Read it. Read it. Clare is opening the wine.
Okay. It is loved, by the way. You were right. Written by Laurence Hope with music by Amy Woodforde-Finden. Not exactly household names. Or not any more.
Polly reads the poem, properly, not hamming it up. Reads it well.
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?
Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far,
Before you agonise them in farewell?
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,
Where are you now? Where are you now?
Pale hands, pink-tipped, like Lotus buds that float
On those cool waters where we used to dwell,
I would have rather felt you round my throat
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar.
Where are you now? Where lies your spell?
Oh wow, said Clare. That is good.
Isn’t it.
I especially liked, what is it, the pink-tipped fingers . . .
Like Lotus buds . . .
Crushing the life out of him. Serious stuff. You can imagine that electrifying Edwardian drawing rooms. The young man just happening to have brought his music case with him, fixing his lustrous eyes on some conscious young woman.
It’s got a kind of roughness, a sharpness, that’s a bit of a surprise. I thought it would be frightfully sentimental.
So did I. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how it went. And it’s so economical. Just the hands, and the rapture, and the farewell, than which he’d rather be strangled. Nothing explained, it’s terrific. And Shalimar; gorgeous word.
I wonder did they live on a houseboat, says Polly. Those cool waters where we used to dwell. That’s why it’s beside the Shalimar, on the lake beside the gardens.
If you’re going to wonder there’s a huge number of things to wonder about. That’s what’s wonderful. Who are they? He? She? Are they English? Kashmiri? The lotus buds and the strangling are maybe the passionate terrible East. What parts them? Perfidy? Parents? Fate? Race? Etcetera, etcetera. And of course, the garden as an image of paradise.
That’s what the word actually means, you know. The Greek word paradeisos means just that, garden.
Really? So that’s what you and I are doing, grubbing about in our back yards; we’re making paradises. I did know that Muslims imagine paradise, as in the afterlife, as a garden. And that’s what these Mughal gardens are about, creating it on earth. A sort of preview glimpse of the next life’s attractions.
And maybe the lady with the hands is the houri in it.
So there it is, our fragment of a narrative. And the whole vessel imagined from a shard.
The fire burns up, their cheeks are flushed by its heat, the wine is dry and cool in their mouths, they are playing their old games. They gaze at one another smiling with the complete pleasure of all these things.
It is enough. It is enough.
Mrs Ramsay might have said so. Virginia Woolf. . .?Well, who knows.
flights of pigeon
CLARE TEARS OLD A4 SHEETS OF paper into quarters and uses the blank side to make notes. Sometimes she imagines them becoming an archaeological problem, as some latter-day scholar comes across them and tries to decipher the messages on both sides. What sort of semiotic sense will they make of one another? Which side will be valued? Maybe her scribbled deep thoughts will seem insignificant beside the typed or printed fragments of messages on the recycled discarded pages.
When she shakes out her doona a sheaf of these little pages rises in the air and flutters to the ground. You can believe you hear them cooing like the wood pigeons in the tree outside.
I am cold. Come to my bed and warm me.
Love me. You do not need to make love, to love me is enough.
Loving, of course, is huger than making love, warmer, longer, harder. It lasts beyond the grave. To an extent.
Geoffrey and Clare were never cold. They always warmed one another. Never slept with an electric blanket, or hot water bottles. Kept their hot doona for guests and bought a lighter one and even so had to stick out their feet and arms for coolness sometimes, so warm did they grow together.
I am cold. I want you in my bed.
These pages have been nested safely in the doona for several days. They come from a night when she was cold as she doesn’t remember being in all her life with Geoffrey, not since she was a girl living beside the sea and everybody believes you don’t need much heating beside the sea so you are cold a lot of the time, the winter gets into your bones. On this night her bones were cold, and she got up and put on woolly socks and a long-sleeved nightgown that anybody else would have tossed in the Smith Family box years ago because they hadn’t worn it for years before that. But still she lay and shivered under this feather-filled doona which mostly was too warm for her. Much later she supposed that it must have been fear that made her so cold. Fear of another death that crept in through some crack in her being and spread its noxious chill through her blood. She’d known the fear was there, but not that there was some crack, some wound, some entry place within her that would allow its virulent attack. She thought that she was strong. Had fortified any weak places.
