«You don't know what this is like.»
«Why shouldn't you have an affair with Julian Baffin? It wouldn't do her any harm.»
«You vile-thing-Oh why did I tell you, why did I tell you, I must have been insane-«Well, I'll keep mum. All right, all right, I'm going.»
When he was gone I simply ran berserk round the house. Why oh why oh why had I broken my silence. I had given away my only treasure and I had given it to a fool. Not that I was concerned about whether Francis would betray me. Some much more frightening thing had been added to my pain. In my chess game with the dark lord I had made perhaps a fatally wrong move.
Later on I sat down and began to think over what Francis had said to me. At least I thought over some of it. About Priscilla I did not think at all.
My dear Bradley,
I have lately got myself into the most terrible mess and I feel that I must lay the whole matter before you. Perhaps it won't surprise you all that much. I have fallen desperately in love with Christian. I can imagine your dry irony at this announcement. «Falling in love? At your age? Really!» I know how much you despise what is «romantic.» This has been, hasn't it, one of our old disagreements. Let me assure you that what I feel now has nothing to do with rosy dreaming or «the soppy.» I have never been in a grimmer mood in my life, nor I think in a more horribly realistic one. Bradley, this is the real thing, I'm afraid. I am completely floored by a force in which, I suspect, you simply do not believe! How can I convince you that I am in extremist I hoped to see you on several occasions lately to try to explain, to show you, but perhaps a letter is better. Anyway, that's point one. I am really in love and it's a terrible experience. I don't think I've ever felt quite like this before. I'm turned inside out, I'm living in a sort of myth, I've been depersonalized and made into somebody else. I feel sure, by the way, that I've been completely transformed as a writer. These things connect, they must do. I shall write much better harder stuff in future, as a result of this, whatever happens. God, I feel hard, hard, hard. I don't know if you can understand.
The third point is about you. How do you come in? Well, you just are absolutely in. I wish you weren't, but you can in fact be useful. Excuse this cold directness. Perhaps now you can see what I mean by «hard,»
About Christian, there is a problem too which concerns you. I have not yet said, though of course I have implied, how she feels. Well, she loVes me. A lot has happened in the last few days. They have been probably the most eventful days of my whole life. What Christian was saying to you the last time you saw her was of course a sort of joke, a mere result of high spirits, as I imagine you realized. She is such a gay affectionate person. However she is not indifferent to you and she wants something from you now which is rather hard to name: a sort of ratification of the arrangement I have been describing, a sort of final reconciliation and settling of old scores and also the assurance, which I'm sure you can give, that you will still be her friend when she is living with me. I might add that Christian, who is a very scrupulous person, is extremely concerned about Rachel's rights and whether Rachel will be able to «manage.» I hope that here too you can give some reassurance. Rachel is strong too. They are really two marvellous women. Bradley, do you follow all this? I feel such a mixture of joy and fear and sheer hard will, I'm not sure if I'm expressing myself clearly.
I shall deliver this by hand and will not try to see you at once. But soon, I mean later today or tomorrow, I would like to talk to you. You will be coming to see Priscilla of course, and we could meet then. There is no need to delay your talk with Rachel till you've seen me. The sooner that happens the better. But I'd like to see you before you see Chris alone. God, does this make sense? It is an appeal, and that should tickle your vanity. You are in a strong position for once. Please help me. I ask in the name of our friendship.
Arnold
PS. If you hate all this for God's sake be at least kind and don't give me any sort of hell about it. I may sound rational but I'm feeling terribly crazy and upset. I so much don't want to hurt Rachel. And please don't rush round to Chris and upset her, just when some things have become clear. And don't see Rachel either unless you can do it quietly and like I asked. Sorry, sorry.
I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge-eyed in the wreck of myself. At the same time there was an awful crescendo of excitement as Wednesday approached, and the idea of simply being with her began to shed a lurid joy, a demonic version of the joy which I had felt upon the Post Office Tower. Then I had been in innocence. Now I felt both guilty and doomed. And, in a way that concerned myself alone, savage, extreme, rude, cruel… Yet: to be with her again. Wednesday.
