Lady Oracle (21 page)

It was to Paul, then, that I owed my choice of career. Aunt Lou’s money was running out, much faster than I’d anticipated, though I was trying to be economical, and I didn’t like the thought of getting a job. Nobody likes that thought, really, they only do it because they have to. I could touch-type, but it seemed to me I could make money faster by typing at something of my own, and other people’s business letters are very boring. Also, there was nothing much for me to do on weekday evenings while Paul sat bashing away at his current book,
Judith Morris, Arctic Expedition Nurse
, chain-smoking Gauloises stuck in a short gold cigarette holder he kept clenched between his teeth, and drinking one glass of tawny port per evening. At such times, contempt for his readers and for himself hovered in the room like a cloud of smoke, and his temper after one of these sessions was foul but cold, like smog.

I asked Paul to get me some samples of historical romances from Columbine Books, his publisher, and I set to work. I joined the local library and took out a book on costume design through the ages. I made lists of words like “fichu” and “paletot” and “pelisse”; I spent whole afternoons in the costume room of the Victoria and Albert Museum, breathing in the smell of age and polished wood and the dry, sardonic odor of custodians, studying the glass cases
and the collections of drawings. I thought if I could only get the clothes right, everything else would fall into line. And it did: the hero, a handsome, well-bred, slightly balding man, dressed in an immaculately tailored tweed cloak, like Sherlock Holmes’s, pursued the heroine, crushing his lips to hers in a hansom cab and rumpling her
pelisse
. The villain, equally well-bred and similarly clad, did just about the same thing, except that in addition he thrust his hand inside her
fichu
. The rival female had a lithe body like that of a jungle animal beneath her exquisitely stitched corset, and like all such women, she came to a bad end. I wasn’t as good at bad ends as I later became: I think she merely tripped on her
paletot
, going downstairs. But she deserved this, as she’d attempted to reduce the heroine to a life of shame by tying her up and leaving her in a brothel, under the supervision of a madam to whom I gave the features of Miss Flegg.

But I had aimed too high. My first effort came back with instructions to the effect that I could not use words like “fichu” and “paletot” and “pelisse” without explaining what they meant. I made the necessary revisions and received my first hundred pounds, with a request for more material. Material, they called it, as if it came by the yard.

I was quite thrilled when two copies of
The Lord of Chesney Chase
arrived in a brown-paper parcel, with a dark-haired woman in a plum-colored traveling cloak on the cover and my pen name in white lettering: Louise K. Delacourt. For of course I used Aunt Lou’s name; it was a kind of memorial to her. Several years later, when I’d switched to a North American publisher, I was asked for a photograph. It was for the files, they said, to be used for publicity; so I sent them the shot of Aunt Lou at the Ex, with me standing beside her. This picture was never used. The women who wrote my kind of book were supposed to look trim and healthy, with tastefully grayed hair. Unlike the readers, they had brisk shoulders and were successful.
They weren’t supposed to squint into the sun, displaying both rows of teeth and holding a cone of spun sugar. The readers preferred not to think of their fairy godmothers, the producers of their delicate nightly masquerades, as overblown and slightly frowsy, with slip straps that showed and necklines that gaped, like Aunt Lou’s. Or my own.

Initially Paul encouraged me, partly because of the money. He liked the idea of having a mistress, but he couldn’t really afford to keep one. After the first five or six months, when I started earning more per book than he did, he even began to charge me rent, though having me sleeping in his library didn’t cost him any extra. I was grateful for his belief, not in my talent exactly, for he didn’t feel that writing this kind of book required any, but in my perseverance: I could think up plots almost as fast as he could, and I was a better typist, so I could equal him page for page on a good night. At first he was paternal and indulgent.

In some ways he reminded me of the man with the bouquet of daffodils who had exposed himself in that chivalrous and touching way on the wooden bridge when I was a young Brownie. Paul too had that air of well-meaning but misplaced gallantry; they were both, I thought, gentle and harmless beneath their eccentricities, asking only simple gratifications that didn’t impose too much on the partner or watcher. And both of them had rescued me, perhaps, though the identity of the daffodil man was still not clear to me.

