Like a miser gloating over his hoard I count the feelings Jenny has forced me to have. At first, lust and desire. Small change. When she went off to Italy the first time I hardly knew I was missing her. During the war our idyll in London seduced me at a deeper level; there were even moments of sentiment. Gold coins I thought had gone out of circulation. When I saw her again with George in Green Park that day my rage and jealousy astounded me. She looked so well and happy, and he, stupid old donkey, had the air of a man who has lived a good life and is about to allow himself one last indulgence. He would soon have died anyway; I only accelerated things.
That shivery delight when I sensed her presence a few months later in Holland Park. Was that the moment I knew that love had begun to mortalize me? Hard to say whether she followed or I led her back to my basement lair. Her voice outside my door made me dizzy for a moment as I leant against the wall with my eyes shut. Diamonds cutting my heart into a shape I cannot recognize.
I’m glad I chose to spend the twentieth century in London. People are charming here. We even have friends. Not only the rather narrow circles of my fellow directors at the Fizz but one-lifers, too. I’ve always had plenty of lovers and business associates, but it never seemed worth the bother of becoming attached to creatures whose span was so pitifully brief and whose understanding was so limited.
But these are attractive times. Much of the old religious and sexual hypocrisy has evaporated, and men and women mix quite freely. I’ve always preferred women; they’re more alive and energetic than men. I haven’t given a man a contract since that tedious old Wittenberg pedant I was lumbered with for twenty-four years. Frowsty Faust, unsanitary even by the abysmal standards of the sixteenth century. What a lecherous old bore. Droning on about his dreary philosophy and nutty alchemical experiments and demanding the whole of history on a plate. After that I resigned as a Klugheitsteufel, or intellectual devil, and asked to specialize in lechery instead. Demotion, of course, but that was the best career move I ever made. Women are never quite as greedy or pompous. I’ve often considered reinventing myself as a woman, but then I wouldn’t be able to play house with Jenny. I’ve tried to interest her in other women, but she’s absurdly phallocentric.
Yes, I have friends now. Dinner with Toby and Katrina. Toby was a big rock star a few years ago, one of many the Metaphysical Bank invested in. He rarely performs live now, but his records still sell. He has enormous charm and treats all women as if they were his devoted fans. Katrina’s milky skin, blue eyes and blonde hair made her an icon of the sixties, one of those actresses who spends more time being photographed than actually appearing in films or plays. I’m fascinated by them both, particularly Toby, who has so much charisma that it’s quite embarrassing to enter a restaurant with him – women start screaming and rush up to him with autograph books. I’d like to help Toby and Katrina, but it’s hard to know how as they appear to have everything. So often my gifts are turned into curses by the recipients’ abuse of them. No, I shall leave those two to be their natural delightful selves. I like them because they’re intelligent and amusing and also because, unlike most couples we know, they’re affectionate together. So this is how it’s done, modern marriage. How different from the older models.
Charles Arbuthnot is another happy find, a barrister whose talent for advocacy rivals my own. He can make a murderer appear to be a philanthropist or present a naïve idealist as the most vile terrorist. Sonorous phrases pour out of his enormous mouth, and I often go to the Old Bailey as if to the theatre to admire his performances. I enjoy our lunches together, and he appreciates my tutorials in how to make a brilliant act even more devastating.
It’s so relaxing, after thousands of years of feeling an outsider, to be surrounded by good will. Why, people used to scream at the sight of me – and not adoringly, as they do at Toby. Once, in Thuringia in the 1530s, a milkmaid I’d just seduced started foaming at the mouth and actually died of an epileptic fit when she realized who I was. I was still between her legs. Quite upsetting. Of course I don’t shout about my past, but somehow I feel that, even if they knew, these new friends would just laugh and accept me. Yes, I do feel accepted in our little circle. And, at the centre of it, my sweet Jenny, not divine but endearingly human. My companion for ever.
Doors Open
I still don’t know, don’t want to know, what exactly you do when you’re not with me. I sniff the pillow where your hard, beautiful head has just been and smell your skin on mine.
