I was not long in deciding this to be impossible. However there were other possibilities. There was the ambiguity of Biscuit herself. Because Kitty trusted Biscuit I had trusted her blindly. Could both trusts be misplaced? What secret loves and jealousies lurked unsuspected here? How much did Biscuit really know anyway? She was capable of lying. The hazard of Biscuit had however to be accepted, now as it had been at the start, and I felt fatalistic and almost uninterested in what Biscuit might or might not do. There was perhaps more danger in other quarters. Kitty might, on some truthful impulse, tell Gunnar that she had seen me. What was the significance of her suddenly appearing in the drawing-room and interrupting our talk? Had she wanted somehow, in some incoherent and illogical way, to mitigate the falsehood by seeing me in his presence? She might be suffering some guilty discomfort by which she might be prompted to tell him everything. Or she might (foolishly, but she was foolish) come to feel that since after all she had been asking me to help Gunnar it did not matter all that much that we had met clandestinely. She might tell Gunnar, she might already have told him, not thinking he would mind, not realizing how, however carefully she described it, the thing might look. Had Gunnar then shaken the whole truth out of her, the kiss upon the jetty, her feelings, mine? Or had he perhaps led her on, and involved her without her knowledge in just such a plot as Biscuit had seemed to suggest?

The strange thing was that after a while, after perhaps hours, I could look at this possibility with fairly calm eyes. Even if this was so I must see Kitty. It was almost as if, especially if this was so I must see her. I felt the forces of destiny quite sufficiently mustered round about me. Was I being lured on, fascinated, not by Kitty but by Gunnar himself, to make perfect his revenge? If there was a plot must I not connive, a trap must I not fall into it? Did I then want Gunnar to kill me? Of course I recognized these thoughts as half mad. They were, I suppose, a frenzied working over, in the interests of a resignation which did not divide me from Kitty, of the plausible terrors which Biscuit had conjured up. I must go to Kitty even if it were to my death, and even if she too had willed it.

I seemed at last to come, in these matters, to some sort of conclusion, and I was able to set them aside. More important, deeper, were considerations which once more cast doubt upon what I ought to do tomorrow. No, I could not believe that Gunnar had been play-acting on Friday. Of course sincerity is not indivisible, he could have been sincere and not sincere. But that talk had been something real, something momentous and genuinely achieved. Surely something good; good at least if only I and he could maintain the peace of mind necessary to let it work. Gunnar had hated me, he had wanted to kill me. Then suddenly because of his indelible generosity, because there are righteous spirits in the world, we had been able to communicate in gentleness, to forgive ourselves and each other. It had all seemed to 'come right'. And, I now realized as I lay there writhing on my bed, how happy all this would have made me if it had simply happened by itself, if it had simply existed between me and Gunnar without the shadow cast upon it by Kitty. And there were moments when I cursed this spoiling of my enjoyment of a perfect thing. If only Kitty had not meddled. Yet it was through her meddling that the thing had come about.

I tossed my body and my thoughts to and fro, and as the hours passed it seemed more and more as if everything was taking place after all against a huge fated background which was, because so fated, somehow calm: my love for Kitty. Being in love has its own self-certifying universality, it informs and glorifies the world with an energy which, like a drug, becomes a necessity of consciousness. Without it the scene is dark, without that throbbing communication, dead. A mad state, perhaps an undesirable one, inimical to justice, benevolence, common sense. But, for its slaves, it justifies itself as, for the ordinary unsaintly man, nothing else ever does. Of course I would see Kitty again. My love for her was a great unexpected extra gratuitous good thing. It was good that I should be changed, shaken, my bones severed, my mind devastated by this experience. How could I wish it otherwise or unwish any suffering it would bring me? About her feelings for me I dared not think, about the future I did not think. I assumed there was none. I had no 'hope'. There were, as I obscurely saw it, various 'goods'. If I could only endure and keep them separate and hope nothing and plan nothing and be prepared for any degree of misery then at last somehow perhaps there would be some merciful dispensation and all would ultimately after all in some as yet undisclosed sense be well.

'Don't go to her,' said Crystal. 'I am so afraid. That woman will lure you to your doom.'

'Don't be silly!' I said. 'You know nothing whatever about her.'

We were drinking wine, at least I was. Crystal had brought her chair near to mine and was staring at me intently and urgently with her enlarged yellow eyes. I was feeling electric, restless, twitching with anxiety and desire for Kitty and love and the magnitude of recent events.

