The Only Poet (48 page)

‘An improbable reason for being late!' he said. ‘Even Yolande won't believe it! A walnut!' Laughter lightened his face, it lost its heaviness, she was surprised by its beauty, she bent over him and dropped a kiss on his lips, then retreated back into laughter, and as he had ceased to laugh went further back into silence. He looked up at her wickedly and said, ‘I win point by point. You never kissed me before without being asked. Now I go without regret. To make love after that would be an anticlimax.'

Once when she went to stay at his country house there was an afternoon when it was raining, and she could not make love. When the others sat down to play bridge they went out and had a walk in the woods, amused by the sound made by the artillery of summer rain. Sometimes they stood still and listened to it, face to face, smiling with happiness, while he held her clasped hands to his breast. The arcades between the trees.… He said under the rain, ‘Oh, my girl, my sweet girl,' and drew her to him, and kissed her as he rarely did except when they were making love. Both their faces were wet with rain. ‘We might both have been crying,' she said. ‘It's not our thing to do.'

His two sons were tall and dark and hard like him, but more graceful. She wondered if he had ever been as beautiful as they were, and if it were simply time that made him so unpliable, so like a rock. They had that sad look too. ‘We all, my sons and I, look subtly awful. Just a hairbreadth's difference and we might all be the sort of man Josephine Baker might employ as a chauffeur.'

His wife was his cousin. ‘I'd as soon be in love with my sister. Indeed sooner. Chateaubriand gives one that idea in one's romantic youth. I think someone has been very unkind to her. But naturally I don't discuss that with her. I haven't the slightest hesitation in making love to you in my own house.'

When she was staying at his country house she came downstairs in a new white satin dress, and though there was nobody else down, they stood beside each other by the great hearth like strangers. He said, ‘That's a new dress, isn't it? Turn round. It's lovely. And it will look its loveliest when I see it tonight as a white shining circle on the floor by your bed.'

‘Let me wear it for a moment. I took a lot of trouble over it.'

He gave her a glass of champagne.

‘Everything about you is so romantic. You do not belong to my world. You might be a spirit from the woods. All the women look at you with surprise. You don't know any of the things they've worked on all their lives, but you can trump all their aces. They'd be envious if you didn't win them over but it's so plain you aren't out to compete. And all the men wonder what you're like. But are frightened of you. Quite frightened. By God, you weren't the woman to cure Gerard March.'

The mention of Gerard March still hurt her. ‘What do you mean?' she said. ‘If there is a woman who could cure him, why shouldn't it be me?'

‘I notice that you'd like the idea of curing him though I am your lover and you're faithful,' he said. ‘We're none of us entirely monogamists. But of course you're frightening. You're intractable. You shot into my life and into my bed, and you might shoot out again. But I don't think you will, for reasons that they won't ever know, quite private to ourselves.'

‘Do you mean,' she said in sudden shame, ‘that they all know that you're my lover?'

‘Oh, no, they don't know that,' he said. ‘We've both been so discreet. They just consider you as someone wonderful who might be loved. Drink that champagne. I know you don't like it. But you should drink it.'

‘Why should I do that?' she asked as she obeyed. ‘I don't like it.'

‘Because you'll blush less easily if you do. You won't care so much,' he said. ‘There's Carrière and his wife coming downstairs now. Start talking to me about dogs. Then she can join in.'

‘Just any dogs?' she asked, laughing against the bubbles of champagne.

‘I can't remember which breed it is she's interested in,' he said, ‘but one dog leads to another.'

The day he made love to her in the afternoon, and a fog fell so that they spent the night together in his apartment. He telephoned to his home. ‘I wish I had my dogs here.' The wood fire. The lights. Naked she went near the fire, and he called her away, ‘You'll get burned far quicker than you think.' They read, they ate, they listened to a concert on the radio, they made love again, they got hungry, they went to the kitchen and got food, they went to bed and slept all night, they had not done that since the first time they were lovers. His hand round her breast.

