The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (40 page)

I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge – eyed in the wreck of myself. At the same time there was an awful crescendo of excitement as Wednesday approached, and the idea of simply
being
with
her began to shed a lurid joy, a demonic version of the joy which I had felt upon the Post Office Tower. Then I had been in innocence. Now I felt both guilty and doomed. And, in a way that concerned myself alone, savage, extreme, rude, cruel ... Yet: to be with her again. Wednesday.

Of course I had to answer the telephone in case it. was her. Every time it sounded was like a severe electric shock. Christian rang, Arnold rang. I put the receiver down at once. Let them make what they liked of it. Arnold and Francis both came and rang the bell, but I could see them through the frosted glass of the door and did not let them in. I did not know if they could see me, I was indifferent to that. Francis dropped a note in to say that Priscilla was having shock treatment and seemed better. Rachel called, but I hid. Later she telephoned in some state of emotion. I spoke briefly and said I would ring her later. Thus I beguiled the time. I also started several letters to Julian. My dear Julian, I have lately got myself into the most terrible mess and I feel that I must lay the whole matter before you. Dear Julian, I am sorry that I must leave London and cannot join you on Wednesday. Dearest Julian, I love you, I am in anguish, oh my darling. Of course I tore up all these letters, they were just for private self – expression. At last, after centuries of sick emotion, Wednesday came.

 

 

 

 

Julian was holding my arm. I had made no attempt to take hers. She had taken mine and was squeezing it convulsively, probably unconsciously, out of excitement. We were jostling our way through a lot of noisy people in the foyer of the Royal Opera House, having just come in out of the evening sunshine into this brilliantly lit crowd scene. Julian was wearing a red silk dress, rather long, covered with an art
nouveau
design of blue tulips. Her hair, which she had been combing carefully and surreptitiously when I first caught sight of her, was unusually casque – like, glowing softly like long slightly dulled strips of flattened metal. Her face was unfocused, joyfully
distrait,
laughing with pleasure. I was feeling a sick delighted anguish of desire, as if I had been ripped by a dagger from the groin to the throat. I also felt frightened. I fear crowds. We got into the auditorium, Julian now pulling me, and found our seats, half – way back in the stalls. People stood up to let us in. I hate this. I hate theatres. There was an intense subdued din of human chatter, the self – satisfied yap of a civilized audience awaiting its ‘show’: the frivolous speech of vanity speaking to vanity. And now there began to be heard in the background that awful and inimitably menacing sound of an orchestra tuning up.

How I feel about music is another thing. I am not actually tone deaf, though it might be better if I were. Music can touch me, it can get at me, it can torment. It just, as it were, reaches me, like a sinister gabbling in a language one can almost understand, a gabbling which is horribly, one suspects,
about oneself
. When I was younger I had even listened to music deliberately, stunning myself with disorderly emotion and imagining that I was having a great experience. True pleasure in art is a cold fire. I do not wish to deny that there are some people – though fewer than one might think from the talk of our self – styled experts – who derive a pure and mathematically clarified pleasure from these medleys of sound. All I can say is that ‘music’ for me was simply an occasion for personal fantasy, the outrush of hot muddled emotions, the muck of my mind made audible.

Julian had let go of my arm but was sitting now leaning towards me, so that the whole length of her right arm from the shoulder to the elbow was lightly touching my left arm. I sat stiffly in possession of this contact. At the same time I very cautiously advanced my left shoe up against her right shoe in such a way that the shoes were contiguous without any pressure being exerted on the foot. As if one had secretly sent one’s servant to suborn the servant of the beloved. I was breathing very short in I hoped not audible pants or gasps. The orchestra was continuing its jumbled keening of crazed birds. I felt a void the size of an opera house where my stomach might have been and through the middle of it travelled the great scar of desire. I felt a cringing fear of which I could not determine whether it was physical or mental, and a sense that soon I might somehow lose control of myself, shout, vomit, faint. I felt the heavenly continued steady light pressure of Julian’s arm upon mine. I smelt the clean rapier smell of the silk of her dress. I felt, delicately, delicately, as if I were touching an egg shell, her shoe.

