by Joan Taylor
He thought I was lazy!
The swirl of disappointment and shock dissipated, and I felt the clarity of outrage. He had thrown me with his critique of my novel. And then to follow it with the offer! He really knew how to win a game.
He indicated I was a naive, sloppy person with some literary talent.
So was he right about my work? I had just felt he had to be, down there, sitting in the drawing room, but now, as I was ascending, and pausing, I wondered. Some of the people who had read my novel had been a little unsure about it, because it didn’t have much action, but they generally thought it was written very well. Others—like my musician flatmates—had loved it. I had sent it to a well-known poet I happen to know and respect, whose name I will withhold, who wrote back with superlative praise, asking me only to tighten up and condense, to work more on honing my style. And I, if the truth be known, believed in my work. I loved my characters and their desperate search for a solution that would save their relationship, as I had sought a solution when things ended with Max. It’s a terrible thing when the glue that kept you together does not seem to work anymore, and you vainly seek some magic formula to restore it. I had wept with them, argued with them, despaired with them. My characters were with me, part of me, yet separate friends I knew intimately. I could hear them talking. How could I box them away and never let them speak again?
I looked once more at Edward Prain’s neat little card and wanted to crush it. Instead I put it in the pocket of my dress, and found myself composing a poem. As I went on upwards to my destination it came to me, surprisingly, in rhymed iambic pentameter, as if I were a Shakespearean heroine soliloquising about the mendacity of a villain.
Hands off my work, you man of means, you foe,
you clumsy brush-and-dustpan mind, just go
to hell and leave my see-through soul in place.
You’ve scratched the breath-blown glass, the brittle vial
that teeters on the gusty edge of space
and time. No rambling pack of words, no pile
of feeling twined with form, no unplanned piss
of bursting thought, no rawness bared is this.
Don’t designate me lazy and naive,
or dare to underestimate my skill.
Call me old-fashioned if you like, but leave
me be. I’ll glow exactly how I will.
The poem was not quite like that as I went up and along the route to the top of Edward Prain’s house. It was rougher, and while there were elements that worked perfectly, instantly, there were other parts that remained a hole, with me skipping the beat over them until the next part flowed. I almost darted off from the task at hand to find my bag, left behind in the study, where I had paper and a turquoise felt pen, but I decided to answer the bodily need before the poetic, thinking I would have plenty of time to play with the poem on the train home.
I followed the route and successfully entered my destination, carefully avoiding looking at the four-poster bed as I passed it. As I closed the door, I closed the poem, and surveyed this new space.
The bathroom was spacious and light, with black and white floor tiles and white walls. Warmed now, I hung up the jacket on a peg on the door and admired the beauty of the room. There was a Delft decorated porcelain lavatory with a polished wooden seat, and matching blue tiles on the sideboard next to the wash basin. It all looked too museumy to be used, but there was no choice. As I sat there I noted the brass taps, and the large, self-standing bath tub, all so clean and shiny. An old oak chest probably held towels. On a small shelf were a few toiletries, a badger shaving brush and hand razor. Everything was immaculate.
In the pokey bathroom in my Camden flat, before filling up the tub, I had to scrub off the tidemarks left by previous bathers and push aside a plastic shower curtain, patterned green with mould. There, rough, patchy lino covered damp boards. The shelves were a metropolis of different shampoos, creams and bottles that no one knew quite what to do with. A broken toilet lid leaned against the wall. Toothbrushes lay around the basin, with three different topless pastes. Threadbare towels hung limply from the rack and door handle. Underwear drooped from lines near the cracked ceiling. Cobwebs nestled in the small window that no one could open.
I flushed the toilet and went to the wash basin. Edward Prain’s soap was shaped like a little shell. His blue towel was thick and soft, and boasted his initials in curvy embroidery. Above the wash basin, a huge, spotless mirror was held in a carved wooden frame. I looked at my familiar reflection. My face was pale, and my hair looked a mess. I washed my hands and splashed my cheeks with water. Did he think I was beautiful? At that moment I didn’t seem that way to myself at all. I noted I hadn’t plucked my eyebrows evenly, and my eco/animal-friendly mascara had smudged.
