“But I don’t want to see for myself. Steady, man! I quite understand. Of course you couldn’t know....”
“No, but look here, you’ll see....”
Feverishly he began fumbling in his inside-pockets, pulling out papers, a pocket-book, passports....
Venice could be very still. I imagined her in the doorway, looking at Napier in this state. She would be very still, and in her stillness she would be destroyed. Venice was jealous, so jealous and possessive. “Got to be with Napier,” she had pleaded to me once. “You don’t know what he’s thinking about half the time, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing the other half.”
Some of the papers dropped to the floor, and I picked them up and thrust them into his gaping pocket. The old nun smiled at me over her spectacles, and then looked at Napier and tapped her forehead. But you could see she liked the looks of Napier. “Quelle belle silhouette!” she grinned. I don’t believe that Napier to this day knows there was any one but our two selves in that lodge.
He waved a white thing covered with scrawled pencil-marks, and beside it I somehow saw that letter from a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives. But between the two came the vision of Venice destroyed.
“I don’t want to read it, Napier. I quite understand. What on earth does it matter whether you knew or not, so long as you know now?”
“Thinks a lot of you,” he said darkly. “Told me, last time I saw her....”
He passed a hand over his mouth. I said: “But....”
“Beastly,” he said, looking at me with enormous, dark surprise. “That’s what I feel. Beastly. As though my skin was a dirty shirt. Ever get that? I mean, here she’s dying, and I ... God, how one gets to know oneself! What? But I’d like you to see. I mean, since it’s you. She thinks a lot of you, I know she does. Thinks you’re nice. Funny how she says that, ‘nice.’ What? But what’s she want to lie for? Iris never lies. Never. That’s what beats me. I mean, why, to me? What? Go on, you’ll see....”