«Oh Bradley, hello, it's me.»
I made some sort of sound.
«Bradley-sorry-it's me-you know, Julian Baffin.»
I said, «Hold on a minute, would you?» I covered the mouthpiece and closed my eyes tightly, groped for a chair, panting, trying to control my breath. In a few moments I said, coughing a little to disguise the tremor, «Sorry. The kettle was just boiling.»
«I'm so sorry to bother you, Bradley. I promise I won't become a pest, always ringing up and coming round.»
«Not at all.»
«I just wondered if I could pick up my Hamlet whenever you've finished with it.»
«Certainly.»
«But there's no hurry at all-any time in the next fortnight would do. I'm not working on that at the moment. And there's one or two more questions I've thought of. If you like I could send them by post, and you could post me the book. I don't want to interrupt your work.»
«In the next-fortnight-«Or month. I may be going to the country actually. My school has still got the measles.»
«Perhaps you could drop in some time next week,» I said.
«Fine. How about Thursday morning about ten?»
«Yes. That's-fine.»
«Thank you so much. I won't keep you. I know you're so busy. Good-bye, Bradley, and thanks.»
«Wait a minute,» I said.
There was silence.
«Julian,» I said, «are you free this evening?»
The restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower revolves very slowly. Slow as a dial hand. Majestic trope of lion-blunting time.
How swiftly did it move that night while London crept behind the beloved head? Was it quite immobile, made still by thought, a mere fantasy of motion in a world beyond duration? Or was it spinning like a top, whirling away into invisibility, and pinning me against the outer wall, kitten-limbed and crucified by centrifugal force?
Concerning absence love has always been eloquent. The subject admits of an explicit melancholy, though doubtless there are certain pains which cannot be fully rendered. But has it ever sufficiently hymned presence? Can it do so? The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.
To speak more crudely, what I experienced that evening on the Post Office Tower was a kind of blinding joy. It was as if stars were exploding in front of my eyes so that I literally could not see. Breathing was fast and difficult, not unpleasant. I was conscious of a certain satisfaction in being able to go on pumping myself full of oxygen. A quiet and perhaps outwardly imperceptible shuddering possessed my whole frame. My hands vibrated, my legs ached and throbbed, my knees were in the condition described by the Greek poetess. This dereglement was completed by a sense of giddiness produced by the sheer conception of being so high above the ground and yet still connected to it. Giddiness of this kind in any case locates itself in the genitals.
All this, and further hues and saturations of bliss which I cannot describe at all, I felt on that evening as I sat with Julian in the Post Office Tower restaurant. We talked, and our communion was so perfect that it might have been telepathic for all I could make out afterwards about how it actually occurred. The evening had darkened to an intense blue, but it was not yet night. The forms of London, some already chequered with yellow light, glided onward through a dim shimmering corpuscular haze. The Albert Hall, the Science Museums, Centre Point, the Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Festival Hall, the Houses of Parliament, the Albert Memorial. The precious and beloved skyline of my own Jerusalem processed incessantly behind that dear mysterious head. Only the royal parks were already places of darkness, growing inkily purple with night-time and its silence.
Mysterious head. Oh the tormenting strangeness of our ignorance of other minds, the privileged comfort of the secrecy of our own! In fact on that night what I felt most in her was her lucidity, her transparency almost. That purity and unmuddied simplicity of the young, after the anxious self-guarding deviousness of later ages. Her clear eyes looked at me and she was with me and spoke to me with a directness which I had never received before. To say that there was no element of flirting is to speak with a totally inappropriate grossness. We conversed as angels might converse, not through a glass darkly but face to face. And yet: I was-again to say that I was playing a part is a barbarism. I was blazing with secrecy. As my eyes and my thoughts caressed and possessed her and as I smiled into her open attentive gaze with a passion and even with a tenderness which she could not see, I felt ready to fall to the ground fainting, perhaps dying, with the enormity of what I knew and she did not.
«Bradley, I think it's swaying.»
«It can't be. I believe it does sway a little in the wind. But there's no wind tonight.»
«There might be a wind up here.»
«Well, there might be. Yes, I think it is swaying.» How could I tell? Everything was swaying.
Of course I had merely pretended to eat. I had drunk very little wine. Alcohol still seemed a complete irrelevancy. I was drunk with love. Julian had both eaten and drunk a good deal, indiscriminately praising everything that passed her lips. We had talked about the view, about her college, about her school with the measles, about how soon one could tell whether one was a poet, about whether the novel, about why the theatre. I had never talked so easily to anyone. Oh blessed weightlessness, oh blessed space.
«Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet.»
«Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end.»
«So the critics are just stupid?»
«It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.»
«Like you now trying to like what my father writes?»
«That's more special. I feel I've been unjust. He has huge vitality and he tells a good story. Stories are art too, you know.»
«His stuff is awfully ingenious, but it's as dead as a door nail.»
«So young and so untender.»
«So young, my lord, but true.»
I was nearly on the floor at that moment. I also thought, in so far as thinking occurred, that she was probably right. Only I was not going to utter any harsh thing that evening. I was mainly now, since I had realized that I could not keep her with me for much longer, wondering about whether and if so how I could kiss her on parting. Kissing had never been customary between us, even when she was a child. Briefly, I had never kissed her. Never. And now tonight perhaps I would.
«Bradley, you aren't listening.»
She constantly used my name. I could not use hers. She had no name.
«Ought I to read Wittgenstein?»
What I wanted to do was to kiss her in the lift going down should we chance to have that momentary love nest to ourselves. But of course that was out of the question. There must be no, absolutely no, show of marked interest. She had, as young people with their charming egoism and their impromptu modes so felicitously do, taken it quite calmly for granted that I should suddenly have felt like dining on the Post Office Tower and should, since she had happened to ring up, have happened to ask her to come too.
«No. I shouldn't bother.»
«You think I wouldn't understand him?»
«Yes.»
«Yes, I wouldn't?»
«Yes. He never thought of you.»
«What?»
«I'm quoting again. Never mind.»