He had no idea what kind of a place I lived in. Did he really know how poor everyone was in my flat? I was the affluent one there, the one with the job. To him, I thought, my flat would seem squalid. He would be appalled at my flatmates.
Rectifying the mascara by licking my finger and rubbing, I mused bitterly on how unfair it was that he should live in such luxury, with such beauty, and I should eke out a living in decrepitude and ugliness. If only the quantity of beauty with which you surrounded yourself was in equal proportion to your sensibilities. I hated staying too long in my flat; that was one of the reasons I liked to go out so much.
And then I imagined taking him there. We reached the yellow front door. Music could be heard from inside. I put the key in the right lock (there were two dud key holes left over from when locks were changed). We entered the hallway, which smelt of dry rot and cigarette smoke, and avoided tripping on a piece of frayed carpet. We walked past the posters, the bike, the amplifiers, and entered my bedroom, a little haven that I had tried to make comfortable and pleasing to the eye.
Here, large bookcases were full of interesting items. On walls I had painted pale olive green there were pictures and photographs done by friends. Large batik curtains in bright colours hung before the high windows which led to the balcony. On the bed was a hand-printed bedspread. Curios and crafted objects imported by fair trade means from Third World countries, cushions, large pot-plants, and striped rugs were arranged harmoniously. I had tinkered with my room as if it were a poem. Over the years, everything had settled into its own place, and I had subtracted and added things until it had reached a completion. Despite it being in that flat, I liked my room.
So there we were, in my imagination, standing, surveying it.
Why had I brought him there? To show him my flat? But no. We should have gone through to the living room or the kitchen. We had gone directly into my room.
With sudden horror, I realised it was a dream of what might have happened if he never had that photograph of me, or if I had not been writing a poem and he had seen it, if somehow we could have gone on not knowing that I wrote and he published, and if I was just that woman he liked to talk to. In my fantasy he was the man he used to be: my “Mr. E,” upper-class visitor who liked to discuss the arts, whom I used to amuse with stories. I even had a sense of the occasion. It was autumn, and he had arrived late in the afternoon. We had talked longer than usual, and the time had come for me to close up. I had pulled down the roller door and locked it, and asked casually if he would like to go for a drink in a nearby pub. Warily, he had agreed. But I had to take my earnings home first, to put them in a metal chest hidden in my room. So we had walked back to the flat, and there we were. All this might have happened had the circumstances been different. We might have become friends. Perhaps it would have dawned on me that I liked him, despite his distance and coolness. Perhaps he would have pushed aside his reserve, and eschewed cerebral distortions. We might have stood together in my room, and we would have realised-
Shut up, I told myself. This is sheer speculation. I sighed hard, dried my hands, and opened the door, walking out into his bedroom. But there I stopped. I saw again the bed. When we were at the window, he had touched my arm and mad
e me jump. Then there was the fantasy in the garden: the bite on the neck. I flinched.
You are so dense, I said to myself. Any fool could see.
I found segments of the day, both imagined and real, entering my head: phrases, expressions, gestures. That certain smile he had: inscrutable, a little cunning and amused.
“Oh Lord,” I whispered aloud, despairing at myself. This was so wrong! I want to touch him, I thought. I want to feel his skin.
And in my dream I did so, in my room. I touched his face.
“Stay with me,” I said.
“I don’t belong here,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” I said. “You belong with me, and this is me.”
No, that is not what happens. I thought. We leave the room and go for a drink, as arranged.
We were then at the pub, which was crowded, loud and dingy, and he was sitting there looking uncomfortably out of place.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Shall we go back to my room?”
“No. Come to my apartment. It’s not far.”
“Why should we go there?”
