Now, leaning back in her chair at the breakfast table and considering the stability of her emotions as a doctor might survey the course of a fatal disease, she found that her behavior throughout these weeks had been quite normal. I’m a bit odd in the evenings, she conceded, but that’s because of the dreams. Since she had come here, she had repeatedly dreamed a stifling, fearful dream of her own death. For that reason, she stayed up long after the Stricklands had gone to bed, reading, or playing the same records over and over again on the phonograph. When at last she went to bed, exhausted, she slept immediately. Each time that she had the dream, she cried out in her sleep and awoke to find the light on and Greta beside her, calling her name. Greta would sit on the bed and take her in her arms, and Elizabeth, unable to speak or weep, pressed her face into the strong, chenille-covered shoulder and trembled. (For months afterward, she could not see turquoise chenille without feeling vaguely reassured.) She did not tell her dream to Greta, from horror and from a kind of shame; she thought that the Stricklands attributed the dreams to grief—and how can it be that, she asked herself, when I never dream of him? When it is not his death I dream of, but my own?
She saw that the Stricklands had put their own concerns aside on her behalf. Their own pleasures, sorrows, quarrels had all been submerged in an effort to help her. She had never felt so protected and consoled. In spite of the calamity that brought her there, the time assumed a simple perfection, so that years later, when she and the Stricklands had become, nonsensically, estranged, that September remained in her memory as something like happiness. It was as if the world had become, briefly, a place where suffering could only occur in dreams, or by accident.
She sat up once more with her elbows on the table and shielded her eyes with her cupped hands. “What shall I put on?” she asked. “Will it be cold?”
It was Saturday, and they were going for a drive in the Alps. Elizabeth was surprised to find herself mildly excited by this prospect. Friends of the Stricklands, Georges and Eugénie Maillard—a short, round, ginger couple who lived in Geneva—were coming over in their car, with a visitor from Paris, at ten o’clock. They would drive together into the mountains and lunch at a restaurant the Maillards had discovered, high up in Savoy. Elizabeth had been in the Alps only once before, in a train. She remembered the long, black tunnels, and the gorges suddenly opening onto Italy. One sees nothing from a train, she thought.
“You’ll need a jacket,” Greta was saying. “And a sweater. And something for your head. We go so high, you see.”
The Maillards led the way, in an ancient Austin. On the other side of the lake, the two cars crossed the border and began climbing into the French Alps. Etienne, the Maillards’ friend, sat in the back of the Stricklands’ car to keep Elizabeth company. He was a dark, attenuated man who looked like an anarchist (she though, never having seen one). His hair rose into the air above a prominent forehead, his eyes were serious, even sorrowful. He was staying with the Maillards, on his way back to Paris from Italy, to recover from a road accident. A truck had overturned his car on a mountainside near Domodossola. The car, miraculously, had not tumbled into the ravine and he had tried to continue his journey by train. He had, however, been unable to go farther than Geneva.
“It is the shock, you see,” he explained. “One doesn’t realize. When I first got on the train in Italy, I read a magazine, had my dinner, and so on. But in a little while the tunnels bothered me, and then the sound of the train. By the time we got to Lausanne, I was shaking from head to foot—had a fever of thirty-nine degrees.” For Elizabeth’s benefit, he added in a solemn aside: “I am speaking in centigrades, of course.”
“But that was the same day?” she asked. “The day of the accident?”
“The evening, yes.” He looked beyond her, out of the car window. Although they were still far below the snow line, the mountains rose all round them, green and black and peaked with white. Elizabeth, sitting on the side of the car that overlooked the drop, could not see the edge of the road—just tufts of grass, a few inclined shrubs and poplars, and the slit of the valley below.
Etienne gave a short, apologetic laugh. “Hardly the moment to discuss my accident. But, after all, one could as easily be killed on the streets of Geneva—or in an airplane.” There was an uneasy silence in the car; Elizabeth’s husband had been killed in a plane accident.
Elizabeth stretched her neck to see the road winding ahead, up the mountainside. At an incredible distance, the white peak overhung them. “Can we really get up there?” she asked.
“We can, but we will not,” he said. “There’s a pass, at about a kilometer, and we take another direction. Does the height trouble you?”
“Not now. It used to, at one time.” She spoke as if that were in the remote past rather than a few weeks earlier. “The mountains bother me more—I mean, the look of them.”
“The drama,” he said. “Yes. Because they have something analogous to our emotions. They look like a graph of one’s experience. Isn’t that it?”
“I suppose so,” she agreed. “There’s a poem—
“0 the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.”
Having said this, she gave him a sunny smile.
There was a small fox on a long chain in the garden of the restaurant where they stopped for lunch. The house was built on a spur of the mountain projecting into an immense valley and surrounded by shoulders of the Alps. They had lunch sitting on the veranda in the sun, at a long table made of weathered boards, and the fox moved about on the grass below them, just out of reach, clinking his chain and watching them out of bright, despising eyes. There were very few people there, and they were served by the owners of the house, a gentle elderly couple who recognized the Maillards and were pleased that they had returned.
