How could she without anything done or said, or left undone or unsaid, so easily believe him guilty? The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. In the room beyond a clock chimed a single sound, fifteen minutes past five o clock. On the floor, the walls, the sinking sun threw long, fantastic shadows. She was so friendly and responsive, and so ready to press the sweet food of flattery on all. She got the things she wanted because she met the great conditions of conquest, sacrifice. At that moment she was no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared. ‘As far as I can see, you’ll just have to endure some things and give up others’. He came and went with his usual noiseless irregularity. She knew it, and knew that she knew it. ‘I would lie awake looking out at the watery stars … hopeless things, the stars’. ‘I would lie awake looking out at the watery stars … hopeless things, the stars’. She knew it, and knew that she knew it. He came and went with his usual noiseless irregularity. ‘As far as I can see, you’ll just have to endure some things and give up others’. At that moment she was no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared. She got the things she wanted because she met the great conditions of conquest, sacrifice. She was so friendly and responsive, and so ready to press the sweet food of flattery on all. On the floor, the walls, the sinking sun threw long, fantastic shadows. In the room beyond a clock chimed a single sound, fifteen minutes past five o clock. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. How could she without anything done or said, or left undone or unsaid, so easily believe him guilty?

She might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Undeniable. In the midst of life, any kind of encounter, her incompleteness. You’re not the same, was surprised when darkness came.  She thought hopelessly. Not a whole women, had eternity stretching. All gone, that time, those people. All gone, that time, those people. She might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.   The season had for many years now been an occasion to get through as quickly as possible. Deprivation implied once having had something to be deprived of. Any kind of encounter would fill her with a dismay equal to his. She was not a whole woman, some vital part of her had been taken away. The most deafening pop music confused her. We are not the same, she thought hopelessly. It was dreadful the way people wanted to know one’s business. She was prepared to accept the fact of their love even if she could not understand it. As a young woman she had wanted to love, had felt that she ought to. There was of course an undeniable interest, and even unadmitted pleasure in the contemplation of other people’s misfortunes. In a sense it was tit for tat. People’s misfortunes. Accept the fact of their love, never existed. All gone, that time, those people. I gyd wedi mynd, yr amser hynnw, y bobl hynny. For many years now. She had no sense of time passing. And was surprised when darkness came. What was it about the French, or the idea of the French? He put down his empty glass and took another. In the midst of life we are in death, she thought. So strong was the habit of forty years. They both made their way separately and unaware to each other. There were no photographs. The time indicated on her card was 11.35. She had resented him being there, resented what seemed his prior curiosity into her affairs. It might be as well to keep an eye on her. God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. They must sense her imperfection, her incompleteness. He did not really know what to say now that it had come to the point. She had eternity stretching before her. All gone, that time, those people. What cannot now be justified has perhaps never existed.

Everything ended as it began. She wished only to begin. She is struck by the improbability of their relationship. She trusted certain feelings herself precisely because they did not lead to conclusions. She talks a great deal in an insistent voice. She believes that the individual will should never bow to the demands of conventional morality. He senses that she by being all that is opposite and therefore complementary to him. Can make the world complete for him. What is it that cannot happen? Because she was the first she was equal in his memory to the sum of all the others. She had trusted him as she unthinkingly trusted the sun to rise in the morning. I am not the same, she whispered. Everything she had ever noticed in the world stood between his life and hers. First experience is protected by a sense of enormous power. It wields magic. Out of the window she could see the sky. September blue. Calendars and clocks are our inadequate inventions. But this was no nostalgia for a vague past which could always be conjured up and induced to return. Her features and her figure possess a kind of angularity which suggests a distinct circumscribed independence of mind. Through his eyes she found herself pleasing.  Doubt produced its own form of erotic stimulation. What is not desired has never existed. She and he together, mysteriously and naked. She opens her legs. She moves sideways so as to be beneath him. The clock keeps another time. A telephone rang in a distant room. Suddenly there is nothing to regret. It is already the future. She hangs there motionless and yet not falling. Two years passed. It was the sheer number of memories, their mass, which oppressed him. Sometimes what remained was an absence. No one knows how to wait anymore because they haven’t anything worth waiting for. They leave the earth behind them. They throw back their heads and their feet go up towards the sky. 

