Balthazar (1958) Part II Chapter 1

Pursewarden!’ writes Balthazar. ‘I won’t say that you have been less than just to him — only that he does not seem to resurrect on paper into a recognizable image of the man I knew. He seems to be a sort of enigma to you. (It is not enough, perhaps, to respect a man’s genius — one must love him a little, no?) It may have been the envy you speak of which blinded you to his qualities, but somehow I doubt it; it seems to me to be very hard to envy someone who was so single-minded and moreover such a simpleton in so many ways, as to make him a real original (for example: money terrified him). I admit that I regarded him as a great man, a real original, and I knew him well — even though I have never, to this day, read a single book of his, not even the last trilogy which made such a noise in the world, though I pretend to have done so in company. I have dipped here and there. I feel I don’t need to read more. ‘I put down a few notes upon him here then, not to contradict you, wise one, but simply to let you compare two dissimilar images. But if you are wrong about him, you are not less wrong than Pombal who always credited him with an humour noir so dear to the French heart. But there was no spleen in the man and his apparent world-weariness was not feigned; while his cruelties of tongue were due to his complete simplicity and a not always delightful sense of mischief. Pombal never recovered I think from being nicknamed “Le Prépuce Barbu”; and if you will forgive me neither did you from Pursewarden’s criticism of your own novels. Remember? “These books have a curious and rather forbidding streak of cruelty — a lack of humanity which puzzled me at first. But it is simply the way a sentimentalist would disguise his weakness. Cruelty here is the obverse of sentimentality. He wounds because he is afraid of going all squashy.” Of course, you are right in saying that he was contemptous of your love of Melissa — and the nickname he gave you must have wounded also, suiting as it did your initials (Lineaments of Gratified Desire). “There goes old Lineaments in his dirty mackintosh.” A poor joke, I know. But all this is not very real. ‘I am turning out a drawer full of old mementoes and notes today in order to think about him a bit on paper; it is a holiday and the clinic is closed. It is risky work, I know, but perhaps I can answer a question which you must have put to yourself when you read the opening pages of the Interlinear: “How could Purse-warden and Justine…?” I know. ‘He had been in Alexandria before twice, before he met us all, and had once spent a winter at Mazarita working on a book: but this time he came back to do a short course of lectures at the Atelier, and as Nessim and I and Clea were on the committee, he could not avoid the side of Alexandrian life which most delighted and depressed him. ‘Physical features, as best I remember them. He was fair, a good average height and strongly built though not stout. Brown hair and moustache — very small this. Extremely well-kept hands. A good smile though when not smiling his face wore a somewhat quizzical almost impertinent air. His eyes were hazel and the best feature of him — they looked into other eyes, into other ideas, with a real candour, rather a terrifying sort of lucidity. He was somewhat untidy in dress but always spotlessly clean of person and abhorred dirty nails and collars. Yes, but his clothes were sometimes stained with spots of the red ink in which he wrote. There! ‘Really, I think his sense of humour had separated him from the world, into a privacy of his own, or else he had discovered for himself the uselessness of having opinions and in consequence made a habit of usually saying the opposite of what he thought in a joking way. He was an ironist, hence he appeared often to violate good sense: hence too his equivocal air, the apparent frivolity with which he addressed himself to large subjects. This sort of serious clowning leaves footmarks in conversation of a peculiar kind. His little sayings stayed like the pawmarks of a cat in a pat of butter. To stupidities he would respond only with the word “kwatz”. ‘He believed, I think, that success was inherent in greatness. His own lack of financial success (he made very little money from his work, contrary to what you thought, and it all went to his wife and two children who lived in England) was inclined to make him doubt his powers. Perhaps he should have been born an American? I don’t know. ‘I remember going down to the dock to meet his boat with the panting Keats — who proposed to interview him. We were late and only caught up with him as he was filling in an immigration form. Against the column marked “religion” he had written “Protestant — purely in the sense that I protest.” ‘We took him for a drink so that Keats