He looked at her hopefully, but she turned her head away.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” he suggested. “I want to talk.” He rose. Losing weight had suited him. He was lean as a cat, with a certain savage forcefulness that was new to him, as though everything had to be done quickly, because there was not much time. When they were back at the hotel, she wanted to stop, to put off the act of decision. But after so long it was a relief to be touched.
“You should have gone out to a dude ranch,” he said. “This couldn’t have been too comfortable.”
“I didn’t want a divorce,” she said. With a quick movement she turned the key in her door and pushed open the door. “Go in,” she said, and followed him, switching on the lights. The room was shabby and dull. Ill at ease, she sat down in a chair. He took out a cigarette, but he had trouble lighting it.
“I’ve done some things,” he said. “I’ve made a settlement on you. All there was.”
“Oh, Christopher….” She did not want him to bribe her.
“It’s because I may have difficulties for a while, that’s all. I wanted you to be safe.” He faced her, in the dim light of the lamp, and she could not see him clearly. “I think I’ve changed a lot, if I can change,” he said. “And I’ll have to be careful. Things aren’t going so well, about money I mean.” He broke off and threw his cigarette out of the window. He came and sat beside her. “Come back,” he said. She reached out a hand and stroked his hair. “I love you,” he said and began to cry. “I didn’t know that.” She had not seen him ever cry so helplessly. She felt pity in the weight of his head. She continued, almost mesmerized, to stroke his hair, which was wet and greasy to her touch. “Are you afraid of me?” he muttered. “I’m not much of a figure of fear now.”
“No, I’m not afraid, but …”
“But what?”
“I don’t love you.”
“I don’t care. Don’t make me go through all this again. I couldn’t do it.”
“Why did you write to Curt?” she asked.
“I had to write to somebody. I couldn’t write to you. I didn’t dare.”
“He’s having a hard time of it.”
He straightened up and looked at her. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I owe him something.”
He did not seem, now, the man who had done her so much harm. He sat on the floor, his head pillowed on the arm of the chair. He was like a small boy locked up in the body of a man. “Tell me something else,” she said. “About Nora….”
“What about her?” he asked angrily.
“She told me about her daughter.”
“What? Oh,” he said. “I see. It wasn’t her daughter. Well, it was, but only because … it was Nora,” he said. “I turned her down. She’s never forgiven that. And then her daughter. I’d seen her hanging round a road-house I used to own in San Mateo. She owed me money, and I had her watched. I told Nora where she could go, and I told her a few things she didn’t know about her daughter, because I got mad. That’s all.”
She sat there for a long time, knowing that the room was cold, but not wanting to move. And she knew she didn’t care what the truth of it was. “I’ll come,” she said.
He got up and went to the window, looking once more out over the city, towards the mountains. “I want to go back to the valley,” he said. “Would you mind that?”
“No.” But she thought of the valley and of the lifeless house.
“We’ll drive down,” he said. “I don’t want to fly the plane.” He sighed. “I guess you’ll want to be alone. I’ll ick you up at ten. Would that be too early?”
“No.”
He did not like the briefness of that, and so he went way. When he had gone she sat in the half-dark for a long time before she went to bed. But when she woke the next morning she heard the church bells, for Reno is a city of churches, tolling early in the air, and she lay there, motionless, listening to them, as they rang out all over the city. It was 8 a.m., Easter Sunday, 1954, and the great solemn bells echoed and tumbled through the impersonal air.
XVI
Now that she had made up her mind, she felt a dread of seeing the valley again, but the trip down was comfortable and Christopher was in an affable mood. By the time they had reached the last grade, she was excited and eager to see once more the great sweep of countryside that had once been her home.
They came round the bend, and below them, thousands of feet down, lay the whole panorama of Mono Lake, the desert, the volcanic cones, and before them, the mountains, sheer and jagged, with the valley hidden in them somewhere. Across the desert, just beneath the cliff, she could see the dirt road that ran into the valley by the back way. It made her want to cry. They began to descend, and on her right she saw the dead expanse of the lake fading into ominous twilight. Despite herself she shuddered and even Christopher was silent.
In an hour they reached the valley. She saw it again, its small flowers hiding in the grass, and all its rapids and pools full again, icy to the hand, and clearer than glass, with each pebble and stick reflected, and the tiny minnows darting to and fro. She was home. It was already dark, with no moon. The stars had begun to glitter fitfully in a sky too pale for them, and the mountains looked ghostly and immense. Soon it would be the time of summer lightning. They came to the top of the cliff, and to her surprise the house was lit up. Christopher had had it opened. Around her was the fragrance of the woods, the heady odour of spruce and fir, and the wind restless in the branches. She paused, and then walked down the ramp and in at the front door.
“Home,” said Christopher, and it was home. But it was not hers. It was his. His personality was everywhere in it, restless, ambitious, and destructive. She had an impulse to go out and look at the broken wall, to assure herself that the past was the past, and that there was something that she could not forget.
