The Bleeding Heart (12 page)

Well, people had their own needs. For her, Dolores, nothing could be worth an empty boring marriage, nothing could be worth living with someone in easy, dead routine. Nothing.

And Victor?

Well, but it isn’t easy, it isn’t dead, it isn’t routine. Yet. And never will be. It will end in a year.

She stubbed out her cigar in disgust. What’s the point of thinking about all this? You can’t eradicate your feelings by telling yourself you shouldn’t have them. By dredging up principles. The fact is you’re as tied to him as you are to your inner organs. Who knows, you may be tied to him
by
your inner organs. Call it love. Who knows, maybe it is.

Okay, okay. It’s only for a year. We’ll keep it light, we’ll play, have pleasure. One’s entitled, once in a while. Making love: pears in wine, peaches in champagne. Life was barren and arid enough. One didn’t need to add to that.

Oh, yes, it was artificial. Two strangers cut off for a neatly demarcated time from everything they’ve known, from all the sticky roots and tentacles, all the mold and rot and mulch that builds up under stationary objects. An idyll.

Oh, Victor. Comfort me with apples, stay me with flagons. For I am sick of love.

D
OLORES WAS ARDENT ABOUT
going to Aldeburgh, so Victor rented a car and took a day off and they went for a three-day weekend in October. She wanted to see Crabbe’s ocean, his shingle, the grey skies of the Borough, its prosperous bursting farms, its shacks and hovels meanly protecting the Borough’s abandoned wives and unwed mothers.

“Who?” Victor said.

“George Crabbe. C-r-a-b-b-e. An eighteenth-century English poet, a good poet. And a great human being. He wrote about the rich, people who mouthed moral pieties and turned their backs on feeling, suffering. And the poor, suffering, dying, suffering from guilt, feeling that it was their own fault they had loved some man and ended up pregnant and starving. In a culture where poverty was literally sin. Where they didn’t even record the names of the poor in the village records. If a baby died, it was recorded as
Died: poor child.
I think Crabbe believed sex was sin too, but you can see him wondering about it all through his work.
Why
did these women have to suffer so much? He felt it. Felt their pain. It’s in the poetry. I love him.”

But when they arrived, they found a pleasant seaside resort, blue sky, blue sea, creamy beach, a fine boardwalk, and good hotels.

“It’s supposed to be grey and bleak and barren,” Dolores moaned.

“Gee, too bad, sweetheart,” Victor laughed.

They signed in at a plush hotel overlooking the ocean. “It’s a shame,” Victor grinned, looking around. He was going to enjoy the weekend after all.

Hardly a sign of Crabbe in town. One woman, who ran a bookstore, knew the poet’s name. His cottage, she said, had been swept out to sea long ago.

“Yes, there’s something right about that,” Dolores said. “He’d have liked that.”

They had good drinks, a lavish dinner, and made love for hours.

“It doesn’t seem right somehow,” Dolores said.

Next morning the sky was still beautifully blue, the sea calm and broad and bluer than the sky. You’d think you were in Miami. They walked along the boardwalk. “It isn’t supposed to be like this!” Dolores protested. “Oh, I wanted to feel it, feel into what he saw and felt, but this isn’t it.”

Victor spotted an oil tanker far out at sea.

“Poor old Crabbe’s world is gone forever,” Dolores said regretfully.

“From the sound of it, good riddance,” Victor said. “I thought you were the one who wanted all that to disappear, all that poverty and pain.”

Suddenly bells started ringing, loud bells. People came running from every direction to the beach. Victor and Dolores followed the crowd. It was converging on a lifeboat sitting on a slide set in the sand. The whole town seemed to collect there. Six or seven men wearing bright orange jackets were spooning up sand with shovels, in front of the lifeboat. Others, in the same jackets, were running around the boat doing things. Unfastening something—a long rail. They hoisted it off the boat and lifted it down to the beach and set it in the sandy groove the other men had shoveled. By now there was quite a crowd watching them. The thing took a long time, although the men were working as fast as they could. They’d glance out at the crowd occasionally, pleased with themselves, jaunty.

Eventually all the sand was shoveled away, the men on the boat were ready, the motor was running. There was a great boom, people gasped, and the boat shot out onto the rail and flew into the water.

Dolores cried out in delight, and clapped her hands. Other people in the crowd laughed and clapped too. But some were shaking their heads. A British woman with a kind face turned to Dolores. “By the time they get there, whoever it is that needs saving is sure to be drowned.”