could interview him at leisure. The poor boy was absolutely nonplussed. Pursewarden had a particular smile for the Press. I still have the picture Keats took that morning. The sort of smile which might have hardened on the face of a dead baby. Later I got to know this smile and learned that it meant he was about to commit an outrage on accepted good sense with an irony. He was trying to amuse no-one but himself, mind you. Keats panted and puffed, looked “sincere” and probed, but all in vain. Later I asked him for a carbon copy of his interview which he typed out and gave me with his puzzled air, explaining that there was no “news” in the man. Pursewarden had said things like “It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively” and “England cries out for brothels”; this last somewhat shocked poor Keats who asked him if he felt that “unbridled licence” would be a good thing in England. Did Purse-warden want to undermine religion? ‘I can see as I write the wicked air with which my friend replied in shocked tones: “Good Lord, no! I would simply like to put an end to the cruelty to children which is such a distressing feature of English life — as well as the slavish devotion to pets which borders on the obscene.” Keats must have gulped his way through all this, dotting and dashing in his shorthand book with rolling eye, while Pursewarden studied the further horizon. But if the journalist found this sort of exchange enigmatic, he was doubly puzzled by some of the answers to his political questions. For example, when he asked Pursewarden what he thought of the Conference of the Arab Committee which was due to start in Cairo that day, he replied: “When the English feel they are in the wrong, their only recourse is to cant.” “Am I to understand that you are criticizing British policy?” “Of course not. Our statesmanship is impeccable.” Keats fanned himself all the harder and abandoned politics forthwith. In answer to the question “Are you planning to write a novel while you are here?” Pursewarden said: “If I am denied every other means of self-gratification.” ‘Later Keats, poor fellow, still fanning that pink brow, said “He’s a thorny bastard, isn’t he?” But the odd thing was that he wasn’t at all. Where can a man who really thinks take refuge in the so-called real world without defending himself against stupidity by the constant exercise of equivocation? Tell me that. Particularly a poet. He once said: “Poets are not really serious about ideas or people. They regard them much as a Pasha regards the members of an extensive harim. They are pretty, yes. They are for use. But there is no question of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his freshness of vision, and finds everything miraculous. And this is what Napoleon meant when he described poetry as a science creuse. He was quite right from his own point of view.” ‘This robust mind was far from splenetic though its judgements were harsh. I have seen him so moved in describing Joyce’s encroaching blindness and D. H. Lawrence’s illness that his hand shook and he turned pale. He showed me once a letter from the latter in which Lawrence had written: “In you I feel a sort of profanity — almost a hate for the tender growing quick in things, the dark Gods….” He chuckled. He deeply loved Lawrence but had no hesitation in replying on a post-card: “My dear DHL. This side idolatry — I am simply trying not to copy your habit of building a Taj Mahal around anything as simple as a good f———k.” ‘He said to Pombal once: “On fait l’amour pour mieux refouler et pour décourager les autres.” And added: “I worry a great deal about my golf handicap.” It always took Pombal a few moments to work out these non-sequiturs. “Quel malin, ce type-là!” he would mutter under his breath. Then and only then would Purse-warden permit himself a chuckle — having scored his personal victory. They were a splendid pair and used to drink together a great deal. ‘Pombal was terribly affected by his death — really overcome, he retired to bed for a fortnight. Could not speak of him without tears coming into his eyes; this used to infuriate Pombal himself. “I never knew how much I loved the blasted man” he would say…. I hear Pursewarden’s wicked chuckle in all this. No, you are wrong about him. His favourite adjective was “uffish!” or so he told me. ‘His public lectures were disappointing, as you may remember. Afterwards, I discovered why. He read them out of a book. They were someone else’s lectures! But once when I took him up to the Jewish school and asked him to talk to the children of the literary group, he was delightful. He began by showing them some card tricks and then congratulated the winner of the Literary Prize, making him read the prize essay aloud. Then he asked the children to write down three things in their notebooks which might help them some day if they didn’t forget them. Here they are: 1. Each of our five senses contains an art. 2. In questions of art great secrecy must be observed. 