Written on the Body

I dwelt on that day when I had found Louise in the rain. She looked like Puck sprung from the mist. Her hair was shining with bright drops of rain, the rain ran down her breasts, their outline clear through her wet muslin dress.

  ‘It was Emma, Lady Hamilton, who gave me the idea,’ said Louise, stealing my thoughts. ‘She used to wet her dress before she went out. It was very provocative but it worked on Nelson.’

  Not Nelson again.

  Yes, that day. I saw her from my bedroom window and rushed out. It was an act of kindness on my part but a very delightful one. It was I who had telephoned her the following day. She very kindly invited me to lunch. All that I could follow, what I couldn’t follow was the spring of her motive. I don’t lack self-confidence but I’m not beautiful, that is a word reserved for very few people, people such as Louise herself. I told her this.

  ‘You can’t see what I can see.’ She stroked my face. ‘You are a pool of clear water where the light plays.’

  There was a hammering at the door. We both jumped.

  ‘It must be Jacqueline,’ said Louise. ‘I thought she’d be back when it got dark.’

  ‘She’s not a vampire.’

  The hammering stopped then a key was inserted carefully into the lock. Had Jacqueline been checking to see if anyone was home? I heard her come in and go into the bedroom. Then she opened the sitting room door. She saw Louise and burst into tears.

  ‘Jacqueline, why did you steal my stuff?’

  ‘I hate you.’

  I tried to persuade her to sit down and have a drink but as soon as she’d taken the glass she threw it at Louise. It missed and shattered on the wall behind. She leapt across the room and took one of the sharpest largest pieces and made for Louise’s face. I grabbed Jacqueline’s wrist and twisted it back against her arm. She cried out and dropped the glass.

  ‘Out,’ I said, still holding her. ‘Give me the keys and get out.’ It was as if I’d never cared for her at all. I wanted to wipe her away. I wanted to blot out her blazing stupid face. She didn’t deserve this, in a corner of my mind I knew it was my weakness not hers that had brought us to this shameful day. I should have smoothed things down, parried, instead I slapped her across the face and tore my keys from her pocket.

  ‘That was for the bathroom,’ I said as she felt her bleeding mouth. Jacqueline stumbled towards the door and spat in my face. I took her by the collar and frog-marched her to her car. She skidded away without her lights on.

  I stood watching her go, hands limp at my sides. I groaned and sat on the low wall beside my flat. The air was cool and calming. Why had I hit her? I’d always prided myself on being the superior partner, the intelligent sensitive one who rated good manners and practised them. Now I’d shown myself to be a cheap thug in a scrap. She’d angered me and I’d responded by thumping her. How many times does that turn up in the courts? How many times have I curled my lip at other people’s violence?

  I put my head in my hands and cried. This ugliness was my doing. Another failed relationship, another hurt human being. When was I going to stop? I pulled my knuckles along the rough brick. There’s always an excuse, a good reason for behaving as we do. I couldn’t think of a good reason.

  ‘All right,’ I said to myself. ‘This is your last chance. If you’re worth anything show it now. Be worth Louise.’

  I went back inside. Louise was sitting very still looking at the glass between her hands as though it were a crystal ball.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t hit me.’ She turned to me, her full lips in a long straight line. ‘If you ever do hit me I shall leave you.’

  My stomach contracted. I wanted to defend myself but I couldn’t start to say anything. I didn’t trust my voice.

  Louise got up and went to the bathroom. I didn’t warn her. I heard her open the door and draw in her breath sudden and sharp. She came back and held out her hand. We spent the rest of the night cleaning.

  The interesting thing about a knot is its formal complexity. Even the simplest pedigree knot, the trefoil, with its three roughly symmetrical lobes, has mathematical as well as artistic beauty. For the religious, King Solomon’s knot is said to embody the essence of all knowledge. For carpet makers and cloth weavers all over the world, the challenge of the knot lies in the rules of its surprises. Knots can change but they must be well-behaved. An informal knot is a messy knot.

  Louise and I were held by a single loop of love. The cord passing round our bodies had no sharp twists or sinister turns. Our wrists were not tied and there was no noose about our necks. In Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a favourite sport was to fasten two fighters together with a strong rope and let them beat each other to death. Often it was death because the loser couldn’t back off and the victor rarely spared him. The victor kept the rope and tied a knot in it. He had only to swing it through the streets to terrify money from passers-by.

  I don’t want to be your sport nor you to be mine. I don’t want to punch you for the pleasure of it, tangling the clear lines that bind us, forcing you to your knees, dragging you up again. The public face of a life in chaos. I want the hoop around our hearts to be a guide not a terror. I don’t want to pull you tighter than you can bear. I don’t want the lines to slacken either, the thread paying out over the side, enough rope to hang ourselves.

  I was sitting in the library writing this to Louise, looking at a facsimile of an illuminated manuscript, the first letter a huge L. The L woven into shapes of birds and angels that slid between the pen lines. The letter was a maze. On the outside, at the top of the L, stood a pilgrim in hat and habit. At the heart of the letter, which had been formed to make a rectangle out of the double of itself, was the Lamb of God. How would the pilgrim try through the maze, the maze so simple to angels and birds? I tried to fathom the path for a long time but I was caught at dead ends by beaming serpents. I gave up and shut the book, forgetting that the first word had been Love.

