by Sam Taylor
She saw me and stopped. She smiled. She spoke. A moment later the two of us were sitting at a table in a tea garden, like old friends. Around us the scene was as lovely as before, but I remember my eyes hardly moved from hers. Those pupils were like wells. That conversation . . . the details of what we said are irrecoverable now; my memory is simply of being adrift from the world, enclosed in some perfect island of air where time stood still and all barriers of communication melted away. I had never talked with anyone like that. Our words were like a river, so flowing and natural. Usually in the presence of ladies I would stammer and blush, would search haltingly for topics of interest, points of commonality, but with Angelina - she bade me call her that, one white-gloved hand on mine - it was as though I had entered some other world, where the usual laws did not apply; where differences of station and gender vanished and we floated serenely, as happy and astonished as if gravity itself had ceased to hold us fast to the earth . . .
CHAPTER 4
We honeymooned, at her father’s expense, in the United States, travelling by cruise ship to New York and then by rail to the West. We had our photograph taken before that magnificent void named the Grand Canyon; we shopped and visited theatres in gay San Francisco; we admired the ancient Redwood trees in Sequoia. It would, under other circumstances, surely have been a marvellous trip, but our marriage, only days old, was already dead, and our honeymoon a mere sham.
It had been so from the moment I received her letter. It arrived three days after the wedding. Even before I opened it, I think, I had a kind of physical premonition - a hollow throb in my chest, some impossible sense of déjà vu - which was merely confirmed by the miraculous, devastating words I discovered therein. My memory of our conversation in that Regent’s Park tea garden was not, as I had feared, an illusion, a sweet dream. It was real; it had meant something to her too. The letter was brief, but it said all it needed to say. And it was signed by her. In black ink; her own fair hand. Angelina Vierge. How strange that these ordinary letters, arranged in this and only this order, could inflame such ecstasy of pain and desire!
Those three weeks were Hell. Not only for me, of course; I am certain that poor Sarah suffered even more than I did; I, at least, understood the cause of our affliction. Though we went everywhere together, the two of us were desperately lonely. Each was the other’s prisoner, and the other’s torturer. Slowly our agony turned to mutual hatred. The silence in our bedroom at night was terrible and heavy. Perhaps I should have confessed - told her the truth, even shown her the letter - but in all honesty Sarah’s emotional welfare was the last thing on my mind. I moved through those American days in a haze of longing, seeing Angelina’s face in canyons and sunsets, leaves and bridges and oceans . . .
... came during the final week in Portland, Oregon. It was a weekday morning in early August and yet that pretty town looked as bleak as any place on earth could, its squat buildings cowering under dark sheets of rain, the pavements turned to waterways. More terrible still was the bitter, blank expression in my wife’s eyes. She lay propped up by pillows in the hotel bed and silently watched me dress for breakfast. When I asked her if she was not also going to rise, my voice almost breaking as I spoke, so unused was it to speech, she stared at me with a disgust so frank and so ugly that I could not help but be shocked. That I had reduced my poor, sweet, subservient Sarah to this . . . the shame I felt was more than I could bear. And so, of course, I pushed it away, ignored it. ‘No appetite?’ I inquired blandly, and then, without waiting for a response, left the room and went downstairs to eat.
I took advantage of Sarah’s absence to compose another letter to Angelina. Like the others, its contents are lost to my memory; all I remember of those letters is the naïve absoluteness of the passion which inspired them. Angelina’s letter to me, which I have even now at my elbow, is brief and tantalisingly ambiguous. It suggests deep reserves of passion without explicitly stating anything of the kind; probably she expected a similarly discreet reply from me. But what she received was something altogether rawer and more copious. I do not believe there was a trace of irony in any of my missives.
