She seemed to be in a particularly bad temper. Perhaps it was exaggerated for my benefit; I believe I was the only person outside her family who noted and assessed her moods. In response to my question about the holidays she mentioned the serial quarrel with her father. The latest instalment had occurred only that morning; it had kept her seething and had at last driven her out of the house in the afternoon. ‘A father,’ she had said to me at our first meeting, ‘is one of nature’s handicaps.’ She had also said on that occasion that she wanted to be either a nun or a king’s mistress. I had been impressed by this and made to feel not a little inadequate; but awe had been converted into sympathy and something like affection when I came across the sentence in one of Bernard Shaw’s plays. To a similar source I attributed her remark about fathers, though I had never been able to trace it. She had another remark for me now, as we stood in front of the Turkish notice. ‘Do you know what I said to him this morning? I told him he was arguing like a crab. Do you like that? Arguing like a crab.’ I said I liked it. She said, turning away from the board, ‘I can’t stand the big-and-busy public-lavatory smell of this damned place.’ I said I had been told it had something to do with the type of disinfectant used. She asked me to give her tea. Snappy, inconsequentiaclass="underline" the way she liked her lines; and I had acknowledged the two remarks she had made. But it did not dispel her gloomy irritation. We left the School and walked out into the Aldwych and down to Bush House, to the canteen of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s European Services. I had used this canteen so often that no one now stopped me.
Sandra, I can see, will not be everyone’s idea of a beauty; few women are. But she overwhelmed me then; and she would overwhelm me now, I know: her looks were of the sort that improves with the strength and definition of maturity. She was tall; her bony face was longish and I liked the suggestion of thrust in her chin and lower lip. I liked her narrow forehead and her slightly ill-humoured eyes — perhaps she needed glasses. And there was a coarseness about her skin which enchanted me. I liked a quality of graining in the skin; it was to me a sign of a subtle sensuality. There was firmness and precision in her movements, and always a slight bite to her speech. Women were continually provoked by her manner, which gave the impression of irony even when none was intended. She affected a very old and grubby khaki-coloured macintosh, which it was always a pleasure to help off, for below it, and always as a surprise, were soft, cool colours, and a body fresh and scrupulously cared for. Not even the macintosh could hide the fullness of her breasts, to which I had for some little time been admitted. They were not the self-supporting cut apples of the austere French ideal; but breasts curving and rounded with a weight just threatening pendent excess, which the viewer, recognizing the inadequacy and indeed crudity of the cupping gesture, instinctively stretches out a hand to support; breasts which in their free state alter their shape and contour with every shift in the posture of their possessor; breasts which in the end madden the viewer because, faced with such completeness of beauty, he does not know what to do. No one loved her breasts more than Sandra herself. She caressed them in moments of abstraction; and indeed it was this ritualistic, almost Pharaonic, attitude — right hand supporting and caressing left breast, left hand supporting right — which had first brought her to my startled if delighted attention in the dreary library one morning and had encouraged me to pen an invitation to coffee on one of the library’s borrowing slips and slide it towards her across the polished table that we shared. Pure joy it was later, at the assisted uncovering, to discover that she painted the nipples of her breasts. So absurd, so pathetic, so winning. I kissed, caressed, stroked with hand and cheek; inadequate speech was dragged out of me. ‘Lovely, lovely,’ I said. And Sandra had replied, ‘Thank you.’ A cooling thing to hear, as I lay between her breasts; and head and hands for an instant went still. But it was a revealing reply, in its humourlessness and confidence. The adoration of none could equal her own; and even at that first encounter I could feel her own sense of self-violation. Self-possessed at one moment, she became frantic at another that the fumbling should go no farther.
