The Golden Notebook (49 page)

strange that one should hold on to a set of sentences, and have faith in them. Meantime, men approached her and she refused them, because she knew she could not love them. The words she used to herself were: I won't sleep with a man until I know I could love him. Yet, some weeks later, the following incident: Ella meets a man at a party. She is again conscientiously going to parties, hating the process of 'being on the market again.' The man is a script-writer, Canadian. He does not attract her particularly physically. Yet he is intelligent, with the cool wise-cracking transatlantic humour she enjoys. His wife, at the party, is a beautiful girl, as it were professionally beautiful. Next morning, this man arrives at Ella's flat, unannounced. He has brought gin, tonic, flowers; he makes a game of the situation 'man coming to seduce girl met at a party the night before, bringing flowers and gin.' Ella is amused. They drink and laugh and make jokes. Out of the laughter, they go to bed. Ella gives pleasure. She feels nothing, and is even prepared to swear that he feels nothing either. For at the moment of penetration the knowledge goes through her that this is something that he set himself to do and that's all. She thinks: Well, I'm doing this without feeling so why am I criticising him? It's not fair. Then she thinks, rebellious: But that's the point. The man's desire creates a woman's desire, or should, so I'm right to be critical. Afterwards they continue to drink and to make jokes. Then he remarks, at random, not from anything that has gone before: 'I have a beautiful wife whom I adore. I have work I like to do. And now I have a girl.' Ella understands that she is the girl, and that this enterprise, sleeping with her, is a sort of project or plan for a happy life. She realises that he expects the relationship to continue, he takes it for granted that it will. She indicates that as far as she is concerned the exchange is over; as she speaks there is a flash of ugly vanity on his face, though she has said it gently, positively compliantly, as if her refusal were due to circumstances beyond her control. He studies her, hard-faced. 'What's wrong, baby, haven't I satisfied you?' He says this wearily, at a loss. Ella hastens to assure him that he has; although he has not. But she understands this is not his fault, she has not had a real orgasm since Paul left her. She says, dry in spite of herself: 'Well, I don't think there's much conviction in it for either of us.' Again the hard, weary, clinical look. 'I have a beautiful wife,' he announces. 'But she doesn't satisfy me sexually. I need more.' This silences Ella. She feels as if she's in some perverse emotional no-man's-land that has nothing to do with her, although she has temporarily strayed into it. Yet she realises that he really does not understand what is the matter with what he offers her. He has a large penis; he is 'good in bed.' And that's it. Ella stands, silent, thinking that the weariness of sensuality he has in bed is the other side of his cold world-weariness out of it. He stands looking her over. Now, thinks Ella, now he's going to lash out, he's going to let me have it. She sets herself to take it. 'I've learned,' he drawls, sharp with wounded vanity, 'that it's not necessary to have a beautiful woman in the sack. It's enough to concentrate on one part of her-anything. There's always something beautiful in even an ugly woman. An ear for instance. Or a hand.' Ella suddenly laughs and tries to catch his eye thinking that surely he will laugh. Because for the couple of hours before they had got into bed, their relationship had been good-humoured and humorous. What he has just said is positively the parody of a worldly-wise philanderer's remark. Surely he will smile at it? But no, it had been intended to hurt, and he would not withdraw it, even by a smile. 'Lucky I have nice hands, if nothing else,' says Ella at last, very dry. He comes to her, picks up her hands, kisses them, wearily, rake-like: 'Beautiful, doll, beautiful.' He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures. That evening Ella goes to Julia's house, and finds Julia in what she classified as 'Patricia's mood'-that is, sardonic rather than bitter. Julia tells Ella, humorous, that the man, the actor who had called her a 'castrating woman,' had turned up a few days before with flowers, just as if nothing had happened. 'He was really quite surprised that I wouldn't play. He was ever so jolly and companionable. And I sat there, looking at him, and remembering how I had cried my eyes out after he had left-you remember, there were two nights, and I had been ever so sweet and kind putting him at his ease, and then he said I was... and even then I couldn't hurt his damned feelings. And I sat there and I thought: Do you suppose he's forgotten what he said or why he said it? Or aren't we supposed to care what they say? We're just supposed to be tough enough to take anything? Sometimes I think we're all in a sort of sexual mad house.' Ella says drily: 'My dear Julia, we've chosen to be free women, and this is the price we pay, that's all.' 'Free,' says Julia. 'Free! What's the use of us being free if they aren't? I swear to God, that every one of them, even the best of them, have the old idea of good women and bad women.' 'And what about us? Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they're with a woman they don't give a damn about, but we don't have an orgasm unless we love him. What's free about that?' Julia says: 'Then you're luckier than 1 have been. I was thinking yesterday: of the ten men I've been in bed with during the last five years, eight have been impotent or come too quickly. I was blaming myself-of course, we always do, isn't it odd, the way we positively fall over ourselves to blame ourselves for everything? But even that damned actor, the one who said I was castrating, was kind enough to remark, oh, only in passing of course, that he had only found one woman in his life he could make it with. Oh, don't run away with the idea that he mentioned it to make me feel better, not at all.' 'My dear Julia, you didn't sit down to count them?' 'Not until I started thinking about it, no.' Ella finds herself in a new mood or phase. She becomes completely sexless. She puts it down to the incident with the Canadian script-writer, but does not care particularly. She is now cool, detached, self-sufficient. Not only can she not remember what it was like, being afflicted with sexual desire, but she cannot believe she will ever feel desire again. She knows, however, that this condition, being self-sufficient and sexless, is only the other side of being possessed by sex. She rings up Julia to announce that she has given up sex, given up men, because 'she can't be bothered.' Julia's good-humoured scepticism positively crackles in Ella's ear, and she says: 'But I mean it.' 