Air and Fire (28 page)

It was during one such moment that she heard a cry. She could not be sure, but she thought it had come from outside, somewhere below. She waited for the ship to rise, and heard the cry again. And then, peering through the glass, she could see what it was. The figure of a man lashed to the railings, not twelve feet from the bows. The ocean curled over him and slammed across the foredeck, but he would always appear again, head tipped skywards, white foam rushing past his ankles. Each time they pitched down the steep slope of a wave, he threw his head back and she heard him laugh. Yes, she was sure that he was laughing.

‘The damn fool,' the Captain was muttering behind her. ‘I'll have his hide for this.'

The Captain did not warrant her attention; she was too preoccupied with the man on deck below. It was a passion similar to hers, a passion she had always been taught to conceal, to deny. Men buried what was precious in themselves and thought that women should do the same. Sometimes, when Théo made love to her, she had to take the sheets between her teeth so that she would not cry out. What Théo felt was muffled, sheathed, contained. She could only sense it, as if through many layers of rock. You would need dynamite to get to it. While hers rose up in seconds. Crackled on the surface of her skin and lifted every hair.
And afterwards sank down, beat slowly through her womb, the wings of a swan at dusk.

The next morning, when the storm had settled, she sat in her cabin, swathed in blankets against the cold, and painted the man with the green waves curling heavily above him.

Three weeks later, in a hotel in Santiago, Théo picked up her sketchbook and leafed through the pages. The contents were probably much as he had expected – flowers, figures, scenery; he commented politely on several of her efforts. Then he saw the picture of the man lashed to the railings and paused, as she had known he would. He asked her how she had come to choose the subject.

‘It was inspired by the storm.'

‘Is he being punished?'

‘No,' she said, ‘he's enjoying himself.'

And Théo had laughed, thinking that she was teasing him.

Their minds were engaged on two different levels. There was only, at times, the habit of a link between the two. In company, of course. In public. The part of him that had understood her had shrunk, and was on the point, she felt, of vanishing altogether.

Some stones rattled down on to the track behind her. She turned to see Montoya standing ten yards away.

‘Captain,' she said, ‘you startled me.'

His eyes had a flatness about them, a dead quality, like the ocean on a humid day, like oysters. His face hung mournfully about the collar of his scarlet tunic. ‘Did you read my letter?'

She said that she had.

‘Well?' he said.

‘Well, what?'

‘Will you come away with me?'

She did not answer.

‘My uncle has a ranch in Venezuela.'

She suppressed a smile and turned away from him.

‘Don't laugh at me. I mean it.' He stood beside her now. He had taken her arm.

‘I'm sorry, Captain. You don't understand.'

‘Come away with me,' he begged her, ‘please.'

‘You seem to have overlooked one rather important fact,' she said.

‘What's that?'

‘I'm married.'

He saw no obstacle. ‘Leave him.'

‘For you?' She had to laugh.

‘Leave him.' He was staring down at her. ‘We could go now. My carriage is waiting behind the rocks.'

She drew back, and he was left with one hand outstretched, like someone offering assistance. She walked away from him. The layer of cinders sprinkled across the slope of the mountain had deepened in colour. It could have been a field of crushed plums.

When she had moved some distance up the hill she turned to look at him again. She saw that he had drawn a gun. It was not aimed at her. He held it slackly, the muzzle pointing out across the railway line.

‘What's that for?' she said.

He did not reply.

She could not believe the feeling of calmness that had flooded through her at the sight of the gun, nor could she make the slightest sense of it.

‘Are you going to shoot me?' she said.

His mouth opened, as if he were about to speak, but then it closed again. He turned on his heel. She stood still, watched him go. It was not long before he had vanished round a bend in the track.

There was a shot. The echo crackled across the loose stones of the mountainside. She picked up her skirts and ran back down the hill.

