No Signposts in the Sea by Vita Sackville-West.

[midnight_birth]

Title: No Signposts in the Sea.
Author: Vita Sackville-West.
Genre: Literature, fiction, travel literature, romance, philosophical fiction, death.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1961.
Summary: Eminent journalist and self-made man, Edmund Carr learns in middle age that he has only a short time to live. Leaving his job on a Fleet Street paper, he takes a passage on a ship to an unspecified destination - for he knows that Laura, a beautiful and intelligent widow whom he secretly admires, will be a fellow-passenger. Exhilarated by the changing colours of the ocean and the distant tropical islands, Edmund strolls the deck with Laura, and his voyage becomes one of awakening. For in these long, purposeless days, Edmund relinquishes the past as he discovers the joys - and the pain - of a love he is determined to conceal.

My rating: 8/10
My review:


♥ Another woman would have enquired further into my intentions if only to show a conventional interest. That was not her habit. She has a disconcerting way of letting a subject drop, or is it because, reserved herself, she respects the reserve of others? I noted once more as I had noted many times before that she managed this feat without conveying any impression of indifference. Intrusive curiosity was not for her, but I knew that had I chosen to enlarge upon my plans, I could with certainty have counted on an attentive listener, bending her grave grey eyes upon me, for she possessed more than any other woman the supreme element of charm: the power of making you believe (alas, how fallaciously!) that you were the only person whose society she desired. It was perhaps for this reason that she drew many confidences she did not invite, as unintentionally as a magnet draws steel filings.

♥ "It is lucky for some people," I say to Laura, "that they can live behind their own faces."

♥ Whether it be the cause or effect of their happy-go-lucky life I cannot tell, but the physical beauty and grace of these islanders appeared to my inexperienced eyes as something out of this world. Civilisation had not grimed the golden skin of these young men, and as for the women in their soft many-coloured draperies they were like flowers walking. Men and women alike, in every poise, every gesture, moved like trained dancers. I recalled the rush-hour in London stations, the hordes in soiled raincoats pouring out of the suburban trains, alighting before the train had stopped, running, dodging to get faster through the crowd, the strained faces, the shabby brief-cases, the pushing to get into the Underground, the queues waiting in the drizzle for the bus-"No more room!" This island was a lyric poem replacing cacophony.

♥ I had never seen Laura as childishly gay, nor had I ever felt so close to her, and I realised for the first time how greatly our apprehension of people depends on the variation of conditions under which we see them, and thought it possible that we may never truly perceive them at all.

♥ Must one always be struck down, after a moment of elation?

♥ Illusion is best. Can it be I, the realist, writing these words? See how kindly the mist transforms an ugly prospect. There upon the shore across the bay at the foot of the mountains rises an ethereal city; those pearly bastions surround a Crusader's castle, and from those tall towers float the black pennants of Saracen defenders. Do not tell me that those bastions are galvanised oil-drums, nor that those towers are factory chimneys emitting a plume of dirty smoke. I prefer not to know.

♥ A sadder and more fastidious philosophy-not, I think, without its elegance-rounds off in finality my earlier discontent, though it may well be that, desiring the unattainable, I have persuaded myself that even the desirable is better left unattained. There is a certain chic in voluntary renunciation. Thus I argue that physical passion is best forgone; left, unfulfilled, to the imagination. For what is the reality? Nothing remains. That animal instinct which brooks no denial, hurling us together in the hours of darkness, that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body-durable not even in memory! There are moments of such seeming perfection when, clinging to one another, we murmur "This we must remember... this we shall remember..." but we never do. Monotonously repetitive, carnal delights all merge, and when the impulse has died away-after a year, five years, ten years?-all recollection becomes impossible.

Grey ashes after the fire.

Perhaps the ideal would consist in spending one perfect night and then never again, so that it stood out in memory as sharp as a Greek temple seen against the sunrise. No blurring of detail, no pain of diminution.

♥ ..I have been unable to regard my fellow-mortals as other than grotesques. What can have come over me? It is as thought I had been suddenly endowed with X-ray eyes, and could see a group of human beings only in terms of their insides; I see the coils of intestines, the sack of the stomach, the bellows of the lungs, the busy heart, the bladder filling and emptying. I become aware of the terrible dependence on the body, on some mean invisible organ altering a man's whole outlook on life. Looking down at the lower deck on stormy days, I reflect that those miserable huddled figures, green in the face and lost to all respect for decency, care neither whether they or their loved ones die. I know perfectly well that under torture I myself should betray my dearest-if I had one.

Men, that look no farther than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I, that have examined the parts of man and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once.

♥ What a medley of noise and colour! Then comes the rush as the gangway is lowered; everyone wants to be first, though there is no conceivable reason for hurry; women hesitate and struggle back, convinced that they have lost their luggage; men enter into argument with the officers in their cool white ducks. The emigrants lugging their poor bundles are directed to a secondary gangway near the stern; they turn this way and that, like panic-stricken cattle. A tall black-bearded man in a red turban clutches a small girl swathed in blue muslin. A Buddhist priest with shaven head and saffron robe falls flat as he stumbles over a rope. A lost child sets up a howl. Is it possible that all this pullulating humanity will ever be sorted out?

It seems like a microcosm of everything that is happening all over the world.

