by Rebecca West
She asks him, ‘What good is the square root of minus one?’ He begins to explain, then bursts into laughter, ‘It’s too absurd. Anybody who knows about us, or anybody who suspects what we are to each other, knowing we were alone, would imagine us as locked in lust, transported in passion. And how much of the time you spend cramming me with caramelles, with walnut fondants, with macaroons, out of God knows what evil intentions, no doubt so that I will grow enormously fat and you needn’t be jealous, and how much of the rest of the time you spend treating me as an encyclopaedia, to fill up the gaps in your deplorable education, it’s simply prodigious, you do it again and again, you have a passion for knowledge at the most odd moments, and God knows where it will lead you. When I was a little boy I picked up a copy of La Vie Parisienne and on the cover was a drawing of a man fully dressed coming into his wife’s bedroom inflamed with rage, and his wife, all pink, jumping out of bed, and a man, all pink, staying in bed, and the wife saying “One moment! I can explain everything!” I wasn’t so little that I hadn’t a rough idea what was going on but young as I was I couldn’t see how she could explain it. But I shall be that man one day and I shall come in one day, and I shall find you in bed with another man, and you will get up and you will say, “One moment! I can explain everything! Just about an hour ago, I felt an overwhelming curiosity about the third law of thermodynamics and this gentleman” – Oh, darling, your fidelity to me hangs on a thread. I may lose you any moment to a man who’s better at exposition than I am. I may as well enjoy the privileges I may lose just whenever you get in touch with a man who has a science degree. Sweetheart, sweetheart, open your arms to me, but first brush back that strand of hair, it’s the loveliest hair but I don’t like finding it in my mouth.’
In the morning the fog had cleared. He was sorry.
He said (some other time), ‘I don’t make love to you in the morning. One could make love to anybody in the morning. There’s nothing personal in that. You and I go to bed because it’s the intensest way we have of thinking of each other.’
‘You went to — ? Why?’
‘Because you did your military service there.’
‘Just for that?’
‘Why not? I liked to see where you once were.’
‘When I was young. Imagine you doing that. What did you do in the town?’
‘I stood in the street and stared at the barracks. Then I went into the public park and sat by the bandstand. Then I had lunch. And then I went and walked along the river, under those trees. Down that tributary that comes in after the bridge, where the trees are bleached. And then I went back to Paris.’
‘Did that really amuse you? It’s nothing of a town.’
‘But it was amusing to think of you, and imagine what you were like.’
He was disconcerted. ‘You spent the whole day just doing that? But how sweet of you! I can’t bear it. Oh, damn it all. It isn’t half an hour from Paris, it’s two hours. You must have got up in the early morning. You can’t have got back until the early evening. And you were at the theatre.’
‘Why, how did you know that?’
‘Someone mentioned it when they were telephoning this morning. Some man.’
‘I didn’t see anybody I knew. Except Solange Guidener.’
‘If we had money [during military service] we had our own girls.’
‘Did you have a girl?’
‘Of course I had a girl. Girls are what I have.’
‘Ah, don’t laugh at me! I’d like to be all the women you have ever made love to.’
‘Darling, I implore you to give up the idea. Please forget it. I’m really alarmed. It seems so possible that that will show you some wonderful new scientific way of turning yourself into all my mistresses – then you’ll say to me, “Wait a moment. This explains everything”. Oh, it would take quite a long time and it would be so boring for me to have to do all that a second time.’ They were rolled up against each other by their laughter. ‘And this girl, oh, I’d hate you to become her. She was thin as an umbrella and pale as phosphorus. She had to be. You see, I was a Socialist then and I chose my girls like that because they were downtrodden victims of the capitalist class and looked it. They had to be skin and bones and livid pale. Like Picasso, I had my blue period. Only like him I’d say by constant experimentation with new ideas I have reached the present stage of my art. O sweetheart, don’t, don’t take me back to my blue period. What a nightmare,’ he said with sudden seriousness, ‘if your eyes looked up at me out of someone else’s face. Oh, come close. Establish your identity, prove to me that all of you is you.’
