‘What?’
‘Oh—this last half-hour.’
‘Neither would I!’ I started to laugh, and then spat, discovering some sand in my mouth. ‘But then, nobody’s ever made me feel quite the way I do with you.’
‘Honestly, Stephen? You know, it really sets a girl up, to hear that—’ Jane kissed my shoulder and then pulled a little away from me. ‘Ouch! My arm had gone to sleep. That’s better … No—the reason I said “Good” was because I made up my mind, quite some while ago, that if I met another boy and liked him enough, I’d be frank about it and not stall around and go into a virginal hesitation act. It’s so corny, and kind of dirty, too—like French postcards. That’s why I feel good about tonight.’
‘Have there been many other boys?’
‘That’s none of your Goddamn business!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Okay. No—not many. A few. More than I wanted. They weren’t always the right ones.’
‘Am I a right one?’
‘What do you think? But we don’t have to get smug about that, either of us. It was just a bit of luck, our running across each other.’
‘It certainly was!’
Jane smiled, and stretched herself lazily. Her arched body looked so exciting in the moonlight that I grabbed her in my arms again. She kissed me hard for a few moments, but then she began to push gently away from me.
‘Listen, Stephen. I don’t want to, any more than you do, but—don’t you think we ought to be getting back home? I mean—won’t your Wife be wondering—?’
‘Well—no, not really. You see, with Elizabeth, it’s different. It’s a bit hard to explain—’
‘Then don’t. I don’t want to hear. And let’s get this straight—I’m no home-wrecker. Couldn’t be, even if I tried. I’m just not the type.’
‘Were any of the others married?’
‘Oh, the hell with the others! You’re not going to fuss about the others, all the time, are you? If you are, I give up. It’s too tiresome.’
‘All right. No others.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ Jane laughed and jumped to her feet.
‘And when am I going to see you again?’ I asked, after we’d finished putting on our clothes.
‘Oh, any time. We’re always around.’
‘I meant—us two alone.’
‘Well—whenever we’re both feeling like it.’
‘Is that apt to be soon?’
‘I expect so, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, it can be any time at all.’
Jane looked up at me and smiled. ‘Why, Stephen Monk,’ she exclaimed, with a mock Southern accent, ‘you say the sweetest things, I declare!’
*
I had a flash-lamp which I kept just inside the door of our villa, so that, on evenings when Elizabeth had gone to bed earlier than I, I could find my way around without turning on lights or making a noise, falling over things in the dark. But this evening, as I came into the bedroom, Elizabeth startled me by switching on the table-lamp which stood between our two beds.
‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ I asked.
My tone must have sounded rather accusing; for Elizabeth smiled at it and said: ‘I’m sorry. I ought to be, oughtn’t I? I was just lying here thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘Oh—a story I may start writing tomorrow.’
‘Is that the one you haven’t told me about yet?’
‘Don’t say that so reproachfully, darling.’ Elizabeth was still smiling. ‘I always tell you about them as soon as I know they’re going to hatch. It’s only the failures you never hear of. You don’t mind my having some secrets from you, do you, Stephen?’
I wondered if she meant anything by that. I thought not. But, when I’d kissed her Goodnight and gotten into my bed, I realized that she’d never asked me if I’d enjoyed my walk.
After this, I began going out a great deal to join Jane and her friends on the beach. I managed to spend hours with Jane every day, but, as I always returned to our villa for meals, the pattern of my life with Elizabeth was scarcely disturbed. Elizabeth must have known, of course, what was going on. Even a stupid woman would have known. When I was away from Jane, I probably acted like a dog which is being kept from a bitch on heat. I was frantically restless. And I couldn’t come within five yards of her without wanting to touch her body. I had to keep doing it, even while the others were around. This certainly didn’t shock Jane’s friends. I don’t think they were even particularly interested; for they were young themselves and preoccupied with their own affairs. I was often struck by their lack of curiosity. They were like a pack of young animals, playing together and sometimes squabbling, but without any strong individual relationships. If a member of the group left suddenly to go back to Paris or the States, there would be noisy Goodbyes, and then, an hour later, he or she would be completely forgotten.