I couldn’t tell about Paul’s identity either, for as time went on he began to change. Or possibly I merely learned more about him. For instance, he viewed the loss of my virginity as both totally his fault – thus making him responsible for me – and a fall from grace which disqualified me from ever being a wife, or his wife at any rate. He thought my lack of guilt was a sign of barbarism. Anyone from across the Atlantic Ocean was a kind of savage to him, and even the English
were questionable, they were too far west. So he ended by being angry with me for my failure to cry, though I told him over and over that this wasn’t the sort of thing I cried about.

Then there were his views on the war. He seemed to think that the Jews were in some obscure metaphysical way responsible for it, and thus for the loss of his family chateau.

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said, outraged; he couldn’t mean it. “That’s like saying a rape victim is responsible for being raped, or a murder victim.…”

He drew imperturbably on his Gauloise. “This also is true,” he said. “They have brought it upon themselves.”

I thought about the revolver. I couldn’t ask him about it without revealing that I’d snooped in his room, and I knew by now he would find this unforgivable. I began to feel a little like Eva Braun in the bunker: what was I doing with this madman, how did I get into this thoroughly sealed place, and how could I get out? For Paul had an end-of-the-world fatalism: civilization for him had either already collapsed or was about to. He thought there would be another war, in fact he hoped there would; not that he thought it would solve or improve anything, but so that he himself might fight in it and distinguish himself by acts of bravery. He hadn’t resisted enough in the last one, he felt; he’d been too young to know that he should’ve stayed and perished in the forest with the rest of the slaughtered army. To have lived, to have survived, to have escaped was a kind of disgrace. But he didn’t picture war as tanks, missiles and bombs, he pictured it as himself on horseback, with a sabre, charging against impossible odds. “Women do not understand these things,” he’d say, clenching his teeth down on the end of his cigarette holder. “They believe that life is babies and sewing.”

“I can’t sew,” I said, but he would merely say, “Later you will sew. You are so young,” and go on to prophesy more doom.

I recited slogans of hope, in vain; he would only smile his twisted little smile and say, “You Americans are so naive, you have no history.” I’d given up trying to tell him I was not an American. “It is all the same thing, isn’t it?” he would say. “The lack of one kind of history is the same as the lack of another.”

Ultimately our differences were: I believed in true love, he believed in wives and mistresses; I believed in happy endings, he in cataclysmic ones; I thought I was in love with him, he was old and cynical enough to know I wasn’t. I had merely been deluded into this belief by my other belief, the one in true love. How could I be sleeping with this peculiar man, who was no Bell Telephone Mercury, without being in love with him? Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

Because Paul knew I was not in love with him, because he thought of me as a mistress and of mistresses as unfaithful by nature, he began to have fits of jealousy. It was all right as long as I did nothing but loll around the flat, reading and typing out my Costume Gothics and going nowhere except with him. He didn’t even mind my trips to the Victoria and Albert; he didn’t notice them much, because I was always home before he was and I didn’t go there on the weekends. It was over the Portobello Road that we came to the parting of the ways. He himself introduced me to it, and it quickly became an obsession with me. I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen’s feet or midget hands, clocks that didn’t work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living. I had never seen things like this before; here there was age, waves of it, and I pawed through it, swam in it, memorized it – a jade snuffbox, an enameled perfume bottle, piece after piece, exact and elaborate – to fix and make plausible the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroines, like diamonds on a sea of dough.

What amazed me was the sheer volume of objects, remnants of lives, and the way they circulated. The people died but their possessions did not, they went round and round as in a slow eddy. All of the things I saw and coveted had been seen and coveted previously, they had passed through several lives and were destined to pass through several more, becoming more worn but also more valuable, harder and more brilliant, as if they had absorbed their owners’ sufferings and fed on them. How difficult these objects are to dispose of, I thought; they lurk passively, like vampire sheep, waiting for someone to buy them. I myself could afford almost nothing.

