AND then, after six years, she saw him again. He was seated at one of those little bamboo tables decorated with a Japanese vase of paper daffodils. There was a tall plate of fruit in front of him, and very carefully, in a way she recognized immediately as his “special” way, he was peeling an orange.
He must have felt that shock of recognition in her for he looked up and met her eyes. Incredible! He didn’t know her! She smiled; he frowned. She came towards him. He closed his eyes an instant, but opening them his face lit up as though he had struck a match in a dark room. He laid down the orange and pushed back his chair, and she took her little warm hand out of her muff and gave it to him.
Mansfield’s lovers are reunited here through an exchange not unworthy of Noel Coward. Both embrace inauthenticity rather easily and the reader is all too aware of the artificiality of the setting with its ostentatiously precious decorations and ‘fragility’ of decor.In fact of course they are the fake flowers, the bamboo furniture and the Japanese vase!
We are also aware of the performative nature of the male as he affects misrecogntion or forgetfulness. He almost seems histrionic and once again in Mansfield is rather feminised in his gestures and behaviour. He is not all that far from the Wildean chacter of Duquette in ‘Je ne parle pas francais’.
I do enjoy the focus upon the orange. Once again, as in Dickens, a character’s gestures give away their inner self( or lack of). The focalisation of the woman upon this ‘special way’ of peeling an orange demonstrates continuity of character and judgement and also a revisitation perhaps of earlier misgivings. Look at the theatrical description of their reunion. The rhythm is pure melodrama! When the woman gives her hand to the man it is as if the hand is separated from the rest of her body..synecdochical revelation! Some disassociated gesture that indicates their mutual estrangement and self-absorption.
I do like this tale and I think I must have somehow missed it when doing my research on KM. It is brittle and almost cruel and reflects a preoccupation with remebrance as a psychological ‘review’ – a means of contemplating apparently lost chances and the faultlines of memory. It is also told from the apparent ‘inside’ of the female character in particular and yet we realise that such a focus is really more outside than in. There is very little authentic interiority to either and the reader enjoys the ‘drama’ of their meeting as theatre glimpsed from another ‘table’ so to speak.
I can hear the surreptitious chink of silver spoons and the faint scent of citrus.
Hell is other people!