There’s a stanza in Blake,’ I droned, ‘Songs of Experience:
Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease. And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’
By rights, Rachel should have quoted the complementary stanza, but she probably didn’t know it. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I said, ‘because I’ve missed you so much. But I still want to get at you although I know how unsatisfying it would be.’ I sipped my gin. ‘Here’s the other stanza:
Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in Hell’s despair.’
Rachel received this idiot outpouring with a pathic nod. (I don’t care what anyone says: poetry, if you can bring yourself to recite some, never fails. Like flowers. Give them a posy, speak a verse – and there’s nothing they won’t do.) Thus:
‘I was going to ring you.’
‘Were you ? But when I rang that Sunday you started going on about cars and roads and things.’
‘No, I was going to ring you yesterday.’
There was an appreciative hoarseness in my voice when I asked: ‘What for?’
She couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. I knew anyway. I thought of saying, ‘Forgive me, I should like to be alone for a few moments,’ but what I in fact said was: ‘Hang on – just going to have a pee.’
Within two minutes I had sprayed my armpits, talc-ed my groin, hawked rigorously into the basin, straightened my bedcover, put the fire on, scattered LP covers and left-wing weeklies over the floor, thrown some chalky underpants and a cache of fetid socks actually out of the window, drawn the curtains, removed The Rachel Papers from my desk, and run upstairs again, not panting much.
‘Let’s … let’s go downstairs for a bit.’
She stood up and looked at me demandingly. I had nothing appropriate to say, so I went over and kissed her.
‘Didn’t it work with DeForest, or what?’
‘No good.’
My left hand slid off her right buttock and twirled round the neck of the wine bottle.
‘Let’s go downstairs. Chat about it there.’
But we were diverted by another kiss and soon folded on to the sofa. We talked in one another’s arms.
DeForest had more or less fallen apart during the weeks roughly corresponding to the Low. Of course the scatty bitch hadn’t told him she was coming to stay with me, and he minded her not having told him. Also, though DeForest didn’t mention it, Rachel had a hunch that he thought I had banged her on the Friday night. I was flattered to learn that Rachel eventually told him she hadn’t banged me – out of the blue. He appeared to believe her, but, five minutes later, burst into tears. Cracked. That was ten days ago. Since then? Smashed up his car twice; crying all the time; stopped working; once came into Rachel’s classroom and dragged her out of it; the headmaster had taken Rachel aside for a talk: the lot. Rachel closed with the not unaffecting low-mimetic remark that she didn’t want to make two people miserable so she’d make one person happy, if she could.
‘Me?’ I asked blankly.
‘If you still want me.’
Right then.
As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes.
So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more ?