Elementals (3 page)

‘You have a great grief, I see.’

‘My – someone – is dead.’

‘Ah. I am sorry.’

She could think of no answer. She put her head back and closed her eyes. She could feel him standing at a respectful distance, watching her until the waiter knocked. He opened the door, and left with the waiter. She gulped the cognac, shuddering, and went to bed.

When she passed him at breakfast the next day, she nodded silently, acknowledging him. They did not speak, and she thought she was pleased. Over dinner that night, they smiled coolly again, from opposite ends of the terrace, inexpressive northerners. She was surprised therefore, at the end of the meal, to find him bending over her table. He wondered, he said, if she would take a
digestif
with him, in the bar. He did not mean to take up much of her time. She thought of saying no. There was an awkwardness in his acknowledgement that she might not want to speak to him. She said yes, because she owed him something for his kindness, and because there was no warmth, no pressure, in his invitation. The Bar Hemingway is a glass box, which juts from the terrace into the garden. It is full of warm, deep yellow light. On the walls are photographs of the matadors who have slept in the hotel, who have put on their embroidered waistcoats, their sculpted breeches, their long sashes, in its shuttered rooms, and gone out to dance their absurd deathly dance with cloak and sword.

They sat, side by side, looking out at the dancing blue cube of water in the dark garden. He ordered eau-de-vie Mirabelle, with ice, and she ordered the same, indifferent. He said:

‘My name is Nils Isaksen. I am from Norway.’

‘My name is Patricia Nimmo. I am English.’

The drinks arrived, sweet, white, glistening liquid over shattered fragments of ice. The taste was fire and air, a touch of heat, an after-space of emptiness. And the mere ghost of a fruit. She would have liked to say something banal, to keep communication to a safe minimum, and could think of nothing at all.

‘I am here to write a book. I am an ethnologist. I am studying the relations between certain Norse beliefs and customs, and those in the South.’

It was a prepared little speech. He raised his glass to her. She said:

‘I am on holiday.’

‘I have never been able to spend an extended time in the South. It was always my dream. I, too, have lost someone, Mrs Nimmo. My wife died, after a long illness, a very long illness. I find myself – detached – and – and – well off, you would say? I wanted no longer to see Tromsø. So I work here.’

‘I am sorry. About your wife. I have just lost my husband.’

‘And you do not wish to speak of this. I understand. I do not intend to speak of Liv. Do you find much to interest you in Nîmes, Mrs Nimmo?’

‘I somehow haven’t done the things one should do. I haven’t walked in the Jardin de la Fontaine. I haven’t been into the Maison Carrée, or the Carré d’Art.’

‘Or the Arènes?’

‘Or the Arènes. I find that rather horrifying. I don’t like the idea of it.’

‘I don’t like it either. But I go there, often. I sit there, in the sun, and think. It is a good place to think, for a man from the north who is starved of sun. The sun pours into it, like a bowl.’

‘I still don’t think I’ll go. I find all this – ’ she gestured at the photographs of bulls, matadors, Hemingway and Picasso – ‘simply unpleasant. The English do.’

‘You are temperate people. I, too, find it unpleasant. But it needs to be understood, I find. Why does an austere Protestant city go mad every year, for blood and death and ritual?’

He bent his pale head towards her. His pale blue eyes shone. His bony white hands were still on the table, on each side of his ice-misted glass. She said:

‘I hope you do come to understand it. I shan’t try.’

