Three weeks.

To my horror I began to cry.

My tears did not last very long. I had no privacy. The bell for class rang, and Demetriades was tapping at my door. I brushed my eyes with the back of my wrist and went and opened it. I was still in pajamas.

“Eh! What are you doing? We are late.”

“I don’t feel very well.”

“You look strange, my dear fellow.” He put on a look of concern. I turned away,

“Just tell the first lot to revise for the exam. And tell the others to do the same.”

“But—”

“Leave me alone, will you?”

“What shall I say?”

“Anything.” I shoved him out.

As soon as the sounds of footsteps and voices had died down and I knew school had begun I pulled on my clothes and went out. I wanted to get away from the school, the village, from Bourani, from everything. I went along the north coast to a deserted cove and sat there on a stone and pulled out the cuttings again and reread them. June 29th. One of the last things she must have done was to post my letter back unopened. Perhaps the last thing. For a moment I felt angry with the other girl; but I remembered her, her flat, prim face, and her kind eyes. She wrote stilted English, but she would never deliberately leave anyone in the lurch; that sort never did. And I knew those two sides of Alison—the hard practical side that misled one into believing she could get over anything; and the other apparently rather histrionic Alison that one could never quite take seriously. In a tragic way these two sides had finally combined: there would have been no fake suicides with her, no swallowing a few tablets when she knew someone would come in an hour’s time. But a weekend to die.

It was not only that I felt guilty of jettisoning Alison. I knew, with one of those secret knowledges that can exist between two people, that her suicide was a direct result of my having told her of my own attempt—I had told it with a curt meiosis that was meant to conceal depths; and she had called my bluff one final time. I don’t think you know what sadness means.

I remembered those hysterical scenes in the Piraeus hotel; that much earlier “suicide note” she had composed, to blackmail me, as I then thought, just before I left London. I thought of her on Parnassus; I thought of her in Russell Square; things she said, she did, she was. And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfisimess, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning… and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant “make love to me”) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as a chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her. In a way her death was the final act of blackmail; but the blackmailed should feel innocent, and I felt guilty. It was as if at this moment, when I most wanted to be clean, I had fallen into the deepest filth; most free for the future, yet most chained to the past.

And Julie; she now became a total necessity.

Not only marriage with her, but confession to her. If she had been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be forgiven by her. Her forgiveness was the only possible justification now. I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me.

Those flowers, those intolerable flowers.

My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all male selfishnesses: to have imposed the role I needed from Alison on her real self. Something far worse than lèse-majesté. Lèse-humanité. What had she said about that muleteer? I felt two packets fond of him.

And one death fond of me.

When I got back that evening I wrote two letters, one to Ann Taylor, the other to Alison’s mother. I thanked Ann and true to my new resolve took as much blame as I could; to the mother (Goulburn, N.S.W.—I remembered Alison screwing up her face: Goulburn, the first half’s all it’s fit for, the second’s what they ought to do with it), to the mother, a difficult, because I didn’t know how much Alison had said about me, letter of condolence.

Before I went to bed I took out England’s Helicon; turned to Marlowe.

Come live with mee, and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,

Woods or steepie mountaine yeeldes.

And wee will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the sheepheards feede the yr flocks,

By shallow Rivers, to whose falls

Melodious byrds sing Madri galls.

And I will make thee beds of Roses,

And a thousand fragrant poesies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,

Imbroydred all with leaves of Mirtle…

I had another letter from England on Saturday. There was a small black eagle on the flap: Barclay’s Bank.

DEAR MR. URFE,

Thank you for writing to me upon the recommendation of the Misses Holmes. I have pleasure in enclosing a form which I hope you will kindly fill in and return to me and also a small booklet with details of the special services we can offer overseas customers.

Yours truly,

P. J. FEARN,

Manager

I looked up from reading it into the eyes of the boy who sat opposite me at table, and gave him a small smile; the unsuppressed smile of the bad poker player.

Half an hour later I was climbing through the windless forest to the central ridge. The mountains were reduced to a pale insubstantiality by the heat, and the islands to the east rose and trembled shimmeringly over the sea, a strange optical illusion, like spinning tops. On the central ridge I moved along to a place where there was shade and a view down over Bourani; and sat there for an hour, in limbo, with the death of Alison still dark inside me and the hope of Julie, Julie now confirmed as Julie, there below me in the south. Gradually, those last two days, I had begun to absorb the fact of Alison’s death; that is, had begun to edge it out of the moral world into the aesthetic, where it was easier to live with.

By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockeyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high.

Before I moved off I took out the headed Barclay’s letter and read it again. It had the effect of making me feel more indulgent towards Conchis than I had intended to be. I saw no objection now to a few small last dissimulations—on both sides.