‘Cheers,’ Farnaby said. ‘May the cries not fall on deaf ears.’
‘My trouble is, I’m a romantic,’ Lusk said. ‘I always look for an affinity, that’s my trouble.’
Farnaby looked away across the pool and then along the terrace. The sun had sunk below the horizon now, sunlight no longer lay on the water. The wreaths and swirls of vapour had thickened over the surface and coalesced into a thin pall, like mist. Darkness was in the air as a sort of graining and a scent of night. Most of the tables were now occupied and a confused sound of conversation carried to him. At the table nearest theirs was a couple he had not seen arrive, a youngish, thickset man with a large blunt head, and an expressionless, rather unkempt-looking blonde girl. They sat silently, not looking at each other but out towards the pool. Surely that could not be Miranda?
‘That has been my error, up to now,’ Lusk said. ‘We should be able to pluck a woman as we pluck a rose, don’t you think so?’ He leaned forward again.
‘I suppose we do tend to complicate things,’ Farnaby said. He felt the urgent heat of Lusk’s breath on his face, and drew back slightly.
‘Simplify it further,’ Lusk said, looking again in a hunted way about the pool. ‘Reduce it to gestures.’
Farnaby said, ‘I don’t understand you, quite.’ He was regretting now having sat next to this person. He looked along the terrace again and picked out the Levantine, at a nearer table now, talking to a middle-aged woman with short dark hair, who he thought might be Mrs Pritchett. Beyond them was a woman sitting alone, whose age was impossible to determine because her face was disfigured by the flaky encrustations of some skin disease. She seemed to be looking directly at him, and he glanced hastily away. This at least could not be Miranda.
‘I mean, like, will you or won’t you? Simple as that,’ Lusk said. ‘That’s all you need to know. Failing that, find a topic.’
‘Topic?’
‘Something to talk about.’
Farnaby looked again, unwillingly, at the lady with the diseased skin. Light was failing from moment to moment, the discoloration of the face was not now so apparent, what marked it out still, in the deepening dusk, as afflicted?
‘Yep,’ Lusk said. ‘There was a guy I knew in Atlantic City and he wasn’t even an American, he was a Pole, he had a Polish name. We all called him Buddy Basil.’
It is the impassivity of the face that denotes disease. Blight does not cause writhing but a stricken stillness rather.
‘He was over thirty years of age,’ Lusk said, ‘but he had this great topic, he used to ask the girls if they had a bad time with their periods. Doesn’t sound very promising, you’ll say, but it was the way he did it, the way he looked at them.’ Lusk leaned forward, mouth a little open, breathing ardently. ‘ “Do you have a bad time with your periods?” he used to say, and I am not kidding, it was like a snake with a chicken.’
‘That was a good ploy of Buddy Basil’s,’ Farnaby said. ‘What’s your topic?’
Lusk drew back and looked away. ‘Of course,’ he said, after a moment, ‘it’s no good going bang smack into the topic, let’s say it is periods, no good rushing in, you got to sort of steer the conversation, but he was an artist at it, Buddy Basil was. He had this foreign accent that sounded kind of sympathetic or concerned maybe …’
Farnaby nodded and glanced again to his left, along the terrace. The faces above the tables had a sort of depthless quality, perspectives seemed obliterated, as if everything were on one plane: effect of the dusk and the perpetual slight haze which hung in the air, and the reflected light from the water, quite uniform now that the sun had gone down. It struck him suddenly as a loss, as a missed opportunity that he had slept through this declension of the light, through the draining of the afternoon sky; as if by so doing he had forfeited some essential clue.
‘If I tell you my topic,’ Lusk said, ‘will you promise not to use it?’
Farnaby looked at him for a moment in surprise. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But you needn’t tell me at all if you’d rather not.’
