra’s anguish. It was a coolness. It was more, much more, than Sandra’s feeling for an occasion. It was a way of looking at the city and being in it, a way of appearing to manage it and organize it for a series of separate, perfect pleasures. It was a sustaining of that mood to which I feared to put an end, knowing it could never return. It was a creation, of the city I had once sought: an unexpected fulfilment. Perhaps I was deceived by Stella’s manner and skills, which might have been the manner and skills of her class. But I was willingly deceived.
All this had to be paid for, though, in those afternoons in her flat. What I know of the sexual capacities of others I have learned from books. With this knowledge I cannot say that excessive demands were made of me, but I believe I have said enough in this narrative to make it plain that my sexual charge was low and unreliable. In fact I dreaded those afternoons behind drawn curtains; in the end they drove me away. They began on my second visit to her flat; she had promised to tell me some stories. She was wearing a quilted pink housecoat or dressing-gown. I kissed her lightly on the forehead. A disagreeable scorched smell, I remember: she had just been to the hairdresser’s. Her expression didn’t change, and I was not prepared for her acknowledgement. She said, ‘Shall we go to bed?’ I was struck by the contrast between the calm, childish voice and what it was proposing. But it was familiar; I remembered. ‘Shall I show you my rude drawings?’ The sentence held an equal guilelessness. There could be no refusal.
Our love-making was standardized. It followed the pattern of that afternoon. It was divided into two parts. The first was dedicated to me; the second Stella claimed for herself. For the first part she lay on her side and was passive. For the second she straddled me, leaning back, resting her hands on the bed or on my shins; she was all motion; her eyes were closed; her skin went moist. She made no sound, except once, when she said, as though to herself, ‘Aren’t bodies wonderful?’ I did not share her view then; later I marvelled at her precision and honesty. Such small breasts as she leaned back! Such a private frenzy; I might not have been there. She was a little alarming. For me this speechless, prolonged second part was torment and torture. I sent my mind off on to other subjects, with such success once that, taking up a large picture book from the bedside table — it was about the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, I believe — I heard myself saying, what I thought I was only thinking, ‘So you’ve got this.’ A swift, slight slap was the reply I received. I put the book down.