Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 

   What I have written



   by John A.Scott



   "Between one book and the next, there is the empty space of a missing
book, linked with we do not know which of the two.  We shall call it the
Book of Torment, appertaining to both." Edmond Jabes, The Book of Shares







   Contents



   I.  Christopher Houghton II.  Sorel Atherton III.Jeremy Fayrfax











   I.

   Christopher Houghton





   PARIS





   1.





   Thursday, May 10.  The day of Sainte Solange.  We have brought our
illness to this town of the ill.  To this place of the aged and the dying
Hotel-Guyon.  Its central park, the streets that curve downwards to it -
dark rivers to their lake - flanked with elaborate hotels.  These edifices,
white, ornate, with their staunch bourgeois facades: Hotel Bellevue, Hotel
Splendide, Hotel Grande . . .  From another place, Belvedere, Ritz. 
American, this town of hotels.

   Bleak foyer: an extrusion of light, glim, the colour of vegetable stock.
"One night?' the girl is asking in English - even though our conversation
has to this point taken place in French - turning the large white pages of
the register.  It is usual to stay for one of the prescribed periods.  She
is shaking her head.  We are clearly here by mistake if we wish just the
single night.  I smile: ours is, of course, a more subtle malady.  I watch
her hand move down the columns of names and dates.  The skin has a darkness
typical of the Auvergne.  Her wrists are thick, the cuffs of her white
blouse pulled tight.  I see where the material has creased, the lines
converging at the button in rills.  Behind the desk, which extends -in a
narrow semicircle from the wall- a doberman paces back and forth.  It rears
suddenly, dabbing the counter with its paws, then slides, failing to gain
traction on the smooth surface, nails clicking against the marble.  It
returns to the floor and sighs: an exhalation of impatience.

   `Ah, yes,' says the girl in English, looking up from the register, `it
is possible.' I catch a glimpse of Gillian moving through the entrance. 
The whiteness of her face seems to have dislodged, its pallor smeared
across the tainted air like a vapour trail.

   The elevator is small - our two suitcases occupy more than half the
floor space - its ascent excruciatingly slow.  An arrow arcing from RDC to
4 on the half-clockface above the door is the only indication of movement.
Pasted to the back wall is a notice requesting the cessation of all noise
at 21.00.

   I go, as usual, to the windows.  I look out across this small provincial
town.  Below, the streets meander in their steepnesses, the cobble washed
by shadow from the buildings.  It is 4.15, but dusk seems already upon us.
To the right the view is dominated by a hill: at its summit the body of
Christ, His arms outspread upon a cross of neon.  I turn to the room.  I
see Gillian entering the salle de bains.  On the wall above the double bed
is a list of doctors and their after-hours numbers in event of an
emergency. The main table is strewn with leaflets: advertisements for
periodic treatments, testimonials to the efficacy of the magnesium cure. 
Beside the leaflets, as if a part of this profusion, is a Paris Match of
some five months before.  On its cover are the statues of Versailles,
swathed in canvas to protect them from the acid rain and from the cold of
winter which never came.

   We eat at the hotel restaurant. .Everything is a' l'Anglais: tepid pulps
of varying flavour, suited to the toothless.  The dining-room is full.  At
every table but ours, the medication pouches have been set alongside the
cutlery.  Those who are permitted have poured themselves a single glass of
wine.  The recorked bottles - each bearing its owner's name - dot the
tablecloth.



   Gillian and I eat in silence.  We have not spoken now for three weeks -
the odd sentence, certainly, but silence has secured itself.  To end it now
would be unthinkable.  What could this first conversation possibly be? 
What words could carry such significance?



   To break this monotony, especially in the long periods of the car
journey, I conduct mock dialogues with myself: speeches so quiet that,
should they provoke enquiry, I could reasonably deny their utterance.  Of
course, we speak where it is necessary in the presence of others - amongst
those we have met, or with the occasional visitor from home.  And we order
meals.  At Sarlat, only yesterday, I ordered fresh asparagus; I ordered
rabbit with a mustard sauce, with beans and spinach; I ordered a bleu
d'Auvergne, a Rigotte de Pelussin and a Cantalon.  A bottle of 1984
Bordeaux.



   And perhaps it is simply that her look is held too long, or else it is
the half-glance back - the briefest hint of indecision, a wish for the
implausible.  I note the straight dark French hair, the starch of the white
cap and apron, the black dress, the stocking seams, the black patent
leather of the shoes.  It is as if Gillian, by her simple presence, were
the sole barrier to the possession of this woman; as though the possibility
of these liaisons is predicated upon her absence.

   It is resentment then, at what she has continued to deny me, that
characterises my feelings first of all.  This is the source of my hatred.
As it is, I can say nothing to this young woman.  She brings the bill on a
white saucer and thanks me.  I stare at her writing, aroused by the over-
whelming childishness of her hand.Its innocence.  I extrapolate the
necessary pallor of her nipples from this script, the belly's flatness, the
sparse, fine, cat-hair of her sex.  I wish to ejaculate across the bill to
see the ink dissolve, the paper darken.

   The salle de bains is separated from the main room by an elaborate
timber partition into which a plastic concertina door has been placed.  I
pull across this door and secure the tiny metal latch.  I watch myself
slowly unbuttoning the shirt.  I loosen the cord of the trousers.  I step
out of these pooled material .

   I slide off my underpants, pushing them down with my hands pressed tight
to my thighs.  I turn both taps full on and enter the shower.  I remove the
rose and its coiled metal tube from the hook.  I direct the water,
needle-fine, underneath the shaft of my penis - moving it full- length back
and forth from the testicles to the glans.  The head is bobbing on the jet
of water, the fine spray flying at my face, blinding me.  I feel the semen
rising.  I redirect the spray only at the last second.  The penis spasms,
but there is no ejaculation.  Only the appearance of the smallest pearl of
fluid at the eye.  Opaque.  A clouded tear.  As if it had wept for me. 
Again I direct the spray against the glans.  This time, however, I take the
flannel, cramming it inside my mouth to prevent my cries.  The taste is
bitter.  I watch the semen fall, undissolved amidst the water.  I watch it
cling against the grill of the drain.  I crush the tiny snakes of fluid
with my heel, sliding my foot back and forth across the metal.  It is gone.



   Perhaps Gillian believes this place will cure us: otherwise why should
she reach to me in this bed made for the dying, her hand coming to rest low
on my belly, her fingertips touching the edge of my hair.  significant she
has chosen this night, within minutes of my self -relief when all desire
has drained from me.

   Already I have invented this convenient fiction that her touch seeks my
attention only - and not my arousal.

   `Is something the matter?' I enquire.

   She turns from me, towards the darkness.  Possibly she cries.  If not
this night, then another



   I awake just before dawn.  I slide from the bed, moving with the
unsteadiness of those recently awoken.

   From the window I watch the fallen angels shuddering across the basin of
this valley, their wings tinted by the light of the neon cross.  They are
scouring the streets for souls.  In this darkest hour - I am not familiar
with the French equivalent of our proverb - they collect the frailest from
this town of hotels.  I detect one peering at me from a distance of some
fifty metres.  He raises his cap.  I smile and shake my head.

   Three rooms away, Madame F-- from Strasbourg reaches for the telephone,
but the hand has never moved.  She finds that she is watching her own
motionless arm - fallen outside the sheets, a diagonal across her bulbous
form (still in bed beside her sleeping husband) - from out- side the
window.

   `Allez!  Allez!' cry the angels, and she is gone.  Without the
opportunity to pack.  Wearing only this nightdress.  Thank God, she thinks,
it is a temperate night . . .  It would be easier to suppose I have been
dreaming, but I find that I am truly at the window staring at the very
first of light and these creatures moving off into the distance as if they
were returning night-birds.

   In the morning nothing is said.  We arise and prepare to view the town.
We walk to the Centre Thermal and the park.  There is a dolorous alacrity
to our movements.  From the foyers of the hotels comes a steady stream,
glacial in its pace: the aged are moving down the stairs from their night's
rest.  It is l'heure du verre d'eau - their time to drink at the springs.
Everyone is carrying a small cup, a bag for the various medications, and a
towel.  We stand before the Source Gubler VI dite Carnot the air
perpetually sour with magnesium .  The aged push us aside, barging with a
skeletal vigour.  `Pardon!' they demand, and move to the long curved bench
named Marguerite, gabbling in their various dialects.

   The bells above the main pavilion are ringing.  A summoning of the
faithful.  But there are no messiahs here to greet them.  Instead there are
bronzed masseurs and sports lead- ers.  There are nurses: dark, thick-
wristed girls of the Auvergne.  The entrance foyer is dominated by
information booths and cashiers: to the left for women, to the right for
men.  Gillian and I depart on our separate inspections.  I go no further
than the pool.  Its edges are festooned with the dying: mouths fallen open,
vacant-eyed.  The colonel from Versailles, the cold dough of his shoulders
marbled with stretchmarks; the banker from Toulouse, his chest a darkened
scouring-board.  They are both here - putting lie to the benign sur- render
- the raw and the cooked.

   Late Friday, afternoon or evening.  A viewless corner room, upstairs in
the Hotel Moderne.  The roofs of Autun.  Diagonals of tile dark with moss.
It is as A Sport and a Pastime has described it, though not as I had
imagined from that description.  `None of this is true,' the book says,
halfway down page seventeen.  `I've said Autun, but it could easily have
been Auxerre.  I'm sure you'll come to realise that.'

   But this is Autun.  I remember the description: `The amphitheatre.  The
great, central square: the Champ de Mars.' I have chosen this place by way
of homage.  By way of remembering.



   A month before.  Maundy Thursday.  James Salter, returning again to
Paris from the States,' gives a reading at the Village Voice, rue
Princesse, in the sixth arrondissement.  It is held upstairs in the area
devoted to history and psychology.  Seven o'clock on a hot, airless
Parisian evening, the space crowded with anglophones: Americans, of course,
and then the British.  And Australians.

   I recognise Clare Murnane; there is a space for me to stand beside her
chair.  `Avery!' she cries, and gestures with her free hand - the cigarette
now at her lips.  `There's room over here!' Her words roll out in smoke
above the audience.  `Avery,' she says, as I approach, where have you been?
We've been waiting for your call . . .  ` She stops.  `You won't know
Catherine.' And so it is I meet her eyes, and everything that I shall tell
begins.  This red-haired woman, Catherine Danon, who might possibly be
forty-seven, who might reasonably be some ten years older than myself. 
Salter, accompanied by a woman in a greyish suit, makes his appear- ance at
the top of the staircase.  The two pick their way through the ragged
obstacles of chairs.  Clare is enquiring after Gillian, expressing a
certain interested surprise at her absence.  I offer some reply.  'Oh, I
see,' she says.  `I do see, don't I?'

   `Yes,' I say, above the sudden out- break of applause.  I return to
Catherine, to find that I have met her eyes again.  Nor is there any
movement on her part to shift them from me.

   There is a brief introduction by the woman, who, we find, is on the
editorial staff of The Paris Review.  Salter seems much younger than his
sixty-four years.  He holds himself straight-backed, his body `well kept'.
And with the moustache, there is an almost military presence to the man.

   He reads a short story, `Foreign Shores', from Dusk, his latest work: a
young girl named Truus, an exchange of pornographic letters.



   We have chosen the brasserie in rue du Four, across from the Mabillon
entrance.  I confess (of course with reservations: in particular the
beggars and the staleness of the air) my fondness for the Metro.  `The
Metro!' Clare exclaims.  `I haven't used the Metro now for over seven
years.' She lights a cigarette.  `I walk,' she says, `or, if it's late, I
take a cab.'





   I lift the copy of A Sport and a Pastime from the table.  It is a book I
first discovered in the early seventies.  After the reading I had asked
Salter for his signature, indicating my great admiration for the work.  He
had written his name, nothing else.  He seemed uninterested in my
enthusiasms.

   I find myself staring at the signature, scrawled between his printed
name and the title: the `J' broken from `ames', the unjoined bar hovering
above the hook.

   I talk about the opening descriptions - the evocation of a French
landscape I have yet to see.  I talk about the dreadful longing of the
narrator in the face of Dean and Anne-Marie's affair.

   `The opening is wonderful, of course,' says Catherine.  `I seem to spend
half my time in French trains watching those little stations . . .  She
smiles as if in memory and then the smile has died.  `But ultimately it
disappointed me.  I found their lovemaking repetitive, without imagination.
And Anne-Marie is so uninteresting.  I'm always irritated by men who find a
girl exciting because she says `oui' instead of `yes.' She pauses.  `You
are in Paris for long?'

   Until late May.  Six weeks But then next Tuesday I am leaving for the
provinces - the Loire Valley, the Perigord, the Auvergne - and will be gone
a month.

   `And you are travelling alone?' she asks.



   I watch as Catherine turns towards the street outside.  An old woman is
threading her way, apologetically, down rue du Four: her body is quite
crippled, bent forward from the waist, as if at any moment she might stop
to retrieve an object from the pavement.  I return my gaze to Catherine. 
The corner of her mouth betrays a trace of anxiety, a hesitancy, before she
brings herself to sip the coffee from the demitasse.



   `What are you working on these days?' asks Clare.  I talk about the
second book of poems.  I see that Catherine has turned, her eyes direct and
close to mine, as if, were we alone, she would be offering her sex to me.
`I would love to read it, Avery, she says.  `Is this possible?' I tell her
that I have some finished sections back at the apartment.

   Perhaps if she would give me her address I could send a copy through the
mail before I leave.  She rises from the table moving to the counter of the
brasserie.  There is a small display of post- cards.  She chooses one,
without offering any payment, and brings it to the table.  I watch the
trace of her handwriting across the card.  Clare is examining the bill and
reaching in her bag.

   `Now, I must have you both to dinner as soon as you return ` she says,
fastening the clip, placing a fifty-franc note, a ten-franc coin in the
saucer.  `You've been very selfish, Avery, not having got in touch sooner.
We're all very much in debt to Mr.  Salter!' I glance at Catherine, the
fine- ness of her bones: the collarbone, the neck.  The dark red - auburn -
of her hair.

   `And now we must be off.  Or Claude will fret.  Are you right,
Catherine?' She offers me the postcard.  It is an advertisement, now some
two weeks out of date, for the tenth Salon du Livre, at the Grand Palais:
Le Livre au coeur de la reussite.  On the reverse she has written the name
of a street in the fifth arrondis- sement.  `So, you have my address,' she
says.

   My only thought now, to return to the apartment, to lock the bath- room
door and bring myself to a release; so urgent this need, that even our
farewells become unbearably prolonged.  We wait perhaps three minutes more,
then we too are compelled to follow all the other patrons from the
restaurant onto the street.  The accident has involved a motor cyclist and
a Mercedes sports.  Perhaps five minutes has elapsed, but already only the
after- math remains: the car, mounted high on the footpath; the crumpled
motor cycle; oil, blood.

   `Qu'est-ce qui s'est passe'?' I ask.

   Of course, the scene has changed: she is no longer with me these are not
the streets of Paris.  We are back here, in Autun.  The man begins his
explanation.  His French has the typical slowness of the region.  It is not
difficult to understand the substance.  It is a bad corner What has
happened is nothing exceptional. .  - Most of the onlookers are there
solely to make comparisons - it has almost become obligatory.  I turn back
to find Gillian staring at the blood.  She is astride it, as if the flow
were hers,



   It is morning.  The Cathedrale Sain - Lazare.  Dankness.  The chlorine
trace of stone.  My gaze is turned upward to these figures carved some
seven hundred years ago.  A demon pushes a young couple into a vast urn. 
Whole cities have preceded them.  There!  A tower disappears into the
opening.  Every- thing re-emerges in Hell.  I recognise Madame F- from the
hotel at Chatel Guyon.  She has been forced to shed her nightdress.  This
then is the destination of those flying souls - as most certainly it is
ours.  Here everyone is naked as if pre- pared for sex.  Here every- one -
even the most beautiful - has been transformed: remade in their inner
uglinesses as the Church has warned would come to pass.  Gillian waits
beneath a stone statue.  Our paths have rejoined here, significantly. 
Perhaps she has been praying.  I look for the trace of blood at her lips,
for the smear of blood on the back of her hands where she has attempted to
wipe it free.

   The hair of the figure above us has been sculpted in small bulbs the
size of profiteroles: a tree of buds.  The nose is flattened, the mouth
stretched sideways not un- like the opening of a letterbox.  It is crouched
in the posture of a cringing dog: Diable du Desespoir The Devil of Despair.


   We move out into a sunlight we could not have believed to still exist.
The weather has been unsea- sonably temperate for these four weeks.  We
have seen clouds amass- ing, only to move off in an opposite direction as
if in fear of us.

   For our return to Paris, once again we drive into clear weather.

   2.

   The freeways are impossible.  At every point of merging, the traffic
seizes.  Back and forth one passes the same cars, is passed; edging in the
lanes, back and forth.  The tempera- ture gauge climbs; the automatic fan
begins to hum.  I unfold the map, considering another porte.  It is
impossible.  In any case, a decision has already been made.  When in doubt,
say no.  At last, a French proverb.



   We move slowly beyond la peripherique.  This city marked on its borders
by these towers arisen from lots razed like bombsites.  This city of small
cities.  Each arrondissement with its own heart.  City of spheres.  City of
these dark, straight-haired women.

   The air is mauve with exhaust, incubated by the coming summer.  Still.
Tinted.  As though the skins of grapes had been added to the light.  L `air
tache'.  Mauve air studded with the yellow globes of approaching
headlights. A flood of warnings.

   Perhaps ultimately it is these streets: the narrowness of their ruelles,
the grandeur of their boulevards.  Plethora: streets in their densities,
threading together in hair or handwriting.  Is it possible to miss this
place as one might a woman, or a woman as this place?



   It is dark at our return.  Too late to buy food.  No, that is not true:
the Algerian shop in rue Saint Antoine will be open.  We are too exhausted
for the necessary preparations.  Instead we visit La Maroc.  We order
couscous royale and a pichet of red wine.  Across from us there sits an
English couple.  They have little French.  The owner is telling them he
will look after everything.  He invites them to the rear of the restaurant
where the entrees are extravagantly displayed on a large table. `You must
help yourselves,' he is saying.  `Everything is delicious.  Fresh.' `What
are those?' the English wife is asking. `Delicious!' he replies. We watch
their return.  Their plates crammed with Moroccan delicacies.  A waiter
brings the `house' wine: an imported Moroccan red.  In this restaurant no
menus are provided.  The owner will look after everything.  Now a couscous
is brought to their table.  Already they have eaten too much.  Now they
begin to argue.  They blame each other for allowing all this food to
arrive. They cannot bring themselves to send it back, or to stop a further
course from arriving.  Several young Moroccan girls have gathered at the
front bar.  Their dresses are gaudy and tight, the cheap fabrics
glistening. It is a Saturday evening.  The room is full with `family'. 
Their men are already playing cards at an end table.  Occasionally they
call to each other the length of the restaurant.  For the English couple,
nothing can now be disputed.  They are surrounded by the enemy.  The
untouched couscous is removed and replaced by another dish The table
nearest the exit is occupied by a drunkard, in his fifties, wrapped in a
grey gaberdine overcoat.  He is unshaven.  Not quite a clochard.  He calls
to the young Moroccan girls.  One answers hi : a single word, and there is
general laughter.  A cat has approached the table of the English couple. 
It rubs its body against the legs of the wife.  I watch her bend, pick up
the animal and enfold it in her arms.  Like us, the couple have been
reduced to silence.  It is as if their table had been replaced by a mirror.
I lift the wineglass to my mouth expecting to see the husband's glass
similarly rise.  He has requested l'addition.  The house red has been
billed at a hundred francs.  I witness their evident despair.  They barely
have enough money to pay.  She is hunt- ing through her bag for coins.  The
couple move from the table - now occupied only by the stretching cat,
inclining itself towards the food on the oilcloth.  The drunkard watches
their exit.  Momentarily he glances back to their table, still brim with
the third, untouched, course.  I see him suddenly stand in agitation,
shouting with concern after the couple. `Madame!  Vous avez oublie' votre
chat!'



