‘And this place is known to the ancients,’ the manager said, ‘from long before. It is very very interesting from the historical side as well as the waters do good to your health. See, the ancient columns and marbles that are lying there two thousand years, maybe more.’ He pointed downward over the side of the bridge.
‘Yes, I see them,’ Farnaby said. Sections of column, fluted marble drums, shining faintly in the depths, traced with lines of tiny radiant bubbles. He averted his eyes, not wishing to add the weight of the past to his other burdens.
Number twelve turned out to be a little to the right of the bridge, more or less in the middle of the row facing directly across the pool towards the entrance. The door was not locked. The gatekeeper deposited his case, the manager gave him a beaming smile.
Senemoǧlu, he said. ‘My name is Senemoǧlu. Anything you want, you ask me. Yes?’
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. ‘Thank you.’ And he was finally alone, in the welcome dimness of the cabin. Calm came to him and a certain stealthiness of feeling at the narrow confines of the cabin. It seemed to him like a cell. A small square window was set into the rear wall, very high up, so that it afforded to normal view merely a section of blue sky, faintly curdled now, he noticed, with cloud. There was a duckboard at the door, a narrow bed with an iron frame, a washbasin, a small table with a paraffin lamp on it, a single hard-backed chair, and a large oil stove. The simplicity of the furnishing and the fact that all the cabins were identical – the manager had said this, hadn’t he? – reinforced Farnaby’s sense of inhabiting a cell, monastic or penal he couldn’t decide which, but it seemed to him unmistakably a place in which people had lived briefly and in some sort of heightened consciousness. Some must have larger beds or at least two such beds or more, for families and so on, but perhaps they are all split up by the manager, by Senemoǧlu, into unicellular creatures. To avoid an appearance of emptiness. No, surely not, devoted couples would refuse …
This thinking about beds led him to wonder in which hut the lady he was looking for, provided she was there at all, was at present reclining. Miss Miranda Bolsover. She would have just a single bed too. Perhaps she was lying on it at this very moment, alone and lightly clad. Farnaby lay down on his bed and placed his hands behind his head, the better to think of this. Glowing limbs wantonly displayed, breasts of a striking fullness, thrust into prominence by the position of the body, a smile both dreamy and provocative. He sat up suddenly, with feelings of guilt and self-abhorrence. He had stores of guilt, returning from almost any reverie with handfuls of it like mud from an ocean bed, to daub himself with. Now he realized suddenly he had been associating Miranda with the strippers in the photographs he had seen on the way to Mooncranker’s hotel. It was not in any case seemly for him to think of her like this, as if she were somehow plastic and he could shape her lineaments to his desire. She existed, already formed. And he was fixed in his relation to her by Mooncranker’s having sent him to fetch her. Mooncranker’s runaway secretary mistress. If she was Galatea then Mooncranker it was who had breathed on her, Mooncranker who had smoothed the flanks. Dear boy, you must get her back for me. I need her, you see. Majestical dishevelled Mooncranker. In the white hospital room, under his sheets, sustenance from the bottles passing along the tube into the veins of his arm. Aquiline nose directed at the ceiling while he intravanously fed. Glucose and water and vitamin B. Dear boy. There is a thermal pool in Anatolia reputed to possess medicinal properties. I have reason to think. In my present condition. I have dehydrated myself through drinking, paradoxical, yes. In an effort to forget Miranda. The sisters rustling down the corridor, the fan whirring high up on the wall, time always the same time in that white room, his deep-toned voice following circular courses. I will be eternally grateful to you. Eternally, yes. To dally throughout eternity with Miss Miranda Bolsover …
He sat on the edge of the bed and took out his wallet. From it he extracted the photograph, the only one of Miranda Mooncranker had had in his possession. Farnaby had insisted on having this, not being at all sure that he would recognize Miranda after all these years. But he did not think it would be much use. For one thing it had been taken several years previously when Miranda was still at school – not much later perhaps than the time when he had known her; and for another it was not of Miranda alone but was a school group photograph, a double row of girls in white blouses and gym slips. Mooncranker had borrowed Farnaby’s fountain pen and with trembling fingers had inscribed on the shiny sky above Miranda’s head a windswept asterisk. ‘That is she,’ he had said. But it was a bad photograph. All the girls looked much the same, fairish, plumpish, gymslips to the knee. Smiling a poignant group smile. Looking at the photograph was like looking at twenty-one Mirandas. The exact repetition of their costume and smile made him think of their perhaps more varying private parts, a double row of silky pubic mounds; a sense of multiplicity recalling the boundless sexual ambitions of adolescence. Feelings of lubricity invaded him at the thought of getting it away with the whole of a compliant fifth form. It was the stern inclusiveness of it that was so exciting …
