The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  In time she returned to the ordinary, demanding world. She was disgusted with the scene she had made and with the poisonous, dirtying, ugly things she had said; she was disgusted with the whole thing and she was weary through and through. But while she was repairing the worst of the havoc done to her face (‘My God,’ she said to the little mirror, ‘what a wreck’) she found that her judgment had fixed rock-hard upon a decision. She would go down to the house and find out whether there were cigars left in that box or not. If there were not, if it was empty in fact, then he might just have yielded to a sudden burst of goatishness: that she could cope with – that would be a recognizable Edward. But if there were … why then she would have been a complacent fool for all this while. She would have been genuinely deceived and she would have to make a fundamental reassessment, since the Edward who could send her (she prayed she was not blaspheming him) on such an errand, and for such a purpose, would be a stranger to her, a man she had never really known; perhaps even an enemy. Everything she had ever heard about cold duplicity in marriage came back to her: tales of unsuspected change, malevolence, concealed bitterness.

  But she had to know. She had to know one way or the other. And suppressing a little habitual whimper to Edward (her invariable recourse in unhappiness till then), she walked down the path.

  Before coming to the door itself she made a noise; she was ashamed of doing so, but she had to – it would not be bearable to catch them, to stumble right on to the beast with two backs and meet its hatred. So shoving the iron garden-gate to and fro she advertised her presence: a harsh metallic clangour.

  She did not know quite what she had expected, but it was certainly not the front-door half open and Conchita’s face peering through the gap. Sickened by the noise she had made – the grating of the iron had pierced through and through her aching head – and perhaps encouraged by the scared little face, she walked straight forward, brushing her hands.

  The girl stood back, retreating into the hall. She was still buttoning her black dress and at the same time trying to confine stray wisps of hair. She was ivory pale, and Paula Grattan could hardly make out what she was saying.

  Paula’s senses were unnaturally acute: she was aware that there was something here she had not expected at all, a tension in the house that did not match with her own. The hypotheses raced through her head and she was already more than half way to the answer when, glancing over her shoulder, she saw a slim youth glide away by the garden wall.

  Conchita followed her eyes: stifled a despairing cry but not a flaming blush. Paula caught some distracted words about ‘a cousin, who happened to be passing by’, and turned away to gaze at the maiolica on the hall table while she mastered her own feelings and let Conchita do the same. Without turning round she asked where Edward was. He had gone to the village for tobacco – he had none left – had started a little after the señora – he meant to surprise her on the road.

  Listening attentively to this, Paula chose her most beloved vase, the roundest, as an offering. She closed her eyes and let it drop: the pot exploded like a bomb. ‘When you have swept up the pieces, my dear,’ she said, ‘be very kind and bring me a martini in the drawing-room. And Conchita, you must take great care with men; it is terrible what they can do to a woman.’ She walked along the hall towards the door, called, ‘Never mind about the drink,’ and hurried out of the house on Edward’s track.

  On the Wolfsberg

  WHEN SHE CAME out of the mindless, ruminating state that walking often induced she found that the moon had risen: a gibbous moon behind hazy cloud, but enough to flood the world with diffuse light. She also found that she had no notion where the road was going to, nor why she was walking along it so eagerly, nor indeed who or where she was.

  As far as she could tell she had never seen these vast rolling mountains, with their moonwards sides gleaming a soft grey and their deep coombs as black as velvet and the white ribbon of a road that ran on and on, vanishing behind spurs and shoulders but always reappearing higher up on the next flank beyond until at last it was lost in the general merging of cloud and sky and moonlight.

  ‘This is the damnedest thing,’ she said, amused, ‘I have absolutely no notion of…’ She looked attentively at the road: it was a metalled road, but clearly few people ever used it – plants stood knee-high in the middle, and brambles reached from either side, flat on the surface. The even slope ran upwards, with no hint of its destination ahead, no high perched village, no lights anywhere, high or low: all around the vast field of view, nothing but these soft hills for ever, limitless peace and silence; and on her right a dark mass with jagged peaks against the sky.

  ‘I must have been lying in the grass,’ she said uncertainly, picking dry wisps and fern from her clothes. ‘But where? When? How come?’ There was no answer at all; a vagueness like that of the grey mountains; but a placid vagueness – she was not particularly concerned or upset even when a concentrated effort brought no response.

  ‘The great thing in these cases is not to press,’ she said. ‘It is like trying to force a tune – if you leave it alone, five minutes later or perhaps the next day you will find the whole orchestra booming away in your head, apropos of nothing. I have only to let a few synapses clear and I shall be able to call myself by name. I shall be able to fill out an hotel card – surname, Christian name, maiden name, date and place of birth, profession, nationality.’ She walked on, whistling Death and the Maiden in an undertone, and presently she was floating along at her former steady pace.

