The Haunted Storm

by Philip Pullman

  He was used to the workings of this uncertain clairvoyance of his, so he was not for an instant surprised when he turned a corner in the road and saw, about fifty yards ahead of him, the slight figure of Elizabeth walking slowly along. She was going the same way as he was, so she had her back to him. He stood absolutely still and watched; he was not sure what to do. But after a few seconds, she turned around and saw him.

  He immediately felt awkward and shy, but he did not move an inch.

  As for Elizabeth, she stood still too, watching him. She had no idea at all of what he might do. He might just turn his back and walk away, for all she knew of him, or he might run up to her, worst of all, and remind her of where they had met, and talk vacuously while he eyed her body. Just for a moment, before either of them moved, she suffered the humiliating torture of knowing that he could easily be the worst thing in the world.

  Then he stepped forward almost as if he had been pushed, and walked up to her unwillingly. As soon as he got close enough for her to see the expression on his face she knew she was safe. He looked disturbed, even distressed, and before a second was up she did, too. In order to help him she went a few paces towards him, so that he should not be embarrassed – have to wait –

  He saw that she had begun to cry, silently and proudly, but in a total confusion. It was his fault; he cursed himself. But then, unable to help himself, he ran the last few yards and stopped dead in front of her. It was astonishing; he was completely helpless. Something had suddenly taken possession of him. He was shaking from head to foot; he felt his arms rising to stretch out towards her and saw her hands move from her side to meet his, and then they touched and his hands clasped tightly around hers. Then without seeming to make the least effort, without seeming to move at all, they were in each other’s arms. Matthew felt a pressure as if all the blood in his body suffused his brain; his eyes closed, and he rested his cheek on the top of her head, hearing himself sigh, and drank in the sweet smell of her hair like water, as if he were dying of thirst.

  She pressed her face into his shoulder, and felt the tweed of his coat rough against her cheek.

  “No! I don’t know you at all!” he began to mutter wildly. “I’ve never seen you before; I can’t understand it, I can’t understand the least little thing about it, I’m lost completely; but now you’re here you mustn’t go, you mustn’t ever leave me; we must try and make sense of it…”

  “Are you afraid of me, then?” she said quietly.

  “Afraid? No! Yes! I’m overcome with fear – look – I’m trembling –”

  He let go of her and held his hands out in front of him, shaking like leaves. As soon as he did so he had to struggle with himself to keep from seizing her again and holding her more tightly than before. She looked him in the eyes; hers were still wet with tears, and the look in them, so tender and yet so cold – yes! – indifferent – nearly forced him to his knees.

  “You are –” he began, and stopped, and his voice rose to a cry – “Oh God! It’s not true, any of it, from the beginning of the world it’s all been false and mocking; and you, now, what I feel for you, if that is false and untrue then I am not here, and you are not here with me, and the sky is not grey, and no storms exist. And this storm here in my heart, now, and my mind, what of that? Well, that’s a deception, too. Tell me, though… Elizabeth,” he said, more calmly, “tell me what you thought I was thinking, there on the beach.”

  They stood a couple of feet apart, and each of them wondered at the force in the other’s eyes.

  “I thought you might have been – you might have been dismayed, you might have thought I was mad, or you were,” she said.

  “No, no! I know you didn’t think that – Christ, we can be honest with each other! In fact we can’t be anything else. There’s no hope for us now, if we’re not; no, I’ll tell you what it was I was thinking. I was thinking that I loved you!”

  This seemed to shock her profoundly, for she went pale and closed her eyes for a second. Matthew felt that unless he continued to talk, swiftly and convincingly, to press his case, he would lose her altogether. Already he regretted having said what he had; but the only way out was to continue, to bludgeon her into accepting it. But some scruple held him back and made it impossible to talk.

  As if to underline the difficulty, a car went past them just at that moment and they had to step on the grass verge. And this action somehow – because it was forced on them and they had to act for a moment in a way that had nothing to do with them – generated an awkward and rather formal tension between them. Matthew felt that he was losing again, that it was now nearly out of his reach; but then she saved it.

