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By Root 2275 0

it back to me was that Gilbert and Titus discovered that they were both singers. Gilbert was quite a good baritone, Titus turned out to be a tolerable tenor, and could also sing falsetto. What was more, they seemed to possess an extremely large common repertoire. Until I ordered them fiercely to go out onto the rocks they made the house ring with their noise. Of course they would have liked to have me as an audience to show off to (all singers are vain), and of course they would have liked to sit up half the night carolling and drinking my wine. (They both drank a good deal and I had to send Gilbert to the Raven Hotel for more.) Even from outside and at a distance they were audible, so loud were their voices and so pleased were they with the mutual exhibition of their talents. (Hartley never mentioned the singing; perhaps she was beyond caring or perhaps like her husband she was a bit deaf.) They roared out pieces from operas and musical comedies, madrigals, pop songs, folk songs, rounds, lewd ballads and love ditties in English, French and Italian. I think they became positively drunk with their music during this time; perhaps it was a natural reaction to the tension inside the house.

I have just said that I now found Titus simpler than I had thought at first. This was so in relation to his mother and to my own problems. (Perhaps by ‘simpler’ I just mean ‘vaguer’, ‘less attentive’.) But it was certainly noteworthy, and Gilbert noticed it too, that Titus was in superficial ways more cultivated than one would expect a boy to be who had left school early to ‘do electricity’ at a polytechnic. Where had Titus been during the last year or two? This remained mysterious. I remembered the cuff links and the book of Dante’s love poems. My own hypothesis was that he had been living with an older woman. He was just now about the age which I had been when I was kidnapped by Clement; baby-snatching, as everybody called it. Had someone snatched Titus—and then, and lately, discarded him? Gilbert’s theory, not surprisingly, was that Titus had been living with a man. Titus himself remained, on this subject, silent. (Perhaps this is the place to say that Perry was of course wrong about the nature of my relations with Fritzie Eitel.)

I have spoken of histories and changes. And indeed in a way later on it seemed to me that what I was doing in those days was reliving the whole history of my love for Hartley, not only the old times, but all the intermediate times as well. Every day, every hour, I remembered more. On about the evening of the second day Hartley became for a while more talkative and had the air of having been reflecting, the talk being the fruit of the reflection. This led to a dialogue which had a most distressing conclusion.

We were sitting on the floor, she on the mattress, I on the bare boards, with our legs outstretched, and facing the long high-up window which gave onto the drawing room. The middle room, usually darkish, was now in twilight, though the evening glow communicated a dim warm illumination. I touched Hartley’s hand. I felt from head to foot connected with her.

‘Darling, my silk dressing gown suits you, but won’t you take it off sometimes?’

‘I’m cold.’

‘Aren’t you beginning to feel that you live here?’

‘You think the important thing is that I made a mistake in not marrying you.’

‘There was a mistake. What’s more important is to undo it now.’

‘You just want someone to remember things with.’

‘That’s very unfair, when I want so much to talk of the future, only you won’t!’

‘You feel resentment against me because I went away.’

‘So you admit you went away?’

‘I suppose so, it’s so long ago.’

‘You said I’d be unfaithful.’

‘Did I? I can’t remember.’ I had lived my life on her words, and now she could not even recall them! ‘I suppose I must have gone away because I can remember feeling guilty.’

‘Guilty about hurting me?’

‘Yes. Really I did always feel guilty and thought you blamed me. And in a funny way I had to protect myself from you by the idea that you hated me.’

‘How on earth would that “protect” you?