‘I think I got a good one,’ Lusk said. The prominent, jagged-looking Adam’s apple leapt suddenly in his throat. ‘I ask them what towns they’ve been in,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Then I kind of say what are the men like, can a girl go out on her own. Then I take some city, Athens is the one I am using at present, and I say that in Athens it is their proud boast that a girl can walk around the city any hour day or night without being molested, then I just wait to see how they react to this and nine times out of ten they come up with some sort of personal experience in some town or other and I listen to this, and they are talking to me, they are presenting me with a slice of their lives and it’s on a sexual topic, broadly speaking a sexual topic, so there we are talking on this intimate level and they are associating me with it, by transference.’ Lusk paused, gulping excitedly, staring at Farnaby.
‘By transference, I see,’ Farnaby said.
‘My theory is that something is bound to emerge. All you have to do is stay with it.’
‘It sounds very promising,’ Farnaby said.
Darkening vapour hung above the pool, rising towards the tables along the terrace, the people seated there seemed to be resting on it or emerging from it. There were two figures in white jackets now, he noticed, moving about among the tables. Perhaps Senemoǧlu had been joined by the husband of the cleaning woman. A row of lights, spaced at intervals along the side of the pool nearer the entrance, suddenly came on. Set into the wall and paned with thick glass they gave out a soft diffused light, each one with a separate fuzz of radiance round it, forming a row of milky blobs along the poolside. Light streamed softly from them across the water and upwards over the terrace, and faces from time to time in the course of the several conversations seemed to dip into the light as though refuelling. Among others he caught sight of the aureoled moon face of the German woman, eyes shadowed, permed hair bright, a tiny glistening mouth moving in speech; and the heavy smiling face of the Levantine talking to a severe profile which did not respond.
‘I think I’ll go and get ready for the pool,’ he said.
‘I tried it out a few times,’ Lusk said. ‘I didn’t actually come up with anything, I mean nothing concrete emerged, but I am perfecting it.’
‘Keep at it,’ Farnaby said. He stood up. ‘Maybe I’ll see you in the pool later on?’
‘You bet,’ Lusk said. ‘Do you really think it is a good topic?’
‘Certainly I do.’ Farnaby smiled down at Lusk, then moved away. He walked towards the bridge. Before crossing it he stood still for a minute or so, looking over the pool. Then, with a sense of foreboding, he made his way along to his cabin.
3
Farnaby stood quite still at the edge of the pool, immersed to the top of his breast-bone. Vague forms moved before and around him ruffling the water, sending it lapping very softly against him, eddying against his breast in a way that seemed at first like a series of signals, attempts to communicate; an impression curiously reinforced by the fugitive patterns of light that glanced across the surface, various enough to be a code, sudden running glitters and dilations, coils, bobbins, tremulous moons that sidled and broke. He experienced during these first moments in the pool, a painful sense of expectancy, almost of dread, which he did not at first understand, though later he supposed it due to the movements of all the bodies in the water, movements more or less continuous, setting up a kind of prolonged, soft rustling, in its gentleness strangely difficult to endure, as if constantly presaging some greater violence which never in fact arrived.
It was characteristic of Farnaby to seek to allay uneasiness at unaccustomed sensations or indeed to dilute any too vivid experience by some sort of moralizing or descriptive process. He indulged in this out of self-defence and at the same time discounted it in advance so that he was held in a slight tension, a sort of controlled retreat from the senses. Now he began, in an experimental way, to question the randomness o
f all this movement and these changing effects of the light.
He stood for some time, looking about him. He was in a rather deep part of the pool – it got deeper, he had discovered, in both directions as the loops widened. The narrow part, the waist of the pool, was the shallowest, and consequently the most crowded.
Farnaby moved his arms in a sort of experimental swimming motion, cleaving the water below the surface and close to his sides, without moving any other part of his body, glancing at the same time up at the sky which was thickly scattered with stars. The night air was cold and he felt pleasure at this contrast, air of the spacious night on his face, body sealed and private in the warm water. The smell of the water rose to him, faintly sweet and brackish, not unpleasant. Like the distant smell of decomposing grass. Piled grass, rotting from within, from the warm damp core, in summer … A sort of generalized excitement stirred in Farnaby, for the moment without an object or discernible source. He took a deep breath and crouched farther down in the water, lowering his head vertically and with care. The water rose over his chin and tightly closed mouth. When it was lapping over the bridge of his nose he saw fifteen-year-old Miranda in her white tennis dress glimmering on the water, hair falling round a face full of suppressed laughter, her long legs refracted and dangling as if they were below the surface. He held this vision until his heart hammered against his ribs and roaring filled his ears. He came up gasping for air. Miranda vanished, fragmented, white dress and pale limbs scattered into the stars.
