So the year turned on its heel, through a winter of racing winds, frosts keener than grief, hardly preparing us for that last magnificent summer which followed the spring so swiftly. It came curving in, this summer, as if from some long-forgotten latitude first dreamed of in Eden, miraculously rediscovered among the slumbering thoughts of mankind. It rode down upon us like some famous snow-ship of the mind, to drop anchor before the city, its white sails folding like the wings of a seabird. Ah! I am hunting for metaphors which might convey something of the piercing happiness too seldom granted to those who love; but words, which were first invented against despair, are too crude to mirror the properties of something so profoundly at peace with itself, at one with itself. Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world’s sorrows. Unless perhaps it were simpler to repeat under one’s breath some lines torn from a Greek poem, written once in the shadow of a sail, on a thirsty promontory in Byzantium. Something like … Black bread, clear water, blue air. Calm throat incomparably fair. Mind folded upon mind Eyes softly closed on eyes. Lashes a-tremble, bodies bare. But they English badly; and unless one hears them in Greek falling softly, word by word, from a mouth made private and familiar by the bruised endearments of spent kisses they must remain always simply charmless photographs of a reality which overreaches the realm of the poet’s scope. Sad that all the brilliant plumage of that summer remains beyond capture — for one’s old age will have little but such memories upon which to found its regretful happinesses. Will memory clutch it — that incomparable pattern of days, I wonder? In the dense violet shadow of white sails, under the dark noon -lantern of figs, on the renowned desert roads where the spice caravans march and the dunes soothe themselves away to the sky, to catch in their dazed sleep the drumming of gulls’ wings turning in spray? Or in the cold whiplash of the waters crushing themselves against the fallen pediments of forgotten islands? In the night -mist falling upon deserted harbours with the old Arab seamarks pointing eroded fingers? Somewhere, surely, the sum of these things will still exist. There were no hauntings yet. Day followed day upon the calendar of desire, each night turning softly over in its sleep to reverse the darkness and drench us once more in the royal sunlight. Every thing conspired to make it what we needed. It is not hard, writing at this remove in time, to realize that it had all already happened, had been ordained in such a way and in no other. This was, so to speak, only its ‘coming to pass’ — its stage of manifestation. But the scenario had already been devised somewhere, the actors chosen, the timing rehearsed down to the last detail in the mind of that invisible author — which perhaps would prove to be only the city itself: the Alexandria of the human estate. The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature. It is hard to believe, I know, when one thinks of the perfection of that summer and what followed it. Much had to do with the discovery of the island. The island! How had it eluded us for so long? There was literally not a corner of this coast which we did not know, not a beach we had not tried, not an anchorage we had not used. Yet it had been there, staring us in the face. ‘If you wish to hide something’ says the Arabic proverb, ‘hide it in the sun’s eye.’ It lay, not hidden at all, somewhere to the west of the little shrine of Sidi El Agami — the white scarp with the snowy butt of a tomb emerging from a straggle of palms and figlets. It was simply an upshouldered piece of granite pushed up from the seabed by an earthquake or some submarine convulsion in the distant past. Of course, when the sea ran high it would be covered; but it is curious that it remains to this day unmarked on the Admiralty charts, for it would constitute quite a hazard to craft of medium draught. It was Clea who first discovered the little island of Narouz. ‘Where has this sprung from?’ she asked with astonishment; her brown wrist swung the cutter’s tiller hard over and carried us fluttering down into its lee. The granite boulder was tall enough for a windbreak. It made a roundel of still blue water in the combing tides. On the landward side there was a crude N carved in the rock above an old eroded iron ring which, with a stern anchor out to brace her, served as a secure mooring. It would be ridiculous to speak of stepping ashore for the ‘shore’ consisted of a narrow strip of dazzling white pebbles no larger than a fireplace. ‘Yes, it is, it