â and I saw a flash of my own face, anxious and wrinkled under grey hair â âthen it will be dangerous, then he could fall in love with one of them.â Would I learn to be clever enough ? Iâd have to. The whole of that day remained dismal, but not for a moment did it occur to me that I might not want to marry him, and soon our relationship was restored to its usual enjoyable state.
So I donât think there was ever a time in my adult life when I didnât realize that men were quite likely to be technically unfaithful to women, although it was not until Paul had finally jilted me that I saw that women, too, could be cheered up by sex without love. I ârecoveredâ from Paul in that I fell in love again, twice, and heavily, but both times it felt âfatalâ, something impossible to avoid, and anyway I longed for it, but which was bound to bring pain. The first time it was with a married man much older than myself, and I never envisaged him leaving his wife for me. No doubt if hehad suggested it I would have accepted, but I admired him far too much to expect it: I was his wartime fling, or folly (thereâs nothing like a whiff of death in the air to intensify desire, the essence of life â I remember him whispering in amazement âIâd resigned myself to never feeling like this againâ), while she was his good and blameless wife who had just become the mother of their first child, so leaving her would prove him cruel and irresponsible which I was sure he was not. I would not have loved him so much if he had been.
My second after-Paul love was available, even eligible, but his very eligibility seemed to make him too good to be true. He liked me a lot. For a time he almost thought he was in love with me, but he never quite was and I sensed almost from the beginning that it was going to end in tears, whereupon I plunged in deeper and deeper. And it did end in tears quite literally, both of us weeping as we walked up and down Wigmore Street on our last evening together. With masochistic abandon I loved him even more for his courage in admitting the situation and sparing me vain hopes (and in fact such courage, which takes a lot of summoning up, is something to be grateful for, because a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation. Believe me! Mine experienced both.)
That, for me, was the end of romantic love. What followed, until I met Barry Reckord in my forty-fourth year, was a series of sometimes very brief, sometimes sustained affairs, always amiable (two of them very much so), almost always cheering-up (two of the tiny ones I could have done without), and none of them going deepenough to hurt. During those years, if a man wanted to marry me, as three of them did, I felt what Groucho Marx felt about a club willing to accept him: disdain. I tried to believe it was something more rational, but it wasnât. Several of the painless affairs involved other peopleâs husbands, but I never felt guilty because the last thing I intended or hoped for was damage to anyoneâs marriage. If a wife ever found out â and as far as I know that never happened â it would have been from her husbandâs carelessness, not mine.
Loyalty is not a favourite virtue of mine, perhaps because André Deutsch used so often to abuse the word, angrily accusing any writer who wanted to leave our list of âdisloyaltyâ. There is, of course, no reason why a writer should be loyal to a firm which has supposed that it will be able to make money by publishing his work. Gratitude and affection can certainly develop when a firm makes a good job of it, but no bond of loyalty is established. In cases where such a bond exists â loyalty to family, for example, or to a political party â it can become foolishness if betrayed by its object. If your brother turns out to be a murderer or your party changes its policies, standing
So I donât think there was ever a time in my adult life when I didnât realize that men were quite likely to be technically unfaithful to women, although it was not until Paul had finally jilted me that I saw that women, too, could be cheered up by sex without love. I ârecoveredâ from Paul in that I fell in love again, twice, and heavily, but both times it felt âfatalâ, something impossible to avoid, and anyway I longed for it, but which was bound to bring pain. The first time it was with a married man much older than myself, and I never envisaged him leaving his wife for me. No doubt if hehad suggested it I would have accepted, but I admired him far too much to expect it: I was his wartime fling, or folly (thereâs nothing like a whiff of death in the air to intensify desire, the essence of life â I remember him whispering in amazement âIâd resigned myself to never feeling like this againâ), while she was his good and blameless wife who had just become the mother of their first child, so leaving her would prove him cruel and irresponsible which I was sure he was not. I would not have loved him so much if he had been.
My second after-Paul love was available, even eligible, but his very eligibility seemed to make him too good to be true. He liked me a lot. For a time he almost thought he was in love with me, but he never quite was and I sensed almost from the beginning that it was going to end in tears, whereupon I plunged in deeper and deeper. And it did end in tears quite literally, both of us weeping as we walked up and down Wigmore Street on our last evening together. With masochistic abandon I loved him even more for his courage in admitting the situation and sparing me vain hopes (and in fact such courage, which takes a lot of summoning up, is something to be grateful for, because a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation. Believe me! Mine experienced both.)
That, for me, was the end of romantic love. What followed, until I met Barry Reckord in my forty-fourth year, was a series of sometimes very brief, sometimes sustained affairs, always amiable (two of them very much so), almost always cheering-up (two of the tiny ones I could have done without), and none of them going deepenough to hurt. During those years, if a man wanted to marry me, as three of them did, I felt what Groucho Marx felt about a club willing to accept him: disdain. I tried to believe it was something more rational, but it wasnât. Several of the painless affairs involved other peopleâs husbands, but I never felt guilty because the last thing I intended or hoped for was damage to anyoneâs marriage. If a wife ever found out â and as far as I know that never happened â it would have been from her husbandâs carelessness, not mine.
Loyalty is not a favourite virtue of mine, perhaps because André Deutsch used so often to abuse the word, angrily accusing any writer who wanted to leave our list of âdisloyaltyâ. There is, of course, no reason why a writer should be loyal to a firm which has supposed that it will be able to make money by publishing his work. Gratitude and affection can certainly develop when a firm makes a good job of it, but no bond of loyalty is established. In cases where such a bond exists â loyalty to family, for example, or to a political party â it can become foolishness if betrayed by its object. If your brother turns out to be a murderer or your party changes its policies, standing