After this they had several more brief drinks together, in the evenings, which were getting hotter, and heavier. Patricia did not think she liked Nils Isaksen, and also felt that this simply did not matter. The nerve-endings with which she had once felt out the shape of other people’s feelings were severed or numbed. She got no further than acknowledging to herself that he was in some way a driven man. His reading and his writing were extravagant, his concentration theatrical, his covering of the paper – wrong somehow, too much, or was it that she felt that any effort, any energy, was too much? The pleasure was going out of
A la recherche
, though she persisted, and her French improved. They talked about Nîmes. He told her things she hadn’t wanted to know, hadn’t been at all anxious about, which nevertheless changed her ideas. He told her that the city and the water of the fountain, Fons Nemausis, were one single thing; that this closed, walled collection of golden houses with red-tiled roofs in a dustbowl in the
garrigue
had been built because of the presence of the powerful source. That the god of the town, Nemausus, was the god of the source. That under and beyond it were gulfs, caverns, galleries of water in the hill. That there had been a nunnery on the hill above the fountain, around the temple of Diana, from the year 1000 to the Renaissance, whose abbesses had claimed ownership of the water. He spoke of excavations, of pagan antiquities, of religious wars of resistance to Simon de Montfort, to Louis XIV, to the Germans. He spoke of the guillotine in the Revolution, and the gibbet in the Second World War. Patricia listened, and then went shopping, or wandering. She thought, if he talked much more, or overstepped some boundary, she would have to move on. But she did not know where she would go. The weather was getting hotter. The weather-map on the television in her room showed that Nîmes was almost invariably the hottest city in France, uncooled by coastal breezes, or mountain winds, a city on a plain, absorbing heat and light. She took longer walks, for variation. She went into the Jardin de la Fontaine in the midday heat, stared into the green troubled depths, climbed the unshaded, formal staircase with its balustrades, observed a crocodile made of bronze-leaved plants in a bed of rose and white flowers, curving its tail over its back, yawning vegetably, in the dancing bright air. Nils Isaksen told her she shouldn’t go out without a hat. She wanted to reply that she didn’t care. She said ‘I know’ but did not buy a hat. Let it bake her brain, something said.

One evening Nils Isaksen broke his cautious bounds. Patricia was very tired. She had taken three eaux-de-vie Mirabelle, instead of one, and saw the cedars shifting across the too spangling stars.

‘I should be happy,’ said Nils Isaksen, ‘if you would come with me to the ethnological museum. I should like to show you . . . ’

‘Oh, no.’

‘I should like to show you the tombstones of the gladiators. So young. We can read the life of a city, in its monuments – ’

‘No, no – ’

‘Forgive me, I think you should make some change. I am impertinent. When I first lost Liv, I wished the whole world to be dead, too. Frozen stiff, I wished everything to be. But I exist. And you, forgive me, you exist.’

‘I don’t need company, Mr Isaksen. I don’t need to be – entertained. I have – I have things to do.’

Before his intervention, something had been going on, in the silence. He had spoiled it. She stared angrily at him.

‘Forget I spoke, please. I am in need of speech, from time to time, but that is nothing to do with you, as I can understand.’

The dreadful thing was that her refusal had made more of an event, had brought them closer together.

The next day she decided, as she walked along the Boulevard Victor-Hugo, that she would certainly leave Nîmes. She kept in the shelter of the plane trees, like a southerner. She decided that, since she was leaving, she would do the city the courtesy of going to the Maison Carrée. Ezra Pound had said it was a structure of ideal beauty. She had read the guidebook. It was made of the local
pierre de Lens
, shining white when quarried in the
garrigue
, turning golden with time and sunlight. It was tall, high on a pedestal, with Corinthian columns ornamented with acanthus leaves, and a frieze of fruits and heads of bulls or lions. It had been the centre of the Roman forum, part of a Franciscan monastery, owned and embellished and pierced by Visigoths, Moors and monks. Staircases had been raised and razed round it. In 1576 the Duchess of Uzès had decided to transform it into a mausoleum for her dead husband, but the City Fathers had resisted. It had been a place of sacrifice according to Nils Isaksen, who had a Viking bloodthirstiness under his bloodless skin.

She climbed the high steps of the portico, and looked out between the columns at the human space around the ancient house. She could see the discreet, vanishing gleam of the Carré d’Art, across the
place
. The guidebook told her that the square house was now a museum for the city’s archaeology, the endlessly unearthed Pans and nymphs, dancers and gladiators. But the guidebook was out of date. There was nothing there but red ochre paint, and a few informative placards. What do you do in a dark red space, full of stony art? Patricia walked along, around, and across. She remembered wondering when it made sense to stop looking – at a pictured dandelion, a windbreak, a frozen avalanche. She went out of the Maison Carrée in a dreamy rush, across the portico and down the steps. Between the
place
and the narrow maze of little streets runs a cobbled lane, along which cars and motorcycles run, occasionally and unexpectedly. The heat and the light dazzled her. She blinked at the dark, bright blue, at the burning white. She narrowed her eyes, and plunged forward. Several things happened. A screaming – brakes and a bystander – a grip like a claw on her wrist, twisting and dragging. She was on her knees in front of the square house, looking up at the violet form of Nils Isaksen’s face above her, framed by his white-gold curls, and the spiky rim of his hat. Somewhere beyond, a dark driver, with the Nîmois nose, was making a speech of mingled reproach and regret.

