Roma
Sara cara cara mia,
How enchantingly your name suits this enchanting language, and how repentant I am for my long silence since I saw you in the summer at that station. I would write, but then what would I say? I have death in my heart.
To resume. I was reminded of you by meeting your sister Louise, whom I last saw three years ago in Oxford, blasé and breathless after three years of conquest: at first sight she reminded me of that piece which begins ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none.’ I met her this time not on a station but in a church, that other refuge of the aimless. In Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Do you remember it? All those layers of all those centuries, Rome, Byzantium, and the dark ages of the world, and I might harden into less than one grain of one pillar. Also those barley sugar things around the altar are very consoling, so frivolous in all the serious stonework. And there I met your sister Louise, half-heartedly inspecting the half-vanished frescoes, and alone on her honeymoon. She was looking more beautiful than in Oxford: in Oxford she had the air of an heiress up for the weekend, coldly distinct in the midst of all those pre-Raphaelite daisy-nibbling barefoot Beatrices who swept the city in our era. But in Rome she looked herself, posed expensively against an artistic background. She was all in black and white and grey, and there was something stoic and stony in her face that suited the masonry. I thought I would avoid her, but she saw me and spoke to me, so we went and sat outside by the yellow fountain, where she told me she had married Stephen Halifax (and I hate cara mia his insufferable books) and that he was lunching with a film director. I would like to have that Vestal Virgin’s House at the bottom of my garden.
As she talked inattentively of this and that I thought of those lines of Joachim du Bellay, which he once wrote of Rome:
‘Si le temps peut finir chose si dure
Peut finir la peine que j’endure.’
My pain I know is without end: I am after all nothing more than a neo-Gothic ruin, built in decay for the bats and the ivy: but hers, hers I cannot help comparing with your more curable afflictions, and I wonder if those enchanting eyes will ever gaze at anything other than the imagined glass?
You will forgive me, Sara de mon coeur, for writing to you of your sister: it is an oblique overture to you, one of the more happy incidents in that succession of journeys and train tickets which is my life.
Mon âme s’envole vers toi.
Simone
I finished her letter and then looked down at it with a glow of pleasure: Simone’s letters are always a delight, they always reassure and assert something in me which is usually crying out for satisfaction. I am so relieved and excited that she continues to remember me: I see her as so much greater and grander than myself, that her recognition is like a bow from a queen. And she clearly remembered that meeting on the Gare du Nord as tenderly as I did: she would say to our acquaintances all over Europe, ‘I met Sarah, you know, at five in the morning . . . ’ My life was thereby extended into bars and trains and drawing-rooms that I would never enter. I was distinguished by her attention from people like Daphne, who was never an incident for anyone. I was cara Sara, and I am a fool about endearments. I wonder, is there something servile in my admiration for Simone? Because I do admire as well as love her, though I have always believed love preferable to an exclusive of admiration. I consider her a superior being. She is superior, and in contact with her I share her superiority: I lose the cruel and evasive sentimentality that Daphne and my mother arouse in me, and I become created harder and brighter in her eyes.
Her writing is so beautiful. So spiked and classy on the page. The first time I saw it was when she called on me in college after meeting me at a party: I was out, and she left me a note on white, thick-grained paper with a flower stuck through the sheet, a black twig with one yellow flower like a Japanese painting, and never since then have I seen her writing without the image of that twig and that leafless, austere yellow flower. It was so like her, so deliberately chosen: or perhaps people choose their own symbols naturally, for Gill always has in her room vast masses of green leaves, any leaves, chopped off trees or hedges, whilst Stephen and Louise have dried grasses in long Swedish vases. Simone, the flower without the foliage, and Gill, the foliage without the flower. I should like to bear leaves and flowers and fruit, I should like the whole world, I should like, I should like, oh I should indeed.
Sad, eclectic, gaunt Simone with her dark face and her muddled heritage, her sexless passions and her ancient clothes, gathered from all the attics of Europe. She is the window through which I first glimpsed the past. Her mother was a French opera singer and her father an Italian general: their houses, she once told me, were full of dead laurel wreaths and medals and pictures of the dead. She herself moves through a strange impermanent world where objects are invested with as much power as people, and places possibly with more: these things have for her a pure aesthetic value, totally divorced from the world of sensations and rhythms where I live. Tragic Simone, cut after an unlivable pattern. She is the most singular character in the subversive feminine realm which men are so ready to resent and to misunderstand: even Tony, who is sympathetic to most of the loose vagaries of the passions, would have called my feelings towards her nothing but decadent emotionalism. I can just hear him saying those very words—words which he would never have used about any man, no matter how decayed. Friendships between women are invariably described pejoratively as intimacies, sublimations or perversions, but I don’t believe that Simone offered or experienced any of these things. Men and women were the same to her, unsmeared by any image of profit or loss or by the overhanging future: she had no future. She was most purely personal in her life. In most people, and in myself, I am vaguely aware of a hinterland of non-personal action, where the pulls of sex and blood and society seem to drag me into unwilled motion, where the race takes over and the individual either loses himself in joy or is left helplessly self-regarding and appalled. With her I sensed a wholly willed, a wholly undetermined life. And how could such a person live? The French believe they can, but one has only to read their books to mark some heroic dislocation from the pulse of continuous life. She lacked an instinct for kitchens and gas-meters and draughts under the door and tiresome quarrels: and, lacking instinct, she had to live on will. Willing to get up, willing to go to bed, willing to eat or sleep or love.
