The Only Poet (49 page)

‘Why do you goad at sex? It works out pretty well for you. I've never known anybody who likes making love more than you do. You say nothing, you practise reserves which are almost comic, but how your eyes shine, and often you're the most deliberate of artists.'

‘What on earth is he talking about?' she thought. ‘And is it better for me that he should think I am a deliberate artist, whatever that means, or know that I'm not?'

People guessed they were in love. Sometimes he came over to London. He borrowed a house once on the Wiltshire downs. A shire house on a ledge. Moonlight.

She sometimes, when she was in England, wondered why he should love her and whether he would not tire of her quite soon, but he took pains to make it clear that whether that might happen or not, it had not happened yet. He sent her notes all the time, a telegram just before she came to him.

Nicholas asks who made a comment which Leonora has repeated to him.

‘A very pretty woman with chestnut hair called Solange Guidener who mentioned Yolande.'

‘Who gave this party?'

‘Someone called Pauline de Mercier. Do you know her?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘but I haven't seen her for years. I'd forgotten she existed. She evidently does.' He went and filled the goblet with wine, came back and put his arm round her waist, and drew her down on the sofa, and made her drink out of the goblet, and then drank himself. ‘Léo,' he said, ‘you must come and live in Paris. Really you must.'

‘I can't, I can't,' she said. ‘I must stay with the children at their grandfather's.'

‘What can that matter? They can see their grandparents quite often. But you must come over here. And live here all the time. You must. You must.'

‘No,' she said.

‘You understand that I am asking something terribly important to me.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘but it's terribly important for my children that I go on seeing their grandparents.'

‘If it's a matter of money I'll give you money. I've always got my women disgracefully cheap. It's time I paid. I'll give you quite a lot of money.'

‘But this particular money is the money my children ought to have,' she said, ‘and there is the house. And I am sorry for my husband's parents, they are old. It is my duty to be there most of the time. This is the kind of thing you'd make me do, if I were your wife or your sister or your daughter.'

He was silent, and they went on drinking the wine in alternate draughts, till the glass was empty. ‘It's ill luck that I've got a moral being for my mistress. But can't it be more than just one week in four? Oh, please, my darling.'

‘I'll try,' she said, ‘but it's so difficult.'

‘Why can't you take money from me?'

‘I don't need it.'

‘Your husband didn't leave so very much. I had his estate looked up at Somerset House by our London Branch.'

‘That isn't all I have. My father left me something too.'

‘That wasn't much either. I had that looked up too. I wish we could marry. It would be so much more convenient.'

‘No,' she cried, ‘no.' A vision of his country house. The roof off, Yolande, the plain daughter, the two sons, sitting exposed to the weather.

‘You wouldn't like it?' he asked.

‘Not at that price,' she said.

‘It's odd, marriage which isn't a marriage because it's incestuous is harder to break than a real marriage,' he said. ‘My sons and my daughter are my second cousins.'

‘I couldn't bring up my children in your house in Paris if your family was round the corner. You wouldn't like living with my two little girls in a household. We couldn't make love. This is the only way. It has to be secret. You don't know how intimate I am with my children. We couldn't sit and drink out of the same glass.'

‘I'd lose you that way too. The fact is, you and I are childless and we want the relationship of childless lovers, but both of us have children. No, there's nothing for it but to
go
on as we're going.' ‘Why do you mind so much tonight?'

‘I'm troubled sometimes,' he said, ‘by slight apprehensions.' ‘But how irrelevant marriage would be to what we've got. How people would interrupt us. We'd have to make love by night. It would get confused with our need for sleep. Now our relationship is perfectly pure, it's unmixed by the slightest taint of anything outside itself.'

‘You have some magnificent possessions. There are your eyes. When you came to luncheon at Deauville I was so wildly excited by them. I'd never seen eyes that spoke of such an immense capacity for pleasure. I don't mean just love-making. I hate those dirty old men who say that a woman with three ginger hairs in her left eyebrow is the thing to go for. I mean you enjoy everything, food, spring, me, rivers. I can make you do anything by showing you a river. It's all shining in your eyes, that greed which is so generous, it isn't greed, it thanks so nicely for what it takes. And you have the softest hair, like my daughter's when she was quite a little girl. She was very pretty then. She isn't now. I dare say she will be later, though I had a very plain grandmother. And you have the quickest reaction time of any human being I've ever known. You see every field in a landscape, you see every detail of a tympanum over a church door as soon as you've lifted those deep eyelids of yours. You should never use eyeshadow, your lids are the right colour, they're naturally a shadowy grey. And you can add up a column of figures like a flash!'

‘Grey eyelids and mental arithmetic,' she said, ‘who would have thought those two would have made a man kiss one from the collarbone to the ear.'

‘You think so quickly, you move so quickly, I feel as if I were looking out of a window and watching a swift flying round the house. And there's your mouth. It's quite without form of its own. Then when you feel or think anything, your lips writhe like little serpents and you make yourself a new mouth that's appropriate. When I say to you, “Do you remember that time when we went to the village in the forest near Autun,” your lips are blank and then they waver, and there's the memory of where we were and what we did. There's much more to you than that but now tell me why you like me.'

‘I like everything about you,' she said.

‘You can't. I wonder you like anything about me. Oh, perhaps you don't.'

‘Your eyes,' she said.

‘They're in bad taste like a loud tie,' he said. ‘Find something else.'

‘Your high cheekbones,' she said.

‘A touch of Albanian blood, we rather suspect,' he said.

‘I like your thick hair that looks sleek and isn't, it's rough like a dog's when you touch it,' she said.

‘Am I supposed to think that flattering?' he said.

‘And I like the way your muscles are like a map over your body,' she said. ‘Incontinent continents.'

