What was I to say? She had a whip in her hand. She handed it to me there in that confusion of red and gold.
And stood there waiting like a little girl.
‘I followed you, you know,’ she said. ‘I know you always take your constitutional and think your great thoughts while you do so. My father told me what you said. I made a great mistake in you. You always looked so mealy-mouthed. But then, when you said that, I knew you were not like my father, that you would not bow and scrape to anyone.’
And all this time, I must have been peeling off my gloves very slowly. I couldn’t help myself, I tell you. I was taking the whip into my hands. Was I not right? Had she herself not asked me to?
‘You have a shop too,’ she said, ‘but you don’t bother to serve in it. You get others to do that.’ (Actually, it is a jeweller’s and my sister serves in it. A long time ago I left it. I couldn’t bring myself to serve people.)
She kept saying, ‘I know now you couldn’t do that. Your nature isn’t like that, is it? You can’t bear to serve, you want to dominate.’
By this time darkness was coming down. She bent over and I raised the whip, and as I did so I knew that this was what I was meant to do, to dominate and not to serve, to impose my will on others, to cleanse the sins of the world. And I knew that volunteers would come to me because they recognised who I really was, the jewel hardness of my will.
She was so beautiful, so submissive. I raised the whip, and as I did so lights flashed all round me, and there was her boyfriend, and she was laughing and giggling and almost rolling on the sand in ecstasy. Naturally, he used a flashlight. And naturally . . . But this I won’t go over. The devil, that’s what she was, the snake with the green eyes. And so beautiful, wriggling like a fish on the sand. If he hadn’t taken the whip from my hands, I would have lashed her and lashed her. I had to wipe the blood from my face with the gloves.
Naturally, my sister left the shop and left the town and naturally . . . Well, naturally, my bowing friend put in for the shop and got it fairly cheap. Who else would buy? Not that he put a direct bid in himself, he did it through intermediaries. It was next door to his sweet shop.
He never came to see me. I never saw him again.
They tell me she’s going to university after all, to study psychology. A soft option, if ever there was one.
It was funny though. That moment was the most intense of my life. I’ll never forget it. I keep going over and over it in my mind, that duel in scarlet and red. Who would have believed evil would be so beautiful and young? And him so servile too. No wonder we get fascists in the world, fascists with blue eyes like mine.
They deceive you and then turn nasty.
But these green eyes, these . . . sweets.
The Bridge
My wife and I met them in Israel. They were considerably younger than us and newly married. They came from Devon and they had a farm which they often talked about. For some reason they took a fancy to us, and were with us a fair amount of the time, sometimes on coach trips, sometimes at dinner in the evenings. They were called Mark and Elaine.
I didn’t like Israel as much as I had expected I would. I read the Jerusalem Post regularly, and was disturbed by some of the stories I found there, though the paper itself was liberal enough. There were accounts of the beatings of Palestinians, and pictures of Israeli soldiers who looked like Nazis.
Certainly it was interesting to see Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Garden of Gethsemane, and they reminded me of the security of my childhood: but at the same time seemed physically tatty, and without romance. Also we were often followed, especially in Jerusalem, by Arab schoolchildren who tried to sell us postcards: the schools were in fact shut by official order.
Though this was the first time Mark and Elaine were abroad they were brighter than us with regard to money. Mark had a gift for finding out the best time for exchanging sterling and was, I thought, rather mean. Sometimes we had coffee in a foursome during the day or at night, and he would pull his purse out very carefully and count out the money: he never gave a tip. He was also very careful about buying for us exactly what we had bought for him on a previous occasion. On the other hand he bought his wife fairly expensive rings which she flourished expansively. They walked hand in hand. They were both tall and looked very handsome.
One day the coach took us to the Golan Heights. There were red flowers growing there, and some abandoned tanks were lying in a glade. The guide, who was a Jew originally from Iraq, told us that a few tanks had held off the attacks till the reservists had been called up. ‘They can be called up very quickly,’ he said. It was very peaceful, looking across the valley to the other side but there were notices about unexploded mines.
Often we met young boys and girls on the buses. They hitched rides from place
