The Only Poet (46 page)

More than six months later he asked her to dinner; and she was very glad indeed to hear from him. Her life had become disagreeable in a way she had never anticipated. She had never been rich, before her marriage or after; but she had always had enough, and everybody round her had had rather more than enough, so that her life was full of presents. It now appeared that a carelessly drafted family trust had left her in her widowhood only half as well-off as Philip had thought she would be. The funds were equally divided between her and her daughters, and the income from their share had to accumulate till they were twenty-one. She could not touch it for their school fees or their keep. This meant that she had, at once, to sell her little white house in Kensington. For eighteen months she went about thinking of herself as valueless and unprized. So, at the time she met Nicholas she had had great need of reassurance.

Eighteen months after Philip's death Leonora is visiting Paris with a friend.

She went out to buy some books and some scent, and was walking round the corner of the Place de la Concorde into the rue de la Paix, when a man came out of a jeweller's shop and stopped dead in front of her. He looked at her in a searching way. He might have been a detective waiting to make himself quite sure that the person he intended to arrest was in fact the person pursued by justice. Then he smiled and said, ‘You have forgotten me, but you and your husband came to lunch a year ago at our house in Deauville.'

She had already recognized him by his eyes. They were blue-grey with very long black lashes; a curiously feminine inset in a face otherwise bleakly masculine. He was indeed very male in a way she did not particularly like. He was tall and in ten years' time, when he got into his fifties, he might be too heavy, there was already a thickening about his neck. His shoulders were very broad and seemed more so because his waist was slender, he had something of the top heavy look of a boxer. She found the effect of all this massiveness unpleasing, disconcerting, because she had a feeling he would use it to force things to go his way when it was hardly fair that they should. His mouth was sulky. But the brute was tamed. He was very carefully dressed. But though his taste was sober she was sure that he and her dead husband would have detected all sorts of things wrong with each other's clothes. They would have been quite subtle points, almost imperceptible to a woman. It was odd that she could not remember his name. He did not look entirely French, he might have been Italian or Spanish, yet she thought his name was more exotic than that.

‘Your house was full of flowers,' was all she could find to say.

‘Yes, we overdo it,' he answered, as if they had already been talking for some time. ‘The place always looks like a flower-show. We overdo everything. We're half French, half Phanariot Greek. Both of us. I married my cousin. We're an exuberant group, the Phanariots. When was it you were with us? Last June, I think. There were probably more roses in our drawing-room than actually exist.'

‘It can't have been last June,' she said, ‘my husband has been dead for eighteen months.'

They had begun to walk round the square together, in the opposite direction to which she had intended to go. He came to a halt, and she stood by him, slightly bewildered, but not much. Then he began to stroll on again. He said, ‘I am sorry. But he was quite old, wasn't he? Much older than –' she expected him to say, ‘Much older than you,' but instead he said, ‘Much older than I am.' In either case it was a strange remark. He couldn't expect her to say, ‘Yes, so it really didn't matter.' It would not even have been true. Yet surely there was no other answer.

She found he was guiding her across the road, and he said, ‘We'll have tea at the Ritz.' She protested that the friend with whom she had come to Paris was ill, that she was taking her back some books and some medicine, but he said amiably that that could wait for half an hour. When they got into the Ritz she had the impression that she was going into a theatre with one of the principal actors rather than into a hotel which she modestly yet impudently thought simply of as a place where one stayed. The concierge came forward to greet him and give him a letter, one of the chasseurs ran up to assure him of a message performed, he moved with the assurance of someone more wanted than wanting, but pleased that he was wanted. He said, ‘I am a son of the house, one of my uncles and his wife have lived here for thirty-five years.' As they sat down at the tea-table she liked the air and the light, the beautifully dressed women. She noticed they brought him tea without him having to order it.

He said, ‘How long are you staying in Paris?'

‘Two or three weeks,' she answered.

