Foe

III

The staircase was dark and mean. My knock echoed as if on emptiness. But I knocked a second time, and heard a shuffling, and from behind the door a voice, his voice, low and cautious. ‘It is I, Susan Barton,’ I announced — ‘I am alone, with Friday.’ Whereupon the door opened and he stood before me, the same Foe I had first set eyes on in Kensington Row, but leaner and quicker, as though vigilance and a spare diet agreed with him.

‘May we come in?’ I said.

He made way and we entered his refuge. The room was lit by a single window, through which poured the afternoon sun. The view was to the north, over the roofs of Whitechapel. For furniture there was a table and chair, and a bed, slovenly made; one corner of the room was curtained off.

‘It is not as I imagined it,’ I said. ‘I expected dust thick on the floor, and gloom. But life is never as we expect it to be. I recall an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instance a bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will it come home to us that we are in eternity.’

‘It is an author I have not read.’

‘The idea has remained with me from my childhood. But I have come to ask about another story. The history of ourselves and the island — how does it progress? Is it written?’

‘It progresses, but progresses slowly, Susan. It is a slow story, a slow history. How did you find your way to me?’

‘By good fortune entirely. I met your old housekeeper Mrs Thrush in Covent Garden after Friday and I came back from Bristol (I wrote you letters on the Bristol road, I have them with me, I will give them to you). Mrs Thrush directed us to the boy who runs errands for you, with a token that we were to be trusted, and he led us to this house.’

‘It is excellent that you have come, for there is more I must know about Bahia, that only you can tell me.’

‘Bahia is not part of my story,’ I replied, ‘but let me tell you whatever I can. Bahia is a city built on hills. To convey cargoes from the harbour to their warehouses, the merchants have therefore spanned a great cable, with pulleys and windlasses. From the streets you see bales of cargo sail overhead on the cable all day. The streets are a-bustle with people going about their business, slave and free, Portuguese and Negro and Indian and half-breed. But the Portuguese women are seldom to be seen abroad. For the Portuguese are a very jealous race. They have a saying: In her life a woman has but three occasions to leave the house for her baptism, her wedding, and her burial. A woman who goes abroad freely is thought a whore. I was thought a whore. But there are so many whores there, or, as I prefer to call them, free women, that I was not daunted. In the cool of the evening the free women of Bahia don their finest clothes, put hoops of gold about their necks and golden bracelets on their arms and ornaments of gold in their hair, and walk the streets; for gold is cheap there. The most handsome are the women of colour, or mulatas as they are called. The Crown has failed to halt the private traffic in gold, which is mined in the interior and sold by the miners to the goldsmiths. Alas, I have nothing to show you of the craft of these excellent smiths, not even a pin. All I had was taken from me by the mutineers. I came ashore on the island with nothing but the clothes I wore, red as a beetroot from the sun, my hands raw and blistered. It is no wonder I failed to charm Cruso.’

‘And Friday?’ ‘Friday?’ ‘Did Friday ever grow enamoured of you?’ ‘How are we ever to know what goes on in the heart of Friday? But I think not.’ I turned to Friday, who had been squatting all the while by the door with his head on his knees. ‘Do you love me, Friday?’ I called softly. Friday did not so much as raise his head. ‘We have lived too close for love, Mr Foe. Friday has grown to be my shadow. Do our shadows love us, for all that they are never patted from us?’

Foe smiled. ‘Tell me more of Bahia,’ he said.

‘There is much to be said of Bahia. Bahia is a world in itself. But why? Bahia is not the island. Bahia was but a stepping stone on my way.’ ·

‘That may not be so,’ replied Foe cautiously. ‘Rehearse your story and you will see. The story begins in London. Your daughter is abducted or elopes, I do not know which, it does not matter. In quest of her you sail to Bahia, for you have intelligence that she is there. In Bahia you spend no less than two years, two fruitless years. How do you live all this time? How do you clothe yourself? Where do you sleep? How do you pass the days? Who are your friends? These are questions that are asked, which we must answer, And what has been the fate of your daughter? Even in the great spaces of Brazil a daughter does not vanish like smoke. Is it possible that while you are seeking her she is seeking you? But enough of questions. At last you despair. You abandon your quest and depart. Shortly thereafter your daughter arrives in Bahia, from the backlands, in search of you. She hears talk of a tall Englishwoman who has taken ship for Lisbon, and follows. She haunts the docks of Lisbon and Oporto. Rough sailors think her a blessed simpleton and treat her with kindness. But no one has heard of a tall Englishwoman off a ship from Bahia. Are you on the Azores, gazing out to sea, mourning, like Ariadne? We do not know. Time passes. Your daughter despairs. Then chance brings to her ears the story of a woman rescued from an island where she has been marooned with an old man and his black slave. Is this woman by some chance her mother? She follows a trail of rumour from Bristol to London, to the house where the woman had briefly taken service (this is the house on Kensington Row). There she learns the woman’s name. It is the same as hers.

‘We therefore have five parts in all: the loss of the daughter; the quest for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and reunion of the daughter with her mother. It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode — which is properly the second part of the middle — and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.’

All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me. I sat heavy-limbed.

‘The island is not a story in itself,’ said Foe gently, laying a hand on my knee. ‘We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger story. By itself it is no better than a waterlogged boat drifting day after day in an empty ocean till one day, humbly and without commotion, it sinks. The island lacks light and shade. It is too much the same throughout. It is like a loaf of bread. It will keep us alive, certainly, if we are starved of reading; but who will prefer it when there are tastier confections and pastries to be had?’

‘In the letters you did not read,’ I said, ‘I told you of my conviction that, if the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue.’

Foe made no reply, and I went on. ‘The story of Friday’s tongue is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.

‘Mr Foe,’ I proceeded, speaking with gathering difficulty, ‘when I lived in your house I would sometimes lie awake upstairs listening to the pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from Friday below, a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black smoke. Before long I could not breathe, I would feel I was stifling in my bed. My lungs, my heart, my head were full of black smoke. I had to spring up and open the curtains and put my head outside and breathe fresh air and see for myself that there were stars still in the sky.

‘In my letters I have told you the story of Friday’s dancing. But I have not told you the whole story.

