by Rebecca West
‘She’s not my mistress. I don’t think she’s ever been anybody’s mistress. It’s not her line.’
‘After the last two years you couldn’t say that of me.’
‘Leonora, you must not talk like that. Of us.’
‘Why not? The thing that you do with a whore is what you do with me.’
‘Yes. That is the most horrible thing in the world, that the most exquisite luxury should be the same as the most brutal necessity.’
‘I cannot bear to be thought of as either a luxury or a necessity.’ ‘But everything that exists is either a luxury or a necessity if it isn’t worthless.’
She was suddenly ashamed of her nakedness, and he perceived it, and picked up her peignoir and slipped it on her. ‘How hard you’re breathing,’ he said. ‘This has been a hideous shock. Lie down, lie down.’ When she did not move he lifted her off her feet and laid her on the bed, and pulled the sheet over her, and sat down on the end of the bed and lit a cigarette. She thought how many women had probably lain in among these pillows. ‘My God, what has this damned woman done to us?’
She went back to London and telephoned to the two men who wanted to marry her. One was out, so it was the second whom she married. She told him that she had been in love with another man, but he did not mind. She never showed the benefits of the experience she had acquired with Nicholas except fitfully, when she was pretending it was Nicholas. Then she was hideously jarred because of his delight which took her out of her fantasy. The violence of her second husband’s making love at first surprised her. But he was famined. Nicholas had never made love out of famine. She supposed he had never let himself get even very hungry.
Sex was not a universal function. It was a lottery. Everyone knew that there were some huge prizes of delight and that among them were those which matured into lasting happiness. Hence there was no woman but hoped that she would derive from her relationship with her husband or her love[r] such pleasure as she herself had been given by Nicholas. Yet she believed, and had some basis of experience for that belief, that Nicholas was a genius as a lover, and that genius in this field was as rare as any other. She was further fortunate, she suspected, in that she had some share of sexual genius herself, or rather that her sexual being was of a sort on which Nicholas’s genius could work happily. She was in the happy position of a singer whose voice is specially suited to the operatic music of Mozart, and who meets the perfect Mozart producer. Such a destiny as hers could not fall to many women. That the singer was enjoying unusual good fortune would be generally admitted; women who cannot sing usually know it. But her own destiny must have seemed to most women within their reach, if only among the men they met was a man like Nicholas; and certainly genius does not exist in such numbers.
When Leonora thought of what differences there were between Nicholas and other men it seemed to her that other men’s kisses had no weight to them. She remembered Nicholas’s mouth as pressing down on hers so heavily that it was painful. This was perhaps not purely physical, it was perhaps a trick of her memory that made material something which was spiritual. Every time that Nicholas had kissed her she committed herself to something she could not name. To a sort of obedience. But obedience was not the word. She would not have performed any act which she believed to be wrong simply because he told her to do it; he would not have asked her to do anything about which she was capable of making a decision. For a woman to obey a man is horrible, to surrender her will, her sense of right and wrong, it is the sort of thing a prostitute does to curry favour with a man. That obligation which Nicholas laid upon her and which she accepted was to go with him out of life, to the place where they went when they made love: to accept their illicit relationship as a means to this discovery.
Leonora and her second husband spend some years in Africa before returning to London. Ten years after her love affair with Nicholas in Paris, she goes, evidently alone, to Vienna and discovers that Nicholas is staying there too. ‘They have a long dialogue and spend the night together and then part.’
Nicholas says about the future, ‘Nothing matters. The flag is torn!’
‘What flag?’
‘The flag. Any flag. All flags.’
He says as he goes about Leonora’s room, ‘One can see you have been loved. That is what strikes me as so sad about my daughter. Every now and then when she is ill I go into her room and there’s nothing lying about that shows she’s been successful at convincing anybody she is a woman. You know, the little jars, the unnecessary things. Everything for use. Sensible.’
‘I come first with you. You needn’t say, “What right have you to do that?” I’m not saying that I ought to come first with you. I’m saying that I do, and by no right that can be recognized by logic. Just as you come first with me. Of course you know quite well that I would automatically say that to any woman I found myself with in any circumstances resembling these. But you know just as well that with you I mean it. And you know that this too I would say to any woman. I am prevented from telling you the truth so that you’ll believe it. It’s a sort of prison …’
‘All you wanted, when you asked me to come over to live in Paris, was that it should be more easy for you to desert Solange. Wasn’t it?’
‘I didn’t know you knew about Solange, though I knew that Solange knew about you.’
‘How did she know about me?’
‘I didn’t tell her. I told nobody, though of course it was understood between Yolande and me. But as it turned out everybody knew. One of my sons spoke of you casually the other day, he didn’t say anything indiscreet but I realized he’d always known. Yet I tried hard never ever to look at you when we were in the same room. I suppose we were obviously so damned happy that people guessed. You used to sit and glow. I suppose I did too in my murky way. Oh, what you threw away, what you destroyed!’
