When he spoke of distorting and beautifying mirrors, I couldn’t remember what we were talking about for the thought of all those times since adolescence when he had looked in mirrors and tried to make them beautifying and not distorting simply by the way he held his head. I wondered why he hadn’t grown a beard long enough to hide the spots; wouldn’t the hair grow there or was it because he hated deception? I had an idea that he was a man who really loved the truth, but there was that word love again, and it was only too obvious into how many desires his love of truth could be split. A compensation for the injury of his birth, the desire for power, the wish to be admired all the more because the poor haunted face would never cause physical desire. I had an enormous wish to touch it with my hand, to comfort it with words of love as permanent as the wound. It was like when I saw Maurice under the door. I wanted to pray: to offer up some inordinate sacrifice if only he could be healed, but now there was no sacrifice left for me to offer.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘leave the idea of God out of this. It’s just a question of your lover and your husband. Don’t confuse the thing with phantoms.’
‘But how do I decide—if there’s no such thing as love?’
‘You have to decide what will be the happiest in the long run.’
‘Do you believe in happiness?’
‘I don’t believe in any absolute.’
I thought the only happiness he ever gets is this: the idea that he can comfort, advise, help, the idea that he can be of use. It drives him every week on to the Common, to talk to people who move away, never asking questions, dropping his cards on the turf. How often does anybody really come as I have come today? I asked him. ‘Do you have many callers?’
‘No,’ he said. His love of truth was greater than his pride. He said, ‘You are the first—for a very long time.’
‘It’s been good to talk to you,’ I said. ‘You’ve cleared my mind quite a lot.’ It was the only comfort one could give him—to feed his illusion.
He said shyly, ‘If you could spare the time, we could really start at the beginning and go to the root of things. I mean, the philosophical arguments and the historical evidence.’
I suppose I must have made some evasive reply for he went on, ‘It’s really important. We mustn’t despise our enemies. They have a case.’
‘They have?’
‘It’s not a sound one, except superficially. It’s specious.’
He watched me with anxiety. I think he was wondering whether I was one of those who walked away. It seemed a little thing to ask when he said nervously, ‘An hour a week. It would help you a great deal,’ and I thought, haven’t I all of time now? I can read a book or go to a cinema, and I don’t read the words or remember the pictures. Myself and my own misery drum in my ear and fill my eyes. For a minute this afternoon I forgot them. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll come. It’s good of you to spare the time,’ I said, shovelling all the hope I could into his lap, praying to the God he was promising to cure me of, ‘Let me be of use to him.’
2 October 1945.
It was very hot today and it dripped with rain. So I went into the dark church at the corner of Park Road to sit down for a while. Henry was at home and I didn’t want to see him. I try to remember to be kind at breakfast, kind at lunch when he’s home, kind at dinner, and sometimes I forget and he’s kind back. Two people being kind to each other for a lifetime. When I came in and sat down and looked round I realized it was a Roman church, full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed. I thought I could believe in some kind of a God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic, to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return—stretching out of the vague into the concrete human life, like a powerful vapour moving among the chairs and walls. One day I too would become part of that vapour—I would escape myself for ever. And then I came into that dark church in Park Road and saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars—the hideous plaster statues with their complacent faces, and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed for ever. I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to preserve any of it for eternity, and suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard’s—about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year’s vermin. It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man’s body from a falling wall. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: Henry told me. That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
Richard’s right, I thought, we have invented the resurrection of the body because we do need our own bodies, and immediately I admitted that he was right and that this was a fairy-tale we tell each other for comfort, I no longer felt any hate of those statues. They were like bad coloured pictures in Hans Andersen: they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, somebody who wasn’t so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness. I walked up the church, looking at them one after the other: in front of the worst of all—I don’t know who she was—a middle-aged man was praying. He had put his bowler hat beside him and in the bowler hat, wrapped in newspaper, were some sticks of celery.
And of course on the altar there was a body too—such a familiar body, more familiar than Maurice’s, that it had never struck me before as a body with all the parts of a body, even the parts the loin-cloth concealed. I remembered one in a Spanish church I had visited with Henry, where the blood ran down in scarlet paint from the eyes and the hands. It had sickened me. Henry wanted me to admire the twelfth-century pillars, but I was sick and I wanted to get out into the open air. I thought, these people love cruelty. A vapour couldn’t shock you with blood and cries.
When I came out into the plaza I said to Henry, ‘I can’t bear all these painted wounds.’ Henry was very reasonable—he’s always reasonable. He said, ‘Of course it’s a very materialistic faith. A lot of magic …’
‘Is magic materialistic?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Eye of newt and toe of frog, finger of birth-strangled babe. You can’t have anything more materialistic than that. In the Mass they still believe in transubstantiation.’