‘After Friday discovered your robes and wig and took them as his livery, he would spend entire days spinning and dancing and singing, after his fashion. What I did not tell you was that for his dancing he would wear nothing but the robes and wig. When he stood still he was covered to the ankles; but when he spun, the robes would stand out stiffly about him, so much so that one might have supposed the purpose of his dancing was to show forth the nakedness underneath.

‘Now when Cruso told me that the slavers were in the habit of cutting out the tongues of their prisoners to make them more tractable, I confess I wondered whether he might not be employing a figure, for the sake of delicacy: whether the lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious mutilation; whether by a dumb slave I was to understand a slave unmanned.

‘When I heard the humming that first morning and came to the door and was met with the spectacle of Friday at his dancing with his robes flying about him, I was so confounded that I gaped without shame at what had hitherto been veiled from me. For though I had seen Friday naked before, it had been only from a distance: on our island we had observed the decencies as far as we could, Friday not least of us.

‘I have told you of the abhorrence I felt when Cruso opened Friday’s mouth to show me he had no tongue. What Cruso wanted me to see, what I averted my eyes from seeing, was the thick stub at the back of the mouth, which ever afterwards I pictured to myself wagging and straining under the sway of emotion as Friday tried to utter himself, like a worm cut in half contorting itself in death-throes. From that night on I had continually to fear that evidence of a yet more hideous mutilation might be thrust upon my sight.

‘In the dance nothing was still and yet everything was still. The whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Friday’s shoulders and enclosing him; Friday was the dark pillar at its centre. What had been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or, I should say, my eyes were open to what was present to them.

‘I saw and believed I had seen, though afterwards I remembered Thomas, who also saw, but could not be brought to believe till he had put his hand in the wound.

‘I do not know how these matters can be written of in a book unless they are covered up again in figures. When I first heard of you I was told you were a very secret man, a clergyman of sorts, who in the course of your work heard the darkest of confessions from the most desperate of penitents. I will not kneel before him like one of his gallows-birds, I vowed, with a mouth full of unspeakable confidences: I will say in plain terms what can be said and leave unsaid what cannot. Yet here I am pouring out my darkest secrets to you! You are like one of those notorious libertines whom women arm themselves against, but against whom they are at last powerless, his very notoriety being the seducer’s shrewdest weapon.’

‘You have not told me all I need to know of Bahia,’ said Foe.

‘I told myself (have I not confessed this before?): He is like the patient spider who sits at the heart of his web waiting for his prey to come to him. And when we struggle in his grasp, and he opens his jaws to devour us, and with our last breath we cry out, he smiles a thin smile and says: “I did not ask you to come visiting, you came of your own will.” ‘

A long pause fell between us. ‘Tossed on shores I never thought to visit’ — the words came to me unbidden. What was their meaning? From the street below came the noise of a woman scolding. On and on went her tirade. I smiled — I could not help myself — and Foe smiled too.

‘As for Bahia,’ I resumed, ‘it is by choice that I say so little of it. The story I desire to be known by is the story of the island. You call it an episode, but I call it a story in its own right. It commences with my being cast away there and concludes with the death of Cruso and the return of Friday and myself to England, full of new hope. Within this larger story are inset the stories of how I came to be marooned (told by myself to Cruso) and of Cruso’s shipwreck and early years on the island (told by Cruso to myself), as well as the story of Friday, which is properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative (I picture it as a buttonhole, ·carefully cross-stitched around, but empty, waiting for the button). Taken in all, it is a narrative with a beginning and an end, and with pleasing digressions too, lacking only a substantial and varied middle, in the place where Cruso spent too much time “tilling the terraces and I too much time tramping the shores. Once you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not accept because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce the island to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter. This too I reject.

‘You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes ia cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You ‘will respond: he is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself? — how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what

make of him. Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence. He is the child of his silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be born that cannot be born. Whereas the silence I keep regarding Bahia and other matters is chosen and purposeful: it is my own silence. Bahia, I assert, is a world in itself, and Brazil an even greater world. Bahia and Brazil do not belong within an island story, they cannot be cramped into its confines. For instance: In the streets of Bahia you will see Negro women bearing trays of confections for sale. Let me name some few of these confections. There are pamonhas or Indian corn-cakes; quimados, made of sugar, called in French bon-bons; pão de milho, spongecake made with corn, and pão de arroz, made with rice; also rolete de cana or sugar-cane roll. These are the names that come to me; but there are many others, both sweet and savoury, and all to be found on a single confectioner’s tray on the corner of any street. Think how much more there is of the strange and new in this vigorous city, where throngs of people surge through the streets day and night, naked Indians from the forests and ebony Dahomeyans and proud Lusitanians and half-breeds of every hue, where fat merchants are borne in litters by their slaves amid processions of ftagellants and whirling dancers and food-vendors and crowds on their way to cock-fights. How can you ever close Bahia between the covers of a book? It is only small and thinly peopled places that can be subjugated and held down in words, such as desert islands and lonely houses. Besides, my daughter is no longer in Bahia but is gone into the interior, into a world so vast and strange I can hardly conceive it, a world of plains and plantations such as the one Cruso left behind, where the ant is emperor and everything is turned on its head.

‘I am not, do you see, one of those thieves or highwaymen of yours who gabble a confession and are then whipped off to Tyburn and eternal silence, leaving you to make of their stories whatever you fancy. It is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold. By such means do I still endeavour to be father to my story.”

Foe spoke. ‘There is a story I would have you hear, Susan, from my days as visitor to Newgate. A woman, a convicted thief, as she was about to be led to the cart that would take her to Tyburn, asked for a minister to whom to make her true confession; for the confession she had made before, she said, was false. So the ordinary was summoned. To him she confessed again the thefts for which she had stood accused, and more besides; she confessed numerous impurities and blasphemies; she confessed to abandoning two children and stifling a third in the cot. She confessed a husband in Ireland and a husband transported to the Carolinas and a husband with her in Newgate, all alive. She detailed crimes of her young womanhood and crimes of her childhood, till at last, with the sun high in the heavens and the turnkey pounding at the door, the chaplain stilled her. “It is hard for me to believe, Mrs — ,” he said, “that a single lifetime can have sufficed for the commission of all these crimes. Are you truly as great a sinner as you would have me believe?” “If I do not speak the truth, reverend father,” replied the woman (who was Irish, I may say), “then am I not abusing the sacrament, and is that not a sin worse even than those l have confessed, calling for further confession and repentance? And if my repentance is not truly felt (and is it truly felt?-I look into my heart and cannot say, so dark is it there), then is my confession not false, and is that not sin redoubled?” And the woman would have gone ·on confessing and throwing her confession in doubt all day long, till the carter dozed and the pie-men and the crowds went home, had not the chaplain held .up his hands and in a loud voice shriven the woman, over all her protestations that her story was not done, and then hastened away.’