  In the weeks that followed Louise and I were together as much as we could be. She was careful with Elgin, I was careful with both of them. The carefulness was wearing us out.

  One night, after a seafood lasagne and a bottle of champagne we made love so vigorously that the Lady’s Occasional was driven across the floor by the turbine of our lust. We began by the window and ended by the door. It’s well-known that molluscs are aphrodisiac, Casanova ate his mussels raw before pleasuring a lady but then he also believed in the stimulating powers of hot chocolate.

  Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb, signing on the body body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut.

  Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

  We tried to be quiet for Elgin’s sake. He had arranged to be out but Louise thought he was at home. In silence and in darkness we loved each other and as I traced her bones with my palm I wondered what time would do to skin that was so new to me. Could I ever feel any less for this body? Why does ardour pass? Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

  Elgin was at breakfast the following morning. This was a shock. He was as pale as his shirt. Louise slid into
her place at the foot of the long table. I took up a neutral position about half way. I buttered a slice of toast and bit. The noise vibrated the table. Elgin winced.

  ‘Do you have to make so much noise?’

  ‘Sorry Elgin,’ I said, spattering the cloth with crumbs.

  Louise passed me the teapot and smiled.

  ‘What are you so happy about?’ said Elgin. ‘You didn’t get any sleep either.’

  ‘You told me you were away until today,’ said Louise quietly.

  ‘I came home. It’s my house. I paid for it.’

  ‘It’s our house and I told you we’d be here last night.’

  ‘I might as well have slept in a brothel.’

  ‘I thought that’s what you were doing,’ said Louise.

  Elgin got up and threw his napkin on the table. ‘I’m exhausted but I’m going to work. Lives depend on my work and because of you I shall not be at my best today. You might think of yourself as a murderer.’

  ‘I might but I shan’t,’ said Louise.

  We heard Elgin clatter his mountain bike out of the hall. Through the basement window I saw him strap on his pink helmet. He liked cycling, he thought it was good for his heart.

  Louise was lost in thought. I drank two cups of tea, washed up and was thinking of going home when she put her arms around me from behind and rested her chin on my shoulder.

  ‘This isn’t working,’ she said.

  She asked me to wait three days and promised to send me a message after that time. I nodded, dog-dumb, and went back to my corner. I was hopelessly in love with Louise and very scared. I spent the three days trying again to rationalise us, to make a harbour in the raging sea where I could bob about and admire the view. There was no view, only Louise’s face. I thought of her as intense and beyond common sense. I never knew what she would do next. I was still loading on to her all my terror. I still wanted her to be the leader of our expedition. Why did I find it hard to accept that we were equally sunk? Sunk in each other? Destiny is a worrying concept. I don’t want to be fated, I want to choose. But perhaps Louise had to be chosen. If the choice is as crude as Louise or not Louise then there is no choice.

  I sat in the library on the first day trying to work on my translations but jotting on the blotter the line of my true enquiry. I was sick to the gut with fear. The heavy fear of not seeing her again. I wouldn’t break my word. I wouldn’t go to the phone. I scanned the row of industrious heads. Dark, blonde, grey, bald, wig. A long way round was a bright red flame. I knew it wasn’t Louise but I couldn’t take my eyes off the colour. It soothed me the way any bear will soothe a child not at home. It wasn’t mine but it was like mine. If I made my eyes into narrow slits the red took up the whole room. The dome was lit with red. I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

  ‘I love her what can I do?’

  The gentleman in the knitted waistcoat opposite looked up and frowned. I had broken the rule and spoken out loud. Worse, I had spoken to myself. I gathered my books and rushed from the room, past the suspicious gaze of the guards and out down the steps built through the massive columns of the British Museum. I started to walk home, convincing myself that I would never hear from Louise again. She would go to Switzerland with Elgin and have a baby. A year ago Louise had given up her job at Elgin’s request so that they could start a family. She had miscarried once and had no wish to do it again. She told me she was firm about no baby. Did I believe her? She had given the one reason I believe. She said, ‘It might look like Elgin.’

  Reason. I was caught in a Piranesi nightmare. The logical paths the proper steps led nowhere. My mind took me up tortuous staircases that opened into doors that opened into nothing. I knew my problem was partly old war wounds playing up. Put in a situation that smelt anything like the one with Bathsheba and I hit out. Bathsheba had always been asking for time to make definite decisions only to come back with a list of compromises. Louise, I knew, wouldn’t make compromises. She would vanish.

  Ten years of marriage is a lot of marriage. I can’t be relied upon to describe Elgin properly. More importantly I’d never met the other Elgin, the one she’d married. No-one whom Louise had loved could be worthless, if I believed that I’d have to accept that I might be worthless too. At least I had never pressured her to leave. It would be her own decision.

  I had a boyfriend once called Crazy Frank. He had been brought up by midgets although he himself was over six feet tall. He loved his adopted parents and used to carry them one on each shoulder. I met him doing exactly that at a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in Paris. We went to a bar and then on to another bar and got very drunk and while we were in a shot bed in a cheap pension he told me about his passion for miniatures.