He thought for an instant then held out a cigarette case to her. It was of an odd gold that looked too much like gold and too heavy, and she did not quite approve. He said, ‘Your husband was Philip Le Measurer. My family are in hydroelectrics, and have done a lot with Gerard March. That was why you came to luncheon with us. I see you are slightly embarrassed, it can only be because you have forgotten my name. You will not remember it even when I repeat it. I am Nicholas –' and indeed she could not take in his long Greek surname. ‘I will write it down.' He took out a little diary and tore out the leaf and held it out to her, but took it back, and folded it up, and gave it to her again. ‘Don't bother about it now,' he said, ‘take it home and learn it by heart.' She was, again, a little disconcerted. Faintly he smiled. ‘Then you'll know what's happening when my wife rings up and asks you to dinner.'

He pursues the acquaintance and Leonora evidently meets his wife, Yolande. She feels the growing attraction between them, but ‘[b]ecause of Gerard March she thought she was imagining it
–
and the proof was when at [a] gala she saw Nicholas put his arm tenderly round his wife's shoulder'.

Her left hand was lying on the table. His right hand went to it, covered it for a moment, while she stared at him, her lips parted, and then closed on it. Gently he crushed her bones, then his grip slowly tightened. She could not divine from his face whether he knew he was hurting her, whether he was not gone from her into a trance and was unconscious of what he was doing. She could not think ill of him for crushing her hand, because in fact she had found the pain delightful. She felt a tense delight, as if she were herself the sound of a trumpet, and great fainting pain, and a disinclination for disobedience. Suddenly his grip relaxed, but he kept his hand over hers and said, ‘I want to take you somewhere outside Paris. On Tuesday, starting in the morning. Is there any place you would like to go?'

She said, ‘Chartres, I haven't been there since I was a schoolgirl.'

He repeated, ‘Chartres. No, not Chartres.'

‘Why not?'

‘A cold place. On a hill in bare country. Two large crowded hotels. How unsuitable. We can do better than that. Somewhere more genial.'

‘Where?' she asked.

‘You needn't know. Just pack your bag.'

‘What?'

‘I said, pack your bag. We're going to stay the night. It's time we were lovers.'

She hated him because he had not said he loved her, because he had never made an opportunity to kiss her, and hated him still more when he said, ‘I am not waiting for a conventional period and saying the conventional things. You see, I hate the idea of getting a woman by pursuing her as if she were an unusually inefficient species of big game, clumsy on her feet, who got caught. I'd think nothing of any animal who didn't succeed in running away if that was what it wanted to do. We could make love beautifully. Inevitably you'll give me greater pleasure than I can give you. I'm a middle-aged man, beginning to get a little thick round the neck and the waist, and I think I'm rather a bore. I'm not really interested in anything but molecular chemistry and engineering. I'm completely unromantic. You're a beautiful though rather strange-looking young woman and a much more amusing human being than I am. I can't give you what I'll get out of you, but it would be foolish to pretend I can't give you something.'

She said nothing, and he went on, ‘You needn't decide now. It's Monday. Ring me up if you don't want to go. I shall feel quite ill if you do. Since I met you outside Van Cupels I have had a continuous singing in my ears, I feel as if I had mountain sickness. I see from your expression you have the same symptom. Is there any reason why we shouldn't?'

He takes her to a cathedral town, unnamed.

‘Why does it mean so much to you to be here with me?'

She could only look at him and ask with her eyes how he could imagine that it would not mean much to her; but his hard handsomeness showed no sign of understanding.

He went on: ‘You're thirty-one? You were married for nine years? You've had two children?' She nodded her head to each of the questions. But then he asked, ‘You must have had lovers?' and when she shook her head he said, ‘How strange,' and was silent for a minute.

‘This isn't at all what I expected,' he said. ‘How strange.'

‘Why are you surprised?' she asked. ‘Lots of women don't have lovers.'

‘I'm prepared to believe that but it's beside the point. I thought you would have had lovers.'

‘Why?'

