by Janet Todd
He stood up too soon. She was still tired as they began walking once more. The air smelled of rosemary.
There was a poplar in the path. Surely she could lean on its smoothness just for a moment. The tree almost invited her back to rest. But on he went ahead of her. As she looked towards him she saw a black-and-orange butterfly just to his left as if leading him forward. He brushed it aside. Others came to join it.
He said something, she didn’t hear. She tried to catch up but failed. Then he turned and said ‘Aglais urticae.’
Did men always know the names of things? Aksel Stamer and the butterfly, Giancarlo Scrittori and the lagoon birds, Robert and his pots, Gilbert and the shells. Was that their power? She tried to press Robert into generic men. But he resisted.
On they trudged. Aksel Stamer making distance between them, then slowing as she struggled to keep up, despite the longer strides she was forcing herself to take.
Now the trees were looming in the dusk. Everything ached about her: blisters welled up on her feet, first one then both. The lady’s boots were not stout enough, intended for stone pavements and city halls not for this tramping over uneven ground. She steadied herself with a sapling, a feathered branch. She would not ask the man to slow down. For, underneath all, there was only one thing that mattered, that Aksel Stamer be there, that he not disappear, that he not abandon her.
But then, as she looked up from keeping her eyes on the uneven ground, he really wasn’t there. Her stomach rose to her mouth. She sat down on a stone to swallow and catch her breath. To be abandoned here in this wilderness.
Then he appeared to the side of her through a grove of olive trees, carrying his leather bottle with its metal cup dangling from the rim. ‘Here is apple juice,’ he said. He unhooked the cup and poured out the liquid. It was yellow-green, with a frothed top. It was cool and delicious.
Then suddenly it was Robert’s constricted throat that was trying to drink. She felt the juice fall from a coloured glass into that mouth. Tears sprang to her eyes. She could swallow no more. Yet what she’d drunk still kept its delicious, delicate taste.
Aksel Stamer saw her emotion. He looked away. She hoped he’d simply judged her tired.
A little breeze came down through the olive trees and holm oaks and tugged at her straight, now straw-like hair. It was short but perhaps not short enough. For it flapped against her flaking face. Appearance was nothing, sensation everything.
A spasm of self-contempt overwhelmed her as she thought of what she, like other women, had once feared of men – a rape, an attack, for God’s sake, even an intimate robbery. What was there about her things or her person to take now? Was there anything that anyone would want?
She got up and handed the leather bottle back to Aksel Stamer. He drank the rest. She heard the liquid pass down his throat.
Soon they came out of the dark green, almost indigo canopy of the shore pines and into an area of sand and scrub intersected with shallow rivers and rivulets. The few freshwater ponds were almost dry, as was the salt marsh with its white powder shining with crystals. There was again the faint smell of rosemary.
Venice with its wet floors and dripping walls, its endless tides over slippery feet, its humid sultry air and floppy gulls, was far from this thirsty scrub. It didn’t call her back.
The stern back almost faded into the undulating dunes as she tried harder to hasten her aching legs. Follow, always follow.
‘We are nearly there,’ he said over his shoulder.
What if, when they got to the other coast, no boat came? What if it happened as it had when they first landed, that nothing was as he expected? What if there had never been a boat? What if Aksel Stamer too was mad and they were walking into a desert? Where was this place?
Would she never learn just to obey – or not to follow?
The dunes stretched on, in and out of headlands. A stray juniper interrupted the waste, a few sandy thickets. On the ground were pieces of bare distorted wood. The few growing things were stunted.
‘How will we know where we should be?’ she asked as she caught up with him.
He didn’t answer. Of course not. She spoke to hear a voice in this emptiness.
What was the matter with him? He didn’t seem like a human being with ordinary emotions.
At last they saw the sea. It was still, almost thick, substantial.
‘We must wait by three huts on the promontory. There is only one place like that.’
She could have wept with relief at his words. Yet she made no sense of them. This was like Giancarlo Scrittori with the lamb and goose in San Marco so very long ago. But that had been playful. She looked at Aksel Stamer with incomprehension. He caught the look but didn’t interrogate it. Then he spoke again slowly, gravely as if talking, any talking, used too much energy and he feared to expend it. ‘We have to find the place, Ann.’
He used her Christian name as he had on La Giudecca. Was it still her name? She was unsure. Her old passports were in her bag under her clothes. They had her name – her two names – on them.
When the stream they had crossed so much earlier – then re-crossed repeatedly as it meandered, following some hardly defined path – entered the sea, they waded through the shallow water holding their boots. The sand below was light brown and blue catching the whiteness of the sandy beach beyond as well as the light azure of the sea. Ann felt herself black and parched as she looked down at her bare feet. Like pieces of chipped wood.
They couldn’t drink the water: it had become salty.
‘When we meet people from now on, it’s best if I say you are my sister,’ he said, with the slightest pause before the last word. ‘Please put back your skirt when we stop.’
‘But our ages are different.’
At last he smiled, or rather his face creased just a little. ‘Not so different. I had . . .’ He hesitated and looked pensive, then added, ‘And do we not look somewhat alike?’
