Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  He reverts to his cine films – moments filmed without thought, even humorously – and they often capture something precious and unintended. For a brief minute their people live in the present. But he dare not play the films or look at any photograph too often. They die with repetition.

  He wonders bitterly if it is too late to take up another profession. He is already twenty-four. During his months with Cleo he has forgotten his passion for image, except for images of her. He has missed crucial work assignments, and his savings are draining away. And now, facing her in his sitting room, where Richard will not be returning for the day, he cannot meet her gaze. She is frightened, he knows. She has always been frightened. His own withdrawal freezes him. But the light has gone out of her eyes, and he cannot restore it.

  For a while they talk about the week’s trivia: her care work for an old diabetic, his own assignment photographing a racing stable. The silence grows too quickly for their voices to fill. And all the time she is looking at him with the conviction of what is to come, her face tense and pale. He has the idea that she has been anticipating this for a long time, perhaps from the beginning, as if it is her destiny to be betrayed. Even while this realisation numbs him – her dashed self-worth – he feels relief that she may meet him halfway, that there will be no surprise.

  Into one of their yawning silences she says: ‘You’ve lost me, haven’t you? I don’t think I exist for you any more.’

  He says: ‘Of course you do.’ But his mind and body feel like lead. He cannot lift his eyes. His speech falters and mumbles. He tells her she is beautiful and hard-working and kind, but these epithets sound small in the room’s quiet, like a roll call for people who are missing. He does not believe them, even though they are true.

  She says: ‘I don’t feel any of that, now that you don’t.’

  A door slams downstairs, and he wonders if Richard is returning early. For once, he hopes so. But nobody comes.

  She says: ‘I guess I’m a refugee, like my father.’

  He does not understand her, but recalls her old photographs; the long, weary line of fugitives. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He says that everyone’s an immigrant really, that we all come from somewhere else. He’s religious. He comforts himself that way. My mother disagrees. She says she’s from Lancashire.’ She smiles ruefully. ‘Maybe I’ll go back to them now, to London.’

  He says: ‘I never met them. You never took me there.’ He pulls this tiny grievance forward in self-defence, despising himself. He imagines she is ashamed of them: the hospital porter and his comfortable wife.

  She says: ‘No, I never did.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They might not understand. They were angry before, when I brought a boyfriend home. They said I just picked up casualties.’

  He says: ‘I’m not a casualty.’

  ‘No, Steve. But you’re not . . . like . . . normal.’ Something in his expression – some self-righteous disbelief – triggers the bitterness of her rejection: a quiet, desolate anger. Her voice’s softness disappears. ‘You live in your own fantasies, Steve. You have a strange look sometimes. I can’t describe it. But my friends noticed it. My parents wouldn’t think you stable. They want me to find someone stable.’

  ‘So you’re ashamed of me.’

  ‘I hoped things would change. I should have known they wouldn’t. Even your love . . . I think you loved me . . . was frightening sometimes. Like you’re a bit crazy. All that about a bronze statue. You should see someone, Steve. You should get professional help.’ Her hands are fists on her lap. ‘And now you’re smoking dope. I can smell that stuff a mile off. I’ve heard some guys go straight from that to coke. My parents were right. My old boyfriend’s a smackhead now. You could go the same way.’

  He meets her gaze at last, appalled. He has taken to cannabis since his mother’s death. It is harmless enough, surely. ‘I never knew you thought these things . . .’

  ‘I didn’t always.’ The rush of her words seems to have emptied her. She hangs her head. When she looks up again it is with a strained pity, more disturbing than her anger. ‘Often I enjoyed your view of me.’ In the long silence she is starting, softly, to weep. For a few more minutes their talk dribbles miserably on. There have always been silences between them, but now these gape like realisations. Once she says sadly: ‘I thought I loved you.’

  When another door slams, she stands up. ‘I’m going now.’ But her walk to the door is unsteady, as if hoping he will stop her.

  He hears himself say: ‘I’ll call you.’ But he knows he will not. He hates his own voice. The days will slip by, and he will do nothing. He goes to the window and watches her disappearing along the street below. She does not look back.