“You know why.”
We were at his flat in Chelsea. Now this was all right. It was open plan, uncluttered, with a few choice items of old, expensive furniture. Classic. Tasteful. I relaxed, and sat down on a soft sofa. He sat down beside me.
“Tell me about yourself,” I said.
“Now that’s a hackneyed line, if ever there was one.”
“You won’t tell me.”
“It would ruin everything.”
“All right, then I don’t need to know.”
“Can we make love now? Isn’t that what we both want?”
Oh Christ, please Stella control yourself, I said, firmly, to my perfidious imagination. Don’t imagine that! Wrong, wrong, wrong!
And suddenly I recognised that one part of my brain had been outraged at his attraction to me, his rudeness and his manipulations, while the other had been floating on Mediterranean zephyrs, congratulating myself on my sexual allure, enjoying a lush tingle of excitement at the way he was so very different and contentious. I liked the game. It excited me. The politically correct eco-warrior part of me had played chaperone to the other all afternoon. I did not want to be attracted to this man. But I had to admit it. It was as if his image of me as the embodiment of his ideal woman had dismantled a device that redirected uncomfortable impulses. I powerfully fancied Edward Prain. The idea of him pleasuring me, and I him, was absolutely delicious.
This was so dangerous, I thought. I really had to go home now. In an ideal world, perhaps it would have been possible to be lovers. We would have lain down together and cared about little else. But in the real world we were completely incompatible, and nothing could happen between us. He was too muddled about me, and in all probability, I was about him as well. There was a possibility, but it could only manifest itself in ignorance. Now we knew each other better, such feelings had to be put away.
I forgot his jacket, and walked stiffly out of the room, down the steps and along the corridor to the main hallway. As I turned into it, to my utter surprise, he was there. He looked as if he had run up the stairs. He held a brown cardigan in one hand. He stopped stock still, to avoid dashing headlong into me. I gasped. He too was startled at my sudden appearance.
“You always run away.” He was breathing fast.
“I was just using your bathroom.” I realised I was breathing very fast. He had reason. What was mine?
“There was one off the entrance hall. I should have shown you.”
“Never mind.”
“Here’s a cardigan.”
He handed it to me. I took it woodenly. I didn’t feel cold anymore. “Thank you,” I said.
“You can take it home with you, and …” How I got it back would depend on my decision.
“Oh right.”
We were not moving, either of us. We should have been walking down the hall, towards the stairs. He seemed unsure of what to do, as if he could see from my face what I had been dreaming about, or at least that something had changed.
“Shall I drive you to the station?” he asked.
We had already decided that he would. Yes, I said to myself. Yes, please. I am leaving now. I kept looking at him, saying nothing.
“Don’t go,” he said, in my imagination, on the sofa in his apartment in Chelsea. “You have admitted what you want.”
“I must. I’m afraid of you,” answered my imaginary self.
“You’re afraid of yourself,” his alter-ego said. “That’s why you cannot win.”
But in the real world we remained standing there, stuck. I could not find anything to say that would not sound banal, and yet I wanted to say something. Obviously, we could not just remain like this in the hallway gazing at one another.
“Edward—,” I began. Then I sensed that I had not addressed him by his first name directly before, despite his request. Somehow by doing so now, it seemed to express what needed to be said. After a moment of indecision, I left it at that. Further words were superfluous. I reached out and took his hand, and led him back up into the bedroom. He went along with me, exuding doubtfulness.
I put down Monique’s cardigan on a chair, and turned to him. I started to undo his silk tie.
“This isn’t a good idea,” he said. “It will only complicate matters.”
“No, you’re entirely wrong,” I said.
He did not touch me, as if he was unsure whether he should hold me away or pull me closer. I progressed to his shirt, which I unbuttoned, slipped off and dropped on the chair. I knew then there was no turning back, whatever objections he made. Now he was partly naked before me. He had a nice chest and arms, well-formed and smooth.