‘Why do you tell me this story?’ I asked. ‘Am I the woman whose time has come to be taken to the gallows, and are you the chaplain?’

‘You are free to give to the story what application you will,’ Foe replied. ‘To me the moral of the story is that there comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever after be content to hold our peace.’

‘To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irishwoman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned.’

‘Then I will tell you a second story. A woman (another woman) was condemned to die-I forget the crime. As the fatal day approached she grew more and more despairing, for she could find no one to take charge of her infant daughter, who was with her in the cell. At last one of her gaolers, taking pity on her distress, spoke with his wife, and together they agreed they would adopt the child as their own. When this condemned woman saw her child safe in the arms of her foster-mother, she turned to her captors and said: “Now you may do with me as you wish. For I have escaped your prison; all you have here is the husk of me” (intending, I believe, the husk that the butterfly leaves behind when it is born). This is a story from the old days; we no longer handle mothers so barbarously. Nevertheless, it retains its application, and the application is: There are more ways than one of living eternally.

‘Mr Foe, I do not have the skill of bringing out parables one after another like roses from a conjurer’s sleeve. There was a time, I grant, when I hoped to be famous, to see heads turn in the street and hear folk whisper, “There goes Susan Barton the castaway.” But that was an idle ambition, long since discarded. Look at me. For two days I have not eaten. My clothes are in tatters, my hair is lank. I look like a~ old woman, a filthy old gipsy-woman. I sleep in doorways, in churchyards, under bridges. Can you believe this beggar’s life is what I desire? With a bath and new clothes and a letter of introduction from you I could tomorrow find myself a situation as a cook-maid, and a comfortable situation too, in a good house. I could return in every respect to the life of a substantial body, the life you recommend. But such a life is abject. It is the life of a thing. A whore used by men is used as a substantial body. The waves picked me up and cast me ashore on an island, and a year later the same waves brought a ship to rescue me, and of the true story of that year, the story as it should be seen in God’s great scheme of things, I remain as ignorant as a newborn babe. That is why I cannot rest, that is why I follow you to your hiding-place like a bad penny. Would I be here if I did not believe you to be my intended, the one alone intended to tell my true story?

‘Do you know the story of the Muse, Mr Foe? The Muse is a woman, a goddess, who visits poets in the night and begets stories upon them. In the accounts they give afterwards, the poets say that she comes in the hour of their deepest despair and touches them with sacred fire, after which their pens, that have been dry, flow. When I wrote my memoir for you, and saw how like the island it was, under my pen, dull and vacant and without life, I wished that there were such a being as a man-Muse, a youthful god who visited authoresses in the night and made their pens flow. But now I know better. The Muse is both goddess and begetter. I was intended not to be the mother of my story, but to beget it. It is not I who am the intended, but you. But why need I argue my case? When is it ever asked of a man who comes courting that he plead in syllogisms? Why should it be demanded of me?’

Foe made no reply, but crossed the room to the curtained alcove and returned with a jar. ‘These are wafers made with almond-paste after the Italian fashion,’ he said. ‘Alas, they are all I have to offer.’

I took one and tasted it. So light was it that it melted on my tongue. ‘The food of gods,’ I remarked. Foe smiled and shook his head. I held out a wafer to Friday, who languidly took it from my hand. ‘The boy Jack will be coming shortly,’ said Foe; ‘then I will send him out for our supper.’

A silence fell. I gazed out at the steeples and rooftops. ‘You have found yourself a fine retreat,’ I said ‘a true eagle’s-nest. I wrote my memoir by candlelight in a windowless room, with the paper on my knee. Is that the reason, do you think, why my story was so dull — that my vision was blocked, that I could not see?’

‘It is not a dull story, though it is too much the same,’ said Foe.

‘It is not dull so long as we remind ourselves it is true. But as an adventure it is very dull indeed. That is why you pressed me to bring in the cannibals, is it not?’ Foe inclined his head judiciously this way and that. ‘In Friday here you have a living cannibal,’ I pursued. ‘Behold. If we are to go by Friday, cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen.’ ‘They lose their vivacity when deprived of human flesh, I am sure,’ replied Foe.

There was a tap at the door and the boy came in who had guided us to the house. ‘Welcome, Jack!’ called Foe.. ‘Mistress Barton, whom you· have met, is to dine with us, so will you ask for double portions?’ He took out his purse and gave Jack money. ‘Do not forget Friday,’ I put in. ‘And a portion for Friday the manservant too, by all means,’ said Foe. The boy departed. ‘I found Jack among the waifs and orphans who sleep in the ash-pits at the glassworks. He is ten years old, by his reckoning, but already a notable pick-pocket.’ ‘Do you not try to correct him?’ I inquired. ‘To make him honest would be to condemn him to the workhouse,’ said Foe-’Would you see a child in the workhouse for the sake of a few handkerchiefs?’ ‘No; but you are training him for the gallows,’ I replied — ‘Can you not take him in and teach him his letters and send him out as an apprentice?’ ‘If I were to follow that advice, how many apprentices would I not have sleeping on my floor, whom I have saved from the streets?’ said Foe — ‘I should be taken for a thief-master and sent to the gallows myself. Jack has his own life to live, better than any I could devise for him.’ ‘Friday too has a life of his own,’ I said; ‘but I do not therefore turn Friday out on the streets.’ ‘Why do you not?’ said Foe. ‘Because he is helpless,’ said I — ‘Because London is strange to him. Because he would be taken for a runaway, and sold, and transported to Jamaica.’ ‘Might he not rather be taken in by his own kind, and cared for and fed?’ said Foe — ‘There are more Negroes in London than you would believe. Walk along Mile End Road on a summer’s afternoon, or in Paddington, and you will see. Would Friday not be happier among other Negroes? He could play for pennies in a street band. There are many such strolling bands. I would make him a present of my flute.’

