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.
What the fruits of solitude are, my dearest friend, I know now very much better and more profoundly than I did then: because of my experiences and because of your wisdom. The person that I was then seems captive and blind. My instincts were true and my sense of direction was sound. Only the way turned out to be very much longer than I expected.
The mind, so constantly busy with its own welfare, is always sensitively filing and sorting the ways in which self-respect (vanity) has been damaged. In doing so it is at the same time industriously discovering methods of making good the damage. I had felt chagrined and ashamed because Rachel regarded me as a failed muddler, and Arnold was posing as having, in some unspecified sense, «found me out.» (And, what was worse, «forgiven me»!) Reflection on what had happened was already repainting this picture. I was quite strong enough to «hold» them both, to comfort Rachel and to «play» Arnold. The sense of challenge involved already made my bruised vanity cease a little to droop.
I would console Rachel with innocent love. This resolution and the ring of the good word made me feel, on that momentous morning, a better man. But what rather preoccupied my thoughts was the image of Christian: her image rather than any definite proposition about her. These images which float in the mind's cave (and whatever the philosophers may say the mind is a dark cave full of drifting beings) are of course not neutral apparitions but already saturated with judgment, lurid with it. I still felt in waves my old poisonous hatred of this bully. I also felt the not very edifying desire beforementioned to erase, by a show of indifference, the undignified impression which I had made. I had displayed too much emotion. Now instead I must stare with cold curiosity. As I practised staring at her charged and glowing image it seemed to be dissolving and changing before my eyes. Was I beginning to remember at last that I had once loved her?
I shook myself and closed the suitcase and snapped the catch to. If I could only get started on the book. A day of solitude, and I could write down something, a precious pregnant something like a growing seed. With that for company I could make terms with the past. And I was not now thinking of reconciliations or even of exorcisms, but just of the shedding of the load of sheer biting remorse which I had carried with me through my life.
The telephone rang.
«Hartbourne here.»
«Oh hello.»
«Why didn't you come to the party?»
«What party?»
«The office party. We specially put it on a day that suited you.»
«Oh God. Sorry.»
«Everyone was very disappointed.»
«I'm terribly sorry.»
«So were we.»
«I-er-hope it was a good party all the same-«In spite of your absence it was an excellent party.»
«Who was there?»
«All the old gang. Caldicott and Grey-Pelham and Dyson and Randolph and Matheson and Hadley-Smith and-«Did Mrs. Grey-Pelham come?»
«No.»
«Oh good. Hartbourne, I am sorry.»
«Never mind, Pearson. Can we make a lunch date?»
«I'm leaving town.»
«Ah well. Wish I could get away. Send me a postcard.»
«I say, I am sorry-«Not at all.»
I put the telephone down. I felt the hand of destiny heavy upon me. Even the air was thickening as if it were full of incense or rich pollen. I looked at my watch. It was time to go to Netting Hill. I stood there in my little sitting-room and looked at the buffalo lady who was lying on her side in the lacquered display cabinet. I had not dared to try to straighten out the buffalo's crumpled leg for fear of snapping the delicate bronze. I looked where a line of sloping sun had made a flying buttress against the wall outside, making the grime stand out in lacy relief, outlining the bricks. The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.
Just then the doorbell rang. I went to the door. It was Julian Baffin. I looked at her blankly.
«Bradley, you've forgotten! I've come for my Hamlet tutorial.»
«I hadn't forgotten,» I said with a silent curse. «Come in.»
«You're wearing the boots,» I said.
«Yes. It's a bit hot for them, but I wanted to show them off to you. I'm so cheered up and grateful. Are you sure you don't mind discussing Shakespeare? You look as if you were going somewhere. Did you really remember I
