The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (29 page)

‘Rachel, you can’t!’

‘And I think that review of yours was spiteful and stupid.’

‘Well, well.’

‘You’re just eaten up with envy.’

‘Let’s not argue about that, Rachel, please.’

‘I’m sorry. I feel so sort of broken. I feel resentment against you for not having had the grace or luck to – rescue me or defend me or something. I don’t even know what I mean. It isn’t that I want to leave Arnold, I couldn’t, I’d die. I just want a little privacy, a little secrecy, a few things of my own which aren’t absolutely dyed and saturated with Arnold. But it seems to be impossible. You and he are going to start up again – ’

‘What a phrase!’

‘You’ll be talking your intellectual talk together and I’ll be outside washing up and hearing your voices going on and on and on. It’ll be just like the old days.’

‘Listen, dear Rachel,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t you have a private place? I don’t mean a love affair, neither of us has the temperament for that. I dare say I’m terribly repressed, not that I mind. And an affair would involve us in lies and would be wrong – ’

‘How simply you put it!’

‘I don’t want to encourage you to deceive your husband – ’

‘I’m not asking you to!’

‘We’ve known each other for years without ever coming really close. Now we suddenly blunder up against each other and it goes all wrong. We might now recede again to the previous distance or even further. I suggest we don’t. We can be
friends.
Arnold was holding forth about how he and Christian were friends – ’

‘Was he?’

‘I suggest that you and I settle down to construct a friendship, nothing clandestine, all cheerful and above board – ’

‘Why not? Why should life be sad?’

‘I often wonder.’

‘Why shouldn’t we love each other a bit and make each other happier?’

‘I like your “a bit”. You’re such a weights and measures man.’

‘Let’s try. I need you.’

‘That’s the best thing you’ve said yet.’

‘Arnold could hardly object – ’

‘He’d love it. That’s the trouble. Sometimes, Bradley, I wonder whether you have it in you at all to be a writer. You have such naïve views about human nature.’

‘When you
will
something a simple formulation is often the best. Besides, morals is simple.’

‘And we must be moral, mustn’t we?’

‘In the end, yes.’

‘In the end. That’s rich. Are you going to leave Priscilla with Christian?’

This took me aback. I said, ‘For the present.’ I could not decide what to do about Priscilla.

‘Priscilla is a complete wreck You’ve got her on your hands for life. I’ve had second thoughts about minding her, by the way. She’d drive me mad. Anyway, you’ll leave her with Christian. And you’ll go there to see her. And you’ll start to talk with Christian and you’ll start discussing how your marriage went wrong, just like Arnold said you ought to do. You don’t realize how confident Arnold is that he’s the centre of every complex. It’s little people like you and me who are mean and envious and jealous. Arnold is so self – satisfied that he’s really generous, it’s real virtue. Yes, you’ll come to Christian in the end. That’s where the end is. Not morality but power. She’s a very powerful woman. She’s a great magnet. She’s your fate. And the funny thing is that Arnold will regard it all as his doing. We are all his people. But you’ll see. Christian is your fate.’

‘Never!’

‘You say “never”, but you smile secretively all the same. You’re fascinated by her too. So you see, our friendship can never be, Bradley. I’m just an appendage, you can’t
separate
me, you’d have to focus your attention on me very hard to do that, and you won’t. You’ll be thinking about Christian and what’s going to happen there. Even in our thing you were really just jealous about her and Arnold – ’

‘Rachel, you know this is all very unworthy and unkind and also completely dotty. I’m not a cold schemer. I’m just a muddler hoping to be forgiven, same as you.’

‘A muddler hoping to be forgiven. That sounds humble and touching. It would possibly be very effective in one of your books. But I’ve got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn’t understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I’m mangled in a machine. Even to say it’s my own fault doesn’t mean anything. However don’t worry too much about me. I expect all married people are like this. It doesn’t prevent me from enjoying cups of tea.’