♥ Then comes departure. Loud-speakers warn all visitors to go ashore. Streamers of coloured ticker-tape frailly link the vessel to the land, and human heart to human heart, before they snap as the ship detaches herself slowly from her moorings and moves out towards the open upon the renewal of her voyage. Wave goodbye! Who knows how many of you will ever meet again?

Through the rainbow of gay motley paper I discern a woman, left behind, weeping.

♥ Besides, I do not want to become involved in discussion. I observe with amusement how totally the concerns of the world, which once absorbed me to the exclusion of all else except an occasional relaxation with poetry or music, have lost interest for me even to the extent of a bored distaste. Doubtless some instinct impels me gluttonously to cram these the last weeks of my life with the gentler things I never had time for, releasing from suppressed inclination which in fact was always latent.

♥ Power. The desire to lead, the wish to command. Was I being honest in telling myself that I was indifferent to honours and recognition, inspired solely by the noble purpose of devoting my talents to my country and the world? Of course I was not being honest. I liked being Edmund Carr, with a European reputation, and across the Atlantic too. Is there anything to be ashamed of in that? Even in the days of the cave, some men must have aspired to authority in the tribe. Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.

♥ I see how much I passed by on my swagger road. Dismissive as a Pharisee, I regarded as moonlings all those whose life was lived on a less practical plane. Protests about damage to "natural beauty" froze me with contempt, for I believed in progress and could spare no regrets for a lake dammed into hydraulic use for the benefit of an industrial city in the Midlands. And so it was for all things. A hard materialism was my creed, accepted as a law of progress; any ascription of disinterested motives aroused not only my suspicion but my scorn.

And now see how I stand, as sentimental and sensitive as any old maid doing water-colours of sunsets! I once flattered myself that I was an adult man; I now perceive that I am gloriously and adolescently silly. A new Clovis, loving what I have despised, and suffering from calf-love into the bargain, I want my fill of beauty before I go. Geographically I do not care and scarcely know where I am. There are no signposts in the sea.

♥ What pleasure we derive from the humble workers going about their tasks: a string of brown naked fishermen dragging their nets ashore, a man ploughing with oxen, a woman walking with a pitcher on her head. Her arm on its upward curve provides the handle of the pitcher. For us, speeding by, they pass in a flash of grace, while for them life goes on day after day in unconsciousness and monotony. Should we return a year hence, we should find them still poised as though time had not moved an hour.

♥ The young moon lies on her back tonight as is her habit in the tropics, and as, I think, is suitable if not seemly for a virgin. Not a star but might not shoot down and accept the invitation to become her lover. When all my fellow-passengers have finally dispersed to bed, I creep up again to the deserted deck and slip into the swimming pool and float, no longer what people believe me to be, a middle-aged journalist taking a holiday on an ocean-going liner, but a liberated being, bathed in mythological waters, an Endymion young and strong, with a god for his father and a vision of the world inspired from Olympus. All weight is lifted from my limbs; I am one with the night; I understand the meaning of pantheism. How my friends would laugh if they knew I had come to this! To have discarded, as I believe, all usual frailties, to have become incapable of envy, ambition, malice, the desire to score off my neighbour, to enjoy this purification even as I enjoy the clean voluptuousness of the warm breeze on my skin and the cool support of the water. Thus, I imagine, must the pious feel cleansed on leaving the confessional after the solemnity of absolution.

♥ Sometimes Laura and I lean over the taffrail, and that is happiness. It may be by daylight, looking at the sea, rippled with little white ponies, or with no ripples at all but only the lazy satin of blue, marbled at the edge where the passage of our ship has disturbed it. Or it may be at night, when the sky surely seems blacker than ever at home and the stars more golden. I recall a phrase from the diary of a half-literate soldier, "The stars seemed little cuts in the black cover, through which a bright beyond was seen." Sometimes these untaught scribblers have a way of putting things.

♥ What I like best are the stern cliffs, with ranges of mountain soaring behind them, full of possibilities, peaks to be scaled only by the most daring. What plants of the high altitude grow unravished amongst their crags and valleys? So do I let my imagination play over the recesses of Laura's character, so austere in the foreground but nurturing what treasures of tenderness, like delicate flowers, for the discovery of the venturesome.

♥ The albatross, it appears, follows a ship only to a certain latitude and then turns back; it knows how far its should go and no further. How wise is the albatross! We might all take a lesson from him, knowing the latitude we can permit ourselves. Thus, and no further, can I follow Laura.

♥ Our wake closes up and we might never have been.

♥ Does one like islands because one unconsciously appropriates them, a small manageable domain in a large unmanageable world? I cannot tell why it should give me such a queer sensation to reflect that that island has always been there (unless indeed it be no more than the work of the patient coral) and will be there still, should I return to find it waiting for me. It is the same sensation as I have experienced in looking at a photograph of, say, some river valley of innermost China, and seen a boulder, and thought that if I could find myself transported to that spot I could touch the reality of that particular piece of rock... It is there. For me. I could sit on that very boulder. I explain myself badly, and it is not a sensation I could expect anyone save Laura to understand, but of such incommunicable quirks is the private mind made up.

