Love in a Bottle (11 page)

Besides, the light had suddenly come on again.

Monsieur Robinet was standing by the switch like a
convivial
old Satan, delighting in his guests’ damnation. The Russian Duchess grabbed the Frenchman by the shoulder and shook him:

“You’re quite mistaken,” she yelled, with a display of energy that was quite shocking. “Love can do anything. There are people out there who swim the Channel for love, and people who die in suicide pacts for love, and everyone forgives them.”

“It seems Madame is not a native of this country,” the Frenchman exclaimed, his face white with anger.

The English girls were noisily pestering a beautiful young man with a large behind, like the fantasy object of some elderly female civil servant. The Alsatian waiter had fallen asleep. But Marcelle, the perfidious Marcelle, was standing in rather intimate proximity to the famous young man. Then she sat down with him, and a few others of his kind, at a table. I turned away from them, in a whirlpool of grief.

I went over to the little Highland Scot. I was tormented by the fear that it might have been her in the darkness. It was not as if she were ugly, rather… But, even viewed from a distance, she could never have been the Unknown Goddess. Could any girl one had actually met be that? I took her by
the left arm and right hand, and felt her even farther back. It hadn’t been her. Every woman’s body has a different feel in a man’s hand. Hers was not the one.

For a moment I was horrified by the thought that
malicious
Fate, with its love of confusion, had made me take Concepción in my arms, while she was perhaps all the while thinking of the gallant Jewish boy from Temesvár. True, I had seen her, just as the lights came on again,
materialising
at the far end of the veranda and sidling up, with a seductive look, to the Greek gentleman who had only half a skull—the other being made of silver (whereby, according to craniology, he must have been a martyr to previously unknown nervous disorders). But then the knowledge latent in my hands reassured me: anyone they had found beautiful could not have been Concepción.

Filled with mournful amiability I caught up with the Highland Scottish girl and declared, with stormy
subjectivity
, how much, ever since childhood, I had adored the Celts, the plaintive verses of Ossian and the one-eared dogs that in Ireland symbolised desire—and also that I happened to know that
pen
is the Gaelic word for ‘head’: something she in fact did not.

By this time I was so grief-stricken and ecstatic that I found myself not only using English with absolutely unshakeable confidence, I even felt—for some minutes—that I might do the same in Gaelic, and indeed in all manner of tongues, like the Apostles at Whitsun. I won’t go so far as to say that the girl carried boundless feminine intuition in her dear little bosom, but she looked at me like someone who realised
that the tempestuous, world-annihilating possibilities I was blathering about might well have been had been imbibed along with the cognac, and the same for my tears, no doubt, and she was clearly wondering if there was any sort of Balm in Gilead for such Dadaist angst. There is indeed a balm for everything in Gilead, and not just for the torments of the School of Solemnity, and the blessed heart of the little Celtic girl found it.

Suddenly there was another girl standing beside her,
practically
holding out in her right hand a balm, straight from Gilead, for my fevered brow. Yes, from Gilead without
question
. For Gilead, I believe, is not a place, just a geographical joke in the Bible, and the new girl had also appeared from nowhere—I hadn’t seen her face all evening—she had, as it were, materialised from among the cognacs. I said nothing, but kissed her hand. It was all I could do; she was so wonderful.

She was one of those women the sight of whom fills a man with a choking, pleasurable melancholy. Not the perennially insistent sadness of ‘so many women, and all spoken for’, but the sort of sadness you know when you feel that neither the world—that mediocre, pretentious planet, the killing field of Nature and all Creation—nor humanity itself are worthy of such a face, of such a subtle body, or rather of the Platonic Ideal that emanates from that body. All this might seem a bit exalted, might make me sound rather juvenile, and suggest that my illusions originate and have their life and being on my writing desk, neatly parcelled up with string, among the part-payment receipts. But I
threw my illusions away some time ago, in a thoroughgoing clear-out. Nowadays I think rather different thoughts about women, and no longer believe in the Hegelian aesthetic that insists that the ideal shines through the material, like the bosom bursting from a torn evening dress. But in those days I did think such thoughts, especially in summer, in the prime of my youth, in the garden in St Cloud, and I am not ashamed of it.

But if pressed for more precise details of the way the woman in question looked, my memory would desert me. I am not generally an observant sort of person, and not really of this world. I was the person, after all, who took years to realise that our editor, poor Ern
Osvát, had a beard.

But this much I can reveal, that she was still very young, perhaps sixteen. She was at the age when you might imagine that in time she might even grow into a boy—which would have been a real waste. She was at the age when a girl is raw and doesn’t know yet how to embody her sweetness to come, and so is modest, quiet and full of promise… like those optical instruments in the physics laboratories at school about which we were never told anything. Besides, she was Anglo-Saxon, endowed by nature with eternal and boundless youth.

When she sat down at my table and simply looked at me, seriously and uncritically, a number of thoughts went through my mind: about what I should say to her and what I should do. I might talk about the kiss as a sonnet form, or about my royal demesnes, now so comprehensively lost; I could show off my extraordinary skill in the palm-slapping
game called Red Roast; I might seize her by the arm and dash outside with her to see the starry sky—and other such things. But it would all have been incredibly self-centred and, by the same token, pointless. It proved rather more to the purpose to announce myself as a well-known palmist, of Hindu origin, and get straight to the point. That way I could at least hold her hand in mine. The claim was not entirely bogus, because at that moment I really felt that with my intuitive genius I could penetrate the secret enclaves of nature and see into the inner life of things.