‘Simply because of your eyes. I apologized to you a moment ago, it was because I should have liked to make my addresses to you at a proper pace. With pomp and ceremony. But to be the second man in your life, the first one that you have not walked down an aisle with in your white dress. My apology would have been a little different.' He stroked her shoulders. ‘But even so why are you trembling as if we were doing something extraordinary? This is something so normal.'

‘If this is a matter of routine,' she said, ‘why have you brought me a hundred and fifty miles?'

He was taken aback. ‘There's some sense in that.' He took out a cigarette and lit it.

‘Your hand is trembling too,' she said. He looked at it and smiled and nodded.

‘Yes, my hand's trembling and my ears are ringing and you are right, we are doing something quite extraordinary.' He extinguished his cigarette and said, ‘Let's go to bed now.'

‘Aren't we going to the Cathedral?'

‘Certainly not. It would be very rash. The heavenly powers might work a miracle on me, or on you, or on both of us, which might upset all my careful plans. So we'll go to bed now.'

‘No,' she said, ‘no. You said I wouldn't have to do anything I didn't want to.'

‘But you want me to make love to you,' he said. ‘I am aching for you, and by the happiest of coincidences you are aching for me.'

‘No,' she said, ‘no. I don't feel in the least amorous, I feel ill.'

‘I never make love to young girls. I am exemplary about that,' he said. ‘I'm not making love to a young girl, how mean and unjust of you to contrive that I should feel as if I were. My dear, you are a woman, a grown woman, and I am a man, and it's time we threw away shame. We've something to do.'

He was so harsh, he was so bleak. ‘There could be nothing we could do that would be any good to either of us,' she said. ‘I want to go back to Paris.'

‘You don't want anything of the kind,' he said, and bent forward and took her in his arms and for the first time kissed her on the mouth. It was very nearly a blow and nothing else. When he let her go she shrank back, covering her lips with her hands in case he did it again, and he said, ‘Too late. You know quite well that now we've done that we've in effect done everything. Stop worrying about it. We're lovers, we must make love, it's an ingrained habit of our species.' He took her jacket off, then her blouse. She became hallucinated. There seemed to be a sun beating down on her, a sea before her in which she wished to swim. She wrenched herself out of his arms, stood up, and took off her skirt, keeping her eyes shut, as though the light of that sun were too much for her. ‘You are horrible. I'm doing this', she said, ‘because I want to, not because you do.'

‘I hope that's true,' he said. She did not think she would ever forgive him. ‘Why does he make me go through this without one word of tenderness?' she cried out to herself, as he laid her down on the bed. ‘I would like to love and be loved, why will he not say one word about love?' She was enraged because he stripped off the rest of her clothes. It did not seem like rape – it would have been absurd to complain of rape – but theft. When he released her she drew the sheet over her face and thought that she would not be able to endure it. When he came back to her he too was naked. She thought how safe she had been with her husband, she wished she had married Gerard March, she did not want to be here in this strange place with this strange man. She thought with fear and hostility of the dark vein on his forehead.

He stopped and said, ‘Can it be possible that I can desire you so that I'm ill? I'm stupid. I'm like a concussion case, and that you don't feel any desire for me at all?' He buried his face against her hair. ‘Then let me make love
to
you out of pity.'

‘It won't be pity if I do. Or cruelty if I don't. I can't do this. It's too awful.' But then his skin was on her skin as a widespread caress, his mouth travelled about her breasts, his arms cradled her, she knew an extremity of pleasure, which was wild, then became peace itself. She became a bird that soared, but as pierced and brought down through space by an arrow that was also herself, fused with him. It was as if she slowly discovered that her body was interpenetrated with another body, that was at once more physical and more ethereal, that existed just to receive and transmit pleasure; and it was being revealed to her because he too had such a body.

She had no idea what had happened to her. She did not know whether she was the slave of the intense pleasure he had given her, or whether she felt that pleasure only because she loved him. It struck her that he knew which it was, but would not tell her; and she would not ask him. She would not dare to admit to him that she might love him, in case by some covetous and unspoken brutality, a mere failure of his eyes to lighten, a preoccupied movement of his fingers across his lips, he showed that he did not welcome such a possibility.