I glanced across at Friday. Did I mistake myself, or was there a gleam of understanding in his eye? ‘Do you understand what Mr Foe says, Friday?’ I called. He looked back at me dully.
‘Or if we had mops in London, as they have in the west country,’ said Foe, ‘Friday could stand in the line with his hoe on his shoulder and be hired for a gardener, and not a word be passed.’
Jack now returned, bearing a covered tray from which came an appetizing smell. He set the tray down on the table and whispered to Foe. ‘Allow us a few minutes, then show them up,’ said Foe; and to me: ‘We have visitors, but let us eat first.’
Jack had brought roast beef and gravy, together with a threepenny loaf and a pitcher of ale. There being only the two plates, Foe and I ate first, after which I filled my plate again and gave it to Friday.
There was a knock. Foe opened the door. The light fell on the girl I had left in Epping Forest; behind her in the shadows was another woman. While I yet stood dumbstruck the girl crossed the room and put her arms about me and kissed me on the cheek. A coldness went through me and I thought I would fall to the floor. ‘And here is Amy,’ said the girl – ‘Amy, from Deptford, my nurse when I was little.’ There was a pounding in my ears, but I made myself face Amy. I saw a slender, pleasant-faced woman of my age, with fair curls showing under her cap. ‘I am happy to make your acquaintance,’ I murmured; ‘but I am sure I have never set eyes on you before in my life.’
Someone touched my arm. It was Foe: he led me to the chair and made me sit and gave me a glass of water. ‘It is a passing dizziness,’ I said. He nodded.
‘So we are all together,’ said Foe. ‘Please be seated, Susan, Amy.’ He indicated the bed. The boy Jack stood at Foe’s side staring curiously at me. Foe lit a second lamp and set it on the mantel. ‘In a moment Jack will fetch coals and make a fire for us, will you not, Jack?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jack.
I spoke. ‘It is growing late, Friday and I will not be staying,’ I said.
‘You must not think of departing,’ said Foe. ‘You have nowhere to go; besides, when were you last in such company?’
‘Never,’ I replied. ‘I was never before in such company in my life. I thought this was a lodging-house, but now I see it is a gathering-place for actors. It would be a waste of breath, Mr Foe, for me to say that these women are strangers to me, for you will only reply that I have forgotten, and then you will prompt them and they will embark on long stories of a past in which they will claim I was an actor too.
‘What can I do but protest it is not true? I am as familiar as you with the many, many ways in which we can deceive ourselves. But how can we live if we do not believe we know who we are, and who we have been? If I were as obliging as you wish me to be – if I were ready to concede that, though I believe my daughter to have been swallowed up by the grasslands of Brazil, it is equally possible that she has spent the past year in England, and is here in this room now, in a form in which I fail to recognize her – for the daughter I remember is tall and dark-haired and has a name of her own – if I were like a bottle bobbing on the waves with a scrap of writing inside, that could as well be a message from an idle child fishing in the canal as from a mariner adrift on the high seas – if I were a mere receptacle ready to accommodate whatever story is stuffed in me, surely you would dismiss me, surely you would say to yourself, “This is no woman but a house of words, hollow, without substance”?
‘I am not a story, Mr Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.’
Here I paused, breathless. Both a girl and the woman Amy were watching me intently, I saw, and moreover with what seemed friendliness in their manner. Foe nodded as if to encourage me. The boy stood motionless with the coal-scuttle in his hand. Even Friday had his eyes on me.
I crossed the room. At my approach the girl, I observed, did not waver. What other test is left to me? I thought; and took her in my arms and kissed her on the lips, and felt her yield and kiss me in return, almost as one returns a lover’s kiss. Had I expected her to dissolve when I touched her, her flesh crumbling and floating away like paper-ash? I gripped her tight and pressed my fingers into her shoulders. Was this truly my daughter’s flesh? Opening my eyes, I saw Amy’s face hovering only inches from mine, her lips parted too as if for a kiss. ‘She is unlike me in every way,’ I murmured. Amy shook her head. ‘She is a true child of your womb,’ she replied – ‘She is like you in secret ways.’ I drew back. ‘I am not speaking of secret ways,’ I said – ‘I am speaking of blue eyes and brown hair’; and I might have made mention too of the soft and helpless little mouth, had I wished to be hurtful. ‘She is her father’s child as well as her mother’s,’ said Amy. To which I was about to reply that if the girl were her father’s child then her father must be my opposite, and we do not marry our opposites, we marry men who are like us in subtle ways, when it struck me that I would likely be wasting my breath, for the light in Amy’s eye was not so much friendly as foolish.
‘Mr Foe,’ I said, turning to him – and now I believe there was truly despair in my looks, and he saw it – ‘I no longer know into what kind of household I have tumbled. I say to myself that this child, who calls herself by my name, is a ghost, a substantial ghost, if such beings exist, who haunts me for reasons I cannot understand, and brings other ghosts in tow. She stands for the daughter I lost in Bahia, I tell myself, and is sent by you to console me; but, lacking skill in summoning ghosts, you call up one who resembles my daughter in no respect whatever. Or you privately think my daughter is dead, and summon her ghost, and are allotted a ghost who by chance bears my name, with an attendant. Those are my surmises. As for the boy, I cannot tell whether he is a ghost or not, nor does it matter.
