Sex & Genius Read online

  He was always self-conscious about the effect of this disclosure. He did not want Adela to feel sorry for him. Telling people often doomed him to a kind of loneliness. But it was time that she knew and it was necessary to be open.

  'I fell in love with Christine on my first day at university,' he began. 'We got married when we were twenty-four. She was a painter. We lived in a flat in Brixton.'

  Adela's eyes were still full of surprise.

  'She fixed herself up with a studio and did commissioned work, plus her own stuff, mainly landscapes. I loved her ability to express what I could only perceive. And she was beautiful. And of course living at a certain pitch made her irritably perfectionist about things that didn't always matter. She needed space. She needed a structure around her. But when things went well she was pure delight. My better half.' He paused and shrugged. 'When she was twenty-six something snapped. She couldn't paint for a few months, was depressed, prey to strange ideas. I found out then that there was a history of mental illness on her mother's side and before I knew what I was dealing with, before anything was diagnosed or explained, she had got herself killed in a car crash.'

  He cleared his throat. He had begun the story and had to finish it.

  'For a year I felt like lying down and dying. That was stage one. Stage two was about guilt. For not saving her. For being less gifted than she was, less fine as a person. One tortures oneself mercilessly, and then the rage kicks in. She had ruined my life by getting herself killed. She had taken me with her. Cheated me of my life. All this pain runs through you, and all you can do is hope that tomorrow will be better. For three years I just dragged myself into work. I honestly thought that was it. That was my allocation of happiness in life. I trudged on, numbed one day, distraught the next, and one morning I noticed that whilst all this was going on I had allowed nothing else to count. And the idea that work might count again, that was a turning point. One comes out of the tunnel, if one comes out, with a vengeance. I remember feeling that having been through hell I wasn't going to compromise about the future. I was probably manic. I left the Beeb, set up on my own, tried to put passion back into my work, and discovered that when you have conviction you're a bloody nuisance. In a mad kind of way I needed to go down guns blazing. I needed to purge myself of all cynicism. If that meant taking risks and saying no, and going out on a limb, I had to do that. Perhaps my mother was right when she said that my business problems were self-inflicted, that I was carrying the cross of my grief as a kind of a militant integrity, which alienated colleagues and cost commissions, but which was actually a failure to cope, or depression. But to me it seemed . . . Well, like the start of a recovery. I was rediscovering what I'd learnt from Christine. That art is part of life, and if you trivialise it, you trivialise yourself. Better to give up producing than hack on compromising the best of yourself: the thing you love.' He looked down. 'I was beginning to have strong feelings again. I wanted to hold on to that.'

  Adela held her chin in her hand, fingers overlapping her mouth.

  He could see at a glance how much she had taken in, how her sense of him had gained depth. But there was nothing she could say to such a speech. No response could strike any kind of note.

  'I do believe in true love,' he said, returning to their earlier subject. 'A birthright you encounter by pure serendipity.'

  She was happy to take the hint. Her eyes widened. 'But how d'you recognise it? What is it?'

  He placed his hand on the seat between them and swung round to face her. 'Knowledge and illumination.'

  'Knowledge?'

  'When two people complete the best in each other.'

  She was eager. 'You believe that can happen?'

  'One can only go so far on one's own.'

  'That's true.'

  Adela seemed troubled. She leaned back against her elbows, pushing forward the swell of each breast.

  Michael cupped his mouth.

  'It must be incredible,' she sighed.

  He swallowed, opened his mouth to speak.

  'But suppose you hold out for something better,' she said, 'and it doesn't come along?'

  He took in her expression, but then was suddenly mauled by her loveliness, blissfully molested.

  She held his gaze.

  'There's no alternative,' he managed.

  'But what about compromise? One can't expect perfection.'

  For a pure moment he felt the unfiltered impact of something unbearably exquisite. He was caught in her mouth's magnetic field, was weightlessly susceptible to iris and eyelash.

  'Don't you think?'

  'I . . . compromise?'

  'Realism.'

  'Realism?'

  'Not expecting too much of other people,' she said. 'Especially men.'

  He hesitated. He knew for a fact he could love Adela. 'You shouldn't expect less from others than you expect from yourself.'

