The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (50 page)

It may seem ridiculous or monstrous that after that telephone call I was obsessed not less but even more with the necessity of making love properly to Julian. That failure, of which she made so little, had come to seem to me a symbol of the whole dilemma. It was at any rate
the
next obstacle. After
that
I could think, after
that
I would see my way. Until
then
I could wait and not be accused. And I had perhaps begun quietly to feel that if I could only get
that
right I should emerge at last into the bright light of certainty; and then it seemed to my dark purposing mind that I was now only an inch away from being able to say to myself with a radiantly clear intent: why should I not marry this girl? Miraculously we love each other. There is nothing, but nothing, except a difference in our ages to prevent us from marrying. And if we simply erase this difficulty then it will no longer exist. How can such loves as ours be wasted? It cannot be. We
can
marry: and as between such loves only marriage will serve. I could, I can, possess Julian forever. But I was not yet at this point and my puritanical conscience was still darkening counsel and I had not even fully realized before the telephone call what the form of my indecision was.

I had of course already decided not to tell Julian about Priscilla’s death. If I told her I would have to go back to London at once. And I felt that if we left our refuge now, if we parted now, with our flight unconsummated, the process which would ensure our liberation from doubt and our eternal betrothal might never take place at all. It was something which, for both of us, I had to do, it was my destined ordeal to keep silent in order to bring us both through this darkness. And it must be done now in unbroken continuity with what had happened. The love – making was part of this. I could not and would not chill Julian’s young blood now with this tale of suicide. Of course I would have to ‘discover’ it soon, we would have to go back soon, but not yet, not without my having reached that point of decision which seemed so close and which would enable me and make me worthy to keep her forever. There was nothing more I could do for Priscilla. My duty henceforth was to Julian. The sheer pain of the concealment was itself part of the ordeal. I wanted to tell Julian at once. I needed her consolation and her precious forgiveness. But for both our sakes I had for the moment to do without this.

 

 

‘What ages you’ve been. I say, look at me and guess who!’

I came in through the porch and blinked in the comparative obscurity of the sitting – room. At first I could not see Julian at all, could only hear her voice coming to me out of darkness. Then I saw her face, the rest obscure. Then I saw what she had done.

She was dressed in black tights, black shoes, she wore a black velvet jerkin and a white shirt and a gold chain with a cross about her neck. She had posed herself in the doorway of the kitchen, holding the sheep’s skull up in one hand.

‘I thought I’d surprise you! I bought them in Oxford Street with your money, the cross is a sort of hippy cross, I got it from one of those men, it cost fifty pence. All I needed was a skull, and then we found this lovely one. Don’t you think it suits me? Alas, poor Yorick – What’s the matter, darling?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘You’re staring so. Don’t I look princely? Bradley, you’re frightening me. What is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I’ll take them off now. We’ll have lunch. I got the watercress.’

‘We won’t have lunch,’ I said. ‘We’re going to bed.’

‘You mean now?’

‘Yes.’

I strode to her and took her wrist and pulled her into the bedroom and tumbled her on the bed. The sheep’s skull fell to the floor. I put one knee on the bed and began to drag at her white shirt. ‘Wait, wait, you’re tearing it!’ She began hastily undoing the buttons and fumbling with the jerkin. I pulled the whole bundle up and over her head, but the chain and cross impeded them. ‘Wait, Bradley, please, the chain’s got round my throat, please.’ I dug in the snowy whiteness of the shirt and the silky tangle of her hair for the chain and found it and snapped it. The clothes came away Julian was desperately undoing her brassière. I began hauling down the black tights, dragging them over her thighs as she arched her body to help me. For a moment, still fully dressed, I surveyed her naked. Then I began to tear my clothes off.

‘Oh Bradley, please, don’t be so rough, please, Bradley, you’re hurting me.’