Sometimes Jane and I made love on the beach at night, after supper; sometimes we did it during the afternoon, in her bedroom, which had only a plywood partition to separate it from the room where Shirley slept. Often, as we lay there in the afternoon heat, with the drawn shade making an orange dusk that hid nothing of our nakedness, we could hear Shirley moving around next door. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ I once asked Jane, whispering right into her ear so that Shirley shouldn’t hear me. ‘Why does she have to keep messing about in there?’
‘She’s jealous,’ Jane whispered back, giggling. ‘She thinks you’re cute. Why don’t you give her a break, Steve? Glen says she’s terrific’
‘Do you want me to?’
‘Do I want you to? What have I got to do with it?’ Jane smiled at me teasingly. ‘I don’t care. If you’re interested, go ahead.’
This indifference drove me wild, because it showed that Jane felt free to do what she liked; and I knew, only too well, that our physical obsession with each other was far too hot to last. If only I could be cured of it before she was! The pain of wanting Jane so badly made me cruel, and I punished Shirley for it by making love as loudly as I could whenever I knew that she was listening on the other side of the partition—grunting and panting and making the bed creak, with a shameless exhibitionism which added enormously to the excitement of the act. And if I met Shirley in the passage as I was coming out of Jane’s room, I’d look straight into her eyes and grin at her shamelessly. I felt as if I could have had any girl in the world, just then. I wasn’t entirely sane.
In this condition, I had to keep passing back and forth between the two utterly dissimilar halves of my life, which were only separated by the three-minutes’ walk from our villa to Jane’s. I remembered coming home one afternoon and entering the sitting-room, where Elizabeth was resting on the couch. I was naked except for my trunks, and darkly sunburned. As I stood before her, I caught sight of myself in the big mirror. My teeth were very white in my dark face, and I was grinning down at her without any human expression, like an animal baring its fangs. I remembered how Elizabeth looked up at me then and gently took my hand. ‘You’re having fun, aren’t you, darling?’ she said; but her tone had so much compassion in it that it was as if she’d meant: ‘You’re suffering terribly, aren’t you?’ I knew now that, at that moment, she saw all life as pain—attachment as pain, gratification as pain, possession as pain—and, in the midst of this realization, found some kind of clarity and peace. But I couldn’t have understood that, then. ‘Sure I am,’ I said (already I was catching some of Jane’s Americanisms); and, avoiding Elizabeth’s beautiful searching eyes, I turned from her to leave the room.
It was about this time that Elizabeth wrote what was to be her last letter to Mary Scriven:
‘Mary darling—something marvellous has happened. It gives me hope that perhaps the fear is conquered, for good and all.
‘The other evening, I was out by myself for a short walk. (Stephen very seldom leaves me—he is so sweet and patient about that, and you must never dream that anything I write t
o you about my being alone implies the slightest criticism of him. Most husbands in his position would have contrived to get rid of me long before this—as the Esquimaux turn out their old people to die on the ice.) Well—as I was walking back towards the villa, the thought came to me—it was like a small quiet mocking voice: “You’re going to die in there. This evening. All by yourself.” It was so silly and yet so horrible. I found myself trembling all over. My legs went weak and my hands shook so that I could hardly turn the door handle. It was like entering my own tomb. I made a prodigious effort, opened the door, went in and collapsed on the nearest chair. “Very well,” I said to myself, “perhaps you are going to die now. What does it matter? Everybody dies alone, even if it’s in a hospital ward or the middle of a battlefield. No one can really help. Why should Stephen be present? Do you want to torture him? Or are you, by any chance, planning a farewell speech? What’s behind all this?”
‘But it was useless, talking to myself in that way, because, as I then realized, I had inside me a terrified animal, a creature absolutely blind and deaf and senseless with fear. No use arguing with it or getting angry. No use trying to beat it into submission. Violence would never make it budge.
