“What do you mean?”
He laughed in my face, wrinkling up his nose. Not quite certain whether to be frank or not. As always he took the chance, however.
“This party of yours. An elaborate piece of self-gratification. You must always take it out on somebody, mustn’t you? Life is one long revenge for your own shortcomings.”
“You’ve been reading the Russians,” I said. Nothing else. It was furiously annoying. I bowed and led him back to the circus. Tarquin was waterlogged by this time, and ready to leave. Clare danced on in a kind of remote control, a social communion with Gracie. They hardly spoke at all, but there was an awareness, an ease between them I envied. A contact.
“Well, Grace, I’m going,” said Chamberlain with good humour, shaking hands with her. To me, as he passed, he offered one word, in my private ear. “Sentimentalist.” I confess it rankled.
That evening I took it out on Grace, appeased the rage that Chamberlain’s little observation had bred in me. For a day or two everything about her seemed odious, odious.
But all this, one realizes, is simply writing down to one’s subject from the heights of an intellectual superiority, à la Huxley. It is a trick to be played on anyone, but not on yourself. The intellectual superiority of the emotionally sterile. Because I am grateful to Grace, more grateful than inky words can express, whatever agony you inject into them. Yet the idea of an audience! The idea of anyone knowing that I felt such sentiments turned them at once crystal-cold. Changed them into a rage against my own emotional weakness. And thence into a rage against the object of that indulgence, yclept she. In retrospect the party explains itself simply enough. Was it possible that I felt anything for this little cockney child with her tedious humours, her spurious gentility? Quick, quick then, let me insult myself and her for such a lapse from the heights of intellectual purity of feeling. How we cherish the festering intelligence! But then again, feeling, if it is to be interpreted by emotion, is not my province: at any rate if I am ever to write about it. For bad emotion can only produce the terrible squealing of the slaughtered pig—De Profundis is the sterling example. Let us thank God, therefore, that I do not try to squeeze out such pus on to handmade paper. I shirk the epitaph for Grace, not because she wouldn’t understand it, but because I dare not write it.
The carapace of the rational intelligence! I think the reason I loved Grace so much was that I could escape from myself with her. The cage I inhabited was broken wide open by our experience. She was not audience enough for me to hate her. Yet, writing nicely, “love” is not the correct word. For a man like me does not need love in the accepted sense. There should be another word to express this very real state. One hardly knows how to do it without the key word to the situation. Let me leave a blank space and proceed.
Why and how Gracie supplied this provender, it would take me an aeon to write. Her idiocy! Her uncomprehending urbanity! Above all, her stupidity! Yes, her stupidity made me feel safe, within my own depth. It was possible to give myself to her utterly. My desire was as unqualified by fear and mistrust as hers was by intelligence. Sometimes, sitting there on the bed with her, playing foolish kindergarten games with her, I used to imagine what would happen if suddenly she turned before my eyes into one of those precise female dormice of the upper classes with whom only my limitations express themselves. A weird feeling. I had, after all, utterly committed myself; and the idea of Grace turning into a she-judas before my eyes was frightening. Imagine a Croydon Juliet, secure in her knowledge of exactly what was sacred and profane love, rising up from my own sofa and scourging me! The cracking whips of outraged romance! (No. No. Preserve us from the ostrich.)
Must I confess, then, that the secret of our love was the vast stupidity of Grace and the huge egotism and terror of myself? These were the hinges on which our relationship turned. You see, I could not tell her I adored her. No. My love expressed itself in a devious, ambiguous way. My tongue became a scourge to torment not only myself but also the object of my adoration. Another woman jeered at, whipped by syllables, addressed as “you bitch”, “you slut”, or “you whore”, would have been clever enough to accept the terms for what they seemed worth. Who would have guessed that in using them I intended to convey only my own abject surrender? Only Gracie, of course, sitting in the corner of the sofa, very grande dame in my coloured dressing gown, deaf and sightless, cocking her finger over a cup of tea! Who would have accepted an apparent hate and known it to be love? No one but Grace, my cinematic princess.
Chamberlain, when he called, was shocked by the knife edge of cruelty that cut down into our social relations. He did not realize the depths of her insensitiveness. He saw only what seemed to him the wilful cruelty of myself. He did not realize that my viper’s tongue would have withered in my mouth if set to pronounce a single conventional endearment, “my darling”, or “my dear”. No. I am that I am. The senex fornicator if you will. The lutin. Nanus or pumilo. Tourneur’s “juiceless luxur”, if you prefer it, but never the conventionalized gramophone-record lover. But I realize that even these weird colours are denied me by my acquaintances whose method is simply to reverse the romantic medallion and declare that what they see is the face of cynicism. “Dear Mr. Gregory,” as someone said, “you’re such a cynic,” whatever she meant.
In a way this must be rather a pity, for Grace pines for romance, dimly in that numb soul of hers. Wistfully. Sometimes, on waking her from a trance, I have discovered that the object of her musing was only Gary Cooper. Soit. It has become imperative to present her with a substitute.
Much pondering on the subject had evolued for me an elixir, which seems to do the trick. Thrice-weekly visits to the cinema seem to hack away most of the romantic whale blubber which would poison our relationship; the rest is dissipated by an occasional visit from Clare. He is, as it were, the practical side of romance.
Saturday evenings she goes dancing at the Pally De Dance with him, glittering in a vulgar new evening frock which my charity has provided; baubled, painted, and with a swath of scent following her, a yard wide, like an invisible page. Radiant, one might almost say, were not her radiance the radiance of a rouged death mask.
With me she is still a little uncomfortable, but once outside the flat door she takes on any romantic colour she chooses. Out of the weekday chrysalis steps the princess Gracie, owner of a tall dark partner and a latchkey of her own. I would be a fool to grudge her this. Yet it rankles. I grudge it. And again, so unfortunate in my way of showing my feelings that I force her to go, goad her, simply in the hope that she will revolt, renounce the role, and stay at home. “But you must go,” I say, when she shows the slightest disinclination. “Clare will be sad. He says you dance lovely.” Hoping of course that she will laugh, put her hands on my shoulders, perhaps, and stay. But a more literal-minded little jezebel you could not hope to find. In all obedience, she goes. If I had the courage to say to her, for instance: “Tonight you must stay. I don’t want to be left alone,” she would as obediently stay; but try as I might I cannot bring myself to say the formula. Poor Gracie. The female thaumaturge. Where anyone else would try perhaps to deduce what I was feeling from the ambiguities of what I say, Gracie accepts the literal rendering of the text and acts on it. In this way I have no one to blame but myself.
Of course, there are solutions. But I am too much of the retiring violet ever to try them. I could, for instance, learn to dance. In fact I even bought a little manual of dance steps and trod a grave measure or two in front of my looking glass, wondering if it were possible to take clare’s place in the ballroom. Alas! I can see at once how fatal the attempt would be. The fallacy of the idea. Because what she wants is not a partner, but a romantic ally. Foxtrot I never so nimbly, I could not hope to oust Clare. For consider the disparity. Clare is tall, insolently cat-eyed, black-locked. The gigolo, in a word. His evening shoulders are padded to professional heavyweight size. Bigger than Grace, he hunches protectively over her, singing snatches of the tunes in her ears. He knows all the words to all the tunes, it seems. His movement is a lush, confident seal’s glide on the polished floor. Confronted by this picture of him for comparison with my own reflection in the mirror, I am at once disgusted by the fatuity of all this. No. Saturday evenings I sit virtuously alone, a-reading Gibbon, waiting for the clock to strike twelve.