Together they climbed up on the low wall, stepping carefully along its crumbling, irregular top, which was overgrown with creepers and clumps of moss and grass. They began walking along the wall in order to encompass the flooded area. It was impossible now to determine whether the land had subsided here or whether some sort of pit had been orginally contrived. The sound of the bees filled their ears and their progress was marked by the slither of lizards quitting the wall as they approached. These sounds and the excessive sweetness of the flowers began to affect Farnaby as in some way almost menacing. It seemed to him that he might quite easily go down feet first and be swallowed up in the lizard-ridden wall or go plunging into the flowers without disturbing a single bee. Echoes of old stories came to him, stories of mergings and metamorphoses, evidence of the perilous plasticity of human beings. He began to have difficulty with his balance on the wall, became increasingly agitated at the problem of how to set his feet. Knowing from experience that his coordination would deteriorate further and not wishing to cut a poor figure before Miranda, he jumped down, hearing the slithering again, that swift retreat into the undergrowth.
‘Somewhere about here,’ he said, ‘would be a good place for the picnic.’ He took several deep breaths.
She jumped lightly down from the wall and he caught her, resting his hands for a short while at the sides of her waist. Sun-flushed, bright-eyed, steady-nerved, she seemed for the moment so superior to him that he experienced a sort of awe. And something of this must have showed in his eyes because her own gaze after a moment wavered and fell and she moved sideways, releasing herself.
They made their way to a grassy, slightly sloping bit of ground some yards from the wall, and sat down for their picnic.
‘There wouldn’t have been a temple here at all, I suppose,’ Miranda said, ‘if there hadn’t been water, fresh water.’
‘No, I suppose not. I wonder who the temple was dedicated to.’ He smiled at her. ‘Aphrodite perhaps.’
‘That’s an elm tree, isn’t it?’ She pointed.
Farnaby looked across. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think so, yes. There’s a Maltese plum tree over there too.’
‘Its leaves are quite yellow, aren’t they? The elm, I mean.’
‘Well, it is October,’ Farnaby said. ‘I don’t suppose there are many elms in these hills. It’s the water, of course. And being so sheltered too, I suppose.’
‘Can I make you a sandwich, or will you just have a piece of bread with salami on top?’
‘Yes, don’t bother to make a sandwich.’
‘A ghastly thing happened this morning,’ she said. She began to tell him about the behaviour of the young American, and Mrs Pritchett’s dreadful assault on him. ‘I shall never forget his face, all covered with blood,’ she said.
‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘What a terrible experience. He’s a fool, but did he really deserve to be treated like that?’
‘Well, that was what was so frightening about it, I mean, her reaction.’
‘Were you frightened?’
‘Yes, I was, for a while.’
He looked at her fixedly for a few moments. ‘In those days,’ he said, ‘you know, when I first knew you, you were only young then of course, but you never seemed frightened of anything.’
‘I don’t believe I ever was, then.’
‘Have some wine,’ Farnaby said. ‘It’s Kavaklidere,I hope it’s all right.’
‘Delicious.’
‘Perhaps being frightened is something you learn later,’ Farnaby said. ‘Like being prudent or well-balanced, all the things applauded by our elders.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘We could never learn it so well.’
‘Do you remember,’ he said suddenly and rather loudly, ‘do you remember the present Mooncranker gave me that summer?’
The question had come without premeditation, emerging through the force of its own gravity, as though it could hang no longer on the weakening stalk of his reticence. ‘You know the one I mean, don’t you?’ he added. ‘That little effigy of Christ on the cross?’ His heart was beating almost painfully.
She turned to him a face in which the full interest and vividness of the day and the scene contended with what seemed to him a certain wariness or reserve. This stilling of the face was very brief. The next moment she smiled a little and said, ‘Yes, I remember.’
‘But you never saw it,’ he said, unwilling to believe she had fallen so casually into the trap.
‘You must have talked to me about it,’ she said.
