tonight.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries. There are, I am told, people who just want «a woman» or «a man.» I cannot conceive of this state of affairs and it does not concern me. I had rarely wanted another human being absolutely which was the same as to say that I had rarely wanted another human being at all. Holding hands and kissing, that can mean something in friendship, though it had not been my way. But that trembling dedication to the totality of another I had experienced-well, as I sat on the divan bed that evening and waited for Julian I felt, never before: though I knew intellectually that I had been in love with Christian. And there had been another case, of which I do not tell the story here.
It was and was not like the first day of the honeymoon when the newly married pair, in tender deference to each other, feign habits which are not their own. I was not a young husband. I was not young and I was not a husband. I felt none of the youthful spouse's need to take control, his reflective anxiety about the future, his calmingly classified commitment. I feared the future and I was committed but I felt myself that day in a world so entirely weird, in a land of marvels, where all that was required of my courage was that I should walk on and on. I felt no need to take control. It was not that Julian controlled me. We were both of us controlled by something else.
We had had eggs for lunch and sausages for supper. At supper we drank some of the wine. Julian had the healthy young person's indifference to alcohol. I thought I would be too excited to drink, but I downed two glasses with a sort of amazed appreciation. Julian had taken great pleasure in finding a pretty tablecloth and laying the table as elaborately as she could for both meals. Patara was, as advertised, well provided with all household necessities. Julian's dustpan and brush were otiose. (It also, as advertised, had its own electricity from a generator in the abandoned farmyard.) She had brought in flowers from the garden, straggling canterbury bells of a faded cottony blue, yellow loosestrife and wild lupins from beyond the fence, and one white peony streaked with crimson, as georgeous as a lotus. We sat down formally and laughed with delight. After supper she said suddenly, «There's nothing to worry about.»
«Uh– hu.»
«You understand me?»
«Yes.» We washed up. She went into the bathroom and I went into the bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I inspected my dulled straight hair and my thin discreetly wrinkled face. I looked amazingly young. I got undressed. Then she came and we were together for the first time.
When one has at last got what has been ardently longed for one wishes time to cease. Often indeed at such moments it is miraculously slowed. Looking into each other's eyes we caressed each other without any haste at all, with a sort of tender curious astonishment. I felt none of Marvell's frenzy now. I felt rather that I was privileged to be living out in a brief span some great aeon of the experience of love. Did the Greeks know between 600 and 400 b.c. what millennia of human experience they were enacting? Perhaps not. But I knew, as I worshipped my darling from head to foot that I was under orders, a sort of incarnate history of human love.
«Don't be silly, Bradley.»
«I'm too old.»
«Darling, we'll sleep.»
«I'm going outside for a minute.»
I went out naked into the dark garden where the light from the bedroom showed a dim square of jagged grass and dandelions. A mist was coming in from the sea, drifting slowly past the house, curling and uncurling like cigarette smoke. I listened and could not hear the waves, but a train rattled and then cried out like an owl somewhere in the land behind me.
When I came back she had put on a sort of– dark blue silk nightshirt, unbuttoned to the navel. I pushed it back onto her shoulders. Her breasts were the perfect fruit of youth, rounded and just pendant. Her hair had dried into a soft golden fuzz. Her eyes were huge. I put on a dressing-gown. I knelt in front of her without touching her.
«My darling, don't worry.»
«I'm not worrying,» I said. «I'm just no bloody good.»
«It will be all right.»
«Julian, I'm old.»
