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By Root 14021 0

all the bitter lye of an uninvited love. She was ‘white of heart’, in the expressive Arabic phrase, and painting the darkness of Justine’s head and shoulders she suddenly felt as if, stroke by stroke, the brush itself had begun to imitate caresses she had neither foreseen nor even thought to permit. As she listened to that strong deep voice recounting these misfortunes, so desirable in that they belonged to the active living world of experience, she caught her breath between her teeth, trying now to think only of the unconscious signs of good breeding in her subject: hands still in the lap, voice low, the reserve which deline-ates true power. Yet even she, from her inexperience, could do little but pity Justine when she said things like ‘I am not much good, you know. I can only inflict sadness, Arnauti used to say. He

brought me to my senses and taught me that nothing matters except pleasure — which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.’ Clea was touched by this because it seemed clear to her that Justine had never really experienced pleasure — one has to be generous for that. Egotism is a fortress in which the conscience de soi-même, like a corrosive, eats away everything. True pleasure is in giving, surely.

‘As for Arnauti, he nearly drove me mad with his inquisitions. What I lost as a wife I gained as a patient — his interest in what he called “my case” outweighed any love he might have had for me. And then losing the child made me hate him where before I had only seen a rather sensitive and kindly man. You have probably read his book Moeurs. Much of it is invented — mostly to satisfy his own vanity and get his own back on me for the way I wounded his pride in refusing to be “cured” — so-called. You can’t put a soul into splints. If you say to a Frenchman “I can’t make love to you unless I imagine a palm-tree,” he will go out and cut down the nearest palm-tree.’

Clea was too noble to love otherwise than passionately; and yet at the same time quite capable of loving someone to whom she spoke only once a year. The deep still river of her heart hoarded its images, ever reflecting them in the racing current, letting them sink deeper into memory than most of us can. Real innocence can do nothing that is trivial, and when it is allied to generosity of heart, the combination makes it the most vulnerable of qualities under heaven.

In this sudden self-consuming experience, comparable in its tension and ardour to those ridiculous passions which schoolgirls have so often for their mistresses — yet touched in by the fierce mature lines of nature (the demonic line-drawings of an expert love which Justine could always oppose as a response to those who faced her) — she felt really the growing-pains of old age: her flesh and spirit quailing before demands which it knows it cannot meet, which will tear it to rags. Inside herself she had the first stirrings of a sensation new to her: the sensation of a yolk inside her separating from the egg. These are the strange ways in which people grow up. Poor dear, she was to go through the same ridiculous contortions as the rest of us — feeling her body like a bed of quick-lime clum-sily slaked to burn away the corpse of the criminal it covered. The

world of secret meetings, of impulses that brand one like an iron, of doubts — this suddenly descended upon her. So great was her confusion of mind that she would sit and stare at the metamor-phosed Justine and try to remember what she really looked like on the other side of the transforming membrane, the cataract with which Aphrodite seals up the sick eyes of lovers, the thick, opaque form of a sacred sightlessness.

She would be in a fever all day until the appointed moment when her model met her. At four she stood before the closed door of the studio, seeing clearly through it to the corner where Justine al-ready sat, turning over the pages of a Vogue and smoking as she waited, legs crossed. The idea crossed her mind. ‘I pray to God she has not come, is ill, has gone away. How eagerly I would welcome ind ifference!