I’m being objective about him. His faults.
His hatred of abstract painting—even of people like Jackson Pollock and Nicholson. Why? I’m more than half convinced intellectually by him, but I still feel some of the paintings he says are bad are beautiful. I mean, he’s too jealous. He condemns too much.
I don’t mind this. I’m trying to be honest about him, and about myself. He hates people who don’t “think things through”—and he does it. Too much. But he has (except over women) principles. He makes most people with so-called principles look like empty tin-cans.
(I remember he once said about a Mondrian—“it isn’t whether you like it, but whether you ought to like it”—I mean, he dislikes abstract art on principle. He ignores what he feels.)
I’ve been leaving the worst to last. Women.
It must have been about the fourth or fifth time I went round to see him.
There was the Nielsen woman. I suppose (now) they’d been to bed together. I was so naive. But they didn’t seem to mind my coming. They needn’t have answered the bell. And she was rather nice to me in her glittery at-home sort of way. Must be forty—what could he see in her? Then a long time after that, it was May, and I’d been the night before, but he was out (or in bed with someone?) and that evening he was in and alone, and we talked some time (he was telling me about John Minton) and then he put on an Indian record and we were quiet. But he didn’t shut his eyes that time, he was looking at me and I was embarrassed. When the raga ended there was a silence. I said, shall I turn it? but he said, no. He was in the shadow, I couldn’t see him very well.
Suddenly he said, Would you like to come to bed?
I said, no I wouldn’t. He caught me by surprise and I sounded foolish. Frightened.
He said, his eyes still on me, ten years ago I would have married you. You would have been my second disastrous marriage.
It wasn’t really a surprise. It had been waiting for weeks.
He came and stood by me. You’re sure?
I said, I haven’t come here for that. At all.
It seemed so unlike him. So crude. I think now, I know now, he was being kind. Deliberately obvious and crude. Just as he sometimes lets me beat him at chess.
He went to make Turkish coffee and he said through the door, you’re misleading. I went and stood in the kitchen door, while he watched the vriki. He looked back at me. I could swear you want it sometimes.
How old are you? I said.
I could be your father. Is that what you mean?
I hate promiscuity, I said. I didn’t mean that.
He had his back turned to me. I felt angry with him, he seemed so irresponsible. I said, anyhow, you don’t attract me that way in the least.
He said, with his back still turned, what do you mean by promiscuity?
I said, going to bed for pleasure. Sex and nothing else. Without love.
He said, I’m very promiscuous then. I never go to bed with the people I love. I did once.
I said, you warned me against Barber Cruikshank.
I’m warning you against myself now, he said. He stood watching the vriki. You know the Ashmolean Uccello? The Hunt? No? The design hits you the moment you see it. Apart from all the other technical things. You know it’s faultless. The professors with Middle-European names spend their lives working out what the great inner secret is, that thing you feel at the first glance. Now, I see you have the great inner secret, too. God knows what it is. I’m not a Middle-European professor, I don’t really care how it is. But you have it. You’re like Sheraton joinery. You won’t fall apart.
He spoke it all in a very matter-of-fact voice. Too.
It’s hazard, of course, he said. The genes.
He lifted the vriki off the gas-ring at the last possible moment. The only thing is, he said, there’s that scarlet point in your eye. What is it? Passion? Stop?
He stood staring at me, the dry look.
It’s not bed, I said.
But for someone?
For no one.
I sat on the divan and he on his high stool by the bench.
I’ve shocked you, he said.
I was warned.
By aunt?
Yes.
He turned and very slowly, very carefully, poured the coffee into the cups.
He said, all my life I’ve had to have women. They’ve mostly brought me unhappiness. The most has been brought by the relationships that were supposed to be pure and noble. There—he pointed at a photo of his two sons—that’s the fine fruit of a noble relationship.
I went and got my coffee and leant against the bench, away from him.
Robert’s only four years younger than you are now, he said. Don’t drink it yet. Let the grounds settle.
He didn’t seem at ease. As if he had to talk. Be on the defensive. Disillusion me and get my sympathy at the same time.
He said, lust is simple. You reach an understanding at once. You both want to get into bed or one of you doesn’t. But love. The women I’ve loved have always told me I’m selfish. It’s what makes them love me. And then be disgusted with me. Do you know what they always think is selfishness? He was scraping the glue away from a broken Chinese blue-and-white bowl he’d bought in the Portobello Road, and repaired, two fiendishly excited horsemen chasing a timid little fallow-deer. Very short-fingered, sure hands. Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way—they don’t mind that. It even excites them. But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way.
It was as if I was another man.
People like your bloody aunt think I’m a cynic, a wrecker of homes. A rake. I’ve never seduced a woman in my life. I like bed, I like the female body, I like the way even the shallowest of women become beautiful when their clothes are off and they think they’re taking a profound and wicked step. They always do, the first time. Do you know what is almost extinct in your sex?
He looked sideways at me, so I shook my head.
Innocence. The one time you see it is when a woman takes her clothes off and cannot look you in the eyes (as I couldn’t then). Just that first Botticelli moment of the first time of her taking her clothes off. Soon shrivels. The old Eve takes over. The strumpet. Exit Anadyomene.
Who’s she? I asked.
He explained. I was thinking, I shouldn’t let him talk like this, he’s drawing a net round me. I didn’t think it, I felt it.
He said, I’ve met dozens of women and girls like you. Some I’ve known well, some I’ve seduced against their better nature and my better nature, two I’ve even married. Some I’ve hardly known at all, just stood beside them at an exhibition, in the Tube, wherever.
After a while he said, you’ve read Jung?
No, I said.
He’s given your species of the sex a name. Not that it helps. The disease is just as bad.
Tell me the name, I said.
He said, you don’t tell diseases their names.
Then there was a strange silence, as if we’d come to a full stop, as if he’d expected me to react in some other way. Be more angry or shocked, perhaps. I was shocked and angry afterwards (in a peculiar way). But I’m glad I didn’t run away. It was one of those evenings when one grows up. I suddenly knew I had either to behave like a shocked girl who had still been at school that time the year before; or like an adult.
You’re a weird kid, he said at last.
Old-fashioned, I said.
You’d be a bloody bore if you weren’t so pretty.
Thank you.
I didn’t really expect you to go to bed with me, he said.
I know, I said.
He gave me a long look. Then he changed, he got out the chess-board and we played chess and he let me beat him. He wouldn’t admit it, but I am sure he did. We hardly said anything, we seemed to communicate through the chessmen, there was something very symbolic about my winning. That he wished me to feel. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know whether it was that he wanted me to see my “virtue” triumphed over his “vice,” or something subtler, that sometimes losing is winning.