   A sudden change in weather.  Late spring brings an undecided rain:
intermittent.  Skies sullen.  Over- cast.  The clouds move eastward -
increasingly dark - running against the movement of the Seine, directly in
my line of vision.  It seems, if I do not focus, that the darkness slides
down the face of the window.

   On the streets everything is impregnated with a sense of decay.  The
cardboard cartons across the metal bars of the grills have returned, along
with the abandoned bottles of the clochards.

   The reflection of a tree branch in the sloping back window of a car
gives the appearance of shattered glass.



   Another day.  At this same window A building sign: Pierre de taille. 
Marbrerie.  Marconnerie.  Beton arme'.  A row of terraces at the end of our
street has disappeared behind sheets of corrugated fibreglass.  I listen to
the endless chipping at the old facades: the Algerian workers on the
scaffolding, their uniforms- caps and - workclothes - like convicts. 
Bottles of Evian on the wooden planks.  Plastic sheeting flapping loudly in
the wind.  At times a bellow.  On the turret roofs of the fourth floor, the
pigeons, heads down, puffed up in their aggression, turn in ever-advancing
circles.

   Behind me I can hear the scratching of Gillian's pen.  She is writing in
her Paris Journal - her book of days.  Now from the bedroom I hear her
voice ascending in its constant scales.  I call, enquiring if she intends
to be much longer.  It is our seventh year together.  This is significant,
perhaps.  But I believe it to be mere coincidence.  What has happened and
is happening could have happened three and four and, yes, I will say it,
even seven years ago.



   We have received the dinner invitation from Clare Murnane and her
husband, Claude.  It is for May 24, Ascension, a public holiday.  We are to
dine with the American novelist Harry Mathews and his partner, Marie Chaix.
Catherine Danon has also been invited, but she is still finishing her work
in Brussels: she will join the party later, possibly for coffee.

   I have come to know these occasions.  Dinner conversations that lapse
suddenly and inexplicably into French, as if the city were asserting
itself. As if it could abide this travesty of foreignness no longer. .  So
it is that Gillian and I are to be a couple once more, these several hours.
Always with me, this ghost presence at the periphery of my vision, her
voice in its depleted counterpoint like the cry of a baby from a distant
room - how can this be possible?  And then I realise how easy it might be
to continue like performers in an exquisite piece of .  theatre, genteel,
urbane meeting the American novelist, the French biographer; making
conversation; carrying a bottle of Saumur, methode champenoise, itself an
adequate impersonation.  It is of course not possible.  W e are betrayed at
every moment .  night, particularly, it is crucial that I play a double
game: so everyone will understand our act to be an act.

   The nearest Metro is La Muette in the sixteenth arrondissement.  We make
a correspondance at Opera, the sound of African drums drifting to us from a
connecting tunnel, like a blood.  At the ent- rance to the platform we hear
the roar of an incoming train.  We begin to run.  The rush of stale air -
warm, used, stinking of electricity - hits my face.  The siren sounds; the
doors hiss shut behind us.  This time the compartment is reasonably
uncrowded.  Gillian takes a seat by the opposite door - drawing the hem of
her coat free from the floor as she sits.  I slide my ticket beneath my
watch- band and take hold of the stainless- steel upright.  The transfer on
the window adjacent to the central seats - those reserved AUX MUTILIES DE
GUERRE - has been predictably altered.  The last three letters of GUERRE
have been scratched away, the first three meticulously amended to CUL.  For
those wounded in the arse. I stare at the impassive faces of the
passengers, silent in the warm and stale electric air.





   At Pompe an Algerian woman a baby held beneath one arm enters the
carriage.  In her other hand she holds a square of white cardboard on which
are several sentences printed in childish capitals with a black felt pen.
Without speaking , the woman moves amongst the passengers, holding the card
close to their faces.  A few have offered two franc pieces.  She accepts
them without comment, without thanks and moves to the next person .  I
stare at the card.  It appears to be a brief biography, though I do not
have time to read beyond the first sentence.  It is a simple variation of
the stories chalked by the beggars in the Metro tunnels: those who do not
ever meet your eyes those for whom what is written is the only speech.  I
wonder if this story is true.

   Whether the elaborateness of the tale is an indication of desperation or
deceit.  Possibly I fail to give her money because I doubt the authenticity
of a confession I cannot follow.  The train pulls in to La Muette.  The
woman and her child move out with us, only to reboard the train a carriage
down.  I find myself standing opposite a poster for a current film: a
floating cherub with the erection of a full- grown man.



   Mathews and Marie Chaix arrive.  He appears as in the photographs on the
covers of his books, but without the cigarette.  Clare makes the necessary
introductions in English.  Claude, her husband, exchanges greetings in
French.  Catherine, Clare mentions again for their benefit, may be joining
them later - perhaps for coffee.  I note how doubt has crept into her
explanation.  The possibility of her absence sickens me : the evening has
been rendered pointless.

   As Mathews sits on the couch, he asks if he may have one of Clare's
cigarettes.  So now the portrait is complete.  I watch him light it' savour
the first inhalation, hold it out before him as if it were the stem of a
wineglass.

   jean-Paul - a precocious long- haired child, somewhere between seven and
nine years old - has a chapter ready from his latest novel to show Monsieur
Mathews.  It is called Pour un Papillo .  It is ens- cribed in an exercise
book in violet ink.

   A scientist and his daughter are clinging to a buoy, calling to each
other.

   ``Daisy!''

   "Papa!"

   As they call, a shark approaches.

   "Sharks are common in the tropical Atlantic.  These large and voracious
saltwater fish may be as much as forty feet,long and weigh up to eight
tons." Mathews has provided the translation for us.

   `It's not a scientist,' says Jean-Paul.  `It's a butterfly collector.'
Adding with ironic resignation, `Mais ca ne fait rien.'

   He retrieves his exercise book and leaves the room: je sais fort bien
que je ne suis qu `une machine a faire des livres!'

   As if filling the space left by his departure, in the doorway stands a
girl of sixteen.  She bears a strong physical resemblance to her mother:
the same blue eyes shadowed by dark lashes, the same pallor of complexion.
It was her whiteness that loomed first against the hall's dark background.
Her body is exquisite.  She wears a high skirt to emphasise the stilt-like
legs.  At her breasts I notice an apparent discolouration of the material:
a swollen darkness of the areola -uncommon in her age.  I imagine her
pregnant. `This is Adele,' says Clare .  'My daughter.' She is off to a
dance.

   There is an episode in Mathews's book Singular Pleasures which I find
particularly moving.  It is the incident in the Barcelona brothel where the
27 year-old man masturbates whilst watching an older woman undress.  She is
the absolute embodiment of his fantasies.  She calls for him to wait, but
he doesn't want to wait - he wants above all to see the real her undress,
as he so often has seen her do in his fantasies.  But she is too quick for
him.  She moves to him swiftly, sits astride him, her stockinged thighs
across him.  He comes inside her.  He feels. . .  a blackness?  I try to
remember the phrase.

   "...  something beyond pleasure, regret, desire. . .  " ` Mathews
finishes the extract from memory.

   `"A flashing blackness that leaves him unconscious as she, with a
compassionate laugh, gathers him in her arms!"





   We sit around the dining table as at a seance.

   `My father,' says Marie Chaix, was a fascist.  A member of the Parti
Populaire Francais.  I wrote his story in a novel.  In English it was
called The Laurels of Lake Constance - perhaps you know of it?  It was how
I came to meet Harry.'

   Mathews continues.  It is a history he has recounted before.  It is now
part of the grand myth of their relationship.

   `I'd been offered the job of translating Marie's novel whilst I was
visiting New York in l975.  At that stage I'd never heard of the book,
though it'd been a bestseller in France.  I agreed because I'd assumed it'd
be an easier task than the avant~garde stuff I'd previously been working
on. Of course, it ended up being harder and much more affecting than I'd
expected In fact, it quite overwhelmed me.

   `I remember writing to Marie from Venice.  The book had a rather
discreetly alluring photograph on the cover.  I was hoping it might prove
more than an ordinary acquaintance.' He smiles and takes the time to ash
the cigarette.  every writer's trick I knew to make myself sound
interesting - and when I'd finished the letter I tore it up!  I thought the
authoress deserved a little better than my disguised come-on.  So I wrote
again, a new letter, short, courteous, respectful...'

   `At the time I was a resolutely devoted spouse and a mother of two,'
adds Marie Chaix.  `I almost left my family to pay Mr Mathews a visit in
Venice.

   `It was as if that first letter had been encrypted in the second.  Six
weeks later we had our first phone conversation, mostly about the book, but
over that hour something happened - not entirely in my imagination, because
when we met two weeks later it was clear that something new, something
quite `impossible', had come into our lives.' He pauses.  `We've never left
each other since.'

   I find myself saying, `Bravo.' Claude smiles benignly on the couple and,
no doubt seduced by the general glow, drinks their health.

   Clare has entered the room with a large casserole, which she places in
the centre of the table.  She lifts the lid: Gibelotte de lapin.  The air
is suffused with the ingredients of the fricassee: the rabbit, the bacon,
the Dijon mustard, the mushrooms and the baby onions, the white wine and
veal stock.

   `I found Jean-Paul still scribbling away at Claude's desk,' she
announces.  `I told him it was getting very -dark and he'd ruin his eyes
and he said, "Meme dans le noir je pourrais e'cnre!" "I can write even in
the dark!" ` she translates for us and laughs.  I notice her gums have been
bleeding from too many cigarettes.



   I have gone in search of the WC.  I wish to hear the conversation
continue beyond me - to be freed from the necessity of keeping it alive, to
diminish it with my distance - the rise of voices, the occasional laughter
breaking like a sea against its shore.

   The apartment is serviced by a narrow corridor (two people would, if
meeting there, need to turn side- on, or move back into the doorway of an
adjoining room) running from the entrance and making two ninety-degree
turns to the right.  I make the second of these turns now.  The passage
ends at a slightly open door.  I pause and then am drawn inside.  I turn on
the light .  My eyes move straight away to the windows: have I become
suddenly visible?  The blind has been drawn.  It is Adele's room.

   Near the door is an open-topped wicker basket used for soiled clothing.
Beneath a damp towel - on top of a pair of American jeans, a T-shirt, a
pair of small white underpants shrivelled together by the elastic - is a
brassiere: flesh-coloured, discarded.
I hear the `clock' of footsteps that have broken from the distant
conversation like a solo passage in some concerto: a woman's heels upon the
polished boards of the apartment.  The stride is confident, assured of the

space, the distances.

   The switch to Adele's room flicks back with a loose metallic click.  I
enter the toilet, gently pushing to the door - the handle raised to avoid
the sound of closing.  I listen as the footsteps go past the entrance to
the kitchen, pause as if the person were assuring themselves of something,
checking on some detail, then move back to the kitchen.

   I hear the taxi pull up below.  Of course it could be any car that has
arrived.  Only the time - it is shortly before 11.00 - increases the
likelihood.  But if it had happened at 9.00, I would have had the same
sense of expectation.  I know the moment of her arrival.  I sense her very
presence in the street.  With the exception of Clare, the others continue
in their conversations, oblivious.  In such a city it would be lunatic to
pause at every arriving car.  I watch Clare move to the window and look
down I imagine her staring at the foreshortened players, the roof of the
taxi, the bonnet, the person who sits just inside the door, her legs
already swung out to the footpath searching for the fare.  `Claude!' she
cries, but also glances momentarily to me, `Voila, Catherine!'



   We share a taxi home, the three.  Catherine talks at some length with
the driver.  There is a disagreement about which apartment should be driven
to first.  We swing by the Metro at Alma and have joined the Cours Albert
Premier, travelling eastwards along the banks of the Seine, part of an
advancing yellow- lighted mass on the unlaned boulevard.



   We have stopped outside our apartment.  Catherine is writing her address
on the back of a bookmark.  She passes it to Gillian: this address I have
repeated to myself a thousand times!  She is insisting that we come for
lunch tomorrow - it is perfect, she will be free all day.

   Gillian reminds me that to- morrow is the day of Godfrey's return from
England.  There are preparations to be made He is expecting us to meet him
at the airport that same afternoon She pauses.  Her refusal has been
embarrassing, overlaid with too much excuse.  Perhaps it would be possible
for me to go alone?  Would Catherine be offended if she remained at our
apartment ?  Of course not.  I agree.  We are to meet at 1.00.  No, earlier
if you must get away.  At 12.30.

   So Gillian has sealed this.  Every- thing has happened.

   I hear the treble of the taxi radio scratching messages across our
arrangements.  The driver seems impatient with this hurried out- break of
English, these foreigners crammed into the back seat of his vehicle.

   Gillian presses fifty francs insistently into Catherine's hand for our
part of the journey.  It is ridiculous says Catherine.  Another minute
passes.





   I watch the departing taxi, hearing its tyres slapping on the irregular
cobblestones.

   Throughout the evening, Catherine has barely spoken to me.  Above all
else, she has made no mention of my poems.  She has carried on this first
duplicity with the absolute discretion of a whore.



   Inside the apartment I pour a glass of La Limousine I purchased at Les
Eyzies, its colour a garish green.  From next door I hear the sound of
Miles Davis's Kind of Blue: the piano solo from `Freddy Free- loader'.

   I retire to the toilet.  I take the folded brassiere from my pocket.  I
gently run my fingers across the inside of the loose cups where Adele's
nipples would have pressed.  I remain convinced that without this talisman
Catherine would not have arrived.  That my planned unfaithfulness had
manifested her.  That she had come to claim me with a far stronger desire.



   Friday, May 25.  The day of Sainte Sophie.  On my right I pass rue
Grenier-sur-l'Eau.  Blocked to traf- fic by large concrete bollards it has
become a makeshift handball court for the adjoining public school.  The
furthest footpath seems perpet- ually littered with the excrement of dogs.

   Each evening on my walk I have watched these animals: squatting, staring
glazedly ahead as if prepa ing to lift some immense weigh .  Their bodies
bear down Again, and again.  Now they are running.  Exuberant.  Released
from their dreadful burdens.  They are delivered souls.  They are
weightless.  They float off into the darkening air.

   Twelve fifteen.  A row of school- girls sit, their backs leaning against
the bars of the Jewish Memorial.  In the masonry it is still possible to
see the bullet holes from the terrorist attack.  They have become another
part of the memorial.  Nothing here will be forgotten.  The legs of the
girls are drawn up close to their chests.  The brown undersides of their
thighs are visible, as are the soft white triangles of their knickers. 
Boys loiter in front of them, anxious for glimpses of their sex.  They
assume my nationality from my appearance.  They use the word `English' as I
pass, and laugh.



   We shall have two hours.  To begin and to end.  I have imagined this
conversation, rehearsed it in every waking hour of the previous night.  A
sufficient thread of narrative - and no more - to allow the sexual act to
plausibly commence.  The plotline of a pornographic magazine.  She moves
ahead of me.  Her skin - a redhead's skin; darkly freckled on the
shoulders, the back - exposed by the white dress .  It has two straps, each
an inch wide.  It is firmly drawn across the bust down to below the waist
where it flares out slightly.



   We sit at opposite ends of the couch.  Our bodies diagonalled.  Backs
wedged into the corners Our legs almost touching in the space in front of
the middle sea .

   `The rents here are impossible ` she is saying.  `Another rise, and I
shall have to move.' She brings a bottle of muscadet.  I tell her how,
since my trip to the provinces, it has become my favourite wine.

   Her legs, only slightly marked by freckles, are unstockinged.  It is
quite possible that she is naked beneath this dress, the material of which
neither confirms nor denies this.



   `We are very much alike,' she says.  `I read your poems.  They have
sadness to them which suggests some prior intimacy.  Their language is that
of the petite mort.  They expose too much of you.' She pauses.  `Or maybe
it's because I'm just coming to the end of an affair myself.'

   The `myself' seems to draw me into this situation.  Incriminates me.  It
must be obvious - Gillian and I - our bodies must exude these desperations.

   `It's very convenient.  He lives in London.  In our jobs we both have
reasons to cross the channel frequently.  We've been involved now for seven
months and yet I know nothing about him.  He tells me the English are very
closed, and I say, `Change.' And he agrees, of course, but there is
nothing. The sex is very good, but I need to know the person - otherwise
it's just the sex and it dies.' She reaches for her glass.

   `I lived too long with a Frenchman - my husband - for seventeen years.
He spoilt me.  My next man must be very special.  Very different.  The wine
has reached her mouth as punctuation.  Her eyes not leaving mine.

   It is clear that I must also now reveal myself.  Share some
corresponding intimacy.  I find myself confiding to her as I would to a
friend of many years.  I tell her of the final weeks with Gillian.  It is
my first betrayal.  I offer up her suffering - this history rewritten the
altar of my uninhibitednes

   `We do not speak together now, at all,' I tell her.

   `How impossible it must be for you,' she says.



   On the mantelpiece there are two photographs.  My eyes have returned to
them several times that afternoon.  Now, in her momentary absence, I have
moved to them.  Drawn by them.

   Each is a portrait of a young woman: one in black and white, possibly
dating from the late thirties or early forties, the other recent.  I cannot
help but notice the dark red, the auburn of the hair.

   `My daughter.' Catherine stands close beside me.  She takes the frame
from my hands.  I have no recollection of having picked it up from the
shelf.  `Danielle.'

   She stares a moment at the photograph.  She has been captured by its
history, that second.  Into a meaning that might never be communicated to
another.

   `She will be twenty in September.  It's hard to accept one's child as
another woman.  She would find it difficult too, possibly, to see me in the
same way.  As a woman with her needs, desires.  Some weekends she stays
here with her lover.  It is strange - you hear the sound of their
lovemaking.

   She replaces it beside the other photograph.  `And my mother.' She
pauses.  `I have lost them both.' I tell her I was twenty-one before my
first sexual encounter - still cowering beneath the shadow of a guilt, it
seems to me now quite self-imposed.



