The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [56]
Perhaps it was foolish to pursue the point of what was to all appearances only an irritable remark. But the circumstances were of a kind when irritating remarks are particularly to be avoided. Otherwise, it would have been easier to find an excuse.
Often enough, women love the arts and those who practice them; but they possess also a kind of jealousy of those activities. They like wit, but hate analysis. They are always prepared to fall back upon traditional rather than intellectual defensive positions. We never talked of Duport, as I have already recorded, and I scarcely knew, even then, why she had married him; but married they were. Accordingly, it seemed to me possible that what she had said possessed reference, in some oblique manner, to her husband; in the sense that adverse criticism of this kind cast a reflection upon him, and consequently upon herself. I had said nothing of Duport (who, as I was to discover years later, had a deep respect for ‘intelligence’), but the possibility was something to be taken into account.
I was quite wrong in this surmise, and, even then, did not realise the seriousness of the situation; certainly was wholly unprepared for what happened next. A moment later, for no apparent reason, she told me she had had a love affair with Jimmy Stripling.
‘When?’
‘After Babs left him,’ she said.
She went white, as if she might be about to faint. I was myself overcome with a horrible feeling of nausea, as if one had suddenly woken from sleep and found oneself chained to a corpse. A desire to separate myself physically from her and the place we were in was linked with an overwhelming sensation that, more than ever, I wanted her for myself. To think of her as wife of Bob Duport was bad enough, but that she should also have been mistress of Jimmy Stripling was barely endurable. Yet it was hard to know how to frame a complaint regarding that matter even to myself. She had not been ‘unfaithful’ to me. This odious thing had happened at a time when I myself had no claim whatsoever over her. I tried to tranquillise myself by considering whether a liaison with some man, otherwise possible to like or admire, would have been preferable. In the face of such an alternative, I decided Stripling was on the whole better as he was: with all the nightmarish fantasies implicit in the situation. The mystery remained why she should choose that particular moment to reveal this experience of hers, making of it a kind of defiance.
When you are in love with someone, their life, past, present and future, becomes in a curious way part of your life; and yet, at the same time, since two separate human entities in fact remain, you merely carry your own prejudices into another person’s imagined existence; not even into their ‘real’ existence, because only they themselves can estimate what their ‘real’ existence has been. Indeed, the situation might be compared with that to be experienced in due course in the army where an officer is responsible for the conduct of troops stationed at a post too distant from him for the exercise of any effective control.
Not only was it painful enough to think of Jean giving herself to another man; the pain was intensified by supposing—what was, of course, not possible—that Stripling must appear to her in the same terms that he appeared to me. Yet clearly she had, once, at least, looked at Stripling with quite different eyes, or such a situation could never have arisen. Therefore, seeing Stripling as a man for whom it was evidently possible to feel at the very least a passing tendresse