I got up, burning, and helped her up, and then in fact a car did come by and its lights showed her legs, the blue of her dress which matched her eyes, and a flash of her shaggy brown-gold mane. It also showed her sandals lying together upon the road.
«There's blood on your leg.»
«It's just a graze.»
«You're limping.»
«No, just stiff.»
We walked back to the car and I turned on the headlights and made an intricate bower of green leaves in the middle of the dark. We got into the car and held each other's hands.
«It won't be necessary to do that again, Julian.»
«I'm very sorry.»
Then we drove on in silence, her hand on my knee. For the last bit she read the map by torchlight. We crossed a railway line and a canal into a sort of empty flat land. There were no lights of houses to be seen now. The lights of the car showed how the roadway faded into a stony verge of smooth grey pebbles and vivid green wiry grass. We paused and turned at a featureless crossroads where Julian turned her torch onto the ringer post. The road turned into a stony track along which we bumped at five miles per hour. And at last the headlights swung round and revealed two white gate posts and the name written in bold Italian lettering: patara. The car moved onto gravel and the lights jerked over red-brick walls and we came to a halt outside a narrow latticed porch. Julian already had the key, she had been holding it for miles. I peered at oi our haven. It was a little square red-brick bungalow. The agent had been a trifle romantic. «It's marvellous,» said Julian. She let me in.
All the lights were on. Julian had run from room to room. She had pulled back the sheets of the double divan bed. «I don't think this is aired at all, it's quite damp. Oh Bradley, let's go down to the sea straightaway, shall we? Then I'll cook supper.»
I looked at the bed. «It's late, my darling. Are you sure you're all right after that fall?»
«Of course! I think I'll just change, it's got a bit chilly, and then we'll go down to the sea, it must be just there, I think I can hear it.»
I went out of the front door and listened. The sound of the sea sieving pebbles came in a regular harsh grating sigh from over the top of some little eminence, sand dunes perhaps, just in front of me. The moon was slightly hazed over but giving out a golden, not silvery, illumination by which I could see the white garden fencing, ragged shrubs and the outline of a single tree. A sense of emptiness and level land. Air moving softly, salty. I felt a mixture of bliss and pure fear. After a few moments I went back into the house. Silence.
I went into the bedroom. Julian, in a mauve-and-white flowered petticoat with a white fringe was lying on the bed deeply asleep. Her glowing brown hair was spread all over the pillow and half over her face in a silky network like part of a beautiful shawl. She lay on her back with her throat exposed as if to the knife. Her shoulders, pale in colour, were as creamy as the moon at dusk. Her knees were a little drawn up, the bare muddied feet sideways and pointed. Her hands, also brown with earth, had found each other and nestled between her breasts like a pair of animals. Her right thigh, below the line of the white fringe, was red and scraped in two places, once where she had climbed over the fence, once where she had thrown herself out of the car. She had indeed had an eventful day.
So had I. I sat and brooded over her and pondered a hundred things. I had no intention of waking her, though I did wonder if I should bathe her thigh. The long scratches looked quite clean. This sudden magical withdrawal into unconsciousness was just what I had been wanting at different times during the day, to be with her and yet not with her. And now as I sat and sighed beside her there was a strange pleasure in not touching her. After a while I lightly lifted the bedclothes over her, laying down the folded sheet just below those clasped and nestling hands, and I wondered what I had done, or more perhaps what she had done, since it was more her will than mine which had so completely transformed our lives. Perhaps tomorrow morning it would all seem to her like a dreadful dream. Perhaps tomorrow I would be driving a weeping girl back to London. For that too I must be faithfully ready, for I had already been given a fortune which I did not in the least deserve. How wonderful and terrible it had been when she leapt out of the car. But what did it mean except that she was young and the young love extremes? She was a child of extremes and I was a puritan and old. Would I ever make love to her? Ought I to? Would I be able to?
«Look, Bradley, an animal's skull, all washed by the sea. What is it, a sheep?»
«A sheep yes.» We 11 take it, back.