His horse sprawled in a pool of blood, its hindquarters flickering. It had been harnessed to the carriage as usual. When the horse fell, the carriage had toppled; it lay on its side, one wheel ticking as it revolved. Montoya stood over the animal, the gun still in his hand. The blood expanded in the dust. It moved less like something liquid than like something solid that had melted. It moved, she thought, like lava. She could already hear the flies gathering.

He spoke without looking at her.

‘Did you think it was me?'

She turned her face away from him, as if from an insult, and began to walk back down the hill, towards the town.

He shouted after her. ‘Would you have cared?'

When she opened the screen door she was surprised to see Théo standing in the corridor. He was dressed in his formal evening clothes. His white tie hung, as yet unfastened, round his neck. His lips were pressed together in such a way that they had almost disappeared.

‘Are you going out?' she asked him.

‘We're due at the de Romblays' house in five minutes.' It had taken all his strength to keep his voice level.

‘The de Romblays' house?'

‘For dinner.'

Of course. It was Friday night. A tradition had been established on the Mesa del Norte: the French would gather at the Director's house and pore over the events of the preceding week. Recently Suzanne had begun to think that she was in danger of becoming an item on the agenda.

‘I forgot,' she said.

His eyes moved past her face, moved downwards. ‘Look at you.'

She had ripped her skirts on a cactus as she ran down the hill. The toes of her glazed kid boots were scuffed and dusty.

‘Where have you been?'

‘I was looking for Monsieur Pharaoh.' It was the only piece of recent truth that she could think of using.

‘He's gone.'

This jolted her. The promptness, the certainty, of his response. She stared at him so hard that he felt compelled to speak again.

‘He's left town.'

She asked him how he knew.

‘I went to see him.' Turning away from her, he faced the mirror on the wall. He began to fasten his tie.

‘You went to see him?' she said. ‘Why?'

He would not answer. His chin lifted, the knot tightened around his neck. The quick, sure movements of his fingers seemed calculated to provoke her.

‘He's no friend of yours,' she said. ‘In fact you hardly know him. Why would you go and see him?'

Still he would not speak. And, as she stared at him, she thought she understood. She suspected a conspiracy to quell her, to tether her, to bring her to heel, with Madame de Romblay as the architect and Théo as the engineer. It could only be done by enforcing her isolation, by removing her one true friend. They had brought some pressure to bear on the American. They had used his goodness, his nobility, against her. She looked into her husband's face and saw no anger there. No, all that righteous anger had been chased away. Now there was only the refusal to acknowledge guilt.

She took the mirror off the wall and let it fall from her hands. It split into three almost equal pieces, as if it were something to be shared. Then
she ran past him, along the corridor and up the stairs. She flung herself on to the bed.

‘Suzanne?' She heard his voice in the hallway below. ‘Suzanne?' The voice had moved closer. ‘What about dinner?'

‘I'm not coming.'

Since the incident with the napkin, she had divided the community. The men, with the exception of François Pineau, treated her much the same; they put it down to her comparative youth, high spirits, one too many glasses of champagne. But the women, less softened by illusion, less gullible, had not forgiven her. She could already see Madame de Romblay rising from her brocade divan and moving forwards to greet her, to gloat over her, to condemn. She could not face it. The sight of that woman's plunging breasts would bring the bile flooding up into her mouth.

‘But – '

‘Tell them I'm sick. Make something up.'

Her tears scalded her cheeks. She knew that he would stand in the doorway with a puzzled, faintly indignant, air. She knew he would not comfort her.

When her crying had died down and she could listen to the house again, there was no sound. He had gone.

She woke up in her clothes and called his name. There was no reply. Moonlight showed her fragments of the room: the doorhandle, a mirror, one edge of the water jug. The house had the silence of a landscape buried under snow.

She raised herself on one elbow. The moon lay on its side, the part in darkness visible, charcoal against the black night sky. She could not tell how late it was. A clock chimed in the parlour. Twice, for the half-hour. Half-hours always sounded lonely somehow. They were the furthest it was possible to be from something that was definite. Not linked to any hour of the day or night. Uncertain, incomplete. Marooned in time.