  'I know,' she sighed.

  'Otherwise it's just a diary entry.'

  'Oh Christ,' she wilted. 'Don't!'

  Her eyebrows were knitted, her lower lip hung, but she managed a rueful half-smile.

  'I've had relationships like that,' he said.

  She looked at him directly. He wanted to kiss her. She seemed to read his mind.

  'I'm having one.'

  'You're having one!'

  'Yes,' she said.

  The first sensation was of leaning too close to her, and he drew back his hand from the seat between them.

  'Damn! You're the only person I've said that to.'

  Michael did not blush, but his embarrassment was intense.

  'What I can't believe is that this whole thing has been an illusion.'

  The admission cut him away from her. He was suddenly relegated, his intensity marooned. He felt peculiar, though not surprised, and slowly, as conversation rambled on, the shock became sorrow.

  She sprawled back against the tree, chin on chest, immobilised by confession. She was prey to private thoughts.

  'Is that why you have to go back?' he asked eventually.

  She hummed softly. 'He's moving to New York for two years and just assumed I'd up sticks and come, as though I have no career, no roots. Which I certainly have. And I'm beginning to think my career is an abstraction to him, which means he doesn't understand me. Which means the relationship isn't real.'

  Michael nodded slowly and thoughtfully, and felt a certain coldness enter his heart. Beyond the overhanging leaves stood the Kodachrome picture of a distant sea with its saturated royal blues and horizon of endless promise, and its dazzling stack beating back the afternoon sun, and he felt that his sudden loneliness was unbearably heightened by the crushing beauty of that scene.

  He glanced at his watch. Four o'clock. They would meet Hilldyard tomorrow; on Friday she would leave.

  Traipsing back to the funicular, he was wryly curious at how suddenly, how steeply, he had succumbed. He had actually had the impulse to kiss her, felt it gather, rise up, an appallingly strong urge. She had sprawled back so fetchingly that he was immensely relieved not to have embarrassed himself.

  They cornered through the narrow streets, re-tracing their outward walk with more knowledge of each other and less energy flowing between them, and he wondered about her boyfriend, and what kind of a man he was.

  Later, on the hydrofoil, the wind buffeted his face and purged his disappointment. Ahead of them Positano was slowly reborn, its cluttered terraces and shanty villas gradually emerging from the skirts of the mountains, its harbour lights ushering in the dusk. He felt the pull of a homecoming. He could look forward to solitude again, to more reading and talking with the old man, and to Positano's autumnal sanctuary, its gorgeous mornings and ethereal light.

  And anyway, he rationalised, as they clambered off the boat on to the quay, glancing over the beach to where he had first seen Adela in her bikini, he had no evidence she liked him in that way. Her friendliness was probably non-exclusive. She was used to delighting people; that was her job. She was persona
ble and attractive and she knew how to make of herself a proposition that was conceptually pleasing. It was her gift to be lovely, and her duty to be generous with that gift. He had succumbed to an allure that doubtless afflicted many intelligent men, men who liked to be engaged intellectually before submitting to the trauma of physical desire.

  She was tired, flushed by the sea air, and he escorted her at an easy pace up the twisting Viale. The street was busy with evening traffic, Piaggio scooters, Ape vans, lively children.

  He brought her to the hotel, where he gave her a squeeze and they managed a kiss.

  'I can't believe I'm going to meet him,' she said.

  'I'll call you tomorrow.'

  'I'll keep myself free,' she smiled.

  He hesitated.

  'I won't mention the book,' she promised.

  Michael made his way up the winding road, joining in with the six o'clock passeggiata. He took a seat at a bar and stared at the sombre reaches of the evening sky while couples drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Three teenage girls with tousled manes of chestnut hair sucked Orangina through straws. A young man placed his car keys on the next table and shouted across the street to a character in jeans and cowboy boots. The evening was just beginning.

  After a last swig he went back to his hotel, where he took the unusual and unsatisfactory step of dining in the restaurant. By the time he slipped up the marble steps to his landing he felt dull and drowsy; and, when he twisted the lock and pushed into the trapped air of his bedroom, the dim light conspired with tiredness to draw him in a headlong slouch to his mattress and to a slow undoing of buttons and shedding of clothes.

