Compulsory Games
Page 39
“Where are you going?” asked Timo.
“To the house my husband bought. For one further night.”
“What do they call it?”
Lydia noticed that he had fallen into the visitor’s idiom.
“They call it the House of the Promised. I don’t know why.”
“And then you are going altogether?”
“Back home to my sisters. Now it is possible.”
“Don’t forget your shoes,” said Lydia.
“No,” the stranger replied, quietly putting them on. And then she was gone.
“That was generous of you,” said Timo in a constrained voice. “And imaginative.”
“It was weak and foolish of me.” Lydia was gathering up the rugs and vessels. “As always. Light the Tilley will you?”
“I haven’t heard her car yet. I haven’t heard a sound.”
Lydia stopped moving. There was a long silence. The land was luridly lit from beyond the sea, but swiftly darkening.
Lydia had to say something. “If you feel like that, you had better have a look.”
“Perhaps I had.” Really it was the thinnest vesture of a convention.
Lydia stood shaking slightly, and still grasping the paraphernalia of their little tea party.
“Well, go then.”
Timo was hesitating ridiculously.
“That music,” said Lydia. “Can you hear it still?”
“No. I am not sure I ever heard it. I probably only thought I did.” He disappeared round the corner of the house. Lydia, as usual, could not tell how far he was speaking the truth.
Lydia stood facing the last of the sunset, which yet looked garish and inimical. There was still nothing to be heard. It was as if Timo had stepped, without a scream, into a pit bottomless and therefore noiseless. Then, very sharp and loud and rattly, she heard the engine of their station wagon. She laid down the rugs and crocks, and walked slowly in Timo’s steps. The last of the green light showed her Timo driving away very fast; alone, it appeared, though it was hard to see. The din seemed to take minutes to die away among the echoing rocks and to merge into sounds she had never before consciously listened to, sounds of the alien dusk, unidentifiable, multitudinous, lyrical. Then the night was on her like the curtain at the end of a play.