The World as I Found It (8 page)

Then honking like gulls came the others: Now O … Ottolinoscoska!
Dearest, darling
O.

Don't O me, she said, whirling around. It went too far. Then turning to Russell, she said with a sniff, Much help you were.

Me? he retorted. The others were near so he kept his voice low, saying, Obviously, you loved it.

How dare you, she hissed. I did not love it. She began walking down the sand.

No? he asked, picking up beside her. If you do not love it, then why are they here, the lot of them? We were supposed to be alone — foreign as you seem to find the concept.

How was I to know they'd come?

Of course. A prisoner to your guests. As usual.

She glared at him.
Spontaneous!
Do you even understand that principle?
Spont-aneity?

He could feel her crumple then. Instinctively, she was retreating before he could trap her with some piddling point, using his mind first as a scalpel, then as a bludgeon, mocking and cold. Ottoline feared his mind — he was painfully aware of that — and here, as ever, he felt he had to retreat to show her the delicate clay feet of his love. This love was a new experience for him. Almost all his most logical important ideas had come unbidden, in moments of sudden insight. But these moments were then followed by months and even years of labor to find
reasons
for these truths, which he hoped would stand like the stars. His love, by contrast, was beyond revoking or reason, and he now had no way of knowing whether it was advancing or receding, whether it would stay, or what, at this rate, would ever become of it.

Ottoline, meanwhile, was looking out to sea, where the dull, gray waves were stippled with light, like the barnacled humps of whales. Russell looked, too, but then instinctively his eyes dipped, deft and hungry as mosquitoes, to the cleft where the clinging wet silk made a fold over Ottoline's noble buttocks.

Oh, drop it, she resumed. She turned and looked at him weakly. They'll be gone tomorrow, most of them.

Glumly, he added, Yes, and then I'll be gone myself. He looked at her miserably, then said, I've half a mind to leave tomorrow. This is doing neither of us any good.

Her piled hair, an earthy dark red, as variegated as wool, was coming unbound. Long face, dark eyes, full lips. Lank supple shanks of legs and slender feet with long, bony toes. As he often did, he was studying her in wonderment, unable to decide whether she was impossibly beautiful or possibly somewhat ugly. She saw him looking, anatomizing her, and again she told herself that she wouldn't be bullied or manipulated by him. In a flash of irritation, she said coldly, Then why don't you? Go, if it's so unpleasant. Really —

Russell's face creased with pain. Knowing he had pushed her too far, he wasted no time backpedaling:

I'm not going, and you don't want me to go. I just find it unendurable at times — to love you this much and be surrounded always by people. I am
so
sick of it, he said, and then stopped himself, feeling his eyes starting to fill.

Seeing he was coming undone, she said quickly, I know — just a while longer. We'll have our day together tomorrow.

And even then, like figures in a comical film, jerking and gesticulating, they felt themselves having to speed up their emotional exposition because the others were lurching toward them, mock penitents now, their legs spavined with drink as they said, Now there, Mabby. Don't be an old crabby … Is there more wine at the house? … Will supper be served soon?

No, their little holiday had not turned out at all as he had planned. They were to have been alone — alone meaning with two maids, the cook, the chauffeur and one or two odd guests thrown in to make it all tidy.

In the six months that Russell and Ottoline had been lovers, there had been various trysts, all of them hasty and increasingly furtive — nothing like this long weekend was to have been. This time she would not have to run back to her husband, Philip, or her daughter, six-year-old Julian. Here there would not be the endless luncheons, dinners, teas, at-homes, parties and charity bazaars that made it almost impossible for her to meet him. For weeks, Russell had been waiting for this, pining for her like a schoolboy waiting for the holidays. After ten unhappy years, married to a woman whom he now could hardly suffer, Russell felt like a man freed from prison. Hang discretion. Die, Wife. Die, old life. Stand and deliver, Philip Morrell, your wife and child, and repair to your constituency to fade away in genteel obscurity.

