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horror, asks, Is that what you want? She says it is. He’s started to suffer here in this room, for the first time, he’s no longer lying about it. He says he knows already she’ll never love him. She lets him say it. At first she says she doesn’t know. Then she lets him say it.
    He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why. He says, You’ve come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone. She says she can’t say, so far she’s never gone into a bedroom with anyone. She tells him she doesn’t want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually doeswith the women he brings to his flat. She begs him to do that.
    He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed. And there he turns away and weeps. And she, slow, patient, draws him to her and starts to undress him. With her eyes shut. Slowly. He makes as if to help her. She tells him to keep still. Let me do it. She says she wants to do it. And she does. Undresses him. When she tells him to, he moves his body in the bed, but carefully, gently, as if not to wake her.
    The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been ill, may be convalescent, he’s hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he’s weak, probably a helpless prey to insult, vulnerable. She doesn’t look him in the face. Doesn’t look at him at all. She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love.
    And, weeping, he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changed, slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clasped to it.
    The sea, formless, simply beyond compare.
    •  •  •
    Already, on the ferry, in advance, the image owed something to this moment.
    The image of the woman in darned stockings has crossed the room, and at last she emerges as a child. The sons knew it already. But not the daughter, yet. They’d never talk about the mother among themselves, about the knowledge of her which they both shared and which separated them from her: the final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child.
    Their mother never knew pleasure.
    I didn’t know you bled. He asks me if it hurt, I say no, he says he’s glad.
    He wipes the blood away, washes me. I watch him. Little by little he comes back, becomes desirable again. I wonder how I had the strength to go against my mother’s prohibition. So calmly, with such determination. How I managed to follow my ideas to their “logical conclusion.”
    We look at each other. He puts his arms around me. Asks me why I came here. I say I had to, it was a sort of obligation. It’s the first time we’ve talked. I tell him I have two brothers. That we haven’t any money. All gone. He knows my elder brother, has met him in thelocal opium dens. I say my brother steals from my mother to go there, steals from the servants, and that sometimes the keepers of the dens come and demand money from my mother. I tell him about the dikes. I tell him my mother will die, it can’t go on like this. That my mother’s approaching death, too, must be connected with what has happened to me today.
    I notice that I desire him.
    He feels sorry for me, but I say no, I’m not to be pitied, no one is, except my mother. He says, You only came because I’m rich. I say that’s how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can’t say what I’d have done if he’d been different. He says, I wish I could take you away, go away with you. I say I couldn’t leave my mother yet without dying of grief. He says he certainly hasn’t been lucky with me, but he’ll give me some money anyway, don’t worry. He’s lain down again. Again we’re