He hesitated, so close to me that his breath, whose male smell I remembered with the deep, griping nostalgia some people feel remembering their mother’s perfume, fanned my face. ‘You’re tired,’ he whispered. ‘Go to sleep. Let me just stay near you . . . dearest. Dearest Jane.’
I closed my eyes. Had he said it, or was it only a memory reflection? ‘When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you’ll hear will be me telling you that I love you.’
As I dropped again into sleep I could still feel his breath, gentle and rhythmical, coming and going with my own.
Chapter 4
MORNING came.
He was gone.
The other bed had not been slept in. There was a chair drawn up beside my bed, and some cushions on the rug beside it, as if he had tried several positions to get through the night in reasonable comfort; now these attributes of his—what? Devotion? Nostalgia? Simple hunger?—lay abandoned, but clamouring, silent spokesmen for the past and its powerful possessive claims.
I got up. My body was heavy, but my head felt clear, as it had been the previous morning when I’d woken in the sleeping-bag on the rock overlooking the aquamarine sea after a night in the open. Then, I had joined the hippies for another swim, if possible more refreshing and delightful in the opalescent early morning light than in the pouring velvet darkness. I wondered if the salinity was still on my skin from that bathe—I had had no chance to wash it off since. I touched my arm with my tongue; it was there—rubbed off to faintness but still tangible. It tasted not merely of another country but another world, where I had been a stranger to myself, doubly so in a way—Jane Graham past, and present too, linked by the seemingly unbreakable fetter of Toby.
I stood by the little screened window and looked out across a hedge of plumbago, a lawn, past another similar low building, and away across a field of sprouting maize to some abrupt whitish hills shawled in fir-trees. The spell of the night (how powerfully affective upon the morning are the last words and images received before sleep!) was still on me; it was Toby I longed to see, my relationship with him that I felt bound, this bright, hot, clear morning, to continue. Rachel’s tousled, oblivious figure was more real and compelling upon my list of compulsions today than Chris or even Andy. Even David stood aside as if to let me find my way unimpeded through this new-old labyrinth.
I stood still a long time, waiting, I think, for Toby to come back and lead me forward to the next, unforseeable, episode. Then I took another automatic and abortive look at my watch, sighed from my depths, and wandered through the main door onto the small porch. A tiny passage led me to another door, through which I found a little shower-room and lavatory, made dim by an unpruned jacaranda tree growing outside. I tried both taps. Cold water issued from the shower. There was some kind of oil-fired boiler on the wall, but I didn’t feel up to tackling it, and in any case I was so hot and sticky that a cold shower seemed more attractive.
The icy water shocking my skin brought me out of my lethargy. I began to direct my thoughts and feelings, instead of letting them push me where they would. I hadn’t brought a towel, but my skin dried by itself in the balmy air, and I put on clean clothes from the skin out. I had washed my hair too, after a fashion, and my scalp drew every breeze blowing through the room, refreshing me immeasurably. I put on some lipstick and eau-de-Cologne and looked at myself in the little mirror over the sink-basin at the end of the passage. It was too dark to see the age-lines, but still, impossible to believe Toby had been honest in saying he could see no change. I had led a quiet life, but it had not been empty of the kind of punishing feelings which age a woman, and without a proper make-up I looked to myself, even in that kindly deceptive gloom, every day of my age.
Yet I must still be desirable. There was still time to make up for the lost years—time to have another man, another relationship, another child. The thought aroused in me an immediate and urgent sexuality, so violent and unexpected that I felt the need to relieve it myself. But I hate that, even more than at the moment I hated and resented this onset of unspecified desire, in which, theoretically, I didn’t believe. I stood leaning against the wall, pressing my thighs together. Of course everyone accepts this side of their humanity these days; all the naked apemen have done their work well in convincing us that we are what, no doubt, we are, brute beasts scarcely head and shoulders out of the swamps. One may know it; the evidence, at moments like the one I was experiencing in the dark passage, is irrefutable if accepted with honesty. But to acknowledge it is one thing. To accede to it, to shrug and clamber on its back and let it carry you off—that is the betrayal. For what was this trip all about, if indeed it were not a complete wild goose chase? Was it not to discover towards whom I could honestly focus and direct myself? That was what I wanted—not merely a man, but a focus.
