Free After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley

refrigerator and the aeroplane.”
    â€œHow many of them were there?”
    â€œOnly two at that particular moment. One was a Grand Passion, and the other a Caprice. A Caprice,” she repeated, rolling the r. “It was one of poor Clare’s favourite words. I used to try and pump her. But she was mum. ‘I want them to be mysterious,’ she told me the last time I pressed her for details. ‘Anonymous, without an état civil * . Why should I show you their passport and identity cards?’ ‘Perhaps they haven’t got any,’ I suggested. Which was malicious. I could see she was annoyed. But a week later she showed me their photographs. There they were; the camera cannot lie; I had to be convinced. The Grand Passion, I must say, was a very striking-looking creature. Thin-faced, worn, a bit Roman and sinister. The Caprice was more ordinarily the nice young Englishman. Rather childish and simple, Clare explained; and she gave me to understand that she was initiating him. It was the other, the Grand P., who thought of such refinements as the refrigerator. Also, she now confided to me for the first time, he was mildly a sadist. Having seen his face, I could believe it. ‘Am I ever likely to meet him?’ I asked. She shook her head. He moved in a very different world from mine.”
    â€œA rabbit-shooter?” Fanning asked.
    â€œNo: an intellectual. That’s what I gathered.”
    â€œGolly!”
    â€œSo there was not the slightest probability, as you can see, that I should ever meet him.” Dodo laughed. “And yet almost the first face I saw on leaving Clare that afternoon was the Grand P.’s.”
    â€œComing to pay his sadistic respects?”
    â€œAlas for poor Clare, no. He was behind glass in the showcase of a photographer in the Brompton Road, not a hundred yards from the Tarns’ house in Ovington Square. The identical portrait. I marched straight in. ‘Can you tell me who that is?’ But it appears that photography is done under the seal of confession. They wouldn’t say. Could I order a copy? Well, yes, as a favour, they’d let me have one. Curiously enough, they told me, as they were taking down my name and address, another lady had come in only two or three days before and also ordered a copy. ‘Not by any chance a rather tall lady with light auburn hair and a rather amusing mole on the left cheek?’ That did sound rather like the lady. ‘And with a very confidential manner,’ I suggested, ‘as though you were her oldest friends?’ Exactly, exactly; they were unanimous. That clinched it. Poor Clare, I thought, as I walked on towards the Park, poor, poor Clare!”
    There was a silence.
    â€œWhich only shows,” said Fanning at last, “how right the Church has always been to persecute literature. The harm we imaginative writers do! Enormous! We ought all to be on the Index, every one. Consider your Clare, for example. If it hadn’t been for books, she’d never have known that such things as passion and sensuality and perversity even existed. Never.”
    â€œCome, come,” she protested.
    But, “Never,” Fanning repeated. “She was congenitally as cold as a fish; it’s obvious. Never had a spontaneous, untutored desire in her life. But she’d read a lot of books. Out of which she’d fabricated a theory of passion and perversity. Which she then consciously put into practice.”
    â€œOr rather didn’t put into practice. Only day-dreamed that she did.”
    He nodded. “For the most part. But sometimes, I don’t mind betting, she realized the day-dreams in actual life. Desperately, as you so well described it, with her teeth clenched and her eyes shut, as though she were jumping off the Eiffel Tower. That rabbit-shooter, for instance. . . .”
    â€œBut do you think the rabbit-shooter really existed?”
    â€œPerhaps not that