When we had finished, the cigarette ends were burned in the fire and Sapphire said: ‘Now we may speak!’
See-a-Bird had apparently been considering what I had told him earlier in the evening about the population of London.
‘How terrible it must be to live there,’ he said, ‘with some ten million people occupying territory that here would support only five or ten thousand! Whenever you leave your house to visit a friend in another part of the town, you must pass hundreds of new people.’
‘What’s so terrible about that?’
‘Well, surely, whenever you see a new face in the street, even if no greeting is exchanged there is always a sort of contact, a recognition: you not only notice the face but you sum it up mentally and store it in your memory. Every personal contact is an expense of mental energy. Here we know practically everyone by sight, so our casual meetings make little demand on our energies, and on grand festival days we dull our sensibilities with drink. But we find visits to other regions exhausting; the brain dizzies after a time from the demands put upon it. That’s why we travel little, and why, when we go abroad, our hosts take care to expose us to as few personal contacts as possible. When I try to imagine thousands and thousands of people all in different clothes and with thoroughly disorganized minds, threading in and out of one another’s lives without knowing or greeting, each pursuing a private, competitive path – I think it would kill me.’
‘Oh, no. One can get used to almost everything. The Eskimos who were brought to London in the eighteenth century didn’t die of seeing too many faces. So far as I remember, they just caught bad colds and died that way.’
‘Nobody dies of a cold,’ Sally insisted. ‘Seeing too many faces must have undermined their strength.’
‘Have it your own way. At any rate, we treat people as if they were trees: when you’re walking through a forest, you don’t study every tree, but only the striking ones that will serve as landmarks to guide you back. In the same way we don’t study people’s faces as they go by. Old friends, relatives, even lovers may pass each other and not know it. We’re conscious only of the policeman who regulates traffic, and of the ticket-collector in the bus or railway station. But unless the policeman pulls us up for breaking some traffic rule we don’t study his face; and we know nothing of the ticket collector, unless he questions the validity of our ticket.’ Here it took me a long time to explain policemen and ticket-collectors.
‘But if a beautiful woman goes by?’
‘The impression is as transitory as a picture in the fire. Women go by with their faces set in the same sightless mask as men: no true beauty is apparent.’
‘This self-protective habit of not-seeing must blunt your poetic sensibilities and impair your memory.’
‘Perhaps it does. Little poetry worth the name has been written in London ever since it ceased to be a country town; but Londoners are in general long-lived, and they keep their memories in notebooks and ledgers. For me, the worst is the noise.’
‘What sort of noise?’
‘I don’t mean the incidental noise of traffic – throbbing of motors, rumbling of buses and trains. One gets as inured to that as the Sudanese who live near the Cataracts get to the noise of falling water. It’s the distractive ringing of the telephone, and the music blared out by a million radios from early morning till late at night. One can never escape that for long.’
‘Do you mean to say that anyone can play what music he likes at any hour of the day he likes?’
‘Anyone who has a gramophone or can strum on a musical instrument. Otherwise he has to rely on the radio programmes. Most Londoners like to listen to music while they work, and don’t much care what sort of music it is. When they have to live in a village for more than a week or two, they get desperately bored and lonely without the noise of traffic and the interminable stream of faces and the constant summons of the telephone. So they keep the radio going all the time.’
They all looked very grave and for a long time asked no more questions. Then Sapphire asked: ‘Would you like to go to bed now?’
‘Will it be safe for me to go to sleep? Shan’t I slip back into my own age?’
‘No. You’ll be quite safe.’
Sally said: ‘You’ve been looking at me most of the time, and making me do all the talking. But you’re in love with Sapphire, whom you’ve hardly looked at.’
I blushed at the suddenness of her challenge, but made no denial.
‘Then what are you waiting for?’ she went on. ‘You are you, not a wraith. Sapphire is Sapphire, not a vision. What holds you back?’
‘Compunctions of custom,’ I mumbled with an appealing glance at Sapphire, and then felt cross and stood on my dignity: ‘I don’t think you have a right to talk to me like that, Sally!’
The effect of my words on everyone present was painful. A sort of spasm shook Sally, and her eyes filled with tears; I saw a couple of them trickle down her cheeks, though she neither sobbed nor cried. Starfish gave a little groan, and I think Fig-bread and See-a-Bird were almost equally affected. What a queer mixture of brutal frankness and sensitivity these people were!
I dared not look at Sapphire, but I heard her say in a fairly calm voice to the rest: ‘Leave us two alone. We have a lot to say to each other.’
Chapter III
Love in New Crete
I found it hard to face Sapphire when we were alone, but I made the effort at last. My heart was beating loudly and there was a wild singing in the air. Her eyes were grey and clear and steady. She did not seem to be embarrassed by the situation but studied me closely, her chin propped on both hands, her elbows on the table. I know women who affect this attitude when they want to appear profound and attentive and at the same time show off the manicured elegance of their hands; but Sapphire was no actress and after a time I felt like some low form of life under the microscope. She looked little more than half Sally’s age, say seventeen, and her magical responsibilities seemed to weigh so heavily on her that she could not have been in practice for more than a short time.