3. The artist must catch every scrap of wind. ‘Then he produced from his mackintosh pocket a huge packet of sweets upon which they all fell, he no less, and completed the most successful literary hour ever held at the school. ‘He had some babyish habits, picked his nose, and enjoyed taking his shoes off under the table in a restaurant. I remember hundreds of meetings which were made easy and fruitful by his naturalness and humour but he spared no-one and made enemies. He wrote once to his beloved DHL: “Ma.tre, Ma.tre, watch your step. No-one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.” ‘When he wished to discuss a bad work of art he would say in tones of warm approbation “Most effective.” This was a feint. He was not interested enough in art to want to argue about it with others (“dogs snuffing over a bitch too small to mount”) so he said “Most effective.” Once when he was drunk he added: “The effective in art is what rapes the emotion of your audience without nourishing its values.” ‘Do you see? Do you see? ‘All this was brought to bear on Justine like a great charge of swan-shot, scattering her senses and bringing her for the first time something she had despaired of ever encountering: namely laughter. Imagine what one touch of ridicule can do to a Higher Emotion! “As for Justine” said Pursewarden to me when he was drunk once, “I regard her as a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass — a somewhat vulpine Alexandrian Venus. By God, what a woman she would be if she were really natural and felt no guilt! Her behaviour would commend her to the Pantheon — but one cannot send her up there with a mere recommendation from the Rabbinate — a bundle of Old Testament ravings. What would old Zeus say?” He saw my reproachful glance at these cruelties and said, somewhat shamefacedly. “I’m sorry, Balthazar. I simply dare not take her seriously. One day I will tell you why.” ‘Justine herself wished very much to take him seriously but he absolutely refused to command sympathy or share the solitude from which he drew so much of his composure and self-possession. ‘Justine herself, you know, could not bear to be alone. ‘He was due, I remember, to lecture in Cairo to several societies affiliated to our own Arts Society, and Nessim, who was busy, asked Justine to take him down by car. That was how they came to find themselves together on a journey which threw up a sort of ludicrous shadow-image of a love-relationship, like a clever magic-lantern picture of a landscape, created by, strangely — not Justine at all — but a worse mischief-maker — the novelist himself. “It was Punch and Judy, all right!” said Pursewarden ruefully afterwards. ‘He was at that time deeply immersed in the novel he was writing, and as always he found that his ordinary life, in a distorted sort of way, was beginning to follow the curvature of his book. He explained this by saying that any concentration of the will displaces life (Archimedes’ bath-water) and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived. You will see from this that he was a serious fellow underneath much of his clowning and had quite comprehensive beliefs and ideas. But also, he had been drinking rather heavily that day as he always did when he was working. Between books he never touched a drop. Riding beside her in the great car, someone beautiful, dark and painted with great eyes like the prow of some Aegean ship, he had the sensation that his book was being rapidly passed underneath his life, as if under a sheet of paper containing the iron filings of temporal events, as a magnet is in that commonplace experiment one does at school: and somehow setting up a copying magnetic field. ‘He never flirted, mind you; and if he started to approach Justine it was simply to try out a few speeches and attitudes, to verify certain conclusions he had reached in the book before actually sending it to the printer, so to speak! Afterwards, of course, he bitterly repented of this piece of self-indulgence. He was at that moment trying to escape from the absurd dictates of narrative form in prose: “He said” “She said” “He cocked an eye, shot a cuff, lifted a lazy head, etc.” Was it possible, had he succeeded in “realizing” character without the help of such props? He was asking himself this as he sat there in the sand. (“Her eyelashes brushed his cheek.” Merde alors! Had he written that?) Justine’s thick black eyelashes were like … what? So it was that his kisses were really warm and wholehearted in an absent-minded way because they were in no way meant for her. (One of the great paradoxes of love. Concentration on the love-object and possession are the