 

Later on, she was crying. There had been no doubt about this love – making. I lay exhausted and let her cry. Then I turned her round and let her tears mingle with the sweat which had darkened the thick grey hairs of my chest and made them cling to my hot flesh in flattened curls. I held her in a kind of horrified trance of triumph and felt between my hands the adorable racked sobbing of her body.

‘Stop crying.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I’m sorry I broke the chain. I’ll mend it.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’ve frightened you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I love you. We’ll be married.’

‘Yes.’

‘We will, won’t we, Julian?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you forgive me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please stop crying.’

‘I can’t.’

Later on still we made love again. Then somehow it was the evening.

 

‘What made you like that, Bradley?’

‘The Prince of Denmark, I suppose.’

We were exhausted and very hungry and I needed alcohol. We ate our lunch of liver sausage and bread and cheese and watercress without ceremony by lamplight with the windows open to the blue salty night, I drank up all the rest of the wine.

What had made me like that? Had I suddenly felt that Julian had killed Priscilla? No. The fury, the anger, was directed to myself through Julian. Or directed against fate through Julian and through myself. Yet of course this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. ‛It was love,’ I said to her.

‛Yes, yes.’

I had removed, at any rate, my next obstacle, though the world beyond it looked different again, not what I had expected. I had prefigured the proximity of some simplifying intellectual certainty. What there was now was my relationship to Julian, stretching away still into the obscurity of the future, urgent and puzzling and historically dynamic, changing it seemed even from second to second. The girl looked different, I looked different. Was that the body which I had worshipped every part of? It was as if the terrible abstraction had been carried by the rush of divine power right into the centre of our passion. I found myself, at moments, trembling, and saw Julian trembling. And the touching thing was that we were comforting each other, like people who had just escaped from a fire.

‛I will mend your chain, I will.’

‘There’s no need to mend it, I can just knot it.’

‘And I’ll mend the sheep’s skull too.’

‘It’s in too many pieces.’

‛I’ll mend it.’

‘Let’s draw the curtains. I feel bad spirits are looking in at us.’

‘We are surrounded by spirits. Curtains won’t keep them out.’ But I pulled the curtains and came round behind her chair, touching her neck very lightly with my finger. Her flesh was cool, almost cold, and she shuddered, arching her neck. She made no other response, but I felt that our bodies were rapt in a communion with each other which passed our understanding. Meanwhile it was a time for quiet communication by words, for speech of a new sort, arcane prophetic speech.

‛I know,’ she said. ‘Swarms of them. I’ve never felt like this before. Listen to the sea. It sounds so close. Though there’s no wind.’

We listened.

‛Bradley, would you go and lock the front door?’

I went and locked it and then sat down again facing her. ‘Are you cold?’

‘No, it’s not – coldness.’

‛I know.’

She was wearing the blue dress with the white willow – spray pattern which she had been wearing when she fled and a light woollen rug off our bed around her shoulders. She was staring at me with big eyes and every now and then a spasm passed across her face. There had been a lot of tears but none now. She looked so much, and beautifully, older, not the child I had known at all, but some wonderful holy woman, a prophetess, a temple prostitute. She had combed her hair down smoothly and pressed it back and her face had the nakedness, the solitude, the ambiguous staring eloquence of a mask. She had the dazed empty look of a great statue.

‘Oh you wonderful, wonderful thing.’

‛I feel so odd,’ she said, ‘quite impersonal, I’ve never felt like this before at all.’

‛It is the power of love.’

‘Does love do that? I thought yesterday, the day before yesterday, that I loved you. It wasn’t like this.’

‛It is the god, the black Eros. Don’t be afraid.’

‘Oh I’m not – afraid – I just feel shattered and empty. I’m in a place where I’ve never been before.’

‘I’m there too.’

‘Yes. It’s funny. When we were just tender and quiet together, you know, I felt you were there, more there than anybody ever. Now I feel as if I were alone – and yet I’m not – I’m – I’m you – I’ m both of us.’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘You even resemble me. I feel I’m looking into a mirror.’