“You thought I was trying to seduce you,” he said quietly.
“No. You were afraid I would think that,” I said. “But perhaps I’ve really wanted you to seduce me, all the time.”
chapter eight | the bedroom again
Writing about sex is one of the hardest things a writer has to do. You find yourself either going into some awful metaphorical avalanche, or drafting pure pornography. A middle way is very difficult to negotiate. Love, by comparison, is easy. Emotion is what writers like. But sex, when you are not sure whether love is really in the picture at all, can sound really bland, or else so titillating it leads nowhere but to sheer eroticism. I cannot describe in detail what took place on that bed without distracting from what was essential about it. I am not inhibited by shyness, but rather by a desire to write accurately and well, and I am not sure I can do it. Some things must be passed over. Some experiences do not succumb to verbal description, which only distorts and misinterprets.
Perhaps this observation holds good for the events of the entire day, and for my conversation with Edward Prain overall. These things were edited by memory even before they were transferred to the written page, so how can I tell the whole, or essential, truth? For example, I have not yet noted that, after we first arrived at Walton Hall, with its born-to-rule brick frontage, high windows and upright chimneys, just before we entered the house, Edward Prain picked a pink rose-bud from a flower bed near the entrance steps. He grasped hold of the thorny stem and, gingerly, avoiding the spikes, broke it. Then, after holding the bud for a second to his nostrils, he went up the steps to the front door. He then turned, saying the rose was something for me to take back to London at the end of the day. This action struck me as being rather nice, sentimental and out of character. We went inside to the kitchen, where tea things had been left on a tray. He put the rose-bud in a little glass vase in the centre of the tray, poured boiling water into the teapot and took it upstairs himself. I have overlooked this sequence until now. Perhaps it was because he was self-servicing in the procedure, and it did not suit the purposes of my characterisation of him.
Life provides moments one does not know what to do with, so one often fails to remember them; it is not amnesia, quite, it is just that certain things go on a shelf. I have wanted
nothing too kind to colour my image of this man. But Edward Prain is not precisely the Edward Prain I have transcribed to paper here, and neither am I quite myself. We are approximations of reality, with certain aspects exaggerated, and others subdued. I have tried for absolute and painstaking honesty in my account, but I cannot tell it; for we know in part, and describe, even more, in part.
So what was essential about our sexual encounter? Perhaps it was an awareness not of union but of separation. We were so different. For him, pleasurable bodily sensations appeared to induce some kind of mental anguish. It was for him both wonderful and terrible. He seemed sometimes more tortured than ecstatic, with gathering excitement. This provoked in me an unadmirable reaction: I wanted to tantalise him. It was all a continuation of the game that had, I realised, fascinated and aroused me. I found myself taking charge of him, doing things that I very rarely did which were designed to increase his physical responses and torment his mind. I felt earthed and powerful and at one with my body. He was somehow at my mercy and I gloried in it. I was that girl in the photograph. You watch me!
After this, as we were lying together sated, he told me more about his visits to Camden.
“I kept trying not to come to visit you, Stella. You seemed the sort of woman who was quite used to men …” He hesitated. Falling in love with me? “… paying you attention. You have that sort of confidence in yourself.”
I did not encourage you, I wanted to add, but I was keener to understand his impression of me than to mount a defence.
“It began to give me sleepless nights, you see. I was drawn to you, and I did not understand why. I mean …” He laughed a little at himself, “you’re … attractive and … I like you, but …” He struggled. I did not dare interrupt. “I wasn’t getting out here to Walton Hall enough any more. If I had the choice of coming here, or going to Camden Lock Market, I would choose the latter. You confused me. I thought about asking you out to dinner or … but where would I take you? I would be equally out of place in your haunts. My work was suffering. My concentration would lapse during important meetings. I kept thinking of you. People commented that I was looking haggard. And yet every fortnight I had to come to see you. I had to keep up the charade of pleasantries.”