   `One of my greatest diversions is initiating young men in sex, she says.
`I have an artist friend in Australia, Marion Harpur.  Perhaps you know her
work?  Her son was travelling through Europe - it was his first time away
from home - and we arranged that he would spend a week with me in Paris.

   `Late on his second night here there was a knock on my bedroom door - I
was in bed watching some- thing on the television - could he watch the
program too?  Of course - I agreed.  I offered him a place beside me on the
bed.  He seemed quite painfully embarrassed at the suggestion and spent the
evening with a cushion on the floor.  `The next two nights the same thing
happened - only he would want to watch the programs later and later.  It
was impossible to sleep, even with the volume down.  And then one night he
simply came into my room and sat beside me.  He was trembling.  He told me
he had wanted to make love to me from the very first night.  We spent two
weeks together.  He wished to move into my apartment permanently.  I
remember when I told him it was impossible, he cried.'



   The afternoon is gone.  The time of parting has been predetermined.  It
cannot be changed.  Gillian has made arrangements for us to meet Godfrey at
the airport by 4.30.

   We are to leave France in two days; our final moments will be filled
with him: lunches, visits, sharing of stories.  We will be obliged once
again to act out a relationship under constant scrutiny.

   I wonder if perhaps Catherine will invite me to remain for a final drink
- but there is no insistence `It is a pity we didn't meet sooner,' she
says. I agree.  We are both standing. `Goodbye, Avery,' she says, kissing
the air to my left and to my right cheek.  She moves back from her embrace,
but our bodies are still touching, our arms still half retaining the
other's body.  We move into a deeper kiss.  I can feel her lower belly
thrusting forward, the bone of her mound hard against my penis.  My hands
lift the weight of this auburn hair from her neck.  Our mouths, still held
slightly open, move apart.  One cannot kiss again.  There is only sex now,
or this departure. `I shall miss you, Avery ` I hear her say.





   She does not wait in the door- way watching my departure.  She returns
to her apartment.  She closes the door.  Doubtless she moves to the table,
takes the glass of muscadet and brings it to her mouth.  Much of the
coolness has gone.  The wine is heavier now, more perfumed.  She moves into
the bedroom and undresses.  She lies upon the bed and touches her sex.  Her
spasms are deep, made perfect by the power of imagination.

   The lift arrives at the ground floor.  I walk through the foyer into the
light of rue Galande.  Only a minute would have passed.  She will still be
in the main room, the muscadet poised at her lips.

   In the street I turn towards her room, looking up.  I know that someone
standing, glass in hand, at the table would be visible, or become visible,
to someone walking from this building and turning back.  I stop.  I search
for her window, counting the floors upwards from the ground.  It is empty.





   3.





   Disconsolate return.  A reckoning.  Melbourne's early winter evening
hatched through with rain; a view deleted, back and back .  Another season,
as perhaps it should have been, irreconcilable with beginnings.

   The taxi winds its way along the freeway.  -Green and white signs: their
destinations deadeningly familiar.  My head is pressed against the rear
side window.  I watch the bulging lanterns of reflected car- lights - these
marquees strung against the glistening macadam of night - until my breath
across the glass hazes everything from vie The driver glances back to ask
our preference of route, the `you' enclosing us.  This plurality I carry
with me everywhere.  The burden of her.  I watch the pallor of her face
interrogated by oncoming traffic.  The downcast eyes.  The lines that grow
from them like creases in material: a pale crushed cotton that has been
half smoothed again.  A piteous attempt to repair an accident.



   The windscreen wipers screech against the momentary break in fall. 
Along the footpaths, dogs of trees are shaking themselves free of rain.  On
the hallway table there is a bottle of champagne and a note from Jeffrey. A
welcoming home.  I carry the suitcases from the hallway to the main
bedroom. Everything is familiar.  As if I had left it the week before and
not these months.  And I had expected to return with eyes that might
enliven the quotidian.  Gillian has followed me into the room.  She has
brought the carry bags.  I hear myself asking her if she would prefer me to
sleep in the end room. `Do what you want,' she can barely say. `If that's
what you want,' I reply.  Alone, again, the `you' has split. Her
declaration sets me free.  I feel it moving to embrace me.  Turning to the
mirror.  You are quite alone, it says.

   MELBOURNE



   1.

   Tuesday, June 12.  The fifth day of persistent rain.  Imbecilic falling.
Gillian retires to her bedroom.  Each evening this pointed withdrawal. 
When I pass by the door, always left ajar as if to offer the admission I
have no desire to take, I see her, bolstered on the bed beneath her roses
quilt her face devoid of colour, vacuous, as if it were asleep apart from
Her eyes have glazed like those of the shitting dogs.

   From the study I can hear her move, occasionally, in the room.  Or else
I hear what seems to be a stifled cry.  Perhaps she is pleasuring her-
-self.  Perhaps she simply cries aloud.



   The lessons have begun again: a procession of arrivals after 4.00.  The
shrill child-voices, the endless repetition of the phrases: persistent as
this rain.

   I prefer to wait until she is asleep, but she is about some business
still.  Her precious voice ceased hours ago: a relentless
la-la-la-la-la4a-la and then the shift a semitone.  There is a certain
blighting trace of tremolo - as if a keening might have crept into the
delivery.

   I have begun to smoke far more and in an increasingly expulsive manner.
The study is permeated with blue air - a barrier to her entrance. 
Sometimes I arise from the desk to blow smoke down the hallway.  On one
occasion I blew smoke rings.

   Alone in this room, every moment becomes drenched in the thought of sex.
I turn the pages of these magazines.  How quickly their surprise has
dissipated.  How little time before these images will fail to arouse, will
lose this necessary excess.



   In this particular photograph she is with two men.  A written text
accompanies the image, like the bi - graphies of beggars chalked on
correspondance tunnels of the Metro.



   ...deux bites bien raides c'est

   le minimum pour une nana

   comme moi.  A peine pubere ma

   chatte etait deja' la partie la

   plus active de ma personn

   C'est Georges qui m'a fait

   de'couvnr le plaisir d'etre

   enculee.  Je suis folle des deux

   activites.  C `est pourquoi je ne

   laisse echapper aucun sand-

   wich quand l'occasion se

   presente .



   These stories we might choose to believe or disbelieve.  These new
biographies.  Her eyes meet mine.  She fails to take her eyes from me.  My
gaze, as if encouraged by her own persistence, follows down her flesh,
resting at this fulcrum point of the double penetration: the three bodies
locked together at this moment.  I notice, for the first time, the presence
of a wristwatch which has recorded, inadvertently, the actual instant of
this encounter, locating it in history.

   It is 10.26.

   The men have filled her with their penises.  They are absorbed in the
act of penetration.  But the woman, burdened with this cheap erotic name -
Mimi - stares towards me.  I become aroused.  I crave her name in this
other place.  What shall I call her?  Julia?  Frances?  Catherine?  And
what has happened to her in the hours before 10.26?  Did she rise at 7.00,
still tired from the dancing of the previous night?  Had she shaved?  Had
she showered, conscious of the photo session that morning involving anal
penetration ?  And how has this affected her in matters of hygiene?  What
of her eating patterns for the preceding twenty-four hours?  Were there
foods she might have chosen to refuse for this reason alone?  And what are
these other necessary choices?  Is she, for example, responsible for the
choice of underwear and stockings?  Does she select a pair of high-heeled
shoes - their soles unscuffed - appropriate to wear in bed?  This woman
-whose love expresses itself in complete abandon, here in this real world.





   2.

   Paris July12

   -Avery, how brilliantly timed your letter!  And I arriving home from
England in the exhaustions and the sadnesses of a love affair now ended! 
You must imagine me entering my apartment with that dread, familiar and
inescapable (and yet for which there is no preparation), of facing the near
future alone.  And there at my feet, slipped beneath my door by the
concierge, your letter, waiting when I most needed you, confirming you a
part of me, and with such audacious declarations!

   And then, so sad, these words that speak of Paris as if she were a
lover, lost forever.  How can I comfort you?  Should I ask you to recall
the noise and rush, the streets stained with the litter of dogs or the
urine of the clochards.  No: whilst cursing her - as does everyone who
lives here - I know there is no other place, and my cry joins with yours
for this city with its beloved monotones of grey and grey~cream river and
its flock of bridges.  This plenitude: the columned arcades of Rivoli, the
steam-filled windows of Rosier.

   For a while I thought that it was London that enthralled me, but I
realise now I had confused my feelings with the love of a man who lived
there.  I should have listened to the words of my friend George the English
are repressed, incapable of saying how they feel.  `I m s rr says the
lover, after eight months of involvement, even more, and still no closer,
`but I'm not too good at this.' Shrinking back.  His words a `mix of fear
and guilt' (his words) .  I curse the race!  I tell him, `From now on you
don't exist!' How different this letter with its openness (its
forwardness!), its daring to be heard.  Yet I also understand how, for
those who know the great insanity that is passion, this city speaks through
our voices and encourages us.  What is our crime, you wonder, that we
should have met to part?  Perhaps we shall discover this after time.  As
time might also reveal the judge and the enforcers of our punishment.  What
shall I say?  Believe me, Avery, that I should take you as a criminal,
hidden in these rooms.  Of course: come and live la boheme in Paris.  Just
to write and love!  (How many dream of this, who turn the pages of their
Miller or their Scott Fitzgerald?  Do you imagine that life still exists!)
What is return if not gesture?  If not surrender - absolute and
unequivocal, a necessary shedding of the vestiges of past.  And what holds
you from this return?  The cost of risk?  The cost of guilt?  This
afternoon the sun has reap- peared, the cloud broken for the first time in
six weeks.  So there is promise of a summer; but as to its purpose?



   Catherine



   Paris August 3

   Once again this place has been born into humidity - only now have I
remembered heat.  Torpid days, the air almost drinkable.  Endless
transformations: windows opened and thrown wide.
The weather has made a carnival of the city.  Yesterday I was with a
friend at Le Rubis, an old-fashioned wine bar with pink and white neon
curved high above its counter Everyone was spilling from the mirrored walls
into the street, around the corner into rue Saint Hyacinthe.  The warmth of
the eve- ning was like a man's hand on my breast.  Suddenly we were invaded
by Egyptians, their skins dyed golden by the sun, their bodies flaring with
barbaric jewels!  They overflowed from taxis.  They moved amongst us,
helping themselves to our wine and to the wine of others.  They stole our
tartines, then, laughing, sped away.  All is madness - but this is only to

be expected.

   I realise I too have become barbaric here, my body left unclothed.  In
the late dying light, in 1'orangeries of this apartment, I seem adrift.  I
bathe my wrists in water and cologne.  I hear the distant scimitars of
voice, of traffic, as if the heat had curved the noises of the street; the
wailing of sirens late into the night a call to some devotion.

   It occurs to me I have been infected with that same restlessness I
detect in your letters - just as I am exhausted by the rigours of search.
Yes, that afternoon has never left me: the sense of possibilities
unfolding, closed by the inflexibility of time and adamant circumstance.

   The concierge has left for Nantes.  With her departure the old man from
the second floor has once again emerged to deliver our mail.  The two are
like those wooden figurines that appear from docks the day, the night, each
with their separate time.

   This afternoon I came home to find him bent beneath the ochre light of
the landing.  I waited as his fingers sorted through the pile of envelopes.
He held out your letter, hands trembling, his eyes averte , if he were
ashamed of what its pages might contain.

   I have arranged to spend the third week of August in the south of
France. I shall go to Collioure and seek the colours of the Fauvists.  I
shall eat braised mussels stuffed with sagemeat!  I shall imagine it is we
who are travelling through these places, returning late to a hotel, our
lips swollen, our skin sticky with salt.

   Montagnac August 23

   Imagine a running child, the dis- order of hair across the forehead.  It
is how the ivy overhangs the small front gate of my house.  I have been
living in an isolated village (old stone dwellings perched on a hill
overlooking a valley planted with vineyards) in the Languedoc, some forty
kilometres from Montpellier.  Behind the house there is a vast wild tangled
garden from which one may observe the neighbour's child, Colombe, forever
walking on the tar roof of their shed.

   There are mostly old people in --ithe village: life is very quiet here,
except in summer when the English -come.  The days have been hot. 
Thirty-seven, thirty-eight degrees.  In the evenings people sit outside
till late: always the children run- ning; the men in clusters, smoking,
playing petanque.  I walk through the streets and drink with these accursed
English.  The young men - ask me endless questions and each night I amuse
myself inventing other pasts. During the days I have been driving to a
small beach between Agole and Sete.  I undress slowly, exposing my body to
the flame of the sun until the burning envelopes me and my whole being
surges up to my skin. One afternoon I made a pilgrimage to the Cimetiere
Marin in Sete to see Valery's grave.  I found I could still recite the
opening verses of the poem from when I studied it in my final year at
school.  For a moment I was that young woman again, with -her strength and
happiness, poised before a - life, only half sensed, in which I would be
desired by men and have to survive that desire .  -I remembered I had only
ever seen a photograph of Valery as a white-haired old man, and when he
exhorted us to run to the waves and spring from them again alive I had this
vision of my uncle in his one- piece black bathing costume with straps over
the shoulders in the thirties and his skinny white legs!  It is your
letters that have enlivened me.  For the first time in my life (you see,
how even now there can be firsts) I have begun to know a man - and I talk
here of that most intimate of knowledges - without first having slept with
him.  And I find it very exciting.  I say this because recently I have
engaged in sex - and quite intemperately so - without emotion.  Per- haps
this is the cost I have exacted -for my disappointment at a lack of
commitment - the Englishman, for example.  I have drawn my pleasures from
them, certainly, but over the days these men merge into each other - they
lose that singularity that makes us fall in love with them.  You will not
be like everyone else.  Which brings me to something you said in your last
letter.  Yes, it has changed.  Something more wilful than these words has
passed between us.  These letters have the power to conjure, to tempt, and
to arouse.  My husband used to say (with a certain touch of bitterness) I
would make a better mistress than a wife, that I should have been born in
another age and been a Ninon de Lenclos, or a professional courtesan.  So
be it. In the house there are eleven windows showing between the ivy-
covered wooden trellis.  One shutter in the middle has been put there for
symmetry only.  I often think about this mysterious room which does not
exist behind the closed shutter .  Perhaps this is where we are meeting in
these languid (and illicit) hours.



   Paris September 6



   This afternoon: a wet, grey, suddenly autumnal time.  I feel summer has
now finally deserted us, its moment gone too soon.  I am in my bedroom,
appropriately perhaps, reading your last letter and its bold requests. 
What a strange correspondence this has become, like some long slow enduring
sex.  How different the very touch of these pages: their first assertion in
my hands; with time, their gradual softening. It is as if, over these
months, you have become more present.  My sadness at your absence is that
of a woman whose lover has returned that morning to his own apartment (and
dare I say it: to his wife).  It is the sadness of a parting that promises
return. As I write, I find myself awaiting your next letter (Such
impatience!  Is it possible to think it might be rewarded?), knowing that
it must be at least two weeks for your reply.  And there is nothing to be
done about it!  Still I prefer letters to the telephone.  They remain, and
you can reread them.  They are part of the person who has written .  My
mother and I corresponded every week for twenty years - and even though I
moved all around the world, I always took her letters with me, crammed into
airline bags and suitcases, and I still have the , although she is gone. 
Her last letters to me written in a child's hand, their sentences half
finished . Shall I tell you parts of my secret life?  I recently met a
young man who asked me to teach him every- thing I knew about sex.  In
addition to the more obvious requests he gave me a list of some half-dozen
perversities, saying, `You can start with any one of these.'Quel pro-
gramme!  (One day I will tell you the list.)

   I rather fancy myself in the role of initiatrice.  It is, as you know,
an old French tradition, and every young man needs an older woman who will
teach him things without making any demands of him, and without expecting
any more of the relationship than that.  He will always remember her with
affection because there will be no possessiveness or jealousy, just pure
pleasure.  I have already gone through two of the things on the list and he
is delighted.

   I of course believe that just as every young man needs an older woman,
so every man need a mistress, and every married woman a lover.  Otherwise
desire dies: that desire at least which is like a fire that burns you, and
keeps you on the edge in what is almost a state of agony, because the
longing is so intense.

   One of the reasons I walked out on my marriage (which in many ways was a
good one) was that the desire had gone.  I said, I want to wait for my
lover like a child waits -for Christmas Day - with that same excitement and
anticipation.  And when he is five minutes late it is unbearable.

   Imagine us together here.  Think of all the things we would talk about,
all the things that you might want to know, all the things that you might
dare to ask of me.



   Paris September 23

   What has led me to such impetuous correspondence?  All through my life I
have sought experience, sensation, pleasure, intensity - and for these
reasons, particularly the latter, there must be constant renewal My search
has led me very far.  When old age approaches, I must, at least, have no
regrets, no feeling of `if only I had done . .' That would be intolerable.

   Since I freed myself of marriage, and with my daughter grown up and
gone, I can live as I pleas without the need to answer to anyone, or to
justify or excuse my actions.  I have been through periods of euphoria and
despair, of extraordinary highs and limitless fantasy, of self- indulgence.
And always the desire to go further, to push back the limits, to be
unafraid.  You can imagine that sometimes I feel there is nothing new, and
yet there is, and hence the challenge and the fascination - this liaison
epistolaire!  I have never done it before and it excites me, yes, in a real
way, and tantalises, because it leaves the imagination free.

   One of the things on the list was his desire to tie me up.  Not in a
banal way - this was with that wide, shiny sticky-tape that is used to
close boxes and parcels.  I was bound tightly from the feet up to my neck
(as in the bandages of an Egyptian mummy), my arms pinned to my sides, with
only my breasts and sex uncovered.  I couldn't move or stand or sit, and I
could hardly breathe.

   First of all, he spent the necessary time exciting me with his mouth. 
Then he climbed astride me, mounting my face.  Like so many men I have
known, he has a particular enthusiasm for spilling his seed in any place
apart from where is commonly seen as `natural'.  After- wards I watched him
slowly turn my silent face.  I could see him gaze at me; wishing to
understand every- thing, to draw every pleasure from me.

   I will tell you the next thing on the list in another letter - that is,
if you want to hear.  I am beginning to believe what some men have told me
- that is, that I am too extreme.  I remember your first letter : I have
always sought a woman whose love expresses itself in total abandon.' I am
tired of these liars and these cowards.  Let us exalt in our excess!  I
shall close now, in order that this reach you more quickly.  I want your
reply.  I want to hear if these things have pleased you.



   Paris October 10

   So many questions I hardly know where to begin.  Perhaps with a maxim:
`la tendresse est le contraire de l'erotisme'. -These perversities in which
we take such evident delight would be unthinkable within a marriage.  And
not because the other might not enjoy them, but because they are ultimately
excluded by familiarity.  It happened to me - that is why I took so many
lovers in my years of marriage.

