by John Bemrose
Suddenly, with a small cry, she lunged forward, took his head between her hands, and kissed him awkwardly on the mouth. For a moment she pulled back to look at him. Then she put her arms around him. Holding her now, moaning her name, he drank in the smell that was almost a non-smell, which rose from her hair, scarcely believing he was feeling the press of her long body against his.
They went together up the river. They went silently, almost gravely, holding hands, conscious of a deed done. She kept sighing as if dismayed at herself. When he asked what was wrong she shook her head and said nothing. The path ran above the sharply edged, shallow bank, descended to cross the mouths of streams, ran on again. Neither of them had ever been here. From time to time they stopped: each time he kissed her he felt he had never kissed her before. He had to keep kissing her so that he could remind himself that what was happening was true. Between kisses he forgot what her mouth tasted like, forgot what her body with its small breasts felt like as it pressed against him. Then he remembered: it was like this.
Now they could hardly go twenty steps without embracing. They embraced and separated, embraced and fell down. She was laughing with him in the hollow place behind a fallen tree trunk, laughing and weeping both, with a fluidity of exchange that left him bewildered: she was balancing above him on the trunk like a ten-year-old who cares about nothing else. They went on. The ground sloped up to what looked like a flat platform. Climbing up its side they saw a long pond, with a little dam gurgling at one end. Under the dark surface fish were rising, breaking the velvet membrane of the water with delicate kissing sounds. The moon was in the pond now, wobbling and broken. “There are many moons,” she said, leading him around the path. She had grown sombre, as if instructing him: a virginal priestess pointing out the mysteries of the place. “Every moon has a different name. They’re sisters.”
He had no idea if she was making this up on the spot, or reciting some old mythology. It didn’t matter: everything she said was miraculous. He threw himself into the game. “Every kiss is a fish, and every fish — is delicious.”
She contradicted him violently. Fish were sacred to Aphrodite, she told him. “We don’t eat them.”
“Never?” he said.
“Not unless we want to lose her favour. Which I don’t think we do.”
She kissed him with slow deliberation now and, before they could separate again, took his hand and placed it on her breast. The moment had the formal aura of an offering, as if Aphrodite were not some old name from the past but a power hovering over them even now, infusing every touch with divine meaning. She watched him in the moonlight. “Sooner or later, everybody loses her favour,” she said. “She’s easily bored.”
“I’ll never be bored with you,” he said. “I couldn’t be.”
But already he feared she might be bored with him. It might happen tomorrow, it might happen in the next five minutes: he seemed held aloft by a kind of spell, not quite daring to believe in what was happening. If he had suddenly found himself alone by this pond, shivering in the damp like that guy in the Keats poem, he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised. He wanted her to echo back to him: I won’t be bored with you either. But she laughed and touched his mouth as if to stop his words and turned back to the pond. A frog splashed from the bank.
There was a second pond, higher than the first, behind another gurgling dam of iron and cement. In this second pond there were no fish, or at least none rising. The moon in this pond was clear, only wobbling a little with the slight movement of the water. They were near a barn, and could sense the slow presence of large animals — cows or horses — and smell the heavy sweetness of hay and manure. “You know I can’t smell horse manure without thinking of vanilla ice cream,” he told her. “It’s the ice-cream man — his wagon was pulled by a horse. You could hear his bell, all up and down the streets.” He was saying anything that came into his head, with no worry about its irrelevance, because tonight everything was connected. Moon, icecream man, horse manure, love, his soaking shoes: all part of the same thing, a thing that had no name but which contained them as the grey moonlight contained them in its silver bowl.
Laura Becker’s house was quiet, the great windows blazed from empty rooms. Everyone had gone on to the next party. Not quite everyone. Turning a corner into the front yard, they saw the black Olds waiting by the curb. Behind the wide windshield sat the twinned, accusing shadows of their guilt.