♥ If we have seen a skiff sailing close inshore, I follow the fisherman as he beaches his craft in the little cove and gives a cry like a sea-bird to announce his coming. His woman meets him; they are young, and their skins of a golden-brown; she takes his catch from him. In their plaited hut there is nothing but health and love.

One night we passed two islands, steeply humped against faint reflected moonlight; and on each of them, high up, shone a steady yellow gleam.

"Not lighthouses," I said to Laura, "Villages."

We gazed, as the ship slid by and the humps receded into the darkness and even the lights were obscured by the shoulder of a hill, never to be seen by us again. So peaceful and secret; so self-contained.

One of the ship's officers joined us, off duty.

"Yes," he said, following our gaze. "One of them is a leper colony and the other a penal settlement."

God, is there no escape from suffering and sin?

♥ "Crème de menthe," says Laura.

"Jade," I say.

"Emerald," says Laura. "Jade is too opaque."

"Vicious viridian," I say, not to be outdone.

"You always did lose yourself in the pleasure of words, Edmund. Say green as jealousy and be done with it."

"I have never know the meaning of jealousy."

♥ I would never have believed in the simple bliss of being, day after day, at sea. Our ports of call are few, and when they do occur I resent them. I should like this empty existence to be prolonged beyond calculation. In the ship's library stands a large globe whose function so far as I am concerned is to reveal the proportion of ocean to the land-masses of the troubled world; the Pacific alone dwarfs all the continents put together. Blue, the colour of peace. And then I like all the small noises of a ship: the faint creaking, as of the saddle-leather to a horseman riding across turf, the slap of a rope, the hiss of sudden spray. I have been exhilarated by two days of storm, but above all I love these long purposeless days in which I shed all that I have ever been.

♥ Let me pity others, myself not pitied be.

♥ ..I felt no fear. Vexed I was, and thought what a pity, but my frame of mind took chiefly the form of surprise at our normal optimism in keeping the image of Death away. That it would come we knew, but how or when seemed inapplicable to ourselves. Our personal death appeared safely fat off. Now here was I, not contemplating death by accident in times of peace or by violence in war when even the soldier believes that not he but the next man will be hit, but death, my own death, impending, immediate, through some mere failure of function in the body. One has to be practical.

♥ I went home marvelling at how little even good friends know of what is really passing in each other's minds.

♥ For one thing I am grateful: I shall bring no grief to anyone by my passing. My friends would probably set me down as a hard man, but I was always haunted on behalf of others by the thought of leaping danger and felt their troubles as keenly as I could have felt my own. Little they knew it. I had a morbid conception of life as a path one travelled complacently, with slight ups and downs perhaps, but on the whole smooth and predictable, and then suddenly opening a chasm not easy to bridge. It might be some vicissitude of fortune, it might be personal disaster, a crippling accident or the loss of the beloved; whatever it was, it came unannounced and must be surmounted with some fund of courage one did not know one possessed. I used to look at people whom I knew to have been struck by some such calamity, and wonder what private anguish they had suffered and how they could continue apparently unchanged. The craziest ideas came to me: that a friend from whom I had just parted would walk into a lift shaft when the lift was not there, or open his front door to find the fatal telegram lying on the mat. In the stolid and unimaginative person I knew myself to be, this abnormality struck me as peculiar in the extreme. I wonder now whether my own destiny cast a shadow of prescience ahead of my confident steps? or are we perhaps none of us as sane as we like to imagine?

♥ "What a pity," I said to Laura, "that we should live on such a well-mapped planet. Don't you envy the early explorers who never knew what might be round the next corner? Fancy coming suddenly on the Grand Canyon when you had no idea of its existence."

"My dear Edmund, I should never have taken you for a romantic."

"No? Well, perhaps you are right. But I am taking a holiday, you see, when I find a lot of queer fish rising to the surface from the bottom of one's mind. One has leisure to make up for lost time. I begin to suspect that it is possible to concentrate too greatly on the mundane side of life."

♥ "Perhaps I am inconsistent-such a luxury, sometimes, to allow oneself a riot of inconsistency. I came on this trip for that express purpose. I am discovering that one of our many problems is the almost schizophrenic rift between our desire for civilisation and our desire for what Miss Corcoran would call the Return to Nature. There is a desert-islander in all of us, mostly unavowed. Until recently I never suspected his existence in myself."

"Perhaps the artists and the contemplatives alone have resolved that problem. Yet without civilisation, Edmund, you would have progressed no further than cave paintings or tom-toms. No Rembrandt, no Beethoven, no St. Mark's in Venice. No Venice."

"No Sheffield either, no Chicago with its slaughter-houses."

"But your islander made his knives, or arrows, as best he could; and as for the slaughter-houses of Chicago, do you really imagine that primitive man was any less cruel, driving herds of bison over the cliffs of the Vézère to smash themselves for easy capture on the rocks below? No, Edmund. I am afraid that man today is merely an extension of what man always was, only more complicated. A logical progression, that's all."

♥ There are no tombstones in the sea.

♥ For the rest, there are the inevitable missionaries of both sexes, bent on interfering with the beliefs of other people. I make an exception for one jolly old French priest who took me aside and with a wink showed me a Simenon disguised between the covers of an ostensible breviary. "One cannot be pious all the time-eh?"

