Ten thirsty fingers of my blind Muse Confer upon my face their sensual spelling TThe lines ran through my head as I pressed the bell of the summer residence the following evening. In my hand I held the green leather suitcase which contained the private letters of Pursewarden — that brilliant sustained fusillade of words which still exploded in my memory like a firework display, scorching me. I had telephoned to Liza from my office in the morning to make the rendezvous. She opened the door and stood before me with a pale graven expression of expectancy. ‘Good’ she whispered as I murmured my name, and ‘Come.’ She turned and walked before me with a stiff upright expressive gait which reminded me of a child dressed up as Queen Elizabeth for a charade. She looked tired and strained, and yet in a curious way proud. The living-room was empty. Mountolive, I knew, had returned to Cairo that morning. Rather surprisingly, for it was late in the year, a log-fire burned in the chimney-piece. She took up her stand before it, arching her back to the warmth, and rubbing her hands as if she were chilled. ‘You have been quick, very quick’ she said, almost sharply, almost with a hint of implied reproach in her tone. ‘But I am glad.’ I had already told her by telephone the gist of my conversation with Keats about the non-existent book. ‘I am glad, because now we can decide something, finally. I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept imagining you reading them, the letters. I kept imagining him writing them.’ ‘They are marvellous. I have never read anything like them in my whole life.’ I felt a note of chagrin in my own tones. ‘Yes’ she said, and fetched a deep sigh. ‘And yet I was afraid you would think so; afraid because you would share David’s opinion of them and advise me that they should be preserved at all costs. Yet he expressly told me to burn them.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Sit down, Darley. Tell me what you really think.’ I sat down, placing the little suitcase on the floor beside me, and said: ‘Liza, this is not a literary problem unless you choose to regard it as one. You need take nobody’s advice. Naturally nobody who has read them could help but regret the loss.’ ‘But Darley, if they had been yours, written to someone you … loved?’ ‘I should feel relief to know that my instructions had been carried out. At least I presume that is what he would feel, wherever he might be now.’ She turned her lucid blind face to the mirror and appeared to explore her own reflection in it earnestly, resting the tips of her frilly fingers on the mantelpiece. ‘I am as superstitious as he was’ she said at last. ‘But it is more than that. I was always obedient because I knew that he saw further than I and understood more than I did.’ This caged reflection gives her nothing back That women drink like thirsty stags from mirrors How very much of Pursewarden’s poetry became crystal-clear and precise in the light of all this new knowledge! How it gathered consequence and poignance from the figure of Liza exploring her own blindness in the great mirror, her dark hair thrown back on her shoulders! At last she turned back again, sighing once more, and I saw a look of tender pleading on her face, made the more haunting and expressive by the empty sockets of her eyes. She took a step forward and said: ‘Well, then, it is decided. Only tell me you will help me burn them. They are very many. It will take a little time.’ ‘If you wish.’ ‘Let us sit down beside the fire together.’ So we sat facing each other on the carpet and I placed the suitcase between us, pressing the lock so that the cover released itself and sprang up with a snap. ‘Yes’ she said. ‘This is how it must be. I should have known all along that I must obey him.’ Slowly, one by one I took up the pierced envelopes, unfolded each letter in turn and handed it to her to place upon the burning logs. ‘We used to sit like this as children with our playbox between us, before the fire, in the winter. So often, and always together. You would have to go back very far into the past to und............