   The first few months, or even less, establishes the acts in which the
couple will engage.  And who would sensibly admit something perverse,
especially when this might well jeopardise the relationship that is so
desired!  (You see how privileged we are - to have this opportunity to
speak our uttermost desires.) And then, of course, it has become too late.
To speak of some- thing now would saturate it with significance.  Imagine
if the w should suddenly express a wish for anal intercourse.  She thinks
about this every day, imagining the fullness of this penetration.  But how
would such an aberration be explained within the marriage?  `What has
changed?' the other asks.  `Why this desire, so suddenly, so unpredictably,
manifested?' No, for most relationships there is the prospect of a slow
decline towards the ordinary.

   Against this, pure eroticism is detached, cerebral - it is lived in what
I call the huis-clos de l'amour.  It is what I have with my young man. 
With him I play games, but I never really make love.

   Another of the things on his list was a menage with a third person. 
This was easy to arrange because I have an old friend and lover who had
already initiated me into this particular perversity.  I call him my
Valmont, and I am his Marquise.  I sometimes think we are rather --wicked
the way we have lured unsuspecting men (so far it has been men - I don't
know howl might function with a woman) into our trap.  There are so many
possibilities: either they both make love to me at the same time, and that
I find is ecstasy - those extra hands and mouths and penises all at once -
or, if one of them is tired, or waiting to recover, he will sit back and
watch me with the other.  So, I arranged for my friend to come over one
time when my young man was here, and he was delighted - uninhibited,
natural, spontaneous.  You would never have thought that it was the first
time for him!
For sex to be really good, I must let my feelings become involved.  I
must be in love, even though most men are afraid of women falling in love
with them because they see it as a loss of freedom.  But I don't know where
sex ends and love begins - they merge and become the same thing.  If a man
makes good love to me, I fall in love with hi .  It is also true though,
that if the sex is not good I will never fall in love.  And what is love to

a man?



   Paris October 29

   The evening is approaching travelling in a country train on its return
to Paris.  Perhaps it is moving through Normandy - yes, we are passing by a
village with its black and white half-timbered houses.  A stranger now
appears at the glass of my compartment.  He lifts his briefcase into the
luggage rack and takes a seat directly opposite me.  We talk for only
minutes before his mouth and hands have sought me.  Now he enters me I am
fully clothed - he has simply torn aside the loose material At an moment
someone may pass by on their way to the WC - so much the better, that they
should see such fierce coupling!  It is over quickly.  There has been
perhaps a slight brutality about it.  Afterwards the man returns to his
seat and takes the paper from his case.  As for myself, I return to this
familiar view.  It is a fantasy I have entertained for many years and only
once have realised.

   How often I have seen myself a sister to Anais: living only for ecstasy,
extravagance; all moderate love, half-shades, leaving me cold!  But only
now have I begun to realise the extent of this desire.  I tremble at the
abyss of my passions.  As for this letter you describe - so explicit, so
extreme, that at the moment of its first description the reader might
ejaculate across its pages - is it not the condition to which all writing
has aspired?  Demanding that admission of desire (no matter how unlikely,
how unspeakable), an honesty, so absolute it would produce a masterpiece.

   Shall I continue with my list?  By way of preparation my young lover had
me shave my genitals: an act which he observed with considerable
fascination.  Of course, I have often indulged myself this way.  Only
shaved does one feel completely naked and exposed.  Even when dressed, the
materials caress you constantly - at times almost unbearably so. 
Furthermore, to see the shock it gives to men, when you undress in front of
them to see the folds of your sex so prominently displayed.  In such a
state he entered me - but with his hand, which I accepted to the wrist; and
near my final climax, he has told me, to the forearm.

   You wonder if perhaps I have made you the voyeur, but for me it is
rather that you are present at these moments, not an observer of them.  For
me, his unforgiving penetrations are the moments when I feel you moving
deep within me: --both present and not present.  Avery, I know that your
release --will surely come.  And it shall be my face that is there before
you, waiting.







   Paris November 16

   This afternoon I lunched with Clare.  She enquired as to whether we had
kept in touch.  I know of her suspicions; she has known me too long.  But
what could have possibly transpired between us now, after five months and
at such a distance?  Perhaps it is because the mention of you has quickened
me.  Perhaps my hand has moved involuntarily to touch myself.  How
frightening this need to tell!  How important and how dangerous this
talisman that is the beloved's name!  The exquisiteness of hearing it, of
speaking it aloud.  This holy blasphemy.  This obscenity.  This world!  And
how difficult it must be -for you - bound by this` passion-- without the
ability, the opportunity, to speak it or express it!' But you are right. 
Only the speaking of these desires can destroy us: it is the weak point
from which our acts unravel.  And yet how it begs to be released.  That is
why our writing has under one these -changes.  Why I have pressed your
-letters hard against my sex and brought them back to my eyes almost
unreadable!  Your questions are so persist- ent - again I ask myself if it
is true that we can exhaust these possibilities.  Do we become jaded?  Do
we want more and more extreme things?  Do we reach the point where normal'
sex is not enough?  Is too insipid?  I know women of my age, whose lives
had been characterised by promiscuity, who now have abandoned sex entirely.
For some, even the company of men has become intolerable.  They seek some
other future: a return to some lost dignity.  Perhaps I have this fear of
boredom, so I find myself playing complicated games in order to keep desire
alive.  I don't want to see a man every day, I want to avoid routine.  I
must build up the desire for him by letting a day or two go by, and really
start wanting him again.  It is how I await your letters - as I might a
lover, never knowing exactly when he will arrive, never sure of what
demands I must fulfill.

   Your last letter begs me to continue with the list.  Can you imagine
what it might possibly be?  Perhaps it is what you have wanted me to
describe for some months but have been frightened to ask.  Remember, I am
your mistress.  You may ask anything of me.

   My young lover had expressed a wish to watch me urinate.  This came as
no surprise to me, as it would not, I should imagine, to you either.  The
act is quite essential to the erotic: the turning of our private acts into
a public spectacle.  For my display I chose to lie naked in my bath, my
legs across the edges of the enamel.  So prepared, I called his name. 
Imagine how it would have appeared to him entering from the main room to
see me thus: fingers holding apart the fullness of my flesh and the fluid
breaking from me!  Is this sufficient?  Do you wish more detail?  Shall I
tell you how I slid my shoulders back down the bath, my hair resting in the
pungent warmth, and raised my legs high above my body in the position of
the exercise called bicycling.  Shall I describe how the next spasm shot
from me high in the air covering my whole body in its fall, blinding me. 
And how I stayed like this until I had quite utterly soaked myself in front
of him Shall I describe how it was in this blinded state that I felt his
fruit shed its seed, melting injouissance, changing its absence into
delight in my mouth, where its shape died! -Or do you wish, as I suspect,
for even more?  Far more?



   Paris December 3

   How your description fills me with unbearable longing.  The extremity of
your passion.  I too can no longer sleep.  My mouth craves the taste of
you. As I eat, as I drink, I imagine these foods have been pushed from your
body.  I hold them in my mouth, I swallow them, occasion- ally I squeeze
them through my teeth and lips and watch them fall back to the tablecloth.
I am a savage here, alone in this room.  Only yesterday for example, having
felt the urge to urinate, I simply wet myself.  I lit a cigarette and leant
back in the chair watching the material darkening between my legs.  Avery,
we are only doing what all lovers might wish to do (perhaps their acts do
not have the courage of ours, nor do they have the wealth of our
imaginings), except we have not chosen to keep our wishes secret from each
other.

   Even Jean-Philippe.  (So, I have -inadvertently written his name.  I
cannot be bothered to erase it- the name I cry is yours alone.  I shall
describe in detail what happened recently.  The act was not in fact on his
original list.  I suspect he wished it from the very start, but could not
bring himself to admit it - how timid we are, how reluctant to expose that
which we most desire How many must go their entire lives unfulfilled.  But
now it seems as if these other activities had just been preparations for
this newest act As if, having been taught the necessary skills, he was
ready to spread his wings; to reveal his own, deeper desires.

   His initial request was that I lie, eyes closed, upon my bed, my legs
tied wide apart, secured to the bed posts.  After binding me, I heard him
leave the room.  There was the sound of the locks on his case, then --he
returned.  I felt the slow movement of his fingers working lubricant into
my sex.  Then I felt an object introduced deep inside me, cold and rounded
at its end, then more awkwardly shaped, narrowing then broadening to a
width that pulled hard against my flesh.  I felt him move this object back
and forth in minute movements, as if his hand were shaking with some
terrible palsy.  I heard him cry aloud and opened my eyes.  He was crouched
beside me, his fingers slathered with ejaculant.  Unsure, I watched him
draw the object slowly from me, until I saw the bald, streaming head of a
doll.

   Avery, I have come more and more to understand this: nothing can watch
over us if what we wish is full of sin.  We must search for these beautiful
obscenities alone and we alone must face the consequences and the judgment
that will surely follow.  I await you in this other place, other city. 
Come to me, to everything that has been written.  Kiss the dark sex of me.

   Can we not sustain ourselves forever like this, surrendering to these
pages, our lives endlessly rewritten.  Imagine everything you wish to
happen at this moment of our meeting, poete, and it shall happen.





   3.





   I come to her.  She is lying on her belly, hands behind her back, palms
flattened on her buttocks.  She pulls the spheres of flesh apart, exposing
the darkened iris.  I lick its creases.  Myriad.  Bitter.  Her genitals are
shaved: it is as if I were seeing the sex of a woman for the first time. 
My finger runs within the folds of flesh.  Anticipation has already soaked
her.  Still, I take the lubricant and smother my hand to the wrist.  She
turns.  I catch the movement, and in response add more jelly, massaging
hand, wrist, and now the forearm into a familiar of the penis.  My fingers
form their beak: I am the swan head, entering her; I am the neck. 
Occasionally she reaches back to caution, to withhold the thrusting to the
forearm.  I take her hand and place the fingers at the clitoris, requiring
her to pleasure herself in front of me.  She begins to rub, as if she were
seeking to erase her sex.  She comes, wind breaking from her at my wrist.
Now her face is upside down before me.  I trace the circle of this loose
inverted mouth.  I smear the lipstick back as if to enlarge its opening. 
My penis rests across her face.  I watch how it is silvering her neck.  I
kneel astride her head, lowering the scrotum into her mouth.  I watch the
hollowing and rehollowing of her cheek .  withdraw, watching her fingers
search out the hairs, her tongue sucking at the roof of her mouth.  One by
one she produces them: seven in all.  The smear of lips now closes round my
penis, the motion of her mouth awakening in me a similar motion, as if
transmitte by contagion.  She reaches back and enters me.  I feel her
pushing deep inside: two fingers, crossed slightly, almost to the webbing.
She trills.  I feel a spasming.  My penis levers from her mouth.  Her hand
has followed it, the palm curving, pressing at the eye.  A jet of urine
shoots .  involuntarily from me, brindling her ribs and belly.  I reach
down and swirl the liquid, bringing it to her breasts.  Her cries alone
have nearly brought me to ejaculation.  Now we stand facing each other. 
Rills of liquid trickle down her body.  We are immaculate, in awe and
wonder of each other's body.  I tremble, heavy with the weight of the sperm
inside me.  Now she is kneeling in between my legs, drawing my knees
upwards.  She loops her arms beneath them, swinging my legs back above my
shoulders; my penis only inches from my face.  She takes my hand, placing
it upon the shaft, moving it back and forward, inviting me to masturbate as
I had her.  I watch the skin drawn back across the head.  Her fingers have
re-entered me.  Her mouth sucks at the base of my testicles.  I spasm
uncontrollably, pasting her finger- tips with excrement.  She with- draws.
I watch her slowly daub the strokes of my initial on her breast.  I am
unsure what blinds me first to this vision.  But now the sperm, in its
second and its third expulsions, gathers in my mouth.  I exalt in the
unexpected warmth of my own release.  She lowers me back to the mattress.
We kiss deeply - as we had that afternoon in May my hands entwined amongst
the auburn of her hair.
I open my eyes, instead, to Gillian's face.  It partakes of a strange
devotion: radiant, serene, as if in contemplation of some holy object.  As
if the semen I had just expelled inside her passive belly had cured her of
this illness.
How still we have both become perhaps having momentarily fallen into
sleep.  I gaze at the white fleshes of our bodies together on this bed.  A
porcelain of limbs.  There is silence.  The absolute silence of the

photograph.

   And then from somewhere well beyond the border of this place the first
trace of sound begins, the faintest hum of traffic moving through the
streets.  Through the narrowness of these ruelles, the grandeur of these
boulevards





   II Sorel Atherton



   APORIA





   Aporia is a figure whereby the speaker sheweth that he doubteth, either
where to begin for the multitude of matters, or what to do or say in some
strange ambiguous thing.

   A Book of Rhetoric, 1657



   1.

   Where to begin?  If the reply had never come from France, I might have
started with my memory of Chris's face - pale fruit, half eaten that is, if
not for the novella, if not for everything that Jeremy had finally said. 
You see, I wrote to Catherine .  ` I always had the address.  Chris knew
this, had chosen to describe her writing it on the back of a bookmark and
passing it to me in our shared taxicab.  The Abbey Bookshop: refuge for the
poet, scholar, pilgrim.  It says that.  I still have it, here, in my hand.
How did he put it - `this address I have repeated to myself a thousand
times!' Then there are the things I shall never know, and those that are
imponderable: why he had to tell this story at all, what he might
eventually have done with it.  Finally, the deeper questions.  How long
would he have maintained the lie of change, the lie of sex?  These are
things to which I shall return.









   Of course, I forget how once there wasn't any telling of our lives (and
let me disregard the way this telling has presented me: `It is all false,
false, false!'), but just our lives.  Into a part of which, into the part
I'd taken for a new beginning (the change I mentioned only sentences ago),
came that most terrible of interruptions: the simple ringing of a
telephone.



   By then it was already written - like some other darkness, fully formed,
concealed, awaiting its disclosure.  Just as you have seen it.  As to the
means by which this came to light, it began, significantly enough, with a
letter.



   Hawthorn January 20

   Dear Sorel,

   Just a brief note: first, to let you know you are in my thoughts, and,
should you feel the need to talk, or simply have some company, that you are
welcome here at any time.  The other thing - I realise it's not what you
might want to be bothered with at this time-is I would like to publish
Christopher's novella in the autumn Metier.  (I had thought originally of
spreading it across two or three issues, but I felt it would be good to
bring this out whilst he is here with us.)

   Of course, I will be absolutely guided by your wishes in this matter and
would not want to proceed without your blessing.

   Please let me know.  Maybe you would like to have dinner one night?  We
seem to see so little of each other these days.



   Jeremy Fayrfax



   I find this appalling to write - I burn, my face burns, even though I am
alone, even though I am totally unobserved.  My body burns - I knew nothing
of a novella.



   There was a change.  At the beginning of December, he began to speak of
a rebuilding.  One that could not, should not, be rushed , because of the
damage that had already been done, that be had done.

   Those months after our return from France, night after night I'd glimpse
him moving by the door way, the floorboards betraying every movement, to
his study.  I'd lie there, waiting for this possible return.  I would
exhaust myself, month upon month.

   Then quite inexplicably: his presence.  He came to me, at first, to ask
forgiveness, and, after seven days or so . . .  How can I possibly talk
about it, knowing now what had enlivened him?  He came to me.  I was lying
in bed on that most ordinary warm December evening, and he kissed me, the
touch of his fingers making me cry out, quite inadvertently.





   The telephone began to ring just before 11.00 in the morning.  (He had
waited for the traffic to clear before leaving for the university.) At the
time I was pulling down the bed.  The words were functional and in a
woman's voice - a nurse's - and spoken with the calm that accompanies the
dreadful, the unspeakable.

   Absurdly, it appears in retrospect, I found myself listening for him in
the background.  But there was too much talking, too much laughter - the
sounds, it seemed, of Hell.

   I must have asked what had happened, because the voice was saying that
he was unconscious and was having tests: the doctor would be able to give
me further information.  It was saying I should come to the hospital, to
the casualty department.  It was giving me the address.





   I read it.  Just as you have read it.  The first time.  How it is,
there. Under other circumstances (if Christopher had lived), how would this
book be different?  If, and if and if. . .  In the padded envelope with
Jeremy's brief covering note.  As I saw, not then of course; as I thought I
saw later; and as, later, I began to see.



   I recognised everything.  Not every- thing; I mean, I recognised every-
thing in which I had a direct par .  My first reading was full of the pain
of memory: I had forgotten the minutiae of our time in France, if not the
silences.  (It was the force of hatred underpinning them I hadn't known.)

   I recognised Catherine.  Not, of course, that this is her name, any more
than my name is Gillian, or Christopher's is Avery.



   I was shown to a waiting-room and took a seat amongst a group of people
- I hardly noticed their number, only that there seemed so many.  I
remember feeling that the largeness of this group might adversely affect
his chances of recovery.  Most were women, alone, or with children.  Those
who were in company sat huddled, engaged in anxious conversation: endless
speculations; guesses based on fear or hope, on misunderstandings of what
the body can and cannot survive.



   I knelt before the wardrobe.  I pulled out the bottom right-hand drawer
and removed my journal, watching the ribboned letters that the book had
previously supported topple to the side.  The trace of lavender came to me
again.  This persistence.  I turned to Thursday, May 10, the day of Sainte
Solange, to find that we had stayed in Chatel-Guyon at the H6tel Bellevue,
and the following day, the day of Sainte Estelle, in Autun, at the Hotel
Moderne.  I found that on May 24, Ascension, we had a dinner invitation
from Kate Metherall and her husband, Jean-Luc, to meet the novelist Harry
Mathews, and his partner, Marie Chaix.  And Frances Bouri

   I began to wonder, if all this was so precise, why he should turn with
such fierceness, and with such obsessive detail, to invention.







   I watched the doctor (I'd thought others, previously, to be the doctor,
but this was not to prove the case) verifying with the duty nurse, then
walk up to where I was seated.  What should he call me?  Was I Mrs Houghton
or Miss Atherton?  I told him I'd chosen to retain my maiden name.

   He invited me away from the others.

   `We think your husband's had a stroke.  We've done a CT scan - which
shows a large haemorrhage into the left side of the brain.'

   I asked if he was going to die.



   I read the version of my acquiescence to his afternoon with Catherine:
how it seemed I was willing it to take place.  But I remember thinking at
the time that if this should happen - even something as clear as an
afternoon of lovemaking - then I did not want to be blamed for having
prevented it.

   On his return, he seemed quite flushed, not only, I felt, from the wine
(I could smell the wine) and the walk from her apartment on such a warm
day. There was a breathless exhilaration to him.  The exhilaration of sin,
perhaps.  I didn't mention `the afternoon', but he chose, almost
immediately, to be dismissive of it.  It was `fine', or something similar -
even this seemed extravagant conversation.  Or else he was readying himself
for Geoffrey's imminent arrival - you see, we had arranged to pick him up
at Charles de Gaulle by 4.30.  But the manuscript has already told you
that.



   Christopher, I wondered time and time again, where were the draft the
different versions of the letters, the record of research?  What would show
me where you learned the weather patterns in Paris for the weeks
immediately after our departure, the constant cloud and then the sudden
change?