My eyes feel heavy and I let them close. I smell the gas. I illustrate nothing by living. At such hours there is need for escape, not for love. He who leaves me free from pain I’ll love forever. It’s heavenly to be washed by someone else. It brings all the sorrow out of the body. There is nothing of me that I fancy …. I run my hands over my body, thinking I can work up a desire. But I am empty. I suppose if I were not beautiful, the world would look the same. I’ve exhausted my youth, and if I look like a prize fool, then the world prizes fools. Surely pain is the silence of joy.  I don’t need much. Needless to add, I don’t get much. Twenty-five bob to me is what I call semi-rich.  I am the victim of sex. Sometimes love … but both are fatal. The law should never have done away with the prostitutes. They are needed more than rockets to the moon. Must I forever live with dreams and fairies? I believe man should believe in man, and leave God to himself. I think he’s looking forward to the change when he gets to hell. Sometimes I find that I am humiliated by myself, and my thoughts get out of hand, becoming absolutely evil, and immediately I am nothing. That’s the trouble with being beautiful. One overlooks the truth. I look down at the young boy. He sees the tears in my eyes. Oh sorry, he says, and I walk on. I am far too feminine to be living in a man’s world. It doesn’t matter what I run from, it will always be with me. People have a hard violence printed on their faces. Time is out of order. Seconds become increasingly eternal. There are three stars shining in the sky above. On the blue it's number two. I stare with stupidity at the freedom of the flowers.

The healing stillness of her breath on the next pillow. All night is a very long time. There’s an air of recent hurt. History is such a romantic place. All his acts of self-love were both subtle and exact. The air goes into him and the air goes out. He’s completely there and not there at all. He must be smitten by hatred and touched by desire. I’ve never trusted men who pray. The beating in your veins is someone else’s heart. There are so few people given us to love. This is how we used to live our lives. There’s an order to these things that has to be obeyed. We swam at night, somewhere, when we were young. Such things having such large consequences. I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth.

This is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what happened at the time. When we are young we invent different futures. Did you leave me because of me? When we are old we invent different pasts. No, I left you because of us. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction, there’s also the accumulation, the multiplication of loss, of failure. There is the difference between addition and increase. Memory is what we thought we’d forgotten. I had a swathe of my past to evaluate. With nothing but remorse for company. I thought I could overcome contempt and turn remorse back into guilt, then be forgiven. History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. Memory is what we thought we’d forgotten. Memory is what we thought we’d forgotten. Memory is what we thought we’d forgotten. This is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time. One day this may be answered in a splendid exegesis.

She wanted an even more soothing darkness. It was a comfortable room furnished with rare and intensely personal taste. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade. They feared and hated her. She pitied and despised them. Perhaps there was too much of it, and therefore it was less than nothing. She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. Its possibilities made her feel a little hysterical. She had no intention of running away, but something, some imp of contumacy, drove her. The thought of love stayed with her, not prominent, definite, but shadowy, incoherent. She began to make plans and to dream delightful dreams of change … of life somewhere else. The last day came. The last goodbyes said. She cloaked herself in a faint disgust. Why had she lost her temper and given way to angry half-truths? She felt consoled at last for the spiritual wounds of the past. The night was far from quiet, the streets far from empty. She liked the small murmur of wonder and admiration. A glare of light struck her eyes; a blare of jazz split her ears. She wasn’t one of them, she didn’t at all count. Between them the vastness of the universe had come. She caught only words, phrases, here and there …superb … eyes … colour … neck column …yellow … hair … alive … wonderful … She couldn’t stay. Nor, she now saw, could she remain away. She understood them too well, was too tolerant of their ignorant stupidities. She lived over these brief seconds, thinking not so much of the man whose arms had held her as of the ecstasy which had flooded her. She was silent. She did not listen, the horror held her. She would have to have something else besides. She felt compensated for all the previous humiliations and disappointments, and was glad. She had to put it brutally as anyone could.

