‘Oh. . . . They have a name for that, haven’t they? Blackmail, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Is it?’
She shrugged with assumed indifference. ‘Why do you ask me about it?’
His yellow stare became unbearable and she looked away. How quiet it is outside, under the spell of noon. Trees shaded the house, the room was dark and cool. Furniture was slow unemphatic gleams of lesser dark and young Robert Saunders, at the age of sixty-five, was framed and indistinct above the mantel: her grandfather.
She wished for George. He should be here to help her. But what could he do? she reconsidered with that vast tolerance of their men which women must gain by giving their bodies (else how do they continue to live with them?) that the conquering male is after all no better than a clumsy, tactless child. She examined Jones with desperate speculation. If he were not so fat! Like a worm.
She repeated: ‘Why do you ask me?’
‘I don’t know. You have never been frightened by anyone, have you?’
She watched him, not replying.
‘Perhaps that’s because you have never done anything to be afraid of?’
She sat on a divan, her hands palm up on either side, watching him. He rose suddenly, and she as suddenly shed her careless laxness, becoming defensive, watchful. But he only scratched a match on the iron grate screen.
He sucked it into his pipe bowl while she watched the fleshy concavity of his cheeks and the golden pulsations of the flame in his eyes. He pushed the match through the screen and resumed his seat. But she did not relax.
‘When are you to be married?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Married?’
‘Yes. Isn’t it all arranged?’
She felt slow, slow blood in her throat and wrists, in her palms: her blood seemed to mark away an interval that would never pass. Jones, watching the light in her fine hair, lazy and yellow as an idol, Jones released her at last. ‘He expects it, you know.’
Her blood liquefied again and became cold. She could feel the skin all over her body. She said: ‘What makes you think he does? He is too sick to expect anything, now.’
‘He?’
‘You said Donald expects it.’
‘My dear girl, I said. . . .’ He could see a nimbus of light in her hair and the shape of her, but her face he could not see. He rose. She did not move as he sat beside her. The divan sank luxuriously beneath his weight, sensuously enfolding him. She did not move, her hand lay palm up between them, but he ignored it. ‘Why don’t you ask me how much I heard?’
‘Heard? When?’ Her whole attitude expressed ingenuous interest.
He knew that in her examination of his face there was calm speculation and probably contempt. He considered moving beyond her so that she must face the light and leave his own face in shadow. . . . The light in her hair, caressing the shape of her cheek.
Her hand between them, naked and palm upward, grew to be a monstrous size: it was the symbol of her body. His hand a masculine body for hers to curl inside. Browning, is it? seeing noon become afternoon, becoming gold and slightly wearied among leaves like the limp hands of women. Her hand was a frail, impersonal barrier, restraining him.
‘You attach a lot of importance to a kiss, don’t you?’ she asked at length. He shaped her unresponsive hand to his and she continued lightly: ‘That’s funny, in you.’
‘Why, in me?’
‘You’ve had lots of girls crazy about you, haven’t you?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I don’t know. The way you — everything about you.’ She could never decide exactly about him. The feminine predominated so in him, and the rest of him was feline: a woman with a man’s body and a cat’s nature.
‘I expect you are right. You are an authority regarding your own species yourself.’ He released her hand saying, ‘Excuse me,’ and lit his pipe again. Her hand remained lax impersonal between them: it might have been a handkerchief. He pushed the dead match through the screen and said:
‘What makes you think I attach so much importance to a kiss?’
Light in her hair was the thumbed rim of a silver coin, the divan embraced her quietly, and light quietly followed the long slope of her limbs. A wind came among leaves without the window, stroking them together. Noon was past.
‘I mean, you think that whenever a woman kisses a man of tells him something that she means something by it.’
‘She does mean something by it. Of course it never is what the poor devil thinks she means, but she means something.’
‘Then you certainly don’t blame the woman if the man chooses to think she meant something she didn’t at all mean, do you?’
‘Why not? It would be the devil of a chaotic world if you never could count on whether or not people mean what they say. You knew damn well what I meant when you let me kiss you that day.’
