The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  The pelvis that I found did not have the same effect. It was not long after the ring, and it lay within a yard or two of the place where I had picked it up: but I did not connect it with the Germans drowned – nor, indeed, with mankind at all.

  It was by itself, white, dry and smooth, symmetrical and polished to inhumanity by the sea. It was only by a conscious effort that I could feel that this had been a piece of a man – only by running my hand round my own hip to my spine and tracing the same rise and curve that I saw on the bleached and diagrammatic bone in front of me. It had been in some way human, that was true; but is a shell the shellfish? This pelvis was very like a shell. Ordinarily, I suppose, a human bone would raise some emotion, some emotion resembling piety; it would be a disturbance of decency, a kind of profanation on the shore. But I felt no such emotion as I sat looking at this bone: I connected it with death, but with no particular death. A specimen in an anatomical museum could more easily have been clothed with living flesh than this white basin in the sun.

  One’s mental processes, and especially the wandering fantasies that pass through one’s mind as one walks, are linked by a chain of association so slight that it usually cannot be traced. A bramble will claw out from a thicket: one pushes on automatically, and then in half an hour one will find that one has been dwelling on the Passion for the last mile of the road. That is why I speak of this bone: it provides the obvious and unfortuitous start for the recollections that unfolded in my head as I walked up the cliff path and high along the edge of the sea to the ruined batteries, where the camouflaged concrete still lies among the thistles and the asphodel, with its reinforcing steel rods all standing like the prickles of some prodigious monster of the earth.

  When first I came to this village I lodged in a house belonging to an elderly couple named Joseph and Martine Albère. It was a large house, but I was the only lodger: it was a tall, gaunt place, always cold and damp, even in the height of the summer, and from the outside you would have said that it was uninhabited. But it was in good repair, a solid, middle-class house, much richer than the terrace-cottages in which most of the villagers lived: only the presbytery and the doctor’s house were better; and from this I judged that the owner would be a man of some standing in the village. I learned, too, that my landlord was the owner and the equipper, the armateur, as they say, of three fishing boats: his boats, then, were the direct means of livelihood for nearly forty of the men of the place – a considerable proportion of the working inhabitants.

  However, I soon gathered the impression that Albère was not a man of high standing. It is difficult to say how one forms an impression of this nature: it is built up of so many little things – gestures, tones of voice, a look cast backward, an avoiding eye – but in the end it grows into certainty. On the concrete, demonstrable side there was the fact that he never ran for municipal office, that he was president of none of the many co-operative or political associations and that he never appeared at any of the funerals or public feasts.

  He seemed to be rich but unconsidered: a contradiction of common experience. At one time I asked myself whether in fact he was rich. Would a rich man take in a lodger? He did not seem to like letting the room I had; but when upon some trifling disagreement (he did not allow his lodgers the front-door key) I suggested that I should find a room elsewhere, he showed so much concern that I could not but suppose he was in earnest. He at once proposed a much lower rent if I would give up my point, and after a little more discussion I agreed to stay. This caused him a disproportionate satisfaction.

  Then I learned that he had a fourth boat building on the stocks, which disposed of my idea that he was poor, for at that time a new boat was a very costly undertaking. As for the letting of rooms, that might indicate much or little: after all, in a big house one might let rooms to keep the house lived in, simply to prevent that decay that always comes in an empty place.

  But still he remained a curious man to me. He did not like me, and he did not like having me in the house: yet he did not want me to leave it. The rent that I paid was a trifle to him even before he reduced it, yet he forced himself to be amiable to me, provided my room with the meagre best of the furniture in the house, and waited up every night to let me in after my evening walk.

  He was a small, dark man, about sixty-five years of age: he was always carelessly dressed, dirty and unshaved, and his air of brutality contrasted strangely with the house he lived in. How did this brutal air appear? He was not obviously vicious: he spoke politely enough to me (though it was patently constrained) and I can only say that it must have been his lurching walk, the set expression on his face and the way he terrorized his wife that made me think, ‘Albère? A brutish man.’ His wife I hardly saw: she was utterly effaced, and she moved about the darkened house furtively, with the sound of a person who is trying to make no noise – this was when she was going about her obvious, everyday duties. She was much more like an imprisoned servant than the mistress of the house. Whenever she spoke to me he would appear and, whatever she was saying, she would stop and hurry downstairs. Yet I had the impression, that in spite of this domination they were allies. Sometimes, in the dead quiet of night, I would hear them talking, two whispers, urgent and hurrying, that would answer one to the other in the basement of the house. They slept in the kitchen, and I do not think they ever used any other room.

  When I had been there some time I learnt something of their habits. They did not sleep very much, and every few hours one or another of them (or sometimes both) would creep up to the top of the house, along the passage that traversed its length, opening every door softly and softly closing it again, then down the stairs to the middle landing, very silently past my door to the room beyond, and there they would pause, perhaps for as long as half an hour, before coming out, crossing quietly to the other side of the house, back to the stairs, and so down again to the hall and their kitchen.