“Yes,” Victor muttered angrily, “what a system!”

“But it was wonderful!” Dolores crowed. “So absurd! So funny!”

“Crabbe’s primitive world isn’t gone yet,” he continued.

But Dolores danced. “Oh, those men, working so hard, so cocky and pleased at the admiration of the crowd. And that ridiculous little boat shooting out like a cannonball. I loved it!”

“You wouldn’t love it so much if you were drowning.”

“But I’m not!”

“Who’s lacking in compassion now? People are drowning out there somewhere and these guys are going through this cockamamie routine.”

She slid her arm through his.

“Wouldn’t you think they’d find a better system!”

A few minutes later: “They could at least have the ramp permanently installed, with a roof over the whole business.”

An hour later: “The whole thing should be set in concrete and walled off so sand doesn’t blow over it. Roofed, doored, locked. Then all they’d have to do is slide up the door, the way you do a garage door.”

“I’m going to be hearing about this for days, I guess.”

“Well, damn it, Lorie, there’s no excuse for such inefficiency.”

She asked the desk clerk for news of what happened. An oil tanker had exploded in the North Sea. The lifeboat had picked up five men, saved them all.

She arched an eyebrow at Victor. “Well, now….”

He grimaced. “There were probably twenty on board and the rest drowned.” But when she laughed, he did too.

All they ever found of Crabbe was a tiny lane bearing his name, and a memorial bust in the village church.

Victor grinned at her over teacups. “I think you look for things to grieve about.”

“Well, it’s sad. What a face he had—if he really looked like that. So beautiful. I’ve seen pictures of him, but he wasn’t so beautiful in those. Anyway, it does grieve me that he’s forgotten. I can’t bear it that art should die.”

“It doesn’t. It’s still around.”

“What’s the use if nobody reads him?”

He looked at her kindly. “Why should art be immune? Everything else dies.”

She looked at the table and played with her spoon.

He reached across and took her hand. “You know, sweetheart, what he did served its purpose. I’m not a worshiper of art. I like it, but I don’t think it’s sacred. It’s a kind of food, it nourishes a culture, gets digested, and when it’s lost its nutritiveness, it gets put into a museum—or a library. His poetry did what it could.”

“That’s a nice way of thinking about it,” she said thoughtfully.

They walked out of the tea shop into the bright blue day. They wandered away from the main street into little lanes dotted with small old houses, nestled in gardens, comfortable looking, charming.

Not a hovel in sight. “Maybe his poetry did that,” Dolores mused.

“I doubt it. I think it’s called industrialization.”

V
ICTOR WAITED UNTIL AFTER
their return to Oxford Sunday evening, to tell her he’d be tied up and unable to see her for ten days or so. He was sitting with his shoes off, drinking a Scotch for the road—he was driving back to London that night—and smoking a cigarette. His body had that brisk, businesslike look. His voice was flat, without feeling, a business voice. She hated the look more than she hated the news.

Some muckety-muck of the holding company that owned IMO was coming to London with his wife and expected to be wined and dined and ushered and catered to. For ten days. They’d never been to England before, they were not travelers, they couldn’t take the unpredictable or the uncomfortable. They wanted to see Stonehenge and Canterbury Cathedral.

“They’re High Church,” Victor explained.

“Oh. I thought they might be druids.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“Why in hell shouldn’t I be mad? I’m going to miss you.”

He gave her that look, the one that got her on the train, an across-the-room intensity she couldn’t resist, so when he came to her, she held out her arms, and spoke no more of anger.

But she didn’t like it.

It wasn’t so much not seeing him for ten days. She saw him only on weekends most of the time anyway. It was all the other—the way he had waited until Sunday night to tell her, as if he thought she’d throw a tantrum and ruin their weekend. The weekend itself, in fact: had he dredged up a three-day holiday as a sop to keep her quiet about the ten-day absence? And the way he told her, turning again into his other self, the Businessman dealing with an unpredictable and emotional Circe.

Yes, that was it: She didn’t like what she felt he was feeling about her, was seeing her as. As volatile, uncontrollable, someone who had to be handled gently.
Handled.
Possessive, dependent, emotional. Yes.

But you can’t be sure about that, can you? It’s only a vague sense that you have. Besides you can’t tell people every little thing about them that bothers you, can you? So picky it would be. Such little things, vague suspicions.

So she decided to forget it and get lots of work done. She was way behind with her collation, and was coming to a point where she was ready to write a chapter.

