Even now, with all the pressures off her, alone, in the condition which had so often during her years of immersion in the family seemed out of reach, she was not able to rest, and to think, understand, absorb—for she continually felt herself streaming towards the future, into her husband’s arms, into a sea of intimacy which included her past. Which her mind was judging as being a kind of madness. She was longing for the past, obsessed with it. Sitting alone in her hotel room, a fever of want transported her to her bedroom at home, her husband’s arms, and leaves being swept about their house in a cold wind, but the warmth of their home closing them in: the past.
She sat at the window until she was the last person awake: all the lights in the village were out. The cluster of lights up on the mountainside which Señor Martinez said was another convent had become a distant twinkle, like that which a hurricane lamp sends across miles of country, and the twinkling is because a wind is making it swing. But this flickering was because of the swaying of leaves across the single light at the convent gate. She found this out when she walked up the hilly roads next morning: there was a little white building all by itself among orange trees, where hens scratched. A nun was hoeing among the orange trees, the black sleeves flung back to expose her wrists, dust settling on black skirts.
This bride of Christ smiled at Kate; Kate smiled back. Mad, she was thinking. All of us, the whole bloody parcel of us, the whole thing, crazy, men and women both, we’re all mad, and don’t know it. Here was this woman in her self-chosen prison, here was she, a prisoner of her memories; and there was Michael, engaged in—not so much eating as sampling a box of chocolates, taking a bite out of one, swallowing another, discarding a third without tasting it.
The lantern on the gate was of iron, and looked old. Probably deliberately made to look old. The leaves that made the light tremble at night were on an ancient olive tree.
Back at the hotel Señor Martinez said that she should not walk by herself in such heat; he was sad for her that she had nowhere to amuse herself, but perhaps she would like to use the courtyard which was not open to ordinary hotel guests, but could be for her.
The courtyard had a small pool where goldfish could be seen with difficulty through a film of dust and many water plants whose leaves were crowded with bubbles. Across the court, in a corner of shade, sat an old woman, an aunt of Señor Martinez’s wife. She was reading a holy book and knitting a black garment.
In the evening Kate visited Jeffrey again. He still had not said anything to anyone, the nuns reported, but now he opened his eyes, appeared to recognise her, and said in a normal voice, “Oh, hi there, hi, how is it?” and fell back into his sleep, or stupor, again.
That night the local doctor came to the convent and the nuns rang Señor Martinez to say that Jeffrey might have typhoid, it was a possibility, but no one was to worry.
Next morning typhoid was ruled out, but jaundice had not been confirmed. A day passed, another. She visited Jeffrey, sat with him, walked through the poor streets and alleyways and olive fields to the convent; she sat in the courtyard, she fought her emotions in a fury of irritation with herself—and she dreamed about the seal. She was becoming drawn into the air of the dream so that even when awake she recognised atmospheres, flashes of feeling—if that was the word, that came from the dream, from the seal. She had always been on good terms with her dreams, had always been alert to learn from them. Ever since she was very small, five or six, she had been able to reach her hand into the country behind the daylit one, to touch a familiar object that lived there, or to walk through it at ease, not astonished, or afraid. Nor was she surprised by a dream that developed like a fable or a myth: she accommodated several such long-running dreams, and when a new stage of development of a familiar theme was presented to her, she would lie awake for as long as she could before letting it be seen that she was awake, thinking of the ideas that were taking shape in her, and which she could not see except in these reflections like firelit shadows on the walls of her sleep.
But this dream, the dream of the seal, was of a different quality from any she had known. Not because it seemed so “real”—many of her dreams did, as real as waking life. No, it was because of its atmosphere, so particularly its own that she could enter into it even when the seal was not there—when it was, as it were, offstage for the time, busy elsewhere, on its own affairs. She could enter the place of the dream and know it to be “the dream of the seal.” Going to sleep and entering this dream was as much her business for this time in her life as being in this hotel in the poor dusty village in a blazing August, as visiting Jeffrey and waiting for his recovery, as wrestling with her emotional self, which seemed like a traitor who had come to life inside her. What she was engaged in was the dream, which worked itself out in her.
One hot afternoon, in siesta, she was in an arena with the seal: in the northern landscape was a Roman amphitheatre. She was at ground level, down on the floor of the arena. Suddenly wild animals leaped from cages that had been opened in the arena walls. Lions, leopards, wolves, tigers. She ran with the seal and climbed as high as she could up the stands, while the animals came after them both. She made an effort and climbed up onto the arena’s edge, which was a flimsy wooden rail that shook under her weight and the seal’s. There she clung, pulling her legs up, trying to lift the seal up and away from fangs and claws. There was an awful noise of snarling and roaring. She thought she would not have the strength to hold on, to keep the seal safe for long. Her strength was going, and the animals were leaping up and snapping and snarling at her feet, only inches away from the seal’s scarred tail. Then the frenzied leaping became less, and soon she and her burden were a long way from the animals, who dwindled, and thinned, and vanished.
It was now a week since Jeffrey had been taken to the convent. No, he most certainly had not had typhoid, though the convent, and the authorities, had had a bad forty-eight hours. But they now did not think it had been jaundice either, the yellowness notwithstanding. The yellow had gone, completely, and he was running rather high temperatures. What was certain was that he was ill, and too weak to travel.
