Elementals

by A. S. Byatt

  On the top floor of the Carré d’Art, behind the stair, is a balcony. You can step out there, and suddenly there is no smoky glass between you and the heat and the light, you can look over the city, the intricate circling of red-tiled roofs, like flattish cones. You can see the Tour Magne on the skyline. Patricia went out. The hot air was as solid as the glass. You could touch it with your finger. She floated over to the balustrade, and looked out and down at Nîmes. She leaned back in a corner, she leaned back, and stared at the dark bright blue. She was light, she was insubstantial, in her shadowy lavender dress. She leaned out. Out. The heat fizzed in her eyes and ears. Her feet left the ground, she balanced, she leaned. A hand took her wrist and dragged. Nils Isaksen grasped her other wrist for good measure. His face loomed craggy in the shadow of his Van Gogh hat. It was a very angry face. His feet were planted like lead and his knees pressed against hers as he dragged her back into the box of the balcony.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘How can I?’

  ‘Very easily. Go away.’

  ‘I think not. Not yet.’

  They walked in hostile silence out of the gallery and faced each other in the hot sun on its steps.

  ‘Please,’ said Patricia, English and icy, ‘just leave me alone.’

  ‘I think I should – ’

  ‘I am going to have to leave this town because of you. Because of your interference in my life.’

  ‘Because of my interference in your death,’ said Nils Isaksen.

  Patricia began to walk away, brisk and furious. She did not look behind to see what he was doing or not doing. In the Place d’Assas there is no shade. There are many modern fountains, carved in the gold stone – a huge head spewing clear water into a long narrow channel, a naked pair of youth and maiden, in bronze, catching water from a columnar structure in a pale aquamarine circular pool. Patricia came to the middle of the square and began to shake. She stumbled towards the pale blue under the dark bright sky and fell on her face towards the water, like a desert traveller in a film. Her stomach heaved. The sun clanged in the sky like a gong. Tears squeezed between her hot lids. She fell forwards to drown in two inches of warm water. And the large bony fingers of Nils Isaksen gripped again, pulling her back by her shoulders. Between the sun and her eyes he was no more than a black space, a shadow carved with spikes. He pulled her to her feet and she fell into his arms, gulping and staggering. He put his arms round her for a moment, and then transferred the Van Gogh hat from his white curls to her bronze cap. She clutched him.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Out of the sun.’

  They sat together in her bedroom, Patricia in the chintz chair, Nils Isaksen gawky on the pretty desk chair. The air-conditioning groaned. It was only the second time he had been in her room. He wiped her face with a cold flannel, and poured her a glass of water from the minibar. He said:

  ‘This cannot go on.’

  ‘It is not what you think.’

  ‘I will tell you a story. In Norwegian it is called Følgesvennen. In French it is Le Compagnon. The Companion? It is about a young man, who dreams of a beautiful princess and when he wakes, sells all he has and sets out in search of her. And when he has walked far, and farther than far, for months, in the deep winter, he comes to a church. And outside the church is a block of ice. And in the ice is a dead man, standing upright. And when the priest comes out of the church, the young man asks him what the man is doing in the ice. And the priest replies that he is a great sinner who has been put to death, and stands there to be spat at. And it would take more money than anyone is prepared to spend on such a sinner to lay him in the ground. So he just stands there.

  ‘When I think of you, walking up and down in the heat with no hat,’ said Nils Isaksen, ‘I think of the block of ice.’

  ‘How does it go on?’

  ‘Oh, the young man asks what the dead man’s sin was. He was a butler, says the priest, who watered the wine. Not so terrible, says the young man and gives the remains of his savings for the dead man to be chipped out of the ice and decently buried. So then he has nothing and goes on his way. And that night a man comes to him, and proposes to be his servant, and the young man says he has nothing left to pay a servant. So the other says he will come for fellowship. So he comes, as a companion. And they have many adventures. They meet three old women – troll women – in three caves. Each hag invites the young man to sit in a stone chair. Each time the Companion insists that the old woman herself sits there, and she cannot refuse, and the chairs do their work, and seize them, and will not let them go. And from each old hag the Companion takes a treasure in return for the promise of her release – a sword, and a thread, and a magic hat of invisibility. But then he leaves them sitting there and breaks the bargain. I have observed,’ said Nils Isaksen, ‘that Norwegian heroes are particularly given to bargain-breaking. They make compacts with trolls, and think nothing of cheating.’