I glanced across at Friday. Did I mistake myself, or was there a gleam of understanding in his eye? ‘Do you understand what Mr Foe says, Friday?’ I called. He looked back at me dully.

‘Or if we had mops in London, as they have in the west country,’ said Foe, ‘Friday could stand in the line with his hoe on his shoulder and be hired for a gardener, and not a word be passed!

Jack now returned, bearing a covered tray from which came an appetizing smell. He set the tray down on the table and whispered to Foe. ‘Allow us a few minutes, then show them up,’ said Foe; and to me: ‘We have visitors, but let us eat first:

Jack had brought roast beef and gravy, together with a threepenny loaf and a pitcher of ale. There being only the two plates, Foe and I ate first, after which I filled my plate again and gave it to Friday.

There was a knock. Foe opened the door. The light fell on the girl I had left in Epping Forest; behind her in the shadows was another woman. While I yet stood dumbstruck the girl crossed the room and put her arms about me and kissed me on the cheek. A coldness went through me and I thought I would fall to the floor. ‘And here is Amy,’ said the girl — ‘Amy, from Deptford, my nurse when I was little. There was a pounding in my ears, but I made myself face Amy. I saw a slender, pleasant-faced woman of my age, with fair curls showing under her cap. ‘I am happy to make your acquaintance,’ I murmured; ‘but I am sure I have never set eyes on you before in my life.

Someone touched my arm. It was Foe: he led me to the chair and made me sit and gave me a glass of water. ‘It is a passing dizziness,’ I said. He nodded.

‘So we are all together,’ said Foe. ‘Please be seated, Susan, Amy.’ He indicated the bed. The boy Jack stood at Foe’s side staring curiously at me. Foe lit a second lamp and set it on the mantel. ‘In a moment Jack will fetch coals and make a fire for us, will you not, Jack?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jack.

I spoke. ‘It is growing late, Friday and I will not be staying,’ I said.

‘You must not think of departing,’ said Foe. ‘You have nowhere to go; besides, when were you last in such company?’

‘Never,’ I replied. ‘I was never before in such company in my life. I thought this was a lodginghouse, but now I see it is a gathering-place for actors. It would be a waste of breath, Mr Foe, for me to say that these women are strangers to me, for you will only reply that I have forgotten, and then you will prompt them and they will embark on long stories of a past in which they will claim I was an actor too.

‘What can I do but protest it is not true? I am as familiar as you with the many, many ways in which we can deceive ourselves. But how can we live if we do not believe we know who we are, and who we have been? If I were as obliging as you wish me to be — if I were ready to concede that, though I believe my daughter to have been swallowed up by the grasslands of Brazil, it is equally possible that she has spent the past year in England, and is here in this room now, in a form in which I fail to recognize her — for the daughter I remember is tall and dark-haired and has a name of her own — if I were like a bottle bobbing on the waves with a scrap of writing inside, that could as well be a message from an idle child fishing in the canal as from a mariner adrift on the high seas — if I were a mere receptacle ready to accommodate whatever story is stuffed in me, surely you would dismiss me, surely you would say to yourself, “This is no woman but a house of words, hollow. without substance”?

‘I am not a story. Mr Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

Here I paused, breathless. Both a girl and the woman Amy were watching me intently. I saw. and moreover with what seemed friendliness in their manner. Foe nodded as if to encourage me. The boy stood motionless with the coal-scuttle in his hand. Even Friday had his eyes on me.

I crossed the room. At my approach the girl, I observed, did not waver. What other test is left to me? I thought; and took her in my arms and kissed her on the lips, and felt her yield and kiss me in return, almost as one returns a lover’s kiss. Had I expected her to dissolve when I touched her, her flesh crumbling and floating away like paper-ash? I gripped her tight and pressed my fingers into her shoulders. Was this truly my daughter’s flesh? Opening my eyes, I saw Amy’s face hovering only inches from mine, her lips parted too as if for a kiss. ‘She is unlike me in every way,’ I murmured. Amy shook her head. ‘She is a true child of your womb,’ she replied — ‘She is like you in secret ways.’ I drew back. ‘I am not speaking of secret ways,’ I said — ‘I am speaking of blue eyes and brown hair’; and I might have made mention too of the soft and helpless little mouth, had I wished ·to be hurtful. ‘She is her father’s child as well as her mother’s,’ said Amy. To which I was about to reply that if the girl were her father’s child then her father must be my opposite, and we do not marry our opposites, we marry men who are like us in subtle ways, when it struck me that I would likely be wasting my breath, for the light in Amy’s eye was not so much friendly as foolish.

‘Mr Foe,’ I said, turning to him — and now I believe there was truly despair in my looks, and he saw it — ‘I no longer know into what kind of household I have tumbled. I ·say to myself that this child, who calls herself by my name, is a ghost, a substantial ghost, if such beings exist, who haunts me for reasons I cannot understand, and brings other ghosts in tow. She stands for the daughter I lost in Bahia, I· tell myself, and is sent by you to console me; but, lacking skill in summoning ghosts, you call up one who resembles my daughter in no respect whatever. Or you privately think my daughter is dead, and summon her ghost, and are allotted a ghost who by chance bears my name, with an attendant. Those are my surmises. As for the boy, I cannot tell whether he is a ghost or not, nor does it matter.

‘But if these women are creatures of yours, visiting me at your instruction, speaking words you have prepared for them, then who am I and who indeed are you? I presented myself to you in words I knew to be my own-I slipped overboard, I began to swim, my hair floated about me, and so forth, you will remember the words — and for a long time afterwards, when I was writing those letters that were never read by you, and were later not sent, and at last not even written down, I continued to trust in my own authorship.

