«We are surrounded by spirits. Curtains won't keep them out.» But I pulled the curtains and came round behind her chair, touching her neck very lightly with my finger. Her flesh was cool, almost cold, and she shuddered, arching her neck. She made no other response, but I felt that our bodies were rapt in a communion with each other which passed our understanding. Meanwhile it was a time for quiet communication by words, for speech of a new sort, arcane prophetic speech.
«I know,» she said. «Swarms of them. I've never felt like this before. Listen to the sea. It sounds so close. Though there's no wind.»
We listened.
«Bradley, would you go and lock the front door?»
I went and locked it and then sat down again facing her. «Are you cold?»
«No, it's not-coldness.»
«I know.»
She was wearing the blue dress with the white willow-spray pattern which she had been wearing when she fled and a light woollen rug off our bed around her shoulders. She was staring at me with big eyes and every now and then a spasm passed across her face. There had been a lot of tears but none now. She looked so much, and beautifully, older, not the child I had known at all, but some wonderful holy woman, a prophetess, a temple prostitute. She had combed her hair down smoothly and pressed it back and her face had the nakedness, the solitude, the ambiguous staring eloquence of a mask. She had the dazed empty look of a great statute.
«Oh you wonderful, wonderful thing.»
«I feel so odd,» she said, «quite impersonal, I've never felt like this before at all.»
«It is the power of love.»
«Does love do that? I thought yesterday, the day before yesterday, that I loved you. It wasn't like this.»
«It is the god, the black Eros. Don't be afraid.»
«Oh I'm not-afraid-I just feel shattered and empty. I'm in a place where I've never been before.»
«I'm there too.»
«Yes. Yes.»
«You even resemble me. I feel I'm looking into a mirror.»
I had the strange feeling that I was speaking these words. I was speaking through her, through the pure echoing emptiness of her being, hollowed by love.
«Then I looked into your eyes and thought: Bradley! Now you have no name.»
«We are possessed.»
«I feel we are joined forever. Sort of-dedicated.»
«Yes.»
«Listen to that train, how clear it sounds.»