is Narouz’ island’ she cried, beside herself with delight at the discovery — for here at last was a place where she could fully indulge her taste for solitude. Here one would be as private as a seabird. The beach faced landward. One could see the whole swaying line of the coast with its ruined Martello towers and dunes travelling away to ancient Taposiris. We unpacked our provisions with delight for here we could swim naked and sun bathe to our heart’s content without interruption. Here that strange and solitary brother of Nessim had spent his time fishing. ‘I always wondered where it could be, this island of his. I thought perhaps it lay westerly beyond Abu El Suir. Nessim could not tell me. But he knew there was a deep rock -pool with a wreck.’ ‘There is an N carved here.’ Clea clapped her hands with delight and struggled out of her bathing costume. ‘I’m sure of it. Nessim said that for months he was fighting a duel with some big fish he couldn’t identify. That was when he gave me the harpoon -gun which Narouz owned. Isn’t it strange? I’ve always carried it in the locker wrapped in an oilskin. I thought I might shoot something one day. But it is so heavy I can’t manage it under water.’ ‘What sort of fish was it?’ ‘I don’t know.’ But she scrambled back to the cutter and produced the bulky package of greased rags in which this singular weapon was wrapped. It was an ugly -looking contrivance, a compressed -air rifle no less, with a hollow butt. It fired a slim steel harpoon about a metre and a half in length. It had been made to specifications for him in Germany. It looked deadly enough to kill quite a large fish. ‘Pretty horrible looking’ she said, eating an orange. ‘We must try it.’ ‘It’s too heavy for me. Perhaps you will manage it. I found that the barrel lagged in the water. I couldn’t bring it to bear properly. But he was a marksman, so Nessim said, and shot a lot of quite large fish. But there was one, a very big one, which made infrequent appearances. He watched and waited in ambush for it for months. He had several shots at it but always missed. I hope it wasn’t a shark — I’m scared of them.’ ‘There aren’t many in the Mediterranean. It is down the Red Sea that you get them in numbers.’ ‘Nevertheless I keep a sharp eye out.’ It was too heavy an instrument, I decided, to lug about under water; besides I had no interest in shooting fish. So I wrapped and stowed it once more in the cutter’s ample locker. She lay there naked in the sunlight, drowsing like a seal, to smoke a cigarette before exploring further. The rock -pool glowed beneath the glimmering keel of the boat like a quivering emerald, the long ribbons of milky light penetrating it slowly, stealing down like golden probes. About four fathoms, I thought, and drawing a deep breath rolled over and let my body wangle downwards like a fish, not using my arms. Its beauty was spell -binding. It was like diving into the nave of a cathedral whose stained -glass windows filtered the sunlight through a dozen rainbows. The sides of the amphitheatre — for it opened gradually towards the deep sea — seemed as if carved by some heartsick artist of the Romantic Age into a dozen half finished galleries lined with statues. Some of these were so like real statuary that I thought for a moment that I had made an archaeological find. But these blurred caryatids were wave -born, pressed and moulded by the hazard of the tides into goddesses and dwarfs and clowns. A light marine fucus of brilliant yellow and green had bearded them — shallow curtains of weed which swung lightly in the tide, parting and closing, as if to reveal their secrets suggestively and then cover them again. I pushed my fingers through this scalp of dense and slippery foliage to press them upon the blind face of a Diana or the hooked nose of a medieval dwarf. The floor of this deserted palace was of selenite plastic clay, soft to the touch and in no way greasy. Terracotta baked in a dozen hues of mauve and violet and gold. Inside close to the island it was not deep — perhaps a fathom and a half — but it fell away steeply where the gallery spread out to the sea, and the deeper lining of water faded from emerald to apple green, and from Prussian blue to black, suggesting great depth. Here, too, was the wreck of which Clea had spoken. I had hopes of finding perhaps a Roman amphora or two, but it was not alas a very old ship. I recognized the flared curve of the poop as an Aegean design — the type of caique which the Greeks call ‘trechandiri’. She had been rammed astern. Her back was broken. She was full of a dead weight of dark sponges. I tried to find the painted eyes on the prow