‘Most extraordinary,’ the small man said.
I felt uncomfortable. I asked, ‘What sort of thing did he say?’
Lord Stockwell’s forehead twitched, as his daughter’s had done. ‘Certain things are simple, banal. Some people make you live them, though.’ He smiled; it did not become him. ‘It’s like the Highway Code. No good until you are on the road. Then it’s a little bit more than logic.’ He was disappointed in me; that I could feel.
I tried to look solemn. I said, ‘I saw little of my father in those days.’
‘Naturally. I will tell you something else about him. The second time I saw him he was just wearing a yellow dhoti. His chest was bare. His skin had a shine.’
We sat in silence for a little. The conversation turned to other things. I excused myself and went to the lavatory. I thought I was going to be sick. But it was just a momentary faintness. In that small room, coming to myself again, I could have wept for my solitude.
Just before I left Lady Stella said, ‘Just a minute.’ She ran out of the room and returned with The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. ‘Have a look at this. I would like to know what you think.’ I made some objection to taking the book; my stay was short and it might be difficult to return it. She said, ‘Are you very busy? Couldn’t you return it tomorrow or the day after?’ It was not at all what I was expecting. I was tremendously flattered. A link with the past, with the city of magical light. We agreed on lunch. She had a flat of her own; she gave me the telephone number.
I walked back to the hotel. I smelled the cold sooty air. The sky was low; for just a little way above street level there was light, from street lamps and shop windows. The city was as if canopied; I had no feeling of being exposed. Around me the sky glowed. Well, it probably glowed in Isabella too, for different reasons. It was past midnight. In the past to which my present mood was linked the city would have been still at such an hour; now the streets hummed with motorcars whose red tail-lights were like warnings in the dark. It made no difference.
Holding The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, oddly solid and scholarly in its bulk and feel, I entered the fairyland of the hotel. I had a hot bath; and, sipping the hot milk which awaited me every evening in a vacuum flask, I began to read. I read, as I had been directed, as a child. It was no effort. Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer. My mood was soft. And soon I was saddened, but pleasurably, not only by the loss, in this roaring red city, of village greens and riders on horseback and milkmaids and fairs and eggs in baskets and journeys by country folk to London town, but also by that limpid, direct vision of the world, neither of which had been mine, neither vision, of delight, nor world, of order.
But when they are clean.
And fit to be seen,
She’ll dress like a lady,
And dance on the green.
‘Winnie the Pooh?’ I said, passing the book back. ‘I’ve often seen it in bookshops and I’ve often seen it referred to. But I must confess I’ve never read it. I suppose the title has always put me off.’
‘Ther Pooh,’ Stella said.
‘Ther Pooh?’
‘Don’t you understand? I see this is something else I’ll have to read to you.’ She sat up and pulled the sheet above her breasts. ‘Are you ready? Then I’ll begin.’
The delegation had gone back to Isabella. I stayed on in London. I no longer seek to explain; I merely record. For eight days, during which whatever reputation I had left was being destroyed, I stayed on in London, held by what I had detected in Stella’s manner at our first meeting. Frenzy was what I had first thought it to be; and frenzy it was, of a sort. It was a capacity for delight, such as I had found in Sandra, but without Sandra’s anguish. It was a coolness. It was more, much more, than Sandra’s feeling for an occasion. It was a way of looking at the city and being in it, a way of appearing to manage it and organize it for a series of separate, perfect pleasures. It was a sustaining of that mood to which I feared to put an end, knowing it could never return. It was a creation, of the city I had once sought: an unexpected fulfilment. Perhaps I was deceived by Stella’s manner and skills, which might have been the manner and skills of her class. But I was willingly deceived.
