The night is hot with dust. I can think of nothing to do, nowhere to go. After an eternal walk among the bone-bare streets I drop in to Chamberlain’s flat. The dogs jump up and lick my hands. She is alone, sitting in the armchair reading. Chamberlain has gone to some musical festival or other in the north, will not be back until tomorrow. “I had a feeling you’d come,” she says. We sit together for a long time in the musty little flat without speaking. Something is happening: out of the hot summer inaction, the lethargy, some decision is shaping itself in us. I try not to think. Presently she switches off the light and turns on the wireless. The room is ringing with a symphony. I sit there in the dark, trembling, expecting I do not know what. Pitch darkness and the strings slamming away at some obsolete figure. Then I put out my arms and touch her. She is standing in front of me in the dark, and as I touch her she topples softly to the armchair, breathing shakily. The skull and crossbones goes slowly down to half-mast. “You won’t say anything, will you?” she whispers. “For Godsake, you won’t, will you?” I promise her faithfully, trying the effects of a sardonic grin on the darkness. I am filled with a profound weariness and disgust. I go through it, yes, but with this gnawing misery of disgust. I don’t know why. The whole room smells of Chamberlain. I am stifled in his musk. His books, his bed, his dogs … Even when she is whimpering like a crazy woman in the darkness I am so agitated that I force my hand over her mouth. Her breasts are rocking with tears. It is a beautiful, satirical ballet we are acting together, like gorgeous toads; the motive is hate in some obscure way. Afterwards I shut my eyes and try to forget that she exists. I will not speak to her, and this puts her in a rage. I suppose it is comfort and tenderness she wants — well, I just haven’t any. Not a scrap. “You’ve made use of me,” she whispers angrily. “Go on then, why don’t you go away? You’ve got what you wanted. Go away, go away, leave me alone.” She begins battering me with the pads of her fists until I fetch her a sharp slap on the cheek. It is so ludicrous now that I want to giggle. Scuffling like this, tearing the bed to pieces. We lie for a long time in silence, side by side. The air is hot and charged with weariness. I am afflicted with the thought of Chamberlain — this place is so charged with his personality. Even she, whatever she does, seems to carry his stamp about on her, as paper will retain the mark of print long after it is stiffened into ash. The wireless is playing in the other room, the dogs are whimpering softly. They do not know what to make of this situation, any more than we do. If I put out my arms and comfort her it is Chamberlain I am petting; to fuck her is like an act of sodomy with him. Finally I can stand it no longer. I get up in the dark and dress quietly. She does not move. I go into the other room, switch on the light and turn off the wireless. Then hesitate. Shall I go in and say good-bye? I am so overwhelmed by tenderness that I turn and open the door. She is lying there quite still, staring with glassy eyes at the ceiling. I begin to apologize, sitting down beside her on the bed, but she does not answer. If I touch her face with my fingers she turns aside. “Go on,” she says at last in a low voice. “Clear out of here.”
I sit there silently, staring at the floor. I do not want to leave her like this, without something, some act of friendship. We are both consumed in this slow permeating hate on the summer night. The cars whirl by on the asphalt outside, the first street-lamps are being lighted. “Listen to me,” I say. “Come out and have dinner with me. Let’s have a post-mortem on this. I’m not trying to hurt you, genuinely.” She turns her face to me, and the light strikes it sharply from the outer room; hard white electric glare melting over her features. Her eyes are sunk back into her forehead; her skin is puffy, her mouth drawn up in disdain. I see she does not believe me. But there is such misery written on her expressions that I repeat it over again, more gently. I feel sorry for her. Looking at her face like this is like looking at the moon through a telescope for the first time: the craters, the light playing on the continents, the dry oceans, the deserts. If it were not for my feeling of tenderness I would leave her and go home. So long as I need not touch her … She says: “I loathe you,” without any real conviction, but because she is still not sure whether to trust me or not. “There isn’t any need,” I tell her. “Dress now, and let’s have dinner.”
We leave the flat together, the best of friends, and take a bus northward. Dinner together does a great deal towards putting us back into our customary places. Afterwards, strolling in the dark part together among the whores and the lanterns and the policemen, she says: “You know I really didn’t want to. That’s why I hated you, do you see? It was something I had to do; I’ve been feeling sort of dead these days, from the hips upward. Now I’m happy again. Thanks for not leaving me. I should have been miserable. Now I’m glad it was you and not someone else.”
The balance restored, we take the bus home, hardly speaking, but comfortable together, as if we were old lovers. This is an item: latterly in a moment of weakness it was confided to Tarquin. His amazement and delight were huge. “Chamberlain!” he kept repeating, as if he personally had scored some immense triumph over him. “My God, and she being fucked all the time! Stuprum in oestris, ha ha, stuprum in oestris.” Stuffing chocolates into his mouth, and sniggering.
All this is an evasion of the true disease, the disease which I try to drown in books, in bright pictures. All day long I pace the museums, inspecting the relics of our history, all carefully laid out and labelled in scholarly hands on postcards. At night I meditate on the quantities of pure gold which we house so carelessly in glass cases, unaware that this same putrid stuff is decaying in our arteries. Is it possible to keep the vitality of the centuries in a bottle, with a postcard on it to hint at an identity long since lost! My own history, my present, is confused by the death which I see gathered around me, here a jawbone, there a femur, here a wedding ring, there a pickaxe. I cannot live because the decomposing bodies of my ancestors dog me at every turn. They are not living in their myth, but dead, influencing my dying, not my life. That is why action is so erratic, so full of extremes, because the hypaethral universes which should live in us today are dead, and behind glass. Instead of nourishing us they are the umpires of our defeat, our decline and fall.
The circuit is complete. We have put our myths in the cellar and must start building again with new implements, a new tongue.
Morgan was telling me last night how he had squeezed out the flaccid womb with his fingers and buried the etceteras in the yard. Little Peter, the Tsarina’s daughter, had a head like a melon with the sick, fish-like eyelids of the microcephalous idiot. That was the regal idiot who was more of an exile than she knew: not only from Russia but from the world. She spent all day with a pencil writing on the walls, the table, the floor, compiling, as she said, a history of her race. And what she didn’t know about history wasn’t worth knowing. She could explain with complete lucidity the diseases of the Norman barons in the tapestry. The arrow had fallen in his eye, and he was tugging at it, as if it were embedded in a log of wood. Harold, she meant. The whole saga was written on the floor. She strikes me as a beautiful symbol of our tactics: a true twentieth-century practitioner of fable, scribbling on the table with the wrong end of a fountain pen, the wall, the floor. The Normans took their women gently, she told him, in spite of their armour, very gently and regally. They sniffed them quietly, like a dog examining fruit; then very gently they bit, until the juice spurted. That is what made him trap her against the wall, and poleaxe her as he did. The value of these experiences is that he regrets nothing. He himself is always part of the phenomena which puzzle him. “Can you imagine”, he is always asking, “me doing it? Can you imagine me believing a thing like that?”