I knew all about that, but I had an idea that it had more or less died out at the Reformation, except for the poor of course. Henry put me right (how often has Henry rearranged my muddled thoughts). ‘Materialism isn’t only an attitude for the poor,’ he said. ‘Some of the finest brains have been materialist, Pascal, Newman. So subtle in some directions: so crudely superstitious in others. One day we may know why: it may be a glandular deficiency.’
So today I looked at that material body on that material cross, and I wondered, how could the world have nailed a vapour there? A vapour of course felt no pain and no pl
easure. It was only my superstition that imagined it could answer my prayers. Dear God, I had said. I should have said, Dear Vapour. I said I hate you, but can one hate a vapour? I could hate that figure on the Cross with its claim to my gratitude—‘I’ve suffered this for you’, but a vapour … And yet Richard believed in less even than a vapour. He hated a fable, he fought against a fable, he took a fable seriously. I couldn’t hate Hansel and Gretel, I couldn’t hate their sugar house as he hated the legend of heaven. When I was a child I could hate the wicked queen in Snow White, but Richard didn’t hate his fairy-tale Devil. The Devil didn’t exist and God didn’t exist, but all his hatred was for the good fairy-tale, not for the wicked one. Why? I looked up at that over-familiar body, stretched in imaginary pain, the head drooping like a man asleep. I thought, sometimes I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too? Oh God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?
Am I a materialist after all, I wondered? Have I some glandular deficiency that I am so uninterested in the really important unsuperstitious things and causes—like the Charity Commission and the index of living and better calories for the working class? Am I a materialist because I believe in the independent existence of that man with the bowler, the metal of the cross, these hands I can’t pray with? Suppose God did exist, suppose he was a body like that, what’s wrong in believing that his body existed as much as mine? Could anybody love him or hate him if he hadn’t got a body? I can’t love a vapour that was Maurice. That’s coarse, that’s beastly, that’s materialist, I know, but why shouldn’t I be beastly and coarse and materialist. I walked out of the church in a flaming rage, and in defiance of Henry and all the reasonable and the detached I did what I had seen people do in Spanish churches: I dipped my finger in the so-called holy water and made a kind of cross on my forehead.
VI
10 January 1946.
I couldn’t stand the house tonight, so I walked out into the rain. I remembered the time when I had stuck my nails into my palms, and I didn’t know it but You moved in the pain. I said, ‘Let him be alive,’ not believing in You, and my disbelief made no difference to You. You took it into Your love and accepted it like an offering, and tonight the rain soaked through my coat and my clothes and into my skin, and I shivered with the cold, and it was for the first time as though I nearly loved You. I walked under Your windows in the rain and I wanted to wait under them all night only to show that after all I might learn to love and I wasn’t afraid of the desert any longer because You were there. I came back into the house and there was Maurice with Henry. It was the second time You had given him back: the first time I had hated You for it and You’d taken my hate like You’d taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh—as I have sometimes laughed at Maurice, saying, ‘Do you remember how stupid we were … ?’
VII
18 January 1946.
I was having lunch with Maurice for the first time for two years—I had telephoned and asked him to meet me—and my bus got held up in the traffic at Stockwell and I was ten minutes late. I felt the fear for a moment I always felt in the old days, that something would happen to spoil the day, that he would be angry with me. But I had no desire to get in first now with my anger. Like a lot of other things the capacity for anger seems dead in me. I wanted to see him and ask him about Henry. Henry’s been odd lately. It was strange of him to go out and drink in a pub with Maurice. Henry only drinks at home or at his club. I thought he might have talked to Maurice. Strange if he’s worried about me. There’s never been less cause for worry since we married first. But when I was with Maurice there didn’t seem any other reason to be with him except to be with him. I found out nothing about Henry. Every now and then he tried to hurt me and he succeeded because he was really hurting himself, and I can’t bear to watch him hurting himself.
Have I broken that old promise, lunching with Maurice? A year ago I would have thought so, but I don’t think so now. I was very literal in those days because I was afraid, because I didn’t know what it was all about, because I had no trust in love. We lunched at Rules and I was happy just being with him. Only for a little I was unhappy, saying good-bye above the grating I thought he was going to kiss me again, and I longed for it, and then a fit of coughing took me and the moment passed. I knew, as he walked away, he was thinking all kinds of untrue things and he was hurt by them, and I was hurt because he was hurt.