poisons.) And he discovered to her the fact that she was ridiculous, with a series of disarming and touching pleasantries at which she found herself laughing with a relief that seemed almost sinful. As for her: it was not only that his skin and hair were fresh and that his love-making was full of a lazy, unblushing enterprise; he was wholly himself in a curious way. It aroused in her an unfamiliar passionate curiosity. And then, the things he said! “Of course I’ve read Moeurs and had you pointed out a hundred times as the tragic central character. It’s all right, written by a born lettré, of course, and smells fashionably of armpits and eau de javel. But surely you are making yourself a little self-important about it all? You have the impertinence to foist yourself on us as a problem — perhaps because you have nothing else to offer? It is foolish. Or perhaps it is that the Jew loves punishment and always comes back for more?” And suddenly, but completely, to take her firmly by the nape of the neck and force her down into the hot sand before she could find time to measure the extent of the insult or form a response in her mind. And then, while he was still kissing, to say something so ludicrous that the laughter and tears in her mind became one and the same sort of things, a mixture of qualities hard to endure. ‘ “For God’s sake!” she said, having decided to behave as if outraged. He had been too quick for her. He had surprised her while she was half-asleep in her mind, so to speak. ‘ “Didn’t you want to make love? My mistake!” ‘She looked at him, a little disarmed by the mock-repentance of his expression. “No, of course not. Yes.” Something inside her repeated “Yes, yes.” An attachment without fingerprints — something as easy as sailing a boat or driving into deep water: “Fool!” she cried, and to her own surprise started laughing. A conquest by impudence? I don’t know. I am only putting down my own views. ‘She explained this to herself later by saying that for him sex was the nearest thing to laughter — quite free of particularity, neither sacred nor profane. Pursewarden himself has written that he thought it comic and sinister and divine in one. But she could not grasp and define the thing as she wished, for when she said to him “You are hopelessly promiscuous, like I am” he was really angry, really outraged. “Imbecile” he replied, “you have the soul of a clerk. For those who love poetry there is no such thing as vers libre.” She did not understand this. ‘ “Oh, stop behaving like a pious old sin-cushion into which we all have to stick rusty pins of our admiration” he snapped. In his diary he added drily: “Moths are attracted by the flame of personality. So are vampires. Artists should take note and beware.” And in the mirror he cursed himself roundly for this lapse, a self-indulgence which had brought him what most bored him — an intimate relationship. But in the sleeping face he too saw the childish inhabitant of Justine, the “calcimined imprint of a fern in chalk”. He saw how she must have looked on the first night of love — hair torn and trailing over the pillow like a ruffled black dove, fingers like tendrils, warm mouth inhaling the airs of sleep; warm as a figure of pastry fresh from the oven. “Oh damn!” he cried aloud. ‘Then in bed with her in a hotel crowded with Alexandrian acquaintances who might easily observe their rashness and carry their gossip back to the city they had left together that morning, he swore again. Pursewarden had much to hide, you know. He was not all he seemed. And at this time he did not dare to prejudice his relations with Nessim. The Bloody woman! I hear his voice. ‘“Ecoute….” ‘“Rien — silence.” ‘“Mais chéri, nous sommes seuls.” She was still sleepy. Cast an eye to a bolted door. She felt a momentary disgust at this bourgeois fear of his; afraid of intruders, spies, a husband? ‘“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” ‘“Je m’écoute moi-même.” Yellow eyes without a trace of discernible divinity in them; he was like a slender rock-god, with ruffled moustache. Past lives? “Le coeur qui bat.” Derisively he quoted a popular song. ‘“Tu n’es pas une femme pour moi — pas dans mon genre.” ‘This made her feel like a whipped dog specially as a moment ago he had been kissing her, breaking her down into successive images of pain and pleasure with an importunity which belonged, she now knew, only to his passion and not to himself. ‘ “What do you want?” she said, and struck him across the face to feel at once the stinging retort on her own cheek — like spray dashing over her. And now he began to fool again until she could not prevent herself from laughing. ‘This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry. ‘As for Pursewarden, he believed with Rilke that no woman adds anything to the sum of Woman, and from satiety