Antal Szerb - Love in a Bottle

Sufficient it to say, I had now come to the end of Bond Street, and still hadn’t found anything truly wonderful for Cynthia, when Providence brought before me, in all his glorious individuality, Stephen Ellesley, a fellow whose one shoulder emanated joie de vivre while the other was weighed down by the burden of his debts. I couldn’t offer him to Cynthia, I thought — I simply can’t find words to express the grotesqueness of his being — but in that precise moment I knew what I was going to surprise my lady with: a chimpanzee. From a little red cubicle I telephoned one of the directors of the zoo, a man I had recently befriended at an anti-vivisection league dinner. We settled on a baby chimp, and, to make him happy, I promised to become a life member of the Friends of the Zoo and vaguely resolved to become vegetarian once again. I left the business of parcelling the creature up and, insuring it to his expertise, went home, packed my bags, and set off for Codliver Manor.

There was a sweet after-rain atmosphere, the trees, the red roofs of the little houses and the telegraph wires all gently dripping. The road followed its own winding way from one end to the other with the peculiar individualism of this country that accords everything its due. It was lined all the way with the cosy houses of the affluent middle class, with English families drinking tea behind carefully drawn curtains, their lives, according to experts, so immeasurably dull but to me so inexpressibly full of attractive mystery (when observed from a passing car. Actually to step inside one would have been the end of any such notion).

By the time I had arrived at the old gate nestling between enormous beech trees, and was making my way towards the manor, I had fallen once again under the spell of Cynthia’s whole aristocratic ambience and the thought that her ancestors’ names featured in the work of several Elizabethan playwrights, not to mention Dryden’s dedication, which I had memorised verbatim when I first got to know her and mumbled in fragments while we were kissing.

But somehow these ancestors were merely an incidental undertone in the rich music of her aristocratic identity, and the closer I got to her the more light years were set between us. I might spend an entire evening in her company, but she never failed to ask in amazement, while I was squeezing her hand:

“So you’re still in England? How can you put up with this damp, boring little country if you’ve nothing special to do here?”

And when after half an hour I finally got the chance to kiss her, before her lips were again in position to be used for speech, she would already have asked me the French for ‘hunting bag’.

With her, you could do anything. She knew no moral inhibitions, nor do I believe any real passions. (“There are three sexes,” Paul Morand tells us somewhere: “men, women and the English.”) But she did go the whole way. My assigned role was to act as if what was going on wasn’t actually happening to us as well-brought-up and intellectual beings, but to two natives somewhere in Patagonia, two complete foreigners, while at the same time, half in a dream, we considered the latest critique of a St John Ervine play. For a while I really enjoyed it — the mouth that wasn’t actually her mouth but rather a means to help the thoughtful philologist conjure up the image of the Oriana of the Amadis novels for himself; the shoulder she so marvellously offered for my kiss that wasn’t her shoulder so much as a precious object revealed for the greater wonderment of a guest, and the whole stunning impersonality of her physical actions. On one occasion, for those same reasons, something gradually rose up inside me, and I sank my teeth into the shoulder as it approached. Cynthia slapped me powerfully but impersonally on the cheek, and started talking about protection racketeering.

I now see that, while we were together, for the whole of those two and a half months, we did genuinely love one another, while our love lasted. I loved her for her superior social class, starting with her Coldliver Manor poker ankles and her eighteenth-century wit. I loved it when she played golf and went riding, and visited the village poor, and fell asleep in church on Sunday morning: these things she invested with an aristocratic perfection I could never have attained in a million years. I loved most of all to think of her asleep, because every thought that ran through her head diminished her unreasoning, God-given perfection. When she slept, with her face set and rather solemn, and now so hopelessly distant from me who a few minutes before had held her in my arms, she was, beyond question, Oriana, the beloved of Amadis’ knight.

But Cynthia, naturally, had a less awestruck attitude to her rank. It is a characteristic of the true upper classes that they are quite unaware of themselves. The sad thing was that Cynthia prided herself on her cleverness. She read a vast amount and was ashamed of all the books she hadn’t read. And she was ashamed of her aristocratic background. Once, after a game of golf, we were lying about on the side of a hill, and Cynthia, set free by a kind of erotic pleasure, allowed herself to relax in the sun, as only the English know how — as if she were experiencing the world through her skin alone. Suddenly she sat up, her face full of agitation.

“You probably imagine that I’m not thinking about anything. But…” And she went on to some highly intelligent observation or other.

And she loved me the way a clever woman loves a clever man. Wise Americans have a saying that women are much more sensible and calculating than we are. Cynthia did not expect any material advantage from me, least of all that I should marry her (which her family would never have consented to, given my dubious forebears and their origins in so many different countries) and because, in erotic terms, I interested her about as much as a native of Patagonia, that is to say, not at all. Mostly she loved me because she was a woman with ‘interests’—an intellectual ‘vamp’. She kept little notebooks about her in which she recorded words she did not know, and came to consult me as the highest lexical authority. If we were alone together, there would be a few kisses, as a sort of preliminary, then out would come the notebooks and the questions. At first, of course, I simply told her nonsense. I advised her that Copernicus’ Christian name was John Nepomuk, that I had compiled a vast collection of works about Ivan the Terrible and translated the Metempsychosis for the Microscope . But when I saw that she believed my every word I became too lazy to lie and gave her the correct answers, didactically, like a good schoolteacher. And besides, she was so stupid. My God, she was stupid!

1932

YES, INDEED, ‘a garden party in St Cloud, in summer’… but, splendid as that may sound, the reality won’t prove quite so grand — as with this friend of mine who never uses his aristocratic Hungarian middle names because of the ‘intolerable poesie ’ of his life. A ‘garden party in St Cloud’ has an air of ‘tea with Rasputin in the Hermitage in the days of the old carnival’ or ‘one of those fine days in Aranjuez’. This tale has nothing to do with such wonders of the past. The garden in question is not the famous one with the green-bearded marble steps, nor is there the slightest hint of snobbery in my thoughts. This particular party had been organised by a gentleman named Robinet (the name means ‘tap’ in English) who ran a boarding house, and quite how I came to be there is not at all clear. Marcelle had been invited, and I trailed along — or it may have been the other way around.

The lamp-lit veranda was crammed with guests speaking every sort of language. Among the Spanish and South Americans was the only person I recognised, a little girl called Concepción. She had once had a fiancé, a gallant Jewish boy from Temesvár in Transylvania, who had undertaken to do what no one had done before — ride his horse across the Amazon. He raised the money for his trip, bought a steed and a gun, had his picture in all the major South American papers… and promptly vanished. Concepción had since overcome her grief in Paris. Also present was an elderly Russian lady, a countess I need hardly add, as was only to be expected when every Hungarian in Paris had prefixed a ‘de’ to his or her barbaric-sounding name. There was also a well-known young man, a friend of the same wealthy Comtesse to whom Napoleon III had declared just four days before his coronation: “Madame, as long as there are still ladies like you in France, it will be worth being Emperor.”