‘I’m ever so sorry,’ I began, talking in Catalan, which was the nearest I could get to her language and which I found she understood fairly well if I talked slowly. ‘I never expected anything like that to happen. Will Sally ever forgive me?’
‘Forgive you for what?’ Sapphire asked, in a rather absent voice.
‘For getting cross. I didn’t realize she’d take offence so easily.’
‘You don’t understand. She wasn’t offended, only surprised; and sorry for you. No great harm has been done.’ She continued to study me.
‘Let me tell you about yourself,’ she said after a while. ‘I know now that you’re the sort of man to hold nothing back when you fall in love; and that’s right. But you’re content to go on seeing what you first saw. Has it ever happened that the woman who was pleased by the first image of herself in your eyes grew dissatisfied when she found that it didn’t change as she changed? And that she finally destroyed it by a violent act that you couldn’t forestall?’
‘Well – yes, that has happened,’ I admitted. I was taken a little aback, because Madame Luna, a palmist on Brighton Pier, had told me much the same thing, in a pseudo-Oriental sing-song, some ten years before. ‘Are you suggesting that it might happen again?’
‘Now you’re here, but your wife, from whose side we summoned you, isn’t, because she belongs to another age altogether. So since you have never in all your life been out of love for more than a few miserable days, you look around for a fresh focus of your love. You focus on me, and I’m pleased by the bright way you see me. But for how long will my pleasure last? That’s what I can’t decide.’
‘Is this how Sally summed me up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she tell you so?’
‘No. I heard it in her voice.’
‘Then she was teasing me when she asked what kept me back from you?’
‘No – she was warning us both.’
‘Well, are we to disregard the warning?’
‘Why not say straight out that I offended you by telling you the truth about yourself?’
‘I find it difficult to be as direct as you New Cretans; but yes, I do think your generalizations are rather sweeping.’
‘In fact, you no longer love me?’
I didn’t answer this. The truth was that I thought her the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, and felt as though I had always known her; but that I was not in love with her in any ordinary way – and could not yet make up my mind just what my feelings were.
‘When you recover from the shock to your pride,’ she said, ‘you’ll realize that you’re that sort of a lover, and that many women would be pleased to return your love – for a time.’
‘Even you?’
‘Even I, until the image ceased to be a true one.’
‘And in the end you’d hate me?’
‘No, it wouldn’t come to that.’
‘I can’t love a woman unless I can convince myself, in spite of all my previous failures, that I’ll love her for the rest of my life. So I try to see her always as I saw her first. A self-deception, perhaps, but that’s my way.’
‘And when the separation comes, it’s a sort of death for you. One woman kills; another reanimates the corpse.’
I disliked the way she was piloting the conversation and tried to seize the controls from her: ‘We seem to have raced through several years of intimacy in the last minute or two. Shall we assume that we’ve had a passionate love-affair and that it’s gradually worked out in the usual way, except that you haven’t had to resort to violence. And that we’re now “very good friends” as, in my age, ex-husband and ex-wife quite often are after a divorce. Love has ended, shall we say? But a warm after-glow remains.’
‘Be very careful!’
‘Why? Because a divorced couple may fall in love again? Of course, if you feel that it would be cheating to cut out the preliminaries…’
‘I mean: don’t try to define your feelings. They’re still unsettled. If you’re not careful you may deceive yourself again.’
‘But what happens now that we’re alone together?’ Her calmness disconcerted me; I couldn’t make her out.
‘We compose ourselves.’
As I sat on the edge of the bed, tense and undecided, Sapphire fetched a broad-toothed comb and combed my hair in a slow rhythm, her lips moving silently to the words of a song. My tension gradually relaxed and a feeling of extraordinary ease crept over me. If I had been a cat I should have purred loud and long.
She looked at me critically, her head tilted slightly, not saying a word. Then she seemed to come to a decision; she signed to me to lie across the bed, put her finger to her lips and massaged my left knee in silence for about twenty minutes. ‘That’s where the trouble was,’ she muttered when she had done. ‘Now sleep!’ she laid my head in the crook of her arm and I fell asleep at once.
I awoke suddenly with the moonlight on my face. Forgetting all that happened and under the impression that I was at home, I whispered sleepily: ‘Tonia, what’s the time?’
‘Was it unkind of us to fetch you here without your wife?’ Sapphire asked. ‘When you first saw me, you noticed how like I was to her, didn’t you?’ She added as a statement, not as a question: ‘You have no secrets from her.’
‘No. Does that make you jealous?’
‘Tell me first whether she still loves you? Would she be jealous of me?’
‘I think so. But you’ve frightened me. Now I don’t know how long her love will last.’ She had taken me off my guard; a warm bed at midnight makes a wonderful confession-box.
‘Only so long as you see her as she is, not as she once was.’
‘I’ll remember,’ I said. ‘But it’s only fair to tell you that I’m afraid I can really love only one woman at a time.’
‘But her time and mine aren’t the same. You can still love her faithfully all your life, and love me as long as you please.’