So raged Russell's enraptured ego, that great claymore which longed to chop the legs from under his wife, Alys, Philip and anyone else who dared stop him. Still, it wasn't just his wife whom Russell found blocking his path. There was his own former self, that drudge poisoned by musty chastity like an Inquisition priest; that heart so shrunken that he sometimes felt his head had swelled like a globe in compensation, revealing supreme forces of concentration — and avoidance — that expanded his already considerable mental powers tenfold. Who was that man who had produced the mammoth
Principia Mathematica?
Who was that dispassionately analytical man who, while riding his bicycle one day ten years before, had come to the almost arithmetical conclusion that he no longer loved his wife?

Russell had not been thinking of Alys when this had happened. Pedaling along, he was thinking of a seemingly unrelated logical problem when he looked up, as if he had suddenly seen the time, and realized that his marriage would never again be the same.

Alys immediately sensed something was wrong when he returned. They had always prided themselves on their honesty, and the next day, dizzily, he told her the truth, not that there was another woman, for there was none, but that he had somehow fallen out of love with her. He thought Alys would at least be thankful for his honesty, but she was impaled. All that night she wailed and wept. She was an American Quaker, five years his senior, and after that she prayed that his heart would change. Several times, unable to stand the tension — that feeling of airlessness and entrapment with no relief — he broke down, telling her and himself that his heart
might
change. But once his senses cleared, he told her, and continued to tell her, that there was absolutely no hope, that his feelings would never change.
Thee cannot predict the future!
she would shriek, slamming the door and choking back sobs that sounded as if she were punching herself in the stomach.

Finally, it made no difference what he said. In spite of his hatred and nullity, in spite of all reason, she passionately believed his love would rise from the dead if only she were patient and forgiving. Poor woman. Poor, deluded woman, he would write in his diary, filling page after page with unctuous tones and fairy tale nobility, the scribblings of a man in shock.

But increasingly she wore on him, as he did on her, until he began to loathe her for her insane patience and submissiveness, suspicious that even her innocence was malign. And gradually over those next years, as if to fulfill his fallen estimation of her, she lost what luster she had, until in his eyes she was nothing at all. By then he found it impossible to imagine that he had ever found her beguiling, this the first woman ever to have paid attention to him when he met her as a prig of seventeen. Even harder to imagine was that he had so dutifully saved himself for her — saved himself even during a year in Paris, passing purblind the frizetted whores and the Moulin Rouge before marrying her as a prig of twenty-two.

Alys was — or once had been — a courageous and freethinking public woman, a champion of women's suffrage, social reform and workers' groups. Early on, she had been a tremendous influence on him, helping him research his first book,
German Social Democracy
. Nor was she without strength of character. Daughter of an evangelist, she would take a podium with the indomitable moral fearlessness of a saint mounting a gibbet to say a few defiant words, and never allowing herself to sink into despair. How he had once loved the charm of her sectarian
thees
and
thous
— it was as if they had their own language, ancient and intimate. Now, though, he associated them with hysterical outbursts — pleas that made him feel like Henry VIII with Anne Boleyn clutching his knees, begging for her life.

Still, he had been practical in those first years of their alienation. Divorce was not an acceptable expedient; it would have been social and professional suicide. Besides, Alys wouldn't have granted him a divorce. Instead, he buried himself in his work, and over the next years they found a
modus vivendi
. Alys managed his household and saw after his every need, setting food before his closed door as for a spirit. To Russell, she was like a piece of furniture, a heavy oak bureau he was careful not to collide with. It occurred to him, and not unpleasurably, that she must have wondered if she still had a face or hips or if, in his mind, she even existed. But for all his mental powers he could not make her vanish. Like the chambers of a heart, their two small bedrooms were separated by a wall through which he could hear her, shuffling, coughing, bumping, a clumsy woman deep in want, craving love and a child — forgiveness.