That night of cold was when she wrote her notes to Geoffrey. Remembering the shape of him in the bed, his smell. How touching him warmed her. His side is still there, she sleeps on her side, not the middle or his side. His side has sheltered her little oblongs of paper. I am cold. Come to my bed and warm me.
On the back of one slip are lines of a menu . . . plings, crushed peanuts, 8.50. chili jam garlic aioli $8.50. Galette, avocado 12.50, 18.50. She can’t remember what restaurant that would have been. Another says, for more information please contact. Re Council working party. Meeting July 26. And, this one takes her back, a pale pink sheet exhorting her in French to vote for the local Communist Party. Which got elected, she remembers, that very bourgeois suburb of Paris believing that the Communists were the best lot to ginger up the government. They didn’t want them running the country, just keeping on criticising the party that was. In those days Geoffrey was very much warm and lively in her bed. Their bed.
There’s also a heavy card, an invitation to Government House, a Children’s Book Council thing; the backs of such cards make good note pages, they are so thick and smooth to write on. This note says, Mrs Hand and her Five Daughters, an expression she was recently much taken with, never having heard it before. Where have you been, her colleague said, telling her how her parents scrimped to send her to a private school at the age of five, and how the first thing she learned was to masturbate. If they’d known, she said. All their money for that. She found it so good, so rare, so secret and setting apart she believed she was an angel.
Don’t you write that, said her friend. That’s mine. But Clare knows that all writing is betrayal, or rather that you have to choose which betrayal it will be, your friends or your art, and masturbating yourself into angelhood, well, you’d be an idiot to let that slip. And it’s still her friend’s to make something of. She’s just mentioning it in passing.
It hadn’t occurred to her to try masturbation to drive out fear. Calling on the ministration of Mrs Hand and her five daughters. Good women all. She knows that sex is a help when there are terrors lurking. Passionate love-making sex. She remembers how they made love at the time of other operations. As though this love which had given a child life in the first place can somehow keep her from losing it now. She thinks that you need two people. It’s the love, as well as the making of love. Pleasuring she thinks isn’t likely to count.
She had conversations with her recent lover about the way all sex ends up being an affirmation of loss because the lovers must part. Maybe only to sleep, to wake up in the same bed knowing that they will sleep in it again the next night. But in the metaphysical way that sex is the desire to become so united with the lover that you become part of him, it’s al
ways doomed. However nearly you get there, you have to stop, and come back. You can’t fuse, you have to part. A man who turns away instantly he comes so insists on this it is heartbreaking. But if he stays locked close and continues to kiss you, and express his desire for you, it’s a consolation. Next time, you might manage the fusion. Of course deep down you both know you won’t, but desire is saying you’re keen to have another go. That you can allow yourself to believe that this time it’ll all come together. You want to know that the assuagement of desire isn’t the end of desire. That’s what good lovers do, they stay an hour, a night, continuing to love you. And good husbands. They stay a lifetime.
On one of her paper fragments, this one a flyer from a cultural studies conference, she writes about fear. How sometimes you can control it, as though your will is a medication for it, a powerful antibiotic that fights the infection, and eventually it passes (cured by circumstances, in fact, in her case the operation having eventually worked), but how you remain convalescent, still rather frail with the memory and the weakness of it. You’ve known it and you can’t forget it. You have a susceptibility. Like tuberculosis.
And there are lots of notes out of Arthur Schnitzler. She has been reading him because of going to see the Kubrik film Eyes Wide Shut. She found it riveting; she knew it was long and found herself sitting in the cinema watching herself watching this long slow-moving morbid movie, and being riveted. She talks about it to everybody she knows, and discovers that it is a film that polarises opinions; a lot of people hate it, don’t want to talk about it. Others are fascinated, as she is.