When I thought it might be Toby, I felt afraid. But Andy was faint, faint and far-off. The two physical encounters with him, although so recent, so important at the time, had not engaged me to him, ‘grappled him to my heart with hoops of steel’. What does that, I wondered as I stared at myself, what grapples a man to your heart? Not just sex, not just companionship and respect, and shared laughter and ‘things in common’, not even an admixture of them all. Not even time. It is—and suddenly it came to me where I had learnt this, from a man now dead, whom I had loved as nearly platonically as possible—it is pain, troubles, unhappiness, shared struggles. That is what unites two people. Toby had been with me through the worst time of my life (and John had shared that time, which helped to explain my lasting bond with him). Andy and I had been through nothing together yet. It was an odd proof of this idea that when I wanted to feel really bound to Andy, my mind sprang back to one occasion—not our love-making at all, not the pleasure or the happiness, but the time when he had made me crawl away and weep. By the same token, the only moments that seemed, in retrospect, important between me and Terry, David’s father, were two—the moment of straight physical pain when he ruptured me and I cried out and pulled back his head by the hair; and once again when he found me bulging with his baby and followed me and wrung his hands till his knuckles cracked, and let Toby beat him up in front of me in an immature attempt at expiation . . . I had thought it ludicrous at the time, but now I looked back on it with sympathy, even poignancy. Pain is so horrible, it is the worst thing in the world. Perhaps it is the only currency in which you can buy its antithesis, love and fulfilment and pleasure, simply because it is the last coin you can willingly pay over—the most extreme for the most extreme, the worst for the best. Like childbirth. Like Sally Bowles saying ‘It’s absolutely right that champagne should be as expensive as it is’. . . .
At this point I remembered I had forgotten to clean my teeth.
I was just spitting out when Toby stepped onto the porch.
‘Charming,’ he said, carrying me one step backwards in his seven-year boots.
‘Sorry. Very unaesthetic.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind. I like sharing these little intimacies When I was a little boy, my parents were so prudish about bathrooms that even the verb “to gargle” was somehow considered rude. From their squeamishness on the subject, I suffered for several years under the supposition that married people made babies by the unthinkable intimacy of seeing each other on the loo.’
‘You are funny!’
‘Oh, yes. So I’m often told. It’s virtually my only virtue.’
‘Even if true, that would justify your membership of the human race.’
‘Come on, buck me up. Tell me nobody’s handed you a really good laugh in seven years.’
Oh, I’ve laughed, I thought, but it hasn’t been the same. But that was too dangerous to say. I simply looked at him along the yard of dark passage and then found that was dangerous too, so I emerged as briskly as I could and said, ‘I’d laugh heartier with a bite of breakfast inside me.’
‘Come on then, I’ll take you to our food-factory.’
We walked along the paths.
?
??What do you think of the place?’
‘Pretty,’ I said non-committally. I had detected a note of anxiety in the casual question.
‘Just a dust-bowl twenty years ago, adorned with rocks and thorn-bushes.’
‘And I suppose you wish you’d helped to transform it.’
‘I do wish so, very much.’
‘But could you have done that, do you think? I mean, is the pioneering bit really you?’
His hands were in his pockets, his head up, looking at the tops of the trees. ‘I don’t know. That’s what I’d have liked to be sure of.’
‘Then you’d never have written any books.’
‘That’s not certain. Some kibbutzniks are creative, I mean they’ve found time to be. In any case, next to what’s going on here, my books all seem a bit—’
‘If you dare say “trivial”, I’ll clout you.’
