arms on my shoulders, removed my glasses, kissed me, and put them back. Then he put his hands on his hips and laughed again. “My dear Clea” he said, “it would be anyone’s dream to take you to bed, and I must confess that in a corner of my mind I have often allowed the thought to wander but … dearest angel, you have spoilt everything. This is no way to enjoy you, and no way for you to enjoy yourself. Forgive my laughing! You have effectively spoiled my dream. Offering yourself this way, without wanting me, is such an insult to my male vanity that I simply would not be able to comply with your demand. It is, I suppose, a compliment that you chose me rather than someone else — but my vanity is larger than that! In fact your request is like a pailful of slops emptied over my head! I shall always treasure the compliment and regret the refusal but … if only you had chosen some other way to do it, how glad I would have been to oblige! Why did you have to let me see that you really did not care for me?”
‘He blew his nose gravely in a corner of the sheet, took my glasses and placed them on his own nose to examine himself in the mirror. Then he came and stared at me until the comedy overflowed again and we both started laughing. I felt an awful sense of relief. And when I had repaired my damaged make-up in the mirror he allowed me to take him to dinner to discuss the problem of paint with magnificent, generous honesty. The poor man listened with such patience to my rigmarole! He said: “I can only tell you what I know, and it isn’t much. First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do — then you have to sleep-walk a little to reach it. The real obstacle is oneself. I believe that artists are composed of vanity, indolence and self-regard. Work-blocks are caused by the swelling-up of the ego on one or all of these fronts. You get a bit scared about the imaginary importance of what you are doing! Mirror-worship. My solution would be to slap a poultice on the inflamed parts — tell your ego to go to hell and not make a misery of what should be essentially fun, joy.” He said many other things that evening, but I have forgotten the rest; but the funny thing was that just talking to him, just being talked to, seemed to clear the way ahead again. Next day he sent me a page of oracular notes about art.* I started work again, clear as a bell, the next morning. Perhaps in a funny sort of way he did depuceler me? I regretted not being able to reward him as he deserved, but I realized that he was right. I would have to wait for a tide to turn. And this did not happen until later, in Syria. There was something bitter and definitive about it when it came, and I made the usual mistakes one makes from inexperience and paid for them. Shall I tell you?’
I: ‘Only if you wish.’
She: ‘I found myself suddenly and hopelessly entangled with someone I had admired some years before but never quite imagined in the context of a lover. Chance brought us together for a few short months. I think that neither of us had foreseen this sudden coup de foudre. We both caught fire, as if somewhere an invisible burning glass had been playing on us without our being aware. It is curious that an experience so wounding can also be recognized as good, as positively nourishing. I suppose I was even a bit eager to be wounded — or I would not have made the mistakes I did. He was somebody already committed to someone else, so there was never, from the beginning, any pretence of permanence in our liaison. Yet (and here comes my famous stupidity again) I very much wanted to have a child by him. A moment’s thought would have shown me that it would have been impossible; but the moment’s thought only supervened when I was already pregnant. I did not, I thought, care that he must go away, marry someone else. I would at least have his child! But when I confessed it — at the very moment the words left my lips — I suddenly woke up and realized that this would be to perpetuate a link with him to which I had no right. To put it plainly I should be taking advantage of him, creating a responsibility which would shackle him throughout his marriage. It came to me in a flash, and I swallowed my tongue. By the greatest luck he had not heard my words. He was lying like you are now, half asleep, and had not caught my whisper. “What did you say?” he said. I substituted another remark, made up on the spur of the moment. A month later he left Syria. It was a sunny day full of the sound of bees. I knew I should have to destroy the child. I bitterly regretted it, but there seemed no other honourable course to take in the matter. You will probably think I was wrong, but even now I am glad I took the course I did, for it would have perpetuated something which had no right to exist outside the span of these few golden months. Apart from that I had nothing to regret. I had been immeasurably grown-up by the experience. I was full of gratitude and still am. If I am generous now in my love- making it is perhaps because I am paying back the debt, refunding an old love in a new. I entered a clinic and went through with it. Afterwards the kindly old anaesthetist called me to the dirty sink to