  But I have my nocturnal habits, too: and more than once I have been there before them, fixed silent in a corner just off their trodden beat (for their patrol was so settled by long routine that their feet stepped in exactly the same places night after night), silent and unbreathing, watching their shadows.

  However, this was much later: at first I merely noted that they never left the house together, and that when one was gone the other always waited in the hall or near it to open the door.

  They appeared to have no relations. At least nobody ever came to visit them; and as far as I could see they were always in the house except when Albère was on the beach, conducting his business with the crews of his boats or when the woman was out for shopping. She never went to church: nor, of course, did he.

  I had been there a long time before I found out what was the matter with them. It was a long time, for there were two difficulties in my way: the one was that the people of the village were not unduly open – they may know for generations, but they will not go out of their way to tell strangers – and the other, that I do not talk readily either. I do not go to cafés nor make acquaintance with the loungers on the quay. My form of recreation after my work is to walk. I like to go for long, uninterrupted walks.

  Eventually it was a Dutch painter who told me what I had to know. He was a fat, exuberant man – spoke the language perfectly, having been brought up in Rheims – and he almost forced himself upon me. All he wanted was an audience: he loved to talk, and the smallest word of attention would keep him talking on the quay for hours. He was not my idea of a Dutchman. He knew all the fishermen and all the shopkeepers: he was hail-fellow-well-met with all of them before he had been here a month, and he stayed for a long time. It was a local man who told him about Albère: or perhaps ‘local man’ is inexact, for he was a waiter who had married a local girl and settled down here: he did not have the same sense of a closed community. The facts were common knowledge, and I often came across references to them afterwards. Albère was originally a sailor, a seaman employed on the packet boats that run between France and North Afr
ica. On his ship, the Jules-Bastide, there were two other men from this village.

  One night, about thirty years ago, the Jules-Bastide put out from Marseilles in a black gale of wind: there were very few passengers, for it was mid-winter, and most of those few went straight to their cabins. Only a few Algerian deck passengers huddled on the fo’c’sle, and one solitary priest, indifferent to the weather, stayed on the afterdeck. He carried a black valise wherever he went. When he went below for dinner he kept it with him, and afterwards, when he returned to the deck, in spite of the wild seas, he carried it still. He paced up and down in the gale, always carrying this valise. There were three men on duty on this part of the ship at this particular time, Albère and his two fellow-villagers.

  In the morning the priest was missing. Nobody knew anything about it: the official inquiry revealed nothing whatever. There was even some mystery about the identity of the priest, as there had been a mistake in the list of passengers, and the person who had arranged for the priest’s ticket could not be traced.

  Shortly afterwards the three men left the sea. One bought a café in the town ten miles up the coast: the second took an important farm some way inland; and Albère bought the house where I was staying and the three fishing boats.

  Within a year the first man and his wife were burned alive in a fire that destroyed their house and café. Two years later the second man, already overcome by misfortune in all his enterprises, lost his only son: the boy was killed riding a motor bicycle that his father had bought him. The man returned to this village by foot, walked to the graveyard, and hanged himself in the daylight.

  Ever since, the Albères had been waiting for their turn. They had taken me in as some kind of protection (the lightning, they thought, would not strike a house where a just man lived) but still they did not think that my presence was enough: they were still in dread, and I remembered how one night, early in my stay, I had gone out about three in the morning (I had thought that it might be the beginning of the day of wrath, but when I looked at the stars I found that I was wrong: I had been unable to move Aldebaran) and I had unbolted the door without a sound. When I came back and closed it after me, I heard the stifled gasp that Albère made as he stood silently behind the door, and in the moonlight from the landing window I saw that he had a gun. He muttered something about thieves, but, as I thought at the time, you shoot thieves down. Thieves had their hands cut off in former days; they were also stoned to death. Some thieves were nailed and hung up alive.

  Nothing has ever given me a livelier pleasure than my realization that they had taken me in as a protection. And it came to me quite slowly, as I was walking by the river, that once again I had been chosen as the hand of God. After such a long time it had come again: all my anxious waiting was rewarded. The wickedness of my doubt was overlooked – for at times I had wavered – and now once again I was the elected vessel. I had hoped for so long: and to hope for such an election twice in one lifetime seemed presumptuous indeed. But now I was the hand of God again; the wrath of a jealous God Who spoke through the prophet and ploughed the Amalekites into the ground. And without any knowledge I had been set there in my place for a long year past: oh, it was the sweetest realization in the world, this kindness done to me.

  Clearly I knew that it was not for the murder I had been sent: no, no; it was for accidie. These wicked people had despaired of all forgiveness: they had hardened their hearts, and for that last wickedness they were to be destroyed in this world as they were already damned in the next.

