And now, though she should have thanked him for his kindness, she did not turn towards this man standing hesitating in the hall, but allowed the young woman to lead her on, bumping their way, burrowing down passages the villa or cottage had failed to suggest to a common voyeuse. Until settling into a room of apparent importance and their evident goal, the woman or girl was helping her out of clothes which clung like refractory cobwebs, and into the bed which she had warmed with a copper warmer conveniently standing amongst a hearthful of glowing pine-knots.
Joan was acutely conscious of the embossed pattern of fruit and flowers on the copper warmer which was first slid between the sheets waiting to receive her. Language was what she could not sort out: perhaps it was the language of silence as the young woman turned her noble head towards her, the invited guest holding in her whiter, plumper fingers a stronger terracotta hand, but from which, in spite of its warmth, she experienced no response, little enough illumination from the white smile in a terracotta face.
Mrs Golson roused herself from a smell of singed or sun-bleached sheets.
On the sheet which she had before her on the table she saw that she had written: Dearest Eadie—comma.
She giggled slightly, remembering how on one occasion Eadie had given herself a moustache, dashed off with burnt cork, and they had dressed up — or Eadie had — and ordered drinks in a hotel winter garden, and joined in with the guests at a formal dinner dance, Eadie in the Judge’s check trousers, Joan in her pale blue charmeuse, everybody staring at them.
Oh dear, write to poor old Eadie Twyborn, tell her about the couple at the villa — if that would ever be possible …
7 feb. 1914
A day which should have been idyllic grew increasingly black, ending in storms, after a real Visitation. Could not believe as this sporty motor surged up our hill that it was Eadie’s pal J.G. sitting in the back seat. But crikey, it was! Angelos tells me not to worry. I don’t, of course. But why should I be persecuted? Eadie has sent her. A. says no, Eadie couldn’t have, it’s nothing but coincidence. Angelos is always right. Or not always. Only when he isn’t wrong.
But just when I’d begun to order my life, perhaps even make it into something believable, this emissary comes to smash it to pieces. Nothing so brutal as a soft, silly woman.
Everything, I now see, has been leading up to this act of aggression. Gentle perfection is never allowed to last for long. The more laboriously it has been built up, the more painfully it is brought down.
Text for every day to come: I must not dwell on Joan Golson’s arrival on the scene.
Had hardly blundered back to consciousness this morning when A. reminded me that it is my birthday. I hadn’t forgotten, but it’s pleasant to be reminded. He brought out presents: the fan (spangled gauze — slats in mother o’ pearl) and a shawl embroidered with pomegranates. Both extremely pretty. But what I loved best was his less material present, which we shared as never before. Why am I besotted on this elderly, dotty, in many ways tiresome Greek? I can only think it’s because we have been made for each other, that our minds as well as our bodies fit, every bump to every cranny, and quirk to quirk. If I hate him at times it’s because I hate myself. If I love him more deeply than I love E. it’s because I know this other creature too well, and cannot rely entirely on him or her.
It was one of the hyacinth mornings, a sea breeze blowing not only its own salt but all the early perfumes of the garden in at the window. When Angelos had left me and started sponging himself I sat by the window in my pomegranate shawl fanning myself with the spangled fan. Delicious fluctuations on bare skin. Looked at myself in the glass and decided I would pass. As I do! Or at any rate, on the days when I don’t hate — when I can forgive myself for being me. So that I’m not purely the narcissist I’m sometimes accused of being — by Angelos on his worst days — and as I am, undoubtedly, on mine.
He comes back into the room rejuvenated by friction, bald head shining, the still black fringes of hair standing out like the spines of a sea-urchin as he rubs himself with his towel. For a man in his sixties his legs are remarkable: muscular, firmly planted on the ground, the old man’s usual ganglion of veins scarcely visible in A.’s case.
He said, ‘I was wrong to give you these things. You have dressed yourself up like a whore, sitting at the open window by morning light.’ We both laughed. His teeth are still brilliant. Mine will crumble before I’m even half his age. I shall hope to crumble, not teeth alone, but entirely. God spare me a gummy old age!
Angelos holding his head on one side as he continues drying the back of his neck, eyeing me with bright, predatory eye, light playing on the polished curve of the ivory beak, a smile coming and going in response to the voluptuous pleasure of friction … We might have begun again, devastating, perhaps even destroying each other in the course of one, silken morning if we hadn’t heard Joséphine arriving.
When I am clothed and more or less in my right mind I go out to say the right thing. She has brought me the prettiest bunch of flowers—n’y a que celles qu’on trouve aux champs. There are wild candytuft, marigold, anemones, a kind of wilting celandine — all tightly bound together by stalks of grass, and warm from the hand of Joséphine: this solid, russet girl, glowing from her walk up the hill from the village on one of the more benign mornings of early spring on this favoured coast. Joséphine looks good, smells good (that smell of innocent soap, unconscious virtue, and honest exertion) enfin Joséphine is unmistakably GOOD. How unforced and enviable! This morning she wishes me health and many years of life. Her smiles are genuinely for my future. Yet Joséphine has been sad lately: at times all sighs and sniffs — her sister who is marrying away — the widowed mother who may move back to her native Toulon. Is Joséphine about to leave us? All the symptoms would suggest that. But not today. Joséphine won’t dare give notice on a birthday.
Angelos said she will. He says a Greek lives by his heart, a Frenchman — and how much more a Frenchwoman—according to reason. ‘Joséphine has given you this charming bouquet to soften the blow it is reasonable for her to deal us. You do not want to believe this because Anglo-Saxons are by nature — most of you — Christian Science. You cultivate your Science to its utmost — all of you, all — the moment a slave threatens to defect.’
I wouldn’t admit that he’s right, but he is. Joséphine will defect this evening.
The ruddy skin of this clumsy but touching girl is peppered with little moles which suggest that somebody once let off a shotgun at her. She even smells of gunpowder after the walk up from the village.
When she first came to us I told A., and because he didn’t think of it himself he said, nonsense, she only needed a bath. I told him, ‘If I found myself alone in the house with Joséphine I might feel inclined to rape her.’ He said I was trying to make myself sound experienced, but that he was pretty sure I had never slept with a woman. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I know you haven’t, my dear Eudoxia, because if you had you wouldn’t be blushing now — like an embarrassed schoolboy who hasn’t been near the brothel he claims to have visited.’