‘But if these women are creatures of yours, visiting me at your instruction, speaking words you have prepared for them, then who am I and who indeed are you? I presented myself to you in words I knew to be my own – I slipped overboard, I began to swim, my hair floated about me, and so forth, you will remember the words – and for a long time afterwards, when I was writing those letters that were never read by you, and were later not sent, and at last not even written down, I continued to trust in my own authorship.
‘Yet, in the same room as yourself at last, where I need surely not relate to you my every action – you have me under your eyes, you are not blind – I continue to describe and explain. Listen! I describe the dark staircase, the bare room, the curtained alcove, particulars a thousand times more familiar to you than to me; I tell of your looks and my looks, I relate your words and mine. Why do I speak, to whom do I speak, when there is no need to speak?
‘In the beginning I thought I would tell you the story of the island and, being done with that, return to my former life. But now all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?’
Through all this talk Foe had stood stock still by the fireplace. I expected an answer, for never before had he failed for words. But instead, without preliminaries, he approached me and took me in his arms and kissed me; and, as the girl had responded before, I felt my lips answer his kiss (but to whom do
I confess this?) as a woman’s answer her lover’s.
Was this his reply – that he and I were man and woman, that man and woman are beyond words? If so it was a paltry reply, demonstration more than reply, one that would satisfy no philosopher. Amy and the girl and Jack were smiling even broader than before. Breathless, I tugged myself free.
‘Long ago, Mr Foe,’ I said, ‘you wrote down the story (I found it in your library and read it to Friday to pass the time) of a woman who spent an afternoon in conversation with a dear friend, and at the end of the afternoon embraced her friend and bade her farewell till they should next meet. But the friend, unknown to her, had died the day before, many miles away, and she had sat conversing with a ghost. Mrs Barfield was her name, you will remember. Thus I conclude you are aware that ghosts can converse with us, and embrace and kiss us too.’
‘My sweet Susan,’ said Foe – and I could not maintain my stern looks when he uttered these words, I had not been called sweet Susan for many years, certainly Cruso had never called me that – ‘My sweet Susan, as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say: it is a question we can only stare at in silence, like a bird before a snake, hoping it will not swallow us.
‘But if you cannot rid yourself of your doubts, I have something to say that may be of comfort. Let us confront our worst fear, which is that we have all of us been called into the world from a different order (which we have now forgotten) by a conjurer unknown to us, as you say I have conjured up your daughter and her companion (I have not). Then I ask nevertheless: Have we thereby lost our freedom? Are you, for one, any less mistress of your life? Do we of necessity become puppets in a story whose end is invisible to us, and towards which we are marched like condemned felons? You and I know, in our different ways, how rambling an occupation writing is; and conjuring is surely much the same. We sit staring out of the window, and a cloud shaped like a camel passes by, and before we know it our fantasy has whisked us away to the sands of Africa and our hero (who is no one but ourselves in disguise) is clashing scimitars with a Moorish brigand. A new cloud floats past in the form of a sailing-ship, and in a trice we are cast ashore all woebegone on a desert isle. Have we cause to believe that the lives it is given us to live proceed with any more design than these whimsical adventures?
‘You will say, I know, that the heroes and heroines of adventure are simple folk incapable of such doubts as those you feel regarding your own life. But have you considered that your doubts may be part of the story you live, of no greater weight than any other adventure of yours? I put the question merely.
‘In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity), the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back.
‘Have you considered (and I will conclude here) that in your own wanderings you may, without knowing it, have left behind some such token for yourself; or, if you choose to believe you are not mistress of your life, that a token has been left behind on your behalf, which is the sign of blindness I have spoken of; and that, for lack of a better plan, your search for a way out of the maze – if you are indeed a-mazed or be-mazed – might start from that point and return to it as many times as are needed till you discover yourself to be saved?’
Here Foe turned from me to give his attention to Jack, who had for a while been tugging his sleeve. Low words passed between them; Foe gave him money; and, with a cheery Good-night, Jack took his leave. Then Mrs Amy looked at her watch and exclaimed at how late it was. ‘Do you live far?’ I asked her. She gave me a strange look. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not far, not far at all.’ The girl seemed reluctant to be off, but I embraced her again, and kissed her, which seemed to cheer her. Her appearances, or apparitions, or whatever they were, disturbed me less now that I knew her better.
‘Come, Friday,’ I said – ‘it is time for us to go too.’
But Foe demurred. ‘You will do me the greatest of honours if you will spend the night here,’ he said – ‘Besides, where else will you find a bed?’ ‘So long as it does not rain we have a hundred beds to choose from, all of them hard,’ I replied. ‘Stay with me then,’ said Foe – ‘At the very least you shall have a soft bed.’ ‘And Friday?’ ‘Friday too,’ said he. ‘But where will Friday sleep?’ ‘Where would you have him sleep?’ ‘I will not send him away,’ said I. ‘By no means,’ said he. ‘May he sleep in your alcove then?’ said I, indicating the corner of the room that was curtained off. ‘Most certainly,’ said he – ‘I will lay down a mat, and a cushion too.’ ‘That will be enough,’ said I.
