“Easter Tuesday, that’s very funny.”
“I love the idiosyncratic; it is all that constitutes integrity. Difference, nuance, hues and shade. Spectra, Brewster. That’s why we travel, perhaps, why we’re found on all this planet’s exotic strands, cherishing peculiarities, finding lost causes, chipping in to save the primitive wherever it occurs—”
“Listen to her talk. Is that a sweetheart?”
“—refusing to let it die, though the old ways are the worst ways and unhealthy, bad for the teeth and the balanced diet and the comfort and the longevity. Is that selfish?”
“I think so.”
“Yes,” she said pensively. “Of course it is. All taste’s a cruelty at last. We impede history with our Sierra Clubs and our closed societies. We’ll have to answer for that, I suppose. Oh, well…Brewster, do you have uncles? Tell me about your uncles.”
“I had an Uncle Clifford who believed that disease could be communicated only by a draft when one was traveling at high speeds. He wore a paper bag over his head even in a closed car. He cut out holes for the eyes, for despite his odd notion he dearly loved to travel and watch the scenery go by. Even going up in elevators he wore his paper bag, though he strolled at ease through the contagion wards of hospitals dispensing charity to the poor.”
“Marvelous.”
“Yes.”
“Brewster, this is important. Do you know things? People should know facts.”
“I know them.”
“I knew you knew them.”
“I love you, Miss Löes Lipton.”
“Jane,” she said. Jane.
She was weeping. I didn’t try to comfort her, but stood silently in place until she was through. I knew she was going to tell me to open the curtains, for this part of the interview was finished.
“Open the curtains, Brewster.”
I went to the bay and pulled the drawstring and light came into the room and flooded it and I turned to the chair in which Jane was sitting and saw her face for the first time. She looked exactly as I knew she would look, though I had never seen a photograph of her or yet been to any of the houses in which her portraits were hung. All that was different was that there was a darkish region under her eyes and her skin had an odd tan.
“Oh,” I said, “you’ve a spot of lupus erythematosus there, don’t you?”
“You do know things, Brewster.”
“I recognized the wolflike shadow across the eyes.”
“It’s always fatal.”
“I know.”
“The body develops antibodies against itself.”
“I know.”
“It’s as if I were allergic to my own chemistry.”
“I know, I know.” I went toward her blinded by my tears. I kissed her, her lips and the intelligent, wolfish mask across her beautiful face. “How much time is there?” I asked.
Jane shrugged.
“It isn’t fair. It isn’t.”
“Yes. Well,” she said.
“Marry me, Jane.”
She shook her head.
“You’ve got to.”
“No,” she said.
“Because of this fatal disease? That doesn’t matter to me. I beg your pardon, Jane, if that sounds callous. I don’t mean that your mortality doesn’t matter to me. I mean that now that I’ve found you I can’t let you go, no matter how little time you might have left.”
“Do you think that’s why I refused you? Because I’m going to die? Everyone dies. I refuse you because of what you are and because of what I am.”
“But we’re the same. We know each other inside out.”
“No. There’s a vast gulf between us.”
“No, Jane. I know what you’re going to say before you say it, what you’re going to do before you do it.”
“No.”
“Yes. I swear. Yes.” She smiled, and the wolf mask signal of her disease made her uncanny. “You mean because I don’t know why you refuse me? Is that what you mean?” She nodded. “Then you see I do know. I knew that it was because I didn’t know why you refused me. Oh, I’m so confused. I’m — wait. Oh. Is it what I think it is?” She nodded. “Oh, my God. Jane, please. I wasn’t thinking. You let me go on. I was too hasty in telling you my life. It’s because you’re pure and I’m not. That’s it, isn’t it? Isn’t that it?” She nodded. “Jane, I’m a man,” I pleaded. “It’s different with a man. Listen,” I said, “I can be pure. I can be again. I will be.”
“There isn’t time.”
“There is, there is.”
“If I thought there were…Oh, Brewster, if I really thought there were—” she said, and broke off.
“There is. I make a vow. I make a holy vow.” I crossed my heart.
She studied me. “I believe you,” she said finally. “That is, I believe you seriously wish to undo what you have done to yourself. I believe in your penitent spirit, I mean. No. Don’t kiss me. You must be continent henceforth. Then…”
“We’ll see?”
“We’ll see.”
“The next time, Jane, the next time you see me, I swear I will have met your conditions.”
I bowed and left and was told where I was to sleep by a grinning Plympton. He asked if, now that I had seen Jane, I would like to go with him on a tour of the estate.
“Not just yet, Freddy, I think.”
“Jane gave you something to think about, did she?”
“Something like that.”
Was ever any man set such a task by a woman? To undo defilement and regain innocence, to take an historical corruption and will it annulled, whisking it out of time as if it were a damaged egg going by on a conveyor belt. And not given years — Jane’s disease was progressive, the mask a manifestation of one of its last stages — nor deserts to do it in. Not telling beads or contemplating from some Himalayan hillside God’s extensive Oneness. No, nor chanting a long, cunning train of boxcar mantras as it moves across the mind’s trestle and over the soul’s deep, dangerous drop. No, no, and no question either of simply distributing the wealth or embracing the leper or going about in rags (I still wore my mourning togs, that lover’s wardrobe, those Savile Row whippery flags of self) or doing those bows and scrapes that were only courtesy’s moral minuet, and no time, no time at all for the long Yoga life, the self’s spring cleaning that could drag on years. What had to be done had to be done now, in these comfortable Victorian quarters on a velvet love seat or in the high fourposter, naked cherubs climbing the bedposts, the burnished dimples of their wooden behinds glistening in the light from the fresh laid fire. By a gilded chamber pot, beneath a silken awning, next to a window with one of the loveliest views in England.
That, at least, I could change. I drew the thick drapes across the bayed glass and, influenced perhaps by the firelight and the Baker Street ambience, got out my carpet slippers and red smoking jacket. I really had to laugh. This won’t do, I thought. How do you expect to bring about these important structural changes and get that dear dying girl to marry you if the first thing you do is to impersonate Sherlock Holmes? Next you’ll be smoking opium and scratching on a fiddle. Get down to it, Ashenden, get down to it.
But it was pointless to scold when no alternative presented itself to me. How did one get down to it? How does one undefile the defiled? What acts of kosher and exorcism? Religion (though I am not irreligious) struck me as beside the point. It was Jane I had offended, not God. What good would it have done to pray for His forgiveness? And what sacrilege to have prayed for hers! Anyway, I understood that I already had her forgiveness. Jane wanted a virgin. In the few hours that remained I had to become one.