Elizabeth took off her jacket, and then her cardigan, and hung them over the back of a chair. She opened the neck of her blue cotton blouse. She sat on a bench at the table, between Cyril and Etienne. Etienne looked sadder than before and spoke to her in a less natural way, and she assumed that he had, in the meantime, been warned to stay off the subject of accidents. They had pâté and omelets and salad and cheese, and three bottles of wine. The sun moved slowly along the mountains opposite.
“I’ve never seen the Alps in such weather,” Etienne said. “I usually come here in winter.” To Elizabeth he added: “You should stay for the skiing.”
“Alas, I can’t,” she answered. “I have to be back at work early in October—I only have six weeks’ compassionate leave.” It seemed to her, as she said this, an odd excuse to offer for not going skiing.
After lunch, the Stricklands and the Maillards lay down in long green canvas chairs on the veranda and went to sleep, with their faces in the shade. Etienne and Elizabeth leaned on the veranda rail, looking at the mountains and scarcely speaking, and in a while they walked down the steps into the garden. Elizabeth carried her jacket on her arm, and Etienne hung a sweater over his shoulders, the sleeves cross on his chest. In his open shirt and thick, battered corduroy trousers he looked more like an anarchist than ever.
They walked through the garden, the little fox tinkling after them on his chain until he could follow no farther. The same path wound for some distance down the mountain ; they could see it grooved through the grass and wild flowers. There were no trees or shrubs on this part of the spur, only the bright-green grass and the tangled flowers. In the great valley, below the black belts of fir trees, a twisting road was lined with fields and farmhouses. Elizabeth kept her eyes lowered to the narrow track on which they walked, pausing now and then to look up at the mountains across the valley. The descent from the track was gradual. The ground sloped away so that the drop, though very steep, was not precipitous. One would probably roll quite a long way, she thought indifferently, before falling into the ravine. She stopped, and Etienne, who was walking behind her, drew le
vel and presented her with a frond of white heather he had picked.
She had nothing to pin it with, but she took it and arranged it in the pocket of her blouse so that it could be seen. She understood that it was the sort of offering a child makes, of the first, valueless thing that comes to hand, to show sympathy. She thought without interest that he was kinder than most people. The sun was in her eyes, and she turned her back to the valley and looked into his face. If he wants to kiss me, he may, she decided. For a moment it seemed almost essential that he should—for surely that, she thought, would shock her into realization; surely he (and she could only picture him in a Sunday-school Heaven not much higher than the mountains around them, not much higher than he had been when the plane exploded in the air) would find the means of making his indignation known to her. In the next instant, she was conscious that her head had begun to ache.
Without moving, Etienne had slightly withdrawn. He was no longer looking at her. Perhaps he had not the least desire for her—or perhaps, she told herself with conscious formality, he is respecting my grief. She turned away from him and said: “I don’t feel well. Can we go back?”
“It’s the altitude,” he replied, keeping pace with her and obliging her to take the inward side of the path.
In any case, she thought, I should not let him kiss me—it would be too disillusioning for him; knowing what has happened to me, he would think there was no loyalty left in the world.
That night she did not dream. She awoke before daylight, feverish and violently ill. Her head still ached. She took aspirin, and was immediately sick again. She lay down on her bed, moaning with pain and confusion, and waited for the night to pass. Her thoughts, although otherwise disconnected, were all concerned with the excursion into the Alps. She saw again, over and over, the thin leaning poplars blowing silently outside the car window, the steep turns of the road, the bright eyes of the fox. In detail, she repeated the descent from the mountain, which had seemed endless at the time, and recalled her own exhausted chatter in the car and the strangely anxious face of Etienne. (She considered his anxiety to be without foundation; knowing herself to be a little out of control, she had made a particular effort to behave naturally during the return journey.) More hazily, she remembered coming home and, for the first time, going to bed early. She also remembered that for the first time she had been struck by her solitude when she lay down.
Still, she reflected (as though feeling might attempt to take her unaware), these things have nothing to do with his death; it is all concern for myself. She raised herself on her elbows and hung her head, overwhelmed with nausea. She could hear her own quick breathing; her nightgown clung to her damply about the waist. I am sick, she thought self-pityingly, and closed her. eyes. The pain in her head was almost intolerable.
When the wave passed, she lay down again on her side. She stayed this way, quite rigid, for a few moments, and then all at once pressed her face into the pillow, sliding her arm up to encircle her head. She thought suddenly and clearly of her husband, and was surprised to hear her own voice say his name aloud.
