Back at the hotel there is a message to call Henk Badings, the man from the Free University with whom she has been corresponding. Did she have a good flight, Badings asks? Is she comfortably settled? Would she like to join him and one or two other guests for dinner? Thank you, she replies, but no: she would prefer an early night. A pause, then she asks her question. The novelist Paul West: has he arrived yet in Amsterdam? Yes, comes Badings' reply: not only has Paul West arrived but, she will be glad to hear, is lodged at the same hotel as she.
If anything is needed to spur her, this is it. Unacceptable that Paul West should find himself quartered with a woman who rants against him in public as a dupe of Satan. She must cut him out of the talk or she must withdraw, and that is that.
She stays up all night wrestling with the lecture. First she tries leaving out West's name.
What if she tries softening her thesis? What if she suggests that, in representing the workings of evil, the writer may
The young man at the reception desk sits with headphones on, jiggling his shoulders from side to side. When he sees her he springs to attention. 'A photocopier,' she says. 'Is there a photocopier I can use?'
He takes the wad of paper from her, glances at the heading. The hotel caters to many conferences, he must be used to distraught foreigners rewriting their lectures in the middle of the night. The lives of dwarf stars. Crop yields in Bangladesh. The soul and its manifold corruptions. All the same to him.
Copy in hand, she proceeds with the task of watering down her paper, but with more and more doubt in her heart. The writer as dupe of Satan: what nonsense! Ineluctably she is arguing herself into the position of the old-fashioned censor. And what is the point of all this pussyfooting anyway? To forestall a petty scandal? Where does it come from, her reluctance to offend? Soon she is going to be dead. What will it matter then if once upon a time she ruffled the feathers of some stranger in Amsterdam?
When she was nineteen, she remembers, she allowed herself to be picked up on the Spencer Street bridge near the Melbourne waterfront, then a rough area. The man was a docker, in his thirties, good-looking in a crude sort of way, who called himself Tim or Tom. She was an art student and a rebel, in rebellion principally against the matrix that had formed her: respectable, petit bourgeois, Catholic. In her eyes, in those days, only the working class and the values of the working class were authentic.
Tim or Tom took her to a bar and after that to the rooming house where he lived. It was not something she had done before, sleeping with a strange man; at the last minute she could not go through with it. 'I'm sorry' she said. 'I'm really sorry, can we stop.' But Tim or Tom would not listen. When she resisted, he tried to force her. For a long time, in silence, panting, she fought him off, pushing and scratching. To begin with he took it as a game. Then he got tired of that, or his desire tired, turned to something else, and he began to hit her seriously. He lifted her off the bed, punched her breasts, punched her in the belly, hit her a terrible blow with his elbow to her face. When he was bored with hitting her he tore up her clothes and tried to set fire to them in the waste-paper basket. Stark naked, she crept out and hid in the bathroom on the landing. An hour later, when she was sure he was asleep, she crept back and retrieved what was left. Wearing the scorched tatters of her dress and nothing else she waved down a taxi. For a week she stayed first with one friend, then with another, refusing to explain what had happened. Her jaw was broken; it had to be wired up; she lived on milk and orange juice, sucked through a straw.
It was her first brush with evil. She had realized it was nothing less than that, evil, when the man's affront subsided and a steady glee in hurting her took its place. He liked hurting her, she could see it; probably liked it more than he would have liked sex. Though he might not have known it when he picked her up, he had brought her to his room to hurt her rather than make love to her. By fighting him off she had created an opening for the evil in him to emerge, and it emerged in the form of glee, first at her pain ('You like that, do you?' he whispered as he twisted her nipples. 'You like that?'), then in the childish, malicious destruction of her clothes.
