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

again.’
    ‘But what happens now that we’re alone together?’ Her calmness disconcerted me; I couldn’t make her out.
    ‘We compose ourselves.’
    As I sat on the edge of the bed, tense and undecided, Sapphire fetched a broad-toothed comb and combed my hair in a slow rhythm, her lips moving silently to the words of a song. My tension gradually relaxed and a feeling of extraordinary ease crept over me. If I had been a cat I should have purred loud and long.
    She looked at me critically, her head tilted slightly, not saying a word. Then she seemed to come to a decision; she signed to me to lie across the bed, put her finger to her lips and massaged my left knee in silence for about twenty minutes. ‘That’s where the trouble was,’ she muttered when she had done. ‘Now sleep!’ she laid my head in the crook of her arm and I fell asleep at once.
    I awoke suddenly with the moonlight on my face. Forgetting all that happened and under the impression that I was at home, I whispered sleepily: ‘Tonia, what’s the time?’
    ‘Was it unkind of us to fetch you here without your wife?’ Sapphire asked. ‘When you first saw me, you noticed how like I was to her, didn’t you?’ She added as a statement, not as a question: ‘You have no secrets from her.’
    ‘No. Does that make you jealous?’
    ‘Tell me first whether she still loves you? Would she be jealous of me?’
    ‘I think so. But you’ve frightened me. Now I don’t know how long her love will last.’ She had taken me off my guard; a warm bed at midnight makes a wonderful confession-box.
    ‘Only so long as you see her as she is, not as she once was.’
    ‘I’ll remember,’ I said. ‘But it’s only fair to tell you that I’m afraid I can really love only one woman at a time.’
    ‘But her time and mine aren’t the same. You can still love her faithfully all your life, and love me as long as you please.’
    As I was sleepily puzzling out the logic of this, she pinched my ear affectionately. ‘She and I are almost the same person,’ she said. A little later I heard Antonia’s laugh, which puzzled me still more, and Antonia’s voice saying something which seemed very important at the time; but again sleep intervened officiously, and I lost its meaning.
    It was morning and Sapphire was just getting out of bed.
    ‘Who are you really?’ I asked, sitting bolt upright.
    ‘The woman you love,’ she answered non-committally, over her shoulder, but in broad daylight I saw that she was no more than vaguely like Antonia. She must have laid a spell to make me hear her speak and laugh with Antonia’s voice. ‘No, perhaps not,’ I thought, ‘not necessarily. I was half-asleep, and now I’m awake. I’m not dead, and neither is Antonia; but I’m no longer my former self, or not altogether because Antonia isn’t Antonia – she’s Sapphire now. Is that it?’ Yes, that seemed reasonable enough. I should explain that since I am fortunate enough to be able to work at home, my wife and I have become unusually close to each other and, after several years together, miss one another acutely if we are ever parted for more than a day. But now here I was, and here Antonia seemed to be too, though she talked a different language and was ten years younger and had a rounder chin and did her hair in a different way, and was a nymph of the month – whatever that might be.
    ‘What’s a nymph of the month?’ I asked. ‘You never told me.’
    ‘That’s too complicated to explain now,’ she said. ‘It’s against custom to discuss before coffee what can wait till after coffee. But my title has to do with the King and Queen and the twelve Court ladies.’
    I accepted the situation provisionally. It was a comfort not to have to go through the usual awkward paces of courtship, for which I felt no inclination; and to show no more embarrassment when I met my new friends at breakfast than if Sapphire and I had been married for twenty years. All the same, I did feel