  ‘It is not what you think,’ said Patricia.

  ‘What is not what I think?’

  ‘The body in the ice. I am not the dead man. I left him.’

  She told Nils Isaksen then, more or less, the story of the day in the Narrow House, and of Tony’s fall, and of how she had left her life behind and come to Nîmes.

  ‘So you see,’ she finished. ‘You buried your wife, under that stone, and I – I walked away. I did not see why I should not walk away.’

  There was a long silence. Patricia was filled with dread, that was the word, by the uncanny aptness of the man in the ice. She told Nils Isaksen how she had fled; she expected, perhaps hoped for, judgement. But he appeared to be struck dumb by her story.

  ‘I did not think I did wrong,’ she said. ‘I loved him, and he died, and that was an end. Enough of an end. But it feels wrong, terribly wrong. Not to the children, which is what you might think, leaving them to – look after – things. But to him. I left him.’

  Nils sat looking out of the window.

  ‘What happened, in the rest of the story?’

  ‘The princess was found. In one of those castles with a fence where the skulls of past suitors are on every post. She set the young man three tasks – things to keep safe overnight, a pair of gold scissors, a ball of gold thread – which she stole back. She was bewitched, she was the lover of a troll to whom she flew every night on the back of a ram. But the Companion made himself invisible, and followed, and seized the scissors and thread, and returned them, so in the morning the boy triumphed after all. So then she said, bring me tomorrow what I am thinking of at this moment. And he said, how can I know that? And he despaired. But the Companion followed again, he followed again, and heard her tell the ugly troll, it was his beloved head she was thinking of. So of course, the Companion decapitated the troll with the magic sword, and brought back his head. And the next day, the boy threw it down before her. And then she had to marry him. And then the spell had to be broken, with alternate baths in milk and in ashes, I remember, certainly with bathing her skin. And then she became his good wife. And the Companion went away, and after five years returned to claim his reward. So the young king gave him half of everything he had. And the Companion said, there is one thing more, born since I left. And the young king and queen brought out their son, and the young king raised his sword to divide the boy, as justice required. And the Companion held back his hand, and said, no, you owe me nothing, for I am the spirit of that man who was frozen in the block of ice. And now I may go to my rest in peace. It is a dark story, Mrs Nimmo.’

  ‘Not altogether.’

  ‘You are right, Mrs Nimmo. You have done wrong. To the living, and to the dead. It can be set right, I think. You can return and set it right.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Patricia gravely. And kissed his cool, bony cheek.