  * * *

  The Internet is the theatre of seductive women. You can travel there for days. Even the advertisements that fringe the roundabout near Steve confront him with vivid and elusive eyes and opened lips and breasts. While reading magazines, he finds from time to time a movie star whose gaze meets his own with a hallucinatory gentleness or violence.

  When he at last saw her, she seemed refracted from a forgotten past. She was entering the stage door of a theatre near the seafront, carrying a duffel bag. Only twice before had Steve encountered a woman with those eyes that can see sideways, like a bird: eyes that may look at you full-face with an other-worldly tenderness or even a kind of luminous indifference. Their upward slant in the head, narrowing to that last unearthly tilt, may be a subtle illusion, of course, the sleight of mascara or artfully plucked eyebrows, but even then the effect remains beautifully strange, as if their owner gazes out from an alien world. Sometimes children have these eyes, still unaware of their power, and once he had seen an old woman from whose wrinkles they blazed like unrelinquished fire.

  He could not dispel the idea that such eyes were conduits of light. Since boyhood he had tried to grasp the spell of trees, water, eyes, sunbeams, by anchoring it, at first in childish paintings, then in photographs. Even now he was striving for some photographic breakthrough in insight or technique – his heroes were Karsh and Avadon – and did not know how this would happen. He had grown obsessed by the singularity of people’s faces. Even those most familiar to him became foreign when intently observed. Even his own. And in their alienation they became exciting. Increasingly he devoted his camera to portraits, hoping this feeling of newness might transfer to his lens, and sometimes, rarely, he thought he had achieved a kind of magic.

  But the woman who had vanished through the stage door made him forget the camera altogether. Afterwards he read the playbill hanging nearby. It meant nothing to him. But he felt sure that the leading actress must be her, and rolled the name’s enchantment round his tongue: Helena Palmer. Instantly he was dreaming of ways to meet her. What would he say? He became aware not only of this outlandish longing but of a light, tingling fear: fear because she was beautiful. The feeling was familiar. He was comfortable with plain women, but their attractive sisters – it was often hard to look into their eyes. He envied the men who targeted them, suave with flattery. His brother Richard had no qualms about seducing them. In the past, at dim-lit discos, Steve had always dithered round whatever girl most attracted him. He would covertly watch her, admire her movements, the way she smiled or held her glass, and in this tremulous interval somebody else – probably Richard – would take her away to dance or into the night to kiss. Richard, sleek and streamlined at twenty-six, was more self-assured than Steve could imagine ever feeling. Richard drove a black BMW (bought on hire purchase). He wore skin-tight jeans and seersucker jackets – not what girls expected of a budding chartered accountant. Steve, struggling to become a photographer, should have evolved a dress sense of his own. But he had none at all.

  As he returned to his flat, he felt himself drowning in a sweet, terrible excitement. Who was Helena Palmer? A passing astonishment, her cheeks dipping under their fragile-seeming bones. The face lit to distraction by those oblique powder-grey eyes
: he knew nothing more. When he reached his door – the entrance to a renovated apartment – Richard was already back, listening to financial news on television, and lifted his hand in a distracted salute, reminding him that they were going out with friends that evening.

  They went to a disco called Le Petit Club des Artistes, tantalisingly close to the theatre. It was packed with dancing bodies. They writhed in and out of strobe lighting, orchestrated by a white DJ with platinum dreadlocks. Richard ordered vodka and wine. But to Steve their friends seemed suddenly boring, and bored with one another. They talked in platitudes until the techno music drowned them out. He knocked back drinks to kill the time. Then he danced with a girl called Vera, a colleague of Richard’s. She began to sweat. She asked him about his photography with mystified condescension, then went silent. The drums and the amplified singing filled all the space between them. The air was touched with forbidden smoke. Steve felt himself go vacant, waiting for the moment to leave. The drumbeats moved his limbs robotically. In the midst of this pulsing human closeness, he had a sensation of utter solitude, and that the singer’s plangent voice and the scuttling drums resounded from a vacuum.