In order to get rid of these thoughts which had nothing after all to do with his mission, he stood up again and setting the chair below the window, climbed on to it and looked out. The view from his window was impressive but bewildering too because nothing much of what he saw could be identified with any certainty. The ground rose steadily away from him in green enfolded ranks of hills, the nearer ones smoothly terraced, green and soft and scattered everywhere to the horizon with evidences of ancient habitation, ruined basilicas, higher up the fan shape of an ancient theatre, crumbling walls and heaps of masonry. There were flocks of sheep among the hills and he could hear the faint manifold tinkling of sheep bells, a sound persistent, obtrusive yet remote, like the frailty and sorrow of great age made audible. Timor mortis conturbat me. Within the range of his vision there was no sign of this ruined landscape coming to an end. Over to his left, which he thought of vaguely as westward, on a level below the first hills, was a long double line of stone, box-like structures. They continued till the angle of the window shut off his view. Sarcophagi he guessed after a moment, marking a funeral way for dead dignitaries. Mooncranker had said nothing of necropolises, and for a moment Farnaby felt aggrieved, as if the other had concealed this deliberately.
No sign of human beings in this extensive vista, where were the shepherds? Only the blank sky and the hills, softly, sepulchrally rounded, with the softness of barrow and tumulus, speckled with ancient pale granite and marble, sheep seeming at this distance to swarm, or pullulate rather, like maggots in a green fleece, and everywhere the rubble and low stone walls that followed the curves of the hills for a few dozen or a few hundred yards before tilting abruptly into the ground. High in the sky three large whitish birds, wheeling slowly.
Oppressed, Farnaby got down from the chair and lay on the bed again. What place was this he had come to? He turned on his side, face to the wall, attempting to shut off thoughts of the rubble-strewn hills, the glittering specious pool. And after some minutes, one delicate big-knuckled hand holding for comfort and consolation his subdued testicles, Farnaby fell asleep.
2
He slept deeply. It was twenty minutes past five when he awoke. He washed at the basin and changed his travelled-in, slept-in shirt for a clean one. Then he went out on to the terrace. There was nobody in the water now. One youngish man was sitting at the first of the tables on the opposite side. The sun was low in the sky, directly behind this man, and the walls of the building beyond the terrace, and the beach umbrellas along the terrace itself cast long shadows over the gleaming, fuming water.
He went across the bridge, intending to find himself a table farther along, but as he passed the man said good evening to him in English and smiled up and Farnaby said, ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ thinking that perhaps he had found a compatriot, but ‘Not at all,’ the other said in accents unmistakably American. Farnaby seated himself at the table and retur
ned the smile, which was a nervous, rabbity one, distinctly incongruous with what seemed to Farnaby his leisurely confident manner of speech, although this impression of confidence was one that the speech of Americans always gave him. He was younger than he had seemed at a distance, hardly more than twenty or so. He had a long narrow face with a pale, prematurely wrinkled forehead and prominent white teeth. His complexion was marred by several inflamed-looking pimples concentrated on the right side of his face. Beside him on the table was a small transistor radio.
‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’ he said, and Farnaby was at once carried back to school days, when there had always been someone to ask that question, not the strongest, but not the least dangerous either. Asking you to declare yourself. It seemed to be as complex a question now as if the intervening years had never happened and surely, he thought, a question normally encountered only in places with inmates, fellow sufferers, places to which one had been consigned. Confronting the narrow salesman’s smile on this immature face, Farnaby was visited by an eerie sense of déjà vu, of something threateningly familiar behind the apparent novelty of his surroundings. Nevertheless he answered as he had always answered, coolly, as literally as possible: ‘Yes. I arrived this afternoon.’
