‘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.’