The Love Object Read Online Free Page A

his cigars. In one of the blue, saucer-shaped ashtrays there were thick turds of dark-grey cigar ash. There were also stubs but it was the ash I kept looking at, thinking that its thickness resembled the thickness of his unlovely legs. And once again I experienced hatred for him. I was about to tip the contents of the ashtray into the fire-grate when something stopped me, and what did I do but get an empty lozenge box and with the aid of a sheet of paper lift the clumps of ash in there and carry the tin upstairs. With the movement the turds lost their shapes, and whereas they had reminded me of his legs they were now an even mass of dark-grey ash, probably like the ashes of the dead. I put the tin in a drawer underneath some clothes.
    Later in the day I was given my award – a very big silver medallion with my name on it. At the party afterwards I got drunk. My friends tell me that I did not actually disgrace myself but I have a humiliating recollection of beginning a story and not being able to go ahead with it, not because the contents eluded me but because the words became too difficult to pronounce. A man brought me home and after I’d made him a cup of tea I said good night over-properly, then when he was gone I staggered to my bed. When I drink heavily I sleep badly. Wakening, it was still dark outside and straight away I remembered the previous morning, and the suggestion of frost outside, and his cold warning words. I had to agree. Although our meetings were perfect I had a sense of doom impending, of a chasm opening up between us, of someone telling his wife, of souring love, of destruction. And still we hadn’t gone as far as we should have gone. There were peaks of joy and of its opposite that we should have climbed to, but the time was not left to us. He had of course said, ‘You still have a great physical hold over me,’ and that in its way I found degrading. To have gone on making love when he had discarded me would have been repellent. It had come to an end. The thing I kept thinking of was a violet in a wood and how a time comes for it to drop off and die. The frost may have had something to do with my thinking, or rather with my musing. I got up and put on a dressing-gown. My head hurt from the hangover but I knew that I must write to him while I had some resolution. I know my own failings and I knew that before the day was out I would want to re-see him, sit with him, coax him back with sweetness and my overwhelming helplessness.
    I wrote the note and left out the bit about the violet. It is not a thing you can put down on paper without seeming fanciful. I said if he didn’t think it prudent to see me, then not to see me. I said it had been a nice interlude and that we must entertain good memories of it. It was a remarkably controlled letter. He wrote back promptly. My decision came as a shock he said. Still he admitted that I was right. In the middle of the letter he said he must penetrate my composure and to do so he must admit that above and beyond everything he loved me and would always do so. That of course was the word I had been snooping around for, for months. It set me off. I wrote a long letter back to him. I lost my head. I over-said everything. I testified to loving him, to sitting on the edge of madness in the intervening days, to my hoping for a miracle.
    It is just as well that I did not write out the miracle in detail because possibly it is, or was, rather inhuman. It concerned his family.
    He was returning from the funeral of his wife and children, wearing black tails. He also wore the white silk scarf I had seen him with, and there was a black, mourning tulip in his buttonhole. When he came towards me I snatched the black tulip, and replaced it with a white narcissus, and he in turn put the scarf around my neck and drew me towards him by holding its fringed ends. I kept moving my neck back and forth within the embrace of the scarf. Then we danced divinely on a wooden floor that was