They slipped into the back seat. It was Anna who spoke first, telling Brad she wasn’t feeling well. (Was it a lie, Joe wondered, or had the events by the river made her ill?) She wanted to go home. No one spoke as the Olds cruised the moonlit streets. Brad dropped off Joe and Liz first. “We can take the Line,” Liz said as they climbed the steps to her house, as if they would simply continue to the next party.
She went up to the bathroom. He waited in the family room, looking out at the floodlit yard. He felt capable of anything — it was the promise of Anna’s touch, given secretly across the back seat before he left the car — and now as he heard Liz come into the kitchen behind him, he turned to her. “Come here,” he said softly, the executioner calling to his victim.
As he poured out his deadly mixture of truth and lies, she watched him without expression, her heart-shaped face pale in the dimly lit room, her beautiful eyes fixed on his with their look of startled candour, at once ferocious and cold and completely vulnerable. Her silence unnerved him. She was doing nothing to defend herself, only watching him with the calm air of someone who has expected such treatment all along. He was fumbling now, fumbling out his apologies like a fool. “I’m sorry,” he said, for the third or fourth time. “I know it isn’t fair —” Not knowing what else to do, he moved to embrace her. She was stiff in his arms. He let her go, looking around uncertainly. “I guess I better go.”
“Anna won’t have you,” she said, her voice small.
Her eyes were still fixed on his.
“She was involved with someone else. She told me — she told me she can’t love any more.”
He stared at her.
“Someone else,” he said numbly.
“A man,” Liz said, and her gaze seemed to push his eyes back into his head. “Not a boy like you.”
He moved off but, at the stairs to the kitchen, looked around again. She was gazing out at the starkly lit patio, at a glass-topped table where someone had left a pair of hedge clippers. He was chilled by her isolation, it gave her a strange authority, and for a moment he nearly went back to ask her what she meant. Finally he crossed the kitchen’s glare and left the house.
The black Olds was coming along Robert. It pulled up to the curb beside him. “Hey, guy,” Brad said, subdued. “Mind having a few words —”
Joe got into the front seat. The Olds swept under the shadows of trees and poles, through the Junction past the ghostly silver barns of the Fairgrounds and out of town.
He glanced at the speedometer: the green ribbon had crept to eighty, and was still extending itself. A thrill of fear went through him. Brad was leaning forward a little, over the wheel, as if wanting to embrace it.
“You wanted to talk.”
Brad said nothing — no matter what Joe said, Brad met it with a hostile silence. He supposed Anna had told Brad it was over between them: at least he hoped she had. But as Brad’s silence went on, it suggested there had been complications. Perhaps Anna had not freed herself. Perhaps — he knew this was a primitive idea, and hoped it was wrong — they were going to have to fight for her. They swept past the glittering deep lakes of the gravel pits, white as chalk in the moonlight, past sleeping farmhouses and mailboxes and ancient maples and fields darker than the night up the grey highway, its white centre line — now broken, now a single streaming thread — speeding under the wide hood of the Olds. At the tops of hills, they seemed about to leave the road and fly. At a rail crossing, Brad barely slowed: the Olds thudded on its springs as if it had been dropped from the sky. The speedometer read a hundred.
&n
bsp; “Slow down,” Joe shouted at him. “For God’s sake, it isn’t worth this.”
“Nothing’s worth this,” Brad said with an irony Joe couldn’t read.
“What did Anna tell you?” Joe said. He was desperate to know exactly how things stood, desperate to start a rational exchange that might sap Brad’s focus on speed. But all his words were absorbed by the pact Brad had made with the open road. Every thought Brad had, every sorrow, was channelled away from speech and into this relentless pressure on the accelerator, this calm, expressionless focus on the highway revealing itself beyond the wheel. Brad was furious — that much seemed clear — but he was letting the engine of the Olds deliver his fury, in a storm of working pistons. He was furious, and grim, but the car seemed almost triumphantly happy, roaring out its hallelujah in the extremity of its power.
