The Golden Notebook (54 page)

and listened out of the passivity that now frightens me, because I know I should have said no, and at just that point. Because there was hostility and aggression in it-not personal at all. But the atmosphere was full of it. He told me this story, remote, detached, smiling, watching my face. A few nights before he had made himself high on marihuana. Then he walked into the street, somewhere in May-fair-'you know Anna, the atmosphere of wealth and corruption, you can smell it. It attracts me. I walk there sometimes and I smell corruption, it excites me.' He saw a girl on the pavement, and walked straight up to her and said: 'I think you're beautiful, will you sleep with me?' He couldn't have done this, he said, unless he was high on alcohol or on marihuana. 'I didn't think she was beautiful, but she had beautiful clothes, and as soon as I had said it, I thought she was beautiful. She said, quite simply, yes.' I asked, was she a prostitute? He said, with a calm impatience (as if he'd been expecting me to ask just that question and even willed it): 'I don't know. It doesn't matter.' 1 was struck by the way he said: It doesn't matter. Cool, deadly-he was saying: What does it matter about anyone else, I'm talking about me. She said to him: 'I think you're handsome, I'd like to sleep with you.' And of course he is a handsome man, with alert, vigorous, glossy good looks. But cold good looks. He said to her: 'I want to do something. I'm going to make love to you, as if I were desperately in love with you. But you mustn't respond to me. You must just give me sex, and you must ignore what I say. Do you promise?' She said, laughing: 'Yes, I promise.' They went to his room. 'This was the most interesting night of my life, Anna. Yes, I swear it, do you believe me? Yes, you must believe me. Because I behaved as if I loved her, as if I loved her desperately. And I even believed I did. Because-you must understand this, Anna, loving her was just for that night, the most wonderful thing you can imagine. And so I told her that I loved her, I was like a man desperately in love. But she kept falling out of her role. Every ten minutes I could see her face change and she responded to me like a woman who is loved. And then I had to stop the game and say: No, that's not what you promised. I love you, but you know I don't mean it. But I did mean it. For that night I adored her. I have never been so in love. But she kept spoiling it by responding. And so I had to send her away, because she kept being in love with me.' 'Was she angry?' I asked. (Because I felt angry, listening, and I knew he wanted me to be angry.) 'Yes. She was very angry. She called me all kinds of names. But it didn't matter to me. She called me sadist and cruel-everything like that. But it didn't matter to me. We had made the pact, she agreed, and then she spoiled everything for me. I wanted to be able to love a woman once in my life without having to give something back in return. But of course it doesn't matter. I'm telling you this because it doesn't matter. Do you understand that Anna?' 'Did you ever see her again?' 'No, of course not. I went back to the street where I picked her up, though I knew I wouldn't see her. I hoped she was a prostitute, but I knew she wasn't, because she told me she wasn't. She was a girl who worked in one of the coffee bars. She said she wanted to fall in love.' Later on in the evening he told me the following story: he has a close friend, the painter B. B. is married, the marriage has never been sexually satisfactory. (He said: 'Of course the marriage has never been sexually satisfactory, and the words, sexually satisfactory sounded like a clinical term.) B. lives in the country. A woman from the village comes in every day to clean the house. For something like a year B. slept with this woman, every morning, on the kitchen floor, while his wife was upstairs. De Silva went down to visit B. but B. was away. So was his wife. De Silva used the house waiting for them to come back and the cleaning woman came in every day as usual. She told De Silva that she had been sleeping with B. for a year, that she loved B. 'but of course, I'm not good enough for him, it's only because his wife isn't good for him.' 'Isn't that charming, Anna? That phrase, his wife isn't good for him-it's not our language, it's not the language of our kind.' 'Speak for yourself,' I said, but he put his head on one side, and said: 'No, I liked that-the warmth of it. And so I made love to her too. On the kitchen floor on a sort of homemade rug they have there, just as B. did. I wanted to because B. had. I don't know why. And of course, it didn't matter to me.' And then B.'s wife came back. She came back to get the house ready for B. She found De Silva there. She was pleased to see De Silva, because he was her husband's friend and 'she tries to please her husband out of bed because she doesn't care about him in bed.' De Silva spent the whole evening trying to find out if she knew about her husband's love-making with the cleaning woman. 