Of course I had to answer the telephone in case it was her. Every time it sounded was like a severe electric shock. Christian rang, Arnold rang. I put the receiver down at once. Let them make what they like of it. Arnold and Francis both came and rang the bell, but I could see them through the frosted glass of the door and did not let them in. I did not know if they could see me, I was indifferent to that. Francis dropped a note in to say that Priscilla was having shock treatment and seemed better. Rachel called, but I hid. Later she telephoned in some state of emotion. I spoke briefly and said I would ring her later. Thus I beguiled the time. I also started several letters to Julian. My dear Julian, I have lately got myself into the most terrible mess and I feel that I must lay the whole matter before you. Dear Julian, I am sorry that I must leave London and cannot join you on Wednesday. Dearest Julian, I love you, I am in anguish, oh my darling. Of course I tore up all these letters, they were just for private self-expression. At last, after centuries of sick emotion, Wednesday came.
How I feel about music is another thing. I am not actually tone deaf, though it might be better if I were. Music can touch me, it can get at me, it can torment. It just, as it were, reaches me, like a sinister gabbling in a language one can almost understand, a gabbling which is horribly, one suspects, about oneself. When I was younger I had even listened to music deliberately, stunning myself with disorderly emotion and imagining that I was having a great experience. True pleasure in art is a cold fire. I do not wish to deny that there are some people-though fewer than one might think from the talk of our self-styled experts-who derive a pure and mathematically clarified pleasure from these medleys of sound. All I can say is that «music» for me was simply an occasion for personal fantasy, the outrush of hot muddled emotions, the muck of my mind made audible.
The softly cacophonous red and gold scene swung in my vision, beginning to swirl gently like something out of Blake: it was a huge coloured ball, a sort of immense Christmas decoration, a glittering shining twittering globe of dim rosy light in the midst of which Julian and I were suspended, rotating, held together by a swooning intensity of precarious feather-touch. Somewhere above us a bright blue heaven blazed with stars and round about us half-naked women lifted ruddy torches up. My arm was on fire, my foot was on fire, my knee was trembling with the effort of keeping still. I was in a golden scarlet jungle full of the chattering of apes and the whistling of birds. A scimitar of sweet sounds sliced the air and entered into the red scar and became pain. I was that sword of agony, I was that pain. I was in an arena, surrounded by thousands of grimacing nodding faces, where I had been condemned to death by pure sound. I was to be killed by the whistling of birds and buried in a pit of velvet. I was to be gilded and then flayed.
«Bradley, what's the matter?»
«Nothing.»
«You weren't listening.»
«Were you talking?»
«I was asking you if you knew the story.»
«What story?»
«Of Rosenkavalier.»
«Of course I don't know the story of Rosenkavalier.»
«Well, quick, you'd better read your programme-«No, you tell me.»
«Oh well, it's quite simple really, it's about this young man, Octavian, and the Marschallin loves him, and they're lovers, only she's much older than he is and she's afraid she'll lose him because he's bound to fall in love with somebody his own age-«How old is he and how old is she?»
«Oh, I suppose he's about twenty and she's about thirty.»
«Thirty?»
«Enough.»
«Don't you want to know what happens next?»
«No.»
At that moment there was a pattering noise of clapping, rising to a rattling crescendo, the deadly sound of a dry sea, the light banging of many bones in a tempest.
The stars faded and the red torches began to dim and a terrifying packed silence slowly fell as the conductor lifted up his rod. Silence. Darkness. Then a rush of wind and a flurry of sweet pulsating anguish has been set free to stream through the dark. I closed my eyes and bowed my head before it. Could I transform all this extraneous sweetness into a river of pure love? Or would I be somehow undone by it, choked, dismembered, disgraced? I felt now almost at once a pang of relief as, after the first few moments, tears began to flow freely out of my eyes. The gift of tears which had been given and then withdrawn again had come back to bless me. I wept with a marvellous facility, quietly relaxing my arm and my leg. Perhaps if I wept copiously throughout I could bear it after all. I was not listening to the music, I was undergoing it, and the full yearning of my heart was flowing automatically out of my eyes and soaking my waistcoat, as I hung, so easily now, together with Julian, fluttering, hovering like a double hawk, like a double angel, in the dark void pierced by sorties of fire. I only wondered if it would soon prove impossible to cry quietly, and whether I should then begin to sob.