   Because I knew of your research of the Cathedrale Saint-Lazare.  I
recognised the devil and his baubled hair like so many Christmas bell I
recognised the cold, the chlorine cold of the stone.  I had stared too long
at this apparition, until the sound of your approaching feet disturbed me.
Then I did this, actually had to do this: I took the morning's paper and
sought out the weather page.  There, below the heading `World', I read for
Paris: `Rain, 10-12'.  But what of a village in the Languedoc, forty
kilometres from Montpellier?  A pettiness, of course.  The narrative
demands the day be hot - then let us call it thirty-seven, thirty-eight
degrees!  What's more, in such a provincial town they play petanque - one
hardly needs the Larousse for this.  Nor for the Fauvist colours at
Collioure.  Nor the young Englishmen with all their questions on her life -
and all her lies.  Nor to have this woman with the name of Catherine,
having returned from a nightly walk, retire to her bedroom to compose a
letter.  Of course it is all fiction.  Not only does one betray his art,
but all art by reducing it to mere transcription.  But then, what about the
town of Agole?



   In a series of small steps, not unlike a dance, the doctor had shifted
his body between the rows of chairs and my line of vision, shielding m
possibly, from the gaze of the waiting women.  I suppose it was an awkward
question I'd asked anyway. `He's unconscious at the moment, ` he replied,
edging slightly backwards on the hard linoleum squares.  `We know it's
serious.  He's been examined by the neuro- surgeons.  They don't think an
operation would help.' I remember waiting at every moment for the sentence
to be given, only to find a series of postponements.  Then he had stopped,
with a half~embarrassed smile, a pulling wide of the lips (looking back, it
may well have been an involuntary nervous act), hoping perhaps this might
suffice as an answer.  Possibly I wasn't expected to respond. `So what is
going to happen?'. `We have to wait.  Watch, over the next couple of days.
In this type of situation many don't wake up.  You can't really predict for
any particular person..." He paused.  Perhaps he'd taken pity on me. `There
is a chance he could die.  On average, roughly a third of patients in his
condition will die, a third will be damaged, a third recover.' I wanted
suddenly to know what `damaged' meant.  I was terrified by the very sound
of it.  It struck me as a hideous word; an ugly, sickening thing.



   He said he loved me.



   There was a change in him, quite unaccountable, for which I only had his
words-his word-and I believed him.  It was this last despairing act of
faith. I had wanted his love so long, and for so long I'd watched him
perfect a self-loathing, a self-absorption : a type of deprecation that
craves denial from the other, which exhausted me.  He preened, constantly
believing in his capacity to captivate women whilst fervently denying his
ability to do so, only to be reduced to despair when what he said would
happen actually occurred. But in my stupidity, I continued above all else
to care for this man, and to expect from him what he'd failed to offer year
after year.



   `For example, he might experience difficulty in speaking or under-
standing,' the doctor offered. `Maybe he'll be able to hear us and not be
able' to respond...

   I asked if it were possible to see him.

   `Of course,' the doctor said.  'I did mention, didn't I, that he's still
unconscious.  The other thing you'll need to be aware of is that he'll be
attached to a number of tubes - to help with breathing - and some drips, so
you shouldn't be at all alarmed by his appearance.  Okay?' He nodded, in
apparent agreement with his own warning.

   I found myself being led, half by the arm as one might lead an invalid,
past the waiting area to a cubicle.  We entered through a partition in the
curtain.

   Christopher was propped up on a trolley of sorts, with metal sides, like
a cot.  His mouth was covered by an oxygen mask which had drifted slightly
askew.  The doctor stepped towards the bed and moved the mask.  I watched
it slowly slip back to its previous position.

   There was a drip feeding into his left arm, which lay outside the covers
like a toy of some description - a favourite animal, perhaps - and a flat
bag beside the bed, fed by tubing which came from underneath the covers,
filled with, I assume, his urine.

   `I'll just leave you for a while," the doctor was saying.  `You can talk
if you like.' I found myself thanking him, quite out of habit, for this
favour.



   Where does the end begin?  Was there ever a point where it might have
been reversible?  Or does that moment always elude us?  Even when we search
backwards for it armed with our histories, our documents, our photographs.
Our re- evaluated memories.

   I can remember thinking, because of this proliferation, because it seems
that everything is brought to every other thing this time shall have no
end, because it cannot end...



   I couldn't explain the change, there was change.  He was asking for
forgiveness.  No, nothing had happened, he was reassuring.  He was asking
me to forgive him for what he'd been for so long, especially the time in
France, and before, as if he'd made some dreadful mistake.  And how was it
possible he hadn't always loved me?  There was an articulateness about this
analysis of his emotions, so uncharacteristic (indeed, the answers he gave
to my questions lacked, almost totally, this eloquence) that I might have
thought it quite prepared.

   So it was, eventually, he entered our bed again, for the first time in
almost seven months, and he wept.



   Of course the doctor hadn't heard.  He returned because a certain time
had passed, or he was free from what had occupied him for those minutes.

   `Everything okay?' he asked.

   I nodded.

   `Good.' He paused.  `We'll be shifting your husband to West Ward
shortly. You might like to get a coffee while we settle him in Just before
you do, there are some details you might be able to give u.  whether he's
on any medication at the moment.  Blood pressure heart problems?  Any
allergies?  That sort of thing.'



   On the weekend I began to search the house, looking everywhere for
evidence - anything to convince that the manuscript was fiction, not
biography - leaving the study, which I saw to be my greatest hope, till
last.

   There were, of course, familiar things.  The chairs each wearing
clothing - the jacket with the leather patches, the grey sleeveless jumper
with the pockets for cigarettes and lighter.  The books he'd brought back
from Paris - Mathews, Salter (those so well known in this real world they'd
been granted the privilege of retaining their own names), La Clos; a
Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece.  Otherwise the room was still a private
diary, full of things kept separate from our relationship: the photos of a
past preceding me; letters scribbled in unknown, often childlike, hands; a
pipe; a legless toy knight made of lead . . .



   Then over the days these new lives, these wilful biographies, drew a
kind of strength from doubt; began to animate, grow fierce; began
increasingly to threaten me.  Doubt was the nature of my betrayal, and I
shall never forgive myself for that, irrespective of what eventually I came
to learn.

   So it was that the `real' brought its pack against the work of art,
began to run it down, to savage it.



   `During the days I have been driving to a small beach between Agole and
- Sete.  I undress slowly, exposing my body to the flame of the sun . .

   Because - and I was thorough - everything that could be verified was
verified, but nothing could be found that might not have hap- pened. 
Except when I sought the road maps from the cardboard box inside the
wardrobe - the box with all the postcards and the entry tickets - when I
turned to page 106, which showed the beaches between Agole and Sete, there
was no Agole.

   Instead there was a town named Agde.  This strange weak point in the
telling of the story worried m I stared at a brief stretch of coast- line,
I reread its single mention in that August letter.  I tried to imagine why
Christopher might have chosen to include in a work of scrupulous research a
single town that didn't exist.

   It seemed quite inconceivable that one might mistype the letters 'o' and
'1' for a single 'd' Then there was a frightening moment at a very simple
thought (after all, to the English-speaking mind, is not the town Agole
more likely than the quite improbable and unpronounceable Agde?) that the
invention of Agole might most easily be explained by the transcription of a
misread hand.



   I know the difference between art and life.  I've been used to seeing
art betray life, time and time again, to appropriate the necessary details.
But this was different.  This seemed as though life had now begun its own
betrayal.

   Betrayals.  So many of them.  Not only this.  It is what we all have
done.  What I have done.  What Frances did.  What Christopher was doing,
what he did.  What Jeremy has done, and did.  These tenses, these acts. 
Their repercussions.  sI didn't return to the box imme- diately.  I
remember postponing the moment for some hours: there were several things
that needed to be done in any case.  It was necessary that I practise the
Chanson Italienne of Ravel, a piece that presents certain difficulties for
the soprano: the refining of emotion to achieve simplicity, the sustaining
of the vocal line.  How does one sing for so long if one is crying?

   I always had the address.  Written on a bookmark and passed to me in the
back of a taxicab outside Geoffrey's apartment.

   It was in the cardboard box with the other paraphernalia.  `The Abbey
Bookshop - Paris' best selection of new and - used scholarly and literary
English language books.' The red brown card with the geometric motif in the
corners.

   I turned it slowly.  In her hand I read: Frances Bourin; 23, rue
Galanole, 5e.  Except there is no rue Galanole in the fifth arrondissement
or, for that matter, in Paris.  Only rue Galande.









   2.

   As friends they would have spoken of it - meeting almost every day at
the department, speaking of it time and time again.  After all, it was
their job to speak of literature.  I sought out Jeremy's letter and chose
the phrase to which I might respond - `to have dinner one night' - and I
rang.  He suggested that it might be `easier' if we were to eat at his
house.  `Rather than, you know, with all those other people.  I think we
both might need a bit of quiet.  Let's say Tuesday: 7.30 for 8.00?' The
slight curve at the edges, at the turnings of the corridors, gave the
feeling momentarily that I was on board an ocean liner and returning to the
cabin.

   My footsteps hit at the linoleum.  It seemed the only sound above a
dully distant hum.  I walked some thirty metres towards the dark space at
the end of the corridor, and came to rest.  I remember the increasing
feeling that I was watch- ing myself.  Or was it more that I was watching
someone else going through these moments?  I pressed down the metal handle.

   Christopher was lying in the bed, propped slightly to one side, the
cot-sides up.  A plastic bag, full of some faint brown liquid, hung from
the wall to the right of him - a tube running from it, taped across his
face, feeding to his nostri .  His right arm was flexed and resting outside
the covers of the sheet.  He had been dressed in flannelette pyjama . 
white with a faded two-green check.  His hair had been combed, but
differently than usual.  They had given him a parting.



   The lounge was much as I remembered it from those obligatory visits
--I'd made with Christopher over the years.  The renovations had of course
progressed.  Both ceiling and walls had been ragged: a mottling of
parchment and a blue (almost ice) down to the picture rail; and below, the
parchment mixed with slates and greys and charcoals.  Within the room, only
the settee - draped in its blue-grey covers - seemed 'unfinished.'

   The day had been oppressive: a fierce, still Melbourne day, one of the
first of summer.  The house -retained an airless warmth.  Possibly the
windows were open, but, even with the light, the curtains had been drawn.
`It's not normally this tidy,' he seemed to be apologising.  `Mrs
Sinclair's been today.' There was a constant flurry to his movements, of
which he must have been aware but failed to keep under control.  He would
sit back in a lounge chair, legs crossed, and take a mouthful of champagne
(he was offering champagne as though in celebration of something he had yet
to reveal: a brut tache', the liquid stained a slightly crimson pink), and
ask a question, which he would suddenly interrupt with an amusing anecdote
or some unnecessary double entendre.  There were gestures, actings out, and
small dramatisations.  He'd be off the chair, or perching on its edge, then
ut to the kitchen, or at the bookshelf.  Or he'd be reminded of a track
from a CD, or from a record, I must hear.  He had' the frantic lunacy of a
moth - you half expected dust to smoulder from him, brushing past your
chair - hell-bent on some collision. There was too much food.

   Appetisers from a gourmet delicatessen spread out across the low cane
table.  Behind them loomed a vase filled with exotic flowers I'd never seen
before, prompting me to ask their name.

   `Tulips,' he replied, smiling. `One simply forces them open! Anyway,
Sorel, despite the awful circumstances, it's lovely seeing you again.'

   I took the drink.  I brought it to my lips because some conciliatory
gesture seemed necessary.  Above all else, I couldn't start the evening
with refusal.

   `Jeremy, I'm here about the manuscript.'

   `I'd imagined so,' he said.  `When I sent it . . .  I mean, it seems
incredible that Christopher had never shown it to you.

   I waited.

   `It's about us, of course.

   `I see.'

   `Not entirely about us.' I heard -my words - neither question nor
statement - in fear, already, of their repercussions.

   `Of course not.

   `Look, it's all right.  It just seems you're aware of more of this than
I am.  Perhaps you should assume complete ignorance on my part and tell me
everything you know.

   My request seemed to have suprised him, silenced him. `About what?  I
mean, what aspect?'

   `Did you know he was writing this?'

   `Well, not necessarily.  I knew he was working on some- thing - I
assumed everyone did.  He seemed to be forever at the key- board in his
office.'

   `Do you remember when he first mentioned it?'

   `I suppose a month, or maybe two, after you got back from France.

   `And did he say what it was about?  A hint?'

   `No, not specifically.  He said he was working on an idea for a prose
piece . . .  Look, do you want to sit up?  I'll need to serve the
vegetables presently.' `I'm not really very hungry, I'm afraid, Jeremy.'
`Just have a taste.  And I've got a wonderful red to have with it - it's a
bugger about the weather, I was counting on that change - I've been I
saving this for years.' It was strange.  It seemed as though he'd totally
misjudged the situation - his gestures tuned for another sort of evening -
and was incapable of making the necessary adjustment.



   I might have started with my memory of Chris's face.  Its looseness, how
it was somehow incomplete, the almost halfness of it.  The ashen colour of
the flesh.  His slightly teary, waxy eyes, moving with their purposeless
gaze away from me, or over me: it hardly mattered.







   I found that I was staring at him from where I'd been seated .  The pale
brown curls of hair finely stroked with grey.  The ginger beard also
greying, but in tufts, not unlike a mould.  The right eye with its
slightest cast.

   `Chris offered me the manuscript around the middle of December, only
days before the stroke thing the haemorrhage.  You know, I was thinking
about this the other day; it was about a week after that dreadful headache
when he went home from work.  I suppose that must have been related.  And I
remember he handed it to me with some line like "It's done." But as for
drafts I never saw any.  I assume he transcribed every thing he had, then
did the necessary editing on disk.'

   I could smell his breath from where I sat, carrying its own stale heat,
its own quite palpable humidity.

   `Did he keep a journal do you know, Jeremy?  On Paris, for instance?  I
lived with him those months and I'd watch him writing, but I assumed that
he was working on the poems.  I'm not sure if he might have kept it from
me, or I failed to see it, or whether in fact such a thing was never
written.' 'I've no idea,' he said, and shrugged quite helplessly.  'He
never mentioned it to me.' `It's just that when you said that he'd
transcribed everything, I wondered what it was he may have been
transcribing?'



   The cream light, coupled with the -stillness, gave a painterly quality
to the room those later hours.  The noises from outside, lessening with the
arrival of night, were finally lost beneath this ragged breath- ing and the
constant hissing of the mask.  I closed my eyes.  I doubt that I was
expecting sleep.  From the carpet - held beneath this industrial perfume,
the persistent trace of disinfectant - I could detect a palimpsest of
odour, the stenches of excreta and of uncontrollable re- lease.  It was the
smell of weakness.  I eased my position.  I leant slightly to the left and
peered through the lifted blind, cupping out the lamplight from the room. I
could not imagine a sky containing more darkness.  I sat like this a moment
until I realised the rough edges of the breathing had become a rasp.

   Whatever evening he'd planned, whatever he'd hoped to have transpire
over those few hours, was in tatters.

   The table was littered with half- finished objects: the bottle of
champagne, the French stick and the Bordeaux, the inappropriate boeuf
bourgignon, my glass of red - though this was quite untouched We'd been
taken far away from all of this: the meal, some bizarre Marie Celeste
artefact.

   `He told me this much one evening - early, mid-November - that he'd met
a woman in Paris and that they'd been writing to each other.  That their
letters had become increasingly erotic.'

   His face had paled with sweat.

   `Of course, Chris was a writer.  It's possible that he'd invented the
exchange in its entirety to test, you know . . .  to see if it was
believable.'

   `And did you find it believable?'

   As I leant forward from the settee, Jeremy slumped, in some foretaste of
his dotage, back into the armchair.

   `Yes,' he said.  `I believed him.'

   I watched his hand swaying close beside the glass of Bordeaux.

   `Did he say her name?'

   `No.  Nothing else.  I found the whole thing dreadfully awkward.  It
wasn't a conversation I particularly wanted to encourage.

   `And when he gave you the manuscript?'

   `When he gave me the manuscript, I took it, rightly or -wrongly, for a
roman-a-clef.  I'm sorry.'

   `Jeremy,' I said, finding I had said it sternly, as though to a
transgressing child, `was there anything else?

   He stood up.  He might have been broad~shouldered were he not blighted
by a stoop.  Possibly he considered he was rising to an occasion, but the
effect was more of cowered exhaustion.  There was, I recall, an immense
silence - one I feared might become impossible to break.

   `After Chris had been in hospital, and it looked as though it would be
unlikely he'd be back to work, I went through his office - you know, in
preparation for the shift . Actually, I must confess , I was rather hoping
I might move in - it's got a lovely view - but mainly I think it was a
gesture to get closer to him, somehow.  This isn't what you're asking, I'm
afraid.  Yes, there was a small box, a shoebox, of pornography-magazines,
that sort of thing - in one of the cupboards.  I brought it home before the
cleaners or the secretary discovered it.'

   `Do you still have it?' 'Yes.' `I'd like it,' I said.

   `Of course,' he replied, then paused.  `What, now?'

   `If it's possible.'

   He returned some minutes later.  The sides of the box, I noticed, had
been reinforced at some stage with packing tape.  He placed it on the edge
of the cane table.

   `I'm sorry, Sorel,' he said.

   `What for?' I asked.

   `I should never have sent the manuscript.  I just assumed . . .  I
suppose it was a fairly stupid assumption.'

   `Not really,' I replied.

   I moved from the lounge into the hallway, and as I turned back, my eyes
met those of this strange woman whose appearance was so similar to mine. 
Our eyes met briefly, then we re-entered our respective worlds, moving from
each other at this quite unnatural speed.



   The night of our return from Paris, the furniture, in the light that
issued palely from the hallway lamp, seemed to be drifting in the room.  It
was how I'd remembered these pieces, coming to my mother's house that final
time: the faint notes of lavender, and the armchairs beneath their sheets,
gently knocking at the edges of the room.



   All these faces.  These brutal and these sad appropriations.  I lifted
them from the box, not wishing to touch them but for this awful necessity.
If this were his choice, I though , if he had chosen this way - turning to
them, page after page - it must have always been his choice.  I'd come in
search of Catherine and found her everywhere.  I found her limbs pulled
wide apart by metal bars.  I found her hung by ropes.  I found her
screaming, impaled upon an arm.  Her mouths agape.  I found these endless
deaths by drowning.



   Grief.  Release.  Anger.  Numbness.  I took her photograph and held it
to my face.  She is offering her life for you.  Here she is.  Here she is.
I am yours, she says.  We hear her say.



   I should have mentioned it before, but I have had this dream.  For weeks
now.  It is winter, not as it was on that perfect, hot, December day.  What
happens does so as if it were months ago.

   Nor, at the start, does it appear that I am really myself so much as a
passer-by, coming upon the scene by chance. It is a cold September morning.
There is rain.  A semi-frozen rain.  A drizzle whose slowness is akin to
snow.  There is a car, a Renault 12, beside a kerb.  The road is Blackburn
Road (but that is not correct outside the dream) in Clayton, near where the
drive-in used to be.  It appears to be quite poorly parked: the front
wheels pointed at, rather than beside, the kerb.  The windows have misted
in the cold, caused by the interior's only trace of life; a raucous
breathing.



