‘Yes. I know that.’
‘You must not go in there . . . It is unsafe.’
I held out my hand. ‘Stand back. I am cursed with it too. Do not get any closer.’
This was a lie, of course, but an effective one. The watchman stepped back away from me, with considerable haste.
‘Rose,’ I said, through the door. ‘It’s me. It’s me. Tom. I just saw Grace. By the river. She told me you were here . . .’
It took a while, but I heard her voice, from inside. ‘Tom?’
It had been years since I had heard that voice.
‘Oh, Rose, open the door. I need to see you.’
‘I can’t, Tom. I am sick.’
‘I know. But I won’t catch it. I have been around many plague sufferers these last months and I have had not so much as a cold. Come on, Rose, open the door.’
She did so.
And she was there, a woman. We were the same age, near enough, but now she looked like she was nearing fifty, while I still seemed a teenager.
Her skin was grey. Sores patterned her face like territories on a map. She could hardly stand up. I felt guilty that I had made her leave her bed but she seemed pleased to see me. She talked, semi-coherently, as I helped her back into bed.
‘You look so young, still . . . You are still a young man . . . a boy, almost.’
‘I have a little line, in my forehead. Look.’
I held her hand. She couldn’t see the line.
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I am sorry I told you to leave.’
‘It was the right thing. Just my existence was a danger to you.’
I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don’t know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren’t. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.
Though I am absolutely sure, word for word, she then said: ‘There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy.’ And I felt the horror of her horror. That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another’s pain as if our own.
She drifted in and out of delirium.
The illness was taking further hold, almost by the minute. She was now the opposite of me. While for me life stretched out towardsan almost infinitely distant point in the future, for Rose the end was now galloping closer.
It was dark in the house. All the windows had been boarded up. But as she lay on the bed in her damp night clothes, I could see her face shining like pale marble, the red and grey patches colonising her skin. Her neck was swollen with egg-sized lumps. It was terrible, a kind of violation, to see her transformed like this.
‘It’s all right, Rose. It’s all right.’
Her eyes were wide with fear, almost as if something was inside her skull, slowly pushing from behind.
‘Soft, soft, soft . . . All will be well . . .’
It was such a ridiculous thing to say. All was not going to be well.
She moaned a little. Her body writhed in pain.
‘You must go.’ Her voice was dry.
I leaned over and kissed her brow.
