Mantissa (12 page)

“I’d like to have a stab at it.”

“I’m seriously not insisting.”

“I think you’re being extraordinarily generous over the mess I’ve made of it.”

“I know there has to be give and take.”

“Except so far I’ve done all the taking.”

She shrugs. “But as technically I don’t exist…”

“But you do. You’ve just shown you’ve a will of your own.”

She makes a little downward moue, self-deprecating. “Hardly a will, I’m afraid. Just a whisper of an instinct.”

There is silence for a moment or two. Again she smooths the purple toweling.

“This really is a heavenly color. I adore bruised purple.”

“Good.”

She pauses, then resumes the more serious train of their conversation.

“I also don’t want you to feel guilty about the… taking. I’m not totally blind to biological realities. I’d hate you to think I’m just one more blue-stocking. Certain of your caresses – you must have realized. What you made me do in the beginning, in spite of myself I… something in me was stirred.”

“I think that makes it even worse. I was simply taking advantage of your being normally female.”

“I was just as bad. That story about the satyr…” She covers her eyes in self-distaste.

“I provoked it.”

“I know, but I embroidered it terribly. When I ought to have resisted telling it at all. I do hope you’ll always cut that particular passage out, if you ever… you know.”

“It was all my fault.”

“It takes two.”

“You’re being much too hard on yourself.”

“I honestly don’t think I am.” She goes back to smoothing the robe again, over her knee. “It was just the way you threw me in at the deep end. Sexually. It caught me off balance. I somehow simply realized, from the very first page of my existence, that I was basically rather a shy person, despite being apparently quite attractive to men.”

“Very attractive.”

“Seriously, I’d rather just be ‘quite.’ Not perhaps without a certain hint of underlying sensuality, but definitely nothing too
voulu.
The sort of person who has to be aroused very slowly and gently.”

“I understand.”

She keeps her eyes lowered. “What I really want to say is that I think I would be prepared to accept some compromise about the nature of our relationship in the eventual future, if you insisted. When we knew each other better.”

“You mean the one where you’re the highbrow lady poet and I’m the crass businessman?”

She gives him a quickly anxious look, full of aghast sincerity.

“Please, I didn’t say that at all, Miles. Not crass. If you were that, obviously I… my character wouldn’t look at you. A perfectly nice man in his way. Just a little… limited and deformed by his milieu and profession.”

“I’m not absolutely clear what compromise you had in mind.”

“If you would prefer them to… well, to put it quite, quite baldly, have a rather more overtly physical relationship in the end.”

“To make it?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“I sort of saw her as too choosy for that.”

“Oh I think she would be for a long time. Certainly for many chapters. Perhaps to the very end.”

“The climax?”

She looks down, but with the trace of a prim smile.

“You’re incorrigible.”

“It wasn’t intended.”

“I’m sure it was. But never mind.”

“I still can’t quite see how it would happen. Given the basic character premise.”

“That’s really not for me to say. Your department.”

“I want it to be yours as well.”

She looks down. “It seems so absurd. Like teaching one’s grandmother to suck eggs. You must have had so much more experience. I feel so terribly conscious I’m only a few pages old.”

“Never mind. You’re learning fast.”

“Spare my blushes.”

“Not at all. I mean it.”

She leaves a little silence, then slips him a look.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Absolutely.”

She stubs out her cigarette. “Then just out of my head, very much off the cuff… I suppose some crisis in the relationship, your becoming more and more desperate for me, your wanting to leave your wife for me –”

“Which wife is this?”

She glances up, surprised. “I just imagined you’d be married. It’s how I see you.”

“So long as I know.”

She folds her arms and stares at the door. “Anyway, one hot summer night you come around to my Knightsbridge flat to thrash it all out one last time, why you love me, why I ought to love you, and so on, and by chance I’ve gone to bed early and have only a short nightdress on.” She hesitates a moment, then twitches at the robe. “Or this. Whatever. It’s very close, there’s thunder in the air, I don’t want to let you in, but you insist, and suddenly somehow everything boils over, your previous diffidence becomes dark desire, your manhood is at last inflamed, without a word you spring and tear the flimsy garment from my bare shoulders, I scream and struggle, I half escape, I manage to stagger to the French windows and out into the steamy pouring rain, you –”

“It’s a ground-floor flat?”