  I waited for the dream that would direct my hand: it had been so clear before. It had been so clear and explicit, and twice repeated, on the last occasion, the sawing of the blasphemer in Newtownards. But it did not come at once this time, and in my lightness of spirits I could not sleep. Between half-past three and four o’clock they were on the upper corridor, together; and the spirit of delight was so strong in me that I could not resist the pleasure of running out with my black coat over my nakedness, barefoot up behind them. They were in the far room, listening; I was fast in the black shadow of the corner, and as they crept by I sprang on them shrieking, ‘The priest, the valise, the priest, ha ha ha ha ha.’ I leaped and sprang, but with the shrieking and the laughter I could hardly run as fast as they did. They were some way ahead, the man before the woman, and I am a very big, heavy man; but I cut them off at the head of the stairs and hunted them into the farthest room: I howled and howled in the room. And I let them escape me there while I ran to leap and shriek all through the house. Then I had them on the stairs half down, the man dragging the woman by the arm. They were trying to reach the door, and the laughing nearly choked my breath. From up there I flew, I say I flew, and smashed them down on to the far stone floor.

  But it was finished then. It was finished almost before it had begun. I had meant a full night’s inspired, enormous ecstasy, and I had wasted it in half an hour. Before it had started it was done: they had died without a mark; and I had not set the sign.

  The Soul

  WITH THE FULL MOON hidden, but only just hidden, the world was lit by a gentle light, enough to see the great features of the land, the rocks, the line of wild mountains, and the shape of the coast. There was no wind, no wind at all, and the soft clouds hung low, smooth, united and unmoving; they never parted for the stars to shine through, but it would not have been called a cloudy night; they were not positive enough for that. The warmth came up from the ground, from the side of the hill, from all around, an enveloping warmth in that still air.

  As she had but just left the cemetery, where the cold lingered among the cypresses, among the angular white tombs and the high pigeonholes where the poor dead lay, she rested on the wall above the cliff and let the grateful warmth soak in.

  This, she thought, must be very like what the ancients believed the end of the world to be – the flat world, that had an end. The dark cliff dropped a hundred feet, perhaps two hundred, to an unmoving sea: on the water there was no reflection; a faint haze deadened it, and no sound came up. There was no horizon. The sea and the sky joined perhaps, but they were lost.

  It was as if she looked into nothing, into infinity. Only a light far out, a round light with no path on the sea, and that gave even more the impression of unending waste beyond.

  A poor soul, she thought, would have to go down the path that was before her, the cliff path, and walk out over that space to the light, beyond all words remote. It would be a perfectly smooth desert, and your feet would not find a surface, not a hard surface. Perhaps for some distance you could walk easily, but then for an unmeasurable time you would labour – dream-walking – with a huge mental effort for no gain.

  Although it was so empty from here, you might pass a silent, pale soul working out some cruel meanness, some tyranny that had not been paid for with more than a moment’s uneasiness before. You might pass: but was there anyone she could pass?

  The light was infinitely remote. But it was no good waiting: all the hope that there could be was in the traject; and in the faint light she bent to see the winding of the path.

  Lying in the Sun

  WITH HIS FACE CRADLED in the soft bend of his arm he could see nothing: but the strong glare of the sun filtered through the crook of his elbow and through his closed eyelids, filling his head with a red light. Behind him, or rather beyond his feet since he was lying on a beach, there was the faint and intermittent murmur of the sea, very small waves that curled and hissed a few inches up the pebbled shore. Above him and all round on every side the dome of the sky pressed down, hemming in and confining this world of brilliant light; there was no room for any air to move and even the sea was flattened by the weight of the day.

  Some of the other people on the beach, however, were not conscious of the weight. They bathed, splashing, and ran about with cries; beyond his right shoulder, ten yards farther up the slope, a family of French women under parasols untiringly discussed their concierge, two or three of them talking at once. From time to time
they shrieked orders to their children not to go too far, not to wet themselves, to keep their heads covered, and out of the medley of sound the children shouted back.

  But the French voices pierced through indistinctly from a very distant world, remote in every way; and the only sound that he heard and accepted was the lapping of the sea.

  If he were to raise his head a little and turn it he would be able to breathe more easily; but then the light would change to yellow, and he did not want that. He preferred the dim red, and he nuzzled his face a little deeper into his arms; the redness surged and for a time it was branched through and through with orange streaks. It settled, and he sank farther into his isolation.

  This was like swimming in a tide of blood, he thought; or not so much swimming as having one’s being in it. This would be the life of a foetus, bathed in dark redness and safe; the only sound in its world would be the throb of the blood, like the waves that he heard now, weak and faint but always there and always prevailing against the irrelevant shouts, the crunch of feet on pebbles, the women gabbling, the ice-cream seller’s raucous voice, the thrum of the diving board and the splash of the divers.

  Those sounds were all so faint, dream-like and unreal; they did not impinge upon his inner world at all, so long as he kept his head right down. So long as he kept his head down he was safe; his limits were drawn in to the sound of the waves in his ears; the ball of red light in his head, and the feel of his forearm across the bridge of his nose – his world was contained by these three things, and it did not extend even to his body, sprawling there on the stones and slowly roasting under the sun.