and a name, but they had vanished. Her wood was crawling with slime and every cranny winked full of hermit crabs. She must have belonged to sponge fishers of Kalymnos I thought, for each year their fleet crosses to fish the African coast and carry its haul back for processing in the Dodecanese Islands. A blinding parcel of light struck through the ceiling now and down flashed the eloquent body of Clea, her exploding coils of hair swerved up behind her by the water’s concussion, her arms spread. I caught her and we rolled and sideslipped down in each other’s arms, playing like fish until lack of breath drove us up wards once more into the sunlight. To sit at last panting in the shallows, gazing with breathless delight at each other. ‘What a marvellous pool.’ She clapped her hands in delight. ‘I saw the wreck.’ And climbing back to the little sickle of beach with its warm pebbles with her drenched thatch of hair swinging behind her she said: ‘I’ve thought of another thing. This must be Timonium. I wish I could remember the details more clearly.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘They’ve never found the site, you know. I am sure this must be it. Oh, let us believe that it is, shall we? When Antony came back defeated from Actium — where Cleopatra fled with her fleet in panic and tore open his battle -line, leaving him at the mercy of Octavian; when he came back after that unaccountable failure of nerve, and when there was nothing for them to do but to wait for the certain death which would follow upon Octavian’s arrival — why he built himself a cell on an islet. It was named after a famous recluse and misanthrope — perhaps a philosopher? — called Timon. And here he must have spent his leisure — here, Darley, going over the whole thing again and again in his mind. That woman with the extraordinary spells she was able to cast. His life in ruins! And then the passing of the God, and all that, bidding him to say good -bye to her, to Alexandria — a whole world!’ The brilliant eyes smiling a little wistfully interrogated mine. She put her fingers to my cheek. ‘Are you waiting for me to say that it is?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Very well. It is.’ ‘Kiss me.’ ‘Your mouth tastes of oranges and wine.’ It was so small, the beach — hardly bigger than a bed. It was strange to make love thus with one’s ankles in blue water and the hot sun blazing on one’s back. Later we made one of many desultory attempts to locate the cell, or something which might correspond to her fancy, but in vain; on the seaward side lay a tremendous jumble of granite snags, falling steeply into black water. A thick spoke of some ancient harbour level perhaps which explained the wind -and -sea -break properties of the island. It was so silent, one heard nothing but the faint stir of wind across our ears, distant as the echo of some tiny seashell. Yes, and sometimes a herring gull flew over to judge the depth of the beach as a possible theatre of operations. But for the rest the sun drunk bodies lay, deeply asleep, the quiet rhythms of the blood respond ing only to the deeper rhythms of sea and sky. A haven of animal contents which words can never compass. It is strange, too, to remember what a curious sea engendered rapport we shared during that memorable summer. A delight almost as deep as the bondage of kisses — to enter the rhythm of the waters together, responding to each other and the play of the long tides. Clea had always been a fine swimmer, I a poor one. But thanks to my period spent in Greece I too was now expert, more than a match for her. Under water we played and explored the submarine world of the pool, as thoughtlessly as fishes of the fifth day of the Creation. Eloquent and silent water ballets which allowed us to correspond only by smile a n d g e s t u r e . T h e w a t e r -s il e n c e s c a p t u r e d a n d t r a n s f o r m e d e v e r y t h i n g h u m a n i n m o v e m e n t , s o t h a t w e w e r e l ik e t h e c o l o u r e d p r o j e c t i o n s o f undines painted upon these brilliant screens of rock and weed, echoing and copying the water -rhythms. Here thought itself perished, was converted into a fathomless content in physical action. I see the bright figure travelling like a star across this twilit firmament, its hair combed up and out in a rippling whorl of colour. But not only here, of course. When you are in love with one of its inhabitants a city can become a world. A whole new geography of Alexandria was born through Clea, reviving old meanings, renewing ambiences half forgotten, laying down like a rich wash of colour a new history, a new biography