She caught his eye. Her mind tumbled over its half-realised thoughts. Why did he not say ‘daughter’? Would that not be more reasonable, more suited to their years? And why the pause? She was sure she’d discerned it.
She wouldn’t ask. He would never respond.
By now she felt weary beyond the bodily weariness of aching legs, sore feet, sprained ankle and burnt skin, even beyond the weariness of worrying about how she’d be answered. A new anger was starting to seep through her at this man who was taking such immense, peculiar trouble to save her. From what now? They were well away. She was filling with fatigue and fury.
She sat, then lay down.
Then he was rubbing her ankle, pressing in crevices with his thumb. She felt comfort steal up her legs.
For the last part of the journey he took her hemp bag on his back again and found her a stick which he peeled with his hunting knife, so she could limp just a little and take the weight off the foot with the weak ankle.
They stopped for her to change back into woman’s clothes. The stays of the bodice rubbed unfamiliarly against her healed ribs.
Let it not rain, please let it not rain! The sandy rubble would become mud and squelch over and into her ageing boots. The skirts she had now to wear would be a weight of wet. She half-closed her eyes from weariness and the sun, and saw instead a sea of shining mud. But it didn’t rain.
Then there, just before the huts and at the edge of the promontory, they spied a man sitting on a pile of broken wall, the remains of a ruined house.
‘Stay here,’ said Aksel Stamer pointing to the ground. She could have been a spaniel. ‘Just come when I beckon to you.’
She obeyed. She’d almost forgotten how much she disliked obeying, but not quite, the feeling was still there, intact. She stood as she’d been told, and waited.
The two men came together. She saw them nod, but didn’t see whether they shook hands or not. They were of equal height. Not so. Aksel Stamer was taller. She had remarked his height earlier. He was not broad, just tall. They were talking now. Then they l
ooked back at her. The man wiped his brow and stared again. Aksel Stamer showed him a paper and the man took it, glanced and gave it back. He shook his head. Why was Aksel Stamer doing this? Could such a man read?
Again they both looked at her.
After a while Aksel Stamer came towards her and nodded for her to move forward. Before she reached the stranger, he whispered in her ear, ‘You will have to be what name I say you are. We have no passports for this part of the journey.’
‘But I have my old papers,’ she protested. Then her cheeks grew hot. She remembered why they were journeying in this tortuous way.
‘I have sold them,’ he said curtly. ‘You are better without them.’ Then he shrugged. ‘They were no use in any case.’
He must have taken them from her bag when she wasn’t looking – or sleeping. She had not given them to him, she knew that. Did he think he simply owned her? Was it to do with her ‘crime’? So she would never again bear that incriminating ‘married’ name? Yet how on earth could people on this forsaken shore know anything of what happened so long ago in Venice? And what had happened there?
‘You have yours, though?’
He shrugged again and walked ahead to the man, not turning round.
The boat they aimed for would be a sizeable one, suitable for crossing the open water. It lay further down, south of the promontory. The stranger had given directions, but would not accompany them. They had to reach it by themselves.
It was hard to do this when, after a short pause, her body expected rest. As if she’d promised it to her recalcitrant legs and was now forsworn.
They continued trudging over the dunes, a few shells cracking as they walked. The sharp edges almost punctured the thinning soles of her boots. The frayed silk scarf she used now against the sun was caught by the low thorny bushes as they passed.
She slowed down again, so that Aksel Stamer went on way ahead of her. She saw he was sitting upright on a rock protruding through the sand. The sun shone on his old leather jacket, making its dark folds look silky. She reached him and sat down beside him on the dry sand, exaggerating their difference in height.
In silence he pulled out a small piece of dry bread, some olives and a thimble size of goat’s cheese, then poured from his leather bottle half a tin mug of warm water.
She put small bits of each in her mouth. They tasted of heaven.
‘Those plants we passed earlier are asphodel,’ he said. ‘They flowered long ago. Here they eat the root.’ He paused. ‘Children heat it sometimes and explode it like fireworks.’
What was he talking about?
To lie in asphodel.
‘That man you spoke to,’ she said, ‘what could he be doing here? There’s little farming. A few goats are all I’ve spied these past days. Is he a fisherman?’
Aksel Stamer stared out towards the sea. ‘He was a miner,’ he said at last. ‘Now he owns boats.’
‘Mining for what? There’s nothing here.’
‘They mine for lead.’
How does he know these things?
He surmised her question. ‘I told you. I have been here before.’
‘Why, when?’
‘I was travelling.’
As earlier, the rest made the aching more palpable, her sore feet more demanding. But still she stood up and went on, hobbling, lurching over rivulets.
Finally they saw it round the low dunes. A large old fishing boat with wet black nets coiled on its deck. In it two men sat waiting, quite still.
Was it a small thing for these men to carry to sea a suspected murderess and her protector, neither with papers for the foreign land? Or was this their traffic: ferrying fugitives back and forth?
Was her life more ordinary than she’d supposed?
When they arrived near the French coast, one of the men rowed them ashore in a sort of India dinghy. He set them down on a deserted inlet by a village called Cassis, he said. Aksel Stamer handed over more money in silence. No one noted their arrival.