‘Yet, in the same room as yourself at last, where I need surely not relate to you my every action — you have me under your eyes, you are not blind — I continue to describe and explain. Listen! I describe the dark staircase, the bare room, the curtained alcove, particulars a thousand times more familiar to you than to me; I tell of your looks and my looks, I relate your words and mine. Why do I speak, to whom do I speak, when there is no need to speak?

‘In the beginning I thought I would tell you the story of the island and, being done with that, return to my former life. But now all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?’

Through all this talk Foe had stood stock still by the fireplace. I expected an answer, for never before had he failed for words. But instead, without preliminaries, he approached me and took me in his arms and kissed me; and, as the girl had responded before, I felt my lips answer his kiss (but to whom do I confess this?) as a woman’s answer her lover’s.

Was this his reply — that he and I were man and woman, that man and woman are beyond words? If so it was a paltry reply, demonstration more than reply, one that would satisfy no philosopher. Amy and the girl and Jack were smiling even broader than before. Breathless, I tugged myself free.

‘Long ago, Mr Foe,’ I said, ‘you wrote down the story (I found it in your library and read it to Friday to pass the time) of a woman who spent an afternoon in conversation with a dear friend, and at the end of the afternoon embraced her friend and bade her farewell till they should next meet. But the friend, unknown to her, had died the day before, many miles away, and she had sat conversing with a ghost. Mrs Barfield was her name, you will remember. Thus I conclude you are aware that ghosts can converse with us, and embrace and kiss us too.’

‘My sweet Susan,’ said Foe — and I could not maintain my stern looks when he uttered these words, I had not been called sweet Susan for many years, certainly Cruso had never called me that-’My sweet Susan, as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say: it is a question we can only stare at in silence, like a bird before a snake, hoping it will not swallow us.

‘But if you cannot rid yourself of your doubts, I have something to say that may be of comfort. Let us confront our worst fear, which is that we have all of us been called into the world from a different order (which we have now forgotten) by a conjurer unknown to us, as you say I have conjured up your daughter and her companion (I have not). Then I ask nevertheless: Have we thereby lost our freedom? Are you, for one, any less mistress of your life? Do we of necessity become puppets in a story whose end is invisible to us, and towards which we are marched like condemned felons? You and I know, in our different ways, how rambling an occupation writing is; and conjuring is surely much the same. We sit staring out of the window, and a cloud shaped like a camel passes by, and before we know it our fantasy has whisked us away to the sands of Africa and our hero (who is no one but ourselves in disguise) is clashing scimitars with a Moorish brigand. A new cloud floats past in the form of a sailing-ship, and in a trice we are cast ashore all woebegone on a desert isle. Have we cause to believe that the lives it is given us to live proceed with any more design than these whimsical adventures?

‘You will say, I know, that the heroes and heroines of adventure are simple folk incapable of such doubts as those you feel regarding your own life. But have you considered that your doubts may be part of the story you live, of no greater weight than any other adventure of yours? I put the question merely.

‘In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity), the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back.

‘Have you considered (and I will conclude here) that in your own wanderings you may, without knowing it, have left behind some such token for yourself; or, if you choose to believe you are not mistress of your life, that a token has been left behind on your behalf, which is the sign of blindness I have spoken of; and that, for lack of a better plan,. your search for a way out of the maze — if you are indeed amazed or be-mazed — might start from that point and return to it as many times as are needed till you discover yourself to be saved?’

Here Foe turned from me to give his attention to Jack, who had for a while been tugging his sleeve. Low words passed between them; Foe gave him money; and, with a cheery Good-night, Jack took his leave. Then Mrs Amy looked at her watch and exclaimed at how late it was. ‘Do you live far?’ I asked her. She gave me a strange look. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not far, not far at all.’ The girl seemed reluctant to be off, but I embraced her again, and kissed her, which seemed to cheer her. Her appearances, or apparitions, or whatever they were, disturbed me less now that I knew her better.

‘Come, Friday,’ I said-’it is time for us to go too.’

But Foe demurred. ‘You will do me the greatest of honours if you will spend the night here,’ he said ‘Besides, where else will you find a bed?’ ‘So long as it does not rain we have a hundred beds to choose from, all of them hard,’ I replied. ‘Stay with me then,’ said Foe — ‘At the very least you shall have a soft bed.’ ‘And Friday?’ ‘Friday too,’ said he. ‘But where will Friday sleep?’ ‘Where would you have him sleep?’ ‘I will not send him away,’ said I. ‘By no means,’ said he. ‘May he sleep in your alcove then?’ said I, indicating the corner of the room that was curtained off. ‘Most certainly,’ said he-’I will lay down a mat, and a cushion too.’ ‘That will be enough,’ said I.

While Foe made the alcove ready, I roused Friday. ‘Come, we have a home for the night, Friday,’ I whispered; ‘and if fortune is with us we shall have another meal tomorrow.’

I showed him his sleeping-place and drew the curtain on him. Foe doused the light and I heard him undressing. I hesitated awhile, wondering what it augured for the writing of my story that I should grow so intimate with its author. I heard the bedsprings creak. ‘Good night, Friday,’ I whispered — ‘Pay no attention to your mistress and Mr Foe, it is all for the good.’ Then I undressed to my shift and let down my hair and crept under the bedclothes.

For a while we lay in silence, Foe on his side, I on mine. At last Foe spoke. ‘I ask myself sometimes,’ he said, ‘how it would be if God’s creatures had no need of sleep. If we spent all our lives awake, would we be better people for it or worse?’

To this strange opening I had no reply.

‘Would we be better or worse, I mean,’ he went on, and meet what we meet there?’

‘And what might that be?’ said I.

‘Our darker selves,’ said he. ‘Our darker selves, and other phantoms too.’ And then, abruptly: ‘Do you sleep, Susan?’

‘I sleep very well, despite all,’ I replied.

‘And do you meet with phantoms in your sleep?’.

‘I dream, but I do not call the figures phantoms that come to me in dreams.’ ‘What are they then?’ ‘They are memories, memories of my waking hours, broken and mingled and altered.’

‘And are they real?’

‘As real, or as little real, as the memories themselves.’

‘I read in an old Italian author of a man who visited, or dreamed he visited, Hell,’ said Foe. ‘There he met the souls of the dead. One of the souls was weeping. “Do not suppose, mortal,” said this soul, addressing him, “that because I am not substantial these tears you behold are not the tears of a true grief.”’

