A Word Child (17 page)

I slowly let her go. I saw her face, utterly and forever changed. I was still mad. I said, ‘I love you. Will you come in here, will you come in here with me and lie down? Just for a moment. I want to hold you. I've never made love to anybody. Come in with me, please, please.'

She was marvellously direct. Her restraining controlling hand was still pressed against my shoulder. ‘Hilary. I'm sorry. Stop this. Is it just that — you want to find out — if you can make love?'

‘I love you, Anne. I worship you. I think about you all the time. I've never loved anyone else. I love you to insanity, to death, I can't help it. Oh don't go away from me, please, don't leave me.' I fell on my knees, grasping her legs, embracing her skirt and her mackintosh, pressing my head against her thigh.

‘Hilary, get up.
Get up!
'

The door had very softly and quietly opened and like a cat entering Tristram had come into the room.

I got up.

Anne, her face blazing, turned quickly and took Tristram by the hand and disappeared out of the door.

Only after she had gone did I feel, in a sort of memory hallucination, her heart beating violently against my heart. I went into my bedroom and fell face downwards on the bed and lay there biting my hands and moaning.

I was to go to dinner with the Joplings three days later. The three days were three blanks of white hell with a few flashes of lurid joy. I had of course soon clarified the matter of the kiss. She had just kissed me out of impulsive kindness, out of the general happiness of her fulfilled life, out of the casual affection which such as she could easily spare for a deprived person such as me. The whole incident must be sealed off. That kiss too meant nothing. Except that Anne would not come to see me again. I was not even sure that I ought to go to dinner. I went because I had to. I had to see her. And when I saw her all clarification vanished. Eldridge was there and a visiting Italian scholar. We talked Italian. Anne's was even better than Gunnar's. She behaved as usual, except that, when I first arrived, her eyes showed consciousness of what had happened. It was also somehow mysteriously clear to me that she had said nothing to Gunnar. I had not even wondered in these three days whether she would have told her husband. I had forgotten Gunnar's existence. When I was leaving she kissed my cheek as usual. I pressed her hand hard, and then regretted this because it left me uncertain whether or not she had pressed mine.

Hell really began after that. Of course Anne would tell Gunnar sooner or later. I would never be invited or visited again. What was I going to do? I had now no serious occupation except thinking about Anne. I continued to teach and to eat, but I did these things in a coma, and in any case the term was now almost over. I avoided occasions of meeting Gunnar in college, though when we did meet he was perfectly friendly and ordinary. Then I heard someone say in hall that the Joplings were leaving for Italy as soon as the vacation began. I made myself even more of a hermit. Term ended and I sat in my rooms unable even to answer Crystal's letters. I did not reflect or speculate or make plans. I just suffered blankly from Anne's absence, like someone who is totally absorbed in a physical pain. There was nothing eke but this pain; except that sometimes I would feel a teasing urge to rush to her house and find out if she was still there. I sat in my armchair in my rooms and suffered. I did not even wait, I suffered. I wanted, if I wanted anything precise, enough days to have passed for me to be sure that she had left Oxford. Then one morning, again about eleven o'clock, she suddenly entered my room.

She came towards me and I took her in my arms at once. I could not speak. She was quiet for a moment, then began to release herself. ‘Hilary. Please. Just listen to what I say, believe what I say and don't think there is anything else. We're going to Italy. I couldn't just go away. I thought I could. But I kept worrying about you. I couldn't leave without seeing you again. So, I just came to say good-bye. Just that. Don't suffer, oh don't suffer, don't — Good-bye — ' And she darted out of the door. I stood where I was, transmuted. Ah if only, if only she had not come! Without that visit I might have managed myself, have savaged my love into hopelessness and the saving lie of appearance. Without that, I would not have let myself believe in her
interest,
not felt again the
complice
beating of her heart with mine. As it was, I now had enough and more than enough to live on for the whole vacation. I knew now that I should see her again, that I should hold her in my arms again. I became suddenly blissfully happy. I could even work. Crystal came down and I drove her round the Cotswolds in the car. However I curtailed her visit and could not talk to her of the future. Of course I said nothing about Anne. I spent the rest of the vacation in my rooms, reading, working. I read poetry and enjoyed the grammar and the poems too. I luxuriated in Russian. I played with Turkish. I made progress in Hungarian. I prepared my lectures for next term. And
now
I waited.