‘The first time we ever made love when I took you to —. We made love so wonderfully that afternoon, but it was not then that I knew that you belonged to me. Do you remember how I slept in the little salon, because you were frightened by it all? I was very stupid with you, even brutal. It was a compliment to you. I was so agitated about you that I could not work things out, and I woke up and thought of the afternoon we’d spent and I was staggered by it all, and went and knelt by the window and looked out at the street, and the river was beyond, and you came in and stood beside me, and we talked a little, and I turned my head and kissed your breast through your nightgown, and you shuddered. Not much. A little frisson, that was all. I admired you so much. You’d brought such courage to bed with you. This extraordinary thing happened to me, and you let it happen to you. You might have refused: women sometimes refuse even when what they’re getting is the ordinary thing. They’re passive. But you came with me, you inexperienced, deliberately limited little creature. But I knew you were horrified because you had gone to the end of the world and back with a naked stranger. So I pretended you were cold. And I carried you back to bed, and then you stretched out your arms to me and told me I could come in beside you. I don’t remember what you said but you were very funny. You really felt it was awful of you to make me sleep on the sofa in the other room, from a social point of view, you were just like a nicely brought up woman saying to a weatherbound guest at her house in the country, “Oh, but you must stay to dinner”, and at the same time you were agonized lest I thought you were asking me to make love to you again. But your good breeding pushed you on, you just had to tell me that I could come into your bed. It was so funny and so pretty, that I had to make love to you again, and then you were so so sweet, and so – I don’t know how to name it, that I found myself thinking, “I must keep her, I must keep her my own for ever”.’
When they were making love their other bodies declared themselves, which felt an immense hunger but were not gross, they were joined in chastity.
Making love was not a fury, a madness, or an obsession, it had nothing to do with all that, it belonged to the reasonable side of life.
Again she awoke and it was still dark. He was awake too, and when she stirred he spoke to her.
‘Tell me. It’s not the sort of thing I should ask you. It’s not the sort of thing you should tell me. But tell me. Our case is a special one, so tell me. Were you happy with other men?’
‘No. Never. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t what I have always been with you.’ Her voice died, she stroked his face through the darkness.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I never had anything like it.’
They lay close together as if it were a grief they were sharing, and slept again.
When she awoke in the morning she was lying with his left arm behind her head. She put down her head against his ribs to hear his heart beating and brushed his flesh with her lips. At that he stirred, opened his eyes, stretched his right arm across his body and ran his fingers through her hair and pulled it hard. Then he chuckled and said, ‘O, toi!’ and with his left arm jerked her up so that his head was on her shoulder, and they laughed into each other’s faces. It seemed to her that nothing as beautiful as this had ever happened between two human beings.
But he was not her lover now, he was her friend, and one could not betray one’s friends – and indeed friends did not betray one as lovers did. Morton was better value for her than Nicholas. She gave up this puzzle of accountancy. It was the immensity of her love for Nicholas which made the barrier between them. She would not dare go back to him even if Lionel were dead.
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ she said.
‘Nothing?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘For one thing, if there is a war, Lionel will have to go back to the Army.’
‘Yes, in that case it wouldn’t do, of course,’ he said. That argument was for him, as she knew it would be, quite final. He got up. ‘When war comes I hope you’ll be all right. You’ve got somewhere to go outside of London? Your husband’s good at looking after things like that?’ He looked at her face, put out his hand and tousled her hair so that it covered her eyes, and said, ‘O, les sales Boches,’ and sighed, and went into the bathroom.
‘How long did you stay with Solange Guidener?’
‘How did you know it was Solange? I thought I had been so very careful.’
‘Somehow or other after Avril Waters did that abominable thing I knew all about you. I remembered things. I wonder why that should have been. What she did had nothing to do with all that.’
‘If an act’s abominable enough it explodes. It no longer hits like a thrown stone, it bursts like a bomb. And everything falls in ruins.’
‘But did you stay long with Solange?’
‘No. A year or so. She was very good to me after you left. She told me she knew and that I didn’t need to pretend. But it all petered out. She’s all right, however. She married an American and lives in New York. Really, she’s perfectly all right. She likes New York.’
‘She likes New York because she had suffered here, she hadn’t been able to stand sharing you with me, she was brutalized by suffering, and so you left her, or wanted to leave her, and she saw it and went. And now you say, she’s quite all right. She likes New York.’
‘You don’t understand. Solange was a pretty woman, and a nice woman, and I will always be grateful to her but she is not the same sort of animal as you. Not for one moment, not for a second, did she come first with me.’
‘It’s you who do not understand. She knew that one week out of every four you didn’t come to see her, and that you went to bed with me as you went to bed with her, you were naked with me as you were naked with her, you were deep in me as you were deep in her. She could not bear it any more than I can bear the reverse side. Would you have shared me with another man?’
‘I’ve never shared a woman who meant anything to me with another man.’
‘That is not what I asked. Would you have shared me with another man?’