Whenever you suspect I’m bored with our shared reality, you fly with me over time and space, showing me a savage and poetic universe. Afterwards, I’m never sure whether these are dreams, flights of fancy or hallucinations, like that conversation you had with Blake once when I was on acid and that terrifying glimpse of decay I saw in Trafalgar Square the other night. Already, that’s fading.
When another man might buy me a piece of jewellery, you conjure up worlds and present them to me. How could I possibly find a more exciting lover?
I love our house. In these generous rooms huge windows reflect the trees and clouds outside on to white walls. When we moved in I threw myself into the house as if loving it was an extension of loving you, knocking down walls, creating arches and tiled floors to give it a Mediterranean look. When friends admire my house I say nothing, having learnt not to brag. But deep inside me the little girl from Hoxton purrs and preens.
It isn’t possible to row with you because at the first sign of anger you – literally – disappear. Over the last fourteen years you’ve become extremely rich. Imports, exports, property, commodities, futures, pasts – I’ve only the vaguest idea of what it is you buy and sell. I go with you to Mexico, New York, Paris and Madrid, where we stay in palatial hotels and go to parties, always meeting the same people, the international eternally rich, who only feel comfortable with one another. They’re good-looking, confident, articulate, polyglot, charming, stylish – and curiously hollow, as if they left their personalities in earlier incarnations.
I still love to walk all over London. I often pass two houses in a terrace in Paddington, which are really just façades with painted windows, built to mask the trains that run behind them. You and I are like those houses: a trompe-l’œil partnership, executed with great panache. Behind – I don’t know what’s really going on.
I sit for hours alone in my study at the top of the house, sitting on the window seat overlooking the gardens and Holland Park beyond, reliving my past. Already there’s far too much of it, and as for you – you’ve never told me just how old you are. Poor Leo. Yes, on the whole I pity you now. Not because you want my sympathy but because you try so hard to be human, like a man learning a foreign language he has no ear for. How terrified you were that night you managed to cry. Ponderously, you struggle to define love and friendship, adding people to your collection.
Katrina and Toby are your current trophies. I’m not sure whether they have contracts or not, I don’t think so, because they have aged quite a lot in the ten years I’ve known them. Toby has put on weight, and last night, with his ruffled shirt, embroidered silk waistcoat and dark, heavy face, he looked like an eighteenth-century rake. Toby and Katrina have three small children now; they’ve bought themselves a life that combines the bohemian and the bourgeois. Toby’s stage act in the sixties involved a black mass and obscene gestures with candles and a crucifix, which was, of course, when you and he became friends. Katrina’s what Lizzie used to call beautiful as the day, but she’s no longer offered young parts or followed around by paparazzi, and this is a terrible blow to her pride.
The four of us go out for an intimate dinner party – your sop to my complaints that our life has become too formal – to an aggressively chic restaurant near Sloane Square with pink napkins and tablecloths and opera sung by a vast soprano. Looking like a bejewelled hippo, she warbles about starvation and consumption and poverty while we all stuff ourselves with delicious Italian food. The music reminds me of George, who loved opera, and makes me
melancholy. I still miss him, even though he’s been dead for fifteen years.
I chatter and laugh until suddenly, about halfway through the meal, I notice that you are not just talking to Toby and Katrina but studying them. Our conversation is, as usual, about mutual friends, investments, plays, books, politics, films and music. But beneath the boozy warmth of our friendship I sense that you are teaching yourself the behaviour of a man in love. Later, as we open our front door, you smile, take my coat and kiss me on the forehead, murmuring, ‘Are you all right, my love?’ The perfect lover. But my heart chills because your words, intonation and gestures are an exact facsimile of Toby’s to Katrina as we all left the restaurant.