The Joplings returned just before term. I met Anne in the quad. Gunnar was over near the gate, out of earshot, talking to the college organist. (He was a great arranger of concerts.) He waved to me. I waved back. I said to Anne, ‘I've got to make love to you, I've got to, I don't care if I die afterwards, I've got to and I'm going to.' Gunnar approached across the grass. ‘Hello, Hilary.' ‘Hello. Had a nice time in Italy?' ‘Marvellous. We were in Calabria. We nearly bought a farmhouse. Why don't you come in to dinner tomorrow? That would be OK, wouldn't it, Anne?' I went to dinner. I drove my ankle hard against Anne's under the table. She drew away. Three days later she came to my room.

It was on a Wednesday afternoon in the fourth week of Trinity Term that she gave in at last. She came first out of pity, so she said, and because she feared I might make some desperate move. I think if I had not told her that I was virgin and that it was bed I wanted, if I had talked more tenderly and sentimentally of being in love, she might have been able to resist. As it was, I think it began to seem to her something simple and quickly given, which she had and I needed, and which out of her generosity she would have to give me sooner or later. She wanted to show me that I could love a woman. In fact I never doubted that I could, but it helped both of us if I let her think of it in this way. I was totally in love, but I wanted to make love, to screw her, more urgently than I had ever wanted anything, and this was the role my love played to her, and the guise, which had its own sort of pseudo-innocence, in which it presented itself. Of course she understood the rest of it too and would not have consented had she not known that my whole being was her slave. But it was my pressing need that she met, not the rest. The rest could wait. We pretended that this huge love did not exist, while at the same time we knew that it was the only possible ground of our proceeding. And thus complicitly we cheated each other. In fact Anne was by this time, though she tried to conceal it, physically very much in love with me. I could hardly believe at first that this was so. What a black glory shone around when I realized it. I drew her like a magnet and she had to come to me. She flew south through Oxford, she flew to my rooms, distraught with need, dissolving into relieved joy as she entered. And still I talked simply of her kindness, my gratitude.

After the great holy enactment of that Wednesday afternoon, after we had dressed, we stood dazed, hand in hand, gazing haplessly as if we pitied each other, stunned by the immensity of the tornado which had picked us up and deposited us in another country. There was no simple thing now which was needed and could be given. We had created a maze and were lost. And now we could see the possibilities of pain, our pain and that of others. After Anne's first visit to me, after her return from Italy, I had put a complete stop to all Crystal's arrangements. Crystal had intended to spend most of Trinity Term in lodgings in Oxford. I told her it was impossible, there was no suitable accommodation, I was working too hard, everything would have to wait. Of course Crystal did not complain. I had cleared the decks for action, but what action was possible? What was there for me to do except to continue to beg a married woman to visit me in secret? In any case how much longer could it be secret? Anne visited lots of people, but it was still a fact that every time she crossed the quad dozens of curious eyes could mark where she went. We parted passionately, but without any plan. We could not bear even to talk of a plan. I heard nothing from her for a week.

