17

The meetings with Muriel happened regularly enough. Her telephone voice suggested the Ritz Bar, or a walk across the Park, or a string quartet in Wigmore Street. Muriel Raphael’s voice was too rational to make a practice of enthusiasm. Taught to react in the right way, it had caught an even steeliness. Because uniformity was desirable. She had discovered this very early. As a child in pigtails, a smudgy Jewess, just a little different, she had suffered from hot palms, the sudden spasms of passion that came from looking at pictures or listening to music. She could not pour it out quickly enough, communicate her passion. But people made it difficult, the surprised and embarrassed English faces that translated Muriel Raphael into an uncomfortable fourteen. She began to be conscious of her race. Resenting, she also envied the aloof voice, the discreet face, that were free from shame, the hot, darting Jewishness. She began to be secretive. Because she had to form herself, and there is always a secretiveness to mask the process of conscious evolution. Muriel Raphael was deliberately making a second Muriel Raphael that overlaid the first, so many layers of habit, opinion, so many mannerisms, each tested already by convention. Only sometimes the recollection of an adolescent ecstasy, Mozart in a sticky twilight, the greenish-yellow light through limes, and the braided shoulders of an officer, or whirling in her father’s gallery, her own skirt caught in the stiff chalkiness of Degas, her own shoulders taking the curtain bow, these pursued her sometimes with a just recognizable nostalgia that she was anxious to disown. She had realized, tested, why, she had proved the superiority of the objective, the intellectual approach. Mozart had become a neat mathematical pattern that stimulated without disturbing. She sat, just a little inclined, and traced a figure in sound right to its neat conclusion. There was no looseness. There was nothing unexplained. A Mozart symphony left Muriel clear-eyed, satisfied. It was, she felt, a triumph of accomplished intellect.

To know what you wanted, and to achieve it, this was desirable, just as to desire the unattainable was not to be encouraged. In the morning Muriel Raphael stood in front of the open window and breathed in a certain way. She drank the juice of crushed carrots. Alone, she ate mostly vegetables. She had prescribed this for herself. She took great pleasure in realizing the rightness of her behaviour, the behaviour of a rational being. She glowed with this rightness, walking in the street, breathing at the window, eating her raw salads. Beyond the circle of this right existence other people moved in a maze of unco-ordinated instinct, lost in the tangle of their self-encouraged loves and hates.

For Muriel Raphael, a personal relationship was a practical arrangement. She took just as much as she needed. She did not choose to give very much of herself, perhaps remembering a door closed in her face, locking herself in the bathroom to cry as a child. But achieving self-sufficiency, she kept emotion at a distance. She controlled the voices on the telephone, her own and those that answered her. She could reduce these to the tempo of her own, listen to their echo, it made her smile, a thin, satisfied motion of the lips that almost brushed the listening ear.