could not prevent himself from saying such things constantly. They burst out of him as a paean of thanksgiving at his phenomenal luck in having discovered Axel and at finding that where he loved he also was loved. Axel smiled. Occasionally he said ‘Good’ or ‘You do that’ or ‘That’s all right then’, and pulled Simon’s hair. Sometimes he said, ‘Oh do shut up, Simon. It means nothing.’ Simon was not good at Axel’s moods, whose principle he could not understand. Axel was often gloomy without explanation, and very occasionally made Simon distraught with tenderness and anxiety by bursting into tears. We feel life so differently, thought Simon. Oh what agony it is, he thought, to love somebody so much and not to be him.
This difference of ‘feel’ was sometimes the occasion of conflict. Simon was greedy for the surface texture of his life whose substance he luxuriously munched second after second as if it were a fruit with a thin soft furry exterior and a firm sweet fleshy inside. Even unhappiness if it were not terrible unhappiness came to him like that. (Terrible unhappiness was different. It divorced him from his body.) Simon loved times of day, eating, drinking, looking, touching. All his experiences were ceremonies. He liked the slow savouring of moments of pleasure and he engineered his life to contain as many of these as possible. It sometimes seemed to him that all his enjoyments were similar in kind though not in degree, whether he was stroking a cat or a Chippendale chair or drinking a dry martini or looking at a picture by Titian or getting into bed with Axel. Whereas Axel had a much more petulant and withdrawn attitude to time, and his life was much more layered and segmented. Simon felt sure that Axel’s delight in Don Giovanni was quite different in kind from his delight in Simon. Axel had secret lives and hidden utterly un-Simon modes of experience. He had a passion for opera. Simon, who detested opera, had pretended for nearly a year to like it until a frenzy of excruciating boredom had wrung the truth from him screaming at last and exposed him to Axel’s bitter reproaches, not for his lack of taste but for his failure to be honest. When they travelled abroad together Simon was an anxious busy greedy tourist while Axel was often maddeningly abstracted from the urgencies of the present. Axel was capable of sitting reading a novel in his hotel and ignoring a great monument at a hundred yards distance. They quarrelled furiously once in Venice when Axel’s dilatoriness made them arrive two days running at the Accademia just when it was shutting.
My love is never without anxiety, thought Simon, never without pain. Yet perhaps this piercing quality is inseparable from my happiness, from my own peculiar highest best happiness. Could it ever be otherwise? Was it not perhaps quite otherwise for heterosexual married people, for Hilda and Rupert for instance? He could not believe that they lived in this constant condition of ecstatic pain. For Axel not to hurt him terribly in the most ordinary passages of their life together cost them both a kind of effort. There was at every moment total vulnerability. There was a dangerous thrilling trembling inner circuit of the soul. Simon had once tried to explain to Axel about this terrible vulnerability and Axel had not mocked him. Yet Axel had not said, ‘Yes, I feel like that too’. Did love fill Axel’s life in the way that it filled his own? There was peace sometimes at night. Sleeping with someone one loves one escapes from time. Yet there were early morning awakenings too when Simon wondered: what dreadful things lie ahead?
The light blue Hillman Minx swept into the Boltons. Feathery bushes and plump trees posed motionless with evening against white walls yellowed by a powdery sun. Pink roses clambered upon stucco balustrades and multi-coloured irises peered through painted lattices.
‘Yes, I think Tallis is probably in for a bad time,’ said Axel
This difference of ‘feel’ was sometimes the occasion of conflict. Simon was greedy for the surface texture of his life whose substance he luxuriously munched second after second as if it were a fruit with a thin soft furry exterior and a firm sweet fleshy inside. Even unhappiness if it were not terrible unhappiness came to him like that. (Terrible unhappiness was different. It divorced him from his body.) Simon loved times of day, eating, drinking, looking, touching. All his experiences were ceremonies. He liked the slow savouring of moments of pleasure and he engineered his life to contain as many of these as possible. It sometimes seemed to him that all his enjoyments were similar in kind though not in degree, whether he was stroking a cat or a Chippendale chair or drinking a dry martini or looking at a picture by Titian or getting into bed with Axel. Whereas Axel had a much more petulant and withdrawn attitude to time, and his life was much more layered and segmented. Simon felt sure that Axel’s delight in Don Giovanni was quite different in kind from his delight in Simon. Axel had secret lives and hidden utterly un-Simon modes of experience. He had a passion for opera. Simon, who detested opera, had pretended for nearly a year to like it until a frenzy of excruciating boredom had wrung the truth from him screaming at last and exposed him to Axel’s bitter reproaches, not for his lack of taste but for his failure to be honest. When they travelled abroad together Simon was an anxious busy greedy tourist while Axel was often maddeningly abstracted from the urgencies of the present. Axel was capable of sitting reading a novel in his hotel and ignoring a great monument at a hundred yards distance. They quarrelled furiously once in Venice when Axel’s dilatoriness made them arrive two days running at the Accademia just when it was shutting.
My love is never without anxiety, thought Simon, never without pain. Yet perhaps this piercing quality is inseparable from my happiness, from my own peculiar highest best happiness. Could it ever be otherwise? Was it not perhaps quite otherwise for heterosexual married people, for Hilda and Rupert for instance? He could not believe that they lived in this constant condition of ecstatic pain. For Axel not to hurt him terribly in the most ordinary passages of their life together cost them both a kind of effort. There was at every moment total vulnerability. There was a dangerous thrilling trembling inner circuit of the soul. Simon had once tried to explain to Axel about this terrible vulnerability and Axel had not mocked him. Yet Axel had not said, ‘Yes, I feel like that too’. Did love fill Axel’s life in the way that it filled his own? There was peace sometimes at night. Sleeping with someone one loves one escapes from time. Yet there were early morning awakenings too when Simon wondered: what dreadful things lie ahead?
The light blue Hillman Minx swept into the Boltons. Feathery bushes and plump trees posed motionless with evening against white walls yellowed by a powdery sun. Pink roses clambered upon stucco balustrades and multi-coloured irises peered through painted lattices.
‘Yes, I think Tallis is probably in for a bad time,’ said Axel
Similar Books
