CHAPTER ELEVEN
All in all,
that Wednesday at Prescott's house had been fairly pleasant for Andrew Doyle,
since the two men had struck up a cordial, not to say understanding,
relationship, and exchanged views on a variety of topics of mutual interest -
the author having been provided with a rare opportunity to air his political
and religious views to a sympathetic ear, while the photographer had been only
too ready, for his part, to expatiate on art and photography as they affected
modern life. After which, the host had conducted
his latest guest on a tour of the house, not excepting his unique 'Panties
Museum', which the latter duly praised for its exotic novelty, albeit declining
recourse to nasal verification of the authenticity of their curator's claims! And then there had been the spectacle of
However, if Prescott's guided tour had
provided Andrew with an unprecedented experience shortly after lunch, the
high-point of the day came when Carol started to model later that afternoon,
and the writer, contrary to his expectations, was not sent packing but, rather,
encouraged to take part in the proceedings himself, if only to the extent of
assisting Prescott prepare the studio by moving various items of furniture
about, arranging props, and adjusting the lights. Carol, of course, had to take care of
herself, though she followed instructions from the photographer without demur,
giving Andrew a fresh glimpse of her shapely body - one which, unlike before,
was concrete rather than abstract.
In fact, as the afternoon progressed, he
found himself becoming positively hypnotized by her, at times scarcely able to
conceal his appreciation of her stunning beauty. It was as much as he could do to sit
perfectly still in the shadows of the studio and not rush across the floor to
embrace the model, as she posed in a variety of erotic postures with, at times,
no more than a flimsy pink G-string protecting her modesty. It was as though he hadn't realized the full
extent of her sexuality until then.
Previously she had been an acquaintance who also modelled. Now she was a model who was also an acquaintance. He could hardly fail to appreciate the
difference! If it was to impress him
that she was modelling like this, she was certainly going about it the right
way!
During the following days he didn't see
anything of her in any sense, though he was only too conscious that a change
had come over his attitude towards her and that the spell of her seductions was
beginning to have its effect on him. For
the first time he allowed her image to become a part of his fantasy life, to
usurp the domain temporarily held by Pauline as an erotic focal-point of his
imagination. He would recall certain of
the postures in which she had posed for
Indeed, had he not already won her over
from the painter to some extent, as evidenced by her confidences in him both at
Henry Grace's house and at Donald Prescott's?
Or perhaps she had won him over ... from Pauline? Yes, there could be no denying that she had a
significant part to play in shaping his current attitude to her. It remained to be seen whether he could turn
it into concrete action, however.
Yet there was still the problem of Pauline
to resolve, and Andrew wasn't altogether convinced that his meeting with her,
the following Monday, had adequately done so.
Having spent the morning in Harding's
However, he did manage to persuade her to
visit Prescott with him later that same week, giving her to know that he was
interested in seeing the photographic results of her modelling session in due
course, and assuring her that the photographer, anxious to develop latent
talent, would generously remunerate her for all her efforts. Naturally, she had been a shade diffident
about accepting the invitation at first, never having considered the
possibility of modelling for anyone before, and being slightly unsure of
exactly what to expect. But with due
coaxing from Andrew, who used his sexual powers over her to tactful advantage,
she eventually discarded her qualms and promised to comply - as also to keep
the matter a secret. It was accordingly
decided that an excuse would have to be made to Harding, to the effect that she
had a dental appointment on the Friday afternoon and would therefore have to
restrict her sitting for him to the morning alone. That would give her time to make the journey
from
Having disposed of this obligation to the
photographer, Andrew smuggled Pauline out of the house under cover of darkness
and set himself the task of forgetting about her until Friday. He had no desire to see her again in the
meantime and principally because he had a strong desire to see Carol again,
whose company was anything but an inconvenience to him. Rather, it was her absence that was becoming
inconvenient! Yet this desire had to
wait until Wednesday evening, when she called on him in a tight black leather
miniskirt and matching high-heels, to find out what had happened between
Pauline and himself. Mr Prescott would
have his way, she was blandly informed, on Friday - a piece of information
which caused Carol to smile inwardly, since she knew only too well what the
photographer liked to get-up to with his new recruits, and lost no time in
reminding Andrew, who was also amused.
But there were more serious matters to address, the writer's feelings
for Carol being among them. He wanted
her to know how much she had impressed him that afternoon in Mr Prescott's
studio, how privileged he had felt to witness her modelling talents at such
close-quarters and, more importantly, her physical charms.