  ‘Amnesia, amnesio,’ she sang, after a while. ‘What a caper. How much is there left? A great deal, I find: speech centres unaffected, technical memory unimpaired.’ She repeated the alphabet, the cranial nerves of the dogfish, the list of elements. ‘I am a woman, of course; I never had any doubt of that. Youngish: sound in wind and limb.’ She glanced at her hand. ‘No ring: but that’s not evidence. And I am myself, that’s sure. What I am looking for is the label.’ Her mind flitted away in a long digression – how much was label a component of identity? How much epoch, nationality, with all their values and associations? Take the social context away from a parcel of reflexes conditioned by that context and what remains? Something, nevertheless: the size of a dried pea or even smaller, but irreducible and enough for the statement I am me to carry some conviction.

  ‘However,’ she said at last, ‘my sex is certain, and the time is the present, whatever that may mean: the question is, what is myself doing in these mountains?’

  Here the road led her round to the westward side, still warm from the sun, and wafts of aromatic air surrounded her. ‘I can’t put a name to these smells,’ she said, ‘nor can I attach them to any sort of association: I don’t know them at any level. So I must be abroad.’ This reasoning was confirmed when she found a milestone by the road. 1.3 km, clear in the moonlight. ‘Kilo-metres. So this is certainly Abroad, as I said.’

  Far away, carrying a great way, there came the call of a midwife toad, repeated at solemn intervals: ‘Ayltes obstetricans,’ she murmured; and reflecting upon the immense silence in which the sound was produced – a silence that seemed part of the moonlight and the huge expanse of shadowed mountain – she concluded that she must herself be an urban creature, used to a continual background of noise. ‘Some time ago, a mile back perhaps,’ she observed, ‘I heard running water on the far side of the valley; and that amazed me too.’

  For an indeterminate time, still walking steadily, she contemplated the peaceful infinity of rounded hills below her, the slope falling sharply from the road, and the mountains above and beyond her: it was not in any way a hostile landscape nor, though bare of trees, a savage one; but rather detached, almost irrelevant – a landscape for vague wandering rather than incisive thought. ‘You would say the farther side was as clear as day,’ she said, ‘but when you look close everything is uncertain. The folds merge together; there is no telling where one begins and the other ends – as soft as clouds from an aeroplane. These mountains
…’ All at once she cried, ‘Mountains! In my very last letter – such a pompous letter – I wrote “leaving geology and everything else aside, from a strictly anthropocentric point of view, mountains are there as an analgesic.” It was my very last letter to–.’ And looking at them the name was almost there, hovering half-formed in her throat; but it faded, no longer to be grasped, before she could bring it to the level of perception. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I shall catch it unawares, in time.’

  Yet time had lost its usual flow, and indeed almost all its meaning: that is to say, in so far as time differed from mere succession. A raucous voice from the sky startled her, breaking her train of thought – a voice that wound about, trumpeting overhead. ‘Heavens!’ she cried, peering up. ‘What can it be? No owl ever carried on like that.’ A farther trumpeting to the north, and the voice drew off to join it. Her wits returned and she said, ‘Why, nycticorax nycticorax, of course. But it might have been an ostrich, judging by the row … Amnesia: it is an obvious refuge from distress, from an intolerable situation: everyone knows that. But I feel no particular distress; no heartbreak, no depression. Only a pleasing melancholy, engendered by this prodigious wild romantic prospect. And perhaps a sort of bruised feeling … I suppose,’ she cried, laying her hand upon her bosom, ‘I suppose I have not been knocked on the head and raped, with all that grass on my back?

  ‘No, of course I have not: everything is perfectly intact. And I do so despise women who are perpetually being raped, or almost raped, or in situations where they might have been raped – trains, cabins, lifts, lonely woods – the lot.’

  The road was turning slowly out of the light of the moon: for another hundred yards she still had her faint shadow for company, and then it was gone. In the soft darkness only the white track could be seen, and with nothing, not even moths, to distract her mind, she thought more about this feeling of a bruise. It was in her heart, and as she probed its nature it was so very like a physical pain that she could almost define it anatomically.

  None of this helped her in her search for a label, but it did take away from her amusement. By the time she walked out of the darkness nothing sharp or clear had flashed into her mind, yet enough of an atmosphere in some way connected with this bruise had drifted near enough to the threshold of apprehension for her to say, ‘If it is as bad as all that, I do not want to find it. Just let me walk along like this.’ Another waft of scent drifted across. ‘I love this road.’

  The scents were extraordinarily varied; there was one as sweet as orange-blossom but far more piercing, another like pot-pourri, and one that must surely have been rosemary; and she thought she had been entirely taken up with her attempt at classifying them when she saw a piece of paper on the road.