‘Sounds like somebody drowning over there.’ A husky, lazy female American voice. This was his first intimation of how sounds carried in the pool. Someone he could not see had heard his gasping. He thought it might be the black girl he had seen with the two men on the terrace earlier. A man answered her now: ‘Yeah, remember Smithy, when he went out that time in the middle of the pool, he got in too deep and he went under and he came up and he says, Help! but so quiet and polite nobody took him seriously, him being the little old quiet-spoken coloured man. “’Scuse me ma’am, I’m kinda drowning.” You know Smithy, he couldn’t swim, he never grew up near no water. He damn near drowned that day and twenty people watching.’
‘Smithy, yeah.’
Farnaby took some steps along the side of the pool to where the water was rather shallower, waist high. Here, closer to the bridge, you could see better. The mist was suffused with light and immediately around him the water showed a milky phosphorescence. He moved one arm slowly upwards through the water and saw just before it broke the surface the tiny gleaming bubbles trapped in his arm hairs. He was aware of other forms standing or moving not far away and he continued to hear splashes and voices, though there was something odd, as he was beginning to realize, about the acoustics of the place, making it virtually impossible from the sounds alone to determine distance or even, with much accuracy, direction. Voices and laughter, and the water sounds too, though amazingly distinct and vibrant, were liable to tail off, or be severed abruptly, apparently through chance shifts in speaker’s or hearer’s position.
‘– more civilized than here,’ Farnaby heard a voice say. Again American. Male, confident-sounding, slightly nasal. It was Lusk’s voice. ‘It is their proud boast in Athens that young women can walk out alone, even after nightfall, they don’t – ’ The rest of this speech was lost but after a moment or two he heard a girl’s voice, hurried, rather breathless, giving an effect of suppressed excitement: ‘I don’t know about here, but if it is anything like Sicily, wow! Not even in the day time–’
Farnaby stood listening, with a tension of anxiety, seeking to discover some recognizable quality in this voice. Might it be Miranda?
‘That is their proud boast in Sicily,’ the girl said, and they laughed, Lusk’s laughter sounding insincere and placatory, showing too clearly a desire for happy intimacy; the girl’s briefer, more neutral. At this point they must have moved away because the laughter was cut off abruptly and Farnaby heard or thought he heard, in this dream-like moment of transition, a harsh whisper in what sounded like German, coming from a different direction altogether. He peered through the mist. The voices of Lusk and the girl had seemed to proceed from the darkness beyond the bridge, but this was an unlikely source surely. Nevertheless, eager to see the girl’s face, he moved along the wall a few tentative steps in this direction, only to find himself confronting a white-skinned stocky man whom he recognized after a moment as one of the people he had seen earlier on the terrace. A yard or two behind this person he made out the fair-haired young woman who had been with him then. Proximity made some sort of salutation unavoidable, but for several moments Farnaby and the other man, whose thin hair was plastered sleekly over a blunt seal-like head, looked silently at each other. Then the man inclined his head in a punctilious, Teutonic way, and uttered a gobbling plosive syllable that sounded like Plopl.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Farnaby said, thinking he had not heard aright. The man uttered the sound again, in exactly the same manner. Plopl.
There followed some moments of numbed silence while Farnaby tried to make sense of this sound. Once again it was as if some signal or password were expected, some response he had not been schooled in. The world fell away steeply on all sides leaving himself and this unintelligible person on a desolate height together.
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said, unable to endure the silence any longer, and smiled through the dimness. Was it simply a watery sound, a sort of playful onomatopœia?