‘Perhaps that was it.’ He knew, however, that he had talked of it to no one. Certainly not to her, whom he had not seen again after Mooncranker’s little presentation ceremony. It came to him now with the force of a conviction that she had deliberately avoided seeing him. If this were so, it could only be a mark of her complicity.
‘There was meat in it,’ he said.
‘Meat?’
‘It was made of sausage-meat. Under its wrappings. You remember, perhaps, that it was wrapped round with white bandage.’
‘Oh, yes, I think so.’
‘Well, underneath there was sausage-meat. Mooncranker, or somebody, went out and bought sausage-meat, then he moulded it into a little figure, arms outstretched you know, wrapped it up in white bandage, tied the whole thing to a little wooden cross and gave it to me.’
Miranda said nothing to this. He offered her more wine, which she refused, then poured a little into his own glass. ‘It rotted,’ he said. ‘Of course. You know, when I hung it up on that tree, I showed you, didn’t I? Well, it rotted there. Mooncranker must have foreseen that.’
He had spoken with a deliberate lack of emphasis not wishing her to think that he was dramatizing things; but there was such a charge of horror and outrage still in that distant episode that his voice deepened with emotion as he spoke of it. She was looking at him steadily, lips slightly compressed, eyes clear, depthless.
‘Any idea why?’ she said, ‘why he should have done that?’ But this was too guileless, and at the same time struck him as challenging somehow. He looked for a moment longer at her serious, mild-eyed face and suspected in that moment that she, she, had fashioned the Christ, moulded the meat into shape with her own fingers, no doubt at Mooncranker’s behest, but she had done it. Whence this idea came he did not know, but knew once it had entered his mind that it would always be there. It was the role Mooncranker would have required from his accomplice: her simple knowledge of what was to happen would not have been enough, not corruptive enough; he had made her an instrument, to her own damage and the damage of that distant boy who had been left alone to see and smell the corruption.
‘I have often wondered why,’ he said, looking away from her. ‘I think there are a number of reasons. He is a destructive man and he wanted to … devastate this sort of private area where I had these feelings about Christ. Well, he certainly succeeded there. But he wouldn’t call it that, he would probably describe it as a salutary experience, get rid of cant and religiosity, that kind of thing, some sort of philosophical gloss to disguise the fact that he is simply one of those worms that settle on fresh green leaves. The bits they don’t eat, they smear.’ His voice which had risen with anger at Mooncranker, now became quieter. It would not do, he sensed, to belittle Mooncranker too much to her. He said, ‘It gave me an awful shock you know.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it must have done.’
‘He used to talk to you quite a bit about such things, didn’t he, during that summer?’
‘He took me into his confidence,’ she said, with a certain dignity.
And that, Farnaby thought, had been the cleverest stroke of all. How had she described him, that day when they had walked down the river together? A humanist, that was it. He could hear her fifteen-year-old voice now, earnest and proud, saying, ‘He doesn’t trust institutions at all.’
‘I’ve never been able to forget it,’ he said. ‘You weren’t around then, were you? When it happened I
mean, when I discovered it.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think I had gone back to school, probably.’
‘Yes, that was probably it. How did he know I was interested in such things, do you think?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Interested in Christ and so on.’
‘Well, I may have told him that.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Farnaby said slowly. ‘You talked about me sometimes, did you?’ It had occurred to him that if Miranda were really as implicated as he suspected, she could only be concealing her part in it out of guilt or else fear of antagonizing him. Either way it seemed to him to mean that she cared enough to want to preserve the relationship between them, not to damage it, perhaps beyond repair, by injudicious or premature admissions. And he sensed obscurely that to drive her into confessing would be a tactical error at his stage – better, he thought, to work on her feelings of guilt and remorse …
‘Do you think Uncle George knew anything about it?’ he said.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘No, I don’t think so either. At the time you know, I thought everyone was in it. That was why it shocked me so much. I thought it was the whole of the adult world. There was no one for me to turn to. You had gone away. My parents were in the midst of a divorce. Uncle George was hardly the sort …’
Miranda stood up without haste. ‘Pity to waste all these crumbs,’ she said. ‘I’ll go over and put them in the water and see if any fish come up for them.’