   I turned the bookmark, placed it horizontally upon the desk.  The back
of the red-brown card unmarked except by this address.  I wrote, frightened
that this mightn't be an ending so much as another beginning, that perhaps
it might be simpler to live with doubt I wrote as much with the fear of
exhaustion as with the fear of embarrassment.  As much the fear of lucidity
as the fear of failure.



   East Melbourne February 1

   Dear Frances Bourin,

   You will recall we met at a dinner party held by Kate Metherall in late
May of last year.  I believe that you and my husband Christopher
corresponded after our return to Australia, that it was an intimate
correspondence involving an emotional commit- ment of some intensity.

   I say, `believe.' I myself have no specific proof apart from a
manuscript of Christopher's which indicates this is the case, and the
testimony of an acquaintance which suggests the existence, but not the
substance, of these letters.

   I have no wish to pursue this beyond simple verification and to offer,
obviously, my sincere apologies should this not be the case

   You will not know, but Christopher suffered a stroke recently -
ironically, perhaps, precipitating the events leading to this letter.  It
is not expected that he will recover and no one can be sure exactly how
long he will live, though it is felt more than a month may be optimistic .
Although I cannot expect it I would appreciate a reply, or some
acknowledgment of this letter



   Yours faithfully

   Sorel Atherton



   Despite the mist there could be seen, at the front driver-side of the
car, a pale blot of flesh pressed against the glass.

   From inside I could hear the stertorous, saliva-ridden breathing
half-snore, half-snort.  I crouched down to get closer to the window.  I
could make out a body slumped against the door, head turned to the right,
resting against the glass.  And this face, once so familiar to me, slowly
dawning on me, as it were: asymmetrical, slightly frozen.



   Then, quite unexpectedly, I came across the photograph of the woman with
the two men.  Her biography was there, as the manuscript had mentioned -
only Christopher had corrected a typographical error in the French (which
gave etat instead of etait) and changed the name Ronny to Georges. I have
no reasonable explanation for this latter change.  Georges was Catherine's
accomplice, but this seems quite gratuitous.  Perhaps he felt Ronny to be
as real as any of us, and in need of some disguise?



   His face seemed succulent: pale fruit, half eaten.  What did Rilke say?
That it had no more substance than a broken fruit corrupting in the air? 
The dying poet. I caught a reflection in the glass of the window.  Only the
light things could be seen.  The hair was not visible.  The face, yes.  Its
pallor.  The whiteness of the face, white as Christopher's pale face, could
be seen.  The material of her dress too dark.  But the light-glint fom the
buttons and the single brooch was visible, as was the whiteness of her
clenched hands. `I read your book.  About a week ago.  I haven't mentioned
it because I was unsure of what to say Perhaps it is beautiful - I'm not
sure of that either.  I'm blinded by the facts, so faithfully recorded, of
those final months.  By your articulation of my loss, and your hatred, and
the stupidity of every evening numbed, remembering, I can't tell you if the
descriptions, of them- selves, constitute a thing of beauty `Christopher,
that's not why I am here .

   I stared at his absolutely silent face, the eyes roving aimlessly across
the room.  Perhaps if I had been totally convinced that he could hear what
I was saying, I might have carried through these final meetings in a mutual
silence.  I shall never know. `I've written to Frances.'



   What if she had never written back?  For it would seem far too benign of
life for her to have replied expressing incredulity, if not offence.  What
if that reply had never come from France?  I'm not sure which would have
been worse: the confirmation or the remaining doubt.  With one there is the
pain of his deceit, but also clarity; with the other, the pain of my own
sense of betrayal.

   I doubted him.





   Paris February 12



   Dear Sorel Atherton,

   So he is to die. Please accept my sympathy for your present grief and
for that greater grief to come - which is mine also, and deeply so.

   I shall make no secret of the fact that I cried at this news.  It should
have made no difference.  Every- thing is without shame, without guilt, but
with a regret.  Poor Christopher.

   I doubt you will wish a long letter from me.  However, let me say there
was the temptation (for simplicity, if nothing else) to lie, or simpler
still, to leave your letter unanswered.  Yes, we wrote to each other - what
you have gathered from your enquiries is true.

   As to the actual substance of our `affair', it is more difficult to
weigh.  As I once wrote to Christopher, had we both still been living in
Paris (or Melbourne), there is no doubt we would have followed through with
this relationship.  You must judge me then as you might judge an ordinary
mistress.

   I believe though that what I have done would be wrong only if I had done
it with a sense of wrong.  Or fear.  But I have no fear.  I take it upon
myself.  What I have written, I have written quite wilfully and
consciously. It was important for me, as I believe it was for him.  There
was a splendid difference about the whole exchange.  An insanity which was
beguiling and -arousing.  Yes.  You see, I am tired of' sense.  It is sense
that has already -passed its judgment on me.

   Sometimes I wonder if I am the last of this generation (my God, I am
nearly fifty - my daughter has now taken lovers) for whom sex is this
unfulfillable imperative.

   To be condemned by the irrational was a far more privileged --fear.  For
this I owe Christopher an apology.  I had ascribed the sudden termination
of his correspondence to some timidity.  I challenged him with this-I
retain a copy of my more important correspondence - I asked him, `Did I
frighten you off with my last letter?  I would never have thought that
possible.  And ours was just a mental thing, it was just correspondence. 
What if it had been real?' No, I could not believe it of him.  Indeed, your
letter has explained his silence, and these accusations tell me more, now,
of myself than of him.

   Presumably, my final letter must still be at his Hawthorn studio.  If
this is so, perhaps you might arrange for it to be destroyed.  It is
clearly based upon a quite inaccurate assumption, and is no proper epitaph.

   As for his manuscript, this was something~ he did not mention to me. 
Has he turned me into fiction , I wonder?  It would be interesting, I
suppose, to see what he has conjured from our brief exchange. --You see, I
loved his writing.

   Yours sincerely, Frances Bourin



   This vile mind, so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious,
concupiscent!



   3.







   I'm not sure if this is all too obvious, or whether none of it makes
sense other than to me, who now knows everything.  It's just that far too
much has come to pass, and every- thing depends on every other thing for
its meaning.  Let me try and clarify at least something here: every word of
this novella happened, and my own arrival at that understanding was
terrible, and full of pain.



   At what point do you cease knowing someone?  Or perhaps the question is
at what point do you begin It terrified me to realise that whilst our lives
had maintained their apparent continuities, whilst the surfaces remained
undisturbed, Christopher had been living in this other world.

   Suddenly it seemed most likely that I'd never known this man, that he'd
always kept the dark centre of himself unilluminated, that the real energy
of his life had burned in these desires.  It seemed too that if he hadn't
actually brought himself to lie, he must have chosen words which would not
compromise this separate existence.  A clever, crafted language.

   But if these words had meant these other things, couldn't they have
meant them from the very first moment of their use? Mightn't the words that
he spoke to me once, in love, be nothing more than script?  I recalled the
-silences of our final years, now so obviously filled with resentment at my
presence, a situation from which he found it impossible to break free. 
This man, so much wishing to suffer, so much seeking plausible reason why
the world he desired had not materialised, needing the excuse to stop
himself from finding out it could never exist.  We grieve, we anger, we
despair.  Then there is this long, barely endurable emptiness.



   He said he loved me.





   `She sent the letters here.  She told me, to his ``Hawthorn studio''! 
It wasn't a suspicion that you had.  You knew about it, didn't you!'

   His face, I can remember, went through a welter of expressions at first
an almost naive hopefulness, an infant joy at my arrival, itself flickering
almost instantly into apprehension; then, after my words were spoken, the
look of a discovered child.  Yet finally -, and this is far more difficult
to put in words - there was the relief of some nervous player whose moment
had arrived at last.



   I wasn't sure I wanted to continue this.  I knew the' truth, if not the
details, and my visit to Jeremy's house was in one sense nothing more than
a means of confronting him with my awareness of his complicity, of telling
him I knew he'd lied.  But this had all been achieved in the semi-darkness
of his porch.

   Now I realise that by entering I was grasping for a final chance, the
slightest hope that Jeremy would have some additional piece of information
which might restore the balances, bring equilibrium to this chaotic world.
I entered then out of that hope which is the admission of despair. The room
was silent - its walls' charcoal and slate a darkening underbelly of cloud
- the silence of the storm's still heart. He had begun. `Chris came to me,
late June, I think it was - quite late - and asked if it were possible to
use my address for some correspondence.  He told me that he'd met a woman
in Paris, shortly before he'd left, and wanted to remain in contact, that
it might be simpler all around if you didn't know about it.  In case you
got the wrong idea.  I wasn't sure how I could refuse.  I mean, to say no,
was tantamount to saying I suspected him of an affair.' `Do you have the
letters here?' The disgusting thought breaking suddenly upon me.  `Have you
read them?' `No, of course not - to both. When a letter arrived I'd bring
it in to work. . `And he'd never talk about it? `Sorel, God.  A little,
yes. Only in -the most general terms - what I told you last time, that it
had become increasingly erotic.' `So when he presented you with the
manuscript, you knew exactly what it was, of what it was made.' His body
first moved forward, then, as it had the evening of our previous meeting,
collapsed back in the armchair: a marionette whose strings had been severed
by my words. `Yes.'



   What is love to a man?

   It is one of the riddles that this body asks me.  This body hovering in
the mist, anus raised high like a cat, whose limbs taper to their hooves,
whose wings have not feathers but (worse than scales) flints!  Whose head
is a mass of baby's curls.  When a man declares his love, what does he
mean? What is this afterburn I cannot erase, holding me to this disfigured
body?  Who is this man who angers me?  Not because of these acts - these
saddening and pathetic acts, these acts of self-doubt - but because of this
waste of time.  Because of what he has done to everything which might have
been of value.



   I forgot myself.  I told him I knew that he'd lied to me.  Deserted me.
Betrayed me.  That he was quite shameless and disgusting.  I told him he
was weak, pathetically weak.  I think now that I must have endlessly
repeated myself, because when I try to recall my words I find a memory of
the same thing said again, but slightly differently.  I said that what he
had achieved was to render everything he'd ever said a lie.  I said, `You
are going to leave me, now, with everything you ever said or did a lie.' I
remember walking around the bed, back and forth, gathering myself,
composing myself. `I'm tired of being deserted.  I'm tired of having to
come to terms with the weakness of others-of -supporting them, of giving
every- thing to them, so they can leave.  -`The other evening, lying in
bed, I thought of that myth, with the young girl following her poet . . .
`I had died, and somehow you'd brought me back to life, those final weeks.
I thought there might be hope (I was unsure of love, if I could ever look
at you as once I must have looked) because you came to me, -Christopher;
you told me you were sorry.  You said you loved me.  `Then your book began
to turn.  Your book began to stare at me . .  and I suddenly died a second
time.  Christopher, to die again is a shocking thing!  Not only do you find
yourself exhausted from that ceaseless holding back of doubt, the cost of
this other life is hope: each hour persuading you to surrender more and
more of your defences.  `Then all at once you realise that everything has
come back to the same familiar point, that all this effort - doing
everything this second time - has been for nothing.  And there is the sense
of waste, doubled; the pointlessness, doubled; the doubled pain of every
wound reopening.' I paused.  What needed to be said had lost its logic; the
thoughts no longer followed naturally one from the other.  I didn't know -
because there were so many things, or because the circumstances were so
strange, - so rife with ambiguity - where I might begin.  I said -a type of
aphorism.  `Faithfulness is only respect.  Your crime is the existence of
these fantasies.' Inside my head, I heard his loud objection, knowing him
(at least in this regard) so well.  `It is fair, Christopher.  I know what
you would say: ``I never touched her.  It was an intellectual exercise."
Too well.  No, Jesus of Nazareth was right: you have looked upon this woman
with lust, and it is enough.  `It was the way I saw you look at every
woman, every day like you were perusing fruit.  Choosing, finding blemish,
choosing once again.  `I'd rather it had finished six months ago, a year
ago - and yes, I'll say it , just as you did - seven years ago.  Whenever
it might have been that you first started living out these vicarious lives
as opposed to what it was you chose to offer me.  But to suggest it might
be love - small, small, small.'

   I have seen it, time and time again, in the few men who have entered my
life, mostly in the lives of my closest friends: Beth, Carola, Lotte,
Merry, Deborah, each of their lives a type of psalm, a version of lament:
To whose beds their husbands have returned, their breath, their hands,
their penises odoured with the trace of other women, quite enlivened!  As
possibly once they may have carried our scents back to others.

   For what of those who have been deserted because we have been the chosen
ones?  We who had con- sented to these betrayals, if only from the belief
that we should be loved again.  Perhaps our sole excuse is here: that
afterwards we had continued loving.  We had put our faith in these
relationships and hadn't thought we should protect ourselves.

   Men are quite without faith.  No, this is not fully true: they have
faith, only for them it appears a fragile thing.  A thing which dies.  It
comes to you how every call could be that call, the ringing interrupting
you from other interruptions, the voice upon you before you have the time
to make an adequate defence.  The serious voice conveying its authority and
right to speak, suspicious of the awkward or irrational response.



   `Do you know where they are?'

   `The letters?  Not here.  Not at the office.  I assume you've checked
his study and such.  I imagine he destroyed them.'

   `What about the final letter?'

   I saw his eyes dart back and forth, the one, it seemed, slightly slower
than the other.  Damaged.

   `In what sense, final?  I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean.'

   Whatever vulnerability I may have momentarily unearthed was shored up by
his question and the time that it had taken him to ask.

   `Frances told me that she'd written a letter to which there'd been no
reply.  I wondered if that letter might be here.'

   `The final letter.  Yes, I see.  Well, it arrived a month or so after
the previous one.  I hung on to it natu- rally, for a while, and then when
it was obvious he wasn't going to recover, I destroyed it.  Threw it out.'

   I couldn't stop myself replying.

   `So the three of you kept your secret to the end.'

   `Was it possible to tell you?  Sorel, look at it from the position I was
in.  Christopher was my friend.  I'd agreed to act as go-between long
before I realised the import of it all.'

   `But when you found out what it was that you were doing, then you could
have gone to him and told him no.

   Even before he spoke, I realised what I'd done.  How I'd made it
possible for him to say these things, my speech a prompt for everything he
wished released.

   If you like, quite inadvertently I had spoken the magic words that had
unloosed a demon.

   `I couldn't have done that, Sorel.  You see, I wanted him to leave you.'

   I heard.  It was impossible to avoid his horrible unburdening.

   `He didn't want you any more; his mind was full of her.'

   I stood to leave.  But he continued with this speech, his voice becoming
louder and louder, shouting as I moved away.

   `I love you, Sorel, I have loved you more than seven years . . .'



   At the time I made a set of notes to which I have returned: for the
purpose of sharing, for the purpose of comparison.  I remember calling them
The Days of Waves, because over that time it seemed I had been lying on a
distant shore and that these things had broken over me, quite beyond my
control, like vast waves.

   -------------

   THE DAYS OF WAVES



   This is the first day: helplessness.  The feeling of moving as in a
dream.  Numb-

   ness.  A forgetting that one is walking. A lack of concern at walking
with such forgetfulness.



   The loss of one's vocabulary in the midst of speaking.  An inability to
articulate. A lack of concern at, a giving in to, inarticulateness.  A
surrender to the inarticulate.  A falling, yes, it seems literally, into
silence.  -`



   Tiredness.  The feeling of having just completed a journey of great
length, but with no sense of arrival, merely of being somewhere else that
must be left.



   The fear that one might never sleep.  The eating of meals out of
obligation, with- out hunger.  Hearing oneself (a mother) saying, you must
eat, or you'll be ill .

   A desire to seek photographs, letters, and a fear of doing so for what
it might unleash.  A need to verify appearances.



   Forgetfulness.  Vagueness.  A drifting off.  An inability to finish and
a lack of caring that a thing be finished.  A sub- duedness in speech.  A
sudden hearing of one's own occasional loudness and dis- taste at such a
lapse.



   Wandering.  The necessity for wandering.



   A sudden fierce devotion to the child. To the small fists raised in
their struggle. Finding oneself staring at this unknown child, talking to
its mother, as though one had been related to them in some direct lineage
by death.  A realisation of the preciousness of the child, worthy of our
adoration.  Granting us serenity in chaos.  Fierceness against apathy. 
Selah.



   Physical things.  The jaw aching through certain necessary holdings-back
of tears. With the tears: that aching of the neck and shoulders, the
discomfort in the chest. A sense that everything inside one has shrunk and
is pulling at the outer flesh.



   -Then nothing.  Only the eyes' afterburn. A consciousness of breathing,
like the beginning of a cold rather than a simple consequence of this
death.



   Days of impatience.  An irritation at the slightest demand that might be
placed on one.  Then anger.  The frustrated anger of a child.



   The noticing.  How many ordinary objects were saturated in this person.
How one is surprised.  Resonances. Everything that might connect: not only
mention of the obvious words - the name, the relationship-but sounds, a
furniture, a perfume (like the sudden shock of lavender).  Everything in
meta- phoric connection.  Returning like per- sistent refrains.  Grief is a
type of poetry.

   --------------------------

   Closing the gate and glimpsing back, I clutched at my stomach..  final
words, half heard as I pulled the door on them, had sickened me I shuddered
at the momentary thought that a desire sufficiently intense might somehow
be transmitted by sheer force of will, that the violation of his words
might somehow grow within me.

   As I reached the car I heard the whisking of the bushes from outside his
porch, cosseting their mania of darkness, possessed, enthralled - about to
speak in tongues.  Then finally, that long, quite horrible cry.

   This sound - an almost animal howl of pain - might possibly have been
the echo of myself, except I knew that I had kept my silence.  It was, I
must suppose, from Jeremy.  From whom I had just walked away, still numbed
beyond the slightest possibility of sympathy.  For even now, I couldn't
bring myself to -believe that it was over.  The telephone again, like some
small child's voice demanding to be answered.  Our lives perpetually
disturbed.  Our meditations scattered.



   When they pulled the curtains round my mother (here, where he had
finally deserted her, this second time), it seemed not so much a gesture of
theatricality as something quite domestic.  Something I had seen her do
each night, a thousand times.

   It was as though she had become the `outside world' which they had seen
grow dark, grow threaten- ing - and they wished to turn the lights on in
this living place.  Yes, she was dark and she was cold.  So they drew the
curtains on her.  Kept her out.



   The call was from a nurse.  `It looks as if your husband may've had
another bleed.' He was to die. I drove out to the hospital.  I remember
thinking that it would coincide with visiting hour.  That parking would be
difficult.  I remember it was raining heavily.  One of those relentless,
idiotic, turn-of-season Melbourne rains that quite forgets to stop, or
seems incapable of stopping.







   It comes as no surprise it is my father's face against the misted glass
- I had expected it - the full expressions somehow unstitched, and pulled
apart. `I must come to see you,' he is saying, `even if it's only for an
-hour.' His voice sounds old.  It frightens me that age should be ludicrous
on him.  "I need to talk to you.'