he had now taken refuge in the plenty of the imagination — the true field of merit for the artist. This is perhaps what made him seem to her somehow cold and unfeeling. “Somewhere inside you there is a nasty little Anglican clergyman” she told him and he considered the remark gravely on its merits. “Perhaps” he said, and added after a pause “But your humourlessness has made you an enemy of pleasure. The enemy. You have a premeditated approach to experience. I am a truer pagan.” And he began to laugh. Great honesty can be crueller than anything else. ‘He was sick, I think too, of all the “mud thrown up by the wheels of life” — so he writes. He had done his best to scrape off as much as he could, to tidy himself up. Was he now to be saddled with the inquisitions and ardours of a Justine — the marshy end of a personality which in a funny sort of way he had himself transcended? “By God, no!” he told himself. Can you see what a fool he was? ‘His life had been a various and full one, and he had held a number of contract posts for some political branch of the Foreign Office, largely, I gather, connected with cultural relations. This work had taken him to several countries and he spoke at least three languages well. He was married and had two children although he was separated from his wife — and indeed never spoke about her without stammering — though I gather they corresponded affectionately and he was always most scrupulous in sending her money. What else? Yes, his real name was Percy and he was somewhat sensitive about it because of the alliteration, I suppose; hence his choice of Ludwig as a signature to his books. He was always delighted when his reviewers took him to be of German extraction. ‘I think what frightened and delighted Justine about him most, however, was his somewhat contemptuous repudiation of Arnauti and his book Moeurs. Mind you, this too was overdone — he actually admired the book very much. But he used it as a stick to belabour Justine, describing her ex-husband as a “tiresome psychoanalytical turnkey with a belt full of rusty complexes”. I must say, this delighted her. You see, here was someone who set no store by jargon and refused to regard her as a Case. Of course Pursewarden, the silly fool, was simply trying to get rid of her and this was not a very good way. Yet as a doctor I can testify to the therapeutic effects of insults in cases where medicine is at a loss to make any headway! Indeed, had Justine succeeded in making herself really interesting to him, she might have learned a lot of valuable lessons. Odd, isn’t it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you must know, it is a law of love that the so-called “right” person always comes too soon or too late. As for Pursewarden, he withdrew his favours so abruptly that there was hardly time for her to measure the full force of his personality. ‘But at the time of which I am writing he was busy insulting her in his somewhat precise idiosyncratic English or French (he had a few pet neologisms which he used with pleasure — one was the noun “bogue” which he had coined from “bogus”; c’est de la grande bogue .a or “what bloody bogue”) — he insulted her, if one can use the expression, simply to discourage her. I must say I can hardly repress a laugh when I think of it: you could as easily discourage Justine as an equinox, and she was not disposed to abandon this experiment before she had learned as much as possible about herself from it. Predatory Judaic characteristic! Pursewarden was like Doctor Foster in the nursery rhyme. ‘For her, his easy detachment gave him freshness of heart. Justine had never had anyone who didn’t want or who could do without her before! All kinds of new resonances sprang out of making love to such a person. (Am I inventing this? No. I knew them both well and discussed each with the other.) Then, he could make her laugh — quite the most dangerous thing to do to a woman for they prize laughter most after passion. Fatal! No, he was not wrong when he told himself in the mirror: “Ludwig, thou art an imbecile.” ‘Worse, the mockery of his cruelty hurt her, and after making love, say, made her think something like this: “What he does is simple as a domestic impulse become habit — cleaning his shoes on a mat.” Then unexpectedly would come some terrible mocking phrase like “We are all looking for someone lovely to be unfaithful to — did you think you were original?” Or else “The human race! If you can’t do the trick with the one you’ve got, why — shut your eyes and imagine the one you can’t get. Who knows? It’s perfectly legal and secret. It’s the marriage of true minds!” He was standing at the washbasin cleaning his teeth in white wine. She could have murdered him for looking so gay and self-possessed. ‘Coming back from Cairo they had several rows. “As for your