“Dear hearts, don’t, don’t touch me! I’m so dreadfully on edge to-night. Nothing to do with the adventure, though. That was altogether beautiful.
“You see there was another woman on the bench, to whom they’d done exactly the same thing—only she’d been walking, not driving. They left us together, and said they’d come back later and shoot us. Terrorism, of course, but it would be such an ugly way of going out, wouldn’t it?
“She and I looked at one another, tied to either end of that bench, and in some way that I simply can’t describe, our spirits leapt together. She, it turned out afterwards, recognised me at once—that’s the worst of being too weak to refuse sittings when one’s pestered by every photographer in London—but I hadn’t the least idea who she was, and don’t care. Bright red hair, quite distinguished-looking, and altogether rather lovely in a pallid, blanc-de-Ninon way, though no actual physical charm. But I felt it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been a déclassée. By the way, what is a déclassée?
“This still isn’t the adventure—besides, you know this part already, all of you—but some of those ruffians came back again, and untied us, and said we could find our own way home. They’d taken my car, needless to say. I gave them one of my looks—the sort that means I’m really, really angry, like when someone kisses me in a clumsy way, or spills something on my frock—and the men melted, literally melted, away. Then she and I began to walk, and this is really when the part that matters started to happen.
“Having come through this shattering episode, and found ourselves unshot, and alive, it was almost like two disembodied spirits communing together. We got into the realities straight away. It was far more wonderful than if one of us had been a man, because then sex must have come into it, but as it was, each of us laid her whole soul perfectly bare, in the way one can never do to a man, if he loves one, for fear it should kill his love, or if he doesn’t love one, for fear it should make him think he does.
“But as it was, each of us was perfectly fearless, and in a way perfectly shameless. It was partly violent emotional reaction. You see, we’d both thought we were facing death.
“She told me that she was utterly miserable. Her husband was a brute, and her lover had let her down. He’d fallen in love with a girl, a sort of pure-eyed-baby person, and had just told this woman—who’d been giving him everything, of course, for years—that he wanted to se ranger and get married.
“She was nearly out of her mind, that woman. You see, she wasn’t young, and then some skin treatment she’d been having hadn’t succeeded, and was helping to break her up. She told me about that, too. Oh, there was nothing she didn’t say, but she simply didn’t care, we were so utterly intimate for that fleeting moment. Nobody else in the world knew, she told me. She’d always tried to avoid scandal, and no one had ever really known about her liaison with this man. (Women are clever about love.)
“And then I told her every single thing about myself—things that I’d never dream of breathing in this room, nor you of believing, most likely. Foul, filthy, hateful things about myself.... I know now why Catholics go to confession. It releases so much.
“Darlings, words can’t ever describe what it was like. I shall never forget it, as long as I live, and neither will she.