'Darling, don't see her. Leave well alone. I'm so terribly glad you saw Gunnar and it was all so good. Leave it there, leave it like that when you've got some good out of it all. Don't see her, and don't see him again either. Let's escape now when we can. I'm so glad you're leaving the office. Oh do let's go away somewhere else.'

'I can't get a university job now, Crystal, that's just a dream.'

'Well, any job, we can both work, we've always been poor, I want to go away.'

'Where to, dear?'

'We could go back to _______. I heard from - '

'Crystal, I will not go back to ------ ! You know that! Don't be insane.'

'Please let's break away now before something happens, Hilary. I wish we could change our lives.'

'So do I. It's not so easy.'

'We've been so unhappy all these years and it hasn't been necessary, it's been bad, we've been unhappy in a bad way.'

'You may be right,' I said, 'but it's a bit late to change that.'

'It isn't too late. I blame myself, I've let you decide everything - '

'That was pretty daft of you, wasn't it!'

'I've let you brood and worry about - that - without end, and I should have told you to stop. We should have tried to be happy.'

'Maybe. But this is all vague stuff. Human minds are relentless things and strong. You can't just turn a switch and decree merriment.'

'Now that you've had this wonderful talk with Gunnar - it's time to go - please, please, for my sake, I've never said this before, never begged you before - I do now - please don't see her - you needn't go to the office any more - let's go away on holiday, go away anywhere - '

'Don't be so silly, Crystal, anyway we haven't got any money. Where do you want to go, the South of France?'

'I'd love to go to France,' said Crystal, 'I'd love to. It seems to me now I've been stupid. I shouldn't have let us get like this. I've lived all these years like a mouse - '

'The dearest goodest little mouse that ever was!'

'In a hole, just sitting here and waiting for you to come and see me, that's what it comes to, it isn't a life - '

'I know, I know, I know, don't tell me, don't torment me with it! I wanted to make you happy, when we were young I thought of nothing else, I wanted to succeed for you, I wanted to be rich for you - and look what it's all come to.'

'I've never complained - '

'Maybe you should have done, if you feel like this!'

'Maybe I should have done. Sometimes it's wicked to be unhappy. Please let's go on holiday. I'll make myself some dresses. I'd like to stay in a hotel. I've never stayed in a hotel.'

'Crystal, darling, stop it, you'll make us both cry, like you used to do in the caravan! We can't go on holiday, (a) because we've got no cash, (b) because I've got to stay here and finish various things. I've got to work my month at the office, I need the time, I need the bloody money. Gunnar may want to see me again. I - '

'You want to see her. That's the only thing that's keeping you.'

'Don't be so bloody spiteful.'

'I'm not spiteful, I'm terrified. I think I shall see Arthur again.'

'See Arthur? I thought we'd finished with Arthur.'

'Dearest, I so much want a child. I've got nothing in my life. Of course I've got you -'

'I agree that amounts to nothing.'

'I want a child. A child could change everything for me. You don't want me to sit here forever becoming bitter and old? I've never complained, but I'm complaining now. Perhaps that's the beginning of being bitter and old. I must have things different - '

'Things could be different and worse.'

'I know you don't like Arthur - '

'I don't mind Arthur. I just think he's a nonentity.'

'Well, I'm a nonentity - '

'Crystal, you're not, you're my sister. Now stop moaning.'

'We could all go away - I'd so much like to live in the country - '

'You mean you and I and Arthur? Count me out. I'm not going anywhere with you and Arthur. He was all set to follow us to Australia!'

'Australia?'

'Oh never mind. He still loves you, he's still waiting. I suggest you and Arthur go to Australia and have six children.'

'Hilary, don't be angry - '

'I'm not angry, or if I am I ought to be shot. Crystal, don't bother me with these things just now, will you.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Just don't torment me at present, you torment me! I've got so much to think about, so much to decide, so much to do. I've got to bloody find a job apart from everything else. Probably the best thing for me to do is to commit suicide. Then you can live happily ever after with Arthur.'

'Oh darling - don't speak like that - you know Arthur doesn't matter - you're the only thing that matters to me - '

'My dear heart, I know it's awful, and I know we've lived stupidly. You're absolutely right, it's a sort of moral cowardice, pure obsession, there has been nothing good in it. I see that now, but what am I to do? I think I mixed up some idea of expiation with a sort of self-destructive disappointed anger against everything - Christ, I even made you suffer - it was probably something to do with the ghastly revengeful sort of religion we were brought up in.'

'Don't say that. If we've gone wrong we've misused our religion.'

'I won't argue. The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.'

'Don't see her.'

'Crystal, I've got to.'

SUNDAY.