♥ Of course people come and go; we discard some, and acquire others. I think of those who have left us, returning to their jobs with no prospect of leave for another two years, three years, four years, and I watch the new-comers, wondering what turn of destiny has moved them on to another spot of the earth's surface, which they will find exactly the same as the one they have quitted. The same bungalow, the same work for the men, the same housekeeping for the women, the same investigation of the new neighbours, the same parties, the same factions, the same surreptitious back-biting. There will be a club-house, with a tennis-court, and ice chinking in a gin-and-tonic at sunset.

♥ The little shark was taking a long time to die; its movements became feebler, but still the urge to live was potent, in the twitching of the tail and the enfeebled opening and shutting of the gills. A convulsive movement every now and again showed that there was still determination in the creature, a reluctance to relinquish life, a desperate hope of regaining its element. Now, in its death-throes, it lay as the butt of its fellows of the same creation. After all, it was by pure chance that any of us had been born human, not spawned as sharks. We had no choice.

♥ "Because I liked that sort of life, and wasn't really so keen on killing things, I tried doing it with a camera instead of a rifle, but then I found one's chaps, one's shikars and porters, hadn't the same respect for you if you just photographed things instead of shooting them dead. Funny, isn't it," he said as though it had occurred to him for the first time, "why people should always wish to destroy? I suppose it's an instinct we can't get away from, a sort of primitive instinct. One has to kill, in order to live. Everything in Nature kills something else in Nature in order to survive. So I suppose one has to accept it, for better or worse."

♥ "I envy anybody who can express themselves on paper. Words blow away and are lost. Printed, they are preserved."

"More's the pity, very often."

♥ "I take it that any creative work, as opposed to my own hack effort, must be intensely private, not to be mentioned, least of all discussed. No doubt the actual process is comparable. One lives in a little world of one's own, and nothing else seems to matter. The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts. To see the pages piling up, and to live in the persuasion that one is doing something worth while. Because of course one must hold on to that conviction, or one wouldn't go on. Luckily a writer's powers of self-delusion are limitless, and oh the smugness of feeling that one has done a good day's work!"

"I see what you mean about the pages piling up-the pattern working out."

"It is rather like building a house," I said, getting carried a way. "Every separate word is another brick laid into place, mortared to its fellows, and gradually you see the wall beginning to rise, and you know that the rooms inside will take their shape as you intended-you feel godlike, masterful. No one can interfere or restrain; for better or worse, it is entirely your own creation."

"You said, 'While it lasts!'"

"Ah, it is heavenly while it lasts. A sort of intoxication. But there is all the difference between the conception and the completion. So much floats through your mind as you write, that never gets put down on paper, but somehow you are persuaded that it must convey its pressure to the reader. Perhaps one credits him with more perspicacity than he possesses. Or with more willingness to take trouble. The average reader skims; he does not pause to observe what you, Laura, rightly called the pattern. He does not weigh, as the author has weighed, the value of each word; he does not stop to notice in passing the subtlety of small touches by which you have endeavoured to build up your structure. Indeed one might say that it takes a writer to appreciate another writer, one craftsman appreciating the technical skill of another craftsman. But above all there is this question of seeing."

"Seeing?"

"I can't think of a better word. It sounds less pretentious than vision, yet that is what it amounts to. You see suddenly, as in a finished picture, the entire shape and design of what you intended to do. I don't say that you ever carry it out to your satisfaction, but for one brief moment of illumination you have apprehended the unity of what you meant. That is the moment of truth, of exaltation-one of the few moments in life worth living. No matter if it lasts only ten minutes while you are soaking in a hot bath. Any artist, whether he be a writer, above all a poet, or a painter, sculptor, musician, architect, would understand what I was trying to say. It might also, I daresay, be comparable to the religious experience of the music. I say that without any intention of blasphemy, Laura, please believe me. I know you think me a hard-boiled materialist; I can't help that. You must blame yourself, and perhaps blame also this enchanted ship, if I let myself go as I would never have done when I had the pleasure and honour of sitting next to you at London dinner-parties."

♥ Sometimes I cone upon her traces, a cigarette case, a scarf left trailing upon a chair. For the competent woman I divine her to be, she is curiously careless of her possessions, but then none so lovable as those who are not all of a piece. These little surprises of inconsistency are endearing enough to mere affection; how much more so when one is in love!

The Colonel and I spend quite a lot of time retrieving her belongings.

♥ Her hands are beautiful; smooth, strong, and shapely; there is something about them which twists my very entrails. I should like to take one and, turning it over, examine the back, the palm, the mysterious lines which may or may not have such significance. Does her head govern her heart? I do not know enough about this quackery. I know only that my own life-line breaks off in a very suggestive way, as a kind friend once pointed out to me. I was sceptical at the time, but am less sceptical now and should not like to discover a similar break in Laura's-unless it meant that she and I were to die together. Philemon and Baucis, that most beautiful legend of married love. Those two old people, living in their cottage in Phrygia, visited suddenly by two gods, given a wish by the gods in return for their hospitality, chose to die at the same hour, that one of them should not have the sorrow of following the other one into the grave. Lucky Philemon and Baucis! They lived, they loved, and they died, together.

Laura and I shall neither live, nor love, nor die, together.

We might, though. Shipwreck? Most unlikely. How superstitious one is, all the same. One does not believe, and yet one half believes, even as one does not believe in prayer yet one prays in moments of fear, childishly. "Oh, please, God..."

