I must get the truth from her. A tearing impatience, resembling the ardour of love, possessed Farnaby. In an hour perhaps, two hours at the most, he would see her again …
Keep right on to the end of the road, Lusk told himself. This elusive hare, experience. He had fallen twice since entering the gully and beginning his ascent, the second time heavily, so that he had lain some moments dazedly looking up at the sky. Now he was on his feet again and the going was a bit easier – he was through the thick of the scrub. The bourbon he had consumed, however, was impairing his vision, making it difficult for him to gauge distance with any confidence. After Farnaby’s departure he had stayed on in his room, brooding over the débâcle of the night before. He had thought also, with increasing fixity, of the girl in the red bathing-suit whom he had seen walking along the terrace like a vision of rosy-fingered dawn. He felt sure she would respond to the Topic if he could get to her. Then, by the merest chance, as he was opening his door on his way to the john, they passed him, obviously setting out for a walk; the girl, and the woman Farnaby had described as dragonish. Hell with that, Lusk mumbled. I can take care of myself. He had watched the way they went, gone back and with injudicious haste finished the bottle, then started after them. Now, passing a tongue over dry lips, he gazed upward into the sun. Somewhere higher up they awaited him, crying out for it. He stumbled again and almost fell, saving himself only at the cost of grazed knuckles. Take it easy. Lusk paused to get his breath, straining his eyes to catch a glimpse of the two women somewhere up there against the bright sky.
‘Higher up,’ Plopl said savagely. ‘Get higher up on your shanks pony. I want to see the arse rising clear.’
Naked, flushed with exertion, her fair tangled hair tumbling about her face, Pamela pushed her body upward, supporting herself on elbows and heels. Her face, held back stiffly between raised shoulders, regarded Plopl sullenly.
‘Keep those bloody legs parted,’ Plopl muttered, more to himself than the girl. He sank to his knees and raised the camera. He had it now: between the narrowing cleft of the legs, which were raised aggressively at the spectator, in a position of prominence rarely encountered – the dark wound of the vagina. Beyond this the pubic bush rose almost vertical, foresting the belly. The long plane of the torso and then – most cunning touch of all and one which Plopl had envisaged when he first thought of the pose – the gully formed by the raised legs reduplicated on a smaller scale by the breasts, between which, tilted forward, outlined against the sky could finally be seen Pamela’s inexpressive face. Most of the main erotic zones caught in a single concentration. The whole relieved from ‘Health and Efficiency’ banality by the strain and effort evident in the pose. And by the face, of course: it was the face that gave distinction to the picture, sullenly enduring what the body was forced to do. No swimming-pool nude this, but a real cry of the flesh, an affliction. Sweat ran down the side of Plopl’s face. The camera clicked. He took several pictures from different angles. Then he told Pamela she could relax for a while.
His own excitement subsided rapidly, the blend of repugnance and desire he always felt on these occasions. He had not even so much as got an erection during this one, and the familiar worry descended on him again: it happened less and less frequently during these photographic sessions that he got one. That had been one reason for coming here – he had been told in Istanbul that the water had aphrodisiacal properties, something to do with the alum contained in it. The other reason had been the prospect of selling pictures.
Plopl sighed heavily, remembering the time in the weeks immediately after meeting Pamela when simply posing her successfully and getting the picture had been so exciting to him that he had been ready to mount her immediately. He looked round him. They had found a good place for it, anyway, a rough clearing in the scrub extending well into the hillside so that it was screened on three sides by the hill itself and though overlooked on the fourth, the open side, which was very steep and rocky, no one could have seen them from any point higher up because of the thick overhanging vegetation at the start of the incline. They were as free from observation here, he thought, as they would have been in his apartment in Istanbul …
Pamela was sitting on the rock, with a folded towel under her. She scratched briefly at her arm below the elbow. Her body was relaxed now, round-shouldered. Her feet turned inward slightly. She looked up at Plopl without expression, shaking the heavy fringe clear of her eyes. He looked at her, forgetting for a moment or two his nagging fear of impotence, the loneliness of the artist, the rage her very existence increasingly roused in him, forgetting everything in the self-congratulation, the pleasure at his own acumen, that the sight of her afforded him. He had seen it from the very beginning, from that first moment in the street, looking at the girl’s buxom figure, her young, blank, infinitely violable face; seen what first-rate material she would make. Her sullenness was proof against all grotesqueness or contortion imposed on her body. Such lack of cooperation made every picture seem almost like a rape. All this he had seen from the start. What he could not have foreseen was her stupidity, her inarticulateness, an ignorance that made her credulous, pathetically easy to dupe. He had told her he would report her to the police for begging if she tried to leave him; he had told her begging was an offence punishable with prison if you did not have a licence. All this she had believed, or so it seemed. At any rate she had not tried to run away. To make absolutely sure he kept her passport under lock and key. As he did the electric toothbrush he had taught her to masturbate with, which he let her have from time to time as a special treat …
