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the last resort traveling
alone.” He was fingering the cross on his chest and his face lit up in a big
smile as he added: "You speak English with astonishing fluency." The
language, though, which I now heard for the first time is not like the language
I had learnt at school. These are living voices and have another ring. My mind
was like a keen knife. But the language is not my language; I had learnt to be
eloquent in it through perseverance. And the train carried me to Victoria
Station and to the world of Jean Morris.
     
    ‘Everything
which happened before my meeting her was a premonition; everything I did after
I killed her was an apology; not for killing her, but for the lie that was my
life. I was twenty-five when I met her at a party in Chelsea. The door, and a
long passageway leading to the entrance hall. She opened the door and lingered;
she appeared to my gaze under the faint lamplight like a mirage shimmering in a
desert. I was drunk, my glass two-thirds empty. With me were two girls; I was
saying lewd things to them and they were laughing. She came towards us with
wide strides, placing the weight of her body on the right foot so that her
buttocks inclined leftwards. She was looking at me as she approached. She
stopped opposite me and gave me a look of arrogance, coldness, and something
else. I opened my mouth to speak, but she had gone. "Who’s that female?” I
said to my two companions.
    ‘London was emerging from the war and the oppressive
atmosphere of the Victorian era. I got to know the pubs of Chelsea, the clubs
of Hampstead, and the gatherings of Bloomsbury. I would read poetry talk of
religion and philosophy discuss paintings, and say things about the
spirituality of the East. I would do everything possible to entice a woman to
my bed. Then I would go after some new prey. My soul contained not a drop of
sense of fun — just as Mrs Robinson had said. The women I enticed to my bed
included girls from the Salvation Army, Quaker societies and Fabian gatherings.
When the Liberals, the Conservatives, Labour, or the Communists, held a
meeting, I would saddle my camel and go. "You’re ugly” Jean Morris said to
me on the second occasion. “I’ve never seen an uglier face than yours." I
opened my mouth to speak but she had gone. At that instant, drunk as I was, I
swore I would one day make her pay for that. When I woke up, Ann Hammond was
beside me in the bed. What was it that attracted Ann Hammond to me? Her father
was an officer in the Royal Engineers, her mother from a rich family in Liverpool.
She proved an easy prey. When I first met her she was less than twenty and was
studying Oriental languages at Oxford. She was lively with a gay intelligent
face and eyes that sparkled with curiosity. When she saw me, she saw a dark
twilight like a false dawn. Unlike me, she yearned for tropical climes, cruel
suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all her hankerings. I am
South that yearns for the North and the ice. Ann Hammond spent her childhood at
a convent school. Her aunt was the wife of a Member of Parliament. In my bed I
transformed her into a harlot. My bedroom was a graveyard that looked on to a
garden; its curtains were pink and had been chosen with care, the carpeting was
of a warm greenness, the bed spacious, with swans-down cushions. There were
small electric lights, red, blue, and violet, placed in certain corners; on the
walls were large mirrors, so that when I slept with a woman it was as if I
slept with a whole harem simultaneously. The room was heavy with the smell of
burning sandalwood and incense, and in the bathroom were pungent Eastern
perfumes, lotions, unguents, powders, and pills. My bedroom was like an
operating theatre in a hospital. There is a still pool in the depths of every
woman that I knew how to stir. One day they found her dead. She had gassed
herself. They also found a small piece of paper with my name on it. It
contained nothing but the words: “Mr Sa’eed, may