‘Rachel, we will be friends, you won’t run away into remoteness? There’s no need to be dignified with me.’

‘You’re so self – righteous, Bradley. You can’t help it. You’re a deeply censorious and self – righteous person. Still, you mean well, you’re a nice chap. Maybe later I shall be glad you said these things.’

‘Then it’s a pact.’

‘All right.’ Then she said, ‘You know there’s a lot of fire in me. I’m not a wreck like poor old Priscilla. A lot of fire and power yet. Yes.’

‘Of course – ’

‘You don’t understand. I don’t mean anything to do with simplicity and love. I don’t even mean a will to survive. I mean
fire, fire
. What tortures. What kills. Ah well – ’

‘Rachel, look up. The sun’s shining.’

‘Don’t be soppy.’

She threw her head back and suddenly got up and started off across the square like a machine which had just been quietly set in motion. I hurried after her and took her hand. Her arm remained stiff, but she turned to me with a grimacing smile such as women sometimes use, smiling through weariness and a self – indulgent desire to weep. As we neared Oxford Street the Post Office Tower came into view, very hard and clear, glittering, dangerous, martial and urbane.

‘Oh look, Rachel.’

‘What?’

‘The tower.’

‘Oh that. Bradley, don’t come any farther. I’m going to the station.’

‘When shall I see you?’

‘Never, I expect. No, no. Ring up. Not tomorrow.’

‘Rachel, you’re sure Julian doesn’t know anything about – anything?’

‘Quite sure. And no one’s likely to tell her! Whatever possessed you to buy her those expensive boots?’

‘I wanted time to think of a plausible way of asking her to say she hadn’t met me.’

‘You don’t seem to have employed the time very profitably.’

‘No I – didn’t.’

‘Good – bye, Bradley. Thanks ever..’

Rachel left me. I saw her disappear into the crowd, her battered blue handbag swinging, the plump pale flesh on her upper arm oscillating a little, her hair tangled, her face dazed and tired. With an automatic hand she had scooped up the hanging shoulder strap. Then I saw her again, and again and again. Oxford Street was full of tired ageing women with dazed faces, pushing blindly against each other like a herd of animals. I ran across the road and northwards towards my flat.

I thought, I must get away, I must get away, I must get away. I thought, I’m glad Julian doesn’t know about all
that
. I thought, maybe Priscilla really is better off at Notting Hill. I thought, perhaps I will go and see Christian after all.

 

 

 

 

As I now approach the first climax of my book let me pause, dear friend, and refresh myself once again with some direct converse with you.

Seen from the peace and seclusion of our present haven the events of these few days between the first appearance of Francis Marloe and my Soho Square conversation with Rachel must seem a tissue of absurdities. Obviously life is full of accidents. But to the intensity of this impression we contribute too by our anxiety and fear. Anxiety most of all characterizes the human animal. This is perhaps the most general name for all the vices at a certain mean level of their operation. It is a kind of cupidity, a kind of fear, a kind of envy, a kind of hate. Now, a favoured recluse, I can, as anxiety diminishes, measure both my freedom and my previous servitude. Fortunate are they who are even sufficiently aware of this problem to make the smallest efforts to check this dimming preoccupation. Perhaps without the circumstances of a dedicated life it is impossible to make more than the smallest efforts.

The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagara – force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say ‘apparently’ because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness. Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word ‘good’ here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self – destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery, but by what is called grandly ‘duty’ and more accurately ‘habit’. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego’s natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life – long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.

With these observations I introduce an analysis of my recent (as it were) conduct which I now wish, my dear, to deploy before you. As far as Rachel was concerned, I acted out a mixture of rather graceless motives. I think the turning point was her emotional letter. What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red – hot evidence. It was a long time since I had received anything resembling a love letter. And the very fact that it was a letter and not a
viva voce
statement gave it a sort of abstract power over me. We often make important moves in our life in a de – individualized condition. We feel suddenly that we are typifying something. This can be a source of inspiration and also a way of excusing ourselves. The intensity of Rachel’s letter communicated self – importance, energy, the sense of a role.

