I raise my thin arm, the mineral drops cling briefly, slip over the loose folds. Most of me is gristle now, not flesh … The mind’s gristle is impotent imagination, accretions of a lifetime’s largely unfulfilled desires. I should write that down. Desires that outlived all possibilities of performance, that were never acted upon, but persisted, caught like insects in the gummy secretions of the time and place, like beetles, trapped beetles stuck on their backs, still able to wave their legs at the random stimulus of memory, or the fear of death. All my little iridescent beetles waving their legs in valediction, since I may not survive this night’s darkness.
The water drops from my arm, which has a glazed unhealthy appearance. The underlying blood vessels stand out in prominent fashion. I raise my eyes from them to see a fair-haired girl approaching me, wading slowly, water up to her midriff, she appears to be floating towards me on her buoyant breasts.
‘Good afternoon,’ I say to her, when she has drawn near enough, and she says ‘Hi,’ a flat, noncommittal monosyllable. I can detect no particular expression in her small blue eyes. Her hair, voluminous and tangled, has not been tended properly. An attempt has been made to tie it behind with a piece of pink ribbon, but quantities of hair have escaped and hang in dampish blond tendrils about her face. A broad, flat-nosed face, with a curious stillness on it. She is looking at me directly.
‘It is very pleasant here, isn’t it?’ I remark. ‘Amid these historic surroundings to take one’s ease, converse with one’s fellows.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
She glances over her shoulder at the row of cabins behind her. She moistens her lips.
‘How long have you been here?’ I ask her, to keep things going.
‘Three days. No, it’s four. Are you a lawyer?’
‘Good heavens, no. Why, do I look like one?’
She regards me in silence for several moments, with a mute expectancy I am already beginning to find oppressive.
‘I bet you know about the law,’ she says at last.
‘I know something about it.’
She draws a little nearer to me in the water. ‘Can you be sent to prison for begging?’
‘I believe so. If you haven’t a licence, that is.’
‘I don’t mean caught in the act. Just reported.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you, quite,’ I say, and then, mumbling and breathing quickly – this quick breath her only mark of agitation – she tells me a story of a man, a photographer, who is threatening to report her for begging.
‘But when was this?’ I asked at last, still in some bewilderment.
‘’Bout six weeks ago now.’
‘But good heavens … What’s your name?’
‘Pamela.’
‘But my dear Pamela, he can’t do anything about it now. Have you been living with him since then?’
‘We been together, yes.’
‘Well, he has condoned it, hasn’t he?’
Stare from Pamela.
‘He can’t do anything about it now.’
The girl’s tongue protrudes, a clean pink, and licks quickly round the full mouth.
‘How old are you?’ I ask her, on an impulse.
‘Seventeen.’
For a moment, looking into the blank, anaesthetized-looking face, I am tempted to get out of the water and go to my cabin for a card with my address on it. Then I remember who I am, why I am here. ‘He has given up all right to prosecute you,’ I tell her, and leave it at that.
‘He can’t do nothing to me?’
‘Not a thing.’ I look at her with awe almost. One hears of subnormal intelligence but rarely converses with one. A girl like this could be persuaded to do almost anything …
‘Well,’ she says. ‘I better be getting back. He will have finished the developing by now. Thanks mister. You helped me a lot, really you did.’
‘Not at all.’ As she climbs out of the pool, I gaze at her beautiful round high buttocks and her sturdy but well-shaped thighs and calves. She walks away along the terrace, cautiously re-enters one of the cabins. Almost immediately I dismiss her from my mind, return to my own situation, which is grievous.
Drops of water from my arm glitter in the sun, rejoin the bright surface. Looking down I see my limbs refracted, my poor shanks foreshortened. In such stasis, sealed off from time, time refracts itself too; it is again late afternoon of the day Miranda became my mistress, slipped blindly from her typist’s stool, gave herself to me on the carpet and afterwards cycled home again changed, while I lay in my celebratory hot bath. Soaking out the Adam whose seed was spent already. In a trance, dazed in every pore, I heard the beat of my heart, as I hear it now, transmitted via the ear-drums. I remember my heart’s drum-beat that night in the hot bath, how many years ago now, I lay amidst the shining white enamel, thinking of Miranda cycling home through the dusk, bats and moths for company. On a bicycle, she was on a bicycle, that first day she came to work for me. An April day, in red. I was standing at the window. She smiled and waved. Her face glowed with youth and health, her teeth were white, the handlebars of her bicycle glittered in the sun. That day the beginning of my death, that angel on the shining bicycle the angel of death who as is well known can assume any form. Slow drum-beat of my heart then as now funereal. In lime-green she clambers about the hills, to what end? I visualize them with a peculiar sorrow, not for myself only. She is so easily led, and he – did I not sense his destructiveness, right from the beginning, ill as I was? He stood there gleaming under the chandelier. There because of a gift I made him, which had gone on festering in his mind. Because of that too I sent him for her, relying on his vengeance. Things conspire to our death, it seems, just as they do to our love …
‘Pardon me, sir.’ A nasal, American voice from the terrace behind me. It seems I am not to be left alone this afternoon. Turning I behold a young man with short hair and a bruised and scratched-looking face. He is standing on the edge of the terrace, bending down towards me. ‘Do you have any kind of ointment I could borrow?’
