Remember Me by David Stacton Page A

Her touch on his arm was light, and yet she seemed to drag his body down. She seemed like a well-bred vampire in a romantic story, but the story was her own, not his. Her right forefinger pointed down towards the ground. His face was free of her, but his body, she seemed to say, would never be free. They had only the protection of their clothes between them.
    It was, in many ways, a successful photograph. He sent her a copy at once. It was more successful, he thought, than perhaps she would know. For like conjurers, women can successfully exert their charms only on those who do not know how the trick is done. As a trip backstage can ruin the ballet forever, so does a touch of feline insight protect a man from the stratagems of women. In the picture he and Sophie looked like members of two different species. She was the huntress, not he. Her body was more real than she was. Beneath the demure white morning dress, her body twisted like that of the Lamia of Corinth, once the latter’s nature had been revealed. Rather than face her as she was, he was eager to introduce her to Wagner, for he could accept her only by turning her into a character in one of the Master’s operas.
    He was nervous about Wagner. Wagner had gone, but Wagner as an artistic dream remained. Wagner was an ideal. Women hate ideas. Their only defence is to engulf the creative impulse and divert it into the making of children. And if he could not keep his ideals as those were expressed in Wagner, then nothing was worth keeping.
    He began to be terribly afraid. Events rushed by him too quickly. He could snatch at only one or two of them.The family had moved Sophie in to town, into the house of Duke Max. It was too close. It meant that he had to pay her visits there, almost daily.
    They were to be married in August. It was already March. He could feel himself being sucked under. He did not know what to do.
    In the hall of Duke Max’s town house were two busts at the foot of the main staircase. One was of Sisi, the Empress Elizabeth. The other was of himself. Sophie certainly resembled her sister, and yet she was not of that litter. She was a kitten too young to scratch. He felt great pity for her. None of this was her fault. If they had not given her claws, he would marry her yet.
    Ascending the stairs, he paused on that “yet”. After all, nothing in his life was inevitable. It occurred to him only with his hand on the balustrade, that if he had to do so, he could always draw away from her at the last moment . At least he thought he could. More cheerfully, he went on up the stairs, bearing in his hand the gift he had brought her.
    He found her alone in a drawing-room upstairs. She turned to look at him, but did not speak. She was posed neatly against a window, and the sight pleased him. In women he liked only the artificial. If she were always to be artificial, then he might be able to go through with it. She was like a rose. She had the same fresh, guileless, new-cut quality. He moved so often in a cloud of chypre that sometimes he forgot how some people had no smell at all, as though being newly scrubbed had an aura of its own. Some smells were sounds. Chypre had the heavy, wooden odour of Wagner, but Sophie was like a powder-dusted baby fresh from the bath, in a Mozart world of popularity. She was a toy. Her jerky little movements of pleasure and delight had been contrived for her at birth,and were innocent of personal artifice, for they were the ancestral strings of rank.
    He paused in the doorway. She made a little smile, and it was a gesture of hers slightly to drop her left shoulder when she did so. It was almost her only gesture. Soon it would be May, and he wondered what a May in this world of hers would be like. He could not talk to her, as he had talked to Wagner, or even to Paul. That sort of enthusiastic ease is unisexual, not bisexual. She had no conversation. It would drive him mad to invent something to do for them both, day after day. The