I've learned a lot.”
“What have you learned?”
“Oh-something from Ash and Vico. About poetic language.
I'm-I-I have things I have to write.”
“You seem angry with me. I don't understand why."
"No, I'm not. That is, yes, I have been. You have your certainties. Literary theory. Feminism. A sort of social ease, it comes out with Euan, a world you belong in. I haven't got anything. Or hadn't. And I grew-attached to you. I know male pride is out of date and unimportant, but it mattered."
Maud said, "I feel-" and stopped.
"You feel?"
He looked at her. Her face was like carved marble in the candle light. Icily regular, splendidly null, as he had often said to himself.
He said, "I haven't told you. I've got three jobs. Hong Kong, Barcelona, Amsterdam. The world is all before me. I shan't be here, you see, to edit the letters. They aren't to do with me."
Maud said, "I feel-"
"What?" said Roland.
"When I feel-anything-I go cold all over. I freeze. I can't- speak out. I'm-I'm-not good at relationships."
She was shivering. She still looked-it was a trick of her lovely features-cool and a little contemptuous. Roland said, "Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle.
"I-I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of possession if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-"
"Beautiful."
"Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening."
"It needn't."
"Even you-drew back-when we met. I expect that, now. I use it.”
“Yes. But you don't want-do you-to be alone always. Or do you?
"I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on doingmy work. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand?"
Oh yes.
"I write about liminality. Thresholds. Bastions. Fortresses."
"Invasion. Irruption."
Ot course. "It's not my scene. I have my own solitude.”
“I know. You-you would never-blur the edges messily-”
“Superimpose-”
“No, that's why I-”
“Feel safe with me-”
“Oh no. Oh no. I love you. I think I'd rather I didn't.”
“I love you," said Roland. "It isn't convenient. Not now I've acquired a future. But that's how it is. In the worst way. All the things we-we grew up not believing in. Total obsession, night and day. When I see you, you look alive and everything else-fades. All that."
"Icily regular, splendidly null.”
“How did you know I used to think that?”
“Everyone always does. Fergus did. Does.”
“Fergus is a devourer. I haven't got much to offer. But I could let you be, I could-”
“In Hong Kong, Barcelona and Amsterdam?”
“Well, certainly, if I was there. I wouldn't threaten your auton omy.”
“Or be here to love me," said Maud. "Oh, love is terrible, it is a wrecker-”
“It can be quite cunning," said Roland. "We could think of a way-a modern way-Amsterdam isn't far-" Cold hand met cold hand. "Let's get into bed," said Roland. "We can work it out.”
“I'm afraid of that too.”
“What a coward you are after all. I'll take care of you, Maud." So they took off their unaccustomed clothes, Cropper's mul ticoloured lendings, and climbed naked inside the curtains and into the depths of the feather bed and blew out the candle. And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph.
In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.
Postscript 1868
There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been. Two people met, on a hot May day, and never later mentioned their meeting. This is how it was.
There was a meadow full of young hay, and all the summer flowers in great abundance. Blue cornflowers, scarlet poppies, gold buttercups, a veil of speedwells, an intricate carpet of daisies where the grass was shorter, scabious, yellow snapdragons, bacon and egg plant, pale milkmaids, purple heartsease, scarlet pimpernel and white shepherd's purse, and round this field a high bordering hedge of Queen Anne's lace and foxgloves, and above that dogroses, palely shining in a thorny hedge, honeysuckle all creamy and sweet-smelling, rambling threads of bryony and the dark stars of deadly nightshade. It was abundant, it seemed as though it must go on shining forever. The grasses had an enamelled gloss and were connected by diamond-threads of light. The larks sang, and the thrushes, and the blackbirds, sweet and clear, and there were butterflies everywhere, blue, sulphur, copper, and fragile white, clipping from flower to flower, from clover to vetch to larkspur, seeing their own guiding visions of invisible violet pentagrams and spiralling coils of petal-light.
There was a child, swinging on a gate, wearing a butcher-blue dress and a white pinafore, humming to herself and making a daisy chain.
There was a man, tall, bearded, his face in shadow under a wide-brimmed hat, a wanderer coming up the lane, between high hedges, with an ashplant in his hand and the look of a walker.
He stopped to speak to the child who smiled and answered cheerfully, without ceasing her creaking swinging to and fro. He asked where he was, and the name of the house in the narrow valley below, which he knew, in fact, very well, and so went on to ask her name, which she told him was May. She had another name, she said, which she did not like. He said perhaps that might come to change, names grew and diminished as time ran on: he would like to know her long name. So she said, swinging more busily, that her name was Maia Thomasine Bailey, and that her father and mother lived in the house down there, and that she had two brothers. He told her that Maia was the mother of Hermes, thief, artist and psychopomp; and that he knew a waterfall called Thomasine. She had known a pony called Hermes, she said, fast as the wind, she could tell him, and she had never heard of a waterfall with a name like Thomasine.
He said, "I think I know your mother. You have a true look of your mother.”
“No one else says that. I think I look like my father. My father is strong and kind and takes me riding like the wind."
"I think you have a look of your father too," he said then, and put his arms around her waist, very matter-of-fact and brief, so as not to frighten her, and lifted her down onto his side. They sat there on a hummock and talked, in a cloud of butterflies, as he remembered it with absolute clarity, and she remembered it more and more vaguely, as the century ran on. Beetles ran about their feet, jet and emerald. She told him about her pleasant life, her amusements, her ambitions. He said, "You seem extraordinarily happy," and she said, "Oh yes, I am, I am." And then he sat quietly for a moment or two, and she asked him if he could make daisy chains.