Dreams bring remembrance, too; perhaps that is what they are for, to force us to dredge up those dirty little deeds and dodges we thought we had succeeded in forgetting. These half-involuntary memories are a terrible thing. There are days like this when they course through me from morning until night like pure pain. They leave me gasping, even the seemingly happy ones, as if they were the living record of heinous yet immensely subtle sins I had thought were covered up forever. And always, of course, there is the unexpected: although last night’s dream was about my father, all day today I have been thinking mainly of my mother. After father died I was surprised by the depth of her grief. It made of her something ancient and elemental, a tribal figure, sitting dry-eyed draped in black, bereft, unmoving, monumentally silent, like a pelt-clad figure in a forest clearing watching over the smouldering ashes of a funeral pyre. Had I misjudged her, thinking she was made of sterner stuff? I believe that was for me the beginning of maturity, if that is the word, the moment when I realised it was too late to readjust my notions of her; too late for atonement, too (there is that word again). I tiptoed around her, not knowing what to say, fearful of intruding on this primitive rite. The house wore the startled, doggy air of having been undeservedly rebuked. I knew the feeling.
INHABITANTS OF THIS PLACE. What a peculiar collection we must seem, the Professor and Licht, the girl and I, disparates that we are, thrown together here on this rocky isle. The girl has complicated everything, of course. Before her coming things had settled down nicely; even Licht, who at first had been so resentful of me, had reconciled himself to my presence. Yes, without her we might have pottered along indefinitely, I at my art history and Licht at his schemes — he is a great one for schemes — and the Professor doing whatever it is the Professor does. Now we have grown restless, and chafe under the imposed languor of these summer days; time, that before seemed such a calm medium, has grown choppy as a storm-threatened sea. If the others had remained, I mean Sophie and Croke and the children, if they too had stayed behind they might have become a little community, might have formed a little fold, and I could have been the shepherd, guarding them against the prowling wolf. Idle fancies; forgive me, I get carried away sometimes.
Inevitably of course there has grown up a half-acknowledged divide, with the Professor and Licht on one side, the girl and I on the other, and behind that again there is yet another grouping in which the girl stands between Licht and me, a pair of ragged old rats scrabbling in the dirt and showing each other our sharpest teeth. Licht thinks he is in love with her, of course, and resents what he considers the excessive attentions I pay to her. Her silences torment him and strike him mute in his turn; he creeps up and stands behind her tongue-tied and quivering, or sits and stares at her across the dinner table, rabbit-eyed, his pink-rimmed nostrils flared and his hands trembling. He devises sly, round-about ways of talking about her, deprecating as Mr Guppy, introducing her name with elaborate casualness into the most unlikely topics and employing laboriously cunning circumlocutions. He is heartsick, mooning about the house with the agonised look of a man nursing an unassuageable toothache. At least it has made him smarten himself up a bit. He runs a comb now and then through that fright-wig of hair, and bathes more frequently than he used to, if my nose is any judge. I suppose she has become associated in his mind with the dream he has of leaving here and finding some more fulfilling life elsewhere; I see them, as in one of those old silent films, in a bare room with a square table, he sitting head in hands and she smiling her Lulu smile at the moustachioed and leering landlord who beckons to her suggestively from the doorway.
She is a singular creature, or seems so to me, at any rate. She claims to be twenty-one but I think she is no more than eighteen or nineteen. She will not tell me about her life, or at least does not: I mean maybe if I knew how to ask, if I knew the codes that everyone else has been privy to since the cradle, she would prattle away non-stop about her mammy and her daddy and schooldays and the job she did at the hotel and all the rest of it. As it is she wears the dulled, frowning air of an amnesiac. There are times when I catch her studying me with that remote stare that she has as if I were something that had suddenly appeared in her path, like a rock, or a fallen branch, or an unfordable blank span of water. Probably she finds me as baffling a phenomenon as I find her, my songless Mélisande. She trails about the house in an old raincoat of Licht’s that she uses for a dressing-gown, with her lank hair and wan cheeks. I am startled anew each time I encounter her. I am like an anthropologist studying the last surviving specimen of some delicate, elusive species long thought extinct. I am assembling her gradually, with great care, starting at the extremities; I ogle her bare feet — the little toe is curled under its neighbour like a baby’s thumb — her hard little hands, the vulnerable, veined, milk-blue backs of her knees. Sometimes at night she comes and sits in the kitchen while I work. I do not know if she is lonely, or afraid, or if the kitchen is just one of a series of stopping-places in her fitful wanderings; she has a way of touching things as she passes them by, tapping them lightly with her fingertips, like a child touching the markers of a secret game. She is tense, restless, preoccupied, always poised somehow, as if at any moment she might unfurl a set of hidden wings and take flight out of the window into the darkness and be gone. It will happen; some morning I will wake and know at once that she has flown, will feel her absence like a jagged hole in the air through which the wind pours without a sound. What shall I do then, when my term is ended?