Fanning tried to protest, to disengage himself, gently, from her embrace.
‘But I want you to take me, Miles,’ she insisted. ‘I want you . . .’ She kissed him again, she pressed herself against his hard body. ‘I want you, Miles. Even if it is stupid and mad,’ she added in another little spurt of desperation, making answer to the expression on his face, to the words she wouldn’t permit him to utter. ‘And it isn’t. I mean, love isn’t stupid or mad. And even if it were, I don’t care. Yes, I want to be stupid and mad. Even if it were to kill me. So take me, Miles.’ She kissed him again. ‘Take me.’
He turned away his mouth from those soft lips. She was forcing him back across the threshold. His body was uneasy with awakenings and supernatural dawn.
Held up by a tram at the corner of a narrow street, the cab was at a standstill. With quick strong gestures Fanning unclasped her arms from round his neck and, taking her two hands in his, he kissed first one and then the other. ‘Good-bye, Pamela,’ he whispered, and, throwing open the door, he was half out of the cab before she realized what he was doing.
‘But what are you doing, Miles? Where . . .’ The door slammed. He thrust some money into the driver’s hand and almost ran. Pamela rose to her feet to follow him, but the cab started with a sudden jerk that threw her off her balance, and she fell back on to the seat.
‘Miles!’ she called, and then, ‘Stop!’
But the driver either didn’t hear, or else paid no attention. She did not call again, but sat, covering her face with her hands, crying and feeling so agonizingly unhappy that she thought she would die of it.
8
‘By the time you receive this letter, I shall be—no, not dead, Pamela, though I know how thrilled and proud you’d be, through your temporary inconsolability, if I were to blow my brains out—not dead, but (what will be almost worse in these dog-days) in the train, bound for some anonymous refuge. Yes, a refuge, as though you were my worst enemy. Which in fact you almost are at the moment, for the good reason that you’re acting as your own enemy. If I were less fond of you, I’d stay and join forces with you against yourself. And, frankly, I wish I were less fond of you. Do you know how desirable you are? Not yet, I suppose, not consciously, in spite of Prof. Krafft-Ebbing and the novels of Miles F. You can’t yet know what a terrible army with banners you are, you and your eyes and your laughter and your impertinent breasts, like La Maja’s, and those anti-educational ears in ambush under the hair. You can’t know. But I know. Only too well. Just how well you’ll realize, perhaps, fifteen or twenty years from now.
For a time will come when the freshness of young bodies, the ingenuousness of young minds will begin to strike you as a scandal of shining beauty and attractiveness, and then finally as a kind of maddeningly alluring perversity, as the exhibition of a kind of irresistibly dangerous vice. The madness of the desirer—for middle-aged desires are mostly more or less mad desires—comes off on the desired object, staining it, degrading it. Which isn’t agreeable if you happen to be fond of the object, as well as desiring. Dear object, let’s be a little reasonable—oh, entirely against all my principles; I accept all the reproaches you made me the other day. But what are principles for but to be gone against in moments of crisis? And this is a moment of crisis. Consider: I’m thirty years older than you are; and even if one doesn’t look one’s age, one is one’s age, somehow, somewhere; and even if one doesn’t feel it, fifty’s always fifty and twenty-one’s twenty-one.
And when you’ve considered that, let me put a few questions. First: are you prepared to be a disreputable woman? To which, of course, you answer yes, because you don’t care two pins about what the old cats say. But I put another question: Do you know, by experience, what it’s like to be a disreputable woman? And you must answer, no. Whereupon I retort: If you can’t answer yes to the second, you’ve got no right to answer yes to the first. And I don’t intend to give you the opportunity of answering yes to the second question. Which is all pure Podsnapism. But there are certain circumstances in which Podsnap is quite right.
‘Sweet Pamela, believe me when I say it would be fatal. For when you say you love me, what do you mean? Who and what is it you love? I’ll tell you. You love the author of Eurydice and of all those portraits of yourself he’s filled his books with. You love the celebrated man, who was not only unsnubbing and attentive, but obviously admiring. Even before you saw him, you vaguely loved his reputation, and now you love his odd confidences. You love a kind of conversation you haven’t heard before. You love a weakness in him which you think you can dominate and protect. You love—as I, of course, intended you to love—a certain fascinating manner. You even love a rather romantic and still youthful appearance. And when I say (which as yet, you know, I haven’t said) that I love you, what do I mean? That I’m amused, and charmed, and flattered, and touched, and puzzled, and affectionate, in a word, a Passionist Father. But chiefly that I find you terribly desirable—an army with banners. Bring these two loves together and what’s the result? A manifold disaster. To begin with, the nearer you come to me and the longer you remain with me, the more alien you’ll find me, the more fundamentally remote.
Inevitably. For you and I are foreigners to one another, foreigners in time. Which is a greater foreignness than the foreignness of space and language. You don’t realize it now, because you don’t know me—you’re only in love, at first sight (like Joan in Eurydice!) and, what’s more, not really with me, with your imagination of me. When you come to know me better—well, you’ll find that you know me much worse. And then one day you’ll be attracted by a temporal compatriot. Perhaps, indeed, you’re attracted already, only your imagination won’t allow you to admit it. What about that long-suffering Guy of yours? Of whom I was, and am, so horribly jealous—jealous with the malignity of a weaker for a stronger rival; for though I seem to hold all the cards at the moment, the ace of trumps is his: he’s young. And one day, when you’re tired of living at cross-purposes with me, you’ll suddenly realize it; you’ll perceive that he speaks your language, that he inhabits your world of thought and feeling, that he belongs, in a word, to your nation—that great and terrible nation, which I love and fear and hate, the nation of Youth. In the end, of course, you’ll leave the foreigner for the compatriot. But not before you’ve inflicted a good deal of suffering on everyone concerned, including yourself.
And meanwhile, what about me? Shall I be still there for you to leave? Who knows? Not I, at any rate. I can no more answer for my future desires than for the Shah of Persia. For my future affection, yes. But it may last (how often, alas, affections do last that way!) only on condition of its object being absent. There are so many friends whom one’s fond of when they’re not there. Will you be one of them? It’s the more possible since, after all, you’re just as alien to me as I am to you. My country’s called Middle-Ageia and every one who was out of the egg of childhood before 1914 is my compatriot. Through all my desires, shouldn’t I also pine to hear my own language, to speak with those who share the national traditions? Of course. But the tragedy of middle-aged life is that its army with banners is hardly ever captained by a compatriot.
Passion is divorced from understanding, and the ageing man’s desire attaches itself with an almost insane violence to precisely those outrageously fresh young bodies that house the most alien souls. Conversely, for the body of an understood and understanding soul, he seldom feels desire. And now, Pamela, suppose that my sentiment of your alienness should come to be stronger (as some time it must) than my desire for the lovely scandal of your young body. What then? This time I can answer; for I am answering for a self that changes very little through every change of circumstances—the self that doesn’t intend to put up with more discomfort than it can possibly avoid; the self that, as the Freudians tell us, is homesick for that earthly paradise from which we’ve all
