She had never despised and hated anyone so much.

“But Irene … Irene,” he kept stammering in confusion. “What on earth have I done? All of a sudden you stay away … I’ve been waiting for you day and night. I’ve been standing outside your apartment block today, waiting for a chance to speak to you for a minute.”

“Waiting for … oh, I see! You too.” She felt that her anger was driving her mad. It would feel so good to strike him! However, she controlled herself, cast him one more glance of burning revulsion, as if considering whether to spit all her accumulated rage out into his face in a torrent of abuse, and then, instead, she suddenly turned and made her way into the busy crowd without looking back. He stood there with his pleading hand still outstretched, bewildered and shaken, until the movement of the crowd in the street took hold of him and swept him away with it like a leaf sinking in the current, rocking and circling, and finally carried away by no will of its own.

 

The idea that such a man had ever been her lover suddenly struck her as absolutely unreal and senseless. She could remember nothing about him, not the colour of his eyes or the shape of his face. She had no physical memory of his caresses, and none of his words echoed in her mind apart from that pitiful, childish, dog-like “But, Irene!” stammered out in desperation. Although he was the cause of all misfortune, she had not once thought of him in all these days, even in her dreams. He meant nothing in her life, he was no temptation now, hardly even a memory. She didn’t understand how her lips could ever have touched his, and she felt strong enough to have sworn that she had never really listened to him. What had driven her into his arms, what terrible madness had led her to embark on an adventure that her own heart no longer understood, and hardly even her mind? She knew nothing more about it, everything in what had passed was strange to her, she was a stranger to herself.

But then again, hadn’t everything else changed in these few days, this single week of horror? Corrosive fear had eaten into her life like nitric acid, separating its elements. The weight of everything was suddenly different, all values were reversed, all relationships confused. She felt as if until this moment she had merely been groping her way vaguely through life with her eyes half closed, and now everything was illuminated with terrible clarity. Before her, as close as her own breath, were considerations that she had never touched but which, she suddenly realised, made up her real life, and others again that had once seemed important to her had dispersed like smoke. Up to this point she had mingled with lively society in the noisy, loquacious company of people who moved in well-to-do circles, and in essence she had lived only for herself, but now, after a week immured in her own household, she felt she did not miss that society. Instead, she was repelled by the pointless hurry and bustle of those who had nothing to do, and instinctively she judged the shallowness of her old inclinations, her constant neglect of love in action, in the light of this first truly strong feeling to come to her. She looked at her past as if looking into an abyss. Married for eight years, and deluding herself that she enjoyed too modest a happiness, she had never tried to come closer to her husband, she had remained a stranger to his real nature and no less to her own children. Paid domestic staff stood between them and her, governesses and servants who relieved her of all those little anxieties which, she only now began to sense—now that she had looked more closely at her children’s lives—were more alluring than the ardent glances of men, more delightful than a lover’s embrace. Slowly, her life was acquiring new meaning. Everything had affinities, all at once turning a gravely significant face to her. Now that she had known danger, and with that danger a genuine emotion, everything, however strange, suddenly began to have something in common with her. She felt herself in everything, and the world, once as transparent to her as glass, had come to mirror the dark shape of her own shadow. Wherever she looked, whatever she heard, was suddenly real.

She went to sit with the children. Their governess was reading aloud to them, a fairy tale about a princess who was allowed into all the rooms in her palace except the one with a door that was locked with a silver key. She opened the door all the same, and unlocking it sealed her fate. Wasn’t that her own story? She too had been intrigued by forbidden fruit, simply because it was forbidden, and it had brought her misfortune. Only a week ago, the simplicity of the little story would have made her smile, but now she felt that there was deep wisdom in it. There was a story in the newspaper about an army officer who had been blackmailed into turning traitor. She shuddered, and understood him.