41
Almost at once tiredness, as we returned, attacked us. Alison discovered a blister on her left heel, where the new shoe had rubbed. We wasted ten minutes of the quick-dying light trying to improvise a bandage for it; and then, almost as abruptly as if a curtain had dropped, night was on us. With it came wind. The sky remained clear, the stars burned frantically, but somewhere we went down the wrong rocky slope and at the place I expected the refuge to be there was nothing. It was difficult to see footholds, increasingly difficult to think sensibly. We foolishly went on, coming into a vast volcanic bowl, a stark lunar landscape; snow-streaked cliffs, violent winds howling round the sides. Wolves became real, not an amusing reference in a casual conversation.
Alison must have been far more frightened, and probably far colder, than I was. At the centre of the bowl it became clear that it was impossible to get out except by going back, and we sat for a few minutes to rest in the lee of a huge boulder. I held her close against me for warmth’s sake. She lay with her head buried in my sweater, in a completely unsexual embrace; and cradling her there, shivering in that extraordinary landscape, a million years and miles from the sweltering Athens night, I felt … it meant nothing, it must mean nothing. I told myself I would have felt the same with anyone. But I looked out over the grim landscape, an accurate enough simile of my life, and remembered something the muleteer had said earlier: that wolves never hunt singly, but always in a pack. The lone wolf was a myth.
I forced Alison to her feet and we stumbled back the way we had come. Along a ridge to the west another col and slope led down towards the black distant sea of trees. Eventually we saw contoured against the sky a tor-shaped hill I had noticed on the way up. The refuge was just the other side of it. Alison no longer seemed to care; I kept hold of her hand and dragged her along by main force. Bullying her, begging her, anything to keep her moving. Twenty minutes later the squat dark cube of the refuge appeared in its little combe.
I looked at my watch. It had taken us an hour and a half to reach the peak; and over three hours to get back.
I groped my way in and sat Alison on a bunk. Then I struck a match, found the lamp and tried to light it; but it had no wick and no oil. I turned to the stove. That, thank God, had dry wood. I ripped up all the paper I could find: a Penguin novel of Alison’s, the wrappings off the food we had bought; then lit it and prayed. There were back-puffs of papery, then resinous smoke, and the kindling caught. In a few minutes, the hut grew full of flickering red light and sepia shadows, and even more welcome heat. I picked up a pail. Alison raised her head.
‘I’m going to get some water now.’
‘Okay.’ She smiled wanly.
‘I should get under some blankets.’ She nodded.
But when I came back from the stream five minutes later she was gingerly feeding logs through the upper door of the stove; barefooted, on a red blanket she had spread over the floor between the bunks and the fire. On a lower bunk she had laid out what was to be our meal; bread, chocolate, sardines,
paximadia,
oranges; and she had even found an old saucepan.
‘Kelly, I ordered you to bed.’
‘I suddenly remembered I’m meant to be an air hostess. The life and soul of the crash.’ She took the pail of water and began to wash the saucepan out. As she crouched, I could see the sore red spots on her heels. ‘Do you wish we hadn’t done it?’
‘No.’
She looked back up at me. ‘Just no?’
‘I’m delighted we did it.’
Satisfied, she went back to the saucepan, filled it with water, began to crumble the chocolate. I sat on the edge of the bunk and took my own shoes and socks off. I wanted to be natural, and I couldn’t; and she couldn’t. The heat, the tiny room, the two of us, in all that cold desolation.
‘Sorry I went all womany.’
There was a ghost of sarcasm in her voice, but I couldn’t see her face. She had begun to stir the chocolate over the stove.
‘Don’t be silly.’
A squall of wind battered against the iron roof, and the door groaned half open.
She said, ‘Saved from the storm.’
I looked at her from the door, after I had propped it to with one of the skis. She was stirring the melting chocolate with a twig, standing sideways to avoid the heat, watching me. She pulled a flushed face, and swivelled her eyes round the dirty walls. ‘Romantic, isn’t it?’
‘As long as it keeps the wind out.’ She smiled secretly at me and looked down at her saucepan. ‘Why do you smile?’
‘Because it is romantic’
I sat down on the bunk again. She pulled off her jumper and shook her hair free. I invoked the image of Julie; but somehow it was a situation that Julie could never have got into. I tried to sound at ease.