They were in the wrong lane now, approaching the crest of another hill. Joe swore at Brad while scanning the smooth horizon for the headlights of an oncoming car. He was on the verge of grabbing the wheel, or perhaps the gearshift — throwing it into neutral. But there were no headlights, there was no other car. They broached the crest, and again seemed about to fly over the expanse of moon-bleached countryside. A few lights burned at the ends of lanes: little beacons of sanity.
He buckled his seatbelt, ignoring Brad’s snort of derision. They were approaching the village of Cairn. They would have to slow down, surely: there was often a police cruiser there, Joe remembered. But as the village’s outskirts hove into view, Brad veered off in a skidding turn down a sideroad. The car fishtailed on gravel. A mailbox on a post reared in front of them, a square-headed victim frozen in the headlights, and went down with a thump and the sound of breaking glass. They sped on. Brad flicked on the high beams — the low on the right had been smashed — and then, with a sudden, jabbing movement of his left hand, turned off the lights altogether. Now their way was lit only by the moonlight pooling on the road, between the shadows of big trees, turning the fields on either side to seas of ghostly absence. Joe knew they were going to die. At any second Brad might turn the Olds into a tree. Or a culvert (there was one now, dangerously close) might catch the wheels and flip them. He sat in horror, unable to read Brad’s mind, unable to gauge the edge over which he might or might not tip them. Everything he saw now seemed a clue to their fate: an open gate, a mailbox, a tractor parked by the road; all threatened, and all, as soon as they had swept past, became part of life’s mercy. In the ditch an animal’s yellow eyes glinted and went out.
Then Brad began to slow. At the next crossroads he brought the Olds to a stop. Breathing hard, trembling, Joe looked over at him.
“Maybe you should get out,” Brad said to the windshield.
“Let me drive,” Joe said. “We can talk.”
“Get out.” Brad said. He was still hunched forward, as if bound to the wheel.
“At least turn on the lights.”
Brad looked at him.
“The lights —”
Brad obeyed. The powerful beams stabbed down the road, lighting trees, the corner of a shed.
“I’m sorry,” Joe said. He knew, now, that he had won.
He started to walk towards Attawan. Behind him, he could hear the Olds rumbling over washboard, headed deeper into the country. Turning, he saw a cloud of dust rising beyond a field, a white spectre in the moonlight as it trailed towards him. He was five or six miles from town. It hardly mattered, he would have walked a hundred, gladly, through the earth-scented night, through the moonlit fields under the great rustling trees that lined the pale road and cast their living shadows ahead of him.
46
THE NIGHT WAS FULL of sounds that drifted through the open windows above the table where Archie Mann sat working — music, voices, the clanking of the conveyor belts across the river — all made small and enticing by distance.
Again he clinked the lip of the Glenfiddich bottle to the little earthenware cup. He was drunk, he realized, pleasantly and thoroughly drunk. I could sneak up on them, he thought with an amused grunt. He imagined his surprised students discovering him in the bushes, with his binoculars hanging from his neck. They could hardly fire me at this stage in the game.
He put down the cup, looked for a few moments at the small, age-browned snapshot lying on his desk blotter, and uncapped his fountain pen.
Dear Esther,
The photo you sent — well, to be frank, it was a shock. Only I think it was taken in Regent’s Park, that time you and Walter came down for a play at the Old Vic — remember? I think you took it. The four of us had a picnic beforehand on the lawn, just to the east of the zoo. August 1935. Those are Nash’s terraces in the distance. Jeremy and me still enjoying our golden age, all five or six months of it. But the photo’s a revelation. I mean, every picture ever taken of us shows something new, don’t you think? If you look closely enough? I think I look positively sheep-eyed, rather pathetically devoted, no wonder he left me! Jeremy looks rather more intense than usual, staring at the camera as if determined to impress it. He had more vanity than I was ever willing to give him credit for. Walter — that way he had of carrying himself — real noblesse in that man of yours, though here he looks a little weary, as if secretly fed up with the rest of us. Do you think he was ever fed up? Not with you, my dear, but with Jeremy and me. We were rather déclassé compared to him, I mean in every sense. But it’s heartbreaking to see us on the very summit of our youth and happiness, don’t you think? God, what life is!