‘Your breast is hard and yet it's soft. It has the feeling of being something folded upon itself. It might unfurl and be a wing. A torturing thought.'

‘Why torturing?'

‘To an engineer quite torturing. A couple of wings just there would make a hopelessly unstable unit.'

The telephone rang and he did not answer it. ‘I want nobody to be able to imagine that we are together in this room. I won't give them the slightest clue, even the knowledge that I am in this room.' It was true that there was immense joy in the secrecy of their companionship. When he took her throat so that her chin rested on the span between his finger and thumb and looked down on her face while she looked up at the eyes shining light out of his darkness, they could contemplate each other as if they were the only people who had ever been on earth.

She asks him, ‘What good is the square root of minus one?' He begins to explain, then bursts into laughter, ‘It's too absurd. Anybody who knows about us, or anybody who suspects what we are to each other, knowing we were alone, would imagine us as locked in lust, transported in passion. And how much of the time you spend cramming me with caramelles, with walnut fondants, with macaroons, out of God knows what evil intentions, no doubt so that I will grow enormously fat and you needn't be jealous, and how much of the rest of the time you spend treating me as an encyclopaedia, to fill up the gaps in your deplorable education, it's simply prodigious, you do it again and again, you have a passion for knowledge at the most odd moments, and God knows where it will lead you. When I was a little boy I picked up a copy of
La Vie Parisienne
and on the cover was a drawing of a man fully dressed coming into his wife's bedroom inflamed with rage, and his wife, all pink, jumping out of bed, and a man, all pink, staying in bed, and the wife saying “One moment! I can explain everything!” I wasn't so little that I hadn't a rough idea what was going on but young as I was I couldn't see how she could explain it. But I shall be that man one day and I shall come in one day, and I shall find you in bed with another man, and you will get up and you will say, “One moment! I can explain everything! Just about an hour ago, I felt an overwhelming curiosity about the third law of thermodynamics and this gentleman” – Oh, darling, your fidelity to me hangs on a thread. I may lose you any moment to a man who's better at exposition than I am. I may as well enjoy the privileges I may lose just whenever you get in touch with a man who has a science degree. Sweetheart, sweetheart, open your arms to me, but first brush back that strand of hair, it's the loveliest hair but I don't like finding it in my mouth.'

In the morning the fog had cleared. He was sorry.

He said (some other time), ‘I don't make love to you in the morning. One could make love to anybody in the morning. There's nothing personal in that. You and I go to bed because it's the intensest way we have of thinking of each other.'

‘You went to — ? Why?'

‘Because you did your military service there.'

‘Just for that?'

‘Why not? I liked to see where you once were.'

‘When I was young. Imagine you doing that. What did you do in the town?'

‘I stood in the street and stared at the barracks. Then I went into the public park and sat by the bandstand. Then I had lunch. And then I went and walked along the river, under those trees. Down that tributary that comes in after the bridge, where the trees are bleached. And then I went back to Paris.'

‘Did that really amuse you? It's nothing of a town.'

‘But it was amusing to think of you, and imagine what you were like.'

He was disconcerted. ‘You spent the whole day just doing that? But how sweet of you! I can't bear it. Oh, damn it all. It isn't half an hour from Paris, it's two hours. You must have got up in the early morning. You can't have got back until the early evening. And you were at the theatre.'

‘Why, how did you know that?'

‘Someone mentioned it when they were telephoning this morning. Some man.'

‘I didn't see anybody I knew. Except Solange Guidener.'

‘If we had money
[during military service]
we had our own girls.'

‘Did you have a girl?'

‘Of course I had a girl. Girls are what I have.'

‘Ah, don't laugh at me! I'd like to be all the women you have ever made love to.'

