11

‘I never thought,’ Lavinia wrote that evening, ‘that one result of wrong-doing was to ease the temper. I feel like an angel. It is so long since I did anything I knew to be wrong, I had quite forgotten the taste of it. Certainly I must try again. To do wrong against one’s will, as I did last night, how disagreeable! But with the full approval of conscience (it must have approved, or it wouldn’t have let me be so nice to Mamma) how intoxicating! Before, when I felt I must only be good, my choice was confined, in fact I had no choice. Now, at last, I see the meaning of free will, which no one can see who has not wilfully done wrong. Even the people who say they always act for the best, and do so much harm, never get an inkling (it is their punishment) of the pleasure they would have if they knew, as others do, that they are really acting for the worst. The joys of hypocrisy are not self-sufficing, they depend upon the approval of others, whereas deliberate sin can be relished only by oneself; of all pleasures it is the least communicable. Why, I wonder, is that? Let me take an instance. Suppose I saw Emilio beating his mother, because his choice that day happened to be surfeited with good? He would be enjoying himself, just as I enjoyed prolonging our stay by deceiving my mother; but should I enjoy seeing him? Perhaps not, but then cruelty is a thing apart; no one can want to be cruel. Suppose I saw him kissing someone—someone he had no right to kiss? That wouldn’t please me either. But if I saw him give alms to a beggar? That would delight me, I know, for I’ve often wished he would. Well, there’s no moral to be drawn from this, except that one should keep one’s wickedness within oneself; to look at it from outside seems to dim its lustre. I will not be the spectator of my own mother-beating. Self-examination looks askance upon forbidden delights and morbidity is a force making for righteousness: away with it.’

12

The regatta of Murano was a sorry affair. Even the Kolynopulos, whose ready response to advertised spectacles had prompted the expedition, confessed disappointment. The dowdy little island was seething with people; the race was conducted with much fuss and continual clearing of the course; but when it actually happened, after a lapse of several hours, excitement had worn itself out and given way to impatience. No gondola, reflected Lavinia, as the first man home was received with shouts and pistol-shots, should ever try to suggest speed. It was like a parody of a boat race, the exhaustion of the performers remaining, the thrill left out, and an air of troubled and unnatural competition hanging over all. On their way back, at Lavinia’s request, they visited St. Francesco della Vigna. From across the lagoon the great Campanile had kept catching her eye, its shaft in the purple, its summit in the blue. She promised herself a moment of meditation in the melancholy cloister; but for some reason the church failed her. The ruinous shrine in the centre of the garth assumed a pagan look; the shadows were too thick for comfort; the darkness had nothing to tell her; the heavy doors were locked against her. She purposely outpaced Mrs. Kolynopulo, whose eyes were long in accustoming themselves to the half-light, to seek out a column she remembered—a column which supported a creeper, common enough, and wispy and poor, but lovely from one’s consciousness of its rarity in Venice. But its greenness had gone grey, its leaves were falling, and the defeated tendrils, clawing the air, symbolized and reaffirmed her failure to recapture the emotion of her first visit.

Leaving her companion behind, she hastened back to the gondola. Mr. Kolynopulo was asleep, sprawled across the cushions, his head over-weighting the hand that sought to sustain it. Emilio, also, was resting, but as she came he threw himself across the poop into an attitude that absurdly caricatured his fare’s. Lavinia laughed and clapped her hands; gone was her sense of isolation, gone her wish to re-create herself by a sentimental communion with the past. The darkness, palpable and unnerving in the cloister, fell into its place, dwindled into a time of day, was absorbed by Emilio and forgotten. Something that had stirred and asserted itself at the back of her mind fell asleep, seemed to die, leaving her spirits free. She resolved to avail herself of a security, a superiority to circumstance, that might vanish as suddenly as it came.

‘Mrs. Kolynopulo,’ she said, pronouncing the ridiculous name more seriously than ever before, ‘you said I might ask you a question: do you remember?’

‘No, dear; I can’t say that I do.’

‘It was about the gondoliers.’ Lavinia’s buoyancy remained, though she detected a wobble in her flight.

‘What about them, dear?’ Mrs. Kolynopulo enquired.

Lavinia realized then that her difficulty in putting the question was in itself a partial answer to it; but she had gone too far to draw back.

‘You said that married people did not—had not . . . . certain . . . . dealings with the gondoliers that unmarried people had. I wondered what you meant.’

‘Why, you’ve got it, my dear,’ Mrs. Kolynopulo chuckled. ‘You’ve said it yourself.’

A sensation of nausea came over Lavinia. She felt degraded and shown up, as though, in a first effort to steal, she had been caught red-handed by a pickpocket of older standing.

‘What have I said?’ she muttered. ‘I haven’t said anything.’

‘Oh yes, you have,’ her mentor rejoined. ‘You said that certain people had dealings with gondoliers. “Well, they do. Relations, it’s generally called.’

‘Why do they?’ Lavinia murmured stupidly.

‘Who, dear? The people, or the gondoliers?’

Oh, the agony of answering that question, the effort of bringing her mind to bear upon it. She turned the alternatives over and over, as though playing heads and tails with herself. The words began to have no meaning for her. At last she said:

‘The gondoliers.’

‘Well,’ Mrs. Kolynopulo answered in a tone of considerable relief, ‘you may be sure they don’t do it for nothing.’

Lavinia said not a word on the way home, and when she went to bed her diary remained unopened. She seemed to have become inarticulate, even to herself.

13

The following evening, however, she resumed her record. ‘I wish I could have left yesterday out of my life, as I left it out of my diary. I didn’t mean to refer to it; indeed I didn’t mean to add another word to this confession. It is false; it is a sham; there is a lie in every line of it. So, at least, I thought this morning. I have always been, and always shall be, the kind of character the last few days have proved me to be: I am the Lavinia who was cruel to Stephen, who snapped the head off a poor hairdresser, who shocked her mother with an indecent word, and imperilled her health with a lie, who worried two boon companions into disclosing a scandal as untrue as it was vile. This is the house Lavinia has built, and a proper pigsty it is; but real, quite real, unlike the decorous edifice whose pleasing lines are discernible in the pages of this diary and which is a fake, a fallacious façade with nothing behind it. I have lost the power to regulate my life; I feel as though it had suddenly grown too big for me; it fits only where it touches, and it touches only to hurt. I feel that all appeals that are made to me are sent to the wrong address. Lavinia Johnstone passed away early in the week and the person who wears her semblance is a very different creature, who would as soon spit in your eye as speak to you. It is a relief to talk of myself in the third person, I get rid of myself that way: if only I could isolate the new me, and enclose the intruder in a coffin of wax, as bees do! What distressed me in reading Elizabeth’s letter this morning was to find that, already, I had ceased to respond to the touches which were meant for me as she knew me; they fell on a dead place. But it will be a long time before my friends notice the change, before I become as strange to them as I am already to myself! And, meanwhile, I can feed their affections with the embalmed Lavinia. It is not a disgusting thought: Mummy was once merchandise—Mizraim cured wounds—Pharaoh was sold for balsams. No doubt many people before me have had to meet the public demand for versions of themselves which, though out of date and superseded, please better than their contemporary personalities could hope to do.’