♥ Everything is a miracle, if you look at it that way. Life itself, and the origin of life. What do we know about the origin of the cell, mysteriously bursting out in an unspecified moment of time from the inorganic into the organic? What made the thing suddenly start to grow, and turn itself into something so fundamentally different from anything (so far as we know) that had ever existed before? When did matter become life? When did life, as differentiated from matter, become mind? When, and how, did thought arise? When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? the need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand?

A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in undecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied by the consummate Mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.

♥ "Let's go on-that is, if you're not tired."

"How could I be tired? This evening will never happen again."

♥ "Don't you find the Colonel rather a bore?"

"Colonel Dalrymple? No, I think he's very nice. A simple soul. And so good-looking."

"What makes you think him a simple soul?"

"Well, obviously. And so dependable. One could rely on him in a shipwreck."

"Shipwrecks occur so seldom in a life-time. For ordinary purposes I prefer people to be amusing."

♥ I know she has a kind heart, for when I once asked her what quality she most esteemed, she replied without hesitation "Compassion."

She can keep her compassion for those not too proud to accept it.

♥ I must not allow myself to become sour. I must not say sarcastic things about that man, that healthy animal. I had thought of my love as a selfless thing, beautiful as a mountain and as useless; any small meanness would damage its purity. Let me preserve it intact to the last.

♥ Most persons, I thought, sleep with their mouth open, so wide as to invite you to drop a bun into it; many, oh worst of human degradations, snore. Now I know better, for I have come upon Laura asleep. Her book had fallen from her hand; she lay relaxed, in an attitude of loose grace and innocence. All the strength of her usual reserve had ebbed away from her; her defenses gone. I had revelation of her vulnerability as though like an eavesdropper I had spied upon her, alone and in tears. It was not only the softness of her limbs that thus moved me, but the intimation of the private being within the self-sufficient image. This was a woman I was looking at, not a woman of the world.

And as I looked down upon her, my heart overflowing, I lost myself in the dangerous speculation of the wealth she could give to the one she loved, the faithfulness, the solicitude, the gaiety, the comradeship, the tenderness, the passion. A Laura that I should never be allowed to know. Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing.... All that I can carry away is the recollection of that brief moment when I perceived her-yes, perceived is the right word-as I might have gazed upon her in the starlight as she lay sleeping in my arms.

♥ If I were that way inclined, which I am not, I can imagine falling in love with him myself. How strange a twist, that such a notion should even cross my mind!

I must be going mad.

I must stop it; stop it; stop it.

♥ So I continue, until in imagination I have the satisfaction of making her cry.

And then I meet her in the morning, and she greets me with her usual friendliness, and I recover my sanity and feel like a Judas, remembering the venomous things I have said to her, of which she is so innocently unaware.

♥ Now it seems that even the last frailty of an immaculate love must suffer tarnish.

♥ ..Laura remarked that it was surprising how many people managed to make a success of so difficult an undertaking as marriage.

"Most people," I said, "would put it the other way round."

"I wasn't thinking," she said, "of a sustained ecstasy throughout the years. But I do think it surprising that any union should survive the irritation of two separate personalities impinging upon one another. One or the other is usually top dog, and that must always be hard for the under dog to accept."

"Some women like it-and the under dog is the woman, in ninety-five cases out of a hundred."

"But consider the women who don't like it," she said, looking at me very gravely. "Should it not be possible for a man and a woman to share their lives on level terms, as two men might, or two women? Each going their own way, and coming together again, enriched by their differing experiences? ..I was trying to analyse out loud what had made me so fiercely independent now. You see, I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue. I resent it as much for other people as I should for myself. It seems to me a degradation of individual dignity."

"You see people very much as individuals, I think. I have noticed that."

"I value personal liberty for everybody as much as you can value liberty for-shall I say the Press?"

.."Tell me you recipe for a workable marriage."

She held up her hand and began ticking off the points.

"Mutual respect. Independence, as I have said, both as regards friends and movement. Separate bedrooms-no bedroom squalor. You know how a chance remark may stick and influence one's whole outlook? Once, when I was a young girl, I heard someone define it as hair-combings floating in a basin of soapy water and I've never forgotten. Separate sitting-rooms-if the house is large enough. Separate finances. I've come to the end of my fingers."

"And what about community of interests?"

"Nice, but not essential. What is essential, is the same sense of values."

"Meaning that one must be shocked, or other3wise, by the same things?"

"Exactly. And amused by the same things too."

"And what about fidelity? Is the liberty of the spirit to extend to the liberty of the body?"

She hesitated.

"I can't prescribe. I would say it must depend on the other person. I feel sure that one should avoid giving pain; it is an elementary part of the bargain of marriage. After all, I did live up to that principle in a minor way; I never offended Tommy's conventional ideas because I knew it would hurt him, and short of breaking away altogether I knew that no compromise was possible."

..She looked a little embarrassed.

"I was thinking of the sort of people we both know," she said. "I think perhaps different laws may apply for... for people living as you describe. I think perhaps their acceptance is simpler than ours. The man is the wage-earner, the woman stays at home to cook, and mind the children. They are bound together by a necessity they never dream of questioning."

