He awoke in half light, wide-eyed. He looked at his watch: it was exactly five o’clock. He lay for a while longer, looking up at the ceiling on which he could make out an extensive design of cracks and fissures like a map, with land masses and seas and strings of islands. He sensed the silence hanging over the pool. It seemed to him that he could hear a very faint tinkle of sheep bells and also the sound of human voices very far away; though these sounds had the curious property of eluding conscious listening, of being heard only when attentiveness lapsed. This dawn, in its immediate stillness and its distant intimations of sound, was like a distillation of all the wakeful dawns of his life to Farnaby, and his body, fully extended in the bed, grew tense as if waiting to be disposed of.
After some more minutes he got up and put on his swimming shorts which were still rather uncomfortably damp. Over them he put on his thick camel-hair dressing-gown, which somewhat resembled a monk’s habit, and stepped out bare footed on to the chilly terrace. It was still not light enough for him to see far across the pool, though light was increasing from moment to moment. The water below him was palest blue, almost grey, hung with vapour which did not now in this faint daylight seem to swaddle the surface so much, merely took away direct reflections, absorbed the light so that the mist itself had a luminosity that should have belonged to the water. He stood gazing, feet cold, body still heavy with sleep. Hanging ethereal in the sky to the west towards the sea, there was what seemed the crest of a great mountain, though morning haze contended with cloud and snow to render its outlines indistinct. The cabins with closed doors slept all around the enclosure.
He took off his dressing-gown and dropped it on the terrace beside him. At once the cold air swooped on to his thin and shrinking body. Hastily he sat at the edge of the pool and from this sitting position slipped down into the water which was deliciously warm and welcoming. He began swimming a cautious breast stroke towards the bridge, looking down as he swam at the antique masonry glimmering below the surface. The marble sections of columns shone white, gleamed through the refracting water as did the immaculate pebbles on which they lay – centuries of immersion in this mineral-laden water had given them no faintest crust or scurf or patina; they were as free of deposit as bleached bones. Not so the brick, he noted, still peering down; there were fragments of brick here and there, parts of a terracotta pavement by the looks of it, and these were coated with a pale greenish substance, like pale moss, though almost certainly chemical. He duck-dived to the bottom to touch some. It was slippery, like wet moss.
He rose to the surface, spluttering slightly, aware of the faint sweetish reek of the water. The water ran into his eyes and stung a little. He pressed the lids of his eyes with his fingertips as if to press out the water and when he opened his eyes he saw across the pool the girl of the night before, whom he had failed to find again the night before. She was standing in the shallower part, up to her waist in the water, wearing a dark red bathing costume, and she was looking towards him. She must have entered the pool while he was swimming.
This meeting, or rather it was not that quite yet, but this fact of their being both together in the otherwise deserted pool, providential as it seemed to him, had an intimidating effect, and he looked diffidently away, in immediate misery that this one failure of nerve might damage all his future prospects with the girl, just as, if it were really Miranda, he had spoilt things somehow, by some obscurer weakness, in the past. After moments of anguished irresolution he looked at her again. Their eyes met and both of them smiled with an amusement that seemed amazingly pure to Farnaby, somehow pristine like the morning, mutually perceived amusement at their own awkwardness, clumsiness, or so Farnaby felt at least, and to him this smile, prolonged as it was beyond the normal time for such signals, marked some special quality of acknowledgement on the girl’s part, recognized something conspiratorial in their situation. Though whether this was their conspiracy coming to fruition, or somebody else’s, he could not determine for the moment. Nor, for the moment, did it matter. Across these few feet of luminous water, with the strange vapour faintly swirling around them, the snows of the mountain beyond, their two bodies stood still in the warm, sealing liquid, blood quickened, confronting each other with this bold smile.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said at last, moving a little towards her. The details of her face were still not quite distinct.
‘Neither could I,’ she said, her voice rising in a surprised, rather excited way. And the smile left her face completely, as if this coincidence were a very solemn thing.
‘Isn’t it marvellous,’ he said, ‘early in the morning like this, when nobody else is around?’ He did not know, in saying this, whether he meant the pool or the fact of their isolation. She assented, still solemnly, her head declined a little, her brows partially obscured by the sweeps of honey-coloured hair.
‘No one to stare,’ Farnaby said, speaking with what felt to him a dreamlike ease as if his lips and larynx had not to labour at all but words formed weightless on his breath. ‘No one chattering around you. No voices. I mean I think it is a great place in itself but for me it is spoilt to some extent by all these voices, disembodied voices.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you never hear the end of anything, do you? You either want to know nothing at all about people, or more than that.’
‘Quite,’ Farnaby said fervently. Her head was slightly turned away from him and he looked at her steadily, taking advantage of this averted gaze, not unwilling either that she should be aware of his scrutiny. Which she could have ended any time by looking at him, meeting his eyes. But did not. He observed her with a sort of detached, potentially loving closeness of regard, as one might look at a flower: a curiosity at the life form, warmed with admiration. Her face was narrower than he remembered the childhood Miranda’s, less instinct with laughter, though there was still that sun-flushed depth, almost a duskiness, in the complexion, and the eyes too he thought he remembered, though graver now, dark eyes slanting upwards very slightly.