  She did not sleep, that night, but lay awake, still and calm, visited by hypnagogic moons and stars and waves lapping on seashores, or skies lit with flaring curtains of blue and crimson light, as though she had stepped, or fallen, into some wo
rld of mythical absolutes. When she came down in the morning, Nils Isaksen was nowhere to be seen. The hotel lobby and dining-room were full of people and life. It was the time of the corrida, and the matadors and their retinues were moving into the Impérator Concorde. Two or three photographers lounged against pillars. Dark Spanish faces nodded ceremoniously to each other, as bundles of bright cloth and weapons went into the gilded lift-cage. Patricia paid them little attention. She went out and walked through the morning, fluid and automatic, from fountain to fountain, crocodile to clocktower, Memnon’s head to the naïf bronze lovers. She avoided the Arènes, as usual. In the evening the town was packed with crowds of festive Nîmois; there were bursts of music and fireworks. Patricia avoided it all. She was not in that world. She looked in the restaurant and the garden for Nils Isaksen, and he was nowhere to be seen. On the first day she thought easily that she could wait – time had become a coloured cave of light in which planets rolled like plates, and fish leaped, and toothed reptiles floated and paddled. On the second day she thought once or twice that she saw him at street-corners, but it was always other tall men in straw hats or linen jackets. She tried sitting in the garden, but that too was full of aficionados, drinking cocktails, discussing faenas, moving naked bronzed shoulders gracefully under the great linen parasols. On the second evening she saw Nils Isaksen, but he did not see her. He was quarrelling with the receptionist. It might have been the kind of quarrel guests have, when they have been politely requested to pay bills they cannot pay. The old Patricia, sharp as a needle, would have picked up a clue from an intonation, or a gesture. The new one, floating largely in some other dimension, registered the quarrelling with difficulty, and was about to approach Nils, to whom she needed to speak, to whom she now needed very much to speak, when she registered dimly that he was drunk. His arms and legs and head were not working together, his voice was loud and uncontrolled, his face was hot. She backed away. She went up in the lift, and lay on the bed. She ordered supper through room service, and it took a long time to come, because of the eddying tauromanic crowds in the body of the hotel. On the third evening of the corrida she made her way past the Bar Hemingway to see whether Nils was on the terrace, or alternatively whether there was a quiet table where she could sit and watch the fountain. The fountain had been turned up, perhaps in honour of the matadors. What used to be a bubbling aquamarine cube of suspended liquid was now a high spraying column, flailing a little in the air, like a turning horsetail, throwing bright droplets and white shoots of wet over the grass. At the far end of the terrace, she saw, through the real glass wall of the Bar Hemingway and the molten glass cocoon of her own consciousness, a struggle round one of the dinner tables. She could hear shouting, but no words. There was a group, like Laocoön and the serpents, one figure rising above a mass, holding above his head what seemed to be a silver buckler, and a flashing bottle. It was Nils Isaksen, his blue-green jacket stained with what could have been blood, or could have been red wine, his hair dishevelled and his mouth open in a roar, fighting off a cohort of white-aproned waiters led by the maître d’hôtel in his uniform. One or two dark Spaniards stood close, involved but not active. The mass of men swayed this way and that; the plume of water swayed this way and that in the dark garden; Nils Isaksen felled the maître d’hôtel with what Patricia could now clearly see to be a heavy silver dishcover, and was himself brought down, more or less pinioned with napkins and tablecloths, and half-led, half-carried, still struggling, into the hotel. Patricia turned to the barman, and ordered an eau-de-vie framboise, on ice. She sat down, inside the glass wall, and stared at the cubes of ice. The barman was explaining the disturbance to a young couple.

  ‘Nothing serious. No, no. He criticised the spectacle. Not a wise thing to do in Nîmes, certainly not during the fte.

  ‘What displeased him?’ asked the young husband, laughing, his arm round his wife’s silky brown shoulder. ‘The quality of the bulls, or the art of the torero?’

  ‘The mise à mort,’ said the barman. ‘He comes out of the North, somewhere. They don’t understand the death of the bulls.’

  The young couple laughed again, easily.

  ‘The culture is different in the Mediterranean,’ said the barman. He saw Patricia listening, and changed the subject, easily, deftly, to the beauty of the night, the brilliance of the moon, the prevalence of shooting stars in this season.

  Patricia made no attempt to find out what had happened to Nils Isaksen. She did not see him again until the Fiesta was over, and the toreadors had ceremoniously driven away in their polished old limousines, with their acolytes, their strapped trunks, their bright capes and swords.

  When she saw him it was in the street, in the Rue de l’Aspic. He was looking into a shop window, his hat pushed forward over his knobbed brow, his skin spangled with unshaven gold bristles. Before she reached him, he loped away, ungainly and hurried. She followed. She followed even when he crossed to the entrance of the Arènes, bought a ticket, and went in. She waited a little, and then bought a ticket herself, and stepped into the circle.

  The Arènes is not a labyrinth. It is an orderly structure of tunnels, colonnades, staircases, rising, diminishing rings of stone seats, open to the sky. At first, having gone in, Patricia walked round in the cavernous arched dark of the ground-level circuit. It smelled of musty stone, and stale urine, the urine of frightened beasts, partly masked with eau de Javel. The silence in it is numb and dumb. There were Coca-Cola machines and bins of empty champagne bottles. She made one and a half circuits in the gloom and then plunged at random under an archway and up a stair, coming out suddenly perhaps four tiers up from the sanded circular arena, with its intricate raked pattern, its red-painted wooden screens behind which men sprang or scrambled out of the way of the plunging horns. The bottom tier was very close to the ground. She had read in the guidebook that it was not thought that there had been wild-beast fighting, because the barrier was too low for safety. Only men ingeniously slaughtering men, and men ingeniously, elegantly, dancing the great beasts on their delicate hoofs, to standstill, shuddering, and the knife. Over all those centuries, people had come there to sit together, festive, and watch death.