The doctor was speaking to Greta in Swiss-German—although, since he practiced in Geneva, he could doubtless speak French. It is so that I won’t understand, Elizabeth thought without resentment, glad to have this detail explained. Dizziness overcame her again, and when her mind had steadied itself the low voices were speaking French. Greta asked what Elizabeth’s temperature was, and the doctor told her. “Of course they are speaking in centigrades,” Elizabeth quoted to herself, and smiled. Greta said something about food poisoning. Opening her eyes a little, Elizabeth could see that the doctor’s national pride was involved; he was frowning—a slight, blond, youngish man with a rosy Swiss face.
“En Suisse, Madame,” he said incredulously, spreading his hands.
Perhaps it would help, Elizabeth thought, if he knew that we lunched in France yesterday. Was it yesterday? Then this was Sunday, unless she had slept through a whole day. She thought she had been given an injection, but perhaps it had only been spoken of—she couldn’t be sure that she was not recollecting something in the future. Now they had gone out of the room, and she felt safe in opening her eyes again. The sun, through the gauze curtains, was immoderate, remorseless. Will it go on forever, this weather, she wondered irritably, with an effort putting her hand up to cover her eyes. Will it never rain, never be night, never be winter? If Greta would come, I could ask her to close the shutters. She felt helpless, victimized by the glare. Unwittingly, she had let herself in for all this. She had only meant to marry, settle down, have children—be safe, or a little bored; it came to the same thing. And here, instead, was all this derangement (she felt it, positively, to be his fault)—expense, journeys, illness, and now the sun glaring in at her. All this punishment simply because (she clasped her hand more tightly over her eyelids to shut out the sun) she had loved him. That was it. Because she had loved him.
She sighed. Her arm ached from being raised to her eyes.
“What is it, dear?” said Greta.
“The sun,” she explained. “Could you close the shutters?”
“But darling, it’s quite dark now.”
Elizabeth opened her eyes and found the room in darkness, except for a small lamp on the dressing table. Her hands were folded on the sheet. Greta was holding a tray.
“I can’t eat anything,” Elizabeth said immediately. The pain had gone from her head. “I feel better, but I can’t eat.”
“A piece of dry toast.”
No.
“Just tea, then.”
“Please” she said, almost passionately. Why can’t anyone understand, she wondered. She didn’t quite know what they should understand—not merely that she should be let alone; rather, a sense of impending catastrophe that rendered absurdly insignificant all this taking of temperatures and bringing of tea. She had no way to describe to them the calamity that was about to befall, no way that would sufficiently prepare them for it. In that respect, it was like her dream.
When she next awoke, the light had returned, but dimly. She thought it must be dawn, but presently she heard Cyril leave for work. When Greta came in, Elizabeth was sitting up in bed. It’s still so dark,” she said. “It is morning, isn’t it?”
“It’s been raining,” Greta told her. She sat down on the bed. “Do lie down. How do you feel?”
“Better,” she said. She knew she was no longer sick.
“You look terrible,” Greta said, and smiled, and kissed her. “You poor thing. I’ll get you some toast and tea.”
When she had eaten, she lay down again and began to be aware of the room. There were bookcases facing her bed, all the way up to the ceiling. She decided that there was nothing worse than to be sick in bed with a room full of books; the titles marched back and forth before her eyes. Her attention was repeatedly arrested by the same combinations of color and lettering, or by a design on a book’s spine. Hazlitt, Mallarmé, and twenty volumes of Balzac; Dryden and Robert Graves; Cicero and Darwin, and, between them, a brand-new copy of By Love Possessed. She closed her eyes, but the cryptic messages, vertical and horizontal, went on transmitting themselves under her eyelids.
She could hear, outside, the faint sound of the plow in the nearby fields. Charlotte was moving the furniture in the living room; one of the accredited mechanics called out from the kitchen. In a little while, there was the ring of the postman’s bicycle bell, and the sound of the front door being opened and closed. (Elizabeth was too tired to be interested.) Everything goes on and on, she thought, and did not know whether this reassured or isolated her. It was not, of course, to say that only she had been excluded from the current of life; perhaps others merely conducted themselves better in their exclusion—Charlotte, the mechanics, Greta. Besides, she reminded herself, it’s not even as though I were actually suffering; it is only this apprehension that troubles me—the uneasiness I brought down from the mountain.
In the afternoon, she got up and took a bath. T
he sun had come out, and she lay in a chair on the terrace, wrapped up in a woollen dressing gown of Cyril’s and covered with a blanket, because the breeze blowing from the mountains was unexpectedly cool. The sun, too, was not quite so strong, and on the farther shore of the lake—less luxuriantly green today—the neat, opulent villas were slightly veiled. The dog, Aurélien, chased the smaller birds up and down the new lawn, and fled from the larger ones. From time to time, Greta came out of the house to see how Elizabeth was, and once she brought her sewing and sat beside her for a while. They said very little. Greta sat peacefully sewing, occasionally calling the dog away from the birds, or glancing up to smile at Elizabeth. Elizabeth felt bored with her own self-centeredness; she did not know how to stop studying her moods, or even to divert attention from them.
Cliffs of Fall Page 10