The softly cacophonous red and gold scene swung in my vision, beginning to swirl gently like something out of Blake: it was a huge coloured ball, a sort of immense Christmas decoration, a glittering shining twittering globe of dim rosy light in the midst of which Julian and I were suspended, rotating, held together by a swooning intensity of precarious feather – touch. Somewhere above us a bright blue heaven blazed with stars and round about us half – naked women lifted ruddy torches up. My arm was on fire, my foot was on fire, my knee was trembling with the effort of keeping still. I was in a golden scarlet jungle full of the chattering of apes and the whistling of birds. A scimitar of sweet sounds sliced the air and entered into the red scar and became pain. I was that sword of agony, I was that pain. I was in an arena, surrounded by thousands of grimacing nodding faces, where I had been condemned to death by pure sound. I was to be killed by the whistling of birds and buried in a pit of velvet. I was to be gilded and then flayed.

‘Bradley, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You weren’t listening.’

‘Were you talking?’

‘I was asking you if you knew the story.’

‘What story?’

‘Of
Rosenkavalier.’

‘Of course I don’t know the story of
Rosenkavalier
.’

‘Well, quick, you’d better read your programme—’

‘No, you tell me.’

‘Oh well, it’s quite simple really, it’s about this young man, Octavian, and the Marschallin loves him, and they’re lovers, only she’s much older than he is and she’s afraid she’ll lose him because he’s bound to fall in love with somebody his own age—’

‘How old is he and how old is she?’

‘Oh I suppose he’s about twenty and she’s about thirty.’

‘
Thirty
?’

‘Yes, I think, anyway quite old, and she realizes that he just regards her as a sort of mother – figure and there can’t be any real lasting relations between them, and it begins with them in bed together and of course she’s very happy because she’s with him but she’s also very unhappy because she knows she’s sure to lose him and – ’

‘Enough.’

‘Don’t you want to know what happens next?’

‘No.’

At that moment there was a pattering noise of clapping, rising to a rattling crescendo, the deadly sound of a dry sea, the light banging of many bones in a tempest.

The stars faded and the red torches began to dim and a terrifying packed silence slowly fell as the conductor lifted up his rod. Silence. Darkness. Then a rush of wind and a flurry of sweet pulsating anguish has been set free to stream through the dark. I closed my eyes and bowed my head before it. Could I transform all this extraneous sweetness into a river of pure love? Or would I be somehow undone by it, choked, dismembered, disgraced? I felt now almost at once a pang of relief as, after the first few moments, tears began to flow freely out of my eyes. The gift of tears which had been given and then withdrawn again had come back to bless me. I wept with a marvellous facility, quietly relaxing my arm and my leg. Perhaps if I wept copiously throughout I could bear it after all. I was not listening to the music, I was undergoing it, and the full yearning of my heart was flowing automatically out of my eyes and soaking my waistcoat, as I hung, so easily now, together with Julian, fluttering, hovering like a double hawk, like a double angel, in the dark void pierced by sorties of fire. I only wondered if it would soon prove impossible to cry quietly, and whether I should then begin to sob.

The curtain suddenly fled away to reveal an enormous double bed surrounded by a cavern of looped – up blood – red hangings. This consoled me for a moment because it reminded me of Carpaccio’s Dream of Saint Ursula. I even murmured ‘Carpaccio’ to myself as a protective charm. But these cooling comparisons were soon put to flight and even Carpaccio could not rescue me from what happened next. Not on the bed but upon some cushions near the front of the stage two girls were lying in a close embrace. (At least I suppose one of them was enacting a young man.) Then they began to sing.