"H'm. Very well, we will continue to consider only the well-to-do. In all this discussion there is one element you have entirely left out: love."

"Ah, love!" she said, a deeper note coming into her voice. I seemed to sink an octave. "Well, if you want to know what I think about that I will tell you. He was a foolish cynic who said that great love occurred only two or three times in a century. There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years from the small acorn of passion into a great rooted tree. Surviving all vicissitudes, and rich with its manifold branches, every leaf holding its own significance. Is there not some passage in Homer about such a love being a joy to the people concerned and a source of irritation to their friends?"

"Something like that, but you have improved upon Homer. He was innocent of irony. For him, it was a pleasure to their friends. Your psychology is subtler than his."

"I still maintain," she said, "that such a love can be achieved only by the practice of mutual respect and personal liberty. Look, I will show you something I have never shown anyone else. I read it somewhere once, I can't remember where, and copied it out and have got into the habit of using it as a book-marker. Read it."

I read:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness
And let the winds of heaven dance between you.

Sing and dance together and be joyous and let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Stand together, yet not too near together;
For the pillars of the temple stand apart
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

♥ "How long could you have kept it up?"

She shrugged.

"I have often wondered. As one grows older and becomes more aware, one also becomes less inclined for self-immolation."

♥ They never seem to tire of this game; children can bear any amount of repetition, and any variation is instantly resented.

♥ Selfishly, I am always aware of a pang when I hear people making plans for a future I shall not see.

How small-minded one is.

♥ "How much I hate, and how little I understand, pain and frustration of that sort. Of any sort, indeed. It seems to me on a par with evil-ugly, unnecessary, cruel."

"That dear old priest over there would tell you that God sent it as a trial for our benefit. God is love, God is just, God is merciful. Can you see any logical justification for such beliefs? Any evidence to support them? All the evidence goes against them. Loving kindness, justice, and mercy! Good God! Why does one say Good God! as an exclamation? One might equally say Bad God, or Indifferent God, or just merely God, or indeed Od, which would perhaps be the best form of address to our incomprehensible deity."

♥ Waking in the morning, I come slowly to my senses with the dim awareness of something unpleasant hanging over me, as on days when one has some tedious duty to perform, and then remembrance returns. "Of course. I am due to die."

It is a curious feeling. I wonder sometimes whether all those who wait upon the shore of death accept the fact with such indifference as I? Death, it has been said, (though not, I think, by Francis Bacon) "arrives graciously only to those who sit in darkness, or lie heavily burthened with grief and irons; to the poor Christian that sits bound in the galley; to despairful windows, pensive prisoners, and deposed kings; to them whose fortune runs back and whose spirits mutiny-with such Death is a redeemer, and the grave a place for retiredness and rest."

♥ From the look she gave me, I fear I may have given myself away.

That is the last thing I want to do. When one has nothing to hope for, it is unpardonable selfishness to trouble the peace of other people, and if I truly loved Laura according to my ideals my last legacy to her would be a wish for her happiness. I fall short. I try so hard to be reasonable, scoffing at my own imaginings, telling myself that there is nothing in it, not even the ghost of a flirtation-Laura is no flirt-but then I do know that she finds the man attractive and he for his part indubitably finds her very attractive indeed. The truth is, that I wanted her to myself for the short time left to me, and I hate him for spoiling that last poor boon I had asked of life. I suppose it is their insouciant health that I envy, and their expectation of many years to come; we are not competing on a fair basis. And what riles me in particular is the knowledge that there is nothing whatsoever in common between them; Laura would find the Colonel every whit as domineeringly male as Tommy Drysdale. She is quite sensible enough probably to see it already. Therefore, I argue miserably, that what draws them together is a purely animal accord, needing no complement of speech; a force of Nature.

What will it matter to me, after I am gone?

♥ She opened it, and a swirl of hot air from outside rushed in. At once the mirror became misty with condensation, and I saw Laura and myself in it, as ghostly as the circumstances of our relationship. Another instant, and great tears would have started to trickle down.

♥ "So you see I have nothing to complain of. Fate has been very kind to me."

"Um. People largely make their own Fate."

♥ Some of the women with whom I had transitory affairs insisted on coming to see where and how I lived and usually wanted to make me "more comfortable." They meant well, little knowing how much I resented interference and how little I relished being managed.

I begin to wonder now what transformation Laura would have worked, and to imagine what it would have been like to return to her of an evening, gently welcomed, never questioned, subtly cherished. I know without her telling me that she would have respected my liberty even as I should have respected hers. Such dreams beguile many an hour, until I build up so detailed a picture of an existence intolerable in its sweetness that it almost takes the place of something which had never been and in this world could never be...

♥ Sometimes the temptation comes over me to tell her the whole truth. What harm could it do? She would know that I could ask nothing of her and that within a very short time she would be relieved of a presence which might have become irksome to her. But no: I refuse, even for a few days, to become a living reproach. She could no longer live on easy terms with a man whom she knew to be dying, a man who hopelessly loved her. This temptation should never come near me; I am appalled at my own weakness. I can turn to no outward help; my silence depends on my own strength, and at moments I feel that I have none.

I must leave her to others.