He stared at her. ‘You. Let’s think. Yes. If that had been the only way of getting you. Or keeping you. Or getting you back. What’s the good of talking about this? I’d have taken you away from any other man. After that first time you’d have left any man for me. And you didn’t leave me for another man. You went to another man, but he wasn’t why you left me. Nor, for another thing, would you have ever consented to be shared by any two men, whoever they were. You’re too scrupulous. Also you are too cruel. You wouldn’t recognize any peculiar situation.’
‘That’s true. Can’t you understand that if I wouldn’t have consented to be shared I couldn’t consent to share you with another woman?’ she asked.
‘But you did and you were happy. I don’t believe you have ever been so happy since you left me,’ he answered.
‘How could I help it? You wouldn’t come and live in France.’
‘I couldn’t come and live in France, and you couldn’t help being unfaithful to me. And I couldn’t help leaving you.’
‘But I was doing my best,’ he said. ‘When you were there I never looked at anyone else.’
‘What would you have said if every time I had gone back to England I’d had a lover there?’
‘I’d have called you a slut,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the same thing and you know it. When you went back to England you didn’t want to be unfaithful to me. Never. I know you. I was faithful to you with my mind, but my body wouldn’t hear of it. So I slept with another woman, and I got out of bed the minute I could, and waited for you.’
‘That is the arrangement which didn’t please me,’ she said.
‘It did, you thought it oughtn’t to and so you pretended it didn’t but it did,’ he said. ‘Ask yourself if we weren’t happy. I never was so good a lover in my life. What more did you want? We lived in paradise.’
‘I suppose it’s hard for you to imagine,’ she said.
She realized that he knew something about her but not all, and that he wanted to know whether she had had any [more] children. She saw that though it was possible that at any moment he might say across the room something about her body which would be like a blow across her face, he could not bring himself to ask this question. She stood up by the hearth and faced his form while she lit a cigarette. ‘Why should I tell him? Why should I be kind to his jealousy? What did he do to mine? What right has he to disapprove of what I do?’ But the childish sullenness of his mouth made her tell him. ‘No, I’ve not had another child.’ She went on to think, looking at his mouth which was not sullen for a moment and then was sullen again, ‘Now he’s wondering whether I chose to or if it’s by accident. I will not tell him that. To think he wants to know!’
He said in English, ‘My dear love, my dear, true love’, but she was not sure if his English were good enough for him to understand how that sounded to her ear.
The kind of love they had had for each other was bound to end in tragedy: but it alone would give that revelation. Nicholas would not have esteemed it so highly if it had been only pleasure. There was some knowledge and wisdom derived from the discussion of their bodies.
He had never believed that their relationship could have any other ending but pain; and he had never rebelled against this belief. He would be faithful to a woman for a time, and never be happier than during such a time, but his faith would be based on an acute perception of sexual values which would lead him to breach of faith. The god had to be served wherever destiny had built an altar; and Communion had left the last celebrant clairvoyant, so that she would know of the new novitiate. How could this sequence be broken? She had a persuasion that it could be ended by a surrender to love. But if he had been unfaithful to her and had gone on living with her she would have known it in agony; and he would have known her agony; by that he would have been brutalized, for he could not have stopped betraying her, and if he had left her and she had waited for him to come back to her their relationship would not create itself again. She would have been brutalized by suffering. Their bodies would have been connected by another link than pleasure, which would not have served the reli
gion of sex. If she had been married to him and had children she could have endured it. She could see herself annulling sex, making him priest of an inferior religion to her own, by going to him on some night when he slept at home and getting into his bed and saying to him, ‘Give me another child,’ and lying, unresponsive to his skill and indifferent to his magic, while he did, what was for her, just that, a way to get another child, and again he would have known it, his body knew everything. But she could not have married him; and what a thing it would have been to do to him, who was a priest of that other religion by birth, who should not be insulted for what he could not help. ‘Not after we had begun that way. I could not have gone on the other way,’ she said to herself. ‘And we could not have begun any other way,’ for she remembered how she had felt like the sound of a trumpet, day in day out, before he became her lover, nothing of her left but an anguished vibration. There was no other possible relationship between them except the one which had been. She would never be as useful to any human being as she was to him, no other human being could be as useful as he was to her. It was true but it was in defiance of fact and logic. With Lionel she had known physical ordeals of courage under heat and fear in Africa, and the wild beauty; with Philip she had known all the resources of the civilized world. She had known infinite kindness from both. With Nicholas she had done nothing but perform again and again and again the simple ballet that two bodies can compose together. Yet somehow she had realized a wider range of her potentialities with him, somehow he had disclosed many more qualities than Lionel or Philip. How could that be? To what god was he making sacrifice when he poured his spirit into her through his mouth and his loins? A god, he had always known, without kindness. A god who had to be worshipped simply because he existed. All his fineness had been wasted in the service of this cruel god – there was occasion for such sorrow as simple people feel when they hear of a promising man become a monk, only Nicholas’s vows had been of wealth and unchastity.