  ‘You’d be perfect if you were smaller,’ he said.

  I asked him if he took his parents everywhere with him and he said that he did. They didn’t need much room and they helped him to make friends. He explained that he was very shy.

  Frank had the body of a bull, an image he intensified by wearing great gold hoops through his nipples. Unfortunately he had joined the hoops with a chain of heavy gold links. The effect should have been deeply butch but in fact it looked rather like the handle of a Chanel shopping bag.

  He didn’t want to settle down. His ambition was to find a hole in every port. He wasn’t fussy about the precise location. Frank believed that love had been invented to fool people. His theory was sex and friendship. ‘Don’t people always behave better towards their friends than their lovers?’ He warned me never to fall in love, although his words came too late because I had already fallen for him. He was the perfect vagabond, swag bag in one hand, waving with the other. He never stayed anywhere long, he was only in Paris for two months. I begged him to come back to England with me but he laughed and said England was for married couples. ‘I have to be free,’ he said.

  ‘But you take your parents wherever you go.’

  Frank left for Italy and I came home to England. I was torn with grief for two whole days and then I thought, A man and his midgets. Was that what I wanted? A man whose chest jewellery rattled when he walked?

  It was years ago but I still blush. Sex can feel like love or maybe it’s guilt that makes me call sex love. I’ve been through so much I should know just what it is I’m doing with Louise. I should be a grown-up by now. Why do I feel like a convent virgin?

  The second day of my ordeal I took a pair of handcuffs to the library with me and locked myself to my seat. I gave the key to the gentleman in the knitted waistcoat and asked him to let me free at five o’clock. I told him I had a deadline, that if I didn’t finish my translation a Soviet writer might fail to find asylum in Great Britain. He took the key and said nothing but I noticed he’d disappeared from his place after about an hour.

  I worked on, the concentrated silence of the library giving me some release from thoughts of Louise. Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing do we invariably think of another? The overriding arch of Louise had distracted me from all other constructs. I like mental games, I find it easy to work and I work quickly. In the past whatever my situation I have been able to find peace in work. Now that facility had deserted me. I was a street yob who had to be kept locked up.

  Whenever the word Louise came into my mind I replaced it with a brick wall. After a few hours of this my mind was nothing but brick walls. Worse, my left hand was swelling up, I don’t think it was getting enough blood being strapped to the chair leg. There was no sign of the gentleman. I signalled to a guard and whispered my problem. He returned with a fellow guard and together they picked up my chair and carried me sedan style down the British Library Reading Room. It is a tribute to the scholarly temperament that nobody looked up.

  In the supervisor’s office I tried to explain.

  ‘You a Communist?’ he said.

/>   ‘No I’m a floating voter.’

  He had me cut loose and charged me for Wilful Damage To Reading Room Chair. I tried to make him amend that to ‘accidental damage’ but he wouldn’t. Then he filed his report very solemnly and told me I’d have to hand over my ticket.

  ‘I can’t hand over my ticket. It’s my livelihood.’

  ‘Should a thought a that before you handcuffed yourself to Library Property.’

  I gave him my ticket and got an appeal form. Could I fall any lower?

  The answer was yes. I spent the whole night prowling outside Louise’s house like a private dick. I watched the lights going off at some windows, on at others. Was she in his bed? What did that have to do with me? I ran a schizophrenic dialogue with myself through the hours of darkness and into the small hours, so called because the heart shrivels up to the size of a pea and there is no hope left in it.

  By morning I was home shivering and wretched. I welcomed the shivering since I hoped it might portend a fever. If I were delirious for a few days her leaving me might hurt less. With luck I might even die. ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ Shakespeare was wrong, I was living proof of that.

  ‘You ought to be dead proof,’ I said to myself. ‘If you’re living proof he was right.’

  I sat down to make a will leaving everything to Louise. Was I in sound mind and body? I took my temperature. No. I peered at my head in the mirror. No. Better go to bed close the curtains and get out the gin bottle.

  That was how Louise found me at 6 o’clock on the evening of the third day. She’d been telephoning since noon but I had been too sodden to notice.

  ‘They’ve taken my ticket away,’ I said when I saw her.

  I burst into tears and lay blubbering in her arms. There was nothing she could do except give me a bath and a sleeping draught. In my sinking haze I heard her say, ‘I will never let you go.’

  No-one knows what forces draw two people together. There are plenty of theories; astrology, chemistry, mutual need, biological drive. Magazines and manuals worldwide will tell you how to pick the perfect partner. Dating agencies stress the science of their approach although having a computer does not make one a scientist. The old music of romance is played out in modern digital ways. Why leave yourself to chance when you could leave yourself to science? Shortly the pseudo-lab coat approach of dating by details will make way for a genuine experiment whose results, however unusual, will remain controllable. Or so they say. (See splitting the atom, gene therapy, in vitro fertilisation, cross hormone cultures, even the humble cathode ray for similar statements.) Never mind. Virtual Reality is on its way.