"What's the point of it?"

"It has no point."

"Oh Arnold, Arnold--"What?"

"Nothing. I'll read your books. I'll start to like them. Everything will be different."

"Have you got softening of the brain?"

"Good-bye, goodbye--I returned to the sitting-room and I picked up the Shakespeares from the floor and I sat down in the armchair and I said to her in my heart, I will suffer, you will not. We will do each other no harm. You will cause me pain, it cannot be otherwise. But I shall cause you none. And I will feed upon my pain like one who feeds on kisses. (Oh God.) I am simply happy that you exist, happy in the absolute that is you, proud to live with you in the same city, in the same century, to see you occasionally, seldom...

The telephone rang. I reached it. This time it was Julian.

"Oh Bradley, hello, it's me."

I made some sort of sound.

"Bradley--sorry--it's me--you know, Julian Baffin."

I said, "Hold on a minute, would you?" I covered the mouthpiece and closed my eyes tightly, groped for a chair, panting, trying to control my breath. In a few moments I said, coughing a little to disguise the tremor, "Sorry. The kettle was just boiling."

"I'm so sorry to bother you, Bradley. I promise I won't become a pest, always ringing up and coming round."

"Not at all."

"I just wondered if I could pick up my Hamlet whenever you've finished with it."

"Certainly."

"But there's no hurry at all--any time in the next fortnight would do. I'm not working on that at the moment. And there's one or two more questions I've thought of. If you like I could send them by post, and you could post me the book. I don't want to interrupt your work."

"In the next--fortnight--"Or month. I may be going to the country actually. My school has still got the measles."

"Perhaps you could drop in some time next week," I said.

"Fine. How about Thursday morning about ten?"

"Yes. That's--fine."

"Thank you so much. I won't keep you. I know you're so busy. Good-bye, Bradley, and thanks."

"Wait a minute," I said.

There was silence.

"Julian," I said, "are you free this evening?"

The restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower revolves very slowly. Slow as a dial hand. Majestic trope of lion-blunting time.

How swiftly did it move that night while London crept behind the beloved head? Was it quite immobile, made still by thought, a mere fantasy of motion in a world beyond duration? Or was it spinning like a top, whirling away into invisibility, and pinning me against the outer wall, kitten-limbed and crucified by centrifugal force?

Concerning absence love has always been eloquent. The subject admits of an explicit melancholy, though doubtless there are certain pains which cannot be fully rendered. But has it ever sufficiently hymned presence? Can it do so? The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.

To speak more crudely, what I experienced that evening on the Post Office Tower was a kind of blinding joy. It was as if stars were exploding in front of my eyes so that I literally could not see. Breathing was fast and difficult, not unpleasant. I was conscious of a certain satisfaction in being able to go on pumping myself full of oxygen. A quiet and perhaps outwardly imperceptible shuddering possessed my whole frame. My hands vibrated, my legs ached and throbbed, my knees were in the condition described by the Greek poetess. This dereglement was completed by a sense of giddiness produced by the sheer conception of being so high above the ground and yet still connected to it. Giddiness of this kind in any case locates itself in the genitals.

All this, and further hues and saturations of bliss which I cannot describe at all, I felt on that evening as I sat with Julian in the Post Office Tower restaurant. We talked, and our communion was so perfect that it might have been telepathic for all I could make out afterwards about how it actually occurred. The evening had darkened to an intense blue, but it was not yet night. The forms of London, some already chequered with yellow light, glided onward through a dim shimmering corpuscular haze. The Albert Hall, the Science Museums, Centre Point, the Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Festival Hall, the Houses of Parliament, the Albert Memorial. The precious and beloved skyline of my own Jerusalem processed incessantly behind that dear mysterious head. Only the royal parks were already places of darkness, growing inkily purple with night-time and its silence.

Mysterious head. Oh the tormenting strangeness of our ignorance of other minds, the privileged comfort of the secrecy of our own! In fact on that night what I felt most in her was her lucidity, her transparency almost. That purity and unmuddied simplicity of the young, after the anxious self-guarding deviousness of later ages. Her clear eyes looked at me and she was with me and spoke to me with a directness which I had never received before. To say that there was no element of flirting is to speak with a totally inappropriate grossness. We conversed as angels might converse, not through a glass darkly but face to face. And yet: I was--again to say that I was playing a part is a barbarism. I was blazing with secrecy. As my eyes and my thoughts caressed and possessed her and as I smiled into her open attentive gaze with a passion and even with a tenderness which she could not see, I felt ready to fall to the ground fainting, perhaps dying, with the enormity of what I knew and she did not.

"Bradley, I think it's swaying."

"It can't be. I believe it does sway a little in the wind. But there's no wind tonight."

"There might be a wind up here."

"Well, there might be. Yes, I think it is swaying." How could I tell? Everything was swaying.

Of course I had merely pretended to eat. I had drunk very little wine. Alcohol still seemed a complete irrelevancy. I was drunk with love. Julian had both eaten and drunk a good deal, indiscriminately praising everything that passed her lips. We had talked about the view, about her college, about her school with the measles, about how soon one could tell whether one was a poet, about whether the novel, about why the theatre. I had never talked so easily to anyone. Oh blessed weightlessness, oh blessed space.

"Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet."

"Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end."

"So the critics are just stupid?"

"It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can."

"Like you now trying to like what my father writes?"

"That's more special. I feel I've been unjust. He has huge vitality and he tells a good story. Stories are art too, you know."

"His stuff is awfully ingenious, but it's as dead as a door nail."

"So young and so untender."

"So young, my lord, but true."

I was nearly on the floor at that moment. I also thought, in so far as thinking occurred, that she was probably right. Only I was not going to utter any harsh thing that evening. I was mainly now, since I had realized that I could not keep her with me for much longer, wondering about whether and if so how I could kiss her on parting. Kissing had never been customary between us, even when she was a child. Briefly, I had never kissed her. Never. And now tonight perhaps I would.

"Bradley, you aren't listening."

She constantly used my name. I could not use hers. She had no name.

"Ought I to read Wittgenstein?"

What I wanted to do was to kiss her in the lift going down should we chance to have that momentary love nest to ourselves. But of course that was out of the question. There must be no, absolutely no, show of marked interest. She had, as young people with their charming egoism and their impromptu modes so felicitously do, taken it quite calmly for granted that I should suddenly have felt like dining on the Post Office Tower and should, since she had happened to ring up, have happened to ask her to come too.

"No. I shouldn't bother."

"You think I wouldn't understand him?"

"Yes."

"Yes, I wouldn't?"

"Yes. He never thought of you."

"What?"

"I'm quoting again. Never mind."

"We are full of quotations tonight, aren't we. When I'm with you I feel as if the whole of English literature were inside me like a warm stew and coming out of my ears. I say, what an inelegant metaphor! Oh Bradley, what fun that we're here. Bradley, I do feel so happy!"

"Good." I asked for the bill. I did not want to ruin what was perfect by any hint of anxious hanging-on. An overstayed welcome would have been torture afterwards. I did not want to see her looking at her watch.

She looked at her watch. "Oh dear, I must go soon."

"I'll see you to the tube."

We had the lift to ourselves going down. I did not kiss her. I did not suggest that she should come back to my flat. Ao we walked along Goodge Street I did not touch her, even "accidentally." I was beginning to wonder how in the world it would be possible to part from her.

"Well, then--Well, then--"

"Bradley, you've been sweet, thank you, I've so much enjoyed it."

"Oh, I quite forgot to bring your Hamlet." I had of course done no such thing.

"Never mind, I'll get it another time. Good night, Bradley, and thanks."

"Yes, I--let me see--"I must run."

"Won't you--Shall we fix a time for you to come--You said you had some--I'm so often out--Or shall I--Will you--"I'll ring you. Good night, and thank you so much."

It was now or never. With a sense of moving very slowly, of executing some sort of precise figure in a minuet, I stepped a little in front of Julian, who was turning away, took her left wrist lightly in my right hand, thereby halting her, and then leaned down and pressed my judiciously parted lips against her cheek. The effect could not be casual. I straightened up and we stood for a moment looking at each other.

Julian said, "Bradley, if I asked you, would you cometoCovent Garden with me?"

"Yes, of course." I would go to hell with her, and even to Covent Garden.

"It's Rosenkavalier. Next Wednesday. Meet in the foyer about half past six. I've got quite good tickets. Septimus Leech got us two, only now he can't come."

"Who is Septimus Leech?"

"Oh he's my new boy friend. Good night, Bradley."

She was gone. I stood there dazed in the lamplight among the hurrying ghosts. And I felt as a man might feel who, with a whole skin on him and a square meal inside him, sits in a cell having just been captured by the secret police.

A common though not invariable early phase of this madness, the one in fact through which I had just been passing, is a false loss of self, which can be so extreme that all fear of pain, all sense of time (time is anxiety, is fear) is utterly blotted out. The sensation itself of loving, the contemplation of the existence of the beloved, is an end in itself. A mystic's heaven on earth must be just such an endless contemplation of God. Only God has (or would have if He existed) characteristics at least not totally inimical to the continuance of the pleasures of adoration. As the so-called "ground of being" He may be considered to have come a good deal farther than half-way. Also He is changeless. To remain thus poised in the worship of a human being is, from both sides of the relationship, a much more precarious matter, even when the beloved is not nearly forty years younger and, to say the least of it, detached.

On the second day I began to need her, though even "anxiety" would be too gross a word for that delicate silken magnetic tug, as it manifested itself at any rate initially. Self was reviving. On the first day Julian had been everywhere. On the second day she was, yes, somewhere, located vaguely, not yet dreadfully required, but needed. She was, on the second day, absent. This inspired the small craving for strategy, a little questing desire to make plans. The future, formerly blotted out by an excess of light, reappeared. There were once more vistas, hypotheses, possibilities. But joy and gratitude still lightened the world and made possible a gentle concern with other people, other things. I wonder how long a man could remain in that first phase of love? Much longer than I did, no doubt, but surely not indefinitely. The second phase, I am sure, given favouring conditions, could continue much longer. (But again, not indefinitely. Love is history, is dialectic, it must move.) As it is, I lived in hours what another man might have lived in years.