Language is so important. Up to this time my relationships had been with women who knew little English and of whose language I frequently knew nothing. These affairs had been conducted in a type of pidgin; they were a strain; I could never assess the degree of complication we had arrived at after the sexual simplicities. Once this had been glamorous and had suited me; now it was like entering an imperfect world, some grotesque tunnel of love, where, as in a dream, at a critical moment one is denied the use of arms or legs and longs to cry out. With Sandra there was no such frustration; the mere fact of communication was a delight; to this extent I had changed. And for all the recurring checks that occurred in my rooms, our relationship developed. It was with surprise that I discovered that, though of the city, her position in it was like my own. She had no community, no group, and had rejected her family. She saw herself alone in the world and was determined to fight her way up. She hated the common — her own word — from which she nevertheless freely acknowledged herself to have sprung and about which she therefore claimed to speak with authority; no one knew ‘them’ as well as she. To the end she had a cruel eye for the common, and she passed on to me the word and the assessing skill. No family, two or three school friends, now scattered: it was easy to see how she felt imprisoned and fearful and how important it was to her to be free of the danger of that commonness which encircled her. The king’s mistress! I saw the magnitude of her ambition and the matching difficulties of her struggle, and sympathized, not yet knowing the part I would soon be called upon to play in their resolution.
The war had also left its mark. No one was more sensitive to anything that savoured of the luxurious; no one had a greater capacity for creating occasions. A bottle of wine was an occasion, a meal in a restaurant, a seat in the dress circle. She took nothing for granted. Was I exploited? I never misunderstood her interest; but no one offered himself more readily. She was rapacious. It was in her social ambitions, in her diligent reading of approved contemporary authors and her pursuit of culture, for which at home she willingly — perhaps even gratuitously — carried the cross of being considered odd; it was in her walk, in the bite of her speech, even in the way she ate food which she considered expensive; in all these things, not least in the adoration of her body, there was a consuming self-love. But how could I resist her quick delight? Her very rapaciousness attracted me. To me, drifting about the big city that had reduced me to futility, she was all that was positive. She showed how much could be extracted so easily from the city; she showed how easy occasions were. Her delight strengthened me; often, in public, I pretended to be seeing her for the first time: those close-set, myopic, impatient eyes, that jutting lower lip. In those days in London, when a decision had to be made every morning to dress, to go through the day, when on numberless nights I could go to sleep only with the consoling thought of the Luger at my head or the thought of retreat on the following day, the degree and the School abandoned, in those days at the darkest moments I was strengthened by the thought of Sandra. I would say, ‘I am seeing her tomorrow. Let me delay decision and last until then.’ And the day would come; and we would create, out of the drabness that surrounded us both, an occasion. It was the perfect basis for a relationship.
She was at her lowest that afternoon as we walked down into the basement canteen for tea, her grubby macintosh belted around her waist. The last few weeks at home had been difficult; she had had to put up with a good deal of mockery. She had failed a qualifying examination for the second time. That was the end of her government grant, the end of the School. No degree for her now; no escape by that route. And as we sat in the low, airless basement she out-lined a life so destitute of glamour or point, a life which now, with the failed examination, neither imprecise ambition nor the pursuit of culture could enhance, that my own disturbance was sharpened. She reflected my own mood exactly. Her despair worked on me; we acted and reacted on one another, there in the canteen of a radio service which, when picked up in remote countries, was the very voice of metropolitan authority and romance, bringing to mind images, from the cinema and magazines, of canyons of concrete, brick and glass, motorcars in streams, lines of lights, busyness, crowded theatre foyers, the world where everything was possible; there now, at the heart of that metropolis, we sat, at a plastic-topped table, before thick cups of cooling tea and plates with yellow crumbs, each drawing out the frenzy from the other. What awaited her? The secretarial course, the librarian’s course, the common employer. She went on, railing at her society, bitter at her lack of protection and patrons within it. A job in the bank; the typing pool; the Woolworth’s counter. She was working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. Tears of anger came to her eyes. Then suddenly, fixing those moist eyes on me, she said, almost ordered, with a look of total hatred: ‘Why don’t you propose, you fool?’