by Rebecca West
But that evening he came with more flowers (he had sent her some) and stayed with her only a quarter of an hour. And all that time told her that she must come to him in Paris.
He said to her, ‘Where do you live?’
‘In Dorset. With Philip’s father and mother. And my two children.’
He thought over that. ‘Two children. Are they boys or girls, or, neatly, one of each?’
‘Two girls. Cassandra and Harriet.’ He did not comment. ‘Ten and eight,’ she added. He still said nothing. ‘The names are family names. It’s awkward, nobody calls their little girls Cassandra, everybody calls their little girls Caroline. But,’ she repeated, ‘they’re family names.’
He said, ‘I never thought of you as having any children.’ He sounded rather cross.
She gave a foolish little laugh, and just stopped herself from repeating, ‘They are ten and eight.’
‘Why do you live with your husband’s father and mother? Did you always live with them?’
‘No. We had a house in London. We went down to Dorset for weekends and holidays. But after Philip died I sold the house.’
[And so on … and so on.… He badgered her with question after question. When does she get up for breakfast? She takes the children to school? What clothes she wore? He seems irritated, his reason for asking these questions seems to spring from his irritation.]
‘It’s so exasperating. I can’t imagine you at any moment of the day, as you are over there. I want to get a clear picture of you in my mind. I would like to see you as you are –’ he paused, and even more resentfully repeated – ‘at any moment of the day.’
She was angry. He had no right to speak as if she had laid him under some obligation to acquaint himself with the whole fact of her being, and to talk as if this imagined obligation was an inconvenience to him. ‘It isn’t necessary that you should,’ she said.
‘Should what?’
‘Be able to imagine me at any moment of the day.’
He looked at her. ‘You don’t admit anything, do you?’
Leonora is telling Nicholas about her humiliation by Gerard March
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard this story before. He said he wanted you and then when you were free he didn’t come through and there was a queer humiliating scene. He asked you to dinner and there were two of you, and a rather ambiguous relative who might have been a mistress, and he behaved as if it were all rather a bore, and never raised a finger. I’ll tell you the name of your friend. It’s Gerard March. African mines. I know him. I don’t sympathize with your taste. He’s a little man. What do women see in little men? But then I don’t really understand any woman surrendering herself to anybody except me or some men who look rather like me, though no man ever does, darling, say no man ever does. But don’t give March another thought. He used you as a cover for something. Either he’s a pederast or impotent. In any case he isn’t a man. I think from what I’ve heard he’s impotent. You’d be an irresistible companion for an impotent man, he could imagine all sorts of things about you. What hell it must be to be impotent. Like having your hearing and your sight and being dumb, not being able to say anything about it. What’s happened to you is like being hit by a cripple with his crutch. But what extraordinary people the English are. Don’t other men want to do something about a man who goes about hurting and insulting their women? Not perhaps if he does it by being impotent, which gives the rest of us an advantage. Oh, you poor darling. How vulnerable all you English women are. You all grow up believing in romantic love, among a lot of men who’ve never heard of the thing. I wouldn’t let Yolande send Gilberte to school in England, though it’s the fashion. Do you want your daughter to have lovers and take money from them? I would never think of my daughter in that way. I turn my imagination away from my family. I don’t try to know what love affairs my sons are having. But all the same I wouldn’t give them an education that would incline them to take a wrong direction when they make that journey into a territory I must never think about.’
‘Who can have told you about Gerard March?’
‘Oddly enough, I can’t remember.’
It came to her mind that there had been other women whose names had for a time been linked with March’s. ‘Would it have been Nini Corder? Harriet O’Shea? Jean Murdoch?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘none of them,’ and yawned.
‘Don’t you know any of them?’ she said.
‘As it happens I know all of them,’ he said. ‘Nini Corder I’ve met at Suvretta. Harriet O’Shea was dancing at Cannes when we spent Easter there. Jean Murdoch’s often at Cap d’Ail. But none of them do I know well enough to ask them if they’ve ever had a wasted evening. And let’s not waste any part of this evening.’
When they were making love he sometimes looked at her with the downcast lids and sideways smile of a proselytizing priest, urging a convert over another hurdle of the faith. It was indeed like being absorbed into a religion. She lived a dedicated life. She did not want to see people, she did not want to go to picture galleries or theatres, she went for walks only because the open air was good for her skin. But this was not idleness. She contemplated his image perpetually. She said, ‘What can I do for him?’ She bought clothes very carefully, going to several of the great dressmakers before she chose a dress, entirely with reference to his taste. In the hotel room, she hardly read, she sat by her window varnishing her fingernails and her toenails, looking down on the tops of the chestnut trees; and thinking of him, with love, with lust, with wonder. She would grow fascinated by memories. Once when she went to his country house she had seen him riding, and it filled her with ecstasy to remember how his ugly hands had looked among the reins on his horse’s withers.