‘Good idea,’ he said, with a certain surprise at being interrupted and a sense too of releasing her from a difficult situation.
She hesitated a moment, then walked slowly towards the clamorous, scented water, through thin shadows cast by the columns, over the grass-grown pavement, into an area of broken mist and sunshine, the glowing yellow tree beyond her. She held the paper-bag with the bread-crumbs away from her, waist high.
Painstakingly, with a sort of self-violating exactness, he began to reconstruct the events immediately before Mooncranker had handed him the gift. Mooncranker had spoken to someone unseen, giving instructions, presumably. Then the white-clad figure glimpsed briefly on the landing, seen again immediately, almost, at the back door, slipping out. Hidden first by Mooncranker’s form and then by the wall of the house itself. Taller than Mooncranker? Impossible to tell, I did not see their two forms together. Henry and Frederick, who were also dressed in white, were on the tennis-court at the time. I remember their voices. It could not have been either of them. I decided that, moreover, long ago. Aunt Jane? Something, some element in the situation, that puts Aunt Jane out of the count, apart from the inherent improbability of Aunt Jane leaguing herself with Mooncranker. The figure at the landing, then at the door. Almost the same moment. There must have been an interval. Perhaps the two images fuse like this in my mind because the interval was so brief. Is this why I have always discounted adults, because only a young person, someone like Miranda, would have raced down the stairs so quickly? Impossible to be sure now. But what would either of them be doing in that house? It was not her house, nor Mooncranker’s, they were guests like myself. Somebody else, in whose room the Christ was kept in readiness? Mooncranker saw his chance, saw me standing there, passed the word on to that swift white-clad person who went racing up to get it, from some hiding-place on the upper floor, Uncle George’s room perhaps, or Aunt Jane’s …
A nightmarish sort of general suspiciousness descended on Farnaby. He felt for some moments now as he had felt at the time, that all the figures peopling that summer had been in the plot against him, all had known what was going to happen, all of them had had some prearranged part to play. The sickening universal sense of duplicity and treachery returned to him, and he thought of the blind, helmeted head of the Christ high up on the tree, the sliding light and the glint of flies’ wings, the heavy odour of flowers and his own final, piercingly horrible perception – for he had been vouchsafed something then, been afforded a glimpse into a pit, and with Uncle George’s gasping face before him had fainted on the edge of it, and had risen changed – so far it was Mooncranker’s victory …
‘Oh, nothing is happening,’ she called to him over her shoulder. He watched her intently, noticed the diffidence of her movements, the way she seemed to hold the paper packet almost with apprehension, as if it might change its texture or shape in her hands. This gentleness was not part of his memory of her at all, perhaps it had been assumed with the years and sorrows, the long course of ministering to Mooncranker.
Weakness there, all the same, he thought, watching her lean over the wall, and scatter the crumbs carefully into the water. Mooncranker had seen that from the start.
‘They don’t seem to be hungry,’ she called in soft, almost plaintive tones. She stood with her burdened look in full sunlight. The mist-fluffed sunshine lay on her like pollen.
‘Perhaps it isn’t their lunchtime,’ he said. He felt sure all this was merely a diversion. She is weak, he told himself. She allowed herself to be prevailed upon, and used. Mooncranker must have seen in her the victim predestined. To find two such persons under his hand as Miranda and myself! And so young. More than he could have hoped for. Strange that my own experience of her that summer was of glowing strength and certainty, no hint of such weakness. Mooncranker saw it.
She came back to him, stepping among the antique rubble, golden slender legs. She was smiling.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘they weren’t interested.’
Farnaby smiled back at her. The horror of the gift and his suspicion was receding but he was conscious now for the first time of a rather helpless feeling of distance from Miranda, a sort of obligatory detachment.
‘They are probably feasting underneath the surface,’ he said.
