«Of course you will. You are a chap who thinks.»
«Rachel-«
«I know. You're going to tell me to go.»
«Yes.»
«I'm going. See how docile I am. Don't be frightened by anything I said. You haven't got to do anything at all.»
«The unmoved mover.»
«I'll run. Can I see you tomorrow?»
«Rachel, I'm so terrified of being tied by anything just now. You'll think me so mean and spiritless-I do care and I'm very grateful-but I've got to write this book, I've got to, and I've got to be worthy to-«I do respect and admire you, Bradley. That's part of it. You're so much more serious about writing than Arnold is. Don't worry about tomorrow or about anything. I'll ring you. Don't get up. I want to leave you sitting there looking so thin and tall and solemn. Like a-like a-Inspector of Taxes. Just remember, freedom, a new world. Perhaps that's just what your book needs, what it's been waiting for. Oh you're such a schoolboy, such a puritan. It's time for you to grow up and be free. Good-bye, Bradley. May your own god bless you.»
She ran out. I stayed where I was, as she had told me to. I was greatly struck by what she had just said. I reflected upon it. Perhaps after all Rachel was the destined angel. How very peculiar it all was, and how brimful I was of sexual desire and how unusual this was.
I found that I was staring at the face of Francis Marloe. He had, I realized, been in the room for some time. He was making curious grimaces, closing up his eyes in a way that involved wrinkling his nose and dilating his nostrils. He looked, while doing this, as unselfconscious as an animal in the zoo. Perhaps he was shortsighted and was trying to focus on my face.
«Are you all right, Brad?»
«Yes, of course.»
«You've got a funny look.»
«What do you want?»
«Do you mind if I go out and have some lunch?»
«Lunch? I thought it was the evening.»
«It's after twelve. There's only baked beans in the kitchen. Do you mind-«
«Yes, yes, go.»
«I'll bring some light stuff in for Priscilla.»
«How is she?»
«She's asleep. Brad-«Yes?»
«Could you give me a pound?»
«Here.»
«Thanks. And, Brad-«
«What?»
«I'm afraid that bronze thing got broken. It won't stand up properly.»
He thrust the warm bronze into my hand and I put it down on the table. One of the water buffalo's legs was crumpled. It fell over lop-sidedly. I stared at it. The lady smiled. She resembled Rachel. When I looked up Francis was gone.
I went softly into the bedroom. Priscilla was sleeping high up on her pillows, her mouth open and the neck of her blouse pulling at her throat. Relaxed in sleep, a softer less peevish dejection made her face look a little younger. Her breath made a soft regular sound like «eschew… eschew…» She still had her shoes on.
Very gently I undid the top button of her blouse. The neck fell open, revealing the badly soiled interior of the collar. I eased off her shoes, holding them by the long pointed heels, and pulled the blankets over her plump sweat-darkened feet. The breathing-murmur ceased, but she did not waken. I left the room.
I went into the spare room and lay down on the bed. I thought about my two recent encounters with Rachel and how calm and pleased I had felt after the first one, and how disturbed and excited I now felt after the second one. Was I going to «fall in love» with Rachel? Should I even play with the idea, utter the words to myself? Was I upon the brink of some balls-up of catastrophic dimensions, some real disaster? Or was this perhaps in an unexpected form the opening itself of my long-awaited «break through,» my passage into another world, into the presence of the god? Or was it just nothing, the ephemeral emotions of an unhappily married middle-aged woman, the transient embarrassment of an elderly puritan who had for a very long time had no adventures at all? Indeed it is true, I said to myself, it is a long time since I had an adventure of any sort. I tried to think soberly about Arnold. But quite soon I was conscious of nothing except a flaming sea of vague undirected physical desire.
It is customary in this age to attribute a comprehansive and quite unanalysed causality to the «sexual urges.» These obscure forces, sometimes thought of as particular historical springs, sometimes as more general and universal destinies, are credited with the power to make of us delinquents, neurotics, lunatics, fanatics, martyrs, heroes, saints, or more exceptionally, integrated fathers, fulfilled mothers, placid human animals, and the like. Vary the mixture, and there's nothing «sex» cannot be said to explain, by cynics and pseudo-scientists such as Francis Marloe, whose views on these matters we are shortly to hear in detail. I am myself however no sort of Freudian and I feel it important at this stage of my «explanation» or «apologia,» or whatever this malformed treatise may be said to be, to make this clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding. I abominate such half- baked tosh. My own sense of the «beyond,» which heaven forbid anyone should confuse with anything «scientific,» is quite other.
I say this the more passionately because I think it just conceivable that an obtuse person might mistake some of my attitudes for something of that sort. Have I not just been speculating whether Rachel's sweet unexpected affections might not set free the talent which I had so long known of, believed in, and nursed in vain? What sort of picture of me has my reader received? I fear it must lack definition, since as I have never had any strong sense of my own identity, how can I characterize sharply that which I can scarcely apprehend? However my own delicacy cannot necessarily cozen judgment and may even provoke it. «A frustrated fellow, no longer young, lacking confidence in himself as a man: of course, naturally, he feels that a good fuck would set him up, release his talents, in which incidentally he has given us no good reason to believe. He pretends he is thinking about his book, while really he is thinking about a woman's breasts. He pretends he is apprehensive about his moral uprightness, but really it is quite another sort of rectitude that is causing him anxiety.»
It was not frivolous to connect my sense of an impending revelation with my anxiety about my work. If some great change was pending in my life this could not but be part of my development as an artist, since my development as an artist was my development as a man. Rachel might indeed be the messenger of the god. She was certainly confronting me with a challenge to which I would have to respond boldly or otherwise. It had often, when I thought most profoundly about it, occurred to me that 7 was a bad artist because I was a coward. Would now courage in life prefigure and even perhaps induce courage in art?
However, and this is just another way of putting my whole dilemma, the grandiose thinker of the above thoughts had to coexist in me with a timid conscientious person full of sensitive moral scruples and conventional fears. Arnold was someone to be reckoned with. If it should come to it, had I the nerve to provoke and to face Arnold's just anger? Christian was also someone to be reckoned with. I had not even begun to settle the matter of Christian in my mind. She prowled in my consciousness. / wanted to see her again. I even felt about her bright new friendship with Arnold an emotion which strongly resembled jealousy. Her vital prying faintly wrinkled face appeared in my dreams. Was Rachel strong enough to protect me from such a menace? Perhaps this was what it was all about, my search for a protector.
So I reflected, attempting to achieve calm. But by about five o'clock of that same day I was in a frenzy again, an obscure frenzy. What was this, love, sex, art? I felt that strong urge to do something, to act, which often afflicts people in unanalysable dilemmas. If one can only act, depart, return, send a letter, one can ease the anxiety which is really fear of the future in the form of fear of the darkness of one's present desires: «dread,» such as philosophers speak of, which is not so much really an experience of void as the appalling sense that one is in the grip of some very strong but as yet undeclared motive. Under the influence of this feeling I put my review of Arnold's book into an envelope and posted it off to him. But first of all 1 read it carefully through.
Arnold Baffin's new book will delight his many admirers. It is, what readers often and innocently want, «the mixture as before.» It tells of a stockbroker who, at the age of fifty, decides to become a monk. His course is