And where does one get the energy for this sort of existence? The only way to be recharged is to be put in touch with external rhythms. Otherwise one will run down from exhaustion. Simone will run down, in a train or a gutter or a hotel bedroom, like those fin-de-siecle poets she so much admires and resembles. I know it, I know the signs of a short term, though she is the only living person in whom I have ever witnessed them. Meanwhile, I am gratified that she puts me on a level with the Vestal Virgin’s house and the candy pillars: if I have as much charm for her, I cannot lack beauty.
And then, what about Louise? I looked down at that white precious letter and turned my thoughts, a little reluctantly, to the other problems it posed. Simone almost seemed to imply in it that Louise was no more dislocated than I was. It was odd that she had mentioned that sinister Shakespearean sonnet, which had come into my head the first time I heard that Louise had chosen lilies for her bouquet. I went over it again, as best I could.
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the things they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces . . .
Something something something . . .
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
But Louise, of course, had the power to hurt and did it. Why, then, this aura of virginity? Was it simply a trick of profile?
The fact that Louise had been alone in that church disturbed me profoundly. Why wasn’t she with her husband? I wasn’t surprised, but I was disturbed. Indeed, I was so little surprised
that the news seemed like a confirmation of something. Poor elegantissima Loulou, wandering sadly around Rome by herself looking at ancient monuments. Whatever Louise was now realizing, she must surely have foreseen: she wasn’t stupid, nor was she carried away by idealistic fervours in marrying Stephen Halifax. Perhaps she was stoically realizing that she had miscalculated.
Re-reading Simone’s letter again today, after an interval of months, I realize that there is nothing in it to suggest the betrayal and disillusion that I sensed.
I put the letter away, that evening, and tried to forget it, except of course for the charming sentiments about myself. After all, I said to myself, what had Louise and her marriage got to do with me? She was merely and accidentally my sister whereas Simone was a personal person of my own.
This is a lie, but a lie that I am often near to believing.
5
The Invitation
I NOW FIND myself compelled to relate a piece of information which I decided to withhold, on the grounds that it was irrelevant, but I realize increasingly that nothing is irrelevant. I meant to keep myself out of this story, which is a laugh, really, I agree: I see however that in failing to disclose certain facts I make myself out to be some sort of voyeuse, and I am too vain to leave anyone with the impression that the lives of others interest me more than my own. So I hasten, belatedly, to say that all this time that I have been writing about I was in love with somebody quite outside this story, so far outside it that thousands of miles separate him and it. His name is Francis. We were in love for our last year at Oxford, most inseparably in love. I felt as though he carried me around in his pocket. At the end of the year, our final year, he, being a great scholar, was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship to go and study political theory in Harvard. He said he wouldn’t go. I said he should. I suppose we quarrelled.
I couldn’t understand myself. Nothing could have appalled me more than the idea of his leaving me for a year, and yet I have never pursued any end with greater intensity. I think I suspected that half of him really wanted to go, and that he was determined not to merely through consideration of my feelings. I was equally determined not to be stayed with through anything but clear, unalloyed desire on his part. So, despite his fervent protests, I forced him to accept the scholarship and go to America. Perhaps he seriously didn’t want to go. I long since gave up any hope of knowing the truth about it. The fact is, he went. Oh, I have been over it a thousand times: the fact that he went meant that he didn’t love me, the fact that I drove him to it meant that I didn’t love him, and so on forever. The fact remains, and now it is all that remains.
It is only now, at the time of writing (or rather, indeed, rewriting) that it occurs to me that I may have been simply delaying the problem of marriage. In a way I’m surprised that I didn’t marry him straight away, on leaving college, as Gill had married Tony. I was dimly beginning to formulate the idea that of all the many kinds of marriages, Gill’s and Louise’s represented some kind of extreme, and that both extremes were to be avoided. I hadn’t in any case done what Gill had done: whether I was to do what Louise had done—whatever that is and was—remains to be seen. I don’t think I ever would, not through any difference in character, but through the happy accident of having once been truly in love. In fact I suppose that I will marry Francis. I have always supposed so. It’s unlikely that I could ever love anybody else. But don’t take this as meaning that all was straight and tidy between us—all was on the contrary tears and separation, and I had never so much as mentioned the idea of marriage to my family. And, moreover, had I been never so happily engaged, all the problems of jobs and work and domesticity would have remained. The days are over, thank God, when a woman justifies her existence by marrying. At least that is true until she has children. So what did Louise think she was doing? Was she going to have a family? The prospect was impossible to contemplate, and I don’t think it ever crossed my mind during all my speculations about her marriage.