‘You look fine. In your element.’
‘So I should. I spend most of my life slaving in a four-by-two galley.’ She stood with one hand on her hip; a minute of silence; old domestic memories from Russell Square. ‘What was that Sartre play we saw?’
‘Huis Clos.’
‘This is
Huis
even closer.’
‘Why?’
She kept her back turned. ‘Being tired always makes me feel sexy.’ I breathed in. She said softly, ‘One more risk.’
‘Just because the first tests are negative, it doesn’t mean –’
She lifted a black-brown dob from the saucepan. ‘I think this delicious
consommé
à la reine
is ready.’
She came and bent beside me with that peculiar downwards look and automatic smile of air hostesses.
‘Something to drink before dinner, sir?’
She thrust the saucepan under my nose, mocking herself and my seriousness, and I grinned; but she didn’t grin back, she gave me one of her gentlest smiles. I took the saucepan. She went to the bunks at the far end of the hut; began to unbutton her shirt.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Undressing.’
I looked away. A few seconds later she was standing by me with one of the blankets wrapped sarong fashion round her; then quietly sat on another folded blanket, on the floor, a careful two feet away from me. As she turned to reach for the food behind her, the blanket fell apart over her legs. She readjusted it when she turned back; but somewhere in the recesses of my mind that little Priapus threw up his hands, and that other member of his body, and leered wildly.
We ate. The
paximadia,
rusks fried in olive oil, were as uninteresting as always, the hot chocolate watery and the sardines inappropriate, but we were too hungry to care. Finally we sat – I had slipped on to the floor as well – satiated, backs against the edge of the bunk, adding more smoke to that from the stove. We were both silent, both waiting. I felt like a boy with his first girl, at the moment when the thing has to stop, or to go on to the end. Frightened to make any move. Her bare shoulders were small, round, delicate. The end of the blanket she had tucked in under her armpit had become loose. I could see the top of her breasts.
The silence grew acutely embarrassing, at least to me; a sort of endurance test, to see which of us would have to break it first. Her hand lay on the blanket between us, for me to reach out and touch. I began to feel that she had exploited the whole situation, engineered everything to place me in this predicament: this silence in which it was only too clear that she was in command, not myself; only too clear that I wanted her – not Alison in particular, but the girl she was, any girl who might have been beside me at that moment. In the end I threw my cigarette into the stove and lay back against the bunk and shut my eyes, as if I was very tired, as if sleep was all I wanted – as indeed, bar Alison, it was. Suddenly she moved. I opened my eyes. She was naked beside me, the blanket thrown back.
‘Alison. No.’ But she knelt and began to undress me.
‘Poor little boy.’
She straddled my legs and unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it out. I shut my eyes and let her make me barechested.
‘It’s so unfair.’
‘You’re so brown.’
She ran her hands up the side of my body, my shoulders, my neck, my lips; playing with me, examining me, like a child with a new toy. She knelt and kissed the side of my neck and the ends of her breasts brushed my skin.
I said, ‘I’d never forgive myself if…’
‘Don’t talk. Just lie still.’
She undressed me completely, then led my hands all over her body, to know it all again, soft skin, small curves, slimness, her always natural nakedness. Her hands. As she caressed me, I thought, it’s like being with a prostitute, hands as adept as a prostitute’s, nothing but a matter of pleasure … and I gave way to the pleasure she gave me. After a while she lay on top of me, her head on my chest. A long silence. The fire crackled, burnt our legs a little. I stroked her back, her hair, her small neck, surrendered to the nerve-ends in my flesh. I imagined lying in the same position with Julie, and I thought I knew it would be infinitely disturbing and infinitely more passionate; not familiar, not aching with fatigue, hot, a bit sweaty … some cheapened word like randy; but white-hot, mysterious, overwhelming passion.
Alison murmured, shifted, bit me, swayed over me in a caress she called the pasha caress, that she knew I liked, all men liked; my mistress and my slave.
I remember our dropping into the bunk, a coarse straw mattress, the harsh blankets, her holding me a moment, kissing me once on the mouth before I could pull away, then turning her back; my hand on the wet breasts, and her hand holding it there, the small smooth belly, the faint washed and rainwashed smell of her hair; and then, in seconds, too soon to analyse anything, sleep.