While Foe made the alcove ready, I roused Friday. ‘Come, we have a home for the night, Friday,’ I whispered; ‘and if fortune is with us we shall have another meal tomorrow.’
I showed him his sleeping-place and drew the curtain on him. Foe doused the light and I heard him undressing. I hesitated awhile, wondering what it augured for the writing of my story that I should grow so intimate with its author. I heard the bedsprings creak. ‘Good night, Friday,’ I whispered – ‘Pay no attention to your mistress and Mr Foe, it is all for the good.’ Then I undressed to my shift and let down my hair and crept under the bedclothes.
For a while we lay in silence, Foe on his side, I on mine. At last Foe spoke. ‘I ask myself sometimes,’ he said, ‘how it would be if God’s creatures had no need of sleep. If we spent all our lives awake, would we be better people for it or worse?’
To this strange opening I had no reply.
‘Would we be better or worse, I mean,’ he went on, ‘if we were no longer to descend nightly into ourselves and meet what we meet there?’
‘And what might that be?’ said I.
‘Our darker selves,’ said he. ‘Our darker selves, and other phantoms too.’ And then, abruptly: ‘Do you sleep, Susan?’
‘I sleep very well, despite all,’ I replied.
‘And do you meet with phantoms in your sleep?’
‘I dream, but I do not call the figures phantoms that come to me in dreams.’
‘What are they then?’
‘They are memories, memories of my waking hours, broken and mingled and altered.’
‘And are they real?’
‘As real, or as little real, as the memories themselves.’
‘I read in an old Italian author of a man who visited, or dreamed he visited, Hell,’ said Foe. ‘There he met the souls of the dead. One of the souls was weeping. “Do not suppose, mortal,” said this soul, addressing him, “that because I am not substantial these tears you behold are not the tears of a true grief.” ’
‘True grief, certainly, but whose?’ said I – ‘The ghost’s or the Italian’s?’ I reached out and took Foe’s hand between mine. ‘Mr Foe, do you truly know who I am? I came to you in the rain one day, when you were in a hurry to be off, and detained you with a story of an island which you could not have wished to hear.’ (‘You are quite wrong, my dear,’ said Foe, embracing me.) ‘You counselled me to write it down,’ I went on, ‘hoping perhaps to read of bloody doings on the high seas or the licentiousness of the Brazilians.’ (‘Not true, not true!’ said Foe, laughing and hugging me – ‘you roused my curiosity from the first, I was most eager to hear whatever you might relate!’) ‘But no, I pursue you with my own dull story, visiting it upon you now in your uttermost refuge. And I bring these women trailing after me, ghosts haunting a ghost, like fleas upon a flea. That is how it appears to you, does it not?’ ‘And why should you be, as you put it, haunting me, Susan?’ ‘For your blood. Is that not why ghosts return: to drink the blood of the living? Is that not the true reason why the shades made your Italian welcome?’
Instead of answering, Foe kissed me again, and in kissi
ng gave such a sharp bite to my lip that I cried out and drew away. But he held me close and I felt him suck the wound. ‘This is my manner of preying on the living,’ he murmured.
Then he was upon me, and I might have thought myself in Cruso’s arms again; for they were men of the same time of life, and heavy in the lower body, though neither was stout; and their way with a woman too was much the same. I closed my eyes, trying to find my way back to the island, to the wind and wave-roar; but no, the island was lost, cut off from me by a thousand leagues of watery waste.
I calmed Foe. ‘Permit me,’ I whispered – ‘there is a privilege that comes with the first night, that I claim as mine.’ So I coaxed him till he lay beneath me. Then I drew off my shift and straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman). ‘This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets,’ I whispered, and felt some of the listlessness go out of my limbs.
‘A bracing ride,’ said Foe afterwards – ‘My very bones are jolted, I must catch my breath before we resume.’ ‘It is always a hard ride when the Muse pays her visits,’ I replied – ‘She must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring.’
Foe lay still so long I thought he had gone to sleep. But just as I myself began to grow drowsy, he spoke: ‘You wrote of your man Friday paddling his boat into the seaweed. Those great beds of seaweed are the home of a beast called by mariners the kraken – have you heard of it? – which has arms as thick as a man’s thigh and many yards long, and a beak like an eagle’s. I picture the kraken lying on the floor of the sea, staring up through tangled fronds of weeds at the sky, its many arms furled about it, waiting. It is into that terrible orbit that Friday steers his fragile craft.’
What led Foe to talk of sea-monsters at such a time I could not guess, but I held my peace.
‘If a great arm had appeared and wrapped itself about Friday and without a sound drawn him beneath the waves, never to rise again, would it have surprised you?’ he asked.