TWO DAYS LATER SHE found out. Too late to locate him, and anyhow, how could she be sure? It was a new situation and she was unfamiliar with the ethics. She reckoned that there was some sort of risk about accusing someone of having it, like there is in accusing someone of theft. She ground her teeth when she thought of him looking at the rim of dirt on his shirt-sleeve and saying 'Disgusting', and she thought if she had a good brother or a good male friend she would ask that good friend to go and kill him. But then again she remembered his reluctance and the shadow that came between them when she begged him to love her. Many of his jokes made sense now, and her anger was not that he had blemished her but that he had fled. He had not trusted her enough to stay. She thought, fondly for a minute, how they could get cured together. Do another joint thing. How long had he had it? Perhaps he didn't know himself. Perhaps it was contracted from Denise. At any rate it must have come to him from a woman and he gave it back to another woman: the perfect circuit of revenge. And at the same time she tried to dismiss it until that was no longer possible.
On the second day when she was lying on the mattress she felt a hot, burning pain. Hotter than the sun had ever made her. Putting her head between her knees, pretending to do a drawing on the sand, she sought out and confirmed the smell. It had been like that all night between her legs. Not the stealthy damp of nice desire but a scalding, unpleasant one. She took out a Cologne stick and touched her pulse and the back of her knees and her legs, and she thought, 'This will take it away, this cool anointment,' and she lay back and told herself it was all delusion, or the result of guilt. But by evening it felt worse and she hurried from the beach and put a chair to her bedroom door and took off her bathing suit to examine herself. There was no doubt. Something had infected her. The dark mesh of hair had a blight. She looked at it, smelt it, a nest of sobs now with ugly yellowing tears, and she damped the cake of soap and washed herself roughly as if by hurting herself she would take away her sin and her shame. Then she dried herself with her pants and wrapped them up in the English paper and put them on the bed until such time as she went out and could throw them in the sea. She foresaw herself contaminating the entire hotel, being found out, being asked to leave, a public scandal, the violinist running along behind her asking for compensation, with his notebook out also, getting the word and the symptoms. And then again she thought it could not be true. Perhaps it was the sun, or the salt water, or the pine cone she'd brought to bed the two nights since he left. The calm she thought she'd stored up from the five days with him had vanished. Even before she knew about the disease she had a desperate longing to be with him again. Down on the beach the sun no longer sustained her and she thought of everything he'd said and done, his jokes, his carelessness with money, the things he taught her and finally of his loving her, and she thought, 'I must hold something, someone, or I will die,' and she cradled her own body in her own arms. Then she saw the huge cone on the beach beside a coloured ball and she went over and picked it up. Its wings were opened and its colour grey from being continually washed by the sea. She held it and then brought it up to her room and put it on the chair beside her bed, and then she got so that she could not be still unless she held it, between her hands, between her legs, between the hollow of her breasts, in the folds of her arm, anywhere. Could this pine cone have done it, she thought, and looked again at the disgraced part where she'd just washed and knew with certainty that it would not stay dry and sweet-smelling for long. Already, despite the talcum, the smell was back in her nostrils, and taking the chair away from the door she put her hand on the service bell and waited with a wrap around her.
'I fear I have mislaid my T.C.P.,' she said when Maurice came.
'Madame,' he said beaming.
'For cuts,' she said, pointing to her wrist, where there were no cuts. She thought he sniffed. She drew back from him, petrified. She stood between him and the chair in the wrap, shivering. He thought she was merely cold.