He stopped walking. ‘Will you? Trivial.’ He presented his ear to me provocatively.
‘Oh, get away.’
Horseplay was more than I dared indulge in with him. I walked on, and he came with me.
‘Seriously, that’s stupid. I can understand your admiration for all this, even though I know very little about it I can see it represents a great achievement—’
‘Not just geographically. Sociologically—’
‘Yes, yes, yes, and all the other “allys”. But a writer with your talent—’
‘If you say “—has a responsibility to it”, or any such claptrap, I shall clout you.’
‘Well, isn’t it true? You’ve always known it yourself.’
‘Values are different in different places.’
‘But not in the same person, surely? I mean, your values are your values, in London or here or in Saskatoon Saskatchewan.’
‘Values are not values which alter where they alteration find?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But one can modify one’s values, acquire new ones.’
‘Doesn’t that entirely invalidate the ones you’ve based your whole life on up to the time you change them?’
‘Not at all. You might as well say the manners and morals of one society, on which you base your conduct when you’re living in that society, become invalid if you move to another society and have to behave differently to avoid giving offence to the people there. The manners, and values, in a capitalist, urban society like London can’t be the same as one finds in a socialist Jewish commune like this. It would be just as laughable to insist on my importance as a producer of English-language novels, which people here have never heard of and couldn’t or wouldn’t read anyway, as it would be to go on wearing the sort of clothes I wore in London or jingling my money in my pocket when the people here haven’t any. I’m not important here because I have a facility for writing stories. My prestige, my place in this little world, if any, is based on my dubious abilities as a teacher of English, a picker of bananas, a layer of irrigation pipes, and a washer-up, once a month when it’s my turn, of supper-dishes for three hundred people. Don’t get me wrong. If I’d ever been a good doctor or a research scientist involved in some project vital to humanity, they’d respect me here for that as much as they would have in England. But a novelist? Fui!’ He made a gesture of tossing something away. ‘It doesn’t rate. And why should it? When you stop to think about it.’
‘Don’t people here read?’
‘Sure they do, more than most people in London. And some of them read novels. But there’s no dearth of novels in the world at large, nor here in the kibbutz. Here, there are so few of us that everybody has to fill in where he’s needed. Where there is a dearth. And I can see that. I can act on it. That’s why I say my values have changed, that they had to change.’
‘So leave this “little world”, as I was interested to note you yourself call it, and go back to where your rare and special talent will be appreciated.’
‘As literary talent is, so noticably, in philistine, telly-ridden Britain?’ he laughed. ‘No, I don’t suppose I’ll go back.’
I stopped walking and stared at him.
‘Never?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Are you actually telling me you’ll never write another book?’
‘No, of course not. I’ll write again, when I get completely used to the work and not tired by it. I shall write as a hobby.’
‘Christ!’ I burst out. ‘What a waste!’
‘Oh, bollocks. You talk as if I were a great writer. No. I’m quite good, at my best; shall we say I’m better than just competent. But it’d be no loss to the world of letters if I never wrote another word.’
‘You’re only forty. That third novel—’
‘Ah, that one! You read that?’ He started walking again, and gave me a little sly, nervous smile out of the sides of his eyes. ‘Did you notice anything about it?’
I was silenced.
‘I see you did. I meant you to. I couldn’t openly dedicate it to you, but I did much more. I exploited you.’
After a moment he said, ‘Let’s not go in to breakfast yet, the dining-hall is so noisy and unprivate. Let’s sit here.’ We sat on a stone wall. People were passing us, most of them in working clothes, but apart from a few smiles and greetings they didn’t impinge. Toby sat quietly, looking out across the main lawn. I noticed a new tranquillity about him; he had always used to be so restless and nervy. After a while he said: ‘Please indulge me. Tell me about—your personal feelings about that book.’
I stared at him. Last night, in the first shock of seeing me, he had verged on telling me some fundamental truth about his feelings. Now I, in the calm of morning, clean and rested, even relaxed, felt some such moment of truth pressing for outlet inside me. But what is the truth, ever, about anything? Every truth bears the seeds of its own antithesis.
