“What are you drinking, Mr. Marlow? Not that fizzy Italian stuff — we can do better than that. There’s a crate or two of Haig left — not quite off the map out here yet! Esma! Esma!” He shouted wildly and clapped his hands above the din. “We’ll have a bottle.”
To my surprise the introductions had gone off with great brio, without any embarrassments. After the vegetable summer I’d obviously come back to some sort of life again. The previous disaster with Bridget hardly seemed to matter. I leaned back happily and the deck chair collapsed beneath me like a rifle shot.
Henry and Mrs. Girgis were caught in mid-sentence, like lovers, and the entire club came to a halt, except for the record player.
“That ohh-ver-pow-er-ring-feee-ling …”
Bridget laughed and I managed to raise the broken stem of my Asti Gancia glass to the company from a completely recumbent position.
For some reason, after I’d fallen over, things became easier between us all. It was as though, quite by chance, I’d fulfilled some arcane social obligation by collapsing amongst them and could now properly be admitted to their circle.
Mr. Girgis took my shoulder.
“Well done, well done! Nothing broken, I hope? That’s the spirit. No fault on your part — we can’t have deck chairs in the lounge — have to bring it up at the next meeting. Now you’ll have a decent whisky.”
He and I were suddenly friends of a casual sort, as if we’d just met again after a war spent together long ago, and I felt like a prodigal member of the Club who had returned and disgraced himself in a mild, appropriate, well remembered way as evidence of my continued solidarity with Mr. Girgis and the other stay-at-home members. I drank my whisky. Bridget had got up and was dancing with Henry. And I remembered it was Gala Night once a month so I danced with Lola.
She murmured, “You’re better at dancing …”
I smiled vaguely, brought her to me a little, and looked beyond her sly, cherubic face, her dark scented hair tickling my ear, to where Bridget and Henry, passing in their dance, had suddenly emerged from the crowd. Henry had his back towards us; they were together as closely as Lola and I, but in a way that spoke of great ease and familiarity and not embarrassment, so that I couldn’t immediately understand the sudden calm expression on Bridget’s face as she looked at me, a calmness in her eyes that was for me and not Henry.
In the second as she passed she was not, as she had been for me before, an unfortunate experience, a nonentity that one had picked up, forgotten and had happened to meet again, but she took on the form — as though we had both been prompted by a thought, I of loving: she of being its object — of someone who, because of this intuition, I was certain I would one day possess. And because of this, seeing in her glance a definite promise for the future, I paid no more attention to her all evening.
It would be ridiculous, I suppose, to imagine that there existed between us that evening — in that moment when we really knew nothing of each other — a sort of correspondence, an element of acceptance and understanding which, though neither of us was aware of it then, was the beginning of that conscious state of trust which later, in the short time we loved each other, made it equally unnecessary to ask questions, to put things into words.
In fact it must have been my obvious indifference towards her that evening which set the fuse alight and led to the opening bids of what was to become a long, rarely happy, and finally disastrous struggle to possess — subdue, dominate, exploit, hurt …
When we have to find an alternative to love it is not, unfortunately for us, hate; it is any of those other words which we choose to enact — which we know will tie us to the other, so that we won’t lose them but remain together in anger, ensuring that if the love was not mutual the punishment will be.
But the words have gone now, along with everything else: the rather awkward, widely spaced eyes — so large that one might have thought them the result of some deformity or illness — the small, sharply triangular face, the thinly disguised curiosity which lay behind her smile — her sexuality. Above all her regard: her way of looking — prompted by a thought, which became a way of thinking, and then suddenly like an explosion became an instantaneous expression of her whole life at that one moment which would never afterwards be repeated at any other.
It was a part of her living through a fraction of time which she cut away from all the surrounding facets of her existence and which, in her expression, she offered me. Smiling, looking out on the river from her room, reading a magazine, making love — those idle or intense preoccupations of hers which went on quite above language, which were nowhere concerned with words — this is what has gone. And afterwards, just before we’d left each other, all the words returned: the saying of things, that desperate telling, questioning and explaining with which, when we have lost a true language, we debase the words that are left to us so that they can do nothing but denigrate or destroy, where they will serve only as carriers of the pain which has overwhelmed us and which, like an infection, we are determined the other should catch …
I watched her dance with Henry. Why does our sixth sense not warn us at such times? — instead of drumming into our heads, “This will be happy. This one is for you.”
Henry brought some whisky home and we drank it in my room, sitting on the ugly little dormitory bed like prefects at the end of term.
“Did you make love to her then — the first time you met?”
“After a fashion.”
“Oh, why? She’s very good at it you know.”
5
“Were you with Henry — before? — I mean — ”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a teacher?”
It was a week afterwards, another Saturday, on the terrace of the Semiramis looking over the river. She had wanted to meet as soon as I had telephoned her; not later or some other time but then, that morning, now. Already we were involved in the urgency of an affair, that extraordinary impatience in love which begins by making every meeting possible and ends by making them all impossible — “I have to go to the hairdresser, to see my aunt, my doctor, dentist.” We were a long way from the impatience of departure but we had started on it.
“A teacher? I thought it would have sounded rather a dull occupation — in the circumstances.”
“That meeting in the Continental — you thought it was just a pick up? I suppose it was.”
“There’s nothing wrong in that, is there? It was what I wanted. I don’t know about Cherry.”
And we laughed at Cherry. Already, too, there were the appropriate things in common: the beginnings of that obsessive regard for each other, the confident immunity from other people, the small jokes at their expense; the unique and secret marks we make in even the most casual relationship.
I said, “You wouldn’t have gone for a pair of dotty teachers.”
“Yes, I would. That’s why it happened. I wanted you. It was as simple as that.”
“Were you with Henry then?”
She looked at me patiently, plaintively, rubbing her nose with the glass, as though I’d asked her whether she could tell the time.
“Of course. Didn’t he tell you?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“At the University here. You’re getting the impression of a vagabond. But what’s the point of being sly about it?”
“Isn’t it rather strange?”