By now the long journey, the privations, the fear, the aching muscles, the dirty hair, the baggy trousers, the returned skirt round a thinner waist, all of it had begun to dissipate the horror left in Venice. Pain and strain changed things, diminished disturbances of the mind. Something was appeased – at least by day.
‘My mother will probably be dead by the time I reach Paris,’ she said.
‘Probably,’ Aksel Stamer replied. She thought he smiled but her lips were still so cracked from the dry air she couldn’t smile back to make him smile again – perhaps he’d never done so.
He glanced at her, then rooted in his bag and pulled out his small jar of rose balm. He put a small amount on his finger and stretched it out to her. She took it off and smoothed the waxy substance on to her lips.
He’d never said why he was going to Paris. Most probably he needed to get papers there to cross back to London, unless England were really his home.
Or did he want to see Caroline? It was possible. The suspicion had been lying in her mind. But silly, gossipy, cruel Caroline?
Or had he been a friend of Gilbert’s, a young relative through the half-English mother? She’d mentioned him and his repeated words a few times on the journey. She couldn’t remember what she might have said or not have said in these long extraordinary days. She registered no response.
She’d not said much about Robert. In fact when, by her face perhaps or some gesture, she’d started to betray that she thought of him and was about to speak, Aksel Stamer seemed to notice, then drew attention to something outside themselves: some stooping woman with a bundle on her back, some quaint feature of the passing landscape, some animal scampering into the bushes. It was not the copious detail of Giancarlo Scrittori and his seagulls, little beyond pointing and an adjective. See the sunset over the hill; look at the girls loading the donkey with more than the poor beast’s weight; notice the tracery round the door of this poor inn – it was once a lord’s palace, and so on. The asphodels had been such a moment. The tactic did not quite serve, but it staunched confession.
By the end she herself had become so mute she’d ignored the few chances for conversation. She had no worry: time enough to talk when they reached Paris and they would both see Caroline alive – or hear of her dead.
Then would be the moment for thinking back on those terrible events in Venice. Then would be the time for explanation.
27
As they came to the end of the journey, near places where she and Robert had been together, she heard her own voice speaking through his. Within her own head she’d become like one of his comic characters, those people he conjured up to amuse his followers, then dismissed as the shallow, simple souls they were. He’d never done intricate personations; or rather, he revealed a secret: that the intricate were really simple. If they thought otherwise, it was vanity. She knew she was simple now.
She stilled the voice that was hers only through him. But there was something she couldn’t control. Why, now that beds were softer and food more edible, did the nightmares become more vivid?
For so many months in Venice she’d dreamt the same dream. She was lost in obscure streets, rushing, running breathless to be home, a home that was always an elusive Robert. There was danger too, violent danger but it was there in his absence, not his presence. His person was never reached. She feared she would be dashed to pieces from a fall before she found him, drowned in whirlpools, or asphyxiated in brown duck feathers. Now as she travelled these dreams had almost stopped and in their place arose the image of that hanging body, washed with a horrid yearning. Underneath was the dread that this yearning would be fulfilled and she would embrace and be embraced by the corpse.
When she reached consciousness with the morning, she was flooded with gratitude that desire could not be, and had not been, acted on. Then she found tears on her face for Robert in all his forms – and for her profound, remorseful relief that he was gone.
As with the old dreams, the day diminished the new ones and
she found that his image stayed behind in the bed, shared on one occasion with a lady’s maid from Marseilles. She could not have credited it. She thought Robert had moved inside her forever.
Signs streaked behind her eyes at intervals, of course. The high-backed chair in his study that had held his body, then fallen. Like the sofa of Princess Caroline which everyone remembered long after ceasing to think of its owner. Like Gilbert’s solid-silver swan. Like Caroline’s coloured shawls. Why did her mind fix so helplessly on these unseen objects?
Something was amiss with it. There was a lump within her head. It had settled just beneath her temple and at times travelled to the nape of her neck. Heat flashed and subsided.
During the last part of their long journey through France, they’d stopped when demands for papers and passes required payment, bribes, or counter-signings by more expensive dignitaries. Aksel Stamer dealt with it all, producing whatever would serve or knowing how to circumvent what would not. He made people accept that they’d landed properly at Marseilles from a regular packet boat – not been dumped by Sardinian fishermen on a deserted beach.
She let him handle all of it, documents and identities, with the trust of a child or beast.
So they reached Paris.
By now she was trembling. Why? So many dreadful things had happened that an encounter with an old woman who’d always been indifferent to her, just a distant figure in false red curls, could not provoke this emotion.
Perhaps to help her struggling mood, Aksel Stamer became more forthcoming. ‘Paris is filthier than London,’ he said, ‘it’s laid out impressively on a grand scale as Napoleon wanted, a Roman imperial capital – but all show. Walk away from the wide boulevards and there’s filth and narrow streets. Yet there are still swans on the Seine. Look, one is moving its head up and down. It looks like a clockwork fowl from this distance.’
She couldn’t reply, not even to that detail of the mechanical bird; she felt too listless. He looked worried then. He had gone too fast for her, he said, it had been too much, he should have thought.