I start to spend even more time in my study. My walls of books are friendly; they remind me that I have, after all, made some progress in my long life. I grew up in bare rooms where books, like most other things, were unheard-of frivolities. In the beginning, it was your mastery of language that bowled me over, and even in my twenties and thirties the sight of libraries and bookshops made me feel inferior. You’re downstairs, bossing the builders around and manipulating people on the phone, putting in a new bathroom and kitchen, knocking down walls, making everything bigger and more grandiose. I won’t let you touch my little study, but all the other rooms are becoming formal and impersonal; the house I designed with such joy a few years ago has almost disappeared. Whenever I open my door I can hear your peremptory voice issuing orders, your expensively shod feet clip-clopping on the wooden floors. You pretend to consult me, but then go ahead and do exactly as you like.
I stand at the top of the stairs shouting down at you, furious because you’ve rearranged the kitchen and accepted an invitation for dinner without asking me. Behind my domestic rage is resentment that we’ve become domestic at all. You come upstairs towards me, and I feel the million-volt erotic charge that is still in the air between us. I’m sure you’re going to divert my anger into sex as usual, but I want to talk, to have a row like –
‘But we’re not a normal couple. How could we be?’
I’m close to tears. ‘You ignore my needs, you behave as if I wasn’t here.’
‘Oh, Jenny, how can you say that? You’re so here, it hurts. You seem to get more vivid, more desirable. I miss you horribly, you know, when I’m away.’ You’re stroking my hair, but I fight my desire because your invasion of my body is a way of keeping me out of your mind. ‘You don’t believe me? Then come with me on my travels, in metaphysical instead of Greenwich Mean Time. I’ll let you into the secrets of Old Iniquity no other woman knows and show you your planet in all its crazy beauty.’
Then words stop and the house is filled with a dark wind that lifts the roof and propels us out above the city. I’ve been here with you before. I recognize the excitement and chaos around us as the London night dissolves.
We fly into daylight, swooping low over a desert where ragged men, women and children are crawling around. Your voice is in my ear. ‘The losers of the next war. The rich get richer and flee our poisoned ravaged planet. These people you’re looking at now are the ones who drown in the wrong genetic pool, inheriting illness and poverty. They’re also blind because the military needed to test a new weapon and human beings are cheaper than guinea pigs. The war has destroyed the infrastructure of their country, so they’re desperate for food – see that child scrabbling in the dirt for insects?’ I try to look away, but your body lies on mine in the air, forcing me to look down. Shut my eyes. ‘Oh, I forgot, you’re not keen on reality, are you, Jenny? You like a varnish of poetry and romance, don’t you? Soggy nostalgia for a past that never was. Knights in armour instead of screaming babies. The acceptable face of war.’
We’re flying again, rushing through time and space. It’s true, I don’t want my nose rubbed in the world’s problems, I’m hungry for beauty, and you dish it up. You orchestrate a sunset and a castle on a mountain; a moonlit coral reef; Venice at dawn. We hover in the air above the towers quivering in the mother-of-pearl lagoon as the bells of San Marco strike five and the city floats on a golden mist.
‘This isn’t too corny for you? It all comes down to timing. Another couple of hours and the heat will bring out the stink of drains, canals will look like fetid beer as pigeons crap and tourists shriek. You know that painting in Urbino, The Ideal City? Absolutely empty. I was going to show you more action – killing, fighting, suffering, torturing, rape, the cherished hobbies of most of that species unwise enough to call themselves Homo sapiens. I can feel you tense at the thought of such horrors. It’s all right, I won’t make you watch if you don’t want to. But sometimes, Jenny, I worry about your taste. It’s just too saccharine, too bowdlerized. If you edit out all the nasty bits where do they go? Into a bin of poverty, disease, madness, pain, fear, they lie there coiled, waiting for you to join them – but not while you’re under my protection.’
‘Leo? I think my arms are about to drop off.’
‘We’ll go home now. I just wanted to entertain you.’
Those marvellous images are singing in my head. I can still feel the wind rushing past me as I lay back on it, feeling you around me like a cloak. You have built me this ivory tower, and now you warn me against it. Of course I choose beauty over ugliness, pleasure over pain, money over poverty. Who wouldn’t? And why should misery be more real than happiness? I’m here to enjoy the best, for ever. I take what I want, throw it away when I’ve had enough and move on to the next toy. There’s no point in having eternal life if you don’t have eternal fun.
