‘So you’re afraid to let me see your face!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘I’m not surprised, after trying to play me such a mean trick with that sham document.’ I held the paper out in the light, hoping he would come forward to take it, so that I’d be able to see him. He didn’t move, and I went on in disgust, ‘You’re just as bad as the others. Heaven only knows why I should have imagined you might have retained some vestige of decent feeling. I see what a fool I’ve been to trust any of you, to believe you were trying to be helpful. You officials must have been laughing your heads off all this time. Well, my eyes are open at last. Now I can see you all in your true colours — corrupt, irresponsible, deceitful and totally callous. Not one of you cares a damn for the people you’re supposed to be helping. No wonder you’re ashamed to show yourselves when you indulge your infantile sadism at their expense in this sort of spiteful play-acting!’
Silence closed on my angry voice, and I knew my anger was partly assumed. Was anyone listening to me? I could no longer be certain of the dark shape I thought I had seen in the shadows behind the door. In any case, why should I bother about the man any further? My indignation withered away now that I’d relieved my feelings by telling him what I thought of him and his colleagues. To hell with the whole lot of them! Suddenly losing interest, I decided to waste no more time and walked out through the door, through the narrow opening into the street beyond, glad to be leaving the place behind me.
Like my feelings, it seemed to wither into unreality as I hurried along, conscious of nothing except the symptoms of my cold, which had been temporarily in abeyance but which now returned to burden me with heavy discomfort. Back at the flat I only remember thinking how many flights of stairs there were to be climbed laboriously. I’d even forgotten that Carla was coming.
She’d already let herself in and was waiting for me, reading by a single light. When I opened the door, not expecting to see her — not even thinking of her — the shock of her beauty took me unawares, like a revelation, waking me momentarily from my stupor. For an enchanted instant the old magic revived, and I eagerly started towards her.
I distinctly saw her stand up and come to meet me with a welcoming smile. There was no rational cause for my feeling that she receded as I approached, gliding away from me like an unattainable vision, too beautiful to be true. Nevertheless, the illusion seemed stronger than truth. My magic moment over, I stopped a short distance from her and stood still, relapsing into dull heaviness, as if not fully awake.
I heard her say, ‘So you’ve been out?’ in a questioning tone. But my head was aching so much I could think of no answer and simply stood staring. She had moved out of the circle of soft lamplight, and against the shadows her face appeared palely lit, mysterious as a miracle or a dream.
Her loveliness made me more aware of my ugly, heavy cold, which became exaggerated into something shameful. As if by contrast with her perfection, even my brain had grown ugly and stupid; its slow stupid thoughts didn’t seem to belong to me. I felt altogether strange and unlike myself, a combination of shame and incapacity having replaced the person I really was, and this seemed to be her deliberate doing. Sudden resentment flared through my daze. Why should she make me ashamed of having a cold? Her beauty, which had charmed me the previous moment, had turned into a source of grievance. The memory of yesterday’s unexplained painful events at her home thrust itself upon me, and a crowd of urgent questions clamoured for answers. ‘Why did you leave me alone so long in the library? Had you arranged to meet that official? Who is he? Just how well do you know him? Why haven’t you ever mentioned him to me?’ Instead of any of these, I asked abruptly, ‘Why are you in the dark?’ at the same time switching on the strong centre light we hardly ever used.
This instinctive attempt to destroy her composure did not succeed, for, though the sudden light made her blink, she remained imperturbable as before. I had only exposed myself, and I stood revealed as a boorish, uncivilized lout to whom she would be eternally inaccessible.
Beginning to sink back hopelessly into stupefaction, to rouse myself I started pacing the room, deliberately working myself up to make a scene, determined to penetrate her calm. If I couldn’t reach her, at least I would make her angry and bring her down nearer my own level. To concentrate on this was a fearful effort; my dull, estranged thoughts kept sliding away from me into blankness. But I stubbornly continued my pacing, persistently dwelling on the things I resented, as if with somebody else’s brain, taking care not to look at Carla; who, realizing no doubt the futility of trying any reasonable approach while I was in this mood, kept silent and out of sight.
Presently I felt a faint itch of curiosity, wanting to know what she was doing. Stealing a furtive glance, I saw her bending over some frail wintry flowers she had brought, arranging them in a bowl on the table, her expression absorbed and withdrawn. Her cool, private self-sufficiency struck me as being assumed for the purpose of hurting and excluding me. Yet she seemed like some fabulous being at the same time, as if she wasn’t quite human; an ice maiden, perhaps, intent on her delicate frost flowers and immune from our emotions.
A sudden monstrous desire to hurt her transfixed me; I wanted to assert my gross earthly condition over her ethereal otherness. What I experienced wasn’t so much a wish as an uncontrollable upthrust of malice, springing from unexplored depths of my being — depths so strange and unsuspected that they seemed utterly alien, augmenting the disconcerting sense of estrangement from my own self. I couldn’t bear this sense of a stranger’s vindictiveness, it was torture to me but a torture incorporating a perverse satisfaction as when one intentionally bites on an aching tooth.
After the one quick glance, I hadn’t looked at Carla again. But the flowers, directly under the light, caught and held my eyes and I stopped to stare at them. All at once it struck me that they were staring back; their pale, still, imperturbable faces were lifted to me in utter indifference, deputizing for the girl’s face at which I would not look. This was the very last straw. The insult of those inhuman flower faces in league with her inhumanity against me was more than I could endure. I had to shut them out of my sight.
My hand began moving upwards to cover my eyes; then, with a weird sensation of abstract malice, I felt it shoot out suddenly in a different direction, like the hand of another person, crashing into something smooth and hard and sending it flying, while, above the noise of smashing china, I heard incoherent shouting. ‘I can’t stand the sight of those things — don’t bring them into the place — so far and no further — it doesn’t belong to you, and neither do I — yet.’
The excitement I’d been working so hard to raise surged over me and for a second swept me beyond myself. Gradually then it dawned on me that the cold-strangled voice with the ugly overtone of hysteria was my own; and with this realization the madness, delirium, or whatever it was, expired exactly as though it had never been, leaving only an incubus, a weight like a bad dream, from which I couldn’t wake, pinning me down and dividing me from the world. As if I’d dropped asleep on my feet, I stood mute and inert, no more than an upright mass of dead matter, except for a single point of anxiety, buried very deep down, warning me of sensation to come, some time in the future.