“Yes, of course. Obviously.”

“I was just worried about the neighbors, if you scream.”

“All right, I hiss low words of passionate hatred. I haven’t worked out all the minutiae, Miles.”

“Sorry. I interrupted.”

“It is the first time I’ve ever done this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve forgotten where I was.”

“Just outside the French windows. In the steamy pouring rain.”

“I run onto the lawn, but you’re much too agile and strong, too animal, and you catch me and throw me on the soft turf, I twist and wrestle, you take brutal possession of me against my will, I weep as your pent-up lust ravages my deepest principles.” She leaves a little pause. “I’m only giving you the rough idea.”

“I like the soft turf. The only thing is, I thought…”

“Yes?”

“You did say something about slow and gentle arousal.”

She gives him a touchingly delicate and hurt look, and speaks in a lower voice, her eyes down.

“I’m female, Miles. I can’t help being a tissue of contradictions.”

“Of course. Forgive me.”

“I mean, obviously you’d have to prepare for this moment of sexual violence. You might for instance show me as I undress before you come, a moment when I might look at myself naked in some mirror and secretly wonder whether poetry is enough.”

“I’ll certainly bear that in mind.”

“You could even show me sadly taking down my copy of Nicholas Chorier from my bookshelves.”

“Nicholas who?”

“Possibly I’m being a tiny bit
recherchée.
The passage I had in mind was the
deuxième dialogue
.
Tribadicon,
as he rather coarsely entitled it. Lyons, sixteen fifty-eight.” She gives him a little inquiring shake of her head. “No?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. I somehow assumed you would have all the pornographic classics by heart.”

“Might I ask how, in your few pages of existence, you happen to –”

“Oh Miles!” She gives a hurried smile down. “Really. I thought we were speaking outside the illusions of text.” She looks up again. “I mean, take just that one time when, as Dr. Delfie, I asked you why you didn’t just get off the bed and leave the room. In reality you took six weeks before you could find an answer. I had to do something while I waited. I felt that at the very least I should familiarize myself with the kind of book evidently dearest to your heart.” She adds, “As your employee. So to speak.”

“That was very conscientious of you.”

“Not at all.”

“To wade through all that appalling filth.”

“Miles, I couldn’t face life if I wasn’t conscientious about my work. I’m afraid it’s my nature. I can’t help it. I’m an overachiever.”

He watches her. She is looking down at the bed again, as if embarrassed to have to expound herself so seriously.

“We left ourselves in the rain in the garden. What next?”

“I think it might turn out that I’d been dying for you to do something like that for chapters on end, but of course I was far too complex emotionally to realize it. I’m weeping for joy really. At last I know orgasm.”

“In the rain?”

“If you don’t think it’s
de trop.
Moonlight, if you prefer.”

He sits back a little.

“And one ends on that?”

She peers gravely at him through the owlish glasses.

“Miles, one can hardly end a contemporary novel on the implication that mere fucking solves anything.”

“Of course not.”

She smooths the robe again. “Actually I see that scene as the finale of the first part of a trilogy.”

“Stupid of me not to guess.”

She picks at a loose thread in the robe toweling.

“In the second part of which I think I’d probably become a total victim of my hitherto repressed sensuality. A Messalina
de nos jours,
as it were. I know you could do this middle section in your sleep.”

“I must have misunderstood. Weren’t all the boring bed scenes to go into the Alice-in-Wonderland preamble?”

“I sincerely hope these wouldn’t be boring. Of course I get no pleasure from it all. I’m only doing it out of despair.”

“Despair of what?”

She looks at him over her glasses. “I’m supposed to be a twentieth-century woman, Miles. By definition I’m in despair.”

