Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

rather like the engine-driver of the Royal Scot express who had one wife in London and another in Edinburgh. ‘And he never once called either of them by the other’s name,’ I remembered. ‘Perhaps he loved them in entirely different ways?’
    After a comfortingly civilized breakfast of coffee, rolls and butter, orange juice and a boiled egg, Sally asked me casually: ‘With how many women have you slept in your life?’
    ‘Are we playing the truth-game?’ I asked defensively.
    ‘What’s the truth-game?’
    This time I was careful not to hurt her feelings. ‘I mean must I answer? In my age no woman would ask a question like that except in the privacy of a bedroom, and even then she’d expect an evasive reply.’
    ‘But why?’ This surprised Sally a good deal.
    ‘Because in theory a man’s allowed only one woman at a time, the one he publicly undertakes to cherish and support until death. I admit that the theory of marriage doesn’t correspond in the least with the facts, because it doesn’t often happen that married couples choose wisely. Either they break their contract after a few years and get a divorce, or else they remain married “for the sake of the children”, or for appearances’ sake, and console themselves with illicit love-affairs – generally with other unhappily married people. Or else they stay married without such consolations and hate each other. But marriage still has force as a convention, which is what makes your question embarrassing. Illicit love-affairs are carried on in a hole-and-corner way, and if a man and a woman choose to live in open sin, as it’s called, married people feel so uncomfortable that the guilty couple – they’re assumed to feel guilty – aren’t invited to public functions, and when they’re travelling they find it difficult to get accommodation at respectable hotels.’
    ‘And if their love-affairs are discovered?’
    ‘There may be a divorce. But usually they’re hushed up: it’s easier to overlook unfaithfulness than to separate.’ I was determined not to give away any secrets of my past, to Sally at least; so I parried her original question by asking: ‘What about marriage here?’
    ‘Different estates have different customs,’ she said. ‘In ours women are promiscuous until they have children.’
    ‘May I ask what anti-conceptual devices you use?’
    This puzzled everyone a great deal, and I had the embarrassment of having to give an elementary lecture on birth control. Sally bit her lip, but old See-a-Bird said gently: ‘She didn’t mean that magicians are promiscuous in the physical sense. In that respect we’re peculiar. The other estates assume that the consummation of love can’t be separated from the reproductive process; but we know that it can and that, as Cleopatra wrote:
To couple as beasts couple,
Is violence and shame.
    Naturally, we avoid congress unless we want children, and then we have it only with the people we love and trust so utterly that violence and cruelty become irrelevant. We remove, and our bodies remain locked in torment far below us. At all other times, consummation is achieved by a marriage of mind and body, while the reproductive organs are quiescent but our inner eyes are flooded with waves of light. In cases of complete sympathy we lie side by side, or feet to feet, without bodily contact, and our spirits float upward and drift in a waving motion around the room. The greatest honour a woman can do a man is to allow him to father her child; but this she only grants after perfect proof of physical and spiritual sympathy. Once such a man is found he stays with her.’
    ‘But if this sympathy dissolves before death – if either partner falls in love with someone else?’
    ‘That doesn’t happen. Once a woman has learned to know herself through friendships with a number of different men, a mistake is impossible.’
    ‘And if one partner dies, does the other re-marry?’
    ‘Not unless the survivor goes