The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (48 page)

In fact Julian’s shoulders had already changed their hue to a glowing angry – looking reddish – brown. It was the
afternoon
of the next day. My meditations of the previous night had been cut short by an attack of sleep almost as sudden as that which had laid Julian low. Sleep sprang upon me like a jaguar launched from a tree. I had half undressed and was wondering how to array myself as Julian’s consort and whether to array myself at all, when the next thing I knew was that it was morning, the sun was shining into the room and I was lying by myself underneath the blankets, dressed in my shirt, underpants and socks. I knew instantly where I was. I felt a shock of fear at Julian’s absence, allayed at once by hearing her singing in the kitchen. Then I felt annoyance at having displayed myself to her sleeping in such an undignified garb. Shirt and socks form a most unattractive
deshabillé.
Had I got into bed myself or had she covered me? Then it seemed dreadful, scandalous and
funny
that my beloved and I should have slept side by side all night, stupefied into total unawareness of each other. Oh precious precious night.

‘Bradley, are you awake? Tea, coffee, milk, sugar? How little I know about you.’

‘Indeed. Tea, milk, sugar. Did you see my socks?’

‘I love your socks. We’re going straight down to the sea.’

And we did. We had a picnic breakfast with milky tea in a thermos flask and bread and butter and jam, down on the flat stones of the beach, just beside where the sea, much more gently than last night, was touching the clean fringe of the land, which it had itself fashioned to be its pure spouse and counterpart, withdrawing to breathe and returning again to touch. Behind us were wind – combed sand dunes and yellow arches of long reedy grass and blue sky the colour of Julian’s eyes. Before us was the calm cold English sea, diamond – sparkling and rather dark even under the sun.

There have been many moments of happiness. But that first breakfast beside the sea had a simplicity and an intensity which it would be hard to match. It was not even plagued by hope. It was just perfect communion and rest and the kind of joy which comes when the beloved and one’s own soul become so mingled with the external world that there is a
place
made for once upon the planet where stones and tufts of grass and transparent water and the quiet sound of the wind can really
be
. It was perhaps the other side of the diptych from last night’s moment of seeing Julian in the twilight lying motionless beside the road. But it was not really connected, as moments of pure joy are not really connected with anything. And human life which has such moments has surely put a trembling finger upon nature’s most transcendent aim.

We walked back, carrying stones and pieces of driftwood – there were already too many to bring in one expedition – over the top of the dunes, and saw inland the graceless but already friendly red brick cube of our home, a ruined farmhouse behind it, and then the flat land, a washed yellowy green in colour, under a huge sky scattered with small cornets of gilded white cloud. Far off, beyond a region of shadow, sun shone upon the long grey back and tall tower of a big church. We left our trophies in a pile at the foot of the dunes, where Julian insisted on covering them with sand in case anyone should steal them, a rather idle precaution since there was no one to be seen except ourselves, and then set off across the sort of huge courtyard of flat seaworn stones which divided us from the house. Here mauve sea cabbage and blue vetch and cushiony pink thrift was growing in profusion and wild yellow tree lupins sprawled their starry leaves and pallid cones of blossom about upon the stripy concentric stones of the natural pavement. Glassy dragon flies whizzed and hovered and butterflies idled in from the sea and blew fluttering away with the breeze, soon becoming invisible in the bright air. The exact whereabouts of the paradise I shall for many reasons conceal, but amateurs of the British coastline may hazard their guess.

