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 The gift of tears which had been given and then withdrawn again had come back to bless me.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.
