The Love Object (2 page)

‘I’ll think of you.’ I said.

‘And I, of you.’

We were not even sad at parting.

It was after that I had what I can only describe as a dream within a dream. I was coming out of sleep, forcing myself awake, wiping my saliva on the pillow slip, when something pulled me, an enormous weight dragged me down into the bed and I thought: I have become infirm. I have lost the use of my limbs and this accounts for my listlessness for several months when I’ve wanted to do nothing except drink tea and stare out of the window. I am a cripple. All over. Even my mouth won’t move. Only my brain is ticking away. My brain tells me that a woman downstairs doing the ironing is the only one who could locate me but she might not come upstairs for days, she might think I’m in bed with a man, committing a sin. From time to time I sleep with a man but normally I sleep alone. She’ll leave the ironed clothes on the kitchen table, and the iron itself upright on the floor so that it won’t set fire to anything. Blouses will be on hangers, their frilled collars white and fluid like foam. She’s the sort of woman who even irons the toes and heels of nylon stockings. She’ll slip away, until Thursday, her next day in. I feel something at my back, or, strictly speaking tugging at my bedcovers which I have mounted right up the length of my back to cover my head. For shelter. And I know now that it’s not infirmity that’s dragging me down but a man. How did he get in there? He’s on the inside, near the wall. I know what he’s going to do to me and the woman downstairs won’t ever come to rescue me, she’d be too ashamed or she might not think I want to be rescued. I don’t know which of the men it is, whether it’s the big tall bruiser that’s at the door every time I open it innocently, expecting it’s the laundry boy and find it’s Him with an old black carving knife, its edge glittering because he’s just sharpened it on a step. Before I can scream my tongue isn’t mine any more. Or it might be the Other One. Tall too, he gets me by my bracelet as I slip between the banisters of the stairs. I’ve forgotten that I am not a little girl any more and that I don’t slip easily between banisters. If the bracelet snapped in two I would have made my escape, leaving him with one half of a gold bracelet in his hand, but my goddam provident mother had a safety chain put on it because it was nine carat. Anyhow he’s in the bed. It will go on for ever, the thing he wants. I daren’t turn round to look at him. Then something gentle about the way the sheet is pulled down suggests that he might be the New One. The man I met a few weeks ago. Not my type at all, tiny broken veins on his cheeks, and red, actually red hair. We were on a goatskin. But it was raised off the ground, high as a bed. I had been doing most of the loving; breasts, hands, mouth, all yearned to minister to him. I felt so sure, never have I felt so sure of the rightness of what I was doing. Then he started kissing me down there and I came to his lapping tongue and his head was under my buttocks and it was like I was bearing him only there was pleasure instead of pain. He trusted me. We were two people, I mean he wasn’t someone on me, smothering me, doing something I couldn’t see. I could see. I could have shat on his red hair if I wanted. He trusted me. He stretched the come to the very last. And all the things that I loved up to then, like glass or lies, mirrors and feathers, and pearl buttons, and silk, and willow trees, became secondary compared with what he’d done. He was lying so that I could see it: so delicate, so thin, with a bunch of worried blue veins along its sides. Talking to it was like talking to a little child. The light in the room was a white glow. He’d made me very soft and wet so I put it in. It was quick and hard and forceful and he said, ‘I’m not considering you now, I think we’ve considered you,’ and I said that was perfectly true and that I liked him roughing away. I said it. I was no longer a hypocrite, no longer a liar. Before that he had often remonstrated with me, he had said, ‘There are words we are not going to use to each other, words such as “Sorry” and “Are You Angry?”’ I had used these words a lot. So I think from the gentle shuffle of the bedcovers – like a request really – that it might be him and if it is I want to sink down and down into the warm, dark, sleepy pit of the bed and stay in it for ever, coming with him. But I am afraid to look in case it is not Him but One of the Others.

When I finally got awake I was in a panic and I had a dreadful urge to telephone him, but though he never actually forbade it, I knew he would have been most displeased.

