And two days later with this last intention firm in my mind, I made still another attempt. This time I was resolved to be much more circumspect. It was a fine morning, quite early yet, and I was sure she would not stay indoors. I would unobtrusively take up my position at the corner of her street, wait for her husband's departure to the city, wait for her to come out and then accost her. But things did not work out quite as I had expected.
I had still some little way to go when suddenly Clare Bishop appeared. She had just crossed from my side of the street to the opposite pavement. I knew her at once although I had seen her only once for a short half-hour years before. I knew her although her face was now pinched and her body strangely full. She walked slowly and heavily, and as I crossed towards her I realized that she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Owing to the impetuous strain in my nature, which has often led me astray, I found myself walking towards her with a smile of welcome, but in those few instants I was already overwhelmed by the perfectly clear consciousness that I might neither talk to her nor greet her in any manner. It had nothing to do with Sebastian or my book, or my words with Mr Bishop, it was solely on account of her stately concentration. I knew I was forbidden even to make myself known to her, but as I say, my impetus had carried me across the street and in such a way that I nearly bumped into her upon reaching the pavement. She sidestepped heavily and lifted her near-sighted eyes. No, thank God, she did not recognize me. There was something heart-rending in the solemn expression of her pale sawdusty face. We had stopped short. With ridiculous presence of mind I brought out of my pocket the first thing my hand met with, and I said: 'I beg your pardon, but have you dropped this?'
'No,' she said, with an impersonal smile. She held it for a moment close to her eyes, 'no,' she repeated, and giving it back to me went on her way. I stood with a key in my hand, as if I had just picked it up off the pavement. It was the latchkey of Sebastian's flat, and with a queer pang I now realized that she had touched it with her innocent blind fingers….
9
Their relationship lasted six years. During that period Sebastian produced his two first novels: The Prismatic Bezel and Success. It took him some seven months to compose the first (April-October 1924) and twenty-two months to compose the second (July I925-April 1927). Between autumn 1927 and summer 1929 he wrote the three stories which later (1932) were republished together under the tide The Funny Mountain. In other words, Clare intimately witnessed the first three-fifths of his entire production (I skip the juvenilia – the Cambridge poems for instance – which he himself destroyed); and as in the intervals between the above-mentioned books Sebastian kept twisting and laying aside and re-twisting this or that imaginative scheme it may be safely assumed that during those six years he was continuously occupied. And Clare loved his occupation.
She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there and petted despite their amazing shapes. She had no special intention of being happy or of making Sebastian happy, nor had she the slightest misgivings as to what might come next; it was merely a matter of naturally accepting life with Sebastian because life without him was less imaginable than a tellurian's camping-tent on a mountain in the moon. Most probably, if she had borne him a child they would have slipped into marriage since that would have been the simplest way for all three; but that not being the case it did not enter their heads to submit to those white and wholesome formalities which very possibly both would have enjoyed had they given them necessary thought. There was nothing of your advanced prejudice-be-damned stuff about Sebastian. Well did he know that to flaunt one's contempt for a moral code was but smuggled smugness and prejudice turned inside out. He usually chose the easiest ethical path (just as he chose the thorniest aesthetic one) merely because it happened to be the shortest cut to his chosen object; he was far too lazy in everyday life (just as he was far too hardworking in his artistic life) to be bothered by problems set and solved by others.
Clare was twenty-two when she met Sebastian. She did not remember her father; her mother was dead too, and her stepfather had married again, so that the faint notion of home which that couple presented to her might be compared to the old sophism of changed handle and changed blade, though of course she could hardly expect to find and join the original parts – this side of Eternity at least. She lived alone in London, rather vaguely attending an art school and taking a course in Eastern languages, of all things. People liked her because she was quietly-attractive with her charming dim face and soft husky voice, somehow remaining in one's memory as if she were subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered: she came out well in one's mind, she was mnemogenic. Even her rather large and knuckly hands had a singular charm, and she was a good light silent dancer. But best of all she was one of those rare, very rare women who do not take the world for granted and who see everyday things not merely as familiar mirrors of their own feminity. She had imagination – the muscle of the soul – and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality. She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier. And finally she was blest with a keen sense of humour. No wonder she fitted into his life so well.
Already during the first season of their acquaintance they saw a great deal of each other; in the autumn she went to Paris and he visited her there more than once, I suspect. By then his first book was ready. She had learnt to type and the summer evenings of 1924 had been to her as many pages slipped into the slit and rolled out again alive with black and violet words. I should like to imagine her tapping the glistening keys to the sound of a warm shower rustling in the dark elms beyond the open window, with Sebastian's slow and serious voice (he did not merely dictate, said Miss Pratt – he officiated) coming and going across the room. He used to spend most of the day writing, but so laborious was his progress that there would hardly be more than a couple of fresh pages for her to type in the evening and even these had to be done over again, for Sebastian used to indulge in an orgy of corrections; and sometimes he would do what I daresay no author ever did – recopy the typed sheet in his own slanting un-English hand and then dictate it anew. His struggle with words was unusually painful and this for two reasons. One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He had no use for ready-made phrases because the things he wanted to say were of an exceptional build and he knew moreover that no real idea can be said to exist without the words made to measure. So that (to use a closer simile) the thought which only seemed naked was but pleading for the clothes it wore to become visible, while the words lurking afar were not empty shells as they seemed, but were only waiting for the thought they already concealed to set them aflame and in motion. At times he felt like a child given a farrago of wires and ordered to produce the wonder of light. And he did produce it; and sometimes he would not be conscious at all of the way he succeeded in doing so, and at other times he would be worrying the wires for hours in what seemed the most rational way – and achieve nothing. And Clare, who had not composed a single line of imaginative prose or poetry in her life, understood so well (and that was her private miracle) every detail of Sebastian's struggle, that the words she typed were to her not so much the conveyors of their natural sense, but the curves and gaps and zig-zags showing Sebastian's groping along a certain ideal line of expression.