But as time went on, and as the days piled up, she was not sure that she wanted to remember the past. In the daytime she sometimes did, but the nights were different. At night he came to her to be soothed, but not out of passion. Only once, in the weeks that followed, was there any of his old violence. But in the daytime he wanted to hide from her, and because of that in the daytime she was still afraid of him. Then she had the feeling that his new gentleness was an enormous cruel game.
One day, when they had gone for a walk in the woods and had come out from among the trees on to a rise of ground that faced the mountains, he had seemed tired and listless. At first these sudden drains of energy frightened her.
They sat on a part of the granite in which some grass had managed to take root, and looked at the cliffs across the valley. The mountains seemed luminous in the clear light. And it was evening. The stars were coming out.
“You know,” he said after a while, “I built this house to escape something. Did you know that? I wanted to be clean. I wanted to stand on top of the world, where I couldn’t be pulled down, I wanted to be strong and pure, because up here you feel different. Up there”, he pointed towards the top of the mountains, “you must feel like a god. There’s something up there I need. Something I came here to find. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Do you? It’s like power.” He gazed up at the tantalizing stars. “When I was a kid I used to look up at the stars,” he said. “That was in Santa Barbara. You can’t see them so clearly down there.” His voice had an edge of awe in it. “I wanted to be up there, where things really happened, and nothing could ever touch me. I guess I won’t make it. But I’d like to think that somebody could. Up here you can be close to them. You can stand on top of things and look up at them and say: ‘Here I am.’ When I was a kid I used to do that. I’d go up to the top of a hill, and stand there, and hope that something would happen, and that I’d land up there.” He pointed up to the Northern Cross. “About there was where I wanted to go, I think. Up there where it’s clean.”
“I’ve felt like that sometimes,” she said.
“Have you been
up there?” he asked, nodding towards the mountains. “We’ll do it some day. That’s the real world up there. It’s just ice and granite, isn’t it?”
“And lichens. There are trees, though.”
“We’ll go above that. We’ll be right up there with God, where no one can touch us. It must be wonderful.”
“It is,” she said. When he tilted his head back to look at the mountains, she saw that his face was fresh and young and eager, like the face of a boy. She wondered what sort of boy he had been, and she was touched.
“People don’t like you to get above them. At least I did that. And now they want to tear me down.”
“Do they?”
“Of course. But up there they couldn’t. I don’t think they could. That’s why I’d never let my mother come here. Why I had to stop her coming here. She knew that. She killed herself to get here, just to stop me. She always wanted to drive me down, but I’m free here.”
It was turning cold and she shivered. Something in his tone made her uncomfortable, something gloating and vindictive. She suggested that they go.
“In a minute,” he said. “Let me look a while longer, while I can.”
She sat there quietly, almost frozen to death, and watched him gaze out at the mountains. There was something mystical in his eyes, and something full of yearning. Across the valley she could see the waterfalls dashing over the cliffs in silver torrents, like life pouring out of the rock. At last Christopher sighed wistfully. “Do you want to go back?” he asked.
“Not if you want to stay.”
“I’ve had enough. I’ll get up there somehow, some day.” He seemed to have forgotten her, but when he got up his old restless nervous energy was back, though his eyes were sad. They were unbearably sad, and at the back of them some defensive expression seemed to stir.
*
It was after that that he began to grow worse again. He locked himself up in his room, and lying in bed at night she could hear him cry out.
“You should take it easy,” she told him one day. “There’s no reason for you to work yourself to death.”
“What I do is my own affair.” For a moment he had that look she had always feared, crouched, tensile, and cruel. “What the hell do you care whether I live or die? You don’t love me. You’d leave me to die to-morrow if you knew how to get away.” He bellowed it at her, and slammed the library door behind him. After that he avoided her all the next day, and that night, when she lay in bed, she could hear him pacing up and down in the next room, cursing to himself. Then, when she was almost asleep, he came in to her.
“So what,” he grunted. “So I snapped your head off. You’ll just have to put up with it.” He tried to come closer to her. “For God’s sake,” he said, “I’m only doing this for you.”
“Do you really believe that?”
He shuddered uncontrollably, and suddenly turned over on his back, closing his eyes. With an exasperated sob he buried his face in her shoulder.
She lay there while he began to sweat. She could feel it break out all over his body. He sobbed like an animal crying, in jagged spasms, and he dug his hands deeper into her flesh, with pain. Despite herself she put her arms around him, pulling him closer to her. For whether she loved him or hated him, she was part of him.
She realized she was crying, not because she was frightened, but because she had at last given in, and was no longer alone. “I love you,” she said, more to herself than to him, but he could not hear her. He was shut off in some sweating delirium of his own.
“She cursed me,” he muttered. “She cursed me when she died.”
She realized he had not heard her, but it made no difference. She had made her choice. She could not turn back now.
