‘Oh God—’ So cunning and vile is the human soul that I felt instantly glad that Hartley had this understandable cause of grief and had told me about it and was weeping about it in my presence. Suddenly there was sympathy, communication.

But I did sleep and I dreamed that Hartley was a ballet dancer and was circling a huge stage sur les points dressed in a black tutu and a head-dress of sparkling diamonds and black feathers. Now and then she would leap, and I would say to myself, but she stays in the air, it’s uncanny, it’s like levitation, she just stays there. And as I watched I said to myself in a complacent way, isn’t it wonderful that we’re both so young and we have all our lives before us. How can old people be happy? We’re young and we know that we’re young, whereas most young people just take it for granted. Then the stage was a forest and a prince also dressed in black came and carried Hartley away, and her head hung back over his shoulder as if her neck was broken. I stayed there still thinking, how wonderful that I’m young; I had a bad dream and thought that I was old. And I’m sure, I’m sure, that on the other side of those trees there is a lake, or perhaps it is the sea. I woke up in the sunshine, and whereas in my other wakings I had understood at once where I was, this time I was very startled, and could still see Hartley’s dead face, her head hanging limply in that terrible way; and I felt a foreboding and a horror which I had not felt in the dream. I pushed myself up on my elbow and only gradually worked out why I was here, lying on the rock, in the bright sunlight in front of a blue muttering sea. I got up slowly, and then felt a pang of sadness as I remembered being so pleased about being young in my dream. I looked at my watch. It was six thirty. It was only then that I thought: if there is no letter this morning I shall go to the bungalow. That is settled.

I reviewed the evidence and I had very little doubt about what it pointed to. Hartley loved me and had long regretted losing me. How could she not? She did not love her husband. How could she? He was mentally undistinguished; there was no wit or spiritual sweetness in that man. He was physically unattractive, with his big unshapely sensual mouth and his look of a cropped school-boy. And he was, it seemed, a barbarian and a bully. He was a tyrant, probably a chronically jealous man, a dull resentful dog, a limited shut-in fellow with no sense of the joy of life. Hartley had been a captive all these years. She may, in the earlier times, have thought of escape; but gradually she fell, as so many bullied isolated women do, into a gradual despair. Better not to fight, not to hope. The shock of seeing me again must have been enormous. Of course she had digested some of it by the time I discovered her. Her frightened negative behaviour was easy to explain. She was probably afraid of her husband; but she was much more afraid of her old love for me, still alive, blazing away there like an underground oil fire: a love which, at the very least, could now utterly destroy her small despairing peace of mind.

‘Nor have I, but every time I turn on the television there she is, that’s a bloody curse. I suppose I loved her once. Or it was just that she made me feel like Mark Antony. Penché sur elle l’ardent impérator … All I saw in Rosina’s eyes was a reflection of myself. Then I saw the divorce court. The trouble with Rosina is she wants every man: Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Leonardo, Mozart, Wilamowitz, Mr Gladstone, D. H. Lawrence, Jimmy Carter—you name him, she wants him. I suppose you wouldn’t like to take Pam off my hands too, would you? No? Ah well, I can’t convey to you what it’s like, like a fight with knives, and really it’s still going on—we haven’t either of us got the sheer bloody strength to start arranging the divorce. Divorce proceedings are hell, you’ve got to think, you’ve got to decide, you’ve got to lie. I believe she’s got another chap, I don’t want to know. She goes away a lot, I only wish she didn’t keep coming back, I suppose it’s convenient. The sheer endless destructive bloody spitefulness, the wanton breaking of all the little tentacles of tenderness and joy, all the little spontaneous nonsenses that connect one human being with another. I do try to communicate with her sometimes, and she says the most hurtful thing she can think of in reply. One’s soul becomes numb with the endless blows—and of course one becomes a sort of fiend oneself, that goes without saying, one becomes ingenious in evil. I’ve seen it in other cases, the spouse who feels guilty, even irrationally, is endlessly the victim of the whims of the other, and can take no moral stand. That leads to mutual terrorism. And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one’s only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one’s partner’s head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow! Ah, Charles, Charles, you know nothing of these marital joys. Have some more whisky.’

‘The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not.’

‘I don’t despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare’s heroines before I was twelve.’

‘But they don’t exist, dear man, that’s the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.’

‘I am writing my memoirs.’

‘Theatre chat? Anecdotes about actresses?’

‘Certainly not! I want to do the deep thing, real analysis, real autobiography—’

‘Not easy to do.’

‘I know it’s not easy to do!’

‘We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen, according to Stesichorus. Vain wars for phantom goods. I hope you will allow yourself plenty of reflections on human vanity. People lie so, even we old men do. Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn’t matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art. Proust is our authority on French aristocrats. Who cares what they were really like? What does it mean even?’

‘I remember your talking about a first love, but these things are imaginary, they are fables. You’re just suffering from the shock of seeing her, give it a fortnight. And she’s got a bourgeois marriage and a son, and, Charles, she’s ordinary, you can’t do it to an ordinary woman just because you fancied her at school, it’s nonsense and she wouldn’t understand! Besides, you wouldn’t be able to, you’re not all-powerful, not in real life you aren’t. You’d simply get yourself into a very unpleasant mess, just the sort of mess which you of all people hate. You’d lose face! Think of that! Have enough self-knowledge to see how you’d hate it, you haven’t any role here, you haven’t any lines. You even admit she doesn’t want to talk to you!’

[...] I wanted, in the time that was left to us, to console her as a god consoles. But I also wanted increasingly, and with a violence which almost burnt the tenderness away, to own her, to possess her body and soul.

I said to Titus, ‘I want him to see the letter. And you are both to stay here. Are we that man’s slaves? I want to let your mother out of that cage.’

Hartley gave a cry of woe.

‘Oh—good. Hartley, just relax, let it go, let it drop.’

‘Let what drop?’

‘You know—this burden, this useless fruitless loyalty, this pointless sacrifice. You’re making his life a misery too, let it go, let him go. You’re like a half-dead person.’