‘Ointment?’
‘I heard you talking English, a while back, to that girl. I thought, maybe he has some kind of skin cream I could borrow.’
‘I’m afraid I have nothing of that sort. Have you had an accident of some kind?’
‘Accident?’ He utters a scornful huh. ‘Nothing accidental about it. Case of assault.’
‘Really? I am sorry to hear that.’
‘Assault and battery. And it was a woman too.’
‘You astonish me.’
‘The women are worse than the men,’ the young man says, with an assumption of worldly acumen that consorts ill with his raw and battered appearance.
‘The female of the species, eh?’ I notice that the young man has a nervous, rabbity face, with light-coloured eyes that seem almost constantly in movement. He emanates a smell too, a compound of sweat and sour whisky.
‘Up there,’ he says and jerks his head towards the hills that rise in ranks beyond us.
‘Did you come across a Maenad?’ I ask him.
‘Who?’ he says. ‘I don’t know her first name. Her surname is Pritchett. She is one of those upper-class English ladies. You know, kind of handing out the tea and saying do you take sugah, that kind of thing.’
‘I know the type you mean. Hair off the forehead, pearls at the neck. But they do not usually attack young men among the hills.’
‘Well she was with this other girl. Pretty girl. Good fuselage too, know what I mean?’
He assembles his features once more into that worldly knowingness that is so at odds with discoloured eye, cut lip, scratched cheeks.
‘It was this chick,’ he says ‘that I was interested in really, but I talked to them both, I didn’t leave the old girl out, I know my manners, Christ! Since we were all up there together, three people with a language in common, for God’s sake, I believe in human contact. I believe in holding out the helping hand. Above all, I believe in communication. We have got to g
et through to people. The peace of the world –’
Suddenly his face changes. ‘That’s her now,’ he says. ‘The Pritchett woman. I don’t want to meet her. I might lose my temper. You haven’t got any ointment then?’
‘Try the manager. He seems an obliging sort.’
‘Maybe I’ll do that,’ he says, already retreating. It seems I am destined not to hear the end of this story. I watch for some moments the person he has designated as the Pritchett woman. She looks ill to me. Face a chalky white. Being supported by a stout foreign-looking man with a fleshy profile and two-tone shoes, who does not seem her sort at all. They move rather slowly along the terrace and seat themselves at one of the tables.
Time, I think now, to get out of this pool, dress myself. I shall sit at one of those same tables and wait for them, for Miranda and Farnaby, to come back …
3
They did not talk much, each conscious of the other’s nearness as something which made the rest of the world more remote. As they climbed higher, clambering among the detritus of centuries, of millennia, all that each was afforded of the other was a series of glimpses, fleeting impressions, overlaid almost at once, as their relative positions shifted, now Farnaby ahead, now Miranda; so that their physical sense of each other was attended by feelings of strangeness, almost unbelief at first, they each felt isolated in their own actions.
‘Have you got any place in mind?’ she said suddenly. ‘For the picnic I mean.’
He stopped and stood there, a yard or two higher than she was, looking down at her. ‘No, not really,’ he said. He made a vague gesture. The sunlight had softened and hazed in the course of the morning, the containing bands of hill and mountain had loosened, lost their firm edges, there was a graining or powdering of mist in the air, slightly fluffing the outlines of things. The girl looked up at him in silence and by some grace of intuition or sympathy he felt her loneliness and half-hostility, and knew that she was giving herself to something, going out of herself and her accustomed self-regard, for his sake and the sake of the occasion. He smiled and said, ‘Let’s go higher, shall we?’
They went on again in silence, reaching after some minutes a place where the hills divided, forming a cleft between them not more than four or five yards wide, with a brighter seam of greenery, a foliage more vivid running through it, as if the grey scrub were a skin that had cracked and fissured here, to show flesh. They followed this track, obliged for much of the time to walk in single file. Miranda went first and he watched the way she set her feet, the slight flexing of the muscles in her legs. She walked with a natural grace, the sway of her figure strong and controlled. On either side of them rose myrtle and hollyoak, and higher up on the slope he saw slender trees with long, tremulous, yellowing leaves.
The strip of green broadened, extending high up the slope on their right. Quite suddenly the path narrowed again, the bushes rose high on either side, arching overhead, almost meeting, darkening the air, obliging them to walk one behind the other. A smell of coolness, dankness, came to them from the vegetation. Farnaby was aware of a feeling of irrevocability, as if the path they were taking now, this narrow fertile seam, committed them both absolutely. Impossible to see anything except the narrow defile of the path before them, curving gradually away through the bushes. Sunlight fell on the topmost leaves, lying heavy and still on them. There was no breath of wind, yet there was a sound, a rustling in the air. Aware of this, they both from time to time looked up, into the leaves above their heads, as if to detect some stirring or agitation, but could see none.