*
He was a hard man to love, and perhaps it was not love at all, but she did not want to think about that. She had never given herself to anyone. She had never wanted to. But she wanted to give herself to him now. She forgave him everything and she wanted to forget everything. She was aware of a tremendous tenderness, of a quavering desire that she could not explain even to herself. In the way he turned his head, in some involuntary gesture, in some turn of speech, she knew that she loved him. But he avoided her now, and she knew why that was. It was because he had shown himself to her, and because she knew that he was ill. Before him she must always pretend that she did not know that. And somehow she had to get him to a doctor. She could not face the thought of losing him, now that she had at last found him. He was trying to fight when he was too weak to fight. The knowledge that his terror helped to pull him down, made it no easier to pretend to him that nothing was wrong, and that he was not afraid.
It was summer. The leaves and streams were parched now. On her walks she discovered that the leaves had withered away from faded flowers. Only the mountains themselves were a deception, for though they had summer at their feet, their upper crowns were still heavy with winter. Up there, high up under the sun, where the air was cold and clear, and the moraine meadows held frozen streams, it was still brief spring amid the ice. She would have liked to go up there. She felt a yearning to be there, to see the pale waxen snow flowers, hidden in the snow, dead to the touch; or to find a lupin, rigid and newborn in the sparse brief grass. One day the two of them would go up there, when he was well.
She would have been content to stay here for ever, but she knew that Christopher would not do that. He would grow tired of his refuge. He would want to go away. And of course she would go with him. She did not like to think what would happen to him if he were left alone.
Back at the house she found him sitting in darkness by the fire, his face reflected fitfully in the flicker of flame about the logs. She could sense that he had been sitting there ever since darkness fell, and something about the way he was sitting alarmed her. He hunched forward, his hands pressed together, not looking into the fire, but straight in front of him.
“I suppose I may as well come out with it,” he said. His voice was strained and serious. “I’m ruined. It’s not very nice to contemplate. I mean it. I’ve felt it coming. That bitch Nora has a lot to do with it.”
“But I don’t see …” she began.
“Why should you?” He hesitated, and reaching out, took her hand. “Most of my money comes from gambling,” he said. “But the profit is tied up in real estate and business, down in California. It’s a matter of juggling, but it’s also a matter of stock, and she’s got the upper hand. And then there are others, too.” He pokered the fire savagely. “But she’s the one who did it deliberately. Oh, we’ll have money. But she’s sold me up down there, and God knows what she can do here. Not much maybe, but something.”
“Will we have to give up the house?” she asked.
“No, of course not. It’s just that I’ve lost a lot of control that I badly needed. And I don’t want to see that bitch triumph over me. And she will, you can depend on that.”
He was morose and went to bed alone. She knew that he would not stay there. She lay in the darkness, waiting for him. But he did not come. At last she got up, and walking barefoot across the cold floors, went in to him. He was lying staring up at the ceiling.
“Christ,” he said, “Everything’s falling round my ears.”
“No, it’s not,” she soothed.
“I’m being punished,” he muttered. “Do you suppose that’s it? How could it be?” He sat up in bed. “I’m strong,” he said, “I’ve always been strong, I’ll fight back.”
“Of course you will.”
“I’ll crush her. She won’t laugh at me then. I’m young. I’m only forty-four. I’ll fight back. She won’t get me. Nobody will get me, I’ll beat them all.” He laughed, a lost laugh that seemed to rip out of him. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “No one could touch me if it weren’t for this.” Jerking up in bed, he forced her to go away.
She slipped out from under the covers and went back into her own room. That night she sat up in bed, smoking, aware of him in the next room. At last she droppe
d off to sleep.
When she woke it was still dark. It took her a moment to get her bearings. She sat up in bed, knowing that something was happening. She felt under the bed for her slippers and padded out into the hall. There was a dim light under the study door. She pressed it open and stepped inside.
Christopher was standing by a tall cupboard in the wall, bending over something. She looked, and saw that it was the portrait of his mother, the ripped canvas unmended, and that he was looking at it intently.
When he saw her, he made no attempt to hide the picture. In the pale light she could see the gleam of the painted scissors, and half of Antoinette’s face, with one beady eye, the rest of the canvas hanging down in ripped shreds. He pushed the picture back into the closet, shut the door on it, and looked distastefully at his hands smudged with dust.
“We’re going to leave here,” he said. “Do you mind?”
“Whatever you wish,” she said, and felt futile.” Where will we go?”
“A long way…. To Macao. It’s a Portuguese town near Hong Kong.”
“Why there?”
He smiled at her crookedly. “I’m not really running away,” he said. “You see, in addition to my other virtues, I once did some gold smuggling. And Macao is the place to do it.”
“I don’t understand.”
He looked at her shamefacedly. “I want to turn everything into cash,” he said. “I want to leave you well provided for. I don’t know what may happen here.”
She glanced towards the closet and then back at him. “Don’t you think you’d better come to bed?” she asked.
“No. I can’t sleep.”
“Do you want me to stay with you?”
“I’d rather be alone.” His hand, she noticed, was twitching violently. She left him, but outside she waited in the darkness, and thought she heard the closet door open again.
Next day they packed.
It surprised her that they had nothing to pack but their clothes. They had no mementoes, no souvenirs, no personal effects. It had not occurred to her before that they had no common possessions. It was what made their life together so anonymous, and she did not like it.
The Self-Enchanted Page 15
