There is no tragedy like that of the bedroom: I believe Tolstoy said that to a friend. No one knows what he meant. The recurring shameful need? Failure? Poor performance? Rejection? Silent condemnation? It was very much like that with me later that evening. I thought I had infected Marian with my feeling of the luxuriousness of the hotel in the market square, the strange feeling it gave, with all the foreign staff, of being somewhere abroad. The wine at dinner had strengthened that feeling, I thought. But her dark, distant mood returned at bedtime. It might have been another person who had accepted the opal piece and been pleased by it.
She undressed and offered herself, and then later exposed herself as before, the sunken exercised waist, the lovely high hip, the dark openness, showing me the hair in her armpits. This time I was better provided to do what she clearly wanted me to do.
But I never knew whether I was pleasing her. I thought that I must be, but she never let on. Perhaps she was acting; perhaps it was her style; perhaps it was something she had got from one of her too boastful friends; perhaps it was something that had been forced on her by her rough childhood on the estate, a little remnant of natural modesty, a way of dealing with that life.
And that — since the mind can deal with many things at the same time — was how I reasoned with myself while I was quite shaken with desire, hardly believing in what was being offered me, wishing at the same time to seize it all.
Later, when I had grown more into this fearful, undermining discovery of the senses, I would understand that in these early days I had not done very well. It would have destroyed me if I had known. But at the time, in the bedroom of the hotel, I didn’t know.
Midway through the evening she said, “I see you’ve come with your belt. Do you want to beat me?”
I had some idea what she meant. But it was too far away from me. I said nothing.
She said, “Use the belt. Don’t use anything else.”
When we had done with that she said, “Is my bottom black and blue?”
It wasn’t. Many weeks later that would be true, but not then.
She said, “Did it give you a nice big fat come?”
It hadn’t. But I didn’t say.
She said, “I had your number.” And she swung her strong legs off the bed.
So, after all that had occurred between us, she kept her distance. I thought that was the whole point of her attitude during this tragedy of the bedroom, and I admired her for it. I willingly granted her that distance. If I didn’t it would have been another relationship, and that simply wasn’t possible. Outside the bedroom, and that darkening of her mood, there was almost nothing between us. We had very little to talk about.
Something she had read, some saucy book or manual, or some conversation with a woman friend, had given her her own idea of my special need, my number, as she said. She was only a quarter right. I had always thought of myself as a man of low sexual energy. Just as your father, Willie, from what you told me, sank into melancholy and made it part of his character, part of his solace in a crisis, so this idea of my low sexual energy had become part of my character. It simplified things for me. The idea of sex with a woman, exposing myself to that kind of intimacy, was distasteful to me. Some people insist that if you’re not one thing you’re the other. They believe that I’m interested in men. The opposite is true. The fact is all sexual intimacy is distasteful to me. I’ve always considered my low sexual energy as a kind of freedom. I am sure that there have been many people like me. Ruskin, Henry James. They are strange examples, but they’re the ones that come immediately to mind. We should be allowed to have our freedom.
I was in my forties when I first saw a modern magazine with sexual photographs. I was shocked and frightened. Those magazines had been in the newsagents’ shops for years, all more or less with the same covers, and I had not thought of looking at them. This is absolutely true. Some time later I saw a variety of more specialist pornographic magazines. They made me ashamed. They made me feel that we could all be trained in these ghastly extensions of sexual feeling. Only a few basic sexual acts occur spontaneously. Everything else has to be taught. Flesh is flesh. We can all be made to learn. Without training we would know nothing of certain practices. I preferred not to be trained.
I believe Marian saw all of this ignorance in me. She wished to draw me out, of course within the limits of her own knowledge, within the limits of what she herself had been trained to, and to some extent she succeeded.
I saw her at a time in middle life when, rather like my father before me, I had begun to feel that the promise of my early years, my rather grand idea of myself, had gone sour. Perdita’s infidelity — not the act itself, which I could visualise without any pain (and perhaps even with amusement), but the public humiliation the act exposed me to — had begun to eat me up. I couldn’t make a scene with her, lay down the law, because I had nothing to offer her in return. I could only endure.
I have said that there was nothing between Marian and me outside the bedroom. But I wonder about that. Having got to know Marian, I wished to know no other woman in that special way, and I wonder whether that cannot be described as a kind of love: the sexual preference for one person above all others. About a year later, in our market town, I saw a young woman of plebeian aspect running on a cold Saturday morning from her place of work to the local baker’s to join the queue for their famous apple pies. She was broader than Marian, heavier in front, loose-bellied. She was wearing black lycra pants and a black top. The elastication had gone slack top and bottom, and as she ran, hugging her charmless breasts in the cold, she was showing as much flesh and contour behind as Marian had when I first saw her getting out of the Volvo at my father’s cottage. I had no wish at all to see any more of the woman running to the baker’s.
And more than once, in the house in St. John’s Wood, I would consider Perdita’s body and gait, which had its admirers, hear her stylish county voice, really quite nice, and wonder why it all left me cold, and why I willingly paid thousands for the sight and enjoyment of the other, in the other place.
I FELL INTO a new pattern of living. Weekdays in London, weekends in the country with Marian. In time I lost my anxiety with her, though there was always that darkness and distance in her bedroom mood. The more I got to know her, the more I pushed myself sexually with her. I never wanted during those weekends to waste her, so to speak; I never wanted to be idle with her. By Sunday morning I was close to enervation. I longed then to be free of her, to be on the road back to London. And, paradoxically, Sunday evenings were the best time of the week for me, a time of delicious rest and solitude and reflection, when sexual exhaustion and relief turned slowly to a general feeling of optimism, and I became ready for the week ahead. By Thursday I would be ground down again; my head would once more be full of pictures of Marian; and I would be more than eager on Friday afternoon to get back to her. It was out of that weekday optimism, I should tell you, that I was able to work, and work hard, for my various good causes, including getting you out of your Indian jail. Those good causes mattered to me. They gave me an idea of myself which I could hold on to.