by MARY HOCKING
Milo listened, watching her speculatively. Her outburst was not without its uses. When she had finished, he said:
‘Do you feel better now?’
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘It’s better than crying with you.’
He held out his hand to help her up.
‘I can’t go on to Izera,’ she said.
He was not sure that he could either, so he said gallantly:
‘You shan’t go one step further than is necessary. There is a farm on the way down. We can stop there and go on to Izera tomorrow.’
‘Thank goodness for that!’ She brushed down her crumpled skirt. Then she glanced at the others as though noticing them for the first time.
‘Why are they all sitting there like that?’
‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps they are tired, or perhaps they have turned to stone. Let’s see if they follow us.’
As he led her forward she warned him: ‘I’m behaving badly, but I can’t help it. I’ve been holding it in for so long. I just can’t help it. You’ll have to put up with me.’
She was not a stoic sufferer and she continued to grumble as she followed the downward path. Milo suited his pace to hers without complaint. The others dragged behind in silence. Rose crept away several times to be sick, and once Raoul stumbled and fell heavily. The evening star came out and soon there was moonlight on the sharp stones and the breeze was raw; the trees and shrubs grew thickly again and later, as the path descended, there was the smell of pines. Only Milo noticed these things.
After an hour had passed they came to the farm, a small, squat building which looked derelict. The moonlight caught broken glass at a window; the dust was thick on the ledge. Milo led them round the side of the house and opened the door of an outhouse. It was empty and smelt of stale dung and damp straw. He went away and after a time they saw a dim glimmer of light wavering past a window and then there was the sound of voices—Milo’s and one other, not saying much. No one is planning to kill a fatted calf, James thought wearily. Rose had gone out again, perhaps to be sick, and Frangcon was sitting on the straw shivering. James hoped that Milo would bring blankets if nothing else. Raoul seemed to have disappeared. After a long time Milo returned with two blankets, followed by a man with a beard carrying a tray. There was a loaf of bread on the tray and a jug of greasy-looking liquid from which a little steam was rising. The man put the tray down reluctantly. His expression was sullen; if he was giving more than he could spare, he was not motivated by charity. He slouched away; soon they heard the farm door slam and the sound of bolts being drawn. Rose picked up one of the blankets, shuddered, and thrust it from her.
‘You mustn’t expect lavish hospitality,’ Milo told her. He picked up the jug of soup and glanced around. ‘Someone missing from the feast?’
They searched for Raoul and found him lying in the yard, his hunched body shaking convulsively. They carried him into the barn and wrapped him in the blankets. While Rose and James searched unsuccessfully for dry wood in the hope of getting a fire going in the yard, Frangcon stayed with Raoul. He did not seem to realize that she was there at first; then he suddenly put out his hand and grasped her wrist.
‘Don’t let me talk.’ The fingers clawed into her flesh. ‘Don’t let me talk.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said gently. ‘It doesn’t matter if you do say something silly. We shan’t mind.’
He shook his head wretchedly and flopped back; the clutching fingers relaxed and slipped from her wrist.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rose had come back.
‘He was afraid he might talk.’
Rose, who usually disliked sickness, came forward reluctantly and stared down at him. She looked uneasy and Frangcon wondered whether she was afraid that Raoul might talk about her.
‘I’ll look after him,’ Rose said. ‘You go and lie down.’
It was a cold night; beyond the barn door they could see the dark square of sky punctured with a few frosty-looking stars. As he lay beside Frangcon on the damp straw James remembered nights when he and his brother had camped out in the glens. Other memories came back. Once the police had hunted a soldier who had murdered an old woman and then taken refuge in the glens. ‘They’ll never find him,’ James had said. ‘He’ll get clean away.’ But his father had replied, ‘If you take to the heather, you must know the heather.’ The man had been found a week later, dead from exhaustion. It was not an incident which had made much of an impression on him as a child, so that it was odd that it should seem significant now.