  She found it hard to see, in the light. She looked around and could see neither Nils Isaksen nor anyone else. She ducked back under her archway, made another segmented progress, climbed another stone stair, reached an upper open gallery and walked round. From the height of the heavy stone cylinder she looked down, and saw a straw hat, and a patch of innocent Norse blue-green, across the great space of the circle. So she went on, round and down, and sat on the warm stone, shaped roughly to hold her, beside him. The silence was at the same time the stony silence of monuments and the airy hot silence of midday in open spaces. It was hot, very hot, the stone was hot to touch. Below, the patterns in the swept sand were pretty and sinister. She sat still for a time, and he sat, his head in his hands, and did not move. Black birds wheeled over, high up, in their own circles.

  ‘Nils.’

  ‘I have nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Are you in trouble?’

  ‘Why should you think I am in trouble? Yes, I am in trouble. Now leave me alone, please, Mrs Nimmo.’

  ‘I saw you fighting.’

  ‘I was berserk.’ With a certain gloomy self-approbation.

  ‘I saw. Why?’

  ‘Because of what you told me. And because I came here, to see the bull-fighting.’

  Patricia was silent, not understanding. She stared round the white rim of the circle. He said, into his hands, ‘I thought it would be a mystery. And it was simply disgusting.’

  ‘I could have told you that, without needing to come,’ she said, taut and English.

  He said something in Norwegian.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘ “Jeg er redd jeg var død longe førenn jeg døde.” I was a dead man long before I died. Peer Gynt. The great liar. The great Norwegian folk-hero. A tissue of lies and old tales and boasting. I lied to you, M
rs Nimmo. You did not lie to me, and in the end you told me – what you told me. And I took it upon myself to be judge and confessor. But my lies are worse. What I have done is much worse.’

  ‘I should like to know,’ said Patricia, although mostly she did not want to know, and feared vaguely that the dead wife had been killed, that she was to be forced to hear something unspeakable.

  ‘I am not an ethnologist, Mrs Nimmo. I am, or was, a junior schoolteacher. I don’t know archaeology. I never married. My wife is a lie, and the labradorite stone is a lie. All lies.’

  ‘And the town with the one tree?’

  ‘That is true. I lived there. I lived there with my mother and my aunt, and taught school, until I had to give up. Three years ago, my mother died. She was eighty-six. I inherited the house, and her savings.’

  Patricia waited. The black birds circled.

  ‘She had not known who I was for five years. I did everything. I washed her. I clothed her. My aunt sat and smiled and sang. Sometimes she cried. Then she too – deteriorated. I had to give up my teaching because I had two old women in wheelchairs in one house, nodding and babbling, and shouting too, they could get very angry, they got very angry with each other . . . Then my mother died. My aunt and I buried my mother in the churchyard. The labradorite stone is a story I told myself, when I found a little piece in a shop, and it reminded me of the North.’

  ‘And then your aunt died?’

  ‘No. Then, Mrs Nimmo, I packed suitcases, and sold the house, and wheeled my aunt on to the train and went south to Oslo. And from there I took her to Stockholm. There is a famous clinic there, a neurological clinic. I took her in there, Mrs Nimmo. I had not made any appointment. We were not particularly remarkable. The clinic was full of people like us. We met nurses in the corridors, and my aunt raised her hand to them, like a queen, and they smiled. I walked up and down, quite quickly, looking for a long line of people. There was one outside the pharmacy, everyone waits there. I put my aunt in her chair, in this queue, in the hospital corridor. She was smiling at everyone, she usually did, she was a nicer woman than my mother. Then I left, Mrs Nimmo. I had premeditated my act like a criminal. There is nothing in my aunt’s clothing, or her handbag, to say who she is, or that she came from the North. Then I came here. By hazard, as you did, as you told me you did. I got on trains and travelled south. Europe is one, now, my movements were unremarkable. I had all my money with me. It was very premeditated, Mrs Nimmo.’