The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two

That is why I am writing this letter to you; this letter is a sort of homage, giving you your due in my life. Or perhaps, simply, I cannot tonight stand the loneliness of my role (my role in life).

When I was a girl it seemed that every man I met, or even heard of, or whose picture I saw in the paper, was my lover. I took him as my lover, because it was my right. He may never have heard of me, he might have thought me hideous (and I wasn’t very attractive as a girl – my kind of looks, striking, white-fleshed, red-haired, needed maturity, as a girl I was a milk-faced, scarlet-haired creature whose features were all at odds with each other, I was pretty only when made up for the stage) … he may have found me positively repulsive, but I took him. Yes, at that time I had lovers in imagination, but none in reality. No man in the flesh could be as good as what I could invent, no real lips, hands, could affect me as those that I created, like God. And this remained true when I married my first husband, and then my second, for I loved neither of them, and I didn’t know what the word meant for years. Until, to be precise, I was thirty-two and got very ill that year. No one knew why, or how, but I knew it was because I did not get a big part I wanted badly. So I got ill from disappointment, but now I see how right it was I didn’t get the part. I was too old – if I had played her, the charming ingenuous girl (which is how I saw myself then, God forgive me), I would have had to play her for three or four years, because the play ran for ever, and I would have been too vain to stop. And then what? I would have been nearly forty, too old for charming girls, and then, like so many actresses who have not burned the charming girl out of themselves, cauterized that wound with a pain like styptic, I would have found myself playing smaller and smaller parts, and then I would have become a ‘character’ actress, and then …

Instead, I lay very ill, not wanting to get better, ill with frustration, I thought, but really with the weight of years I did not know how to consume, how to include in how I saw myself, and then I fell in love with my doctor, inevitable I see now, but then a miracle, for that was the first time, and the reason I said the word ‘love’ to myself, just as if I had not been married twice, and had a score of men in my imagination, was because I could not manipulate him, for the first time a man remained himself, I could not make him move as I wanted, and I did not know his lips and hands. No, I had to wait for him to decide, to move, and when he did become my lover I was like a young girl, awkward, I could only wait for his actions to spring mine.

He loved me, certainly, but not as I loved him, and in due course he left me. I wished I could die, but it was then I understood, with gratitude, what had happened – I played, for the first time, a woman, as distinct from that fatal creature ‘a charming girl’, as distinct from ‘the heroine’ – and I and everyone else knew that I had moved into a new dimension of myself, I was born again, and only I knew it was out of love for that man, my first husband (so I called him, though everyone else saw him as my doctor with whom I rather amusingly had had an affair).

For he was my first husband. He changed me and my whole life. After him, in my frenzy of lonely unhappiness, I believed I could return to what I had been before he had married me, and I would take men to bed (in reality now, just as I had, before, in imagination), but it was no longer possible, it did not work, for I had been possessed by a man, the Man had created in me himself, had left himself in me, and so I could never again use a man, possess one, manipulate him, make him do what I wanted.

For a long time it was as if I was dead, empty, sterile. (That is, I was, my work was at its peak.) I had no lovers, in fact or in imagination, and it was like being a nun or a virgin.

Strange it was, that at the age of thirty-five it was then for the first time I felt a virgin, chaste, untouched. I was absolutely alone. The men who wanted me, courted me, it was as if they moved and smiled and stretched out their hands through a glass wall which was my absolute inviolability. Was this how I should have felt when I was a girl? Yes, I believe that’s it – that at thirty-five I was a girl for the first time. Surely this is how ordinary ‘normal’ girls feel? – they carry a circle of chastity around with them through which the one man, the hero, must break? But it was not so with me, I was never a chaste girl, not until I had known what it was to remain still, waiting for the man to set me in motion in answer to him.

A longer time went by, and I began to feel I would soon be an old woman. I was without love, and I would not be a good artist, not really, the touch of the man who loved me was fading off me, had faded, there was something lacking in my work, it was beginning to be mechanical.

