overjoyed. They would surely come round now, especially when she told them that she was expecting a child. Miles saw her off at London air port. The plane crashed in the Alps. Miles had never told anybody, not even Diana, that Parvati was pregnant.
Miles never went to see the parents. Understandably they seemed to blame him for their daughter’s death. He wrote to them much later when he married Diana but got no reply. He stayed on at Cambridge and did some inconclusive research and failed to get a fellowship. The war came, bringing Miles seven years of dreary misery. He saw no action. He moved from camp to camp, unable to read, unable to write, developing mysterious troubles in his intestines. He was moved into clerical work. He rose eventually to the rank of captain. When the war ended he went into the civil service.
The writing of the long poem, which took him over a year, had somehow prolonged, even in circumstances of dreadful grief, the sense of a life filled with love. He transformed the plane crash into a dazzling tornado of erotic imagery. But the poem was a
Parvati had made all other women impossible for him. Parvati plaiting her very long black hair. Parvati with quick deft movements pleating her sari. Parvati sitting on the floor with her tongue slightly out like a cat. Her delicate aquiline face, her honey-coloured skin; his sense of acquiring with her a whole precious civilization. The jewels in her ears which he was so surprised to learn were real rubies, real emeralds. How she had laughed at his surprise. Parvati ironing her saris in a room in Newnham. Then ironing his shirts. “You represent the god.”
”What god?”
”The god-Shiva, Eros… All poets have angels. You are mine.” The very small deft brown hands, the glimpse of bare sandalled feet upon the wet autumnal pavements. The red-brown grain of her lips. Her grace, which made any Western woman look gauche and stiff. How coarsely made, how dumpy and disagreeably pink her college friends looked beside her. The feel of that long thick plait of hair in his hand the first time he had dared, playfully but trembling to take hold of it. He had kissed her hair. Then he had kissed the edge of her silken sari where it slipped over her thin arm. She laughed, pushing him away. She was a clever girl who was going to get a first in economics, but she had not been very long out of that enclosed courtyarded house in Benares where her mother wove garlands to place upon images. Parvati talking about
He had written hundreds of love poems for Parvati. After the war, poetry, like so much else, seemed to have come to an end. Eros had changed into Thanatos, and now even the face of Thanatos was veiled. The only person he had any real con tact with was Gwen. He had not been very close to Gwen as a child. She was several years younger and he had been away at school. He first became really fond of Gwen, indeed first re ally noticed Gwen, when she stood up for him so fiercely when his father opposed the marriage. Gwen loved Parvati and admired her. Gwen was very partisan and given to making long speeches. He thought much later, when he a little re gretted the breach with his father, that perhaps Gwen had done more harm than good. Bruno needed coaxing, and a different kind of daughter might have coaxed him instead of lecturing him. Miles had no intention of coaxing him. He wished his father at the devil.
After Parvati’s death he wanted to see nobody, not even Gwen. Gwen went up to Cambridge and read Moral Sciences and started on a Ph. D. thesis on Frege. The war came and Gwen became an air-raid warden in London. Later on in the war Miles arrived in London, still in uniform, working in an office, and for a while a curious almost intimate relationship existed between them. Gwen was usually tired to the point of collapse. Miles felt guiltily how easy a life he was now leading by contrast. They never shared a house, but he used to go round most evenings to her little flat off Baker Street, arriving before she did, and prepare a hot meal for her. Sometimes she was very late and he sat tensely listening to the bombs and trying not to let terrible imaginings break out. Sometimes she worked at night and he saw little of her. They talked a great deal, not about themselves, never of Parvati, but about cool healing impersonal things, poetry, philosophy, art. Eventually they talked mainly philosophy and theology: Karl Barth, Wittgenstein.
Their intimacy was ended, towards the close of the war, by Danby. Miles could never understand about Gwen and Danby. It all happened very quickly. They met on an underground train. On the Inner Circle: they both seemed to attach importance to this, and reiterated it with an imbecile ritual solemnity. They had begun to talk to each other. People did this more readily in the war time. Danby surreptitiously passed his station. Gwen surreptitiously passed hers. When they had been all the way round the circle they had to admit to each other that something had happened. Thus the thing began in a kind of absurdity; and Miles felt that in some way it had never ceased to be absurd. Danby was fundamentally a very absurd person, a contingent person, and Miles resented the absorption into this loose and floppy organism of his close-knit and far from contingent sister.
He felt that Gwen had deceived him. She ought not to have let things happen so fast, she ought to have consulted him. As it was, and only a little apologetically, she just introduced Danby out of the blue as her fianc6. Miles scowled politely at this plump bland constantly smiling and obviously self-satisfied person in the uniform of an artillery officer. Danby’s hair was golden in those days and his complexion was pink. He looked like a schoolboy cadet. Miles questioned him closely about his background and his education. His father was a shop keeper in Didcot. He went to a local grammar school and then to Reading University, where he studied English literature for a year and then gave up. He worked in an insurance office and then went into the war, where he served without drama or distinction in the artillery and later told Miles he had thoroughly enjoyed it. He appeared to have no intellectual interests. Once married he entered the printing works with an insouciance which irritated Miles even more. Miles could not see that Danby had any decent
Bruno, with whom Gwen had by now reestablished relations, was reported to be fond of Danby, and after a while Miles began to tolerate his brother-in-law. Danby was anxious to please, and after Miles had made clear what he thought of the masculine jokes with which Danby at first sought to establish connivance, they did manage to achieve a sort of understanding, based on Danby’s interpretation of his role as a controlled and censored fool. Danby, who was not totally in sensitive, managed to extend in the direction of Miles, as a kind of propitiatory feeler, the sense of inferiority which he genuinely felt in relation to Gwen. He accepted Miles as his superior and he accepted and shared Miles’s view of his incredible and quite undeserved good luck in having obtained Miles’s sister. Like that, things settled down; but Miles saw less and less of them. Then after Gwen was dead there was no reason to see Danby any more.
Diana came later, as a surprise, almost as a miracle. The terrible bitterness of Gwen’s death put Miles once more into the presence of that which his long poem had served to shield him from. But as soon as he was able to he ceased to look and to feel and set himself to lead a life of complete retirement and almost ferocious dullness. Writing was inconceivable. He read a good deal, as a matter of routine, mainly history and biography, but without passion. He did his job, avoided his colleagues, was classified as an eccentric and quietly passed over at promotion times. His superiors began to regard him as slightly unbalanced, but on the whole he attracted little attention. He suffered occasional fits of severe depression, but not very frequently.
Then one day in the grocer’s shop in the Earls Court Road where he went twice a week with a large basket to buy his provisions a girl said to him, “Don’t look so sad.” Miles shuddered at being addressed by a woman and left the shop immediately. She followed him. “I’m so sorry. I’ve so often seen you in here. May I walk along with you?” And later, “Do you live alone?” And later still, “Have you been married?” Diana did all the work. She explained afterwards to Miles how she had seen him several times in the shop looking self-absorbed and melancholy and had had a fantasy that everything would happen even as it did happen: that he would turn out to live alone, that he had had a great sorrow, that he shunned society, that he had no dealings with women. For Diana it was, in some extraordinary way, the perfect working out of a dream. She had been searching for Miles. She recognized him at once. It was her sense of destiny which carried them both along.
Diana had a very positive conception of her role as a woman. It was in fact her only role and one which had absorbed her since she left school. She grew up in Leicester, where her father was a bank clerk. Her parents were vague people and she and her sister did what they pleased. Diana went on a scholar ship to an art school in the