I wanted to cry unobserved, and I went to the National Portrait Gallery, but it was students’ day—there were too many people, so I went back to Maiden Lane and into the church that’s always too dark to look at your neighbour. I sat there. It was quite empty except for me and for a little man who came in and prayed quietly in a pew behind. I remembered the first time I had been in one of those churches and how I had hated it. I didn’t pray. I had prayed once too often. I said to God, as I might have said to my father, if I could ever have remembered having one, Dear God, I’m tired.
3 February 1946.
Today I saw Maurice but he didn’t see me. He was on his way to the Pontefract Arms, and I trailed behind him. I had spent an hour in Cedar Road—a long dragging hour trying to follow poor Richard’s arguments and only getting from them a sense of inverted belief. Could anyone be so serious, so argumentative about a legend? When I understood anything at all, it was some strange fact I didn’t know that hardly seemed to me to help his case. Like the evidence that there had been a man called Christ. I came out feeling tired and hopeless. I had gone to him to rid me of a superstition, but every time I went his fanaticism fixed the superstition deeper. I was helping him, but he wasn’t helping me. Or was he? For an hour I had hardly thought of Maurice, but then suddenly there he was, crossing the end of the street.
I followed him all the way, keeping him in sight. So many times we had been together to the Pontefract Arms. I knew which bar he’d go to, what he’d order. Should I go in after him, I wondered, and order mine and see him turn and everything would start over again? The mornings would be full of hope because I could telephone him as soon as Henry left, and there would be evenings to look forward to when Henry warned me that he would be home late. And perhaps now I would leave Henry. I’d done my best. I had no money to bring Maurice and his books brought in little more than enough to keep himself, but on typing alone, with me to help, we should save fifty pounds a year. I don’t fear poverty. Sometimes it’s easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you’ve made.
I stood at the door and watched him go up to the bar. If he turns round and sees me, I told God, I’ll go in, but he didn’t turn round. I began to walk home, but I couldn’t keep him out of my mind. For nearly two years we had been strangers. I hadn’t known what he was doing at any particular hour of the day, but now he was a stranger no longer because I knew as in the old days where he was. He would have one more beer and then he would go back to the familiar room to write. The habits of his day were still the same and I loved them as one loves an old coat. I felt protected by his habits. I never want strangeness.
And I thought, how happy I can make him and how easily. I longed again to see him laugh with happiness. Henry was out. He had had a lunch engagement after the office, and he had telephoned to say that he wouldn’t be in till seven. I would wait till half past six and then I would telephone Maurice. I would say, I am coming for tonight and all the other nights. I’m tired of being without you. I would pack the large blue suitcase and the small brown one. I would take enough clothes for a month’s holiday. Henry was civilized and by the end of a month the legal aspects would have been settled, the immediate bitterness would be over, and anything else I needed from the house could be fetched at leisure. There wouldn’t be much bitterness: it wasn’t as though we were still lovers. Marriage had become friendship, and the friendship after a little could go on the same as before.
Suddenly I felt free and happy. I’m not going to worry about you any more, I said to God as
I walked across the Common, whether you exist or whether you don’t exist, whether you gave Maurice a second chance or whether I imagined everything. Perhaps this is the second chance I asked for him. I’m going to make him happy, that’s my second vow, God, and stop me if you can, stop me if you can.
I went upstairs to my room and I began to write to Henry. Darling Henry, I wrote, but that sounded hypocritical. Dearest was a lie, and so it had to be like an acquaintance, ‘Dear Henry.’ So, ‘Dear Henry,’ I wrote, ‘I’m afraid this will be rather a shock to you, but for the last five years I’ve been in love with Maurice Bendrix. For two years nearly we haven’t seen each other or written but it doesn’t work. I can’t live happily without him, so I’ve gone away. I know I haven’t been much of a wife for a long time, and I haven’t been a mistress at all since June 1944, so everybody’s the worse off all round. I thought once I could just have this love affair and it would peter slowly and contentedly out, but it hasn’t worked that way. I love Maurice more than I did in 1939. I’ve been childish, I suppose, but now I realize that sooner or later one has to choose or one makes a mess in all directions. Good-bye. God bless you.’ I crossed out ‘God bless you’ very deeply so that it couldn’t be read. It sounded smug, and anyway Henry doesn’t believe in God. Then I wanted to put Love, but the word sounded unsuitable although I knew it was true. I do love Henry in my shabby way.
I put the letter in an envelope and marked it Very Personal. I thought that would warn Henry not to open it in anybody’s presence—for he might bring home a friend, and I didn’t want his pride hurt. I pulled out the suitcase and began to pack and then I suddenly thought, where did I put the letter? I found it at once, but then I thought, suppose in my hurry I forget to put it in the hall and Henry waits and waits for me to come home. So I carried it downstairs to put it in the hall. My packing was nearly done—only an evening dress to fold, and Henry wasn’t due for another half an hour.