There was in fact very little in my story that could have done her much damage in a court of law. It was all circumstantial, without the force of real evidence. When I finished I imagined my moment was over: that she would throw me out, with redoubled anger because I had frightened and terrorised her … and I would have gone quietly, my desires unquenched, but as a man who had outwitted Eileen St Claire.
But it wasn’t like that. When my story was over and I had risen to my feet, she smiled a mocking little smile and purred:
“So, is Eileen not to be stroked any more?”
She held out her hand to me and before I knew what I was doing we were locked in a kiss that went on for eternity.
In the entire Llanvygan adventure, rich as it was in murky obscurity, this utterly contradictory kiss struck me as quite the most baffling development. Only later, when we had run out of breath and were again seated at the table — she having disengaged herself and sent for champagne — did it begin to dawn on me what it was all about. I am not vain, and I did not for a moment attribute my success to my manly sex appeaclass="underline" not that she was the sort of woman who might be influenced by such ridiculous notions.
No. Idiosyncratically, but quite understandably, she had misconstrued my actions. A shocked Englishman, knowing what I did about her, would instantly have cried, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ But I had joined her over an amicable dinner and forced her to flirt with me. It’s an old truth that the wicked think everyone wicked. She had drawn the conclusion from my behaviour that it would be possible in the end to bargain with me, I just didn’t intend to sell myself cheaply. The right moment had to be found, and the right price named. The price, or part of it, was to be herself.
But then, as we sipped the champagne and established ourselves on the very best of terms, the voice of the man who had taken all those half-yearly exams in Kantian ethics finally spoke up.
Since Eileen St Claire was not going to get what she hoped for — my testimony, or collusion, or whatever else was wanted — had I the right to accept her embraces? Wasn’t my conduct every bit as reprehensible as that of the man who refuses to pay for the embrace he has already enjoyed?
But I soon quieted my conscience. In situations like this, one’s conscience is very amenable to reassurance. I had promised her nothing. She was the one playing hazard.
“Now you really must go home,” she declared, as we downed the last of the champagne. But her eyes said, ‘Stay till morning’.
“You want me to end the meal with the hors d’oeuvre?”
“It was a very substantial hors d’oeuvre. And anyway, it’s entirely up to you … ”
“Well?”
“Just make yourself comfortable at the desk and write what you saw two nights ago at Llanvygan.”
I stood up, Kant’s ethics having surfaced again inside me.
“Eileen, to go home now would drive a man crazy … but I’d rather go. I’m not going to write anything, so don’t count on me.”
“Then go,” she said, and the next moment she was already in the room next door, in bed, smiling at me expectantly.
To this day I can’t figure out what sort of training she must have had to be able to undress at such speed. I cannot pretend my own progress was as rapid. Oh, how awkward is a man’s appareclass="underline" on these special occasions I invariably get my shoelaces in a tangled knot.
Eileen St Claire’s gift was a priceless one. I had never had such a night of love, with so rich and varied a programme. The body that writhed and rippled and trembled in my arms was mistress of a thousand strategies, and new with every new beginning — wondrous, astonishing, and mysterious as the sea.
I woke shortly before dawn, from a brief, utterly exhausted dream. The woman slept on, in her cruel, expressionless beauty, her head at rest on her right arm that curved with the sinuous grace of a Greek vase. I got up, went to the window and lit a cigarette. Below, bathed in the unearthly slate-grey tints of the hour before dawn, lay Hyde Park, with white patches of mist drifting, as if forgotten and abandoned, over the green, meadow-like lawns. Now everything seemed tainted with sin, with impropriety, with sheer wrong-doing. The bad conscience of the Piarist-educated schoolboy joined in lamentation with the neurotic’s instinctive self-distrust: “How did I get here? Why am I not down there, on the dewy turf of Hyde Park, newly-risen, with fresh thoughts and an unclouded mind?”
“Chéri?” came Eileen’s voice. The cigarette smoke had roused her. I went over and kissed her hand, absent-mindedly.
“Chéri,” she asked wearily. “Have you given it any more thought?”
“What, Chérie?”
“You know, the written statement. Chéri, you know I have to have it … ” she said, with gentle annoyance, as if I had simply had a moment’s forgetfulness and she was quite sure I would write what she wanted.
I could have murdered her. And I felt utterly ashamed.
We had breakfast, then it was time to say goodbye.
Sitting on the bed, she smiled her charming smile and said:
“You’ve been so sweet, Chéri, I’d love to have you here again. But only if you bring that statement. Until then I won’t even talk to you. But I know you’ll bring it. Tomorrow, then? Now off you go!”
I took a taxi, feeling very self-conscious in my formal evening attire and cold for lack of sleep.
I did a lot of thinking in the taxi, and decided I had seen through her tactics. I remembered Cristofoli’s little adventure and came to the conclusion that she relied entirely on the irresistibility of her erotic arts. She must have reckoned, no doubt on the basis of experience, that any man who had known her intimately would thereafter be unable to be without her, at least for any extended period. The memory of her body would haunt me like an obsession, a ruling passion, and would lead me back to her whatever the cost.
With these reflections, as I might put it, ‘a bitter-sweet smile played on my lips’, to no purpose, since no one could see it inside the taxi.
The fact was, she knew nothing of my real nature, or rather my unnaturalness. I wasn’t like Cristofoli, who left her with the smug smile of the saved on his face, and went slightly mad because he would never see her again. All that remained with me was the unpleasant feeling of not having slept enough, and a gnawing sense of guilt.
Nor am I a connoisseur of the arts of love, to be ravished by the perfection of figure and the technical virtuosity she embodied. I am not an enthusiast by nature, except in matters of history or literature. What I look for in a woman is something rather different: not the transient harmony of lines and contours, not amorous expertise, nothing so cheap … Rather, through the woman I embrace something which is not in her, but which she represents.
With every woman I savour the thing she symbolises. There was one I loved because she was Sweden; another — whose beauty was as frail and delicate as Sèvres china — reminded me of the eighteenth century; one whom I dreamed of as Joan of Arc; one whom I imagined as the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus. Kissing Cynthia felt like dallying with the entire English tradition of sonnets and blank verse. In the docile, bovine amiability of yet another I revelled in Swiss and Alpine meadows. ‘Die Weiber sind silberne Schalen, in die wir goldene Äpfel legen.’—‘Women are the silver bowls in which we place golden apples.’