On occasion, Mallory would go off into the desert on some unspecified errand, and then Halliday would see Leonora alone. Together they would walk along the bed of the drained river, or dance to the recordings of Masai chants in the anthropology library. Halliday’s growing dependence on Leonora was tempered by the knowledge that he had come to Africa to seek, not this white-haired young woman with her amiable eyes, but the night-walking lamia within his own mind. As if aware of this, Leonora remained always detached, smiling at Halliday across the strange paintings on her easel.
This pleasant ménage a` trois was to last for three months. During this time the dusk line advanced another half mile toward Columbine Sept Heures, and at last Mallory and Leonora decided to move to a small refinery town ten miles to the west. Halliday half expected Leonora to stay with him at Columbine, but she left with Mallory in the Peugeot. Sitting in the back seat, she waited as Mallory played the last Bartok quartet in the auditorium before disconnecting the battery and carrying it back to the car.
Curiously, it was Mallory who tried to persuade Halliday to leave with them. Unlike Leonora, the still unresolved elements in his relationship with Halliday made him wish to keep in touch with the younger man.
‘Halliday, you’ll find it difficult staying on here.’ Mallory pointed across the river to the pall of darkness that hung like an immense wave over the town. Already the colours of the walls and streets had changed to the deep cyclamen of dusk. ‘The night is coming. Do you realize what that means?’
‘Of course, doctor. I’ve waited for it.’
‘But, Halliday . . .’ Mallory searched for a phrase. His tall figure, eyes hidden as ever by the dark glasses, looked up at Halliday across the steps of the hotel. ‘You aren’t an owl, or some damned desert cat. You’ve got to come to terms with this thing in the daylight.’
Giving up, Mallory went back to the car. He waved as they set off, reversing onto one of the dunes in a cloud of pink dust, but Halliday made no reply. He was watching Leonora Sully in the back seat with her canvas and easels, the stack of bizarre paintings that were echoes of her unseen dreams.
Whatever his feelings for Leonora, they were soon forgotten with his discovery a month later of a second beautiful neighbour at Columbine Sept Heures.
Half a mile to the north-east of Columbine, across the drained river, was an empty colonial mansion, once occupied by the manager of the refinery at the mouth of the river. As Halliday sat on his balcony on the seventh floor of the Oasis Hotel, trying to detect the imperceptible progress of the terminator, while the antique clocks around him ticked mechanically through the minutes and hours of their false days, he would notice the white façades of the house illuminated briefly in the reflected light of the sandstorms. Its terraces were covered with dust, and the columns of the loggia beside the swimming pool had toppled into the basin. Although only four hundred yards to the east of the hotel, the empty shell of the house seemed already within the approaching night.
Shortly before one of his attempts to sleep Halliday saw the headlamps of a car moving around the house. Its beams revealed a solitary figure who walked slowly up and down the terrace. Abandoning any pretence at sleep, Halliday climbed to the roof of the hotel, ten storeys above, and lay down on the suicide sill. A chauffeur was unloading suitcases from the car. The figure on the terrace, a tall woman in a black robe, walked with the random, uncertain movements of someone barely aware of what she was doing. After a few minutes the chauffeur took the woman by the arm, as if waking her from some kind of sleep.
Halliday watched from the roof, waiting for them to reappear. The strange trancelike movements of this beautiful woman – already her dark hair and the pale nimbus of her face drifting like a lantern on the incoming dusk convinced him that she was the dark lamia of all his dreams – reminded Halliday of his own first strolls across the dunes to the river, the testing of ground unknown but familiar from his sleep.
When he went down to his suite he lay on the brocaded settee in the sitting room, surrounded by the landscapes of Delvaux and Ernst, and fell suddenly into a deep slumber. There he saw his first true dreams, of classical ruins under a midnight sky, where moonlit figures moved past each other in a city of the dead.
The dreams were to recur each time Halliday slept. He would wake on the settee by the picture window, the darkening floor of the desert below, aware of the dissolving boundaries between his inner and outer worlds. Already two of the clocks below the mantelpiece mirror had stopped. With their end he would at last be free of his former notions of time.