Beside him, Frangcon frowned, moistened her lips and made a little grunting noise. A strand of hair fell across her forehead. Perhaps it irritated her? Very gently, he smoothed the hair back, letting his fingers rest lightly for a moment on her forehead. Her skin was flawless still, the flesh soft and blue-veined about the temples and beneath the eyes. She was lovely, and yet as he gazed down at her he felt a little frightened. He had come to Spain to enjoy a freedom that had not been his for years, and now he felt as though a net was closing around him. Did he really want this? Who was she? What did he know about her? He studied her face, seeking the answers, knowing that it was already too late for questioning. As he watched, the face puckered and tears formed along the thick rim of eye-lashes.
Frangcon could hear Raoul muttering incoherently. When she slept it became a part of her dream.
‘A touch of malaria,’ James had said. ‘He’s pushed himself too far.’
She had nearly done the same thing herself. As sleep came, she was wondering where you went when you pushed yourself too far. Then she saw Raoul standing in a great crystal dome; beyond the glass walls there were stars but no sign of land. She was on the other side of a door, frantically trying to reach him. ‘It’s no use,’ they kept telling her. ‘He’s pushed himself too far.’ And then the dome began to glide away; she could see his face pressed against the glass. It was not only Raoul that was going away; a part of herself was slipping away, too. She cried out: ‘It can’t happen; it can’t happen because no one ever goes quite out of reach; no one ever goes quite out of reach.’
She woke to find James bending over her and trying to soothe away her tears. He patted her shoulder, just like her mother had done when she was a child. After a time she went to sleep again and he, too, slept, slumped against the wall, his hand resting on her shoulder.
Only Milo remained awake. He had a pain in his chest and breathing was difficult. Triumph had been short-lived. It had been a miserable little skirmish, not worth the physical wear and tear. It showed what he had come to when this kind of bloodless contest mattered. Nevertheless, there had been one moment, up there in the valley of rocks, when time had stood still. They had all been frightened then. There was no comfort in this, though, because the man that had stood up there, so glorious in the setting sun, was a stranger that he was unlikely to encounter again. It would be better not to come to the mountains, better to leave the ghosts undisturbed.
Milo sat up to relieve the pain in his chest. He could hear Raoul shuddering, twisting, muttering to himself. What a waste! he thought. More than a waste, a sin, to squander youth, the only stage of life that mattered. And for what? An ideal, an abstraction, a mirage of a sick mind. It made Milo feel hollow even to think about it. One day, when the play-acting was over, he would ask the man why he had sacrificed so much so pointlessly. Not that the answer would mean anything; it was not through question and answer that men came to an understanding of one another. He turned over and felt the stiffness in his limbs. He wondered whether he would have made Izera if they had put him to the test.
Chapter Eight
Rose was writing a letter to her girl friend in England. It was early evening, stuffy and dark in her room, the shutters still down. Slats of light reflected on the wall above her. She studied them as she paused a moment, sprawled on the unmade bed.
‘. . . so you will see that the trip to the mountains was quite disastrous!’ she had written. ‘It seems to have give
n James a kind of fever, too. He behaves as though each day was the end of the holiday and everything must be crammed into it. He is almost greedy for time. He and Frangcon go off on long trips, loaded with cameras, packed lunches and guide books. They are both passionately fond of the past and they spend hours wandering around just one part of a church. They were wild about Tarragona, which one can understand, but even when they went to Poblet, which is quite small, they went on and on about the Romanesque cloisters. I begin to find all this rapturousness a bit trying. The more they find to praise, the more I become conscious of the things that irritate me. One of which—does it surprise you?—is Raoul. James and Frangcon are so intensely interested in each other. They seem to have soured things for Raoul and me. He is recuperating at a place called Izera, miles from here. So I haven’t seen him for a while and I’m not looking forward to his return. He is very experienced and makes quite an art of it. But I understand what you meant about Alex now. It does become a trifle tedious. And then, he will try to borrow money from me. It makes me feel rather dreadful when he does that; there’s something sordid about a man who borrows money from a woman, don’t you think?’
She watched the bars of light on the wall fading and growing further apart as the light became less intense. There were other reasons why Raoul was no longer so desirable, but she would not write about that because fear had made her discreet. She went on:
‘Now this man Milo that I have mentioned before—he would be different. Not so refined, for one thing. The possibility begins to interest me. Have you had anyone really lecherous?’