To be sure, Carol was flattered by this
confession. She hadn't expected him to
respond to her seductions with such alacrity, knowing something about his
reputation for coyness. It was almost a
shock to her. Yet, at the same time, she
was relieved, immensely relieved that Andrew hadn't been more interested in
Pauline and was all for disentangling himself from the little bitch as quickly
as possible. For she had been at pains
to conceal her jealousy from him at Mr Grace's house and, to some extent, was
still smarting from the effort. Now,
however, she need be in no uncertainty over him. He was not bluffing her. It was all too obvious that he meant
everything he said, that he wanted to make her his girlfriend, and she, true to
her essential nature, was only too willing to oblige, to give him the opportunity
of getting his own back on Harding for all the humiliations of that Berkshire
weekend; to allow him to do the double, as it were, on his ideological enemies
- first through Pauline and now with herself.
It was the least she could do to prove her allegiance to Andrew's
transcendentalism at the expense of Harding's dualism.
Having already adopted a number of his
philosophical positions as her own, what was there to prevent her from adopting
his body as well, from linking her allegiance to his mind with an alliance to
his flesh, and thus bringing her relationship with him to completion? Was it right that she should continue to
rebel against Harding's views on art, politics, religion, etc., while
permitting him to ravish her body?
Surely there was a dangerous dichotomy involved between the spirit and
the senses which could only be to her personal disadvantage, reducing her
relationship with the painter to a predominantly physical thing. And hadn't he already noticed that something
was amiss, that she wasn't quite the woman she had been, before Andrew Doyle
and Henry Grace came onto the scene? He
could only become more suspicious of and dissatisfied with her as the months
wore on, just as she would grow more dissatisfied with and suspicious of him as
Andrew's spirit took greater possession of her, making her contemptuous of
everything Harding stood for, in his anachronistic battle against modern art,
with particular reference to beingful abstraction.
Yes, it was perfectly obvious that she
could not continue to find her spiritual bearings in the writer and
simultaneously orientate herself to the physicality of the painter. This fact had first occurred to her during
the weekend in Berkshire, shortly after she secretly found herself siding with
Andrew against the combined opposition of Robert Harding and Mr Grace on the
subject of transcendentalism, and it had grown more pronounced ever since. There could accordingly be no alternative but
to try and win Andrew over to an appreciation of her body, to get him to
respond to her in the exact opposite way she had responded to him, so that a
completely integrated relationship became possible. For she could no longer face-up to the
prospect of being the repository of Harding's semen when she no longer related
to his mind. Strictly speaking, she had
never related to his mind anyway. But it
had taken Andrew to make her fully aware of the fact, to wake her up from the
mental stupor and moral inertia into which she had fallen as a consequence, in
large measure, of the mere physicality of her relationship with the
painter. Now she could be under no doubt
as to where she stood with Harding. It
was her duty to break with him, to establish a new centre for herself in which
body and soul were reconciled to the same man, and she thereby acquired a new
lease-of-life, positive and wholesome.
She needed to find her equal, and so establish herself on a footing
which could only lead to their common good.
And this equal, this spiritual mirror to her own physical self, was now
standing before her, reflecting her beauty in his spiritual eloquence, assuring
her how of beneficial her physical influence had been upon him, and extending
to her the opportunity of a two-way relationship which would rescue her from
the self-division into which she had tragically fallen.
A single kiss, gently placed on her
sensuous little mouth, was sufficient to ignite the torch of her desire and
hurl her into the arms of her saviour, bringing the present to life in a way
which made the past irrelevant, insignificant, and contemptible. No doubt, she would have a lot to learn from
him in due course, other aspects of his transcendentalism presenting themselves
to her as they went forward, growing more finely attuned to each other, more
closely integrated, as their relationship blossomed. She would learn about the development of the
superconscious at the expense of the subconscious, and the changing nature of
the ego in relation to this, so that the contemporary ego, subject to a greater
influx of spirit, was decidedly less egocentric, not to say egotistic, than the
ego of, say, three hundred years ago.
The doings of Western man in his egocentric prime were a thing of the
past, never to be resurrected in the future.