The basic premise is the problem. A man’s wife gets stoned and tells him of a fantasy she had once, to make love to a young naval officer. They were staying in a hotel in the summer and she saw him in the lobby. She tells her husband that she would have given up everything, him, her children, her rich apartment, her comfortable life, for a night of love with this stranger.
Schnitzler wrote this in 1925. Kubrik sets his movie in late nineties Manhattan. So, doesn’t this make the subject anachronistic? Frederic Raphael the writer of the screenplay said something like this to Kubrik. Haven’t relations between men and women changed since then, he asked. Do you think they have, said Kubrik. I don’t think they have.
Clare wonders about this. She thinks that betrayal may have become more complicated. Less absolute. Perhaps even more manageable. A confession of a fantasy, from a stoned wife: the women she knows have forgiven so much more. Her lover’s wife, for instance. Herself, once. But the thing is, it’s not the point, that’s what she argues when people like, it has to be said, the former lover, claim that the basic premise is ludicrous. Ludic, maybe. It’s a trope, a construction that stands in for a betrayal; accept it, willingly suspend your disbelief—she did not need much will to suspend hers—and the movie works.
There was a scene where a number of women stood in a circle and dropped their cloaks to reveal themselves naked except for g-strings and high-heeled shoes. And masks, enormous elaborate masking headpieces. Later the g-strings went too, and revealed pubic hair trimmed into heart-shapes. Clare was moved by the nobility of the women. Their hieratic quality. True, they conformed to an image that was itself an unnatural construct, so tall they were, so small in the waist and curved in the buttocks, so jutting and firm in the breasts, they weren’t real women but images of an ideal whose premises were flawed but whose expression was gorgeous. They were noble, and they were proud, but they were not erotic. They were hieratic, denatured, grand. So men have always made art of women. And as well these were terrible in their masks, like dangerous goddesses.
The men were entirely ignoble. At first they were sinister in their cloaks and head coverings. Some wore plague masks with bonnets and great curved bird beaks, and you thought, yes, this is wise, they are in the presence of disease. Then, naked, they became ferrety creatures, scampering about on all fours, poking in and out of the women like wood-pecking Russian toys. Poor forked creatures, entirely without courage, though they were men of immense wealth and power and with death easily in their command. And so feeble were their imaginations, this was their idea of fun. Of ultimate pleasure and the quintessential expression of desire. And the viewer can only think, how pathetic. The women noble, even bent back over tables, and the men able only to peck at them.
No, says Clare, I do not believe it is misogynist. The men may be so, the film isn’t.
She hasn’t managed to get hold of Traumnovelle, the story on which the movie was based, but she has found some other stories of Schnitzler’s. They are all about desire. About how desire goes wrong. He is very good at expressing desire through weather, hot weather, burning sun, white flimsy dresses with no underwear, languid afternoons beside lakes and distant shrouded mountains, inside dim shuttered rooms. His women know what their bodies are telling them, even when they think they ought not to be saying such things, especially when their husbands think their bodies ought not to know such things. There’s a lot of foolishness; it seems to be the endemic human state.
Schnitzler wrote plays too. She discovers his most famous is called La Ronde, which she and Geoffrey saw years ago as a French film, the Max Ophuls version. The play was first printed in a run of only a couple of hundred copies, since he knew it would enrage people. Later, after the war, it was performed, and it did enrage, it was denounced as a plot against the German people, against all that was good in the German way of life, on the part of sinister Asiatic invaders—that is, Jews.
