“What do you mean, your former life? Do you mean when you were impersonating a doctor?”
Fludd looked up, a piece of fruit he called melon speared on his fork and poised in the air.
“Who told you I did that?”
“You. You as good as told me.”
“You don’t understand an analogy, do you?”
“No.” She looked down at her plate, ashamed. She could make nothing of the melon; it tasted to her like sucked fingers, flesh dissolved in water. “I like everything to be just what it is, I suppose. That’s why I hated it when I had the stigmata. I didn’t understand it. Nobody had crucified me. I didn’t understand why I had to have it at all.”
“Don’t talk about that,” Fludd said. “That’s all over and done with now. You’re going to get a fresh start.”
The waiter came and took their plates away. “My palm,” the girl said. “You’re forgetting. You said you’d read it, if I’d come down.”
She held it out under the candle. “Once is enough,” Fludd said.
“No, tell me again. I didn’t listen properly the first time. I want to know my destiny.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“I thought it was written in my lines. I thought you believed in it.”
“Patterns can alter,” Fludd said. “A soul is a thing in a state of flux. Your fate is mutable. Your will is free.” He reached across the table and tapped once with his forefinger, urgently, in the palm of her hand. “Roisin O’Halloran, listen to me now. It is true that, in a way, I can tell the future. But not in the way you think. I can make you a map. I can indicate to you a choice of turnings. But I cannot travel the route on your behalf.”
She dropped her head. “Are you afraid?” Fludd said.
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s the way it should be. Nothing is achieved without proper fear.” Her mouth trembled. “You don’t understand,” he said tiredly.
“Help me then.” Her eyes pleaded: animal eyes. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you come from. I don’t know where you might take me.”
At other tables, the sated diners rose and cast down their napkins to the seats of their red plush chairs. Businessmen, their deals concluded, offered each other a toast. Crystal clinked on crystal; wine flowed, dark as Our Saviour’s blood. Fludd opened his mouth to speak, began, and broke off. His throat ached with pity. “I should like to tell you,” he said at last. “For my own reasons, I cannot.”
“What kind of reasons?”
“You might say, professional ones.”
Because in the work of transformation, there are conditions of success. The art requires the whole man; and besides the alembics and retorts, the furnace and the charcoal, there must be knowledge and faith, gentle speech and good works. And then when all of these are brought together, there must be one further thing, guarantor of all the rest: there must be silence.
Fludd looked around the room, attracted the attention of the waiter, signalled that they were ready for their next course. The waiter brought other plates, and then a little spirit-burner, which he set up on their table. He whipped his white napkin around in an ostentatious way and flipped it over his arm; he seemed to be looking around, out of the corner of his eye, to see whether his colleagues were observing him.
Then some meat came along, in a sauce, and Roisin O’Halloran watched the waiter put it over the spirit-burner to warm it up for them; then he poured something over it. A moment later he set fire to the whole lot. Her cheeks burned in embarrassment for him. It was something even Sister Anthony had never managed. On the stove, yes, often: not at the very table.
But Fludd didn’t seem to mind. He looked at her steadily from behind the blaze. She supposed the meat would still be edible, and she would try to get through it: to please him.
At that moment when the blue flame leapt up between them, illuminating the starched white cloth and his dark face, tears sprang into her eyes. This is all very well, she thought, while it lasts, but it won’t last, will it, because even Hell comes to an end, and even Heaven. “Champagne,” Fludd said to the waiter. “Come on man, look lively, didn’t I order champagne?”
When she woke next morning, and the bed was empty, she cried a little; in fright and panic, like a sleepy child in a strange room. It did not surprise her that she had slept so soundly that she had not heard him go; it had been a willed, furious sleep, the kind of sleep that perhaps felons have the night before they are hanged.
She got out of bed stiffly and, naked, groped about on the dressing table. Sunlight crept around the edges of the heavy curtains. She looked about the room; she was casting around for something, but she hardly knew what.
But very soon, she found what she was looking for. Her eye fell on a paper. He had left her a letter, it seemed.
The eiderdown had fallen to the floor. Roisin O’Halloran pulled a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. She did not want to draw back the curtains; she switched on the lamp.
Then she took up the paper. She unfolded it. His writing was strange, black, cramped, old-fashioned, like a secret script. The letter was brief.
Not a word, not a word of love. Perhaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all; He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch.
She sat down on the bed with the piece of paper, holding it in both hands, as if it were some State Proclamation. She twisted her bare foot on the carpet, right and left, left and right. It was a slip of the pen, she