‘True grief, certainly, but whose?’ said I — ‘The ghost’s or the Italian’s?’ I reached out and took Foe’s hand between mine. ‘Mr Foe, do you truly know who I am? I came to you in the rain one day, when you were in a hurry to be off, and detained you with a story of an island which you could not have wished to hear.’ (’You are quite wrong, my dear,’ said Foe, embracing me.) ‘You counselled me to write it down,’ I went on, ‘hoping perhaps to read of bloody doings on the high seas or the licentiousness of the Brazilians.’ (’Not true, not true!’ said Foe, laughing and hugging me — ‘you roused my curiosity from the first, I was most eager to hear whatever you might relate!’) ‘But no, I pursue you with my own dull story, visiting it upon you now in your uttermost refuge. And I bring these women trailing after me, ghosts haunting a ghost, like fleas upon a flea. That is how it appears to you, does it not?’ ‘And why should you be, as you put it, haunting me, Susan?’ ‘For your blood. Is that not why ghosts return: to drink the blood of the living? Is that not the true reason why the shades made your Italian welcome?’

Instead of answering, Foe kissed me again, and in kissing gave such a sharp bite to my lip that I cried out and drew away. But he held me close and I felt him suck the wound. ‘This is my manner of preying on the living,’ he murmured.

Then he was upon me, and I might have thought myself in Cruso’s arms again; for they were men of the same time of life, and heavy in the lower body, though neither was stout; and their way with a woman too was much the same. I closed my eyes, trying to find my way back to the island, to the wind and waveroar; but no, the island was lost, cut off from me by a thousand leagues of watery waste.

I calmed Foe. ‘Permit me,’ I whispered — ‘there is a privilege that comes with the first night, that I claim as mine.’ So I coaxed him till he lay beneath me. Then I drew off my shift and straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman). ‘This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets,’ I whispered, and felt some of the listlessness go out of my limbs.

‘A bracing ride,’ said Foe afterwards — ‘My very bones are jolted, I must catch my breath before we resume.’ ‘It is always a hard ride when the Muse pays her visits, I replied — ‘She must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring.’

Foe lay still so long I thought he had gone to sleep. But just as I myself began to grow drowsy, he spoke: ‘You wrote of your man Friday paddling his boat into the seaweed. Those great beds of seaweed are the home of a beast called by mariners the kraken — have you heard of it?-which has arms as thick as a mail’s thigh and many yards long, and a beak like an eagle’s. I picture the kraken lying on the floor of the sea, staring up through tangled fronds of weeds ~t the sky, its many arms furled about it, waiting. It is into that terrible orbit that Friday steers his fragile craft.’

What led Foe to talk of sea-monsters at such a time I could not guess, but I held my peace.

‘If a great arm had appeared and wrapped itself about Friday and without a sound drawn him beneath the waves, never to rise again, would it have surprised you?’ he asked.

‘A monstrous arm rising from the deep — yes, I would have been surprised. Surprised and unbelieving.’

‘But surprised to see Friday disappear from the face of the waters, from the face of the earth?’ Foe mused. Again he seemed to fall into a slumber. ‘You say,’ he said — and I woke up with a start — ‘you say he was guiding his boat to the place where the ship went down, which we may surmise to have been a slaveship, not a merchantman, as Cruso claimed. Well, then: picture the hundreds of his fellow-slaves — or their skeletons — still chained in the wreck, the gay little fish (that you spoke of) flitting through their eyesockets and the hollow cases that had held their hearts. Picture Friday above, staring down upon them, casting buds and petals that float a brief while, then sink to settle among the bones of the dead.

‘Does it not strike you, in these two accounts, how Friday is beckoned from the deep — beckoned or menaced, as the case may be? Yet Friday does not die. In his puny boat he floats upon the very skin of death and is safe.’

‘It was not a boat but a log of wood,’ said I.

‘In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story. I ask: Why was Friday drawn into such deadly peril, given that life on the island was without peril, and then saved?’

The question seemed fantastical. I had no answer.

· ‘I said the heart of the story,’ resumed Foe, ‘but I should have said the eye, the eye of the story. Friday rows his log of wood across the dark pupil — or the dead socket — of an eye staring up at him from the floor of the sea. He rows across it and is safe. To us he leaves the task of descending into that eye. Otherwise, like him, we sail across the surface and come ashore none the wiser, and resume our old lives, and sleep without dreaming, like babes.’

‘Or like a mouth,’ said I. ‘Friday sailed all unwitting across a great mouth, or beak as you called it, that stood open to devour him. It is for us to descend into the mouth (since we speak in figures). It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear.’

‘That too,’ said Foe. ‘I intended something else; but that too. We must make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday.’

‘But who will do it?’ I asked. ‘It is easy enough to lie in bed and say what must be done, but who will dive into the wreck? On the island I told Cruso ·it should be Friday, with a rope about his middle for safety. But if Friday cannot tell us what he sees, is Friday in my story any more than a figuring (or prefiguring) of another diver?’

Foe made no reply.

‘All my efforts to bring Friday to speech, or to bring speech to Friday, have failed,’ I said. ‘He utters himself only in music and dancing, which are to speech as cries and shouts are to words. There are times when I ask myself whether in his earlier life he had the slightest mastery of language, whether he knows what kind of thing language is.’

‘Have you shown him writing?’ said Foe.

‘How can he write if he cannot speak? Letters are the mirror of words. Even when we seem to write in silence, our writing is the manifest of a speech spoken within ourselves or to ourselves.’

‘Nevertheless, Friday has fingers. If he has fingers he can form letters. Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech. Be attentive to yourself as you write and you will mark there are times when the words form themselves on the paper de novo, as the Romans used to say, out of the deepest of inner silences. We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?’

‘Whether writing is able to form itself out of nothing I am not competent to say,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps it will do so for authors; it will not for me. As to Friday, I ask nevertheless: How can he be taught to write if there are no words within him, in his heart, for writing to reflect, but on the contrary only a turmoil of feelings and urges? As to God’s writing, my opinion is: If he writes, he employs a secret writing, which it is not given to us, who are part of that writing, to read.’

