Oh God, she was difficult. The trouble I’d gone to and she asked ‘What’s out?’ I said: ‘The cactus is out,’ and I thought—your bloody, rotten cactus is out, and the devil Eblis is out and all the devils in hell, and Gehennum is empty. I said, ‘Finish your breakfast and you must all come to the summerhouse and see, and we will drink champagne.’

And I went back to the summerhouse and Syl came as I had bidden him, for I had said to him: ‘Out of the love I bear you, and for old times’ sake, we must meet in the morning before the wedding, and I will give you something whereby you will never forget me’, for when I smoke too much I revert to the speech form of my childhood. Oh dear God.

When he came he was carrying a dead dog. He said, ‘My mother’s dog died.’ And I thought I had truly gone mad.

I said, ‘You must bury the dog’, wondering as I spoke whether the dead dog was an illusion of the jânn and Syl would know I was mad. I think he went away and then he came back and then...

I danced for him. I danced for them all. I looked up and saw them through the window. My audience. Syl’s mother saw me as she had seen me before. I had given her my word. Margaret saw me, and to her too, I had given my word. The cleaning lady saw me and grinned, for she was not surprised. Robert saw me as he had never seen me before and I was avenged.

I had danced thus before in dark places. In the dark places of the world. I had thought never to do so again. I had paid my debts—both of love and hate. I was dead now. I was Lilith high on her black wings in the desert air. It was for the living to continue the dance, if dance they could. Adam and Eve and their ruined little children. And if they could not then it was nothing to me. For I had kept my word.

About the author

Alice Thomas Ellis (1932–2005) was one of Britain’s most widely admired writers. Her dozen novels include The 27th Kingdom, which was nominated for a Booker Prize, and The Inn at the Edge of the World, which won the 1991 Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction. She also published many essays and edited books by Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge. She was a Fel­low of the Royal Society of Literature.