‘Adrian Plopl,’the man said, with yet another slight bow.
‘Er, Farnaby. James Farnaby.’
‘Are you interested in photography?’ A foreign voice, guttural and slow, laboriously over-inflected, giving an effect of kindness and simplicity of heart, like a connoisseur of bird song or an Alpine toymaker.
‘Yes,’ Farnaby said. The man moved closer and Farnaby found himself being regarded intently by small, widely spaced eyes. ‘That is,’ he added, ‘I am interested in a general way.’
‘Not as a practitioner?’
‘No.’
At this moment Farnaby became aware of someone standing not very far away, just outside his direct line of vision. He turned his head, saw in what seemed a sudden local burst of light, glints of dark hair hanging heavy about an oval face, a long-necked, slightly drooping form, facing inwards across the pool, standing quite still. There was an immediately poignant impression of loneliness about this figure which Farnaby never afterwards forgot, and something else, something wilful, a sort of imperviousness. He had no sense of recognition; indeed this apparent listlessness conflicted with the images he had retained through the years, images of certainty and gaiety, of clear moods flowing into robust physical expression; nevertheless he felt sure that this was Miranda.
‘Everything is in the selection,’ Plopl was saying. ‘You have to have the vision of the child, the innocent vision. If you do not have that, I advise you to give away all thoughts of becoming a photographer.’
‘But I have no ambition to be a photographer,’ Farnaby said.
Perhaps aware of being watched, the girl turned her head and looked towards him. The long, heavy-seeming hair swayed across her face. In the faint light a smile or at least the sense of a smile was exchanged between them, a willingness to be aware of the other’s existence. Or am I imagining this? Perhaps it is accident, coincidence, that she should continue to look this way, perhaps she doesn’t see me at all. Perhaps it is too dark for her to see, though light enough for me. He felt a sudden exalted subjectivity of sensation. The girl raised a white arm, the fingers of her left hand moved across her forehead, lifting aside the dark fringe of hair, a gesture clearly habitual, left to right, the back of her hand for a second obscured her face, a hand innocent of rings. She looked away, and at once Farnaby experienced a sense of loss.
‘Very interesting,’ he said to Plopl, seeking some graceful way of extricating himself from this conversation, so that he could approach the girl.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Plopl said.
‘What you say is very interesting.’
An earnest male voice, somewhere behind Farnaby, said suddenly: ‘I know a person in Izmir who can’t resist tearing up books and paper.’
‘You must seize the moment,’ Plopl said. He did not know why it had become important to impress this aloof-looking Englishman. ‘Make that moment eternal,’ he said. He squeezed water out of his hair, blinking at the thin form before him. ‘Are you interested in Zen?’ he asked anxiously.
‘He is a teacher, as a matter of fact,’ said the man behind Farnaby. ‘So he has a lot of temptation in his daily life.’
‘Zen?’ Farnaby said. ‘Not really, no.’
The girl began to move away. Peering after her, Farnaby made out another, he thought female, form; an impression confirmed, a few seconds later, by the burst of upper-class contralto laughter that came from it. ‘My dear,’ he heard this person say, ‘I belong to the older generation myself, for that matter.’ More laughter. Then the girl’s voice, clear, without special accent, saying, ‘Oh I don’t include you in that, Mrs Pritchett.’ This was Mrs Pritchett, then, the beloved of the Levantine. The two women moved farther off and he heard nothing more.
‘That’s what photography is,’ Plopl said. ‘Arresting the flux of time.’
‘He says these outbreaks are always followed by a sort of post-coital sadness.’
‘If you have no eye for the significant moment, you are never going to be a photographer, not ever.’
‘I have no wish to be a photographer,’ Farnaby repeated. Plopl did not seem to register what one said to him, as though equipped only for transmitting. He seems to have got it into his head that I aspire to be a photographer. Had he not delayed me I might have been able to ascertain whether the girl was indeed Miranda, before that Pritchett woman carried her off. Nevertheless, he was unwilling, even now, to offend. ‘Are you a photographer yourself?’ he asked, with some deference.
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