She lay back on her pillows, one arm behind her head, her left foot fitting against the muscle of her right calf. Her eyes travelled up the pale curving folds of the mosquito-net and on up the string to the brass hook, visible only as a glint, embedded in the ceiling. She imagined Théo comfortable. Sitting on the de Romblays' veranda with a glass of Sauterne and a lit cigar. She watched smoke flurry off the tip. He would also be looking at the moon. She could almost hear his voice – the measured pronouncements, solid sounds. He would be home soon,
in his own good time. She was glad that she knew where he was, and could imagine him. She turned to face the wall and fell asleep again.

When she woke, he was sitting on the bed. The room seemed darker now. He had extinguished all the lamps in the house, and the moon had fallen in the sky.

‘Théo?'

‘Yes.'

He was still angry. She could tell from that one word, the way he had snapped it off like a piece of rotten wood.

‘I'm sorry about earlier. I was upset.'

He said nothing. He just sat against what little light there was, his head and shoulders framed by the window, smelling, as she had thought he would, of sweet wine and cigar smoke.

She shifted in the bed. ‘Don't hate me.'

Her words hung in the heavy air like a church bell at a funeral. The way that tolling lingered. You could never quite identify the point at which it stopped being heard and started being imagined. It occurred to her that falling out of love would be like that. It also occurred to her that she had lived much of her life in fear of that uncertainty, that moment of transition, that imperceptible withdrawal. He had not noticed her at first. He had not even seen her. Sometimes she had such doubts. She feared that she might become invisible again, that he might leave. Was that why she had insisted on coming with him? Because she felt she could not risk his absence? Absence made the heart grow colder. Absence made you disappear.

‘Théo,' she said, ‘please forgive me.'

‘Why is it with you that there is always something to forgive?'

He was holding on to his anger; he would not let it go. There was no need for error, no excuse for it. Behaviour should be accurate to within one-tenth of a millimetre. Perfection was attainable. He still had not turned round, or even moved.

She sighed. ‘I don't know.'

She had gone about this the wrong way. He hated any form of pleading or apology; they only compounded the offence. At last she saw that penitence would get her nowhere.

He rose suddenly, moved towards the door.

‘Where are you going?' she asked him.

‘I'm not tired.'

She waited until he had left the room and then lay down. One cord of orange light unravelled against the wall. The conveyor belt must have
started up. Yes, she could hear it: the distant grinding and clanking as bins of coarse ore were borne towards the crushers. What was valuable would soon be taken out. The rest would be drained off and dumped.

Her eyes drew back into the room. A china jug for water, a cake of soap, a chair. In the darkness they looked worthy of her trust, almost noble in their simplicity.

She felt a clenching inside her. A tightening, a shrinking. Like the place where a rope is tied, the place they call a knot. She had said too much to him; she had gone too far. He must have something to answer for, surely. He could have felt the need to apologise, to explain himself, to ask forgiveness. Why did the burden always seem to fall on her?

She thought she might be blind. All she could see was dazzle, one solid sheet of it. Like being too close to the doctor's waistcoat. She lifted her head. It was the sunlight beating through the window, skidding along the floor, right into her just-opened eyes. Her own house then. Upstairs, presumably. And Imelda kneeling beside her, feet tucked beneath her dress. A look on her face that you saw in churches; her concern, which must have spread over several hours, had assumed the aspect of a trance. She could smell the girl's spicy skin.

‘Are you sick, Madame?'

‘No, I was just resting.' She wanted to smile, but her face resisted. The foolishness of being found, like an animal, on the floor. She sat upright, leaned against the wall. ‘Is Monsieur Valence still here?'

‘He's downstairs, Madame, He's having breakfast.'

A smooth crimson groove encircled half her wrist where a bracelet had bitten into her. She must have been sleeping on her hand.

‘Do you need anything, Madame?'