'Then I realised she didn't know so I said: "Of course, your husband's affair with the cleaning woman doesn't mean anything, you shouldn't mind." She blew up. She went frantic with jealousy and hate. Can you understand that, Anna? She kept saying: He has been sleeping with that woman every morning on the kitchen floor. That was the phrase she kept saying: He's been sleeping with her on the kitchen floor while I was reading upstairs.' So De Silva did everything to pacify B.'s wife, as he put it, and then B. came back. I told B. what I'd done and he forgave me. His wife said she'd leave him. I think she's going to leave him. Because he slept with the cleaning woman "on the kitchen floor." ' I asked: 'What did you do it for?' (Listening, I felt an extraordinary cold, a listless terror. I was passive in a sort of terror.) 'Why? Why do you ask? What does it matter? I wanted to see what would happen, that's all.' As he spoke he smiled. It was a reminiscent, rather sly, enjoyable, interested smile. I recognised the smile-it was the essence of my dream, it was the smile from the figure in my dream. I wanted to run out of the room. And yet I was thinking: This quality, this intellectual 'I wanted to see what was going to happen,' 'I want to see what will happen next,' is something loose in the air, it is in so many people one meets, it is in me. It is part of what we all are. It is the other face of: It doesn't matter, it didn't matter to me-the phrase that kept ringing through what De Silva said. De Silva and I spent the night together. Why? Because it didn't matter to me. Its mattering to me, the possibility of its mattering to me was pushed well away into a distance. It belonged to the Anna who was normal, who was walking away somewhere on a horizon of white sand, whom I could see but could not touch. For me, the night was deadly, like his interested, detached smile. He was cool, detached, abstracted. It didn't matter to him. Yet at moments he suddenly relapsed into an abject mother-needing child. I minded these moments more than the cool detachment and the curiosity. For I kept thinking stubbornly: Of course it's him, not me. For men create these things, they create us. In the morning, remembering how I clung, how I always cling on to this, I felt foolish. Because why should it be true? In the morning, I gave him breakfast. I felt cold and detached. Blasted-I felt as if there was no life or warmth left in me. I felt as if he had drained life out of me. But we were perfectly friendly. I felt friendly and detached from him. Just as he left, he said he would telephone me and I said that I would not sleep with him again. His face changed suddenly into a vicious anger; and I saw his face as it must have been when the girl he picked up in the street responded to his saying that he loved her. That was how he looked when she responded-angry and vicious. But I had not expected it. Then the mask of smiling detachment came back, and he said: 'Why not?' I said: 'Because you don't care a damn whether you sleep with me or not.' I had expected him to say: 'But you don't care either,' which I would have accepted. But suddenly he cracked into the pathetic child of the moments in the night, and he said: 'But I do, indeed I do.' He was positively on the point of beating his breast to prove it-he stopped his clenched hand on the way to his breast, I saw him. And again I felt the atmosphere of the dream of the fog-meaninglessness, the emptiness of emotion. I said: 'No, you don't. But we'll go on as friends.' He went right downstairs, without a word. That afternoon he rang me up. He told me two or three cool, amused, malicious stories about people we know in common. I knew something else was coming, because I felt apprehension, but I couldn't imagine what. Then he remarked, abstractedly almost indifferent: 'I want you to let a friend of mine sleep in your upstairs room tonight. You know, the one just above your room where you sleep.' 'But it's Janet's room,' I said. I couldn't understand what he was really saying. 'But you could move her out-but it doesn't matter. Any room. Upstairs. I'll bring her this evening about ten o'clock.' 'You want to bring a woman friend to my flat to stay the night?' I was so stupid that I didn't know what he meant. But I was angry, so I should have understood. 'Yes,' he said, detached. Then in the abstracted cool voice: 'Well, it doesn't matter anyway.' And he rang off. I stood thinking. Then I understood, because of my anger, so I rang him back. I said: 'Do you mean that you want to bring a woman into my flat so that you can sleep with her?' 