‘And I like the odd way your hip-bones don't lie quite the way one expects, but more delicately, a little bit of Chinese carving,' he said, ‘but let's go to bed, let's take an inventory of all the other things we like.'

‘I particularly like those queer muscles above your ribs,' she said, ‘I've seen them on statues before.'

‘As to what I like in you, my taste is less recondite and austere,' he said. ‘My dear, you are so sweet today I'll give you a special treat. I won't make you walk along that passage. You won't have to face the fact that you want to be loved and bruised and turned into a quivering little animal and then have to be brought all the way back to being a serene and dignified human being again all by nothing in the least like magic. I'll carry you along that passage so that you can pretend you're being raped. Up you go.'

He set her down on her feet in the bedroom, and unzipped her dress, and kissed her down her spine, while she took off her shoes and stockings. Nowadays she wore no girdle, no brassiere, in case they made a pattern on her skin, only some ribbon suspenders. They were very pretty. She spread them out and wound them round her hand so as not to crease them, and her eyes fell on the reflections of their heads in the wide mirror over the chimneypiece. She saw him smiling, but it was a sad man who was smiling. He was, when she came to think of it, always sad. She turned round to face him, meaning to ask him why he was sad, but he picked her up in his arms and laid her on his bed.

‘When you say “hurt me” you are so sweet. You don't really want to be hurt. Your mouth tells me you have to steel yourself to say it. You only like to be hurt the least little bit, there's almost no perversity in you. But you know I like to hurt you that little bit, so you think I might like to hurt you still more, and you want to give me that pleasure. Sometimes I think of that, I can hear you saying, “hurt me”, and my eyes are wet. But I have to confess to you that I would hate to hurt you really, pain isn't what I want to give you.'

‘Oh, God, oh, God, let this last for ever.'

In the synopsis Rebecca West writes that Leonora and Nicholas
‘are together in his flat on the quay, when Avril [Waters] comes and calls on him, to get him to pay her hotel bills. […] He is infuriated. Avril [Waters] has never been his mistress but she has for some years been in the habit of expecting him to pay her hotel bills. In a rage he goes in and writes her a cheque and throws it at her. The scene is brutal. When she goes Leonora and Nicholas have a talk and suddenly Leonora realizes he is thinking, “She realizes that Avril is not my mistress, how awful it would be if she guessed the truth.” She guesses that when she goes back to England he goes back to the woman who was his mistress when he first met her.'

‘She's not my mistress. I don't think she's ever been anybody's mistress. It's not her line.'

‘After the last two years you couldn't say that of me.'

‘Leonora, you must not talk like that. Of us.'

‘Why not? The thing that you do with a whore is what you do with me.'

‘Yes. That is the most horrible thing in the world, that the most exquisite luxury should be the same as the most brutal necessity.'

‘I cannot bear to be thought of as either a luxury or a necessity.' ‘But everything that exists is either a luxury or a necessity if it isn't worthless.'

She was suddenly ashamed of her nakedness, and he perceived it, and picked up her peignoir and slipped it on her. ‘How hard you're breathing,' he said. ‘This has been a hideous shock. Lie down, lie down.' When she did not move he lifted her off her feet and laid her on the bed, and pulled the sheet over her, and sat down on the end of the bed and lit a cigarette. She thought how many women had probably lain in among these pillows. ‘My God, what has this damned woman done to us?'

She went back to London and telephoned to the two men who wanted to marry her. One was out, so it was the second whom she married. She told him that she had been in love with another man, but he did not mind. She never showed the benefits of the experience she had acquired with Nicholas except fitfully, when she was pretending it was Nicholas. Then she was hideously jarred because of his delight which took her out of her fantasy. The violence of her second husband's making love at first surprised her. But he was famined. Nicholas had never made love out of famine. She supposed he had never let himself get even very hungry.

Sex was not a universal function. It was a lottery. Everyone knew that there were some huge prizes of delight and that among them were those which matured into lasting happiness. Hence there was no woman but hoped that she would derive from her relationship with her husband or her love[r] such pleasure as she herself had been given by Nicholas. Yet she believed, and had some basis of experience for that belief, that Nicholas was a genius as a lover, and that genius in this field was as rare as any other. She was further fortunate, she suspected, in that she had some share of sexual genius herself, or rather that her sexual being was of a sort on which Nicholas's genius could work happily. She was in the happy position of a singer whose voice is specially suited to the operatic music of Mozart, and who meets the perfect Mozart producer. Such a destiny as hers could not fall to many women. That the singer was enjoying unusual good fortune would be generally admitted; women who cannot sing usually know it. But her own destiny must have seemed to most women within their reach, if only among the men they met was a man like Nicholas; and certainly genius does not exist in such numbers.

When Leonora thought of what differences there were between Nicholas and other men it seemed to her that other men's kisses had no weight to them. She remembered Nicholas's mouth as pressing down on hers so heavily that it was painful. This was perhaps not purely physical, it was perhaps a trick of her memory that made material
something
which was spiritual. Every time that Nicholas had kissed her she committed herself to
something
she could not name. To a sort of obedience. But obedience was not the word. She would not have performed any act which she believed to be wrong simply because he told her to do it; he would not have asked her to do anything about which she was capable of making a decision. For a woman to obey a man is horrible, to surrender her will, her sense of right and wrong, it is the sort of thing a prostitute does to curry favour with a man. That obligation which Nicholas laid upon her and which she accepted was to go with him out of life, to the place where they went when they made love: to accept their illicit relationship as a means to this discovery.

Leonora and her second husband spend some years in Africa before returning to London. Ten years after her love affair with Nicholas in Paris, she goes, evidently alone, to Vienna and discovers that Nicholas is staying there too.
‘They have a long dialogue and spend the night together and then part.'

Nicholas says about the future, ‘Nothing matters. The flag is torn!'