  Her automatic cry, ‘Let it be nothing symbolic, for God’s sake. No more of those square old symbols,’ showed her that in fact some part of her mind had been running in quite another direction. ‘No more symbols,’ she went on nevertheless, ‘and nothing directed: I have had digs enough to last me the rest of my life. If it says anything in the line of expense of spirit in a waste of shame I shall blaspheme.’

  It was not of that nature at all. Tilting it to the best light she made out a set of diagrams, possibly directions for solving a Chinese puzzle, an interlocking wooden ball.

  She opened her fingers, let it plane gently to the ground, and walked on. But the realization that some busy autonomous process had been burrowing in that direction took away the very last of her amusement: she felt an anxious, dreary expression settle on her face and she found that the elasticity had gone from her stride.

  Her whistling was a failure too. ‘It occurs to me,’ she said, after a long course in the darkness, two miles at least, ‘that the reason why I do not really care where this road is going is that I do not care where I am going either: not a damn, alas.’

  Moonlight again, even brighter now; and with the change of light there was some subtle alteration in the atmosphere, the landscape and the sky – a certain air of menace. She noticed it at once, but she said, ‘Nothing can threaten me: nothing can threaten me now.’

  She must have reached some kind of pass, for now the road no longer climbed. After a quarter of a mile of flat it began to slope down, still in this noiseless silvery everlasting universe, the easiest road in the world to follow. And although at present the silence had something frozen and indeed inimical about it, she sank deep into its cold heart.

  Down and down, so detached from her body that she could have left it to float on ahead, and so removed from any ordinary consideration that the wolf did not cause her any extreme surprise.

  He was a big wolf, lean, long-legged and gaunt, and he was drifting along on the mountainside above her and somewhat behind, moving silently on a track parallel with her own. He reached the inky shadow of a rock, and she saw his eyes gleam green.

  It did not surprise her very much; and although at first her heart beat hard and quick and she felt weakness in her knees, this died away and she and her pursuer moved on steadily, the wolf paying no overt attention to her and she watching him out of the corner of her eye as he loped through the clumps of thyme. Presently she heard a soft dump as he leapt down on to the road, crossed, and took up his position on her left, still a long stone’s throw away, neither gaining nor losing ground.

  He was easier to see now, and although the moonlight never gave a really sharp view of him at any one time, the countless glimpses built up a perfect image: he was enormously strong.

  ‘It would be a laugh if he turned out to be no more than a prodigious great dog,’ she said, and she was surprised to find tears running down her face. ‘But it is more likely he is just some damned symbol, longing for a romp.’

  She wiped away her tears and sniffed, and at the sound the wolf’s ears pricked up. They walked on. Half a mile later she called out ‘Hey!’ and the wolf froze, so that she could see him perfectly: a huge brute, quite six feet long with his mangy tail; and in spite of his silver flanks he looked indescribably mean. After some repetitions of this he sprang up on to the road and followed immediately behind, his shadow clear on the whiteness; and sometimes he snuffled on her track. But she was growing bored with the wolf, bored with watching, bored with tension.

  At last anger flared up: she turned and cried, ‘What kind of a goddam symbol are you, anyhow?’ At this point the wolf was sniffing about a milestone: he kept his eye on her and deliberately cocked his leg. ‘A symbol cocking its leg, for God’s sake,’ she exclaimed. ‘I never knew wolves did that. Unless indeed it is symbol upon symbol.’ She picked up a stone and walked back along the road: the wolf crouched, rigid, glaring. She called out, ‘Here’s for you, canis lupus,’ and as her arm whipped up she knew who she was and that Hugh Lupus was an empty selfish man, hollow and false: false through and through. The knowledge came faster than the flying stone.

  Copyright © 1994, 1974, 1956, 1953, 1950

  by Patrick O’Brian

  First American Edition 1994

  First published as a Norton paperback 1995

  ‘The Return’, ‘The Happy Despatch’ and ‘The Dawn

  Fighting’ first appeared in The Last Pool (1950); ‘Not Liking to

  Pass the Road Again’, ‘The Slope of the High Mountain’, ‘The

  Little Death’, ‘The Passeur’, ‘The Tunnel at the Frontier’ and

  ‘The Path’ in The Walker (1953); ‘Billabillian’, ‘Lying in the

  Sun’ and ‘The Walker’ in Lying in the Sun (1956); and ‘The

  Rendezvous’, ‘The Stag at Bay’, ‘Samphire’, ‘The

  Clockmender’, ‘The Chian Wine’, ‘The Virtuous Peleg’,

  ‘A Passage to the Frontier’, ‘The Voluntary Patient’, ‘The

  Long Day Running’, ‘On the Bog’, ‘The Lemon’, ‘The Last

  Pool’, ‘The Handmaiden’ and ‘On the Wolfsberg’ in

  The Chian Wine (1974).

  All rights reserved

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  eISBN 978-0-39334-444-8

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