Plopl mopped his face and neck again. He felt the stickiness of his shirt against his back. This physical discomfort recalled the humiliation of his failure with Farnaby earlier in the morning. The Englishman had not been impressed, not at all. Plopl felt a return of his doubt and self-mistrust. Nude poses were not enough. What was needed were some pictures of actual sexual intercourse. ‘Listen,’ he said to Pamela, ‘we shall now try something slightly different …’
Mooncranker moved out through a gap in the walls, only to find further scatterings of ruined masonry. Looking back through this gap it seemed to him that he saw the distant figures of Miranda and another lady in a bright shirt or blouse. They disappeared again almost immediately, leaving him wondering whether he had in fact seen them at all – the whole landscape was pitted with granite outcrop, clotted with shrub, gashed everywhere with gullies and hollows; an army could move across it without being more than intermittently glimpsed. And the very clarity of the light seemed hallucinatory to him now, more apt to breed illusive images than any mist or haze. Moreover he was confused by the sound of water that was suddenly all around him, the trickle, gurgle, rush of running water. He had emerged, it seemed, into an area where the myriad streams rose to the surface. Soft sounds, but curiously thick and implosive, perhaps because of the charge of minerals the water bore. Here and there on the slopes round about he could detect the presence of water; make out, by the stray gleams they emitted and the vapour that hung about them in the still air, the courses of descending streams. The whole area was combed, riddled with channels of moving water. He remembered his own slow voice pronouncing. The ancient city was fed by underground springs which made her baths among the most famous in antiquity …
Suddenly he saw the man he had talked to at the poolside, not very far below him, moving along a narrow path, little more than a sheep-track, that ran round the hillside. ‘Hallo!’ he shouted. The other looked up briefly, then proceeded on his way without any further sign of recognition. After a few moments he disappeared round the side of the hill. Mooncranker speculated about this person for a while – he had come after their conversation to the conclusion that the Scot was more or less crazy, or at any rate that he lived for a lot of the time in a private world of his own. Where could he be going to now, with such apparent air of purpose? He soon forgot all about him, however, in a continuing wonder at the sounds of the water which pervaded the hills
ide. Some of these streams no doubt fed the pool below. The composure, the apparent autonomy of the buildings, the sense one had within them of inhabiting a self-contained world, all this was an illusion, among manifold illusions. The water possessed all in common, hills, ruins, pool. Cities of the past and any to be built there … He saw Miranda and the other lady again – there was no mistaking the latter’s orange-coloured blouse. They were standing together presumably in colloquy, but now in quite a different spot, beyond the theatre, near a ruined basilica. Some hundreds of feet below them he thought he glimpsed another figure moving upwards, though it was difficult to be sure about this because of the darkness of the background vegetation. Far away, on the horizon, a line of persons, dark against the sky, walking very slowly in immemorial procession. He felt sure for some reason that these people were local, inhabitants of the hills …
McSpavine hurried round the hillside, aware of behaving with less than customary courtesy, quite unrepentant, his thoughts absorbed in the paradox of Flora’s last hours. So luxuriant he had imagined the growth, in the final stages, behind the wall of Flora’s face, so intricate with tendrils, that it must progressively muffle all expression on the face itself, which had not happened, of course – Flora’s face had been right up to the end more mobile and expressive than he had ever known it, passing from luminous aquiescence to wild alarm and thence to a sort of excessive shrewdness of appraisal, as if she were re-enacting key scenes from her life. The performance had brought out a fine dew of sweat on Flora’s brow, as she moved restlessly on the bed, repeatedly moistening her lips with water, like a person needing refreshment after such strenuous efforts. An artistic debility, not illness. And when all this talent and demonstration was over, when the brain was finally choked, what was left was this smile. A smile not peaceful exactly, but healed. This smile persisted on Flora’s face through the hurried interchange between doctor and nurse. ‘Rigor mortis’ the doctor had said, words clearly not applicable to Flora. It persisted, he was sure, while they drew the screen round, excluding him from whatever ministrations to the body were to follow. And when he went back to see what time precisely Flora had passed away. And when the young woman had smiled at him, and he had stood there in the desolation of his lust, Flora too had been still smiling, the smiles of the dead woman and the living one commingling …
Before him the ground inclined steeply down to a sort of rocky gully, then rose again more gradually in enfolded ranks of hills. Beyond, right up on the skyline, McSpavine made out a number of human figures walking slowly along in irregularly spaced procession. The sun was painful to his eyes, he was compelled to look down, and it was at this moment, dazzled, bewildered by the line of walkers, that he heard a hissing sound which seemed to be coming from higher up on his right. Turning his head he saw a child, a girl of about thirteen, standing against the wall. She was dressed in the voluminous, brightly patterned clothes of a peasant woman, with a white headcloth. He stared wordlessly up at the girl, who kept her thin, dark face turned directly towards him. Clutched against her breast she had a cloth tied up in a bundle.
