overstayed welcome would have been torture afterwards. I did not want to see her looking at her watch.
She looked at her watch. «Oh dear, I must go soon.»
«I'll see you to the tube.»
We had the lift to ourselves going down. I did not kiss her. I did not suggest that she should come back to my flat. Ao we walked along Goodge Street I did not touch her, even «accidentally.» I was beginning to wonder how in the world it would be possible to part from her.
«Well, then-Well, then-«
«Bradley, you've been sweet, thank you, I've so much enjoyed it.»
«Oh, I quite forgot to bring your Hamlet.» I had of course done no such thing.
«Never mind, I'll get it another time. Good night, Bradley, and thanks.»
«Yes, I-let me see-«I must run.»
«Won't you-Shall we fix a time for you to come-You said you had some-I'm so often out-Or shall I-Will you-«I'll ring you. Good night, and thank you so much.»
It was now or never. With a sense of moving very slowly, of executing some sort of precise figure in a minuet, I stepped a little in front of Julian, who was turning away, took her left wrist lightly in my right hand, thereby halting her, and then leaned down and pressed my judiciously parted lips against her cheek. The effect could not be casual. I straightened up and we stood for a moment looking at each other.
Julian said, «Bradley, if I asked you, would you cometoCovent Garden with me?»
«Yes, of course.» I would go to hell with her, and even to Covent Garden.
«It's Rosenkavalier. Next Wednesday. Meet in the foyer about half past six. I've got quite good tickets. Septimus Leech got us two, only now he can't come.»
«Who is Septimus Leech?»
«Oh he's my new boy friend. Good night, Bradley.»
She was gone. I stood there dazed in the lamplight among the hurrying ghosts. And I felt as a man might feel who, with a whole skin on him and a square meal inside him, sits in a cell having just been captured by the secret police.
A common though not invariable early phase of this madness, the one in fact through which I had just been passing, is a false loss of self, which can be so extreme that all fear of pain, all sense of time (time is anxiety, is fear) is utterly blotted out. The sensation itself of loving, the contemplation of the existence of the beloved, is an end in itself. A mystic's heaven on earth must be just such an endless contemplation of God. Only God has (or would have if He existed) characteristics at least not totally inimical to the continuance of the pleasures of adoration. As the so-called «ground of being» He may be considered to have come a good deal farther than half- way. Also He is changeless. To remain thus poised in the worship of a human being is, from both sides of the relationship, a much more precarious matter, even when the beloved is not nearly forty years younger and, to say the least of it, detached.
On the second day I began to need her, though even «anxiety» would be too gross a word for that delicate silken magnetic tug, as it manifested itself at any rate initially. Self was reviving. On the first day Julian had been everywhere. On the second day she was, yes, somewhere, located vaguely, not yet dreadfully required, but needed. She was, on the second day, absent. This inspired the small craving for strategy, a little questing desire to make plans. The future, formerly blotted out by an excess of light, reappeared. There were once more vistas, hypotheses, possibilities. But joy and gratitude still lightened the world and made possible a gentle concern with other people, other things. I wonder how long a man could remain in that first phase of love? Much longer than I did, no doubt, but surely not indefinitely. The second phase, I am sure, given favouring conditions, could continue much longer. (But again, not indefinitely. Love is history, is dialectic, it must move.) As it is, I lived in hours what another man might have lived in years.
The transformation of my beatitude could, as that second day wore on, be measured by a literally physical sense of strain, as if magnetic rays or even ropes or chains were delicately plucking, then tugging, then dragging. Physical desire had of course been with me from the first, but earlier it had been, though perceptually localized,