‘It was then, Mary, that I suddenly knew what to do. I gathered the creature up into my arms, as it were, ever so gently, and nursed it, and soothed it. I don’t really quite know what I mean by this, because I don’t know exactly who the “I” was, who did the nursing. But it was done somehow, and that’s the only way I can describe it. And the doing of it made me feel, to an intense degree, the distinction between the physical part of me and the—Oh dear, how I hate that word “spiritual”!—let’s call it the higher, or deeper will. I was two quite distinct people at that moment—that much I know-—and one of them tended the weakness of its animal sister and carried it into the bathroom, where it vomited. And then—utter, utter relief! The creature wasn’t frightened any more; it was far too busy relieving itself. And I felt touched by its weakness, and amused. I actually began to laugh, between the spasms, and I said to myself, “How I wish Mary were here, so that we could laugh over this together!” I’m sure you would have laughed, Mary, if you’d been with me. I’m only afraid that reading about it in this letter may harrow you. That’s the last thing I want. And yet I have to write this to you. It’s really important to me. And perhaps it’ll seem so to you—one day, if not now.
‘Darling, your letters have been so wonderful. I live by them—by what they express of your strength—and I shall die by them, I hope. I could never make very much out of church-religion. They seem to me to have turned their God into such a very constitutional monarch. They’ve smothered Him in deference and bowed Him practically out of existence. But still I do believe in Him—or in my version of Him, which I prefer to call “It”. At least, I’m sure now (I used not to be) that there’s a source of life within me—and that It can’t be destroyed. I shall not live on, but It will. And by that I don’t mean any of that sickly humanist stuff about being remembered by and living in one’s books or one’s friends’ minds, or anywhere else. That would anyhow be a short, a very short extension. Because the friends and the books will die, and the very language wear out and change. No. No. There are so many of us—so very many everywhere—that nobody, not even God, could be concerned with all of us individually. I simply cannot believe that His eye is on the sparrow—at least, not on sparrow 789443 as distinct from sparrow 789444. But every sparrow, and everything that ever was born, is part of It. I, like everything else, am much more essentially in It than in I.
‘Yes—I know all this. I know that Stephen is essentially in It. But what really hurts me, in my ignorance, is my attachment to Stephen as an individual, and the thought that I must leave him. I keep telling myself that we shall still be together as part of It. But that’s no comfort at the moment; it’s horribly painful. I suppose it won’t be when it happens, because then I shall understand that what I think of as “Stephen” has been changing and dying a little, every hour of every day, just as “Elizabeth” has.
‘Isn’t that, perhaps, the Original Sin of novelists—that they’ve tried to persuade their readers, and themselves, to see human beings as “characters”; beautifully complete three-dimensional wholes? Oh yes, the novelists pay lip-service to the idea of the fourth dimension, which is time and change. They often let their characters “grow old”. But it’s only a masquerade; as if a make-up man were to powder an actor’s wig and draw a few wrinkles on his face. Novelists daren’t really accept the fourth dimension with all its implications, because, if they did, their characters would blur and dissolve, and the whole novel would disintegrate. Characters have to have characteristics; they have to be “well-rounded”, as the reviewers say. But human beings can be anything and everything. They’re full of contradictions; and they have no shape, rounded or otherwise, only a general direction. This lie of the novelists is a sin because it encourages the belief that you can treat human beings as characters; that you can know them fully, and possess them—in the same way that one can know and possess Emma Bovary or Alyosha Karamazov.
‘I see you smiling, Mary, and saying to yourself: “Why, how philosophical she’s getting, in her old age! Will all this wisdom prevent her from writing any more novels?” No—of course it won’t. Even now, I must confess to you, I’m toying with an idea—.
‘Oh, if I could only know—will there be time? But I must stop thinking about that.’