And so I resigned myself. I could no longer choose a man; and no man chose me. So I said, ‘Very well then, there is nothing to be done.’ Above all, I understand the relation between myself and life, I understand the logic of what I am, must be, I know there is nothing to be done about the shape of fate: my truth is that I have been loved once, and now that is the end, and I must let myself sink towards a certain dryness, a coldness of intelligence – yes, you will soon develop into an upright, red-headed, very intelligent lady (though, of course, affected!) whose green eyes flash the sober fires of humorous comprehension. All the rest is over for you, now accept it and be done and do as well as you can the work you are given.

And then one night …

What? All that happened outwardly was that I sat opposite a man at a dinner party in a restaurant, and we talked and laughed as people do who meet each other casually at a dinner-table. But afterwards I went home with my soul on fire. I was on fire, being consumed … And what a miracle it was to me, being able to say, not: That is an attractive man, I want him, I shall have him, but: My house is on fire, that was the man, yes, it was he again, there he was, he has set light to my soul.

I simply let myself suffer for him, knowing he was worth it because I suffered – it had come to this, my soul had become its own gauge, its own measure of what was good: I knew what he was because of how my work was afterwards.

I knew him better than his wife did, or could (she was there too, a nice woman in such beautiful pearls) – I know him better than he does himself. I sat opposite him all evening. What was there to notice? An aging actress, pretty still, beautifully dressed (that winter I had a beautiful violet suit with mink cuffs) sitting opposite a charming man – handsome, intelligent and so on. One can use these adjectives of half the men one meets. But somewhere in him, in his being, something matched something in me, he had come into me, he had set me in motion. I remember looking down the table at his wife and thinking: Yes, my dear, but your husband is also my husband, for he walked into me and made himself at home in me, and because of him I shall act again from the depths of myself, I am sure of it, and I’m sure it will be the best work I can do. Though I won’t know until tomorrow night, on the stage.

For instance, there was one night when I stood on the stage and stretched up my slender white arms to the audience and (that is how they saw it, what I saw were two white-caked, raddled-with-cold arms that were, moreover, rather flabby) and I knew that I was, that night, nothing but an amateur. I stood there on the stage, as a woman holding out my pretty arms, it was Victoria Carrington saying: Look how poignantly I hold out my arms, don’t you long to have them around you, my slender white arms, look how beautiful, how enticing Victoria is! And then, in my dressing-room afterwards I was ashamed, it was years since I had stood on the stage with nothing between me, the woman, and the audience – not since I was a green girl had I acted so – why, then, tonight?

I thought, and I understood. The afternoon before a man (a producer from America, but that doesn’t matter) had come to see me in my dressing-room and after he left I thought: Yes, there it is again, I know that sensation, that means he has set the forces in motion and so I can expect my work to show it … It showed it, with a vengeance! Well, and so that taught me to discriminate, I learned I must be careful, must allow no second-rate man to come near me. And so put up barriers, strengthened around me the circle of cold, of impersonality, that should always lie between me and people, between me and the auditorium; I made a cool, bare space no man could enter, could break across, unless his power, his magic, was very strong, the true complement to mine.

Very seldom now do I feel my self alight, on fire, touched awake, created again by – what?

I live alone now. No, you would never be able to imagine how. For I knew when I saw you this evening that you exist, you are, only in relation to other people, you are always giving out to your work, your wife, friends, children, your wife has the face of a woman who gives, who is confident that what she gives will be received. Yes, I understand all that, I know how it would be living with you, I know you.

After we had all separated, and I had watched you drive off with your wife, I came home and … no, it would be no use telling you, after all. (Or anyone, except, perhaps, my colleague and rival Irma Painter!) But what if I said to you – but no, there are certain disciplines which no one can understand but those who use them.

So I will translate into your language, I’ll translate the truth so that it has the affected, almost embarrassing exaggerated ring that goes with the actress Victoria Carrington, and I’ll tell you how when I came home after meeting you my whole body was wrenched with anguish, and I lay on the floor sweating and shaking as if I had bad malaria, it was like knives of deprivation going through me, for, meeting you, it was being reminded again what it would be like to be with a man, really with him, so that the rhythm of every day, every night, carried us both like the waves of a sea.

