Sir William Mallock came to dinner. He was one of Lloyd George’s advisers on National Insurance, very old and important. Henry of course has nothing to do with pensions any longer, but he keeps an interest in the subject and likes to recall those days. Wasn’t it widows’ pensions he was working on when Maurice and I had dinner for the first time and everything started? Henry began a long argument with Mallock full of statistics about whether if widows’ pensions were raised another shilling they would reach the same height as ten years ago. They disagreed about the cost of living, and it was a very academic argument because they both said the country couldn’t afford to raise them anyway. I had to talk to Henry’s chief in the Ministry of Home Security, and I couldn’t think of anything to talk about but the V1s, and I longed suddenly to tell everybody about coming downstairs and finding Maurice buried. I wanted to say, I was naked, of course, because I hadn’t had time to dress. Would Sir William Mallock have even turned his head, or would Henry have heard? He has a wonderful knack of hearing nothing but the subject in hand and the subject in hand at that moment was the cost-of-living index for 1943. I was naked, I wanted to say, because Maurice and I had been making love all the evening.
I looked at Henry’s chief. He was a man called Dunstan. He had a broken nose and his battered face looked like a potter’s error - a rejected-for-export face. All he would do, I thought, was smile: he wouldn’t be cross or indifferent -he would accept it as something that human beings did. I had a sense that I had only to make a move and he would reply to it. I wondered, why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I escape from this desert if only for half an hour? I haven’t promised anything about strangers, only about Maurice. I can’t be alone for the rest of my life with Henry, nobody admiring me, nobody excited by me, listening to Henry talking to other people, fossilizing under the drip of conversation like that bowler hat in the Cheddar Caves, 15 July 1944.
Had lunch with Dunstan at the Jardin des Gourmets. He said.., 21 July 1944.
Had drinks with Dunstan at home, while he waited for Henry. All went on to…
22 July 1944.
Had dinner with D. He came home afterwards for another drink. But it didn’t work, it didn’t work.
23 July 1944 - 30 July 1944.
D. telephoned. Said I was out. Started on tour with Henry. Civil Defence in Southern England. Conferences with Chief Wardens and Borough Engineers. Blast problems. Deep shelter problems. The problem of pretending to be alive. Henry and I sleeping side by side night after night like figures on tombs. In the new reinforced shelter at Bigwell-on-Sea the Chief Warden kissed me. Henry had gone ahead into the second chamber with the mayor and the engineer, and I stopped the Warden, touching his arm and asking him a question about the steel bunks, something stupid about why there weren’t double bunks for the married. I meant him to want to kiss me. He twisted me round against a bunk, so that the metal made a line of pain across my back and kissed me. Then he looked so astonished that I laughed and kissed him back. But nothing worked. Will it never work again? The mayor came back with Henry. He was saying, ‘At a pinch we can find room for two hundred.’ That night, when Henry was at an official dinner, I asked trunks to get me Maurice’s number. I lay on my bed, waiting for it to come through. I said to God, I’ve kept my promise for six weeks. I can’t believe in you, I can’t love you, but I’ve kept my promise. If I don’t come alive again, I’m going to be a slut, just a slut. I’m going to destroy myself quite deliberately. Every year I’ll be more used. Will you like that any better than if I break my promise? I’ll be like those women in bars who laugh too much and have three men with them, touching them without intimacy. I’m falling in pieces already.
I kept the receiver tucked in my shoulder, and the Exchange said, ‘We are ringing your number now.’ I said to God, If he answers, I’ll go back tomorrow. I knew exactly where the telephone stood beside his bed. Once I had knocked it down in my sleep, hitting out with my fist. A girl’s voice said, ‘Hello,’ and I nearly rang off. I had wanted Maurice to be happy, but had I wanted him to find happiness quite so quickly? I felt a bit sick in the stomach until logic came to my aid, and I made my brain argue with me - why shouldn’t he? You left him: you want him to be happy. I said, ‘Could I speak to Mr Bendrix?’ But everything had gone flat. Perhaps he wouldn’t even want me to break my promise now: perhaps he had found somebody who would stay with him, have meals with him, go with him to places, sleep with him night after night till it was sweet and customary, answer his telephone for him. Then the voice said, ‘Mr Bendrix isn’t here. He’s gone away for a few weeks: I’ve borrowed the flat.’
I rang off. At first I was happy, and then I was miserable again. I didn’t know where he was. We were not in touch. In the same desert, seeking the same water-holes perhaps, but out of sight, always alone. For it wouldn’t be a desert if we were together. I said to God, ‘So that’s it. I begin to believe in you, and if I believe in you I shall hate you. I have free will to break my promise, haven’t I, but I haven’t the power to gain anything from breaking it. You let me telephone, but then you close the door in my face. You let me sin, but you take away the fruits of my sin. You let me try to escape with D., but you don’t allow me to enjoy it. You make me drive love out, and then you say there’s no lust for you either. What do you expect me to do now, God? Where do I go from here?’
When I was at school I learnt about a King - one of the Henrys, the one who had Becket murdered - and he swore when he saw his birthplace burnt by his enemies that because God had done that to him, ‘because You have robbed me of the town I love most, the place where I was born and bred, I will rob You of that which You love most in me.’ Odd how I’ve remembered that prayer after sixteen years. A King swore it on his horse seven hundred years ago, and I pray it now, in a hotel room at Bigwell-on-Sea - Bigwell Regis. I’m going to rob you, God, of what you love most in me. I’ve never known the Lord’s Prayer by heart, but I remember that one - is it a prayer? Of what you love most in me.
What do you love most? If I believed in you, I suppose I’d believe in the immortal soul, but is that what you love? Can you really see it there under the skin? Even a God can’t love something that doesn’t exist, he can’t love something he cannot see. When he looks at me, does he see something I can’t see? It must be lovely if he is able to love it. That’s asking me to believe too much, that there’s anything lovely in me. I want men to admire me, but that’s a trick you learn at school - a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there’s something to admire. All my life I’ve tried to live in that illusion - a soothing drug that allows me to forget that I’m a bitch and a fake. But what are you supposed to love then in the bitch and the fake? Where do you find that immortal soul they talked about? Where do you see this lovely thing in me - in me, of all people? I can understand you can find it in Henry - my Henry, I mean. He’s gentle and good and patient. You can find it in Maurice who thinks he hates, and loves, loves all the time. Even his enemies. But in this bitch and fake where do you find anything to love?