‘You’ve made love to me so well that if you meant nothing at all to me, I should be grateful for ever, but, of course, if you were the worst lover in the world I shouldn’t mind.’
‘Why not, I’d like to know?’
‘Well, it would be you.’
He lit a cigarette and she saw that, as on the first time they had made love, his hands were trembling. With his other hand he covered the dark vein on his forehead. ‘I have said the wrong thing,’ she thought. But how can he expect that I should go on and on being his mistress unless I felt an emotion for him which would make me happy just to be with him? How could he think I can see so much of him without taking him as himself rather than as a purveyor of pleasure?
‘The trouble is that there is a physical connection between love-making and having children, though there isn’t any mental connection. A man can have children by a woman he doesn’t love and be perfectly satisfied with them, and if a man adores a woman he’ll probably think of having a child by her. It’s a brutal thing to do to a woman who’s fragile and pretty and who is being charming to one, to say, “In nine months from now you’ll suffer pain, and most of those nine months will be disagreeable.’”
‘I hate virginity,’ he said, ‘I think it’s the nastiest arrangement of nature.’
‘I would have thought you could have avoided it.’
‘I have. I’ve only had one virgin in my life, and as you know the facts of my life you will understand I loathed it. It’s a horrible thing for a young man to have to do to a young girl he likes and doesn’t love. But all the same I sometimes wish I could have been your first man.’
She had often wished it.
‘You make love so beautifully, so intelligently, I sometimes think afterwards, “She knows so many things someone else taught her.”’
‘Oh God, you are a thundering ass! I don’t make love like that.’
‘Your skin is different from anyone else’s.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘I’m not sure. My skin knows but won’t tell.’
Nicholas speaks:
‘I distrust any account of a love affair which describes lovers as sleeping in each other’s arms. The only comfortable way a man and woman can sleep together is either for the man to sleep with his back to the woman, and she lies with her arm like a little fin through the crook of his elbow, something marine, something seal-like, or for her to sleep with her back to him, which is very pleasant, he can wake her up by kissing the nape of her neck. Face to face may be advisable for conversations of the mind, and love-making is partly that, but it’s no particular help for the conversations of the body, and sleeping with you is a heavenly physical conversation. I wake feeling we have come nearer to an understanding of all sorts of things.’
‘The real reason against promiscuity for women is that most men have nothing to give any woman, while most women have something to give any man. I mean of course inside the circle of people who have organs that are not merely generative but sexual. However casual an affair is, however commonplace the woman is, there can be something that’s charming. Suppose a man’s lying on his back on the bed, his arms behind his neck, and a woman’s sitting on the edge beside him, and they’ve made love and it’s all calm, she can do something so delightful, simply putting out her arm and caressing him, the way she bends her head, even if she’s quite plain, it’ll be memor
able. What likelihood is there that most men will do that?’
‘I’m bored by your body,’ Leonora said. ‘It makes an inconvenient third. It’s as if just because we liked to eat saddle of mutton sometimes we had to live with a sheep as our constant companion.’
‘I count it a supreme triumph that I can get a woman who can say such awful things to go to bed with me and like it. Go on and make some more remarks like that. My complacence will get richer and richer. And by the way my sexual being can’t be compared with a sheep.
‘Why do you goad at sex? It works out pretty well for you. I’ve never known anybody who likes making love more than you do. You say nothing, you practise reserves which are almost comic, but how your eyes shine, and often you’re the most deliberate of artists.’
‘What on earth is he talking about?’ she thought. ‘And is it better for me that he should think I am a deliberate artist, whatever that means, or know that I’m not?’
People guessed they were in love. Sometimes he came over to London. He borrowed a house once on the Wiltshire downs. A shire house on a ledge. Moonlight.