The former tense balance between the two hemispheres of the psyche -
ever the driving-force behind the development of great civilizations in the
estimation of philosophers like Spengler - had been superseded by a mounting
imbalance in favour of the superconscious, with a consequence that all
traditional manifestations of dualism, whether religious, political, cultural,
scientific, or social, were in rapid decline.
Yes, the civilized world was destined to
become increasingly transcendental as the decades passed, and nothing, short of
a solar collapse, could prevent it from becoming more so! Those who were categorically against the
decline of dualism, and accordingly in favour of stemming the rising tide of
transcendentalism, were simply enemies of evolution, of progress, of
enlightenment. They and their kind would
have to be dealt with in due course, when the world arrived at the Last
Judgement and the wheat were subsequently divided from the chaff and the chaff,
in a manner of speaking, from the wheat.
A just retribution would doubtless be meted out to all who stood in the
way of progress, no matter how highly they thought of themselves. 'The slow' would be found wanting and
condemned for having turned their back on the Christian prophecy of Heaven and
the prospect of Eternal Life - a life lived in the spirit of heavenly eternity
rather than in the flesh of worldly time.
'The slow' would not be praised for their competitive bias in the face
of ongoing co-operativeness. It would be
their undoing, their banishment from a transcendental society. Their dualism, no longer respectable, would
be condemned on every front, slowly but surely eradicated from society, so that
the Christian prophecy of Heaven could eventually be realized ... in the
millennial Beyond, where 'the peace that surpasses all understanding', and
hence egocentric relativity, reigned supreme, and dichotomies ceased to
exist.
The transcendental future was certainly no
fiction, and Carol would have to learn this, along with all of the other things
which Andrew chose to impart to her concerning the evolution of mankind. She would also come to understand why D.H.
Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent was virtually anathema to him and why, by
contrast, he valued Aldous Huxley's Island so highly. Why Wolfgang Paalen was one of his favourite
Surrealists and why he abhorred so much of the work of Gericault and
Delacroix. Why he disapproved of Freud
but admired Myers, and so on.
Yes, there would be a lot for her to learn
as the months slipped by and their relationship became more firmly
cemented. She had a thirst for
knowledge, a thirst which Harding, with his third-rate mind, had failed to
quench. It was a thirst every
intelligent woman needed to have quenched.
Otherwise, she would be a mere physical thing in the hands of man -
parched and indifferent, shut-out from proper contact with herself, deprived of
spiritual growth. No, she'd had enough
experience of that, enough alienation from herself at the hands of someone who
was spiritually beneath her, to be able to tolerate any more of it!
But Andrew would revive her, he would pour
some of his spirit into hers and bring it back to life, offer her the cup of
his wisdom until her spirit overflowed with his being and was duly restored to
its true strength. She would not be
short of spiritual nourishment with him!
On the contrary, she would be satiated.
And what she received she would return, transformed and enriched to her
benefactor, in the guise of devotion.
She would take and give back. He
would give and take back. A two-way flow
of giving and taking would be established, so different from the arid, bogus,
one-sided giving she had known with Harding - a giving of her body merely! A woman wasn't happy until she gave not only
with her body but, no less importantly, with her soul, a soul which answered
the man's physical giving and corresponded to her admiration of him, his whole
being ... both physical and mental. If
he didn't permit himself to be fully loved because his ideas and attitudes were
unacceptable to one, failed to correspond to one's deepest intuitions and
ideological life-urge, then one would be cheating oneself, and nothing good
could come of the relationship. Better
not to love at all than only to love by half-measures, on the strength of the
man's sexual prowess.
No, an intelligent woman could not allow
herself to be degraded to the extent of being a mere body - a whore. Her soul would rebel against it. She needed the give and take, the spiritual
and the physical, love and sex. Hitherto
Carol had known too little of the former and too much of the latter. Now, with the promise of Andrew's company, it
was time to swing over to the opposite extreme and break free of the alienated
physicality in which she had been stranded with the painter, working towards
the reintegration of her being through love.
It didn't matter if Andrew transpired not to being the best of lovers,
if he didn't make love to her as often or as vigorously as Harding. The fact that his political and religious
beliefs were so much more congenial to her than Harding's, suggested his sexual
habits would be too, so that a reduction in physical sex would work to her
advantage. For the double life of mental
allegiance to him but physical allegiance to the painter was a contradiction in
terms which could not be continued without the risk of serious consequences -
possibly a severe neurosis or even psychosis, such as usually afflicted those
who were deeply divided against themselves.
