He tucked her in gently and with all the neatness of a flyer's training, using the deftness of long experience with camping. She lay back accepting this, but what he tucked in so gently was not a night of pleasure, a body satiated, but a body in which he had injected the poison which was killing him, the madness of hunger, guilt and death by proxy which tormented him. He had injected into her body his own venomous guilt for living and desiring. He had mingled poison with every drop of pleasure, a drop of poison in every kiss, every thrust of sensual pleasure the thrust of a knife killing what he desired, killing with guilt.

The following day Alan arrived, his equable smile and equable temper unchanged. His vision of Sabina unchanged. Sabina had hoped he would exorcise the obsession which had enslaved her the night before, but he was too removed from her chaotic despair, and his extended hand, his extended love was unequal to the power of what was dragging her down.

The sharp, the intense moment of pleasure which had taken possession of her body, and the sharp intense poison amalgamated with it.

She wanted to rescue John from a distortion she knew led to madness. She wanted to prove to him that his guilt was a distortion, that his vision of her and desire as bad, and of his hunger as bad, was a sickness.

The panic, the hunger and terror of his eyes had passed into her. She wished she had never looked into his eyes. She felt a desperate need to abolish his guilt, the need of rescuing him because for a reason she could not fathom, she had sunk with him into the guilt; she had to rescue him and herself. He had poisoned her, transmitted his doom to her. She would go mad with him if she did not rescue him and alter his vision.

If he had not tucked her in she might have rebelled against him, hated him, hated his blindness. But this act of tenderness had abolished all defenses: he was blind in error, frightened and tender, cruel and lost, and she was all these with him, by him, through him.

She could not even mock at his obsession with flying. His airplanes were not different from her relationships, by which she sought other lands, strange faces, forgetfulness, the unfamiliar, the fantasy and the fairy tale.

She could not mock his rebellion against being grounded. She understood it, experienced it each time that, wounded, she flew back to Alan. If only he had not tucked her in, not as a bad woman, but as the child, the child he was in a terrifying, confusing world. If only he had left brutally, projecting his shame on her as so often woman bore the brunt of man's shame, shame thrown at her in place of stones, for seducing and tempting. Then she could have hated him, and forgotten him, but because he had tucked her in, he would come back. He had not thrown his shame at her, he had not said: "You're bad." One does not tuck in a bad woman.