  “But, you know,” she began hesitantly, “the fact is that we still – don’t know each other. And if you want to know what I was thinking on the beach – you were right, I wasn’t thinking that at all, what I said just then – but what you’ve just done saying that – it shows that what I was thinking about you was true, because I was thinking that you’d be more daring than I was, you’d go further, you’d speak more – openly, and where I’d hedge and make excuses and stay silent, perhaps, you wouldn’t… you’d say it, whatever it was. I can’t say it more plainly than that. But yes, I can, I’ll do what you do. I’ll tell you –”

  “Tell me what it was you shouted, then! Tell me what you cried out just as you ran away!” Matthew said urgently.

  “All right…” she said, and put her hands to her forehead as if it were aching. The gesture touched Matthew’s heart, for it looked as if she were trapped, like a shy wild animal that could not bear being looked at, and he longed to say “no, don’t do as I tell you, you needn’t…” but he let her go on. “All right, I’ll tell you,” she continued, “I’ll have to think to remember the exact words, but I told you in that cry that you had the same touch as he did, as my lover did – but you don’t have to take it literally, like that – not just the way you touched me; it wasn’t just the way he touched me at all – oh, do you see? It was a whole sort of aura, a whole sort of atmosphere about it, power, stillness, something like that – do you see? I said nothing but ‘It’s you,’ I think; I said I’d found you…”

  Her voice faded. He felt dizzy, unreal, as if the wind that swept the trees and the road and the clouds had now entered his head, his eyes, his limbs, cleaning him, sweeping him bare and ecstatic.

  “Elizabeth, Elizabeth,” he muttered, “I – am – unable… I can’t believe any of it… anything; and I can’t believe you’re lying!”

  He took her shoulders roughly and squeezed them tight. She looked at him openly, without fear or shame, and he saw desperation in her eyes, and anger, and contempt, and pleading. He looked away, unable to bear it, up at the cold grey sky; that was where he belonged! That was his home land, those grey wastes, haunted by gulls and by geese! And he drew strength from it, too, he felt resolution entering him.

  “Matthew –” she said, “I don’t care what you do, or what you say; it’s almost incidental; but you – that’s all – that’s all I – oh, all I – I can’t say it, I’m afraid to say it! But I don’t want you to care about my being afraid, I don’t want you even to listen, just hear it casually, turn away, look me once in the eyes perhaps, and say nothing about it – that’s what I want; and what I’m afraid to say is that you – that central part – that’s all I love. There, I’ve said it. I can’t pretend I haven’t, now. I’ve copied you and said what l thought.”

  Matthew was still holding her by the shoulders; he dared not let go. But he could not look into her face – he had to look away, at the road, at the hedge, at the windy sky, and all of them seemed to flicker and tremble on the edge of articulation, on the edge of becoming something else…

  “No!” he cried; it burst out of him – “no! Look, I’ll tell you! Look at me now, I can’t look you in the face, you see that? You know why? Do you? It’s because you’re too human, that’s why it is! Too beautiful! No, no, no, I don’t say what I think; because I don’t know what
I think, because I am not human enough. I daren’t look you in the face because my heart would turn to flesh if I did, and break… Now, you see, I can feel it – you’ve gone cold – was it true then, what you said, that you don’t care a straw what I do?”

  She was astonished by the speed of the complete change that now came over him. He was staring fixedly into her eyes as if he’d never said anything at all about not being able to; “he must be half-mad,” she thought. And in place of the fearful, naked look of anguish that had twisted his features a second ago, he now wore a light, free, almost joyous expression that was strangely innocent.

  She nodded.

