‘But did you really go about like this?’ I asked him. ‘I somehow thought——’ Suddenly I wondered if he had imagined the whole thing. He looked at me oddly and the light died from his face.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We didn’t. It wasn’t real, that part. You see, she was a cripple. She’d had an illness, and she was a cripple.’

I cannot say how painfully, how disagreeably, this disclosure affected me. It was almost as if he had told me he had been in love with a skeleton. And I was angry with myself for not having foreseen it—for it, or something like it, was implicit in everything my friend had told me. I was angry because I had been taken in, angry because he had warned me I should be angry, angry with myself for being angry. I didn’t know what to say, or where or how to look; I did not try to meet his eye.

To my intense relief he did not seem to notice my confusion, and went on:

‘But the rest was real, the one real thing in my life. If only I had foreseen what was coming! If only I had given Adele, straight away, the tip that I meant to give her at the end! Only I didn’t foresee an end. The time-factor had ceased to exist for me; I felt I should stay in Venice all my life. Perhaps Adele felt that too; perhaps she saw the prospect of her tip receding into the dateless future. Afterwards, she was full of excuses She said she never knew him come at that hour. She said he——’

‘Who?’ I asked.

My friend stared at me as though he couldn’t believe I didn’t know. ‘The doctor. She said he found the flat door open and just walked in. But she contradicted herself, she gave herself away, for she also said she was alarmed for her mistress’s state, thereby admitting she had told the doctor. It was all such nonsense! Every time she saw me——’

‘Every time who saw you?’ I interrupted. ‘The maid, or . . . or . . . You haven’t told me her name.’

‘I couldn’t,’ he answered. ‘At least, I’d rather not. Fate has some power over a name. But she . . . she said that never in her life had she felt so well. Life-giver was one of her names for me: she had so many!’

My friend bent his outraged, protesting gaze on mine, but I looked away, I could not meet his eye: he did not look at all life-giving then. ‘And I could tell, too: I’m not a fool, am I?’ he went on. ‘Didn’t I look at her with a doctor’s eye, as well as with a lover’s? I couldn’t have been mistaken. I noticed every little change, and they were all changes towards health. How could it have been otherwise, when we were drawing all this glory down on us? How could all the other elements have united for her benefit, and one not? I said so to the doctor, once we were out of ear-shot. “You are a physician,” I said, “don’t you know that a patient’s surest road to recovery is happiness? Do you deny,” I said, “that she is happy, now, as she has never been happy before?”

‘But he wouldn’t listen to me; he kept on saying he would allow us one more meeting: “un solo incontro, un solo incontro”. Then I got angry and asked him by what right he was depriving us of this blessing? We walked up and down the vestibule between the Victorian and Edwardian ladies and gentlemen whose coloured photographs hung on the walls. He became as agitated as I was, and poured out a flood of medical terms of which I understood very little. The shock alone, he said, might have killed her. I was still trembling from the shock myself, the irruption into our birch-grove of this alien figure, parting the branches, with the heat and dust and hurry of the streets still on him, holding his professional bag of tricks, wearing, until he saw us, his professional air of wary optimism. It might have been worse, it might have been much worse; but it was bad enough—the secret not only out, but you might say, exploding round us, and the sudden necessity we were under for the first time, to speak, almost to explain ourselves, to a third person.

‘ “I must go back to her,” said the doctor, glancing impatiently at the closed door behind us; but he wouldn’t hear of my going back, not then.

‘ “To-morrow if she is well enough, to-morrow, and for the last time.

My friend paused. All this time with his face and his voice he had been dramatizing his interview with the doctor: first he was one, then the other.

‘I can’t pretend he underestimated what the separation would mean to us,’ he said, ‘he spoke with a gravity which made it seem more than ever final. “And supposing she doesn’t consent?” I asked him. “Then you must make her,” he said. “You must plead with her, for her sake, and yours too, to give up this suicidal folly. Do you want to kill her?”

‘ “Do you want to kill her?” I retorted.

‘We had our last meeting. I won’t say anything about it—it was in almost every way so unlike the others that it hardly counted. You see, they were all outside time, but, in this one, Time was so present he might have been standing over us with his scythe and hour-glass. The moment of real parting came much earlier, the doctor brought it in his bag, like a prescription. It took us unawares, like sudden death. Afterwards we were like ghosts, planning our reunion beyond the grave. I remember that even her voice sounded different. It had been ours, just as a song belongs to the listener as much as to the singer, but it became hers, a lovely voice expressing what she thought, but not what we thought, another person’s voice. I believe we even argued a little about how soon she would be well enough, etc., and whether she shouldn’t consult another doctor. I remember the long pauses, when we were thinking what to say, better than what we said. There had been no pauses before, only the sort of pauses that there are in music, leading up to the next theme. It seemed extraordinary that the world outside should be more real than the world contained in this room. We were only going to be as we had been before we met, it was no worse than that; and yet it seemed to both of us that such an existence, the existence we had known before, would be unbearable. Almost deliberately I tried to keep my thoughts away from hers, there was a refuge in egoism, for to think of her pain doubled mine. So I sat by her bedside as correct as a doctor, as unimplicated as a district visitor; and the love duet, without which no opera is complete, instead of swooning itself away in long, heart-broken phrases, grew more and more tense and staccato and inconsecutive with the things we had to say to keep silence at bay, but hated saying, until somehow I got myself out of the room, and out of the flat, and out of the palace, on to the Zattere where the heat blasted me, but it would have been the same if it had been freezing—I couldn’t have recognized myself in any environment.’

My friend stopped as abruptly as if his memories had come up against a concrete obstacle. I was still uncomfortably aware of seeing the whole thing at an angle different from his, and of withholding some of the sympathy I should have liked to give; and all I could think of to say was:

‘So she agreed to the parting?’

‘Yes,’ he answered listlessly, ‘she agreed to it. In a way, she decreed it, for I should never have consented. But she was not herself that day.’

‘No?’ I said.

‘No. It was the shock, of course, the mortal shock of the . . . discovery and then the strain of those last hours. She reproached herself a good deal . . . for having written to me. That was all nonsense. I could see she was not herself. But how could you expect her to be? I wasn’t, either.’ He added, with an effort: ‘She had to take her tablets.’

‘Had she never taken them before?’ I asked.

‘Never in my presence, I swear. They were for emergencies, you see. She kept them by her bed, in a tortoiseshell box. But the maid said she had taken them quite often, between times, and that was one reason why she was alarmed. I didn’t and don’t believe it.’