‘But I don’t know that you meant anything, any more than I did. You are the one who—’
‘Like hell you didn’t,’ Jones interrupted roughly. ‘You knew what I meant by it.’
‘I think we are getting personal,’ she told him, with faint distaste.
Jones sucked his pipe. ‘Certainly, we are. What else are we interested in except you and me?’
She crossed her knees. ‘Never in my life—’
‘In God’s name, don’t say it. I have heard that from so many women. I had expected better of someone as vain as I am.’
He would be fairly decent looking, she thought, if he were not so fat — and could dye his eyes another colour. After a while, she spoke.
‘What do you think I mean when I do either of them?’
‘I couldn’t begin to say. You are a fast worker, too fast for me. I doubt if I could keep up with the men you kiss and lie to, let alone with what you mean in each case. I don’t think you can yourself.’
‘So you cannot imagine letting people make love to you and saying things to them without meaning anything by it?’
‘I cannot. I always mean something by what I say or do.’
‘For instance?’ her voice was faintly interested, ironical.
Again he considered moving, so that her face would be in light and his in shadow. But then he would no longer be beside her. He said roughly: ‘I meant by that kiss that some day I intend to have your body.’
‘Oh,’ she said sweetly, ‘it’s all arranged, then? How nice. I can now understand your success with us. Just a question of will power, isn’t it? Look the beast in the eye and he — I mean she — is yours. That must save a lot of your valuable time and trouble, I imagine?’
Jones’s stare was calm, bold, and contemplative, obscene as a goat’s. ‘You don’t believe I can?’ he asked.
She shrugged delicately, nervously, and her lax hand between them grew again like a flower: it was as if her whole body became her hand. The symbol of a delicate, bodyless lust. Her hand seemed to melt into his yet remain without volition, her hand unawaked in his and her body also yet sleeping, crushed softly about with her fragile clothing.
Her long legs, not for locomotion, but for the studied completion of a rhythm carried to its nth: compulsion of progress, movement; her body created for all men to dream after. A poplar, vain and pliant, trying attitude after attitude, gesture after gesture— ‘a girl trying gown after gown, perplexed but in pleasure’. Her unseen face nimbused with light and her body, which was no body, crumpling a dress that had been dreamed. Not for maternity, not even for love: a thing for the eye and the mind. Epicene, he thought, feeling her slim bones, the bitter nervousness latent in her flesh.
‘If I really held you close you’d pass right through me like a ghost, I am afraid,’ he said and his clasp was loosely about her.
‘Quite a job,’ she said coarsely. ‘Why are you so fat?’
‘Hush,’ he told her, ‘you’ll spoil it.’
His embrace but touched her and she, with amazing tact, suffered him. Her skin was neither warm nor cool, her body in the divan’s embrace was nothing, her limbs only an indication of crushed texture. He refused to hear her breath as he refused to feel a bodily substance in his arms.
Not an ivory carving: this would have body, rigidity; not an animal that eats and digests — this is the heart’s desire purged of flesh. ‘Be quiet,’ he told himself as much as her, ‘don’t spoil it.’
The trumpets in his blood, the symphony of living, died away. The golden sand of hours bowled by day ran through the narrow neck of time into the corresponding globe of night, to be inverted and so flow back again. Jones felt the slow, black sand of time marking life away. ‘Hush,’ he said, ‘don’t spoil it.’
The sentries in her blood lay down, but they lay down near the ramparts with their arms in their hands, waiting the alarm, the inevitable stand-to, and they sat clasped in the vaguely gleamed twilight of the room, Jones a fat Mirandola in a chaste Platonic nympholepsy, a religiosentimental orgy in a grey tweed, shaping an insincere, fleeting articulation of damp clay to an old imperishable desire, building himself a papiermâché Virgin: and Cecily Saunders wondering what, how much, he had heard, frightened and determined.
What manner of man was this? she thought alertly, wanting George to be there and put an end to this situation, how