   I think, He comes to me, a father, when I no longer need a father. `We
don't have to lie to one another any more,' I say.  `I'm not a child.  I
can't believe your stories any more.

   -I think, I tried so long to win him back.  I sang for him.  To tempt
him home.  I was a siren for him. `Go on!' I hear him screaming through the
glass.  `Tell me that I'll never come to anything.  Tell me I am beyond
love.  Tell me that I'm self-absorbed . . .  Everything your mother used to
tell me.' `She's dead,' I cry into the telephone.  `While you were gone. 
Now keep away!"

   I was sitting at a table in the cafeteria - almost precisely where I'd
been seated whilst waiting for Christopher to be taken to his room - amidst
a noise sharpened by hard surfaces: the chrome benches and the troughs, the
glass racks and displays.  A clockface reading 8.15.  I'd been searching
for her.  Trying to catch a glimpse of this woman somewhere in the room. 
There she was!  Distorted, interrupted by the shifting queue, but there, in
the thick glass of the servery.  I watched her rising slowly from the
table. Her pot of tea, like mine, left untouched.

   Then for a moment she was lost to view, reappearing quite clearly though
as she approached the glass door of the exit.  She was reaching Ifor the
very handle, when suddenly she sheared off, flattened, thinned, distorted,
like some ghost taking flight at the living.  She was gone.  Behind me
there was hubbub in the foyer.  There were many strangers carrying flowers.

   I'd already forgotten how the weather had been at the time of my
arrival. I stared down at my own -body: at my own arms and at the cone of
my coat; at the distant brown shoes, too small it seemed to carry all that
loomed above them, too small it seemed to retain the -balance that they
did. A man appeared in front of me.  He had been holding back the door.  He
had stepped aside to let me pass.  I felt his eyes upon me, seeking once
again to jettison me into death. I strode outside.  My hands pushing
through the threads of rain held out like bribes within the passing lights.



   AFTERWORD

   I have been looking over everything that we have written.  No doubt
you'll think I have been dwelling on this - in one sense, yes - but the
grief is of a different order.  It seems strange after the magnitude of
these events that minor details should obsess me so.  I have no wish to
tell them all, but they are of this order: of wondering why it was that
Christopher had waited to reply to Frances's letter of December 3.  There
would have been a week.  Perhaps, by then, he could sustain himself in
fantasy alone?  It's difficult to say and, without his letters, quite
impossible to know. Another thing, almost, I suppose, stylistic.  Carola,
who'd spent a week in Paris recently and sought to visit Le Rubis, only to
find it closed the month of August (with whom I've shared the manuscript,
and no less, my pain), had pointed out this small discrepancy in the
beginning of the letter dated August 3. Of course, you say, the evocation
is poetic, and there's no reason after all why Frances shouldn't have
sought to intensify the feeling of romance in her writing at this time. 
Maybe just these trivialities, now, are all I wish to know.





   III.

   JEREMY FAYRFAX



   <THE VIRGIN>



   It was as if I had awoken from a -dream to find myself awry: my posture
crooked, quite half cocked, my neck exposed, my head thrown backwards like
a baying wolf.

   From outside came the `clop' of -the gate's metal latch, almost liquid
in its sound: a word pronounced by some watering mouth.  Then the turning
over of the engine cutting through the swirling blackness a volley of dog
bark, ra-ra-ra-ra-ra and she had gone, leaving me, halted -mid-room in my
shock. Yes, as if awakening, I began to reassemble fragments, piecing back
together the preceding moments.  How, for instance, the last part of my
speech must have been unheard (I have the recollection of her moving from
the room), and spoken, for example, to the mantelpiece.  `Sorel, you're the
only woman I've ever met I could imagine carrying my child.' Spoken
ludicrously out loud towards the empty hall.  `I can imagine your devotion,
fiercely radiant.' No more than this.  Only a sudden pause at the
realisation of my own words (their noise within the room), then nothing -
more like fit than dream - until I heard the gate, until I heard the hollow
door-slam and the turning of the engine. Perhaps her exit had allowed some
of the night to permeate the room, for it had darkened.  It was possible
now to detect shadows amongst the folds of curtaining, in the fabrics of
the armchairs There beneath the mantelpiece!  A pervasive chiaroscuro
beginning to assert itself within this space.



   I remember thinking that the curtains had been drawn against the heat of
a late-January day - a single tranche of light coming from the window, its
beam aswarm with particles of dust - then realising, no, the curtains had
been drawn because of their departure.

   I found myself to be trembling in a state of anticipation, scarcely less
than sexual.  You see, I was to be `in charge', I was to `stay here every
once in a while' - Christopher had said these things to me.

   `Jeremy, while we're away in Paris, would you be prepared to look after
the house?  Collect any stray mail, that sort of thing ?`

   He had given me the key.  He had unloosed me in the heart of this place:
here, amongst the endless traces of her presence.  These places where she
slept, and where she cleansed herself, where she squatted, ridding her body
of its wastes.  He had granted me the feel, the odour and the taste of
these objects with which she surrounded herself, that previously I had only
glimpsed.  He had given me this tabernacle for my use, until the time of
their return. Over the days I began to imagine it as the place where I
would eventually live with her, to the' extent that, on certain evenings, I
would take the journey from Haw- thorn to East Melbourne to rehearse our
moments together.  I would call to her from a distant room, imagining her
voice in reply - but only if he were to leave.  Only if that
dissatisfaction which I understood within him were to grow; if some
yearning might carry him outside his fear, outside the shadow of his guilt.
In such a reverie, I had quite forgotten my own presence in their house,
rediscovering myself as it were, only by the dull drum of my blood, the
high nerve-whine by my breath, a slowly breaking wave.  I flicked on the
light and looked about me, catching my image in the dressing-table's oval
mirror.  Fayr- fax in his thirty-seventh year, I thought.  A trace of grey
that strokes amongst the pale brown curls of hair, or from the gingered
beard.  A single coin of unsilvered glass, oil- bright, blemishing his
face. In the corner of the room stood a large keyless wardrobe, its russet
wood radiating a soft luminance.  I stared at its brown-black door and it
seemed I heard, from the depths of the gaping lock, a distant sound: some
vague and joyous murmur.  I slowly pulled the bottom drawer-releasing to
the air a note of lavender, sharp and ineradicable - moving upwards on the
left- hand side: through the gloves and scarves and straps, the shed skins
of stockings, a medicated cream, a box of tampons, a single brassiere -
flesh-toned and prophylactic.  Then down: the underwear, the silk and nylon
crackling, catching at the rough sides of my fingers



   Christopher was in the open door- way.  Sheepish, suddenly quite so
adolescent I might have mistaken his posture for that of an undergraduate
seeking an extension for his essay. `Jeremy, could I have a word?' I think
he said, with ridiculous formality.  Obviously enough, he had rehearsed it.
Entering the office he pulled to the door, pausing halfway to ask, `Do you
mind?' I nodded in the direction of the leather chair.  The next pause was
excruciatingly long.

   I was wondering if I might ask a favour.' It was awkward for him, so
much so as to enliven me with its potential.  I remember my mouth filling
with saliva. He began picking at the raised seam of the chair, its noise
amongst his sentences like punctuation. `You might recall, about a month
before we left Paris I went to a reading at the Village Voice Book- shop. I
would have mentioned it in a letter . `Yes.' I could recall.  Kate
Metherall had been there, accompanied - more significantly it had appeared~
by an older woman, finely boned with deep red hair.  The letter had dwelt a
trifle long on her, enough to suggest he might wish to write of nothing
else - too much of her opinion of A Sport and a Pastime.  A question of
proportion- where the description of a single gesture, a single attribute
of appearance, might disturb a sense of natural balance, might topple
everything from anec- dote into confession. `I met a woman there.  Frances
Bourin.  Do you recall?' `I think so, yes. He picked. `I remember it
occurring to me at the time that she was a sort of kindred spirit, and she
said that we must keep in touch.' He stopped, his sentence hanging with its
slightly upward inflection.  Perhaps he hoped he had said enough, that I
would finish off what needed to be said or asked and then quietly accede.
`I'd like to write to her, of course.  Except that it might prove a little
awkward - I mean, should it become a regular correspondence - with the
letters coming to East Melbourne.  And to use the universi- ty's address
says far too obviously, Write to me at work.  You see the problem.  And
then I thought, if I were to use your address, as if it were my own, I mean
.

   He was a boy engaged in his first misdemeanour, barely capable of
holding back a nervous laugh.  I think, had not this action the potential
to destroy his marriage, it would have quite disgusted me. `I was
thinking,' he continued `I might ask her to write to my "Hawthorn studio".'
He was to be unfaithful.  And there begins my story, I suppose, in earnest.
He no longer loved Sorel. This subterfuge was, at least, his first
admission of the fact - as later he would hint at and agonise his way
through our afternoon confessions.  Yes, above all else, it seems in
retrospect, he wanted to confess.  Remember that.  The first of my eleven
o'clock class had come tapping at the door.  I acquiesced.  I yelled, `Come
in, so that there would be no more of it.  In order that the business be
completed.  The arrangement sealed. `After all,' I added, `I would hate for
you to "lose touch".'



   It was Sorel who had knocked, standing in the ochrish glow of the porch
light.  I knew almost instantly what had happened.  Just as a voice across
a telephone imparts tragedy well before the first sentence has been
completed, I had this split- second of realisation before her words burst
over me.

   `I wrote to Frances.  She sent her letters here, to his "Hawthorn
studio'', didn't she!  It wasn't a suspicion that you had; you knew about
it from the start.' Behind her, there seemed a wild cavort of plants, a
tarantella, both of uncontrol and ecstasy.

   I had never expected Sorel to write to Frances, if only because the
address would be unknown, kept from her by Christopher.  I was, for a
moment, quite unmanned at her discovery.  Then I began to see in this a
possibility to say what I had wanted said for many years.  Fur- thermore, I
felt the very extremity of my action, the depth of passion it revealed,
might well eventually recommend me, in her eyes.

   I asked her to come in then, not out of fear, but with relief, and with
joy at a rich opportunity.  Without this incident, how long might I have
harboured my unspoken love, how long before the circumstance arose in which
I had no choice but this admission.

   I recall her, perched at the very edge of the settee, leaning forward,
her right leg outstretched, the left folded back beneath her thigh her
whole body in precarious balance , demanding explanation.

   I began by telling her all I have already mentioned: how Christopher had
asked if he might use my address, how he had met a woman in Paris and
wished to correspond with her.

   `He said everything might be simpler if you didn't know about it,' I
continued.  `In case you got the wrong idea.

   `I wasn't sure how I could refuse. After all, to say no, suggested I
suspected him of an affair.'

   She asked me if I knew the letters' whereabouts, and of course I had to
tell her no. It wasn't easy for Sorel.  I felt the desperation underpinning
her anger.  Hers was a vulnerable indignation, and one which might be
turned.  It was then she posed a question for which I had been unprepared.
She asked about the final letter.  Of course, with what she knew, she could
only have meant one thing by this enquiry.  And all I needed then was to
steady myself and exercise a simple rigorous logic.  I told her that one
other had arrived perhaps a month or so after Frances's previous
correspondence.  That I had retained it, against all likelihood that
Christopher would actually read it.  And finally, that I had thrown it out,
unopened.  At this, she became quite accusatory. `So the three of you kept
your secret to the end.' I, of course, could only point out that I had no
other choice.  I had agreed to a friend's request, in all good faith, and
quite without the knowledge of what would eventuate. 'But when you found
out what it was that you were doing,' I heard her voice come in reply,
`then you could have gone to him and told him no.' They were perfect word
as if I had been forced into my speech, compelled to make this utterance I
had dreamed of making year after year. `No, I couldn't,' I could suddenly
explain.  'Because I wanted him to leave you.' And I paused, quite free now
of responsibility for everything I said.  `Because I love you, Sorel.  I
have loved you now for over seven years.'



   I was standing in the room.  It hardly mattered where.  Perhaps another
fifteen minutes had elapsed.  The wind had fiercened.  Now each sound of
that outside world arrived distorted in some extreme pianoforte, by turns
too close, too far.

   She had gone, but I knew she had already heard enough.  She had heard
this declaration of my love.  I had sowed the seed of this knowledge within
her.  It was my hope, where before, in silence, there was hopelessness.  I
moved the telephone closer to my chair.  I poured a glass of wine. I
considered tidying the room, but, should she choose to return that evening,
things would need to appear as they were when she had left.  I did,
however, take the precaution of inspecting the bed, and made it up in a
relaxed, informal manner.  I waited.  Quickening at the approach of every
car, anticipating the slowing down, the cricking of the handbrake, the
door-slam, the metallic drop which is the opening of the gate: everything
which would lead to that final half-rap at the door, distorted by this
dervish wind, each noise covering me, uncovering me with its wave.



   I seemed to have awoken yet again, my legs crossed, my left leg quite
numbed.  I lifted its dead weight to the floor, waiting for the prickling
to emerge, and to subside.  Two o'clock.  I raised myself out of the chair
and hobbled to the bedroom.

   I sat on the edge of the bed and reached for the wooden box upon the
bedside table.  Holding back its lid, I withdrew the postcard reproduction
of Leonardo's Tbe Virgin, Cbild and Saint Anne.

   I gazed at these three figures, locked together in their passion, my
eyes following down the Virgin's body (this slightly breasted, pale-nippled
body as I had imagined it), resting at the fulcrum point, and back then to
her face, the hair scarved, pulled from the forehead, the eyes cast down.

   I should tell you now what I had tried to tell Sorel, shouting at the
time of her departure: that I wished her pregnant, when I had never before
wished this with any woman.  I wished to see the absolute radiance of that
face illuminate my child.  But what I have never told - this secret I keep
close, unspoken - is the peculiar wonder that the painting has for me.  How
I knew this face, from the moment of recognition, cutting its swathe of
silence through that relentless traffic of the gallery; how it swam back to
me, though at that time we were half the world apart.  And I had never told
her this.

   It is a simple thing, this love I -have for the work, why I have, over
the years (from the time indeed when I first saw the painting and realised
the strange coincidence!), dwelt upon it.  Perhaps overly?  It is this.  It
is because the face of the Virgin is Sorel's face.  Exactly.  It might as
well be a photograph.  And with the picture of it, I lay back upon the
counterpane, and wept.



   <THE VIRGIN, CHILD AND

   SAINT ANNE >



   (An Essay)

   'It seemed to me that as I lay in my cradle, a vulture came to me; open-
ing my mouth, and striking me several times between my lip its tail.'

   So Freud quoted from one of Leonardo's earliest childhood recollections.
It is a startling fan- tasy.  And the central question it raises appears as
intriguing now as it most certainly must have been to Freud: why has the
suckling mother been replaced by a vulture?

   `At such a point,' considered Freud, `a thought comes to mind from so
remote a quarter that it would be tempting to set it aside.  In the
hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians, the mother is repres- ented by a
picture of a vulture The Egyptians also worshipped a Mother Goddess, who
was represented as having a vulture's head, or else several heads, of which
at least one was a vulture's.  This goddess's name was pronounced Mut.  Can
the similarity to the sound of our word Mutter be merely a coincidence?'

   So, in his 1910 essay, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Child-
hood, Freud was able to associate the mother, approaching with her imagined
erect penis, with the androgynous vulture-headed god dess, Mut, and through
this argue a case for the artist's passive homosexuality.

   By way of seeming confirmation, some three years later the analyst Oskar
Pfister discovered, as a type of `unconscious picture~puzzle', the actual
outline of a vulture in the blue-grey cloth of Mary's drapery in Leonardo's
painting, The Virgin, Child and Saint Anne.

   Needless to say, all of this strikes us as absurd, if for no other
reason than that the initial association is based on Freud's mistranslation
of nibbio as `vulture', and not as `kite.' The painting in question hangs
in the Denon wing of the Louvre museum.  Though only metres from the Mona
Lisa, surrounded by its constantly replenishing crowds, all trace of
clamour has abated.  It is as if this trinity of figures has silenced them,
reduced their ragged babble to mere distant murmuring .  In- stead, one is
enraptured by an abso- lute serenity; overwhelmed by this painting's sense
of flow, the sweep of the diagonals, a movement which has begun in the very
landscape: the curve and fall of the river.  Or is it mist?
Why are they here, these women and this child, perched at the preci-

pice edge, these generations linked together in the softest chain of flesh?

   Much discussion of the painting has centred on the half~completed action
of the Virgin: the mother's desire to draw her Son back from His wilful
embrace of self-sacrifice.  Yet even the most perfunctory inspection
dispels any suggestion of concern upon her face.  There is no sense of
competing emotions here - rather there is a calm acceptance.  The Virgin is
captured at the moment of action.  As for Saint Anne, she appears no more
than a ` dispassionate observer. But this has not always been the case.



   In particular, I am interested in the last occasion on which they `met',
as it were, for any length of time.  For this we must return to a charcoal
drawing, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John,
dating from some four years previously. To look upon this earlier cartoon
is to refer almost to a prior conversation, a glimpse of a moment in which,
it would seem, advice is given and a decision made.  Visually, the Virgin
and Saint Anne are of the same age, the drawing suggesting the women to be
sisters or friends, rather than mother and daughte Furthermore, their
decision is undeniably carnal: their faces could be seamlessly collaged
into a pornographic image.  (And should this seem extreme, does not one of
the more worrisome picture-puzzles that insinuate themselves amongst the
painter's later work here include the erect phallus?  Does not the left
hand of the Virgin cup the testicles of this hidden member?) How earthbound
they appear, for they have yet to don the masks of radiance and serenity.
In particular, Saint Anne appears to be suggesting some action or opinion,
conspiratorial in its nature.  She has already turned half into the shadow;
the darkness almost, but not totally, obscuring the slight disfigurement of
her right eye.  Her mouth holds none of the enigma characteristic of other
Leonardo women: the smile is tempting, sin- ister, collusive, and the
Virgin has quite clearly treated Anne's suggestion with favour, her head
tilted in attention, a corresponding smile about to break upon her lips. 
The umbrous visage of Saint Anne!  `Wounded in the eye, a mask upon her
face of fair appearance, whilst making a contemptuous motion towards
Heaven.' This apposite description is, in fact, from Leonardo: an earlier
observation entitled `Envy'.  Equally apposite might be his note upon the
kite that `when it sees its young ones growing too big in the nest, out of
envy, it pecks their sides, and keeps them without food . . .  And this
from the man who felt that `to write thus clearly of the kite would seem to
be my destiny'.  He, whose speech is that of kites.  He, whose mouth was
first penetrated by the kite. The kite, the artist and Saint Anne are
united in their various envies.  And, out of envy, Anne has spoken her
persuasive words - caught, almost fortuitously, in the shade of the
charcoal and brown paper of a drawing.