‘Yes,’ he said, taking in all this in a series of visual raids on her. There was no single feature that established her beyond doubt in his mind as Miranda, there was only his general sense of familiarity, of recognition and also a more superstitious feeling of necessity. He knew he should ask her now if that was her name, announce himself, say why he was there. But he delayed doing this, from instinct rather than any deliberation, feeling obscurely the need to exist independently in her view, to form something between them first, so as not to be set down as an adjunct merely, an emissary of Mooncranker’s. He had not after all come to reclaim Mooncranker’s secretary, but had at the last moment agreed to come because it was Miranda. She was the reason, and he would have to make her understand this somehow – but the way was not by blurting out that Mooncranker had sent him.
He said, ‘I wish it were all mine. The pool I mean. Instead of the property of the Turkish state. Then there’d only be my own voice in it. And yours of course. I would invite you. You would be my permanent guest.’
She looked at him now and smiled again, but a different, more secretive smile. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful,’ she said, ‘to have it for one’s own?’ This smile, slow and secretive, just catching the corners of her mouth, transformed her face, gave it a sort of ancient irony and knowingness, which lasted only a few moments, after which it broadened, lost its sybilline character, became more openly joyous, almost gleeful. This was how that particular smile began and ended and Farnaby at once formed the ambition to provoke it as frequently as possible. ‘We could have who we liked here,’ she said. ‘Just the people we wanted.’
Farnaby made no reply for the moment. He had suddenly felt himself assailed once again by a sense of the girl’s physical existence, the wonder of it, and by a sort of gratitude for it. The desire stirred in him to reciprocate, demonstrate his own reality, a reality which had nothing to do with the words he had been uttering. He realized that it was his identity he wanted to present her with, to lay
before her, so that she could then reassure him about her own. Still however, perhaps out of fear that he might after all be wrong, he delayed.
‘What made you choose Turkey?’ he asked. ‘Not many girls come as far as this on their own.’
‘I suppose not,’she said. ‘I didn’t come on my own actually.’
‘Here to the pool do you mean?’
‘To Turkey. I just came to this place on an impulse really. Because I was fed up. Anyway, going back to what you said, I think a lot of girls would be scared of coming to Turkey, you know, they think of the people as very primitive.’
‘Rapists one and all.’
‘Well, more or less.’
‘I think a lot of that feeling is unfounded,’ Farnaby said. ‘They may be primitive, but they are decent people. Obviously you must be careful. I mean I think it’s unreasonable for a girl to go round half naked and then raise loud complaints when a Turkish peasant, who rarely sees a woman’s ankle, gets carried away. No, I put it down to the philhellenism prevalent in England – Greece the cradle of civilization. Well that is true I suppose, but the English turn everything into a moral issue. They set against Pericles some bloodthirsty Sultan. Greece is the light side, Turkey the dark, so this myth gets built up, wicked barbarous extortionate Turks occupying beautiful Greece for four hundred years, grinding down the ideals of Hellenism with their greed and sloth and essentially uncreative …’ In the midst of this speech, which he felt quite strongly about, he noticed that she had a tiny scar, circular in shape, high up on her cheek bone towards the right temple – the one turned towards him. This sight and the attentiveness to her which it renewed in him, caused him to falter in his argument. She was listening, or appeared to be, with concentration, face turned in profile away.
‘Whereas the fact is,’ Farnaby said, looking at her, ‘the fact is that fifteenth-century Greece was a backwater, Athens no more than a village, and Turkey took it over as part of the Balkan job lot. They were more cultivated than any people in Europe at that time. The Turks I mean …’
He wondered suddenly if he was boring her. Impossible to know what she was thinking. ‘Anyway,’ he added, rather lamely, ‘it seems difficult for people who like Greeks to like Turks too.’
‘I think it is so stupid for people to take sides like that,’ she said.
‘I think so too.’
‘What part of England are you from?’
‘I was born in Berkshire,’ he said. Then he added slowly and carefully, ‘I had an uncle and aunt who lived at Sinning-ford, in Surrey. I spent a summer holiday there once.’
‘That is where my parents’ home was.’
‘I know,’ Farnaby said. His heart was beating rapidly. ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You are Miranda, aren’t you? Miranda Bolsover.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember a boy called Farnaby, James Farnaby?’ She looked at him a moment and her eyes widened. ‘I knew I had seen you somewhere before,’ she said. ‘Of course I remember. What an extraordinary thing. What are you doing here, are you on holiday?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I live in Istanbul.’
‘Isn’t it an extraordinary coincidence?’ she said. ‘You have grown tall. But I remember you were tall for your age.’
He said, ‘It is not really all that much of a coincidence. Let’s have breakfast together, and I’ll explain things.’
‘Can we get breakfast yet?’ It must be still pretty early.’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I expect we can get something. And we can talk before anyone else arrives.’