She sometimes, when she was in England, wondered why he should love her and whether he would not tire of her quite soon, but he took pains to make it clear that whether that might happen or not, it had not happened yet. He sent her notes all the time, a telegram just before she came to him.
Nicholas asks who made a comment which Leonora has repeated to him.
‘A very pretty woman with chestnut hair called Solange Guidener who mentioned Yolande.’
‘Who gave this party?’
‘Someone called Pauline de Mercier. Do you know her?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t seen her for years. I’d forgotten she existed. She evidently does.’ He went and filled the goblet with wine, came back and put his arm round her waist, and drew her down on the sofa, and made her drink out of the goblet, and then drank himself. ‘Léo,’ he said, ‘you must come and live in Paris. Really you must.’
‘I can’t, I can’t,’ she said. ‘I must stay with the children at their grandfather’s.’
‘What can that matter? They can see their grandparents quite often. But you must come over here. And live here all the time. You must. You must.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘You understand that I am asking something terribly important to me.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it’s terribly important for my children that I go on seeing their grandparents.’
‘If it’s a matter of money I’ll give you money. I’ve always got my women disgracefully cheap. It’s time I paid. I’ll give you quite a lot of money.’
‘But this particular money is the money my children ought to have,’ she said, ‘and there is the house. And I am sorry for my husband’s parents, they are old. It is my duty to be there most of the time. This is the kind of thing you’d make me do, if I were your wife or your sister or your daughter.’
He was silent, and they went on drinking the wine in alternate draughts, till the glass was empty. ‘It’s ill luck that I’ve got a moral being for my mistress. But can’t it be more than just one week in four? Oh, please, my darling.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said, ‘but it’s so difficult.’
‘Why can’t you take money from me?’
‘I don’t need it.’
‘Your husband didn’t leave so very much. I had his estate looked up at Somerset House by our London Branch.’
‘That isn’t all I have. My father left me something too.’
‘That wasn’t much either. I had that looked up too. I wish we could marry. It would be so much more convenient.’
‘No,’ she cried, ‘no.’ A vision of his country house. The roof off, Yolande, the plain daughter, the two sons, sitting exposed to the weather.
‘You wouldn’t like it?’ he asked.
‘Not at that price,’ she said.
‘It’s odd, marriage which isn’t a marriage because it’s incestuous is harder to break than a real marriage,’ he said. ‘My sons and my daughter are my second cousins.’
‘I couldn’t bring up my children in your house in Paris if your family was round the corner. You wouldn’t like living with my two little girls in a household. We couldn’t make love. This is the only way. It has to be secret. You don’t know how intimate I am with my children. We couldn’t sit and drink out of the same glass.’
‘I’d lose you that way too. The fact is, you and I are childless and we want the relationship of childless lovers, but both of us have children. No, there’s nothing for it but to go on as we’re going.’ ‘Why do you mind so much tonight?’
‘I’m troubled sometimes,’ he said, ‘by slight apprehensions.’ ‘But how irrelevant marriage would be to what we’ve got. How people would interrupt us. We’d have to make love by night. It would get confused with our need for sleep. Now our relationship is perfectly pure, it’s unmixed by the slightest taint of anything outside itself.’
‘You have some magnificent possessions. There are your eyes. When you came to luncheon at Deauville I was so wildly excited by them. I’d never seen eyes that spoke of such an immense capacity for pleasure. I don’t mean just love-making. I hate those dirty old men who say that a woman with three ginger hairs in her left eyebrow is the thing to go for. I mean you enjoy everything, food, spring, me, rivers. I can make you do anything by showing you a river. It’s all shining in your eyes, that greed which is so generous, it isn’t greed, it thanks so nicely for what it takes. And you have the softest hair, like my daughter’s when she was quite a little girl. She was very pretty then. She isn’t now. I dare say she will be later, though I had a very plain grandmother. And you have the quickest reaction time of any human being I’ve ever known. You see every field in a landscape, you see every detail of a tympanum over a church door as soon as you’ve lifted those deep eyelids of yours. You should never use eyeshadow, your lids are the right colour, they’re naturally a shadowy grey. And you can add up a column of figures like a flash!’
