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Oh, Desmond Desmond Desmond. What does he need her to do? Tell him it wasn’t his fault? But the police report said as much, in plain English. He’d been driving like a grown man recently struck by his father. That morning, his father had sprung at him but had been too out of sync with himself to land the punch. “It happens,” the nurse said mildly, as if referring to matters of the toilet. It happens? Desmond repeated to Gemma in the corridor. That someone who’s always loved you, pretty well without pause, suddenly and certainly ends their subscription?
It does happen. You look at a person you’ve known and who has known you—a person with whom you’ve shared an understanding beyond language, a person whose smell comes out of your own pores—and you want to protect your memories with them. Which is to say, you have no mind to add new ones.
It’s a devil’s bargain, being a writer. You’re committed to exposing yourself and your family to the outside world, for money. My work had been known, before Intimacy, as being quite charming, fun—people really turned against me. It got really hot, very nasty. But I have quite thick skin in some ways. And at a certain point, it’s between you and your conscience. You go as close to the line as your conscience will permit in terms of producing material that pleases you. You’re working at the edge of risk, if you’re lucky. The writing can so easily go dead—you want to feel some excitement when you’re in the room, some throbbing in the gristle. You want to hit the wave.
He studied the terrace around them, the satisfied diners, the officious servers in white and black like pretend Italians. Maybe the longing he felt was the longing one felt for God. To reach toward the divine not for pious reasons but for the solace of not being stranded inside yourself for the rest of your life.
oh wow
I was still going to church at the ages of eighteen and nineteen, when I got back, but that was about the time I drifted away. It didn’t happen like a thunderclap. I lived in a strict household, and when my parents thought I was going to Mass, I’d walk down to the milk bar and sit there drinking a malted milk and reading a sporting paper until the hour was up. Then I’d walk home. I marvel at the fact that the religion that I was brought up in—all the talk of God and angels and eternal salvation—never reached the part of me that fiction and poetry reached. To get away from those beliefs of eighteen or nineteen years, I actually did have to be some kind of atheistic, Freudian sort of hedonistic person to start with. But I didn’t want to be a pagan—I didn’t want to run away from Catholicism to the opposite extreme. I learned the whole of A Shropshire Lad in my nineteenth year, and in Housman I found an alternative. I was sort of obsessed with it. The greens of England suggested not a vivid, red-colored, pagan sexuality and not the black-and-white certainties of Catholicism but the cultivation of the poetic emotions, as I would’ve called them. I suppose I had to grow up to learn that the realm, let’s call it, of poetry and fiction and horse racing and music was the utmost realm, that religion was just a man-made concept of a lower order, and that all the satisfaction I wanted from existence, from my own life, lay in the direction of poetry, fiction, music, and horse racing and not in the direction of religion, and that those states of being or feelings or states of awareness that came to me while I was reading poetry or fiction, or while I was watching or reflecting on horse races or listening to music or playing it, pointed in the direction that my life was going.
“She isn’t here yet,” Edmund said, swallowing a mouthful.
“I wonder what she’ll be wearing,” Albert said. He was a trim, dapper young man, who affected a monocle.
“Awfully hot, isn’t it?” Edmund said.
“If she wears anything like last year I’ll simply fall at her feet.”
They looked at each other with displeasure.
“You’re as besotted as I am,” Albert said.
Edmund broke off more cake.
Albert drank his tea, squeezing his eye around his monocle. “Probably won’t be either of us. Almost certainly. Except women do such odd things. That’s all that gives me hope.”
lollll
If Mrs. Simpson surveyed as from a pediment, Mrs. Laird was suggestive of a large ornamental gate. Impressive; attractive even, if you could see the attraction in heavy iron, manipulated by supreme technical skill. Violet was always trying to look past her, to get a proper view of things. She had given up on being properly seen herself. She hoped only to offer glimpses from behind the bars.
heh
“Do you think they’re only flirting?” she said eventually. “Or is it love?” The band had finished and were preparing to start again. The couple were still holding each other, smiling and talking, his head sunk toward hers, hair hanging lankly, sipping at her forehead.
“Oh, one or the other, I expect,” Edmund said, his eyelashes beating, and his Adam’s apple dipping in his throat.
The band started, and the couple whirled away. Violet followed the woman’s red wrap as it licked around the man, like a flame licking at meat.
More people were coming to watch, and Violet was now standing at the edge of the wooden floor. She and Edmund were very near together. They were both aware of it, both watching the couple, not daring to take their eyes off them. Their hearts were fast, as though it were they who were dancing. The red wrap flew about, and the man and woman laughed as they whirled, their hands clamped tight together, disappearing behind other dancers and then appearing again.
Edmund stared blinkingly at the dancers again. He was the happiest he had ever been, and he needed to put an end to it. If the moment were drawn out, if he and Violet were to talk, he knew he would spoil it somehow. If only he could get away! He veered his head and saw Mrs. Simpson a few yards off. His and Violet’s fingertips were still touching. What on earth had made him do it? His great-uncle had been at Waterloo. Perhaps this was the last dreg of heroism left over. For a while longer he kept his fingertips there. Then he fluttered them in temporary, yearning farewell. He hoped Violet would understand that this was what the flutter meant. But oh God, he had not removed them. He had fluttered for nothing.
lmao
Violet knew it was a mistake, letting Edmund Bliss hold her hand. Not holding her hand—only cradling her fingertips. It was most unlike him, yet like him all the same. This was how it would be, she told herself, to be married to him: a vague, tentative, fingertipping sort of love. If she ever married Edmund, it would mean she had become vague and tentative herself. It didn’t bear thinking about. She continued thinking about it as she searched for her mother, stopping to gaze all about her and seeing the couple from the marquee, the man with the wet dark hair and the cap that clapped at the seat of his trousers, and the woman with the red wrap that licked. The cap was placid on his head now, and the wrap lay quiescent. Violet saw that the man and woman were also altered: gentle, talking closely and quietly, him with his hands in his pockets, thumbs stretched on the outside, and her with arms lightly folded, head tilted back. Violet wondered about them again, with that guilty, jealous ache.
Violet did not think of Edmund being carried away. Already this buried hook of pain was what remained of him. She ran and seized the woman, falling on her knees too. The woman’s shouts pulsed into her chest and Violet began to sob, gripping tighter, squeezing her tears against the woman’s neck. She heard someone saying her name and stared up through the strands of the woman’s hair at Albert in his mustard waistcoat, stricken, his monocle trapped and blurred in his eye. The woman shouted again into her chest, wrestling in her grip, and Violet put her mouth to her ear, whispering. “Was it love?” she said. “Please, tell me, please, was it love?”
this always makes me think of the larkin poem, an arundel tomb:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.