off her shoulders by the same careful disarrangement of accidentality to show the spillage of her breasts, in profile only, not with that startlingly grand fullness and frontality celebrated in the oil painting on the stairs, or with the same attention to the rouge (unless the pallor was just an effect of the lighting), but the more tremblingly desirable, it seemed to me, for being a gentle intimation rather than a bold assertion of themselves.
Whether her pose was artful or artless, Mrs Gowan would have found a path to any man’s heart, let alone a frightened boy’s. It was impossible not to imagine what it would be like turning her over and gathering her into your arms. Was that because her limbs were truly slender, or because they were wasted? Was it because she had retained her beauty even in her illness, or because, with the help of careful lighting, the illness itself was beautiful? I didn’t know. How could I know? I was too young to know.
‘If you come closer,’ Victor said, but I could not.
I wanted to look but I could not. All thoughts of what would follow, or what should follow, fled my mind. There was no right or wrong of what came next because there could be no next. This was wrong enough. Whoever was its instigator – and I didn’t exclude myself from blame, for desire is instigation too – this was an unpardonable abuse of a woman’s helplessness. She was an invalid. A man’s rapacious eye will take every kind of liberty with a woman’s body and permit no actual or moral obstacle to be a hindrance to his seeing, but Joyce Gowan’s sickness was a hindrance I could not overcome. Never mind that you would never have known from the lovely shape of her that she was ill. Never mind that her being desirable in despite of that illness made her if anything more desirable still. And never mind that she was a woman who had been admired for her beauty all her life and perhaps wanted to go on being admired whatever her age and health. Enough had passed between us for me to be sure it had been Victor’s idea to get me up here, not his wife ’s; that it was he who, in an act of desperate love, sought to exhibit her one more time tosomeone who could never have beheld such beauty before; and that, no matter whether she had willingly gone along with him in this, his will – his need, the rather – had been the stronger. But it didn’t matter for whom I had been brought here. For myself I wanted to look, but I did not. Desire dissolved in sadness.
‘I will go downstairs now,’ I said to Victor.
A few days after my return to London I received a package from Victor with an accompanying letter of explanation and apology. ‘I cannot imagine what you must think of me,’ he wrote, though the fact of this apology proved he could imagine it only too well. ‘I plead – but what right have I to plead anything. I did not mean unkindly by you. I realise now how alarmed by the Cervantes story you must have been. Trust me, I had no such errand as Lothario’s in mind for you. Your youth would have persuaded me against such a course had I ever considered it, but I have never doubted Joyce and of course, tragically, can have no cause ever to doubt her now. I am unable to explain what prompted me to dredge that story up. If your answer is that I dredged it from my unconscious there is nothing I can say to you, since my unconscious is of necessity unknown to me. But I do beg you not to view my situation – for yes, I confess it to be a “situation” – in that sinister light. It is not in order to be forgiven, only to be understood, that I send you as a sort of corrective the enclosed. It is, I think, a truer account of the respects I bear to you and the love I feel for my dear wife.’
The ‘enclosed’ was a facsimile of the 1502 first printing of Herodotus’ The Histories in the original Greek, bound in calfskin and bookmarked at the passage which tells of how Candaules, King of Lydia, a man disordered by the
Whether her pose was artful or artless, Mrs Gowan would have found a path to any man’s heart, let alone a frightened boy’s. It was impossible not to imagine what it would be like turning her over and gathering her into your arms. Was that because her limbs were truly slender, or because they were wasted? Was it because she had retained her beauty even in her illness, or because, with the help of careful lighting, the illness itself was beautiful? I didn’t know. How could I know? I was too young to know.
‘If you come closer,’ Victor said, but I could not.
I wanted to look but I could not. All thoughts of what would follow, or what should follow, fled my mind. There was no right or wrong of what came next because there could be no next. This was wrong enough. Whoever was its instigator – and I didn’t exclude myself from blame, for desire is instigation too – this was an unpardonable abuse of a woman’s helplessness. She was an invalid. A man’s rapacious eye will take every kind of liberty with a woman’s body and permit no actual or moral obstacle to be a hindrance to his seeing, but Joyce Gowan’s sickness was a hindrance I could not overcome. Never mind that you would never have known from the lovely shape of her that she was ill. Never mind that her being desirable in despite of that illness made her if anything more desirable still. And never mind that she was a woman who had been admired for her beauty all her life and perhaps wanted to go on being admired whatever her age and health. Enough had passed between us for me to be sure it had been Victor’s idea to get me up here, not his wife ’s; that it was he who, in an act of desperate love, sought to exhibit her one more time tosomeone who could never have beheld such beauty before; and that, no matter whether she had willingly gone along with him in this, his will – his need, the rather – had been the stronger. But it didn’t matter for whom I had been brought here. For myself I wanted to look, but I did not. Desire dissolved in sadness.
‘I will go downstairs now,’ I said to Victor.
A few days after my return to London I received a package from Victor with an accompanying letter of explanation and apology. ‘I cannot imagine what you must think of me,’ he wrote, though the fact of this apology proved he could imagine it only too well. ‘I plead – but what right have I to plead anything. I did not mean unkindly by you. I realise now how alarmed by the Cervantes story you must have been. Trust me, I had no such errand as Lothario’s in mind for you. Your youth would have persuaded me against such a course had I ever considered it, but I have never doubted Joyce and of course, tragically, can have no cause ever to doubt her now. I am unable to explain what prompted me to dredge that story up. If your answer is that I dredged it from my unconscious there is nothing I can say to you, since my unconscious is of necessity unknown to me. But I do beg you not to view my situation – for yes, I confess it to be a “situation” – in that sinister light. It is not in order to be forgiven, only to be understood, that I send you as a sort of corrective the enclosed. It is, I think, a truer account of the respects I bear to you and the love I feel for my dear wife.’
The ‘enclosed’ was a facsimile of the 1502 first printing of Herodotus’ The Histories in the original Greek, bound in calfskin and bookmarked at the passage which tells of how Candaules, King of Lydia, a man disordered by the