I resent the way you keep reminding me of your power over me. That damned contract, which I really can’t be bothered to read. I hate legal language.
Today you’re going off to Brazil. The hall is piled with your expensive luggage, and I’ll be glad to have the house to myself. I need time to think, strength to reinvent myself, space for other people in my life, a new vocabulary to fight you with. I keep remembering things Annette has said to me over the years. I don’t think of her as a friend exactly; I dread her haranguing that leaves me feeling small and weak. Last time she phoned I invited her to supper, but she won’t come to this house. She despises my prosperity and hates you on principle, not that she’s ever met you.
I arrange to meet her in a very expensive hamburger restaurant, which immediately provokes an attack. ‘God, Jenny, why don’t you just go to McDonald’s if you want to eat meat slurry and greasy crap?’ She orders a huge meal. ‘I’m starving. I’ve been up all night studying for my law exams. I can’t get a grant because I’ve already been a student, so I have to work in a pub to support myself. I’m off to Greenham tomorrow. Have you been?’
‘No.’
‘We’re going to bring this Fascist government down. They think they can force Cruise missiles on us, treat us as an outpost of the American Empire. But people are brighter than Thatcher realizes. Don’t you just hate her?’
‘All politicians sound the same to me.’
‘Still Little Miss Solipsist. You look great.’
Compliments from Annette are so rare that I choke on my salad. She looks tired, she has a few grey hairs, although she can’t be more than thirty, and her obstinately natural skin looks neglected. ‘Oh, I’ve got a late Christmas present for you.’ I hand her a fifty-pound note.
‘Jesus! Jenny, I can’t accept this.’ But she pockets it and then returns to the moral high ground. ‘David was asking me what you were up to, so I said I thought you were still a gangster’s moll.’
My heart races at the sound of his name. I’m jealous because she can see him whenever she likes. ‘How is he?’
‘Oh, married, smug, getting fat.’
‘I’d love to see your family again. I miss them.’
‘You mean you miss him. Honestly, Jenny, you’re so brainwashed by the patriarchy. You’re trapped in the ghetto of the women’s pages. All you think about is men.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Not if I can help it. They’re all babies, bullies or bastards.’
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br /> ‘Then what do you –’
‘Do for sex? I’m having an affair with Steff. She’s studying with me, and we’re sharing a bender at Greenham this weekend. I suppose you disapprove of lesbians.’
‘Me? I don’t disapprove of anything. You’re the one who judges everybody.’
‘My parents were shocked.’
‘Bet you enjoyed that.’
‘One good thing about you, Jenny, you always surprise me.’
Alone in my study, alone in the house at last, I continue this dialogue. I’m talking to my femunculus, who has expanded into an alchemical projection. I can see her now. She has dark eyes in her pale face and curly black hair sticking out. I recognize bits of Annette but an Annette who knows me as I really am, who has snuck inside the self I have to hide. My femunculus is the friend there is no space for in the claustrophobic heaven I’ve made with you, Leo. She’s younger than Annette; she could be my daughter. This dark girl has the terrible purity of adolescence as she stares at me with contempt and whispers the words I dread, the shameful secrets only I could know:
Did you think love was a full-time job? Did you expect to learn wisdom from your pathetic little philosophy course? Well, love is just a conjuring trick, and what a trickster you’ve chosen. Tied for ever to the biggest faker of them all; head over heels with a mass murderer; in bed with Lucifer. Not much of an upbringing for me, is it? I don’t care. I’m tough. I’m fierce. I’ve given birth to myself, and when I’m unleashed on the world there’ll be no more soppy happy-ever-afters. Happy ever after with him? You might be old, but you haven’t learnt a thing. You’re still flirting and vamping like you did when you were eighteen. You might live for ever but you’ll always be worthless. Mother, I can see straight through you to the future when you’re going to be on the scrap heap and I’m going to be in charge.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 15