Paradise is not for living in … it’s for visiting. A larch had fallen into the river and had been shaved by the water of all its bark. Large rivers attract more and more water to themselves. She felt sure he was destined to become her friend. She asks questions all the while. He is one of those men for whom manual gestures are more trustworthy than words. A blackbird sings in a tree a little downstream. He removed his hat and she kicked off her shoes. All of her is the secret, and the secret is sweet and warm. She wants everything and she wants nothing. The river is fast and the glacier is slow, but nothing can stop them. Far, going far?  Far. He took her to the Mediterranean which she had never seen. I have to do everything today, everything … you understand? What, his eyes are asking, what is she underneath? We are going to live the years with craziness and cunning and care. They will make a wish, they will remember, they will relish the sweetness of it. She talks to him like a cat’s tongue, tiny and warm and raspy. His eyes will follow her into ever. He looks up at the sky. No stars. Blackness, a visible blackness. When we are tired we long for silence, yet silence we fear. What shall we do before eternity? It is in the nature of rivers to arrive at the sea. They say cats, when they lay on you, take away static electricity … fear makes lots of static. The sky is the colour of a dressing over a wound which bleeds. The young know things our parents didn’t. He did everything deliberately, as though he couldn’t think of more than one thing at a time. They have been sitting beside one another for two hours and have not said a word. I’m never frightened with you. She is on the verge of sleep. How beautiful I’m becoming for him. There’s nothing to ask for, and there’s everything. Then one night, at the beginning of June something changed. The land is often lower than the river or the sea. Difficulties twist a man. The water, astern, simply undulates. A comb. A lipstick. A green notebook. A shopping list. A pair of earrings. Some traveller’s cheques … The words tap dance instead of sing. With her high cheekbones and sad eyes, she is pretty … and no longer young. There’s no question of leaving. It’s a question of not going further, of stopping. Shepherds have  their own way of walking from place to place. Birdsongs remind me of what things once  looked like. The older ones explain what is happening in the world. There’s no night, no stars. The gift of giving myself has been taken away. They wait for the moments during which life counts. When time is pulse, as music makes it, eternity is in the gaps between.

Nothing is secret for long in this whore of a bay.  They grew up in a world where the truth was something you needed shielding from.  There wasn’t a place for curses or lucky heather in the modern world.  … a cloud of white smoke obscures the low sun … … a crow …. caw caws, seeming to enjoy the vibration in its throat. It would be easier to just lie here quietly she thinks, than to face whatever is on the other side. She savours these moments first thing, before the past, present and future have solidified …. when time feels timeless … She sucks the tobacco deep, keeps everything still and listens to the swoop and shriek of innocent birds. A nun-like purity to both her dress and to her pink-cheeked face. Maybe life would be different for her. … that beautiful sound of white noise, of captured time, of anticipation and held breaths … that beautiful sound of white noise, of captured time, of anticipation and held breaths … She is the blade that he has cut himself on. She felt deeply that he was somewhere beyond her reach. He never loses himself or allows people to lose themselves in him. Asking if you are black cos you came out of your mother’s arsehole. So deep runs the hard exterior that only she can notice the fine fractures running along the bones. Who else had breached a white home like that? The ground beneath their feet is liquid now. … the potion and the poison taken together … … the potion and the poison taken together … There was a strange comfort in the idea that all of this pain was beyond their control. The tide of it all just pulling her in and pushing her out, the shipwreck slow and ongoing. … all of it somehow both fleeting and eternal … What kind of mother lets her daughter marry a darkie in the first place?