Beyond the Arch

by David Evered

  ‘It sounds wonderful.’

  ‘It has the advantage that it’s not too prescriptive and we can accelerate the pace or take our feet off the gas and slow down according to how we feel each day.’

  * * *

  The week that followed passed for Peter as if in a dream. The repeated pattern of the days provided a loose framework for their activities without imposing any constraints on their freedom to modify their plans at a moment’s notice. Guided by Sally, he quickly became familiar with the mediaeval town of Sarlat which was just a mile away. They wandered through its narrow, crowded, guttered streets, exploring its hidden courtyards surrounded by ochre buildings with windows shuttered against the sun. They drove up to the proud, self-consciously picturesque bastide of Domme, perched on its promontory high above the valley, the houses bleached by the sun. They looked down through the summer haze at the river far below as it wound its way through the green landscape offering a view like some half-forgotten impressionist painting. They visited the immense castles of Beynac and Castelnaud facing each other across the river, implacable rivals through much of their history, the great gardens at Eyrignac and the caves at Lascaux in the valley of the Vézère.

  The week of freedom reached its final day. Sally and Peter lay on the small beach by the river which he had visited on the day of his arrival. A lunch of wine and bread and brie had engendered a feeling of contentment and ease. They lay looking at the trees growing from the cliff and clinging to the rock-face like lichens. The shadows from their sun-dappled leaves creating a pointillistic pattern on the river below.

  ‘I have much enjoyed a pretext for a week away from work and I have enjoyed your company,’ said Sally, ‘but tomorrow my holiday must be over. We have allowed the simple sensuous pleasures of this week to flow over us but we have not talked about you. What are your plans now?’

  ‘I too have enjoyed this week. It has created a clear space between the life I’ve left behind and the one I hope to lead. It has also given me the chance to see recent personal events in perspective, to a certain extent, although I still have some unease and perhaps a sense of guilt over Ann.’

  ‘I don’t think you should use words like blame and guilt or right and wrong. Events and interactions occur and people are people. But what now?’

  ‘I must leave and head back to England. I thought I’d find a remote place to stay, away from the distractions of person and place at my flat and settle to writing.’

  Sally hesitated. ‘I have a suggestion to make, but it comes with strings attached. It has been a good week and, after a week of your company, I should be happy for you to stay and write here, if you would like to do so. The strings are these. I shall work to my normal routine which is writing from nine to twelve-thirty and again from four-thirty until seven in the evening. I set myself a target of fifteen hundred words a day and I take Saturdays and Sundays off each week. Occasionally I go into Bergerac to visit the library there.’ She smiled. ‘You see, it’s not so very different from being a solicitor in London. The main difference is that the surroundings are more pleasant and I don’t spend time commuting into central London from a flat in Barnes, as you’ve been doing, or a semi-detached house in Gerrards Cross. I am quite strict about my schedule and I will not be interrupted.’

  Peter was about to protest that he had to get back to England but then thought for a few minutes. There was no compelling reason why he should return the following week and he had been captivated by the environment. ‘I should very much like to do that, if it would really not inconvenience you.’

  ‘I think we should be quite business-like about this and I suggest we try it for a month and if it doesn’t work out then we can call a halt with no hard feelings on either side. I also suggest that we should retain our independence. As I said, I sometimes go to the municipal library in Bergerac and I also make use of archives in some of the smaller towns and local museums. You must also feel free to come and go. Naturally, at weekends, we will be free to choose to do things together as we’ve been doing so companionably this week but that shouldn’t inhibit either of us from doing things independently. I think it’s important that we don’t intrude on one another by enquiring about progress on a daily or weekly basis. I’m happy to be a sounding board if you would find that helpful and I’m sure there will be times when I shall want to bounce ideas off you but it should be on our own initiatives.’

  ‘That sounds very fair. This is probably the first time in my life that I’ve been at liberty to make such spontaneous decisions without considering my responsibilities to others.’

  ‘There are two practical issues which we should perhaps discuss. First, do you have the necessary materials here for writing?’

  Peter laughed. ‘As it happens, I do have two reams of paper in my car and I have several pens. I also came with a dictionary. I’d thought that if I was touring around and was on my own in the evenings I would try and transfer some thoughts to paper but I’ve been enjoying myself too much this last week and have achieved absolutely nothing so far. I shall try and adopt your disciplined approach. I shall write longhand initially and then later try and transfer my efforts using a typewriter, slowly and painfully with two fingers, revising as I go.’

  ‘Sounds good. The second question is, what are your culinary skills like? I suggest that we each take responsibility for the catering on alternate weeks – doing the shopping and cooking dinner. I should be happy to take the first week.’

  ‘I can cook though my culinary skills are limited but I should be happy to accept the challenge if you will accept the risk.’

  She laughed. ‘I can live with that – or at least I hope I shall!’