♥ These varying uncontrollable moods so greatly afflicting me are like the sea which I have grown to love. On calm blue days when we glide, our wake closing up behind us, it seems that nothing could disturb its sunny serenity. Even the great green scoops of wave created by our passing have their sculptural beauty, and break down from their ridges into a renewed tranquillity. (Strange, that anything so fluid should at the same time contrive to be so marmoreal.) Little rainbows fly from their crests. Happy dolphins, like jokes, cleave the surface. How ingenuous of Dionysus, when harassed by pirates, to think of metamorphosising them into dolphins. The whole ocean laughs; I laugh with it.

Then come mysterious currents which rock the ship from below without much visible convulsion. Where do they come from, these secret arteries of the sea, tropical or polar? They are as inexplicable to me as the emotions which rock my own heart. I do not let them appear on the surface but am terribly aware of them beneath. Sometimes, churned by a gale, the waters grow angry and the blue expanse turns black and white, tossing us remorselessly, the waves crashing with a sound as of breaking biscuits, the rain hissing as it obliterates all vision, and again I draw the parallel between the elements and the surprising violence I have discovered in myself.

♥ How dare she tease me thus? No other woman ever dared to make fun of me in this light-hearted way. The other women always attempted to "understand" me, and I hate being "understood." Laura takes a short-cut towards understanding me without saying so.

♥ But anyhow, how can I know what sort of a person I really am? Who does know? Who ever knows about himself?

Oh Laura, Laura, what a perfect friend and playfellow for me! How happy you make me! How miserable, how desperate! My perfect love, my perfect woman. My missed opportunity. My Laura, my Laura. No, not my Laura. Never to be my Laura. Never, never, never...

♥ Do I deceive myself into thinking that her manner has imperceptibly changed? Wishes are great persuaders.

♥ This way madness lies. Let me rather think of her as good and kind, sweetness itself, gay and serious by turns, brave-I am sure she is brave-generous in her giving. Ah, if she loved, how good she would be, in sickness or distress.

♥ He assured me that these twinges would neither incapacitate me nor cause me more than a momentary wince, but they would indicate that the disease was reaching some vital part and I must be prepared for the worst. I cannot regard it as the worst; the worst was when I realised that I could never, however wildly, however hopelessly, aspire to Laura. That, and not the loss of life, was the supreme renunciation. I daresay that in the goodness of her heart she might have yielded to me out of pity; it was not upon those terms that I wanted her. And now, when she seems to soften towards me, the prohibition is even harder to bear.

What was it she said? That if she found herself stricken-and I think she meant under sentence of death-she would try to accept the verdict without rebellion. And so, at times, I do.

It is not for nothing that the Samurai have chosen for their truest symbol the fragile cherry blossom. Like a petal dropping in the morning sunlight and floating serenely to earth, so must the fearless detach himself from life, silent and inwardly unafraid.

♥ I have not much time left.

I cannot compare her to the wild bird one seeks to tame, for the simile would be inappropriate: it is not I who essay to entice her, but rather she who with inducement walks round me in alternatively narrowing and widening circles. Yet the image is recurrent in my mind.

Like as a dove the proffered corn refuseth,
Yet ever nearer to the hand approacheth,
So doth my love...

I cannot remember how it goes on, and alas I have no corn to proffer.

♥ "And then there was the night of the electric storm, when we watched it from my balcony, only that was different: more exciting and somehow more dangerous. Of course I knew it wasn't really dangerous at all.

Oh Laura! didn't you?

"I feel flattered," I said as lightly as I could, "that two of the peaks of your enjoyment should have been moments you shared with me."

"And now we shall go back," she said, "and pick up our lives where we dropped them."

♥ "I told you, didn't I, that I liked being alone? Almost a physical necessity. But there is a great difference between solitude and loneliness. One is weak, Edmund. I have come to believe that even the strongest, the most self-sufficient, need one other person in their lives from whom nothing is concealed, neither the most important things nor the most trivial. Someone with whom at the end of the day one can sit over the fire and talk or be silent as the fancy moves one."

"Supposing one lost that person?"

"Hostages to Fortune? Well, I've been through it, so I know. I had that kind of relationship with the friend I was telling you about. And yet I don't know. Perhaps a relationship between two women must always be incomplete-unless, I suppose, they have Lesbian inclinations which I don't happen to share. Then, or so I have been given to understand, the concord may approach perfection. You see, there is a kind of free-masonry between women-and no doubt between men also-which makes up for the more elemental excitement of the sex-war. Also, women have many petty interests in common, which would bore a man. Clothes, shops!" she said with a smile.

I love her when she suddenly smiles, serious one moment and amused the next.

"There must always be a snag, though," she went on. "I knew two women, Lesbians, who lived for years together in a harmony more idyllic than the majority of marriages. One of them used to confide in me, I can't think why, except that she saw I was interested. And I was interested; it was an aspect of love I had never come across. You look sceptical, but I assure you that it was love, deep, sincere, and in its way beautiful."

"What was the snag, then?"