At the end of this week Halliday discovered that the woman slept at the same intervals as he did, going out to look at the desert as Halliday stepped onto his balcony. Although his solitary figure stood out clearly against the dawn sky behind the hotel the woman seemed not to notice him. Halliday watched the chauffeur drive the white Mercedes into the town. In his dark uniform he moved past the fading walls of the Fine Arts School like a shadow without form.
Halliday went down into the street and walked towards the dusk. Crossing the river, a drained Rubicon dividing his passive world at Columbine Sept Heures from the reality of the coming night, Halliday climbed the opposite bank past the wrecks of old cars and gasoline drums illuminated in the crepuscular light. As he neared the house the woman was walking among the sand-covered statuary in the garden, the crystals lying on the stone faces like the condensation of immense epochs of time.
Halliday hesitated by the low wall that encircled the house, waiting for the woman to look towards him. Her pale face, its high forehead rising above the dark glasses in some ways reminded him of Dr Mallory, the same screen that concealed a potent inner life. The fading light lingered among the angular planes of her temples as she searched the town for any signs of the Mercedes.
She was sitting in one of the chairs on the terrace when Halliday reached her, hands folded in the pockets of the silk robe so that only her pale face, with its marred beauty – the sunglasses seemed to shut it off like some inward night – was exposed to him.
Halliday stood by the glass-topped table, uncertain how to introduce himself. ‘I’m staying at the Oasis – at Columbine Sept Heures,’ he began. ‘I saw you from the balcony.’ He pointed to the distant tower of the hotel, its cerise façade raised against the dimming air.
‘A neighbour?’ The woman nodded at this. ‘Thank you for calling on me. I’m Gabrielle Szabo. Are there many of you?’
‘No – they’ve gone. There were only two of them anyway, a doctor and a young woman painter, Leonora Sully – the landscape here suited her.’
‘Of course. A doctor, though?’ The woman had taken her hands from her robe. They lay in her lap like a pair of fragile doves. ‘What was he doing here?’
‘Nothing.’ Halliday wondered whether to sit down, but the woman made no attempt to offer him the other chair, as if she expected him to drift away as suddenly as he had arrived. ‘Now and then he helped me with my dreams.’
‘Dreams?’ She turned her head towards him, the light revealing the slightly hollowed contours above her eyes. ‘Are there dreams at Columbine Sept Heures, Mr –’
‘Halliday. There are dreams now. The night is coming.’
The woman nodded, raising her face to the violet-hued dusk. ‘I can feel it on my face – like a black sun. What do you dream about, Mr Halliday?’
Halliday almost blurted out the truth but with a shrug he said, ‘This and that. An old ruined town – you know, full of classical monuments. Anyway, I did last night . . .’ He smiled at this. ‘I still have some of the old clocks left. The others have stopped.’
Along the river a plume of gilded dust lifted from the road. The white Mercedes sped towards them.
‘Have you been to Leptis Magna, Mr Halliday?’
‘The Roman town? It’s by the coast, five miles from here. If you like, I’ll go with you.’
‘A good idea. This doctor you mentioned, Mr Halliday – where has he gone? My chauffeur . . . needs so
me treatment.’
Halliday hesitated. Something about the woman’s voice suggested that she might easily lose interest in him. Not wanting to compete with Mallory again, he answered, ‘To the north, I think; to the coast. He was leaving Africa. Is it urgent?’
Before she could reply Halliday was aware of the dark figure of the chauffeur, buttoned within his black uniform, standing a few yards behind him. Only a moment earlier the car had been a hundred yards down the road, but with an effort Halliday accepted this quantal jump in time. The chauffeur’s small face, with its sharp eyes and tight mouth, regarded Halliday without comment.
‘Gaston, this is Mr Halliday. He’s staying at one of the hotels at Columbine Sept Heures. Perhaps you could give him a lift to the river crossing.’
Halliday was about to accept, but the chauffeur made no response to the suggestion. Halliday felt himself shiver in the cooler air moving toward the river out of the dusk. He bowed to Gabrielle Szabo and walked off past the chauffeur. As he stopped, about to remind her of the trip to Leptis Magna, he heard her say, ‘Gaston, there was a doctor here.’