IT HAD snowed all night. Now the sun was shining. I was with Kitty in Kensington Gardens. We had met at Peter Pan and walked up to my 'Leningrad garden'. Here there were few people about. Some well-padded individuals were exercising their dogs, watching with absurd pleasure the dogs' amazement at the snow, their play, the doggy footprints. The stone basins were frozen and some ducks, with comical caution, were slithering about on the ice. The fountains were bearded with opaque white icicles. We had carried a couple of chairs into the little stone pavilion at the end and were sitting there in a corner. The pavilion, heaped over with snow, was enclosed and private, our corner almost obscure. The snow had dulled the traffic noise, muffled the world about us, arched us in. Every now and then a dog ran up to the doorway, sniffed and ran off, wild with snow-joy, and a smiling wool-clad owner plodded by. No one else came. Straight ahead, between two stone nymphs, the lake curved away, goldened with willows, and the cloudless glittering blue sky arched over the snowy park. There was not a breath of wind.

The meeting with Kitty was a climax of quiet joy. There had been anguish, fear, indecision, then gradually the brightness of her presence cast beforehand, obliterating all else. Then I was with her and there was a strange blankness, an utter calm of delight. Suddenly, down into the furthest crannies of being all was well. It was all so strangely simple too, with a blameless simplicity as of childhood. Even Peter Pan, heaped up with snow, a scarcely decipherable crystal mound with streaks of polished gold, seemed for once a monument to innocence, as unsmirched as the very children who came to dig with little woolly mittened hands for the rabbits and the mice whom they knew so well. And Kitty and I too were like children, we laughed, we swung along together.

'Oh Kitty, I do love you, I'm sorry, I do, I just love saying it, it's my song of praise to the world, you don't have to do anything about it, I love your coat, it's so expensive and it smells so nice, I love your nose, I - '

'Hilary, stop, dear Hilary. You talk as if we could really be light-hearted.'

'Let's be. So much has happened in my mind since I last saw you - '

'Yes, yes. And in mine. Oh dear - I care for you so much, I care so much what happens to you, you've no idea what a figure you've been in my mind all these years - '

'A horrible figure I should have thought.'

'Of course I was curious.'

'You must have expected to hate me.'

'It's odd, but I never expected that.'

'You pitied me. That was prophetic. And you didn't just take on Gunnar's feelings.'

'I tried to be detached. And his feelings were never all that clear, I mean they were such a battlefield - '

'He was so wonderful to me on Friday, so generous, so simple, it was suddenly all sort of clarified and easy like it should be in heaven.'

'You think it will be easy in heaven?'

'Oh Kitty, I do just love talking to you, talking's so natural, babbling's natural, I don't usually babble. Yes, but heaven can only be on earth. Everything falls away, some crystal of personality that is most of all you, which perhaps you never new existed, understands it all clearly at last and you pardon everything, not even that, that's too personal, everything is in the light of God - '

'I'm so terribly glad you talked like that with Gunnar, he's been a different person since.'

'Really somehow better?'

'Yes, yes, yes.'

'You didn't listen, did you? Why did you come in at the end? I nearly fainted when you came in.'

'It was rather sort of - rash - but I wanted to be with both of you together - to sort of - establish that it was possible - '

'Oh my dear - Am I to see Gunnar again?'

'Wait, wait, I've got a lot of things to say - '

'Kitty, I can't waste this love, I can't, it mustn't be wasted, poured away upon the face of the universe, you must help me - '

'You have helped me so much - '

'Helped you?'

'Yes, and not only by helping Gunnar. I feel, you know, it sounds a bit weird, she's gone away at last.'

'Anne - '

'You did love her very much, didn't you?'

The idea that Kitty might be jealous of Anne because of me flickered luridly, then burst like a kind of rocket. 'Yes.'

'I'm glad you did - I mean, otherwise it would all have been - '

'Even more awful.'

'You know, it's a sort of strange experience, a strange pain, to have her coming at me now through you, as if differently made in a new life, a new Anne - '

'The same Anne, dear Kitty. Gunnar and I both loved her and she's dead. If there was any ghost it was something that Gunnar's anger invented and it's gone now.'

'Yes, I heard him say that. He had to suffer of course. And so did you. But my sufferings were idiotic, I mean my sufferings because of her. I was jealous of her as if she were still alive.'

'We can be jealous of the dead, but we must remember that they are dead - there's a sort of inevitable pity mixed in.'

'Yes. I feel the pity so much now, I feel all pity, as if all the resentful things were going away.'

'You said when we first met that you wanted your husband to be entirely here in the present with you, not a haunted man.'

'Yes, and I think it's happened, or at any rate it's happening - '