It was therefore high-time for the spirit to triumph over the senses, in
accordance with the Zeitgeist of an increasingly post-dualistic age, so that the
dualistic past, in which more often than not senses had triumphed over spirit,
could be clearly distinguished from the transcendental present, and the will to
spiritual beatitude made known in no uncertain terms!
It was consequently imperative for Carol
to sever connections with Harding and thus free herself from the past, not
continue to be torn between worlds. The
new future which Andrew Doyle promised her seemed a good deal superior to
anything she had known before, signifying a positivity of outlook which moved
with the current of evolution rather than against it, rejoicing at the most
progressive developments the age had to offer, rather than rebelling against
them; seeing in the times not defeat and humiliation but pride and victory -
the grand sweep of transcendental progress taking place right before one's very
eyes! How different it would be, being
made love to by a man who entered one with a real positivity in his spirit, the
positivity born of an assurance that the world was gradually changing for the
better, becoming steadily, if slowly, a better place in which to live! That, in spite of the ever-present threat of
global war and the constant reporting of murders, arsons, rapes, thefts,
hijacks, explosions, accidents, etc., on the news or in the papers, life was
gradually evolving for the better!
Yes, different to the point where one
would hardly recognize oneself. Yet
there it was, Andrew Doyle was such a man, he lived with the unshakeable
conviction that, come what may, things were evolving for the better and would
continue to do so until mankind, in overcoming itself, reached its ultimate
destination in transcendental bliss, some centuries hence, and thereupon
brought progress to a halt, having attained to its culmination in the
post-human millennium. No matter how
pessimistic the bourgeoisie became with regard to the impending collapse of their world,
there could be no kidding Andrew that his world was
in collapse. Even if he personally
became a casualty of evolution, even if he personally succumbed to a premature
death, there could be no question of anyone's shaking his confidence
in the triumph of transcendental ideals and the fact that human life was on the
rise. Severe economic, social, and
political problems there might be, but they had no power to alter his vision to
one of bourgeois pessimism or even proletarian cynicism.
To be sure, he had been through the worst
in his own life, had pushed pessimism as far as it could go before, in a moment
of enlightenment analogous to a 'Pauline conversion', he had seen the Light and
thereupon acquired a new optimism, a new wisdom born largely from the extent of
his previous folly. Thenceforth the
decline of the West, primarily conceived in terms of its bourgeois traditions,
became not a cause for complaint but one for rejoicing, since it signified the
progression of Western civilization towards higher spiritual development - a
development tending away from the dualistic norms of civilized achievement
towards a level where dualism became no more than an historical landmark on the
road to enlightenment, a kind of midway stage in human evolution, with nothing
to recommend it for eternal honours. The
fact that we were outgrowing dualism was yet another aspect of our progression
towards a higher stage of life, even though it was not an aspect that appealed
to everyone, including, Andrew had to concede, the painter Robert Harding. For him, by contrast, it was an indication of
regression, to be fought against with every means at his disposal.
Yet how fortunate for Carol that she
hadn't been deceived by the painter's views, but had found her true ally in
Andrew Doyle! How fortunate for her that
she could now begin to live the victory of the spirit over the senses, instead
of being the hapless victim of the latter!
To have a companion whose body and spirit vibrated in tune with her own
... on a major rather than a minor chord.
Not to have to feign scorn at the sight of Abstract Expressionist or
other modern paintings which Harding invariably chose to castigate. Not to have to feign a liking for works of
art which were really a hundred or more years out-of-date and accordingly
failed to synchronize with one's inner being, failed to impress one on account
of their worldly representations. What a
relief it would be to have a companion who, whilst instructive, enabled one to
remain true to oneself! Carol was so
tired of playing the hypocrite, so anxious to be genuine. It was such a relief to know that an escape
route from Harding lay open through Andrew and that, by availing herself of it,
her life could begin to be lived progressively, optimistically, even happily,
for the first time not only in months, but in years!
She was still somewhat overcome by emotion
when, after due kissings and fondlings that evening, during which Andrew had
contrived to excite and even ignite her crotch to a degree where the fire could
only be extinguished with the help of a succession of wet bursts which drenched
her nylon panties, she returned to her room in Harding's house and threw
herself down on its bed with a mixture of relief and joy in her heart. It wouldn't be long now before she saw the
back of the artist for good, and moved, with Andrew, to a flat in Highgate,
north