They walked together round the outside edge of the site, to a point behind the flooded area, and stopped again just outside the zone of shade cast by the elm. Miranda with frank enthusiasm was demolishing an apple in a series of large bites, each one of which sounded clean and final like wood snapping. Mist lay among the branches of the elm, thickening the mass of the tree. The rays of sunshine struck through the foliage, not so much penetrating the mist as infusing it with tints of pale blue and rose. From the upper branches they heard a clatter of wings and a number of pigeons rose into the sunshine and wheeled in a body, the sun eliciting flashes from their breasts.
‘It happened accidentally, really,’ she said, with a certain inconsequence, which he recognized or remembered as her habit. ‘Things like that often do, don’t they? I mean, courses of action you set yourself on, or just a train of events that happens to you and becomes part of your life.’ She was not good at explaining things, needing, as he again thought he remembered, someone else’s more positive assertions to set her going.
‘Oh come,’ he said, helping her, ‘we choose our own way, surely.’
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I didn’t with Mooncranker, anyway. I mean, of course there was a time when I could have drawn back from a physical action, from actually sleeping with him, or anyway I could have got out of it afterwards, not gone on with it. But that isn’t the important thing, is it?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’ Farnaby with the ardour of his twenty-three years, peered doubtfully through the lower branches of the yellow elm at the white columnar flowers of the Malta plum tree slightly below and to his left. There were three fig trees in a group beyond this. It did not seem to him that it would ever be possible to take sleeping with Miranda as a matter of course. He counted five tortoiseshell butterflies on the flowers.
‘Actions you can refrain from,’ Miranda said, and he was suddenly aware of a change of mood in her, an increasing sadness. ‘But things you get into aren’t actions. It is a sort of permission you give to your will.’
A leaf drifted down from the elm, fell into the dark green heart of the Malta plum tree. Farnaby heard the remote incessant sound of the bees, the scrape of the dry leaf. He looked down at the back of his palm, at the fain
t blond hairs incandescent in the sunlight. The changing leaves, the massing of the trees caused by the mist, the stillness and doomed warmth of the place, all reminded him of autumns at home in England. Elsewhere, among the bare hills and sulphurous streams, he had not been aware of the seasons, the landscape seemed changeless, but here one felt the extended summer, there was something precious in these middle hours of the day, something precariously achieved, full of sadness. He felt the sun resting on his hands, with a sort of loving particularity, as it rested on water and marble and flowers and leaves.
With an effort he summoned resistance to the sadness of the place, the feeling it conveyed of inevitable decline.
‘By action you can break out,’ he said. ‘A relationship between people isn’t something self-perpetuating.’
‘Once you undertake a role …’ she said.
‘I don’t believe that.’ He looked at her. ‘Unless it is something that satisfies mutual needs. Permanent invalid, permanent nurse,’ he said, deliberately. ‘How did it happen, how did you get into it all?’
Miranda made a vague gesture. ‘I don’t know, it wasn’t a series of steps,’ she said. ‘He made an impression on me from the start. I mean, you know, that summer. He used to talk to me a lot, as if he thought I was intelligent. About being a humanist, and people coming to terms with reality.’
‘I was held out to you as a boy full of damaging illusions, I suppose,’ Farnaby said.
‘You were, I suppose, yes. He sort of made fun of you, in a gentle way.’
‘I can imagine.’ Farnaby felt a fresh spasm of hatred for Mooncranker. My turn will come, he promised himself. He felt a sort of cautious exhilaration that she had accepted without demur his definition of her relation with Mooncranker.
‘I don’t know,’ she went on slowly, her face turned away from him. ‘There was a feeling … It seemed to me that he knew so much. He lived, he seemed to live in a different area, where life was more serious somehow.’
‘Serious,’ Farnaby echoed. ‘Serious?’ He heard a faint thudding noise not too far away, as of something falling into piled leaves. Chestnut perhaps. Figs long ago departed probably. Or something larger, a quince. But would quinces be growing wild here? He pictured the yellowing quince on the tree, heavy with ripeness, burdening the stalk, the mist and sun eroding the stalk and then in the secrecy of the mist the fruit falls, crashes into the debris of summer below. ‘He has a gift for enlisting accomplices,’ he said bitterly.
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