'Yes. Not a friend of mine. I was going to take a prostitute off the station and bring her. I wanted to sleep with her just above your room so that you could hear us.' I couldn't say anything. Then he asked: 'Anna, are you angry?' I said: 'You wouldn't have thought of it at all if you hadn't wanted to make me angry.' And then he let out a cry like a child, 'Anna, Anna, I'm sorry, forgive me.' He began wailing and crying. I believe he was standing there beating his chest with the hand that did not hold the receiver, or banging his head against the wall- at any rate, I could hear irregular thumps that might have been either. And I knew quite well that he had planned all this from the beginning, right from the moment when he telephoned me about bringing the woman to my flat, so that he could end by beating his breast or thumping his head against the wall, and that was the point of it all. So I rang off. Then I got two letters. The first one cool, malicious, impertinent-but above all, irrelevant, it was off the point, a letter that might have been written after a dozen different situations, each of them quite unlike. And that was the point of the letter-its inconsequence. And then another letter, two days later, the hysterical wail of a child. The second letter upset me more than the first I have dreamed of De Silva twice. He is, incarnate, the principle of joy-in-giving-pain. He was in my dream without disguise, just as he is in life, smiling, malicious, detached, interested. Molly telephoned me yesterday. She has heard that he has abandoned his wife without money, with the two children. His family, the rich upper-class family, have taken them all in. Molly: 'The point of all this is of course that he talked his wife into having the second child, which she didn't want, just to make sure of nailing her fast and leave him free. Then he buggered off to England where I suppose he expected me to smooth his brow. And the awful thing is, if I hadn't been away at the crucial moment, I would, I'd have taken the whole thing at its face value: poor Cingalese intellectual unable to earn a living, has to leave his wife and two children to come to the well-paid intellectual marts of London. What fools we are, perpetually, eternally, and we never learn, and I know quite well that next time it happens I'll have learned nothing.' I met B., who I've known for some time now, in the street by accident. Went to have coffee with him. He spoke warmly of De Silva. He said he had persuaded De Silva 'to be kinder to his wife.' He said that he, B., would put up half the money for a monthly allowance for De Silva's wife, if De Silva would promise the other half. 'And does he pay the other half?' I asked. 'Well, of course he won't,' said B., his charming intelligent face full of apology, not merely for De Silva, but for the entire universe. 'And where is De Silva?' I asked, already knowing the answer. 'He's going to come and live in the village next to me. There's a woman he's fond of. Actually the woman who comes to clean my house every morning. She'll go on cleaning our house though, I'm glad about that. She's very nice.' 'I'm glad,' I said. 'Yes, I'm so fond of him.' Anna and Molly influence Tommy, for the better. Marion leaves Richard. Anna does not feel herself ANNA was waiting for Richard and Molly. It was rather late, getting on for eleven. The curtains in the tall white room were drawn, the notebooks pushed out of sight, a tray with drinks and sandwiches already waiting. Anna sat loose in a chair, in a lethargy of moral exhaustion. She had now understood that she was not in control of what she did. Also, earlier that evening she had caught sight of Ronnie in a dressing-gown through Ivor's half-open door. It seemed that he had simply moved back in, and now it was up to her to throw them both out. She had caught herself thinking: What does it matter? And even that she and Janet should pack their things and move out and leave the flat to Ivor and Ronnie, anything to avoid fighting. That this idea was not far off lunacy did not surprise her, for she had decided she was very likely mad. Nothing she thought pleased her; for some days she had been observing ideas and images pass through her mind, unconnected with any emotion, and did not recognise them as her own. Richard had said he would pick Molly up from her theatre where she was currently playing the part of a deliciously frivolous widow trying to choose between four new husbands, each one more attractive than the next. There was to be a conference. Three weeks before, Marion, kept late by Tommy, had slept upstairs in the empty flat once inhabited by Anna and Janet. Next day Tommy had informed his mother that Marion needed a pied-a-terre in London. She would of course pay the full rent for the flat, though she intended to use it occasionally. Since then Marion had been to her home only once, to pick up clothes. She was living upstairs, and had in fact quietly left Richard and her children. Yet she did not seem to know she had, for every morning there was a fluttering expostulating scene in Molly's kitchen, where Marion exclaimed that she was really so naughty to have been kept so late the night before, but that she would go home and look after everything today-'yes, really, I