At any moment Rosalie might have told Vivian. She lived, moved, and had her being in a state of emotional tension. She had the irresistible impulses of a child. She had, too, a child’s craving to share its happiness. Her imagination tortured her by compelling her to regard that happiness as he would regard it. Above all, she had the dream that it was possible for Vivian to know we were lovers—and to share the innocence she felt in that relationship. And, for her, this was not only a dream, it was an objective. It was her belief in this fantasy which enabled her to continue to deceive him. This was why she wanted me to visit their flat. To be there together, the three of us, in a room—seemed to her to be prophetic of the fulfilment of her dream. The three of us—in physical proximity! To Rosalie, that fact foreshadowed a future intimacy in which all barriers would be down.
She was so far removed from Vivian that she could believe that about him! She was such worlds away from him that she could not believe he was what he seemed.
Whenever my telephone bell rang, whenever a wire came for me, or a ring at the door, my mind became a question mark. Often, I was
Once she impulsively took his arm and mine simultaneously. I could see that her romanticism was regarding herself as a link between us. I burst out laughing, and thereby jarred her back to actuality.
To dominate her so that she would
And—simultaneously—not to care if she did tell him. Her confession would force me into action. If he divorced her, I would marry her. If he killed her, I would kill him. To be forced to act, to do something—anything! At times I thought that this would be deliverance.
What did it matter to me whether she told him or not? I was living so “outside” myself, so divorced from my centre, that all my actions were unreal to me. What gave them a ghostly appearance of reality was Rosalie’s belief in my strength. That belief almost enabled me to believe in the Ivor Trent whom she loved. And, every day, my desire to believe in him deepened, for—every day—the alternative became clearer and clearer.
The alternative was to enter a desert—not unlike the one which surrounded Denis Wrayburn. But of him—later.
Did I love Rosalie? The question is meaningless. When a man is desperately at odds with himself, others do not exist. He is a battlefield of principalities and powers. His relations with others are a caricature of that conflict. He is alone. And the more people he knows, and the more famous he is, the greater is that solitude.
To me, Rosalie was something rare, something unexpected in the modern world—a work of art in a factory. Sometimes I forgot my falsity, my emptiness, in watching her. (Usually, I watched her. I seldom listened to what she said.) At times I felt that she was my childhood—the childhood of which I had been robbed. But, had she guessed that the only link between us was weakness, she would have turned to ice in my arms. For she needed strength, and she believed that I was strong. She needed two types of strength: Vivian’s—and what she believed was mine. Vivian’s, because the actual world was so shadowy to her that she needed the companionship of one to whom it was overwhelmingly real. And she needed the strength she believed was mine—that is, psychic strength—in order to stabilise her imagination.
She needed the physical proximity of Vivian—and the psychic proximity of the type she imagined me to be. It was because she realised this unconsciously that she longed for Vivian to share our secret.
It never occurred to her that she was separated from me by a gulf as wide and as deep as that which divided her from Vivian.
She did not know that Ivor Trent was a ghost. She thought he was a giant.
During the three years we were lovers, Rosalie believed she was the only woman with whom I was intimate. Actually, during the first year, Vera Thornton visited me frequently. . . .
One afternoon—a few days before my first meeting with Rosalie at the Laidlaws’—I was alone in my flat, reading, when I was disturbed by a long peal from the bell.
I went to the door and found myself confronted by a woman of about twenty-one, who was trembling with excitement. She stood, speechless, staring at me with dark fanatical eyes, as if I were an idol in a shrine. She held a bulging bag which was clearly very heavy, for she stood obliquely, so that the pull of her body balanced its weight.
“I’m Vera Thornton,” she announced at last, in a voice resembling a gasp.
The name was vaguely familiar, but I failed to place her.
“I wrote to you, if you remember, and—and you answered my letter.”