‘We cannot read it, I agree, that was part of my meaning, since we are that which he writes. We, or some of us: it is possible that some of us are not written, but merely are; or else (I think principally of Friday) are written by another and darker author. Nevertheless, God’s writing stands as an instance of a writing without speech. Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself. Friday has no speech, but he has fingers, and those fingers shall be his means. Even if he had no fingers, even if the slavers had lopped them all off, he can hold a stick of charcoal between his toes, or between his teeth, like the beggars on the Strand. The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say. None is so deprived that he cannot write.’

Finding it as thankless to argue with Foe as it had been with Cruso, I held my tongue, and soon he fell asleep.

Whether the cause was the unfamiliar surroundings or Foe’s body pressed against mine in the narrow bed I do not know; but, weary though I was, I could not sleep. Every hour I heard the watchman rapping on the doors below; I heard, or thought I heard, the patter of mouse-paws on the bare floorboards. Foe began to snore. I endured the noise as long as I could; then I slipped out of bed an~ put on my shift and stood at the window staring over the starlit rooftops, wondering how long it was yet to the dawn. I crossed the room to Friday’s alcove and drew aside the curtain. In the pitch blackness of that space was he asleep, or did he lie awake staring up at me? Again it struck me how lightly he breathed. One would have said he vanished when darkness fell, but for the smell of him, which I had once thought was the smell of woodsmoke, but now knew to be his own smell, drowsy and comfortable. A pang of longing went through me for the island. With a sigh I let the curtain drop and returned to bed. Foe’s body seemed to grow as he slumbered: there was barely a handsbreadth of space left me. Let day come soon, I prayed; and in that instant fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes it was broad daylight and Foe was at his desk, with his back to me, writing. I dressed and crept over to the alcove. Friday lay on his mat swathed in his scarlet robes. ‘Come, Friday,’ I whispered — ‘Mr Foe is at his labours, we must leave him.’

But before we reached the door, Foe recalled us. ‘Have you not forgotten the writing, Susan?’ he said. ‘Have you not forgotten you are to teach Friday his letters?’ He held out a child’s slate and pencil. ‘Come back at noon and let Friday demonstrate what he has learned. Take this for your breakfast.’ And he gave me sixpence, which, though no great payment for a visit from the Muse, I accepted.

So we breakfasted well on new bread and milk, and then found a sunny seat in a churchyard. ‘Do your best to follow, Friday,’ I said-’Nature did not intend me for a teacher, I lack patience.’ On the slate I drew a house with a door and windows and a chimney, and beneath it wrote the letters h-o-u-s. ‘This is the picture,’ I said, pointing to the picture, ‘and this the word.’ I made the sounds of the word house one by one, pointing to the letters as I made them, and then took Friday’s finger and guided it over the letters as I spoke the word; and finally gave the pencil into his hand and guided him to write h-o-u-s beneath the h-o-u-s I had written. Then I wiped the slate clean, so that there was no picture left save the picture in Friday’s mind, and guided his hand in forming the word a third and a fourth time, till the slate was covered in letters. I wiped it clean again. ‘Now do it alone, Friday,’ I said; and Friday wrote the four letters h-o-u-s, or four shapes passably like them: whether they were truly the four letters, and stood truly for the word house, and the picture I had drawn, and the thing itself, only he knew.

I drew a ship in full sail, and made him write ship, and then began to teach him Africa. Africa I represented as a row of palm trees with a lion roaming among them. Was my Africa the Africa whose memory Friday bore within him? I doubted it. Nevertheless, I wrote A-f-r-i-c-a and guided him in forming the letters. So at the least he knew now that all words were not four letters long. Then I taught him m-o-th-e-r (a woman with a babe in arms), and, wiping the slate clean, commenced the task of rehearsing our four words. ‘Ship,’ I said, and motioned him to write. hs-h-s-h-s he wrote, on and on, or perhaps h-f; and would have filled the whole slate had I not removed the pencil from his hand.

Long and hard I stared at him, till he lowered his eyelids and shut his eyes. Was it possible for anyone, however benighted by a lifetime of dumb servitude, to be as stupid as Friday seemed? Could it be that somewhere within him he was laughing at my efforts to bring him nearer to a state of speech? I reached out and took him by the chin and turned . his face toward me. His eyelids opened. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of those black pupils was there a spark of mockery? I could not see it. But if it were there, would it not be an African spark, dark to my English eye? I sighed. ‘Come, Friday,’ I said, ‘let us return to our master and show him how we have fared in our studies.’

It was midday. Foe was fresh-shaven and in good spirits.

‘Friday will not learn,’ I said. ‘If there is a portal to his faculties, it is closed, or I cannot find it.

‘Do not be downcast,’ said Foe. ‘If you have planted a seed, that is progress enough, for the time being. Let us persevere: Friday may yet surprise us.’

‘Writing does not grow within us like a cabbage while our thoughts are elsewhere,’ I replied, not a little testily. ‘It is a craft won by long practice, as you should know.’

Foe pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps, he said. ‘But as there are many kinds of men, so there are many kinds of writing. Do not judge your pupil too hastily. He too may yet be visited by the Muse.’

While Foe and I spoke, Friday had settled himself on his mat with the slate. Glancing over his shoulder, I saw he was filling it with a design of, as it seemed, leaves and flowers. But when I came closer I saw the leaves were eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot: row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes.

I reached out to take the slate, to show it to Foe, but Friday held tight to it. ‘Give! Give me the slate, Friday!’ I commanded. Whereupon, instead of obeying me, Friday put three fingers into his mouth and wet them with spittle and rubbed the slate clean.

I drew back in disgust. ‘Mr Foe, I must have my freedom!’ I cried. ‘It is becoming more than I can bear! It is worse than the island! He is like the old man of the river!’

Foe tried to soothe me. ‘The old man of the river, he murmured — ‘I believe I do not know whom you mean.’

‘It is a story, nothing but a story,’ I replied. ‘There was once a fellow who took pity on an old man waiting at the riverside, and offered to carry him across. Having borne him safely through the flood, he knelt to set him down on the other side. But the old man would not leave his shoulders: no, he tightened his knees about his deliverer’s neck and beat him on his flanks and, to be short, turned him into a beast of burden. He took the very food from his mouth, and would have ridden him to his death had he not saved himself by a ruse.’