‘How tiresome for you that Alex should be posted to London again . . .’
She paused, eyes half-closed. Quite suddenly she had a vivid picture of Park Lane, dappled with pale evening sunlight, the trees in the park green and the grass smelling fresh as though it had been raining; people arriving at the Dorchester, lights reflected in pavements still wet, fur stoles and sparkling short dresses; a girl coming late out of one of the beauty parlours, a car drawn up waiting in a side-street; a young couple leaving one of those superbly expensive-looking flats in North Audley Street; the commissionaire standing outside the Mirabelle, hands behind his back . . . She sat up on the crumpled bed and drew her fingers through her hair which, as usual at this time of the day, was damp with sweat. The sweat ran down her neck, trickled between her breasts. In the mirror she could see her face, shining, the make-up clogged. ‘I look tatty!’ she thought. Worst of all, her body was sweaty and the talcum powder which she had put on when she came in already had a sour smell. She was homesick. It had happened once or twice lately; things seemed to be getting a bit beyond her—the heat, the constant discomfort, all that unpleasantness on the mountain. She picked up the pen and read through what she had written. She added:
‘So Derry is coming out to the Med? Well, there’s one thing about a sailor—he never stays long. So give him my address, by all means.’
She found an envelope in her drawer, addressed it, slipped the letter inside and then stood irresolute, wondering what to do next. It was these moments she had hated when she first arrived; if you let them spin out you ended up becoming really morbid, thinking how alone you were, how far away all your friends and relations were and how little they meant to you anyway. But she had made contacts here quickly and there had been little time for introspection. She sat on the edge of the bed and absently examined her legs, which had a nice smooth tan. The cure for this unease was to find a companion for the evening. Not Raoul. She had heard from a girl in the agency where he worked that he had returned to Barcelona, but she did not want to see him. He was becoming too complex; too dangerous. She felt under the bed and hooked out a pair of slippers. Her feet had swollen in the heat and it was difficult to get the slippers on. Everything was so tiresome lately. Raoul, the slippers . . . She could have cried with exasperation. And yet a month ago Raoul had not worried her and neither had her feet.
It was her Cousin James who was really to blame for this change in her attitude. Life here had seemed so different until he came, so gay, so irresponsible; one felt that one had shrugged off all the time-worn conventions and moralities. She had been inclined to laugh about the law. Of course, she had known that politically things were rather grim, but that had only added to the unreality. The words ‘police state’ belonged, in her view, to the realm of the thriller; they represented a situation which had been rather over¬played and which one did not take seriously. There was Milo, of course; at times he had succeeded in alarming her. But Milo’s reactions were so unlike her own that she could not see things clearly through his eyes. James was different. James represented rules of behaviour that she understood only too well, even if she did not see the need for them. James was a reminder that there were penalties for breaking the rules. Gradually, since he came she had realized that she might get into a bit of trouble as a result of meddling in Raoul’s affairs.
So she would not get in touch with Raoul. She would leave the next move to him. But in the meantime . . . She got up and went across to the window. She pulled back the shutters. How wonderful it would be to have a cool evening breeze, the smell of damp grass instead of the inevitable cooking fat and drains! There were children playing under the trees in the centre of the courtyard; a couple of old women, hunched black bundles from this distance, sitting on a bench talking; a girl and a young man walking away from the church, side by side, but not close. At home their arms would be twined and their bodies, too, in the first dark comer; but here, the girl so ripe and the boy as proud as a young cock, they must yet walk a little apart, not even holding hands. She shivered, although there was still no breeze. How alien these people were! She turned from the window. James. That was the answer. She would go out with James this evening. Sensible, perhaps, to have a stake in the old country; and who better at a time like this than a solicitor. When he came to the telephone she said:
‘Have you seen Raoul?’
One might as well start by talking casually about Raoul, she thought; it would open the way to a further discussion during the evening when she could intimate how little she really knew him. Perhaps she could make a joke about her mother’s fears and go on to prove how groundless they were. Already she was beginning to establish her innocence.