  * * *

  The rest of the day passed in the sun. In the evening they walked the mile through the rich rose of the sunset to a restaurant in the town. It lay in a courtyard behind a low sandstone arch, brightly illuminated, the lights casting widening shadows across the cobbles. The interior and the courtyard were alive with noise from family groups. The red and white checked table cloths covered wooden tables and the meals were served by the children of the patron with shy smiles. The evening darkened as they dined until the sky became a smooth deep indigo and when they came out to walk back to the house they were caressed by the soft warm air. The atmosphere remained balmy as the stone of the houses slowly and reluctantly yielded the heat gathered from the oppressive sun of the day. The tall narrow buildings illuminated by hidden floodlights threw grotesque shadows up to the night sky. Lovers walked languorously hand in hand from deep shadow to pools of light. Sally took Peter’s hand as they wandered comfortably through the market place and streets, surrounded by the contented sounds of people at ease flowing out from the restaurants and bars. This was a night to savour. Slowly they walked along the track up the hill towards the pine woods which led to the house.

  They stopped on the edge of the woods and looked down on the small encapsulated and brightly lit town below. They walked round a bend and were embraced by the darkness of the wood – a darkness which was dense and mysterious to the city dweller. The perpetual glow of the city sky at night was absent and the night shades enclosed and confined them. The soft smell of the pines and the rattle of the cicadas seemed to emanate from outside their private universe. The ground was soft and yielding under their feet, a bed of pine needles over the moss-embedded grass. The call of a forsaken owl emphasized their solitude.

  They stopped once more and Sally turned to face Peter. She stood for a moment face upturned and then slowly pulled him close to her, kissing his eyes, his lips, his neck and then his chest as she loosened the buttons on his shirt. He returned the kisses and moved to free the buttons on the front of her dress and enclosed her breasts with his hands. He paused, gently caressing her nipples and then kneeling kissed them, holding his head close to her. ‘Oh Sally, you are so wonderful.’

  ‘No, Peter,’ she laid a finger across his lips
. ‘Don’t talk.’ She knelt facing him and slipped the shirt off his shoulders. They lay back together facing one another as they softly probed and explored.

  ‘Sally, you’re beautiful and I think I’m falling in love.’

  ‘Shh,’ she said covering his lips with a kiss. ‘I think we’re still a little overdressed for this sort of thing,’ and with two quick movements her dress and underwear were cast aside and slowly and deliberately she undressed Peter, kissing his face, neck and chest as she did so and then softly with the tips of her fingers she stroked the inside of his thighs as he gently caressed her until neither could contain the intensity of the emotion any longer and he entered her.

  They lay back resting, comfortable and fulfilled, with Sally curled in his embrace gazing at the dark sky above. They stayed there for some minutes gently caressing each other.

  ‘I’m sorry to sound so mundane,’ said Sally after a pause, ‘but I think we should put at least some of our clothes on to walk back to the house.’

  They entered the living room and Peter embraced her again. ‘You are wonderful, Sally.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to say that but not entirely true.’

  They prepared for sleep.

  ‘Can I … shall I push the other bed into your room?’

  ‘No, Peter. I have to say gently, it’s not like that – something has changed but not everything has changed.’ She paused and looked across at him. ‘Don’t look so crestfallen and hurt.’

  ‘But it was wonderful. Didn’t it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yes, Peter, it did,’ she smiled, ‘but possibly not quite the same thing that it meant to you. The whole world has not been inverted because we’ve fucked.’

  ‘That seems a very cold view.’

  She went over and laid her hands on Peter’s shoulders. ‘No, anything but cold. We have had a very good week – a week of indolence and pleasure. For me this holiday week has been magical. We have talked together and remained silent together. We have taken great pleasure in each other’s company. The week has now ended and out there in that warm sensuous atmosphere we have shown our appreciation of what we have shared by enjoying each other’s body. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. It was neither cold nor casual. I don’t do casual sex – but I do look upon you as a particularly special and loving friend. Our chance meeting in Northumberland has proved to be a special and significant event for me.’

  ‘But I think I love you.’

  ‘No, Peter, you and I are free people and to be in love can imply possession. We can be involved and love without being in love, which too often implies exclusivity.’

  ‘But I’m more than happy to relinquish some of that freedom.’

  ‘Peter, I don’t believe you should think of diminishing the freedom which you have so newly acquired. Let us be loving friends. We have come together as independent free spirits. We should cherish and revel in that independence and the freedom which it grants us to share as we’ve been doing for the last week, without entering into a compact which would place obligations and commitments on one or both of us. Now it’s time that we went to our beds.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said a little ruefully, ‘but it might take me some time to acquire the necessary flexibility of thought and attitude to manage my emotions.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll achieve that. Now I’m going to give you one more long and loving kiss before we retreat to our beds.’

  16

  The morning started early. They met on the terrace for breakfast. The strong light of the day filtered through the trees. Peter had slept well and was able to recover some of the ease which had been the hallmark of the previous week.

  ‘Well, I shall clear these things away and then it will be time to retreat. What are you planning to do?’

  ‘I shall have to start sometime, so I guess this is where I catch my breath, take my imagination in both hands, pick up my pen, start writing and see if I have what it takes.’ Sally kissed Peter saying, ‘Good luck – we’ve had a wonderful week, my loving friend, and I am happy that you are here.’