I woke up some time in the night, and went and drank some water from the pail. Small pencils of late-risen moon came through the old bullet-holes. I went back and leant over Alison. She had thrown back the blanket a little and her skin was a deep shadowed red in the ember-light; one breast bare and slightly slumped, her mouth half open, a slight snore. Young and ancient; innocent and corrupt; in every woman, all woman.
The wave of affection and tenderness I felt made me determine, with that sort of revelationary shock ideas about courses of action sometimes have when one wakes up drugged with sleep, that tomorrow I must tell her the truth; and not as a confession, but as a means of letting her see the truth, that my real disease was not something curable like syphilis, but far more banal and far more terrible, a congenital promiscuity. I stood over her, almost touching her, almost tearing the blanket back and sinking on her, entering her, making love to her as she wanted me to; but not. I gently covered the bare breast, then picked up some blankets and went to the next bunk.
42
We were woken by someone knocking on the door, then half opening it. Sunlight slashed through. He withdrew when he saw we were still in the bunks. I looked at my watch. It was ten o’clock. I pulled on my clothes and went out. A shepherd. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the bells of his flock. He struck back with his crook the two enormous dogs that bared their teeth at me and produced from the pockets of his greatcoat a cheese wrapped in sorrel-leaves, which he had brought for our breakfast. After a few minutes Alison came out, tucking her shirt into her jeans and screwing up her eyes against the sun. We shared what was left of the rusks and the oranges with the shepherd; used up the last of the film. I was glad he was there. I could see, as clear as printed words in Alison’s eyes, that she thought we had crossed back into the old relationship. She had broken the ice; but it was for me to jump into the water.
The shepherd stood up, shook hands and strode off with his two savage dogs and left us alone. Alison stretched back in the sun across the great slab of rock we had used as a table. It was a much less windy day, April-warm, a dazzling blue sky. The sheep-bells sounded in the distance and some bird like a lark sang high up the slope above us.
‘I wish we could stay here for ever.’
‘I’ve got to get the car back.’
‘Just wishing.’ She looked at me. ‘Come and sit here.’ She patted the rock by her side. Her grey eyes stared up at me, at their most candid. ‘Do you forgive me?’
I bent and kissed her cheek and she put her arms round me so that I lay half across her, and we had a whispered conversation, mouths to each other’s left ears.
‘Say you wanted to.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘Say you love me a little still.’
‘I love you a little still.’ She pinched my back. ‘A lot still.’
‘And you’ll get better.’
‘Mm.’
‘And never go with those nasty women again.’
‘Never.’
‘It’s silly when you can have it for free. With love.’
‘I know.’
I was staring at the ends of her hair against the rock, an inch or two from my eyes, and trying to bring myself to the point of confession. But it seemed like treading on a flower because one can’t be bothered to step aside. I pushed up, but she held me by the shoulders, so that I had to stare down at her. I sustained her look, its honesty, for a moment, then I turned and sat with my back to her.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. I just wondered what malicious god made a nice kid like you see anything in a shit like me.’
‘That reminds me. A crossword clue. I saw it months ago. Ready?’ I nodded, ‘“She’s all mixed up, but the better part of Nicholas” … six letters.’
I worked it out, smiled at her. ‘Did the clue end in a full-stop or a question-mark?’
‘It ended in my crying. As usual.’
And the bird above us sang in the silence.
We set off down. As we came lower, it grew warmer and warmer. Summer rose to meet us.
Alison led the way, and so she could rarely see my face. I tried to sort out my feelings about her. It irritated me still that she put so much reliance on the body thing, the shared orgasm. Her mistaking that for love, her not seeing that love was something other … the mystery of withdrawal, reserve, walking away through the trees, turning the mouth away at the last moment. On Parnassus of all mountains, it occurred to me, her unsubtlety, her inability to hide behind metaphor, ought to offend me; to bore me as uncomplex poetry normally bored me. And yet in some way I couldn’t define she had, had always had, this secret trick of slipping through all the obstacles I put between us; as if she were really my sister, had access to unfair pressures and could always evoke deep similarities to annul, or to make seem irrelevant, the differences in taste or feeling.
She began to talk about being an air hostess; about herself.
‘Oh Jesus, excitement. That lasts about a couple of duties. New faces, new cities, new romances with handsome pilots. Most of the pilots think we’re part of the aircrew amenities. Just queueing up to be blessed by their miserable old Battle-of-Britain cocks.’
