Max had his love affairs: he did not go out of his way to attract girls: he would explain — 'What is love if it is not what turns up out of the dark?' The one time he had gone against this realisation, he used to say, was when he had set out deliberately to get Caroline — and look what had happened then! It had almost killed him. (Eleanor
would say 'You set out to attract me!' Max would say 'Ah yes, I sat underneath that tree!') It was when he was quite late into middle age that Max met — quite by chance of course! oh those loops, feedbacks: indeed they can be called 'aesthetic'! - the girl called Lilia.
Max had not seen Lilia's mother since the time nearly thirty years ago when he had been present at the wedding which had taken place in the enormous country house in the wing that was occupied by her grandmother. Max had liked Lilia's father: he was an energetic young arts' student with a passion to make films. When he had joined the army Lilia's mother had gone with him to live near where he trained: then he was sent abroad, and she and the child were on their own. But by this time Max was in America, and so he had not seen Lilia. When he got back from America he learned that there had been a fire in the enormous country house and it was now a shelclass="underline" the grandmother had died and none of the family were in the area. Max, of course, retained a romantic vision of Lilia's mother — and indeed of Lilia.
Some thirty years later, then, Max for the first time came across Lilia: they were at some gathering of people protesting about the war in Vietnam. Max had gone to the meeting in the spirit in which he had gone to the anti-nuclear meeting years ago: he himself had ambivalent feelings about the war in Vietnam — he felt that protests should be not so much against this war as against the predilection of humans to make any war — but he had sympathy with the people who were making this particular protest. However, he was also known at this time to be an adviser to the government on scientific matters so it was likely that his presence at the gathering would provoke comment. Max noticed Lilia in the aftermath to the meeting; people were still talking in a crowded room; he thought he might go to her and say — You remind me of someone I used to know a long time ago — and then it would be impossible for him to say any more, the remark having been so commonplace. He was wondering about his ambivalence in such matters when, in a movement of the crowd towards the door, he found himself next to Lilia. He said 'You remind me of someone I used to know a long time ago.' She said 'Everyone says that.' He said 'I know.' She said 'You know my mother?' He said 'Why, who is your mother?' She said 'Everyone always says I remind them of my mother.' Then Max of course felt that he knew who she was, although it was as if he could not know. He said 'I see.' She said 'What do you see?' He
thought he might say — I see a broken-backed cottage: something dead coming alive.
Then Lilia said 'What are you doing here? I thought you were supposed to approve of the war in Vietnam.'
He said 'No, I don't approve of it, it's just that if there isn't a war there, there might be a worse one somewhere else. You can try to stop this war, but you can't achieve innocence.'
Lilia said 'God, what a boring attitude!'
Max said 'Yes, it's difficult to talk about it.'
The odd thing about this meeting (this was how Max told the story) was that they each talked as if they knew who the other was — Max as if he knew she was Lilia; Lilia as if the person whom she had recognised as a public figure was the person who her mother had told her had so much influenced her years ago although she had not told her his name — though in fact it was only the next day that they uncovered these parts of their stories. Towards the end of the evening, after they had had dinner together and had talked — perhaps about patterns? about things being apt to return on the curve of the universe? — they had gone back to the small flat where Lilia was staying and she had given Max coffee and had sat straight-backed and smoked a cigarette and backed away as if the smoke were coming after her; and it was then that she had said to him the sentence that had become some sort of talisman for her — 'I must tell you, I never go to bed with people I like.'
And Max had said 'Then that's all right.'
She had said 'Why?'
Max had said 'Because either we like each other or else we will go to bed.'
And she had thought — Oh, if you say that, it can be both?
Max and Lilia set up house together for a time. Lilia's mother and father were away in California — he was working in films; she was doing social work with the homeless. Max and Lilia used to stay in the cottage on the borders of Suffolk and Norfolk: Max would go to and fro between there and Cambridge. Max needed someone once more to adore: Lilia needed someone to learn from. Their affair worked very well for a time, in spite of Max being so much older. But this is the beginning of another story, or set of stories.
Once upon this time there were Max and Lilia; then Lilia's younger brother Bert to whom Eleanor became analyst and mentor; then the girl called Judith who became the lover or beloved of all the male protagonists of these stories; then also Jason, who was or
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is the correlator of the stories — the writer of this postcript — who loved both Lilia and Judith, who in the end, as it were, is married happily to Lilia. And there is the child who emerges from these stories — as a result of the activities of all the protagonists but in fact, of course, from his mother Lilia. Perhaps too the child is what might come alive in the mind of a watcher or a reader: it is stories, patterns, as Eleanor and Max used to say, that bear the seeds of what is living.
There is also another child, a girclass="underline" but this appears at the very end of these stories.
There was always a problem about how to write about all this — liveliness being somewhat secret, being what is experienced on one's own, moving often in the dark between levels. The writer writes: there is that which he writes and that which is what comes alive (or does not) both in his mind and in the mind of a watcher or a reader. Is it you: is it you? It is this that might be like a child. Stories are messages. (Is it not this that Eleanor and Max have been saying?) To exist there has to be a code: messages bring things into existence.
At the beginning it seemed there were seeds; they were like people on a stage; they were in a writer's mind; they were saying 'How do we bring this into existence? — what we would like: in other minds, in the outside world.' The messages, to be effective, would have to be partly in the dark. The questions would be not just what did happen then, not what will happen next, but what is happening now. An actor comes on; he is watched; he watches himself being watched; he watches himself watching. From the recognition of this predicament other questions grow: 'What is acting and what is not?'; 'What is real and what is not?'; 'What is the style that can be seen to be not false but true?' And the answers are not in words: they are (indeed!) what flowers (if any) grow. For creation there will have been some journey through the dark — for an audience, for a reader, for demonstrators in a mind or on a stage: what on earth, after all, is a human being to do? Eleanor and Max and the others wanted to form messages. They might have been linked to archetypes in my mind: but from whatever such seeds, flowers are the flowers that grow.