The Black Prince

For the crime of publication I blame the self-styled Mr Loxias (or ‘Luxius’ as I believe he sometimes calls himself). As several newspapers have hinted, this is a nom de guerre of a fellow-prisoner upon whom the unfortunate B.P. seems to have become distressingly fixated. The name conceals the identity of a notorious rapist and murderer, a well-known musical virtuoso, whose murder, by a peculiarly horrible method, of a successful fellow-musician made the headlines some considerable time ago. Possibly the similarity of their crime drew these two unhappy men together. Artists are notoriously an envious race.

(Black Prince. Bradley Pearson.

And she came straight to you?’
‘I suppose so. She arrived pretty soon after Arnold—’
‘And what did she say?’
‘Do stop looking like King Lear—’
‘What did she say?

I tried, out of a sort of last-resort self-preserving wisdom, to suffer purely. O you my fellow sufferers, you who mourn in waning hope and in ingenious fantastic yearning the loss of the beloved, let me give you at least this advice: suffer purely. Banish remorse, banish resentment and the screaming contortions

‘What can I do to prove that I love you absolutely?’
‘I don’t see that you can do anything.’
‘I shall jump out of the car.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I shall.’
And the next moment she had.

I felt a void the size of an opera house where my stomach might have been and through the middle of it travelled the great scar of desire. I felt a cringing fear of which I could not determine whether it was physical or mental, and a sense that soon I might somehow lose control of myself, shout, vomit, faint.

The act of falling in love, of really falling in love (I do not mean what sometimes passes by this name), floods the being with immediate ecstasy.

‘Because, my dear Julian, pure ignorant young girls cannot save complicated neurotic over—educated older men from disaster, however much they kid themselves that they can.’

‘An alternative would be to do what you do. Finish nothing, publish nothing, nourish a continual grudge against the world, and live with an unrealized idea of perfection which makes you feel superior to those who try and fail.’
‘How clearly you put it.’

I’m a damned clever woman who wants to have fun for the rest of her life, real fun, and happiness, not just emotional messes.