I crossed the room. At my approach the girl, I observed, did not waver. What other test is left to me? I thought; and took her in my arms and kissed her on the lips, and felt her yield and kiss me in return, almost as one returns a lover’s kiss. Had I expected her to dissolve when I touched her, her flesh crumbling and floating away like paper-ash? I gripped her tight and pressed my fingers into her shoulders. Was this truly my daughter’s flesh? Opening my eyes, I saw Amy’s face hovering only inches from mine, her lips parted too as if for a kiss. ‘She is unlike me in every way,’ I murmured. Amy shook her head. ‘She is a true child of your womb,’ she replied — ‘She is like you in secret ways.’ I drew back. ‘I am not speaking of secret ways,’ I said — ‘I am speaking of blue eyes and brown hair’; and I might have made mention too of the soft and helpless little mouth, had I wished ·to be hurtful. ‘She is her father’s child as well as her mother’s,’ said Amy. To which I was about to reply that if the girl were her father’s child then her father must be my opposite, and we do not marry our opposites, we marry men who are like us in subtle ways, when it struck me that I would likely be wasting my breath, for the light in Amy’s eye was not so much friendly as foolish.
‘Mr Foe,’ I said, turning to him — and now I believe there was truly despair in my looks, and he saw it — ‘I no longer know into what kind of household I have tumbled. I ·say to myself that this child, who calls herself by my name, is a ghost, a substantial ghost, if such beings exist, who haunts me for reasons I cannot understand, and brings other ghosts in tow. She stands for the daughter I lost in Bahia, I· tell myself, and is sent by you to console me; but, lacking skill in summoning ghosts, you call up one who resembles my daughter in no respect whatever. Or you privately think my daughter is dead, and summon her ghost, and are allotted a ghost who by chance bears my name, with an attendant. Those are my surmises. As for the boy, I cannot tell whether he is a ghost or not, nor does it matter.
‘But if these women are creatures of yours, visiting me at your instruction, speaking words you have prepared for them, then who am I and who indeed are you? I presented myself to you in words I knew to be my own-I slipped overboard, I began to swim, my hair floated about me, and so forth, you will remember the words — and for a long time afterwards, when I was writing those letters that were never read by you, and were later not sent, and at last not even written down, I continued to trust in my own authorship.
‘Yet, in the same room as yourself at last, where I need surely not relate to you my every action — you have me under your eyes, you are not blind — I continue to describe and explain. Listen! I describe the dark staircase, the bare room, the curtained alcove, particulars a thousand times more familiar to you than to me; I tell of your looks and my looks, I relate your words and mine. Why do I speak, to whom do I speak, when there is no need to speak?
‘In the beginning I thought I would tell you the story of the island and, being done with that, return to my former life. But now all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?’
Through all this talk Foe had stood stock still by the fireplace. I expected an answer, for never before had he failed for words. But instead, without preliminaries, he approached me and took me in his arms and kissed me; and, as the girl had responded before, I felt my lips answer his kiss (but to whom do I confess this?) as a woman’s answer her lover’s.
Was this his reply — that he and I were man and woman, that man and woman are beyond words? If so it was a paltry reply, demonstration more than reply, one that would satisfy no philosopher. Amy and the girl and Jack were smiling even broader than before. Breathless, I tugged myself free.
‘Long ago, Mr Foe,’ I said, ‘you wrote down the story (I found it in your library and read it to Friday to pass the time) of a woman who spent an afternoon in conversation with a dear friend, and at the end of the afternoon embraced her friend and bade her farewell till they should next meet. But the friend, unknown to her, had died the day before, many miles away, and she had sat conversing with a ghost. Mrs Barfield was her name, you will remember. Thus I conclude you are aware that ghosts can converse with us, and embrace and kiss us too.’
‘My sweet Susan,’ said Foe — and I could not maintain my stern looks when he uttered these words, I had not been called sweet Susan for many years, certainly Cruso had never called me that-’My sweet Susan, as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say: it is a question we can only stare at in silence, like a bird before a snake, hoping it will not swallow us.
‘But if you cannot rid yourself of your doubts, I have something to say that may be of comfort. Let us confront our worst fear, which is that we have all of us been called into the world from a different order (which we have now forgotten) by a conjurer unknown to us, as you say I have conjured up your daughter and her companion (I have not). Then I ask nevertheless: Have we thereby lost our freedom? Are you, for one, any less mistress of your life? Do we of necessity become puppets in a story whose end is invisible to us, and towards which we are marched like condemned felons? You and I know, in our different ways, how rambling an occupation writing is; and conjuring is surely much the same. We sit staring out of the window, and a cloud shaped like a camel passes by, and before we know it our fantasy has whisked us away to the sands of Africa and our hero (who is no one but ourselves in disguise) is clashing scimitars with a Moorish brigand. A new cloud floats past in the form of a sailing-ship, and in a trice we are cast ashore all woebegone on a desert isle. Have we cause to believe that the lives it is given us to live proceed with any more design than these whimsical adventures?
‘You will say, I know, that the heroes and heroines of adventure are simple folk incapable of such doubts as those you feel regarding your own life. But have you considered that your doubts may be part of the story you live, of no greater weight than any other adventure of yours? I put the question merely.
‘In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity), the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back.
‘Have you considered (and I will conclude here) that in your own wanderings you may, without knowing it, have left behind some such token for yourself; or, if you choose to believe you are not mistress of your life, that a token has been left behind on your behalf, which is the sign of blindness I have spoken of; and that, for lack of a better plan,. your search for a way out of the maze — if you are indeed amazed or be-mazed — might start from that point and return to it as many times as are needed till you discover yourself to be saved?’
Here Foe turned from me to give his attention to Jack, who had for a while been tugging his sleeve. Low words passed between them; Foe gave him money; and, with a cheery Good-night, Jack took his leave. Then Mrs Amy looked at her watch and exclaimed at how late it was. ‘Do you live far?’ I asked her. She gave me a strange look. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not far, not far at all.’ The girl seemed reluctant to be off, but I embraced her again, and kissed her, which seemed to cheer her. Her appearances, or apparitions, or whatever they were, disturbed me less now that I knew her better.