When I had finished writing, I addressed and sealed the envelope and untastingly ate a croissant and drank some black coffee; then I went outside into the rain, the letter smuggled safely under my coat, and walked to the post office. On the way back I stopped at the town library and passed a few hours in contemplation of poetry. Keats, Wordsworth, perhaps Coleridge . . . I don’t recall what I read; my abiding memory is of staring through those large, rain-streaked windows at the bruised sky and letting the minutes flow emptily by. If I thought of anything, it was certainly of Angelina, on the other side of the world, and not the hollow-eyed woman I had abandoned in the hotel. When I got back to our room, sometime in the early evening, Sarah was gone. She didn’t leave a note. I suppose she must have caught the train to New York. I never saw her . . .
... found the side gate open and slipped through to the garden, which was large but surprisingly unadorned: a flat and well-tended lawn with a few bright flower beds and, at its centre, an old and beautiful apple tree. No sooner had I closed the gate behind me than the drone and clatter of the street was silenced. I felt I had surely entered Eden. The sun was high, the sky a dazzling blue: the Indian summer so glorious I could not but help remember that day in June, in the park. The memory came to me so strongly I gasped and had to stand still, one hand touching the brickwork of the house, as I waited for the dizziness to fade and for my equilibrium to reassert itself. It was in that moment of desire and disorientation that I noticed her, a dark shape behind the sun-bright glass of the kitchen window. I had the brief impression that she was watching me, though I could not possibly have made out her face, and then I saw her walk into the garden, wearing the simplest and most beautiful of summer dresses - thin white cotton, almost like a nightdress - with her legs and feet bare, and slightly brown. My heart was in my mouth, I could not speak or move, as she softly paced the lawn, her eyes fixed ahead on the apple tree, as though she had yet to mark my presence. At once, regathering my wits, I felt at a loss . . . embarrassed, guilty: here I was, a trespasser, stealing in on Miss Vierge’s private property, unannounced and uninvited, now silently watching her in a state of undress. And yet still I said nothing.
She stood beneath the heavy branches and plucked a ripe fruit. Then, showing no surprise, she looked up at me and held the apple out in her hands; an offering. Dumbly I moved towards her, out of the shadow of the house and through the hot sunlight. For a moment I was blinded and then the tree’s shadow covered me, covered the two of us, and Angelina stood close to me, her eyes speaking of things her mouth never could. ‘Take a bite,’ she whispered finally, and lifted the apple in one hand to my mouth. She held it as I bit. Afterwards in the fruit’s perfect round skin there was a rough crater of exposed white flesh, and staining it a little blood from my gums. I wanted to apologise, to remove the stain myself, but before I could say or do anything of the kind, she placed it directly to her own mouth and slowly, gently, deliberately licked the blood with the tip of her . . .
... woke with the scent of the harlot’s flesh on my skin and bedclothes. It was late morning and brash sunlight came pouring through the gap between the curtains. My quarters were modest at best, of course, and the view from the window nothing short of dismal, but even so on that morning I felt a kind of pride and relief at the course my life had taken. Whatever else happened to me, at least I would not die a virgin. True, I had no prospects, no hope of happiness, but at least I could say I had lived.
I went to work and by the end of lunch felt dead on my feet. The customers were moaning and the chef was screaming, and my euphoria dimmed beneath the weight of fatigue. When my shift ended, however, I walked to The Polar Bear and had a drink with Ivan, who told me all the office gossip and toasted my manhood. Thus it was in a vainglorious and slightly drunken state that I entered my room.
The first thing I noticed was that a light was on; th
e second that the floor was covered with my clothes. I stared at them, jackets and trousers splayed violently across the room, like the raiment of invisible corpses on a battlefield. Stunned, I moved further into the room and stared at the weird disorder. The doors of the wardrobe were wide open and the coat hangers bare. I turned around, seeking some explanation, and it was then that I saw Angelina, sitting demurely on the bed.
‘Your sheets stink of her,’ she said.
I shrugged, feigning coolness. ‘How did you know?’
‘A little bird told me. There’s no need to look so damned pleased with yourself.’
Suddenly I felt angry. ‘Why do you care anyway? You’re engaged. You told me so yourself.’
