«Rachel, you're sure Julian doesn't know anything about-anything?»
«Quite sure. And no one's likely to tell her! Whatever possessed you to buy her those expensive boots?»
«I wanted time to think of a plausible way of askinS her to saY she hadn't met me.»
«You don't seem to have employed the time vel7 profitably.»
«No I-didn't.»
«Good-bye, Bradley. Thanks even.»
Rachel left me. I saw her disappear into the crowd, her battered blue handbag swinging, the plump pale flesh ex» her upper arm oscillating a little, her hair tangled, her face dazed and tired– with an automatic hand she had scooped up the hanging shoulder strap. Then I saw her again, and again and again. O^fшrd Street was ful1 of tired ageing women with dazed faces, push*ing blindly against each other like a herd of animals. I ran across the road and north –wards towards my flat.
I thought, I must get away, I must get away I must Set away. I thought, I'm glad Julian doesn't know about all that. I thought, Maybe Priscilla really is better off at Notting ^ilL: thought, Perhaps I will go and see Christian after all.
As I now approach the first climax of my bool^ let me pause, dear friend, and refresh myself once again with some direct converse with you.
Seen from the peace and seclusion of our present haven the events of these few days between the first appearanc^ of Francis Marloe and my Soho Square conversation with Rachel *»
With these observations I introduce an analysis of my recent (as it were) conduct which I now wish, my dear, to deploy before you. As far as Rachel was concerned, I acted out of a mixture of rather graceless motives. I think the turning point was her emotional letter. What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red– hot evidence. It was a long time since I had received anything resembling a love letter. And the very fact that it was a letter and not a viva voce statement gave it a sort of abstract power over me. We often make important moves in our life in a de-individualized condition. We feel suddenly that we are typifying something. This can be a source of inspiration and also a way of excusing ourselves. The intensity of Rachel's letter communicated self-importance, energy, the sense of a role.
Vanity and anxiety had involved me with Rachel, and envy (of Arnold) and pity and a sort of love and certainly an intermittent play of physical desire. As I have explained I was even then (and of course without any particular merit) generally indifferent to bodies. I experienced them involuntarily and without positively shuddering in crowded tube trains. But on the whole I did not now concern myself much with these integuments of the soul. Faces, of course, my friends had, but as far as I was concerned the rest could have been ectoplasm. I was not by nature a toucher or a starer. So it was that I was interested to find that I wanted to kiss Rachel, that I wanted, after a considerable interval, to kiss a particular woman. This was part of my excitement in the idea of playing a new role. In kissing her I had however no thought of proceeding further. What happened afterwards was just an unintentional muddle. Of course I did not disown it and I thought it might have serious consequences. And it did.
Christian's take-over of Priscilla, though utterly «obscene,» was already becoming more of a problem than an outrage. I was more inclined to let the situation ride. Christian would get no profit from her hostage. But I did not think that she would therefore abandon or «drop» Priscilla. Perhaps here again I had been influenced by Arnold. In some people sheer will is a substitute for morality. What Arnold called «grip.» When she was my wife Christian had employed this will in an attempt to invade and conquer me. A lesser man would have surrendered in exchange for a marriage which might even have been a happy one. One can see many men who live happily, possessed and run (indeed manned, the way a ship is manned) by women of tremendous will. What saved me from Christian was art. My artist's soul rejected this massive invasion. (It was like an invasion of viruses.) The hatred for Christian which I had nursed all these years was a natural product of my struggle for survival and its original spearhead. To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate. Now however, no longer reallv threatened and with an incentive to be more objective, I could see how well, how intelligently, Christian had organized herself. Perhaps learning that she was Jewish had altered my vision. I felt almost ready for a new kind of contest in which I would defeat her casually. The final exorcism would be a display of cool amused indifference. But these were shadowy thoughts. The main point was that I now felt ready to trust Christian to be business-like and reliable about Priscilla, since I felt like being neither.
I have perhaps not even now sufficiently emphasized how much I was dominated during this time by an increasingly powerful sense of the imminence in my life of a great work of art. This pellet irradiated each of the «frames» of my awareness in such a way that even when I was, for example, listening to Rachel's voice or looking at Priscilla's face, I was also thinking: The time has come. At least I was not thinking these words, I was not thinking anything in words: I was simply aware of a great dark wonderful something nearby in the future, magnetically connected with me: connected with my mind, connected with my body, which sometimes literally shook or swayed under that tremendous and authoritative pull. What did I imagine that the book would be like? I did not know. But I intuitively grasped both its being and its excellence. An artist in a state of power has a serene relationship to time. Fruition is simply a matter of waiting. The work announces itself, emerges often quite whole, when the moment comes, if the apprenticeship has been correct. (As the sage looks for years at the bamboo branch, then draws it quickly and without effort.) I felt that all I needed was solitude.
