165
How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark
Autumn evenings come...
He was deeply moved by his own reading. He had never loved
Julia so much as at this moment. Here was home — nothing else had
been other than a caravan.
. . . I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by firelight, that great brow
-
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Mutely, my heart knows how—
He rather wished that Julia had really been reading, but then of
course she wouldn't have been listening to, him with such adorable
attention.
If you join two lives, there is oft a scar,
They are one and one, with a shadowy third,
One near one is too far...
He turned the page and there lay a sheet of paper (he would have
discovered it at once, before reading, if she had put it in an envelope),
with the black neat handwriting.
Dearest Philip, only to say goodnight to you between the pages of
your favourite book—and mine. We are so lucky to have ended in the
way we have. With memories in common we shall for ever be a little in
touch.
Love, Josephine
He flung the book and the paper on the floor. He said, "The bitch.
The bloody bitch."
"I won't have you talk of her like that," Julia said with surprising
strength. She picked up the paper and read it.
"What's wrong with that?" she demanded. "Do you have
memories? What's going to happen to our memories?"
"But don't you see the trick she's playing? Don't you understand?
Are you an idiot, Julia?"
That night they lay in bed on opposite sides. Neither slept much. In
the morning Carter found a letter in the most obvious place of all which
he had somehow neglected: between the leaves of the unused single-
lined foolscap on which he always wrote his stories. It began:
"Darling.
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