She went to the office, after leaving the child at his nursery school, feeling as if cold had got into her bones, into her backbone. She was shivering slightly. Yet it was a warm day. For some days she had not been in connection with Patricia, she had been too absorbed in her happiness. Now she easily came close to the older woman again. Patricia had been married for eleven years; and her husband had left her for a younger woman. Her attitude towards men was a gallant, good-natured, wisecracking cynicism. This jarred on Ella; it was something foreign to her. Patricia was in her fifties, lived alone, and had a grownup daughter. She was, Ella knew, a courageous woman. But Ella did not like to think too closely about Patricia; to identify with her, even in sympathy, meant she might be cutting off some possibility for herself. Or so she felt. Today Patricia made some dry comment about a male colleague who was separating from his wife, and Ella snapped at her. Later she came back into the room, and apologised, for Patricia was hurt. Ella always felt at a disadvantage with the older woman. She did not care for her as much as she knew Patricia did for her. She knew she was some sort of symbol for Patricia, a symbol perhaps of her own youth? (But Ella would not think about that, it was dangerous.) Now she made a point of staying with Patricia and talking and making jokes, and saw, with dismay, tears in her employer’s eyes. She saw, very sharply, a plump, kindly, smart, middle-aged woman, with clothes from the fashion magazines that were like a uniform, and her gallant mop of tinted greying curls; and her eyes—hard for her work, and soft for Ella. While she was with Patricia, she was telephoned by the editor of one of the magazines that had published a story of hers. He asked if she were free to lunch. She said she was, listening in her mind to the word free. For the last ten days she had not felt free. Now she felt, not free, but disconnected, or as if she floated on someone else’s will—Paul’s. This editor had wanted to sleep with her, and Ella had rejected him. Now she thought that very likely she would sleep with him. Why not? What difference did it all make? This editor was an intelligent, attractive man, but the idea of his touching her repelled her. He had not one spark of that instinctive warmth for a woman, liking for a woman, which was what she felt in Paul. And that was why she would sleep with him; she could not possibly have let a man touch her now, whom she found attractive. But it seemed Paul did not care one way or the other; he made jokes about the “man she had taken home from the party,” almost as if he liked her for it. Very well, then; very well—if that’s what he wanted, she didn’t care at all. And she took herself off to lunch, carefully made-up, in a mood of sick defiance of the whole world.
The lunch was as usual—expensive; and she liked good food. He was amusing; and she liked his talk. She was eased into her usual intellectual rapport with him, and meanwhile watched him and thought it was inconceivable that she could make love with him. Yet why not? She liked him, didn’t she? Well then? And love? But love was a mirage, and the property of the women’s magazines; one certainly couldn’t use the word love in connection with a man who didn’t care whether one slept with other men or not. But if I’m going to sleep with this man, I’d better do something about it. She did not know how to; she had rejected him so often he took the rejection for granted. When lunch was over, and they were on the pavement, Ella was suddenly released: what nonsense, of course she wasn’t going to sleep with him, now she would go back to the office and that would be that. Then she saw a couple of prostitutes in a doorway, and she remembered her picture of Paul that morning; and when the editor said: “Ella, I do so wish that…” she interrupted with a smile and said: “Then take me home. No, to your place, not to mine.” For she could not have borne to have any man but Paul in her own bed now. This man was married, and he took her to his bachelor flat. His home was in the country, he was careful to keep his wife and children there, and he used this flat for adventures like these. All the time she was naked with this man, Ella was thinking of Paul. He must be mad. What am I doing with a madman? He really imagines I could sleep with another man when I’m with him? He can’t possibly believe it. Meanwhile, she was being as nice as she could be to this intelligent comrade of her intellectual lunches. He was having difficulties, and Ella knew this was because she did not really want him, and so it was her fault, though he was blaming himself. And so she set herself to please, thinking there was no reason for him to feel bad, simply because she was committing the crime of sleeping with a man she did not care tuppence for…and when it was all over, she simply discounted the whole incident. It had meant nothing at all. She was left, however, vulnerable, quivering with the need to cry, and desperately unhappy. She was yearning, in fact, towards Paul. Who rang her next day to say that he couldn’t come that night either. And now Ella’s need for Paul was so great that she told herself it didn’t matter in the slightest, of course he had to work, or to go home to his children.
The next evening they met full of defences on either side. A few minutes later they had all vanished, and they were together again. Some time that night he remarked: “Odd isn’t it, it really is true that if you love a woman sleeping with another woman means nothing.” At the time she did not hear this—somewhere in her a mechanism had started to work which would prevent her hearing him when he made remarks that might make her unhappy. But she heard it next day, the words suddenly came back into her mind and she listened to them. So during those two nights he had been experimenting with someone else, and had had the same experience as she. So now she was full of confidence again, and of trust in him. Then he began to question her about what she had done during those two days. She said she had had lunch with an editor who had published one of her stories. “I’ve read one of your stories. It was rather good.” He said this with pain, as if he had rather the story were bad. “Well, why shouldn’t it be good?” she asked. “I suppose that was your husband, George?” “Partly, not altogether.” “And this editor?” For a moment she thought of saying: “I’ve had the same experience you’ve had.” Then she thought: If he’s capable of being upset by things that never happened, what would he say if I told him I did sleep with that man? Though I didn’t, it didn’t count, it was not the same thing at all.
