Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

began, talking in Catalan, which was the nearest I could get to her language and which I found she understood fairly well if I talked slowly. ‘I never expected anything like that to happen. Will Sally ever forgive me?’
    ‘Forgive you for what?’ Sapphire asked, in a rather absent voice.
    ‘For getting cross. I didn’t realize she’d take offence so easily.’
    ‘You don’t understand. She wasn’t offended, only surprised; and sorry for you. No great harm has been done.’ She continued to study me.
    ‘Let me tell you about yourself,’ she said after a while. ‘I know now that you’re the sort of man to hold nothing back when you fall in love; and that’s right. But you’re content to go on seeing what you first saw. Has it ever happened that the woman who was pleased by the first image of herself in your eyes grew dissatisfied when she found that it didn’t change as she changed? And that she finally destroyed it by a violent act that you couldn’t forestall?’
    ‘Well – yes, that has happened,’ I admitted. I was taken a little aback, because Madame Luna, a palmist on Brighton Pier, had told me much the same thing, in a pseudo-Oriental sing-song, some ten years before. ‘Are you suggesting that it might happen again?’
    ‘Now you’re here, but your wife, from whose side we summoned you, isn’t, because she belongs to another age altogether. So since you have never in all your life been out of love for more than a few miserable days, you look around for a fresh focus of your love. You focus on me, and I’m pleased by the bright way you see me. But for how long will my pleasure last? That’s what I can’t decide.’
    ‘Is this how Sally summed me up?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Did she tell you so?’
    ‘No. I heard it in her voice.’
    ‘Then she was teasing me when she asked what kept me back from you?’
    ‘No – she was warning us both.’
    ‘Well, are we to disregard the warning?’
    ‘Why not say straight out that I offended you by telling you the truth about yourself?’
    ‘I find it difficult to be as direct as you New Cretans; but yes, I do think your generalizations are rather sweeping.’
    ‘In fact, you no longer love me?’
    I didn’t answer this. The truth was that I thought her the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, and felt as though I had always known her; but that I was not in love with her in any ordinary way – and could not yet make up my mind just what my feelings were.
    ‘When you recover from the shock to your pride,’ she said, ‘you’ll realize that you’re that sort of a lover, and that many women would be pleased to return your love – for a time.’
    ‘Even you?’
    ‘Even I, until the image ceased to be a true one.’
    ‘And in the end you’d hate me?’
    ‘No, it wouldn’t come to that.’
    ‘I can’t love a woman unless I can convince myself, in spite of all my previous failures, that I’ll love her for the rest of my life. So I try to see her always as I saw her first. A self-deception, perhaps, but that’s my way.’
    ‘And when the separation comes, it’s a sort of death for you. One woman kills; another reanimates the corpse.’
    I disliked the way she was piloting the conversation and tried to seize the controls from her: ‘We seem to have raced through several years of intimacy in the last minute or two. Shall we assume that we’ve had a passionate love-affair and that it’s gradually worked out in the usual way, except that you haven’t had to resort to violence. And that we’re now “very good friends” as, in my age, ex-husband and ex-wife quite often are after a divorce. Love has ended, shall we say? But a warm after-glow remains.’
    ‘Be very careful!’
    ‘Why? Because a divorced couple may fall in love again? Of course, if you feel that it would be cheating to cut out the preliminaries…’
    ‘I mean: don’t try to define your feelings. They’re still unsettled. If you’re not careful you may deceive yourself