The Only Poet (51 page)

‘I couldn't meet you as a friend,' he said. ‘I was your lover, and I can't be anything else. I may be a resentful and hating lover, but I am still your lover. You can't think of a resentful and hating friend, and no more can you think of a friend giving you pleasure that turns your body into something better than your body and floods your mind with light. If we were friends and met and never went to bed, it would be as if one of us had said to the other, “I don't want you any more!” That's not for us.'

‘But isn't that what you would have said to me, sooner or later,' she asked, ‘if I had stayed with you?'

He was silent. ‘No,' he said at last. But he went on thinking about it. She could follow what he was thinking. He was remembering some recent love affair, which had been important to him, though not as important as theirs, and wondering whether he could have brought himself to abnegate the pleasure it had promised if she had still been his mistress. He said, ‘I would never have said, “I don't want you any more”, because I would always have wanted you. I might have lied to you and deceived you sometimes. But I would have always come back to you. What is between us is the absolute.'

‘But you made love to other women.'

‘You hadn't any reason to fear them. You must have known you had a unique value for me.'

She paused before the question, because she knew he would never answer it by saying he loved her, but in the end her curiosity forced her. She asked him. ‘Why, what was that?'

He told her curtly, and she stared at him in astonishment. She could not see why so slight a physical thing should have mattered so much to him. She said, ‘You never told me.'

‘Greek cunning,' he said gloomily, ‘it often overreaches itself,' and laughed. ‘No, it wasn't that. It was my secret, my own joke. It sent me to heaven. It was so amusing that you who were a prude had this marvellous gift and didn't know you were doing anything wonderful.'

She thought: ‘He must be using the word prude in a comparative sense', and he burst out suddenly with black hatred, ‘Has nobody else mentioned it to you?'

‘I'd forgotten what a brute you are,' she said, but he would not say that he was sorry. After a long pause she said, ‘I never tried to do it. My body did it because I liked you. So with other people it did not happen.' She paused. ‘Was that why you would have shared me with another man? That thing I did.'

‘No!' he said. But he would not say, ‘I loved you.'

His last words to her: ‘You were abominable to leave me.'

Leonora Morton, remembering all this, is still standing in the octagonal hall, preparing to join her friend's party.

The lovers women remember are usually older than themselves, and women live longer than men; so it happens when they are old that they find themselves thinking with passion of a face or a body which is no longer anywhere in all the world, which has as completely vanished from existence as if it had never really existed, as if it had belonged to an imaginary personage invented by a painter or a writer.

Nicholas had died of rage. The dark vein on his forehead had killed him. He had been in Paris at the time of the German invasion, and had been called to see Laval, and in the course of an interview concerned with the future of the works had broken into shouting and had fallen dead. He had said earlier to his nephew, ‘I have a terrible pain in my arm'. His sons had been deportees, and only one had returned to France at the end of the war. Yolande had been in prison but was released.

She felt that it would have been better if she had not left him, if she had gone on and faced betrayal in full consciousness, brutalization, even desertion. Indeed, to have him go from her while she was still unquestioning in her acceptance of him would have been like being abandoned on the burning dunes without water. Yet she did not believe he would ever have deserted her. It would not have been
quite like that.
In Vienna she had seen that what he had esteemed in her was both that she had left him and that what was between them was so strong that she could not really leave him. She had to go back to what was the truth about their relationship. She would have liked to spend the whole of eternity trying out the relationships possible to them. She would have liked to be his wife; the first woman he ever made love to, the girl he kept when he was in military service; she would have liked to be Solange Guidener, she would have liked to be a woman who was only his friend, the mistress he had when he was old, whom he would have clasped to him chiefly for comfort. But there was no such woman, for he had never grown old. That he should have been cut off when he was still strong, that he should have missed some joy, that he should never have had white hair, this brought tears to her eyes.

But it was then that she was pierced by a sensation painful as pain but without site. It inconvenienced the whole of her, but was not present in any part, though she was aware that if it affected her she would be sick for the first time since she was a child. She knew she should walk to a chair and sit down, but she could not move. It struck her as a miracle that she should ever have moved. She could not think how muscles worked. It would be all right if somehow she could get to the man at the front door, which was only thirty yards away, through the main door of the hall, and down the steps. If she tried she could perhaps stagger over to the door, and he would see her. But she heard the front door open on some guests who were even later than herself. They might think if they saw her rocking across the room that she was drunk or drugged, and would be less disapproving but more frightened, perhaps more disgusted, if they recognized that she was, as she supposed she was, dying. So she stood still, and was pleased to find that she could support herself. The latecomers came in, two married couples, and the men halted at the drawing-room door, and the women walked past her to the cloakroom. She had hoped she might know them, know them well, so that if words came out of her mouth as strangely as she feared they would, they would be brave and not show their fear when she asked them to call the butler because she was ill. But they were strangers and she simply fumbled with her bag as if she had stopped to find something. This meant such effort that she panted and had to clench her teeth and check the outflow of her breath lest the panting turn into groaning. She found herself remembering a ballet seen half a century before, which ended with a girl in a white dress standing in just such a house as this in the foreground of a bright gathering like the party in the drawing-room which she doubted she would ever see. The girl had slowly keeled over from the vertical to the oblique, while the man beside her as slowly fell to his knees, so that her head came to rest on his ruffled shirtfront, as the music became fatally sweet, sad like the Russian champions' skating, and the curtain fell. ‘The timing of life is all wrong,' thought Leonora. ‘How lovely the girl was, with that little oval face all ballerinas had then, like the back of a teaspoon, and her blue lids closed over her eyes. How dead she looked and how pathetic. But when I die and close my eyes my wrinkles will make such a noise about life nobody will be worrying about the pathos of death. Only the young can die beautifully, but the profession is manned by the old.'

