The Riddle of Sphinx Island by R. T. Raichev Page B

.’
    ‘Do what? Sorry – I don’t understand …’ Ella looked at him in some confusion.
    ‘One day you will. The time has not yet come. They had been snapped entering the Metropolitan Opera House. Oswald had his public face on. He looked like a senator, I thought. Suave, respectable, confident, relaxed, faintly amused. He might have been on his way to the Congress. I spent an hour studying those photographs, you see. Martita looked extremely unwell. Her mouth was twisted to one side. Her eyes were wild and staring.’
    ‘Martita looked ghastly, yes,’ Ella agreed. ‘Hardly human. By then she was very ill. Those photographs should never have been taken. I believe that was her last outing. We had gone to see Don Giovanni  … Appropriate, in a way …  Ironic  … Don Juan – the serial philanderer!’
    ‘You were there too? You were with them at the opera?’
    ‘I was. I am not in any of the photographs, but I was there all right. I was always with them. Faithful Ella. Always a couple of steps behind. Oswald wanted it that way. He needed me to take care of Martita. Martita was getting extremely difficult. Well, I was Martita’s companion and nurse maid till – till he decided to replace me with a younger and prettier woman.’
    ‘Maisie.’
    ‘Maisie, yes. Sweet, innocent Maisie … Sorry, I mustn’t be catty. Oswald and I had an affair. It went on for a couple of years but then it came to an end. I stayed on. He made me stay on.’ Suddenly Ella sounded breathless. ‘I am ashamed to admit it but I was in love with him once, very much in love, that’s what makes the whole thing so awful. I’ve been doing my best to forget that I was in love with Oswald. I’ve tried to put it in the bottom drawer of my mind. I wince each time I remember the feelings I had for him. I can’t help thinking there is something wrong with me. Something abnormal – freakish –’
    ‘ No . You should never think that, Ella.’
    ‘I can’t help it. I seem to be one of those natural victims one reads about. Fated from birth to frustration and despair. It couldn’t have been love, could it?’ Ella’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I mean – not love . I couldn’t really have loved a man like Oswald – it seems impossible, when I think about it now. It’s obscene – grotesque. What kind of love could it have been? I don’t understand myself.’
    ‘Wittgenstein says somewhere that love which can’t be classified is the best.’
    ‘Apollo and Marsyas.’ She was staring before her. ‘Do you remember what Apollo did to Marsyas?’
    ‘Apollo flayed Marsyas.’
    ‘The agony of Marsyas is said to be the inevitable agony of the human soul in its desire to achieve God. Nonsense, all nonsense. I am afraid I’ve lost my faith in God.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t even know if Marsyas was male or female!’
    ‘You don’t? Male or female? Male or female?’ Doctor Klein reiterated in an odd voice. Suddenly he laughed. He clapped his hands. ‘You really don’t know?’
    ‘I am sure you’ve been wondering why I never left Oswald – why I am still with him? You have been wondering, haven’t you? It must strike you as terribly twisted, this whole situation.’
    The tall lamp beside the fireplace shed a diffused light upon Doctor Klein’s face, which had retained its detached expression.
    ‘I have been wondering, yes. So what is the answer? Why haven’t you left him? Why are you still with him?’
    ‘I can’t leave him because I am afraid of him,’ she said. ‘This sounds like the first sentence of an Iris Murdoch novel, doesn’t it? Ella Gales stayed with her former lover because she was afraid of him. I am afraid of what he might do to me. I really am. It’s a complicated story. He threatens to destroy me if I leave. He wants me to stay with him.’
    ‘How could he possibly destroy you?’
    There was a pause.
    ‘Years ago he promised to marry me, only he didn’t. At first he told me it had to wait,