id="u47f030c4-bd15-5d33-84bf-e798f63b6372">
The Other Side of You
Salley Vickers
FOURTH ESTATE • London
For Xopher
Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside you…—But who is that on the other side of you?The Waste Land, T. S. ELIOT
Table of Contents
When I count, there are only you and I together
SHE WAS A SLIGHT WOMAN, PALE, WITH TWO WINGS OF DARK hair which framed her face and gave it the faintly bird-like quality that characterised her person. Even at this distance of time, which has clarified much that was obscure to me, I find her essence hard to capture. She was youthful in appearance but there was also an air of something ambiguous about her which was both intriguing and daunting.
When we met she must have been in her forties, but in a certain light she could have been fourteen or four hundred—though when I say ‘light’ I perhaps mean that subtle light of the mind, which casts as many shadows as it illuminates but in the right conditions can reveal a person’s being more accurately than the most powerful beam.
Once I would have known her age to the day, since it would have been part of the bald list