to replace the old one. Memory of old cafés along the seafront by bronze moonlight, their striped awnings a-flutter with the midnight sea -breeze. To sit and dine late, until the glasses before one had brimmed with moonlight. In the shadow of a minaret, or on some strip of sand lit by the twinkle of a paraffin lamp. Or gathering the masses of shallow spring blossom on the Cape of Figs — brilliant cyclamen, brilliant anemone. Or standing together in the tombs of Kom El Shugafa inhaling the damp exhalations of the darkness which welled out of those strange subterranean resting places of Alexandrians long dead; tombs carved out of the black chocolate soil, one upon the other, like bunks in a ship. Airless, mouldy and yet somehow piercingly cold. (‘Hold my hand.’) But if she shivered it was not then with the premonitions of death, but with the sheer weight of the gravid earth piled above us metre upon metre. Any creature of the sunlight would shiver so. That brilliant summer frock swallowed by the gloom. ‘I’m cold. Let us go.’ Yes, it was cold down there. But with what pleasure one stepped from the darkness into the roaring, anarchic life of the open street once more. So the sun -god must have risen, shaking himself free from the damp clutch of the soil, smiling up at the printed blue sky which spelt travel, release from death, renewal in the life of common creatures. Yes, but the dead are everywhere. They cannot be so simply evaded. One feels them pressing their sad blind fingers in deprivation upon the panels of our secret lives, asking to be remembered and re -enacted once more in the life of the flesh — encamping among our heartbeats, invading our embraces. We carry in ourselves the biological trophies they bequeathed us by their failure to use up life — alignment of an eye, responsive curve of a nose; or in still more fugitive forms like someone’s dead laugh, or a dimple which excites a long -buried smile. The simplest of these kisses we exchanged had a pedigree of death. In them we once more befriended forgotten loves which struggled to be reborn. The roots of every sigh are buried in the ground. And when the dead invade? For sometimes they emerge in person. That brilliant morning, for example, with everything so deceptively normal, when bursting from the pool like a rocket she gasped, deathly pale: ‘There are dead men down there’: frightening me! Yet she was not wrong, for when mustered the courage to go down myself and look — there they were in very truth, seven of them, sitting in the twilight of the basin with an air of scrupulous attention, as if listening to some momentous debate which would decide everything for them. This conclave of silent figures formed a small semicircle across the outer doorway of the pool. They had been roped in sacks and leadweighted at the feet, so that now they stood upright, like chess pieces of human size. One has seen statues covered in this way, travelling through a city on a lorry, bound for some sad provincial museum. Slightly crouched, responding to the ligatures which bound them, and faceless, they nevertheless stood, flinching and flickering softly like figures in an early silent film. Heavily upholstered in death by the coarse canvas wrappers which bound them. They turned out to be Greek sailors who had been bathing from their corvette when, by some accident, a depth charge had been detonated, killing them instantly by concussion. Their un marked bodies, glittering like mackerel, had been harvested laboriously in an old torpedo net, and laid out upon dripping decks to dry before burial. Flung overboard once more in the traditional funeral dress of mariners the curling tide had brought them to Narouz’ island. It will sound strange, perhaps, to describe how quickly we got used to these silent visitants of the pool. Within a matter of days we had accommodated them, accorded them a place of their own. We swam between them to reach the outer water, bowing ironically to their bent attentive heads. It was not to flout death — it was rather that they had become friendly and appropriate symbols of the place, these patient, intent figures. Neither their thick skin -parcels of canvas, nor the stout integuments of rope which bound them showed any sign of disintegration. On the contrary they were covered by a dense silver dew, like mercury, which heavily proofed canvas always collects when it is immersed. We spoke once or twice of asking the Greek naval authorities to remove them to deeper water, but by long experience I knew we should find them unco operative if we tried, and the subject was dropped by common consent. Once I thought I saw the flickering