“I’d love to bathe my feet. Could we get down?”

We struck off the path through the trees and after a while came on a faint trail. It led us down, down and finally out into a clearing. At one end was a waterfall some ten feet or so high. A pooi of limpid water had formed beneath it. The clearing was dense with flowers and butterflies, a tiny trough of green-gold luxuriance after the dark forest we had been walking through. At the upper edge of the clearing there was a little cliff with a shallow cave, outside which some shepherd had pleached an arbor of fir branches. There were sheep droppings on the floor, but they were old. No one could have been there since summer began.

“Let’s have a swim.”

“It’ll be like ice.”

“Yah.”

She pulled her shirt over her head, and unhooked her bra, grinning at me in the flecked shadow of the arbor; I was cornered again.

“The place is probably alive with snakes.”

“Like Eden.”

She stepped out of her jeans and her white pants. Then she reached up and snapped a dead cone off one of the arbor branches and held it out to me. I watched her run nakedly through the long grass to the pool, try the water, groan. Then she waded forwards and swanned in with a scream. The water was jade green, melted snow, and it made my heart jolt with shock when I plunged beside her. And yet it was beautiful, the shadow of the trees, the sunlight on the glade, the white roar of the little fall, the iciness, the solitude, the laughing, the nakedness; moments one knows only death can obliterate.

Sitting in the grass beside the arbor we let the sun and the small breeze dry us and ate the last of the chocolate. Then Alison lay on her back, her arms thrown out, her legs a little open, abandoned to the sun—and, I knew, to me. For a time I lay like her, with my eyes closed.

Then she said, “I’m Queen of the May.”

She was sitting up, turned to me, propped on one arm. She had woven a rough crown out of the oxeyes and wild pinks that grew in the grass around us. It sat lopsidedly on her uncombed hair; and she wore a smile of touching innocence. She did not know it, but it was at first for me an intensely literary moment. I could place it exactly: England’s Helicon. I had forgotten that there are metaphors and metaphors, and that the greatest lyrics are very rarely anything but direct and unmetaphysical. Suddenly she was like such a poem and I felt a passionate wave of desire for her. It was not only lust, not only because she looked, as she did in her periodic fashion, disturbingly pretty, small breasted, small waisted, leaning on one hand, dimpled then grave; a child of sixteen, not a girl of twenty-four, but because I was seeing through all the ugly, the unpoetic accretions of modern life to the naked real self of her—a vision of her as naked in that way as she was in body; Eve glimpsed again through ten thousand generations.

It rushed on me, it was quite simple, I did love her, I wanted to keep her and I wanted to keep—or to find—Lily. It wasn’t that I wanted one more than the other, I wanted both, I had to have both; there was no emotional dishonesty in it. The only dishonesty was in my feeling dishonest, concealing… it was love that finally drove me to confess, not cruelty, not a wish to be free, to be callous and clear, but simply love. I think, in those few long moments, that Alison saw that. She must have seen something torn and sad in my face, because she said, very gently, “What’s wrong?”

“I haven’t had syphilis. It’s all a lie.”

She gave me an intense look, then sank back on the grass.

“Oh Nicholas.”

“I want to tell you what’s really happened.”

“Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.”

And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

Lying beside her I began to try to describe what had happened at Bourani. The ancient Greeks said that if one slept a night on Parnassus either one became inspired or one went mad, and there was no doubt which happened to me; even as I spoke I knew it would have been better to say nothing, to have made something up… but love, that need to be naked. I had chosen the worst of all possible moments to be honest, and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring… but love, that need to be understood. And Parnassus was also to blame, for being so Greek; a place that made anything but the truth a mindsore.

Of course she wanted first to know the reason for the bizarre pretext I had hit on, but I wanted her to understand the strangeness of Bourani before I mentioned Lily. I didn’t deliberately hide anything else about Conchis, but I still left great gaps.

“It’s not that I believe any of these things in the way he tries to make me believe them. But even there… since he hypnotized me, I don’t absolutely know. It’s simply that when I’m with him I feel he does have access to some kind of power. Not occult. I can’t explain.”

“But it must be all faked.”

“All right, the events are all faked. But why me? How did he know I would go there? I’m nothing to him, he obviously doesn’t even think very much of me. As a person. He’s always laughing at me.”

“I still don’t understand…”

The moment had come. I hesitated. She looked at me, and I could not hesitate anymore.

“There’s a girl.”

“I knew it.” She sat up.

“Alison darling, for God’s sake try to understand. Listen.”

“I’m listening.” But her face was averted.

So at last I told her about Lily; though not, except obliquely, by implication, what I felt about Lily. I made it out to be an asexual thing, a fascination of the mind.

“But she attracts you the other way.”

“Allie, I can’t tell you how much I’ve hated myself this weekend. And tried to tell you everything a dozen times before. I don’t want to be attracted by her. In any way. A month, three weeks ago I couldn’t have believed it. I still don’t know what it is about her. Honestly. I only know I’m haunted, possessed by everything over there. Not just her. Something so strange is going on. And I’m… involved.” She looked unimpressed. “I’ve got to go back to the island. Because of the job. There are so many ways in which I’m not a free agent.”

“But this girl.” She was staring at the ground, picking seeds off grassheads.

“She’s irrelevant. Really. Just a very small part of it.”

“Then why all the performance?”

“You can’t understand, I’m being pulled in two.”

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

“If I still didn’t care like hell for you deep down it would all have been so easy.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes.”

“Very pretty.”

“I suppose so.”

She buried her face in her arms. I stroked her warm shoulder.

“She’s totally unlike you. Unlike any modern girl. I can’t explain.” She turned her head away. “Alison.”

“I must seem just like a lump of dirty old kitchen salt. And she’s a beautiful cream jelly.”

I sat up. We stared in opposite directions.

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I?”

There was a tense silence.

“Look, I’m trying desperately, for once in my miserable life, to be honest. I have no excuses. If I met this girl tomorrow, okay, I could say, I love Alison, Alison loves me, nothing doing. But I met her a fortnight ago. And I’ve got to meet her again.”

“And you don’t love Alison.”

I looked at her, trying to show her that, in my fashion… she stared away.

“Or you love me till you see a better bit of tail.”

“Don’t be crude.”

“I am crude. I think crude. I talk crude. I am crude.” She kneeled, took a breath. “So what now? I curtsey and withdraw?”

“I wish to God I wasn’t so complicated

“Complicated!” She snorted.