Affection he might shirk, but sex he could not avoid. Sex was his conjugal duty, and as an aristocrat, he strongly believed in duty. Alys knew this, and periodically, with what seemed a subconscious desire to torture him, she would beg him to come “lie” with her. He could not stave her off forever. Feeling himself a life shirker and a bedroom criminal, he would flog them both by lumbering over her, mashing his face into the pillow so as not to see her. She was a heavy woman, with white, doughy skin, freely perspiring. His slack penis was bent like a thumb, and unwilling. Not a word passed between them. For him, there was only nullity as he rocked and hated and punished her, thinking of mathematical entities, flaccid abstractions, empty sets. And failing, mightily failing. Hearing her gently ask, with the faint catch of a sob,
Thee cannot?
and wanting then to strike her. Jumping up, he would walk quietly into his room and note in his diary, as if he were making an entry in a ledger, that he had made his “sacrifice” and thus had earned his reward: three months absolved from suffering her touch.

Then came Ottoline. Russell had first met her the year before while campaigning for Philip Morrell, a liberal candidate who was trying to win a seat in Burnley. Philip won the election, and sometime later, when Russell was attending a dinner at their home in Bedford Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury, Philip was suddenly called away. There were several other guests, but when they left, Russell, without quite knowing why, remained, sitting by the fire with Ottoline. He did not plan or anticipate what happened. They were quietly talking when out of nowhere he said cryptically, There is always a tragedy in someone's life if one knows where to look for it. He remembered Ottoline looking at him, not knowing what to say. He was surprised himself and suddenly found himself telling her of the misery of his marriage and the vile emptiness of his life.

They slept together soon enough, but for him not often enough. He was in rut — completely mad for new life, mad to jettison Alys and wrest Ottoline from Philip. He was living apart from Alys then, having taken rooms in Cambridge, where he had been given a lectureship at Trinity. But Alys refused to give up. On the contrary, she was so desperate that friends feared she would kill herself or ruin them all in court if she caught whiff of the affair.

Hang her. He didn't care. All instincts of self-preservation were gone. In those first flushed months, he was completely reckless. Ottoline was nothing like Alys; he didn't know what she was. Russell could see at a glance that she was not a true intellectual, did not think logically or sequentially, and indeed was not, even for an upper-class woman, especially well educated. Yet she was everything he was not: sensual, when he was still unawakened; attracted to beauty, which he thirsted for but feared; and drawn to art, which, in its seeming irrationality and subjectivity, he still did not entirely understand. It seemed he told her everything at once, wanting to conquer not only her body but even her mind and memory. He overwhelmed her. She felt he was far too brilliant for her to be of any conceivable interest to him except sexually. Yet in another way, it seemed they had always known each other. She knew all about his illustrious family, especially his formidable grandfather, Lord John Russell, a prime minister under Victoria. He would say, Of course, my grandfather. And she, nodding, would say, Of course, the story evoking the bare outlines of a tale she already knew, like a nursery rhyme. Of course, the Russells. Of course, the Balfours and Lansdownes. The world, within certain realms, was small, and she had been taught to be more at ease where she could say of course and to be wary where she could not.

Yet even so she was wary. Ottoline liked fire in a man, but she didn't want the fire to get out of control. At bottom, she knew that she was not about to risk her husband and daughter, not to mention her freedom and reputation, for a man who wasn't sure he could even get a divorce and who would be penniless if he did. And what was the need when she could eat her cake and have it, too? If Ottoline was more conscious than he was of society's rules, this was because as a woman she had more to lose. Besides, if the rules were at times a farce and a bother, they were there for her protection. They were something to play against, offering a favorable backdrop for her high coloratura life. Ottoline knew she was skating on thin ice, yet if she was something of a maverick, she was nonetheless a cunning and practiced skater who knew just how much the ice would decently bear. Russell had been planning to give her a lesson in logic, but she, in turn, was teaching him social skating on the scrim, with some hard lessons yet to come that weekend down in Studland.

I
N FACT
, Ottoline was on the thinnest of ice, having said good-bye only hours before Russell arrived to that most special of her young friends, the painter Henry Lamb.