All this had to be paid for, though, in those afternoons in her flat. What I know of the sexual capacities of others I have learned from books. With this knowledge I cannot say that excessive demands were made of me, but I believe I have said enough in this narrative to make it plain that my sexual charge was low and unreliable. In fact I dreaded those afternoons behind drawn curtains; in the end they drove me away. They began on my second visit to her flat; she had promised to tell me some stories. She was wearing a quilted pink housecoat or dressing-gown. I kissed her lightly on the forehead. A disagreeable scorched smell, I remember: she had just been to the hairdresser’s. Her expression didn’t change, and I was not prepared for her acknowledgement. She said, ‘Shall we go to bed?’ I was struck by the contrast between the calm, childish voice and what it was proposing. But it was familiar; I remembered. ‘Shall I show you my rude drawings?’ The sentence held an equal guilelessness. There could be no refusal.
Our love-making was standardized. It followed the pattern of that afternoon. It was divided into two parts. The first was dedicated to me; the second Stella claimed for herself. For the first part she lay on her side and was passive. For the second she straddled me, leaning back, resting her hands on the bed or on my shins; she was all motion; her eyes were closed; her skin went moist. She made no sound, except once, when she said, as though to herself, ‘Aren’t bodies wonderful?’ I did not share her view then; later I marvelled at her precision and honesty. Such small breasts as she leaned back! Such a private frenzy; I might not have been there. She was a little alarming. For me this speechless, prolonged second part was torment and torture. I sent my mind off on to other subjects, with such success once that, taking up a large picture book from the bedside table – it was about the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, I believe – I heard myself saying, what I thought I was only thinking, ‘So you’ve got this.’ A swift, slight slap was the reply I received. I put the book down.
So now, with a sinking heart, I listened to the adventures of Pooh and Eeyore and Piglet, knowing that the moment would soon come when sterner things would have to be faced. The moment came. The sheet was thrown off, the book put aside, and I lay patiently on my back. The book was within reach; I longed for nothing more than to be allowed to continue quietly reading. I studied the jacket. It remains imprinted on my mind and whenever I see it I am irritated by a little feeling which presently defines itself as deprivation. Then the inevitable happened; I had feared that it might. I began to fail. The figure above me was pathetically frenzied; I wished I could help her. Later, when failure was absolute, the childish face was blank with disappointment and unforgiving anger. It was the end. No relationship, especially a play-relationship like ours, recovers from such a failure.
And really it was time to go, to leave the city of fantasy; to leave the fairyland of the hotel, no longer fairyland. But it was a good thought of Stella’s to send the paperback of The House at Pooh Corner to my hotel.
7
IT was time to leave. But there was no need for me to return to Isabella. That, however, I didn’t see until it was too late, until, in fact, our aeroplane was a few minutes from Isabella and we were fastening safety belts. The city and snow, the island and the sea: one could only be exchanged for the other. So my mind ran; departure implied a destination. I was calm. It was the calm that comes to so many in moments of crisis; and I was still infected by Stella’s attitude to experience, her special hubris, as I saw it, the gift perhaps of her class or race, her prodigal’s conviction that what is will continue to be. Fulfilment creates its own illusions. Sandra had been made careless of the wealth she had longed for; now I easily turned my back on the city which I had at last seen to glitter. It was only at the airport, where I had arrived in good time, that I became aware of my calm. An
d instantly began to question it. Error! Questioning, self-examination, reassurance: the process quickly became continuous, and I feared I was launched on the familiar switchback of neurosis. It seemed to me at the time it was this fear alone which was working on me. I feared and saw that my fear was justified. Within minutes my world was spoilt – so recently whole – and my calm was gone.
Even then I did not ask myself whether a return to Isabella was necessary. I wished only to delay it, to make a detour, to have a momentary escape. To recover my calm and that limpid vision of the world: this was now all my concern. Everything else dwindled: Stella, Isabella and what awaited me there. I was a student in the city again. I needed new sights, new landscapes, an unfamiliar language. Northern Spain in a snowstorm, the brown earth whitening, the light suddenly grey; Provence on a sunny morning, green and yellow and hazy, the big Wagon-Lit coffee cup kept steady by a heavy spoon.