As I was sleepily puzzling out the logic of this, she pinched my ear affectionately. ‘She and I are almost the same person,’ she said. A little later I heard Antonia’s laugh, which puzzled me still more, and Antonia’s voice saying something which seemed very important at the time; but again sleep intervened officiously, and I lost its meaning.
It was morning and Sapphire was just getting out of bed.
‘Who are you really?’ I asked, sitting bolt upright.
‘The woman you love,’ she answered non-committally, over her shoulder, but in broad daylight I saw that she was no more than vaguely like Antonia. She must have laid a spell to make me hear her speak and laugh with Antonia’s voice. ‘No, perhaps not,’ I thought, ‘not necessarily. I was half-asleep, and now I’m awake. I’m not dead, and neither is Antonia; but I’m no longer my former self, or not altogether because Antonia isn’t Antonia – she’s Sapphire now. Is that it?’ Yes, that seemed reasonable enough. I should explain that since I am fortunate enough to be able to work at home, my wife and I have become unusually close to each other and, after several years together, miss one another acutely if we are ever parted for more than a day. But now here I was, and here Antonia seemed to be too, though she talked a different language and was ten years younger and had a rounder chin and did her hair in a different way, and was a nymph of the month – whatever that might be.
‘What’s a nymph of the month?’ I asked. ‘You never told me.’
‘That’s too complicated to explain now,’ she said. ‘It’s against custom to discuss before coffee what can wait till after coffee. But my title has to do with the King and Queen and the twelve Court ladies.’
I accepted the situation provisionally. It was a comfort not to have to go through the usual awkward paces of courtship, for which I felt no inclination; and to show no more embarrassment when I met my new friends at breakfast than if Sapphire and I had been married for twenty years. All the same, I did feel rather like the engine-driver of the Royal Scot express who had one wife in London and another in Edinburgh. ‘And he never once called either of them by the other’s name,’ I remembered. ‘Perhaps he loved them in entirely different ways?’
After a comfortingly civilized breakfast of coffee, rolls and butter, orange juice and a boiled egg, Sally asked me casually: ‘With how many women have you slept in your life?’
‘Are we playing the truth-game?’ I asked defensively.
‘What’s the truth-game?’
This time I was careful not to hurt her feelings. ‘I mean must I answer? In my age no woman would ask a question like that except in the privacy of a bedroom, and even then she’d expect an evasive reply.’
‘But why?’ This surprised Sally a good deal.
‘Because in theory a man’s allowed only one woman at a time, the one he publicly undertakes to cherish and support until death. I admit that the theory of marriage doesn’t correspond in the least with the facts, because it doesn’t often happen that married couples choose wisely. Either they break their contract after a few years and get a divorce, or else they remain married “for the sake of the children”, or for appearances’ sake, and console themselves with illicit love-affairs – generally with other unhappily married people. Or else they stay married without such consolations and hate each other. But marriage still has force as a convention, which is what makes your question embarrassing. Illicit love-affairs are carried on in a hole-and-corner way, and if a man and a woman choose to live in open sin, as it’s called, married people feel so uncomfortable that the guilty couple – they’re assumed to feel guilty – aren’t invited to public functions, and when they’re travelling they find it difficult to get accommodation at respectable hotels.’
‘And if their love-affairs are discovered?’
‘There may be a divorce. But usually they’re hushed up: it’s easier to overlook unfaithfulness than to separate.’ I was determined not to give away any secrets of my past, to Sally at least; so I parried her original qu
estion by asking: ‘What about marriage here?’
‘Different estates have different customs,’ she said. ‘In ours women are promiscuous until they have children.’
‘May I ask what anti-conceptual devices you use?’
This puzzled everyone a great deal, and I had the embarrassment of having to give an elementary lecture on birth control. Sally bit her lip, but old See-a-Bird said gently: ‘She didn’t mean that magicians are promiscuous in the physical sense. In that respect we’re peculiar. The other estates assume that the consummation of love can’t be separated from the reproductive process; but we know that it can and that, as Cleopatra wrote:
To couple as beasts couple,
Is violence and shame.
Naturally, we avoid congress unless we want children, and then we have it only with the people we love and trust so utterly that violence and cruelty become irrelevant. We remove, and our bodies remain locked in torment far below us. At all other times, consummation is achieved by a marriage of mind and body, while the reproductive organs are quiescent but our inner eyes are flooded with waves of light. In cases of complete sympathy we lie side by side, or feet to feet, without bodily contact, and our spirits float upward and drift in a waving motion around the room. The greatest honour a woman can do a man is to allow him to father her child; but this she only grants after perfect proof of physical and spiritual sympathy. Once such a man is found he stays with her.’
‘But if this sympathy dissolves before death – if either partner falls in love with someone else?’
‘That doesn’t happen. Once a woman has learned to know herself through friendships with a number of different men, a mistake is impossible.’
‘And if one partner dies, does the other re-marry?’
‘Not unless the survivor goes through a ritual death and is adopted into another estate after rebirth.’
‘What reliable proofs of this lasting sympathy have you?’ I asked incredulously.
Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 3