Sometimes as he sat beside her in an automobile, he would draw the fingertips of the hand nearest her along his mouth and then press them for a second against the bare flesh of her forearm. It was the remotest form of caress imaginable. It was as tenuous as a whisper on the telephone. It bewildered her that sometimes when he had made extravagant love to her and they were lying side by side, he would brush his lips with his fingertips and then put them to her forearm, just as if they were in public and their bodies dead again with clothes. What did that mean? That he wanted to warn her that making love was making love, but they were still separate people? That he wanted to own that when they were not joined by desire they were still joined in some way that had almost nothing to do with the body?
When she entered his flat he used to put his hands on each side of her face, kiss her on both cheeks, then draw his hands down her throat and over her shoulders, and down her arms till he took her wrists and brought her hands up to his mouth. Sometimes in the midst of her joy at seeing him, she would feel bewildered because of the sadness of his face.
‘Do you think when we die there’s anything?’
‘I’m sure there is. I believe in the existence of God and the Son of God and the Mother of God. They’re there. I knew it in the war. But they’re two-dimensional, no deeper than a picture or a mosaic, though they work miracles and save us. It’ll all be absurd, winged giraffes in the Place de la Concorde, but otherwise just like the world as we know it.’
He liked to pour out wine into a goblet, for both of them to drink from.
He liked to call her ‘you wicked little thing’.
In bed when he wanted to read he used her back as a book-rest.
‘We always make love all the time as if God were looking at us.’
When he was naked he was more like a Roman statue than a Greek one.
He was untidy. He was always taking his possessions out of his pockets and putting them down. But they always fell into groups like a seventeenth-century still-life. They made the room look beautiful. He bought antique scientific intruments and once left one in her hotel sitting-room – a fifteenth-century astrolabe.
‘You hate walking along this passage, you wish there was some way by which you could be transported from the windowseat of my
living-room straight into my bed, without having to give away that you go to my bed by your own free will. You nearly die of embarrassment every time, I can feel it. But why? You aren’t a humbug. You never try to suggest that you’re doing something for my sake which you don’t want to do. It puzzles me. But it’s your folly. You may have one little folly.’
‘You are a little mad. I’m complimenting you. You know, you get a horse, and then you try it out, and you find there’s something a little mad about it, and you know then it is going to be a good horse.’
His feeling that to kiss a woman on the mouth was something as intimate as the sexual act, that it would be as shameful to be seen by a third person doing the one as the other. Old fashioned.
‘Whores don’t attract me, but I’ve nothing against them. They are realists who face reality for the sake of practising an art or making easy money or doing both at the same time. And I respect them for escaping one humiliation. A whore’s the only woman who goes to bed with a man without running the risk of the man thinking that she’s in love with him though he’s not in love with her. If I were a woman I couldn’t bear that.’ But isn’t that, she thought, just our case? Or isn’t it?
He hated pederasts but thought it pardonable for women to be lesbians. But he found this difficult to explain.
‘Wouldn’t you think it odd for me to go to bed with, let us say, Yvonne Achille?’
‘No, she’s pretty, you’re pretty, it would be quite charming.’
‘But what would we get out of it? When I make love it’s for the sake of being as close as I can to someone’ – she dared not say it – she dared not ever speak of love – ‘who is strong as men are, who gives a sense of protection.’
‘You take it all too seriously. Can’t you see that it might be pleasant for two women to use each other’s prettiness to give each other sensations?’
‘It’s odd, you’re so professional about sex,’ she said, ‘and then I suddenly realize you don’t know a thing about it. Sensations.’
Nicholas thought Frenchmen brutal to and about women. ‘It’s their livers. We Greeks have killed off all our own people with weak digestions by the badness of our food, and left a digestively strong people that isn’t interested in food.’
Nicholas did not care much for food and drank wine with an impatient liking; he complained he could not taste it after the first glass. But he had a passion for sweets, not chocolates, which he would not let himself indulge. She bought all the local sweets she could, and left them about her hotel sitting-room so that he would see them and she could watch him eat half a dozen wolfishly, and then check himself with difficulty. It seemed so odd that this was evidently the only thing he thought it wrong to do. He developed this habit of coming in to see her in the evenings if they were not to make love that day. He used to come in before he went out to dinner, very correct in his evening clothes, his public self, a hard, rich man, arrogant and unsympathetic and impassive. It was as odd that he should be the lover she knew, half out of his body with subtlety and desire and revelation, as it would have been if he were a poet or a musician. She would be dressed for her dance or her dinner-party or her theatre, and he would tell her how she looked. He would tell her what he had been doing that day, either not troubling to make it comprehensible, or perhaps hallucinated into thinking that everything he said was comprehensible to her simply because he said it. He would ask her what she had been doing, and always found her answers surprising and comic, as if the idea of her being able to do anything independently of him was amusing, as if she showed great hardihood continuing to exist and moving about when she was not in bed with him. He had usually arranged for his car (a huge Rochfort Schneider) to take his wife alone to the house where they were to dine and send it back for him, so that he should have stayed with Leonora only ten minutes, but sometimes he stayed longer. Once, on such an occasion, he looked at her and sighed ‘I must go, they’ll think I’m making love to someone, and how I wish I were.’ At the last moment as he turned away he took a crystallized walnut as a compensatory sweetness from a box. It turned out to be full of syrup in a thin shell of sugar which broke between his fingers and the syrup ran down his dress-shirt. He sat on the edge of the bath while she sponged the syrup off his shirt front, and they laughed together.