so-called illness — have you ever thought it might be just due to an inflamed self-pity?” She became so furious that she nearly drove the car off the road into a tree. “Miserable Anglo-Saxon!” she cried, on the point of tears — “Bully!” ‘And he thought to himself: “Great Heavens! Here we are quarrelling like a couple of newly-weds. Soon we shall marry and live in filthy compatibility, feasting on each other’s blackheads. Ugh! Dreadful isogamy of the Perfect Match. Perce, you gone and done it again.” I can reconstruct this because he always spoke to himself in cockney when he was drunk as well as when he was alone. ‘ “If you try to hit me” he said happily “we shall have a crash.” And the thought of a bitter little short story into which he might insert her. “What we need to establish for sex in art” he muttered “is a revulsion coefficient.” She was still angry. “What are you muttering about?” — “Praying.” ‘For her, the moiety which remained after love-making then was not disgust or despair as it usually was, but laughter; and though furious with him she nevertheless found herself smiling at some absurdity of his even as she realized with a pang that he could never be achieved, attained as a man, nor would he even become a friend, except on his own terms. He offered an uncompanionate compassionless ardour which in a funny sort of way made his kisses thrilling. They were as healthy as the bite of a hungry child into a cooking-apple. And regretting this, with another part of her mind (there was an honest woman somewhere deep down) she found herself hoping he would never abandon this entrenched position, or retreat from it. Like all women, Justine hated anyone she could be certain of; and you must remember she had never had anyone as yet whom she could wholly admire — though that may sound strange to you. Here at last was someone she could not punish by her infidelities — an intolerable but delightful novelty. Women are very stupid as well as very profound. ‘As for Justine, she was surprised by the new emotions he seemed capable of provoking. Quite simple things — for example she found her love extending itself to inanimate objects concerned with him, like his old meerschaum pipe with the much basted stem. Or his old hat, so battered and weather-stained — it hung behind the door like a water-colour of the man himself. She found herself cherishing objects he had touched or thrown aside. It seemed to her an infuriating sort of mental captivity to find herself stroking one of his old notebooks as if she were caressing his body, or tracing with her finger the words he had written on the shaving-mirror with his brush (from Stendhal): “You must boldly face a little anatomy if you want to discover an unknown principle” and “Great souls require nourishment.” ‘Once, when she discovered an Arab prostitute in his bed (while he himself was shaving in the other room and whistling an air from Donizetti) she was surprised to find that she was not jealous but curious. She sat on the bed and pinning the arms of the unfortunate girl to the pillow set about questioning her closely about what she had felt while making love to him. Of course, this scared the prostitute very much. “I am not angry” Justine repeated to the wailing creature, “I am puzzled. Tell me what I ask of you.” ‘Pursewarden had to come in and release his visitant and they all three sat on the bed together, Justine feeding her with crystallized fruit to calm her fears. ‘Shall I go on? This analysis may give you pain — but if you are a real writer you will want to follow things to their conclusion, no? All this shows you how hard it was for Melissa…. ‘If he succeeded in infuriating her it was because he could feel concern about her without any real affection. He did not always clown, or stay beyond her reach; that is what I mean by his honesty. He gave intellectual value for money — in fact he told her the real secret which lay hidden under the enigma of his behaviour. You will find it in one of his books. I know this because Clea quoted it to me as his most profound statement on human relationships. He said to her one night: “You see, Justine, I believe that Gods are men and men Gods; they intrude on each other’s lives, trying to express themselves through each other — hence such apparent confusion in our human states of mind, our intimations of powers within or beyond us…. And then (listen) I think that very few people realize that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth — a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach. That is why all your dull repetitions of the same mistake are simply like a boring great multiplication table, and will remain so until you get your head out of the paper bag and start to think responsibly.” ‘It is impossible to describe the effect these words had on her: