Anonymous

Muriel

CHAPTER ONE

Phillip Mansfield's Day-Book

Where there is silence there is pain; where there is music there is often pain; where there is absence there is pain. And sometimes all these congregate, even in the presence of the once-beloved, becoming like a veil across the eyes, a tight band round the forehead, so that the pain obtains the greyness of an early-evening mist, obscuring the thoughts, the words, to which the mind would otherwise give birth.

In such moments, clamped within my own being, and feeling that the very spaces around me (those spaces between the furniture and the walls such as encroach on one in moments of douleur more than do the physical objects themselves) are areas of the alien, of foreignness, even though lived in, walked in, day by day-yes, in such moments I am drawn into a dullness, an unspeaking, a sense of being separated from myself and from all others.

It is because, I am told, I live too much in my mind, when in fact I would that I could live in others' minds- for I, the real Phillip (seemingly unknown to those I hold most dear) have sat and held his once-beloved's hand, discoursing with her in the manner of a flowing stream and pausing only at the stones and bridges of her words, absorbing and enfolding them to show my true identity with her. Ah, how often-how often-did I clamp my lips upon my wife's (aware that my own were too wet and too loose sometimes) and swear to her that in my love for her I would become her, dissolve and disappear in her, and know our souls to be united.

'They cannot be', she would say and turn her face. Downstairs a piano might be tinkling-its notes wounding with their brittle, careless sounds. Then would come a silence and my wife would stir. The bed must be smoothed, she would say, or the maid would see, and this despite my protestations that we had not made love, nor I as much as flirted a hand beneath her skirt.

'Even so, Phillip, even so', she always murmured and would pat her hair with that distracted air of a woman who is not appeased or, if she is, has her mind elsewhere, though she will not acknowledge it.

'I cannot be other than myself any more than you can be other than yourself, she often said.

'And thus there is a vacuum where love should be', said I.

'No vacuum, Phillip, but rather an enclave of desire that will renew itself. I cannot help myself if love between my legs enchants me more than is in my head'.

'Impure!', I cried, but said it only in my head.