   Look again at The Virgin, Child and Saint Anne, that most serene of
paintings.  The Virgin, under the watchful eye of her mother, seems to urge
the Child towards His sacrifice.  Only in the knowledge of the earlier
drawing would one detect that residue of satisfaction still apparent at the
mouth of Saint Anne, the confidence, the amused cynicism.

   How she has blinded us!  This neutrality is complicity.  The suggestion
of sacrifice has been made She can now sit back and observe.  She, this
fulcrum point on which the Virgin's action literally dep- ends.  She, whose
hand (the simple pressure of which would tip one, thus balanced, quite
irreversibly forward) remains concealed by the unfinished drapery, this
cloak so much a work-cloth laid across some dark machine.

   The Child, tipped from the precipice, entwining with the lamb, fulfills
His destiny.  The cloak of the Virgin rears open and a vulture shudders
downwards, out of the frame's eye, chained likewise to its own imperatives.









   < THE CHILD>





   There was nothing then.  I awoke with the first of light, the postcard
semi- propped against the second pillow.  The lounge-room, its curtains
drawn, lay in a preponderance of greys, objects making vague assertions of
their shape against the dark.  An obscure evidence of the previous hours, a
history which the coming morning would slowly restore with a meticulous
precision.  Lightly brushing at the surfaces, the materials of the chairs;
revealing who had sat most recently in which particular posture;
re-establishing each minute from the char-ended cigarette butts, the fallen
columns of ash, a glass three~quarters full with wine

   I waited for the telephone For her apology at leaving as she did, and
for the moment of our reconciliation.

   `About last night, I'm sorry, Jeremy.  None of this has been your fault
- I realise that.  There was nothing you could have done.  You must forgive
me.  I've been under such a dreadful strain with Christopher . . .  `

   And so forth, till her invitation to a meal.  With this difference: she
would know of my love.  She would know the moment she surrendered to it,
howl would be hers.  For the separated lover, what is more intolerable than
waiting?

   The following days, my usual activity - the necessary commerce of my
life - found itself replaced by thoughts of her alone, my sole desire to be
with her again, this next encounter.

   So began my vigil.

   I could sense her everywhere within the room.  This was where she left
her glass that Tuesday evening (and I marked it), here her hand had rested
on the mantel- piece (I stroked the coolness of the wood), here she sat
upon the settee with her leg folded back beneath her.  I touched the very
place, resisting though the temptation to bend down and inhale the thick
materials.

   Not an hour would pass without returning to her image: I had installed a
volume of Leonardo paintings, bent open at page 128, the detail of her
face, upon the dresser.  I carried the postcard reproduction of the entire
work in my top pocket.  Such are the obsessions of love!

   Any interruption to these ceremonies angered me.  A phone call from
another was briskly terminated (perhaps she may have chosen that very
moment to ring me I blundered through the hous .  became infuriated trying
to find a book of Herrick I had held within my very hand, it seemed, the
previous second.  I cancelled the Thursday late tutorial because of the
condition of my eyes, having spent several hours earlier that afternoon
bathing my face in water, seeking to reduce the puffiness, the blotching of
the flesh.

   And then she rang.



   It was to tell me Christopher had died.

   `On Tuesday evening,' she related, `about 9.00.'

   I began the usual words of sympathy, but she interrupted, thanking me,
and adding there would be a small funeral on Friday afternoon.

   There was not the slightest opportunity for me to say the words I had
prepared during the previous week.  I had failed to anticipate any of her
lines or, indeed, the actual rapidity of her speech.

   A funeral (and I imagined standing close behind her, watching as she
bent, throwing almost matter- of-factly the handful of earth into a gaping
pit) would be an awkward occasion to re-establish a relation- ship: the
flood of memories, the presence of attentive others.  It would be best to
leave the thing alone for several weeks - what I had anticipated for so
long could wait a little longer - and yet, the speaking of my love had
instilled in me a fury of impatience.

   For I knew at last how she must have to come to me, her radiance milking
down, to give me life again.  After this proper time.  After this
inevitable interruption

   So, he was dead.



   The Virgin, Child and Saint Anne was one of only three paintings
Leonardo took with him to the Chateau du Clos-Luce' at Amboise in 1516. 
There is no reason to assume he didn't continue to work on it occasionally
during his final period in France, and, given that the drapery remained
unfinished, this must be considered his final painting

   Christopher said little about Amboise, either in his journal notes or in
the letters he had sent to me from France, merely recording their visit to
the Chateau, adding, in brackets, `da Vinci models.' He appeared to have
been far more taken with the dungeon at Loches, its hollow tower, the mass
of pigeon~flight, a cooing like the rush of souls.  Then six days later,
they were at Chatel~Guyon.

   Perhaps it was the metaphor of illness, perhaps the imminence of their
return to Paris, but the written detail was restored by then.  For several
reasons it was a logical beginning.



   I have of course already talked about my deep complicity in his affairs,
the business of the go~between, and I cannot help but think of his request
to use my address as if it were his own as the opening of some grand
parenthesis, a sad digression in a life condemned to gestures of timidity,
of which the following incident became the close.

   It was a Tuesday, early in December, the fourth.  He was in the open
doorway almost exactly as he had been six months previously.  Only this
time he was carrying a small package.

   `Can we talk?' he asked.

   There was about him an air of resolve, which I came to understand to be
little more than a veneer.  It had taken him almost three weeks of
procrastination before this firm decision, and he was without the strength,
I found, to even write to Frances telling her what he had come so manfully
to announce to me.

   `It's over, Jeremy, the correspondence thing.'

   I remember thinking I should miss our small confessional times together
a day or two (religiously) after I'd passed on each letter.  Never the
specifics, mind, but sufficient to imply himself into a state of mild
excitement.

   `I've decided it's quite infantile and destructive.  God, Jeremy, I've
got a real relationship at home.  I have to give that another chance.'

   I suppose because not only are particular circumstances replicated
endlessly within our own lives, but within the lives of thousands upon
thousands of others, one is reduced at moments such as these to an exchange
of cliches.  Apart from which, what on earth could I reply?

   `Are you sure it's Sorel you want to go back to?' I heard myself
enquire. `I know that sounds awfully cynical, Christopher, and I suppose
I'm being the devil's advocate here, but it hasn't been good for a long
time, has it?  I mean, one's tempted to think of Frances as a symptom of
the very problem you're now going, if you'll excuse the expression, to
embrace.'

   `She still loves me, Jeremy.'

   I was sickened by the words. Their stupidity.  I really wished this
conversation over then and there, but unfortunately his speech had yet to
run its course.

   `I've got together everything.' He stared down at the package in his
hand.  `I suppose that I should simply burn it all.  But the journal's got
some decent writing.  Trouble is, it's full of ber as well, you know. 
Look, can you keep this stuff for me?  I've been carrying it around inside
the briefcase now for months.  It's quite ridiculous, but I can hardly
leave it in the house.  Not that Sorel would go through the study, you
under- stand, but by accident...what- ever.

   So it was that I became the guardian of the evidence of this sad
liaison. A foolscap envelope, sealed, unmarked, delivered to me, amusingly
enough, in its plain brown wrapper.



   I realise that I have hardly spoken about Christopher.  I might say that
the analysis of character holds little interest for me.  And what is there
that might be said?  He was an ordinary man in nearly every way.  He was
quick witted.  He was presentable in his appearance.  He was often
irritatingly self~deprecating.  He had a sense of some destiny unfulfilled.
He longed.  He wore leather patches on the elbows of his pullover. Apart
from this, he possessed the thing I most desired.  He had this woman and,
more disgustingly, he appeared to have her love.  And that was somewhat
much for me to bear.  December 13 was the day on which I had Christopher
deliver his completed manuscript - associating that event with the onset of
his lovemaking.  I have a reason for remembering it, it being the occasion
when, in reality, I brought him Frances's final letter.  It was unusually
slight, and I presumed at the time (quite incorrectly as I was to read for
myself not much more than a week later) it to be her response to his
decision.  It was, then, with some surprise, if not a mild disgust, that I
discovered he had never bothered to reply to her previous letter of
November 3.  So unmanned was he, I must assume, he could not bring himself
to depart with any honour, distance sparing him the indignity of flight. 
If you want my opinion, the words which frightened him were those about the
necessity for making good love.  I doubt his technique cap able of matching
his imagination, whereas she was, on her own admission, very sexually
active and fit!  My God, that would have threatened him, those worrisome
comparisons.

   One sensed he could see the end: it was going to stop, or it would have
to be pursued.  For him, they were simply different types of extinction.

   At the time I was not so wise; yet even so, I could hardly have expected
him to welcome a further letter.  No doubt he had been dreading its
appearance.  I, in my naive way, had rather hoped it might upset the
equilibrium that had been restored to his relationship with Sorel.  A final
temptation?  An out- burst of guilt?  Something which might bring him to
his senses.

   In any case, we had both, it appeared, prepared our speeches: two
barristers at work for prosecution and defence.  Unfortunately,
Christopher's, in its own piteous, self- obsessive manner, held sway.

   `Jeremy,' he said, with an air of desperation when one might have
reasonably expected joy, `if this affair might ever have been possible
once, it surely isn't now.'

   For emphasis, it seemed to me, he sat down in the leather chair, his
hands clasped between his knees.  I recall he had forgotten his cigarettes
and at various intervals would tap the pocket of his shirt in search of
them.

   `I've never told you very much about the Melbourne end of all of this,
have I?  And I appreciate the way you haven't asked.' He glanced up at me,
briefly, on the word `you'.  Two tiny looks.

   `Since Paris, actually since before that, there hasn't been a sexual
relationship between us - Sorel and I.  We'd walk around the house,
avoiding looks.  I'd spend the evenings in my study.  I'd wait until she'd
gone to bed, then retire to the spare room.

   `Perhaps the letters were some release for this.  In any case they
seemed to bring me to a point of choice: what was it that I really wanted,
emotionally and sexually, from my life?  It was as if I realised I'd been
pursuing this idea of women for years, and that a real person, with their
own needs and desires, had never entered into it.  The letters dragged me
to the edge of something that I'd thought I wanted.  But of course it's
only from that point, isn't it, that one can see one doesn't really want it
at all.'

   After this outburst of melodrama, there was a pause of some
significance, in which it came to me exactly what it was that he was going
to say.  If I had been sickened by his earlier comments on Sorel's `love',
I knew this impending declaration, with all of its attendant carnality,
would bring me close to nausea; that is, I felt there was a possibility I
might actually be sick.

   I therefore began to think about something else entirely, almost half
muttering to myself beneath my breath to keep the subject matter at the
forefront of my mind: an introduction I was writing for a book of poems.



   "There is a staggering versa-

   tility to this language.  Power-

   fully energetic verbs: a floor

   that `thwarts', an economy

   that `rises, waffles, bolts'."



   His words continued relentlessly against this improvised defence,
breaking through, but never wholly occupying my attention.

   `After I had made my decision . . .  strange hiatus in my life . 
attempt some reconciliation . . .  at first we only lay beside . . .  and
then two days ago .

   I heard him say this thing.  I heard him use the words `made love'.  I
pictured him on top of her, for whatever quickly over moments, and I heard
her tepid answering cry.  Six days afterwards he would be struck down,
dumb, with no chance whatsoever of recovery.  Only this uncertain time, to
stare, to register God knows what of the faces that would parade about him
in their half-embarrassed silences.



   Paris December 5

   Dear Christopher,

   What happened? Did I frighten you off with my last letter?  I would
never have thought that possible.  All I know is that it has been a very
long time since I sent it, and I have received no answer.  I am beginning
to believe what some men tell me - that is, that I am too extreme.  Show me
the man who is just as extreme.  I am tired of the emotional cripples, the
pathological liars and the cowards.  I don't know why I keep on loving men
so much when they let me down so often.  And ours was just a mental thing,
it was just correspondence.  What if it had been real?

   I think I will retire to a convent, although I can't bear the thought of
being surrounded by all those women.  Perhaps I will become a hermit, or do
what Bardot did, and devote the second half of my life to animals.  Do you
think that women (and men) who indulge a bit too much in sex reach
saturation point?  An old friend who visited me in Paris this week
certainly has.  After a rather wild beginning, she has given up men
completely.  We are close to Christmas, and on Friday I will be off to
England with my daughter and her boyfriend to spend five days with my
sister and her family.  Then the new year will begin.  What will it bring
for you?  I hope that you will write to me again.  I enjoyed your letters
so much, and I feel as though the momentum which was developing has been
abruptly halted - a most unpleasant feeling.  Until the next time, all the
best for the new year.



   Frances



   I placed this final letter on the pile of others, beside his Paris
journal and the fledgling drafts of a novel: those worried pages which
stank of labour and of the labourer.  I cannot imagine at what stage he
started jotting down ideas for such a venture, or, had he been capable of
bringing it to a conclusion, what on earth he would have done with it!  The
work's raison d'etre seemed predicated on his relationship with Frances
actually coming to fruition.  None of these materials, I might add, could
possibly be thought of as art - the manuscript itself was shapeless as some
boned fowl - but the detail of its observation proved quite indispensable.



   For Christopher and Sorel's final month in France then, I had ample
material.  However, from the very start I knew the seven letters from
Frances would not be sufficient - perhaps under other circumstances, yes,
but I was faced with the problem of his recent enlivenment, a cause for
which must be attributed elsewhere.

   It would be easier, I felt, to begin a sense of sexual commitment at an
earlier time.  (I imagined, for example, Catherine's reference to their
swollen lips in letter two.) The fourth and fifth might be compounded in a
single correspondence, to which I could give the date September 6.  The
substance of her next two letters would be perfect: the bondage was an
image that I'm sure would not have occurred to me, the menage a trois
suggesting a development so lewd, no doubt it would have frightened
Christopher!  It would simply now be a case of realistically filling in a
sexual progression, dated at appropriate intervals which might be seen to
correspond with the advent of his own preposterous coupling.  with his
death.





   I felt I had a month, no more.  (I conceived it from the first as a
tribute predicated on his still being alive at the time of its completion.)
It became expedient then to bind myself to certain self-imposed laws.  It
would be my practice to allow myself no mercy.  When I commenced the book I
prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried on for the period I had
allowed myself for the completion of the work.  In this I entered, day by
day, the number of pages I had written, so that if at any time I had
slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness was
there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour to make
up the deficiency.

   I would begin my writing at 5.30 every morning and continue for three
hours, the first half-hour being devoted to rereading the previous day's
work.  The remaining time was taken up by the production of one hundred
words or so, every half-hour.  Indeed, I found those hundred words (a deal
of which I must admit was little more than lightly edited transcription)
were forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.  This division of time
allowed me to produce some two pages of work each day, which when kept up
gave as its result a novella (as you have seen it) on January 19, this
year. I will not bore you with the finer details of the process - what was
invention (augmented by my memories of Paris, and with the help of various
travel guides) and what required mere transcription - suffice it to say
that although many passages needed only relatively minor editing, the
general application of imagination was required throughout.

   To compensate, the work developed its own energy.  At times it seemed I
merely held the reins as Avery careered towards his destiny.  Needless to
say, I could not help but picture Christopher throughout, and, more
significantly, Sorel's face was always there before m loitering at the
corner of her hus- band's eye like some irritating grit; Sorel staring
upwards, mooning underneath The Devil of Despair; Sorel waiting in the
bedroom of their East Melbourne house, all of course as Christopher - must
have seen her.

   I was happy with the finished work.  There was a sense of closure whilst
giving the impression of ongoingness.  My major regret being that the work
would languish finally under another's name, especially given the numerous
passages which were entirely from my own hand.  In particular I might
mention the final trilogy of letters, which I must confess excited me.  I
shall never forget those times in my study, seated before the blank page,
wondering what exquisite perversity (still tenuously held within the bounds
of literature) might be invented.  Because I had no wish to merely
reproduce the gross descriptions that accompanied the photos in my box of
pornographic magazines, as I had with Avery's consideration of the young
girl and the double penetration.

   Why not, you ask, when the opportunity presented itself, simply give her
Frances's letters and the journal with his incriminating dotings?  Don't
think this was not considered.  But my very possession of these objects
argued a complicity, and there was the problem too of my address upon the
occasional aerogramme she chose to send.  Too difficult.  You must
understand that his relationship with Sorel, had to be discredited
entirely: I could ill afford to offer him the defenc albeit mute, of having
seen the error of his ways.

   No, the manuscript had the advantage of my apparent ignorance, though I
would let her, should the occasion arise, and of course it did, chivvy out
of me my deep suspicion of a factual base.  I could deliver it, as if a
favour, as I might a recently discovered tale by Balzac.  And you must not
forget that Christopher was going to die.  I could not be seen discrediting
him in Sorel' s eyes.  `Don't speak ill of the dead' is not a proverb for
nothing!



   But mainly this, and I keep coming back, again, again, to make the
point: he wanted to confess.  And death would strip him of the opportunity.

   The documents themselves were sufficient to indicate what his intentions
were: remember he had left the outlines of an unfinished novel (if more
proof were needed, he had written this infant draft, whatever it might be
called, in twenty-leaf account books!).  For him of course there could be
no ending, no novel to be finished; nothing, that is, that would not
celebrate his own atrocious behaviour, his weaknesses, his procrastination,
his timidity.  Indeed, these jottings never possessed the courage of true
confession; they were more an exer- cise in despair, their passage to
abandonment apparent from the start.  I redrafted and I finished it,
following the work, as he should have followed it in life, to its natural
conclusion, that it might be given at least the dignity of excess.



   All that now remained was to draft a letter to Sorel (a fiction which I
found to be most difficult to write) feigning a naivete and suggesting that
I publish the novella, which I knew too well she had never seen, as a
special number of my magazine.

   It had of course the desired effect.  The phone rang as expected .  0,
happy sound of her voice expressing such confusion and such ignorance!

   `What novella?' she was asking, and God knows how I restrained myself.

   I told her I would drop it in the mail immediately-this was Wednesday
evening, on the twenty-third.

   And so it was that I imagined her, removing his novella from its pack-
age.  Sitting down to read.  As I sat down to read it, start to finish,
twice again; at first with Sorel's eyes, and then my own.

   Looking back, it seemed my greatest labour had been in writing out those
passages concerning Gillian, and embellishing that evident disgust.  The
sacrifice of having to articulate the extent of the revulsion that he must
have felt for Sorel, as close as I might imagine it (know- ing too, the
pain that it would cause her), was almost unbearable.  You must imagine me,
in my study, set at this appalling task; imagine the excruciation for one
so devoted to be involved in this act of debasing her, the acute difficulty
of using words of hate about some- one I loved so much.  And to have
succeeded!





   It is late afternoon.  The time of low sun through glass.  Shadows of
lace curtains bathe the walls, shadow and half-shadow, overlays of light. A
silent iridescence seems to have pervaded everything.  In the corners of
the room, the glimmer of back-reflections in the shadow.

   The objects that surround me seem swathed in veils.  Or is it mist.  The
sudden scintillation of an as tray.  Glass against the glass of this table
top.  The air shimmer light strikes the surface of this half- filled flute.
Palettes of reflection quiver at the walls.  Onto the other glass of
paintings.  Everything is enhaloed.  I shall prosper.