The sound of women’s voices singing is one of the bitter – sweetest noises in the world, the most humanly piercing, the most terribly significant and yet contentless of all sounds: and a duet is more than twice as bad as a single voice. (Perhaps boys’ voices are worst of all : I am not sure.) The two women were conversing in pure sound, their voices circling, replying, blending, creating a trembling silver cage of an almost obscene sweetness. I did not know what language they were singing in, and the words were inaudible anyway, there was no need of words, these were not words but the highest coinage of human speech melted down, become pure song, something vilely almost murderously gorgeous. No doubt she is crying for the inevitable loss of her young lover. The lovely boy protests but his heart is free. Only it has all been changed into a sort of plump luscious heart – piercing cascade of sugary agony. Oh God, not much more of this can be endured.

I became aware that I had uttered a sort of moan, because the man on my other side, whom I noticed now for the first time, turned and stared at me. At the same moment my stomach seemed to come sliding down from somewhere else and then quickly arched itself up again and I felt a quick bitter taste in my mouth. I murmured ‘Sorry!’ quickly in Julian’s direction and got up. There was a soft awkward scraping at the end of the row as six people rose hastily to let me out. I blundered by, slipped on some steps, the terrible relentless sweet sound still gripping my shoulders with its talons. Then I was pushing my way underneath the illuminated sign marked
Exit
and out into the brightly lit and completely empty and suddenly silent foyer. I walked fast. I was definitely going to be sick.

Selection of a place to be sick in is always a matter of personal importance and can add an extra tormenting dimension to the graceless horror of vomiting. Not on the carpet, not on the table, not over your hostess’s dress. I did not want to be sick within the precincts of the Royal Opera House, nor was I. I emerged into a deserted shabby street and a pungent spicy smell of early dusk. The pillars of the Opera House, blazing a pale gold behind me, seemed in that squalid place like the portico of a ruined or perhaps imagined or perhaps magically fabricated palace, the green and white arcades of the foreign fruit market, looking like something out of the Italian Renaissance, actually clinging to its side. I turned a corner and confronted an array of about a thousand peaches in tiers of boxes behind a lattice grille. I carefully took hold of the grille with one hand and leaned well forward and was sick.

Vomiting is a curious experience, entirely
sui generis.
It is involuntary in a peculiarly shocking way, the body suddenly doing something very unusual with great promptness and decision. One cannot argue. One is
seized
. And the fact that one’s vomit moves with such a remarkable drive contrary to the force of gravity adds to the sense of being taken and shaken by some alien power. I am told that there are people who enjoy vomiting, and although I do not share their taste I can, I think, faintly imagine it. There is a certain sense of achievement. And if one does not fight against the stomach’s decree there is perhaps some satisfaction in being its helpless vehicle. The relief of having vomited is of course another thing.

I leaned there for a moment, looking down at what I had done, and aware too of the tear – wetness of my face upon which a faint breeze was coolly blowing. I remembered that casket of agony, steel coated in sugar. The inevitable loss of the beloved. And I
experienced
Julian. I cannot explain this. I simply felt in a sort of exhausted defeated cornered utmost way that she
was
. There was no particular joy or relief in this, but a sort of absolute categorical quality of
grasp
of her being.

I became aware that someone was standing beside me. Julian said, ‘How are you feeling now, Bradley?’

I began to walk away from her, fumbling for my handkerchief. I wiped my mouth carefully, trying to cleanse it within with saliva.

I was walking along a corridor composed entirely of cages. I was in a prison, I was in a concentration camp. There was a wall composed of transparent sacks full of fiery carrots. They looked at me like derisive faces, like monkeys’ bottoms. I breathed carefully and regularly and interrogated my stomach, stroking it gently with my hands. I turned into a lighted arcade and tested my stomach against a smell of decaying lettuce. I walked onward occupied in breathing. Only now I felt so empty and so faint. I felt that I had reached the end of the world, I felt like a stag when it can run no further and turns and bows its head to the hounds, I felt like Actaeon condemned and cornered and devoured.

Julian was following me. I could hear the soft tap – tap of her shoes on the sticky pavement and my whole body apprehended her presence behind me.

‘Bradley, would you like some coffee? There’s a stall there.’

‘No.’

‘Let’s sit down somewhere.’

‘Nowhere to sit.’