‘You cannot make him an accomplice – that is to say, responsible –’ said Nils.

‘Don’t be absurd. I was dazzled.’

‘You looked neither to right nor to left. I saw. You threw yourself under his wheels.’

‘I did not. I could not see. The sun dazzled me, after the dark.’

‘I saw you. You threw yourself.’

‘And how did you come to be there?’ asked Patricia, one human being to another. She stood up, wiping dust and blood from her knees and the palms of her hands like a schoolgirl. She bowed to the driver, and made a gesture of abasement with her head and arms. ‘How?’ she said, to Nils Isaksen.

‘I was passing by. I thought I would ask you to have lunch with me. I stepped forward to do that, and you plunged. So I was able to take hold.’

‘Thank you.’

They ate lunch under an ivory-coloured parasol, next to the fountain with the unmoving energetic crocodile. Patricia had quails’ eggs in aspic, pale little spheres in translucent coffin-shapes of jelly, flecked with sprigs of herbs. Her palms and her knees were stinging as they had not stung since school playgrounds. The sunlight packed down, dense and brilliant. The canvas was not enough protection. Sweat ran along her upper lip, between her breasts, in the crook of her elbow. Nils Isaksen had an angry red line between his hair and his shirt collar. Blood pulsed beside his Adam’s apple, ruddy where it should have been pale. He asked if she liked her aspic. He had chosen
barquettes
of
brandade de morue
. A northern fish, he said, the codfish. It seemed illicit and unnatural, made into a paste, would she say? – a purée? – with olive oil. And garlic. Excuse me, he said, you have dust on your cheeks, from your fall. May I? He touched her cheekbone with his napkin. All the same, he said, you took a plunge. I will say no more. But I was watching. You launched yourself, so to speak, from the plinth of the Maison Carrée. I would like to be able to help.

‘Help,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in help. I believe . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I believe in indifference,’ said Patricia Nimmo. ‘The flow of things. Anything. One thing, then another thing. Crocodile fountains. Dust. Sun. Eggs in aspic. I’m talking nonsense. The sun’s moved. It’s in my eyes.’

‘We could change chairs. I have dark glasses. I have a hat. Please – ’

They stood up. They changed places. Nils Isaksen said:

‘I understand you. You will think I don’t, but I think I do. To me indifference is a temptation, fatally easy. You will say that he is insensitive, he has understood
nothing
, he is a fool, everybody believes indifference is bad, but I, Patricia Nimmo, have secret wisdom, I know there is good in it. That is what you think, don’t you? Whereas, Mrs Nimmo, I dare to offend you by saying I have been there, I have tried indifference, it is a good station for changing trains, then it becomes – cement. Cement. You did not launch yourself into the path of that Corvette out of indifference.’

‘Out of the purest indifference. If it was a launch, it was out of indifference.’

‘We are in deep.’

‘Talking does no good.’

‘I should like to recommend curiosity. You must take an interest. Curiosity and indifference, Mrs Nimmo, are opposites, you will say. But not truly. For both are indiscriminate. You may sit there, glass-eyed while things slip past, what did you say, eggs in aspic, crocodile fountains, the stones of this city. Or you may look with curiosity, and live. I am trying to learn this city. It is not a trivial undertaking. I am learning these stones. You are right, in part, I believe it is a matter of indifference what you learn – or rather, it is a matter of blind fate, which has a creepy way of looking like destiny. But you must be curious, you must take an interest. This is human.’

The truth was, Patricia thought, with a trace of her old wit, he looked dreadfully inhuman as he said this, staring like a gargoyle, his pale skin flaking in patches, his yellow-white curls sweat-streaked, his lips stretched with evangelical fervour. He did not create curiosity about himself, by no means.

‘I take an interest in you,’ he said, plucking off his dark glasses and turning a dazzled blue stare on her.

‘I don’t want a guardian angel, I’m afraid,’ said Patricia, pushing back her chair.