‘Merhaba,’ McSpavine said at last. ‘What is it you want, lassie?’
The girl gestured to him to draw nearer, a gesture as if the thin fingers were digging or scrabbling. She squatted down against the wall and began to untie the knot of her bundle. McSpavine moved up the slope towards her.
· · ·
There you are, Lusk mumbled to himself. I got you. Not a hundred feet above him they stood together looking at a book. Climb as high as you like, baby, you will not outclimb Lusk. He stood still for some time to recover his breath, holding on to a piece of jutting rock. To the ends of the earth, he told himself drunkenly. I’ll follow you. All my life through. Da-dum-di-dum. He looked down rather giddily at the steep and tangled route by which he had come. He was aware of having cut and scratched himself in a number of places without feeling any localized pain. He looked up again at the two women, standing with their backs to him. More slowly, with an effort at circumspection, he began to move up towards them, rehearsing his opening lines as he went.
‘Now then,’ Plopl said hoarsely. ‘Are you ready?’ He was quite naked. Pamela was lying, also naked, spreadeagled on a rock some five yards away, in a position of sexual readiness. Plopl checked his camera. The sun was hot on his back and buttocks. Peering through his coupled rangefinder he saw there was still a slight duality of image, two naked girls overlapping each other, forming a three-breasted figure. He adjusted the focus until they merged. A faint fugitive sound of sheep bells came to him while he was engaged in this. Once again he checked the aperture and shutter settings: all was in readiness.
His idea was to take a delayed action photograph of himself and Pamela having sexual intercourse – with himself just beginning to penetrate Pamela, so that the prospective customer should see, not just two bodies in congress, but the actual member, half in – half out.
‘Get ready,’ he repeated. He was about to depress the delayed action setting lever when he realized that in the tension of these last-minute adjustments to the camera he had lost the rather inspiring erection he had had to begin with, he was now sticking out more or less horizontally. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘Hold it a minute.’ Pamela gave no sign of having heard him. She lay on the grey slab of rock, knees slightly raised, eyes closed against the sun. Her body gleamed whitely.
Plopl gritted his teeth and began playing with himself, in an effort to restore his now distinctly sullen penis to that former readiness and rigidity. For quite a long time nothing very much happened. ‘Oh God,’ Plopl groaned inwardly, raising a sweating face to the pale immense sky, stroking himself with terrible impatience. At last, reluctantly, there was a stiffening under his hands, a rearing up. Not to the previous peak, which he thought must have been caused in the first place by the artistry of the idea, but sufficient for performance.
‘I am on my way now,’ he called out threateningly to Pamela, and he pressed down the lever. Almost immediately afterwards, in haste not to lose what he had thus painfully recovered, he pressed the release and began lumbering across the clearing towards the recumbent Pamela, caressing himself feverishly, hurting his soft feet on the rocky earth, hearing behind him the whirring of the delayed-action mechanism, which stopped however, terminated in an ominous click, before he could get there, while he was still half crouching over Pamela’s body.
‘Merde!’ Plopl shrieked. ‘Verdammt nochmals!’
He thought for a moment of hitting Pamela with the flat of his hand, then decided against it. He knew what had happened, what must have happened. In his haste he had not pressed the release all the way down. Instead of getting twelve seconds he had only had about five. Pamela had turned her head. She was looking down, in bemused inquiry, at Plopl’s limp and shrunken adjunct.
‘Right,’ Plopl said, his lower jaw rigid with fury. ‘Right, we are going to try again.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Mrs Pritchett said. ‘That sort of shrieking noise? It came from down there somewhere.’ They both looked down over the sheer side of the hill they were standing on, where the ground plunged down in a series of steep rocky folds to a tangle of arbutus and thorn. ‘I think it was a human voice, don’t you?’
‘It certainly sounded like it,’ Miranda said. ‘Though sounds get distorted, I suppose,’ she added vaguely, ‘over these distances.’
‘Yes, dear, I am sure they do,’ Mrs Pritchett said, conscious of being tactful. It had occurred to her that she was wrong to assert so frequently her own order of perceptiveness over the girl’s, perhaps it was this that was causing the provoking vagueness on the other’s part that seemed so like recalcitrance to Mrs Pritchett’s essentially authoritarian mind. She did not, however, really believe that this could account for it. With every moment that passed the distressing conviction was growing on her, that the girl had something – almost certainly some man – on her mind.
‘You see,’ she said, reverting to the Plutonium,
‘it says here that it was fenced off in the first century because it was regarded as dangerous to animals and men.’
They had stopped on a sort of narrow platform, with the ground falling away fairly steeply on both sides. In front of them was a level area roughly rectangular in shape, on which could be made out the ground plan of a temple, grass-grown bosses marking portals and colonnades, and the remains of slender pillars scattered here and there.
Mooncranker's Gift Page 23