“And what becomes of my character?”

She takes another cigarette from the box.

“You’d become terribly jealous, you’d start drinking, your business would go to pot. In the end you’d have to live on my immoral earnings. You’d become haggard, bearded, a broken shell of the…” she pauses to light her cigarette “… successful banana importer you once were.”

“I was once what!”

She blows a plume of smoke.

“It has a number of advantages.”

“I have no ambition whatever to be a banana importer.”

“I think you might be a touch colorless without a slightly exotic background. As a matter of fact I see our very first meeting in the real world taking place in one of your East End ripening sheds. Our oblique and tentative dialogue counterpointed by those vistas of thousands of detumescent vegetable penises.”

“I’m not sure I’d know how to write that.”

“I’d hate to lose it.” She pauses. “It feels right.”

“It feels right?”

“Feeling right is terribly important to me, Miles.” She gives him the hurt ghost of a prim smile. “I’d rather hoped you’d realized that by now.”

He takes a slight breath. “And the third part of this trilogy?”

“I was going to be more specific about one or two scenes in the second. When the unnatural female animal in me takes over. There was one with two Dutch car salesmen and a lecturer in Erse that I –”

“I think I’d prefer a general synopsis. For now.”

“All right. Well.” She cocks the wrist of the hand holding the cigarette. “I’m sure you’ve noticed a missing element in the first two parts. No?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Religion.”

“Religion?”

“I think I should become a nun. There could be scenes at the Vatican. They always sell well.”

He stares at the old rose carpet beneath the bed.

“I thought we were a fiercely fastidious Cambridge graduate in English.”

“That’s where the pathos would be. When someone who has sat at the feet of the Leavises and Dr. Steiner is brutally raped by –”

“And you do seem awfully hooked on brutality, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

She lowers her glasses again and looks at him over them.

“I understood it was generally agreed that any accurate mimesis of contemporary reality must reflect symbolically the brutality of class relations in a bourgeois-dominated society.”

“When you put it like that. And who…?”

“Twenty-four young black Marxist guerrillas in my African mission-house. There’d be a place for your character. He could come to Rome for the beatification ceremony. With his new lover.”

“I thought I loved you.”

She exhales smoke.

“Obviously not after I took my vows. It wouldn’t be
vraisemblable.
”

“And where does this other woman come from?”

“I wasn’t talking about a woman, Miles.”

“You mean…?”

“After the shock of losing me to God, I think your true sexual nature might very plausibly declare itself.”

“But –”

“Quite apart from the fact, which I’m sure you know, that gay readers now constitute thirteen point eight percent of all English-speaking fiction buyers. Not that that would influence you. But it is a point.”

She goes back to picking at the loose thread.

“But why on earth should a homosexual want to go to your beatification ceremony?”

“Because you can’t forget me. Besides, I expect you and your hair-dressing friend would love the high camp of it all. The incense and vestments. Actually it might be rather nice if we ended with your confusing my face – after I’m dead, of course – with that of a statue of the Virgin Mary in your own local church.”

“I’m a Catholic too, now?”

“From the first. I forgot to tell you.” She looks up at him. “You must have one character. And a sense of sin. They’re twenty-eight point three percent.”

“Catholics?”

She nods. “And I have an interesting idea for a very last scene. I see you secretly placing a little hand of unripe bananas at the foot of my statue – or her statue. I think it might be particularly meaningful to end on that.”

“What the devil’s it supposed to mean?”

She has a demurely patronizing smile.

“Don’t worry. I think your more discriminating readers would grasp the symbolism.”

“Isn’t a bunch of vegetable penises a bit blasphemous, in the circumstances?”

“Not if you offered them on your knees, with tears in your eyes.”

“You don’t think I might have dropped one banana at the top of the steep flight of steps leading up to this church?”

“Why?”

“When I come out after the
ex voto
bit I could slip on it.”

She looks at him for a moment, then down. There is a silence. Then she speaks in a small, hurt voice.

“I was only trying to help.”