‘Darling, I implore you to give up the idea. Please forget it. I'm really alarmed. It seems so possible that that will show you some wonderful new scientific way of turning yourself into all my mistresses – then you'll say to me, “Wait a moment. This explains everything”. Oh, it would take quite a long time and it would be so boring for me to have to do all that a second time.' They were rolled up against each other by their laughter. ‘And this girl, oh, I'd hate you to become her. She was thin as an umbrella and pale as phosphorus. She had to be. You see, I was a Socialist then and I chose my girls like that because they were downtrodden victims of the capitalist class and looked it. They had to be skin and bones and livid pale. Like Picasso, I had my blue period. Only like him I'd say by constant experimentation with new ideas I have reached the present stage of my art. O sweetheart, don't, don't take me back to my blue period. What a nightmare,' he said with sudden seriousness, ‘if your eyes looked up at me out of someone else's face. Oh, come close. Establish your identity, prove to me that all of you is you.'

‘You've made love to me so well that if you meant nothing at all to me, I should be grateful for ever, but, of course, if you were the worst lover in the world I shouldn't mind.'

‘Why not, I'd like to know?'

‘Well, it would be you.'

He lit a cigarette and she saw that, as on the first time they had made love, his hands were trembling. With his other hand he covered the dark vein on his forehead. ‘I have said the wrong thing,' she thought. But how can he expect that I should go on and on being his mistress unless I felt an emotion for him which would make me happy just to be with him? How could he think I can see so much of him without taking him as himself rather than as a purveyor of pleasure?

‘The trouble is that there is a physical connection between love-making and having children, though there isn't any mental connection. A man can have children by a woman he doesn't love and be perfectly satisfied with them, and if a man adores a woman he'll probably think of having a child by her. It's a brutal thing to do to a woman who's fragile and pretty and who is being charming to one, to say, “In nine months from now you'll suffer pain, and most of those nine months will be disagreeable.'”

‘I hate virginity,' he said, ‘I think it's the nastiest arrangement of nature.'

‘I would have thought you could have avoided it.'

‘I have. I've only had one virgin in my life, and as you know the facts of my life you will understand I loathed it. It's a horrible thing for a young man to have to do to a young girl he likes and doesn't love. But all the same I sometimes wish I could have been your first man.'

She had often wished it.

‘You make love so beautifully, so intelligently, I sometimes think afterwards, “She knows so many things someone else taught her.”'

‘Oh God, you are a thundering ass! I don't make love like that.'

‘Your skin is different from anyone else's.'

‘What's the difference?'

‘I'm not sure. My skin knows but won't tell.'

Nicholas speaks:

‘I distrust any account of a love affair which describes lovers as sleeping in each other's arms. The only comfortable way a man and woman can sleep together is either for the man to sleep with his back to the woman, and she lies with her arm like a little fin through the crook of his elbow, something marine, something seal-like, or for her to sleep with her back to him, which is very pleasant, he can wake her up by kissing the nape of her neck. Face to face may be advisable for conversations of the mind, and love-making is partly that, but it's no particular help for the conversations of the body, and sleeping with you is a heavenly physical conversation. I wake feeling we have come nearer to an understanding of all sorts of things.'

‘The real reason against promiscuity for women is that most men have nothing to give any woman, while most women have something to give any man. I mean of course inside the circle of people who have organs that are not merely generative but sexual. However casual an affair is, however commonplace the woman is, there can be something that's charming. Suppose a man's lying on his back on the bed, his arms behind his neck, and a woman's sitting on the edge beside him, and they've made love and it's all calm, she can do something so delightful, simply putting out her arm and caressing him, the way she bends her head, even if she's quite plain, it'll be memorable. What likelihood is there that most men will do that?'

‘I'm bored by your body,' Leonora said. ‘It makes an inconvenient third. It's as if just because we liked to eat saddle of mutton sometimes we had to live with a sheep as our constant companion.'

‘I count it a supreme triumph that I can get a woman who can say such awful things to go to bed with me and like it. Go on and make some more remarks like that. My complacence will get richer and richer. And by the way my sexual being can't be compared with a sheep.