they threw her life and actions into relief in an entirely new way. She saw him all of a sudden in a new light, as a man whom one could “really love”. Alas, he had already withdrawn his favours … ‘When he next went to Cairo he elected to go alone and, made restless by his absence, she made the mistake of writing him a long passionate letter in which she clumsily tried to thank him for a friendship of whose real value to her he was completely unaware — that is true of all love again. He regarded this simply as another attempt to intrude upon him and sent her a telegram. (They corresponded through me. I have it still.) “First nobody can own an artist so be warned. Second what good is a faithful body when the mind is by its very nature unfaithful? Third stop whining like an Arab, you know better. Fourth neurosis is no excuse. Health must be won and earned by a battle. Lastly it is honourable if you can’t win to hang yourself.” ‘Once she happened upon him when he was very drunk at the Café Al Aktar; I gather that you and I had just left. You remember the evening? He had been rather insulting. It was the evening when I tried to show you how the nine-point proposition of the Cabal worked. I did not know then that you would type it all out and send it to the Secret Service! What a marvellous jest! But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket. No sooner had we left than Justine entered. It was she who helped him back to his hotel and pushed him safely on to his bed. “Oh, you are the most despairing man!” she cried at that recumbent figure, at which he raised his arms and responded “I know it, I know it! I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!” And he began to laugh — a laughter which was overtaken by nausea. She left him being sick in the washbasin. ‘The next morning she went round early with some French reviews in one of which there was an article about his work. He was wearing nothing but a pyjama jacket and a pair of spectacles. On his mirror he had written with a wet shaving-stick, some words from Tolstoy: “I do not cease to reflect upon art and upon every form of temptation which obscures the spirit.” ‘He took the books from her without a word and made as if to shut the door in her face. “No” she said, “I’m coming in.” He cleared his throat and said: “This is for the last time. I’m sick of being visited as one might visit the grave of a dead kitten.” But she took him by the arms and he said, more gently, “A definite and complete stop, see?” ‘She sat down on the end of the bed and lit a cigarette, considering him, as one might a specimen. “I am curious, after all your talk about self-possession and responsibility, to see just how Anglo-Saxon you are — unable to finish anything you start. Why do you look furtive?” This was a splendid line of attack. He smiled. “I’m going to work today.” ‘ “Then I’ll come tomorrow.” ‘ “I shall have ‘flu.” ‘ “The day after.” ‘ “I shall be going to the Zoo.” ‘ “I shall come too.” ‘Pursewarden was now extremely rude; she knew she had scored a victory and was delighted. She listened to his honeyed insults as she tapped the carpet with her foot. “Very well” she said at last, “we shall see.” (I am afraid you will have to make room in this for the essential comedy of human relations. You give it so little place.) The next day he put her out of his hotel-room by the neck, like a pet cat. The following day he woke and found the great car parked once more outside the hotel. “Merde” he cried and just to spite her dressed and went to the Zoo. She followed him. He spent the morning looking at the monkeys with the greatest attention. She was not blind to the insult. She followed him to a bench where he sat, eating the peanuts which he had originally bought to feed the monkeys. She always looked splendid when she was angry, with her nostrils quivering, and clad in that spotless shark-skin suit with a flower at her lapel. ‘ “Pursewarden” she said, sitting down. ‘ “You won’t believe me” he said, “you bloody tiresome obsessive society figure. From now on you are going to leave me alone. Your money won’t help you.” ‘It is a measure of his stupidity that he could use such language. She was delighted at making him so alarmed. You, of course, know how determined she is. But there was a reason — and underneath the insults she detected a genuine concern — something that did not bear at all on their relationship such as it was. Something else. What? ‘You have already noted that she was an unerring mind-reader; and sitting beside him, watching his face, she said like someone reading a badly-written manuscript — “Nessim. Something to do with Nessim. You are afraid … not of him.” And then in a flash the intuitive contact was made and she blurted out: “There is something regarding Nessim which you cannot afford to compromise: I