When something has been perfect, as our last encounter in the gaslight had been, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it. Unfortunately the next occasion was clouded. He came in the afternoon and brought a suitcase containing all the paraphernalia for a dress dinner which he was attending that night. When he arrived he asked if he could hang up his tails as otherwise they would be very creased. He hooked the hanger on the outer rim of the wardrobe and I remember being impressed by the row of war medals along the top pocket. Our time in bed was pleasant but hasty. He worried about getting dressed. I just sat and watched him. I wanted to ask about his medals and how he had merited them, and if he remembered the war, and if he’d missed his then wife, and if he’d killed people, and if he still dreamt about it. But I asked nothing. I sat there as if I were paralysed.

‘No braces,’ he said as he held the wide black trousers around his middle. His other trousers must have been supported by a belt.

‘I’ll go to Woolworths for some,’ I said. But that was impractical because he was already in danger of being late. I got a safety pin and fastened the trousers from the back. It was a difficult operation because the pin was not really sturdy enough.

‘You’ll bring it back?’ I said. I am superstitious about giving people pins. He took some time to reply because he was muttering ‘damn’ under his breath. Not to me. But to the stiff, inhuman, starched collar which would not yield to the little gold studs he had wanted to pierce through. I tried. He tried. Each time when one of us failed the other became impatient. He said if we went on the collar would be grubby from our hands. And that seemed a worse alternative. I thought he must be dining with very critical people, but of course I did not give my thoughts on the matter. In the end we each managed to get a stud through and he had a small sip of whisky as a celebration. The bow tie was another ordeal. He couldn’t do it. I daren’t try.

‘Haven’t you done it before?’ I said. I expect his wives – in succession – had done it for him. I felt such a fool. Then a lump of hatred. I thought how ugly and pink his legs were, how repellent the shape of his body which did not have anything in the way of a waist, how deceitful his eyes that congratulated himself in the mirror when he succeeded in making a clumsy bow. As he put on the coat the sound of the medals tinkling enabled me to remark on their music. There was so little I could say. Lastly he donned a white, silk scarf that came below his middle. He looked like someone I did not know. He left hurriedly. I ran with him down the road to help get a taxi, and trying to keep up with him and chatter was not easy. All I can remember is the ghostly sight of the very white scarf swinging back and forth as we rushed. His shoes, which were patent, creaked unsuitably.

‘Is it all-male?’ I asked.

‘No. Mixed,’ He replied.

So that was why we hurried. To meet his wife at some appointed place. The hatred began to grow.

He did bring back the safety pin, but my superstition remained because four straight pins with black rounded tops that had come off his new shirt were on my window ledge. He refused to take them.
He
was not superstitious.

Bad moments, like good ones, tend to be grouped together, and when I think of the dress occasion I also think of the other time when we were not in utter harmony. It was on a street; we were searching for a restaurant. We had to leave my house because a friend had come to stay and we would have been obliged to tolerate her company. Going along the street – it was October and very windy – I felt that he was angry with me for having drawn us out into the cold where we could not embrace. My heels were very high and I was ashamed of the hollow sound they made. In a way I felt we were enemies. He looked in the windows of restaurants to see if any acquaintances of his were there. Two restaurants he decided against, for reasons best known to himself. One looked to be very attractive. It had orange bulbs inset in the walls and the light came through small squares of iron grating. We crossed the road to look at places on the opposite side. I saw a group of rowdies coming towards us and for something to say – what with my aggressive heels, the wind, traffic going by, the ugly unromantic street, we had run out of agreeable conversation – I asked if he ever felt apprehensive about encountering noisy groups like that, late at night. He said that in fact a few nights before he had been walking home very late and saw such a group coming towards him, and before he even registered fear he found that he had splayed his bunch of keys between his fingers and had his hand, armed with the sharp points of the keys, ready to pull out of his pocket should they have threatened him. I suppose he did it again while we were walking along. Curiously enough I did not feel he was my protector. I only felt that he and I were two people, that there was in the world trouble, violence, sickness, catastrophe, that he faced it in one way, and that I faced it – or to be exact that I shrank from it – in another. We would always be outside one another. In the course of that melancholy thought the group went by and my conjecture about violence was all for nothing. We found a nice restaurant and drank a lot of wine.