I was finally pushed into embarking on this Francis explanation because I now have to describe a party which would have been quite different had my status been other than that of an unmarried attached girl. It was the sort of party that doesn’t matter at all if one is with a man, but which can be very dangerous or very unpleasant if one goes alone. It was the sort of party that I had forgotten: I had grown so used to being taken everywhere that I had forgotten what it meant to be alone. I knew it would be ominous as soon as the invitation arrived. It wasn’t a printed one: it was typed, in rather precious sloping typescript, and it said:
On my invitation the message about bottles and partners had been crossed out, but David had scribbled underneath ‘Do come, we’re short of girls.’ It looked, in fact, precisely the sort of party that one shouldn’t go to alone unless feeling detached, tough, or lecherous, and I might have hesitated more than I did if I hadn’t liked David Vesey so much, and if Gill hadn’t had an invitation too. She was out when the post arrived, but I had collected hers with mine on my way in. I could see from Gill’s envelope that it was addressed to both her and Tony—Mr and Mrs A. Slater, it said, with their King’s Road address. Tony had clearly opened the letter, read it, stuck it up again with Sellotape and readdressed it. I decided to wait till Gill came in before I made my mind up whether to go or not, but in fact I already sensed that I would end up by going. I knew I would be there.
David Vesey is an Oxford friend, who had been working for two years on a big London daily: he is very amusing and very clever, tending towards the pedantic, though Fleet Street was on the way to curing that, I didn’t doubt. He writes imitation-French novels in his spare time, all about pursuing ways of life to the absurd or the logical (it didn’t seem to matter which, owing to some strange Gallic confusion of terminology). He hasn’t published anything yet but I’m sure he will, once he stops making all his characters commit suicide in the last chapter in order to prove the supremacy of unreason. No publisher could take that, but the rest is really very funny. I wanted to see him again: we hadn’t met for about a year He had known Francis well, which seemed to lend a sanction to the whole occasion.
Both Simon and Ildiko were aspirant actors. Ildiko had appeared at the Arts once, and had done several TV plays, after leaving RADA the year before. Simon was more successful, and had just finished a reasonably-sized working-class part in a working-class play at the Royal Court. I knew them both very slightly, through David and one or two people in the BBC, and didn’t dislike them particularly, though I never could understand why an egghead like David could live with such flashy people. I don’t know, actors seem to be so obvious, as though looking like an actor were half the job of being one. Perhaps it is. A devotion to forms and ceremonies and darlings and anecdotes: what artist or poet would ever say they loved art galleries or literary cocktail parties in the infatuated way in which actors say they love the theatre?
However, I liked actors well enough to think the evening might be amusing. So when Gill came in I was prepared to put a little pressure on her to persuade her that she would enjoy it too. She didn’t get back till late: I had spent the evening lying on the hearthrug smoking, reading a pile of scripts of appallingly touching rawness, and eating a pile of apples, so I suppose that what with ash, apple cores and sheets of typescript everything was rather a mess: but nevertheless I was unprepared for her opening words.
‘For Christ’s sake, Sarah,’ she said, as she shook the rain primly off her umbrella all over the carpet, ‘what an absolutely filthy mess. The place looks like a pigsty.’
I sat up, looked round, and replied vaguely and probably very irritatingly, ‘Yes, I suppose that perhaps it does.’
‘I don’t know how you can live in it,’ she pursued, proceeding to unbutton her plastic raincoat. I would rather drown than wear a plastic raincoat, and so would Gill have done in the old days. Desertion does funny things to a woman.
‘Oh, it isn’t too bad,’ I said.
‘It’s absolutely filthy,’ she said again,
and went into the bathroom, dripping her raincoat and umbrella all the way. She looked so dreary, her face tight and disapproving, her hair all wet and plastered back under a head-square. I decided I’d better say something placating, but hadn’t the energy, so I changed the subject, instead.
‘There’s a couple of letters for you, Gill,’ I said, as she came back again, rubbing her hair with a towel.
‘Oh, are there? Where?’
‘On the mantelpiece.’
She read the first one very quickly, and then opened the invitation; as she took it in her expression clouded. She stood there scowling at it, then she looked down at me, read my face, and said, ‘I suppose you’ve got one too?’
‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen David for ages, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t, and I can’t say I particularly want to.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with David?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘I thought I’d probably go.’
‘What on earth for? It’s bound to be an utterly sick-making drunken orgy, with foreign girls and models with their hair done up over bird-cages. And actors.’
She paused for my response, which didn’t arrive.
A Summer Bird-Cage Page 7