  “It doesn’t matter a bit,” she said. “I told you it doesn’t. And I think I can see why it is that you – whatever it is, torture yourself, if you like; and why you’ve changed suddenly, why you’re smiling now as if nothing had happened. Yes, I know; it’s because what you get agonised about, like now, is only on the surface; it just doesn’t go deep enough to last. Truly, honestly, you couldn’t care less about it; but you don’t like to say so, and so you act, you overact; but your mind’s not on it and after a minute you’ve forgotten it again. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that true about you?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And so that’s why I don’t care about it.”

  He was silent for a moment, hoping with all his might that she wouldn’t suddenly disappear again; and he felt bitterly ashamed of this cold charlatanry she had just unmasked. Well, he’d better tell her so, and set about clearing his name!

  “I’m sorry I’m like that, I genuinely am; I had no idea it was so obvious – but that’s not an excuse – I don’t know – I’m ashamed of it. Should I be more open? Should I have more human feelings? I admitted it, though, I said I’m not human enough – oh, but Elizabeth, I’m sick of these human feelings! That’s why I changed just then, you see! It was because I felt you go cold, as if you were contemptuous; and my mood changed because it delighted me that you should feel contemptuous – because I did, too! I hate myself like that – I was saying that I didn’t know, I couldn’t see, I was lost – weak things! I should be strong enough to see and to know. And underneath the charlatan, the actor, I’m constantly working on myself like a madman to make myself strong enough –”

  “Stop! For God’s sake shut up! Because you don’t believe that either! And it’s not the point anyway.”

  Her voice shook; she held up her hand to stop him interrupting.

  “Oh, Matthew, it’s not the point,” she went on. “I know about that – of course I know about it, because I can see straight into your eyes – I knew about it on the beach. I swear I did! Why am I saying all this now? Why is it me who’s talking? I don’t know; I’m just trying to show you what’s obvious…”

  “Yes,” he said, “I know! It is obvious; oh God, let me for once accept it, please, accept the truth… all right, Elizabeth, the truth is this, and I swear I will accept it – that my soul – and your soul – however it’s come about – that we have, somehow, we have one soul between us! And maybe it’ll turn out that now we’ve found each other we’ll be complete, we’ll be human, we’ll be happy, and we’ll forget about these other things – your matter and spirit, and my morality, as you called it – they’ll just lose their urgency, and die, and be buried, and we’ll – grow up. That’s malice, and envy; that’s the charlatan speaking, that last bit. I know you know it is, so I don’t worry. I’m double, Elizabeth, I’m sorry, I’m a mocking ghost as well as – me, whatever my soul is, my central part.”

  She was looking at him with what he could only think of as tenderness in her expression; it was the same tenderness which had so stirred him when she had smiled at him on the beach.

  “Supposing when we get to know each other we find out that we don’t even like each other? What’ll we do then?” he asked, only half seriously.

  “Put up with it,” she said. “I won’t care, if you don’t. I think we live so little on the surface anyway that we won’t even know if we like each other or not. Isn’t it – isn’t it incredible;” and she smiled again, looking down at the road and shaking her head.

  “I love you,” he said.

  The whole afternoon was cradled in stillness. Far away above them the wind blew as coldly as ever, and Matthew felt an obscure corner of his soul lifted and borne out like a banner in the great invisible streams of air. Isolated drops of rain fell now and then. He breathed in deeply, feeling faint, uncertain, but a little relieved… in the depths of the freshness he could taste in the wind, he caught the scent of her hair; it was clean and lightly perfumed, as if she had just washed it. And only then did he realise that he hardly knew what she looked like, for he had scarcely any apprehension at all of her physical presence. For what he knew of her body, he might as well be dreaming of her. He noticed that she was looking at him, -and stared back at her, puzzled by something…

  And then he had it: it could only be that her existence – the whole of it, her entire being, that rose-pearl-white-silk coloured flesh, her flawless hands – which she held, now, clasped tensely in front of her – her hair, thick like dark water, loose and wild in the wind – her eyes – what colour were they? Light! Of course! Like her father’s! Light green-blue, narrowed, with a multitude of expressions held trapped in them, held back like wolves on a leash – her lips – pale in colour, too, just tightened: the upper lips curved proudly, and the two almost equal in fullness – her slim shoulders – he had never realised truly how slim she was, she was like an arrow, her breasts small and her hips slender – this, her body; and this, her soul, too, hidden, tenuous, intent, self-regarding, possessed: the very mirror of his own – it could only be that her whole being was akin to his, akin as closely as brother and sister, as twins.