The curtain suddenly fled away to reveal an enormous double bed surrounded by a cavern of looped-up blood-red hangings. This consoled me for a moment because it reminded me of Carpaccio's «Dream of Saint Ursula.» I even murmured «Carpaccio» to myself as a protective charm. But these cooling comparisons were soon put to flight and even Carpaccio could not recue me from what happened next. Not on the bed but upon some cushions near the front of the stage two girls were lying in a close embrace. (At least 1 suppose one of them was enacting a young man.) Then they began to sing.
I became aware that I had uttered a sort of moan, because the man on my other side, whom I noticed now for the first time, turned and stared at me. At the same moment my stomach seemed to come sliding down from somewhere else and then quickly arched itself up again and I felt a quick bitter taste in my mouth. I murmured «Sorry!» quickly in Julian's direction and got up. There was a soft awkward scraping at the end of the row as six people rose hastily to let me out. I blundered by, slipped on some steps, the terrible relentless sweet sound still gripping my shoulders with its talons. Then I was pushing my way underneath the illuminated sign marked exit and out into the brightly lit and completely empty and suddenly silent foyer. I walked fast. I was definitely going to be sick.
Selection of a place to be sick in is always a matter of personal importance and can add an extra tormenting dimension to the graceless horror of vomiting. Not on the carpet, not on the table, not over your hostess's dress. I did not want to be sick within the precincts of the Royal Opera House, nor was I. I emerged into a deserted shabby street and a pungent spicy smell of early dusk. The pillars of the Opera House, blazing a pale gold behind me, seemed in that squalid place like the portico of a ruined or perhaps imagined or perhaps magically fabricated palace, the green and white arcades of the foreign fruit market, looking like something out of the Italian Renaissance, actually clinging to its side. I turned a corner and confronted an array of about a thousand peaches in tiers of boxes behind a lattice grille. I carefully took hold of the grille with one hand and leaned well forward and was sick.
I leaned there for a moment, looking down at what I had done, and aware too of the tear-wetness of my face upon which a faint breeze was coolly blowing. I remembered that casket of agony, steel coated in sugar. The inevitable loss of the beloved. And I experienced Julian. I cannot explain this. I simply felt in a sort of exhausted defeated cornered utmost way that she was. There was no particular joy or relief in this, but a sort of absolute categorical quality of grasp of her being.
I became aware that someone was standing beside me. Julian said, «How are you feeling now, Bradley?»
I began to walk away from her, fumbling for my handkerchief. I wiped my mouth carefully, trying to cleanse it within with saliva.
I was walking along a corridor composed entirely of cages. I was in a prison, I was in a concentration camp. There was a wall composed of transparent sacks full of fiery carrots. They looked at me like derisive faces, like monkeys' bottoms. I breathed carefully and regularly and interrogated my stomach, stroking it gently with my hands. I turned into a lighted arcade and tested my stomach against a smell of decaying lettuce. I walked onward occupied in breathing. Only now I felt so empty and so faint. I felt that I had reached the end of the world, I felt like a stag when it can run no farther and turns and bows its head to the hounds, I felt like Actaeon condemned and cornered and devoured.
Julian was following me. I could hear the soft tap-tap of her shoes on the sticky pavement and my whole body apprehended her presence behind me.
«Bradley, would you like some coffee? There's a stall there.»
«No.»
«Let's sit down somewhere.»
«Nowhere to sit.»
We passed between two lorries loaded with milky-white boxes of dark cherries and came out into the open. It was becoming dark, lights had come on revealing the sturdy elegant military outline of the vegetable market, resembling a magazine, a seedy eighteenth– century barracks, though quiet at this time and sombre as a cloister.
Opposite to us the big derelict eastern portico of Inigo Jones's church was now in view, cluttered up with barrows and housing at the far end the coffee stall referred to by Julian. Some mean and casual lamplight, itself seeming dirty, revealed the thick pillars, a few lounging market men, a large pile of vegetable refuse and disinte– rating cardboard boxes. It was like a scene in some small battered Italian city, rendered by Hogarth.
Julian seated herself on the plinth of one of the pillars at the lark end of the portico, and I sat down next to her, or as near next to her as the bulge of the column would allow. I could feel the thick filth and muck of London under my feet, under my bottom, behind my back. I saw, in a diagonal of dim light, Julian's silk dress hitched up, her tights, smoky blue, coloured by the flesh within, her shoes, also blue, against which I had so cautiously placed my own.
«Poor Bradley,» said Julian.