‘It mustn’t be a strain for you. I’d hate that,’ he’d said later.
‘Hate to be saddled with me, you mean — the object of a hopeless longing?’ She laughed. ‘No. Not that. We’ve talked that out, haven’t we? You’re older — one foot in the grave — that’s the only difference.’
‘It’s quite a lot. Not just fifteen years; a totally different past — and a different future.’
‘We talked that one out too. We agreed on that: just to have now.’
He threw the cigarette away and just sucked the pipe, examining the minute bowl carefully. ‘You have it all so well organised in your mind, Helen. You set all your feelings out so clearly — like things on a tray — all in order. As if you were older than I was, had lived it all, and found just these few really valuable things — got rid of all the rest — the bad feelings, disappointment, being hurt. I’ve always been amazed by the clarity of your vision.’
‘You’ve just an old-fashioned idea about women, that’s all — you old Georgian peasant. I’m not orderly for want of feeling for you either, Alexei, or to prevent feelings for you. Don’t think that.’
‘No. No — I know that.’ He paused, looking at her carefully instead of at the pipe. ‘It makes me frightened of leaving you that’s all, that’s what worries me. Missing your temperament. It’s something very important to me, your balance — yet your full love: the uncomplicated way you express your feelings, yet the depths you show as well but never talk about. One wants that all one’s life — passion and the reason. One wants the same thing politically, after all.’
She looked at his unbalanced face and thought how much his lack of symmetry appealed to her: the chipped front tooth, hair dark, even slightly coarse at the top, fine and going white at the sides, the eyes set a bit too close and too deep, the long arms a little too long and the torso a little too short. And she thought: we do not love human perfection. Have we come to that simply through long disappointment? Or is it a quality in our nature, a natural truth, an essential factor in the preservation of the world? And if so, why should we hold out such hopes for any political ideal? Why should she? As an antidote to human failure — hers as a child, and her father’s now — searching for an outside order, like a child ruminating in a huge candy shop craving the satisfaction of all that ordered sweetness. Yes, that had been the original impetus in her case, however much she had rationalised her beliefs afterwards. She might just as well have taken to God and all the hands of Providence, she thought.
In the shape of her father humanity had dropped her once. Thus she expected — indeed could only love — imperfection and failure there. But politically, in retaliation for all unsuccessful nature, she wished for the moon. Yet fulfilment in that quarter would have frightened her as something quite unnatural. So she was secretly pleased at Alexei’s pessimism now, which confirmed her natural experience, and at the same time disgusted at her pleasure.
They went a little way down the valley towards the minute vision of sea, pushing through the dry underbrush beneath the old trees, slipping on loose stones, frightening salamanders, treading on clumps of lemon thyme, running their nails along the stalks of other herbs as they passed, collecting dry balls of leaves, a pungent pot-pourri, pushed up into the palm of their hands as if by machine as they moved along, which they smelt before throwing them away behind them.
And it was a bit of one of these leaves, thrown over his shoulder, that caught her in the eye, and his hands smelt incredible as he looked for it, the skin dry and the ribs on his fingers a little coarse like fine sandpaper.
The hands of care about her face, without invitation or suggestion. They had not come here to do that. They had come out for the day to walk and talk and look — two ordinary people, she thought, ordinarily involved in the most casual pursuits, not bent on any sexual gratification, not grasping for emotional success. All that they knew they possessed in any case. And even though time was running out that did not matter either. Didn’t matter today, now — or not yet she wondered? Well yes, it might matter a little. And she would get over it. For surely there was that balance, that complete understanding between them that must include a palliative against any real future hardship?
Yet now he had said he was going to miss something — her, it, everything … It seemed a contradiction of all the terms in their association. Now he was setting up loss, the hurt — assembling the bridges that she had never thought to cross, suggesting pain, and therefore creating a future that had never existed before — a time of empty, unhappy consideration and memory for both of them. It annoyed her.
She said, angrily, ‘Why tempt me — tempt yourself — with a future between us, Alexei, sad or happy? Why do that with talk of missing me?’
And she was surprised at the small, measured anger of his return: ‘You can easily think of now — there’s lots of it for you, even if it wasn’t a quality you possessed so fully anyway — living now, with reason, curiosity, passion, all that. But perhaps without too much reflection, the need for hope. And we need both: ironic reflection as well as the singing and dancing.’
‘Listen, what sort of hope can you suggest for us? If you had, I would have thought about it, I can tell you. Shall we go and live in Moscow? Or back in the States? Or anywhere — I don’t mind. But there isn’t that hope; there never was.’
They had come suddenly, for the first time together, to that stage of telling things in love — putting it into too many words, justifying it, commenting, trying to commemorate it in speech and not in deed — the time when one feels the first intimations of losing it and tries to save it by punishing the other.
Pain rose from somewhere strange inside her and blew up in her mind, a bitter explosion, and with it came a world of violent needs, an uncontrollable desire to demean their whole shared experience, to cut it all down to size and turn it into nothing more than a prolonged one-night stand.
‘Words, you have the words, Alexei — all as neatly arranged as you said my feelings were. And just because you put it into words you think it’s all explained — and therefore all over and all right. You’ve justified yourself — but not me, not my feelings. I can’t argue myself into that kind of happy goodbye anymore — I could, but not now, now you’re more or less saying it: “Cheerio, and toodleloo, and goodbye and wasn’t it wonderful? Absolutely great. Oh yes, and we shouldn’t worry about anything else, no, not at all, absolutely nothing. Because it’s been great — and hasn’t it been great in bed too? Hasn’t it? Smashing.” And that’s all there ever really was — all we really wanted: the now business and doing it first thing in the morning as well. And thanks very much and we can both of us reflect on it ironically afterwards. “Ironic reflection” — that’s just what I needed, that makes it all absolutely wonderful. But I can’t fucking well reflect on it all ironically. Not now.’
‘I didn’t say any of that, Helen. I said I’d miss your future — that’s what I said.’
‘That’s what kills me — because I’d never seen us missing each other until you mentioned it.’
Tears came, unnoticed, her face angled from him, her vision clouding, a sense of warm water perfectly composed about her eyeballs, supporting them easily with a salty buoyancy, which might at any moment collapse.