‘Stop a minute,’ Farnaby said.
She stopped and turned to face him. Farnaby took some steps towards her.
‘I did not suggest coming up here because of him,’ he said. The loneliness of the place, and the proximity of the girl filled him with weakness. He put his hands on her shoulders, almost as if seeking support. She was tall, not needing to raise her eyes much to look into his, as she did now, but with a curious absence of expectation, which pained him obscurely.
‘I could have asked you at once who you were, couldn’t I?’ he said, ‘and told you who I was and why I had come. Why do you think I didn’t?’
She looked at him steadily. He could feel the warmth of her shoulders under his hands.
‘I suppose you didn’t want me to think you were simply on an errand for Mooncranker,’ she said. She paused, lips parted slightly, and his heart felt an impact, a blow at her beauty, which was not hers only but that which he had bestowed on her over the years, treasuring her face, he and others, of course – he suddenly in this moment saw her as shaped by a necessity in the minds of others, himself, Mooncranker, who else? – the complex and variegated pressures of memory and desire, like shaping hands. Galatea. ‘He involves people in errands, yes,’ he said slowly. ‘You’ve been involved in one yourself, in my opinion, a long one. I don’t know whether he thinks I came here on an errand for him – it is difficult to know what he thinks, in any case he is not in a fit state, at the moment. But if he does think that he is quite wrong. I came here for my own sake.’
Suddenly, from somewhere beyond the bushes, upon the hillside, a bird sang briefly, paused, sang again: a slow song, trickling down to them, both secretive and deliberate-sounding, like the very voice of this green clandestine passage they had stumbled upon in the midst of the bare hills.
The bird did not sing again, and in listening for it they became once more aware of the hushed sound that was everywhere around them like a sigh.
They walked some yards farther. The bushes thinned, revealing the slope beyond them, tangled with vegetation. Miranda stopped and stood looking down.
‘That’s where it’s coming from,’ she said, pointing at the bankside, but quite low down on the hill. ‘It’s all these leaves rustling.’
‘But there is no wind at all,’ he said. ‘Not a breath.’
The leaves at the base of the bushes, and the stems of the grasses, were moving, trembling, continuously, with a very faint but incessant motion, as if fanned from a long way above. Glancing higher he saw a wide arc of the hillside in similar motion. It was like the breath of a god.
He squatted and looked more intently down. His eyes caught fugitive gleams from below the leaves, on the undersides of them or caught in the fine hairs of grass stems; tiny globes trembled there, balancing their brightness against disintegration. The touch of a hair; the shiver of a leaf; perils. His eyes were involved in stretching and contracting webs of light in this world below the lowest leaves.
‘It’s water,’ he said. ‘The bank is running with water.’
She got down too and their shoulders touched, moved apart, touched again. ‘It’s the water that is making the sound as well as the leaves and things,’ she said. She turned to him a face alight with the interest of the discovery. ‘I mean, it’s all these thousands and millions of little drops weighting the leaves and bending them and then dropping off, releasing them, and then it is the sound the water itself is making, sliding and slipping down over things.’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling at her enthusiasm.
‘Where’s it coming from, do you think?’
‘Somewhere underground,’ he said vaguely, ‘there’s no shortage of water hereabouts after all.’
‘Yes,’ she said, in the same tone of excitement, ‘but this is different. This is fresh water.’
‘Of course,’ he said, remembering the vegetation all around them. He pushed spread fingertips under the leaves, against the slippery stone. ‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘Cold as ice.’
They smiled at each other then, like children with a secret, and got up and went on together, again in silence but not now uneasy at it. Soon the path broadened, and they debouched on to a level area scattered with the ruins of an ancient temple, around which on all sides the hills rose again. They paused here, sensing the deep seclusion of the place, the religious emotions of people long dead. A few thin pillars still stood, forming an arbitrary pattern; others lay i
n fragments over the grass. Such places convey a sense of order and meaning, no matter what the interval of time, the dilapidation. In the basin formed by the hills it stood there, pavements and steps and broken columns bathed in misty sunlight.
Hand in hand they crossed the grass-embossed markings of colonnade and tholos. A hot, very sweet smell came to them, and they heard a distant reverential sound of buzzing. Grass grew up through the cracked pavement, and delphiniums and grape hyacinths. They reached a low stone wall and saw immediately beyond it the source of both scent and sound: an area here about the size of a tennis-court was flooded and in the still water great masses of staring white flowers with yellow centres grew, their roots it seemed in the water itself; and tumbling about on them and in them a multitude of fawn-coloured bees buzzing liturgically while they looted. The flowers, incessantly stirred by the bees, gave off that ravishing, that almost swooning scent.
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