  He sat for a while on the bed. And then he rose for a last look through the shutters, and found himself drifting on to the balcony and into the cool air and standing before the night and the sea.

  Later, he sat upright in bed.

  He sat waiting for a moment, his hands flat on the bedspread, while something collapsed within him, some force of resistance that had run out, as it did from time to time, leaving a vacuum in his heart.

  It came suddenly, the familiar spasm: a wrench of despair. He lay there, looking to the side, strangely grimacing; and then he tried to move, as if to pull away from the epicentre of the feeling; and as he reached the edge of the bed he wondered if this returning stab of sorrow were the memory of his love for Christine welling up and attacking him from within, like something to be set free.

  He bathed his face in his hands and reached for the glass of water on his bedside table. Tomorrow, he thought, he would try to do some more writing.

  Chapter Ten

  'I've seen you on television.'

  'Gwendolyn?'

  'With Frank McCallum?'

  'That was me.'

  'Is he really that handsome?'

  'Oh, sure. And very gay.'

  'Oh darn! D'you hear that, James? Frank McCallum is gay.

  Must've been jolly odd doing the sex bit with a gay person.'

  'It was only my character that did the sex bit.'

  'But your character kisses him!'

  'My character kisses his character, and in the film his character is straight.'

  'Oh, I see! How ingenious!'

  'It's called acting.'

  Frances trilled laughter. 'James, can we go somewhere decent for dinner? I'm absolutely famished and I refuse to eat another pizza.

  Rome pizzaed me out.'

  'Conserve calories by talking less.'

  They walked two by two along the road, Frances and Adela ahead, Hilldyard and Michael a few yards behind. To their right Positano glimmered in the dusk. For an hour they had strolled around the back of the town, under the overhang of the mountain. The evening air was savoury with woodsmoke. On the far flatness of the sea the lights of boats pricked the gloom.

  Hilldyard was not happy. He gazed at his niece, as if to check that she was really here, in the heart of his retreat, like grit in the eye. Michael walked uneasily by him.

  Frances Rampton was a sharp-faced, brilliant-eyed girl with a short haircut and a stick-like figure. Her accent was affected, her laughter shrill; her wiry form bristled with energy. She talked out all her ideas, however tangential, and had latched on to Adela with a hundred personal questions.

  Frances, it transpired, had descended on Hilldyard without notice or apology. Whatever excuses he made on the phone she had brushed them aside as if sensing their falsehood or deeming them false. She had arrived at lunchtime from Rome, presenting herself with a suitcase and promising that she would stay only two days unless he was 'horrid', in which case she would stay for a month. Hilldyard spent the afternoon flappishly procuring a spare mattress from a neighbour and clearing a space in his study. He made her a sandwich and listened to her report on Rome; and when she crashed out in his study, he crept to the balcony with a tense face and a stiff drink.

  Michael had spent the afternoon writing. He moved the desk in his bedroom on to the balcony and sat wearing dark glasses, one hand on the pad, one hand dangling in the crook of his thighs, his feet pressed together, a position of comfortable equilibrium that helped him burn away three hours whilst his pen travelled back and across, ceaselessly animated by a flow of ideas that rushed to be connected in his mind, ideas that the pen itself seemed to twirl out of focused recollection. He wrote about the trip to Ravello, his hour in the garden with Hilldyard, starting in the centre of things and working concentrically into the past and back again, and as the words and phrases came more fluently he wrote a purer and more concentrated version of himself, in a tone that had propulsion behind it, the pressure of backed-up experience; and Michael, rubbing his eyes at five-thirty and sipping water from his hotel toothmug, realised how daunting was the question of form. How could he frame his own experience? How could he organise the material of his inner life, the sensations and ideas that crystallised only under intense concentration, into a form you could share with other people? He was exhilarated and tired. After the release of writing there was a residue of strangeness, as though he had lost the sense of his own personality. He began to get ready for the evening, and noticed how remote Adela seemed, and how odd the prospect of their drink with Hilldyard, as if social reality were now insubstantial. As he shrugged into his jacket his anticipation sharpened. His nervousness about Hilldyard and Adela returned.