Meanwhile, the day was rapidly approaching when Jane and her friends would leave. Jane was going to join her parents in Paris and then travel back with them to the States. I looked forward to her leaving: there was no question in my mind about that. My obsession had become so painful to me by now that I honestly longed for it to end. But it made a last, rather strange demand. I felt that I absolutely must be together with Jane for one whole night.
As I got this idea fixed in my head, I also thought of a way to carry it out. Jane would be travelling to Paris alone; and it would be very simple for her to stop off the train for a night in Marseille, without anyone at either end of her journey knowing that she’d done it.
Jane agreed to my plan at once, with her usual air of slight indifference. ‘All right, why not—’ she said, ‘if you want to.’ However, she made up for this by proving unexpectedly practical about the arrangements; so I suspected that she was more interested in the project than she’d admit.
Dealing with Elizabeth was a much more serious problem. It was so unheard of for me to suggest going away anywhere, even for one night, that I hardly knew how to approach the subject. After racking my brains for two days, I finally came up with an involved and peculiarly unconvincing tale. It was a terrible nuisance, I told her, but a French painter I’d met on the beach with those Americans (I always affected a vagueness about their names when speaking to Elizabeth) had trapped me into agreeing to spend a night with him and his family at their home in Marseille. ‘I really don’t see,’ I concluded, ‘how I can possibly get out of it.’
‘But surely, darling,’ said Elizabeth with a smile, ‘that wouldn’t be so difficult—I mean, if you hate the idea so much?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, speaking rather sharply because of my guilt.
‘Only that you’re lucky enough, always, to have a readymade excuse.’ Elizabeth laughed gaily and ironically. ‘Your poor tiresome sick wife.’
‘But, Elizabeth,’ I said hastily, ‘you know that would never work. He just wouldn’t believe it. I mean—you couldn’t be ill all the time. This is a standing invitation.’
‘I could be ill each time that you tried to go.’ (I began to suspect, now, that Elizabeth was teasing me.) ‘Quite a lot of chronic invalid wives do it. He’d understand, I’m sure—Frenchmen always seem to understand those things—so he wouldn’t be offended; he’d only feel sorry for you. Because he’d know that women who behave like that are just pathologically jealous.’
‘But, darling, you can’t want him to think that
about you! I certainly don’t. Besides, it’s too ridiculous for words.’
‘I can hardly care what he thinks about me, Stephen, when I’ve never even set eyes on him. And, anyway, we were only discussing how you could wriggle out of this invitation you dislike so much. I’m quite ready to sacrifice my reputation if I can save you from being bored.’
‘Oh, perhaps I shan’t be as bored as all that,’ I said, rising to my feet with the air of having made an unwilling decision. ‘And it’s really too tiresome, having to invent all these lies; when, in any case, I’ll only be away for twenty-four hours, at the most … I’d better go.’
I thought that had settled the matter; but it hadn’t. The day that I was due to go to Marseille, Elizabeth suddenly spoke to me at breakfast. I could tell from her manner that she’d been preparing herself to do this ever since she’d sat down at the table.
‘I wonder, darling,’ her tone was almost humble, ‘if you’d do me a very great favour?’
‘Of course,’ I answered; quite easy in my mind, and not in the least expecting what was to come. Probably, I thought, she was going to ask me to get something for her at one of the Marseille shops.
‘I wonder if you’d mind putting off your visit—just for a few days?’
‘But, why on earth—?’ I began; growling a little, already, like a dog who sees his bone threatened.
‘Well’—Elizabeth sounded more and more hesitant as she went on—’it’s only that I haven’t been feeling quite up to the mark—nothing serious, of course—and—I know this sounds dreadfully silly—but, when I’m like this, I do rather hate being left alone.’
‘I think you might have told me this a bit earlier,’ I said, my voice getting hard with resentment.
‘I’m so sorry, darling, but, you see, I didn’t want to say any thing about it. I kept putting it off. And then, this morning—’
‘I’d better go for the doctor.’
‘Oh, no—that’s not necessary. There isn’t anything he could tell me that he hasn’t said a hundred times already.’
The World in the Evening Page 25