Kate visited him daily, sometimes twice a day. Now he recognised her, and they spoke, not much, but were friendly, and likeable to each other, as they had been at the beginning, in Istanbul. His fever kept flaring up, and subsiding. He said he was happy where he was; lying in that austere room, looking out into sunlight that held a tree, and a bed of petunias, some jasmine, was what he had been needing for—he did not know how long. He did not believe he was ill: he had forgotten his days of being semiconscious and did not know he had been for many days unconscious. He saw his sojourn in the convent as this: lying quietly in a white bed, in a white room, looking out at foliage and flowers.
When she was not at the convent, Kate sat through the hours in the courtyard at the hotel. At night she sat at the window, an area of alert vigilance against the treachery of memories, wants, false hopes, and watched the moon that was at its full.
One evening the walk to the convent was beyond her. It was too hot, she had slept too long at siesta, she felt a little sick with all this heavy unseasonable food, she believed that the night before it must have been dawn before she had been able to leave the moon-filled window, the stars, the convent light that flickered down the mountainside through its moving screen. She asked Señor Martinez to ring the convent and tell Jeffrey she was not coming that evening, and remained in her bed. She did not go down to dinner, sent back her breakfast tray untouched, and when Señor Martinez arrived in her room to enquire after her, saw from his face that she, like Jeffrey, was ill.
Oh, so that was all it was? She had been feeling so—she did not know how to describe it, but to be told that she might be getting jaundice, or whatever it was that Jeffrey had, was reassuring. All last night she had lain on her bed—sitting at the window had been beyond her—watching the moon’s movement across the square of stars; but she had been walking northwards with the seal in her arms. She believed tha
t somewhere ahead must be the sea, for if not, both she and the seal would die. Snow had begun to fall softly, drifting into the cracks and the hollows of the sharp black rocks. She shivered, and was glad the seal’s body was against hers, shielding it. The seal had its head on her shoulder, and she could feel the soft bristles of its hide on her cheek. The seal’s life was very weak, she knew that. She knew that walking into the winter that lay in front of her she was carrying her life as well as the seal’s—as if she were holding out into a cold wind her palm, on which lay a single dried leaf.
Señor Martinez said that she should authorise him to ring the doctor’s aunt, who would tell the doctor to come and diagnose for her. Kate saw that she was at the beginning of a process that might lead her to lie in a whitewashed cell beside the one Jeffrey was in. If she was ill, or going to be ill, then she should go home. While up to this minute it had seemed impossible to leave Jeffrey here alone, an act of coldness or of irresponsibility, now she was saying to herself that he was after all a man of thirty, that he would continue to live and probably even to prosper if she were not waiting at the hotel to sit with him once or twice a day for an hour—which in any case she could no longer do. She might leave him. She sent him telephone messages through Señor Martinez and the nuns, and, with paper from Señor Martinez—the hotel did not have its own paper—wrote to him. It was a small, humorous, regretful letter, full of the ironies of the situation—writing it she understood she was ill, for the effort was enormous. In due course he would write a similar one to her. By then, this little village and their two so very different experiences in it would have slipped into the past like films which had however begun with the same sequence—of a man and a woman sitting side by side in a country bus that had stopped somewhere. They were looking out into bright moonlight. It was a village square. On the edge of a small cracked fountain shone a white china cup. Men sat drinking outside a cafe. There were some trees that did not look right. They were diseased? No, they were thick with dust.
She stood by the fountain with her luggage, having paid the unbelievably modest bill, and Señor Martinez pressed her hands in his and his eyes had tears in them. She felt tears in her own. And she was embarrassed again, for while Señor Martinez liked her, oh yes, indeed he liked her very much, and understood why that unfortunately ill young man should have chosen her, although so much older than he was (passports say everything), all the same he was shocked, he was still shocked, though regretfully: he knew the world accommodated many such relationships nowadays, but he did not think the world to be better for it—all this and a lot more he conveyed in the pressure of his hands, the wetness of his fine lively eyes, as the bus stood shaking gently in the sun of an early morning waiting for two passengers, Kate, and a young girl who Señor Martinez said was the daughter of a man who grew tomatoes on a field she passed walking to the convent. The girl was going to work as a maid in a hotel on that lucrative coast for a month, before coming back to help her mother with the six smaller children.
Señor Martinez put her suitcase on the bus and told the driver that the señora was not well and should be treated gently. As indeed, she needed to be: the drive to the coast was all nausea and heat, and the glare of the coast when she reached it made her dizzy. It was midday. Her head ached, and she should be in bed, but now she was set on one thing, to return to London as fast as she could.
At the coast she found another bus and was soon in a town large enough to have a tourist office, and by five that afternoon had reached a doctor: a few miles inland, among those very poor people, getting a doctor had meant days of waiting, and the intervention of religion.