Everything I am most proud of seemed nothing at all – what I have worked to achieve, what I have achieved, even the very core of what I am, the inner sensitive balance that exists like a sort of self-invented super instrument, or a fantastically receptive and cherished animal – this creation of myself, which every day becomes more involved, sensitive, and delicate, seemed absurd, paltry, spinsterish, a shameful excuse for cowardice. And my life, which so contents me because of its balance, its order, its steadily growing fastidiousness, seemed eccentrically solitary. Every particle of my being screamed out, wanting, needing – I was like an addict deprived of his drug.

I picked myself off the floor, I bathed myself, I looked after myself like an invalid or like a – yes, like a pregnant woman. These extraordinary fertilizations happen so seldom now that I cherish them, waste nothing of them, and I both long for and dread them. Every time it is like being killed, like being torn open while I am forced to remember what it is I voluntarily do without.

Every time it happens I swear I can never let it happen again, the pain is too terrible. What a flower, what a fire, what a miracle it would be if, instead of smiling (the ‘sweetly piercing’ smile of my dying beauty), instead of accepting, submitting, I should turn to you and say …

But I shall not, and so something very rare (something much more beautiful than your wife could ever give you, or any of the day-to-day wives could imagine) will never come into being.

Instead … I sit and consume my pain, I sit and hold it, I sit and clench my teeth and …

It is dark, it is very early in the morning, the light in my room is a transparent grey, like the ghost of water or of air, there are no lights in the windows I see from my own. I sit on my bed, and watch the shadows of the tree moving on the brick wall of the garden, and I contain pain and …

Oh my dear one, my dear one, I am a tent under which you lie, I am the sky across which you fly like a bird, I am …

My soul is a room, a great room, a hall – it is empty, waiting. Sometimes a fly buzzes across it, bringing summer mornings in another continent, sometimes a child laughs in it, and it is like the generations chiming together, child, youth, and old woman as one being. Sometimes you walk into it and I shut my eyes because of the sweet recognition in me of what you are, I feel what you are as if I stood near a tree and put my hand on its breathing trunk.

I am a pool of water in which fantastic creatures move, in which you play, a young boy, your brown skin glistening, and the water moves over your limbs like hands, my hands, that will never touch you, my hands that tomorrow night, in a pool of listening silence, will stretch up towards the thousand people in the auditorium, creating love for them from the consumed pain of my denial.

I am a room in which an old man sits, smiling, as he has smiled for fifty centuries, you, whose bearded loins created me.

I am a world into which you breathed life, have smiled life, have made me. I am, with you, what creates, every moment, a thousand animalcules, the creatures of our dispensation, and every one we have both touched with our hands and let go into space like free birds.

I am a great space that enlarges, that grows, that spreads with the steady lightening of the human soul, and in the space, squatting in the corner, is a thing, an object, a dark, slow, coiled, amorphous heaviness, embodied sleep, a cold stupid sleep, a heaviness like the dark in a stale room – this thing stirs in its sleep where it squats in my soul, and I put all my muscles, all my force, into defeating it. For this was what I was born for, this is what I am, to fight embodied sleep, putting around it a confining girdle of light, of intelligence, so that it cannot spread its slow stain of ugliness over the trees, over the stars, over you.

It is as if, since you turned towards me and smiled, letting light go through me again, it is as if a King had taken a Queen’s hand and set her on his throne: a King and his Queen, hand in hand on top of my mountain sit smiling at ease in their country.

The morning is coming on the brick wall, the shadow of the tree has gone, and I think of how today I will walk out on to the stage, surrounded by the cool circle of my chastity, the circle of my discipline, and how I will raise my face (the flower face of my girlhood) and how I will raise my arms from which will flow the warmth you have given me.

And so, my dear one, turn now to your wife, and take her head on to your shoulder, and both sleep sweetly in the sleep of your love. I release you to go to your joys without me. I leave you to your love. I leave you to your life.