'Good for you,' says Julia. Ella decides to write again, searches herself for the book which is already written inside her, and waiting to be written down. She spends a great deal of time alone, waiting to discern the outlines of this book inside her. I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else. I don't understand what happens at the moment Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella. No one does. It's enough to call her Ella, instead of Anna. Why did I choose the name Ella? Once I met a girl at a party called Ella. She reviewed books for some newspaper and read manuscripts for a publisher. She was small, thin, dark-the same physical type as myself. She wore her hair tied back with a black bow. I was struck by her eyes, extraordinarily watchful and defensive. They were windows in a fortress. People were drinking heavily. The host came over to fill our glasses. She put out her hand-a thin, white delicate hand, at just that moment when he had put an inch of liquor in her glass, to cover it. She gave a cool nod: 'That's enough.' Then a cool shake, as he pressed to fill the glass. He went off; she saw I had been looking. She picked up the glass with just an inch of red wine in it, and said: 'That's the exact amount I need for the right degree of intoxication.' I laughed. But no, she was serious. She drank the inch of red wine, and then remarked: 'Yes, that's right.' Assessing how the alcohol was affecting her-she gave another small, cool nod. 'Yes, that was just right.' Well, I would never do that. That's not Anna at all. I see Ella, isolated, walking about her big room, tying back her straight black hair with a wide black ribbon. Or sitting hour after hour in a chair, her white delicate hands loose in her lap. She sits frowning at them, thinking. Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticises her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being 'a career woman.' This woman who, throughout the five years of then-affair, in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticised her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties, and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does-sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that's what you wanted, that's what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she 'really' is. He has rejected her 'real' self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected. Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true. She looks inside herself again and finds: A man and a woman. She, after years of freedom, is over-ready for a serious love. He is playing at the role of a serious lover because of some need for asylum or refuge. (Ella gets the idea of this character from the Canadian script-writer-from his cool and mask-like attitude as a lover: he was watching himself in a role, the role of a married man with a mistress. It is this aspect of the Canadian that Ella uses-a man watching himself play a role.) The woman, over-hungry, over-intense, freezes the man even more than he is; although he only half-knows he is frozen. The woman, having been unpossessive, unjealous, undemanding, turns into a jailor. It is as if she is possessed by a personality not hers. And she watches her own deterioration into this possessive termagant with surprise, as if this other self has nothing to do with her. And she is convinced it has not. For when the man accuses her of being a jealous spy, she replied and with sincerity: 'I'm not jealous, I've never been jealous.' Ella looked at this story with amazement; because there was nothing in her own experience that could suggest it. Where, then, had it come from? Ella thinks of Paul's wife-but no; she had been too humble and accepting to suggest such a character. Or perhaps her own husband, self-abasing, jealous, abject, making feminine hysterical scenes because of his incapacity as a man? Presumably, thinks Ella, this figure, her husband, with whom she was linked so briefly and apparently without any real involvement, is the masculine equivalent of the virago in her story? Which, however, she decides not to write. It is written, within her, but she does not recognise it as hers. Perhaps I read it somewhere?-she wonders; or someone told it to me and I've forgotten hearing about it? About this time Ella pays a visit to her father. It is some time since she has seen him. Nothing has changed in his life. He is still quiet, absorbed in his garden, his books, a military man turned some sort of mystic. Or had always been a mystic? Ella, and for the first time, wonders: What must it have been like, married to such a man? She seldom thinks of her mother, so long dead, but now tries to revive memories of her. She sees a practical, cheerful bustling woman. One evening, sitting across the fireplace from her father, in a white-ceilinged black-beamed room full of books, she watches him read and sip whisky and at last brings herself to talk of her mother. Her father's face takes on the most comical look of alarm; clearly he, too, has not thought of the dead woman for years. Ella persists. He says at last, abruptly: 'Your mother was altogether too good for me.' He laughs, uncomfortably; and his remote blue eyes suddenly have the startled rolling look of a surprised animal. The laugh offends Ella; but she recognises why: she is annoyed on behalf of the wife, her mother. She thinks: What's wrong with Julia and me is quite simple: we're being mistress figures long past the age for it. She says aloud: 'Why too good?' although her father has picked up his book again as a shield. He says, over the top of the book, an elderly burned-leather man, suddenly agitated with emotions thirty years old: 'Your mother was a good woman. She was a good wife. But she had no idea, absolutely no idea at all, all that sort of thing was left completely out of her.' 'You mean sex?' asks Ella, forcing herself to speak in spite of her distaste for associating these ideas with her parents. He laughs, offended; his eyes rolling again: 'Of course all you people don't mind talking about that sort of thing. I never talk about it. Yes, sex, if that's what you call it. Was left clean out of her make-up, that sort of thing.' The book, a memoir of some British General, is raised against Ella. Ella insists: 'Well, what did you do about it?' The edges of the book seem to tremble. A pause. She has meant: Didn't you teach her? But her father's voice says from behind the book-the clipped yet hesitant voice, clipped from training, hesitant because of the vagueness of his private world: 'When I couldn't stick it, I went out and bought myself a woman. What did you expect?' The what did you expect is addressed, not to Ella, but to her mother. 'And jealous! She didn't give a damn about me, but she was jealous as a sick cat.' Ella says: 'I meant, perhaps she was shy. Perhaps