‘That’s why you did it, isn’t it? To get revenge. Because you hate me.’ I said nothing; it occurred to me that she was right. She stood up and came towards me. It was then that I noticed she too had been drinking. Her eyes were so lovely, loosened by wine. ‘And you know perfectly well why I care.’
‘Do I?’
The scent of her, sweet and carnal, was overwhelming. She swayed as she moved . . .
... with Ivan had, I felt, lost some of its old closeness. I suppose this was my fault; certainly I felt guilty about it at the time. After all, best friends are meant to tell each other everything, and I had, for the past month, been keeping him in complete ignorance of the most important and dramatic development ever to have occurred in my short life. He knew nothing of Angelina and I. Part of me wished I could tell him, wished to celebrate my great happiness, but I held back for two reasons: firstly, because Angelina had begged me not to breathe a word; and secondly, because I remembered all too clearly Ivan’s warning to me about her - how vehemently he had declared that I ought never to see her again.
As I have said, I felt bad about this, but at the same time I had begun to wonder how open Ivan was being with me. Sometimes I had the feeling that he, too, was keeping something from me; his words, when I thought about them afterwards, seemed oddly ambiguous, full of potential secrets and double-meanings. In fact, as I learned later, he had been like this with me from the beginning. It was not his behaviour towards me that changed at this time; it was my perception of his behaviour. Call it liar’s sense. Before, when I had been fully honest with him, I had innocently assumed he was acting the same way with me; now, because of my own duplicitousness, I suspected it in him. It is often thus, I fear: when we look at another person, what we see is not their otherness, but a mirror image of ourselves.
Whatever guilt and worry I felt about Ivan, however, was easily put to the back of my mind. In truth, everything in my life at this point was an afterthought, a fast-fading whim, in comparison with my love for Angelina. That first month, and the month and a half that followed, were, for me, a golden age. Those were my miracle days.
It is almost impossible to be objective about such periods in our life - to see them afterwards as we saw them at the time. Hindsight alters everything. I can make intelligent guesses about my state of mind, the precise nature of my happiness, during the final months of 1891. I can infer that there must have been times, even then, when I was bored or frustrated; I can conclude that sometimes I might even have felt relieved to get away from her presence, to relax with a tankard of beer or to sleep alone all night. And yet those assumptions of mine, while doubtless correct, do not feel true. It is analogous to the fact that I can quantify the length of time this period lasted. My calendar tells me it began on 22 September and ended on 11 December; my calculations tell me that this means I was deliriously happy for exactly eighty days, which is approximately equal to eleven and a half weeks, or just over two and a half months, or a little less than a season; or, just as meaninglessly, to nearly two thousand hours, or seven million seconds. Yet these numbers - all of them, to me, monstrously small - are also a kind of lie. Because that autumn was (and is) in some sense eternal. What I mean is that the nature of my bliss was eternal; that, in loving Angelina, I existed in a sort of temporal vacuum; that my hours - our hours - were breathed not in the late nineteenth century nor in London, but in that timeless Paradise that all lovers inhabit.
And yet, while dates and times were immaterial to our bliss, places certainly were not. Indeed, often what comes to my mind when I remember that time is not an image of Angelina or myself, but of the living room in 21 Luff Street. In my memories, it is always six or seven o’clock in the morning in that room, the sun just rising, its silver rays ghosting through the window, illuminating the garden, with its dew-pearled grass stalks and its tree of knowledge, and spreading warm pools of gold over the flea-bitten lionskin on the parquet floor, the blood-red Chesterfield, and the tatty old armchair, once a favourite of Angelina’s beloved grandfather, in which I always sat, those sweet mornings, staring into the fire and reflecting on my scarcely believable happiness. How I loved that room and its furniture! If, by some medical miracle, a Dr Jekyll were able to wipe all these memories from my brain and restore me as a blank page in a book whose story was yet untold, I still fear and hope - I still believe - that the briefest sight of that armchair would bring everything back to me in an instant: the love, the ecstasy, the horror . . . all!