shadow of a great catfish moving among them but I must have been mistaken. We even thought later of giving them names, but were deterred by the thought that they must already have names of their own — the absurd names of ancient sophists and generals like Anaximander, Plato, Alexander…. So this halcyon summer moved towards its end, free from omens — the long sunburnt ranks of marching days. It was, I think, in the late autumn that Maskelyne was killed in a desert sortie, but this was a passing without echoes for me — so little substance had he ever had in my mind as a living personage. It was, in very truth, a mysterious thing to find Telford sitting red -eyed at his desk one afternoon repeating brokenly: ‘The old Brig’s copped it. The poor old Brig’ and wringing his purple hands together. It was hard to know what to say. Telford went on, with a kind of incoherent wonder in his voice that was endearing. ‘He had no -one in the world. D’you know what? He gave me as his next -of -kin.’ He seemed immeasurably touched by this mark of friendship. Nevertheless it was with a reverent melancholy that he went through Maskelyne’s exiguous personal effects. There was little enough to inherit save a few civilian clothes of unsuitable size, several campaign medals and stars, and a credit account of fifteen pounds in the Tottenham Court Road Branch of Lloyds Bank. More interesting relics to me were those contained in a little leather wallet — the tattered pay book and parchment certificate of discharge which had belonged to his grandfather. The story they told had the eloquence of a history which unfolded itself within a tradition. In the year 1861 this now forgotten Suffolk farm -boy had enlisted at Bury St Edmunds. He served in the Coldstream Guards for thirty -two years, being discharged in 1893. During his service he was married in the Chapel of the Tower of London and his wife bore him two sons. There was a faded photograph of him taken on his return from Egypt in 1882. It showed him dressed in white pith helmet, red jacket and blue serge trousers with smart black leather gaiters and pipe -clayed cross belts. On his breast was pinned the Egyptian War Medal with a clasp for the battle of Tel -el -Kebir and the Khedive’s Star. Of Maskelyne’s own father there was no record among his effects. ‘It’s tragic’ said little Telford with emotion. ‘Mavis couldn’t stop crying when I told her. She only met him twice. It shows what an effect a man of character can have on you. He was always the perfect gentleman, was the Brig.’ But I was brooding over this obscure faded figure in the photograph with his grim eyes and heavy black moustache, with the pipe -clayed cross belts and the campaign medals. He seemed to lighten the picture of Maskelyne himself, to give it focus. Was it not, I wondered, a story of success — a success perfectly complete within the formal pattern of something greater than the individual life, a tradition? I doubted whether Maskelyne himself could have wanted things to fall out otherwise. In every death there is the grain of something to be learned. Yet Maskelyne’s quiet departure made little impact on my feelings, though I did what I could to soothe the forlorn Telford. But the tide -lines of my own life were now beginning to tug me invisibly towards an unforeseeable future. Yes, it was this beautiful autumn, with its torrent of brass brown leaves showering down from the trees in the public gardens, that Clea first became a matter of concern to me. Was it, in truth, because she heard the weeping? I do not know. She never openly admitted it. At times I tried to imagine that I heard it myself — this frail cry of a small child, or a pet locked out: but I knew that I heard nothing, absolutely nothing. Of course one could look at it in a matter -of -fact way and class it with the order of natural events which time revises and renews according to its own caprices. I mean love can wither like any other plant. Perhaps she was simply falling out of love? But in order to record the manner of its falling out I feel almost compelled to present it as something else — preposterous as it may sound — as a visitation of an agency, a power initiated in some uncommon region beyond the scope of the ordinary imagination. At any rate its onset was quite definitive, marked up like a date on a blank wall. It was November the fourteenth, just before dawn. We had been together during the whole of the previous day, idling about the city, gossiping and shopping. She had bought some piano music, and I had made her a present of a new scent from the Scent Bazaar. (At the very moment when I awoke and saw her standing, or