A Year in Regent’s Park

Last year was out of ordinary from the start – just like every other year. What start, January? But January is a mid-month, in the middle of cold, snow, dark. Above all, dark. In January nothing starts but the new calendar, which says that the down-swing of our part of the earth towards the long light of summer has already begun, is already stimulating the plants, changing their responses. I would make the beginning back in autumn, when I ‘found myself possessor’ – I put it like that because someone else is now in possession – of a wild, very long, narrow garden, between mellow brick walls. There was an old pear tree in the middle, and at its end a small wood of recently sprung trees, sycamores, an elder, an ash. This treasure of space was twenty minutes’ strolling time from Marble Arch, on a canal. The garden had to be prepared for planting. By luck I found a boy, up from the country to try his fortune in London, who hated all work in the world but digging. He chose to live in half a room which he curtained with blankets, carpeted with newpapers, then matting, and wall-papered with his poems and pictures. He was, of course, in the old romantic tradition of the adventurous young, challenging a big city, but he saw himself and the world as newly hatched, let’s say a year before, when he became twenty and discovered that he was free and probably a hippy. He lived on baked beans and friendship, and when he needed money, dug people’s gardens. Together we stripped off the top layer of this potential garden, which was all builder’s rubble, cans, bottles, broken glass. Under this was London clay. It is a substance you hear enough about; indeed, London’s history seems made of it. But when you actually come on tons of the stuff, yards deep, heavy, wet, impervious, without a worm or a root in it, it is so airless and unused, you wonder how London ever came to be all gardens and woodland. I could not believe my gardening book, which said that clay is perfect potential soil for plants. I, friends, and the boy from the country, made shapes of the stuff, and thought it was a pity none of us was a sculptor – but that wasn’t going to turn the clay into working earth. At last, we marked out flowerbeds, and turned over the clay in large clods, the weeds and grass still on them. The place looked like a ploughed field before the cultivators move in. But even before the first frosts, the soil between the flinty-sided miniature boulders was showing the beginning of a marriage between rotting grass and clay fragments. It had rained. It was raining. As London does, it rained. Going out to inspect the clods, each so heavy I could only pick one up at a time, I found they had softened their harsh contours somewhat, but I couldn’t break them by flinging them down or bashing them with a spade. They looked eternal. Steps led up from the under-earth – the flat was a basement flat – and standing at eye-level to the garden, it all looked like a First World War film: trenches full of water, wet mats of the year’s leaf, enormous clods, rotting weeds, bare trunks and dripping branches. All, everything, wet, bare, raw.

That was December. Around Christmas, after several heavy frosts, I went up to see how things went on, kicked one of the clods – and it crumbled. The boy from the country who, being not a farming boy but a country-town boy, and who therefore had not believed the book either, saying the garden needed a bulldozer, came on my telephone call, and about an hour of the lightest work with a hoe transformed the heaving scene into neat areas of tilth mixed with dead grass. Not really dead, of course, but ready to come to life with the spring. But now we had faith in the book, and we turned the roots upwards to be killed by the frost. This happened. Each piece of stalk or root filled with wet, and then swelled as it froze, and burst like water-mains in severe cold. Long before spring the earth lay broken and tamed, all the really hard work done, not by the spade, or the hoe, or even by the worms, but by the frost. The thing is, I knew Africa, or a part of it, and there you can never forget the power of sun, wind, rain. But in gentler England you do forget, as if the north-slanting sun must have less power than a sun overhead, as if nature itself is less drastic in her working. You can forget it, that is, until you see what a handful of weeks of weather can do to smash a seventy-by-twenty-foot bit of wilderness into conformity.

It rained in January, and in February it did not stop. If I set one foot off the top of the steps that came up from the flat, I sank in clay to my ankles. The light was strained through cold coud, but it was strong enough to drag the snowdrops up into it. I walked in Regent’s Park along paths framed with black glistening twigs which were swelling, ready to burst: the shape of spring, next year’s promise, is exposed from the moment the leaves fall. The park was all grey water, sodden grass, black trees, and the water-fowl had to contend for crumbs and crusts with the gulls that had come inland from a stormy sea. In March it rained, and was dull. Usually by March more than snowdrops and crocuses are showing from snow or mud; and already the paths are loaded with people staking claims in the spring. But it was a bad month. My new garden was calling forth derisory remarks from friends who were not gardeners and who did not know what a month’s warmth can do for water-filled trenches, bare walls, sodden earth. April wasn’t doing anything like what the poet meant when he said, ‘Oh, to be in England’ – certainly he would have returned at once to his beloved Italy. April was not the beginning of spring, but the continuation of winter. It was wet, wet, wet, and cold, and it all went on the same day after day. And in the park, where I walked daily, only the lengthening evenings talked of spring, for in spite of crocuses everywhere, the buds seemed frozen on the bushes and trees. It would never end. I don’t know how they bear it in northern countries, like Sweden or Russia. It is like being shut inside a caul of ice, when the winter lengthens itself so.