  Then, to his astonishment, he saw her. Even before her eyes flashed blindly over his face, he knew it was her. She was wearing a black halter-neck dress and dancing opposite a red-headed girl with bare feet. He felt as if she had floated unbidden into his hands, and that she must be conscious already of his gaze. She was dancing with carnival energy, her face crossed by a slight, self-mocking smile, while her arms made long, elastic sweeps around her head and body. During the past few hours her blonde-streaked hair and those unsettling eyes had occurred so obsessively to him that their memory was already diverging from its origin, and now he stared at her across the darkness in nervous wonder. As he moved closer to her, he saw how delicate she was. Her slender neck and narrow, dimpled shoulders seemed to contradict her ebullience, and her skin looked almost translucent.

  It was while she danced there in oblivion, her head momentarily turning to him, that he called out: ‘Helena!’ But there was no Helena to turn around. Vera smiled vacantly across at him, her arms lifted. Then the misnamed Helena came gyrating closer, smiling at nothing. As her head turned to him again, he exclaimed: ‘I thought you’d be on stage!’

  Her eyes focused him. ‘No, we’re still rehearsing!’ He thought she asked how he’d recognised her, but her voice vanished under the music. As the drums pattered to a halt she said: ‘We start next week’, but he could not tell if this held any invitation.

  When she returned to her table, he was drawn helplessly after her. He heard himself say: ‘I’ll come and see you.’

  ‘Yes, do!’ Her gaze flooded over him. ‘Bring all your friends!’ She laughed. God, she was beautiful. She laughed again at his mistaking her for Helena Palmer. Her laughter was silvery and musical, as if she had practised it. Helena, she said, was a middle-aged celebrity, whereas she – well, she was in a lesser role, somewhere down the cast list. Her name was Linda Spalva. (He tucked this strangeness away, to savour later.) They would play for two weeks here, she said, then on to Peterborough, then on to Sheffield, then into unemployment. Steve had found a chair by now, and was perched between them. The redhead gave her name too – he heard Diana – and for a minute he was alone with them, and the music had stopped. Out of their talk there surfaced precious fragments of Linda’s life. She lived in London, sharing with two others. No marriage ring. No mention of a partner.

  Then Richard’s voice behind him said: ‘Did I overhear you were actresses?’

  At that moment, for that oiled voice, Steve hated him. Now his brother loomed over the table, owning it. In Steve’s head numerous past humiliations – stillborn opportunities, thwarted desires – brewed up in a sickening miasma. Yet here, here was Linda, who still gazed opposite him, golden earrings shining through her backswept hair, and her presence was a fragile, miraculous thing, but one he was terrified was doomed to evanescence. Richard was the harbinger of failure. Richard would overshadow him without even noticing. And now, instantly, typically, he supplied what Steve had neglected. ‘Can I buy you girls a drink?’

  Their table was bare except for two drained disco lemonades. Diana wanted a daiquiri. Linda asked for wine. Steve found himself sinking into frustrated silence. The apt words always came effortlessly to Richard’s lips, while they deserted his own. Richard’s stare circled the pair with equal flattery. ‘What’s the play about, then?’

  Diana said: ‘It’s a murder mystery.’

  ‘Which of you gets killed?’

  Linda smiled thinly. ‘Perhaps we do the killing.’

  Later Steve realised with astonishment that they talked for barely ten minutes; yet theirs was not a conversation, but a timeless ritual. While speaking about the theatre, the disco, the girls’ musical tastes (Diana for Europop, Linda for jazz), they were exploring the sexual and personal possibilities of one another, playing, assessing, discarding.

  In the mirror that covered the nearby wall, Steve glimpsed them round their table as if in another, unidentifiable world; there, to his surprise, he saw himself not wretchedly less than his brother. The same hair that curled crisply round Richard’s head flew dark and loose around his own irregular features, so that he looked sensitised and even poetic in this dim light. That was what girls always said of him: he appeared romantically maverick.

