«Just Francis. He'll stay with you. I've got to go.»
«When will you be back? You aren't going properly away are you, for days?»
«I'm not sure. I'll ring up.»
«Oh Bradley, please, please don't leave me. It's so frightening, everything frightens me now, I get so frightened at night. You are my brother, I know you'll look after me, you can't leave me with strangers. And I don't know what to do for the best and you're the only person I can talk to. I think I won't go and see the lawyer yet. I don't know what to do about Roger. Oh I wish I'd never left him, I want Roger, I want Roger-Roger would pity me if he saw me now.»
«It's broken now,» she said.
«Yes. Francis broke it trying to mend it.»
«I don't want it now any more.»
I picked it up. One of the buffalo's front legs was broken off jaggedly near the body. I laid the bronze on its side in the lacquer cabinet.
«It's quite broken now. Oh how sad, how sad– «Priscilla, stop it!»
«Oh dear, I do want Roger, Roger was mine, we belonged together, he was mine and I was his.»
«Don't be silly, Priscilla. Roger's a dead loss.»
«I want you to go to Roger and tell him I'm sorry– «Certainly not!»
«I want Roger, dear Roger, I want him– I tried to kiss her, at least I approached my face to the dark soiled line of the grey hair, but she jerked her head as I stooped and rapped me hard on the jaw. «Good-bye, Priscilla, I'll ring up.»
«Oh don't go away and leave me, please, please, please-I was at the door. She stared up at me now with huge slow tears coming out of her eyes, her gaping mouth all red and wet. I turned from her. Francis was just emerging from the kitchen with the tea tray. I saluted him and ran out of the house and along the court. At the end of the court I paused and peered cautiously out round the corner.
Arnold and Christian were just getting out of a taxi about ten yards away. Arnold was paying the taxi man. Christian saw me. She at once moved, turning her back to me and placing herself between me and Arnold.
I dodged back. There is a tiny slit of an alleyway just before the court debouches and I wedged myself into this, and saw almost instantly Arnold striding past, his face set hard with anxiety and purpose. Christian followed him more slowly, her eyes questing about. She saw me again and she made a gesture of a sort of Oriental voluptuousness, a kind of amused sensuous homage, lifting her hands palm upwards and then bringing them sinuously down to her sides like a ballet dancer. She did not pause. I waited some moments and then emerged.
Part Three
– – s, he had so much enjoyed our shopping. She conducted it. Boldly she chose food, cleaning stuff, washing stuff, kitchen things. She even bought a pretty blue dustpan and brush with flowers painted on. And an apron. And a sun hat. We loaded up the hired car. Some prophetic wit had made me keep my licence up to date. But, after earless years, I was driving cautiously.
It was five o'clock of the same day and we were far from London. We were in a village, the car was parked outside the village shop. Grass grew between the paving stones and the sloping sun was giving to each blade of grass its own individual brown little shadow. There was still quite a long way to go.
Seeing Julian playing housekeeper so busily and naturally and ordering me about as if we had been married for years made me sick with joy. I dissembled the intensity of my delight so as not to make her self-conscious. I bought some sherry and some wine because that is what couples do, but I felt I should be perpetually drunk on sheer pleasure. At moments I almost wanted to be alone so as to meditate more single-mindedly upon what had happened. When we had driven on a bit and I had stopped to relieve myself in a wood, and as I stood looking down at a criss-crossy linoleum of pine needles, and a little copse of frondy moss in a tree root and a few stars of scarlet pimpernel, I felt like a great poet. These tiny things stood before me, the concrete embodiment of something resonant and huge, of histories and ecstasies and tears.
Human happiness is rarely in the best of circumstances without shadows, and an almost pure happiness can be a terror to itself. My happiness at this time, though intense, was far from pure, and in the midst of all this mad joy (watching Julian buy the dustpan and brush, for instance) I soon started rehearsing terrors and miseries. Of course there was vengeful Arnold, resentful Rachel, miserable Priscilla. There was the quaint and curious fact that I had lied about my age. There was a huge question mark over the immediate future. But these matters were, now that I was with Julian, problems rather than nightmares. Soon and in solitude I would tell her everything and she would be the just judge. The fact of loving and being loved can make (in a way which is of course sometimes illusory) even the most practical of difficulties seem trivial or even senseless. Nor did I in any vulgar sense fear exposure. We would be secret. No one knew of this place. I had told my plans to nobody.
What troubled me as I drove along in that very blue twilight between fat flowery chestnut trees and saw the full moon like a dish of Jersey cream above a barley field which was still catching the light of the sun, were two things, one vast and cosmic, the other horribly precise. The cosmic trouble was that I was feeling, in some way quite unconnected with ordinary speculations about what might happen, that I should certainly lose Julian. I did not doubt now that she loved me. But I felt a kind of absolute despair, as if we had loved already for a thousand years and were condemned to become weary of something so perfect. I raced about the planet like lightning, I put a girdle round the galaxy, and was back in the next second gasping with this despair. Those who have loved will understand me. I was giddy with fear. A great loop had been made in the continuum of time and space and across the mouth of it Julian's right hand held my left. All this had happened before, perhaps a million times, and because of this was doomed. There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented terrified present. The future had passed through the present like a sword. We were already, even eye to eye and lip to lip, deep in the horrors to come.
My other trouble was wondering, when we reached Patara and I tried to make love to Julian, whether I should succeed.
So we started arguing.
«You're thinking too much, Bradley, I can see you are. We'll solve all these problems. We'll have Priscilla to live with us.»
«We won't be living anywhere.»
«What do you mean?»
«We just won't. There isn't any future. We shall go on and on driving in this car forever. That's all there is.»
«You mustn't speak like that, it's false. Look, I've bought brown bread and toothpaste and a dustpan.»
«Yes. That's a miracle. But it's like the fossils which religious men used to think God put there when He created the world in 4000 b.c. so that we could develop an illusion of the past.»
«I don't understand.»
«We have an illusion of the future.»
«That's wicked talk and a betrayal of love.»
«Our love is in the nature of a closed system. It is complete within itself. It has no accidents and no extension.»
«Please don't talk that abstract sort of language, it's a way of lying.»
«Maybe. But we have no language in which to tell the truth about ourselves, Julian.»
«Well, I have. I'm going to marry you. You will write a great book. I will try to write a great book.»
«Do you really believe this?»
«Yes. Bradley, you're tormenting me, I think you're doing it on purpose.»
«Perhaps. I feel so connected with you. I am you. I must stir a little, even cause pain, if I'm to apprehend you at all.»