As I sat and watched her preparing our lunch (she had told me quite correctly that she could not cook) I marvelled at her sheer grasp of the situation, her absolute hereness, and I tried to put off all anxiety, as it seemed that she had done, and to keep at bay the demons of abstraction in protest against which she had hurled herself from the moving car. In the afternoon we drove across the flowery courtyard to collect our trophies and to look for more and we laid them out on the rough weedy lawn in front of the house. The stones were all elliptical and faintly humped and fairly uniform in size but varied immensely in colour. Some were purple spotted with dark blue, some tawny with creamy blotches, some a mottled lavender grey, many with swirling patterns round a central eye or strikingly decorated with stripes of purest white. As Julian said, it was very difficult to decide to leave any of them behind. It was like being in a huge art gallery and being told to help oneself. The most privileged stones she now took inside together with the sheep’s skull and the bits of driftwood. The square piece of wood with the Chinese writing she propped upright like an icon upon the chimney – piece of our little sitting – room, with the sheep’s skull on one side of it and the gilt snuff box on the other, and on the window ledges she arranged the stones among pieces of grey worked tree root, like small modern sculptures. I watched her total absorption in these tasks. We had tea.

After tea we drove over to the big church and walked about inside its bony emptiness. A few chairs upon the huge stone floor betokened a tiny congregation. There was no stained glass, only huge perpendicular windows through which the cool sun shone on to the pale rather powdery stone of the floor, casting a little shadow into worn
requiescats
many centuries old. The church in the flat land was like a great ruined ship or ark, or perhaps like the skeleton of an enormous animal, under whose gaunt ribs one moved with awe and pity. We trod in silence with soft feet, padding and prowling, separated from one another and yet connected, pausing and gazing at each other across slanting shafts of powdery air, leaning back against pillars or against the thick wall where the cold damp stone was like the touch of death or truth.

We drove back under a sky of light brown cloud streaked with long mouths full of green or orange light, and I felt exalted and hollow and clean and at the same time burning with desire and wondering, but with no will of my own, what was going to happen next. Julian prattled on and I gave her a short tutorial on English church architecture. Then she announced that she wanted to swim and we drove to the dunes and ran to the sea and it turned out that she had her bathing costume on underneath her dress and she rushed into the water and was soon splashing about and taunting me. (I cannot swim.) I think, however, that the sea was extremely cold for she came out of it fairly quickly.

Meanwhile I sat upon the ridge of patterned stones above the water, holding the hem of her discarded dress and, until I noticed what I was doing and deliberately relaxed, crushing it up spasmodically in my hand. I did not think that Julian was deliberately postponing the moment of love – making or that she was doubting her gift of herself. Nor did I think that she wanted me to force her. I felt entirely given over to her instinct and to the tempo of her being. The moment I longed for and dreaded would come at its natural time, and its natural time would be tonight.

 

 

 

 

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries. There are, I am told, people who just want ‘a woman’ or ‛a man’. I cannot conceive of this state of affairs and it does not concern me. I had rarely wanted another human being absolutely which was the same as to say that I had rarely wanted another human being at all. Holding hands and kissing, that can mean something in friendship, though it had not been my way. But that trembling dedication to the totality of another I had experienced – well, as 1 sat on the divan bed that evening and waited for Julian I felt, never before: though I knew intellectually that I had been in love with Christian. And there had been another case, of which I do not tell the story here.

It was and was not like the first day of the honeymoon when the newly married pair, in tender deference to each other, feign habits which are not their own. I was not a young husband. I was not young and I was not a husband. I felt none of the youthful spouse’s need to take control, his reflective anxiety about the future, his calmingly classified commitment. I feared the future and I was committed but I felt myself that day in a world so entirely weird, in a land of marvels, where all that was required of my courage was that I should walk on and on. I felt no need to take control. It was not that Julian controlled me. We were both of us controlled by something else.

We had had eggs for lunch and sausages for supper. At supper we drank some of the wine. Julian had the healthy young person’s indifference to alcohol. I thought I would be too excited to drink, but I downed two glasses with a sort of amazed appreciation. Julian had taken great pleasure in finding a pretty tablecloth and laying the table as elaborately as she could for both meals. Patara was, as advertised, well provided with all household necessities. Julian’s dustpan and brush were otiose. (It also, as advertised, had its own electricity from a generator in the abandoned farmyard.) She had brought in flowers from the garden, straggling canterbury bells of a faded cottony blue, yellow loose – strife and wild lupins from beyond the fence, and one white peony streaked with crimson, as gorgeous as a lotus. We sat down formally and laughed with delight. After supper she said suddenly, ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ ‛Uh – hu.’ ‘You understand me?’ ‘Yes.’ We washed up. She went into the bathroom and I went into the bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I inspected my dulled straight hair and my thin discreetly wrinkled face. I looked amazingly young. I got undressed. Then she came and we were together for the first time.