It’s a series of sketches, of couples, beginning with a whore and a soldier, then the soldier and a parlourmaid, the parlourmaid and a young gentleman, the young gentleman and a young wife, the young wife and the husband, and so it goes, until it gets back to the whore again. She remembers the merry-go-round music of the movie. Each sketch contains a copulation, which appears as a line of asterisks in the text. All the women in La Ronde want the men to stay with them, the men who have mostly persuaded the women to fuck them by lying that they love them, and these men having got their way and fucked want to go on to the next thing. The women are often quite hypocritical too, in their case pretending that they don’t want to fuck, never do this kind of thing, are being persuaded against their will, but when they succumb they want to believe in love, some little love, they want to believe that he has not divested himself of desire along with his semen. Leaving him empty and satisfied, and her full, of him and of longing. Frustration.
The women are gentle, they don’t want the man to go but they know that he will, all they ask is that he not go with too great haste. They want him to tarry a little. La Ronde isn’t some crude subversive racial tract, how could anybody think that, it is about loveless love-making, about lust that does not bother even to pretend it cares, once it has slaked itself.
Clare is becoming addicted to this moving plain translated prose. It feeds her own obsessions. She makes little notes about them on her torn-up oblongs of paper, writes down phrases and sentences, ideas. The story called ‘Casanova’s Homecoming’, for instance, when the famous lover is old and poor and trying to get let back into his native Venice. His lechery seems as lively as ever, though, and he bribes a young soldier called Lorenzini to let him sleep with his lover of so far only one night, a pretty young girl who is clever too, a philosopher in the habit of corresponding with famous mathematicians. The men have been playing cards, with a marquis whose wife’s been having it off with the soldier, and Lorenzini loses a lot of money which he can’t pay, which will mean his dishonour, his ruin, the end of his glamorous soldier’s career, the end of his life as he knows and loves it. The marquis will see to that, it is he who’s owed the money, he will demand every jot and tittle of his cuckold’s revenge if the young man does not pay. Casanova offers Lorenzini his own winnings from the same card game, in return for this night of love.
She ponders this, so much hanging on one night of love. Casanova evidently believes that one night with a woman and he has possessed her. Does not realise what all c
ontinuing lovers know, that possession doesn’t last, that it does not even really happen, that it is an illusion. That you can try again and again and not, never, possess anyone. That even when a woman gives herself to a man, she has inevitably to take herself back. A woman or a man, two women, two men; always the self has to be taken back. Though it can be given again. But you can’t possess by taking, only by being given. In the dark of night she writes on one of her slips of paper: And that this is the wonder and the terror of sex.
Casanova has his night with the fresh lovely intelligent young woman, who’s called Marcolina, and Schnitzler makes you believe it is something pretty special in the sex stakes. She doesn’t notice that he isn’t the gorgeous young soldier. Wouldn’t he smell different, feel different, the young silky fresh-fleshed young man, from the flaccider, more lizardy, more bristly, probably rancid old man? Old: between fifty and sixty, but worn out you suppose by dissipation, and in more aging times. Skilful still, but definitely not the lovable body that once he was. But Clare who feels sure she could distinguish between one man and another even in the pitchiest dark, would never not know a lover from a stranger, assumes that this is also a trope, and one often used in literature. Shakespeare does it. It’s always a sneaky nasty trick. And usually backfires, though not because the woman twigs.
Marcolina only notices it’s not the expected lover when the man in her bed falls brutishly asleep and she opens the shutters. Which he was supposed to be alert and in control of. She is scathing, furious, beside herself. So he leaves, wrapped only in the other’s cloak, no shoes or clothes to give him away, but with his sword. He is, even starkers, a gentleman. As signified by the sword. He makes for a waiting carriage, but Lorenzini accosts him. Challenges him to a duel. With a naked man? So Lorenzini takes off his clothes too. Both naked. They fight in the pale dawn. Casanova kills Lorenzini. So he’s ruined, after all. The youth lies on the green grass like a flower in the early summer morning. Casanova puts on his clothes and goes on his way, pleased that he has had his desire, he has possessed the lovely young woman. She’s done. Notched up. No more to be had there.
The Fog Garden Page 14