For an instant it seemed that she was feeling better. Then the pain found its lodging at last, in her arm, and became an assault, an assassination. Till then she had thought she was going to die, but now she knew it. The body was trying to evict her, to throw her out into the air without a stitch. ‘Yes, life is unendurable,' she told herself, ‘but it will not have to be endured for long.' Something had gone wrong with her sight. The hall was lit by sconces set halfway up the high walls, leaning forward and spreading their gilded branches towards each other. Now the lights made a continuous yellow band round the room. A mist was swirling round the house, and she wondered if fog had fallen, but when more latecomers arrived, the women's dresses looked as if they were veiled, and all their faces featureless, they might have been spendthrift burglars wearing the finest stockings as masks. She mounted above appearances and suspected everything she saw as a sign of death.

The pain was cutting through her like a kitchen knife, separating her body from her mind, and hurting both. This was too much for her to bear. Ever since she was born she had had to bite off more than she could chew, and this was the last savage excess of exigence. And not to be evaded, not to be trumped by some other resource. One could stop doing things by an act of will, one could not stop being. ‘A gasman, a dustman, a postman,' she thought, ‘they can lay down tools and refuse to work, soldiers can resign their commission, there are those things MPs apply for, the Chiltern Hundreds, whatever they are,' – what a lot of things she had not time to find out. What had Toc H been? – ‘but as human beings we can't say no, we have to go on and on being human, even to frightful this.'

Several people were standing not too far from her, two men waiting for their wives to come out of the cloakroom, a couple who seemed to be impatiently waiting for someone to join them, looking back at the front door as it opened and closed. When she could trust her dry tongue and quivering lips she would ask one of these faceless figures to find the butler. Not the butler belonging to the house, there probably was none, the caterers' butler. She had seen him when she came in, not to be mistaken, the wire-haired terrier type of Scotsman, like Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the butler she always asked Willowes-Aumbrie to send her when she had people to lunch or dinner. He would do what was necessary, take her to a room where she could lie down, and telephone for a doctor and an ambulance, and he would know too that it was just as necessary that it should be done quietly, that she must not spoil Patricia's party.

She said, ‘I have a terrible pain in my arm.' She was weeping because the pain in her arm was really terrible. She was smiling because she was saying the same words he had once spoken.

The pain was gone from her arm. It was as if a magnet had lifted it out.

He said, ‘I'm bringing you some brandy. I remember you don't partake –' He came to a pause, and gave an embarrassed smile. ‘I should say, you don't drink. But I thought it might be what you needed.'

She said, ‘How kind,' but looked up into his face, raising her eyebrows. He put her into a chair.

He explained carefully, ‘I noticed you were very pale when you came here! Mrs Rhodes came to me and said you were standing here looking very white.'

‘Mrs Rhodes? Do I know her?'

He took a canny look at her and waited a moment before answering, ‘She's been at your house three times when I've been waiting at table.'

The forgetfulness of old age was not the gentle thing people thought. Old age was a kind of madness. There was nothing to be done about it. But usually one was able to make the connection. As she drank the brandy he said, ‘It would be good for you to go home. Your car is still here.'

The chauffeur said, ‘Who is your doctor, madam? I'd better ring him.'

‘What, send for a doctor in the middle of the night?' said Leonora. ‘I would never think of such a thing. So vulgar, I always thought. My daughters were both born at six o'clock in the afternoon. It gave the doctor time to go home and have a bath and a drink before dinner. One must stick to routine. Ring the doctor in the morning at half-past eight. We will be there in five minutes.'

But she had not got five minutes. By an effort of will she recalled that by a foolish mistake she had put all that sort of thing in the transparent plastic purse which she had meant to throw away because it had split at the bottom, but had left it on the dressing-table. It was now empty – everything had fallen out of it through this split. It followed that she would never reach the hospital. But it did not matter any more.

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copyright © 1992 by the Estate of Rebecca West

introduction copyright © 1992 by Antonia Till

cover design by Karen Horton

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0686-7

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com