Stopover: the word from the airline advertisements came to me. Not easy at this stage. But my frenzy ignored rebukes and overcame difficulties. And a few hours later I was walking, as in a dream, through the streets of a city, I thought I didn’t know, which yet now revealed little points of familiarity, abrupt half-remembered areas: so that reality was disturbed, sounds curiously muted, and for stretches I had the sensation of witnessing and performing actions for the second, third, fourth time. I drank the drinks I had first tasted twelve years before, nibbled at the same savouries; they rested as heavily on my stomach. A glimpse of sawdust on a tiled floor of a familiar pattern, the eye-straining fluorescent light in a dark corner, a face, snatches of conversation in a language I could only partly follow: my disturbance was complete. For the second time that day I was frantic with airline officials. But there were no aeroplanes to Isabella that day. Tomorrow, yes: a fresh sticker was gummed to my ticket. Sixteen intransit hours awaited me.
I went into bookshops and looked through expensive, difficult-to-handle editions of the country’s classics until assistants became over-attentive. Then even the shops closed and the streets had nothing to hold me. I dawdled about the hotel, in the lounge, in my room. On the cream-coloured plastic bell-push a flat-footed maid stared placidly and a slender steward raced, tray aloft, coat tails flying. Promise of delight! I rang for snacks I didn’t want and drinks I couldn’t finish. I exhausted the services of the hotel. I had a bath and got into bed. After some time I got out of bed. It was only nine o’clock. I dressed with an effort, and went out into the streets.
I took small drinks from tired barmen in little tiled bars; each drink added to the weight in my stomach. A conjunction of streets, a building, a slope, a turning: a remembered area. A woman walked slowly ahead of me and turned into a café entrance. Memory stirred. I followed the woman through the revolving door. I was strained with more than drink; I was exhausted; it was the last thing I was looking for. But my stomach lightened with an old excitement. I felt I had been guided to this place: the light, the low tables and low chairs, the slender half-filled glasses, the solitary intense young men in double-breasted suits, the carefully made-up women, in twos and threes, so cool, concealing such skills, such energy.
It is for faces I go on such occasions. The body doesn’t interest me, one body being so much like another. The excitement I feel is enough; what follows is perversity or, oddly, duty. I went for a fresh, appealing, witty face, unusually thin for the country, though to this face was attached a body as plump as any. She was friendly and gentle, as such women invariably are; and as we left the café on foot for the hotel she chatted of this and that with such ease that the observer might have believed we were old friends. Her good humour was not out of place even in the hotel. The thin elderly lady at the desk, though businesslike and brisk in her starched apron, greeted my companion effusively. She said it was good to see my companion again, and looking so well; was she better? My companion replied that she was. The lady at the desk, studying the register I had signed, said that she was not surprised; she playfully reproached my companion with her earlier despair and said that in all circumstances we would be wiser to leave everything in the hands of God. And so we went up the dimly-lit carpeted stairs. No word had been said to me, it being the gracious custom of the ladies of these hotels to pay no attention to the clients of their clients. My smiling companion, appreciating my unspoken alarm at the talk of illness, explained that she had been slimming. Making a face of satire, and holding her hands wide apart, she said she had been fat, oh, but enormous.
The curtained room was warm; red-shaded bedside lamps made it cosy; at the same time it was somewhat surgical with its white, polished wash-basin, two small towels lying across its spotless bidet, and other towels lying neatly folded on the edge of the bed. I paid my companion the sum we had laughingly agreed on in the café. She stroked my cheek and said she didn’t like taking money beforehand – it was modern and rapacious – but she had had unpleasant experiences. Her courtliness delighted me. She left the room, doubtless to hand over some fraction of the sum I had given her to the lady of the hotel; I heard animated conversation between them. Presently my companion returned, somewhat out of breath, apologizing as to a child for her absence. I had undressed and was lying on the bed. I was beginning to know the depth of my exhaustion. Whatever excitement I had felt on entering the cosy, surgical room had subsided; and the smiling willingness of the young girl to please – I now saw that she was young – seemed remote, slightly touching, slightly absurd.