"Jealousy. You say you don't know the meaning of the word. These two knew it, in all its cruellest refinements, especially the one who made a confidante of me; she was the more masculine of the two. You see, if a man is jealous of a woman, he at least meets his rival on level ground, man to man; but if a woman is jealous of a woman, she enters into an unfair competition with the other sex; she is always afraid that the natural thing will conquer in the end. In this case the other woman, Lucy, the feminine one, was highly attractive to men, and although I don't believe she ever responded there was always the danger that she might some day do so. I can't tell you what torments my poor friend went through. She would seize upon every tiny circumstance and construe it according to her suspicions. She hated herself for it, for at heart she was really rather a noble creature, but that's the devil of jealousy: it transforms people. Tommy was jealous of me-possessive-but that was simple and straightforward and never worried me; it hadn't got this cruel twist in it. I used to try and reassure that wretched woman, who was going just the right way to ruin their two lives, but although she would wring her hands and cry, "I know! I know all that," I could no more convince her than I could argue that iron stanchion into walking about. The worst of it was that people fed her mistrust, whether out of malice or sheer unawareness I never could make out. They could say that this man or that appeared to have taken a great fancy to Lucy: did she think there was anything in it? Then there would be another terrible scene. I really thought that she would end by wearing Lucy down and driving her into marriage with some quiet kind man in self-defence, and possibly a suicide thrown in, but the rest of the story is quite tame, and so far as I know they are peacefully ageing together and floating into calm waters."

"A cautionary tale. What an expenditure of energy, and all for nothing."

"If I loved," said Laura, looking at me with a severity that was almost a challenge, "I should be utterly faithful, and I should presume the same fidelity in the other person. In small things as well as great, unquestioning."

"And if you found out... anything you resented?"

"I should pack up and go."

♥ "You wouldn't tell me a lie?"

Oh Laura, if only you knew how many lies I have told you.

"I should hate to have to tell you a lie." That, at any rate, is true.

♥ It is true that he has a way of coming out with odd little bits of information. I suppose that that is partly what renders him attractive in Laura's eyes. For the hundredth time I wish that I could dislike the man I hate.

..I hate him for the sheer vulgarity of my suspicions, quite as much as I hate myself.

♥ She asks me about my childhood, and in a sense I find it rather soothing to talk about the past when one has so little future. Thus in extreme old age do people revert to forgotten scenes with a vividness of memory that has no counterpart in their present. What does it matter if today is Wednesday or Thursday, when one can recall the glow of building a snow-man and sticking a pipe into his mouth? Our cottage door had a latch you lifted by pulling a shoe-string; to this day I can hear the familiar click.

♥ "Beginning with a great liking, that deepened day by day, but remained placid and platonic, until..."

"Yes? Until?"

"Until one realised that one began to look round for the... the person when he wasn't there; felt incomplete in his absence; expanded when he came; looked for little signs of his sympathy; was easily happy, and as easily cast down and tremulous; lived in bewilderment; did not put two and two together, until one suddenly said to oneself, 'What is this? What does it mean?'"

"And then?"

"Then one knows-blindingly. It takes some courage to face; one's submission is so appalling, so improbable. One had thought oneself so safe, and there one is, lying on the ground with a lion standing over one. And then everything becomes invested with an immense significance-what is that drug that heightens every sense?"

"Mescalin."

"With one part of oneself one knows that it doesn't make sense-why should one single out one person rather than another? Reasonably one knows that he is neither the handsomest nor the cleverest nor the most faultless in the world, but reason has become a foreign language one does not understand. All the novelists that ever wrote have failed to explain what brings about this strange... electricity that sparks; what sets it off in the first instance; they describe the effects but not the cause. Love, fondness, devotion, one can comprehend; but not this extraordinary nature of in love-ness; you see that I separate them, though the one may contain the other, and love may outlast in love. One hopes it will; sometimes one knows it will. But there's plenty of time to think about that later; it seems very homespun compared with the incandescent flame. For the time being, nothing matters but the one thing. Parceque cétait lui; parceque c'était moi."

She was flushed; her eloquence seemed to be dictated by something outside herself.

"One's life becomes like this ship, all lit up in the midst of the darkness. Think how beautiful she must look, to watchers on the shore-the rows of lights, the great archlights illuminating her white sides. No, that is too abstract, for love is compounded of many elements; there is the blaze of light, but there is also the detail, the infinite tenderness of discovery. A tone of the voice, a turn of the head, a gesture of the hand, all hitherto unremarked but now how revealing! And to observe from afar, unseen oneself, and to say in one's heart, 'I love you, darling!'"

"Are you quite sure," I said as gently as I could, "that you are not confusing love with physical attraction? It can be very misleading, you know-a sort of masquerading proxy, a Doppel-gänger."

"Do you not think that by a certain age and with a certain amount of experience one may become capable of distinguishing? I have not been speaking of calf-love. I have been speaking of an astonishing thing which comes upon one in later life, when all such thoughts had been put away as an impossibility, and one believed rather sadly that fulfilment was nowhere to be found in this world. One is well aware of all the flickering deceptions-after all, one is made of flesh and blood, and there will have been incidents over the years, like your passing fancies-oh yes, the flesh can be a very convincing cheat. I know that. One has even known a tremor of it, ridiculously, meeting the eyes of a stranger across a restaurant. But when one has had time for reflection, and even in one's intervals of sanity time enough for a close examination-a study of the person, I mean, his nature, character, climate of mind and so on-when you have discovered him to be sensitive and delicate of spirit, strong of mind but fastidious and imaginative, a sort of poète manqué-don't you agree that one can be sure, sure, sure?"