It seems pointless to describe what we did during this time. We did what all lovers do. We kissed and talked. We undressed one another. We caressed one another. We made love. And we did so secretly, which was at once maddening and glorious.
I have so many memories of that time, yet it will suffice, I think, to recount one only. When I close my eyes at night and wish to dream of something sweet, this is the image that comes first to my mind. Perhaps when I die, I will summon it one last time, to soothe my dark and lonely fall into the void. The memory is this:
It is three or four o’clock in the morning and I am walking Angelina back to her house in Mayfair. We have spent the last few hours in my room, our bodies naked and our two hearts beating as one. Now, out on the street, we both wear cloaks, though the night is not too cold. The air is filled with tiny, floating raindrops, almost like a clear mist, and the streetlamps’ outer haloes lend it a kind of soft blue hue. We do not speak as we walk, but we hold hands, and communicate through little squeezes and strokes of the other’s palm, wrist, fingertips. Our footsteps echo, but otherwise there is no sound at all. The street is empty and it feels as though everyone, at that instant, is holding their breath to let us pass, as though time has stopped in our honour. Angelina sighs - with contentment, I think - and leans her head gently on my shoulder. I put my arm around her back and we continue to walk, more slowly now. In that moment I possess her and she possesses me. We are each the other’s special secret. Ahead of us, under a distant streetlamp, I see a dark human form, vague in the mizzle. As we draw closer, I recognise it as the constable who patrols this area. He is young; not much older than me. He says ‘Good evening’ and nods, and we murmur the same as we pass.
An hour or so later, I walk back the way I came, the taste of Angelina’s goodbye kiss in my mouth, her scent on my skin, my body and mind reeling pleasantly from fatigue, and notice that there are now two dark shapes under the lamppost. I reach the point where the policemen stand and the new one, obviously senior, moves towards me. He begins to speak, his voice stern, and I hesitate. And then - and this is the most sublime part of the memory - and then the constable, the one we passed earlier, puts a hand on his colleague’s elbow and says, ‘It’s all right, sergeant, I know this gentleman. He’s just walked his fiancée home.’ And the sergeant nods, apologetically, respectfully, and I am allowed to go past. And the pride, the satisfaction, the perfect happiness I feel when the constable pronounces the word ‘fiancée’ in his official-sounding voice; that is what stays with me as I walk the last mile back to my room in Cathedral Street.
CHAPTER 5
Looking backward now, what happened when I saw Angelina again after Christmas has the cold, inevitable logic of an Aeschylean tragedy. Everything was foreshadowed. The signs were there, if only I had dared to see them. Ang
elina herself had told me on many occasions that this could not last, that it was wrong; she had sobbed with the pain and the guilt of it, and I had wiped her tears dry and kissed her better . . . and kissed her worse. I had closed my eyes to the warning signs; I had turned a deaf ear to her pleas and avowals. I had told myself it could not end because my life without it - without her - did not bear thinking about.
I do not regret my wilful ignorance. At least I tasted true, undiluted happiness, if only for a short time. Who, in all honesty, can claim more than that? It was something Angelina always talked about - the brevity of life, the certainty of death, the misery of the human condition, the cruelty of the world; and the miracle, the glory, of any happy moment one can snatch between the jaws of all these conspiring horrors. One time she said to me, ‘It’s good to know it will end soon, in a way. It makes the pleasure more intense.’ I had thought she was talking about life and death. Perhaps, though, she was hinting to me that eighty days was the sum of my allotted stay in Paradise?
I saw her the day after she returned, and I knew as soon as she walked through the door that nothing would ever be the same again. The joy on my face was not reflected on hers. I asked her what was wrong and for a long time she could not speak at all; she only wept, silently, her face strangely expressionless. When finally I begged her to tell me what had happened, she said, in a voice almost blank with misery, ‘It’s over, Martin.’ I demanded to know what she meant - why she would say such a thing - and she told me that she and Gerard Ogilvy had been married over Christmas. She showed me the diamond ring on her finger. To me it was like a dagger, thrust into my heart and . . .