‘An improbable reason for being late!’ he said. ‘Even Yolande won’t believe it! A walnut!’ Laughter lightened his face, it lost its heaviness, she was surprised by its beauty, she bent over him and dropped a kiss on his lips, then retreated back into laughter, and as he had ceased to laugh went further back into silence. He looked up at her wickedly and said, ‘I win point by point. You never kissed me before without being asked. Now I go without regret. To make love after that would be an anticlimax.’
Once when she went to stay at his country house there was an afternoon when it was raining, and she could not make love. When the others sat down to play bridge they went out and had a walk in the woods, amused by the sound made by the artillery of summer rain. Sometimes they stood still and listened to it, face to face, smiling with happiness, while he held her clasped hands to his breast. The arcades between the trees.… He said under the rain, ‘Oh, my girl, my sweet girl,’ and drew her to him, and kissed her as he rarely did except when they were making love. Both their faces were wet with rain. ‘We might both have been crying,’ she said. ‘It’s not our thing to do.’
His two sons were tall and dark and hard like him, but more graceful. She wondered if he had ever been as beautiful as they were, and if it were simply time that made him so unpliable, so like a rock. They had that sad look too. ‘We all, my sons and I, look subtly awful. Just a hairbreadth’s difference and we might all be the sort of man Josephine Baker might employ as a chauffeur.’
His wife was his cousin. ‘I’d as soon be in love with my sister. Indeed sooner. Chateaubriand gives one that idea in one’s romantic youth. I think someone has been very unkind to her. But naturally I don’t discuss that with her. I haven’t the slightest hesitation in making love to you in my own house.’
When she was staying at his country house she came downstairs in a new white satin dress, and though there was nobody else down, they stood beside each other by the great hearth like strangers. He said, ‘That’s a new dress, isn’t it? Turn round. It’s lovely. And it will look its loveliest when I see it tonight as a white shining circle on the floor by your bed.’
‘Let me wear it for a moment. I took a lot of trouble over it.’
He gave her a glass of champagne.
‘Everything about you is so romantic. You do not belong to my world. You might be a spirit from the woods. All the women look at you with surprise. You don’t know any of the things they’ve worked on all their lives, but you can trump all their aces. They’d be envious if you didn’t win them over but it’s so plain you aren’t out to compete. And all the men wonder what you’re like. But are frightened of you. Quite frightened. By God, you weren’t the woman to cure Gerard March.’
The mention of Gerard March still hurt her. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘If there is a woman who could cure him, why shouldn’t it be me?’
‘I notice that you’d like the idea of curing him though I am your lover and you’re faithful,’ he said. ‘We’re none of us entirely monogamists. But of course you’re frightening. You’re intractable. You shot into my life and into my bed, and you might shoot out again. But I don’t think you will, for reasons that they won’t ever know, quite private to ourselves.’
‘Do you mean,’ she said in sudden shame, ‘that they all know that you’re my lover?’
‘Oh, no, they don’t know that,’ he said. ‘We’ve both been so discreet. They just consider you as someone wonderful who might be loved. Drink that champagne. I know you don’t like it. But you should drink it.’
‘Why should I do that?’ she asked as she obeyed. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Because you’ll blush less easily if you do. You won’t care so much,’ h
e said. ‘There’s Carrière and his wife coming downstairs now. Start talking to me about dogs. Then she can join in.’
‘Just any dogs?’ she asked, laughing against the bubbles of champagne.
‘I can’t remember which breed it is she’s interested in,’ he said, ‘but one dog leads to another.’
The day he made love to her in the afternoon, and a fog fell so that they spent the night together in his apartment. He telephoned to his home. ‘I wish I had my dogs here.’ The wood fire. The lights. Naked she went near the fire, and he called her away, ‘You’ll get burned far quicker than you think.’ They read, they ate, they listened to a concert on the radio, they made love again, they got hungry, they went to the kitchen and got food, they went to bed and slept all night, they had not done that since the first time they were lovers. His hand round her breast.
‘Your breast is hard and yet it’s soft. It has the feeling of being something folded upon itself. It might unfurl and be a wing. A torturing thought.’
‘Why torturing?’
‘To an engineer quite torturing. A couple of wings just there would make a hopelessly unstable unit.’
The telephone rang and he did not answer it. ‘I want nobody to be able to imagine that we are together in this room. I won’t give them the slightest clue, even the knowledge that I am in this room.’ It was true that there was immense joy in the secrecy of their companionship. When he took her throat so that her chin rested on the span between his finger and thumb and looked down on her face while she looked up at the eyes shining light out of his darkness, they could contemplate each other as if they were the only people who had ever been on earth.