And it was so wet. If you took one step off the paths you squelched. No air, you knew, could possibly remain in that sponge. There was so much water everywhere, tons of it hanging in the air over our heads, tons falling every day, lakes underfoot.

Suddenly there were some days of summer. No, not spring. Last year was without spring. In no other country that I know is it possible for things to change so fast. And when one state holds, then the one just past seems impossible. In the garden, from which baths of steam flew up to join the by now summer-like clouds, bluebells, hyacinths, crocuses and narcissi had sprung up, and if you turned the earth, the worms were energetically at work. Weeks of growth were being concentrated into each day; nature did overtime to catch up; and if things had gone on like that, we would have been precipitated straight into full summer, with fruit blossom and spring flowers flying past as in a speeded up film but no, suddenly, we were in a cold drought. And it went on for weeks. A cold sunless drought, a dry cold, with sometimes a cold, withdrawn sun. In the garden the water sank back fast in the newly turned, loose earth, and you could walk easily over the clay. The pear tree hung on the edge of blossom, but did not flower. The trees at the bottom of the garden had a look of green about them, but it was like the smear of moss on soil soaked and soaked again. When I turned a spade of earth, the worms were sluggish. The birds, dodging plentiful cats, snapped off each new blade of grass as it appeared, and slashed the crocuses with their beaks. In the park, the black boughs had frills of leaf on them, but walking along the shores you could see the ducks and the geese sitting on their eggs on leafless islands. The waters were still tenanted by adult birds, who converged towards their providers on the lakes’ edges, and climbed up on the banks with their coloured beaks open, hissing and demanding. Soon, off the little islands would tumble nestfuls of baby birds, who would learn from the parents to follow the stiffly moving shapes along the banks with their expectations for bread. But not yet. And the blossoms were not yet. Everything was in check in that no-spring of last year when first it rained without sun, and then held a chilly drought for weeks. Yet we knew that spring must have arrived, must be here. Slowly the chestnut avenue unfurled shrill green from each stiff twig’s end. The catkins were dangling on branches inhibited from bursting into leaf. The roses had been pruned almost to the earth, but very late. The fine hairlines of the willow branches trailing into the water had become yellow-green instead of wintry yellow-grey. And everywhere, on hawthorn and cherry, on plum and currant and white-beam and apple, the buds of that year’s flowering stood arrested among leaf buds. The park’s gardeners bent heavily-sweatered over flowerbeds that had a cold dusty look, and the grass wore thin and showed the soil, as often happens in late summer after drought, but not often so early in the year. The evenings had already nearly reached their midsummer length – for just as spring stands outlined in black buds on empty branches in November, so the lengthening evenings of April, May, then June, spread summer light everwhere when the earth is still gripped with cold, and you are clutching at summer before it has begun, marking Midsummer Day as a turn towards the dark of winter before the winter has been warmed from the soil. The earth is tilted forward, dipped completely into light, light that urges on blossom, leaf, grass, light which is more powerful for growth even than warmth. The avenues are filled with strolling people until nine and after; the theatre is open; the swings in the children’s playgrounds are never still. England’s myriads of expert gardeners visit the rose gardens to match those paragons with the inhabitants of their own gardens – but last year found that the cold was still holding the roses, tightening their veins and arteries, and giving the long reddening shoots the pinched look of a person short of blood. And it all went on and on, the dry cold, just as, earlier, the wet winter had extended itself, and the park seemed like a sponge that could never dry.