‘I recognize the story now. It was one of the adventures of Sin bad of Persia.’

‘So be it: I am Sinbad of Persia and Friday is the tyrant riding on my shoulders. I walk with him, I eat with him, he watches me while I sleep. If I cannot be free of him I will stifle!’

‘Sweet Susan, do not fly into a passion. Though you say you are the ass and Friday the rider, you may be sure that if Friday had his tongue back he would claim the contrary. We deplore the barbarism of whoever maimed him, yet have we, his later masters, not reason to be secretly grateful? For as long as he is dumb we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish.’

‘Friday’s desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine. But how is Friday to recover his freedom, who has been a slave all his life? That is the true question. Should I liberate him into a world of wolves and expect to be commended for it? What liberation is it to be packed off to Jamaica, or turned out of doors into the night with a shilling in your hand? Even in his native Africa, dumb and friendless, would he know freedom? There is an urging that we feel, all of us, in our hearts, to be free; yet which of us can say what freedom truly is? When I am rid of Friday, will I then know freedom? Was Cruso free, that was despot of an island all his own? If so, it brought no joy to him that I could discover. As to Friday, how can Friday know what freedom· means when he barely knows his name?’

‘There is not need for us to know what freedom means, Susan. Freedom is a word like any word. It is a puff of air, seven letters on a slate. It is but the name we give to the desire you speak of, the desire to be free. What concerns us is the desire, not the name. Because we cannot say in words what an apple is, it is not forbidden us to eat the apple. It is enough that we know the names of our needs and are able to use these names to satisfy them, as we use coins to buy food when we are hungry. It is no great task to teach Friday such language as will serve his needs. We are not asked to turn Friday into a philosopher.’

‘You speak as Cruso used to speak, Mr Foe, when he taught Friday Fetch and Dig. But as there are not two kinds of man, Englishman and savage, so the urgings of Friday’s heart will not be answered by Fetch or Dig or Apple, or even by Ship and Africa. There will always be a voice in him to whisper doubts, whether in words or nameless sounds or tunes or tones.’

‘If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honour, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain. They are words without a home, wanderers like the planets, and that is an end of it. But you must ask yourself, Susan: as it was a slaver’s stratagem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s stratagem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?’

‘Friday is no more in subjection than my shadow is for following me around. He is not free, but he is not in subjection. He is his own master, in law, and has been since Cruso’s death.’

‘Nevertheless, Friday follows you: you do not follow Friday. The words you have written and hung around his neck say he is set free; but who, looking at Friday, will believe them?’

‘I am no slave-owner, Mr Foe. And before. you think to yourself: Spoken like a true slave-owner!, should you not beware? As long as you close your ears to me, mistrusting every word I say as a word of slavery, poisoned, do you serve me any better than the slavers served Friday when they robbed him of his tongue?’

‘I would not rob you of your tongue for anything, Susan. Leave Friday here for the afternoon. Go for a stroll. Take the air. See the sights. I am sadly enclosed. Be my spy. Come back and report to me how the world does.’

So I went for a stroll, and in the bustle of the streets began to recover my humour. I was wrong, I knew, to blame my state on Friday. If he was not a slave, was he nevertheless not the helpless captive of my desire to have our story told? How did he differ from one of the wild Indians whom explorers bring back with them, in a cargo of parakeets and golden idols and indigo and skins of panthers, to show they have truly been to the Americas? And might not Foe be a kind of captive too? I had thought him dilatory. But might the truth not be instead that he had laboured all these months to move a rock so heavy no man alive could budge it; that the pages I saw issuing from his pen were not idle tales of courtesans and grenadiers, as I supposed, but the same story over and over, in version after version, stillborn every time: the story of the island, as lifeless from his hand as from mine?

‘Mr Foe,’ I said, ‘I have come to a resolution.’

But the man seated at the table was not Foe. It was Friday, with Foe’s robes on his back and Foe’s wig, filthy as a bird’s nest, on his head. In his hand, poised over Foe’s papers, he held a quill with a drop of black ink glistening at its tip. I gave a cry and sprang forward to snatch it away. But at that moment Foe spoke from the bed where he lay. ‘Let him be, Susan,’ he said in a tired voice: ‘he is accustoming himself to his tools, it is part of learning to write.’

‘He will foul your papers,’ I cried.

‘My papers are foul enough, he can make them no worse,’ he replied — ‘Come and sit with me.’

So I sat down beside Foe. In the cruel light of day I could not but mark the grubby sheets on which he lay, his long dirty fingernails, the heavy bags under his eyes.

‘An old whore,’ said Foe, as if reading my thoughts — ‘An old whore who should ply her trade only in the dark.’

‘Do not say that,’ I protested. ‘It is not whoring to entertain other people’s stories and return them to the world better dressed. If there were not authors to perform such an office, the world would be all the poorer. Am I to damn you as a whore for welcoming me and embracing me and receiving my story? You gave me a home when I had none. I think of you as a mistress, or even, if I dare speak the word, as a wife.’

‘Before you declare yourself too freely, Susan, wait to see what fruit I bear. But since we speak of childbearing, has the time not come to tell me the truth about your own child, the daughter lost in Bahia? Did you truly give birth to her? Is she substantial or is she a story too?’

‘I will answer, but not before you have told me: the girl you send, the girl who calls herself by my name is she substantial?’

‘You touch her; you embrace her; you kiss her. Would you dare to say she is not substantial?’

‘No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you too are substantial, no less and no more than any of us. We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world.’

‘You have omitted Friday.’

I turned back to Friday, still busy at his writing. The paper before him was heavily smudged, as by a child unused to the pen, but there was writing on it, writing of a kind, rows and rows of the letter o tightly packed together. A second page lay at his elbow, fully written over, and it was the same.

‘Is Friday learning to write?’ asked Foe.

‘He is writing, after a fashion,’ I said. ‘He is writing the letter o.’

‘It is a beginning,’ said Foe. ‘Tomorrow you must teach him a.’