The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault

Author:Mary Renault [Renault, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781480432932
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-08-14T23:47:00+00:00

19

DURING THE TIME THAT followed this, I was much in the City, and little at home. There was a great emptiness within me; I was always glad to be in company, and did not always wait to find the best.

I could not speak of what had happened, even to Lysis. But some hint at least I would have given him, if he had not asked me in anger where I had been, and reproached me with leaving no word for him. Natural as this was, yet being still not myself I felt he had failed me at need, and only said shortly that I had been hunting. “Alone?” he asked. I told him yes. Seeing I had lied, I need not have been injured by his disbelief; yet I felt it an injury.

After this, though needing him more now than ever before, from being thoughtless I grew to be unkind. I often tormented him, well knowing what I did; saying to myself that his baseless jealousy deserved to be punished. Then lonely and wretched, and full of shame, I would return to him, as if this were to undo the past, or as if I had treated lightly a man without pride. At his first coldness I would let fly, and it would all begin again. Sometimes out of longing for his company I would beg his pardon, or set out to get round him in spite of himself, and we would be reconciled. But it was like the clouded gaiety of fever. At parting he would ask me with forced carelessness what I meant to do next day and whom I was seeing. I would laugh, and give him some slight answer; later, alone at night, I would have given anything to have parted friends, and could not think what had possessed me. For often in company, or with the troop about us, I would look at him knowing the world held nothing so dear; if at that moment we could be alone, it seemed, there would be no cloud between us. And I even thought he felt the same.

While I was with Sokrates, I could always stand aside and see my folly. Yet I did not come to him for counsel. When one day I could bear myself no longer, it was to Phaedo that I turned.

By chance I found myself lying next him at the hot-bathhouse. It was Kydon’s place, an irreproachable establishment. When the bath-man had done with us, and we were waiting for the masseur, we drew up our couches and talked. It is a place, one finds, for loosening the tongue, and I found my troubles pouring out with my sweat. He listened, lying on his belly, his head on his folded arms, looking round at me through his fair hair. Once he seemed about to interrupt me, but was silent, and heard me out. At the end, he said, “You’re not serious, are you, Alexias, when you say you can’t understand all this?”—“Why, yes; for I don’t think either of us really cares any less for the other.

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