«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.»