Besides, like everyone who dabbles in historical
philosophy
, I have a very broad palm. First, as a sly
captatio benevolentiae,
I intoned a few formulae which have never failed to work:

“You are highly self-centred, but when the need arises a wonderful capacity for sacrifice bursts from your soul. You are a fundamentally good person, but capable of extreme anger against those who have hurt your feelings, and you cannot abide people who behave dishonestly towards you. A rather cold and reserved nature, but sincere and loyal to those you love”… and so on.

This succeeded in arousing her curiosity, in so far as one might use the word of an English girl. She looked at me nervously, waiting for me to announce in the next second something she did not know, something no one could know, the either deeply alarming or entirely wonderful meaning and purpose of her life.

I was then able to describe her days, and the story of those days as they flowed ever on in their miraculously
vivid drabness. I talked about postcards, railway stations, hotels, dresses, boys, resentments, all charged with some yet-to-be-explained meaning that she would clearly not wish to spell out directly. About how good it was to lie in bed in the morning and how her little brother was a really nasty piece of work, and all the thousands of little things she had to do, all so trivial and yet so profound—the enclosed, saturated world of the flapper, in her world without men, where the time is always taken up with things but unmarked by any variety: the lake of liquid crystal, in the novels of Jókai, waiting for the pebble to fall into it so that the rows of basalt columns beneath the surface aligned with such astronomical precision could at last be seen: her young girlhood, her purity, secrets, secrets…

But I mentioned none of these wonderful things, because they would have frightened her, like something in Latin—she would have thought I was hinting at some bizarre medical abnormality. So I made an effort to talk about more specific, concrete things, and her replies were equally concrete. She spoke about someone called Fred, a friend since childhood. They called on one another every day, went horse-riding and canoeing together, and understood one another completely—only there was one unresolved source of contention between them: she had a big grey dog called Caius who scientifically
speaking
did not belong to any of the well-known breeds, but was very good-looking nonetheless. But Fred loved cats. He couldn’t stand dogs and always sent Caius into the water after things like his pocket knives, his pocket
Shakespeare and live frogs, which instantly sank and made Caius very sad.

We were friends within minutes, and the pretext of
palm-reading
melted away. Without it I could never have held her hand in mine, but now we did so out of genuine mutual liking. The conversation that ensued took us, on a
summer
’s day, in a motorboat aflutter with little flags, to visit some islands of fresh coral. Half an hour later, we were onto the central problem of her life: how to reconcile her complicated mind and problematic national identity with the instinctive order of being, and how to choose between Fred and the dog—in other words: was it possible for an English girl to have two friends? But the Fates, ever adept at dividing and separating, did not want it that way. So she had to split either her manner of life or her inner consciousness into two compartments, as people did nowadays, or have it out with Fred face to face.

A general dancing erupted around us. Someone asked her to join them, and I made no objection. Somehow I had lost my sense of the night passing. I was in a world where there was no time, and I thought she’d come back. But that never happened.

Because suddenly Marcelle sat down beside me. Marcelle herself, my beloved, sitting there like the personification of Chaos, that horror of classical scholarship. And not just beside me but somehow all around me, sitting and drinking, steadily drinking, laughing loudly and waving her hands about. There were sundry random items of clothing on her person, but essentially she was naked. Suddenly every
carefully repressed anarchic desire rose up in me, and, in the utterly childish images of my fantasy, I pulsed with the urge, as I always do when I see women drunk, to seize them by the arm and drill a hole through them with my head, then look out the other side and put out my tongue, and say to M. Robinet: “do this after me”—or some such impulse. I was filled with a quite uncharacteristic daring.

“I slapped the old Duchess’s pimp across the face,” she announced lightly. “Just imagine, he said he’d had an affair with me when I was still a ten-franc woman. I told him that it wasn’t true. I remember everyone I’ve had a relationship with, and there haven’t been that many.”

“And is that why you slapped him?”

“It just isn’t true that I was a ten-franc woman. But then he also said I’m not Swedish. That’s when I smacked him.”

“Come into the garden, Marcelle. The air would do you good.”

She looked at me in wonderment, as if to say: “How long have you known how these things are done?”

Then she pursed her lips and added: “All right, I don’t mind.”

And she was already there.

It would be a mistake to describe a woman who would flirt with me on such a basis as ‘easy’. What happened was that Love interposed its effect. It’s just as it is with light and sound and every other form of wave motion: when different impulses meet in the heart, the energy level of one side is raised while the other is reduced. Once, when I was in love with two different women, the two loves unfortunately met
in my soul in phases that completely cancelled each other out, and I was forced to transfer my affections to a third woman. The opposite happened in St Cloud: the
wholesome
, nourishing flames of passion kindled in me by that wonderful young girl happened to vibrate in a phase that simply amplified those aroused by Marcelle, and my earlier success in taking the young girl’s hand now emboldened me to attempt rather more decisive action with her. It’s like that sometimes, with these interference patterns.

I led her outside, to a place where thick bushes clustered around a little courtyard. The area housed M. Robinet’s pride and joy, the Champion of All France, an
unsurpassably
handsome chow chow with a lion’s mane. But now its only manifestation was a loud barking: the night blotted out everything else, and even the barking I didn’t hear for very long. I was attending to my inner voices and trying to calculate, from the movements of Marcelle’s body, how far I might take this.