‘I felt it was a secret message in code.’
I saw his shoulders slump a little; he closed his eyes and smiled. ‘I knew it. I knew you’d get it. And did you—decode it?’
‘I thought I had. But when you—when I heard about the divorce and you didn’t—you know, contact me, I decided I must have been using the wrong cypher.’
‘No. You weren’t. Something happened to me about the divorce. You know I said to you once—that awful time, the last time I ever saw you, when you came to my flat in Earl’s Court with John—that one could love two women at once. I did love Whistler. I love her still. She’s the sweetest girl, Jane, I swear no-one could help loving her, that’s why what’s happened is so horrible—I’m so afraid that by taking advantage of what she offered me, in her ignorance and innocence, I’ve damaged her for ever. I feel so appallingly guilty about her. All the time; now, too, when it’s supposedly over. I still have dreams of the most primitive kind, in which all my limbs, my fingers and toes, swell and become heavy and gross and I’m some kind of prehistoric monster, shuffling about and grunting and screeching, catching birds out of the sky and tearing them to pieces, trampling with my great grey ugly feet on little white flowers . . . When she was going to have Rachel she wanted me to be with her, to share it, so we arranged it. She’d done all the preparation and I’d helped her, and she’d believed every word of those lying books and wasn’t the least bit frightened—she thought it was going to be a beautiful, elevating experience that we could have together, and she was expecting to sail through it, “breasting the pains like a galleon” she said.’ He turned his head away. ‘It was ghastly . . . She’d never really been physically hurt before. She tried so hard, but it was too much for her; she started screaming almost at the beginning, and the bloody nurse was so cross with her, telling her briskly to be a brave girl and that there was nothing to make a fuss about yet . . . I tried to help, but it was like holding her hand while she was lying on a rack. I’m not exaggerating. A nightmare . . . She couldn’t love me for ages afterwards, and when she did it was never the same. Carrie was a complete accident. When Whistler realised she was pregnant again she left me and went to Billie. She was hysterica
l, she said she wouldn’t go through that again for anyone. I wanted her to have an abortion but Billie dissuaded her, only by promising to find her a doctor who’d agree to put her out altogether during the birth. In the event she was so tense she had to have a Caesarian anyway. And that was another thing, that scar. She minded so desperately, she’d never run around naked after that, the way she used to. The whole business ruined the one thing we had, the physical thing which had been so nearly perfect.’ He glanced at me, frowning. ‘Do you mind about that?’ he asked suddenly.
‘That you were happy in bed with some other woman? No, of course not.’ Then I realised there was another truth buried in that one, and added, ‘I mean, yes, of course. It depends what level I happen to be on.’
He looked at me steadily and shook his head a little. ‘You—’ he said. ‘You really are the most extraordinary . . .’ He broke off. ‘What was I talking about?’
‘The divorce.’
‘Well. By the time it came to the point, I’d felt I’d done her so much damage already that I thought it would be comparatively painless, I mean like letting some poor creature you’ve broken go free.’
‘Really, Toby,’ I couldn’t help interrupting with some impatience. ‘I can’t help feeling you’re overdoing the mea-culpa a bit. Some of it must have been her.’
‘I don’t think so . . .’ he said. ‘Just years are so large a factor in this sort of thing. If one partner is really much older than the other, he’s got to accept more responsibility.’
‘But if it was simply, even mainly, the business of childbirth, I mean that wasn’t your fault at all.’
‘Oh, but it was much more than that! It was me writing, and me not being patient with her youngness, and—let’s face it—me marrying her in the first place when all the time—’ He reached out abruptly without looking at me and gripped my wrist, as suddenly taking his hand away. ‘It was greed, sheer blind masculine greed, and conceit to think I could overcome everything that was obviously wrong with it and make her happy.’