The transformation of my beatitude could, as that second day wore on, be measured by a literally physical sense of strain, as if magnetic rays or even ropes or chains were delicately plucking, then tugging, then dragging. Physical desire had of course been with me from the first, but earlier it had been, though perceptually localized, metaphysically diffused into a general glory. Sex is our great connection with the world, and at its most felicitous and spiritual it is no servitude since it informs everything and enables us to inhabit and enjoy all that we touch and look upon. At other times it settles in the body like a toad. It becomes a drag, a weight: not necessarily for this reason unwelcome. We may love our chains and our stripes too. By the time Julian telephoned I was in deep anxiety and yearning but not in hell. I could not then willingly have put off seeing her, the craving was too acute. But I was able, when I was with her, to be perfectly happy. I did not expect the inferno.

I woke with a clear head, a slight headache, and the knowledge that I was completely done for. Reason which had been--where had it been, during the last days?--somehow absent or dazed or altered or in abeyance, was once more at its post. (At least it was audible.) But in a rather specialized role and certainly not in that of a consoling friend. Reason was not, needless to say, uttering any coarse observations, such as that Julian was after all a very ordinary young woman and not worth all this fuss. Nor was it even pointing out that I had put myself in a situation where the torments of jealousy were simply endemic. I had not yet got as far as jealousy. That too was still to come. What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.

There were no tears now. I lay in bed in an electric storm of physical desire. I tossed and panted and groaned as if I were wrestling with a palpable demon. The fact that I had actually touched her, kissed her, grew (I am sorry about these metaphors) into a sort of mountain which kept falling on top of me. I felt her flesh upon my lips. Phantoms were bred from this touch. I felt like a grotesque condemned excluded monster. How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?

I got up but was suffering such extreme local discomfort that I could hardly get dressed. I started making tea, but its smell sickened me. I drank a little whisky in a glass of water and began to feel very ill. I could not stand still but wandered distractedly and rapidly about the flat, rubbing against the furniture as a tiger in a cage endlessly brushes its bars. I had ceased groaning and was now hissing. I tried to compose a few thoughts about the future. Should I kill myself? Should I go at once to Patara and barricade myself in and blow my mind with alcohol? Run, run, run. But I could not compose thoughts. All that concerned me was finding some way of getting through these present minutes of pain.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins. It is at once one of the ugliest and one of the most pardonable. In fact, in relation to its badness it is probably the most pardonable. Zeus, who smiles a lovers' oaths, must also condone their pangs and the venom which these pangs engender. Some Frenchman said that jealousy was born with love, but did not always die with love. I am not sure whether this is true. I would think that where there is jealousy there is love, and its appearance when love has apparently ceased is always a proof that the cessation is apparent. (I believe this is not just a verbal point.) Jealousy is certainly a measure of love in some, though as my own case illustrates not in all, of its phases. It also (and this may have prompted the Frenchman's idea) seems like an alien growth--and growth is indeed the word. Jealousy is a cancer, it can kill that which it feeds on, though it is usually a horribly slow killer. (And thereby dies itself.) Also of course, to change the metaphor, jealousy is love, it is loving consciousness, loving vision, darkened by pain and in its most awful forms distorted by hate.

The idea that one recovers from being in love is, of course, by definition (by my definition anyway) excluded from the state of love. Besides, one does not always recover. And certainly no such banal would-be comfort could have existed for a second in the scorching atmosphere of my mind at that time. As I said earlier, I knew that I was completely done for. There was no ray of light, no comfort at all. Though I will now also mention something which dawned upon me later. There was of course no question now of writing, of "sublimating" it all (ridiculous expression). But the sense remained that this was my destiny, that this was... the work of... the same power. And to be pinned down by that power, even liver, was to be in some terrible sense in one's own place.

To speak of matters which are less obscure, I soon of course decided that I could not "run." I could not go away to the country. I had to see Julian again, I had to wait through those awful days until the appointment at Covent Garden. Of course I wanted to ring her up at once and ask her to see me. But I somehow kept blindly thrusting this temptation away. I would not let my life degenerate into madness. Better to be alone with him and to suffer than to pull it all down into some sort of yelling chaos. Silence, though now with a different and utterly unconsoling sense, was my only task.

Somewhere in the middle of that morning, which I will not attempt to describe further (except to say that Hartbourne rang up: I replaced the receiver at once) Francis Marloe came.

I went back into the sitting-room and he followed me, already staring at me with surprise. I sat down and started rubbing my eyes and my brow, breathing heavily.

"What's the matter, Brad?"

"Nothing."

"I say, there's some whisky. I didn't know you had any. You must have hidden it jolly well. May I have some?"

"Yes."

"Would you like some?"

"Yes."

Francis was putting a glass into my hand. "Are you ill?"

"Yes."

"What's the matter?"

I drank some whisky and choked a bit. I felt extremely sick and also unable to distinguish physical from mental pain.

"Brad, we waited all evening for you."