I couldn’t, you can see, not do anything just then. I couldn’t let this love-lost man be found by Venice in her husband’s shoes. Napier and Venice, the happy lovers. … I was on Venice’s side. For Venice! Always, I was for Venice. One likes so few people, but one likes those few very, very much. This love-lost man must be woken up, must behave. Of course he must behave! Venice, for Venice! How dared he have done this to Venice? Marrying her on the third day from that night. …
I asked him where he was staying, and when he said “the Meurice,” I told him that if he would go now I could ring him up when I had seen the doctor. “It’s no good waiting here,” I said. “I know the doctor.”
He stared at me with the immense, the devastating, dignity of the utterly careless. I bitterly wanted to wake him up, to make him see the thing he had done, the beastly thing. For Venice! “It’s no good,” I said cruelly, “keeping Venice waiting forever. …”
He scowled at me, or at something just behind my shoulder. “I’m going to see Iris,” he said.
It was quite definite, he was going to see Iris. It would probably, I supposed, do Iris all the good in the world to see Napier on this critical night. Napier and Iris. It might make her care whether she lived or died … but why shouldn’t she die? Venice would condemn her to die. Iris was the foe. Why shouldn’t she die? You can’t do things like that, and not die. Stealing like a little thief into the garden of Venice, and stealing away like a little thief … to bear Napier’s child, unknown to Napier. …
“Hell!” he muttered. I stared at him, at those burning, broken eyes.
“Hell!” he said. “Oh, God, what hell! What? If you only knew. …”
“I don’t want to know,” I snapped. Well, did one want to know? But he didn’t hear, didn’t care, didn’t see. Being with him, you can see, was exactly like eavesdropping. Why, if Venice came in and saw this love-lost man … her Napier, her darling, like this, with burning broken eyes. But there are some things that can’t happen! You couldn’t take Napier from Venice. And how quickly, how poignantly, Venice, if she saw him like this, would know the difference between his easy, smiling love for her and this … damnable madness.
But in the dark taxi she wouldn’t see his face, and I was just about to try again to get him away when he said fiercely: “It’s not as though I don’t know anything about it. Or do you think Iris is a liar? What?”
“Napier, you really must pull yourself together—”
“No, but anyone would think I was a most fearful cad. What?”
And he scowled, in that Napier way of his that made one want to forgive him everything. “I mean, not coming before, seeing she’s so ill … waiting all this time, and coming just now. Why, she wrote to me four weeks ago, saying she was going to be just slightly ill and have a rest for a week or two, so of course—Oh, look here, here’s the letter, you’ll see for yourself—”
“But I don’t want to see for myself. Steady, man! I quite understand. Of course you couldn’t know. …”
“No, but look here, you’ll see. …”
Feverishly he began fumbling in his inside-pockets, pulling out papers, a pocketbook, passports. …
Venice could be very still. I imagined her in the doorway, looking at Napier in this state. She would be very still, and in her stillness she would be destroyed. Venice was jealous, so jealous and possessive. “Got to be with Napier,” she had pleaded to me once. “You don’t know what he’s thinking about half the time, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing the other half.”
Some of the papers dropped to the floor, and I picked them up and thrust them into his gaping pocket. The old nun smiled at me over her spectacles, and then looked at Napier and tapped her forehead. But you could see she liked the looks of Napier. “Quelle belle silhouette!” she grinned. I don’t believe that Napier to this day knows there was anyone but our two selves in that lodge.
He waved a white thing covered with scrawled pencil-marks, and beside it I somehow saw that letter from a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives. But between the two came the vision of Venice destroyed.
“I don’t want to read it, Napier. I quite understand. What on earth does it matter whether you knew or not, so long as you know now?”
“Thinks a lot of you,” he said darkly. “Told me, last time I saw her. …”
He passed a hand over his mouth. I said: “But. …”
“Beastly,” he said, looking at me with enormous, dark surprise. “That’s what I feel. Beastly. As though my skin was a dirty shirt. Ever get that? I mean, here she’s dying, and I … God, how one gets to know oneself! What? But I’d like you to see. I
