Hamlet, sword in hand.
«Here thou incestuous murderous damned Dane-«Bradley, you must be a mind-reader. Look, do tell me something more about what you were saying, couldn't you sort of put it in a nutshell?»
«Hamlet is a piece a clef. It is about someone Shakespeare was in love with.»
«Oh you are a tease. They're much as usual. Dad's out at the library all day, scribble, scribble, scribble. Mum stays at home and moves the furniture about and broods. It's such a pity she never had any education. She's so intelligent.»
«Don't be so bloody sorry for them,» I said. «They're marvellous people, both of them, marvellous people with real private lives of their own.»
«Sorry. I must have sounded awful. I suppose I am awful. Perhaps all young people are awful.»
«Lay not that flattering unction to your soul. Only some.»
«Sorry, Bradley. I say, I do wish you'd come and see the parents oftener, I think you do them good.»
I felt some shame in asking her about Arnold and Rachel, but I wanted to be, and now was, sure that they had said nothing damaging about me.
«So you want to be a writer?» I said. I was still leaning back against the window. She was pointing her alert secretive little face at me. With her mane of hair she looked more like a nice dog than like Royal Denmark. She had crossed her legs now, one lying horizontal upon the other, showing off the purple boots and a maximum amount of pink tights. Her hand played at her neck, opening another button, questing within. I could smell her sweat, her feet, her breasts.
«I feel I can. I'm ready to wait. I won't rush into it. I want to write hard dense impersonal sort of books, not a bit like me.»
«Good girl.»
ш «I certainly won't call myself Julian Baffin-«Julian,» I said. «I think you'd better go.»
«I'm so sorry-Oh Bradley, I have enjoyed this. Do you think we could meet again before long? I know you hate to be tied down. Aren't you going away?»
«No.»
«Then please let me know sometime if we can meet.»
«Yes.»
«Well, I suppose I must be off-«I owe you a thing.»
«What?»
«A thing. In return for the buffalo lady. Remember?»
«Yes. I didn't like to remind you-«Here.»
I took two strides to the chimney piece and picked up a little oval gilt snuffbox, one of my most treasured pieces. I gave it into her hand.
«Oh Bradley, how frightfully kind of you, it looks so sort of elegant and valuable, and something's written on it, A Friend's Gift, oh my dear, how nice! We are friends, aren't we?»
«Yes.»
«Bradley, I am grateful-«Off you go. Out, out.»
«You won't forget all about me-?»
«Out.»
I saw her to the front door and closed it immediately after her as soon as she had stepped outside it. I went back into the flat, into the sitting-room, and closed the door. The room was sweet with heavy dusty sunlight. Her chair was where it had been. She had left her copy of Hamlet behind on the table.
I fell on my knees and then lay full-length face downwards on the rug in front of the fireplace. Something very extraordinary indeed had just happened to me.
Part Two
What it was that had happened the percipient reader will not need to be told. (Doubtless he saw it coming a mile off. I did not. This is art, but I was out there in life.) I had fallen in love with Julian. At what point during our conversation I realized this fact is hard to determine. The consciousness darts back and forth in time like a weaver and can occupy, when busy with its mysterious self-formings and self-gatherings, a very large specious present. Perhaps I realized it when she said, in that beautiful resonant tone of hers, «Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice.» Perhaps it was when she said, «Black tights and black velvet shoes with silvery buckles.» Or perhaps it was when she took her boots off. No, not as early as that. And when I had had that mystical experience, looking at her legs in the shoe shop, had that been a veiled realization of being in love? It had not seemed so. Yet that too was part of it. Everything was part of it. After all, I had known this child since her birth. I had seen her in her cradle, I had held her in my arms when she was twenty inches long. Oh Christ.
«I had fallen in love with Julian.» The words are easily written down. But how to describe the thing itself? It is odd that falling in love, though frequently mentioned in literature, is rarely adequately described. It is after all an astounding phenomenon and for most people it is the most astonishing event that ever happens to them: more astonishing, because more counter-natural, than life's horrors. (I do not of course refer to mere «sex.») It is sad that, like the experience of bereavement, the experience of love is usually, like a dream, forgotten. Furthermore, those who have never fallen desperately in love with someone whom they have known for a long time may doubt whether this can occur. Let me assure them that it can.
It happened to me. Was it always there cooking, incubating, in the warm inwards of time, as the girl grew and filled out into bloom? Of course I had always liked her, especially when she was a little child. But nothing really had prepared me for this blow. And it was a blow, I was felled by it physically. I felt as if my stomach had been shot away, leaving a gaping hole. My knees dissolved, I could not stand up, I shuddered and trembled all over, my teeth chattered. My face felt as if it had become waxen and some huge strange weirdly smiling mask had been imprinted upon it, I had become some sort of God. I lay there with my nose stuck into the black wool of the rug and the toes of my shoes making little ellipses on the carpet as I shook with possession. Of course I was sexually excited, but what I felt transcended mere lust to such a degree that although I could vividly sense my afflicted body I also felt totally alienated and changed and practically discarnate.
Of course the mind of the lover abhors accident. «I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved» is a question intimate to his amazement. My love for Julian must have been figured before the world began. Surely it was lovers who discovered astrology. Nothing less than the great chamber of the stars could be large and steady enough to be context, origin and guarantee of something so eternal. I realized now that my whole life had been determinedly travelling towards this moment. Her whole life had been travelling towards it, as she played and read her school books and grew and looked in the mirror at her breasts. This was a predestined collision. But it had not only just happened, it had happened aeons ago, it was of the stuff of the original formation of earth and sky. When God said, «Let there be light,» this love was made. It had no history. Yet too my awakening consciousness of it had a history of bottomless fascination. When, how, did I begin to realize the charm of this girl? Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise. And in fact lying there absolutely limp and yet absolutely taut with my brow on the ground and my eyes closed I was actually not just glimpsing but in paradise. The act of falling in love, of really falling in love (I do not mean what sometimes passes by this name), floods the being with immediate ecstasy.
The rather flowery ideas which I have set out above were not of course as such at all clear in my mind while I was sitting on the floor hugging the chair which she had sat in. (I did this too for some considerable time: perhaps until the evening.-) I was, for that period, largely dazed with happiness: joy in my marvellous achievement of absolute love. In this blaze of light of course a few more mundane thoughts flitted to and fro like little birds, scarcely descried by one who was dazzled by emergence from the cave. I will mention here two of these thoughts
