Sylva

“Nobody understood her marriage, but nobody guessed the wretched reason for it, the impure, secret, squalid reason. Not even I, though I gradually learned appalling things about her husband and the revolting life he led -but not a word about drugs. His sordid death came as no surprise to me. I must confess I even gave a rather scandalous sigh of relief, all the more as Dorothy had never managed to hide from me how unhappy she was. I thought she would come back to me. And I failed to understand her reasons for staying on in London. She had found a fairly good job there but one that couldn’t possibly interest her: secretary to the manager of a brickworks.

“I only learned the truth when she had to go to hospital for the first time. The doctor wrote to me. There are always some risks involved during a cure-fits of raving madness, suicidal mania. I dashed up to London, but I was not allowed to see her. Fortunately everything went well. After the cure I wanted to take her back with me, but she pleaded her work, declared that she could not leave her employer in the lurch. It is a fact that he was full of praise for Dorothy when I went to see him. He had not guessed a thing and naturally I did not tell him. Perhaps I should have done so. He’d have kept an eye on her. But drug addicts are incredibly clever at outwitting surveillance, so probably it would have been no good.

“Anyhow, she started again. A relapse is always more serious. This time, her work suffered. She stayed away for two or three days at a time. So much so that, after her second cure, four years later, she found her place at the brickworks had been filled. In a sudden burst of clearsightedness she wisely decided to come home.”

As he was speaking Dr. Sullivan had remained with his empty cup in his hand, hunched forward, his eyes glued to the Tadjik carpet as if he wanted to engrave its pattern in his memory. He now put the cup down on a side table and turned toward me.

“I had counted so much on you.” He sighed.

I felt guilt-stricken and thought he was accusing me. But no, his disappointment was not caused by me.

“She was fond of you, more than fond-anyway, as much as a drug addict can be. When she was fourteen or fifteen she even had a crush on you. But you were too shy to notice it, and later your youthfulness played against you. Young girls have a weakness for men of a certain maturity, and afterward it was too late, she was in the grip of an exclusive passion which left no room for ordinary love. When she wrote me that she would like to see you again, I had great hopes. So had she perhaps. They lasted for a few weeks. And then… Ah, then…”

He had slumped down again in his armchair.

“I don’t know when she started again. I didn’t notice it at once. And even up to a few days ago I wondered how ever she could get hold of the stuff in a place like Wardley. An envelope in the wastepaper basket with a London postmark and a postbox address enlightened me on that point. I can’t keep her locked up, after all!” he exclaimed, and fell silent.

I was literally stunned. Nothing else can express what I felt as I listened to those revelations. To such a degree that I could not at first unclench my jaws and the silence between us grew too solid to be broken. How long it lasted I don’t know. What was the old man thinking? He remained motionless in the depths of the armchair, with that air of a broken old puppet which only added to the density of the silence. In the end he turned toward me a questioning, faraway gaze that seemed almost surprised at meeting mine. I found nothing to say except: “I’m stunned.”

He raised a weary hand, and his mouth twitched sideways in a grimace that might possibly be construed as a smile. “Quite so, quite so,” he said, just as he would have said to a child apologizing for being stumped by a difficult passage in Lucretius: Don’t get flustered, take your time, it’ll come.

I stammered something like “How could I have guessed…” or “It’s unimaginable…” to which he replied with rejoinders of the same type, such as “Naturally” or “I quite understand.” I too was slumped deep in my armchair, and the two of us must have looked very much like a pair of discarded marionettes after a show. The first clear thought I was eventually able to express was:

“When exactly did the last relapse occur?”

And as I uttered it I became clearly aware of the anxiety that had stealthily been gnawing at me: wasn’t it my doing, after all?

He said, “Let me see, let me see…” but could not manage to remember. However, by dint of checking his reminiscences, it appeared that the date was definitely prior to her last visit but one when Dorothy and I had had that curious conversation which had been first violent, then pathetic. And that very violence, and equally the pathos, were not at all normal for a woman who was so reserved as a rule, sometimes even to the point of being enigmatic. However, I still could not convince myself that I was quite free from blame.