The Love Object (17 page)

There was a new dog, a mongrel, in whom he took no interest. He said the servants got new dogs simply because he allotted money for that. But as they were not willing to feed more than one animal, the previous year’s dog was either murdered or put out on the mountain. All these dogs were of the same breed, part wolf; she wondered if when left on the mountain they reverted to being wolves. He said solemnly to the table at large that he would never allow himself to become attached to another dog. She said to him directly, ‘Is it possible to know beforehand?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ She could see that she had irritated him.

He came three times and afterwards coughed badly. She sat with him and stroked his back, but when the coughing took command he moved her away. He leaned forward holding a pillow to his mouth. She saw a film of his lungs, orange shapes with insets of dark that boded ill. She wanted to do some simple domestic thing like give him milk and honey but he sent her away. Going back along the terrace she could hear the birds. The birds were busy with their song. She met the fat woman. ‘You have been derouted,’ the woman said, ‘and so have I.’ And they bowed mockingly.

An archaeologist had been on a dig where a wooden temple was discovered. ‘Tell me about your temple,’ she said.

‘I would say it’s 400
B.C
.,’ he said, nothing more. Dry, dry.

A boy who called himself Jasper and wore mauve shirts received letters under the name of John. The letters were arranged on the hall table, each person’s under a separate stone. Her mother wrote to say they were anxiously awaiting the good news. She said she hoped they would get engaged first but admitted that she was quite prepared to be told that the marriage had actually taken place. She knew how unpredictable he was. Her mother managed a poultry farm in England and was a compulsive eater.

Young people came to ask if Clay Sickle was staying at the house. They were in rags, but it looked as if they were rags worn on purpose and for effect. Their shoes were bits of motor-tyre held up with string. They all got out of the car though the question could have been asked by any one of them. He was on his way back from the pool and after two minute’s conversation he invited them for supper. He throve on new people. That night they were the ones in the limelight – the three unkempt boys and the long-haired girl. The girl had very striking eyes which she fixed on one man and then another. She was determined to compromise one of them. The boys described their holiday, being broke, the trouble they had with the car which was owned by a hire purchase firm in London. After dinner an incident occurred. The girl followed one of the men into the bathroom. ‘Want to see what you’ve got there,’ she said and insisted upon watching while the man peed. She said they would do any kind of fucking he wanted. She said he would be a slob not to try. It was too late to send them away, because earlier on they’d been invited to spend the night and beds were put up, down in the linen room. The girl was the last to go over there. She started a song ‘All around his cock he wears a tri-coloured rash-eo’, and she went on yelling it as she crossed the courtyard and went down the steps, brandishing a bottle.

In the morning, she determined to swim by herself. It was not that she mistrusted her instructor but the time was getting closer, and she was desperate. As she went to the pool one of the youths appeared in borrowed white shorts, eating a banana. She greeted him with faltering gaiety. He said it was fun to be out before the others. He had a big head with closely cropped hair, a short neck, and a very large nose.

‘Beaches are where I most want to be, where it all began,’ he said. She thought he was referring to Creation and upon hearing such a thing he laughed, profanely. ‘Let’s suppose there’s a bunch of kids and you’re all horsing around with a ball and all your sensory dimensions are working …’

‘What?’ she said.

‘A hard on …’

‘Oh …’

‘Now the ball goes into the sea and I follow and she follows me and takes the ball from my hand and a dense rain of energy, call it love, from me to her and vice versa, reciprocity in other words …’

Sententious idiot. She thought, Why do people like that have to be kept under his roof? Where is his judgement, where? She walked back to the house, furious at having to miss her chance to swim.

