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By Root 13935 0

was talking. He must prepare lunch. And then he rummaged in a corner and thrust into my hand a crumpled snap-shot which he must at some time have stolen from Melissa. It was a street-photograph and very faded. Melissa and I walked arm in arm talking down Rue Fuad. Her face was half turned away from me, smiling — dividing her attention between what I was saying so earnestly and the lighted shop-windows we passed. It must have been taken, this snapshot, on a winter afternoon around the hour of four. What on earth could I have been telling her with such earnestness? For the life of me I could not recall the time and place; yet there it was, in black and white, as they say. Perhaps the words I was uttering were momentous, significant —

or perhaps they were meaningless! I had a pile of books under my arm and was wearing the dirty old mackintosh which I finally gave to Zoltan. It was in need of a dry-clean. My hair, too, seemed to need cutting at the back. Impossible to restore this vanished afternoon to mind! I gazed carefully at the circumstantial detail of the picture like someone bent upon restoring an irremediably faded fresco. Yes, it was winter, at four o’clock. She was wearing her tatty sealskin and carried a handbag which I had not ever seen in her possession. ‘Sometime in August — was it August?’ I men-tally quoted to myself again.*

Turning back to the wretched rack-like bed again I whispered her name softly. With surprise and chagrin I discovered that she had utterly vanished. The waters had simply closed over her head. It was as if she had never existed, never inspired in me the pain and pity which (I had always told myself) would live on, trans-mitted into other forms perhaps — but live triumphantly on forever. I had worn her out like an old pair of socks, and the utter-ness of this disappearance surprised and shocked me. Could ‘love’

simply wear out like this? ‘Melissa’ I said again, hearing the lovely word echo in the silence. Name of a sad herb, name of a pilgrim to

Eleusis. Was she less now than a scent or a flavour? Was she simply a nexus of literary cross-references scribbled in the margins of a minor poem? And had my love dissolved her in this strange fashion, or was it simply the literature I had tried to make out of her? Words, the acid-bath of words! I felt guilty. I even tried (with that lying self-deception so natural to sentimentalists) to force her to appear by an act of will, to re-evoke a single one of those afternoon lasses which had once been for me the sum of the city’s many meanings. I even tried deliberately to squeeze the tears into my eyes, to hypnotize memory by repeating her name like a charm. The experiment yielded nothing. Her name had been utterly worn out of use! It was truly shameful not to be able to evoke the faintest tribute to so all-engulfing an unhappiness. Then like the chime of a distant bell I heard the tart voice of the dead Pursewarden saying ‘But our unhappiness was sent to regale us. We were intended to revel in it, enjoy it to the full.’

Melissa had been simply one of the many costumes of love!

I was bathed and changed by the time Pombal hurried in to an early lunch, full of the incoherent rapture of his new and remarkable state of mind. Fosca, the cause of it, was, he told me, a refugee married to a British officer. ‘How could it have come about, this sudden passionate understand ing?’ He did not know. He got up to look at his own face in the hanging mirror. ‘I who believed so many things about love’ he went on moodily, half addressing his own reflection and combing his beard with his fingers, ‘but never something like this. Even a year ago had you said what I am just saying I would have answered: “Pouagh! It is simply a Petrarchian obscenity. Medieval rubbish!” I even used to think that continence was medically unhealthy, that the damned thing would atrophy or fall off if it were not frequently used. Now look at your unhappy — no happy friend! I feel bound and gagged by Fosca’s very existence. Listen, the last time Keats came in from the desert we went out and