At the end of the week I received a letter from her saying that we had better not meet again. I did not reply. I stayed in my rooms and waited. She came. We made love. It sounds as if it was a pretty heartless business. Any story can be told many ways; and there is a kind of justice in the fact that this one could be told cynically: a young wife and mother secretly amusing herself, a libertine deceiving his best friend, and so on. There is no escape here from damnation by the facts. I do not in any case want to excuse myself, but I do want to try to excuse Anne. It was all so complicated and it happened, not all at once, but in little movements each one of which seemed to have its own inevitability and its own sense. We were young and gripped by the awful compelling force of physical love. I was in total love from the start. Anne became so. She was sorry for me. Pity changed imperceptibly into enslaving fascination. She felt the grains of violence in me and yearned over them. I talked about my past. I told her things I had not told even to Crystal. She talked about her past. I could communicate with her, miraculously, totally. She
saw
me, she attended to me more than anyone had ever done, even Mr Osmand. It was like being seen by God. She bathed my hurt soul in a reviving dew. Yet at the same time we were both in hell. She suffered hideously. I saw her bright face changing, losing its joy, and I ground my teeth with despair and fury against the Fates. If only this woman were not married, if only things were different, if only — She did not want to come to me and yet she did and she came. She loved her husband and her son, but she loved me too and she desired me in a way in which (I suspect: she never said this) she had never desired her husband. We suffered so much together during that May and that June, and comforted each other, and resolved to part, and could not part, and wept.

Then one day she came and I knew at once from her face what had happened. Gunnar had found out. We never discovered how, but it would not have been difficult. He asked her and (as we had agreed she must) she told him. I did not ask her how he behaved. She went away from me in a misery such as I had never seen, like a dead woman walking. The next morning I got a letter from Gunnar which just said,
Please leave Anne alone. Please.
Then nothing for several days. Gunnar did not appear in College. Term came to an end. I was in a frenzy, but now there were dreadful hopes. I had no intention of giving her up. We had, as it were, waited for Gunnar's knowledge, as we had waited for Anne's surrender, treating these things as blank wall-like barriers beyond which things would have to change, beyond which it was fruitless to try to look beforehand. Now that this last one was past I knew that I must simply persuade Anne to come to me, to come to me forever, to break and abandon her marriage, and marry me instead. And I knew too, with the strength of the hold which I had at that moment on her being, that this was possible. I must, as a first move, simply take her away, kidnap her if necessary, be alone with her for a long time: for a long time without lies at last. Waiting was anguish now, since I felt that every hour which she remained with Gunnar was diminishing my power. On the fourth day I telephoned her and asked her to meet me in St John's garden. My college rooms were not safe any more. I met her and she cried for an hour. We hid ourselves in the wildest part of the garden and she cried and cried. I told her all that I felt, all that I intended. She was incoherent, practically hysterical. I was demented with distress. Nothing could be planned or even discussed.

The following evening at about nine o'clock she arrived in my rooms with a white rigid face, trembling and shuddering. I gave her some whisky and took a stiff drink myself. She said, ‘I simply had to run out of the house.' This was what I had been waiting for. I said, ‘I'll take you away. Come.' I seized a few things and threw them into a suitcase, then led her down the stairs and put her into my car. I was in a sweat of terror all the time in case Gunnar should turn up. Not that I feared any violence which he could put upon me, but I wanted to take this god-given chance to carry her right away while she was in a mood of absolute flight. I was trembling so much myself I could hardly start the car. Anne sat beside me in a trance, staring blankly ahead. As we careered through Headington towards the London road she said, ‘Where are we going?' ‘To London.' ‘No — please — take me home — ' ‘Certainly not. I am running away with you forever. I am your home now.' She began to cry. Before we got to the motorway she said, ‘Hilary, stop please. There's something I've got to tell you.' ‘There's nothing more to say, darling. We love each other. It's too late for regrets now. You're mine.' ‘Stop, please, I've got to tell you something.
Stop.
'

I slowed down and drew the car into a lay-by. There was a blue midsummer dusky light, the sky still glowing but the earth darkening. I turned to her in the dimness. Passing cars, their headlights just switched on, momently revealed her face.

‘Anne, darling, I love you. Don't leave me. You've come to me now, don't leave me, I should die.'

She put her arms round my neck with such a gesture of confidence and absolute love that for a moment all fear left me. Then pulling back she said, ‘Hilary, it's no good.'

‘Don't. I shall start the car. We've escaped, we're going on. You're mine.'

‘No, no, listen. We can't go. I'm pregnant.'