I had the strange feeling that I was speaking these words. I was speaking through her, through the pure echoing emptiness of her being, hollowed by love.

‘Then I looked into your eyes and thought: Bradley! Now you have no name.’

‘We are possessed.’

‘I feel we are joined forever. Sort of – dedicated.’

‘Yes.’

‘Listen to that train, how clear it sounds.’

We listened to it passing, far off.

‘Is it like this in inspiration, I mean when you write?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I knew it was, though I had never yet experienced it, never yet. But now, empowered, I would be able to create. Though still in the dark, I had come through my ordeal.

‛It it the same thing really?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The desire of the human heart for love and for knowledge is infinite. But most people only realize this when they are in love, when the conception of this desire being actually fulfilled is present to them.’

‘And art too – ’

‘Is this desire – purified – in the presence of – it’s possibility – in the divine presence.’

‘Art and love – ’

‘Must both envisage eternal arrangements.’

‘You will write now, won’t you?’

‘I will write now.’

‘I feel complete,’ she said, ‘as if why we had to come together had been somehow explained. And yet the explanation doesn’t matter. We are together. Oh Bradley, I’m
yawning
!’

‘And my name’s come back!’ I said. ‘Come on. To bed and to sleep.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt so beautifully tired and
heavy
in my life.’

I led her to bed and she fell asleep in her petticoat as on the first night. I felt wide awake and alert. And as I held her in my arms I knew that I had been right not to go back to London. I had had to stay, for the ordeal. I held her and felt the simple warmth of ordinary domestic tenderness flowing back into my body. I thought about poor Priscilla and how I would share all that pain with Julian on the morrow. On the morrow I would tell her everything, everything, and we would go back to London and face plain tasks and duties and begin the ordinariness of being together.

 

 

I was deeply asleep. Some sound was crashing, crashing, crashing into the place where I was. I was a hidden Jew whom the Nazis had found at last. I heard them, like the soldiers in Uccello’s picture, beating their halberds on the door and shouting. I stirred, found Julian still in my arms. It was dark.

‘What is it?’ Her frightened voice woke me into full consciousness and absolute dread.

Someone was banging and banging and banging on the front door.

‘Oh who can it be?’ She was sitting up. I felt her warm darkness beside me, seemed to see light reflected from her eyes.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, sitting up too and putting my arms round her. We clung together.

‘Better keep quiet and not put the light on. Oh Bradley, I’m so frightened.’

‘I’ll look after you.’ I was so frightened myself I could hardly think or speak.

‘Sssh. Perhaps they’ll go away.’

The banging, which had stopped for a moment, was resumed louder than before. Some metal object was being pounded on the panels of the door. There was a sound of splintering wood.

I turned on a lamp and got up. As I did so I actually saw my bare legs trembling. I pulled on my dressing – gown. ‘Stay here. I’ll see. Lock yourself in.’

‘No, no, I’m coming too – ’

‘Stay here.’

‘Don’t open the door, Bradley, don’t – ’

I put the light on in the little hall. The banging stopped at once. I stood in silence before the door, now knowing who was on the other side of it.

I opened the door very quietly and Arnold came, or rather almost fell, in through it.

I turned on the lights in the sitting – room and he followed me in there and put down on the table the large spanner with which he had been beating on the door. He sat down, not looking at me, breathing hard.

I sat down too, covering my bare knees which were shuddering convulsively.

‛Is – Julian – here?’ said Arnold, speaking thickly, as if in drunkenness, only he was certainly not drunk.

‘Yes.’

‛I’ve come to – take her away – ’

‘She won’t want to go,’ I said. ‛How did you find us?’

‘Francis told me. I asked him and asked him and asked him, and he told me. And about the telephone call.’

‘What telephone call?’

‘Don’t pretend,’ said Arnold, looking at me now. ‛He told me he telephoned you this morning about Priscilla.’