Dear Mother: It’s not that kind of relationship. Being unmarried instals me as positively as being married and neither instals me with any certainty. It is a beautiful house but staying here is quite a strain. You could easily get filleted. Friends do it to friends. The food is good. Others cook it but I am responsible for each day’s menu. Shopping takes hours. The shops have a special smell that is impossible to describe. They are all dark so that the foodstuffs won’t perish. An old woman goes along the street in a cart selling fish. She has a very penetrating cry. It is like the commencement of a song. There are always six or seven little girls with her, they all have pierced ears, and wear fine gold sleepers. Flies swarm round the cart even when it is upright in the square. Living off scraps and fish scales, I expect. We do not buy from her, we go to the harbour and buy directly from the fishermen. The guests – all but one woman – eat small portions. You would hate it. All platinum people. They have a canny sense of self-preservation; they know how much to eat, how much to drink, how far to go; you would think they invented somebody like Shakespeare so proprietary are they about his talent. They are not fools – not by any means. There is a chessboard of ivory and it is so large it stands on the floor. Seats of the right height are stationed round it.

Far back – in my most distant childhood, Mother – I remember your nightly cough, it was a lament really and I hated it. At the time I had no idea that I hated it, which goes to show how unreliable feelings are. We do not know what we feel at the time and that is very perplexing. Forgive me for mentioning the cough, it is simply that I think it is high time we spoke our minds on all matters. But don’t worry. You are centuries ahead of the people here. In a nut shell they brand you as idiot if you are harmless. There are jungle laws which you never taught me; you couldn’t, you never knew them. Ah well!

I will bring you a present. Probably something suede. He says the needlework here is appalling and that things fall to pieces, but you can always have it re-made. We had some nice china jelly moulds when I was young. Whatever happened to them? Love.

Like the letter to the doctor it was not posted. She didn’t tear it up or anything, it just lay in an envelope and she omitted to post it one day to the next. This new tendency disturbed her. This habit of postponing everything. It was as if something vital had first to be gone through. She blamed the swimming.

The day the pool was emptied she missed her three lessons. She could hear the men scrubbing and from time to time she walked down and stood over them as if her presence could hurry the proceedings and make the water flow in, in one miracle burst. He saw how she fretted, he said they should have had two pools built. He asked her to come with them on the boat. The books and the sun-oil were as she had last seen them. The cliffs as intriguing as ever. ‘Hello cliff, can I fall off you?’ She waved merrily. In a small harbour they saw another millionaire with his girl. They were alone, without even a crew. And for some reason it went straight to her heart. At dinner the men took bets as to who the girl was. They commented on her prettiness though they had hardly seen her. The water filling into the pool sounded like a stream from a faraway hill. He said it would be full by morning.

Other houses had beautiful objects but theirs was in the best taste. The thing she liked most was the dull brass chandelier, from Portugal. In the evenings when it was lit the cones of light tapered towards the rafters and she thought of wood smoke and the wings of birds endlessly fluttering. Votive. To please her he had a fire lit in a far-off room simply to have the smell of wood smoke in the air.

The watercress soup that was to be a speciality tasted like salt water. Nobody blamed her but afterwards she sat at table and wondered how it had gone wrong. She felt defeated. On request he brought another bottle of red wine but asked if she was sure she ought to have more. She thought, He does not understand the workings of my mind. But then, neither did she. She was drunk. She held the glass out. Watching the meniscus, letting it tilt from side to side, she wondered how drunk she would be when she stood up. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what interests you?’ It was the first blunt question she had ever put to him.

‘Why, everything,’ he said.

‘But deep down,’ she said.

‘Discovery,’ he said, and walked away.

But not self-discovery, she thought, not that.

A neurologist got drunk and played jazz on the chapel organ. He said he could not resist it, there were so many things to press. The organ was stiff from not being used.

She retired early. Next day she was due to swim for them. She thought he would come to visit her. If he did they would lie in one another’s arms and talk. She would knead his poor worn scrotum and ask questions about the world beneath the sea where he delved each day, ask about those depths and if there were flowers of some sort down there, and in the telling he would be bound to tell her about himself. She kept wishing for the organ player to fall asleep. She knew he would not come until each guest had retired because he was strangely reticent about his loving.

But the playing went on. If anything the player gathered strength and momentum. When at last he did fall asleep she opened the shutters. The terrace lights were all on. The night breathlessly still. Across the fields came the lap from the sea and then the sound of a sheep bell tentative and intercepted. Even a sheep recognized the dead of night. The light-house worked faithfully as a heart beat. The dog lay in the chair, asleep, but with his ears raised. On other chairs were sweaters and books and towels, the remains of the day’s activities. She watched and she waited. He did not come. She lamented that she could not go to him on the night she needed him most.