Later our love-making, as usual, was perfect. He stayed all night. I used to feel specially privileged on the nights he stayed, and the only little thing that lessened my joy was spasms of anxiety in case he should have told his wife he was at such and such an hotel and her telephoning there and not finding him. More than once I raced into an imaginary narrative where she came and discovered us and I acted silent and ladylike and he told her very crisply to wait outside until he was ready. I felt no pity for her. Sometimes I wondered if we would ever meet or if in fact we had already met on an escalator at some point. Though that was unlikely because we lived at opposite ends of London.

Then to my great surprise the opportunity came. I was invited to a Thanksgiving party given by an American magazine. He saw the card on my mantelshelf and said, ‘You’re going to that, too?’ and I smiled and said maybe. Was he? ‘Yes,’ he said. He tried to make me reach a decision there and then but I was too canny. Of course I would go. I was curious to see his wife. I would meet him in public. It shocked me to think that we had never met in the company of any other person. It was like being shut off … a little animal locked away. I thought very distinctly of a ferret that a forester used to keep in a wooden box with a sliding top when I was a child, and once of another ferret being brought to mate with it. The thought made me shiver. I mean I got it confused; I thought of white ferrets with their little pink nostrils in the same breath as I thought of him sliding a door back and slipping into my box from time to time. His skin had a lot of pink in it.

‘I haven’t decided,’ I said, but when the day came I went. I took a lot of trouble with my appearance, had my hair set, and wore a virginal attire. Black and white. The party was held in a large room with panelled walls of brown wood; blown-up magazine covers were along the panels. The bar was at one end, under a balcony. The effect was of shrunken barmen in white lost underneath the cliff of the balcony which seemed in danger of collapsing on them. A more unlikely room for a party I have never seen. There were women going around with trays, but I had to go to the bar because there was champagne on the trays and I have a preference for whisky. A man I knew conducted me there and en route another man placed a kiss on my back. I hoped that he witnessed this, but it was such a large room with hundreds of people around that I had no idea where he was. I noticed a dress I quite admired, a mauve dress with very wide, crocheted sleeves. Looking up the length of the sleeves I saw its owner’s eyes directed on me. Perhaps she was admiring my outfit. People with the same tastes often do. I have no idea what her face looked like, but later when I asked a girl friend which was his wife she pointed to this woman with the crocheted sleeves. The second time I saw her in profile. I still don’t know what she looked like, nor do those eyes into which I looked speak to my memory with anything special, except, perhaps, slight covetousness.

Finally I searched him out. I had a mutual friend walk across with me and apparently introduce us. He was unwelcoming. He looked strange, the flush on his cheekbones vivid and unnatural. He spoke to the mutual friend and virtually ignored me. Possibly to make amends he asked, at length, if I was enjoying myself.

‘It’s a chilly room,’ I said. I was referring of course to his manner. Had I wanted to describe the room I would have used ‘grim’, or some such adjective.

‘I don’t know about you being chilly but I’m certainly not,’ he said with aggression. Then a very drunk woman in a sack dress came and took his hand and began to slobber over him. I excused myself and went off. He said most pointedly that he hoped he would see me again, some time.

I caught his eye just as I left the party and I felt both sorry for him and angry with him. He looked stunned as if important news had just been delivered to him. He saw me leave with a group of people and I stared at him without the whimper of a smile. Yes, I was sorry for him. I was also piqued. The very next day when we met and I brought it up he did not even remember that a mutual friend had introduced us.

‘Clement Hastings!’ he said, repeating the man’s name. Which goes to show how nervous he must have been.

It is impossible to insist that bad news delivered in a certain manner and at a certain time will have a less awful effect. But I feel that I got my walking papers from him at the wrong moment. For one thing it was morning. The clock went off and I sat up wondering when he had set it. Being on the outside of the bed he was already attending to the push button.