Halliday watched from the roof, waiting for them to reappear. The strange tranceljke 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 faade 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 some 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 Citro'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?' Mallorys'led 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 woman held his hands in suddenly strong fingers. Behind the glasses her face was a white mask. 'Mr Halliday - ' She felt his wrists, as if relieved to see him. 'I thought you would come. Tell me, how long have you been here?'
'Weeks - or months, I can't remember. I dreamed of this city before I came to Africa. Miss Szabo, I used to see you walking here among these ruins.'
She nodded, taking his arm. Together they moved off among the columns. Between the shadowy pillars of the balustrade was the sea, the white caps of the waves rolling towards the beach.
'Gabrielle... why are you here? Why did you come to Africa?'
She gathered the silk robe in one hand as they moved down a stairway to the terrace below. She leaned closely against Halliday, her fingers clasping his arm, walking so stiffly that Halliday wondered if she were drunk. 'Why? Perhaps to see the same dreams, it's possible.'
Halliday was about to speak when he noticed the footsteps of the chauffeur following them down the stairway. Looking around, and for one moment distracted from Gabrielle's swaying body against his own, he became aware of a pungent smell coming from the vent of one of the old Roman cloacas below them. The top of the brick-lined sewer had fallen in, and the basin was partly covered by the waves swilling in across the beach.
Halliday stopped. He tried to point below but the woman was holding his wrist in a steel grip. 'Down there! Can you see?'
Pulling his hand away, he pointed to the basin of the sewer, where a dozen half-submerged forms lay heaped together. Bludgeoned by the sea and wet sand, the corpses were only recognizable by the back-and-forth movements of their arms and legs in the shifting water.
'For God's sake - Gabrielle, who are they?'
'Poor devils...' Gabrielle Szabo turned away, as Halliday stared over the edge at the basin ten feet below. 'The evacuation - there were riots. They've been here for months.'
Halliday knelt down, wondering how long it would take the corpses whether Arab or European he had no means of telling - to be swept out to sea. His dreams of Leptis Magna had not included these melancholy denizens of the sewers. Suddenly he shouted again.
'Months? Not that one!'
He pointed again to the body of a man in a white suit lying to one side farther up the sewer. His long legs were covered by the foam and water, but his chest and arms were exposed. Across the face was the silk scarf he had seen Mallory wearing at their last meeting.
'Mallory!' Halliday stood up, as the black-suited figure of the chauffeur stepped onto a ledge twenty feet above. Halliday went over to Gabrielle Szabo, who was standing by the step, apparently gazing out to sea. 'That's Dr Mallory! He lived with me at Columbine Sept Heures! How did he Gabrielle, you knew he was here!'
Halliday seized her hands, in his anger jerked her forward, knocking off her glasses. As she fell to her knees, scrambling helplessly for them, Halliday held her shoulders. 'Gabrielle! Gabrielle, you're - , 'Halliday!' Her head lowered, she held his fingers and pressed them into her orbits. 'Mallory, he did it - we knew he'd follow you here. He was my doctor once, I've waited for years..
Halliday pushed her away, his feet crushing the sunglasses on the floor. He looked down at the white-suited figure washed by the waves, wondering what nightmare was hidden behind the scarf over its face, and sprinted along the terrace past the auditorium, then raced away through the dark streets.
As he reached the Peugeot the black-suited chauffeur was only twenty yards behind. Halliday started the motor and swung the car away through the dust. In the rear mirror he saw the chauffeur stop and draw a pistol from his belt. As he fired the bullet shattered the windshield. Halliday swerved into one of the kiosks, then regained control and set off with his head down, the cold night air blowing fragments of frosted glass into his face.
The Complete Short Stories Page 97