  Diana smiled and laughed at whatever Richard said. She was voluptuous, yet oddly shy. Her breasts cuddled in the cleft of her blouse. But Steve remained caged in an old expectation that the evening would escape him. He felt himself freezing, growing stupid. And he was seething with resentment. He was afraid to meet Linda’s eyes. It took him long minutes to realise that she was not responding to Richard at all. She was uninterested in him. She was looking at Steve. Through the din of techno he heard her words only in isolation. ‘So after Peterborough . . . What kind of photography? . . . Can you do portraits? . . . Acting unmasks you, it’s funny . . . You really want to? . . . It’s actually a shitty play . . . Monday at the stage door, then . . .’ and he could not later remember the words he had responded with. By now the DJ was mixing in more soulful sounds, and the dance floor thinning out, while Linda’s eyes went on drowning him.

  There’s a groove in my soul

  And you’re turning there, turning,

  Turning to me again . . .

  Richard had thrown one arm around Diana’s shoulder, like a scarf. He was grinning at Steve. ‘I thought you said you were going to leave early.’

  ‘I got stuck.’

  They both laughed. Steve saw a change in Richard’s face, as if, belatedly, his brother had noticed his excitement. For long minutes Richard had backed away from speaking with Linda, and before they left, he touched Steve’s forearm in passing collusion.

  Steve reached the stage door an hour before the play ended. He had tried to postpone an appointment eighty miles away, but failed, and had raced back after borrowing Richard’s car, his eyes darting between the road and the dashboard clock.

  It seemed a narrow, secret door compared to the public entrance. Linda had called it the door of disillusion. The people who went in and out, she’d said, were like everybody else, only smaller than you’d expect.

  At nine o’clock the sky was still pale with early summer. There was nobody much about. Sometimes a coldness stirred in his chest. And waiting here turned him furtive. When he peered through the stage door’s glass panel, he saw a porter at a desk. Then he read the playbill again, but only the two stars were billed there, and the playwright’s name was unknown to him. For a long time nobody emerged from the door or went in. The street lights came on. Towards ten o’clock the audience flooded on to the neighbouring street. There were sounds of cars, laughter. A group of students gathered at the stage door, and a tall young man whom Steve feared might have something to do with Linda. He stood back in the shadows, suddenly wretched. It was the old, engulfing fear quickening his breath like a physical
sickness. But when she appeared, she hesitated, alone, in the doorway, her duffel bag dropped at her feet, until she saw him.

  ‘I thought you might have forgotten!’ she said.

  He had booked at an Italian restaurant nearby: an old-fashioned bistro, candlelit. As they entered, he imagined every customer turning to stare at her. The flush of acting was still on her, a vivid afterglow. Although the evening was warm, she was wearing a white blouse buttoned close at the neck, and this obscurely pleased him. He remembered the shimmer of her breasts as she had danced. Only while she read the menu did he dare gaze at her. Her face, as its faint blush ebbed away, took on an opalescent pallor. The long slant of her lowered eyes made dark-lashed crescents which fixed him helplessly when they lifted. She said: ‘Why are you staring at me? Am I looking strange?’

  He averted his gaze and fumbled with the menu, but for a moment could not read it, as if his eyes’ focus was still fixed across the table. Awkwardly he asked: ‘How was the premiere?’ He remembered the audience pouring on to the street: shouting, laughter.

  She said: ‘There was no real response. Just the kind of clapping people do to convince themselves they’ve enjoyed something. And now we have two weeks of acting a failure.’ She shivered. ‘I’ll have the lasagne. What will you have? The audience laughed a bit, sometimes in the wrong places. But it’s a lousy play. We’ve gone round telling each other “Isn’t it great? Isn’t it ingenious?” but at heart we knew it was crap. Sometimes I think it would be better just to step aside and announce to the audience: Go home! Money back!’

  She said this with a kind of hardy vivacity, at once amused and a little stricken.

  He asked: ‘Who do you play?’

  ‘A betrayed wife.’ She opened her hands as if to release something. They were slender and fine-boned, unadorned. ‘But I can’t find her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’