There is no shortage of grand declarations of love; they start pouring in from the first few pages. Upon being questioned about his affections for her, Antony asserts:

There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

Then comes a messenger from Rome, to whom Antony makes his loyalties clear:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.

Cleopatra too waxes poetic about her love for him:

Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor / But was a race of heaven.

Loyal to the end, she follows him to the grave, comparing the bite of a snake to a “lover’s pinch”. Liebestod indeed, but a question nags: if they loved each other enough to die for each other, how come they couldn’t work together while alive? Cleopatra’s fleet turns around twice at the crucial points of war—no explanation offered to either Mark Antony or the reader. But there are cracks even before Actium. Upon hearing Antony’s plan to return to Rome, she pretends to faint, then throws a tantrum. She questions him:

“Excellent falsehood! / Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her? / I’ll seem the fool I am not.”

When Thidias, messenger from Octavian, comes to persuade her surrender, she lets him kiss her hand. The sight brings so much fury to Antony that he curses his lover thus:

“You were half blasted ere I knew you.”

One could say that Antony and Cleopatra bring their downfall upon themselves. One could even argue that, without Octavian, they would find another way to self-sabotage. Whatever sweet nothings Antony and Cleopatra whisper to each other, the ugly reality of their relationship remains: it is one of constant misjudgment and mistrust. Their tragedy is not the tragedy of circumstances (Romeo and Juliet), but the folly of character; they are two people who love grandly but trust poorly.

I first came to Josephine Hart’s novel by its 1992 film adaptation by Louis Malle. My verdict is that Damage is not the sort of book one places beside Anna Karenina and feels obliged to reckon with — very few books are. It is, rather, the exactly sort of book one reaches for at 11PM when the spirit is low, and one wants something of respectable quality yet has no capacity for anything too demanding.

Miss Hart’s characters are sketches rather than portraits — she has not the patience for the slow accumulation of detail that another writer would have insisted upon — but she has the gift for delivering a single devastating sentence. Always finely tuned, and always at the right time in the depiction of a desperate, forbidden romance. Indeed I finished this book remembering her observations and aphorisms. It is a narrow but real gift, which Lady Saatchi — as she became in her other life in high society — wielded with admirable skill.

And so I did, in the room in which I had first lain with her. Is it important which way I tried to take her? Which entrance? And whether with tongue or hand or penis? Did she lie or stand? Was her back to me or to the wall? Were her hands free or bound? Did she see my face or not? Tales of ecstasy are endless tales of failure. For always comes separation. And the journey towards the essential, fleeting unity begins again.

She was the split-second experience that changes everything; the car smash; the letter we shouldn’t have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. On my well-ordered stage-set the lights were up, and maybe at last I was waiting in the wings.