Clare himself has gone north to stay with his mother. That is why life is unbearable for Tarquin. One day he thinks he’ll go to Salzburg for the festival, the next to Antibes, the next to Athos. As a compromise he goes to Brighton, in order to be not more than two hundred miles away from Clare. I see him off at the station. He looks ill and bewildered, standing at the carriage window, as if he were being taken into the next world. His lips tremble. He grips my hand fiercely, afraid to let go. “Perhaps a girl,” he says. “Eh? Listen to me, damn you, when I speak to you. Perhaps I could find fulfilment if I married, eh? A girl. I might find a girl, what do you think? I thought it all out the day I said good-bye to him. I hate journeys. I feel so damn worn out these days. If I had children and settled down, eh? The pull of domesticity and all that stuff, eh?”
The train begins to draw away. I can think of nothing to say to him. “It’ll be all right,” I say idiotically. “Don’t you worry. It’ll be all right.” He leans over clutching my hand, drops it, reaches out, smiles. The distance stretches between us, slowly, fluidly, like chewing gum. He cannot let go on the known world. “0 God,” he whispers, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.” And the engine shrieks. His face moves across the sky like the face of death itself. Fulfilment!
In the hotel the sour carpets putrefy among all that other furniture, real or imaginary I cannot tell. I am no longer sure of the outlines of the real, so that men and women themselves take on a curious impermanence, mixing together like shapes and symbols in a cinema mix-in.
A letter from the underworld, too, which has a curious dusty flavour when I read it here.
“Dear Puck,” you say, “everything is altered now with the first spring things, the first delicate flowers. Everywhere there are delicate arteries thawing, and the earth turns over on her side to let the seeds wake in her. The cottage lies quietly in the shoulder of the hill, under the discipline of day and night. When do we meet?”
I am reminded of Ishtar going down every year into the territories underground, the atmosphere of dust and ashes and silence; and the slow vegetative revival of life, the corn springing from the navel of Osiris. The rain dazzling on the enormous eyelashes of April. The English Seasons, so nostalgic in death, cherishing their decay in heavy loam and delicate rain! It is something unknown. Spring under the ledge of the Ionian weather, that is the image which has swallowed the cottage, the April, the drizzle among the corn; your letter reminds me of the sea among the islands, played out, sluggish, inert like a heavy blue syrup. And there? Dust on the window frames, dust on our hands, our eyebrows, and the racket of machines.
At night Peters tells me about his genius, comparing it to the genius of other men past and present. “One must be a man of the world,” he says shyly, “like Eliot, don’t you think?” I offer him those portions of Gregory which contain nostrums against the literary evil eye, and canons for novices: “Books should be built of one’s tissue or not at all. The struggle is not to record experience but to record oneself. The book, then, does not properly exist. There is only my tissue, my guilt, transmuted by God knows what alchemy, into a few pints of green ink and handmade paper. Understand me well. This is the ideal being we call a book. It does not exist. And when I talk in this knowing way I intend you to imagine the work of genius I could write if I put my own principles into practice. Alas! I am too well-read to make the attempt. Or perhaps well-bred — because in order to write one must first be convinced that every book ever written was made for one to borrow from. The art is in paying back these loans with interest. And this is harder than it sounds.”
Well, this is no concern of mine. Gregory’s little struggles with his logical self have a flavour of putrefaction here, at the desk behind the door. Whenever I become too conscious of this suburban house, this suburban world, whose symbol is the map Lobo is drawing and never finishes, I leave the stuffy vestry in which Eustace walks and whistles, adds, picks his teeth, sucks his pipe, consults his tin watch, and climb the stairs to the room which is marked “General Knowledge”. There is one solitary occupant: an inky personality which belongs purely to the world of the image. A negress. Miss Smith.
She sits, carefully segregated from the pallid northern pupils of the school, working away at The Life and Times of Chaucer. It is curious. I am compelled to sneak up to the top floor three or four times every day to assure myself that she is still sitting there, lost in the Middle Ages, with the window at her back looking out like a blind eye on the yard wall. Unreal! But what does one expect? You cannot expect her to have the reality of, say, Monday, Hymnbooks, lunch intervals. She does not compete. As I say, she belongs purely to the world of the image. Against her there is only Zanzibar, mandrakes, Marco Polo, El Greco, and the Dead Sea. Try to make her plausible and you will find yourself mixing her in a stew of images, torn limb from limb from the mythologies of Asia. She is my one connection with the lost worlds. I treasure her. I would not know what to say if she left and deprived me of that world of myth which I can see so clearly at work in her.
You see, I sit beside her for two hours every morning now, expounding Chaucer’s language to her, about which I know nothing whatsoever. This is a concession from Eustace. She must get lonely up there, all alone, he says: and no one really understands that blinking Chaucer but me. “And no mucking about with her, my lad,” he adds uncomfortably. “Her father is a famous African judge.”
“Miss Smith,” I say sternly, “are you aware that this language you are learning will be useless to you?”
She cocks her poll down shyly and emits a snigger, laughing behind her hand, as if she were shy of her white teeth. It is fascinating. She laughs at everything, chuckling shyly in her sleeve. It is pure Zanzibar, tiger tiger burning bright, monkeys, pagodas … everything at once. This insatiable giggle of hers gets in among my thoughts, and shakes the world to pieces. A negress in bright clothes, laughing down her sleeve, at a school desk. Chocolate carpets of amusement, hissing between four walls, under a blind window.
Miss Smith powders her face heavily, snapping her flashy crocodile-skin bag open and shut. She plays gracefully with her features above a pocket mirror, like a dissatisfied gazelle at a pool. Her breasts are large and languid inside the European clothes. Her hair has been artfully clipped into the shape of a bob. It reminds one of those stiff topiary privets, clipped into forms, against the natural grain of the foliage. But it is useless. With one laugh I am across Zanzibar, coloured stamps, yellow sharks, vultures, Chaucer, lipstick, Prester John, Ethiopia — moving in the rare air of the image, whose idol she is. It is useless for me to say to her: “I have seen women like you carved in ebony and hung on watch chains.”
She will laugh in her sleeves. Her eyeballs will incandesce. Her red Euro-African mouth will begin to laugh again. It becomes impossible to walk hand in hand with Chaucer on the first Monday morning of the world. The laughter penetrates us, soaks us, winds us in spools of damp humorous macaroni. Beads of Nubian sweat break from the chocolate skin, powdered into a matt surface. Miss Smith sits forever at the centre of a laughing universe, her large languid tits rotating on their own axes — the whizzing omphaloi of locomotion. African worlds of totem and trauma. The shingle deserts, the animals, the arks, the floods, carved in a fanatical rictus of the dark face, bent hair, and the long steady pissing noise under the lid of teeth.