Her third wire arrived Sunday night, the same kind of message, this time from Bakersfield. I clung to my resolution for two hours. Then I pictured her wandering around, penniless, probably caught in the rain. I sent her fifty, with a message to buy some clothes and keep out of the rain.

Chapter Eighteen

Three nights later I came home from a ride to find my hotel door locked from the inside. I knew what that meant. I knocked but got no answer. I called her name. I hurried down the hall to the back door and ran up the hillside to the level of my window. I wanted to catch her redhanded. The window was down and so was the curtain on the inside, but there was an opening in the curtain and I could see into the room. It was lighted by a desk lamp and I could see all of it, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. The clothes closet door was locked, and I knew she was in there. I prised the window open. I pushed the glass quietly and slipped inside. The bed rugs were not on the floor. On tiptoe I walked towards the closet door. I could hear her moving inside the closet, as though she were sitting on the floor. Faintly I caught the cubeb-like smell of marijuana.

I reached for the knob of the closet door, and all at once I didn’t want to catch her at it. The shock would be as bad for me as for her. Then I remembered something that had happened to me when I was a little boy. It was a closet like that one, and my mother had opened it suddenly. I remembered that terror of being discovered, and I tiptoed from the closet door and sat in the chair at my desk. After five minutes I couldn’t stay in the room. I didn’t want her to know. I crept out of the window, closed it, and returned to the back door of the hotel. I took my time. When I thought it must be over, I walked loudly and briskly towards the door of my room and barged in.

She lay on the bed, a thin hand shielding her eyes. ‘Camilla!’ I said. ‘You here!’ She rose and looked at me with delirious black eyes, black and wanton and in a dream, her neck stretched and denning the bulging cords at her throat. She had nothing to say with her lips, but the ghastly cast of her face, the teeth too white and too big now, the frightened smile, these spoke too loudly of the horror shrouding her days and nights. I bit into my jaws to keep from crying. As I walked towards the bed, she pulled up her knees, slipping into a crouched frightened position, as though she expected me to strike her.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘You’ll be alright. You look swell.’

‘Thanks for the money,’ she said, and it was the same voice, deep, yet nasal. She had bought new clothes. They were cheap and garish: an imitation silk dress of bright yellow with a black velvet belt; blue and yellow shoes and anklelength stockings with greens and reds forming the tops. Her nails were manicured, polished a blood red, and around her wrists were green and yellow beads. All of this was set against the ash-yellow of her bloodless face and throat. She had always looked at her best in the plain white smock she wore at work. I didn’t ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face. It didn’t look like insanity to me. It looked like fear, the terrible fear screaming from her big hungered eyes, alert now from the drug.