I was also moved, as I have said, by the idea of scoring off Arnold, especially by excluding him from a secret. This instinct too can often lead us into ill – doing. To see someone as not in the know’ is to see them as diminished. My resentment against Arnold was not entirely concerned with our general and time – honoured relationship. It derived also from the
shock
which I had received when I saw Rachel lying on her bed in the curtained room and covering over her face with the sheet. It was then that I conceived the strong pity for her which, though it was contaminated as perhaps all pity is by feelings of superiority, represented the tiny fragment of moderately clean emotion in the amalgam. Did I believe Arnold when he said it was ‘an accident’? Perhaps I did. Perhaps in the darkness of my egoistic pity, I was nevertheless beginning to see Rachel through Arnold’s eyes, as a faintly hysterical and not always truthful middle – aged woman. When dealing with a married couple one can never be neutral. The hot magnetic power of each one’s view of the other makes the spectator sway. Also of course I felt resentment against Rachel because she had made me behave in a ridiculous way. Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

Vanity and anxiety had involved me with Rachel, and envy (of Arnold) and pity and a sort of love and certainly an intermittent play of physical desire. As I have explained I was even then (and of course without any particular merit) generally indifferent to bodies. I experienced them involuntarily and without positively shuddering in crowded tube trains. But on the whole I did not now concern myself much with these integuments of the soul. Faces, of course, my friends had, but as far as I was concerned the rest could have been ectoplasm. I was not by nature a toucher or a starer. So it was that I was interested to find that I wanted to kiss Rachel, that I wanted, after a considerable interval, to kiss a particular woman. This was part of my excitement in the idea of playing a new role. In kissing her I had however no thought of proceeding further. What happened afterwards was just an unintentional muddle. Of course I did not disown it and I thought it might have serious consequences. And it did.

I suspect that I have not yet succeeded in purveying the peculiar quality of my relationship with Arnold. Perhaps I should attempt once more to describe this friendship. I was, as I said, his ‘discoverer’ : at first his patron. He was my grateful protégé! I can even remember at that time thinking of him as a pet dog. (Arnold resembles a terrier.) There was even a ‘dog’ joke between us, now lost in history. Only gradually did the poison get in, deriving mainly from the fact of his (worldly) success and my (worldly) failure. (How hard it is for the best of us to be genuinely indifferent to the world!) Even then we were, to a remarkable extent, gentlemen about this. That is, I feigned a magnanimity and he a humility which in part we genuinely felt. Such feigning is essential in the lives of us imperfect beings. Our relationship in fact was never idle. It was obvious that we constantly thought about each other. He was (but of course not in Marloe’s sense) the most important man in my life. And this was noteworthy, since I had many male acquaintances, persons in the office such as Hartbourne and Grey – Pelham, also literary and journalistic persons, lawyers and scholars, whom I do not mention simply because they were not actors in this particular drama. It would not be too strong to say that Arnold fascinated me. There was a sort of gritty not quite ‘engaging’ feel about our friendship which gave me a sense of reality. A conversation with him always stimulated a fresh flow of thought. Also, and paradoxically, he sometimes seemed like an emanation of myself, a strayed and alien
alter ego
. He made me laugh
deeply
. I liked his doggy greasy humorous face and pale ironical eyes. He was abrasive, always slightly teasing, always slightly aggressive, always slightly (I cannot avoid the word) flirting with me. He was well aware of being the disappointing and even slightly menacing son – figure. He played the role wittily and usually with kindness. Only in later years, and after several open quarrels, did I begin to feel him the cause of such pain that I had to withdraw a little. His remarks now all seemed ‘needles’. And as my life passed on without the great visitation in which I believed, I became more and more irritated by Arnold’s facile success.