After these excursions I would return to the flat exhausted, my energy drained, while back in their stalls the coral rose brooches, the cairngorm pins, the cameos with their ivory profiles would be glowing in the dusk, sated as fleas. No wonder Paul began to suspect I had a lover and was sneaking off to visit him. Once he followed me; he thought I didn’t see him, dodging in and out of the racks of used evening gowns and feather boas, like a comic private eye. It was beneath his dignity, of course, to actually accuse me of anything. Instead he threw tantrums because I wanted to go to the Portobello Road on Saturday, the good day, and he felt this day should be reserved for him. He began to attack my novels too, calling them cheap and frivolous, and it infuriated him when I agreed with him pleasantly. Of course they were cheap and frivolous, I said, but I had never claimed I was a serious writer. He took this as a dig at his own previous ambitions. Probably he would rather have found out I had a lover than discovered I didn’t. A lover would have been less humiliating.

Paul was beginning to frighten me. He would wait for me at the top of the stairs after my orgies in the Portobello Road, standing there like a newel post, not saying anything, and as I came up the steps he would fix me with a reproachful, vindictive stare. “I saw a wonderful Victorian jack-in-the-box today,” I would begin, but my
voice would sound false, even to myself. I’d always found other people’s versions of reality very influential and I was beginning to think that maybe he was right, maybe I did have a secret lover. I certainly began to want one, for making love with Paul had begun to resemble a shark fight, he was no longer gentle, he was pinching and biting and coming into the library on weekdays. It would have been all right except for the baleful glances and the oppressive silences, and the revolver, which was making me anxious.

Also, he’d just announced that the Polish government had agreed to let his mother out of Poland. He had saved up for it and at last it would happen, it was easier to get the old ones out than the young ones, he said. But I didn’t want a Polish Countess living with us – where would she sleep? – discussing me in Polish and siding with Paul against me and ironing his boxer shorts, which I refused to do. He was devoted to his mother, which was tolerable only at a distance. But when I mentioned moving out, to give them more space, I said, he wouldn’t hear of it.

I
never told Arthur about Paul, which was perhaps a mistake. Not that he would have minded the fact that I was living with another man; but he would have been horrified by Paul’s title, such as it was, and by his politics. Any woman who could live with such a man would have been stamped wrong by Arthur right away, and this was obvious to me fifteen minutes after I met him.

I was walking in Hyde Park, in July 1963. From either side came the sound of orations, doom-laden as the Old Testament, but I only half heard them. It was almost my twenty-first birthday, but I wasn’t thinking about that either. I was pacing out the route which was about to be taken by Samantha Deane, the heroine of
Escape from Love
, as she fled from the illicit attentions of Sir Edmund DeVere. He’d just tried to take advantage of her in the children’s schoolroom while everyone else had gone off to the Crystal Palace for the day.

As Samantha hurried down the stairs, her cheeks burned with the memory of what had just occurred. She’d been sitting alone in the schoolroom, working on the piece of crewelwork she kept for her few leisure moments.
She hadn’t heard the door open, hadn’t heard Sir Edmund approach until he was within two yards of her chair. With an exclamation of surprise, she had risen to her feet. Sir Edmund was flushed and disheveled. His usual iron control had vanished. As he gazed at her, his eyes flamed like those of some wild animal that scents its quarry
.

“Sir Edmund,” Samantha said, trying to keep her voice level. “What is the meaning of this intrusion? Why are you not at the Crystal Palace with the others?” Yet despite her efforts her knees were weak, either with fright or with a response she tried in vain to deny
.

“I knew you were alone,” he said, moving closer. “I slipped away. You must take pity upon me, you must know that my life is hell.” Yet he was not pleading, he was demanding. He seized her by the wrist and drew her toward him, pressing his hard mouth against hers. In vain she struggled, fighting both him and her own unbidden desires. His avid hands were already at her throat, tearing aside her fichu.…