‘Good idea,’ she said. They smiled at each other again with the same amusement, the same complicity – accomplices now in extorting what they could out of this meeting …
Senemoǧlu was already up and about, dressed in his white jacket. The smile with which he greeted their entrance was a complex blend of congratulation for Farnaby and distress at their earliness. The bread had not arrived yet, he explained – it came up from the village every day. So madam could not have the toasted cheese-sandwiches she had immediately asked for. There was yogourt, however, and honey and fresh fruit. They said that would be fine. Miranda asked for café au lait. ‘I can’t bear Turkish coffee in the mornings,’ she said happily and with a certain intimate assumption of his involvement in her tastes and preferences which excited him but at the same time recalled Mooncranker lying swathed in the hospital – had not Mooncranker remarked on her dislike for Turkish coffee?
He ordered a large orange juice and they both watched with pleasure as the fresh oranges were sliced into halves and crushed in the fruit press, which occupied a central place on the counter. Heaps of fruit and vegetables lay alongside it, piled in wire-mesh baskets, carrots, tomatoes, apples, lemons.
‘That is one of the things I like best about this country,’ Farnaby said, ‘the way there is always a big fruit press like this, and you can get fruit and vegetable juice any time you want.’ The piled fruit glowed in the baskets, Farnaby’s orange juice came frothing out into the tall glass, at a sink behind the counter a tap was turned on and the gushing sound of water filled the room for a few moments.
‘It must be very healthy,’ she said.
He watched the frank enthusiasm with which she stirred pale gold honey into her yogourt. She had a full underlip, rather childish, slightly puffy-looking as if she had been stung on it and the swelling had not quite gone down. She was wearing a grey dress and a dark blue woollen jacket. She had tied her hair back. He took in these details with wonder at her separateness, which he had not felt before, in the tension of establishing who she was, who they both were.
‘It is amazing,’ she said, ‘that we should both be sitting here like this. I never thought we would meet again, did you? I didn’t even know you were in Turkey at all.’
He said, ‘No, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I’m glad it has happened.’ He began to tell her what he was doing in Istanbul. He would have liked to protract this moment, make it stretch out indefinitely, this charmed moment in the quiet room with the potential of this meeting still vibrant between them, her face before him, not the face he had remembered, both more and less beautiful, listening, responding; to protract the conversation, remarks uttered without particular emphasis, casually, almost it might have seemed indifferently, but word by word reconstituting the past, reaffirming the time they had spent together, shared, the fact that they were together again now, all this as precisely in a way as if a mosaic were being filled in, even the pauses between them supplied something necessary, and the glances they exchanged. Or so at least Farnaby felt, offering cigarettes, speaking, smiling, while he glimpsed through the open door early sunshine powdered with mist lying across terrace and pool.
‘Do you remember that time,’ he said, ‘we were playing that game of pretending to be stalking animals and we went into the bushes, do you remember?’
Her face was full of laughter. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course I remember, and we couldn’t get out because of the gardener, what was his name …?’
‘Matthews.’
‘That’s right, Matthews, he was watering the garden.’
‘So we crawled through the bushes all the way across the garden and – ’ Suddenly, much too late, he saw where this would lead them.
‘Yes and when we came out –’
They looked at each other, and the laughter faded from her face. ‘It was Mooncranker I came to Turkey with,’ she said.
‘I know that,’ Farnaby said.
‘What did you mean when you said it wasn’t such a coincidence? Did Mooncranker send you?’
‘Would you like some more coffee?’ Farnaby said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you, no.’ She leaned forward, setting her elbows on the marble-topped table. ‘I think you’d better tell me,’ she said.
He told her then, the whole story, beginning with Uncle George’s letter. Told her with the desolate conviction that she would immediately be overcome by pity for Moo
ncranker and guilt for deserting him and that these two emotions in conjunction would quench completely and for ever any interest she might have been feeling in himself.
‘Which hospital did you say?’
‘The French hospital at Harbiye. I thought that would be the best one. They are more used to foreigners there.’
She nodded. She did not, to his surprise and hope, seem particularly shaken by the news. ‘I suppose it’s all my fault,’ she said.
‘I don’t see how you can be held responsible –’
‘I saw it coming, you see. It isn’t the first time you know. I can always tell when there is a bout coming on. There’s a sort of, I don’t know, a sort of physical obtrusiveness about him then. He always seems to be just in front of you, sort of hovering or wavering about. It is terribly oppressive.’
Farnaby looked at her in silence. It was intensely disagreeable to him, this knowledge of hers that could only have been gained through intimacy, the proximity of their bodies. He had not so far allowed his imagination to dwell with any particularity on her relations with Mooncranker, absorbed as he had been by his vision of her in the past, as if she were still in some way encapsulated in that distant summer.
‘Not the first time, then,’ he said at last, on a note of rather gloomy interrogation.
‘Heavens, no. And this time he had actually started drinking. I couldn’t bear it. The thought of going through all that again. I just had to get away.’
Mooncranker's Gift Page 20