The meaning of this oblique remark remained hidden from Halliday as he watched the house from the roof of the Oasis Hotel. Gabrielle Szabo sat on the terrace in the dusk, while the chauffeur made his foraging journeys to Columbine and the refineries along the river. Once Halliday came across him as he rounded a corner near the Fine Arts School, but the man merely nodded and trudged on with his jerrican of water. Halliday postponed a further visit to the house. Whatever her motives for being there, and whoever she was, Gabrielle Szabo had brought him the dreams that Columbine Sept Heures and his long journey south had failed to provide. Besides, the presence of the woman, turning some key in his mind, was all he required. Rewinding his clocks, he found that he slept for eight or nine hours of the nights he set himself.
However, a week later he found himself again failing to sleep. Deciding to visit his neighbour, he went out across the river, walking into the dusk that lay ever deeper across the sand. As he reached the house the white Mercedes was setting off along the road to the coast. In the back Gabrielle Szabo sat close to the open window, the dark wind drawing her black hair into the slipstream.
Halliday waited as the car came towards him, slowing as the driver recognized him. Gaston’s head leaned back, his tight mouth framing Halliday’s name. Expecting the car to stop, Halliday stepped out into the road.
‘Gabrielle . . . Miss Szabo –’
She leaned forward, and the white car accelerated and swerved around him, the cerise dust cutting his eyes as he watched the woman’s masked face borne away from him.
Halliday returned to the hotel and climbed to the roof, but the car had disappeared into the darkness of the north-east, its wake fading into the dusk. He went down to his suite and paced around the paintings. The last of the clocks had almost run down. Carefully he wound each one, glad for the moment to be free of Gabrielle Szabo and the dark dream she had drawn across the desert.
When the clocks were going again he went down to the basement. For ten minutes he moved from car to car, stepping in and out of the Cadillacs and Citroe¨ns. None of the cars would start, but in the service bay he found a Honda motorcycle, and after filling the tank managed to kick the engine into life. As he set off from Columbine the sounds of the exhaust reverberated off the walls around him, but a mile from the town, when he stopped to adjust the carburettor, the town seemed to have been abandoned for years, his own presence obliterated as quickly as his shadow.
He drove westward, the dawn rising to meet him. Its colours lightened, the ambiguous contours of the dusk giving way to the clear outlines of the dunes along the horizon, the isolated watertowers standing like welcoming beacons.
Losing his way when the road disappeared into the sand sea, Halliday drove the motorcycle across the open desert. A mile to the west he came to the edge of an old wadi. He tried to drive the cycle down the bank, then lost his balance and sprawled onto his back as the machine leapt away and somersaulted among the rocks. Halliday trudged across the floor of the wadi to the opposite bank. Ahead of him, its silver gantries and tank farms shining in the dawn light, was an abandoned refinery and the white roofs of the near-by staff settlement.
As he walked between the lines of chalets, past the empty swimming pools that seemed to cover all Africa, he saw the Peugeot parked below one of the ports. Sitting with her easel was Leonora Sully, a tall man in a white suit beside her. At first Halliday failed to recognize him, although the man rose and waved to him. The outline of his head and high forehead was familiar, but the eyes seemed unrelated to the rest of his face. Then Halliday recognized Dr Mallory and realized that, for the first time, he was seeing him without his sunglasses.
‘Halliday . . . my dear chap.’ Mallory stepped around the drained pool to greet him, adjusting the silk scarf in the neck of his shirt. ‘We thought you’d come one day . . .’ He turned to Leonora, who was smiling at Halliday. ‘To tell you the truth we were beginning to get a little worried about him, weren’t we, Leonora?’
‘Halliday . . .’ Leonora took his arm and steered him round to face the sun. ‘What’s happened – you’re so pale!’
‘He’s been sleeping, Leonora. Can’t you see that, my dear?’ Mallory smiled down at Halliday. ‘Columbine Sept Heures is beyond the dusk line now. Halliday, you have the face of a dreamer.’