understand.” And she heaved a great sigh. “O Fool, why did you not tell me? Am I to forfeit your friendship because of this? Of course not. I don’t care whether you want to sleep with me or not. But you — that is different. Thank God I’ve discovered what it was.” ‘He was too astonished to say anything. This mind-reading performance surprised him more than anything about her. He simply stared at her and said nothing, for a long time. “Oh, I am glad” she went on, “for that is so easily arranged. And it will not prevent us from meeting. We need never sleep together again if you don’t wish it. But at least I shall be able to see you.” Another category of the “love-beast”, one which I am unable to define. She would have gone through fire for him by now. ‘The silences of Nessim had already assumed huge proportions in her mind. They stretched away on every side like the desert itself — unnerving her. And since her own conscience was by its nature and even without reason, a guilty one, she had already begun to build up a defensive circle of friends whose harmless presences might obviate suspicion of her — the little court of homosexuals like Toto and Amar, whose activities and predispositions were sufficiently well-known to everybody to offer no cause for heart-burnings. She moved now like some sulky planet in the social life of the town, accepting the attentions of these neuters purely as a defence. In this way a general will utilize the features of a town he wishes to defend by building up ring within ring of earthworks. She did not know, for example, that the silences of Nessim betokened only despair and not suspense — for he never broke them. ‘In your manuscripts, you hardly mention the question of the child — I told you once before that I thought Arnauti neglected that aspect of affairs in Moeurs because it seemed to him melodramatic. “To the childless all things are without resonance” says Pursewarden somewhere. But now the question of the child had become as important to Nessim as to Justine herself — it was his sole means of enlisting the love he desired from her — or so he thought. He fell upon the central problem like a fury, thinking that this would be the one means of penetrating the affective armour of his beautiful tacit wife; the wife he had married and hung up in a cobwebbed corner of his life, by the wrists, like a marionette on strings! Thank God I have never “loved”, wise one, and never will! Thank God! ‘Pursewarden writes somewhere (again from Clea): “English has two great forgotten words, namely “helpmeet” which is much greater than “lover” and “loving-kindness” which is so much greater than “love” or even “passion”.’ ‘Now Justine one day overheard part of a telephone conversation which led her to believe that Nessim had either located the missing child or knew something about it which he did not wish to reveal to her. As she passed through the hall he was putting down the telephone after having said: “Well then, I count on your discretion. She must never know.” Never know what? Who was the “she”? One can be forgiven for jumping to conclusions. As he did not speak of the conversation for several days she taxed him with it. He now made the fatal mistake of saying that it had never taken place, that she had misheard a conversation with his secretary. Had he said that it related to something quite different, he would have been all right, but to accuse her of not hearing the words which had been ringing in her ears for several days like an alarm bell, this was fatal. ‘At one blow she lost confidence in him and began to imagine all sorts of things. Why should he wish to keep from her any knowledge he might have gained about her child? After all, his original promise had been to do what he could to discover its fate. Was it then too horrible to speak of? Surely Nessim would tell her anything if indeed he knew anything? Why should he hold back a hypothetical knowledge of its fate? She simply could not guess but inside herself she felt that in some way the information was being held as a hostage is held — against something — what? Good behaviour? ‘But Nessim, who had destroyed by this last clumsiness the last vestiges of regard she had for him, was grappling with a new set of factors. He himself had set great store by the recovery of the child as a means to the recovery of Justine herself; he simply did not dare to tell her — or indeed himself, so painful was it — that one day, after he had exhausted all his resources in an attempt to find out the truth, Narouz telephoned to say: “I saw the Magzub by chance last night and forced the truth out of him. The child is dead.” ‘This now rose between them like a great wall of China, shutting them off from any further contact, and making her afraid that he might even intend her harm. And this is where you come in.’