This doctor heard all she had to say about jaundice and typhoid, examined her, and said that in his opinion she was anaemic. He advised her to see her own doctor the moment she arrived in London, though for his part he believed she would soon find herself quite well. He prescribed a sedative, and charged her something like five pounds. Of course, in Full Flood Time, while rivers of gold poured up and down the coasts, and when the señora was obviously rich—look at her dress, her handbag, her shoes!—what could be more just?
The señora, recognising in the doctor her own attitude to Jeffrey, that to begin with at least his illness had been a sickness of the will, nevertheless felt too weak for buses and for coaches, and re-entered the world of the rich by hiring a car to take her to the airport.
There she drowsed in a chair, waiting for a cancellation, and then as time passed and passed, she laid herself down on a long seat, shutting out the curiosity or disapproval of other passengers. She was deep inside the cold nausea that characterised this sickness, whatever it was, and when at last, but not till next morning, she was on an airplane, knew how great a mistake it was to be there at all: she was sure she would die, hoped that she would, and by the time she reached London was sustained only by thinking of her own bed, in her own room, with its flowered curtains beyond which summer branches could be seen sifting sunshine, or cloud light, or moonlight—oh, she could not wait to be back in her own home, with possibly even one of the children back from somewhere and able to help her. She had already given her address to the taxi man when she remembered that she had no right to it: her home was full of strangers. She asked him to wait while she considered. He did so, and the clock measured her predicament while she thought that to freelance for a hotel room in London in August was insanity. But she did not want to approach friends, and particularly not Mary, who she knew would take her in with enthusiasm. If, that is, she was not engaged in some affair or other—her children were away too.
At last she told the taxi man her trouble, and indicated that his devotion to her concerns would be rewarded. He drove her into London, turning to examine her from time to time to see how ill she was, and if he ought to be taking her to hospital, and then drove to hotel after hotel, leaving her while he went to put her case to one, two, three, four receptionists. At last, at a hotel in Bloomsbury, one much more expensive than Mrs. Michael Brown would use, he came to say that if she was able to wait for an hour or so, there would be a double room with a bath: the price appalled her, but she had no choice.
The Hotel
Paying off the taxi man, she paid herself in at the hotel and was asked if she were well enough to sit in the foyer and wait. The question, the solicitude, were delightful, but of course she had to go on sitting there, unless she took herself to hospital, which alternative had been turned down by the taxi man and the desk, in their consultations—which must have taken place—about infection, epidemics, that sort of thing. No, the desk, the taxi man, and herself, had decided she was sick rather than ill, and so she sat weakly in the foyer trying to make her mind steady itself by concentrating it on the scene around her. Surely, looked at from a geographical vantage point—a pair of particularly strong binoculars on top of the Alps, for instance?—it must seem as if in August all of Europe swaps populations, exchanges blocks of populace? In this foyer, set off by banks of flowers—artificial, but trumping nature so magnificently that real flowers would have seemed puny and out of place—the uniforms of the many attendants, the holiday clothes of the visitors, at first disguised the really interesting fact: that she was probably the only British person there. The couriers and porters that ran about, the nannies, of the kind she had recently been herself, smiling and sympathetic behind their desks, the waiters, as well as the guests, were from every part of Europe. She might as well still be in Istanbul, she might be in Málaga or Alicante—she might be anywhere, though not, of course, the village which she had left yesterday. And her ears were still attempting to make amenable lumps of sound to which she did not have the key, while they absorbed other sequences of sound which sank easily into her brain. A young couple near her were speaking German; they turned to stare at her, and Kate wondered why they did. They kept on her a steady, quite friendly, but attentive gaze. They were very attractive and obviously rich. He wore, although it was a muggy London summer’s day, a full-length fur, like moleskin, in a soft
mauveish colour. Or perhaps it was a very supple suede. It was buttoned up all the way, but open at the collar, showing a gleam of white silk. His eyes were dark and affectionate, his hair cut like a page’s, in supple black locks. The girl was himself, his double. Her hair was dark, and cut like his. Her eyes and smile were equally delightful. She wore long white crêpe de Chine that was fastened with a couple of hundred minute covered buttons along the sleeves and up the front. She wore very long glittering crystal beads, and white lace-up boots. Their hands, which looked capable and quick and intelligent, had rings on every finger. Even in this well-fed, well-tuned crowd, these two stood out, radiating a harmony of sensual fulfilment. They had only to walk into a room, these two, and everyone must know that their eating, their love-making, their conversation, their sleep, must be a feast. They looked as if all their lives they had been licked all over by invisible tongues dipped in honey … Kate was not the only one who was staring. Of course, that was why they were looking at her: “Yes, we are used to being stared at, we know it is the price we have to pay for being so beautifully dressed, for being so beautiful ourselves, but enough is enough!” Kate turned her gaze elsewhere, and listened to their German instead—no, now they were speaking French, and were deciding whether to take a car to visit friends who lived in the country in Wiltshire, or whether first to give themselves some lunch—no, at a restaurant, not here in this hotel, where it was obvious, the food could not be expected to be up to much … the sounds seemed to be going away and coming back, they seemed almost to be fanning her, her forehead was cold and wet: a smiling young woman in a bright black-and-white outfit was bending over her and inviting her in accented English to accompany her. As Kate stared, the invitation was repeated.
The Summer Before the Dark Page 14