I laughed.
‘Nicko, it’s not funny. It destroys you. That bloody tin pipe. And all that freedom, that space outside. Sometimes I just want to pull the safety handle and be sucked out. Just falling, a minute of wonderful lovely passengerless falling
‘You’re not serious.’
‘More serious than you think. We call it charm depression. When you get so penny-in-the-slot charming that you stop being human any more. It’s like … sometimes we’re so busy after take—off we don’t realize how far the plane’s climbed and you look out and it’s a shock … it’s like that, you suddenly realize how far you are from what you really are. Or you were, or something. I don’t explain it well.’
‘Yes, you do. Very well.’
‘You begin to feel you don’t belong anywhere any more. You know, as if I didn’t have enough problems that way already. I mean England’s impossible, it becomes more
honi soit qui
smelly pants every day, it’s a graveyard. And Australia … Australia. God, how I hate my country. The meanest stupidest blindest… ‘ She gave up.
We walked on a way, then she said, ‘It’s just I haven’t roots anywhere any more, I don’t belong anywhere. They’re all places I fly to or from. Or over. I just have people I like. Or love. They’re the only homeland I have left.’
She threw a look back, a shy one, as if she had been saving up this truth about herself, this rootlessness, homelandlessness, which she knew was also a truth about me.
‘At least we’ve got rid of a lot of useless illusions as well.’
‘Clever us.’
She fell silent and I swallowed her reproach. In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling. All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea-anemone – had only to be touched to adhere to what touched her.
She stopped. We both noticed it at the same time. Below us to our right, the sound of water, a rush of water.
‘I’d love to bathe my feet. Could we get down?’
We struck off the path through the trees and after a while came on a faint trail. It led us down, down and finally out into a clearing. At one end was a waterfall some ten feet or so high. A pool of limpid water had formed beneath it. The clearing was dense with flowers and butterflies, a tiny trough of green-gold luxuriance after the dark forest we had been walking through. At the upper edge of the clearing there was a little cliff with a shallow cave, outside which some shepherd had pleached an arbour of fir-branches. There were sheep droppings on the floor, but they were old. No one could have been there since summer began.
‘Let’s have a swim.’
‘It’ll be like ice.’
‘Yah.’
She pulled her shirt over her head, and unhooked her bra, grinning at me in the flecked shadow of the arbour.
‘The place is probably alive with snakes.’
‘Like Eden.’
She stepped out of her jeans and her white pants. Then she reached up and snapped a dead cone off one of the arbour branches and held it out to me. I watched her run nakedly through the long grass to the pool, try the water, groan. Then she waded forwards and swanned in with a scream. The water was jade-green, melted snow, and it made my heart jolt with shock when I plunged beside her. And yet it was beautiful, the shadow of the trees, the sunlight on the glade, the white roar of the little fall, the iciness, the solitude, the laughing, the nakedness; moments one knows only death will obliterate.
Sitting in the grass beside the arbour we let the sun and the small breeze dry us and ate the last of the chocolate. Then Alison lay on her back, her arms thrown out, her legs a little open, abandoned to the sun – and, I knew, to me. For a time I lay like her, with my eyes closed.
Then she said, ‘I’m Queen of the May.’
She was sitting up, turned to me, propped on one arm. She had woven a rough crown out of the oxeyes and wild pinks that grew in the grass around us. It sat lopsidedly on her uncombed hair; and she wore a smile of touching innocence. She did not know it, but it was at first for me an intensely literary moment. I could place it exactly:
England’s Helicon.
I had forgotten that there are metaphors and metaphors, and that the greatest lyrics are very rarely anything but direct and unmetaphysical. Suddenly she was like such a poem and I felt a passionate wave of desire for her. It was not only lust, not only because she looked, as she did in her periodic fashion, disturbingly pretty, small-breasted, small-waisted, leaning on one hand, dimpled then grave; a child of sixteen, not a girl of twenty-four; but because I was seeing through all the ugly, the unpoetic accretions of modern life to the naked real self of her – a vision of her as naked in that way as she was in body; Eve glimpsed again through ten thousand generations.