show me the little pale homunculus with its tiny members. I wept bitterly. It looked like a smashed yolk of an egg. The old man turned it over curiously with a sort of spatula — as one might turn over a rasher of bacon in a frying-pan. I could not match his cold scientific curiosity and felt rather sick. He smiled and said: “It is all over. How relieved you must feel!” It was true, with my sadness there was a very real relief at having done what I recognized as the right thing. Also a sense of loss; my heart felt like a burgled swallow’s nest. And so back to the mountains, to the same easel and white canvas. It is funny but I realized that precisely what wounded me most as a woman nourished me most as an artist. But of course I missed him for a long time: just a physical being whose presence attaches itself without one’s knowing, like a piece of cigarette paper to the lip. It hurts to pull it away. Bits of the skin come off! But hurt or not, I learned to bear it and even to cherish it, for it allowed me to come to terms with another illusion. Or rather to see the link between body and spirit in a new way — for the physique is only the outer periphery, the contours of the spirit, its solid part. Through smell, taste, touch we apprehend each other, ignite each other’s minds; information conveyed by the body’s odours after orgasm, breath, tongue-taste — through these one “knows” in quite primeval fashion. Here was a perfectly ordinary man with no exceptional gifts but in his elements, so to speak, how good for me; he gave off the odours of good natural objects: like newly baked bread, roasting coffee, cordite, sandalwood. In this field of rapport I missed him like a skipped meal — I know it sounds vulgar! Paracelsus says that thoughts are acts. Of them all, I suppose, the sex act is the most important, the one in which our spirits most divulge themselves. Yet one feels it a sort of clumsy paraphrase of the poetic, the noetic, thought which shapes itself into a kiss or an embrace. Sexual love is knowledge, both in etymology and in cold fact; “he knew her” as the Bible says! Sex is the joint or coupling which unites the male and female ends of knowledge merely — a cloud of unknowing! When a culture goes bad in its sex all knowledge is impeded. We women know that. That was when I wrote to you asking if I should come to visit you in your island. How grateful I am that you did not answer me! It would have been a wrong move at the time. Your silence saved me! Ah! my dear, forgive me if I bore you with my wanderings for I see that you are looking somewhat sleepy! But with you it is such a pleasure to talk away the time between love-making! It is a novelty for me. Apart from you there is only dear Balthazar — whose rehabilitation, by the way, is going on apace. But he has told you? He has been inundated with invitations since the Mountolive banquet, and it seems will have little difficulty in rebuilding the clinic practice again.’
I: ‘But he is far from reconciled to his teeth.’
She: ‘I know. And he is still rather shaken and hysterical — as who would not be. But everything goes forward steadily, and I think he will not lapse.’
I: ‘But what of this sister of Pursewarden’s?’
She: ‘Liza! I think you will admire her, though I can’t tell if you will like her. She is rather impressive, indeed perhaps just a little bit frightening. The blindness does not seem like an incapacity, rather it gives an expression of double awareness. She listens to one as if one were music, an extra intentness which makes one immediately aware of the banality of most of one’s utterances. She’s unlike him, yet very beautiful though deathly pale, and her movements are swift and absolutely certain, unlike most blind people. I have never seen her miss a doorhandle or trip on a mat, or pause to get her bearings in a strange place. All the little errors of judgement the blind make, like talking to a chair which had just been vacated by its owner … they are absent. One wonders sometimes if she really is blind. She came out here to collect his effects and to gather material about him for a biography.’
I: ‘Balthazar hinted at some sort of mystery.’
She: ‘There is little doubt that David Mountolive is hopelessly in love with her; and from what he told Balthazar it began in London. It is certainly an unusual liaison for someone so correct, and it obviously gives them both a great deal of pain. I often imagine them, the snow falling in London, suddenly finding themselves face to face with the Comic Demon! Poor David! And yet why should I utter such a patronizing phrase? Lucky David! Yes, I can tell you a little, based on a scrap of his conversation. Suddenly, in a moribund taxi speeding away to the suburbs she turned her face to him and told him that she had been told to expect him many years ago; that the moment she heard his voice she knew that he was the dark princely stranger of the prophecy. He would never leave her. And she only asked leave to verify it, pressing her cold fingers to his face to feel it all over, before sinking back on the cold cushions with a sigh! Yes, it was he. It must have been strange to feel the fingers of the blind girl pressing one’s