Halliday nodded. ‘It’s good to leave the dusk, Leonora. The dreams weren’t worth searching for.’ When she looked away Halliday turned to Mallory. The doctor’s eyes disturbed him. The white skin in the orbits seemed to isolate them, as if the level gaze was coming from a concealed face. Something warned him that the absence of the sunglasses marked a change in Mallory whose significance he had not yet grasped.
Avoiding the eyes, Halliday pointed to the empty easel. ‘You’re not painting, Leonora.’
‘I don’t need to, Halliday. You see . . .’ She turned to take Mallory’s hand. ‘We have our own dreams now. They come to us across the desert like jewelled birds . . .’
Halliday watched them as they stood together. Then Mallory stepped forward, his white eyes like spectres. ‘Halliday, of course it’s good to see you . . . you’d probably like to stay here –’
Halliday shook his head. ‘I came for my car,’ he said in a controlled voice. He pointed to the Peugeot. ‘Can I take it?’
‘My dear chap, naturally. But where are –’ Mallory pointed warningly to the western horizon, where the sun burned in an immense pall. ‘The west is on fire, you can’t go there.’
Halliday began to walk toward the car. ‘I’m going to the coast.’ Over his shoulder, he added, ‘Gabrielle Szabo is there.’
This time, as he fled towards the night, Halliday was thinking of the white house across the river, sinking into the last light of the desert. He followed the road that ran north-east from the refinery, and found a disused pontoon bridge that crossed the wadi. The distant spires of Columbine Sept Heures were touched by the last light of sunset.
The streets of the town were deserted, his own footsteps in the sand already drowned by the wind. He went up to his suite in the hotel. Gabrielle Szabo’s house stood isolated on the far shore. Holding one of the clocks, its hands turning slowly within the ormolu case, Halliday saw the chauffeur bring the Mercedes into the drive. A moment later Gabrielle Szabo appeared, a black wraith in the dusk, and the car set off toward the north-east.
Halliday walked around the paintings in the suite, gazing at their landscapes in the dim light. He gathered his clocks together and carried them onto the balcony, then hurled them down one by one onto the terrace below. Their shattered faces, the white dials like Mallory’s eyes, looked up at him with unmoving hands.
Half a mile from Leptis Magna he could hear the sea washing on the beaches through the darkness, the onshore winds whipping at the crests of the dunes in the moonlight. The ruined columns of the Roman city rose beside the single tourist hotel that shut out the last
rays of the sun. Halliday stopped the car by the hotel, and walked past the derelict kiosks at the outskirts of the town. The tall arcades of the forum loomed ahead, the rebuilt statues of Olympian deities standing on their pedestals above him.
Halliday climbed onto one of the arches, then scanned the dark avenues for any sign of the Mercedes. Uneager to venture into the centre of the town, he went back to his car, then entered the hotel and climbed to the roof.
By the sea, where the antique theatre had been dug from the dunes, he could see the white rectangle of the Mercedes parked on the bluff. Below the proscenium, on the flat semi-circle of the stage, the dark figure of Gabrielle Szabo moved to and fro among the shadows of the statues.
Watching her, and thinking of Delvaux’s ‘Echo’, with its triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city, Halliday wondered whether he had fallen asleep on the warm concrete roof. Between his dreams and the ancient city below there seemed no boundary, and the moonlit phantoms of his mind moved freely between the inner and outer landscapes, as in turn the dark-eyed woman from the house by the drained river had crossed the frontiers of his psyche, bringing with her a final relief from time.
Leaving the hotel, Halliday followed the street through the empty town, and reached the rim of the amphitheatre. As he watched, Gabrielle Szabo came walking through the antique streets, the fleeting light between the columns illuminating her white face. Halliday moved down the stone steps to the stage, aware of the chauffeur watching him from the cliff beside the car. The woman moved towards Halliday, her hips swaying slowly from side to side.
Ten feet from him she stopped, her raised hands testing the darkness. Halliday stepped forward, doubting if she could see him at all behind the sunglasses she still wore. At the sound of his footsteps she flinched back, looking up towards the chauffeur, but Halliday took her hand.
‘Miss Szabo. I saw you walking here.’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 99