  * * *

  He arrived at her pensione and was sent up to her room. He found her struggling with hairpins in the bathroom. She was flustered, nervous, unhappy with each side of her face in the mirror.

  Adela wore a strapless green cotton dress, tightly waisted and kneelength, with a sculptural décolletage. Her hair was up, ears delicate and neck slender, and although she pouted against lipstick and grimaced in distress at her reflection, she looked extraordinarily enhanced. She was notably shapely in this outfit, a very professional creation of slants and lines.

  'Crikey,' he said, nervousness coming back.

  'I'm suffocating.'

  'You look tremendous.'

  'Don't use that word.'

  'Why not?'

  'It means ''huge''.'

  He laughed. 'Not at all!'

  There was something spirited in her approach. She was asking to be taken on her own best terms. Such panache might well win the day.

  Adela took a wrap from the bed, wound a choker round her neck and asked him to carry her wallet and lipstick in his pocket. She grabbed his arm and with a certain awkwardness he escorted her along the corridor and down to the lobby.

  Hilldyard was to be encountered on the veranda of the villa, as though hiding from the clamour of Frances's welcome. Michael went through first and saw the trapped look of pain in his eye, as though he were pleadingly unequal to the effort of socialising; but then Adela came in, and Michael saw the author clip to attention,manners plucked from his terrible mood by the shock of the vision before him. Therewas a tableau transition in which everyone was introduced, Adela presented and received, Michael told to pour drinks and Hilldyard
became the official host. Michael let the formalities play out, hoping that something polite and anodyne would soon establish itself whilst Adela admired the view. Frances nattered at his side as he thumbed ice and cut lemon, andHilldyard's demeanour was transiently suave. For a while it seemed like an ordinary evening drinks party, except for the fact that James and Frances were flabbergasted by Adela's dress.

  She sank into a wickerwork chair. 'Oh dear,' she smiled, looking around at the author's turned-up jacket sleeves and Frances's cardigan. 'I've rather overdone it.'

  'You are elegant,' he bowed. 'We shall have to be witty.'

  'Such a beautiful dress,' mused Frances. 'I'd kill for your cleavage.'

  Adela blushed and managed a smile.

  'Frances is outspoken,' said Hilldyard. 'It gets her into trouble.'

  'What trouble?'

  'Trouble with discreet, well-mannered people.'

  'James, I'm thirty. I say what I like. When I like.'

  'Of that I have not the slightest doubt.'

  'If you had any so-called manners you'd have asked me to stay.'

  'My dear, I'm busy.'

  'So I see.' She gleamed mockingly, raising her glass to the others.

  Hilldyard inhaled theatrically, though Michael saw the beginnings of a genuine unease.

  Now, on the walk, Michael noticed how irritable Hilldyard had become with Frances's harmless chatter, as though he were dealing with a person ill-bred. Frances was eccentric and lively, and Hilldyard could neither out-talk her nor entirely encompass her. Michael saw his chance to relieve Adela when Frances stopped at a bride-shop window. He took her elbow in his hand and propelled her along the street, leaving Hilldyard to his fate.

  'I feel a right twit in this dress.' Adela was gliding along in her shapely frock. She took his arm. 'D'you mind? I'm being boreholed by lots of Italian males.'

  Attached, they deflected the men and attracted the attention of elderly women, strict buzzards who stared first at the excellence of Adela's bella figura and bridesmaidenly chignon, deeming her acceptable to Italian standards of daughterliness, then drove their dark eyes through Michael, shoes to shirt-collar, to see what measure of a man such beauty had won. He was pierced with scornful looks, an aquiline perusal of his worthiness as lover and breadwinner. He gave himself no airs but felt under the scrutiny the kudos of a real boyfriend, in this way tricking himself into the illusion of being that person, an odd sensation, a breathtaking split second that flashed back strangely when they descended the steps to the open-air restaurant, where her lush entry and his imposing height caused a waiterly flurry, as if, in a stroke, they had made the place fashionable. Chairs were pulled out, Italian spouted. Candles were lit and back-up summoned. Other guests took in the duo with more than routine interest, watching them cross the restaurant floor and noting the arrival of their more ordinary companions.