When one has at last got what has been ardently longed for one wishes time to cease. Often indeed at such moments it is miraculously slowed. Looking into each other’s eyes we caressed each other without any haste at all, with a sort of tender curious astonishment. I felt none of Marvell’s frenzy now. I felt rather that I was privileged to be living out in a brief span some great aeon of the experience of love. Did the Greeks know between 600 and 400 BC what millennia of human experience they were enacting? Perhaps not. But I knew, as I worshipped my darling from head to foot that I was under orders, a sort of incarnate history of human love.

My luxuriant sense of destiny had its nemesis however. I put the essential matter off too long and when I came to it it was over in a second. After that I groaned a good deal and attempted to caress her but she held me very closely pinioning my arms. ‘I’m no good.’ ‘Don’t be silly, Bradley.’ ‘I’m too old.’ ‘Darling, we’ll sleep.’ ‘I’m going outside for a minute.’

I went out naked into the dark garden where the light from the bedroom showed a dim square of jagged grass and dandelions. A mist was coming in from the sea, drifting slowly past the house, curling and uncurling like cigarette smoke. I listened and could not hear the waves but a train rattled and then cried out like an owl somewhere in the land behind me.

When I came back she had put on a sort of dark blue silk night shirt, unbuttoned to the navel. I pushed it back on to her shoul ders. Her breasts were the perfect fruit of youth, rounded and just pendant. Her hair had dried into a soft golden fuzz. Her eyes were huge. I put on a dressing – gown. I knelt in front of her without touching her.

‛My darling, don’t worry.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ I said. ‘I’m just no bloody good.’

‘It will be all right.’

‘Julian, I’m old.’

‘Nonsense. I can see how old you are!’

‘No, but – How bruised you are, your poor arm and your leg.’

‘I’m sorry – ’

‘It’s beautiful, as if you’d been fingered by a god, stained with purple.’

‘Come into bed, Bradley.’

‘Your knees smell of the northern sea. Has anyone ever kissed the soles of your feet before?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Sorry to be such a failure.’

‘You know there isn’t any possible failure here, Bradley. 1 love you.’

‘I’m your slave.’

‘We will be married, won’t we?’

‘It’s impossible.’

‘Don’t frighten me by saying that. You don’t mean it, it’s just mechanical. There’s nothing to stop us. Think of other poor people who want to get married and can’t. We are free, we aren’t married to anyone else, we’ve got no responsibilities. Well, there’s poor Priscilla, but she can live with us. We’ll look after her and make her happy. Bradley, don’t just reject happiness stupidly. Well, I know you won’t, you can’t. If I thought you could I’d be screaming.’

‘You needn’t scream.’

‘Well, why do you say these sort of abstract things that you don’t mean?’

‘I’m just instinctively protecting myself.’

‘You haven’t answered properly. You will marry me, won’t you?’

‘You’re quite mad,’ I said, ‘but as I told you, I’m your slave. Whatever you go on wanting will be the law of my being.’

‘That’s settled then. Oh dear, I am so tired.’

We both were. After we had turned off the light she said, ‘And another thing, Bradley. Today has been the happiest day I have ever had in my whole life.’

I was asleep two seconds later. We woke at dawn and embraced each other again, but with the same result.

 

 

 

 

The next day the mist was still there, thicker, still moving in from the sea with a sort of relentless marching motion, passing by the house in a steady purposive manner like a shadowy army bound for some distant hosting. We watched it, sitting laced together in the window seat of the little sitting – room in the early morning.