Afterwards Ella judged that their “being together” (she never used the word affair) started from that moment—when they had both tested their responses to other people and found that what they felt for each other made other people irrelevant. That was the only time she was to be unfaithful to Paul, though she did not feel it mattered. Yet she was miserable she had done it because it became a sort of crystallisation of all his later accusations of her. After that he came to her nearly every night, and when he could not come she knew it was not because he did not want to. He would come in late, because of his work, and because of the child. He helped her with her letters from “Mrs Brown,” and this was a very great pleasure to her, working together over these people for whom she could sometimes do something.
She did not think of his wife at all. At least, not at the beginning.
Her only worry, at the beginning, was Michael. The little boy had loved his own father, now married again and living in America. It was natural for the child to turn with affection to this new man. But Paul would stiffen when Michael put his arms around him, or when he rushed at him in welcome. Ella watched how he instinctively stiffened, half-laughed, and then his mind (the mind of the soul-doctor, considering how best to deal with the situation) started to work. He would gently put down Michael’s arms, and talk to him gently, as if he were grown-up. And Michael responded. It hurt Ella to see how the little boy, denied this masculine affection, would respond by being grownup, serious, answering serious questions. A spontaneity of affection had been cut off in him. He kept it for her, warm and responsive in touch and in speech, but for Paul, for the men’s world, he had a responsible, calm, thoughtful response. Sometimes Ella panicked a little: I’m doing Michael harm, he is going to be harmed. He’ll never again have a natural warm response to a man. And then she would think: But I don’t really believe it. It must be goo
d for him that I’m happy, it must be good for him that I’m a real woman at last. And so Ella did not worry for long, her instincts told her not to. She let herself go into Paul’s love for her, and did not think. Whenever she found herself looking at this relationship from the outside, as other people might see it, she felt frightened and cynical. So she did not. She lived from day to day, and did not look ahead.
Five years.
If I were to write this novel, the main theme, or motif, would be buried, at first, and only slowly take over. The motif of Paul’s wife—the third. At first Ella does not think about her. Then she has to make a conscious effort not to think about her. This is when she knows her attitude towards this unknown woman is despicable: she feels triumph over her, pleasure that she has taken Paul from her. When Ella first becomes conscious of this emotion she is so appalled and ashamed that she buries it, fast. Yet the shadow of the third grows again, and it becomes impossible for Ella not to think. She thinks a great deal about the invisible woman to whom Paul returns (and to whom he will always return), and it is now not out of triumph, but envy. She envies her. She slowly, involuntarily, builds up a picture in her mind of a serene, calm, unjealous, unenvious, undemanding woman, full of resources of happiness inside herself, self-sufficient, yet always ready to give happiness when it is asked for. It occurs to Ella (but much later, about three years on) that this is a remarkable image to have developed, since it does not correspond to anything at all Paul says about his wife. So where does the picture come from? Slowly Ella understands that this is what she would like to be herself, this imagined woman is her own shadow, everything she is not. Because by now she knows, and is frightened of, her utter dependence on Paul. Every fibre of herself is woven with him, and she cannot imagine living without him. The mere idea of being without him causes a black cold fear to enclose her, so she does not think of it. And she is clinging, so she comes to realise, to this image of the other woman, the third, as a sort of safety or protection for herself.
The second motif is in fact part of the first, though this would not be apparent until the end of the novel—Paul’s jealousy. The jealousy increases, and is linked with the rhythm of his slow withdrawal. He accuses her, half-laughing, half-serious, of sleeping with other men. In a café he accuses her of making eyes at a man she has not even noticed. To begin with, she laughs at him. Later she grows bitter, but always suppresses bitterness, it is too dangerous. Then, as she comes to understand the image she has created of the other serene, etc., woman, she wonders about Paul’s jealousy, and comes to think—not from bitterness, but to understand it, what it really means. It occurs to her that Paul’s shadow, his imagined third, is a self-hating rake, free, casual, heartless. (This is the role he sometimes plays, self-mockingly, with her.) So what it means is, that in coming together with Ella, in a serious relationship, the rake in himself has been banished, pushed aside, and now stands in the wings of his personality, temporarily unused, waiting to return. And Ella now sees, side by side with the wise, serene, calm woman, her shadow, the shape of this compulsive self-hating womaniser. These two discordant figures move side by side, keeping pace with Ella and Paul. And there comes a moment (but right at the end of the novel, its culmination) when Ella thinks: Paul’s shadow-figure, the man he sees everywhere, even in a man I haven’t even noticed, is this almost musical-comedy libertine. So that means that Paul with me is using his “positive” self. (Julia’s phrase.) With me he is good. But I have as a shadow a good woman, grown-up and strong and un-asking. Which means that I am using with him my “negative” self. So this bitterness I feel growing in me, against him, is a mockery of the truth. In fact, he’s better than I am, in this relationship. These invisible figures that keep us company all the time prove it.