  Peter sat on the part of the terrace that was shaded from the sun and looked at the daunting supply of white paper in front of him. He leaned back in the chair and his thoughts carried him back to the previous evening. He found the prospect of the relationship offered to him appealing and exciting in abstract, although it was difficult to think dispassionately of Sally as the arousing memory of the contact between their bodies in the woods intruded upon and finally filled his consciousness. Recollection of each stage of the preceding day leading to its final consummation drove all the partly formulated ideas from his mind. Restlessly, as the rattle of a typewriter filtered through to the terrace, he rose to his feet and paced up and down. He finally decided to walk back down the track to the town but stopped where he and Sally had lain the evening before. He turned into the clearing and, shielding his eyes from the sun, looked up through the canopy of the trees as the memories of the previous night returned with an erotic urgency.

  He strolled back to the house but was unable to settle to writing. The emptiness of the paper and the poverty of his imagination seemed to mock him. Finally, he took his car and, having bought some beer and fruit, drove to the shingle by the river where he lay in the sun. He soon fell asleep only to find when he wakened that the heat of the day had passed and that he was almost alone. He drove back to the house, anxious at his failure to consign even a single thought to paper.

  The following days passed. He remained unable to compose himself sufficiently to write. The challenge of generating a compelling story line, creating characters and elaborating these to create a novel seemed too momentous and the inventions of his mind too prosaic. When he did occasionally consign words to paper, he became dispirited and downcast as he examined his efforts, dismissing them as banal and pedestrian. He started to take the car out during the day and pass the time in solitude in an attempt to escape from his inadequacy. That first period of freedom had been lost and although he explored further he was unable to recapture the joy of seeing, smelling and touching places which had so excited him the previous week. He became resigned to being a lone tourist, sitting in cafés with a coffee or a tisane. The hours of these days dragged slowly until he felt he could return and re-join Sally, freed from her self-imposed discipline in the evenings. They talked little and only about trivial matters as he felt constrained by his failures, all the more brought into focus when he was daily able to hear the persistent clatter of the keys of her typewriter which marked her steady progress. Her routine and apparent productivity drove him to wonder if he might have been wiser to have returned to England and gone into a solitary self-imposed exile, distancing himself from the allure of this environment and the ever-enticing presence of Sally. He knew he could not be certain that he would be any more successful elsewhere and progressively a mood of defeatism pervaded his thinking.

  The week merged into the weekend. ‘Do you know what day it will be on Monday?’ asked Sally over breakfast on the Saturday. ‘It will be “une fête nationale”, the fourteenth of July which celebrates the storming of the Bastille. I’m planning to work this Saturday but take Monday off as it will be a public holiday. Why don’t you think of doing the same? Towns and villages will go crazy with celebrations and fireworks. Why don’t we join them and give ourselves the opportunity to go a little crazy too? But that’s for Monday evening. What would you think of a quiet day on the beach by the river beforehand? We could go back to where we spent last Sunday for lunch and a swim.’

  Peter fell silent at the implicit suggestion that he might rearrange his work schedule to fall in with Sally’s suggestion. He was ashamed to admit that his efforts had amounted to absolutely nothing. The first week had indeed been magical but now it was becoming an increasingly distant memory, an enchanted interlude. They set off on the Monday having bought the obligatory bagu
ette, cheese, fruit and wine for their lunch and headed for the shingle beach. They lay back after their picnic and Peter said quietly, ‘Sally, I think it was a mistake for me to stay and probably an error to think that my literary talents might extend beyond the drafting of wills.’

  She raised herself on one elbow and laughed. ‘Peter, this is nothing. It will come to you if you set yourself a schedule to write. You don’t need to feel that you have to sit and write “A novel by Peter Bowman, Chapter 1, Page 1”.’

  ‘Now you’re teasing.’

  ‘No, this is a topic on which I would never tease you. You’ve done a remarkable thing by leaving your established life behind you. Few others would have done this.’

  ‘What do you mean then?’

  ‘Perhaps, just for once, I’ll break my self-imposed ordinance and offer some advice. Write something. It doesn’t matter if it’s not and never becomes part of some major literary work. You won’t write something to challenge “War and Peace” in the literary canon straight off. Describe people, scenes and events. Spin stories around them, fantasy stories if you like, and the rest will follow.’

  ‘I have tried to do that but when I read it back it seems either pretentious or trite.’

  ‘That will often be the case until you’ve established a flow. You told me about your encounter with those two young people in Bloomsbury and you recounted the events of the day with wit and fluency. There is a story there and certainly one that could be spun around it, particularly after your further chance meeting with them.’ She laughed. ‘You seem to have a talent for chance encounters! Or go and sit in the market place in the town and observe people and their mundane daily activities. There is plenty to see there, the local people, the tourists, the puce-faced English on holiday struggling to comprehend and be comprehended, the superior sounding expatriates still often speaking inadequate French and sometimes with atrocious accents. Let your imagination run freely. If you feel more comfortable, write a short story or two, although practitioners of that art claim that it’s a greater challenge than writing a full-length novel.’