‘Grey eyelids and mental arithmetic,’ she said, ‘who would have thought those two would have made a man kiss one from the collarbone to the ear.’
‘You think so quickly, you move so quickly, I feel as if I were looking out of a window and watching a swift flying round the house. And there’s your mouth. It’s quite without form of its own. Then when you feel or think anything, your lips writhe like little serpents and you make yourself a new mouth that’s appropriate. When I say to you, “Do you remember that time when we went to the village in the forest near Autun,” your lips are blank and then they waver, and there’s the memory of where we were and what we did. There’s much more to you than that but now tell me why you like me.’
‘I like everything about you,’ she said.
‘You can’t. I wonder you like anything about me. Oh, perhaps you don’t.’
‘Your eyes,’ she said.
‘They’re in bad taste like a loud tie,’ he said. ‘Find something else.’
‘Your high cheekbones,’ she said.
‘A touch of Albanian blood, we rather suspect,’ he said.
‘I like your thick hair that looks sleek and isn’t, it’s rough like a dog’s when you touch it,’ she said.
‘Am I supposed to think that flattering?’ he said.
‘And I like the way your muscles are like a map over your body,’ she said. ‘Incontinent continents.’
‘And I like the odd way your hip-bones don’t lie quite the way one expects, but more delicately, a little bit of Chinese carving,’ he said, ‘but let’s go to bed, let’s take an inventory of all the other things we like.’
‘I particularly like those queer muscles above your ribs,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen them on statues before.’
‘As to what I like in you, my taste is less recondite and austere,’ he said. ‘My dear, you are so sweet today I’ll give you a special treat. I won’t make you walk along that passage. You won’t have to face th
e fact that you want to be loved and bruised and turned into a quivering little animal and then have to be brought all the way back to being a serene and dignified human being again all by nothing in the least like magic. I’ll carry you along that passage so that you can pretend you’re being raped. Up you go.’
He set her down on her feet in the bedroom, and unzipped her dress, and kissed her down her spine, while she took off her shoes and stockings. Nowadays she wore no girdle, no brassiere, in case they made a pattern on her skin, only some ribbon suspenders. They were very pretty. She spread them out and wound them round her hand so as not to crease them, and her eyes fell on the reflections of their heads in the wide mirror over the chimneypiece. She saw him smiling, but it was a sad man who was smiling. He was, when she came to think of it, always sad. She turned round to face him, meaning to ask him why he was sad, but he picked her up in his arms and laid her on his bed.
‘When you say “hurt me” you are so sweet. You don’t really want to be hurt. Your mouth tells me you have to steel yourself to say it. You only like to be hurt the least little bit, there’s almost no perversity in you. But you know I like to hurt you that little bit, so you think I might like to hurt you still more, and you want to give me that pleasure. Sometimes I think of that, I can hear you saying, “hurt me”, and my eyes are wet. But I have to confess to you that I would hate to hurt you really, pain isn’t what I want to give you.’
‘Oh, God, oh, God, let this last for ever.’
In the synopsis Rebecca West writes that Leonora and Nicholas ‘are together in his flat on the quay, when Avril [Waters] comes and calls on him, to get him to pay her hotel bills. […] He is infuriated. Avril [Waters] has never been his mistress but she has for some years been in the habit of expecting him to pay her hotel bills. In a rage he goes in and writes her a cheque and throws it at her. The scene is brutal. When she goes Leonora and Nicholas have a talk and suddenly Leonora realizes he is thinking, “She realizes that Avril is not my mistress, how awful it would be if she guessed the truth.” She guesses that when she goes back to England he goes back to the woman who was his mistress when he first met her.’