Without her outer garment – which she hung carefully over the back of the chair – she all at once appeared bigger than I had thought. She exceeded the generous standards of the country. Her arms were wide and slack. Her breasts had been pulled tightly upwards and flattened against her chest; even so they had appeared full and large. Now, with a sigh from my companion that turned into a laugh, these breasts were released. They cascaded heavily down. They were enormous, they were grotesque, empty starved sacks which yet contained some substance at their tips, where alone they had some shape. She unbound, untied, released herself. Flesh, striped, indented, corrugated, fell helplessly about her. Below those breasts, wide flabby scabbards which hung down to her middle, her dimpled, loose belly collapsed; flesh hung in liquid folds about her legs which quivered like risen dough. She was ghastly, tragic, a figure from hell with a smiling girl’s face, the thin starved face of the slimmer. Tormented by flesh, she offered knowledge of flesh. Fat, fat, she kept on saying, smiling, tragic; and courtesy, compassion answered for me, No, no. I knew I would never touch; and I feared being touched. Yet I never moved. Flesh, flesh, I thought: how could I disdain? How could I even judge? She lifted herself off the bidet and sat on the bed, liquescent flesh running laterally, her breasts touching what passed for thighs. I closed my eyes and waited.
No damp, flat, smothering embrace came; only the softest of words, the sweetest of breaths, a brushing – of those breasts? – against my nipples, the barest touch of a fingernail circling my areola. I never touched; my hands still lay at my side. Yet I was already turning in on myself; judgement was disappearing. Nails, tongue, breath and lips were the instruments of this disembodied probing. Two light lines drawn down my chest, a quick tongue against the side of my belly, and my tense abdominal muscles quivered, rippled, liquefied. The probing went lower; no effort of concentration was now required, no need to shut out the world, the liquid sighs and sounds. Judgement disappeared, I was all painful sensation. Flesh, flesh: but my awareness of it was being weakened. I was turned over on my belly. The probing continued, with the same instruments. The self dropped away, layer by layer; what remained dwindled to a cell of perception, indifferent to pleasure or pain; neutral perception, finer and finer, having validity, existing only because of that probing which, growing fainter, yet had to be apprehended, because it was the only proof of life: fine perception reacting minutely only to time, which was also the universe. It was a moment that was extended and extended and extended. There could be no issue; it was a moment which, when release without
fruition came and perception widened again, defined itself as an extended moment of horror. It is a moment that has remained with me. After three years I can call it back at will: that moment of timelessness, horror, solace. The Highway Code! Through poor, hideous flesh to have learned about flesh; through flesh to have gone beyond flesh.
But, monstrous, she was in despair. The smile, of hysteria, was replaced by tears; she reproached herself for my failure. I comforted her; at that moment I was genuine. Fat, fat, she said, lifting her breasts, lifting her belly; and I said No, no. She began to smile again; she rinsed out her mouth, made up her face, rearranged her hair. We talked, imperfectly, in her language. She misunderstood something I said. She said, as though replying to a question, ‘During those moments I never open my eyes. I never think.’ I was too moved to speak. I watched her re-erect her body for the café, without disdain or judgement; it was all I could offer her. I walked her back to the revolving door. Less than an hour had passed.
In the hotel that night I was awakened by a sensation of sickness. As soon as I was in the bathroom I was sick: all the undigested food and drink of the previous day. My stomach felt strained; I was in some distress. On the plastic bell-push the chambermaid still stared and the waiter still raced. But it was just past three; the hotel was still. I began to wait for morning. I had not slept well. In a serial dream I had found myself on my back, on my belly, in a London street or tunnel through which red underground trains careered on crisscrossing tracks. Beyond the trains I could see Sally, Sandra, my father, Lord Stockwell, anxious to come to me, who could not move towards them. As I slept and awakened, waiting for the light to come to the fantasy city, known and unknown, memory and the dream flowed together. When the light came I was weak and ill. The stopover was at an end. It was necessary to rise and prepare for another departure.