It rushed on me, it was quite simple, I did love her, I wanted to keep her
and
I wanted to keep – or to find -Julie. It wasn’t that I wanted one more than the other, I wanted both. I had to have both; there was no emotional dishonesty in it. The only dishonesty was in my feeling dishonest, concealing … it was love that finally drove me to confess, not cruelty, not a wish to be free, to be callous and clear, but simply love. I think, in those few long moments, that Alison saw that. She must have seen something torn and sad in my face, because she said, very gently, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I haven’t had syphilis. It’s all a lie.’
She gave me an intense look, then sank back on the grass.
‘Oh Nicholas.’
‘I want to tell you – ‘
‘Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.’
And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been far wiser.
Lying beside her I began to try to describe what had happened at Bourani. The ancient Greeks said that if one slept a night on Parnassus either one became inspired or one went mad, and there was no doubt which happened to me; even as I spoke I knew it would have been better to say nothing, to have made something up … but love, that need to be naked. I had chosen the worst of all possible moments to be honest, and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring … but love, that need to be understood. And Parnassus was also to blame, for being so Greek; a place that made anything but the truth a mindsore.
Of course she wanted first to know the reason for the bizarre pretext I had hit on, but I wanted her to understand the strangeness of Bourani before I mentioned its deepest attraction. I didn’t deliberately hide anything else about Conchis, but I still left great gaps.^
‘It’s not that I believe any of these things in the way he tries to make me believe them. But even there … since he hypnotized me, I don’t absolutely know. It’s simply that when I’m with him I feel he does have access to some kind of power. Not occult. I can’t explain.’
‘But it must be all faked.’
‘All right. But why me? How did he know I would go there? I’m nothing to him, he obviously doesn’t even think very much of me. As a person. He’s always laughing at me.’
‘I still don’t understand … ‘ but then she did. She looked at me. ‘There’s someone else there.’
‘Alison darling, for God’s sake try to understand. Listen.’
‘I’m listening.’ But her face was averted.
So at last I told her. I made it out to be an asexual thing, a fascination of the mind.
‘But she attracts you the other way.’
‘Allie, I can’t tell you how much I’ve hated myself this weekend. And tried to tell you everything a dozen times before. I don’t want to be attracted by her. In any way. A month, three weeks ago I couldn’t have believed it. I still don’t know what it is about her. Honestly. I only know I’m haunted, possessed by everything over there. Not just her. Something so strange is going on. And I’m … involved.’ She looked unimpressed. ‘I’ve got to go back to the island. Because of the job. There are so many ways in which I’m not a free agent.’
‘But this girl.’ She was staring at the ground, picking seeds off grassheads.
‘She’s irrelevant. Really. Just a very small part of it.’
‘Then why all the performance?’
‘You can’t understand, I’m being pulled in two.’
‘Is she pretty?’
‘If I still didn’t care like hell for you deep down it would all have been so easy.’
‘Is she pretty?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very pretty.’
I said nothing. She buried her face in her arms. I stroked her warm shoulder.
‘She’s totally unlike you. Unlike any modern girl. I can’t explain.’ She turned her head away. ‘Alison.’
‘I must seem just … ‘ but she didn’t finish.
‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’
‘Ami?’
There was a tense silence.
‘Look, I’m trying desperately, for once in my miserable life, to be honest. I have no excuses. If I met this girl tomorrow, okay, I could say, I love Alison, Alison loves me, nothing doing. But I met her a fortnight ago. And I’ve got to meet her again.’
‘And you don’t love Alison.’ She stared away. ‘Or you love me till you see a better bit of tail.’
‘Don’t be crude.’
‘I am crude. I think crude. I talk crude. I
am
crude.’ She knelt, took a breath. ‘So what now? I curtsy and withdraw?’
‘I wish to God I wasn’t so complicated –’
‘Complicated!’ She snorted.
‘Selfish.’
‘That’s better.’
We were silent. Two coupled yellow butterflies flitted heavily, saggingly, past.
‘All I wanted was that you should know what I am.’
‘I know what you are.’
‘If you did you’d have cut me out right at the beginning.’
‘I still know what you are.’
And her cold grey eyes went through me, till I had to look down. She stood up and went to wash. It was hopeless. I couldn’t manage it, I couldn’t explain, and she could never understand. I put my clothes on and turned my back while she dressed in silence.
When she was ready, she said, ‘Don’t for God’s sake say any more. I can’t bear it.’