Subsidiary motifs. Her novel. He asks what she is writing and she tells him. Reluctantly, because his voice is always full of distrust when he mentions her writing. She says: “It’s a novel about suicide.”
“And what do you know about suicide?”
“Nothing, I’m just writing it.” (To Julia she makes bitter jokes about Jane Austen hiding her novels under the blotting paper when people come into the room; quotes Stendhal’s dictum that any woman under fifty who writes, should do so under a pseudonym.)
During the next few days he tells her stories about his patients who are suicidal. It takes her a long time to understand he is doing this because he thinks she is too naïe and ignorant to write about suicide. (And she even agrees with him.) He is instructing her. She begins to hide her work from him. She says she doesn’t care about “being a writer, she just wants to write the book, to see what will happen.” This makes no sense to him, it seems, and soon he begins to complain that she is using his professional knowledge to get facts for the novel.
The motif of Julia. Paul dislikes Ella’s relationship with Julia. He sees it as a pact against him, and makes professional jokes about the Lesbian aspects of this friendship. At which Ella says that in that case, his friendships with men are homosexual? But he says she has no sense of humour. At first Ella’s instinct is to sacrifice Julia for Paul; but later their friendship does change, it becomes critical of Paul. The conversations between the two women are sophisticated, full of critical insight, implicitly critical of men. Yet Ella does not feel this is disloyalty to Paul, because these conversations come from a different world; the world of sophisticated insight has nothing to do with her feeling for Paul.
The motif of Ella’s maternal love for Michael. She is always fighting to get Paul to be a father to the child and always failing. And Paul says: “You’ll come to be glad yet, you’ll see I was right.” Which can only mean: When I’ve left you, you’ll be glad I didn’t form close ties with your son. And so Ella chooses not to hear it.
The motif of Paul’s attitude to his profession. He is split on this. He takes his work for his patients seriously, but makes fun of the jargon he uses. He will tell a story about a patient, full of subtlety and depth, but using the language of literature and of emotion. Then he will judge the same anecdote in psychoanalytical terms, giving it a different dimension. And then, five minutes later, he will be making the most intelligent and ironical fun of the terms he has just used as yardsticks to judge the literary standards, the emotional truths. And at each moment, in each personality—literary, psychoanalytical, the man who distrusts all systems of thought that consider themselves final—he will be serious and expect Ella to accept him, fully for that moment; and he resents it when she attempts to link these personalities in him.
Their life together becomes full of phrases, and symbols. “Mrs Brown” means his patients and her women who ask for help.
“Your literary lunches,” is his phrase for her infidelities, used sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously.
“Your treatise on suicide.” Her novel, his attitude to it.
And another phrase which becomes more and more important, though when he uses it first she does not understand how deep an attitude in him it reflects. “We are both boulder-pushers.” This is his phrase for what he sees as his own failure. His fight to get out of his poor background, to win scholarships, to get the highest medical degrees, came out of an ambition to be a creative scientist. But he knows now he will never be this original scientist. And this defect has been partly caused by what is best in him, his abiding, tireless compassion for the poor, the ignorant, the sick. He has always, at a point when he should have chosen the library or the laboratory, chosen the weak instead. He will never now be a discoverer or a blazer of new paths. He has become a man who fights a middle-class, reactionary medical superintendent who wants to keep his wards locked and his patients in straitjackets. “You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frighten
ed of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents, into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. We push the boulder. I sometimes wish I had died before I got this job I wanted so much—I thought of it as something creative. How do I spend my time? Telling Dr Shackerly, a frightened little man from Birmingham who bullies his wife because he doesn’t know how to love a woman, that he must open the doors of his hospital, that he must not keep poor sick people shut in a cell lined with buttoned white leather in the dark, and that straitjackets are stupid. That is how I spend my days. And treating illness that is caused by a society so stupid that…And you, Ella. You tell the wives of workmen who are all just as good as their masters to use the styles and furnishings made fashionable by businessmen who use snobbery to make money. And you tell poor women who are slaves of everyone’s stupidity to go out and join a social club or to take up a healthful hobby of some kind, to take their minds off the fact they are unloved. And if the healthful hobby doesn’t work, and why should it, they end up in my Out-patients…I wish I had died, Ella. I wish I had died. No, of course you don’t understand that, I can see from your face you don’t…”