“But I assure you,” she had once said to John Bidlake, quite angrily—for he had been making fun of poor Edward, “I’m genuinely fond of him, genuinely.”
“In your own way, no doubt,” mocked Bidlake. “In your own way. But you must admit it’s a good thing it isn’t everybody’s way. Just look at yourself in that mirror.”
She looked and saw the reflection of her naked body lying, half sunk in deep cushions, on a divan.
“Beast!” she said. “But it doesn’t make any difference to my being fond of him.”
“Oh, not to your particular way of being fond, I’m sure.” He laughed. “But I repeat that it’s perhaps a good thing that …”
She put her hand over his mouth. That was a quarter of a century ago. Hilda had been married five years and was thirty. Lucy was a child of four. John Bidlake was forty-seven, at the height of his powers and reputation as a painter: handsome, huge, exuberant, careless; a great laugher, a great worker, a great eater, drinker, and taker of virginities.
“Painting’s a branch of sensuality,” he retorted to those who reproved him for his way of life. “Nobody can paint a nude who hasn’t learnt the human body by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body. I take my art seriously. I’m unremitting in my preliminary studies.” And the skin would tighten in laughing wrinkles round his monocle, his eyes would twinkle like a genial satyr’s.
To Hilda, John Bidlake brought the revelation of her own body, her physical potentialities. Lord Edward was only a kind of child, a fossil boy preserved in the frame of a very large middle-aged man. Intellectually, in the laboratory, he understood the phenomena of sex. But in practice and emotionally he was a child, a fossil mid-Victorian child, preserved intact, with all the natural childish timidities and all the taboos acquired from the two beloved and very virtuous maiden aunts who had taken the place of his dead mother, all the amazing principles and prejudices sucked in with the humours of Mr. Pickwick and Micawber. He loved his young wife, but loved her as a fossil child of the ’sixties might love—timidly and very apologetically; apologizing for his ardours, apologizing for his body, apologizing for hers. Not in so many words, of course, for the fossil child was dumb with shyness; but by a silent ignoring, a silent pretending that the bodies weren’t really involved in the ardours, which anyhow didn’t really exist. His love was one long tacit apology for itself; and being nothing more than an apology was therefore quite inexcusable. Love must justify itself by its results in intimacy of mind and body, in warmth, in tender contact, in pleasure. If it has to be justified from outside, it is thereby proved a thing without justification. John Bidlake made no apologies for the kind of love he had to offer. So far as it went, it entirely justified itself. A healthy sensualist, he made his love straightforwardly, naturally, with the good animal gusto of a child of nature.
“Don’t expect me to talk about the stars and madonna lilies and the cosmos,” he said. “They’re not my line. I don’t believe in them. I believe in …” And his language became what a mysterious convention has decreed to be unprintable.
It was a love without pretensions, but warm, natural, and, being natural, good so far as it went—a decent, good-humoured, happy sensuality. To Hilda, who had never known anything but a fossil child’s reticent apology for love, it was a revelation. Things which had been dead in her came alive. She discovered herself, rapturously. But not too rapturously. She never lost her head. If she had lost her head she might have lost Tantamount House and the Tantamount millions and the Tantamount title as well. She had no intention of losing these things. So she kept her head, coolly and deliberately; kept it high and secure above the tumultuous raptures, like a rock above the waves. She enjoyed herself, but never to the detriment of her social position. She could look on at her own enjoyment; her cool head, her will to retain her social position, remained apart from and above the turmoil. John Bidlake approved the way she made the best of both worlds.
“Thank God, Hilda,” he had often said, “you’re a sensible woman.”
Women who believed the world well lost for love were apt to be a terrible nuisance, as he knew only too well by personal experience. He liked women; love was an indispensable enjoyment. But nobody was worth involving oneself in tiresome complications for, nothing was worth messing up one’s life for. With the women who hadn’t been sensible and had taken love too seriously, John Bidlake had been ruthlessly cruel. It was the battle of “all for love” against “anything for a quiet life.” John Bidlake always won. Fighting for his quiet life, he drew the line at no sort of frightfulness.
Hilda Tantamount was as much attached to the quiet life as John himself. Their affair had lasted, pleasantly enough, for a space of years and slowly faded out of existence. They had been good lovers, they remained good friends—conspirators, even, people called them, mischievous conspirators leagued together to amuse themselves at the
