“No,” she said,
“I would have welcomed a pedestal, after my rough life.
A halo can be a lovely thing, providing you can take it off, now and again, and become human.”
“What then?”
She sighed, and her hands dropped to her side.
She suddenly looked very tired.
She leaned back in her chair, and resting her head against the cushion closed her eyes.
“Finding religion does not always improve a person,” she said, “waking to the world did not help Ambrose.
His nature changed.”
Her voice sounded tired too, and oddly flat.
Perhaps if I had been speaking in the confessional, so had she.
She lay back in the chair pressing her eyes with the palms of her hands.
“Change?” I said.
“How did his nature change?”
I felt a queer sort of shock in my heart, like the shock that comes to you as a child when you suddenly learn of death, or of evil, or of cruelty.
“The doctors told me later that it was his illness,” she said, “that he could not help himself, that qualities lying dormant all his life came to the surface at long last, through pain, and fear. But I shall never be sure. Never be certain that it need have happened. Something in me brought out those qualities.
Finding me was ecstasy to him for one brief moment, and then catastrophe.
You were right to hate me.
If he had not come to Italy he would have been living here with you now.
He would not have died.”
I felt ashamed, embarrassed.
I did not know what to say.
“He might have become ill just the same,” I said, as though to help her.
“Then I would have borne the brunt of it, not you.”
She took her hands away from her face, and without moving looked across at me and smiled.
“He loved you so much,” she said.
“You might have been his son, he was so proud of you.
Always my Philip would do this, my boy would do that.
Why, Philip, if you have been jealous of me these eighteen months, I think we are quits.
Heaven knows I could have done with less of you at times.”
I looked back at her, and slowly smiled.
“Did you make pictures too?” I asked her.
“I never stopped,” she said.
“That spoiled boy, I told myself, always writing letters to him, which I may say he would read extracts from, but never show.
That boy who has no faults, but all the virtues.
That boy who understands him, when I fail.
That boy who holds three-quarters of his heart, and all the best of him.
While I hold one-third, and all the worst.
Oh, Philip…” She broke off, and smiled again at me.
“Good God,” she said, “you talk of jealousy.
A man’s jealousy is like a child’s, fitful and foolish, without depth.
A woman’s jealousy is adult, which is very different.”
Then she put back the cushion from behind her head, and patted it.
She straightened her gown, and sat upright in her chair.
“I would say that, for this night, I have talked to you enough,” she said.
She bent forward, and picked up the piece of embroidery that had fallen on the floor.
“I’m not tired,” I said.
“I could go on longer, much longer.
That is to say, not speaking perhaps myself, but listening to you.”
“We still have tomorrow,” she said.