I had of course already decided not to tell Julian about Priscilla's death. If I told her I would have to go back to London at once. And I felt that if we left our refuge now, if we parted now, with our flight unconsummated, the process which would ensure our liberation from doubt and our eternal betrothal might never take place at all. It was something which, for both of us, I had to do, it was my destined ordeal to keep silent in order to bring us both through this darkness. And it must be done now in unbroken continuity with what had happened. The love-making was part of this. I could not and would not chill Julian's young blood now with this tale of suicide. Of course I would have to «discover» it soon, we would have to go back soon, but not yet, not without my having reached that point of decision which seemed so close and which would enable me and make me worthy to keep her forever. There was nothing I could do for Priscilla. My duty henceforth was to Julian. The sheer pain of the concealment was itself part of the ordeal. I wanted to tell Julian at once. I needed her consolation and her precious forgiveness. But for both our sakes I had for the moment to do without this.
«What ages you've been. I say, look at me and guess who!»
I came in through the porch and blinked in the comparative obscurity of the sitting-room. At first I could not see Julian at all, could only hear her voice coming to me out of darkness. Then I saw her face, the rest obscure. Then I saw what she had done.
She was dressed in black tights, black shoes, she wore a black velvet jerkin and a white shirt and a gold chain with a cross about her neck. She had posed herself in the doorway of the kitchen, holding the sheep's skull up in one hand.
«I thought I'd surprise you! I bought them in Oxford Street with your money, the cross is a sort of hippie cross, I got it from one of those men, it cost fifty pence. All I needed was a skull, and then we found this lovely one. Don't you think it suits me? Alas, poor Yorick-What's the matter, darling?»
«Nothing,» I said.
«You're staring so. Don't I look princely? Bradley, you're frightening me. What is it?»
«Nothing.»
«I'll take them off now. We'll have lunch. I got the watercress.»
«We won't have lunch,» I said. «We're going to bed.»
«You mean now?»
«Yes.»
I strode to her and took her wrist and pulled her into the bedroom and tumbled her on the bed. The sheep's skull fell to the floor. I put one knee on the bed and began to drag at her white shirt. «Wait, wait, you're tearing it!» She began hastily undoing the buttons and fumbling with the jerkin. I pulled the whole bundle up and over her head, but the chain and cross impeded them. «Wait, Bradley, please, the chain's got round my throat, please.» I dug in the snowy whiteness of the shirt and the silky tangle of her hair for the chain and found it and snapped it. The clothes came away. Julian was desperately undoing her brassiere. I began hauling down the black tights dragging them over her thighs as she arched her body to help me. For a moment, still fully dressed, I surveyed her naked. Then I began to tear my clothes off.
«Oh Bradley, please, don't be so rough, please, Bradley, you're hurting me.»
Later on, she was crying. There had been no doubt about this love-making. I lay exhausted and let her cry. Then I turned her round and let her tears mingle with the sweat which had darkened the thick grey hairs of my chest and made them cling to my hot flesh in flattened curls. I held her in a kind of horrified trance of triumph and felt between my hands the adorable racked sobbing of her body.
«Stop crying.»
«I can't.»
«I'm sorry I broke the chain. I'll mend it.»
«It doesn't matter.»
«I've frightened you.»
«Yes.»
«I love you. We'll be married.»
«Yes.»
«We will, won't we, Julian?»
«Yes.»
«Do you forgive me?»
«Yes.»
«Please stop crying.»
«I can't.»
Later on still we made love again. Then somehow it was the evening.
«What made you like that, Bradley?»
«The Prince of Denmark, I suppose.»
We were exhausted and very hungry and I needed alcohol. We ate our lunch of liver sausage and bread and cheese and watercress without ceremony by lamplight with the windows open to the blue salty night. I drank up all the rest of the wine.
What had made me like that? Had I suddenly felt that Julian had killed Priscilla? No. The fury, the anger, was directed to myself through Julian. Or directed against fate through Julian and through myself. Yet of course this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. «It was love,» I said to her.
«Yes, yes.»
I had removed, at any rate, my next obstacle, though the world beyond it looked different again, not what I had expected. I had prefigured the proximity of some simplifying intellectual certainty. What there was now was my relationship to Julian, stretching away still into the obscurity of the future, urgent and puzzling and historically dynamic, changing, it seemed, even from second to second. The girl looked different, I looked different. Was that the body which I had worshipped every part of? It was as if the terrible abstraction had been carried by the rush of divine power right into the centre of our passion. I found myself, at moments, trembling, and saw Julian trembling. And the touching thing was that we were comforting each other, like people who had just escaped from a fire.
«I will mend your chain, I will.»
«There's no need to mend it, I can just knot it.»
«And I'll mend the sheep's skull too.»
«It's in too many pieces.»
«I'll mend it.»
«Let's draw the curtains. I feel bad spirits are looking in at us.»
«We are surrounded by spirits. Curtains won't keep them out.» But I pulled the curtains and came round behind her chair, touching her neck very lightly with my finger. Her flesh was cool, almost cold, and she shuddered, arching her neck. She made no other response, but I felt that our bodies were rapt in a communion with each other which passed our understanding. Meanwhile it was a time for quiet communication by words, for speech of a new sort, arcane prophetic speech.
«I know,» she said. «Swarms of them. I've never felt like this before. Listen to the sea. It sounds so close. Though there's no wind.»
We listened.
«Bradley, would you go and lock the front door?»
I went and locked it and then sat down again facing her. «Are you cold?»
«No, it's not-coldness.»
«I know.»
She was wearing the blue dress with the white willow-spray pattern which she had been wearing when she fled and a light woollen rug off our bed around her shoulders. She was staring at me with big eyes and every now and then a spasm passed across her face. There had been a lot of tears but none now. She looked so much, and beautifully, older, not the child I had known at all, but some wonderful holy woman, a prophetess, a temple prostitute. She had combed her hair down smoothly and pressed it back and her face had the nakedness, the solitude, the ambiguous staring eloquence of a mask. She had the dazed empty look of a great statute.
«Oh you wonderful, wonderful thing.»
«I feel so odd,» she said, «quite impersonal, I've never felt like this before at all.»
«It is the power of love.»
«Does love do that? I thought yesterday, the day before yesterday, that I loved you. It wasn't like this.»
«It is the god, the black Eros. Don't be afraid.»
«Oh I'm not-afraid-I just feel shattered and empty. I'm in a place where I've never been before.»
«I'm there too.»
«Yes. Yes.»
«You even resemble me. I feel I'm looking into a mirror.»
I had the strange feeling that I was speaking these words. I was speaking through her, through the pure echoing emptiness of her being, hollowed by love.