For the first time she thought about cramp.

In the morning she took three headache pills and swallowed them with hot coffee. They disintegrated in her mouth. Afterwards she washed them down with soda water. There was no lesson because the actual swimming performance was to be soon after breakfast. She tried on one bathing suit, then another, then realizing how senseless this was she put the first one back on and stayed in her room until it was almost the time.

When she came down to the pool they were all there, ahead of her. They formed quite an audience: the twenty house guests and the six complaining children who had been obliged to quit the pool. Even the housekeeper stood on the stone seat under the tree, to get a view. Some smiled, some were a trifle embarrassed. The pregnant woman gave her a medal for good luck. It was attached to a pin. So they were friends. Her instructor stood near the front, the rope coiled round his wrist just in case. The children gave to the occasion its only levity. She went down the ladder backwards and looked at no face in particular. She crouched until the water covered her shoulders, then she gave a short leap and delivered herself to it. Almost at once she knew that she was going to do it. Her hands no longer loath to delve deep scooped the water away, and she kicked with a ferocity she had not known to be possible. She was aware of cheering but it did not matter about that. She swam, as she had promised, across the width of the pool in the shallow end. It was pathetically short, but it was what she had vouched to do. Afterwards one of the children said that her face was torture. The rubber flowers had long since come off her bathing cap, and she pulled it off as she stood up and held on to the ladder. They clapped. They said it called for a celebration. He said nothing but she could see that he was pleased. Her instructor was the happiest person there. When planning the party they went to the study where they could sit and make lists. He said they would order gipsies and flowers and guests and caviare and swans of ice to put the caviare in. None of it would be her duty. They would get people to do it. In all, they wrote out twenty telegrams. He asked how she felt. She admitted that being able to swim bore little relation to not being able. They were two unreconcilable feelings. The true thrill she said was the moment when she knew she would master it but had not yet achieved it with her body. He said he looked forward to the day when she went in and out of the water like a knife. He did the movement deftly with his hand. He said next thing she would learn was riding. He would teach her himself or he would have her taught. She remembered the chestnut mare with head raised, nostrils searching the air, and she herself unable to stroke it, unable to stand next to it without exuding fear.

‘Are you afraid of nothing?’ she asked, too afraid to tell him specifically about the encounter with the mare which took place in his stable.

‘Sure, sure.’

‘You never reveal it.’

‘At the time I’m too scared.’

‘But afterwards, afterwards …’ she said.

‘You try to live it down,’ he said and looked at her and hurriedly took her in his arms. She thought, Probably he is as near to me as he has been to any living person and that is not very near, not very near at all. She knew that if he chose her that they would not go in the deep end, the deep end that she dreaded and dreamed of. When it came to matters inside of himself he took no risks.

She was tired. Tired of the life she had elected to go into, and disappointed with the man she had put pillars round. The tiredness came from inside and like a deep breath going out slowly it tore at her gut. She was sick of her own predilection for rotten eggs. It seemed to her that she always held people to her ear, the way her mother held eggs, shaking them to guess at their rottenness, but unlike her mother she chose the very ones that she would have been wise to throw away. He seemed to sense her sadness but he said nothing, he held her and squeezed her from time to time in reassurance.

Her dress – his gift – was laid out on the bed, its wide white sleeves hanging down at either side. It was of open-work and it looked uncannily like a corpse. There was a shawl to go with it, and shoes and a bag. The servant was waiting. Beside the bath her book, an ashtray, cigarettes, and a box of little soft matches that were hard to strike. She lit a cigarette and drew on it heartily. She regretted not having brought up a drink. She felt like a drink at that moment and in her mind she sampled the drink she might have had. The servant knelt down to put in the stopper. She asked that the bath should not be run just yet. Then she took the biggest towel and put it over her bathing suit, and went along the corridor, and down by the back stairs. She did not have to turn on the lights, she would have known her way, blindfolded, to that pool. All the toys were on the water, like farm animals just put to bed. She picked them out one by one and laid them at the side near the pile of empty chlorine bottles. She went down the ladder backwards.