annoyed. I have not revealed to Mrs Thrush who I am. I say only that I have messages for you, messages of the utmost importance. On my first visit Mrs Thrush plainly gave to know she did not believe me. But my earnestness has now won her over. She has accepted my letters, promising to keep them safe, which I take to be a manner of saying she will send them to you. Am I right? Do they reach you? She confides that she frets for your welfare and longs for the departure of the bailiffs.
‘The bailiffs have quartered themselves in your library. One sleeps on the couch, the other, it seems, in two armchairs drawn together. They send out to the King’s Arms for their meals. They are prepared to wait a month, two months, a year, they say, to serve their warrant. A month I can believe, but not a year they do not know how long a year can be. It was one of them, an odious fellow named Wilkes, who opened the door to me the second time. He fancies I carry messages between you and Mrs Thrush. He pinned me in the passageway before I left and told me of the Fleet, of how men have spent their lives there abandoned by their families, castaways in the very heart of the city. Who will save you, Mr Foe, if you are arrested and consigned to the Fleet? I thought you had a wife, but Mrs Thrush says you are widowed many years.
‘Your library reeks of pipesmoke. The door of the larger cabinet is broken and the glass not so much as swept up. Mrs Thrush says that Wilkes and his friend had a woman with them last night.
‘I came home to Clock Lane in low spirits. There are times when I feel my strength to be limitless, when I can bear you and your troubles on my back, and the bailiffs as well if need be, and Friday and Cruso and the island. But there are other times when a pall of weariness falls over me and I long to be borne away to a new life in a far- off city where I will never hear your name or Cruso’s again. Can you not press on with your writing, Mr Foe, so that Friday can speedily be returned to Africa and I liberated from this drab existence I lead? Hiding from the bailiffs is surely tedious, and writing a better way than most of passing the time. The memoir I wrote for you I wrote sitting on my bed with the paper on a tray on my knees, my heart fearful all the while that Friday would decamp from the cellar to which he had been consigned, or take a stroll and be lost in the mazes and warrens of Covent Garden. Yet I completed that memoir in three days. More is at stake in the history you write, I will admit, for it must not only tell the truth about us but please its readers too. Will you not bear it in mind, however, that my life is drearily suspended till your writing is done?’
‘The days pass and I have no word from you. A patch of dandelions — all we have for flowers in Clock Lane — is pushing up against the wall beneath my window. By noon the room is hot. I will stifle if summer comes and I am still confined. I long for the ease of walking abroad in my shift, as I did on the island.
‘The three guineas you sent are spent. Clothes for Friday were a heavy expense. The rent for this week is owed. I am ashamed to come downstairs and cook our poor supper of peas and salt.
‘To whom am I writing? I blot the pages and toss them out of the window. Let who will read them!’
‘The house in Newington is closed up, Mrs Thrush and the servants are departed. When I pronounce your name the neighbours grow tight-lipped. What has happened? Have the bailiffs tracked you down?· Will you be able to proceed with your writing in prison?’
‘We have taken up residence in your house, from which I now write. Are you surprised to hear this? There were spider-webs over the windows already, which we have swept away. We will disturb nothing. When you return we will vanish like ghosts, without complaint.
‘I have your table to sit at, your window to gaze through. I write with your pen on your paper, and when the sheets are completed they go into your chest. So your life continues to be lived, though you are gone.
‘All I lack is light. There is not a candle left in the house. But perhaps that is a blessing. Since we must keep the curtains drawn, we will grow used to living in gloom by day, in darkness by night.
‘It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau. The window overlooks not woods and pastures but your garden. There is no ripple in the glass. The chest is not a true chest but a dispatch box. Nevertheless, it is all close enough. Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?’
‘We have explored your garden, Friday and I. The flower-beds are sadly overgrown, but the carrots and beans are prospering. I will set Friday to work weeding.
‘We live here like the humblest of poor relations. Your best linen is put away; we eat off the servants’ plate. Think of me as the niece of a second cousin come down in the world, to whom you owe but the barest of duties.
‘I pray you have not taken the step of embarking for the colonies. My darkest fear is that an Atlantic storm will drive your ship on to uncharted rocks and spill you up on a barren isle.
‘There was a time in Clock Lane, I will confess, when I felt great bitterness against you. He has turned his mind from us, I told myself, as easily as if we were two of his grenadiers in Flanders, forgetting that while his grenadiers fall into an enchanted sleep whenever he absents himself, Friday and I continue to eat and drink and fret. There seemed no course open to me but to take to the streets and beg, or steal, or worse. But now that we are in your house, peace has returned. Why it should be so I do not know, but toward this house — which till last month I had never clapped eyes on — I feel as we feel toward the home we were born in. All the nooks and crannies, all the odd hidden corners of the garden, have an air of familiarity, as if in a forgotten childhood I here played games of hide and seek.’
‘How much of my life consists in waiting! In Bahia I did little but wait, though what I was waiting for I sometimes did not know. On the island I waited all the time for rescue. Here I wait for you to appear, or for the book to be written that will set me free of Cruso and Friday.
‘I sat at your bureau this morning (it is afternoon now, I sit at the same bureau, I have sat here all day) and took out a clean sheet of paper and dipped pen in ink — your pen, your ink, I know, but somehow the pen becomes mine while I write with it, as though growing out of my hand — and wrote at the head: “The Female Castaway. Being a True Account of a Year Spent on a Desert Island. With Many Strange Circumstances Never Hitherto Related.” Then I made a list of all the strange circumstances of the year I could remember: the mutiny and murder on the Portuguese ship, Cruso’s castle, Cruso himself with his lion’s mane and apeskin clothes, his voiceless slave Friday, the vast terraces they had built, all bare of growth, the terrible storm that tore the roof off our house and heaped the beaches with dying fish. Dubiously I thought: Are these enough strange circumstances to make a story of? How long before I am driven to invent new and stranger circumstances: the salvage of tools and muskets from Cruso’s ship; the building of a boat, or at least a skiff, and a venture to sail to the mainland; a landing by cannibals on the island, followed by a skirmish and many bloody deaths; and, at last, the coming of a golden-haired stranger with a sack of corn, and the planting of the terraces? Alas, will the day ever arrive when we can make a story without strange circumstances?
‘Then there is the matter of Friday’s tongue. On the island I accepted that I should never learn how Friday lost his tongue, as I accepted that I should never learn how the apes crossed the sea. But what we can accept in life we cannot accept in history. To tell my story and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost!
‘So this morning I made two sketches. One showed the figure of a man clad in jerkin and drawers and a conical hat, with whiskers standing out in all directions and great cat-eyes. Kneeling before him was the figure of a black man, naked save for drawers, holding his hands behind his back (the hands were tied, but that could not be seen). In his left hand the whiskered figure gripped the living tongue of the other; in his right hand he held up a knife.
‘Of the second sketch I will tell you in a moment.
‘I took my sketches down to Friday in the garden. “Consider these pictures, Friday,” I said, “then tell me: which is the truth?” I held up the first. “Master Cruso,” I said, pointing to the whiskered figure. “Friday,” I said, pointing to the kneeling figure. “Knife,” I said, pointing to the knife. “Cruso cut out Friday’s tongue,” I said; and I stuck out my own tongue and made motions of cutting it. “Is that the truth, Friday?” I pressed him, looking deep into his eyes: “Master Cruso cut out your tongue?”
‘(Friday might not know the meaning of the word