Of course, it did not work out that way. The legal mind was so tiresomely exact; her elegant tapestry of suggestion and half¬statement was soon destroyed by his sharp, incisive questions. The interrogation started at the fish course and went on intermittently throughout the meal.
‘How did you become involved with him in the first place?’
‘Good gracious! I don’t remember. How do these things start? One never really knows, does one?’
‘You know where you met him, I imagine.’
‘I’m not at all sure that I do. At a party probably; but one goes to so many parties . . .’
‘But that particular party must stand out in your mind.’
‘James dear! We didn’t fall in love at first sight or anything like that. I didn’t rush back to my flat and write ecstatic entries in my diary.’
He was not amused, just scowled down at his plate. After the meat had been served he resumed the cross-examination.
‘What has he done?’
‘Done?’
‘One doesn’t exchange a lectureship in a university for work in a travel agency without reason.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with working in a travel agency.’
‘Not for you, perhaps.’ He was not in a tactful mood. ‘But it’s hardly a job for a man of his capabilities.’
She pushed her plate to one side. Really, the heat was intolerable, she was beginning to feel quite sick with it—and now this!
‘It’s not his intellect I’m interested in.’
Her voice sounded thin and she was beginning to have a feeling of claustrophobia in the small, dark restaurant. She did not care what she said provided she brought this conversation to a close and escaped.
&
nbsp; ‘I believe he got into some kind of trouble in the south. I don’t know anything about it, though.’
‘You must have some information.’
‘Well, I haven’t. I don’t want to know. I’ve never asked a lot of questions.’
She searched in her handbag for a handkerchief. The idea that she should burst into tears in a public place appalled her. Fortunately it appalled him, too. After that he was as anxious as she was to change the subject. It was a pity she hadn’t weakened earlier, she thought wretchedly, before she told him that Raoul had got into trouble. When they left the restaurant she met a couple of friends and insisted on joining them. It put James in an even worse humour, but at least it prevented him from reopening the discussion. Later, when he went back to the flat with her he did not refer to it again. She hoped that he intended to let the matter rest there. The idea that she might use him to establish her innocence was obviously absurd: the more she talked to him, the less innocent she felt. When she went to bed she was saying to herself, ‘I hate him! I hate him!’ But it was of Raoul that she was thinking.
Chapter Nine
When Raoul returned from Izera he kept to himself for a while. He was very weak and work exhausted him. He went back to his room in the evening and lay on the bed thinking and waiting. For the first time his nerve began to fail him. After a few days the letter for which he had been hoping arrived. It contained enquiries about travel facilities in various places; the only thing of any importance in the letter was a reference to the Argentine. Raoul put it to one side. His body was covered in a cold sweat that seemed to drain all energy from him as though he was losing blood. He stared up at the ceiling; around him the noises in the street seemed far away, the clatter in the kitchen and the maids’ laughter on the stairs became muffled. There was nothing, nothing. It was as though his life had been cut off at its hidden source of strength. For so long he had been standing in the wings, waiting to resume his part. Now, it seemed, the play had been abandoned, the other actors had departed. There was nothing left for him to do. He had not realized how important it had been to him to feel that the others were there, waiting also; he had not realized that other people could be so important to him until this moment. It did not occur to him that his own attitude could be wrong: the issues of right and wrong had been settled long ago and could not be reopened now. He could hear the clock ticking very fast, as though it wanted to get something over and done with; his head felt very heavy, much too heavy to turn to look at the clock. And anyway, time no longer mattered. He would never get up again. It was not the weight of the years ahead that drove one mad, nor the fear of what would happen tomorrow or the day after; it was the impossibility of living through the next two minutes. He told himself that if he lay without movement while the clock ticked off another two minutes, he would never get up again, the relationship between brain and body would have broken down. He counted the seconds. One minute gone, ten seconds, twenty . . . His legs swung over the side of the bed, he caught on to the bed-rail, steadied himself, made his way across to the wash basin, splashed cold water on his face. It seemed to take more courage than anything he had ever done in his life. He looked round the room. What next? He must occupy his mind; difficult to do that alone. He went into the hall. No one there, but the telephone caught his eye. He telephoned Rose. She was out. So he telephoned Frangcon who was in.