Besides he probably wouldn’t understand. He’d think she was making a fuss about little things in order to disguise her real anger at his absence. It would be very hard to explain to him. Not worth the effort.

No. So get on with work. And she did, finishing the last of one group of manuals within a week, catching up with the collation nights and over the weekend. Monday she would start to write a chapter. But as she laid things out Sunday night, she saw that she had forgotten to record a reference, so Monday morning, she bicycled down to the Bod to get it. She stopped at Blackwell’s to order some books, then slowly wound back towards her house.

And saw Victor.

He was walking down towards Cornmarket from the direction of the Randolph Hotel, with a middle-aged man and woman, well-dressed in the American style. She stopped her bike at the corner. He did not see her, he was on the other side of the street. He was talking and being charming, but in his Businessman self, she could see that from where she stood. He had a map in his hand. He’d need it. What he knew about Oxford was mainly the way to her house from the Randolph.

The three passed into the crowded Cornmarket, and Dolores got back on her bike and headed in the other direction. Biting her lip. Victor in Oxford and he didn’t even call. Didn’t say to the muckety-mucks: there’s an American scholar here in Oxford, perhaps you’d like to meet her, perhaps we could all have dinner. He could have disguised things.

No. He was hiding her away.

The thought made her heart stop.

She was, implicitly and beyond her control, a scarlet woman, a person branded illegitimate, forbidden to walk in the light. Victor was permitted to have her and even to keep her, on this condition. As long as he was secretive, furtive. That way he offers tacit assent to the prevailing morality.

But she, Dolores, did not assent to the prevailing morality. Yet she was in its power. She was the Mistress, the Other Woman, the woman with no rights, the one who had to be hidden away, like poor Rosamund, kept by Henry II of England in a palace that could be reached only by tracing a labyrinth, kept there forever out of the sunlight to serve his desire and his jealousy…. A prisoner.

No, no, I am not a prisoner, of course not.

She reached home with a throbbing head and sat down, just dumped her body in a chair, couldn’t work. Lighted a cigar. Getting as bad as Victor. This is silly. There are terms, bargains. This is one of them. It’s not that he wants to hide me, it’s that he’s worried about his job.

But why is it always the same old story? Always the woman who pays? Always, despite anyone’s best intentions.
She
was the hidden one, not he. When the Carriers had invited Dolores to dinner one Saturday night, she’d asked if she could bring along an American friend who was visiting her. They’d had fun, Leonard with his grim ironic British humor, Jane with her equally ironic but livelier Bronx Jewish wit. Victor had, thank God, refrained from discussing politics. Yes, but the Carriers were sophisticated. You couldn’t have taken Victor with you to dinner at high table in New College. Well, but that was on a week night, he wasn’t here. And besides,
you’re
not married.

Her mind whirled, and she could not get it in order.

Of course she wouldn’t want him to flaunt her (but even the word shows bias!), to cause ripples of gossip in his company, to damage him, maybe even reach his wife, hurt her.

Maybe she, Edith, was loving someone else too while Victor was away. She should, after all, why not? But she’d have to be even more furtive than he, a woman, and living in a small town.

Yes, women always pay more.

She rubbed her forehead so hard that bits of skin began to flake in her fingers. She didn’t want to
feel
this. But it wouldn’t go away.

Victor did call, late that night, to say he was in Oxford and felt desolate that he couldn’t see her. She was cool; their conversation was brief. “I’ll see you this weekend, darling,” he said placatingly. As if she were cool because she was angry at his absence. Just assumed she was eager to see him. Arrogant male.

But she said nothing.

A
ND NEVER DID SAY
anything. She was ecstatic by Friday, having written a rough draft of her chapter in just four days, having written with fire and conciseness, fueled, perhaps, by her anger. Yes: Women and Suffering. The right subject for her. A set of chapters on the way feeling, every feeling except anger, had increasingly been associated with women, and suffering above all. All those paintings of the Pieta, all those Hecubas and Niobes. At some point, feeling (except anger) had been declared unmanly. Then a set of chapters on the way women had been taught their suffering role, taught to accept their dependent status, subservience, patient endurance. And the way it had been justified, this role decreed for women. And the concluding chapters—the ones she was frightened of, hard to do—showing the effects of this dumping of emotion onto the one-half of the human race and declaring it off limits for the other half. No clear material there: she’d have to hunt and cull and pull things together from many fields. And there, she’d enter the realm of the subjective: always dangerous for a scholar.