The word lingered in the air once I had uttered it, dancing before me, and because he received it silently, making no comment, the word magnified itself into something heinous and appalling, a forbidden word, unnatural to the tongue.
And I could not call it back, it could never be unsaid.
Once again I saw the inscription on the fly-leaf of that book of poems, and the curious slanting R.
I felt sick at heart and cold.
He would never forgive me, and this would be the end of our friendship.
I remember staring straight in front of me at the windscreen, seeing nothing of the flying road, my ears still tingling with that spoken word.
The silence became minutes, and the minutes became miles, and everything is over now, I thought, I shall never drive with him again.
Tomorrow he will go away.
And Mrs Van Hopper will be up again.
She and I will walk along the terrace as we did before.
The porter will bring down his trunks, I shall catch a glimpse of them in the luggage lift, with new-plastered labels.
The bustle and finality of departure.
The sound of the car changing gear as it turned the corner, and then even that sound merging into the common traffic, and being lost, and so absorbed for ever.
I was so deep in my picture, I even saw the porter pocketing his tip and going back through the swing-door of the hotel, saying something over his shoulder to the commissionaire, that I did not notice the slowing-down of the car, and it was only when we stopped, drawing up by the side of the road, that I brought myself back to the present once again.
He sat motionless, looking without his hat and with his white scarf round his neck, more than ever like someone mediaeval who lived within a frame.
He did not belong to the bright landscape, he should be standing on the steps of a gaunt cathedral, his cloak flung back, while a beggar at his feet scrambled for gold coins.
The friend had gone, with his kindliness and his easy camaraderie, and the brother too, who had mocked me for nibbling at my nails.
This man was a stranger.
I wondered why I was sitting beside him in the car.
Then he turned to me and spoke.
'A little while ago you talked about an invention,' he said, 'some scheme for capturing a memory.
You would like, you told me, at a chosen moment to live the past again.
I'm afraid I think rather differently from you.
All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them.
Something happened a year ago that altered my whole life, and I want to forget every phase in my existence up to that time.
Those days are finished.
They are blotted out.
I must begin living all over again.
The first day we met, your Mrs Van Hopper asked me why I came to Monte Carlo.
It put a stopper on those memories you would like to resurrect.
It does not always work, of course; sometimes the scent is too strong for the bottle, and too strong for me. And then the devil in one, like a furtive peeping Tom, tries to draw the cork.
I did that in the first drive we took together.
When we climbed the hills and looked down over the precipice.
I was there some years ago, with my wife.
You asked me if it was still the same, if it had changed at all.
It was just the same, but — I was thankful to realise — oddly impersonal.
There was no suggestion of the other time.
She and I had left no record.
It may have been because you were with me.
You have blotted out the past for me, you know, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo.
But for you I should have left long ago, gone on to Italy, and Greece, and further still perhaps.
You have spared me all those wanderings.
Damn your puritanical little tight-lipped speech to me.
Damn your idea of my kindness and my charity.
I ask you to come with me because I want you and your company, and if you don't believe me you can leave the car now and find your own way home.
Go on, open the door, and get out.'
I sat still, my hands in my lap, not knowing whether he meant it or not.
'Well,' he said, 'what are you going to do about it?'
Had I been a year or two younger I think I should have cried.
Children's tears are very near the surface, and come at the first crisis.