To write of someone loved, of oneself loving, above all of oneself being loved—how can these things be done with propriety? How can they be done at all? I have treated of love in my published work; I have used it—with avarice, envy, revenge—as one of the compelling motives of conduct. I have written it up as something prolonged and passionate and tragic; I have written it down as a modest but sufficient annuity with which to reward the just; I have spoken of it continually as a game of profit and loss. How does any of this avail for the simple task of describing, so that others may see her, the woman one loves? How can others see her except through one’s own eyes, and how, so seeing her, can they turn the pages and close the book and live on as they have lived before, without becoming themselves the author and themselves the lover? The catalogues of excellencies of the renaissance poets, those competitive advertisements, each man outdoing the next in metaphor, that great blurb—like a Jewish publisher’s list in the Sunday newspapers—the Song of Solomon, how do these accord with the voice of love—love that delights in weakness, seeks out and fills the empty places and completes itself in its work of completion? How can one transcribe those accents? Love, which has its own life, its hours of sleep and waking, its health and sickness, growth, death and immortality, its ignorance and knowledge, experiment and mastery—how can one relate this hooded stranger to the men and women with whom he keeps pace? It is a problem beyond the proper scope of letters.

In the criminal code of Haiti, Basil tells me, there is a provision designed to relieve unemployment, forbidding farmers to raise the dead from their graves and work them in the fields. Some such rule should be observed against the use of live men in books. The algebra of fiction must reduce its problems to symbols if they are to be soluble at all. I am shy of a book commended to me on the grounds that the “characters are alive.” There is no place in literature for a live man, solid and active. At best the author may maintain a kind of Dickensian menagerie, where his characters live behind bars, in darkness, to be liberated twice nightly for a brief gambol under the arc lamps; in they come to the whip crack, dazzled, deafened and doped, tumble through their tricks and scamper out again, to the cages behind which the real business of life, eating and mating, is carried on out of sight of the audience. “Are the lions really alive?” “Yes, lovey.” “Will they eat us up?” “No, lovey, the man won’t let them”—that is all the reviewers mean as a rule when they talk of “life.” The alternative, classical expedient is to take the whole man and reduce him to a manageable abstraction. Set up your picture plain, fix your point of vision, make your figure twenty foot high or the size of a thumbnail, he will be life-size on your canvas; hang your picture in the darkest corner, your heaven will still be its one source of light. Beyond these limits lie only the real trouser buttons and the crepe hair with which the futurists used to adorn their paintings. It is, anyway, in the classical way that I have striven to write; how else can I now write of Lucy?

I met her first after I had been some weeks in London; after my return, in fact, from my week at the seaside. I had seen Roger several times; he always said, “You must come and meet Lucy,” but nothing came of these vague proposals until finally, full of curiosity, I went with Basil uninvited.

I met him in the London library, late one afternoon.

“Are you going to the young Simmondses’?” he said.

“Not so far as I know.”

“They’ve a party today.”

“Roger never said anything to me about it.”

“He told me to tell everyone. I’m just on my way there now. Why don’t you come along?”

So we took a taxi to Victoria Square, for which I paid.

As it turned out, Roger and Lucy were not expecting anyone. He went to work now, in the afternoons, with a committee who were engaged in some fashion in sending supplies to the Red Army in China; he had only just come in and was in his bath. Lucy was listening to the six o’clock news on the wireless. She said, “D’you mind if I keep it on for a minute? There may be something about the dock strike in Madras. Roger will be down in a minute.”

She did not say anything about a drink so Basil said, “May I go and look for the whisky?”

“Yes, of course. How stupid of me. I always forget. There’s probably some in the dining room.”

He went out and I stayed with Lucy in her hired drawing room. She sat quite still listening to the announcer’s voice. She was five months gone with child—“Even Roger has to admit that it’s proletarian action,” she said later—but as yet scarcely showed it in body; but she was pale, paler, I guessed, than normal, and she wore that incurious, self-regarding expression which sometimes goes with a first pregnancy. Above the sound of the wireless I heard Basil outside, calling upstairs, “Roger. Where do you keep the cork-screw?” When they got to the stock prices, Lucy switched off. “Nothing from Madras,” she said. “But perhaps you aren’t interested in politics.”

“Not much,” I said.

“Very few of Roger’s friends seem to be.”

“It’s rather a new thing with him,” I said.

“I expect he doesn’t talk about it unless he thinks people are interested.”

That was outrageous, first because it amounted to the claim to know Roger better than I did and, secondly, because I was still smarting from the ruthless boredom of my last two or three meetings with him.

“You’d be doing us all a great service if you could keep him to that,” I said.

It is a most painful experience to find, when one has been rude, that one has caused no surprise. That is how Lucy received my remark. She merely said, “We’ve got to go out almost at once. We’re going to the theatre in Finsbury and it starts at seven.”

“Very inconvenient.”

“It suits the workers,” she said. “They have to get up earlier than we do, you see.”

Then Roger and Basil came in with the drinks. Roger said, “We’re just going out. They’re doing the Tractor Trilogy at Finsbury. Why don’t you come too. We could probably get another seat, couldn’t we, Lucy?”

“I doubt it,” said Lucy. “They’re tremendously booked up.”

“I don’t think I will,” I said.

“Anyway join us afterwards at the Café Royal.”

“I might,” I said.

“What have you and Lucy been talking about?”

“We listened to the news,” said Lucy. “Nothing from Madras.”

“They’ve probably got orders to shut down on it. I.D.C. have got the BBC in their pocket.”

“I.D.C.?” I asked.

“Imperial Defence College. They’re the new hush-hush crypto-fascist department. They’re in up to the neck with I.C.I. and the oil companies.”

“I.C.I.?”

“Imperial Chemicals.”

“Roger,” said Lucy, “we really must go if we’re to get anything to eat.”

“All right,” he said. “See you later at the Café.”

I waited for Lucy to say something encouraging. She said, “We shall be there by eleven,” and began looking for her bag among the chintz cushions.

I said, “I doubt if I can manage it.”

“Are we taking the car?” Roger asked.

“No, I sent it away. I’ve had him out all day.”

“I’ll order some taxis.”

“We could drop Basil and John somewhere,” said Lucy.

“No,” I said, “get two.”

“We’re going by way of Appenrodts,” said Lucy.

“No good for me,” I said, although, in fact, they would pass the corner of St. James’s where I was bound.

“I’ll come and watch you eat your sandwiches,” said Basil.

That was the end of our first meeting. I came away feeling badly about it, particularly the way in which she had used my Christian name and acquiesced in my joining them later. A commonplace girl who wanted to be snubbing, would have been conspicuously aloof and have said “Mr. Plant,” and I should have recovered some of the lost ground. But Lucy was faultless.