‘Thought so,’ the other said. ‘Thought I hadn’t seen you around.’ He placed both elbows on the table, leaning forward, as if prepared even at this early stage to be frank and confidential. ‘Would you like to listen to the radio?’ he said.
‘I don’t mind,’ Farnaby said.
The other pressed a button on top of the set and a man’s voice was heard, very faintly singing. ‘Can’t turn it up too loud,’ he said. ‘There’ve been complaints. My name is Lusk. Eugene Lusk. I been here four days.’ He contrived to make this last remark sound like a sort of claim to seniority.
‘James Farnaby.’
‘Glad to know you? You’re British, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is coming to you from the American base in Izmir,’ Lusk said, looking at the radio. ‘It is specially put out for the military.’ He turned up the sound and it was now in fact military music, a brass band playing a march. After a moment Farnaby recognized it for the triumphal march in ‘Aïda’.
As if summoned by these strains, a portly man emerged from one of the cabins in the row facing them and walked with a curious smooth rolling gait along the side of the pool. He was smartly dressed in a cream-coloured suit.
‘Who is that, do you know?’ Farnaby said.
‘He is a Levantine,’ Lusk said. ‘Name of Spumantini. Runs an agency in Izmir. Electrical equipment. He is after an English lady staying here, named Mrs Pritchett.’ He smiled wrinkling his forehead. ‘She doesn’t give him much encouragement,’ he said.
‘How do you know all this?’ Farnaby asked.
‘You got to keep your ear to the ground,’ Lusk said. ‘In a place like this you got to watch points. You can’t tell what might be important.’
Farnaby watched the infatuated Levantine with considerable interest. The man’s body was shaped like a barrel, with legs in the cream slacks rather short. A heavy, handsome, fleshy face; a pronounced thrusting motion of the thick thighs as he walked, graceful and rather repellent, as though the man were in a not quite human element, subject to some slightly more resistant substance than air. He seated himself at one of the tables farther down from them.
‘They come out here for a drink, you see,’ Lusk said. ‘You will see them coming out.’
There was a short silence between them, filled with the continuing strains of ‘Aïda’. Then Lusk said, ‘Yes, they’ll be out.’ He spoke with a certain satisfaction, as if glad at thus being able to reduce the complex humanity at the pool to this single predictable shape. ‘Afternoons resting mainly,’ he said. Then a drink or two here on the terrace, then the pool, dinner, pool again. They stay in the water half the night, some of them.’
‘Is that so?’ Farnaby said. He was beginning to hope now, after what the other had said, that if he sat on here and waited Miranda would sooner or later appear, to take part in these ritual preliminaries to immersion.
‘I am in the Peace Corps,’ Lusk said. ‘That is the basic reason for me being here.’
‘Are you looking to the peace of the pool?’ Farnaby said smilingly.
‘No, no, I mean here in Turkey. I am based in Izmir right now. No, this is just a kind of vacation.’ He advanced towards Farnaby a face narrow, pale-lashed, serious, smelling of lemon-scented cologne. ‘I heard a lot about this place,’ he said. ‘In Izmir, I mean. You know, the guys there, they were always singing its praises. You go there, they said, you can get yourself a good time.’
The band had changed over now to ‘Speed Bonny Boat’ which they were playing very fast as if it were a light infantry march. A short and enormously fat woman with a tiny permed head, dressed in a lilac-coloured towelling beach-dress, emerged on to the terrace from one of the cabins in the row on their left, followed by a bald man in a dark blazer who seemed skimpy by comparison. They walked along the terrace one behind the other, towards the tables, he with head slightly inclined, she setting moccasined feet with dainty care, calves quivering at every step.
‘Who are they?’ Farnaby asked.
‘Krauts,’ Lusk said. ‘Herr and Frau. A lot of overweight people come here, the manager told me that. The water is supposed to be good for the glands.’
He said no more for the moment and Farnaby watched with fascination the progress of this couple until they too had seated themselves. A man in a white jacket approached them and stood at their table in a deferential manner. They appeared to be ordering drinks.