Glenfiddich thoughts. I’m sitting at my long desk with the windows open, pleasantly sloshed and listening to a group of my students make merry at a house near here. I wish I was eighteen again. There’s a boy here reminds me so much of Jeremy, not in looks so much (he’s fairer, to Jeremy’s dark, and not quite so handsome), but he has the same look of anticipation, eager for something the rest of us can’t quite see. I’m a sucker for that, makes me want to protect him. He’s a gifted student, maybe the best I’ve had, and with my encouragement is going on to university next year. His family’s working class, one of the rising type. I think his mother is actually middle class (English, a war bride), while his father works as a mechanic of some sort in the mill. The whole family has this — bearing. There’s something superior about them, not snobbish, but dignified and open. I had the boy here in my lair, just last week, showing him some books. My hands were shaking. I was that close to kissing him. One kiss — and there goes my pension, or at least a thirty-five-year reputation as an honourable man. I mean, I don’t think he’d have welcomed it. Lately he’s been snared by a poor little rich girl with vamp eyes. But then I’m jealous. And drinking good Scotch. Anyway, they’re doing it, I’m sure. You see what a pathetic old lech I’ve become. Only I don’t want her to sabotage him. His last essay not up to snuff — I worry she’s undermining him.
But Jeremy. I remember you said, one time after he’d left me, that it was probably a good thing, for me if not for him: Jeremy too self-absorbed and, likely, you said, “to pull me down with him.” But why couldn’t I have pulled him up? People do pull other people up, don’t they? Or do they get pulled down a little too, no matter what? Of course all this is irrelevant, really, because the fact is, in the end, he didn’t want me. I still don’t understand what happened, I mean what his real thoughts were. I don’t know if there was someone else, I mean some special someone else. He was so damnably opaque, and I let him be, out of some misguided notion of kindness. I never pressed him. I wished I had, now. We talked so much, and in the end we talked about everything except why he was drawing away. That last summer in London, in the borrowed flat on St. Marks Crescent, we were getting along so beautifully. Then one day (I don’t believe I’ve told you this, forgive me if I have) I was pulling on my clothes, hurrying to get to work, and I look up and see Jeremy looking at me from the bed. Jeremy of the wide shoulders and far-seeing eyes — and his face had gone cold. I went cold. It was as if he’d seen me, some fatal flaw of mine, for the first time. I’d always th
ought I was lucky beyond deserving to have him — he was better-looking, smarter, the target of a thousand other boys, etc., etc. But I’d almost got used to him being there. And then this look. I believe I lost him right then. In a look. And I still don’t know what it was about. But I can tell you this, there are moods — Glenfiddich moods — when I feel that look was the central event of my life. That it’s the biggest thing that’s happened to me. In some way it’s happening still.
Enough of this. Did I tell you I’m writing an essay about our founder, Abraham Shade? The man has got under my skin. I’m living in his house, of course, and maybe it’s just old age, but I seem to feel him around here, more and more. A poet-farmer, a personality, but what moves me most about him was his affection for the valley. From his first arrival, he was struck by the beauty of the place — as I was, you know — and for the rest of his life he was concerned about it, wanting to make sure the public buildings were put in the right places, not wanting to obscure any views. I think there may have been some nostalgia in this — wanting to preserve something of his original, pristine discovery. From my yard I can see the hill, across the valley, where he sat on horseback one fine day in 1822 and looked down on the forks for the first time. He knew in a flash (this isn’t speculation, I have his diaries) he had to make a town here. To my mind (a most unhistorical notion) he’s still there, on the crest of the hill, holding the town in his gaze; and it’s this, somehow, that allows the town to go on existing.
As I say, Glenfiddich moods. I feel sometimes as if thirty-five years have gone by in the time it takes me to put down one exam paper and take up another. But we make do, don’t we? We rub on. I think your Walter was the best man I ever knew. He was older and wiser and funnier than the rest of us and I loved him as I love you. Forgive your old friend his rambling. I will definitely come to Cambridge this summer. Archie.