  Then, and only then, when he’d stepped outside himself accidentally, as it were, did he know completely what it meant to have found her. And how completely he was bound to her, heart to heart.

  Then he blinked, and sighed, and suddenly smiled broadly at her.

  “Now – do you know what?” he said. “I feel shy, I don’t know what to say.”

  She looked away, thinking it embarrassed him to be stared at; but in fact he was hardly conscious of it, and after a second he went on: “Did you do it again after you left me there on the beach? I mean, did you find anyone else?”

  Without thinking of it they both began to move gently along the road, as if they had exhausted for the time being the psychic potentiality of that one spot. It was easier to talk, too, because they did not have to look at each other, but instinctively each of them sought the other’s hand and clasped it tightly. She answered him in such a low voice that he had to lean close to her to hear it.

  “No…I never did after that, because I didn’t need to, you see, I’d found you; and then lost you immediately… I had to make myself again falsely, to pretend all day long, month after month. But I never did it again.”

  “No…I believe you, my love! You see, I can believe simply and honestly! Oh Elizabeth, tell me something else: do you think that in this love of ours there’s anything real? No, I don’t mean real: I mean realistic, I mean worldly. If I were to write about it, to write it down like a story, would it look – I don’t know – improbable? Fanciful?”

  She smiled at this, but it may have been his expression she was smiling at, for he looked almost childishly anxious as he said it.

  “Why don’t you know?” she asked. “But just because it’s extravagant and unlikely doesn’t mean it’s not true. I don’t know, I haven’t the least idea about it. It doesn’t matter either, does it? It’s just happened now, like this, instead of after we’d known each other for a long time, that’s all. It would have happened anyway. But it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t matter. What is realistic anyway?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t feel the world to be true. I don’t know if it is true, so I don’t know how important it is; politics, war, trade, business, crime,
are they a sort of dream, because that’s how I see them, or are they vital – real – true – important? Am I deluding myself? And us, Elizabeth, are we part of the world, or are we outside it?”

  “No! We’re outside it! Politics and business and war don’t concern us at all, any more than if we were on another planet. But it’s hard for me to say that, it’s harder now than it was on – on the beach. I said then – I can’t remember, I think I said about politics that it was matter, it was completely earthy, and I’m not matter at all, so of course it’s not real… now it’s harder. I don’t know so clearly because I’ve been, all this time when I thought I’d never see you again, I’ve been denying myself, I’ve been copying the world so earnestly and moulding myself to it – to pretend that – if the real part – my soul – if it shrank, if it grew colder and smaller and finally died – I could pretend that the false part was true, when I had nothing else; and so I’d last a bit longer. And I pretended it so completely and so fully that now you’ve come and the – my soul can be true and live again – but the false part’s strong, it’s grown hard, hard to break – so it’s – it’s difficult… oh Matthew! “

  She had been speaking haltingly, uncomfortably, but now she broke down and wept, and shook her head helplessly and turned to face him, making awkward movements with her hands before flinging her arms round his neck and holding him tightly.

  His concern was all for her; but he could not help thinking, as he led her gently to the side of the road and the shelter of a great elm that stood there, how the strangeness – the unworldliness – of their meeting was never so poignant as when their bodies were pressed so closely together.

  She cried so passionately and so freely that it began to worry him a little, and, noticing that the gate in the hedge nearby was unfastened, he said to her “Elizabeth – Elizabeth – listen, love! – come and sit down in the field, come on; it’ll be quiet in there.”

  It was quiet enough in the road; but he hated the thought that a car might come past, or a man on foot or on a bicycle, to disturb them.