‘I’m from Atlantic City myself,’ Lusk said. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Reading.’
‘Oh, is that in England?’
The waiter moved away from the Germans’ table and Farnaby saw from the brilliance of the smile that it was in fact Senemoǧlu, the manager. Apparently he combined the two functions, at least in the dead season.
‘They told me a lot about this place,’ Lusk said. ‘There’s girls here on their own.’ He looked anxiously at Farnaby for a moment, then said, ‘Crying out for it.’
‘Crying out for it, eh?’ Farnaby said. Two more men had appeared on the terrace, though he had not seen them emerge from any of the cabins. One was a tall, sharp-featured, rather saturnine-looking man, the other tubby and wearing a straw hat with a black band. They were arm in arm.
‘Homosexuals,’ Lusk said, anticipating his question. ‘Practising,’ he added, with a sort of respectfulness, as if it were of merit that they had not lapsed.
‘Are they English?’
‘The tall one is a Greek. I don’t know about the other. They talk to each other in English. Shall we have a drink?’
‘That is a good idea,’ Farnaby said. Lusk clapped his hands together and peered, wrinkling his brows anxiously. After a moment he relaxed and Farnaby guessed that Senemoǧlu had acknowledged the signal.
‘Crying out for it,’ Lusk said, reverting to the former topic. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
‘I suppose they come for a variety of reasons,’ Farnaby said rather coldly – he had not liked the imputation of inexperience.
‘They come for a good lay,’ Lusk said. ‘In the great majority of cases.’ The eyes, pale and beseeching, were at odds with the confident pronouncement. They seemed to Farnaby eyes which had not been able to take much for granted in life, except perhaps the condition of being alone: friends that advised him to come, not offered to accompany him.
‘And you have come here …?’ Farnaby said.
Lusk drew back and looked away across the pool. ‘Just a look,’ he said. ‘Sizing things up.’
Senemoǧlu now approached and stood before them smiling widely. ‘Good evening, gentlemen.’
‘What will you have?’ Lusk said.
‘I think I’ll have a vermouth. With ice, please.’
‘I’ll have a gin and Fruko,’
Lusk said. ‘You know, like I usually have. Don’t put the Fruko in, just bring the bottle separately. They put too much in,’ he said to Farnaby.
Senemoǧlu said, ‘Very good, sirs,’ but did not move away at once. Beyond him on the terrace, Farnaby saw three slender, brightly-dressed negroes, two men and a woman.
‘What is it?’ Lusk said, looking up at Senemoǧlu.
‘Herr and Frau Gruenther find themselves incommoded by the radio. They ask if you will adjust it to a lower volume.’
‘My God,’ Lusk said bitterly, reaching out an arm at once, however, to the radio. ‘Just hold me tight in your arms tonight’, a woman’s voice was singing. ‘And this blue tango – ’ Moodily Lusk switched it off altogether.
‘Thank you,’ Senemoǧlu said, withdrawing.
‘See what I mean?’ Lusk said to Farnaby.
‘Who are those blacks, do you know?’
‘They are new arrivals,’ Lusk said. ‘Probably G.I.’s, from the base at Izmir. Do you live in Izmir?’
‘No,’ Farnaby said. ‘Istanbul. I’m doing research there. Tell me,’ he added, making a strong effort to appear casual, ‘do you know of anyone staying here by the name of Miss Miranda Bolsover?’
‘No,’ Lusk said, after a moment or two of apparent reflection. ‘Can’t say I do. I might know her by sight of course. Is she a friend of yours?’
‘Yes, an old friend.’
‘They are crying out for it. That’s what the boys in Izmir said. This pool is known for it throughout the length and breadth of the land. His eyes bolted nervously round the pool. ‘They told me that,’ he said.
‘I thought people came here for health reasons mainly,’ Farnaby said.
‘A good lay is a health reason,’ Lusk said.
Senemoǧlu came with the drinks, beamed, bowed, retreated.
‘I have every reason to trust those boys.’ Lusk said defiantly, as if Farnaby had impugned their testimony about the sexual opportunities the pool afforded.
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