rather crouching by the window, I caught the sudden breath of scent from my own wrist which had been dabbed with samples from the glass stoppered bottles.) Rain had fallen that night. Its delicious swishing had lulled our sleep. We had read by candle fight before falling asleep. But now she was standing by the window listening, her whole body stiffened into an attitude of attentive interrogation so acute that it suggested something like a crisis of apprehension. Her head was turned a little sideways, as if to present her ear to the uncurtained window behind which, very dimly, a rain washed dawn was beginning to break over the roofs of the city. What was she listening for? I had never seen this attitude before. I called to her and briefly she turned a distraught and unseeing face to me — impatiently, as if my voice had ruptured the fine membrane of her concentration. And as I sat up she cried, in a deep choked voice: ‘Oh no!’, and clapping her hands over her ears fell shuddering to her knees. It was as if a bullet had been fired through her brain. I heard her bones creak as she hung crouching there her features contorted into a grimace. Her hands were locked so tightly over her ears that I could not disengage them, and when I tried to lift her by her wrists she simply sank back to her knees on the carpet, with shut eyes, like a dement. ‘Clea, what on earth is it?’ For a long moment we knelt there together, I in great perplexity. Her eyes were fast shut. I could feel the cool wind from the window pouring into the room. The silence, save for our exclamations, was complete. At last she gave a great sigh of relaxation, a long sobbing respiration, and un fastened her ears, stretched her limbs slowly, as if unbinding them from painful cramps. She shook her head at me as if to say that it was nothing. And walking like a drunkard to the bathroom she was violently sick in the wash -basin. I stood there like a sleep walker; feeling as if I had been uprooted. At last she came back, got into bed and turned her face to the wall. ‘What is it, Clea?’ I asked again, feeling foolish and importunate. Her shoulders trembled slightly under my hand, her teeth chattered lightly from cold. ‘It is nothing, really nothing. A sudden splitting headache. But it has gone. Let me sleep now, will you?’ In the morning she was up early to make the breakfast. I thought her exceptionally pale — with the sort of pallor that might come after a long and agonizing toothache. She complained of feeling listless and weary. ‘You frightened me last night’ I said, but she did not answer, turning away evasively from the subject with a curious look of anxiety and distress. She asked to be allowed to spend the day alone painting, so I took myself off for a long walk across the town, teased by half -formulated thoughts and premonitions which I somehow could not make explicit to myself. It was a beautiful day. High seas were running. The waves flailed the Spouting Rocks like the pistons of some huge machine. Immense clouds of spray were flung high into the air like the explosion of giant puff -balls only to fall back in hissing spume upon the crown of the next wave. I stood watching the spectacle for a long time, feeling the tug of the wind at the skirt of my overcoat and the cool spray on my cheeks. I think I must have known that from this point onward everything would be subtly changed. That we had entered, so to speak, a new constellation of feelings which would alter our relationship. One speaks of change, but in truth there was nothing abrupt, coherent, definitive about it. No, the metamorphosis came about with comparative slowness. It waxed and waned like a tide, now advancing now retreating. There were even times when, for whole weeks, we were apparently completely restored to our former selves, reviving the old raptures with an intensity born now of insecurity. Suddenly for a spell we would be once more com pletely identified in each other, inseparable: the shadow had lifted. I tell myself now — and with what truth I still do not know — that these were periods when for a long time she had not heard the weeping which she once long ago described as belonging to a she -camel in distress or some horrible mechanical toy. But what could such nonsense really mean to anyone — and how could it elucidate those other periods when she fell into silence and moroseness, became a nervous and woebegone version of her old self? I do not know. I only know that this new personage was subject to long distracted silences now, and to unusual fatigues. She might, for example, fall asleep on a sofa in the middle of a party and begin to snore: as if overcome with weariness after an immensely long vigil. Insomnia too began to play its part, and she resorted to relatively massive doses of barbiturates in order to seek release from it. She was smoking very heavily indeed. ‘Who is this new nervy person I do not recognize?’ asked Balthazar in perplexity one evening when she had snapped his head off after some trivial pleasantry and left the room, banging the door in my face. ‘There’s something wrong’ I said. He looked at me keenly for a moment over a lighted match. ‘She isn’t pregnant?’ he asked, and I shook my head. ‘I think she’s beginning to wear me out really.’ It cost me an effort to bring out the words. But they had the merit of offering something like a plausible explanation to these moods — unless one preferred to believe that she were being gnawed by secret fears. ‘Patience’ he said. ‘There is never enough of it.’ ‘I’m seriously thinking of absenting myself for a while.’ ‘That might be a good idea. But not for too long.’ ‘I shall see.’ Sometimes in my clumsy way I would try by some teasing remark to probe to the sources of this disruptive anxiety. ‘Clea, why are you always looking over your shoulder — for what?’ But this was a fatal error of tactics. Her response was always one of ill -temper or pique, as if in every reference to her distemper, however oblique, I was in some way mocking her. It was intimi dating to see how rapidly her face darkened, her lips compressed themselves. It was as if I had tried to put my hand on a secret treasure which she was guarding with her life. At times she was particularly nervous. Once as we were coming out of a cinema I felt her stiffen on my arm. I turned my eyes in the direction of her gaze. She was staring with horror at an old man with a badly gashed face. He was a Greek cobbler who had been caught in a bombardment and mutilated. We all knew him quite well by sight, indeed Amaril had repaired the damage as well as he was able. I shook her arm softly, reassuringly and she suddenly seemed to come awake. She straightened up abruptly and said ‘Come. Let us go.’ She gave a little shudder and hurried me away. At other such times when I had unguardedly made some allusion to her inner preoccupations — this maddening air of always listening for something — the storms and accusations which followed seriously suggested the truth of my own hypo thesis — namely that she was trying to drive me away: ‘I am no good for you, Darley. Since we have been together you haven’t written a single line. You have no plans. You hardly read any more.’ So stern those splendid eyes had become, and so troubled! I was forced to laugh, however. In truth I now knew, or thought I did, that I would never become a writer. The whole impulse to confide in the world in this way had foundered, had guttered out. The thought of the nagging little world of print and paper had become unbearably tedious to contemplate. Yet I was not un happy to feel that the urge had abandoned me. On the contrary I was full of relief — a relief from the bondage of these forms which seemed so inadequate an instrument to convey the truth of feelings. ‘Clea, my dear’ I said, still smiling ineffectually, and yet desiring in a way to confront this accusation and placate her. ‘I have been actually meditating a book of criticism.’ ‘Criticism!’ she echoed sharply, as if the word were an insult. And she smacked me full across the mouth — a stinging blow which brought tears to my eyes and cut the inside of my lip against my teeth. I retired to the bathroom to mop my mouth for I could feel the salty taste of the blood. It was interesting to see my teeth outlined in blood. I looked like an ogre who had just taken a mouthful of bleeding flesh from his victims. I washed my mouth, furiously enraged. She came in and sat down on the bidet, full of remorse. ‘Please forgive me’ she said. ‘I don’t know what sort of impulse came over me. Darley, please forgive’ she said. ‘One more performance like this’ I said grimly, ‘and I’ll give you a blow between those beautiful eyes which you’ll remember.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ She put her arms round my shoulders from behind and kissed my neck. The blood had stopped. ‘What the devil is wrong?’ I said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘What has come over you these days? We’re drifting apart, Clea.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know.’ But her face had once more become hard and obstinate. She sat down on the bidet and stroked her chin thoughtfully, suddenly sunk in reflection once more. Then she lit a cigarette and walked back into her living -room. When I returned she was sitting silently before a painting gazing at it with an inattentive malevolent fixity. ‘I think we should separate for a while’ I said. ‘If you wish’ she rapped out mechanically. ‘Do you wish it?’ Suddenly she started crying and said ‘Oh, stop questioning me. If only you would stop asking me question after question. It’s like being in court these days.’ ‘Very well’ I said. This was only one of several such scenes. It seemed clear to me that to absent myself from the city was the only way to free her — to give her the time and space necessary to … what? I did not know. Later that winter I thought that she had begun running a small temperature in the evenings and incurred another furious scene by asking Balthazar to examine her. Yet despite her anger she submitted to the stethoscope with comparative quiet ness. Balthazar could find nothing physically wrong, except that her pulse rate was advanced and her blood pressure higher than normal. His prescription of stimulants she ignored, however. She had become much thinner at this time. By patient lobbying I at last unearthed a small post for which I was not unsuitable and which somehow fitted into the general rhythm of things — for I did not envisage my separation from Clea as something final, something in the nature of a break. It was simply a planned withdrawal for a few months to make room for any longer -sighted resolutions which she might make. New factors were there, too, for with the ending of the war Europe was slowly becoming accessible once more — a new horizon opening beyond the battle -lines. One had almost stopped dreaming of it, the recondite shape of a Europe hammered flat by bombers, raked by famine and discontents. Nevertheless it was still there. So it was that when I came to tell her of my departure it was not with despondency or sorrow — but as a matter -of -fact decision which she must welcome for her own part. Only the manner in which she pronounced the word ‘Away’ with an indrawn breath suggested for a brief second that perhaps, after all, she might be afraid to be left alone. ‘You are going away, after all?’ ‘For a few months. They are building a relay station on the island, and there is need for someone who knows the place and can speak the language.’ ‘Back to the island?’ she said softly — and here could not read the meaning of her voice or the design of her thought. ‘For a few short months only.’ ‘Very well.’ She walked up and down the carpet with an air of perplexity, staring downwards at it, deep in thought. Suddenly she looked up at me with a soft expression that I recognized with a pang — the mixture of remorse and tenderness at inflicting unwitting sorrow upon others. It was the face of the old Clea. But I knew that it would not last, that once more the peculiar shadow of her discontent would cast itself over our relationship. There was no point in trusting myself once more to what could only prove a short respite. ‘Oh, Darley’ she said, ‘when do you go, my dear?’ taking my hands. ‘In a fortnight. Until then I propose not to see you at all. There is no point in our upsetting each other by these wrangles.’ ‘As you wish.’ ‘I’ll write to you.’ ‘Yes of course.’ It was a strange listless way of parting after such a momentous relationship. A sort of ghostly anaesthesia had afflicted our emotions. There was a kind of deep ache inside me but it wasn’t sorrow. The dead handshake we exchanged only expressed a strange and truthful exhaustion of the spirit. She sat in a chair, quietly smoking and watching me as I gathered my possessions together and stuffed them into the old battered briefcase which I had borrowed from Telford and forgotten to return the summer before. The toothbrush was splayed. I threw it away. My pyjamas were torn at the shoulder but the bottom half, which I had never used, were still crisp and new. I assembled these objects with the air of a geologist sorting specimens of some remote age. A few books and papers. It all had a sort of unreality, but I cannot say that a single sharp regret was mixed with it. ‘How this war has aged and staled us’ she said suddenly, as if to herself. ‘In the old days one would have thought of going away in order, as we said, to get away from oneself. But to get away from it….’ Now, writing the words down in all their tedious banality, I realize that she was really trying to say good -bye. The fatality of human wishes. For me the future lay open, uncommitted; and there was no part of it which I could then visualize as not con taining, somehow, Clea. This parting was … well, it was only like changing the bandages until a wound should heal. Being unima............